Side Effects (27 page)

"Dammit, Jared," she muttered as the cab rolled to a stop in front of her hospital. "I need you." She began her day as she had each of the last several working days, with a visit to Room 421 of the Berenson Building.

Ellen was lying on her back, staring at the wall. Her breakfast was untouched on the formica stand by her bed.

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Suspended from a ceiling hook, a plastic bag drained saline into her arm.

"Hi," Kate said.

"Hi, yourself." Ellen's eyes were shadowed. Her skin seemed lacking in color and turgor. Bruises, large and small, lined both arms. There was packing in one side of her nose. Kate set the Cosmopolitan and morning Globe she had brought on the stand next to the breakfast tray.

"Something new's been added, huh?" She nodded toward the IV.

"Last night. A little while after you left."

Kate raised Ellen to a sitting position and then settled onto the bed by her knee. "They say why?"

"All they'll tell me is that it's a precautionary measure."

"Have you had some new bleeding?"

"In my bowel movements, and I guess in my urine, too." She took a glass of orange juice from her tray and sipped at it absently.

"That's probably why the IV," Kate said. "In case they have to inject any X-ray dye or give you any blood." How much do you want to hear, El? Give me a sign. Do you want to know about sudden massive hemorrhage?

About circulatory collapse sudden and severe enough to make emergency insertion of an intravenous line extremely difficult? Do you want to know about Beverly Vitale?

"Listen, Kate. As long as you're on top of what's going on, I'm satisfied."

"Good." Thank you, my friend. Thank you for making it a little easier.

"Sandy's back. He flew in late last night and then moved into the house to look after the girls." Kate motioned to a vase of flowers by the window.

"From him?"

"Uh-huh."

"So?"

Ellen shrugged. "No significance. He's still on his way out, I think."

"I hope not."

"Am I?"

"Are you what?"

"On my way out."

"Jesus, Sandier, of course not."

Ellen took her hand. "Don't let me die, Katey, okay?"

"Count on it," Kate said, having to work to keep from breaking down in front of her friend. Silently, she vowed to place her efforts on Ellen's behalf ahead of every other

task, every other pressure in her life. Somewhere, there was an answer, and somehow she would find it.

"Listen, I've got to go and get ready for some biopsies. I'll check on your lab tests and speak with you later this afternoon.

Okay?"

"Okay." The word was spiritless.

"Anything I can bring you?"

"A cure?" Kate smiled weakly. "Coming right up," she said. The flowers, in a metallic gray box with a red bow, were on her desk when Kate returned from the Berenson Building. First a huge bouquet for Ellen from Sandy and now flowers from Jared. The former Dartmouth roommates had come through in the clutch.

"I knew you guys must have learned something at that school besides how to tap a keg," she said, excitedly J opening the box. '

They were long-stem roses, eleven red and one yellow--the red for love and the yellow for friendship, she had once been told. She scurried about her office, opening and closing doors and drawers until she found a heavy, green-glass vase. It was not until the roses were arranged to her satisfaction and set on the corner of her desk that she remembered the card taped to the box. It would say something at once both witty and tender. That was Jared's style--his way.

"To a not so unexceptional pathologist, from a not so secret admirer. Tom."
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Kate groaned and sank to her desk chair, feeling angry and a little foolish. Try as she might, she could not

, dispel the irrational reaction that Jared had somehow let 1 her down. Call Tom. She wrote the reminder on a scrap of paper 1 and taped it in a high-visibility spot on the shade of her desk lamp. Still, she knew from experience that even a location only inches from her eyes gave her at best only a fifty-fifty chance of remembering. Perhaps now was the time to call. It was almost nine. If Tom wasn't in the OR, a page would reach him. Things were beginning to get out of hand, and at this point, meeting Tom for a drink hardly seemed fair.

Kate was reaching for the phone when it rang.

"Hello. Kate Bennett," she said.

"Dr. Bennett, how do you do? My name is Arlen Paquette, Doctor Arlen Paquette, if you count a Phd in chemistry. I'm the director of product safety for Redding Pharmaceuticals. If this is an inopportune time for you, please tell me. If it is not, I would like to speak with you for a few minutes about the report Dr. William Zimmermann phoned in to us yesterday."

"I have a few minutes," Kate said, retaping the Tom note to her lampshade.

"Fine. Thank you. Dr. Bennett, I spent a fair amount of time taking information from Dr. Zimmermann. However, since you seem to have done most of the legwork, as it were, I had hoped you might go over exactly what it was that led you to the conclusion there was a problem with one of our Redding generics."

"I'd be happy to, Dr. Paquette."

It was obvious from the few questions Paquette asked during her three-minute summary that Zimmermann's account to him had been a complete one and, further, that the director of product safety had studied the data well.

"So," the caller said when she had finished, "as I see it, your initial suspicions of trouble at the Omnicenter were based on a coincidence of symptoms in three patients of the thousands treated there. Correct?"

"Not exactly," Kate said, suddenly perturbed by the tone of the man's voice.

"Please," he said, "bear with me a moment longer.

You then decided to focus your investigation on the pharmaceuticals provided for the Omnicenter by my company, and ..."

"Dr. Paquette, I don't think it's at all fair to suggest that I jumped to the conclusion that the drugs were at fault. Even now I am not at all sure that is the case.

However, of all the factors I checked--sterilization techniques, microbiology, and all others common to my three patients--the contaminated vitamins were the only finding out of the ordinary." "Ah, yes," Paquette said. "The vitamins. Several dozen samples analyzed, yet only one containing a painkiller. Correct?" "Dr. Paquette," Kate said somewhat angrily, "I have a busy schedule today, and I've told you about all there is to tell. You are sounding more and more like a lawyer and less and less like a man concerned with correcting a problem in his company's product. Now, I don't know whether Dr. Zimmermann told you or not, but I feel that the need to get to the bottom of all this is urgent, critical. A woman who happens to be a dear friend of mine is in the hospital right now, with her life quite possibly at stake, and for all I know, there may be others. I shall give you two more days to come up with a satisfactory explanation. If you don't have one, I am going to get the chemist from the state toxicology lab, and together we will march straight down to the PDA."

"By chemist, I assume you mean Mr. lan Toole?"

"Yes, that's exactly who I mean."

"Well, Doctor, I'm a little confused. You see, I have in front of me a notarized letter, copies of which I have just put in the mail to you and Dr. Zimmermann. It is a letter from Mr. lan Toole stating categorically that in none of his investigations on your behalf did he find any contamination in any product dispensed at the Omnicenter."

"What?" Kate's incredulity was almost instantly replaced by a numbing fear. "That's not true," she said weakly.

"Shall I read you the letter?"

"You bought him off."

"I beg your pardon."

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"I gave you the courtesy of reporting this to your company instead of going to the PDA, and you bought off my chemist."

"Dr. Bennett, I would caution you against carelessly tossing accusations about," Paquette said. "The statement in front of me is, as I have said, notarized."

"We'll see about that," she said with little force. The vitamins she had sent to Toole were all she had. In a corner of her mind, she wondered if Arlen Paquette knew that.

"I would like to confirm my company's sincere desire to correct any shortcomings in its products, and to thank you for allowing us to investigate the situation at your hospital." Paquette sounded as if he was reading the statement from a card.

"You may think this is the end of things, Dr. Paquette," Kate said, "but you don't know me. Please be prepared to hear from the PDA."

"We each must do what we must do, Doctor."

Kate had be gun to seethe. "Furthermore, you had better hope that whatever you paid lan Toole was enough, because that man is going to be made to visit a certain hospital bed to see first hand the woman he may be helping to kill." She slammed the receiver to its cradle. Seated in his suite at the Ritz, Arlen Paquette hung up gently. He was shaking. You don't know me.

Paquette snorted at the irony of Kate Bennett's words, splashed some scotch over two ice cubes, drank it before it had begun to chill, and then set the glass down on the photographs of the woman he had just helped nail to a cross of incompetence, mental imbalance, and dishonesty. Cyrus Redding had decreed that she be discredited, and discredited she would be. Kate Bennett had only herself and a few shaky allies. Cyrus Redding had an unlimited supply of Norton Reeses, Winfield Samuelses, lan Tooles, and, yes, Arlen Paquettes.

He glanced down at the pad where he had written the words he had rehearsed and then used when talking to the woman, and he wondered if he could have come off so self-assured in a face-to-face confrontation. Doubtful, he acknowledged. Extremely doubtful. Their conversation had lasted just a few minutes, with all of the surprises coming from his end. Yet here he was, soaked with sweat and still trembling. He'd take a dozen in-person encounters with Norton Reese over the one phone call he had just finished.

Water. That was it, he needed some water. No more goddamn scotch.

He snatched his empty glass from the coffee table.

Beneath it was one of the five-by-seven blowups of Kate Bennett, this one of her bundled in a sweatsuit, scarf, and watch cap, jogging with her dog along a snowbanked road.

Paquette turned and unsteadily made his way to the bathroom.

"You bastard," he said to the thin, drawn face staring at him from the mirror. "You weak little fucking bastard."

He hurled the glass with all his strength, shattering it and the mirror. Then he dropped to his knees amidst the shards and, clutching the ornate toilet, retched until he felt his insides were tearing in two.

"Don't you see, Bill? Someone at Redding Pharmaceuticals, maybe this ... this Paquette, bought off lan Toole. Damn, I knew I was right not to trust them. I knew it. I knew it." Kate, still breathless from her run across the snowy street and up three flights of stairs, screamed at herself to calm down. William Zimmermann, as relaxed as Kate was intense, rose from behind his desk and crossed to the automatic coffee maker on a low table by his office door. His knee length clinic coat was perfectly creased and spotless, his demeanor as immaculate as his dress. "How about a few deep breaths and a cup of coffee?"

"Coffee's about the last thing I need in my state, thanks, but I will try the deep breaths. Vacation. Can you believe it? One day the man is at his little spectrophotometer running tests, and the next he's off on vacation and nobody knows when he'll be back. Now if that isn't a payoff, I don't know what is. Next thing you know, lan Toole's name will be on a lab door somewhere in Redding Pharmaceuticals."

"The deep breaths?" Zimmermann asked, returning to his desk.

"Oh, yes. I'm sorry, Bill. But you don't blame me, do you?"
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"No, I don't blame you." He paused, obviously searching for words. "Kate," he said finally, "I want to be as tactful as possible in what I have to ask, and if I'm not, please excuse me, but ..."

"Go on."

"Well, since you brought the subject up at our dinner the other night, I feel I must ask. Just how badly do you have it in for the pharmaceutical industry?"

The question startled her. Then she understood. "What you're saying is that without lan Toole, it becomes a matter of my word against theirs. Is that it?"

"If I'm out of line, Kate, I'm sorry. But remember, there is a lot at stake here--for me and my clinic, and as far as I know, this whole matter was between you and your Mr. Toole. I mean I called in the report because it was our facility, but the hard data are strictly ..."

"Wait," Kate interrupted excitedly. "There is someone else. I just remembered."

"Who?"

"Her name's Millicent. She's Toole's assistant, and I remember him telling me she was put out about having to work late on the stuff I sent him."

"Do you have a last name?"

"No, but how many Millicents can there be at the State Toxicology Lab?" She was already reaching for the phone and her address book. "You don't know me, Dr. *>> /./.

Paquette," she murmured as she dialed. "Oh, no, you don't know me at all." The call lasted less than a minute.

"Millicent Hall is no longer in the employ of the state lab," Kate said as she hung up, her expression and tone an equal mix of embarrassment, dejection, and anger. "They wouldn't give out any further information."

This time it was Zimmermann who took a deep breath.

"First the baseball player and now this," he said. "You certainly aren't having a very easy time of it." Kate's eyes narrowed. An emptiness began to build inside her. "You're having trouble believing me, aren't you?"

Zimmermann met her gaze and held it. "Kate, what I can say in all honesty is that at this moment I believe that you believe." He saw her about to protest, and held up his hands. "And at this moment," he added reassuringly, "that is enough. There is too much at stake for me to make any hasty moves. I shall await Bedding's formal response to my report, meanwhile keeping our pharmacy on backup. No Redding generics until then. However, if there have been no further cases or further developments in, say, a week, I plan to reinstate our automated system."