The Assailant (7 page)

•

Carol was watching the news when he got to her apartment. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “It was on the news. The murder.”

“Yeah? Aaron give a statement?” Aaron Pressler, the department's media spokesman.

“No,” Carol said. “Not on television. The newscaster just said the police were investigating it. I guess it's not that big a story. Do you want a beer?”

“Yeah, thanks. I can get it.” He went to the refrigerator as she took a seat on the divan. On TV, the local PBS station was playing an old Preston Sturges film. William Demarest in a marine uniform telling small-town folk that he was at Guadalcanal and that was no fooling.

Hastings said from the kitchen, “I wouldn't say it wasn't important.”

“I didn't say that.”

He came back to the living room and took a seat next to her. He said, “No, you didn't. Sorry.”

“It's all right. The news said she was a coed.”

“They used that word? Coed?”

“Yeah, they like stuff like that. Coed murder.”

“Hmmm. She was a call girl.”

“She was?”

“Yeah. An escort. They probably marketed her as a college girl. It helps, I guess.”

“They—the escort service?”

“Yes.” Hastings put his head back and closed his eyes. It was an involuntary communication. It meant that he didn't want to talk about it anymore. Half of the first forty-eight hours gone and they had made little progress in finding the girl's murderer. Tomorrow was Sunday. He had responsibilities to his work and to his daughter. But he would think about that later.

“George?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to go to sleep?”

“No, I'm fine. What's on television?”

“A movie.
Hail the Conquering Hero
. It's pretty good.”

“Okay.” He opened his eyes to watch it.

Five minutes later he was asleep. Carol McGuire took the nearly full beer from his hands and set it on the coffee table.

“Can I get you a drink, Raymond?”

Raymond Sheffield held up his glass. It was about three-quarters full.

“Oh,” Carla Monroe said. “Drinking the white liquor, eh?”

Raymond said, “It's club soda.”

Carla Monroe was a nurse. She was heavyset, her face almost balloonlike when she smiled. She smelled of wine. She said, “I forgot, you don't drink.”

The party was at Ted Zoller's house in Kirkwood. Ted was the hospital's premier chest surgeon. He was leaving St. Mary's to take a position at a clinic in Ladue. He and his wife had invited most of the staff to his going-away party. His home was smaller than Raymond had thought it would be.

Raymond recognized about half the people at the party from work. The other half were Dr. Zoller's friends and family outside the hospital. A few of them were doctors.

Raymond made small talk with a couple of schoolteachers, one of whom had spent the previous year in China. She had brought her photos to the party, and Raymond politely went through them, asking simple questions about some of the people and places every few photos. He stopped only when Dr. MacDonald raised his voice to say that he wanted to say a few words about Ted. The
guests gave him their silence and then laughed appropriately at his jokes and warm remarks for Dr. Zoller, and after glasses were raised to toast the good doctor with a great future, Dr. Zoller was forced to say something in response.

When that was done, the schoolteacher who had gone to China said to Raymond, “Are you a doctor too?”

“Yes,” Raymond said.

“You worked with Dr. Zoller?”

“Yes. For a short time.”

The girl was around twenty-seven, and she had healthy blond hair and a clean, athletic look. She paid little attention to her boyfriend. Her name was Tracy.

There was a pause. Tracy was waiting for Raymond to say something else.

When he didn't, she said, “I went to school with Jeff. That's Dr. Zoller's son.”

“I see.”

Tracy thought that she could tell him more about that. That she was the son's first girlfriend . . . in a way, though probably more of a female friend than a girlfriend. But she didn't think this man would find it that interesting. She thought, You're too old to be explaining things like that anyway. She thought the doctor was an interesting figure. He wore a herringbone jacket and tie and he looked like he belonged in the 1950s or early '60s. He was not overly handsome, but there was something interesting about him. He looked a bit like a young Martin Sheen. She saw no wedding
band on the man's finger. She wondered if he was bored by her company. He didn't seem very interested in what she had to say. He seemed indifferent, in fact. Yet at the same time, he did not seem uncomfortable. She wondered if he would remain seated with her until he had to use the bathroom or if he would excuse himself before that.

Another man approached them. An older guy with a big stomach and glasses and a frog's face. He said something to the doctor next to her, but Tracy could see that it was a pretense to get closer to her.

The man sat on an ottoman and said, “Ray, you trying to keep this pretty young lady all to yourself?” Haw-haw. The doctor smiled thinly, and before he could say anything, the fat man extended his hand to Tracy and said, “Don McGinnis. How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“And you are?”

“Tracy.”

“And how did you end up with Dr. Sheffield here?”

“I did—I'm here with my boyfriend. He's over there by the bar.”

“Ohhh.” The frog-faced man said it brightly, underlining the opportunity. Haw-haw.

Dr. Sheffield said, “Dr. McGinnis is our chief ob-gyn resident.”

Tracy said, “Is that right?” Her tone polite but uninterested. She hoped he would take the cue. He didn't.

Dr. McGinnis said, “Yeah, St. Mary's is a good little hospital. It's not Barnes-Jewish, but sometimes less is more, you know?”

“Hmmm-mmm.”

“A place like that, you're just a cog in a big machine.”

After a moment, Tracy said, “A place like what?”

“Barnes.”

“Oh. I don't work in medicine, so I . . .” She raised her hands, as if to say that he was wasting his time talking shop to her, but that didn't work either.

Another couple drifted over, the nurse who had offered to get Dr. Sheffield a drink and an intern from the hospital. A new conversation bouquet formed.

It began then. A couple of professional men, one of them in his middle years, and a woman whose best years were behind her, all of them consciously or unconsciously aware of her, young and pretty, and wanting to impress her. It had happened before. It happens to the most well intentioned of people.

The intern said that Dr. Zoller was smart, getting out of the hospital now. He didn't have the exact figures, but he was sure that the man's income would at least double. Dr. McGinnis said, sure, but there were other factors besides money to consider. He said that you could work outside the hospital system if you wanted, but then you were in the business of getting and keeping patients. He said, “Have you noticed that doctors are becoming like lawyers?”

The intern said, “How do you mean?”

“I mean,” Dr. McGinnis said, “all the advertising. Look at the phone books, the billboards, the local magazines. Doctor ads everywhere. It's the sort of thing we used to criticize lawyers for. Ambulance chasers, we called them. Trolling for clients. Who'd've thought our profession would end up doing the same thing?”

The nurse said, “I don't think it's as simple as that.”

“Isn't it?” McGinnis said. “Look at all the photos of doctors. They're everywhere. Like real estate salesmen. ‘Introducing ten new physicians and three convenient new locations to care for you and your family.' ”

The intern said, “Well, it is a business. You need patients.”

McGinnis shrugged and raised his glass to tip more Dewar's into his mouth.

Dr. Sheffield said, “I think what Dr. McGinnis is saying is that something has been lost.”

The intern said, “Excuse me?” having almost forgotten that Dr. Sheffield was there.

“I think what Dr. McGinnis is saying is that the medical profession is supposed to be that: a profession. Not a business.”

“What's the difference?”

“There is a difference. You either see it or you don't.”

“Oh, come on. Are you saying you consider this profession a calling?” The intern was smiling to himself now.

“A calling.” Dr. Sheffield smiled then, just. Then he said, “It
should
be, of course. Ideally, it should be. We should be in the ‘business' of healing. But are we?”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

Dr. Sheffield smiled again, wider this time. He looked down.

Tracy said, “You were going to say something else.”

He shrugged.

“No, come on.”

“I was only going to say something about reconstructive surgery.”

The intern said, “You mean breast implants.” He was smirking. “It always comes back to tits, huh?” The joke brought him a couple of tired smiles but only that.

“Well,” Dr. Sheffield said, “I was only going to point out that reconstructive surgery is perhaps a misnomer. A woman's face is shattered in an auto accident. We want to rebuild her face, fix the disfigurement so that she's presentable to the public. That is reconstructive surgery. That is a genuine healing. But contrast that with a woman who goes to a doctor complaining that her breasts are sagging. That there are lines developing on her face and forehead. In other words, that she is suffering from the ravages of age. Of time. Of the natural order. Do we say to this woman, ‘This is nature. This is the passage of time.' That ‘a struggle against time and nature is both futile and immature'? No, we do not. We take this woman's anxiety and depression as if they were symptoms of a disease. When there is no disease. There is no sickness. And in so doing, we do not heal this woman. Indeed, we exacerbate her condition. We increase her anxiety because we help foster her immature, unrealistic view of the world. We foster her childlike narcissism. When
we do that, we are not healing. We are profiting from something that helps no one. We engage in something that demeans both the physician and the patient.”

Tracy regarded the doctor. She said, “But if it's what the woman wants, where is the harm?”

“I've just explained the harm. Weren't you listening?”

He did not make eye contact with her when he answered her. And this did not go unnoticed. It was as if he thought she was not worth regarding.

•

On the way home, Tracy said to her date, “I don't know what I said to offend him.”

The young man said, “You said, what if the woman wants it?”

“I said, I didn't see the harm if the woman wants to do it. You know, so she feels better about herself. And he got, I don't know, cold. Like I shouldn't have even opened my mouth. Up till then, I'd thought he was a nice guy. A little strange, but nice.”

“He's a doctor,” the young man said. “They're all assholes.”

Mickey Caldwell didn't know until lunchtime that his wife was going to Kansas City to visit her sister. As usual, she hadn't planned too far ahead. She just came back from book club and said, “We're going to Kansas City.”

“When?”

“In about an hour. I want to see my sister.”

Mickey didn't ask why. His wife's behavior had become increasingly erratic in the last year. Ever since their son had been born, she hadn't been the same. She had put on weight, which shouldn't have been that unusual. Most of Mickey's married friends made the same complaint about their wives. They also complained that they were being less frequent with the sex. They talked about going months without action from the wives.

And Mickey thought,
Months
? Try
years
. He remembered making love with his wife sometime before LSU won the BCS championship, and that had been at least two years ago. He remembered it because they had been at that game. Been at the Superdome
before
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. A long time ago, and he had since stopped wondering what had gone wrong in the marriage.

Mona had put on weight, yeah. But there was something more than that. She told Mickey she didn't feel like it. Not tonight, not
now . . . not ever saying,
Not ever again
. But that was the de facto reality. Mickey suspected it had something to do with all the pills she was taking. This one for depression, that one for anxiety, another one for melancholy. All these pills in different colors and sizes . . . he couldn't compete.

He believed that he had tried. He really thought he had. He had asked her if there was something he had done wrong, if she wanted to go to a counselor, if there was something he could do or change. She just looked at him blankly or denied that there was anything wrong at all. She'd once said to him, “
I
don't miss it.” And that hurt, it really did. Not so much that she said it, but rather the way she said it. Like, if she didn't miss it, what else should matter? Why should it matter to him?

He had wanted to say,
But
I do
miss it. I miss you. You're my wife. I'm your husband
.

But he didn't consider himself a sophisticated man. He didn't want to seem indecent or inconsiderate. She was the mother of his child.

When a friend first suggested he go to an escort service, Mickey was repulsed. He had been raised by good Christian parents. Not just churchgoing, but decent. He knew without ever asking that his father had never even contemplated such a thing. It would have been disrespectful to his wife. His father would never even have looked at another woman. His father had stopped speaking to one of his closest friends because the man had left his wife to marry a mail-order bride from the Philippines. His father
had said to Mickey, “He basically
bought
a second wife because he got tired of the one he had. A good man doesn't do that.”