The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (186 page)

“The report will be considered at a meeting of the hospital’s Medical Incidents Committee.”

The waitress came by and Tom stopped her and asked her to bring more coffee.

“It’s no big deal, I’m certain. But I wanted to tell you about it before you heard it from somebody else,” he said.

On Monday, in accordance with the wishes she had expressed in her will, Elizabeth Sullivan was cremated. Tom, R.J., and Suzanna Lorentz went to the funeral home, where Suzanna, as the
attorney handling the estate, was handed a square box made of gray cardboard, containing the ashes.

They went to lunch at the Ritz, and Suzanna read parts of Betts’s will to them over salads. Betts had left what Suzanna described as “a considerable estate” to support and encourage the care of her aunt, Mrs. Sally Frances Bosshard, a patient at the Lutheran Home for the Aged and Infirm of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Following the death of Mrs. Bosshard, the remaining money, if any, would go to the American Cancer Society. To her beloved friend Dr. Thomas A. Kendricks, Elizabeth Sullivan had left what she hoped were good memories and an audiotape of Elizabeth Bosshard and Tom Kendricks singing “Strawberry Fields.” To her new and valued friend Dr. Roberta J. Cole, Elizabeth Sullivan had left a six-piece silver coffee service of French design and eighteenth-century manufacture, silversmith unknown. The silver service and the tape cassette were in storage in Antwerp, along with other items, mostly furniture and artwork that would be sold, the proceeds to be added to the monies going to Sally Frances Bosshard.

Of Dr. Cole, Elizabeth Sullivan requested one last favor. She wished her ashes to be given to Dr. Cole for placement in the earth, “without ceremony or service, at a beautiful place of Dr. Cole’s choosing.”

R.J. was stunned, both by the bequest and by the unexpected responsibility. Tom’s eyes glistened. He ordered a bottle of champagne, and they drank a toast to Betts.

In the parking lot, Suzanna took the small square cardboard box from her car and gave it to R.J. R.J. didn’t know what to do with it. She put it on the passenger’s side of the seat in the BMW and drove back to Lemuel Grace.

On the following Wednesday morning she was awakened at 5:20
A.M
. by the loud and shockingly intrusive sound of bell chimes announcing that someone was at the front door.

She struggled out of bed and into her robe. Unable to locate her slippers, she padded into the cold hallway in her bare feet.

She went downstairs and peered through the glass at one side of the door. It was still dark outside, but she could make out two figures.

“What do you want?” she called, not about to open the door.

“State police.”

When she turned on the light and looked out again, she saw it was so, and she unsnapped the lock, suddenly terribly afraid.

“Did something happen to my father?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. No, ma’am. We would just like a word with Dr. Kendricks.” The speaker was a wiry female corporal, in uniform, alongside a beefy male in civilian clothes: black hat, black shoes, raincoat, gray slacks. They gave off an aura of unsmiling competence.

“What is it, R.J.?” Tom said. He stood at the top of the stairs wearing his blue suit trousers with the dusty rose pinstripe, in stocking feet and undershirt.

“Dr. Kendricks?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“I’m Corporal Flora McKinnon, sir,” she said. “And this is Trooper Robert Travers. We’re members of C-PAC, the Crime Prevention and Control Unit attached to the office of Edward W. Wilhoit, the District Attorney of Middlesex County. Mr. Wilhoit would like to have a few words with you, sir.”

“When?”

“Well, now, sir. He’d like you to come down to his office with us.”

“Jesus Christ, do you mean to tell me he’s working at five-thirty in the morning?”

“Yessir,” the woman said.

“Do you have a warrant for my arrest?”

“No, sir, we do not.”

“Well, you tell Mr. Wilhoit that I refused his kind invitation. In one hour I’ll be in the surgical theater at Middlesex Memorial, operating on someone’s gallbladder, somebody who’s depending on me. You tell Mr. Wilhoit I can come to his office at one-thirty. If that’s all right, he can let my secretary know. If it’s not all right,
we can work out another time that is mutually satisfactory. Got that?”

“Yes, sir. We understand that,” the red-haired corporal said, and they nodded and went out into the dark.

Tom stayed on the stairs. R.J. remained fixed in the bottom hallway, looking up, afraid for him. “God, Tom. What’s going on?”

“Maybe you’d better go there with me, R.J.”

“I was never that kind of lawyer. I’ll come. But you’d better have somebody else come, too,” she said.

She canceled her Wednesday class and spent three hours on the telephone talking to lawyers, people she knew would respect her need for confidentiality and give honest advice. The same name kept being mentioned, Nat Rourke. He had been around a long time. He wasn’t flashy, but he was very smart and highly respected. R.J. had never met him. He didn’t take the call when she telephoned his office, but an hour later he called back.

He said almost nothing while she laid out the facts of the case.

“No, no, no,” Rourke said gently. “You and your husband will not go to see Wilhoit at one-thirty. You will come to
my
office at one-thirty. I have to meet with somebody here, briefly, at three. We’ll go to the D.A.’s office at four forty-five. My secretary will call Wilhoit with the new time.”

Nat Rourke’s office was in a solid old building behind the State House, comfortable but shabby. The lawyer himself reminded R.J. of pictures she had seen of Irving Berlin, a small man with sallow complexion and sharp features, nattily dressed in dark and subdued colors, very white shirt, a university tie whose symbol she didn’t recognize. Penn, she found out later.

Rourke asked Tom to recount for him all the circumstances leading up to Elizabeth Sullivan’s death. He watched Tom intently, a good listener, not interrupting, staying with the narrative until the end. Then he nodded, pursed his lips, leaned back in his chair with his hands folded on his vested belly, over the Phi Beta Kappa key.

“Did you kill her, Dr. Kendricks?”

“I didn’t have to kill her. The cancer took care of that. She would have stopped breathing on her own, a matter of hours, a matter of days. She could never again be conscious, never again be Betts, without agony. I’d promised her she wouldn’t suffer. She was already receiving very heavy dosages of morphine. I increased the dosage to make certain she wouldn’t have further pain. If it brought death sooner rather than later, that was perfectly all right with me.”

“The thirty milligrams that Mrs. Sullivan received by mouth twice a day. I would suppose it was a slow-acting form of morphine?” Rourke said.

“Yes.”

“And the forty milligrams you gave her by needle, that was fast-acting morphine, in sufficient amount perhaps to inhibit her respiration.”

“Yes.”

“And if it inhibited her respiration sufficiently, that would cause death.”

“Yes.”

“Were you having an affair with Mrs. Sullivan?”

“No.” They discussed Tom’s early relationship with Elizabeth, and the lawyer seemed satisfied.

“Have you in any way benefited financially from Elizabeth Sullivan’s death?”

“No.” Tom told him the terms of Betts’s will. “Is Wilhoit going to make something dirty of this?”

“Very possibly. He’s an ambitious pol, interested in moving up in the world, lieutenant governor. A sensational trial would be a springboard. If he could get you convicted of murder in the first degree, sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, with big, black headlines, pats on his back, lots of splash, he’d be made. But first-degree murder isn’t going to happen in this case. And Mr. Wilhoit is too shrewd a politician even to bring the case to the grand jury unless he has a good chance to convict. He’ll wait for the hospital Medical Incidents Committee to give him direction.”

“What’s the worst thing that can happen to me in this case?”

“Bleakest scenario?”

“Yes. Worst.”

“No guarantees that I’m right, of course. But I would guess your worst scenario would be conviction for manslaughter. The sentence would be incarceration. This kind of case, it’s likely the judge would be sympathetic and give you what we call a ‘Concord sentence.’ He would sentence you to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord for twenty years, thus preserving his reputation as a judge who was tough on crime. But he’d be giving you easy time, because at Concord you would be eligible for parole after serving only twenty-four months of the sentence. So you could use the time to write a book, get famous, earn a potful of money.”

“I would lose my license to practice medicine,” Tom said levelly, and R.J. could almost forget that she had stopped loving him a long time ago.

“Keep in mind that we’ve been talking about the worst scenario. The best scenario would be that the case doesn’t go to the grand jury. Accomplishing the best scenario is why I get paid the big money,” Rourke said.

It was easy to move into a discussion of his fee. “Case like this, anything could happen, or nothing. Ordinarily, if the defendant were someone not terribly respectable, I would ask for an initial retainer, twenty thousand. But … you are a professional man of high reputation and good character. I think your best bet would be to hire me on a time-spent basis. Two and a quarter an hour.”

Tom nodded. “Sounds like a bargain to me,” he said, and Rourke smiled.

They reached the high-rise courthouse at five minutes to five, ten minutes after Rourke had said they would get there. It was the end of the workday and people were pouring out of the building with the pleased energy of children released from school. “Take your time, we’re in no hurry,” Rourke said. “It’ll do him good to meet us on our own schedule. That business of sending troopers to fetch you at the crack of dawn is strictly cheap intimidation, Dr. Kendricks. An invitation to the ball, you might say.”

It was meant to tell them, R.J. knew with a chill, that the district attorney had gone to the trouble of learning Tom’s timetable, not something he would do for a routine matter.

They had to sign in with the guard at the desk in the lobby, and then the elevator whisked them to the fifteenth floor.

Wilhoit was lean and tanned, a big-nosed man who smiled at them as cordially as an old friend. R.J. had looked him up. Harvard College, ’72; Boston College Law School, ’75; assistant D.A., ’75-’78; state representative, ’78 until elected district attorney in 1988.

“How are you, Mr. Rourke? A pleasure to see you again. Nice to meet you, Dr. Kendricks, Dr. Cole. Yes, sit down, sit down.”

Then he was all business, cool eyes and quiet questions, most of which Tom already had answered for Rourke during the course of the afternoon.

They had obtained and studied Elizabeth Sullivan’s medical file, Wilhoit told them. “It says that by order of Dr. Howard Fisher, the patient in Room 208 of the Middlesex Memorial Hospital had been receiving an oral morphine medication known as Contin, thirty milligrams twice a day.

“Let’s see now. … At two-ten a.m., the night in question, Dr. Thomas A. Kendricks entered into the patient’s record a written order for forty milligrams of morphine sulphate to be injected intravenously. According to the medications nurse, Miss Beverly Martin, the doctor told her he’d give the needle himself. Martin said that half an hour later, when she entered Room 208 to check the patient’s temperature and blood pressure, Mrs. Sullivan was dead. Dr. Kendricks was seated next to her bedside, holding her hand.” He looked at Tom. “Are those facts essentially correct as I have presented them, Dr. Kendricks?”

“Yes, I would say they are accurate, Mr. Wilhoit.”

“Did you kill Elizabeth Sullivan, Dr. Kendricks?”

Tom looked at Rourke. Rourke’s eyes were guarded, but he nodded, signifying that Tom should answer.

“No, sir. Cancer killed Elizabeth Sullivan,” Tom said.

Wilhoit nodded, too. He thanked them politely for coming, and he indicated that the interview was at an end.

6

T
HE
C
ONTENDER

There was no further word from the district attorney, no story in the newspapers. R.J. knew silence could be ominous. Wilhoit’s people were at work, talking to nurses and doctors at Middlesex, assessing whether they had a case, whether it would help or hurt the district attorney’s career if he tried to crush Dr. Thomas A. Kendricks.

R.J. concentrated on her work. She posted notices in the hospital and at the medical school announcing the formation of the publications committee. When the first meeting was held, on a snowy Tuesday evening, fourteen people showed up. She had expected the committee to attract residents and young doctors, the unpublished. But several senior physicians attended, too. It shouldn’t have surprised her. She knew at least one man who had become a medical school dean without having learned how to write acceptable English.

She set up a monthly schedule of lectures by medical journal editors, and several of the doctors volunteered to read their own papers-in-progress at the next meeting so they could be critiqued. She had to admit that Sidney Ringgold had anticipated a need.