The Doctor and Mr. Dylan (35 page)

I shook my head, and met her gaze. All I wanted was the truth. Lena frowned back at me, and shook her head in return.

Martinovich watched her with solemn attention for several seconds, and then said, “I thank you, Mrs. Johnson. I have no further questions at this time.” Lena looked ready to explode. Her face clouded further, and I could see her chest rise and fall faster and faster as her indignation grew.

It was Hamilton’s turn. The pudgy prosecutor rolled out of his chair and made a hasty approach to the podium. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said. “Can you describe your relationship with Dr. Antone?”

She clenched her teeth and said, “I loved him,” with loud emphasis on the word loved.

“And was it your impression that Dr. Antone loved you in return?”

“I thought he did, yes.”

“Did Nico Antone ever talk about his relationship with his wife?”

“Sometimes.”

“What did he say about her?”

She stared down the jury and said, “Nico told me they fought all the time. He told me that Alexandra was a bitch, and he moved to Minnesota to get away from her.”

The hair stood up on my neck.
Why would she tell the jury that?

“Did Dr. Antone love his wife?”

“Nico didn’t ever say anything like that.” She stopped and chose her words with care. “He didn’t like her very much. He told me many times he wished she would disappear from his life.”

My jaw dropped.
What was she saying? What the hell was she doing?

“Is it possible that Dr. Antone envisioned a life with you, and wanted to rid himself of his wife?”

She cast me an evil look, and said, “It’s possible, yes.”

My heart was a jackhammer in my chest. My lover was dropping a noose over my neck.

“Did Dr. Antone have access to the insulin vials your daughter stored in your home refrigerator?”

“He was in my kitchen many times.”

“He was in your house on the morning of Mrs. Antone’s surgery. Was the refrigerator locked?”

“Of course not.”

“Is it possible that he opened the door of the refrigerator and removed a vial of insulin the morning of his wife’s surgery?”

Lena muttered an inaudible syllable. She closed her eyes and her head quivered in a tight vibrato.

“I didn’t hear you,” Hamilton said. “Is it possible that Dr. Antone opened the door of your refrigerator and removed a vial of insulin that morning? Is it possible that after he got the phone call about anesthetizing his wife, Dr. Antone removed a vial of insulin from your refrigerator and took it with him to the hospital?”

She opened her eyes wide, and blurted out, “Oh, Jesus, this is so awful I can hardly say it. The day after Alexandra’s surgery, when I looked into my refrigerator, there had been a full box containing ten vials of insulin, but now the box was opened and there were only nine vials left.”

Hamilton’s eyes widened at his good fortune. “Nine vials? And one vial was missing?”

Lena clawed at her cheeks with her fingertips. “Yes. One vial was missing. I kept this a secret for so long, but I just can’t… I can’t lie, Nico.  I can’t.” She covered her face with both hands and cried real tears.

Hamilton inhaled through a gaping mouth, raised his eyebrows in triumph, shot a lethal glance at me, and said, “I have no further questions at this time, Your Honor.”

Lena stepped down and walked across the floor like a tightrope walker, her footsteps balancing on a narrow line. She looked beaten and drawn.

Lena had fried me. Any reasonable doubt had floated out the window. She’d professed love for me, and then in the same breath she’d told everyone that I wanted my wife dead and that I took the insulin from her house.

I was dead meat. Dead.

I turned to watch Lena exit through the rear door of the courtroom. Bobby Dylan turned his back on her as she passed him. Johnny watched her with a look of abject horror. After Lena walked out the door, Johnny looked over at me and shook his head in disgust.

I leaned into Martinovich, and scribbled on his legal pad, “Fuck her. Stick to the script.” He nodded in assent, and I saw a gladiator’s ire in his eyes. He turned around to confirm that a certain diminutive, balding, white-haired physician had returned to the courtroom. Dr. Thomas Zender was sitting one row behind us. It was a risky move, but I’d convinced Martinovich we needed to bring back the prosecution’s expert witness for further questioning. Zender had incriminated me at his initial testimony. He’d insisted the insulin could only have been injected during my anesthetic. Giving Zender a second opportunity to repeat the accusation seemed unwise, but I believed this geriatric fossil was the vital cog in my hope for acquittal.

“The defense would like to recall Dr. Thomas Zender,” Martinovich said.

The courtroom was quiet as the old man took the stand. He looked so frail that I prayed the man had enough stamina to hang in there through another round of questioning. Dr. Zender leaned his two canes across the railing next to the witness chair. His eyes were distorted, warped crescents behind the Coke-bottle-thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He had a new nervous tic this morning, his neck jerking leftward every second or two, his ear approaching his shoulder in an irregular rhythm.

I leaned forward, my sweaty palms folded as in prayer. “Help me, Dr. Zender,” I murmured to myself. “Be my savior this very day.”

Martinovich addressed the witness with respect. “Dr. Zender, you testified earlier in this case, in this courtroom. As you recall, your testimony asserted that Alexandra Antone’s brain death was attributable to an intravenous injection of insulin during her general anesthetic.”

“That is correct,” Zender said, his voice a coarse rasp. He reached up and adjusted his red bowtie with both hands. The tie moved from a 30-degree tilt to the right into a 30-degree tilt to the left.

Martinovich touched a button on the podium, and projected an image onto the video screen hanging on the courtroom wall. A magnified copy of Alexandra’s anesthetic record appeared for all to see. Martinovich said, “Dr. Zender, this is a copy of the anesthetic record from Mrs. Antone’s surgery on September 9th. In the lower right-hand corner of this form, I call your attention to the line that reads “Surgery End Time.” Do you see that line?”

Zender screwed his face up, studied the video screen, and said, “Yes, I do. The surgery end time was 8:30 a.m.”

Martinovich said, “Agreed. Now I’m going to show you another page from the medical record. The page on the screen is the summary document from Mrs. Antone’s laboratory report from Hibbing General Hospital.
Have you seen this document before?

“I have. I reviewed these lab tests in detail.”

“I call your attention to the time stamp at the top left hand corner of this page, which documents the time and date when these blood tests were drawn. Can you read the date and time of these blood tests to us?”

Zender said, “The blood was drawn at 11:05 a.m. on September 9th.”

“So if the surgery ended at 8:30 a.m., and these blood tests were drawn at 11:05 a.m., then two hours and thirty-five minutes passed between the conclusion of surgery and these tests. Correct?”

“Yes. The blood tests were drawn in the Intensive Care Unit, when the doctors were trying to determine why Mrs. Antone was not waking up.”

“You testified in this court that these toxicology blood tests were diagnostic for an overdose of injected insulin. Do you still agree with that assessment?”

“I do.”

Martinovich paused for theatric effect, and scratched his head as if mining deep thoughts. I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for the fateful confrontation. Martinovich was shuffling the deck and toying with dealing out the cards, but at the moment no one in the room was anteing up. No one had a clue where Martinovich was going. I watched the lead juror stifle a yawn.

“Let’s take a closer look at the toxicology blood tests, Dr. Zender. These tests revealed a multitude of other drugs that were present in Mrs. Antone’s blood, in addition to the insulin. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“The patient had just finished anesthesia and surgery, and there were multiple drugs administered in the operating room. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Could you please read to us from the toxicology report, and tell us the names of all the drugs found in Alexandra Antone’s bloodstream?” Martinovich said. He puffed out his chest now. He’d dealt out the cards, and he knew where the ace lay.

“You want me to read the whole list?” Zender said, with incredulous wonder.

“The whole list. Yes.”

Zender adjusted his glasses, and started reading off the video screen. “The tox report shows the following drugs were present in Alexandra Antone’s blood: propofol, midazolam, fentanyl, lidocaine, morphine, promethazine, succinylcholine, rocuronium, glycopyrrolate, ondanstetron, neostigmine, atropine, naloxone, meperidine and insulin. There were also trace amounts of cocaine, cannabis, and alprazolam.”

Martinovich nodded in assent, and turned to face the jury. “Thank you, Dr. Zender. Let me ask you a question: do you see the drug cefazolin on that list?”

Zender scrutinized the video screen for thirty seconds, and then he said, “No. There is no cefazolin.”

“Can you tell us what cefazolin is, Doctor?”

“Yes. It’s a common antibiotic.”

“Do you know any other names for cefazolin? Brand names?”

“Yes. Cefazolin is also known as Ancef or Kefzol.”

A ripple of mumbling began in the gallery behind me. It began as a buzzing din of illicit whispers, punctuated by a low-pitched curse or two. I wanted to turn around to view the audience’s reaction, but the wordplay on the courtroom floor at that moment was too riveting to ignore.

Martinovich said in a bold, theatrical voice, “Dr. Zender, if Kefzol is cefazolin, is it true there was no Kefzol in Mrs. Antone’s bloodstream?”

Zender took off his thick spectacles and chewed on the earpiece as he pondered. He blinked twice, and said, “No. There was no Kefzol in Alexandra Antone.”

“In your expert opinion as a pathologist and the interpreter of Alexandra Antone’s toxicology report, if the blood tests show no Kefzol in her bloodstream at 11:05 a.m., could the patient have received one gram of Kefzol at any time in the preceding five hours?”

Zender furrowed his brow, and pursed his lips until the color left them. He cocked his head back and uttered the single, damning syllable, “No.”

“If someone documented on the medical record that they injected one gram of Kefzol, what would be your expert opinion about that fact?”

Zender blinked hard and said, “I would say the medical record was false. No Kefzol was ever injected.”

“Is it possible that insulin was injected in place of the Kefzol?”

“It is possible, yes.”

I closed my eyes and bit down hard. Martinovich sat down next to me and squeezed my hand. It was Mr. Hamilton’s turn to cross-examine Dr. Zender. At the prosecution table, Hamilton looked perplexed. He rose to his feet and said, “I have no questions for the witness, Your Honor.”

Judge Satrum said, “Dr. Zender, you may step down.”

Dr. Zender wobbled off the witness stand, and had no sooner escaped the well when Ed Martinovich said, “The defense would like to recall Lena Johnson to the stand.”

Lena was ushered back into the courtroom. She floated down the aisle, her face a porcelain mask. She fingered the golden scarf as she sat down on the wooden chair. Her gaze was directed downward. The anger Lena had unleashed on me minutes before was gone. She was subdued, tranquilized, stuporous. She bit her fingernails. Lena Johnson, my lover, the changeling, would not look me in the eye.

“Mrs. Johnson,” Martinovich said, “we’ve already heard sworn testimony from you this morning. Once again, I’m projecting a page from Alexandra Antone’s medical record onto the video screen.” The screen lit up with a black-and-white magnified copy of a page from Alexandra’s chart. “We are looking at a page of the Physician’s Orders. Order #14 in this list of orders from the surgeon, Dr. Perpich, reads, ‘Administer Kefzol 1 gram IV.’ Do you see that?”

“I do,” Lena said in a faint whisper.

“Let me read to you from the transcript of your testimony from earlier this morning:

Mr. Martinovich: “Does that mean that you administered Kefzol to Alexandra Antone at 6:20 a.m. on the morning of her surgery?”

Mrs. Johnson: “Yes.”

Mr. Martinovich: “What does it say below your initials?”

Mrs. Johnson: “It says, ‘Done.’”

Mr. Martinovich: “Done. What does that mean?”

Mrs. Johnson: “It’s an indication that I gave the Kefzol at 6:20 a.m
.”

Martinovich stopped reading. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said. He glared at her. He was circling for the kill. Lena, precious Lena, was backed into a corner.

“Mrs. Johnson,” he repeated. “We have a problem here. Dr. Zender just presented laboratory evidence that there was no cefazolin, no Kefzol, in Mrs. Antone’s body. Where was the Kefzol?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? According to your signature in the medical record, on which you wrote ‘Done,’ you injected the Kefzol into her IV at 6:20. The laboratory tests reveal insulin in her blood, not Kefzol. Mrs. Johnson, did you inject insulin into Mrs. Antone’s IV bag instead of the antibiotic Kefzol?” He boomed out the question at a frightening amplitude.