Doctors (90 page)

“What about the kids?”

“We could go for a month and maybe ask your mother to take care of them.”

“My mother, Judy? Maybe you’re the one who’s cracking up. May I remind you you’re talking about a woman who on every January twelfth gets up, bakes a cake, and invites imaginary friends to come in and sing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Howie.’ ”

The thought cast a heavy pall on both of them. For they knew that was where it all had started. When he’d “saved” his brother to release his parents—and himself—from living with his helpless, endless agony.

He should have learned his lesson then. It had not worked. To his mom, still crazed with grief, he was a living ghost. And her distraction surely was one reason for his father’s early death.

“All right, Seth,” Judy said sternly, “I’ll make a deal with you. The kids get out of school on June eleventh. On the twelfth you’ll take off your white coat, put your stethoscope away, and we’ll travel till Labor Day.”

“And the syringe,” he added blankly. “We won’t pack the syringe.”

She held his face with both her hands and said, “That’s over now, Seth. That’s over as of this instant. Let someone else show mercy on them, Seth. You’ve done enough.”

But Seth had already gone too far. The previous Saturday night, Nurse Millicent Cavanagh had seen him attend a patient in the Lakeshore V.A. Hospital (where he was now working one afternoon a week). The patient, Sergeant Clarence T. Englund, a paraplegic veteran of World War II, was, after nearly thirty years of hospitalization for his wounds, all too slowly dying of bone cancer.

It was Millie who, in her next routine check of vital signs, had found the patient dead. The next morning the official certificate listed cause of death as the sequelae of the patient’s many maladies, which resulted in heart failure.

But in her mind it should have read “premeditated murder.”

In the eighteen or so years that she had worked at the V.A. she’d grown fond of “Old Clarence T.,” as everybody called
him. What she perhaps admired most was his amazing courage to endure—and now and then even to smile through pain.

Indeed, the night before, though comatose from analgesics that dulled his mind but could not wholly ease the agony, he had said something so beautiful to her that she recalled it word for word. “When I get to paradise, Millie, and all this pain is over, I’ll sit and wait for you and the two of us will live together for eternity.”

And she also remembered him saying, “I’ll be seeing Saint Peter very soon and I’ll ask him to start looking for a special cloud for us.”

Clarence died two days later. Loving him as she did, Millie was glad that his earthly suffering was over.

On the other hand, she had often heard him plead with doctors—in fact, with every new physician who would come to him—to put an end to his life.

And even as she mourned him, Millie could not keep from thinking that he had finally found a doctor who had helped fulfill his un-Christian wish for a sort of suicide.

Perhaps the impact of the death of Clarence Englund would not have been as great as it was had it not occurred just before an election year.

At Thanksgiving, which Millie always spent with her parents and two brothers, she was brooding. Her younger brother, Jack, took her aside to ask if anything was wrong.

She welcomed the opportunity to share the burden she’d been carrying—especially with Jack, who was a lawyer.

He was astounded by her story and—she could not fathom why—strangely excited.

“Millie, will you come and talk about this to the senior partner in my firm?”

She suddenly was hesitant. Her retirement was just a few years off and she did not want to rock the boat.

“Please, I don’t want to get involved,” she responded nervously.

“Hey, look, Sis, I guarantee your name will never come up—
ever.
Just tell Mr. Walters what you’ve just told me and that’s the end of it. We’ll take the ball and run from there.”

“What do you mean, ‘ball’?” she asked uneasily.

“It’s nothing you have to worry about, Sis. And you’d be doing
me
a real big favor.”

Edmund Walters, the senior partner in his firm, was Attorney General for the state of Illinois and made no secret of the
fact that he harbored loftier political ambitions. One of the senatorial seats was coming up for grabs and Ed was seriously thinking of going for it—even though he knew the governor himself had eyes on it. Edmund had more money, but the governor had the significant advantage of his high visibility.

What Walters needed was a cause célèbre—a controversial case that would attract attention. Anything that could position him on center stage in limelight strong enough to get him on TV and make his name a household word.

And so the next Monday when young Cavanagh came down to see him at his office, Edmund Walters knew he had found the chariot to carry him to Washington.

“Thanks, Jack, I won’t forget this. In fact, I’d like you to stay here and help me break the case.”

“But, Mr. Walters, we don’t have a case yet.”

The attorney general then pointed straight at Jack and said, “Then you help me make it one.”

They met again that afternoon at four o’clock. Jack already had some news that would enhance the attorney general’s prospects.

A Veterans Administration Hospital is legally a federal government facility, and, according to Section 18 of the U.S. Code, that means that the FBI could be called in—to do the legwork in pursuing this allegedly homicidal doctor.

“That’s good news, Jack,” Walters said, grinning. “Let’s get in touch with the Bureau.”

“I already have,” said Cavanagh with satisfaction. “He’ll be glad to see you tomorrow morning—if eight o’clock isn’t too early.”

“No, that’s absolutely fine. I don’t have to tell you what the early bird always catches.”

They met for breakfast at a run-down diner near the State House. Walters thought it best that the matter not attract the attention of the governor. Besides,
he
was attorney general, and this was by rights his case.

Even among the nondescript patrons of the diner, the FBI man looked exactly like an FBI man. That is to say, he looked like someone trying to look unobtrusive and nondescript. His name was J. P. Sullivan, officially assistant special agent-in-charge (ASAC). He was, as he himself put it, “a fighting Irishman.”

Sullivan was morally outraged by what he heard. Not only was it a felony, it violated all the tenets of his personal convictions.
No one should be able to make such judgments; they are in God’s jurisdiction.

“You can count on the Bureau, Mr. Walters. As our late chief used to say, ‘We always get our man.’ ”

Both of them realized they had no hard evidence against Dr. Lazarus for what he’d done to Clarence T. But this guy had doubtless struck before. The likelihood was that he’d strike again.

From that moment Sullivan would have Seth under around-the-clock surveillance. And would get some of the Bureau’s new “egghead” computer agents to search the records of all hospitals in Cook County.

“That could take years,” Walters complained. He needed some hard evidence right now if he had any hopes of making hay out of the trial.

“That’s the point, sir,” the agent answered. “The info that used to cost us so much time and shoe leather takes these characters just a few minutes. I think we can count on them to come up with some evidence.”

“I can’t impress upon you enough that time is of the essence,” Walters urged. “I’ll never get a wink of sleep until this ‘Doctor Death’ is put away.”

“Hey,” Sullivan said. “That has a catchy ring to it. ‘Doctor Death’—I think that’s what we’ll call the case.” He stood up. “Okay, sir, I’ll get cracking.”

The attorney general shook the hand of the agent-in-charge.

“I think for all our best interests, we should have our meetings here. Just leave a message at my office that you’d like to have a cup of coffee.”

“Yes, sir,” Sullivan replied, and slipped away.

Walters stood there for a moment, stoking the fires of his ambition.

He wanted “Doctor Death” to take the stand.

The information the FBI fed into the computers did not lead to anything conclusive. But it did confirm that when three fatalities from certain terminal diseases had occurred in University Hospital, Seth was known to have been somewhere on the premises.

Furthermore, when Seth was on vacation in the summer, none of these natural but coincidentally “merciful” sudden deaths occurred.

“He’s our man,” said Sullivan, tapping the manila envelope that lay upon the diner’s laminated table.

“Can we call him in for questioning?” asked Walters eagerly.

“I wouldn’t, sir. This evidence says something to you and me. But I don’t think it’s solid enough to pin the rap on him. I mean, it doesn’t show him with a needle—or whatever his MO is. If we want an airtight case, we’ve gotta catch him in the act.”

“Have your men been watching him?”

“Day and night,” said Sullivan. “We’ve known every move he’s made. We’re tracing his previous history. We’ve even had a specialist from Washington get access to the files in Pathology, to see if something turns up. So far, the autopsies all show natural deaths. So we’ve got nothing in our hands unless we catch him at it.”

“What the hell’s he waiting for? Isn’t there anything you Bureau guys can do?”

“Well, yes and no. It might be very risky.…”

“What, man, what?” he demanded.

“We could set him up. You know, get someone who’s got a relative in pain and who wants to die. That’s the way it usually works.”

“You mean, this isn’t just an isolated incident? There are other places in the country where this sort of thing occurs?”

The agent nodded. “There’re a lot of dirty doctors who play God, sir. Frankly, I wish I could string ’em all up. That’s why I’m so hot to nail this bastard to the wall.”

“Then why not try your plan?”

“But there’s a big risk. We’ve had a case similar to this, and the defense managed to convince the jury that it was police entrapment, and the guy got off.” To which he appended in a whisper: “And just between you and me, that’s pretty much what it was.”

“Sullivan, you just get your man, and I’ll take care of those twelve men on the jury.”

The agent shrugged. “Well, sir, my gut feeling is still that we should wait it out. This kind of sick human being can’t help repeating his crime. But if you want us to ‘inspire’ him, I’ll do my best.”

The two men rose and shook hands.

“One thing, Mr. Walters,” the agent continued.

“Yes?”

“I don’t think we should see each other or communicate until … we’ve got the evidence.”

The trap was now set for Dr. Seth Lazarus.

*    *    *

Special Agent Madeline Hanson, among the first females hired when the Bureau went co-ed in 1972, had used her talents as a onetime aspiring actress in the service of the Bureau many times. Of course, a lot of her assignments were “garden variety” seductions which, despite the danger involved, now bored her. At last she was presented with a challenge—and the promise of ascending yet another step in the hierarchy of the Bureau.

She spent three days in a hotel in midtown Chicago being tutored and drilled by medical experts and psychologists. The agents had already gone through the medical histories of the terminally ill at the Lakeshore V.A. Hospital and had found the most likely candidate who could unwittingly—or, more accurately, unconsciously—impersonate her husband.

Just reading the file of Captain Frank Campos made her cringe. He had stepped on a land mine in Vietnam, lost a leg and an arm, and had become legally blind and partially deaf. He had 80 percent hearing in one ear and none in the other. But his worst affliction was the shrapnel still welded to his spine. It was inoperable, and the pain unbearable, despite the Demerol and morphine and the other licensed analgesics, which had long since lost the power to give him much relief.

He had pleaded with the doctors for cocaine or heroin both of which he had tried in Nam, and which he desperately believed could allay his suffering. But his doctors would not act illegally. And thus the wounded hero of America’s most unheroic war was doomed to undiminishing agony.

Once, when they had brought him up to the roof to get some sunshine, Frank had summoned all the strength in his warped body and attempted to propel himself from his chair and over the roof railing. Only the alertness of a nurse saved him from death.

Also on the record was an incident recorded the previous Christmas Eve when Campos’s younger brother Hector came to see him at the hospital with a .32 revolver in his pocket, determined to fulfill his brother’s wish: an end to his relentless pain.

Ironically, his hand was shaking so much that the two shots he had fired missed his brother’s head by inches, and the orderlies subdued him so that he could not shoot again. He was not brought to trial, since a police psychiatrist determined that he was mentally incapable of knowing what he was doing. Instead, he was remanded to an institution for six months’ observation.

“Christ,” Madeline remarked, her stomach churning. “Are we at least going to let Doctor Death put this poor man out of his misery?”

“Of course not, ’Lainie. We don’t sanction murder.”

Agent Hanson grinned and said sarcastically: “Yeah, tell me all about it, guys.”

Agent Sullivan directed that the little group go back to business.

“Well,” he said after another hour. “Are you all set, Madeline? Do you think you’ve got the details of Captain Campos’s life in your head?”

She frowned. “Guys, this just won’t work. If this doctor’s half as smart as you, then he’ll never buy a ‘grieving wife’ act. I mean, the poor bastard’s been in the hospital for eight years. Just where am I supposed to have been hiding? This bullshit you concocted about ‘missing dog tags’ wouldn’t fool a dog.”

Sullivan glowered. “Have you got a better idea?”

“No,” she countered. “I’m just trying to be smart. You need someone who can really play the role of suffering relative. I mean, his brother has already tried to kill him.
He
could make a really convincing pitch to Doctor Death.”