Flashback (1988) (19 page)

A fat man with a brown robe and a bald place on the top of his head hopped onto the screen.

“Hello, boys and girls,” he said. “What ho, there, Robin. Today, we’re going to learn about one of my favorite letters. It’s the letter that starts off a lot of our favorite words like
candy
and
cartoon
. It’s the third letter in the alphabet, and it’s called C. So here’re Robin and Alan to tell you about it.”

Robin the Good swung across the screen on a rope with
leaves growing off it. Then he dropped to the ground as Alan-a-Dale began to play.

“Alas, my love, you do me wrong,” Robin sang, “to cast me out so discourteously. Because today I sing this song about our friend the letter C.…”

Toby Nelms rubbed at his eyes as the color of the television set began growing brighter and brighter.

“… C, C, is all our joy. C’s for carrot and car and cat. C, C starts club and cloud. Now what do you think of that? …”

Robin the Good danced around a tree.

Seated on the floor in his den, Toby Nelms’s body grew rigid. His shoulders began to shake. The sound of Robins voice grew softer as the music grew louder. Overhead, lights began to flash past. A face floated into view.

“… There’s C for comet and C for crab; and C in front of the coat we wear.…”

“… Now, Toby,” the face said, “there’s nothing to worry about. You’re going to go to sleep. Just relax. Relax and count back from one hundred.…”

Robin the Good was singing and prancing across the television screen as Toby Nelms began, in a soft, tremulous voice, to count.

He was on one knee, crooning the final lines of his ballad, as the boy began to scream.

12

It was, all would later agree, a magnificent funeral. Standing room only. The crowd, sweltering in the brutally humid summer afternoon, filled the pews of St. Anne’s Church and spilled out into the vestibule. The priests conducting the mass were not only from the predominantly French-Canadian St. Anne’s, but from the crosstown parish, St. Sebastians, as well.

“… Guy Beaulieu was not a
son
of Sterling,” Monsignor Tresche was declaring in his eulogy. “He was one of its fathers—a gentle man, whose skill and caring hands have, through the years, touched each and every one of us.…”

Over the three days following Beaulieu’s death, Zack had visited his widow, Clothilde, and daughter, Marie Fontaine, several times. Even so, he was surprised when Marie asked him’ to serve as a pall bearer. Although he would have preferred to remain less intimately involved with Guys funeral than he had been with his death, accepting their request was the least he could do.

It had been at his desperate urging that Marie and her mother had put aside their biases against such things and had agreed to an autopsy.

“… a man of vision and conviction. A humble man, who faced mounting personal difficulties with courage and dignity.…”

The priest droned on, but Zack, seated in the first row with the seven other pall bearers, heard only snatches. His thoughts kept drifting, as they had much of the time, to the agonizing scene with Guy in the emergency room, and to the equally unpleasant experience of viewing his post mortem examination.

As Zack had suspected, the man had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. There was, however, a major surprise. The arteries in Beaulieu’s brain, and, in fact, in his whole body, were those of a man decades younger. The lethal stroke had resulted not from any crack in a hardened vessel but from the
rupture of a small aneurysm—a pea-sized defect in one artery which, almost certainly, had been present without producing symptoms for many years.

The cause of that fatal tear, Zack knew, could only have been a sudden, drastic rise in blood pressure. That thought sent an angry jet of bile rasping into his throat, as it had over and over again since the autopsy. Guy Beaulieu’s two years of difficulties at Ultramed-Davis, whether real or contrived, had loaded the weapon of his destruction.

The humiliating conflict in the emergency ward with Mainwaring, Frank, and the security guard had, in essence, pulled the trigger.

Frank, of course, saw things differently.

He had issued statements of shock and bereavement from the hospital, and from Ultramed, and had sent a basket of fruit to Guy’s widow. But in the few minutes he and Zack had spent alone, he had made it clear that he considered Beaulieu’s death nothing short of an act of Providence.

Unobtrusively, Zack glanced about the chapel. Suzanne, though dressed in sedate blue and wearing no makeup, sparkled in the midst of two rows of Ultramed-Davis physicians which did not include Donald Norman, Jack Pearl, or Jason Mainwaring. Several pews behind her, between the Judge and Cinnie, sat Frank, resplendent in a beige summer suit and appearing, as usual, composed and in control. The mayor was there, along with several other area notables, including the region’s congressman.

Guy Beaulieu had once described himself to Zack as “just a plain, old, small-town Canuck, lucky enough to be born to parents who wouldn’t let him quit school to work in the mills.”

It was good, at least, to see that so many people knew better.

Later, as Zack and the other pall bearers shuffled up the aisle with Guys casket, his eyes and Frank’s met briefly. He felt so distant from the man—so totally detached.

Had they really grown up in the same home, played in the same yard year after year? Had they really worn the same clothes, shared so many childhood dreams? Had they really once been fast friends?

The hope of reestablishing a friendship with his brother suddenly seemed naive. They would make do, perhaps, tolerate one another, even work together. They would spend sterile time together at family functions. But they would never be close.

The open hearse was festooned with flowers. Zack, feeling overwhelmed by the sadness and futility of it all, helped slide the heavy casket into place among them.

“Excuse me, Doctor,” a voice behind him said as he stepped back from the casket. “Kin I talk to you?”

Zack turned and was surprised to find himself confronting the huge security guard, Henry Flowers, who seemed ill at ease in a dark suit and solid black tie. Looking on, several respectful steps behind him, was a petite, plain young woman in a white lace dress—almost certainly the man’s wife.

“Yes?” Zack asked.

The guard shifted uncomfortably.

“I … uh … I wanted you to know that I’m real sorry for what happened to Dr. Beaulieu,” he said. “He took care of my wife’s mother once, real good care, and he’s never done nothin’ bad to me.… Dr. Iverson, I never laid a hand on him except to grab his wrist. I swear it. I …”

His voice drifted away. It took several moments before Zack realized that the man did not know the results of the autopsy, and if he did, he did not understand them.

Zack reached out and put a hand on the guards shoulder.

“You didn’t do anything that caused Dr. Beaulieu’s death, Henry,” he said, loudly enough for the mans wife to hear. “He had an aneurysm—a time bomb—in his head, and it just happened to go off while you were there.”

Relief flooded the guards pocked face.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said, pumping Zack’s hand as if it were the handle on a tractor-trailer jack. “Oh, God, thanks a lot. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just ask. Anything.”

He backed away, and then grabbed his tiny wife by the arm and hurried off.

Zack watched until the incongruous couple had disappeared around the corner. Then he turned and headed to his camper, feeling marginally less morose. At least one other who had shared those awful moments in the quiet room had been affected by them.

The procession to All Saints Cemetery was, according to the Judge, as long as any Sterling had ever seen.

Following the service, Zack accompanied Frank and their parents to the shaded spot where Marie Fontaine and her mother were receiving final condolences.

Marie, who seemed to have aged a year in just the three days since her return home, accepted an embrace from Cinnie and a kiss on the cheek from the Judge. However, she barely touched Franks outstretched hand before pulling away.

“It was good of you to come,” she said coolly.

“Your father meant a great deal to all of us,” Frank replied blandly.

She eyed him for a moment, and then said simply, “That’s nice to know.”

Zack glanced over at his parents, but saw nothing to suggest that they appreciated the tension in the brief exchange. Marie then turned to him, took both his hands in hers, and kissed him by the ear.

“Please stop by our limousine,” she whispered.

Imperceptible to the others, Zack nodded.

Half an hour later, Zack sat across from Marie Fontaine and Clothilde Beaulieu in the back of the mortuary’s black stretch Cadillac. The smoked-glass windows, including the partition separating them from the driver, were closed, but the limos air-conditioning system kept the steamy afternoon at bay.

Maries husband, a gaunt, bearded man whose quiet dignity reminded Zack a little of her father, stood outside.

“We wanted you to know how grateful we are for all you’ve done,” Marie began.

“Your father was always very good to me.”

“He was very good to everyone,” she said. “That’s why it’s so hard to understand why nobody stood up for him while he was being murdered.”

Zack’s impulse was to correct her, but the intensity of her eyes told him not to bother.

“It upsets me a great deal to think that anyone might have deliberately set about to ruin him,” he said.

“Not anyone, Zack. Ultramed.”

“What?”

“Zack, we know Father confided in you. We know that even though your brother runs the hospital, he thought you would give him the benefit of an open mind. Was he right?”

“I told him I would listen and that I would respect his confidence, if that’s what you mean.”

Marie glanced over at her mother, who nodded her approval of Zack’s response.

“That’s exactly what we mean,” she went on. “Several years ago, Father opposed the sale of the hospital to Ultramed. He just didn’t believe an outside corporation should be given such a vital foothold in this community—at least, not with so little community involvement or control. If it weren’t for
your
fathers influence, we think he would have succeeded in blocking it. But that is neither here nor there, now. Did you know that shortly after they took over at the hospital, Ultramed took legal action to fire him?”

“No,” Zack said. “No, I didn’t.”

“He was preparing to countersue them when they backed off. According to Father, they became frightened by a court decision in Florida that ended up costing one of die other corporations millions for trying to do the same thing to a pathologist who was working in a hospital they had acquired.

“Zack, Ultramed wants blind loyalty from everyone working for them—total acceptance of their policies. Father fought them at every turn. Less than a year after they dropped die suit against him, the rumors started. And within just a few months of that, a showy new surgeon was on die scene, snapping up chunks of Father’s practice.”

“That would be Jason Mainwaring,” Zack said.

“Exactly.”

“Have you any proof that Ultramed engineered all of this?” he asked.

“Only this.” She reached beneath her seat, drew out a thick manila envelope and passed it across to him. “Mother and I talked it over last night. Father liked you and trusted you. And frankly, we have nowhere else to turn. This is all the information he had been able to gather in his battle against Ultramed. It doesn’t prove they were behind his murder, but it does show something of how they operate—some of the things they’re capable of doing to turn a profit.”

“What am I to do with this?”

For the first time, Beaulieu’s widow spoke.

“Dr. Iverson,” she said, in a soft accent virtually identical to Guy’s, “it was my husbands hope that the information contained in that envelope would convince the board of trustees, including your father, to exercise their option and order the repurchase of the hospital from Ultramed.”

Zack stared at her in disbelief.

“Mrs. Beaulieu, are you forgetting that I
work
for Ultramed? They pay my salary, my office expenses, insurance,
everything. To say nothing of the administrator at the hospital being my brother. What you are asking me to do isn’t really fair.”