Flashback (1988) (22 page)

“Sponge. No, over here. Right here!”

Her clothes now a mass of flame, Hattie Day lurched to her feet and plunged toward the window.

“Okay. Now, retract here.”

Shrieking, and now engulfed in flame, the woman they all called the Witch of West Eighty-seventh Street hurled herself through the glass and out into the summer night, ten stories above the street.

14

Tuesday morning descended on Zack in the guise of one of his sneakers, set neatly and carefully on the side of his face by Cheapdog.

“Self-centered brute,” he mumbled, working his eyes open one at a time. “The world has to turn upside down just because you have to take a pee.”

Cheapdog responded to the rebuke by licking him on the mouth.

“Okay, okay, mop-face. You made your point.” Zack scratched the animal behind one ear and made yet another in a long series of promises to get him a haircut. “I’m afraid I haven’t been paying much attention to you lately, old boy. Thanks for being so understanding.”

Feeling sluggish, and less enthused about a day at work than he had in some time, he pulled on a pair of surgical scrub pants emblazoned
PROPERTY
OF
MUNICIPAL
HOSPITAL
OF
BOSTON—NOT
TO
BE
REMOVED
FOR
ANY
REASON
, let Cheapdog out into the backyard, did fifteen minutes of lackluster calisthenics, and finally started water for coffee.

Suzanne’s striking change of attitude toward him was, he knew, one reason for his unpleasant humor. And as wonderful as making love with her had been, he wished now that they had played things differently.

But weighing perhaps even more heavily at that moment was Guy Beaulieu’s legacy.

For most of the prior evening, Guy’s envelope had remained unopened in the camper. In fact, at various times throughout the day Zack had actually considered returning it in that state. In the end, though, he realized that his decision to do what he could for the man had been made well before meeting with his widow and daughter, and in fact, even before the terrible events in the quiet room.

As he dripped hot water through his Chemex filter and scrambled two eggs with some chopped peppers, onions, and
bits of leftover bacon, Zack mulled over his initial impressions of the surgeons strange and bitter legacy.

It was after midnight when he had finally returned home from a long walk with Cheapdog and brought in the envelope. Too tired to read with much comprehension, he had spent two hours sifting through the material and sorting it into piles on the dining room table. From what he could tell, the Ultramed Hospitals Corporation, whether responsible for Guys difficulties or not, had had a tiger by the tail.

There were dozens of newspaper clippings and official documents, plus computer printouts, a number of typed and amended lists of corporate officers and boards of directors, and several smaller envelopes filled with hastily scrawled, handwritten notes.

Beaulieu and his researchers had been thoroughly preparing themselves for battle. Still, despite their diligence, it looked to Zack as if the evidence they had accumulated of Ultramed’s avaricious business practices was circumstantial and vague.

Zack felt certain that although the assorted documents might raise some eyebrows among the hospital trustees, they were lacking the one, essential ingredient that might turn that concern into votes: a flesh-and-blood example—even one—of the dangers of such practices—what Rock Hudson had been to AIDS, or the Challenger explosion to the dangers of space exploration.

Without such a rallying point, such an emotional linchpin, Zack knew that Beaulieu’s efforts were ultimately as doomed as the man himself.

In addition to the evidence against Ultramed, the envelope contained a diary.

During the early morning hours, Zack had done no more than scan the small, spiral-bound notebook. Now, after clearing a space on the table for his breakfast, he opened it randomly. Not surprisingly, the writing, almost all of it in fountain pen, was meticulous and precise.

Zack glanced at several other pages, some of which outlined more of Guys efforts to dive beneath the murky sea of rumors. Others described clashes with members of the medical staff, the local newspaper, and even certain patients.

Taken as a whole, it was a chronicle of the agonizing disintegration of a mans life.

Allegations of malpractice, none of them substantiated or backed up with a suit … letters of complaint to the newspapers and the hospital, most of them anonymous … rumors of sexual misconduct … rumors of inappropriate behavior … patient defections …

Blow after blow, humiliation after humiliation, yet Guy Beaulieu had refused to knuckle under. On one page he seemed heroic, on the next, pathologically obstinate. As Zack scanned the notes, the fine line separating the two conditions grew even less distinct.

The chances that a man is in the right increase geometrically by the vigor with which others are trying to prove him wrong
.

The maxim was one of Zack’s favorites, and he had cited it any number of times over the years. But never had he felt it in his gut the way he did at this moment.

Still, there was more than gut instinct to consider. There was the incriminating letter from Maureen Banas, along with other damning evidence Frank claimed to have. There was also Guy’s explosive and irrational behavior in the emergency ward on the morning of his death. And finally, there was the lack of any really good explanation as to why the man might have been singled out for destruction in the first place.

Certainly, his widows belief that Ultramed was trying to rid itself of a potential troublemaker was possible, but the
response seemed absurdly out of proportion to the threat Guy posed—like shooting a fly with an elephant gun.

Zack retrieved Cheapdog from where he was lurking beneath the window of a neighbors unspayed collie, and chained him on a long run in the yard. Then he showered, dressed, and headed for the hospital, wondering what he would do if he had to confront Marie Fontaine and her mother with hard evidence that Guy had been, in fact, irrational, unstable, and paranoid. Even with a negative autopsy, the man could have been in the early stages of Alzheimers or struggling with nonanatomical mental illness.

As he was pulling into the small Doctors Only lot at the hospital, Zack flashed on another saying—this one from a poster he had tacked to the wall of his med school apartment.

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you
.

The emergency ward was in a louder-than-usual morning hum, with several private physicians doing minor procedures, and the E.R. physician of the day, Wilton Marshfield, huffing from one of four “active” rooms to the next, clearly upset that things were not proceeding at a more gentle pace.

Zack stopped by the lounge for one final cup of coffee, and was in the process of failing to confound two candy stripers with a thumb palm, when he was paged for an outside call.

“Zack, it’s Brookings here, Phil Brookings.”

“Oh, yes, Phil. If you’re calling about that youngster, Nelms, I had to postpone his appointment because of Guy Beaulieu’s funeral. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow afternoon.”

Zack glanced over at the candy stripers, one of whom was completing the more-than-passable thumb palm of a penny on her first try.

“I know,” the psychiatrist said. “The boy’s mother called me. She was, how can I say, a little concerned that you told her to meet you on the side of some mountain. I promised her I would check with you to see if … ah … if there was anything further I could do.”

“Actually,” Zack said, smiling at Brookings’s discomfiture, “it’s near the base of the mountain. Not on the side.”

“Oh … I see.… Well, I’ll just give Mrs. Nelms a call and reassure her that you’re not the, how should I say, the eccentric she thinks you might be.”

This time, Zack laughed out loud.

“Phil, forgive me for being glib. The truth is, I probably
am
the eccentric she thinks I might be. But this time, at least, I’m just doing what I can to avoid the difficulty
you
had. It’s a little tricky doing a detailed neurological exam on a moving target.”

“I understand,” Brookings said, although his tone suggested some lingering doubts. “I’ll speak with the boy’s mother and make sure they show up. And just in case, perhaps you should wear your sneakers. The kid is fest.”

“Thanks, Phil. I’ll be in touch.”

Zack hung up as the candy stripers, still practicing, were preparing to leave the lounge.

“Here you go, ladies,” he said. “One more. This one’s called a finger roll. In it, this perfectly normal American quarter will be magically transported across the tops of my fingers and back without the aid of a crane, bulldozer, or my other hand.”

Between the second and the third roll, the quarter slipped between his fingers and plunked into his coffee.

“Now, I suggest that you two stay away from this trick until you’re old enough to work with hot coffee,” he warned.

He stood proudly by the cup and waited to retrieve his coin until the bewildered pair had left the room.

“Me, eccentric,” he muttered as he headed through the emergency ward. “That’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.”

A set of X rays, five views of a teenager’s cervical spine, were wedged up on a four-paneled viewbox in the corridor. Hours later, when the tension and excitement had died down and there was time to reflect, Zack would be unable to explain what it was about those films that had caught his eye.

But in that one microsecond as he passed by, something did.

It might have been the widening of a shadow, or perhaps the slightly unusual curve in the lateral view. Or it might have been nothing more or less than the instinctive processing of the films against thirteen years of study and God only knew how many other C-spines in how many other settings.

Whatever it was, something made him stop, turn, and study the X rays in more detail.

The fractures of vertebrae C-l and C-2 were far from the most obvious he had ever seen, but they were certainly present—and unquestionably unstable. If the spinal cord had not already been damaged, a sudden twist, or turn, or bump could be disastrous.

Either way, he certainly should have been called in on the case.

He checked the name and birthdate:
Stacy Mills, age 14
.

Next, he cut through the nurses’ station, looking for Wilton Marshfield. The portly physician was hunched over a counter, hurriedly writing a set of discharge instructions. Next to the instruction sheet was a soft cervical collar.

“Hi,” Zack said, moving close enough to verify that the instructions were, in fact, for Stacy Mills.

He looked past the man to bed 3, where a dark, pretty girl in riding jodhpurs and a lavender T-shirt was waiting with her parents. She was sitting on the edge of the litter with her feet dangling down, and she was rubbing gently at the base of her skull.

“Oh, hi, Iverson,” Marshfield said. He glanced up only long enough to nod, and then returned to his writing. “This is one bitch of a morning, I’ll tell you.… Saw you at Beaulieu’s funeral yesterday.… Terrible business. Terrible.”