Mortal Remains (30 page)

Within moments they had their drinks in hand and Lucy was receiving the lion’s share of attention from the men around them. She acted fascinated with every single one.

Mark recognized the names of at least four or five heads of the Fortune 500 whose firms were headquartered in New York. The ingrained resentment he’d always had for the silver-spoon set stirred deep within him.

Other men walked over to introduce themselves. He barely paid attention, until:

“… Freddy Lawler II, and this is my boy Ronald…”

Mark started at this name, and found himself staring at a small-statured man with delicate features and short-cropped blond hair. He reappraised his audio impression of the kid’s mother, downsizing his mental image by about 50 percent. But he wasn’t curious enough to go over and ask Ronnie if he carried a picture of the woman to be sure. He did wonder if this well-heeled son ever visited Diane Whigston in her trailer park, and if he drove up to her front door in whichever fancy car parked outside was his, or arrived in a taxi to save them both embarrassment at the difference in their economic stations.

He slipped away from where Lucy continued to hold court and parked himself beside a table of hors d’oeuvres, making it a point to be alone and accessible.

He and Lucy suspected Braden wanted a private word with Mark, perhaps to suggest subtly that it would be wise to leave Chaz alone during the investigation. But while Mark went one-on-one with Charles, she would work the crowd, and perhaps succeed at prompting somebody to make a slip about Chaz’s real whereabouts at the time of the ambush. Judging by how readily they fell under her spell, Mark figured she just might pull it off.

At least that had been their plan.

“And you all hunt, do you?” Lucy asked the men arrayed around her. “I have a huge weak spot for venison. My four brothers used to bring in enough to feed our entire family for a winter, and nothing, but nothing, could surpass the taste of that meat prepared in my mother’s marinade…”

Her enthusiasm was so convincing that Mark figured her every word to be true. In any case she had her audience eating out of her hand.

“… so if any of you gentleman are willing to share some of your catch with me, I’d be pleased to remunerate-”

“Love to, Doc!”

“How much do you want?”

“I’ve got a dozen steaks in the freezer with your name on it – my gift to you…”

Mark chuckled at how she’d captivated these weekend hunters.

“… why, thank you gentlemen,” Lucy continued. “But which of you has bagged the most? I wouldn’t want to deprive someone of their sole catch?”

“We could show you later.”

“Yeah, it’s all down in the meat locker.”

“Just at the foot of the back steps.”

“Really? It isn’t bloody, is it? I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“Oh, of course not,” reassured a very earnest young man with blow-dried black hair. Chipper he’d said his name was. “It’s all been cut into steaks, just like at the meat market-”

Lucy burst out laughing and, laying her hand on his, gave him a wink. “Chipper, you forget what I do for a living.”

He flushed.

The rest roundly laughed.

“Now you quit teasing me, Doc,” Chipper said, breaking into a good-natured smile.

Mark looked around, but Charles didn’t appear to be in the room. Spotting a group of men in a small parlor with sliding doors, he thought his host might be there, and sidled over. As he drew near, he picked up snatches of the conversation.

“… shareholders will bale at the slightest rumor…”

“… exercising my options…”

“… if it gets public…”

But no Charles.

Nevertheless, he strained to hear, thinking he might at least get a tip on which stocks to dump.

“… other CEOs have had worse problems…”

“… the SEC filed charges against Bob last week…”

“… Christ, everyone’s going down like flies these days…”

At that moment Charles appeared out of nowhere, stepped over to the doors, and drew them closed. He turned around and, seemingly only then, spotted Mark. He smiled, and shrugged, almost apologetically. “Businessmen are like doctors,” he said, walking over to take him by the elbow and lead him away. “You can’t even invite them to a party but they clump together and talk shop.”

“Well, I guess that’s true-”

“I wonder if you and I could have a word in private?”

Here we go,
Mark thought.

“Of course.”

“Perhaps you’d be kind enough to wait for me in the library. I have to speak with the caterer, but will be along in a minute. You remember the way, don’t you? You used to play there as a child.”

The double wooden doors of polished mahogany were as high as the fifteen-foot ceilings. They opened as soundlessly as he remembered, admitting him to the silent interior. Overhead chandeliers suspended from dark wooden beams cast a dim golden glow over the thousands of book spines that lined the shelves along the walls. Though the room seemed smaller than before, it remained impressive.

Perfect, thought Mark. With the two of them alone, Braden would be more likely to start in with his refined arm-twisting techniques. There’d be no need to keep it polite. That might be more revealing about any family secrets Braden wanted to keep hidden than the nuanced exchanges they’d had thus far in the middle of crowds. Mark might even press him a little – make him defensive about Chaz.

As Mark waited, the soft pungent smell of leather mixed with the caramelized odor of varnish. Closing his eyes, he could have been backin that time when the three people he loved most in the world were as close as the next room, all happily, he’d believed, laughing, eating, and drinking together. Then he felt all the more desolate for the reminder of what he’d lost. “Goddamn it,” he muttered, starting to stroll and read the titles, anything to prevent the past from reinvading his memory. He resented such incursions at the best of times. Somehow, in this house, thoughts of his mother, his father, and Kelly were unseemly fresh and doubly painful.

Yet he found himself heading for the corner he’d liked best – the place where he had curled up on one of the big leather reading chairs with books on travel adventures that were full of wild-animal pictures.

On the way he passed entire sections of medical works, and quickly appreciated the extent of the collection. Interested, he took a closer look.

Initially he saw worn, faded books on obstetrics, some of them almost historical records exhibiting how crude and primitive the profession once was. Others documented more recent history. He pulled down an old leather-bound text dated 1930 and, flipping through it, shuddered at the realities of infant and maternal mortality in the era when his own parents had been born. Ether had been the only anesthetic, sulfa the only antibiotic for infections, and neonatal care for any compromised infants amounted to little more than keeping them warm and hydrated until they died or revived on their own.

The next shelf over contained more up-to-date texts on both childbirth and neonatology, some of them real doorstoppers. Mark remembered his OB rotation under Charles Braden – it had been the man’s last year before retirement – and, whatever he thought of him personally, begrudgingly admitted how excellent he’d been as a teacher. Always on top of current practices, Braden had a wonderful knack for putting those techniques and advances in the context of how things were before.

A few steps farther, he found a whole section of completely contemporary editions, including the latest works on high-risk births, neonatology intensive care, and the management of congenital birth defects. There were scientific publications as well – molecular biology, DNA, the human genome – and tucked alongside them were reprints of articles that Charles Braden coauthored six years ago outlining the potential of screening amniotic fluid for mutated genes to diagnose genetic abnormalities in utero. Handwritten notes in the margins outlined the commercial possibilities of marketing kits to make doing the job easier. Well-thumbed journals with the latest studies in theoretical applications of gene and stem cell therapies completed the collection.

This was not a person who had slipped into retirement and let his profession pass him by. He’d kept up.

On the adjacent shelves, he found the other end of the spectrum – the less noble records of the profession, including yellowed tracts from the thirties and forties that were little more than fascist rants on eugenics. Filled with crude caricatures of Africans pointing out their Negroid features and accompanying texts that were outright racist in attributing inferiority to such physiognomy, these were published in both Boston and New York. Other paperbound manuals hailing from the University of Berlin spewed similar filth about Jews, but had been translated into English by a well-known Manhattan publishing house better known these days for bestsellers by lawyers. Still others were journals that tried to argue the superiority of the white race through exhaustive measurements of cranium sizes on cadavers.

“I see you found my hall of shame,” Charles Braden said from the doorway.

Mark gave a start. He quickly slid one of the works he’d been perusing back into its slot.

“I remember poking through books in here as a kid, Dr. Braden.” He gestured to the room as a whole, hoping to draw attention away from that particular section. “Except I obviously didn’t appreciate then the extent of the medical collection. It’s very impressive.”

“Please, continue to browse. And don’t be embarrassed. Most doctors are drawn to those particular writings. They’re both fascinated and repulsed.” He started toward him, and pointed to the shelves near the end of the wall. “Down there are the big results, the global offspring of these poisonous tracts” – he hooked his thumbs at the odious titles Mark had been looking at- “if they are allowed to bear fruit. Come, take a look. The legacy of hate.”

Not sure what Braden was getting at, or why the man would even collect such despicable material, he hesitated.

“Don’t be shy.” Braden walked to the next set of shelves and ran his hands over the half dozen maroon spines of what resembled an encyclopedia set. “These are bound articles related to war crimes of doctors in Germany and Japan during World War II.” He pulled one out and handed it to Mark. “This author actually does a good job at explaining why genocide occurs.”

As Mark glanced at it, he recognized the name of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose work he still read regularly in the
Herald
. Braden had tagged some of the more insightful pieces, often the same ones that Mark remembered clipping and saving when he needed a little extra help sorting out the latest ethnic cleansing on the planet.

Braden moved on to less-weathered volumes. “The study of how our profession has strayed into evil is a pursuit of mine,” he said. “We should all be forced to read the obscenities of science, in order that none of us drift into a similar arrogance.”

Mark picked up the top sheet of a printout that had obviously been taken off the Internet. It reported on recent war crime prosecutions in Tokyo. Included were photos of a vivisection being done on an unanesthetized pregnant woman in a notorious torture camp during Japan’s occupation of Manchuria.
The woman had screamed entreaties that her baby be saved as they cut out the womb,
read the caption quoting one of the witnesses. He shuddered, and returned it to its place. “Strong stuff.”

“We have our local brand of monsters.” Braden reached up a few shelves and handed Mark a pamphlet written in the early thirties by a Dr. Brown from a town not twenty miles north of Hampton Junction. It argued for the smothering of babies at birth if they have obvious physical defects.

The back of Mark’s throat closed as he tossed the paper onto the nearest shelf. “That’s hideous!”

“Don’t think this guy was that far off the thinking of the time, at least in small places like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was the depression. The good Dr. Brown and every other GP in impoverished, isolated parts of the land would look at a severely deformed baby they’d just delivered and think, What about the family? Barely able to survive now, how will trying to care for this hapless creature sap the little energy and money they have for the healthy siblings? Most doctors might just despair, but some might act – think the right thing to do would be protect the other children from even more abject poverty than they already suffered. Haven’t you ever wondered why there are so few older adults with severe disabilities in the little villages of rural America?”

“You’re kidding. You don’t believe doctors actually smothered infants.”

“And you don’t believe it ever happened.”

Mark felt too startled to speak. He’d heard stories from long ago about midwives doing that kind of thing, but not doctors. “Surely that’s the stuff of rural legends.”

“I think you’re hopelessly naive.”

“Hopelessly naive to say most doctors draw the line at murder.”

“Yes, it is about drawing lines. Except those lines – between right and wrong, life and death – change with the circumstances and the times. Look how blurred it’s getting these days in ICUs with all the high-tech advances we have in keeping people alive.”

Even though Braden’s tone was quiet and polite, almost professorial, Mark felt uncomfortable. Why was the man going on about this? It certainly wasn’t what he’d brought him into the library for. And right now, that was all Mark had an interest in. “Why did you want to see me, sir?” The question sounded more impertinent than he intended, but it got to the point.

The landscape of Braden’s features shifted slightly, from pensive to thoughtful. Not different in a way he could describe, but different.

“I wanted to thank you for the discreet way you’ve been handling your investigation into Kelly’s murder,” he said.

The compliment caught him by surprise. “I haven’t done anything special.”

“That can’t be true, not for Mark Roper. You’re too much like your father. Best damn mind. Inquisitive as hell. That’s what made him such a great doctor. Could have been a leading specialist in any field he chose.”