Sisterhood (16 page)

Hadawi was obviously used to dealing with Huttner’s ego. He merely shrugged and said, “If you wish, I shall be happy to order a penicillin level on her blood. Is there anything else you would like?”

Huttner seized the chance to avoid a Surgical Death Rounds presentation as a drowning sailor might grasp a
passing chunk of driftwood. A medication error would provide him with instant absolution.

“Yes, there are some other things I think should be done,” Huttner said with a professorial tone that included several significant pauses. He seemed actually to be savoring his own words. “I think she should have a complete chemical screen. Antibiotic levels, electrolytes, toxins—the works.”

“With no specific idea of what we’re searching for, that will be quite expensive,” Hadawi said softly, as if anticipating the eruption that would follow even this mild objection.

“Damn the money, man,” Huttner fired, his fingers jabbing even faster than before. “This is a human life we’re talking about here. You just do the damn tests and get me the results.”

“As you wish, Wally.”

Huttner nodded his satisfaction, then started to leave. As he passed David, he snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot, David,” he said over his shoulder. “The Cape Vascular Conference really wasn’t all that it was cut out to be. I’ve decided not to go back. Thank you for your help yesterday. I think there’s a meeting in January I might want to attend. Perhaps we can work out another coverage arrangement then.”

His voice, David thought, held every bit as much sincerity as Don Juan saying, “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning.”

I
n his selection of a hospital, as in all the other affairs in his life, Senator Richard Cormier was his own man. While many Washington politicians considered it a status symbol to be cared for at Bethesda Naval or Walter Reed, Cormier overruled the objections of his aides and insisted that he be operated on by Dr. Louis Ketchem at Boston Doctors. “Always trust your own kind,” he said. “Louie’s an old war-horse just like me. Either he does the cutting or I don’t get cut.”

The walls of Cormier’s room were covered top to bottom with cards, and cartons containing several hundred more were stacked neatly in one corner. In addition to a nurse and the senator, the presence of a secretary and two aides helped to create an atmosphere almost as chaotic as that perpetually found in his Washington office.

“Senator Cormier, I must give you your preop meds, and these people will have to leave your room.” The nurse, an ample matron named Fuller, projected just the right amount of authority to get the senator to comply with the request.

Cormier ran his fingers through his thick, silver hair and squinted up at the nurse. “Ten more minutes.”

“Two,” she said firmly.

“Five.” The bargaining brought a sparkle to his eyes.

“All right, five,” she said. “But one minute longer and I use the square needle to give you this medication.” She bustled out of the room, turning at the doorway to give Cormier a glare that said she was serious. The senator winked at her.

“Okay, Beth, time to get packed up,” he said, to his secretary. “Remember, I want a thank-you sent to everyone who put a return address on his card. I signed what seemed like a thousand of them yesterday, but if you run out, have some more printed up and I’ll sign them after the operation. Gary, call Lionel Herbert and tell him to fly up here for a meeting the day after tomorrow. Tell him to be prepared to make some concessions on that energy package or, by God, it’s back to the drawing board again for his boss and those oil people he’s so damn friendly with. Bobby, call my niece and tell her I’m fine, not to worry, and, most of all, not to be upset that she couldn’t leave the kids to fly here. I’ll call her myself as soon as they let me back near my phone. Oh, and Bobby, have you got all the names of people who sent flowers? I want to send each of them a personal note. Do you think it would hurt anyone’s feelings if I told them to send candy next time? This place looks like a funeral parlor and smells like a bordello.”

Bobby Crisp, a young lawyer as sharp and eager as his name, smiled over at his boss. “You must be getting more confidence in me, Senator,” he said. “This is only the fourth time you’ve told me to do the same thing. Back when I first started working for you, it was seven. Everything’s taken care of. I’ll have the list ready for you as soon as you’re ready to write, which will probably be half an hour after you come out of the anesthesia,
if I know you. By the way, do you know someone named Camellia?”

“Who?” Cormier asked.

“Camellia. See those pink and white flowers over there on the table? They came this morning with a note that just said ‘Thank you for everything. Camellia,’ ”

“Men,” Beth said scornfully. “Those pink and white flowers, as you call them,
are
camellias. Let me see that note.” She read it and shrugged. “That’s what it says, all right.”

“Thanks for checking,” Crisp said. “I got low marks in reading throughout law school.”

“Now, now, settle down, you two,” Cormier said. He rubbed his chin. “Camellia’s a strange enough name so that I should remember it. Camellias from Camellia, eh? …” His voice drifted off as he tried to connect the name with a person. Finally he shook his head. “Well, I guess a little memory lapse here and there is a small price to pay for the frustration I’m able to cause on The Hill with the rest of my senility. Whoever she is, she’ll just have to live without a thank-you note.”

At that moment Mrs. Fuller reappeared at the door. “I said five minutes, and it’s already more than that,” she said. “I swear, Senator, you are the most obstinate, cantankerous patient I’ve ever had.”

“Okay, okay, we’re done,” Cormier said, waving the other three out of his room. “You know, Mrs. Fuller, if you don’t sweeten up soon, you’re going to move from the sleek cruiser class into the battle-ax category.” He smiled at her and added, “But even then you’ll still be my favorite nurse. Go easy with that needle, now.”

The nurse swabbed at a place on Cormier’s left buttock and gave him the injection of preoperative medication. Fifteen minutes later, his mouth began feeling dry and a warm glow of detachment crept over him. Like the beacon from a lighthouse, the corridor ceiling lights flashed past as he was wheeled to the operating room.

*  *  *

Louis Ketchem was a towering, slope-shouldered veteran of more than twenty-five years as a surgeon. Over that span he had performed hundreds of gall bladder operations. None had ever gone any smoother than Senator Richard Cormier’s. The removal of the inflamed, stone-filled sac was uneventful except for the usual amount of bleeding from the adjacent liver. As he had done hundreds of times, Ketchem ordered a unit of blood to be transfused over the last half hour of the operation.

The anesthesiologist, John Singleberry, took the’ plastic bag of blood from the circulating nurse, a young woman named Jacqueline Miller. He double-checked the number on the bag before attaching it to the intravenous line. To speed the infusion, he slipped an air sleeve around the bag and pumped it up. Cormier, deeply anesthetized and receiving oxygen by a respirator, slept a dreamless sleep as the blood wound down the tubing toward his arm like a crimson serpent.

At the instant the blood slid beneath the green paper drape, Jacqueline Miller turned away. The drug she had been instructed to use, the drug she had injected into the plastic bag, was ouabain, the fastest acting and most powerful form of digitalis—a drug so rapidly cleared from the bloodstream, so difficult to find on chemical analysis, that even the massive doses she had used were virtually undetectable. Three minutes were all the ouabain required.

Without warning the cardiac monitor pattern leapt from slow and regular to totally chaotic. John Singleberry glanced at the golden light slashing up and down on the screen overhead and spent several seconds staring at it in disbelief.

“Holy shit, Louis,” Singleberry screamed. “He’s fibrillating!”

Ketchem, who had not encountered a cardiac arrest
in the operating room in years, stood paralyzed, both hands still inside Cormier’s abdomen. His orders, when he was finally able to give them, were inadequate. But for the work of the nurses, including Jacqueline Miller, several minutes might have passed with no definitive action. Sterile drapes were quickly stuffed into the incision and two unsuccessful countershocks were given. Seconds later, the monitor pattern showed a straight line.

Without warning Ketchem grabbed a scalpel, extended his incision, and slashed an opening through the bottom of Cormier’s diaphragm. Reaching through the opening, he grasped the man’s heart and began rhythmically squeezing. A nurse ran for help, but everyone in the operating room already knew it was over. Ketchem pumped, then stopped and checked the monitor. Straight line. He pumped some more.

For twenty minutes he pumped, with absolutely no effect on the golden light. Finally he stopped. For more than a minute no one in the room moved. Ketchem bit down on his lower lip and peered over his mask at the body of his friend. Then two nurses took him by the arms and helped him move away from the operating table, back to the surgeons’ lounge.

Off to one side, Jacqueline Miller closed her eyes, fearing they might reflect the excited smile beneath her mask. The greatest adventure in her life was ending in triumph. Oh, Dahlia had told her where to go and what to say, but
she
had been the one to actually pull it off. Little Jackie Miller, ordering around one of the richest, most powerful oilmen in the world.

She tingled at the irony of it all: from girlhood in a squalid tenement to a secret meeting in Oklahoma with the president of Beecher Oil. What would Mr. Jed Beecher have said if he knew that the woman who was giving him instructions, the woman who was taking his quarter of a million dollars, the woman who was dictating
his every move had just taken her first airplane flight.

Jacqueline silently cheered the good fortune that had brought Dahlia and The Garden into her life. She still knew little about either of them, but for the present she really didn’t care. When Dahlia was ready to disclose her identity, she would, and that was all there was to that. As long as the excitement and the monthly payments were there, Camellia would do what she was asked and keep her eyes and ears open for cases that might be of interest to The Garden. As for The Sisterhood of Life, they would simply have to survive without any further participation from Jackie Miller. No more free rides.

Mexico. Jamaica. Greece. Paris. Jacqueline ticked the places off in her mind. One more case like this one, and she would be able to see all of them. The prospects were dizzying.

Behind her on the narrow operating table, covered to the neck by a sheet, Senator Richard Cormier looked as he had throughout his operation. But his dreamless sleep would last forever

“L
adies and gentlemen, if you would all find seats, we can get started and hopefully make it through this inquiry in a reasonable amount of time. ”

Like an aging movie queen, the Morris Tweedy Amphitheater of Boston Doctors Hospital had handled the inexorable pressure of passing years with grace and style. Although undeniably frayed around the edges, the cozy, domed lecture hall still held its place proudly atop the thrice-renovated West Wing. There was a time when the seventy-five steeply banked seats of “The Amphi” had accommodated nearly the entire hospital staff—nurses, physicians, and students. However, in 1929, after almost fifty years of service, it had been replaced as the hospital’s major lecture and demonstration hall by a considerably larger amphitheater constructed in the Southeast Wing basement.

Hours upon hours of heated argument on the pros and cons of demolishing the jaded siren ended abruptly in 1952 when the state legislature designated the structure an historic landmark. Her stained glass skylights, severe wooden seats, and bas-relief sculptures depicting
significant events in medical history were thus preserved for new generations of eager physicians-in-training.

But, despite a century of continuous service, never had the Morris Tweedy Amphitheater entertained a session such as the one for which this milling group of fifty men and women was assembled. It was eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, October 5—two days after the postmortem examination on Charlotte Thomas.

As hospital chief of staff, Dr. Margaret Armstrong sat behind a heavy oak table facing the arc of seats. Beside her, attempting to bring some order to the room, was Detective Lieutenant John Dockerty. Dockerty was a thin, rumpled man in his late forties. He wore a gabardine suit that appeared large for him by at least two sizes. His limp green eyes scanned the hall, then turned to a sheaf of papers on the table in front of him. As he looked down, an errant wisp of thinning, reddish brown hair dropped over one eye. He absently swept the strands back in place, only to repeat the ritual moments later.

His languid, almost distracted air suggested he had encountered most of what there was in life to see. In fact, he had spent more than fifteen years on the Boston police force carefully cultivating that demeanor and learning how best to utilize it.

He looked over the hall again, then spoke to Margaret Armstrong out of the corner of his mouth. “This group is obviously much more adept at giving orders than they are at taking them.”

Armstrong laughed her agreement, then banged a notebook on the table several times. “Would you all please sit down,” she called out. “If we can’t show Lieutenant Dockerty cooperation, at least we can show him manners.” In less than a minute, everyone had found a place.

The hospital administrator sat to one side of the hall surrounded by his assistants. He was a paunchy, foppish
man who had run away from his Brooklyn home at age seventeen and changed his name from Isaac Lifshitz to Edward Lipton III. For years he had kept his job by pitting his enemies against one another in a way so skillful that none of them ever had the unified backing needed to push for his ouster.

On the other side of the room were clustered the men and women who comprised the hospital board of trustees. The men, a homogeneous, patrician lot, were vastly more concerned with the impact that their trustee position might have on their Who’s Who listings than with the influence that they might have on Boston Doctors Hospital. The token black on the board was distinguishable from the others only by color, and the four women were not distinguishable at all. The inquiry marked the first time in recent memory that the entire twenty-four-member board was present for a meeting.