The Oath (27 page)

“And you’re sure he didn’t return before the code blue?”

“I don’t think he did. I can’t say for sure. I told you, I was busy out in the hall.”

“But he was definitely still in the hospital, at least.”

“Oh yeah. After Tim died…” He sighed again. “He didn’t take it well. It was pathetic, in fact. Embarrassing.”

Hardy checked his watch. He had forty-five minutes before he needed to be home and he didn’t want to start something he couldn’t finish. But putting these two together was turning out very well, and Ann—as Markham’s lover—had access to parts of his psyche that would be unknown to anyone else. “Let me ask you, Ann,” he began. “What was in those original memos to Ross that made Tim so mad?”

“Let me guess,” Kensing said. “Sinustop?”

Ann nodded. “That’s it.” She looked at Hardy. “Have you heard of it?”

“It’s a new hay fever pill, isn’t it?” Hardy had a vague memory. “But there was some problem with it?”

“Not for most people,” Kensing said. “Some people, though, developed the unfortunate side effect of death. This was after the reps dumped thousands of samples on us and the directive came down from the corporate office—”

“From Dr. Ross,” Ann interrupted. “He made those decisions. Not Tim.”

“If you say so.” Kensing’s look told Hardy he wasn’t buying that. “Anyway,” he continued, “this stuff was so inexpensive and miraculous that we were strongly urged to prescribe it to all of our patients with any and all allergy symptoms. You know about samples?”

“Not enough,” Hardy replied. “Tell me.”

“Well, any new drug comes out, their reps go out and try to get doctors to give them to patients for free. The idea, of course, is brand-name recognition. The stuff works, it’s on the formulary, we prescribe it. Bingo, a wonder drug is born. But the sample campaign for Sinustop was just unbelievable. Nationwide, they must have given away a billion pills.”

“And this was unusual?”

Kensing nodded soberly. “The numbers were unusual, yes.”

“So what was the problem between Markham and Ross?” Hardy asked.

Ann looked over at Eric, then back to Hardy. “Tim heard about the first death and got a bad gut feeling. He asked Ross to call back all the samples and take it off the formulary until they could check it out further.”

“But he didn’t?”

Ann shook her head. “Worse than that, really. He and Tim had had these fights before, but Ross was really super-invested in this one. He tells Tim he’s the medical director, he knows this stuff. Tim just runs the business side. Why doesn’t he stick to that and keep his nose out of the medicine, which he doesn’t know anything about?”

“So they went at it?”

Kensing seemed jolted out of his silence. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re not saying Tim was the good guy here, I hope?”

She faced him with an angry and pitiless look. “What’s he supposed to do, Eric? Tell me that.”

Hardy didn’t want to let any more friction develop. Kensing had enough reasons to hate Markham on his own—he wasn’t going to change his mind because maybe Tim had been a better CEO than he’d thought. “So how long had Tim and Ross been together?”

“They were two of the founders.” She shrugged. “You could look it up.

“And recently they’d had more than one of these Sinustop-type fights?”

She frowned. “A few. Tim thought Ross’s decisions weren’t good medicine. He believed we had to keep delivering a good product—”

“Product,” Eric said, snorting. “I like that.”

Hardy ignored the interruption. “But then with Sinustop, things got worse? What finally happened?”

“Well, Ross got his way. They didn’t pull the samples—”

Kensing supplied the ending. “And sixteen other people died around the country. Two of them with Parnassus.”

In the telling, Hardy had come to remember the scandal clearly now. But although it had been prominent in the news, he didn’t recall that Parnassus had been any part of it, and he said as much.

Ann jumped to Markham’s defense. “Tim covered for Ross, that’s why.”

Kensing was shaking his head. “Not.” He turned to Hardy. “Tim released a statement that the two patients who had died had taken samples they’d gotten here from before the first death had been reported—apparently this was true—and that we’d recalled all the samples and taken Sinustop off the formulary at the first indication of any problem. Not true. And if you call that covering for Ross…”

“That’s what he did,” Ann snapped at him.

Hardy jumped in before the smoldering anger in the room could erupt again. “Okay, good,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I want you both to keep thinking about.” He turned to each of them in turn. But tension remained high.

He was afraid to push his luck any further. Standing, he kept up his patter to keep them from each other. “I’m afraid I’ve got another appointment. Mrs. Kensing, thanks for your time. We’re settled in terms of the kids, right? All good there? Eric, I’d like a few words with you on our way out. I’ll wait while you tell your children good night.”

“Honey, I’m home!” Ricky Ricardo he wasn’t, but for years early in their marriage, Hardy had come through the front door with his dead-on imitation. He’d made it with four minutes to spare by his watch, and considering the ever-escalating demands of the case that had been consuming his hours, he felt he’d done well.

All lanky arms and legs, Rebecca came flying down the hallway. “Daddy! I’m so glad you’re home.” She jumped at him and knocked him back, but he held on and gave her a spin.

In the dining room, the table was set. Frannie came to the door of the kitchen with her arms crossed over her chest, but she was smiling. “Cutting it close, buster. Very, very close.”

“I’ll get better, I promise.”

They shared a chaste married kiss. Vincent, hanging back by the family room, said, “Gross.”

So the two adults made eye contact and suddenly had their arms around each other, making out like teenagers. He picked Frannie all the way up off the ground and she kicked back her heels.

“Gross me out,” Vincent shouted.

“C’mon, you guys! Please. Just stop, okay.” This was Rebecca, arbiter of social correctness to the whole family.

“I can’t help it,” Hardy said, finally stopping. “Your mother makes me crazy.”

“Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,” Frannie begged.

Hardy complied. The romantic assault drove the two kids to the front of the house, gagging at peak volume. The last kiss turned into a semireal one, and when it ended, Frannie caught her breath for a second, then said, “Oh, that reminds me. Treya called this morning. We talked for nearly an hour.”

Hardy was thinking this was swell. The wives were going to referee, and that would end with them all hating one another.

“What about?” he asked.

“She’s pregnant.”

M
alachi Ross sat kitty-corner to Marlene Ash at a large table in the Police Commissioner’s Hearing Room, facing the members of the grand jury. When Ross had first come in, he took the oath and sat down, declining to remove the jacket to his suit. This had been a mistake. Once the initial opportunity had passed, no other appropriate moment presented itself. He didn’t want to seem nervous. Which he was. By now he was sweating heavily.

Rooms in the Hall of Justice were traditionally far too hot or way too cold. Due to the state power crisis, maintenance crews had adjusted each and every one of the thermostats in the building. Now all the rooms that had been too cold were too hot and vice versa. It must have been eighty degrees in the airless chamber.

Ross’s original plan was to cooperate fully with the investigation into Tim Markham’s death, and to that end his time in the witness chair began amicably enough. For nearly a half hour, this attractive and competent woman walked him through the many years of his and Tim’s relationship, the founding of Parnassus, the social contacts shared by the two men. Ms. Ash was looking for the person who had killed Tim. He had expected this sort of background drill, had even mentally prepared himself for it.

He’d just given the grand jury a couple of minutes on the nature of his professional relationship with Mr. Markham. He’d told them that there had been very little friction between the two of them over the course of a dozen years, although of course they’d had their disagreements. But basically, they respected and trusted each other.

Marlene Ash took this moment to stand up and move off a few steps into the center of the room. This was when the focus of the interrogation began to change. “Dr. Ross,” she said, turning back to where he sat, “how is Parnassus doing financially right now?”

He took a misdirected shot at some levity. “We’re doing about as well as most health organizations in the country, which isn’t saying much. But we’re still afloat, if that’s what you mean.”

A frigid smile. “Not quite. I was hoping you could tell us with more specificity. One can be afloat and still sinking at the same time, isn’t that right? Wasn’t that the entire second half of
Titanic
? Aren’t you now the acting CEO of the corporation?”

“Yes.” He composed himself, looking down at his linked fingers. When he raised his gaze to the grand jury, the effect of the tragedy he’d endured was apparent. “After last Tuesday, after Tim—Mr. Markham—died, the board appointed me CEO on an interim basis.”

“So you’re intimately familiar with the company’s financial situation, are you not?”

“Well, it’s been less than a week. I wouldn’t say I’ve got the handle on it that Mr. Markham had, but I’m reasonably conversant with the numbers, yes. And frankly, have been for some time.”

“Then you would know if, in fact, Parnassus is under some financial duress, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Has the company, in fact, considered filing for bankruptcy?”

Understanding that financial pressures at Parnassus would clearly appear to the DA to be a possible motive for Markham’s death, Ross had expected his inquisitor to get to this line of questioning sometime, but now that it was here, he felt somewhat unprepared. He ran a couple of fingers over his damp forehead, considered whether he should ask permission to take off his coat, or simply do it. In the end, he did nothing. “It’s certainly been discussed. It’s an option we’ve considered.”

“Do you know if Mr. Markham had considered it, as well?”

“Yes. The matter has been on the table now for some time.”

During the next forty-five minutes, Ash led him on a grueling journey through the Parnassus books, through the intricacies of incomes, copays, expenses, payrolls, premiums, and corporate salaries. The damned woman seemed to know enough to cut through his obfuscation and get to the real nuts and bolts of how the place worked. Ross knew that many other employees had also gotten subpoenas, and figuring that on balance they would tell the truth, he had no choice but to stay close to the facts himself.

“So, Dr. Ross, to your knowledge is Parnassus going bankrupt in the next six months? If not, please explain how you plan to keep the company solvent.”

The sheer effrontery of the question made him want to snap back that it was none of her goddamn business, but he realized that he was trapped.

Now began a cat-and-mouse game where he provided as vague and general a version as possible of his plans for Parnassus, from which Ash—calm, collected, and apparently with all the time in the world—pried out details, one by one and piece by piece. He felt as if he were being very slowly ground to sausage.

By the time they finished, the water pitcher in front of him was empty, and he was so wet with perspiration he might well have dumped its contents over his head instead of drinking it. The only good news was that the questions about the formulary had centered on the dollars and cents, details such as how much items cost and the volume of prescriptions. Ash didn’t really probe how new drugs got listed in the first place. Ross found it agonizing to wait for that shoe to drop—what if they knew? Or even suspected? Wouldn’t they have had to tell him he was under investigation? Would he have to stop and insist on seeing a lawyer?

But these fears remained unrealized. Ash moved along to her own priorities. “So, Dr. Ross, to summarize. It is your testimony under oath that you do not expect Parnassus to go bankrupt within the next six months, whether or not the city pays the thirteen-million-dollar bill it has presented.”

Ross put on a fresh face for the nineteen citizens seated in front of him. He was surprised to see such a focus, an apparent interest, in most of them. They were waiting for his answer, although he had a sense of gathering impatience. But maybe, he realized, that was him. “Well, never say never. Bankruptcy protects the corporation from its creditors, true, and we could indeed use some relief there if the city defaults on its obligation. But with a group like us, when our biggest client is the city and county of San Francisco, it would also negatively impact our credibility, which is not too high as it is. As some of you may know, we’ve been getting a lot of bad press lately.”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Dr. Ross.” Ash looked like she meant it. “I was hoping that you could give us some insight on the type of disagreements that must have surfaced at Parnassus in light of, say, the Baby Emily case. I should tell you that the grand jury already has a working knowledge of those events. Maybe you could fill in some of the blank spots? Specifically, Mr. Markham’s role and reactions of various staff to it. Please begin with Mr. Markham.”

“Are you saying you think his death might be related to Baby Emily or something of that nature?”

“That’s what this inquiry is about, Doctor. Mr. Markham’s death.” She had moved a few steps closer to him and now, standing while he sat, she loomed as somewhat threatening. “Someone introduced a lethal dose of potassium into his IV. As a doctor, would you agree that it is unlikely that this could have been an accident?”

Ross didn’t know what kind of answer Ash wanted. He wished they would have allowed him to bring his lawyer into the room. He had to rely now upon the truth, and this made him uneasy. “It’s always possible to give an improper dose of any drug. If Mr. Markham’s heartbeat had become irregular, I could envision the need to administer a therapeutic dose of potassium. It’s also possible, though rare, for a drug’s concentration in solution to differ from what’s on the label.”

He was slightly shocked to find Ash prepared for this. “Of course. Please assume we have the drip bag that held the potassium in this case, and the concentration is correct. Also assume that there is no indication that Mr. Markham’s heart, prior to the attack brought on by the overdose, was malfunctioning. So given these assumptions, do you have any explanation for these events other than that this was an intentionally administered overdose?”

Ross wiped sweat from his upper lip. “I guess I don’t see any other possibility. Do you mind if I take off my coat?”

“Not at all.” In half a minute, he was seated again. Ash hadn’t lost her place. “So, Doctor, if Mr. Markham was intentionally overdosed—”

“I didn’t say that.” Then, amending, “I didn’t realize we’d gotten to there.”

At this, Ash turned dramatic. She paused, as though in midthought, and glared down at him. “That’s exactly where we are, Doctor. Did you and Mr. Markham have serious disagreements, for example, over policy?”

Ross lifted his chin in controlled outrage. “Are you joking?” he asked her.

“About what?”

“As I take it, you’re asking me if some argument about business would have made me want to kill my longtime friend and business partner. I resent the hell out of the question.”

“I never asked that question,” Ash said. “You made that leap yourself. But having asked it, please answer.” She fixed him with a steadfast gaze.

He matched her with one of his own. “No, then, nothing. Nothing that even remotely would have made me consider anything like that.” He spoke directly to the jury. “Tim was my friend, a close friend.”

Ross forced himself to slow down. A fresh pitcher of water had appeared—maybe it had been there for a while. He poured some into his glass and took a sip. “I need to point out, Ms. Ash, that the medical decision on Baby Emily, though hugely unpopular, wasn’t all wrong. Baby Emily did in fact make it to County and to the premature baby unit, where she lived until she was transported back to Portola. I didn’t kill her by any means, or even endanger her unnecessarily.”

“But how did Mr. Markham react to all this?”

“He was all right with it until it became big news.”

“You two did not have words over it?”

“Of course we did, after it blew up on us. He thought I should have consulted him, that I shouldn’t have acted only on business considerations.” Again, he directed his words to the grand jury. “We had some heated words, that’s true. We run a big, complicated business together, and our roles sometimes overlap. We’d been doing this for twelve years.” He made some eye contact, decided he’d be damned if he’d even dignify Ash’s insinuation with a further denial.

As they’d been sitting down to the Tuesday lunch group at Lou the Greek’s, Treya had made apologies for Glitsky’s absence. He’d been called away at the last minute to a murder scene in Hunter’s Point. Hardy was convinced that this excuse was an outright falsehood.

A murder scene at Hunter’s Point indeed, he mused. As though they didn’t happen every week. Hardy knew that unless some gangbangers had slaughtered themselves and twenty or thirty other bystanders in a daylight shootout involving children, drugs, the Goodyear blimp, and a sighting of the Zodiac Killer, Glitsky the administrator wouldn’t need to be called to a “murder scene in Hunter’s Point.”

In Hardy’s mind, the nature of the excuse had even deeper implications. The mundanity of the explanation, though perfectly plausible on the surface, was in reality so lame that Hardy took it to be a secret yet personal fuck-you message to himself. Murder scene, my ass, he thought. Right up there with “My grandmother died.” Or “The dog ate my homework.”

Furious at most of them, but especially at him, Abe was avoiding the group today. It probably hadn’t helped when he’d gotten the word this morning that Jackman had directed Strout to go ahead with Wes Farrell’s request to dig up his clients’ mother. Before they’d sat down, Strout told Hardy that he had called Abe as a courtesy to tell him about this decision. He’d endured an angry earful of Glitsky’s opinion on the question, then thanked him for it, and said he’d be going ahead on Jackman’s approval anyway.

But no one else seemed bothered by his absence. They’d barely gotten settled before the conversation had gotten into full swing. David Freeman had started with a few comments about the Parnassus situation, how prescient they’d all been last week. Before too long, half the table had chimed in with one comment or another. Eventually, they got to Jeff Elliot’s first column on Malachi Ross, which led Jeff to ask Marlene Ash if she’d talked to Ross yet and, if so, how he’d fared before the grand jury.

She’d smiled, glanced at Jackman, and sipped her iced tea. “No comment, I’m afraid, even if we’re off the record here.”

“Ross and Markham were close personal friends is what I hear,” Hardy said. “Never a cross word between them.” He shot a look at Treya across the table from him. “Kind of like me and Abe.”

But Elliot thought he knew where the story lay. “Let me ask you this, Marlene,” he began. “Diz thinks they are close personal friends, yet I have heard that they disagreed on just about every decision either one of them made over the past couple of years—Baby Emily, Sinustop, formulary issues, you name it.”

Marlene Ash sipped her iced tea. “I can’t talk about it, Jeff. It’s the grand jury, get it? I’m not even saying who I talked to. You want to think it was Ross, you go ahead.”

“It was today, though, right? The grand jury still meets Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

Gina Roake joined in. “Anybody else here for repealing the First Amendment?” But the words were innocent banter, lightly delivered. “She can’t talk about it, Jeff. Really. Even to an ace reporter like yourself.”

“And far be it from me to try to make her.” Elliot shook his head, truly amused at the games these lawyers played, and apparently even took seriously. He flashed a smile around the table. “However, for our own edification, Dr. Ross has a secretary, Joanne, who told me when I called that that’s where he was. I don’t think she’s been let in on the top secret part.”

“She talked to you,” Roake asked incredulously, “after what you did to her boss last week?”

Elliot nodded soberly. “She might have gotten the impression that I called to apologize or something.”

As Freeman and Jackman fell into a more serious discussion about last week’s issue—the possibly fraudulent outpatient billings—Hardy leaned over and spoke quietly to Elliot. “How’d you hear about Sinustop?”

“Same way I found out Ross was at the grand jury. I’m a reporter. I ask. You’d be surprised. People talk.”