Authors: Michael Palmer
To Harry’s profound relief, the one-and-a-half-hour inspection unearthed nothing. But with each fruitless minute, Dickinson became more annoyed—and more determined. By the time he and the other cop had left, he had reiterated in a variety of colorful and profane ways his threat to put the screws to Harry.
There was a small, enclosed terrace off the master bedroom. It had a view of the midsection of another apartment building, and might have been considered a solarium if it ever received anything more than token sunlight. Evie had had many plans for the room when they first moved into the apartment, but soon lost interest in them. There were similar terraces all the way up the building. Those on the upper floors had expansive views and hours of direct sunlight. Over time, the room came to symbolize those things she felt were second-rate in their life, and she absolutely never went out there.
Eventually, Harry had replaced the table, chairs, and small sofa with his exercise mat, stationary bicycle, weights, and a twelve-inch TV. Now, he turned on the early morning news and began a sequence of lifts with ten-pound
barbells, aimed at maintaining strength in the muscles in his back—muscles that had been surgically repaired after being shredded at Nha-trang. The lead story this morning was about the cascading rumors of sexual impropriety that continued to plague the president and undermine his effectiveness. The second story dealt with the Republican filibuster that had all but damned the strict caps on health-insurance premiums demanded by the administration’s health-care package. The third story was about Evie’s murder.
“Evelyn DellaRosa, consumer editor at
Manhattan Woman
magazine and wife of prominent Manhattan physician Dr. Harry Corbett, died of a brain hemorrhage last week at the Manhattan Medical Center.” Evie’s stock photo appeared behind the anchorwoman with the word
MURDERED
scrolled across it in crimson. “Now, according to reliable police sources, the death of the former beauty queen and television reporter is being treated as a homicide.…”
Harry set the weights aside and sank to one knee as the details of the medical examiner’s findings were presented in TV shorthand. Behind the reporter flashed first a photo of MMC, then a close-up of a vial labeled
Aramine
with a syringe protruding from the top, and finally, one of Harry himself—a twenty-year-old shot of him in dress uniform that someone had resurrected from the photo morgue at the
Times
.
“According to police sources, the only suspect currently under investigation in DellaRosa’s murder is her husband, a general practitioner on the staff of the hospital in which she was slain. Reportedly, Dr. Corbett, who was awarded the silver star for bravery in Vietnam, was his wife’s last visitor before her fatal hemorrhage. Police claim the couple was having marital difficulties. No other details are available at this time.…”
Harry buried his face in his hands. Weariness and perspiration burned in his eyes. As promised, Dickinson was off and running. And aside from remaining as composed as possible before the eruption that was about to occur, there
wasn’t a goddamn thing Harry could do about it. At that moment, the phone began ringing. It was Rocky Martino, the night doorman. A film crew from Channel 11 had just shown up in the lobby, and the reporter was demanding to see Harry about the murder of his wife.
Tell them to go fuck themselves
, Harry thought.
“Tell them there will be no interviews,” he said, and don’t say anything to them yourself. Nothing at all. Can I get out of the building through that metal door in the furnace room?… Great. Rocky, believe me, I didn’t do anything to hurt Evie.… Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Now remember, no matter how much you want to help me, don’t say anything at all to anyone.”
Seconds after he had hung up, the phone was ringing again. This time it was his brother. Before Evie’s funeral, Harry had shared with Phil a good deal of what had transpired at the hospital with Sidonis and Dickinson. Phil had offered then to put him in touch with a top-notch attorney, but Harry had decided to wait.
“You been watching TV?” Phil asked.
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“Would you be?”
“When did you know for sure about that drug being in Evie?”
“Yesterday afternoon. They came and searched the office for it. Then last night they searched my apartment.”
“I take it they didn’t find anything. Harry, you should have called me when the cops showed up at your office. You have rights. You should have let me call my friend Mel. He’s an animal. Most obnoxious son of a bitch I’ve ever known. I mean that as a compliment, of course. You want me to call him now?”
“How do you know him, Phil?”
“How do you think? He’s bought a new Mercedes from me every year since I went into the business. This year it’s a 600 SEL—the big one. Black. That’s the first thing you gotta check when you get a lawyer. Not his law school or his bar exam score. The car he drives. Course, he’d cost you. You’re
probably looking at a twenty- or twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer.”
Harry was shocked. “Let me think about it, okay?”
“Don’t take too long. Oh, and Harry—”
“Yes?”
“Happy birthday.”
Mary Tobin was the next to call. Harry had made the front page of two papers. He assured her he’d be in for a full day at the office and told her not to argue with anyone who wanted to cancel an appointment or even change doctors. Rocky, then Phil, now Mary—and it was just half past six. He said a silent thanks to Evie for insisting their number be unlisted.
He stripped out of his sweats and was waiting for the shower water to heat up when the phone again began ringing. This time, he decided, the machine could answer it. He hovered close enough to hear the caller.
“Hello, you have reached the phone of Evie and Harry.…”
The voice was Evie’s. It was both bittersweet and somewhat ghoulish to hear her speaking this way. Before he left for work, he told himself, he had to remember to record a new greeting.
“Dr. Corbett, Samuel Rennick speaking. I’m chief counsel for the hospital. If you’re .screening calls, could you please pick up …”
Harry leaned against the bathroom door frame. Steam from the shower had begun to fill the small room.
Goddamn Dickinson
, he was thinking.
“… Okay, then. I guess I’ll leave a message and then try to reach you at the hospital.…” The lawyer paused again. It was as if he knew Harry was listening. “… Dr. Erdman would like to meet with you about the developments this morning. His office, ten o’clock. If there’s a problem with that time, please call his secretary. Dr. Erdman has asked that I be there, as well as Dr. Lord from the medical staff, Dr. Josephson, who is acting chief of your department, and Mr. Atwater from Manhattan Health. I’ll
be at Dr, Erdman’s office beginning at eight. You can reach me there if need be. Thank you.”
Owen Erdman, a highly political, Harvard-educated and-trained endocrinologist, had been president of MMC for nearly a decade, during which time he had overseen the physical transformation of a shabby institution and a turnaround of its shaky reputation. The jewel in the crown of his reformation had been the affiliation with Manhattan Health. But Harry knew that with the new federal health policies, alliances between caregivers were as fragile as spring ice, and an allegiance meant something only so long as it was profitable. Any piece of negative publicity for MMC had to be worrisome to the CEO.
Harry had heard via the hospital grapevine that his minor victory against the edicts of the Sidonis committee did not sit well with Erdman. Now he was responsible for more soot falling on the man’s house. Harry showered quickly and then called his brother.
“Phil, I’ve decided to take you up on your offer about that lawyer,” he said.
“Smart move, bro.”
“If so, it will be the first one I’ve made in a while.”
Attorney Mel Wetstone’s retainer, “marked down twenty-five percent because Phil’s such a good friend,” was indeed $20,000 against an hourly rate of $350. And here the President was, Harry thought, knocking himself out and pitting brother against brother across the country to effect
health care
reform. Perhaps a bit of attention was due the legal system as well.
Harry decided to borrow the $20,000 against his pension plan, rather than wipe out a large portion of his savings. He met with his new lawyer in the family medicine conference room on the seventh floor of the Alexander Building at MMC. Wetstone was a prosperous fortyish, a dozen or so pounds overweight, with thinning dark hair that looked as if it had been surgically augmented. There was a slight wheeze to his breathing. Hard-pressed at times
to forget that the meter was running at $350 an hour, Harry reviewed his complete story in detail for the first time, including the encounter in the Village with his apparent nemesis. Wetstone was a sympathetic listener and only rarely interrupted the narrative with a question.
“So,” Wetstone said after Harry had finished, “what it boils down to is that you didn’t do anything wrong, and people think you did. In my business that’s the norm. My job will be to keep anyone from hurting you. Now, what do you think this meeting at ten is all about?”
“I don’t know for certain. I’ve taken some stands on issues lately that haven’t been too popular with the administration. Now I’m publicly giving them a black eye. I don’t think they’d just boot me off the staff at this point, although I guess they could. More likely they’ll want to ask me to take a voluntary leave from the hospital until the situation is ironed out.”
“You want to do that?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then that’ll be our goal. You told me who this Erdman is, and I know Sam Rennick. Who are the other guys?”
“Bob Lord is the chief of staff. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He resents that I led the fight to continue to allow GPs to put simple, nondisplaced fractures in casts without referring our patients to a specialist. He’s very much into who’s got the power and who doesn’t, and I think he’s pretty tight with the surgeon Evie was involved with. I can’t imagine him siding with me on anything. Josephson and Atwater are a different story. They’re about the best friends I have around here. Steve—that’s Josephson—is the acting head of the family medicine department until Grace Segal gets back from a maternity leave. Atwater and I are both jazz nuts. We go to clubs together once in a while, and sometimes he comes to hear me play.”
Harry expected the usual questions, like “Oh,
what instrument do you play?”
or
“You play professionally? Where?”
Instead, Wetstone straightened his notes and stood up.
“I want to see if I can speak with Sam Rennick before
we go in there,” he said. “I left a message for him to call my pager, but he hasn’t.”
“You said you knew him. Perhaps he’s afraid of you.”
Wetstone grinned, but his small, dark eyes were cold—all business.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but he should be.”
There were fifteen floors in the Alexander Building. The elevator down was nearly full when it reached the seventh floor. By the time it reached the lobby, it was packed. A sign on the wall of the car warned passengers to guard their valuables against pickpockets. After thousands of trips, Harry had already reflexively shifted his wallet from his hip pocket to the front. He thought about what it would be like to work in a scrubbed little rural hospital with no crushes of people and no pickpocket warnings. He doubted that there was a single scrubbed little rural hospital this side of Bora Bora that would take him, should he be removed from the MMC staff.
The conference room adjacent to Owen Erdman’s office featured a long, highly polished cherrywood table with rounded corners and an inlay of the MMC crest at the center. The twelve matching, high-backed chairs each had an identical crest in miniature inlaid at the top. Harry had been in the room once some years before, but was certain the remarkable set had not been there. He tried briefly to guess its value, then gave up when he realized he had absolutely no reference point.
Evie would have known
, he thought.
Possibly to the dollar
.
Steve Josephson, Doug Atwater, and the orthopedist Bob Lord were there when Harry and Wetstone arrived.
“How’re you doing?” Steve asked.
Harry answered with a
How do you think?
shrug.
“Do you have any idea who could have been responsible for doing this to Evie?” Doug asked.
“Not really,” Harry said, careful to stop there.
Wetstone had cautioned him against sharing his theory with anyone, even his allies.
“Remember that party game of Telephone we used to play as kids?” the attorney had asked. “Well, take it from
the voice of experience. No matter how well-meaning people are, the moment words are out of your mouth and into their ears, the original version begins to change.”
Despite Wetstone’s caveat, Harry would not have hesitated to share the details of Evie’s secret life with either Josephson or Atwater had Bob Lord not been there. Instead, there was an uncomfortable minute and a half of silence before Erdman and the hospital counsel entered the room. With them was a trim, businesslike woman introduced as Ms. Hinkle, the hospital’s head of public relations. Harry shook her hand and felt as if he had grasped a Popsicle.
“Dr. Corbett,” Sam Rennick began, “we wondered if you might start by reviewing the events—as you see them—from the night of your wife’s death.”
“Now just a minute, Sam,” Wetstone rejoined immediately. “I thought we decided on what the ground rules were going to be here.…”
Feeling strangely distant and distracted, Harry listened as two attorneys whom he had not even known before today debated his situation. From time to time, one of the others at the table spoke up. He even heard himself once or twice. But the voices seemed distorted, the meaning of their words often lost. The whole situation was just too surreal. Instead of being keen and focused, Harry’s thoughts were drifting. He tried to imagine how many hours—hundreds of hours, perhaps—he was now destined to spend in one type of legal proceeding or another. He had been thrust through the looking glass into a world where anything—however illogical or bizarre—was possible.