Silent Treatment (27 page)

“Nooo!” Harry bellowed as the dial tone intervened. “Damn you, no!”

Harry looked up at that moment and realized that Walter Concepcion was standing just outside his door.

“I … I just wanted to know if I should get changed,” he said, embarrassed.

Mary Tobin, responding to Harry’s shout, came rushing past him and into the office.

“Call Alexander Five,” he ordered. “Tell them to get someone into room five-oh-five now. Andrew Barlow. Room five-oh-five. I’m on my way over.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Mary Tobin said.

“Mr. Concepcion, you’ll have to come back another time.”

Without waiting for a response, Harry bolted past the bewildered man, out of the office, and across the sunlit street. It was six blocks to the Manhattan Medical Center.

In this part of the city, people were not that surprised to see a man dressed in loafers and a suit sprinting along the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. Harry felt as if he was running through molasses. The morning was already nearing eighty and quite humid. Passersby moved aside and a few turned to watch. But most of them were looking past Harry to see who was chasing him. Harry knew he had a faster gear, but with the chest pain still unresolved, he was reluctant to use it. As it was, he felt some sharp jabs inside his left chest. And he wondered, with each block, when the debilitating, bandlike discomfort was going to take hold.

By the time he reached the hospital, he was carrying his suit coat and using one sleeve to mop sweat off his face. He dashed through the main doors, anticipating that the overhead page would be calling out a Code 99 on Alexander 5. There was no such announcement, nor had the pager hooked to his belt gone off. The lobby was crowded as usual. Out of deference to the hospital and the patients,
Harry slowed to a rapid walk down the main corridor to the Alexander Building cutoff. At certain times of the day, taking the elevator might have been faster than the stairs. But Harry never gave it a thought. Grateful for his regular workouts on the track, he took the stairs two at a time. Again, there was some discomfort in his chest, but nothing major, nothing that definitely said cardiac. Muscular or gastrointestinal, Harry decided, filing the conclusion away.

The Code 99 cart was parked outside the doorway to room 505. Harry cursed out loud as he hurried toward it. He was just a few feet away when he realized that the cover had not been removed from the cart. The two nurses who had so blatantly snubbed him just an hour ago were standing nearby, chatting. They looked over at him, and he could feel as much as see their disdain.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“
We
don’t know,” one of the women said pointedly. “You tell us.”

Harry stepped past them and into the room. Steve Josephson, stethoscope in place, was standing on the far side of the bed, hunched over Andy Barlow, examining his chest and back. The young architect, with his oxygen running almost wide open at six liters a minute, looked about the same to Harry as he had on rounds—sick but in no mortal distress.

“Stuff at both lung bases,” Josephson muttered to himself. He glanced up and noticed Harry. “Hey, there you are,” he said. “I was on the floor finishing rounds when the nurses grabbed me. Apparently your office nurse called and said there was an emergency with Mr. Barlow, here.”

Harry approached the bed, aware that a cluster of people—nurses, the ward secretary, and a couple of residents—were now filling the doorway. He knew that no matter what he said, his credibility, already greatly diminished around the hospital, would soon be extinct. He had been set up by a maniac, and quite masterfully at that.

“I got a call on the private line in my office,” Harry said, in a near whisper that he hoped would not be audible to the gallery. “The man on the phone implied that”—he
looked at his patient and measured his words carefully—“that he might be planning to harm Andrew, here, in some way.”

“But why?” Barlow asked, the question nearly lost in a spasm of coughing.

Harry turned to the crowd.

“Look, could someone please close the door?” he asked.

No one in the group moved. Harry stalked over to do it himself. The head nurse, Corinne Donnelly, stepped inside.

“I’ll allow you to close the door,” she said. “But I intend to stay and hear exactly what explanation you have to offer for this.”

Donnelly, about Harry’s age, had once sent a close friend to him for medical care. Now, she eyed him challengingly, almost begging for a confrontation.

“Come on in,” Harry said wearily.

The nurse nodded people away from the door and then closed it behind her. Steve Josephson rested his considerable bulk against the wall. Harry turned to his patient.

“Andy, we haven’t spoken about this, but I assume you know about my wife’s death and some of the newspaper and TV reports about me.”

“I do. I didn’t believe them.”

The two sentences again sent Barlow into a racking cough. Harry wondered what this scene was costing him in stamina.

“You’re right not to believe the papers,” Harry said. “I didn’t do anything to harm my wife. But whoever did administer that lethal injection is very angry with me—I … I’m not sure I know why. Apparently he’s decided to hurt me by threatening my patients.”

Steve Josephson said, “You mean that because this guy has some sort of grudge against you, he’s killed Evie, and now wants to hurt your patients?”

“I think there are other reasons he killed Evie. I think he was threatened by some research she was doing. But as far as Andy goes, the answer is yes. I know it sounds crazy, Steve, but—”

“It doesn’t
sound
crazy,” Corinne Donnelly cut in. “It
is
crazy. Dr. Corbett, I think we should talk in my office.”

Harry looked down at his patient.

“Whatever you have to say, you can say right here.”

“Okay, have it your way, Doctor. I intend to call the nursing director right now and ask her to speak with both Dr. Erdman and Dr. Lord immediately. I don’t believe your story one bit—about your wife or about this mystery caller. I don’t know what’s going on, what’s wrong with you, but I do know that recently you’ve changed drastically. Maybe it’s some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome—something to do with the war. Or maybe it has to do with your wife and Dr. Sidonis. Whatever it is, you need to get help before anyone else gets hurt. And for everyone’s sake, you should voluntarily take yourself off the admitting staff of this hospital until the truth comes out. This young man has enough problems without being put in jeopardy by his own physician.”

Harry looked over at his longtime friend. Josephson shifted uncomfortably and stared down at the floor. In the prolonged silence, they could hear some scraping from the other side of the door. The staff was still there, undoubtedly pressing in to hear what was going on. Corinne Donnelly moved to put a stop to the eavesdropping, but Harry motioned for her to stay put.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Mrs. Donnelly, you’re right, I need to do whatever I can to keep my patients from being endangered by this … this sadistic lunatic. But there’s no reason to believe that taking myself off the staff will accomplish that. Closing my practice would be like admitting that I’ve done something wrong, and I haven’t. I’m sorry, but I intend to stay on and see this thing through.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the nurse snapped.

She turned and stalked from the room, nearly colliding with the assembly pressed against the door.

“Harry, I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Josephson said. “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ll
see you later, Mr. Barlow. I hope you know that you couldn’t have a better doc.”

“I
do
know.”

Josephson shook hands with Andy, then patted Harry on the arm and left, closing the door behind him.

“Looks like we’ve both got some tough times ahead of us,” Barlow said.

His breathing was more labored than it had been. Harry could see that he was exhausted and desperately in need of
rest Stress
was dangerous for a man in Andy’s condition. Harry felt at once angry and impotent. He was being manipulated like a puppet by a madman who thrived on inflicting pain.

“Andy, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hey, what can you do?”

“I’ll call here later on to check on things if it’s okay with you.”

“Thanks.… Hey, Doc?”

“Yes?”

The young man with newly diagnosed AIDS reached out for the second time that morning and took Harry’s hand.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said.

“Yeah, I know it will.”

Harry turned and hurried from the room, nearly colliding in the hall with a bronze-skinned man dressed in surgical scrubs, carrying the metal basket of the intravenous service.

“Oh, excuse me, please,” the man said, in a dense Indian accent.

Harry muttered that it was no problem. Aware that backs had turned and all activity had gone freeze-frame as soon as he neared the nurse’s station, he left the floor as quickly as possible. Once back at his office, he would call Doug Atwater at Manhattan Health to begin drumming up support should Corinne Donnelly or anyone else try to have him removed from the staff. A call to Mel Wetstone might be in order as well.

As he headed back down the stairs, Harry found himself
wondering what might have happened if, instead of shooting the two men in Central Park, the unseen gunman had captured them and turned them over to the police. Maybe the whole nightmare would have been over by now. Instead, Evie’s killer had decided that Harry would pay for that shooting.

He entered the main corridor, again sensing the stares and whispers.
Could it possibly get any worse than this?

Five floors above, the male nurse from the intravenous service strolled unnoticed into room 505 and readied his equipment by the bedside. He wore the headdress and beard of a Sikh. Andrew Barlow glanced up at him sleepily.

“Everything okay?” Andy asked.

“Oh, yes, everything is fine, just fine,” the man said in staccato English. He peered down at Andrew’s IV site through tortoiseshell glasses. “Just a routine check. No needles. No new IV.”

“Oh, good.”

Andrew smiled weakly and drifted off.

The nurse, whose MMC name tag identified him as Sanjay Samar, R.N., checked the bag of glucose and the plastic infusion tubing. Then he injected a small amount of liquid through the rubber port.

“Just to clear line,” he said softly.

“Mm-hm,” Andrew murmured without opening his eyes.

Sanjay was putting his metal basket back in order when he noticed a patch of white skin just inside his elbow. In the future, he thought, when he used that particular skin dye, he would have to be more careful. He left the room and walked purposefully to the stairway that was farthest from the nurse’s station. His expression was all business, but beneath his spectacles and his dark brown contact lenses, his pale blue eyes were sparkling.

“All right, Doc, let’s start all over again.”

“From where?”

“From the fucking beginning, that’s from where.”

Albert Dickinson, his rumpled suit in desperate need of dry cleaning, stubbed out one Pall Mall as he prepared to light another. The ashtray was full-to-overflowing. The small interrogation room reeked of years of tobacco, stale coffee, and body odor. Harry shifted uncomfortably in the slat-back wooden chair and wondered if he should back off on saying anything else without calling Mel Wetstone. But the truth was he had done nothing wrong. And aside from his intimate involvement in last night’s Central Park murder, he had nothing to hide. Still, his troubles were piling up rapidly. And now a young man he cared very much for was dead.

Approximately twenty minutes after Harry left room 505, a nurse’s aide found Andrew Barlow lying peacefully in bed without any pulse or respirations. A brief attempt at
resuscitation by the nurses and residents was called off because of fixed, dilated pupils and an absolutely straight-line EKG. Although morning was the busiest, most hectic time of day in the hospital, with any number of technicians, physicians, students, maintenance people, aides, transportation workers, and nurses coming and going, none of the staff on Alexander 5 recalled seeing anyone enter or leave Barlow’s room after Harry.

After receiving the news, Harry canceled what few patients he had left to see and returned, numb and dreamlike, to the hospital. Andy Barlow lay on his back in the semi-darkness, a sheet drawn up to his chin. His face already reflected the early mottling of death. Harry wanted to scream, to bellow like the wounded animal he was. He wanted to destroy the room, to rip attachments from the wall, to snatch up a chair and hurl it through the plate glass window. Instead, he sat alone by the bedside, Andy Barlow’s hand in his, and wept.

Before he left the floor, he placed three phone calls. The first was to inform Owen Erdman that he would be calling back later that day to set up an appointment as soon as possible. The second call was to Andy’s family, and the third was to Albert Dickinson.

“If you think being the one to notify me takes you off my list,” Dickinson said now, “you’re crazy.” He thought for a moment and then added, “But that’s just the point, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“That you’re crazy.”

Dickinson could not charge him with any crime until an autopsy proved that Andy had died of something other than natural causes. But even a negative autopsy would leave unanswered questions. After all, the young architect was officially listed by the hospital as being in guarded condition, and the nurses to whom Dickinson had spoken testified that Harry’s false alarm had doubtless added immeasurable stress to an already difficult situation.

“It wasn’t a false alarm,” Harry said, with exaggerated patience. “My office manager heard the call.”

“Correction, sir. She heard the phone
ring
. Even a dumb cop like me knows the difference between hearing a phone ring and overhearing a conversation.”

“Well, there was a patient of mine there, too. Standing in the hall right outside my door. He heard some of the conversation. Some of my half of it, anyway.”