Extreme Measures (15 page)

He was entering the long corridor from the lobby to the Bigelow Building when Dave Subarsky fell into step beside him. Subarsky was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and an MIT sweatshirt. He had an armload of bound journals and textbooks wedged between his forearm and his beard.

“Library?” he asked.

“Where else?”

Subarsky shrugged. “At this hour? How about home?”

“You mean this isn’t my home? Damn, now he tells me.”

“You look a little more tired than usual, old buddy.”

Subarsky used his key-card to open the library door.

“I am, I guess,” Eric said. “There’s just been a lot going on. Tonight they brought in this fifty-seven-year-old guy with four kids. He was up and walking around one moment, collapsed and dead the next. I explained to his wife that we were working on him, but that he was essentially brain-dead. She begged me not to call off the resuscitation. So we tried. For more than an hour we tried just about everything, but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do.”

“That’s just the way it is,” Subarsky said, setting his pile of journals on a reading table. “God shoots … He scores!”

“Touchingly put, David. You are a true nonclinician. But fortunately, every so often, if we do things right He hits the post.”

“Mayhap,” Subarsky said. “Listen, how about a beer after we finish here?”

“Can’t. I’m going over to see a guy at the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home.”

“Always planning ahead. I like that in you, Eric.”

“I’m trying to track down a John Doe we worked on back in February. In fact, it was that day we used the laser.”

“God, I hope he’s not still there.” Subarsky held his nose.

“He might be actually. The M.E. won’t release a body until they have a signed authorization from a next of kin. Sometimes they hang on to them for six or seven months before they give up and have the Commonwealth spring for a burial. And unless foul
play is suspected, they won’t ever do an autopsy. They’re as terrified of lawyers as the rest of us.”

“I can see the headlines now:
PATHOLOGIST BOTCHES AUTOPSY, GETS SUED FOR MALPRACTICE.”

“Believe it or not, it happens.”

“I’ve never been to a funeral home. Want company?”

“Actually, I could do with a little moral support. On tape at least, the proprietor of the place sounded
mondo bizarro
. Digger O’Dell, the friendly undertaker.”

“Sounds like my kinda guy.”

“In that case, you’re on. Between the resuscitation we just called off and the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home, I have a feeling I’m going to need a beer or two tonight.”

“My treat,” Subarsky said.

The Gates of Heaven Funeral Home was hardly a place to inspire poetic thoughts about the eternal. It occupied a shabby building on a dingy side street six blocks from White Memorial. The windowless façade was painted black, and the ornately lettered sign above the entryway was peeling. Beside the door was a small wooden plaque, hand-painted with the ambiguous motto:

Several windows in what seemed to be an apartment on the second story were lit.

“Nice place,” Eric said.

“Positively inspirational,” Subarsky added. “Makes one want to rush right out and die.”

Eric gestured at the doorbell. “Want to do the honors?”

“Be my guest. But first check around your feet for any signs of a trapdoor.”

Eric depressed the small lacquered button, setting off a series of six or seven chimes which were loud enough to echo down the empty street. They were playing a melody he recognized, but could not identify.

“Dr. Najarian, I presume?”

Donald Devine’s voice flowed forth from a speaker built in over the doorway. Eric swore he could hear violin music playing in the background.

“That’s right,” Eric said. “I hope this isn’t too late.”

“Hardly. Hardly. I’ll be right down.”

“Perry Como,” Subarsky whispered. “And a damn good Perry at that.”

A pair of lights recessed beside the speaker flicked on, and moments later Donald Devine opened the Gates of Heaven. Had there been a contest to design a mortician, Devine might well have been the winning entry. Thin, almost cadaverous build; sallow complexion; round, wire-rimmed glasses; coal-black three-piece suit; thinning hair, pomaded to his scalp; he was at once prototype and caricature, a man in his forties trying diligently to look sixty.

Eric introduced himself and David. Devine led them inside. The decor of the Gates of Heaven was baroque and musty, and generic string music played through speakers in every room. The air was heavily perfumed, but through the bouquet Eric could still detect the familiar, unmistakable odor of formaldehyde.

“Can I get you gentlemen anything?” Devine asked, escorting them past a small chapel to a reception area. “Some wine? A little tea?”

Both declined. Devine poured himself a goblet of burgundy and then turned down the music from a panel on the wall.

“Pardon me for asking,” Eric said, “but is Devine your real name?”

Devine turned to him, his fingertips touching to form a steeple.

“Donald Devine is, in fact, my real name now. I had it legally changed a number of years ago.”

“Well, it does go nicely with the job.”

“Yes, I think it makes a statement of sorts. It helps put my clients’ loved ones at ease.”

Devine
. Eric wondered if the misspelling was intentional.

Donald Devine motioned them to a pair of heavily brocaded love seats. Then he withdrew a file from the drawer of a small writing desk with glass-ball feet.

“Now then,” he said, “you mentioned in your message that you were interested in the ultimate fate of Mr. Thomas Jordan.”

“Thomas Jordan?”

“You did say the death of your patient occurred on February twenty-seventh, did you not?”

“That’s right.”

“Well then, this must be your man.” Devine flipped through the file but did not hand it over. “John Doe; Caucasian male; late thirties; acute and chronic alcoholism; probable cardiac arrest due to arterios … art-er-i—”

“Arteriosclerosis,” Eric said, glancing over at Subarsky.

“Exactly.”

“How did you find out his name was Thomas Jordan?”

“Fingerprints, I believe. The M.E. does all that stuff.”

“Dr. Bushnell?”

Donald Devine looked up from the file and seemed momentarily startled. Then he smiled.

“Precisely,” he said. “Dr. Bushnell. Getting along in years but still as sharp as any of them. He made the ID and located the man’s sister in”—he consulted the file again—“Chicago. The woman gave him authorization to release the body. We did the rest.”

“Doesn’t she have to come in and view it in person?” Eric asked.

“Not with a positive fingerprint ID. All she needs to do is get a notarized statement that she is who she says she is, and she can do the whole thing long distance. I think when she found out what her brother did for a living, which apparently was to drink, she lost her enthusiasm for a trip east.”

Eric felt a growing sense of relief. For once, Terri Dillard had been mistaken. John Doe was not Laura Enders’s brother. He was not a scuba-diving computer wizard. He was Thomas Jordan, a down-and-out alcoholic with a sister who scarcely cared that he had died.

“So what happened to the body?” Subarsky asked.

Donald Devine flipped to another page in his file.

“Ashes to ashes,” he said reverently. “The body was taken to the crematorium in West Roxbury on … March 11. I would assume that the urn was sent to the deceased’s sister.”

“Well then, I guess that’s it,” Eric said.

“I hope I’ve been of some help to you gentlemen,” Donald Devine said, extending a hand that felt as if it had been kept in a meat locker.

“You’ve been a great help,” Eric said. He was thinking of how pleasant dinner with Laura Enders was going to be, now that he had no bad news for her.

Devine again formed his phalangeal steeple.

“Think nothing of it,” he crooned. “At the Gates of Heaven, service is our middle name.”

“Nice slogan,” Subarsky muttered thoughtfully. “ ‘Service is our middle name.’ I like that.”

They thanked the mortician. Then, to the strains of muted string music, they departed.

A
lthough the lobby of the Hotel Carlisle was badly in need of refurbishing, the lighting was so subdued that Eric actually had an impression of opulence as he crossed the frayed Oriental carpet in the lobby and settled into a cracked blue leather easy chair near the elevators. He was ten minutes early, and Laura had asked him to wait. The prospect of spending time with her was appealing for reasons even beyond his initial attraction. She would be the first woman unassociated with medicine he had dated in longer than he could remember.

Buoyed by thoughts of the evening, he had enjoyed a day as peaceful, productive, and close to normal as any he had had in some time. The morning, which Verdi had ushered in with an aria that might have been from
Madama Butterfly
, had been spent paying bills and writing some long-overdue letters. In the afternoon he had played racquetball with a friend and attended grand rounds at the hospital.

Normal.
After thirteen years of study and training,
of ungodly hours and one sacrifice after another in his personal life, he wasn’t even sure he knew what the word meant. What he did know, however, was that change was in the wind for him, with or without the appointment as associate director of the E.R.

It had been a full week since the search committee meeting. For three of those days he had worn the caduceus pin, but so far no one had made contact with him. Still, all three members of the committee had seen the pin on his clinic coat, and he sensed that before much longer Caduceus would make its requirements known to him.

A pretty blonde in spike heels and a skintight red dress caught his eye and sashayed over to him.

“Hi. My name’s Wendy. You lookin’ for a date?” she asked.

“Huh? Oh, no. That’s a really nice invitation, Wendy, but no thanks. I’m waiting for someone.”

“She this hot?” The woman gestured to her body. Beneath her excessive makeup, Eric saw, was a girl still in her mid-teens.

“Maybe not,” he said, stifling the urge to ask her the what’s-a-nice-girl-like-you question, or to lecture her on the importance of safe sex. “But tonight I think she’s all I can handle.”

The prostitute struck a pose and folded down her lower lip in an exaggerated pout.

“Your loss,” she said. “You’re real cute. I could give you a hell of a time at a hell of price.”

“Thanks, Wendy, but no thanks.”

“Suit yourself.”

She scanned the lobby and set her sights on a man who was buried behind a newspaper.

“Hi, friend,” Eric heard her say. She pushed down the top of the paper with one finger and peeked over. “Lookin’ for a date?”

“Beat it.”

The man, wearing sneakers and a tan wind-breaker, snapped the paper back over his face.

“Suit yourself,” Wendy said.

The prostitute retreated to her post just as the elevators opened and Laura stepped out. She had on a long gray sweater over jeans, and carried a trenchcoat over one arm. Her sable hair was tied back with a clip, and she moved with the ease and grace of a natural athlete. She was even lovelier than Eric had remembered.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said.

“No problem.” He stumbled getting up from his chair. “You look great.”

“Thanks. It’s amazing what twenty miles a day of fruitless walking can do.”

“No success?”

“Not unless you count a hundred or so ‘hey, baby’s,’ ten requests for dates, and two proposals of marriage.”

“Don’t get discouraged.”

“I’m not. At least not yet.”

“Good. You still up for a slice of Armenia?”

“You bet. The thought got me through half a dozen hotels, two hospitals, a few computer stores, and a sleazy reporter who suggested that there might be a way to run a story about Scott in his paper if I was willing to come by his place tonight for an interview.”