by Robin Cook
“What about arranging for me to have a talk with this esteemed CEO of yours? She’s the one who needs to have an idea of what she is doing to real people buying her policies.”
Ebony’s jaw dropped open in mock shock. “Now, that would be an interesting confrontation,” she choked out. “Let me tell you something: Heather Williams is riding the crest of a wave and doesn’t talk to mere mortals. I’m doing well with this job and I’m appreciated, but there is no way that even I could arrange to have a meeting with her. Even high-flying investment types often have to pay for her time.”
“She sounds charming,” Brian said sardonically, also remembering the security guard’s description.
“She’s a piece of work, no doubt about it. But she is extraordinarily good at what she does. I have to say we are all appreciative of the ride she’s engineered for us, especially with the employee stock she’s doled out to encourage company patriotism.”
Fifteen minutes later and more irritated and strung out than he ever remembered feeling, Brian left Ebony’s office. He felt as if he’d accomplished nothing. Reaching the empty Peerless lobby with its vacant reception desk, he collapsed onto one of the leather couches, wondering how much of the expensive piece of furniture his and Emma’s premiums had paid for. Adding insult to injury, he found himself staring again at the haughty foxhunting portrait.
A sudden clamor of voices at the far end of the long hallway caught his attention. A few moments later a throng of five people entered the room, heading for the door out to the elevators. Leading the pack was none other than the woman in the painting herself, perhaps having aged maybe five or ten years. In Brian’s estimation, she appeared to be maybe a year or two younger than Emma’s thirty-four. As she swept past with a determined, rapid gait, she glanced in his direction. For a moment a look of mild disdainful bewilderment flashed across her thin-lipped, carefully made-up face, but she didn’t slow down.
“Excuse me! Heather Williams?” Brian called out on a whim. “I need to talk to you. I think you’re in need of some moral advice.” His unplanned outburst surprised even himself, but it had the desired effect. The Peerless CEO came to a stop at the threshold of the lobby door that had been opened for her. She turned to treat Brian to a shocked but clearly contemptuous inspection.
“You are going to give me advice?” she questioned with a disbelieving tone. “Who the hell are you?” Her voice was shrill. She was obviously unaccustomed to being accosted by a stranger, especially in her own office. “Do you know it costs a thousand dollars a minute to talk with me?”
“That sounds like a bargain to me,” he said as he leaped to his feet. He wanted to take full advantage of this serendipitous encounter by looking at her eye to eye. “I was guessing more like two or three thousand at the very least.”
In spite of her obvious irritation, Heather laughed. Apparently, Brian’s mocking humor appealed to her narcissism. From the vantage point of his six-foot-one stature, he guessed she was somewhere around Emma’s five-eight but of much slighter build. What he didn’t expect was that his sudden standing up alarmed two of the four men in her entourage, including the one who had rushed ahead to open the lobby door. Both of these men were dressed in dark, ill-fitting suits and wearing prototypical aviator sunglasses. Instantly it occurred to Brian that the two older men were the bodyguards the building security guard had described.
As the two men started toward him, reaching under their lapels presumably for their firearms, Brian instinctively went for the P365 Sig Sauer nine-millimeter automatic pistol holstered in his waistband, which he carried religiously ever since he’d been a cop. Brian was a firearms expert par excellence, particularly with a handgun, which he had trained with on a regular basis and was fully licensed to carry. Luckily, in this instance, a potentially bad situation was averted by Heather, who snapped her hands out laterally to restrain her overeager escorts. Brian relaxed the fingers wrapped around his gun’s grip.
“I repeat: Who are you?” Heather demanded. “And what makes you possibly think you can give me advice?”
“I’m a very, very dissatisfied Peerless Health Insurance customer,” Brian answered. And then while poking his index finger accusatorily toward Heather’s face, he added: “You should be ashamed of yourself for designing and selling your worthless policies.”
Reacting to Brian’s possibly threatening hand gesture, the two bodyguards surged forward once more only to have Heather restrain them for the second time. There was little doubt that in his angered state he could more than handle these two mildly overweight, out-of-shape men who looked more like bouncers at a small-town bar than proper security personnel. In his aggravation, he would have actually enjoyed giving in to his bottled-up emotions and taking them down.
“Worthless?” Heather questioned in an overly mocking tone. “I beg your pardon, but thousands of extremely happy investors would tell you how wrong you are. How in God’s name did you get in here, anyway?”
“You’re the second person who has asked me that question,” Brian said, imitating Heather’s sarcastic tone. “I merely walked in, which means that not only are you selling morally suspect crap, it seems that you are in dire need of some professional security advice. Luckily, I happen to be an expert in that realm, and I’d be happy to give you one of my cards if you are interested.”
“Get the hell out of here!” Heather snapped, pointing to the door to the elevator lobby. “And if you ever venture to come within a hundred yards of me again, I won’t restrain my pit bulls.”
Despite himself, Brian laughed while glancing briefly at the two supposed pit bulls. “I hope that’s a promise, not a warning. But I can tell when I’m not appreciated, so I’ll take your suggestion and leave. But, your threat notwithstanding, I have a sense that you are going to hear from me again very soon. You, your attitude, and your company continue to ruin my life. It’s just not right, and I’m going to do something about it.”
Without looking back, he walked to the door, deriving a bit of satisfaction from the shocked silence his little speech had engendered. Unfortunately, when he got there, he couldn’t open it and had to wait until one of the younger men in Heather’s entourage came over and used a magnetic card.
“Thank you,” Brian said with forced dignity as he strolled out into the elevator lobby.
CHAPTER 10
August 31
Brian awoke Monday morning way before he intended but instantly knew he would not be going back to sleep. It was the characteristic whine of a mosquito that had rudely awakened him. Sitting bolt upright in bed, he listened intently. The sun had yet to come up, but dawn’s twilight filled the room with more than enough light for him to see. A moment later he caught sight of the insect as it landed on his upper left arm just above his elbow. For a split second he watched as it prepared to bite. He noticed that it was the same species that had plagued them at their beach barbecue, an Asian tiger, with its characteristic white marks on its black body and legs.
With fear-fueled speed, Brian slapped the insect with enough force to make his arm sting. The blow reduced it to a smudge of blood, suggesting it had already feasted. After using a bedside tissue to wipe off the remains, he bounded out of bed to check the open window. Sure enough, one corner of the screen was not fully engaged in its track, providing an opening to the outside. Brian quickly pulled it in tightly and set the small spring lock in place. With his heart racing, he climbed back into bed on his side and pulled up the covers, marveling at the fact that the Asian tiger mosquito could haunt such a highly urbanized area.
When he’d gone to bed just before midnight, he’d been totally exhausted both mentally and physically. The five or so hours of sleep he’d gotten clearly weren’t adequate, yet the confrontation with the pesky mosquito started him thinking. It was depressingly clear to him that there was no guarantee that things were going to improve as he faced another difficult week ahead. Rolling over ont
o his back, he stared up at the blank bedroom ceiling to make sure no other mosquitoes had gotten in. Although he knew more sleep was out of the question, he didn’t get out of bed, preferring to wallow in self-pity and lament his life. He’d never realized how tenuous it had been. Friday had started out bad, when a call from Calvin Foster’s executive secretary came in informing him that the October wedding had been canceled until further notice, meaning that even that modest potential income was off the table.
Right after that bit of disappointing news, Juliette had a meltdown while Camila tried to make her eat some breakfast. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then Brian started getting a flurry of calls on both the business landline and his mobile phone as well as multiple emails from a company called Premier Collections, which was threatening both a lawsuit over the $189,375.86 MMH Inwood bill and a sharp decrease in his credit rating if he didn’t immediately set up a payment plan. The harassing communications had shocked him after having had a face-to-face meeting with Roger Dalton just the day before. When he’d tried calling him for an explanation of why it was happening so quickly, he’d had to leave a voice message.
Continuing to stare up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes, Brian wondered how his bill was so astronomical, especially when he considered that MMH Inwood hadn’t really done anything besides just watch Emma go downhill. Except for handling the seizure in the ED, they hadn’t really treated her, and they certainly hadn’t cured her. In many ways, she was worse off when discharged than the day she walked into the Emergency Department. And then to truly add insult to injury, he had gotten three more non-hospital bills by email. The smallest invoice was from the ambulance company, Adultcare, who had had the nerve to charge nine hundred dollars to drive Emma about twenty blocks from MMH Inwood to the Hudson Valley Rehabilitation Hospital. At the time the MMH discharge people had arranged the transportation and if Brian had been given any warning about the cost, he would have driven Emma himself.
And then worse still were two other much larger bills from doctors. The biggest was from the neurologist who was not employed by MMH Inwood but had been asked to see Emma. The cost of his evaluation was $17,197.50. The second bill was for an out-of-hospital cardiologist in the amount of $13,975.13 after a nurse had possibly detected a few extra heartbeats when taking Emma’s pulse. In the end, Emma’s heart function was determined to be entirely normal, and all this meant was that his debt had reached a staggering $221,448.49.
The blaring of a horn accompanied by an angry shout out on West 217th Street briefly interrupted Brian’s thoughts, but a moment later he was back to his musing, specifically about how financially predatory and overly expensive the healthcare industry had become, particularly the hospitals. What he realized was that most people with good insurance, like he and Emma had had when employed by the NYPD, were ultimately complicit in allowing this ridiculous situation to happen. If hospital bills got paid, and of course they did, who cared or questioned how much the costs were, especially if trying to figure them out was practically impossible? Now he saw that such an attitude over time had contributed to allowing prices to climb exponentially, making it a recipe for disaster when someone lost their insurance or had bad insurance like the short-term policies Peerless offered. From his perspective it all amounted to a type of tolerated fraud, seeing as hospitals like MMH Inwood could create their own demand and then charge whatever they pleased. On top of that, less than ethical companies like Peerless could latch on and enjoy the ride while making a fortune.
As bad as Friday had been, Saturday was even more upsetting for Brian. It had started encouragingly enough when Aimée had called early and offered to come over and help with Juliette, whose behavior was getting worse. In many respects Juliette was as attached to her paternal grandmother as she was to her mother, and with Aimée present she’d eaten a decent breakfast for the first time in several days and for a while was her old self and content watching her cartoons. The reprieve gave Aimée and Brian a few moments to talk, which he used to share the disturbing news about Emma’s astounding hospital bill. Shocked at the amount, Aimée had suggested he contact a medical billing advocate.
“What the hell is a medical billing advocate?” Brian had asked. “I’ve never heard of such a person.”
“Apparently they help people with hospital bills,” Aimée had responded. “I hadn’t heard of them, either, but a friend of mine had a problem with an MMH Inwood bill and told me a billing advocate had helped her. The advocate’s name is Megan Doyle, and she has an office here. You should let her help you.”
Following that relatively pleasant morning and with Aimée entertaining Juliette, and Hannah expected to join them, Brian had gone to Hudson Valley Rehabilitation Hospital with the intent of spending the day with Emma. His plan was to get a true idea of how much rehabilitation she was actually receiving. But similar to what had happened at MMH Inwood on Thursday, as soon as he had entered HVR, he was told he needed to see Antonia Fluentes in the business office immediately.
With some trepidation Brian complied, but the moment he entered the woman’s office, he knew from her body language that trouble was afoot, and she confirmed it immediately.
“It’s been brought to our attention that your MMH Inwood bill is outstanding with no payment plan arranged,” Antonia said. She stared at him expectantly with dark, piercing eyes framed with equally dark glasses.
“It’s only been a few days since my wife’s discharge,” Brian said evasively.
“But we also have learned that your account has been turned over to collections. As you can imagine, that is not encouraging for us.”
“It’s not great for me, either,” he responded.
“We’ve also not had a good experience with your insurance carrier, Peerless Health.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Brian added.
“I’m sure you can see our dilemma. Due to the pandemic, Hudson Valley Rehabilitation Hospital has been struggling financially, like most healthcare facilities. To be perfectly honest, we are going to need upfront coverage for your wife if we are to continue with her rehabilitation.”
“I see,” Brian said, feeling like he was taking yet another low blow. “Exactly what kind of figure do you have in mind?”
“Minimally we are looking for two thousand dollars a day for the first ten days. At that point we can reassess the situation and her progress.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have a spare twenty thousand lying around.” He could hardly keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“I figured that might be the case, so I spoke with our chief medical officer, Dr. Harold Spenser,” Antonia continued. “Medically he doesn’t see any reason your wife cannot be discharged and have her rehabilitation carried out at home by local physical therapists who will be up to you to retain.”
“What about somewhat of a lower advance, say, in the five-thousand-dollar range?” Brian said. “This would be a gesture of good faith to keep my wife here as an inpatient.”
“I’m afraid not. Your wife’s current bill is already almost five thousand dollars.”
At that point the conversation went downhill as he became incensed that Emma’s charges could already be at the five-thousand-dollar mark, considering she’d only been there two full days, the shabby state of the facility, what seemed like a lack of staff, and that she’d essentially received no treatment. In the end, it was decided that Emma had to be discharged, and to avoid another thousand-dollar ambulance bill, Brian had to drive her home himself.
Although getting Emma into the car had been a struggle, once they’d gotten underway, she perked up. “Being discharged was unexpected, but I’m looking forward to getting home,” she’d said. She was out of breath from the effort of climbing into the car’s front seat. There was no doubt her spasticity was worse.
“I can well imagine. We are all going to be thrilled to have you, especially Juliette, who’s really missed you.”
“I’ve missed her, too,” Emma confessed. “And how about the business? I’ve been afraid to ask.”
“Not good,” he told her regretfully. “There was a possibility of a wedding in October out in the Hamptons, but just yesterday it was canceled. Camila is constantly trying to scare up some business with social media.”
“How are our finances?” Emma asked.
“Also not good, I’m afraid,” Brian said with a wince. He’d not mentioned anything to Emma about the problems with Peerless or the hospital bill and didn’t intend to until she was fully recovered, seeing no reason to stress her out.
At first Emma’s homecoming had been well received, especially since both Aimée and Hannah were there to greet her with Juliette and Camila. Juliette was obviously thrilled, at least initially. But the bonhomie didn’t last, as Emma’s physical limitations and precarious emotional state put the festivities to a quick end. She quickly tired, had no patience with Juliette, who needed constant attention and reassurance, and soon just wanted to go to bed and sleep. Getting her up the stairs to the master bedroom became an exhausting ordeal for everyone; although she could walk on the flat with some difficulty, the stairs were almost impossible.
For him it had been the night that was by far the most difficult part, when he was left alone with his ailing wife. Although Emma had slept most of Saturday afternoon and evening, at night she was mostly awake, emotionally unstable, and rather restless, putting Brian’s patience to a true stress test. She even managed to fall out of bed around four a.m. On top of that was the difficulty of getting her from the bed to the toilet on multiple occasions. He’d barely slept a wink, and it also made him understand why it had been far better that he’d become a policeman rather than a medic, a notion he had entertained for a short time as a teenager.