Doc in the Box

by Elaine Viets

  “That medical records chick is a Nazi,” Katie said. “She thinks all patients’ medical records are her personal property. You’d think I’d asked to borrow her car. She wouldn’t give me anything until I signed off on all my old delinquent charts. And she wants these back before she gets off work at six, or else. They’re all a bunch of burned-out doctor-haters.”

  She parked her rump on the desk and said, “There are twelve patient files here. I think I can weed out some.”

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “How?” she said. “You don’t know what you’re looking for and you can’t read the doctors’ writing.”

  I spent the next hour in a chair designed by the Spanish Inquisition, listening to Katie mutter to herself. “In. Definitely. That one’s out. No. Maybe. Maybe. No, can’t be him. Wrong doctor.” Then the file would go in the reject pile, and she’d start muttering again. She poured herself coffee and pawed through files. Meanwhile, I was deep into “Moorton Musings,” which was about as exciting as the Gazette editorial page. I read the message from Moorton’s CEO, an article about the dedication of the Herbert Snernford lobby in Building D, and the entire list of Moorton Angels in the magazine. Dr. and Mrs. Brentmoor were on that list, too.

  “Okay,” Katie said. “I think I’ve got it down to three people. Let’s go through the list:

  “The first one is a twenty-seven-year-old man who died of colon cancer recently. He was unmarried, no children, worked as an engineer up until his death. He’s past wanting revenge, but I wondered if his father, a widower with no other children, might want vengeance against the people who killed his only son. From reading his records, it looks like it took almost two years to diagnose his cancer. The doctor probably didn’t think someone so young could get it. They put him through some tough treatment, but the guy died anyway. The father might be bitter enough over the loss of his only son to kill his doctors.

  “The next candidate is a forty-five-year-old woman with inoperable colon cancer. A very sad case. She’s married and has two kids in middle school. She’ll never live to see them grow up. Her white blood cell count is too low and she can no longer tolerate chemotherapy.”

  Katie shook her head. “Another stupid diagnosis. The woman had a questionable sigmoidoscopy, so her family doctor, lovable old Dr. Jolley, ordered a CT with contrast. It came back with some very iffy results, but the doctor delayed giving her those results for several months.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Reading between the lines, I’d guess the doctor stuck the report in a drawer or buried it on his desk and forgot about it. She had a very fast-growing cancer, and by then it was too late to remove it. The surgeon performed a colostomy to make her more comfortable, and tried to shrink the tumor with chemo and radiation, but that didn’t work. The cancer might have been fatal anyway, but with that delay in treatment she’s going to die for sure.”

  I forgot about my aching back and sore neck and being stuck in this small uncomfortable room. All I could think of were these poor people, condemned to death by someone’s carelessness.

  “That’s an awful story,” I said. “I’d want to kill the doctors who did that to me.”

  Katie had one more file to show me.

  “This is the last case, a thirty-year-old man operated on for colon cancer. His initial results looked good, but fourteen months after his operation, they found more cancer.”

  “Did it come back?”

  “Can’t tell. It was probably in there in a teeny, tiny microscopic amount, and then later … poof! Could have been something the doctors didn’t catch the first go-around, could be something new. But it showed up first in his liver, and then in his colon again. I saw the poor bastard’s path report. Not a chance he’ll make it. He’s discontinued radiation but still takes chemo. It probably keeps him going. I saw something else, too. About six months ago, he requested that copies of his medical records be sent to a lawyer.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He’s thinking about a lawsuit. He’s someone who definitely wants revenge.

  “There are some other possible candidates for our killer, but none of them have stories as dramatic as these. I’d say the chances are good that one of these three is the killer. They all had Dr. Jolley for an internist. They all had a sigmoidoscopy at Moorton. They all went to the same oncologist, the late Dr. Brentmoor. They were all treated in the hospital’s radiation oncology department. And they all have reason to be furious. Colon cancer is a very curable cancer, if it’s caught early. If I had to get a tumor, it’s one of the ones I’d want. Provided it was small. And not in the lymph nodes. To die of it would piss me off, too.”

  “Do any of these people fit the description of the killer?”

  “Well, we don’t know what the dead guy’s father looks like. The woman was fairly tall—five feet nine and one hundred fifty pounds when she was diagnosed, according to her chart. Her weight’s dropped to one twenty now. Her hair’s light brown.

  “The guy is about five-eight and he was on the heavy side, about one eighty-nine. He’s down to one forty-two now.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Dark brown.”

  “Who do you think is the killer’s next target?”

  “He’s running out of people he can kill,” Katie said. “Unless he—or she—has a grudge against some other specialist, I’d say it’s going to be either the surgeon who performed the colostomy, or the chemotherapy nurses. And from what I know, it’s unlikely this person would kill the chemo nurses. They’re decent at Moorton. There’s a slight chance it could be the surgical pathologist. The patient might think the path blew the call. Of course, it would take a pretty knowledgeable patient to know about surgical pathologists.

  “I think it’s probably got to be the surgeon. Everyone hates surgeons. I’d like to off a few myself.”

  Then Katie the Qualifier reappeared. “Well, urologists are usually decent. And ear, nose, and throat surgeons tend to be nice, but your average surgeon is a real prima donna. Surgeons are just glorified mechanics—cutters, we call them—but try telling them that.”

  Katie stretched and stood up. “Listen, do we really have to stop this guy? I think he’s doing a good job so far. He’s gotten rid of a lot of jerks at this hospital. That radiation oncology department needed cleaning out.”

  “The hospital could have just fired them, you know.”

  “Awfully difficult these days when there’s no actual malpractice,” Katie said. “You’d need tons of paperwork. The deceased oncologist had the compassion of a prison guard, and you already know my opinion of the doc who did the sigmoidoscopies. I’d be inclined to let the killer go awhile more.”

  Katie’s conversation was making me uneasy. This went beyond path room humor. I hoped it was a caffeine overdose. “You are joking, right?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so,” she said, shoving papers into files.

  “Anyway, what about the murdered internist, Dr. Jolley? The police interviewed his patients in the waiting room and everyone said he was a nice guy.”

  “Dead men tell no tales,” said Katie. “He made a stupid mistake with that woman. And I autopsied two of his other mistakes. One was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of twins. There are whispers of pending lawsuits. Nothing’s gone public yet, but I’ve heard the rumors. Dr. Jolley had a great bedside manner, but he was careless. That kind of thing is hard to prove. The guy’s not a drunk or an out-and-out incompetent who cut off the wrong leg, and doctors hate testifying against each other. We all think, when one of our own does something stupid, ‘There but for the grace of God …’ It would have taken a long time and a lot of rumors to bring Dr. Jolley down. This killer got rid of Dr. Jolley for us, and we don’t have to feel guilty.”

  I stared at her. But then I thought about all the incompetent reporters who were still working. What did we do to stop them? Nothing. We had our own code in the media. Maybe our mistakes didn’t kill people, but we could make them mi
serable.

  “What do you think we should do next?” I asked her.

  “We? Unless you got a mouse in your pocket, there is no more we. Now it’s up to you. I’ll give you the patients’ addresses, next of kin, home and work numbers. That’s all. I’m finished. You won’t see any of these files. At least I’ll be able to say under oath that I never showed them to anyone. They’ll go back to the records room before we leave, or my life isn’t worth living. The medical-records Nazi will hunt me down like a dog.

  “You have to check alibis for the three names,” she said. “Two of the three patients have the same surgeon, and all three went for chemo at Moorton.

  “It’s your move next. I’ve done what I could.”

  My move. Just the thought made me sick. If I failed, more people would die. I tried not to think of the bloody scene in radiation oncology, the blood on the walls and floors and …

  “We don’t know when he’ll kill again,” I said. “There’s no pattern I can see. There were four days between the radiation oncology murders and Dr. Brentmoor’s death. Two days between Brentmoor and Dr. Jolley’s murder. Five days between the killings of Jolley and Dr. Tachman. How much time between Tachman and the next one? It looks like five days at the most, two at the least.”

  “It could be quick,” Katie said. “If this is a terminal cancer patient, he may be running out of time. The killer could decide a violent death is the way to go, and take a lot of people with him, and he could do it in the next few days. And don’t forget—he could just as easily be a she. Women can handle guns just as well as men. I certainly can.”

  “You said the three cancer patients have been worked on by two surgeons. What are those doctors like?”

  “The young man had Dr. Gilbert Harpar. He’s okay. Not really good. Not really bad. Not a doctor I’d want treating me. I could see him making some fatal screwup. I’d check out his patient first. Dr. Theodore Boltz did the other two patients. He’s damn good. If I was operated on, I’d want him to do it.”

  “Sounds like a decent human.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Katie said. “He’s still a surgeon.

  “Look, I can’t say Boltz never made a mistake. Every doctor does. But it’s more likely, from what I know of Boltz, he said something stupid to the killer and ticked him off. And if that’s what happened, this situation is turning really scary.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we all say stupid things, especially in a hospital where we’re all under stress. If he starts killing people for mouthing off, everyone in this hospital is under a death sentence.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The sound of breaking glass woke me up.

  Suddenly, I was alert. I could feel my heart pounding. Was it the gunman? Where was he trying to get in? I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anyone on the steps, or trying the doors.

  I grabbed the pepper spray off the bedside table, ran to the bedroom window, and lifted one blind slat with a fingernail in classic South Side spy style.

  It was morning, the sun was shining, and a scrawny blond kid was standing in the alley with a baseball bat. His head hung down, and he seemed paralyzed with fear. I saw a broken side window in a garage six doors up. I could hear a gravelly male voice yelling that he was calling the cops if the kid didn’t pay for a new window. A shriller female voice added that she’d call his mother if he didn’t come up with the money, and don’t try to get out of it, buster, because she knew where he lived on Giles.

  I put the blind slat down. So much for my burglar. What time was it? Eight after eight. I’d had three hours’ sleep after my all-nighter with the medical records. My back was stiff. My neck was sore. I felt groggy, nervous, edgy. I’d had a death threat, hazardous waste dumped on my doorstep, and a crazy man with a gun might be looking for me. Since the death threat, I didn’t even go to the bathroom without pepper spray in my hand. I took a shower with it sitting on the window ledge. I’d seen Psycho and I knew what happened in showers.

  I hated living like this, always waiting for something bad to happen. My two security guards, Mrs. Geimer and Mrs. Indelicato, reported that they’d seen no one near my place, but I still went around locking windows and testing doors. I jumped at every noise in the alley and every car door slam on the street.

  I had two goals:

  (1) Find the killer and save the doctors.

  (2) Find the killer and save my flagging career.

  Not necessarily in that order.

  In the meantime, my regular work kept intruding. At eight-fifteen, I got a call from Irene. She was sorry to call me so early at home, but she’d just talked with the photographer. He was having trouble with his developing equipment, and their Whispering Arch photos wouldn’t be ready early today as she had promised. She knew I was counting on those photos. Sorry.

  I was sorry, too. I needed a column today and it had to have a photo. I’d written the story of Irene and Bill’s ceremony. It was ready to go, except for the photos. Now I needed another column with photos and I needed it fast. My deadline was noon today for tomorrow’s paper. I couldn’t do anything about the Doc in the Box killer until I had a column. My mind was mush after last night. Maybe I could figure out what to do over breakfast at Uncle Bob’s. I gathered up my briefcase and pepper spray, then wracked my brains for ideas all the way over. Nothing occurred to me. I was desperate. I’d have to check the slush pile when I got to the office, a sorry collection of ideas that weren’t good enough for a column unless I was really desperate. Desperate was here.

  The solution to my problems smiled at me when I walked in the door. “Have I got a column for you,” Marlene said, showing me to a booth.

  “You do?”

  I felt the first faint stirrings of hope through the fatigue. Of course, it might not be a column. Lots of people told me interesting stories, but for one reason or another I couldn’t make them into a column.

  “Let me tell you about Jamal. High school kid. Works back in the kitchen as a dishwasher. Nice kid. Lives with his grandmother, makes A’s and B’s and is on the baseball team.”

  My newly hatched hope was starting to die. No column so far.

  “One of the houses right behind us is owned by an eighty-year-old widow. A couple of months ago, a careless driver going down the alley took out a section of her back fence. She never had it replaced, and it left her backyard wide open. She had some old boards and junk out by her garage, and people started adding to the pile, using her yard as a dumping ground. They left a rusty bicycle, an old mattress and box springs, even a couch.

  “The neighbors complained and she got cited by the city inspector. Jamal looked out the kitchen window and saw her arguing with the guy. The inspector told her the junk was attracting rats and she had seven days to remove it or she’d have to go to court and pay a fine. She said she didn’t put it there and she shouldn’t have to pay to haul it way. After the inspector left, she was standing in the yard crying. Jamal ran out to see if the old lady was okay. She told him the whole story and said she didn’t have the money to have the trash hauled away.

  “You know what Jamal did? He got some of the kids from the baseball team, borrowed his uncle’s pickup truck, and the whole bunch hauled away the trash, then cut her lawn and put the busted fence section back up. Then with his own money, Jamal bought two geraniums for her porch. Wasn’t that sweet?”

  It was. It was a column, too. Jamal was a tall lanky kid with a smooth brown face. He had that peculiar long torsoed, loose-limbed body you saw on some pro baseball players. They look uncoordinated, until you see them moving on the field. Jamal was embarrassed to be caught doing good. He mumbled and said he didn’t do anything, but when he realized he and his baseball buds would get their picture in the paper wearing their uniforms, he finally owned up and admitted his good deed. He said we could take their picture during practice after school. For once, I was able to get a Gazette photographer.

  Saved once again by Uncle Bob’s. This story would practi
cally write itself. I knocked on the widow’s door. She was eager to confirm the story and couldn’t say enough good things about Jamal and his friends. I could have the story written by eleven o’clock.

  Could have, but didn’t. Everything conspired against me that day. Wendy the Whiner, my editor, called a sudden mandatory morning meeting, where she told us Charlie was unhappy with the number of typos in our Family section. The copy desk blamed the writers. The writers blamed the copy desk. Nothing was accomplished, and an hour was wasted. My phone rang constantly, mostly calls from lonely old guys who just wanted to yak. It took forever to pry them off the phone.

  The only good thing was that today started Georgia’s week off in the chemo-radiation cycle. I didn’t have to take her to the hospital for treatment for a whole week. Otherwise, the day was a bust. It was after noon before I could finish my column and get out of the office, and I wondered if another doctor was dying in his office, even now.

  Katie had given me the home and business phone numbers of her three suspects, plus their addresses. I started with the easy one first: Harry Handlein, the father whose only son had died of colon cancer. He was a widower, aged fifty-seven, and his son Brian had never married. Brian had been engaged at the time of his diagnosis, but the wedding never took place and he’d had no children. Katie wondered if the father would be bitter enough to kill over the death of his only son.

  The hospital records showed the father worked in security at the Travelers Rest, one of the nicer hotels around the airport. That meant he probably carried a gun. I could check easily enough. I had an in at the hotel. A guy I went to the high school prom with worked days as a supervisor in security at the Travelers Rest. St. Louis was like that. I could probably find some connection to the other two patients, too, if I looked hard enough.

  Joe and I went steady for a while, then split up the summer after high school graduation. He married a few years later, but we stayed friends. I knew he had two little girls. He proudly showed me their pictures whenever I ran into him. It was one-thirty when I got out to the hotel and found Joe’s office. A secretary said he was still at lunch. I waited in a chair outside his locked door. The hotel lobby had deep carpets, sofas you could sink into, and big expensive flower arrangements, but the plush touches stopped when you got into the working part of the hotel. The walls back here were scuffed by encounters with cleaning and serving carts. The floors were ugly gray tile. The fluorescent lights glared. I fell asleep anyway, and only woke up when I heard Joe’s footsteps coming around the corner. I hoped he didn’t hear me snoring.