Deathbed

by William Kienzle

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Let’s just put that notion on the back burner,” the Fourth Man said. “What we must consider is where, if anywhere, we are going from here.”

  “I’ve got another idea,” Whitaker volunteered.

  “No!” the First Man said.

  “Not again,” the Third Man said.

  “Let’s hear him out,” the Fourth Man said.

  “I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open and I’ve got a plan. A very good plan. What would you say if I told you I could shut down the operating room?”

  “I’d say you couldn’t do it,” said the Third Man.

  “I’d say so what?” the First Man said.

  “So what,” Whitaker replied, “is just this: The operating room is the hub of the hospital. It’s where the hospital makes most of its money. If the operating room closes down, there is no possible way the hospital can avoid tons of publicity. It’s like a baseball team trying to play without any pitchers. I guarantee you, once the operating room closes, there will be reporters, radio, and TV crews all over the place. From that point on, it will be easy to get them interested in ‘other things’ that are going on in that supposedly Catholic institution.”

  “So,” the Third Man evidently was not convinced, “how can you do that?”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Ha!” the Third Man commented.

  “We have no one else,” the Fourth Man said. “We must leave it to you. We put our trust in you. “

  “Thanks. I won’t fail you. And ... I have this feeling. I mean there are a couple of portents that seem to indicate that things have turned around for us . . . that things are looking up.”

  “What are they, Bruce?” The Fourth Man said. “God knows, we certainly could use a favorable sign or two.”

  “Well, for one thing, there was that control-group experiment at the hospital.”

  “You mean when you got the patient to be given penicillin when she was allergic to it?”

  “Yes. I overheard some of the hospital personnel talking about it, several times, as a matter of fact. They kept talking about how not only did she have the wrong protocol number that would include her in the experiment, but she also did not have any sticker on her chart that indicated she was allergic to the medicine.

  “So I remember very clearly removing the number they gave her when she was admitted and substituting the number that would put her in the experiment. But I don’t remember pulling off the sticker that said she shouldn’t be given penicillin.”

  “How could you—”

  “That’s just it—I must have. There was no other way it could have worked. I take that as a sign—a sign that things are turning around for us. It was a miracle, I guess, how that sticker disappeared from the lady’s chart. It must have been a miracle. I didn’t take the sticker off—and yet, I did. What else could anyone call it?”

  “Dumb luck,” the Third Man said.

  “Maybe he’s right,” the Fourth Man said. “Anyway, Bruce, you said there were a couple of portents that augured well for us. What else beside the disappearance of the telltale sticker?”

  “Well, this very meeting right now. We’ve been talking for a long time and nothing’s gone wrong. Not one of us has had an accident or done anything to attract the guard’s attention or anything like that. Now I ask you: Doesn’t that bode well?”

  “Maybe. But I still think we’ve got to keep our options open on Father Koesler. He may have to be eliminated.”

  “I don’t even want to think about that,” said Whitaker.

  “Don’t think about it,” the Fourth Man reassured. “As I said before, we’ll put that on the back burner. We may have to consider it, but, for the moment, let’s just put all our chips on Bruce’s plan. We’re behind you, Bruce.”

  “Wait a minute!” The Third Man looked searchingly at the First Man. “Did you take anything from the Big Top again?”

  “No . . . .” The First Man hesitated.

  “How about the chow cart?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Then what’s that bulge under your shirt?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something. Obviously something.”

  “Well, maybe I took a little something out of the Big Top.”

  “You’re going to do it to us again, aren’t you, dummy!”

  “I’m not doing anything to you guys. It’s just that I get hungry. It’s just for me and don’t worry about it. I can take care of myself. No one is going to catch me at this. I am going to get away with this, just watch.”

  And it’s likely he would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t, as he walked past the guard, folded his arms so tightly across his chest that one end of the loaf protruded from the open collar of his shirt. No guard could miss that. And this one didn’t.

  * * *

  “Let me understand this,” Sister Eileen addressed her somewhat apprehensive secretary, “a patient entered St. Vincent’s with a mild case of pneumonia. Her prognosis was good. There were no known complications.”

  Dolly nodded.

  “Somehow she was put in a test group that was to be given penicillin, even though she had stated that she was allergic to the drug.”

  Dolly nodded.

  “The admissions clerk’s records show she was given the correct protocol number that would have excluded her from the test group. Yet, that is not the number that was found on her chart. The number on her chart automatically placed her in the study and insured that she would receive the penicillin.”

  Dolly nodded.

  “We have on record that someone remembers seeing the allergy-warning sticker on her chart. Yet the sticker seems to have just disappeared somewhere along the way.”

  Dolly nodded.

  “She was given penicillin and we almost killed her. Is all that a fairly accurate history of this patient?”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  Eileen leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. She massaged her temples with her fingertips. “Why wasn’t I told about this immediately?”

  “Because”—Dolly shifted her weight; she’d been standing quite a while—“Mr. Haroldson took immediate charge of the investigation. He told everyone you were not feeling well and you were not to be disturbed. But after I thought about it for a while it seemed to me you’d want to know no matter how you felt.”

  “I feel fine !” Eileen snapped, though she did not appear well. The unrelenting headache had left her pale and in obvious pain.

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “On top of it all, the patient might actually have died if Father Koesler had not remembered a conversation wherein she had mentioned her allergy to penicillin.”

  “Well, that’s probably true, Sister. Except that the doctors told Mr. Haroldson that they would probably have identified the allergic condition if her symptoms had continued much longer. And Mr. Haroldson says that’s probably true.”

  Eileen thought about that for a few moments. “All right, so she probably would not have died. The fact remains, we made her a very sick person.”

  Dolly nodded.

  “I suppose we ought to prepare for a malpractice suit.”

  “I don’t think so, Sister.”

  “No?” Eileen was surprised.

  “No. It seems Mrs. Power is a very religious woman. According to Father Koesler, she tends to put herself in the hands of God. Father mentioned that she refers to God as ‘Dr. Jesus.’ Anyway, everything that happens to her is fate—”

  “Or providence.”

  “Yes. So the bad period she just went through—”

  “Was God’s will . . . is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “It seems I’ve been getting a lot of ‘good news-bad news’ packages lately.” Her frown intensified. “Whatever else happens, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. We’ve got to find the responsible party or parties and take appropriate action. This particular calamity se
ems to have had a relatively happy ending, but there is no doubt it could have been a disaster. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this. Dolly, please tell Mr. Haroldson to see me about this at his earliest convenience.”

  “Yes, Sister.” Dolly exited.

  Eileen continued to massage her temples. Something was wrong; no doubt about that. Never before had she had such a persistent and intense headache. But now was not the time to be sick. So she would not be. She could not be. She had to stay on top of this mess.

  Thanks to the remarkable faith of Millie Power, there would be no outside repercussions. But there might have been. There could have been. A malpractice suit could have caused such an increase in their insurance premiums that St. Vincent’s simply could not have afforded it. With no insurance coverage, St. Vincent’s would have been forced, at long last, to close its doors for good and all. And if the unaffordable insurance had not done the job, the media coverage would have accomplished the same.

  Cardinal Boyle could be counted on to look the other way as St. Vincent’s fudged on Catholic teaching in order to be relevant to its community. But massive media coverage could not be overlooked. Sister Eileen could not guess how the hierarchy would react to a media exposé of St. Vincent’s. And she didn’t want to find out.

  In either eventuality—litigation or publicity—St. Vincent’s seemed the loser.

  * * *

  Pat Lennon riffled through her notepad. She appeared to be studying the contents. Actually, her attention was some distance from the city room of the Detroit News. She was thinking about St. Vincent’s. She was supposed to be doing a story on St. Vincent’s. But there wasn’t much connection between her notes on St. Vincent’s and her musings about St. Vincent’s.

  She had completed all the research needed for the Michigan Magazine article. She had gathered all the background information and done all the interviews. The facts were scattered throughout her notebook. All she had to do was put them together. But rather than collating the material, she was woolgathering.

  It was unlike Pat Lennon. She was a professional who could be depended upon. Editors had become used to giving her an assignment and then not having to be concerned about it again. Lennon would bring it in acceptably and on time. While time on a piece for the Sunday magazine was somewhat more leisurely measured than for the regular daily deadline, she was admittedly procrastinating. She had the data. All she had to do was write it up.

  But she was distracted by something she could not quite define. Call it a sixth sense, or intuition, or perhaps a hunch. There was some impending danger at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She had felt it during some of her interviews, notably with John Haroldson and Dr. Lee Kim. There was some unrest among certain of the nursing staff. Even Sister Rosamunda seemed to be holding something back. And Lennon had anticipated nothing but the stereotypical sweet little old nun.

  Then there was Sister Eileen herself. Somehow she seemed to be the cynosure of the hostility Lennon had uncovered. Pat was also concerned about Eileen’s present state. The crippling headache from which the nun was suffering seemed to make her more vulnerable.

  Yet there was nothing Lennon could do about a premonition, or intuition, or a hunch. Staff reporters dealt in facts, events, reality, not in emotional reaction, no matter how strong it might be.

  She sighed. Enough of this! Speculation was the purview of columnists and editorialists. She was a pawn in the chess game of journalism. Let’s turn this story out! She switched on the CRT.

  “Lennon!” It was Bob Ankenazy.

  She looked up and reflexively turned off the word processor.

  “All hell’s broken loose at Van’s Can. A full-scale riot! The prisoners have barricaded themselves in the central dining area—the . . . uh . . . Big Top. The riot’s less than half an hour old. We’ve got three people on the scene. We need a rewrite and you’re it! Get on the phone—line three. The story’s coming in right now.”

  This, she thought, is more like it. A breaking news story you can sink your teeth into. Nothing speculative or conjectural about this: X-number of prisoners have rioted, X-number of prison guards have been taken hostage, X-number of law enforcement officers will be gathering, armed with everything short of nuclear weapons. There will be X-number of prisoner demands. Eventually, X-number of public officials—mayor, police chief, maybe governor—will assemble.

  The first need: Fill in the Xs. Then do a more complete, insightful job of it than either radio or TV, which will reach the public hours before the print medium will be able to tell the story. And, as rewrite, she would quarterback.

  For no more than an instant, she thought of Joe Cox. Undoubtedly, he would be covering this for the Free Press. She wondered whether he would be on the scene, where he would want to be, or if he would be, as she was, working from the city room. She had no more luxury than an instant to give to Cox. She put on a headset and activated line three.

  “Bill Dunnigan,” the voice identified.

  As the story unfolded, Lennon pictured Dunnigan at the scene. Blond, mild-mannered, wearing granny glasses behind which soft blue eyes usually seemed wide with surprise. Dunnigan was the sort of reporter who could be depended on to bring in a careful story faithful to facts. Dunnigan was a professional in the best sense of the term.

  “That you, Pat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good. What we’ve got here is an insurrection—a riot. Occurred at 12:25 p.m. in the central dining area—the Big Top, as the prisoners call it. That’s upper case B and T. Five guards—all male—have been taken hostage. So far, no one’s been hurt. None of the guards was armed. So the prisoners have no weapons except the tools and kitchen utensils they managed to appropriate. That would include screwdrivers, knives, and saws. Of course, to the hostages these things can be both frightening and threatening.

  “Actually, the riot just got under way. So there isn’t much more to tell just yet. We know there will be demands made. But so far, we have no intimation of what they’ll be.”

  “Is the entire prison population involved—all the inmates?” Lennon was feeding Dunnigan’s information into the CRT.

  “No. Just the ones who were in the Big Top at that time. That would exclude those inmates restricted to their cells, the ones in solitary, and the ones in the ‘dog ward’—the most violent ones.”

  Lennon liked that. Readers would relish getting acquainted with prison jargon like the “dog ward.”

  “No,” Dunnigan continued, “not everybody. Maybe from 85 to 90 percent of the inmates are in on it. There’s talk that the prisoners themselves want to exclude three of their fellow inmates from the riot. None of us can figure that out yet. The word is that these three are born losers, considered jinxes by the others. If this is true, those three jerks must be the crap de la crap. It may make a good side-bar. I’ll get into that later. Right now, we’re waiting for the mayor, who’s supposed to be on his way over. I’ll be back to you.”

  The connection went dead. Concise, factual, interesting, current, with a possible side-bar—everything you’d need to begin an important, breaking news story. Lennon had no sooner completed feeding the CRT when the phone rang again.

  “Pfeiffer. This you, Lennon?”

  Pat shook her head. Mark Pfeiffer was close to being the antithesis of Bill Dunnigan. Where Dunnigan was careful, factual, inclined to understatement, Pfeiffer was careless, and often inaccurate, with a massive ego—built up to defend an equally massive inferiority complex—that crowded out all consideration of others. Pfeiffer’s creed seemed to be: He that doth not tooteth his own horn the same shall not get tooted. Finally, Dunnigan was respected and liked by his peers, while Pfeiffer was neither respected nor generally liked.

  “Yes,” Lennon responded wearily.

  “Listen, this place is a madhouse. Everyone’s running around like their ass is on fire. Which reminds me, what are you doing tonight, Honey?”

  Silence. Lennon knew of several News staffers who would wi
llingly contribute to Pfeiffer’s severance pay just to get rid of him.

  “Okay.” Pfeiffer was undaunted by Lennon’s stony silence. “We’ll pursue that and you later. Back to the dull stuff. Right now, nobody knows nothing. Seems some inmates got steamed and rioted at lunchtime. Nobody knows for sure whether they’re armed, but I’d lay you five-to-one they probably broke into the arsenal and got guns. Now that I think of it, I’d lay you for free gratis.”

  Silence. Come to think of it, she’d contribute to a fund to have Pfeiffer castrated. Thank God for staffers like Dunnigan. From long experience as well as just the tone of his voice, she could tell Pfeiffer didn’t know what he was talking about. If she hadn’t had Dunnigan, she would have had nothing. She certainly wasn’t going to share a by-line with a nincompoop like Pfeiffer.

  “Wait a minute, Sweetie,” Pfeiffer continued, “the mayor just got here. He’s being surrounded by the TV and radio creeps, and he’s got his usual entourage of bodyguards. But I’ll get to him. I’ll be right back with you, Honeypot.”

  Not if I can help it, thought Lennon. The problem was, for this story she could not help it. She would have to listen to him, but she didn’t have to use anything he called in. And she was fairly certain she would use nothing of his. It wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t recognize that— despite having his by-line with the others on the story—nothing that he had called in had been used. Lennon would have to rely on the dependable Bill Dunnigan and whoever the third reporter might prove to be.

  The phone rang.

  “Dunnigan. Pat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The mayor’s here. Says it’s too early to comment; he’ll have to hear the demands before he can make a statement. The governor’s on his way. But right now, Mayor Cobb is the authority of record. It’s his jurisdiction and he’s not one to slough it off.

  “Pat, this is gonna be a step-by-step procedure. We’re going to have to take one comment at a time. So stay with me and I’ll give you the developments as they happen. One thing: From everything I’ve been able to gather so far, this place is going to be shut up tight as a drum even after the riot’s been settled. It’ll be a long, long time before any of these guys get another visitor from the outside world.”