Deathbed

by William Kienzle

  * * *

  Father Koesler wondered why it had taken him so long to find the doctors’ lounge. It was an almost perfect place to wait for the bereaved when there had been a death in emergency or the operating room. The lounge was comfortable, some unseen hand kept the coffee brewing, and it was near the “quiet room” in that area of the hospital where the chaplain and the bereaved would meet.

  Koesler was, indeed, waiting for just such an event. An elderly man had suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. He was dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s emergency room. His next-of-kin had been contacted. Koesler was awaiting them.

  In the lounge with Koesler were the members of an OR team, consisting of two surgeons—one of whom was Dr. Lee Kim—an anesthetist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. They had informed Koesler that they were waiting for a “hand.” Someone had put a hand through a pane of glass and, judging by Dr. Kim’s blood-spattered tunic, the wrist had bled quite a bit. One of the nurses commented on Kim’s stained tunic.

  “Wrists bleed,” the principal surgeon observed laconically. He introduced himself to Koesler as Dr. James Meyer.

  “She really did a job on herself,” said Kim, who had treated the patient in the emergency room, thus the blood. “Wrist is almost completely severed.”

  “Oh. God!” Meyer said, “that means three or four hours.”

  Both nurses winced. The anesthetist showed no emotion.

  “I was home,” Meyer said. “We were just getting ready to go skiing at Pine Knob when the damn call came.”

  “Yeah.” The anesthetist smiled. “You said good-bye to me in OR.”

  “Well, hello again.”

  “You keep referring to the patient as a ‘wrist,’” Koesler addressed him.

  “That is all we will see,” Kim said. The rest of her will be draped. All that will be exposed will be her wrist. You get used to that after awhile. All you deal with in OR are appendages of one sort or another.”

  The nurses’ expressions seemed to register a silent protest.

  “Do you know what happened to her?” Koesler asked.

  Kim shook his head.

  “Didn’t you talk to her?” Koesler could not imagine treating a conscious injured person without inquiring what had happened.

  “I used to ask people what happened,” Kim said, “but it was always the same story. Nothing unexpected. Just walking down the street. Just washing a window. Just opening a door. When the glass broke, or the piano fell, or my boyfriend shot me. Always the same. So, I stopped asking.”

  Koesler thought that an odd explanation.

  “What’s the status?” Meyer asked.

  “I put a pressure pack on it,” Kim said.

  “What time is the hand scheduled?” Meyer asked.

  “Four-thirty,” a nurse replied.

  The principal surgeon consulted his watch and sighed. “It’ll go right through dinner.”

  The intercom squawked. Koesler was not expecting the voice nor was he attuned to it. He needed a short period to grasp part of what he’d heard and put it together.

  There had been an announcement of a trauma. About that he was sure. A trauma case had just entered the emergency room. A motorcyclist had been hit by a car. There were multiple head injuries. There was more to the announcement, but that was all Koesler was able to decipher. He thought that must be the substance of the matter.

  Dr. Kim said something. It might have been in his own language. It sounded like an expletive. Koesler didn’t understand it, but he recognized the tone. The others registered emotions from disgust to disappointment.

  “What’s the matter?” Koesler asked of anyone.

  “The head will take precedence over the hand,” Dr. Meyer explained.

  “They’ll have to call in another team,” the anesthetist said.

  “Looks like we could be here till midnight,” one of the nurses said.

  There followed a lively discussion ranging from laws that would compel cyclists to wear helmets to the general danger of riding on anything so unprotected.

  “Danger or not,” Kim said, “that is what I want.”

  “What’s that?” Meyer asked.

  “A bike. A big one. With horses to spare.”

  Koesler was slightly surprised. He never associated the notion of doctors with their wanting anything. His concept was too generalized to be all-encompassing, but Koesler subconsciously thought doctors could buy anything they wanted. Evidently, Dr. Kim could not. Not yet. A big expensive motorcycle must be part of his planned upward mobility. The plan that Dr. Scott had described.

  “I’ve got a friend with a bike like that,” Meyers said, “who wants me to go along on a ride all the way out to the West Coast. A nut.”

  “Sounds terrific,” Kim said. “If you do not want to go, you might tell your friend that there is another doctor at St. Vincent’s who is willing to go along with him.”

  “Who said anything about a ‘him’?”

  Kim smiled. “Even better.”

  The phone rang. Kim picked it up. “Yes, the cyclist . . .? He what . . .?

  “You could not, eh . . .?

  “Well, that is terrific news! Very good! Magnificent!” Kim hung up and turned to his team. He obviously considered himself the bearer of good news. “The cyclist is dead. He arrested in ER and they could not stabilize him. The hand is coming down now.”

  For just a moment, revulsion passed across the faces of the two nurses. Neither Meyer nor the anesthetist displayed any emotion.

  “Will we do this with a local or are you going to put her out?” Meyer asked.

  “She’ll be asleep,” the anesthetist replied.

  A medical student appeared at the door of the lounge. “Your family is here, Father,” he announced.

  “Thanks.” Koesler rose and left the lounge for the quiet room that in a few minutes would not be very quiet. He was shocked at Dr. Kim’s reaction to the death of the cyclist. Koesler could not imagine exulting over the death of anyone, much less a stranger whose care would be the cause of nothing more than an inconvenience.

  During his time as temporary chaplain at St. Vincent’s, Koesler had met many other Oriental doctors on the hospital’s staff. He had never encountered a shred of indifference to human life from any of them. Before coming to St. Vincent’s, he had shared the Occidental prejudice which held that Orientals had a lesser value for life. That prejudice had been shaken when a Philippine parishioner had reminded Koesler that, to date, only Americans had dropped a nuclear bomb, that it was the Occidental allies who had leveled much of Germany with bombs of just about every description, and it was the United States that nearly destroyed Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Considerations like that could shake one’s faith in convenient prejudices.

  And, as far as St. Vincent’s was concerned, there was no hint of a lack of respect for life among either Occidentals or Orientals.

  With the major exception of Dr. Lee Kim.

  Until now, Koesler had only heard-tell of Dr. Kim’s reputedly casual approach to human feelings and life. Now, Koesler felt he had experienced at least the semblance of such an attitude.

  Of course it was possible that Kim’s reaction to the death of a patient might have been a poor joke or perhaps an aberrant response. But given his reported history, this probably was Kim’s real personality.

  If this were true, Koesler wondered further about Kim’s attitude toward Sister Eileen. If Kim, indeed, had precious little regard for human life, and if Sister Eileen posed a serious challenge to all Kim desired, what might be Kim’s intent with regard to Eileen? Could he be a threat? To her life?

  Koesler had no answer to these questions. At the moment, they were no more than hypothetical. But how long could such a dangerous hypothesis go unchallenged? Koesler had no answer to this question either. Nor had he any more time to spend on such speculation. He was nearing the quiet room and a very vocal group was impatiently awaiting.

  * * *

&nb
sp; George Snell, nonpareil guard of St. Vincent’s Hospital, assessed his situation.

  On the plus side: He didn’t have to patrol the ill-lit corridors. All he needed to do for this entire night shift was sit in the command center and watch the closed-circuit monitors. It was a promotion, with a promised raise in the near future. And he was out of harm’s way.

  Actually, he never thought of St. Vincent’s Hospital in terms of danger. He was a very large man. And he was imbued with the false confidence of the big man who feels he can handle any challenge. He had never been thrown by a small person who was skilled in the martial arts. He had never even given any consideration to that possibility.

  On the negative side: He didn’t have to patrol the ill-lit corridors. Thus he would have no opportunity to find empty rooms with empty beds and a growing list of willing nurses and aides to help fill them. This was the one and only negative factor. But given Snell’s proclivity for rambunctious sex, it was nearly enough to offset all the positive factors.

  Upon further thought, he would add one more drawback. It was dull.

  He tilted his chair back and propped his feet on the desk. He scanned the four monitors. One was out of order. Well, he thought, three out of four ain’t bad. The three functioning screens revealed little. The areas they covered were, by and large, not sufficiently illuminated to avoid obscuring shadows. Some system, thought Snell; if thieves wanted to clean out St. Vincent’s, nighttime, with a skeleton staff and monitors that were either inadequate or nonfunctioning, would be the time to do it.

  Fortunately, there was a commercial television set in the room. It was a miniature set, identical to those provided the patients. The set might be small but the picture was in color and it provided just the distraction that Snell would need to get him through the night.

  WKBD-TV, Channel 50, was carrying a rerun of an old “Barney Miller” episode. Snell had seen practically every “Miller” show repeatedly. He now was able to anticipate most of the dialogue. From the first few frames of tonight’s program, Snell instantly recalled the entire plot. Wojo’s girlfriend bakes a batch of cookies. Wojo brings the cookies to the squad room where Sergeants Harris and Yamana eat a goodly supply and then begin to react. Eventually, Barney wants to know what’s happening. A bemused Harris diagnoses that the cookies have been laced with hashish.

  Snell could hardly wait for Harris to say he thought there was hash in the cookies. “. . . from the way that I feel . . .” Then Yamana would continue the thought in song: “. . . when that bell starts to peal. Why, it’s almost like being in love.”

  Great episode. Snell had always thought Barney Miller was the coolest dude. He intended this as a compliment from one law-enforcement officer to another, of course.

  * * *

  Before beginning his own evening program, Bruce Whitaker took the time to check out the command center. He was overjoyed to find George Snell ensconced there and completely absorbed by a TV program.

  This Bruce took to be a further sign of divine providence. Snell had appeared to be his nemesis. Twice, when Whitaker was on his way toward that ill-fated mission to mutilate the IUDs and while he was altering the pneumonia patient’s chart, he had almost been apprehended by the same guard—George Snell.

  But increasingly, Whitaker was becoming convinced that God was prospering his objective.

  There was no question that the IUD caper had been botched. But how could anyone have expected him to know the difference between an intrauterine device and curtain hooks when he’d never even seen an IUD and the curtain hooks were in the drawer reserved for IUDs?

  On the positive side—and for Whitaker a very definite plus—he hadn’t been caught. That was definitely providential.

  God’s protective hand had been even more in evidence in his second attempt, Whitaker thought. While he was altering that woman’s chart, Snell had had him dead-to-rights. All the guard had to do after calling out to him was simply walk the rest of the way down that corridor and Whitaker would have been apprehended red-handed.

  But something miraculous had happened: The guard had disappeared somewhere. Figure the odds on something like that! So, Whitaker had been able to finish his work. And even though for the life of him, Whitaker could not remember removing the allergy sticker from the chart, that plan had worked. God was indeed good.

  Or at least the plan would have worked if that priest hadn’t interfered. If only the woman had been given the penicillin a bit longer! When she had gotten near death, Whitaker would have seen to it that the news media got the story, and the hospital and all of its immoral deeds would have been exposed for all to see. Then the archdiocese would have been forced to act . . . .

  But now he was on the right trail. He knew it. He sensed it. The very fact that his nemesis, Guard Snell, would not be out roaming the halls was an added and very welcome sign that God was with him. God wills it! The battle cry of the Crusades—those of yore as well as this present one.

  After checking out the command center, such as it was, Whitaker made his way through the empty corridors en route to the operating room area.

  At least Whitaker thought the halls were empty. He saw no one as he kept to the shadowy walls. But someone was there. Someone following him. Someone who had stalked him in the past. But the one keeping vigil was even more careful than Whitaker to remain undetected.

  Cautiously, Whitaker eased open the door to the operating room area. A soft, indirect light illuminated the area just enough so that anyone unfamiliar with the territory might avoid running into anything. That is, if he—or she—were careful.

  At least one possible major block was missing. No one was in the area. Of course there was no elective surgery at this late hour, but there was no emergency surgery either.

  Whitaker had the place to himself. Or so he thought. Aware of his penchant for clumsiness, he moved very slowly and carefully. As he moved, he noted that he was colliding with nothing, upsetting nothing, making no noise whatever. This he again interpreted to mean that God was with him.

  Whitaker now stood in the doorway of Operating Room One. By now, his eyes had adjusted to the dim light. He looked around the room. It was an old hospital and an old room. But the equipment was about as up-to-date as St. Vincent’s tight budget could afford. It had long been the hospital’s policy that while they must scrimp on some facilities and functions, OR was given a prime budget position.

  Whitaker allowed himself a moment of awe at the many complex machines as well as the thorough sterility of the place.

  But he knew what he had to do. He’d gone out of his way both to remain undetected and, at the same time, to listen in on conversations of personnel in the anesthesia department. He had also spent considerable time in the medical library. All this research led him to the head of the operating table, the area where the nurse anesthetist would function.

  It was easy to find the container of nitrous oxide. The canister was clearly labeled. Deliberately, Whitaker turned the handle, releasing the gas. That was really all he had to do—just let the gas escape.

  He then repeated this same procedure in the other operating rooms.

  Tomorrow, when the anesthetists attempted to anesthetize their first patients, an inadequate supply of nitrous oxide would be delivered. The patients would be near death. The anesthetists would notice this and “bag” the patients, manually delivering life-saving oxygen. But the operations would have to be canceled. And no one would know why the patients had arrested. Without knowing the cause of this life-threatening situation, they would have to close down the operating rooms—the chief money-making section of the hospital.

  If shutting down the operating rooms for unexplainable reasons didn’t qualify as a good news story . . . well, he certainly missed his guess. And once the news people were in here, he’d make certain they became interested in more than the operating rooms.

  And that was the scenario according to Bruce Whitaker!

  Having done the deed, he moved most cautiou
sly out, taking extreme care to upset nothing. In this, he succeeded. God was good!

  The eyes that had watched intently as Whitaker had busied himself in the operating rooms now watched him leave. It was not difficult to remain undetected, shielded by the dim light, the shadows, and the huge machines. Particularly if one were familiar with the area.

  Once Whitaker was gone, allowing a few minutes more to make sure he would not return, the figure moved out of the shadows to the head of the operating table.

  What in the world was he doing? Ah, yes, I see. The nitrous oxide. The handle has been turned. The container is empty. He bled the oxide. But why? What must he think that will do?

  Does he think that will somehow hinder the operation procedure? Why else would he have done it? How typical of him!

  But why would he . . .? Of course; he plans that the shutdown of the OR will bring the notoriety he wants. Yes, of course. Not a bad idea. If only he could have carried it off!

  Well, perhaps I can improve on his plan. Let us see. Whatever is done must be bigger than this and much more attention-getting. Bigger and unavoidably catching everyone’s attention.

  Of course!

  Here, in the maintenance closet, there should be . . . yes . . . a screwdriver and a file. Good.

  A tank of nitrogen gas, under enormous pressure. It looks like . . . what?—a torpedo. And it can become one. It rests on its three-wheeled cart. If I loosen the cotter pins of the wheel on one side . . . there. Now, if I file through the cap until it is hanging by a thread . . .

  There.

  Now I have but to leave it resting against this outer wall. Now it is a bomb waiting to explode. My inept friend would have been so pleased with himself if he had thought of this. Never mind. As long as it accomplishes our purpose. And it will.

  Before leaving the operating room, the mysterious figure dropped rubber gloves into a waste container. A precaution Bruce Whitaker had not thought to take.

  11

  “‘. . . Sincerely yours, et cetera.’ And Dolly, make sure that letter gets in tomorrow morning’s mail. It’s important that the Cardinal has advance notice that I won’t be able to attend next week’s vicariate meeting.”