The Chairmen

by Robert I. Katz

  “Tell me, Chris, have you ever heard of spinocerebellar ataxia, type 3?”

  Christina moaned.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘No.’” He sipped his Scotch, then held the glass up to the light and frowned. He had gone through almost the whole bottle during the past few hours and his voice was just slightly slurred.

  Surreptitiously, Christina wiggled her toes. She was relieved to find that they responded but not too happy to discover that her legs were tied together. She was leaning backwards in the chair, with her hands in her lap and her feet sitting on the floor.

  “It’s sometimes known as Machado-Joseph disease. It’s the most common type of spinocerebellar ataxia, a defect on chromosome fourteen.” He shrugged and took another sip of his Scotch. “It’s usually an inherited condition but it must have been a mutation in me because nobody else in my family has it. It was quite a shock, as you can imagine.” He grinned at her, though on second thought, maybe he wasn’t grinning at all. The room still swirled with intersecting lights, and weird geometric patterns covered the walls and ceiling. “I’ve become a little clumsy in the past year or so.” He held the Scotch up again to the light. The glass shook as his hand trembled. “More than a little, actually. I can’t operate anymore. Soon, I won’t be able to drive a car and soon after that, I’ll be confined to a wheelchair and then…” He shrugged. “That’s if I let it get that far.” He looked at her and slowly grinned. “Which I have no intention of doing.”

  Somewhere deep inside, Christina considered whether or not to feel sorry for the sorry son-of-a-bitch, but at the moment, she just didn’t have it in her.

  “So, I suppose you’re wondering why you’re here?” He raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Well, you needn’t wonder because I’m going to tell you.”

  He sipped his Scotch and poured the glass full again and shook the empty bottle over the glass. “I always enjoyed the finer things in life, Chris. Most doctors do. We work hard, we’ve got money and status and respect, and neurosurgeons have more than most. Nothing wrong with that. We deserve it.” He gave a rueful smile. “I’ve got a disability policy but it’s not enough to cover my expenses and I don’t have a lot of money left.

  “I never thought I would see you again, after the divorce, but my career took me to New York, and then, lo and behold, you showed up, too. A chairman. You’re a fucking chairman. You got a new chairman of neurosurgery, less than a year ago, and you were on the Search Committee. I can’t do clinical work anymore but administrative work?” He shrugged. “That I could do, so I applied for the job.” He took a long sip of his Scotch, shook his head and grimaced. “Needless to say, I didn’t get it. I didn’t even get an interview. So, okay, you got a lot of applications, some good people applied. I understand that. It was a long shot. Life isn’t fair and nobody promised me a rose garden but I’ve done some good research and I’ve got a good CV and you disrespected me, Chris. Again. I’m a little tired of your attitude, Chris. I’m a little tired of you taking things away from me.

  “But frankly, I would have done it, anyway, because in the end, having you here, on top of the world, when my world is spiraling down and turning into nothing…well, that’s just a little more than I’m willing to put up with. Life’s a bitch and then you die, and that might as well apply to you as to me. You know what I’m saying?”

  The front door to the room splintered.

  Alan Lane grinned and calmly knocked the aluminum can over onto its side. A clear liquid poured out and cascaded, seemingly in slow motion, onto the floor. He picked up the lit cigar and smiled at it. Then he dropped it.

  Christina didn’t even think. She kicked out at the floor with her bound feet. The chair tipped over backward and she fell behind it.

  “Freeze!”

  She couldn’t see who said it but it didn’t matter. Within an instant, there sounded a concussive roar followed by a white blinding light and then the room was engulfed in flames. She coughed and tried to crawl but her hands and feet were still tied so she tried to roll instead and then hands grabbed her and lifted her up and carried her away.

  Westchester was out of Barent and Moran’s jurisdiction. The show was being run by a Westchester police lieutenant named Steve Girardi. He was thin and stooped, with thick black hair and cold brown eyes. He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to. His men knew what they were doing. Barent, Moran, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien stayed out of the way. They had focused a parabolic microphone on Alan Lane’s house by the lake and had heard his entire monologue. When they heard enough, they broke in. Nobody had expected the can of ether but Christina Pirelli was alive and except for a few minor burns, unhurt. Alan Lane was dead, the house a total wreck.

  “He wasn’t really trying to cover his tracks,” Moran said.

  They were sitting in Christina’s apartment, two days later. Christina and John Crane sat close together on a couch. Christina’s daughter, a slightly Goth version of her mother, sat on a chair and listened intently. Moran, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien sat on kitchen chairs that they had moved into the living room. Barent stood by the fire place.

  “He left notes on his computer, almost as if he was expecting them to be read.” Moran shrugged. “Maybe he was. Well, first of all, he had two kids with the second wife and dumped her after she gained weight. It appears that she no longer ‘inspired him.’ Alimony and child support took a big chunk out of his income. He did most of his cases at Metropolitan but he was also on staff at Easton. A lot of the Easton physicians also have privileges at Staunton. It was easy enough for him to swipe an ID card and make copies of it. He got himself a brown wig and contact lenses and he wore them whenever he went on one of his escapades.

  “The locker numbers and combinations at Easton are listed in a hand-written notebook that’s kept by one of the OR nurses. The notebook is in her desk, which isn’t locked, in her office, which is only locked at night. One of James McDonald’s jobs at Easton is to stock the PYXIS machines in the OR. The pharmacy techs share a locker, so the tech on duty can change into scrubs. Lane got McDonald’s locker number, then he got into the locker and made impressions of the keys to McDonald’s apartment. He broke into the apartment while McDonald was at work. He did set the poor schmuck up, just like McDonald claimed.”

  Christina frowned. “How did he know it when you started to focus on McDonald?”

  “McDonald didn’t keep quiet about what was going on; quite the opposite. He was complaining to everybody he knew. Lane paid attention to McDonald. He knew when we took the bait.” Moran glanced at Kurtz, who winced. “He also hired a guy who looked like McDonald to chase you around the park, and of course, with the brown hair, the height and the build, they both looked at least a little bit like him. They were intended to.” Moran shrugged again. “A part time waiter and unemployed actor. He seems to think the whole thing was a lark. If you want us to, we’ll press charges, but at best, it’s petty harassment.”

  “Forget it,” Christina said. “Not worth it.”

  “The autopsy is interesting. He shot you up with ketamine but he saved the fentanyl and the morphine for himself. He knew how much to take so he’d stay functional but not feel any pain. I don’t know if he was expecting us to find him or not, but he was clearly planning on the two of you going up in flames together.”

  Christina nodded. She drew a long, shaky breath. “I’ve listened to the recording that you made before you broke into the house. He talks about compromise but he doesn’t mention that I was always the one who had to do the compromising. He would ask me where I wanted to eat dinner but only after he had already decided that we were going to go out. Everything we did was like that. He decided that I would work part time after we had our first kid and that I would quit, for a ‘few years’ at least after the second.” She sighed. “He had it all planned.

  “And that baloney about him applying to be the Chairman of Neurosurgery? I never knew. He had twenty or so papers, a couple of minor grants and no leadership to speak o
f. The search firm knocked him out on the first round. We never even saw his application. Jackass.” She hung her head. A slow tear dripped down her cheek. John Crane took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Barent glanced at Kurtz and shrugged.

  “We’ll be going then,” Moran said. “Give us a call if you need anything.”

  Christina nodded silently. John Crane rose to his feet. “I’ll show you to the door.”

  “You did good,” Moran said to Kurtz, once the door had closed behind them in the elevator.

  Kurtz shook his head. “We were two steps behind him the whole time. We got lucky.”

  Moran smiled. “She’s alive and he’s not. It’s over, and that’s what counts.”

  “I suppose so. Anyway, the Dean will be pleased. Things can get back to normal.”

  “Yup. Have a good night,” Moran said, “and cheer up.

  “You bet.” Kurtz grinned weakly. “Back to work in the morning. A couple of nice routine gallbladders will do me a world of good.”

  “Nothing like a nice, routine gallbladder,” Barent said. He smiled. He had heard Kurtz express this conviction before.

  “You said it.”

  Epilogue

  Three months later, Henry Tolliver took over as Chairman of the Department of Cardiac Surgery. He proved to be an able administrator, a good clinician and an excellent steward of the Department’s scholarly activities. The Department prospered and the Dean was pleased.

  After considerable arm twisting, Peter Reinhardt agreed to stay on as Chairman until Henry Tolliver’s arrival, then was granted the sabbatical he had requested and, somewhat to the Dean’s surprise, actually wrote his textbook. It was published, received excellent reviews and sold a reasonable number of copies.

  A delegation of junior anesthesiologists went to the administration of the Medical School and announced that they would all be leaving unless things swiftly changed in the operating rooms. After considering this announcement, the Dean informed Stewart Serkin that his resignation would be accepted, as of thirty days from that date. Mahendra Patel was appointed Acting Chairman. A Search Committee was formed to find a permanent replacement, on which Henry Tolliver, Christina Pirelli and Richard Kurtz were all asked to serve.

  —The End—

  Information About the Author

  I hope you enjoyed The Chairmen.

  I graduated from Columbia College with a degree in English before attending Northwestern University Medical School and went on to a career as an academic physician. I was a member of my institution’s Appointment, Promotion and Tenure Committee for approximately ten years and I’ve served on three Search Committees, one for Chief of Surgery, two for Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology. I began writing many years ago and am now the author of the four books in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson, Seizure and The Chairmen. I am also the author of the science fiction novels: Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, The Cannibal’s Feast and The Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind, which to date includes The Game Players of Meridien, The City of Ashes and the soon to be released, The Empire of Dust.

  For more information, please visit my website, http://www.robertikatz.com or Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Robertikatzofficial/. For continuing updates regarding new releases, author appearances and general information about my books and stories, sign up for my newsletter/email list at http://www.robertikatz.com/join and you will also receive two free short stories. The first is a science fiction story, entitled “Adam,” about a scientist who uses a tailored retrovirus to implant the Fox P2 gene (sometimes called the language gene) into a cage full of rats and a mouse named Adam, and the unexpected consequences that result. The second is a prequel to the Kurtz and Barent mysteries, entitled “Something in the Blood,” featuring Richard Kurtz as a young surgical resident on an elective rotation in the Arkansas mountains, solving a medical mystery that spans two tragic generations.