Lethal Practice

by Peter Clement

  “C’mon, Janet, this is embarrassing me.”

  “Ahh, scare me half to death, then poor you gets embarrassed.”

  She was up off her chair now, obviously enjoying my discomfort. “You can just lie there in silence and contemplate your sins,” she proclaimed rather loudly, then walked over to my array of monitors. She gave me a big wink and started shutting off the alarm switches one by one. “No! Not another word.” She started undoing her ponytail. “Just let me read in peace” was her final, very public instruction.

  Then she leaned over me and let her hair shower down around our faces. For the next half hour, not a bong could be heard. At least not in my cubicle.

  * * * *

  My next awakening was not so pleasant. Bufort sat huddled in the chair like a hulking toad. Riley prowled restlessly back and forth in front of the curtains.

  I wasn’t sure what time it was except that another serving of the dried egg stuff lay congealing on my bed tray. Must be day three.

  Bufort didn’t even wait until I was fully awake. “Dr. Garnet, do you know the penalty for impersonating a police officer?”

  “Why, Bufort? Is someone threatening to charge you with it?”

  “What!”

  “I wouldn’t worry. It’ll never stick. At least not for impersonating a competent one!”

  A few of my bongs had started going off. Janet must have reattached them. Bufort’s eyes bulged, he was so enraged. Riley had gone perfectly still.

  “That’s right, you pompous prick, your silly, conceited posturing left me at the mercy of a serial killer, a maniac. If I hadn’t done what I did, I’d be dead by now, and you’d be clucking your tongue and pronouncing it an unfortunate end by stress.”

  “That’s absolutely—”

  “It’s absolutely true, and you know it! You bother me one more time and I’ll give enough depositions to bust you to traffic tickets!”

  A few nurses swished by the curtains and busied themselves with the alarms my rocketing pulse and blood pressure had triggered. A very stern Nurse Mandy said, “Gentlemen, you are out of here.” Forcefully, she levered Bufort out of the chair by the elbow and showed him the door. Riley winked at me as he trailed after his boss.

  * * * *

  The rest of the afternoon crept by. Popovitch and Sylvia Green dropped in to wish me a speedy return to work. Sometime later a rather morose Hurst hung around the end of my cubicle for a few seconds, mumbled about reopening the hundred beds, then left. I guess he figured it was politically unwise to continue our battle while I was so helpless.

  I had a couple more sleeps and then was gently shaken awake. It was Riley. “Hi, Doc,” he said quietly. “Dr. Deloram said you wanted to speak to me?”

  He’d pulled a chair up near my bed and kept looking nervously over at the curtain. I guessed he’d snuck back in and was afraid of being found again by Nurse Mandy.

  “Yeah,” I answered sleepily.

  But before I could say anything else, Riley interjected, “I wasn’t part of what that idiot boss of mine pulled today, but I couldn’t prevent it.” Then he gave me a big grin. “You really got him!”

  I smiled back at the compliment. Then I got down to what I wanted to ask him. “I’ve got a lot of questions about how it all happened. And with Jones dead, are you going to be able to make a case against her thugs? The thought of them getting out scares me. And who was the guy that came back to resuscitate me? After all the killings that Jones had involved him in, why’d he bother?” Slept out, I was eager now to talk.

  Riley leaned back in the chair. “First of all,” he began, “the guy who saved you is going to testify against the other two goons who worked with Jones in exchange for a lighter sentence. You won’t have to worry about them. Apparently they used to beat up on strikebreakers for the truckers’ union before they got to be ambulance drivers. That’s where Jones found them. Since they know we have a witness, their lawyer advised them to cooperate, and they’re talking now as well, though we haven’t made them any promises. They claim they never actually killed anyone, but are admitting to working with Jones for more than three years, snagging derelicts off the street for her ‘research,’ and then scattering their bodies around town after she was done with them.”

  Three years. That was longer than I’d figured.

  “They also did her other dirty work,” Riley added, “like trying to run you down, helping her trash your house, and setting up Watts. We found the Dobermans in a cage behind the house where one of them lived. They said it was for the money she paid them, but I got a creepy feeling they liked watching people suffer and would’ve done it for free. One of them also told me she really liked getting it on with them, together.” He related her sordid story with the neutral cynicism I’d expect from a cop. But I couldn’t suppress a shudder on hearing what she’d kept hidden all these years.

  “A few of the vagrant DOAs’ bodies are being exhumed,” he continued, “to get evidence of needle marks in the heart. By the way, why was she so afraid of your ER data?”

  I sat up. “The data covered only twelve months of her activity, but it contained enough information to expose her, if you knew enough to ask the right questions. It showed that DOAs came in only on the mornings when she was off duty the night before, or, to put it crudely, only when she wasn’t stuck in the ER and was free to go out and kill. I’m pretty sure the same pattern will show up for the times the other DOAs turned up all over the city. At first I made the mistake of looking for the shift with a lot of DOAs, but then I realized that didn’t make sense because they weren’t being killed in the ER. What pointed to her was the lack of DOAs when she was on duty. Show that same pattern for all those derelicts murdered with a cardiac needle and Jones would stand out from every other ER doc in Buffalo. I don’t know if she always used Watts’s lab to kill them, or if she sometimes ran her codes right in the back of the ambulance. If so, it might also have been possible to link the deaths to the nights she was on the road with the cardiac study.”

  Riley reached for his notebook. “Can I get copies of the data that shows this?”

  “Sure. See my secretary.”

  Then I remembered Jones’s words back at the cabin. “All that risk, all that work. I couldn’t let it go to waste.”

  “Oh my God!” I exclaimed, suddenly realizing the obvious. “The torsade de pointes killings were only part of it. There must have been earlier murders as she tried to get a breakthrough treating V. tach. and V. fib.”

  Riley looked puzzled, and I took a moment explaining the terminology. When I finished, he stayed silent, then reached into his briefcase and handed me a folder. “Does this mean what I think it does?” he asked. “We found it in her apartment.”

  I opened the file and recognized Jones’s familiar handwriting. It was an outline of the research she’d intended to pursue ‘in phase two of the cardiac study, but it was never intended for presentation to any ethics committee.

  “My God!” I said again as I handed it back to him.

  “She intended to go on killing, didn’t she,” he replied.

  “I think she’d already started,” I answered.

  “What!”

  “Her idea in there,” I said, nodding to the file, “was to see if magnesium sulphate would be a breakthrough in the prevention of deadly heart rhythms as opposed to their treatment. She proposed loading up her derelicts with magnesium sulphate and then challenging them with her erythromycin/terfenadine cocktail or unsynchronized electric shock, like she’d tried on me, to see if they’d be more resistant to developing abnormal rhythms.”

  “I thought those medicines usually produced torsade de whatever, and it was too rare to make her famous.”

  “Torsade de pointes is still a variant of V. tach., and preventing it might have given her a useful lead on how to prevent ordinary V. tach. and V. fib. I’d already figured she was onto something new, using her old techniques, because the DOAs had kept coming. And even though she’d finished her paper
on torsade de pointes, Watts had found terfenadine and erythromycin on the last John Doe.” I paused, thinking of all the poor souls who had died in such fear, then tapped the grisly document still in Riley’s hand. “She’d obviously begun her own phase two.”

  “Christ!” whistled Riley as he returned the file to his briefcase. I thought he was going to close it, but he hesitated before snapping the clasps shut and took out a small cassette instead. I noticed his jaw was bulging as he looked at it. “Doc, you also asked about the fourth man, the one who saved you. I wasn’t going to put you through this yet, but if you’re well enough, I’d like you to listen to part of his interrogation.”

  “Sure, but why wouldn’t I be well enough to hear it?”

  “Because it’s going to take you back through all that happened to you, but from their point of view. And there are some nasty insinuations about you, at first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me start by telling you about the guy who saved you. His name’s Vito Manley, though that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What’s important is he’s different from the other two. He worked for the same company as them, but he’d been transferred to dispatch at 911 about four years ago as part of some program to improve standards when MAS took over. A few months later, Jones appeared on the scene and started riding the ambulances for the research project. He noticed she preferred his old company and later realized it was because the types there suited her purposes.”

  “How’d he get involved?”

  “Listen for yourself. The full session was formally videotaped, but I recorded the parts I wanted you to hear on a cassette.” He pressed the Play button. Even with the hollow sound of a recording taken in a room, I recognized the familiar voice of the man who had saved my life and who had kept saying, “I’m sorry.”

  “She’d slipped me a few thousand to direct any calls to pick up street derelicts to her and not make a record of it. Hell, I thought it was a Medicare scam—that she was copping their cards and running up a bunch of bogus claims payable to her. It seemed safe enough, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year, when someone started blackmailing her, that she told me what was really going on. Then she threatened to pull me down with her unless I helped her find out who it was.”

  His words kept coming in a rush, as if he felt compelled to talk.

  Riley leaned over and stopped the machine. “Did you know anything about a blackmailer?” he asked.

  “No!” I exclaimed, astonished.

  “The next part is going to be hard for you to hear,” he warned, restarting the tape.

  After a few seconds of room noise, the man spoke. “At least, at first it was to find out who was blackmailing her. After the Kingsly fiasco, whoever it was hit her for a last big payment, probably figuring she’d soon get caught and the cash flow would end. The way Garnet had kept the pressure on, discovering the needle in Kingsly and exposing the derelict’s murder, she actually figured for a while that it might be him. That made her nuts. She thought he was lording it over her that he was a medical bigshot while he was bleeding her dry. But she didn’t want to kill him outright until she was sure. That first night she had her goons use the dogs on him, it was a warning, like, to back off.”

  The man coughed, then said, “The next night she had the two of them follow Garnet to his country place—at that time she only wanted them to steal the analysis of the ER statistics. You see, she was also afraid Garnet was preparing a record of dates based on the data that would show her connection to the DOAs. She figured it would have been good strategy on his part, had he been the blackmailer, to have it as a kind of insurance policy against being killed if he was ever found out—to be opened if he died. Something like that. If she found a document like that she’d know for sure he was the blackmailer and could kill him. But his dog chased the guys off before they could get what they came for. She tried again herself and broke into his hospital office early one morning. She didn’t find anything. But when he had that resident ask about using cardiac needles on derelicts in front of her, she was sure it was him, and that he was still playing with her to get more cash out of her. So she phoned her goons and arranged his hit-and-run accident on the spur of the moment. I think it was as much revenge as a need to get rid of him. When it didn’t work, she got away from the hospital long enough to join the men in searching his house while we were on the way to the vet’s with his dog. Boy, did she go berserk when she couldn’t find his analysis.”

  Riley stopped the tape again. “Does any of that make sense, Doc? Or was this guy blowing smoke to try to get a better deal?”

  My mouth was so dry, I could barely swallow. “She thought I was blackmailing her?” I finally managed to croak.

  “Apparently, at first.”

  “What do you mean, ‘at first.’ “

  “There’s more. But what about his account of what happened? Does it jibe with how you remember things?”

  The swirl of events he described ran through my mind like fragments of a movie—familiar, yet seen from the other side. “I guess so,” I said haltingly. And then a detail popped into place. “He said he drove me to the animal hospital. That’s where I remember him from. He was the older attendant! Good God, does that mean he was the one who tried to run me down?”

  As an answer, Riley continued the tape.

  This time I heard the detective’s voice echo my own question.

  “Was it you who hit Garnet and the dog?”

  “Oh, no! That was those two goons of hers. I was only told to be in the area. Like I said, it was a last-minute call just twenty minutes before. She said that she was gonna take care of the blackmailer. I had to be careful because my partner had nothing to do with it.”

  “Were you supposed to finish him off?”

  “No!”

  “Level with me! What were you supposed to do with him?”

  “If he was okay, just shaken up like, I was to make sure we took him to the hospital for a checkup. To get him away from the house so she could search it.”

  “And if he wasn’t okay?”

  I heard some shuffling noises and another scrape from a chair leg.

  “If he wasn’t already dead, but near killed, I was to tip him over, an accident like. Drop his neck, leave his airway blocked, stuff like that. You know, our usual screw-ups.”

  There were a few more seconds of shuffling sounds.

  “Hey, I didn’t do it, did I?”

  “Because he wasn’t near dead, and it would have been too obvious.”

  “No! I couldn’t do that.” There was another pause, then he added very quietly, “At least I found that out.”

  Riley pushed Stop and waited.

  I felt angry. “He probably saved my life only to get a better deal with you guys, once he saw Jones was dead.”

  “Maybe. Either way, he’s going to do time. But I don’t think he had the taste for killing the way the others had.”

  “You said there was more ... about the blackmailer?”

  “That’s the next bit,” he answered. The tape came on in the middle of his next question.

  “—Garnet the blackmailer?”

  “No! That Sunday evening she calls me and says she’s taken care of the real blackmailer and that it hadn’t been him after all. But she told me Garnet was still a threat because he wasn’t buying that Kingsly and the derelict had been killed by that crazy psychiatrist who dove off the roof. She knew he hadn’t figured out it was her yet or he would have already gone to the cops and had them arrest her. If we moved fast, she said, we could stop him before it was too late and make it look like a heart attack. That we’d all be safe forever.”

  Riley snapped off the machine and moved to put it back in his briefcase. “Do you know who might have been blackmailing Jones?”

  “No. Did he, Vito, what’s his name?”

  “Manley. No, he said she never told him. The other two men had no idea either.”

  “Did you really think it was me?�
��

  Riley looked embarrassed. “He brought it up. I had to ask the question. No offense. I only wanted you to hear in case you’d felt there was a blackmailer involved somewhere and hadn’t been sure enough about the idea to mention it. But if you’ve no idea, you know what I think? Here this guy’s talking ten pounds of fog, trying to get us hooked on chasing some crazy story about a blackmailer so he can get a better deal. No, I think it’s a crock. There were four creeps. One’s dead, and we got the rest. For once I agree with my boss. This case is closed.”

  * * * *

  That evening I got to sit in a chair for half an hour. Carole came up and would have put me to work had Nurse Mandy not shooed her off. But before she left, Carole sat on the edge of my bed, hunched forward, and started rubbing her palms together. I waited. Still looking at her hands, she said, “The police returned the articles they found in Jones’s locker that they didn’t think were important.” She reached into her sweater pocket and handed me a small envelope. “I thought you should have this.”

  I opened the flap and shook out the contents while Carole continued to look down at her hands. It was an old newspaper clipping, a photo taken a few years ago of Janet and me in formal dress at the annual hospital ball. We wore polite smiles. We usually had the best fun of these evenings while getting ready, with Janet doubled over laughing as I struggled into my tuxedo. This kind of social circuit definitely wasn’t our style.

  Clipped to the picture was an unused ticket. My first response was so what, but by the way Carole’s palms were rubbing together, I figured there was more. “What does it mean?” I asked, truly puzzled.

  Carole stopped rubbing her hands, then looked up at me with a kind of smile you bestow on a child who’s too naive to get it. She started talking very softly, careful of her words. “With a woman like that, I wouldn’t use the word love, not at all. But she was interested in you. I could tell by a lot of little things, the sort of things only a woman might notice: the way she would watch you when you weren’t aware; all those green outfits she wore—in the early years I think they were mainly for your benefit. But you never caught on.”