by Larry Karp
Sanford put on an embarrassed, little boy grin that must have left the Holcomb County cops bought, sold, and packaged. “I said if I were a cop, I’d probably have thought like a cop, but a doctor’s going to think like a doctor.”
“And that’s that?”
“Pretty much. When I’m done here, I’ve got to go down and make a formal statement to the Emerald Police, but I can’t imagine they’re going to put me under any kind of pressure. Can you?”
“No. They’ll want to slam down the lid and seal it tight. But what actually happened with Camnitz’s body?”
“Turn on your TV. The Holcomb County cops called Emerald, the Emerald cops went to Camnitz’s house, found the body, and labeled it an obvious suicide. Especially after what I’d told them.”
I scratched at the stubble on my chin. “Two levels of lies with just enough truth mixed in to keep the whole crazy concoction from caving in. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Loosen up, Baumgartner. What’s the sense in making the rest of a poor old woman’s life miserable? And do you really want to try explaining to your chief why you and a couple of civilians went off in the middle of the night to dig up a body, and then you and one of the civvies ended up in a fatal face-off with a murderer? Much better my way. Everyone gets what they deserve. Including you.”
He pulled something out of his shirt pocket, and tossed it onto my lap. Two somethings. My badge and ID. Then he took a cloth sack out of the pocket of his white coat, and tossed it into my lap. “Your firearm and holster, Officer.”
I gathered up the badge and ID, stuffed them into the sack with the gun, then slipped the sack under the sheet. “You are some piece of work, Sanford. Trying to figure out what you deserve could be a lifetime job.”
“Your call. Yours and the Good Deed Fairy’s.”
Manipulation by the master? Was he really concerned for Mrs. Hearn and me? Or was that simply a piece of his overall game plan? But any way I tried to cut it, I kept coming up against the fact that I owed him my life two times over.
I studied him from the corners of my eyes. He was so pumped, he couldn’t stand in one place. “You really do want to go ahead and make that announcement?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Given that you’ve got no shame whatsoever, I guess no reason. But don’t you ever think about the cost of your glory? Four people dead, and how many other lives ruined?”
“Who’s going to mourn Wanego? And Camnitz, that pious hypocrite? In the end, he got himself off easy. As for James and Joyce Kennett, and Giselle, yes, believe it or not, I feel terrible about all of them. But what am I supposed to do, walk around in torn clothes with a face full of ashes the rest of my life? If people stopped to consider all the possible consequences of their actions, the human race would end in one generation. I can’t bring Giselle back to life, but I’m going to make her immortal. Everyone’s going to know Giselle Hearn conceived the world’s first IVF baby.”
“I’m sure. It’ll make your story even better. ‘The dedicated, heroic…’ no, check that. ‘The martyred scientist.’”
He nodded extravagantly. “You know, you’re right. That’s perfect. ‘Dr. Giselle Hearn, the martyred scientist, who was so devoted to her work…’ That’s exactly the way I’m going to put it.”
I couldn’t take any more. “All right, Sanford, go ahead. Set up your press conference. I’ll get on the horn to the GD Fairy, and tell her to give Iggy the log and your chart notes. You can pick them up at his shop. Give me a paper, I’ll write you the address.”
He pumped on my hand. The plastic IV tubing quivered. Then he pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it onto my lap, put a pen between my fingers.
When I finished writing, he slid the notebook and pen back into his pocket. “Thanks, Baumgartner. I’ll be back to check on you, and if there are any problems…” He patted the beeper on his left hip. “They’ll get me for you.”
“Not so fast. I’m also sitting on a little bit of money, ten thousand dollars. I can’t turn it in to the police now, can I? And if I try to stretch far enough to keep it myself, I’ll break. If I could give it to its rightful owner, I would, but I don’t know who that is. Once upon a time, I’d have sworn it was you, but no. You bet on a horse.”
He walked slowly back to the bedside. “Last night, on the way over here, when you asked me about what Giselle and I said to each other about dealing with Wanego, did I say anything about horses?”
“Hmmm. Yeah, we did talk about that, didn’t we? But I guess I was pretty delirious, and I can’t remember just what you said. So, since I can’t find the rightful owner, I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. I’d like to give that money to a certain young woman so she can go back to school and get her degree. She was one of the people I interviewed, and I needed to squeeze her a little harder than I feel good about. Maybe that’ll make it up.”
He worked a chuckle into a full-throated belly laugh, wiped at his eyes, then shot me a double thumbs-up. “I’d have never believed it, Baumgartner, not from you. I like that. Go for it.” He stepped away from the bed.
“One more thing.”
He turned back. “What?”
I was going to ask him again about the second sample, but then I told myself, forget it. He’d feed me one of two answers: either insist the sample really did come from James Kennett, or tell me if questions ever arose as to the kid’s paternity, he’d figure how to handle them. He was the Lion of the Puget Community Hospital Surgery Unit. In an emergency, everyone prayed Dr. Sanford would be available.
While I was thinking, he bent over me. “You look like you’re about to give me a bad biopsy report.”
“Not quite. I’m going to tell Iggy to give you something else along with the log and the chart entries. I may be making a mistake, but I guess if you’re not going to worry about the consequences of your actions, I won’t worry about mine.”
“Fair enough.”
I reached for the phone on the night table, but stopped, halfway there. “Sanford?”
“What now?”
“Just wanted to say thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. All in a night’s work.” He waved a sloppy salute in my direction, then took off toward the door.
“Good luck, Sanford,” I called after him.
Chapter Twenty-five
Sanford
My statement to the Emerald Police took less than an hour. I told Chief Richmond and Detective Olson what I’d told the Holcomb County cops the night before, including the same explanation and apology for handling the matter the way I did. The chief told me it would be best if I didn’t speak to the press or anyone else, publicly or privately, about the case. His PR staff would handle it; he hoped I’d understand. I assured him I did.
***
The tires of my car squealed against the curb in front of Iggy’s Lock Shop. As I came through the doorway, Iggy aimed an index finger in my direction, then reached under the counter. “Got your stuff, Doc. Hey, sounds like Mr. B had one foot in that hole out by Mrs. Hearn’s place. He says, hadn’t been for you, he’d be under six feet of dirt by now.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off that gray-covered log on the counter. “My patients don’t go out of the hospital feet first, Iggy. Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.” I picked up the log. My heart went thump against my ribs.
He gave me a close study. “You don’t really come across like a doctor.”
“What do I come across like?”
Shrug. “I guess a regular kinda guy. Somebody I could sit down with over a beer or a dinner, and talk to. Like Mr. B.”
I laughed. “I can think of worse shoes to have to wear.” I glanced at the chart pages. “Yep, all here…but there’s something else…oh, right. Baumgartner said…”
“Doc. You ok
ay?” Iggy sounded like he was talking through a tube.
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“The look on your face. Hey, go have a seat over there, I’ll get you a glass of water. You want I should call 911?”
While he was talking, the entry bell rang. A hefty woman in her fifties stormed in, waving a door lock. “Wouldja lookit what they did to my lock,” she shouted. “Damn kids, after drugs. You got something they can’t get through?”
Iggy could’ve been watching a ping-pong match. I waved him off. “I’m okay. Just a little surprise.” I started for the door. “Take care of your customer. I’ll catch up with you later.”
***
The ride to my parents’ house should’ve taken twenty minutes; I was at the front door inside fifteen. I let myself in with my key, then followed voices into the kitchen, where my mother and father sat over the remains of lunch. They both jumped as I came through the doorway. “Colin, for heaven’s sake,” my father said. “Don’t you have patients?”
I shook my head. “No patients and no patience,” I barked.
Dad gave a twist to his hearing aid. “Sorry, Colin, I didn’t quite get what you said.”
I slammed a sheet of paper down in front of him. “Maybe this’ll clear things up for you. Then you can explain it to me.”
My father needed just a quick peek. He lowered his head into his hands.
“Death certificate, Victor Franklin Sanford,” I said. “July 4, 1939. Cause of death, electrocution. Other conditions, mongoloid idiocy.”
My mother batted lashes at me. “Well, what of it?” Bland as olive oil, but I’d known her too long. No missing the tautness in that short string of words.
“What of it? Wasn’t he supposed to be a genius child, the marvel of the universe? Didn’t you have some kind of tutor for him because he was already making Einstein look like a moron?”
She was up in a flash, caught me with an open hand to the cheek. “Don’t you dare talk like that about your brother. If you hadn’t misbehaved, he’d be alive today, and the whole world would know his name.”
I looked to my father. He motioned me to calm down or sit down, or both, I couldn’t tell. And didn’t care. I jabbed a finger at the death certificate. “Are you people crazy? He had Down Syndrome. ‘Mongoloid idiocy.’ He’d never—”
My mother had me by the shirt sleeve, tugging, screaming. “Dr. Ehrenstein had been treating mongoloid children for twenty-five years. I took Victor to his office five days a week for injections of the vitamins and minerals he needed, and electrical brain treatments with the doctor’s machine. I was scrupulous with his diet and medicines. The doctor told me Victor was coming along beautifully, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d be first in his class.”
She shook my arm savagely. I tried to pull out of her grip, couldn’t. “But you! Always getting in the way, clinging to me, trying to get me away from Victor. You weren’t even supposed to have been born. They told me women don’t ovulate while they’re breast-feeding.” She pointed with her free hand at my father. “He even said it. Well, I guess I must have ovulated, because inside half a year, there you were, making me throw up five and six times a day. Inconsiderate from the moment you were conceived, impossible from the day you were born. Jealous of every minute of attention I gave your brother. And spiteful? Daddy brought me that music box all the way from France when he came home from the war.”
Her eyes narrowed, and a corner of her mouth curled upward in a way that gave me chills. “You broke it on purpose, didn’t you? To get your father away from the electrical outlet. You weren’t going to be happy till you’d destroyed my two most precious possessions.” She flung my arm down as if it were contaminated, then marched out, into the living room.
Up to then, my father had sat silent, looking miserable. Now, he got up, and followed my mother. I took a step after him, but he motioned me back to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, he was back, looking twenty years older than when I’d come into the room. He plopped into his chair, and gazed at me, hollow-eyed. I started to speak, but he held up a hand. “The pediatrician told us there was nothing to be done for Victor, which I knew, of course. But your mother wouldn’t accept it. She consulted doctor after doctor, and they all told her the same thing. The last straw was finding herself pregnant again. If doctors didn’t even know when a woman could or couldn’t get pregnant, why should she believe what they said about Victor?
“Then, somebody told her about a German professor up on Seneca Road who claimed congenital mental deficiencies were caused by nutritional imbalances, and the kids could be cured if they got treatment early enough. She took Victor to see him, then dragged me along to the second visit. The man was one of those charming charlatans who can talk their way around anything and anyone. According to him, doctors didn’t want to take the time and trouble necessary to cure those children, but he’d made it the mission of his life, and his results proved how right he was.
“Afterward, I tried to talk some reason to your mother, but it was useless. What could be the harm in trying? What could we lose? I thought, all right, she’ll see soon enough it’s not helping. But that never happened. The man was very persuasive, and as your mother kept pointing out to me, he had a wall full of diplomas from impressive-sounding German and French academies. He gave Victor periodic tests that he claimed were showing progressive subclinical improvement. Obvious balderdash, but your mother told me I was talking like all the other doctors who called the professor a quack, because they were jealous of his success.
“Finally, I gave up. I suppose I might have insisted she stop, but I couldn’t bring myself to take away her hope without giving her anything to take its place. Sooner or later, I thought the truth would force itself on her, but then…”
“But then, he stuck a metal screwdriver into an electric outlet, and you blamed me.”
“I never blamed you. Do you ever remember me blaming you?”
I wanted to pull him out of the chair and shake him. “You just sat there while she blamed me. All those years, you never said a word. You didn’t even say anything today. You just sat there with your head in your hands.”
“Colin, for heaven’s sake. You’re forty-two years old, and a doctor, a very skillful and successful one. You don’t need me to defend you from a poor woman who’s never recovered from a terrible blow to her mind.”
“How about when I was four? Or five, or six, or seven? How could you do that to me? It wasn’t me who didn’t bother to throw the circuit breaker, and then left that screwdriver sitting in front of the live outlet. To hell with that ‘poor woman,’ and to hell with you, you sorry excuse for a father. You’ve got a banana for a backbone.”
As I stormed out of the room, my father’s words sailed after me. “You’re no one to criticize, Colin. You’ve never been where I have.”
***
I drove like a madman to a little strip mall a few blocks from Joyce Kennett’s place, parked, walked into a coffee shop, ordered a large black drip, then sat and sipped at it while I paged through Giselle Hearn’s log and Joyce’s chart notes. I’d left Victor’s death certificate on my parents’ kitchen table, but it didn’t matter. The entries had burned themselves into my mind for the duration. I damned Baumgartner up, down, and sideways, which didn’t do me a bit of good. Not his fault I was here.
I turned the log pages to Patient JK’s entry, and saw myself peering through Giselle’s microscope at three tiny balls of cells, shimmering in culture medium. Which one became Robbie, squeezing out of his mother, into my care? A tear surprised me by plopping onto the paper, smearing the ink.
If I scooped Dr. Edwards, he’d probably want to look at my records, and there would be that second sperm sample, spelled out on the log page—after I’d told Joyce over and over there was no second sample, period. My plan had been to persuade Gisell
e to copy the entire log into another book after our press conference, but leave out the reference to the second sample. That way, by the time anyone wanted to check our data, we’d have no problem. But if I copied the log myself, how did I know Edwards wouldn’t have a handwriting expert check it out? Wasn’t that what I’d do if the situation were reversed? And what if Edwards insisted on definitive blood testing? Could I get past that? I wouldn’t bet against myself.
But the real question wasn’t whether I could handle the situation. As worked up as Joyce had been for the past week, what effect would all that commotion have on her? If results from a battery of blood tests came out any way other than strictly kosher, I could easily see her going off the deep end.
And then, never mind Edwards. What might Joyce do to Robbie?
I’d known when Giselle called me, frantic over the dropped sample, that any reasonable doctor would’ve eaten a plate of crow, called off the procedure, talked to the couple, and offered to reschedule it for a month later. So why didn’t I do that? Because in that month, Edwards and Steptoe might have beaten me out. The Kennetts might have gotten sore and walked, maybe talked to reporters, even filed a lawsuit. But would that crow have tasted uglier than what was heaped on my plate right now?
I starting crying, softly at first, but then it smashed through. I wept like the chief mourner at an Irish wake, loud honks, one right on the heels of the last. The intensity of emotion astonished me. Tears streamed down my face, onto the log page. I’d never cried before, at least not that I could remember. Not even when my mother dragged me into the hall, stood me over Victor’s body, shook me till my head rattled, and smacked my face with her open hand, first on one cheek, then the other. The fact I was sitting in a public place meant nothing. I was beyond reasoning, in terra incognita, not a landmark in sight.