Do No Harm (2002)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  "So eat in the doctors' lounge."

  "I would, but I haven't had time to get back there."

  Someone rapped on the door. "Be there in a minute!" David said. He turned back to Don. "Then wait to eat, or if the agony is too much for you to bear, come get me, and I'll take care of dealing with the family members."

  "That man just lost his son. Do you really think my not eating a hot dog is going to make things easier for him? I doubt he even noticed." He crossed his arms. "Look, you brought a bunch of shit down on yourself lately. The press is beating you up. The board's on your ass. Don't take it out on me. This is preposterous."

  "No, Don. It's shitty care."

  "You are always on my ass. What are you worried about? Do you think if I'm gone for an extra ten minutes, or I'm eating a hot dog, that someone's gonna sue your precious department?" He shook his head. "Well, rest assured. Everything I do can hold up in a court of law."

  "Since when is that the gauge by which we judge our level of treatment?"

  Don did not respond. On his way out, David grabbed a roll of gauze from the counter and tossed it at him. "You have mustard on your lip," he said.

  He found the man sitting stunned in a chair in the lobby, people bustling around him in all directions. His face had reddened and he was breathing hard, as though fighting down a panic attack.

  David crouched and looked up into his face. "Mr. Henderson? Robert Henderson?"

  The man's eyes flickered, but there was no look of recognition in his face.

  "Why don't you come back with me for a minute?" David said. "We can find a private room."

  With a hand in the small of Henderson's back, David guided him back to Fourteen. The sleeves of Henderson's yellow Carhartt jacket extended down over hard, calloused hands. A white outline, the shape of a tin of tobacco dip, had been worn into the back pocket of his jeans.

  Henderson sat on the bed, paper crinkling beneath his legs. He turned his hands over before his eyes, as if checking to see if they were real. His face, slightly sunburned, was wrinkled beyond its years from hours spent working outside. His face quivered, as though he were about to cry, then stiffened again. David sensed that Henderson did not cry very often.

  David slowly became aware of his own discomfort in the face of Henderson's suffering. He was inadequate at this--the comforting. As a diagnostician, as a technician, as a scientist, he was exceptional, but in this department he was lacking. There was nothing for him to do--no action to take, no medicine to administer, no test to run. If these past few days had driven anything home, it was the fact that people suffer from events beyond their control. Often, they make all the right choices and suffer anyway. Again, he found himself wishing Diane were here to console Henderson.

  "Kevin was gonna be the first one on my side of the family to graduate college," the father said. "Was making good grades too. His mom's been working double shifts to help pay. I been trying too--to work steady. He was a good kid. A good fucking kid." He swiped angrily at a tear with his cuff. "Don't know how I'm gonna tell his mom."

  "Do you live with her?" David asked.

  Henderson shook his head. "She's up in Seattle. Remarried."

  "Would you like me to call?"

  Henderson shook his head. "I should do it." He sighed, puffing out his cheeks. "You have kids?"

  "No."

  "Well, if you do, have mean ones. Good kids, good kids are the ones that die. You get a fuckup like me, I'm gonna live forever." He lowered his eyes into the fork of his thumb and index finger. "That kid was the best thing I ever did in my life. I hope I told him. I hope I told him enough."

  David sat quietly, uncomfortably. "I don't know a single person who gets everything said to those they love. It sounds like you said so much more than most of us do." His pager went off--a text message to pick up a package at Sandy's office--and he felt a quick flare of necessity. His desire to leave Henderson to jump back on Clyde's trail shamed him. He turned off the pager and sat with Henderson for a few minutes, glad he had chosen to remain.

  "You have to go?" Henderson asked.

  "No."

  Henderson lowered his shoulders, his hands twitching on his knees. Receptive. Needing. He looked up at David, his face starting to come apart. "Can I?"

  David moved over and embraced him, and Henderson keened openly for a while. It took him a few moments to raise his head again, then David sat by his side, the stain of Henderson's tears drying on the front of his coat. The two men stared at the wall.

  "Me and my old man, we never talked much. All growing up, we never talked about anything, like . . . you know. He was a man's man. When I got divorced, I was hurting, you know, something awful. Peggy's a great gal--she just finally figured out what she deserved, I guess. But when she left me, I decided I wasn't gonna fuck around no more. I was gonna tell people how I . . . you know, how I felt. So I took a whole weekend and wrote a letter to my father. Told him how much I . . . how much I loved him, what he meant to me, all that stuff. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. Spent the whole goddamn weekend at the kitchen table. And finally I finished it--eight pages--and I went over there and gave it to him. He read it, right there with me standing there watching him, then he handed it back to me and you know what he said?"

  David shook his head.

  " 'Nice letter.' " Henderson laughed, a genuine laugh. " 'Nice letter.' " Grief washed through his eyes again. "I hope I told my boy enough," he said.

  Chapter 52

  THE humble room that served as the chapel barely fit ten chairs. A stained-glass window lit the front, and bad paintings of clouds decorated the walls. English and Spanish copies of the New Testament leaned from a small box adhered to the wall.

  David sat on a chair in the middle row, one foot perched on the genuflecting pad before him, the occasional sound of a rolling gurney audible in the hall outside. The manila envelope he'd picked up moments before from Sandy's assistant sat in his lap, unopened. Sandy had written on it: David--the enclosed is all public record. Covering her ass, as always.

  Henderson's open weeping had unsettled him, and he stared at the tacky chapel walls, thinking of the ways he'd weathered his own losses. An image came, whitewashed and ethereal. Elisabeth blow-drying her hair, naked so she wouldn't overheat, her dress draped across the bathroom counter. She'd caught him looking, smiled around the comb she held between her teeth, and closed the door with a foot. The aching reached a place inside him it had not in months, and he wondered which intimacies had allowed it its inroads. He thought about lying beside his wife, feeling her warmth along the full length of his body. They used to sleep forehead to forehead sometimes, curled beneath the sheets. Through a brief chink in his scientist's armor, David caught himself wondering if we go anywhere when we pass, and if so, what things we miss the most.

  He wondered if he would ever allow himself to know someone so intimately again. He wondered why it took a smattering of alkali to eat through the monotony of his life and reveal it for what it was.

  He opened the manila envelope and pulled out the two pieces of paper it contained. The first was a photocopy of a newspaper article.

  Psych Study Terminated After Resultant Aggression in Children

  A psychology study at UCLA's prestigious Neuropsychiatric Institute was terminated after several alarming incidents involving its subjects. Chief Investigator J. P. Connolly was not available for comment, but NPI Chief of Staff Dr. Janet Spier described the study's focus as "examining children's responses to stimuli, that parents and educators can better create healthy, supportive environments, and avoid unhealthy ones."

  David felt a growing sickness. Mrs. Connolly's comment--We always appreciated what your mother did for us--had snagged on a raised suspicion in his mind. He scanned farther down the article, looking for information betraying the extent of his mother's involvement in what was quickly betraying itself as a cover-up.

  The problems arose when the first set of subjects were released from the study and
returned to their homes. Several of the boys were observed by foster parents to be more aggressive, disrupting the home environments with persistent fighting and temper tantrums. After one boy broke a foster sibling's nose, his "mother" phoned the Chief Investigator and lodged a formal complaint. "We shut the study down immediately," Spier said. "While we stand behind its meritorious and conscientious nature, we also recognize that certain minor problems have resulted in assimilating the subjects back into their social environments, so we decided to halt and recalibrate."

  The study, which was to run for three months, was shut down after nine weeks.

  The other piece of paper was a photocopy of a check for $40,000, signed by the UCLA Medical Center's treasurer. Dated two days previous to the article, it was made out to Happy Horizons Foster Home. Clearly, some aspect of the study had gone terribly awry--something worse than a broken nose--if the foster home owners were being paid off so grandly.

  David's nausea reached a room-jarring pitch as he contemplated his mother's involvement in such a matter. It was probably she who had ordered the files cleared from the hospital, wanting to leave behind no paper trail. His head buzzed with shock. The full force of epiphany would come later, he knew; this was only the tug of the retreating surf, drawing back and back and back.

  The foster home's address, listed on the check stub, was 1711 Pearson Rd. The same as Douglas DaVella's.

  David slid the papers back in the envelope and sat quietly, trying to untangle the implications of what he'd just read. He breathed slowly and evenly, taking advantage of the surprisingly effective surroundings of the chapel.

  David's earliest memory was of visiting his father at the hospital. He'd followed him around the entire day, tugging at the edge of the white coat. When he'd gotten bored, his father had inflated a latex glove and drawn a face on it for him. He couldn't remember how old he'd been, but when he'd walked by his father's side, he'd only come up to his hip. His father had rested his hand on his shoulder, as he always did.

  A nurse had stopped his father, flipping some pages on a clipboard and needing advice. A bad trauma had come in--a motorcycle crash--and the body approached them on a gurney. David had made out only the gruesome red mess of the face before his father's hand rose from his shoulder and shielded his eyes, cool, protective, and rough from overwashing, pulling his face in tight to his white coat, never missing a beat in his conversation with the nurse.

  He wracked his brain to recall an equally warm memory he had of his mother but found none. He remembered only briefer, colder images--how she wouldn't meet his eyes when he'd had chicken pox, as though something about his weakened state shamed her; the way his palms had sweat when he'd called to tell her about his low mark in embryology; how she wouldn't address Elisabeth at the dinner table when she broached medical topics.

  Still, he was horrified by her complicity in covering up the study. And she was not alive for him to confront, question, or accuse. He'd always held her medical code of honor to be impeccable. That she'd been cold and withholding in her personal life, and a sharp-edged politician, had always seemed separate from that somehow. He should have known that in a field as absorbing as medicine the lines would eventually blur.

  The bedrock had shifted beneath his feet. David had no choice but to desert it and seek more solid ground, to accept the injustices of the past and work at redeeming the present.

  The door opened and someone sat in the chair beside him. He gradually came to realize it was Diane. He looked over. Her face was wrapped loosely in gauze. "I am not an animal," she joked in a creaky voice. "I am a woman."

  "You shouldn't cover your wounds," he said, his voice tired and flat.

  "I know," she said. "But I don't want to scare the patients."

  "You are a patient."

  "Oh," Diane said. "Oh yeah." She put her feet up on her chair and hugged her knees to her chest. "What are you doing in here? You're a Jew. And an atheist."

  "How'd you find me?"

  "Jill said she saw you duck inside."

  "How are you feeling?"

  "I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. It's a pity how pretty I feel." Diane's monotone matched David's pretty well. "They let me out of my cage, at least. Said I should be ready to go home tomorrow." She pointed to the manila folder in David's lap. "More notes from the underground?"

  He told her briefly about Connolly's study, then handed her the folder. She read it slowly, then set it down. She didn't say anything for a few minutes as they stared at the tiny stained-glass window ahead. David realized it depicted a tree. A man came in and uttered a few prayers, his lips moving soundlessly. He departed quickly afterward.

  Diane patted the bandage gently over her cheek, as if trying to alleviate an itch. "This keeps getting messier."

  "It's just that with the attacks, the cops, bullshit hospital politics, the media all over me . . . " He rubbed his eyes. "It's all been wearing on me enough. And now to learn my mother bears some responsibility for these assaults . . . "

  Diane's eyes sharpened. "From what do you draw that conclusion?"

  "The experiments took place under her tenure."

  "It sounds like she stopped them when she caught wind. You know damn well that the NPI chief of staff can't oversee every study run over there."

  "She covered up the experiments that created him."

  "Helped create him, David. Only helped. There were twenty-seven other kids in that study. None of them are throwing alkali."

  "If you'd seen those films--"

  "They sound awful. I'm just saying you can't shoulder this one too. Your trying to is an act of arrogance. A lot of psych studies were questionable before the Ethics Board tightened up. And besides, who's to say that your mother or even those experiments have any specific culpability? Nature versus nurture. Causation versus correlation. Genes versus environment. You're wading into some pretty murky philosophical waters."

  "My mother taught me a lot of things," David finally said. "Probably more than anyone else. She was as tough as they come, tough to the point of being obdurate and unfeeling."

  "That toughness also gave her her career in an age when women didn't have careers like hers," Diane said. "People's best traits are often also their worst. That's true for most of us."

  "But you have to own up," David said. "You're permitted to stumble as long as you rectify. She never did. That study was wrong. There's no way around it. It was wrong. And she knew it. She covered it up."

  "Well, you hardly have time to mope about that now."

  He wiped his hands on his scrub top, and they left a sweat stain. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Go check out that address, for one thing. You have double coverage today--you can probably sneak out a bit early."

  David nodded. "Happy Horizons. Sounds like a '50s retirement facility."

  "Are you keeping the cops at bay?"

  "For the time being."

  "Clyde has clearly been exacting revenge for being run through those experiments. You need to get a better handle on what, specifically, he's after."

  "The million-dollar question is: Then what?"

  They studied the stained-glass tree, sorting their respective thoughts.

  Diane touched her good cheek with her fingers. "If you were the kind of man who strictly wanted to see him punished, there would be an easy solution."

  They looked at the tree a few moments longer.

  "But then I probably wouldn't love you," she said.

  Chapter 53

  WHEN David stepped on the decrepit front porch, it sagged as though about to give way. The address on the side wall, composed of rusting numerals, read 17 1, the middle 1 having fallen off. The placard by the doorbell read pearson home for the developmentally disabled. The adjacent lot stood desolate and empty, save for a heap of trash and a burnt-out old car up on blocks that looked somehow haunted in the twilight.

  A woman in a ratty sweatshirt opened the door, pinning the screen with her knee. She wore her hair in a high
ponytail, a young style for someone who looked to be in her late thirties. Behind her, an overweight man with Down's syndrome sat cross-legged on the floor, folding and refolding a section of newspaper. "Can I help you?"

  "Hello, I'm David Spier--I'm a doctor at UCLA. A man named Douglas DaVella used to live here. I was hoping you could put me in touch with someone who knew him."

  "Oh sure. Doug was my dad, kind of. He passed on a few years back. He and his wife, Sue, used to run a foster home here. That's where I grew up." She smiled proudly. "I started working here after high school, and we switched the place to a retarded home in '86--more money available for that kind of stuff, you know."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The government subsidizes it when you take in kids, or people with disabilities. Not a ton of money in it, but it's a living. And you get to, you know, help people."

  The man on the floor behind her made an incomprehensible noise.

  "Okay, sweetie." She walked over and handed him a new section of newspaper, which he began assiduously folding. She smiled at David self-consciously. "He's a handful sometimes, but it's twenty-five hundred a month."

  "That seems like a good arrangement," David said. "Did you live here in 1973?"

  "Yup. I was . . . " Her head tilted back, her tongue poking at her lip. "Nine."

  "Do you remember an incident that year involving a study run at the Neuropsychiatric Institute?"

  "Yeah. But we weren't supposed to talk about it. Still aren't, I suppose. But you're from the hospital, didn't you say? I guess you know already."

  "Pretty much," he lied. "I just wanted to talk to someone to flesh out the details."

  "Would you mind if I took a look at your ID?" She smiled ingratiatingly. "I'm sorry; we do get all kinds through here."

  "No problem." David pulled his UCLA badge from his pocket, and she examined it before stepping back from the door.

  "Why don't you come in? Keep your voice down, though. It's quiet time. Except for those who did the most extra chores last week. Isn't that right, Tommy?" She ruffled Tommy's hair, but he remained fixated on the newspaper.