Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  “You’re still my doctor!” he had screamed at her, waving his arms. Then he had grabbed her shoulders, almost lifting her off the ground, shaking her. “You know you love me. You know it’s my baby you’re carrying! Mine!”

  Somehow, although she never remembered quite how, Diana had managed to free herself. Terrified, she had rushed into the house and called the police.

  But James was long gone by the time they arrived.

  The view from the conference room of Bogdanow, Federgreen was spectacular. It was on the second floor of a Back Bay town house, a small slice of a once-grand ballroom belonging to a once-grand Boston family. Floor-to-ceiling bay windows overlooked the Public Gardens. Even at this time of year, the strollers crisscrossing the park and walking along the edge of the lagoon were an entrancing sight. Diana’s eyes lingered on a large oak; its once emerald leaves, now a rusty brown, clung tenaciously to its limbs. She and James had shared a sandwich sheltered from the summer sun by that oak’s spreading green canopy.

  But Diana had no time for irrelevant memories or entrancing sights. She turned her back to the windows and reached for the files Valerie had given her, Valerie’s words still in her ears. “I’m feeling pretty confident about our side of the case, but these medical records look bad to me,” Valerie had said as she led Diana to the conference room. “They’re just what Engdahl ordered: They read like Hutchins wasn’t that crazy. This doctor makes the suicide attempt sound like some minor mental aberration—like being depressed after a divorce. Or having insomnia. Is that possible?”

  “It’s not possible.” Diana shook her head. “But it appears to be Dr. Pumphrey’s conclusion.”

  “Look, the guy tried to commit suicide—a couple of times—and he had been in therapy for years.” Valerie handed Diana the medical records. “And this attempt was only last July, right? So he succeeded in killing himself less than three months later—that doesn’t sound too healthy to me.”

  Diana nodded and glanced down at the file.

  “See what you can find in there to buttress our contention that he was one sick cookie: errors, omissions, ways we can undermine the credibility of the other doctors—anything and everything. I can’t believe it’ll be all that difficult.”

  “It’s so amazing to see this here,” Diana said, flipping through the pages. “Hospitals treat medical records like gold locked in Fort Knox.”

  “Limited discovery.” When Valerie noticed Diana’s confused expression, she tapped the top file with the tip of her manicured finger. “Production of documents because of the speedy trial. Judge Hershey ruled that in order to proceed in such a short time frame, both Engdahl and I had to get copies of all evidentiary documents to each other immediately. Pumphrey’s notes and Hutchins’s medical records are part of Engdahl’s case—I have to give him copies of everything you just gave me.”

  “You mean one side gets to see everything the other side’s going to use in court?” Diana was amazed.

  “That’s the law,” Valerie said as she walked to the door. “I’ll check back with you later.”

  Flipping through the hospital files, Diana was overwhelmed with remorse. She had terminated with James on July 25; he had swallowed an entire bottle of Seconal on July 31. Pushing away her guilt, she focused on the records. They were even more dense and complicated than she had expected. Considering that James had been in the hospital for only three days, it didn’t seem possible that so much could have been written about him. She quickly began sorting the papers into piles: intake interview, medical evaluations and tests, a neurological assessment, psychiatric consults, psychological test results, lab reports, daily rotation notes. She shook her head. Incredible.

  She decided to start with the psychological information, figuring that held the most promise. Glancing quickly at the grandfather clock standing at the far corner of the room, Diana bent to her task.

  She was familiar with most of the test results—she had copies of the same pages in her personal files—although a few were new to her. She was not surprised to discover that James had achieved an extremely high score on the WAIS, an intelligence test, or that his mode of aggression, measured by the Rosenzweig Picture Frustration Study, was extrapunitive—that he projected his anger outward, toward other people. Disappointed, she skimmed through the rest of the tests; but whether she was searching for proof of James’s illness, a discrediting bit of evidence, or Ethan’s “something,” there didn’t appear to be much of anything there.

  The grandfather clock chimed, and Diana jumped in her chair. She squinted at the clock as it chimed nine more times, guessing that it was going to go off at least every half-hour, perhaps every fifteen minutes. She turned to the psychiatric assessment done after James had been stabilized in the medical unit. Pumphrey had administered the interview and, although he had recommended ten days of psychiatric evaluation, Diana now understood Pumphrey’s diagnosis: James had lied to him. The problem was proving it.

  Diana was all too aware of how easily, and how well, James could lie. She knew for a fact that Ethan was capable of reciting complete fiction and passing a lie detector test, for his lack of a conscience—and therefore any physical manifestations of guilt—easily fooled the machine. And although she didn’t like to acknowledge too much similarity between James and Ethan, Diana had often wondered whether James would be an equally successful subject. Even though James had thoroughly fooled Pumphrey, that didn’t make him a psychopath. In his defense, Pumphrey was a new resident, completely unfamiliar with James. And probably equally unfamiliar with the deceptive nature of borderlines.

  According to Pumphrey’s notes, James had been “lucid” and “charmingly forthcoming.” Diana had to smile at the description: James at his best—and most manipulative. James had denied any drug use, any past suicide attempts, said he was never troubled by insomnia, had no problems concentrating, and had just recently left a job he had held for almost two years. She nodded as she read Pumphrey’s diagnosis: moderate reactive depression, single episode. Unfortunately for their case, it was a reasonable diagnosis, given the information he had.

  The clock chimed again, and again Diana jumped. She was relieved to see that it was ten-thirty—at least the damn thing wasn’t going to go off every fifteen minutes. She turned back to the records and then laughed out loud. Pumphrey had done a suicidality evaluation to determine James’s chance of attempting suicide again; on the basis of the test, he had concluded that James was low-risk. She pulled the test sheet from the pile: Finally she had something they could use to show an error in Pumphrey’s judgment.

  She pushed away the psychiatric and psychological piles and skimmed through the rest of the reports. Her stomach churned with frustration. Valerie was right: These reports made James look good. She supposed they could use the suicidality evaluation to show how tests—and doctors—could be wrong. But she knew it was weak at best.

  Diana stood up and walked into the bay. As had happened earlier, she was overcome with both exhaustion and a surprisingly strong anger. She clenched her fists and actually raised one, as if to punch it through the mullioned panes of the window. Stop it, she warned herself, pulling her arm down and opening her fingers. Now was not the time to lose it. Perhaps she could find something that would help their case—and there was always the remote possibility that Ethan actually was trying to help her.

  Diana sat back down at the table and reached for the intake interview. James had overdosed on barbiturates and alcohol—Seconal and Scotch, to be exact. He had been brought in by ambulance, barely conscious, with a laceration to his head, apparently from a fall down the front steps of his building. His blood had been analyzed, assessed for toxicity, lethal levels established, and then his stomach had been pumped. After he was stabilized, they had run him through a battery of neurological tests.

  Just as Diana was reaching for the neurological reports, Valerie walked into the room and asked if she had found anything. When Diana shook her head, Valerie sat down across fr
om her. “What can I help you with?” she asked. “I’ve got about an hour.”

  “See if anything jumps out at you,” Diana said as she pushed the intake and medical piles across the table, figuring they would be easier for Valerie to understand than the neurological. “You know your four prongs as well as I do.” Valerie began to read.

  When the clock chimed eleven times, Diana stiffened but didn’t look up. Although she couldn’t imagine finding anything helpful in the neurological reports, nonetheless she flipped through the poor-quality copies; the originals had been on flimsy yellow or pink paper, and the contrast was very bad. She squinted at the words: a CAT scan, an MRI, an EEG. All showing normal brain activity. The neurological tests had been run because James had been admitted with a head injury; there had never been any real expectation that something was wrong. Just covering their butts, she thought. Something with which she should have been a little more concerned.

  Alertness assessment: normal. Orientation to time, space and person: normal. Reflex assessment: normal both knees; normal left Babinski; no Babinski contraction of all five digits of right foot, no plantar reflex. See recommendation. Diana drew in her breath and read the reflex assessment results again. No Babinski contraction of all five digits of right foot.

  “What?” Valerie asked. “What is it? Did you find something?”

  Diana didn’t say anything. Her eyes flew to the bottom of the page where the recommendation was recorded. “Patient reports paralysis of five toes on right foot due to nerve damage suffered in motorcycle accident, 8/90,” she read. “Seek medical records to explore history and extent of previous injury.”

  “What?” Valerie demanded. “What?”

  Stunned, Diana simply handed the paper over to Valerie.

  Valerie quickly scanned the report. “I don’t get it.”

  Diana pointed to the recommendation, her finger shaking slightly. “James couldn’t have killed himself,” she said, unable to believe she was actually speaking the words she heard coming from her mouth. “Or at least not the way that we thought,” she added.

  “He couldn’t have?” Valerie frowned and read the paragraph again.

  The clock ticked in the corner, horns honked from the street, voices called to one another in the corridor on the other side of the door, and Valerie held the poor copy up to the light. But Diana was alone. She was separate, apart. It was as if the noises and movements of the living were happening on another plane while she existed within this unearthly fog of incredulity. A fog that muted sound, light, time. A fog that buffered her from this overwhelming new reality.

  “His right big toe was paralyzed,” Valerie said, her voice slow and incredulous, as if hearing the words spoken out loud would lend them meaning.

  Diana was back on the landing of James’s apartment building on Anderson Street, looking down the narrow hallway at the still form that lay on the stretcher, at the two feet that dangled from the edge of the sheet. The left foot was covered with James’s paint-splattered sneaker. The right one was bare. There’s powder burns on his foot, the policeman had said. My guess is he pulled the trigger with his toe.

  “His right toe was paralyzed,” Valerie said again. Then a huge grin split her face, and she actually let out a whoop. “You’re off the hook—he couldn’t have committed suicide!”

  Diana listened to the high whine of an approaching police siren drop as it raced passed the building, rushing to its emergency. She said nothing.

  Valerie’s smile disappeared into her more customary severe expression. Her eyes locked onto Diana’s. “But if Hutchins didn’t commit suicide …”

  Diana nodded grimly.

  “Then,” Valerie said slowly, “he must have been murdered.”

  17

  THEN HE MUST HAVE BEEN MURDERED. VALERIE’S words seared like a neon stamp into Diana’s brain. Then he must have been murdered. Through her protective haze, Diana could feel a fragment of dread in the center of her soul, an apprehension that she feared would soon grow and overpower her.

  Valerie leaned forward in her chair. She raised her eyebrows slightly, but she said nothing.

  Neither did Diana. Then he must have been murdered.

  Finally, Valerie placed her hands on the table, fingers splayed, and began to push herself from her chair. “I’ll go call Engdahl,” she said.

  Diana’s hand flashed forward. She grabbed Valerie’s wrist before she could stand. “Do you have to?”

  Without taking her eyes from Diana’s, Valerie sat back down in her chair. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Diana released Valerie’s hand and looked down at her own. She shook her head. Valerie said nothing, and Diana could almost feel the force of the challenge in Valerie’s reticence. Although Diana didn’t raise her head, she mumbled, “They’re going to say that I did it.”

  Valerie was silent for yet another moment. When she finally spoke, her words were slow and deliberate. “Why do you think that?”

  “For all the reasons I was responsible for his suicide,” Diana said, still looking at her hands. “But now it’s even more compelling.” She slowly raised her eyes and looked at Valerie. “I’ve got plenty of motive: five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of it. And …” she paused as the potential horror of the situation struck her. “And I don’t think I’ve got an alibi for that afternoon.”

  “Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions here?”

  “But what about my journal?” Diana asked. “What if the police decide I did it to get rid of a difficult patient—or because James and I were having some kind of lovers’ quarrel?”

  “You’re really stretching, Diana,” Valerie said, smiling and shaking her head. “And if it came to it—which it won’t—the rules of evidence are different in criminal law.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that although your journal might have been admissible in a civil suit, it would never be allowed in evidence in a criminal proceeding. Criminal law is much more advantageous to the defendant. And anyway—”

  “But don’t you see how this looks?” Diana interrupted. “I’ve got motive and opportunity.”

  “I can’t believe this.” Valerie threw her hands in the air in mock despair. “You’ve just gotten the best news you could ever get and you’re talking like some character from ‘Murder, She Wrote’.” She shook her head. “You remind me of my Grandma Rae—always looking for the cloud in the silver lining.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.” Valerie stabbed a fingernail at the neurological report. “This completely exonerates you in James Hutchins’s death, and Engdahl will be forced to drop all the charges.” She chortled happily. “There’s no basis for either wrongful death or malpractice—and this undermines the hell out of the sexual abuse aspect.”

  “What does this have to do with sexual abuse?” Diana asked, although she felt hopeful for the first time. “Why should Jill let that go?”

  “I’d guess she’d be too embarrassed not to.”

  “You think the press will drop it too?”

  Valerie looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know what I think?”

  Diana shook her head.

  “I think that the same media that has had such fun crucifying you is now going to do a one-eighty.” She nodded as if heartily agreeing with her own words. “Yes, I wouldn’t doubt it at all. Not at all.” Valerie began to chuckle. “Don’t you see—the sniffers are going to feel guilty. They’ve backed the wrong side, and we’ll make sure that it’s thrown in their faces!”

  Diana leaned forward. “We will?”

  “I have a few friends in the press,” Valerie said slyly. “And we’ve got a hell of a defamation of character suit against the Inquirer to add to the right-to-privacy violation.”

  Diana’s smile was half-bitter, half-amused. “Spoken like a true lawyer.”

  Valerie stood. “The truth is, no matter what you might want, as an officer of the court, I’m under a legal obligation to report
this information.” She lifted the neurological report and let it drift slowly back to the table. “Not to mention that it’s part of the official court record.”

  “But its importance would probably be overlooked.”

  Ignoring Diana’s comment, Valerie picked the report up again. “I’d just love to take this over to Engdahl myself,” she said, waving it in the air. Then she looked at the clock. “No time—I’ve got to be in court in an hour. I’ll have to be satisfied hearing his voice and imagining what splattered ego looks like all over his face.” She pulled open the heavy door and left the room.

  Diana remained at the large table, papers scattered all over its marble surface, listening to the happy clicking of Valerie’s heels on the hardwood floor.

  The weekend following Diana’s discovery passed in a whirlwind of chaotic emotion. One moment she soared from her public vindication, and the next she plummeted from the suspicion and innuendo. She was buffeted and bloodied by the storm of media conjecture. SEX DOC INNOCENT, the Inquirer headline screamed in a double-edged exoneration the morning after the suit was dismissed. HUTCHINS MURDER INVESTIGATION OPENED, declared the Globe.

  Valerie had been right in her prediction that Jill would drop all the charges. With the evidence that James couldn’t have committed suicide, it was clear that the wrongful death and malpractice suits were moot, and apparently Engdahl felt that without Diana’s journal, even his sexual abuse case was too weak to prosecute.

  Unfortunately, Valerie’s prophecy of the press’s one-eighty wasn’t quite so accurate. Although the Globe ran an editorial exploring the role of the media in her persecution, comparing it to the media’s mishandling of the Carol Dimaiti Stuart fiasco—when Boston police had harassed and arrested a black man for the murder of a white pregnant woman, only to discover that her husband was guilty—much of the coverage was negative. With the lurid fascination of a bypasser at a highway accident scene, Diana followed the talk shows and tabloids as they debated the various possibilities of who might be charged with murder—she, Jill, or even Ethan, who became a suspect when the press got hold of two police reports of Ethan and James fighting in a Cambridge bar. Still, most people seemed to think it would be Diana who would be charged. Diana had wished for an end to the agony of the civil suit; now she understood the full meaning of the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for.”