by Scott Pratt
Up to that point, the doctor was nowhere to be found. We’d been told he had been paged and that he would be arriving soon, but he didn’t arrive until Grace was obviously in trouble, and when he did arrive, he looked and smelled drunk. I needed some answers, so I decided to turn to the nurse, Jenny Diaz. I called the birthing center and asked for her, but they told me she wasn’t working until the next day. I asked what time her shift started, and surprisingly, the young woman I was talking to offered the information right up. Jenny would be in at 7:00 a.m. the next day.
“Twelve-hour shift?” I said.
“Right. She gets off at seven.”
The next morning, I was in the employee parking lot at the birthing center at 6:30 a.m. At 6:45 a.m., I saw Jenny Diaz get out of a silver Chevy Malibu. I watched her walk into the hospital. I left, but I was back twelve hours later. I got out of my car when I saw her walk out of the building. It was hot, nearly ninety degrees and muggy. I stopped about ten feet from her car.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Diaz?”
She looked over at me, surprised, and then stopped dead in her tracks.
“I apologize if I frightened you. I’m Darren Street. I was here last week with Grace, the woman who—”
“I remember you,” she said.
“I wanted to thank you for your kindness.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened. I really am.”
“Can we talk for a minute?”
“I really shouldn’t talk to you, Mr. Street. I’m sure there will be a lawsuit.”
“I’m not filing a lawsuit. Grace and I weren’t married, and I don’t want money for the baby. It wouldn’t bring her back. Wouldn’t do any good.”
“Her parents will probably sue,” Jenny said.
“Maybe. Probably. But that has nothing to do with why I want to talk to you.”
She looked around the parking lot. “There are cameras out here.”
“I know.”
It was a part of me now, looking for cameras everywhere I went. I was constantly vigilant about watching for people following me. I did a lot of doubling back in traffic, circling blocks multiple times, pulling in and out of parking lots. The things I’d done in the past had caused me to become paranoid.
“There’s a dog park just down the street,” she said. “We could talk there for a few minutes.”
“Perfect. I promise I won’t take much of your time. I’ll follow you.”
I was relieved to hear that she’d talk to me, and as I followed her out of the parking lot, I wondered why a nurse who would undoubtedly become involved in litigation, who would be deposed, and who could possibly lose her job if anyone found out she had spoken to me would make herself so accessible. Perhaps she felt guilty. Maybe she knew instinctively that when Fraturra didn’t answer his pages early on that he wasn’t coming and that she should have called the head of his medical group immediately. Perhaps she was simply a genuinely kind person and thought she could be of assistance to someone who was grieving. Or maybe she had some kind of personal grudge against Fraturra. Had she known my real reason for wanting to talk to her, she probably would have fled with her arms flailing, screaming at the top of her lungs for help. But instead, five minutes later, we were sitting next to each other on a park bench in the shade of an elm tree while people and their dogs passed by.
“Long day?” I said.
She looked tired, but she was a pretty woman with high cheekbones, dark, smooth skin, and shiny black hair.
“How did you know when I would be getting off?” she said.
“I called the nurses’ station last night. They told me.”
“No questions asked?”
“Nope.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you’re not some kind of murderer or stalker.”
If you only knew, I thought. “Yeah,” I said. “You might want to speak to them about giving out information over the phone.”
“I assumed the woman who died was your girlfriend, but I wasn’t sure until you said so back in the parking lot. How long had you known her?”
“Several years. We were engaged once, but we went through a rough time and broke up for a little while.”
“She was a sweet lady.”
“Yes, yes, she was.”
“Where is she now? I mean, I know she isn’t, you know . . . Was her funeral here in Knoxville?”
“She was originally from San Diego. She and the baby are there now. It’s a nice spot.”
She folded her hands and looked down at the ground. “What did she do? For a living, I mean.”
“She was a lawyer. She worked in the federal system, defending criminals.”
“Really? That beautiful lady was a criminal lawyer?”
I smiled and nodded my head. “Don’t let the pretty face fool you. She was as tough as a pine knot. Smart, too. The world lost a fine lawyer and an even better person.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and her eyes began to fill with tears.
“Please, I know this wasn’t your fault. I’ve done a lot of research, and I know you did everything you could do. There are some things that I have to know, though. I’m not going to do anything rash, but if my suspicions are true, I’m going to do everything in my power to see to it that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“You’re talking about Dr. Fraturra.”
I nodded. “I know you said you haven’t been here long, but what can you tell me about him?”
“He has problems,” Jenny said.
“What kind of problems?”
“Substance abuse. Drugs and alcohol. And from everything I’ve heard, he’s an insufferable womanizer.”
“Has anything like this happened before that you know of?”
“Like what? A mother and baby dying because he was out drinking? No, I don’t think anything like that has happened before. But he’s been late before, he’s had other doctors in his group cover for him, he’s come in smelling of alcohol.”
“You’ve witnessed all these things firsthand?”
“Just a couple of times. He came in smelling like booze three weeks ago and then last week with your girlfriend. But the other nurses talk about him a lot. They hate him.”
“The day we were there, you said you paged him. How many times?”
“Three. I paged him when I was first made aware that you were on your way to the hospital. I paged him again about fifteen minutes later because I hadn’t heard anything back from him. I paged him again after I got Grace into the room and the monitors hooked up. And then I called him.”
“You called him? Did you talk to him?”
“No. It went to voice mail.”
“Did you leave him a message?”
“I did. I told him he had a patient who was within a half hour or so of giving birth. Then I called him again when the baby’s heart rate first started to drop.”
“Why does he still have a medical license?” I said. “Why is he still working if he does these kinds of things? Dr. Jenkins seems like a good man. Why would he put up with it?”
“My understanding is that Dr. Jenkins keeps him on because Dr. Fraturra’s father was Dr. Jenkins’s best friend. They started the medical group together. A few years back, Dr. Fraturra’s father died of pancreatic cancer, but before he died, he asked Dr. Jenkins to take care of his son. He knew his son was having problems. Dr. Fraturra was also married to Dr. Jenkins’s daughter, but she divorced him a couple of years ago. They have a five-year-old boy who is severely autistic. It’s complicated, to say the least. I think Dr. Jenkins is just trying to do the right thing by everyone, but Dr. Fraturra keeps getting worse and worse. From what everyone is saying, there could be some real problems over what happened to your girlfriend and your daughter.”
“Do you by any chance know what bars he hangs out in? Does he have a favorite that you know of?”
“I’ve heard a couple of nurses say you can find him at the Portal two or three times a week. I’ve
also heard them mention Spanky’s.”
I’d heard of both bars. Spanky’s was a meat market in the Old City, frequented mostly by upperclassmen and graduate students at the University of Tennessee. The Portal was a high-end bar and restaurant in Turkey Creek.
I looked at Jenny and reached out my hand. She took it, and I squeezed and shook her hand gently.
“Thank you for talking with me,” I said.
“What are you going to do, if you don’t mind my asking? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but when you and Dr. Fraturra were talking in Grace’s room, when it got really tense, I thought I heard you threaten him.”
“I don’t really remember what I said to him,” I lied, “but I don’t think I threatened him. If I did, it was an empty threat. I’m not a violent person. I am a lawyer, though, and I think Grace and Jasmine—that was the baby’s name—deserve some justice. I’m going to talk to the district attorney general and try to have Dr. Fraturra arrested.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“Reckless homicide. Maybe criminally negligent homicide.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Reckless is a little worse. I think drinking while you’re on call, ignoring pages and telephone calls and messages from the hospital, and finally showing up drunk is reckless behavior, especially when a woman and a baby die because of it. I think he deserves to be punished.”
“So he could go to jail?”
“I hope so,” I said. “That seems like a more just outcome to me than an insurance company having to pay out a bunch of money.”
Just outcome, I thought. Here I was, the killer of four men, talking about “just outcomes.” But justice, to me, had become nothing more than a hypocrite’s word. Justice was a prettied-up term for revenge.
“Speaking of money, Jenny, do you happen to know what kind of car he drives? Guy like that probably drives something flashy and expensive.”
“Why would you want to know what kind of car he drives?”
“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”
“It’s one of the flashiest cars I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Brand-new Porsche 911 Cabriolet. I’ve heard him brag about it to other doctors. It’s some kind of turbo something or other. He said it cost him more than two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” I said. “Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, of course. You can’t miss it in the parking lot. It’s silver.”
I thanked Jenny again for talking with me, and she stood and said goodbye. As I watched her walk away, black hair waving in the breeze, I thought again about the chances of getting the district attorney to agree to prosecute a doctor under these circumstances. It was doable. The facts fit the law for a prosecution for reckless homicide.
I knew Grace wouldn’t want me to kill Dr. Fraturra. Her preference, I believed, would have been for me to sue him on Jasmine’s behalf and let her parents sue on her behalf, but I thought she also would have gone along with the idea of filing a reckless homicide charge in criminal court. At least that’s what I told myself, because I wasn’t going to sue anyone.
Filing a lawsuit would take years, involve dozens of depositions and court hearings. Lawyers who defended medical malpractice cases worked for medical malpractice insurance companies, and they were cutthroat litigators and strategists. Their goal was always to drag a case out, especially a big-money case like Grace and Jasmine’s, until the other side became so frustrated that they finally gave up and settled. They would come into court and file motions, trying to convince a judge that a cloudless sky was green if it suited their purpose. They would prolong depositions for days, harassing and intimidating witnesses, going through minutiae that had absolutely no relevance to anything, until the plaintiff’s lawyer or lawyers finally threw up their hands in frustration and disgust.
So I was going to try another route. I had a plan. First, I would go to the Portal and ask around about the night Fraturra was there. I’d talk to the bartenders, the waitresses, the bouncers—anyone who would talk to me, and I’d find out what Fraturra had done there that night when he was supposed to be taking care of Grace. Then I would go to the district attorney, a man I knew and had helped get elected. I would give the criminal justice system another chance. I would lay out a case for him that was a lock. I would hand him Dr. Nicolas Fraturra’s head on a platter and let him make an example out of a man who deserved far worse than a few years in jail. I would give the district attorney an opportunity to garner some excellent publicity for himself and his staff. It would be win/win.
But if that system failed me, as it had in the past, I would have to take matters into my own hands.
And, once again, I didn’t give a damn about the consequences.
CHAPTER 6
I was a little surprised Stephen Morris agreed to see me, although we’d been close at one time. Morris was the district attorney I’d helped get elected more than six years earlier after I successfully freed my Uncle Tommy from prison. Morris beat Ben Clancy, my nemesis, largely because of the work I put in on Morris’s campaign. It didn’t really hurt Clancy, though. He immediately moved on to the US attorney’s office where one of his old political cronies gave him a job as an assistant US attorney. He later used that position to frame me for a murder and send me off to prison. I got out, with Grace’s help, after two years. Not long after that, Clancy disappeared.
I knew Morris, along with every other local and federal law enforcement officer within fifty miles, suspected that I had killed Clancy. They also thought I had killed a couple of rednecks in West Virginia who were suspected of dynamiting my mother’s house. They were right, but they couldn’t prove anything, and I wasn’t about to offer any admissions.
I tried to get Morris to meet me at a coffee shop or diner somewhere, but he insisted that I come to his office in the City County Building a couple of blocks from Neyland Stadium, where the Tennessee Volunteers had played mediocre football in front of huge crowds on Saturdays for the past ten years. He let me stew in the lobby for half an hour before he finally had his secretary lead me through the maze of hallways to his office. It was one of those ornate, ego offices. It overlooked the Tennessee River, had plush leather furniture, US and Tennessee flags, a vintage set of the Tennessee Code Annotated on a shelf to my left, and framed certificates and photos of Morris with politicians and judges and sheriffs everywhere. He’d even somehow managed to work a chandelier into the office decorating budget.
“Nice,” I said as I looked around. Morris was medium height, a stocky, powerful man whose dark-brown hair was perfectly cut and parted on the side. I could easily imagine him as one of those guys in the gym at six in the morning, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and spandex shorts. When I walked into his office, though, he was wearing a sharp navy-blue suit with a red tie and a white shirt.
“Had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of it,” Morris said. “Some of the county commissioners would just as soon have the top law enforcement officer in the county work out of a bathroom in the basement. Bunch of damned cheapskates.”
He reached his hand across the desk, and I took it.
“Nice to see you again, Darren,” he said. “A lot of water under the bridge since the last time I laid eyes on you.”
I nodded. “An ocean. Nice suit, Stephen. I’m not an aficionado, but that doesn’t look like it came off the rack at Sears.”
He smiled. “It’s an Armani, actually. Treat from the wife for our anniversary last year.”
“Well, you wear it well.”
“I was so sorry to hear about your mother when that terrible thing happened,” Morris said. “I should have reached out, but I just didn’t know what to say. We got the TBI and the ATF involved right away, but—”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, holding up my hand. “I barely remember anything during that time.”
“And then our two main suspects got themselves shot to hell in West Virginia.”
“Yeah, I know. Did you ever
look at anybody else? I mean, besides me?”
“I hope you’re not taking that personally, Darren. The cops just let the investigation lead them. You know how they do it.”
“They made up their minds it was me, and when they couldn’t prove it, they shelved the whole thing.”
“Is that why you’re here? Do you want us to reopen the investigation into your mother’s death?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it would do any good at this point. I’m here about something else. Did you hear about Grace Alexander and my daughter?”
He nodded and put his elbows on the desk. “I did, and again, I’m so sorry. I met her once, you know.”
“Grace? Yeah, she told me. She said it didn’t go very well between the two of you.”
“She told me I didn’t have any balls.”
I smiled. Grace had never told me she’d used those exact words, but I didn’t doubt it. “She was one of the kindest people I ever met, but if she got riled, she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. It wasn’t always what people wanted to hear.”
“The worst part about it was she was right,” Morris said. “She came to me and told me Clancy had framed you, and she wanted me to help, but I refused. I was afraid of the big fed machine. And then you got out and cleared yourself. That was an amazing feat.”
“Like they say, the truth shall set you free.”
“What do you think happened to him?” Morris said.
“Who? Clancy?”
“Yeah. You think somebody killed him? I mean, none of his credit cards were ever used, and his money is still in the bank, from what I know. He isn’t sitting on a beach, sipping rum punch, but he hasn’t been declared legally dead yet.”
“Guys like Clancy never die,” I said. “They just fester.”