By this time, Kensing had a good idea of what was coming, but he asked anyway. “So what’s this about?”
There was no love lost between the two men, and the administrator wasted no time on niceties. “I’m afraid that the board has decided to place you on leave for the time being.”
“I don’t think so. They can’t do that. I’ve got a contract.”
Andreotti more or less expected this response. He had the paperwork on him, and he handed over the letter. “It’s not my decision, Doctor. As I said, the board has decided.”
Kensing snorted derisively. “The board. You mean Ross. Finally seeing his chance.”
Andreotti felt no need to respond.
“What’s his excuse this time?”
“It’s clearly explained in the letter, but there seem to be too many questions involving you related to Mr. Markham’s death.”
“That’s bullshit. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
Andreotti’s mouth turned down at Kensing’s unfortunate use of profanity. “That’s not the board’s point. There is the appearance.” Andreotti was in bureaucrat mode. He might as well have been a mannequin. He was only there to deliver the letter and the message, and to see that the board’s will was implemented.
“What appearance? There’s no appearance.”
Andreotti spread his hands. “It’s really out of my control, Doctor. If you want to appeal the decision, I suggest you call Dr. Ross. In the meantime, you’re not to practice either here or at the clinic.”
“What about my patients? I’ve got to see them.”
“We’ve scheduled other physicians to cover your caseload.”
“Starting when?”
“Immediately, I’m afraid.”
“You’re afraid. I bet you are.” Kensing’s temper flared for an instant. “You ought to be.”
Andreotti backed up a step. “Are you threatening me?”
Kensing was tempted to run with it, put some real fear into this stooge, but starting with Glitsky’s visit last night, he was beginning to get a sense of how bad things could really get with this murder investigation, this suspicion over him. Some reserve of self-protectiveness kicked in. “This is wrong,” was all he said. Glancing down at the papers in his hand, he turned on his heel and walked out.
It wasn’t yet 9:00 in the morning. The storm had finally blown over. The sky was washed clean, deep blue and cloudless.
Kensing was back at his home, in the living room of his condominium. He moved forward and forced open one of the windows, letting in some fresh air. Then he walked back to his kitchen, where Glitsky had skewered him last night. The lieutenant’s teacup was still in the sink. It was one of a set he’d inherited from his parents after his dad had died, and now he abstractedly turned on the water to wash it, then lifted the dainty thing carefully. There was a window over the sink, as well, and Kensing simply stopped all movement suddenly, staring out over the western edge of the city, seeing none of it.
The cup exploded in his hand, shattering from the force of his grip.
He looked down in a cold, distracted fury. The blood where the shards had cut him ran over his hand and pooled in the white porcelain saucer amid the broken fragments in the bottom of the sink.
Jeff Elliot had his home number from the Baby Emily days, and called him twenty minutes later. He’d been hounding Parnassus for stories lately, and he’d heard the news about the administrative leave this morning, probably not too long after Kensing had gotten it himself. Elliot offered to let him tell his side to a sympathetic reporter who was covering the whole story soup to nuts. He could come right by if Kensing could spare an hour or so.
When he arrived, Elliot wheeled himself into the kitchen. He’d been here before during Baby Emily, and knew his way around. After he sat, his first comment was about the several Band-Aids on Kensing’s hand.
“I was trying to slash my wrists in despair. I guess I aimed wrong.” The doctor laughed perfunctorily and offered an explanation. “Don’t pick up a butcher knife by the blade. You’d think I’d have learned that by now somewhere along the way.” Deftly, he changed the subject. “Hey, I loved your article on Ross, by the way. You captured him perfectly.”
Elliot nodded in acknowledgment. “What motivated that guy to become a doctor in the first place I’ll never know. He seems to care about patients like the lumber companies care about the rain forests.” But then he got down to business. “So they finally laid you off?”
Eventually, they got around to personalities at Parnassus, the players. Elliot said he’d been talking a lot with Tim Markham’s executive assistant, a bitter, apparently soon-tobe-jobless young man named Brendan Driscoll.
“Sure, I know Brendan. Everybody knows Brendan.”
“Apparently he knows you, too. You had heated words in the hospital?”
Kensing shrugged. “He wouldn’t leave the ICU when Markham was there. I had to kick him out. He wasn’t very happy about it.”
“Why was he even there if he’s just a secretary?”
“Bite your tongue, Jeff. Brendan’s an executive assistant and don’t you forget it.”
“So what’s his story? Why’s he so down on you?”
“It must be a virus that’s going around. I’m surprised you haven’t caught it. But the real answer is that Brendan’s one of those hyperefficient secretaries, that’s all. His job is his whole life. He’d been with Markham since before he came on with Parnassus. Anyway, he scheduled every aspect of Markham’s life. Including Ann, although let’s leave that off the record.”
“Your wife, Ann?”
He nodded. “She…now she really doesn’t like him. But Brendan’s one of those people who identifies so completely with their boss that they really come to believe they can do no wrong themselves. I’d take him and anything he says with a grain of salt.”
“Well, I did for my purposes. But he could hurt you. He wants everybody to know how close Markham was to firing you, how you were true enemies.”
“Well, he’s half-right there,” Kensing replied. “We didn’t get along. But he wasn’t going to fire me. In fact, if anything, he was on my side. He knew what he’d done to me with Ann. If he fires me, what’s it going to look like? I’d sue him and the company for a billion dollars, and I’d win. And he knew it.”
“So what were all the reprimand letters about?”
A shrug. “Markham covering his ass with the board, that’s all. He’s trying to keep costs down, get those uppity doctors like me in line, but they just won’t listen. Especially me, I’m afraid. I’ve got a bad attitude. I’m not a team player. But Tim couldn’t touch me.”
“But that’s changed now? With Ross at the helm?”
Kensing’s expression grew more serious. “Ross is a big problem. In fact, I should tell my lawyer there’s a good argument to be made that killing Markham was the worst thing I could do if I wanted to keep my job. The truth is that Markham was the only thing that stood between me and Ross. Now he’s gone. If I listen real carefully, I can even now hear the ice beginning to crack under me.”
There was the faint sound of a key turning in a lock, and a door slammed behind them. Kensing was halfway to standing up when they heard a woman’s voice echoing out of the hallway. “Somebody could sure use a good fuck about now. Oh!”
A mid-thirties Modigliani woman with frizzy hair was standing in the entrance to the kitchen. Seeing Elliot at the table, she brought her hand to her mouth in a cliche´ of surprise. “Oh shit.” She turned to Kensing with a “what can you do” look and threw her hands up theatrically.
“Well, this might be a good time for introductions.” Kensing was up now, and moving toward the woman. “Judith, this is Jeff Elliot, from the Chronicle. Jeff, meet Judith Cohn.”
“Sorry,” she said to the room. “I’ll just sink through the floor now.”
“I’ll get over it,” Elliot said. “Occasionally I could use one myself.”
It turned out that Coh
n wasn’t Ross’s biggest fan, either.
“That son of a bitch. He can’t just lay you off,” she said, fuming. “You should’ve just stayed there working.”
Kensing was standing by the sink again and he shook his head. “Andreotti had a call in to security. They showed every inclination to escort me out if I didn’t want to go alone.”
Cohn stood up in the kitchen, walked to its entrance, slapped the wall, and turned back to face the men. “Those fucking idiots! They can’t—”
Elliot suddenly snapped his fingers and interrupted her. “Judith Cohn? You’re the Judith Cohn?”
She stopped, her eyes glaring in anger and caution. “I must be, I guess. Is there another one?”
But Elliot didn’t shrink. As a reporter, he was used to asking questions that made people uncomfortable. “You’re Judith Cohn from the Lopez case?”
“That’s me,” she answered in cold fury. “Infamously bad diagnostician. Perhaps child killer.”
Kensing came forward. “Judith,” he said with sympathy. “Come on.”
Suddenly, the spunk seemed to go out of her. She came back to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat on it. “That’s not going to go away, is it? And I guess you’re right, maybe it shouldn’t.”
“It wasn’t you,” Kensing said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Whoa up,” Elliot said. “Wait a minute!” He was leaning back in his wheelchair, focusing on first one of the doctors, then the other. Finally he settled on Cohn. “Look, I’m sorry, your name just clicked. I wasn’t trying to be accusatory.”
Cohn’s face was hard and bitter. “But the name clicks, doesn’t it?”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” Elliot said apologetically. “I’m a newspaperman. I remember names.” He scratched at his beard. “And the kid’s name was Ramiro, right?”
“We’re not opening this can of worms again, Jeff. The topic’s not on the table.”
But Cohn raised her hand to stop him. “It’s all right, Eric. It’s past now.”
“Not so long past. Markham sure wasn’t over it.”
“He is now.” Cohn obviously took some comfort in the thought. “Actually, this might be a good time to tell somebody the facts.” She turned to Elliot. “You know the basic story, right? This kid goes to urgent care with his mom. He’s got a fever, sore throat, funky-looking cut on his lip.”
Elliot nodded, recalling. “Some other doc had seen him a couple of days before and told him he had a virus.”
Kensing spoke up. “Right. So this night, Judith is at the clinic, swamped. Overwhelmed, really. She sees Ramiro and sends him home with some amoxicillin and Tylenol.”
“And two days later,” Elliot concluded, “he’s in the ICU with the flesh-eating disease.”
Kensing nodded. “Necrotizing fasciitis.”
Elliot remembered it all clearly now. The flesh-eating disease was always news, and when there was a local angle, it tended to get everybody worked up. So he’d heard of it, and had even heard the rumors about Judith Cohn’s—among many others’—alleged part in the tragedy. The official story didn’t include her by name, however, and Elliot’s own follow-up inquiries at the hospital were met with what he’d come to expect—the typically evasive Parnassus administrative fandango that left all doctors infallible, all administrative decisions without flaw. He’d never gone to press because he’d never felt he had it exactly right.
But Cohn was telling him now in a voice heavy with regret. “They’re right. I should have recognized it.”
Kensing shrugged. “Maybe the first doc who saw him could have, too. But neither of your diagnoses are what killed him.”
“What do you mean, Eric?” Elliot asked.
“I mean that at every step in the treatment, Parnassus took too long deciding what they could afford to do to save him. Ramiro didn’t have the right insurance. There was a glitch on one of the forms in his file. Was this test covered? Was the oxygen covered? Who was going to pay?” He angrily shook his head. “Long story short, they were counting pennies all the way, and it compromised his care. Fatally.”
Cohn’s eyes had gone glassy, the memory still painful to her. Elliot asked her gently, “You didn’t treat him at all after his initial visit to the clinic?”
“No. I never saw him again. Except at his funeral.”
Kensing took it up. “But did that stop Markham from singling her out within the physicians’ group as the primary point of failed care?”
“That’s the impression I got,” Elliot admitted. “But nobody would go on the record.”
“Everybody got that impression,” Kensing said. “Of course, what it really was, was Markham looking for a scapegoat. He himself had been the point man for the lame explanations of what we were not doing and why. Judith was his way to take the heat off him. Fortunately, the physicians’ group went to bat for her.”
“At least enough so I wouldn’t lose my job,” she added with real bitterness. “The only consolation is that I saw Luz—the mother?—at the funeral. She seemed to understand. She didn’t blame me. She blamed Markham.”
“Markham?” Elliot asked. “How did she know Markham even existed?”
Cohn obviously thought it was a good question. “You remember that puff piece they did on him in San Francisco magazine? It was lying out everywhere in the system that that poor woman went with her sick boy. Markham’s happy face and how he cared so deeply for his patients. She still had the cover with her at the funeral. She showed me.”
“And you want to know the supreme irony there?” Kensing asked. “It wasn’t Markham either. In fact, they’d all been Ross’s decisions. Ross is the chief medical director. He makes those calls. The truth is that Ross lost that kid single-handedly, and nobody seems to have a clue.”
A silence settled. After a minute, Elliot spoke. “Do you live here, Judith?”
“She stays over sometimes,” Kensing answered quickly, then added, “Why?”
“I was wondering if she was here last Tuesday morning.”
It was Judith’s turn to ask. “Why?”
Elliot felt he had to tell them that in talking with the hospital staff, checking the records, he had discovered that Eric had been well over an hour late for work on the morning Markham had been hit.
Kensing closed his eyes, squeezed his temples with one hand, looked across at Elliot. “I don’t even remember that. Was I? And what would it mean if I was?”
“It would mean you didn’t have an alibi for the time of the hit-and-run accident.” Elliot turned to Judith. “And you could corroborate the time he left for work.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” she said. “Now someone thinks Eric drove the hit-and-run car, too?”
“No one necessarily thinks it,” Elliot said. “I’ve just heard the question, that’s all.”
“What idiots,” Judith said.
“Well, idiots or no,” Elliot said, “you ought to appreciate what other people might be saying.”
“I think I’m getting a feel for it,” Eric answered wearily.
“Tuesday night I was here,” Judith said. “Does that help?”
“Yeah,” Kensing said, “but that was midnight.” He turned to Jeff. “I stopped by the Markhams’. Judith was asleep when I got home.”
Cohn gave the subject a minute’s more reflection, then shook her head. “Come on. You’re in the hospital, working your normal job, which means you’re not some criminal. You’re a regular person with a decent career. Suddenly an accident victim comes in and there’s a good chance he’s going to die. Now it turns out that you know this person. Not only that, but he’s somebody you hate enough to want to kill. To kill! And just like that he’s delivered to you and you decide on the spur of the moment to take this tremendous and probably unnecessary risk and make sure he dies where they might be able to trace it back to you.” Judith sat straight up, dripping ridicule. “Please.”
“Except that from what I hear, that�
�s essentially what happened,” Elliot said soberly.
Hardy’s morning had been awful. He’d slept fitfully with Rebecca Simms’s news percolating somewhere in his unconscious. Unknown dead people featured in several half-remembered dreams, and he was up and out of bed before 6:00. After the kids were off at school, damned if he’d call Glitsky for the company. He’d walked briskly alone for an hour, to the beach and back, but he hadn’t warmed up first so the exercise had left him feeling tight and old. One of Freeman’s clients had parked in his space under the building, and by the time he went to get his car back from where he’d parked it on the street, he’d gotten a ticket. Finally, just before lunchtime, after a morning of reviewing bills and other mail he’d ignored for the past week, and before he left the office to go to the Chronicle building, he placed a call to homicide when he was fairly sure the lieutenant would be at lunch. And sure enough—his first stroke of luck the whole day—Glitsky had been out.
Now he sat on a low filing cabinet in the cubicle that was Elliot’s office on the ground floor of the Chronicle building. His frustration with Kensing surfaced in an over-formal tone. “I confess to being somewhat surprised to learn at this late date that he has a girlfriend. We talked last night on the phone for hours. I asked him to tell me everything important about his life he could think of, and he never mentioned her.”
“Judith,” Elliot said. “Really pretty. But maybe it’s not an important relationship. Maybe it’s one of those modern things where they just have incredible sex every couple of hours, but otherwise don’t even like each other. Wouldn’t that be horrible?”
“Awful.” Hardy remained somewhat distracted. “Do you know when they got together?”
“No. Why?”
“Because it’d be nice to know if she was in the picture before he and Ann separated. Maybe his wife leaving didn’t break his heart after all.”
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 68