Doctored Evidence

by Michael Biehl

  She had a dozen visitors in the next three days, not counting Jake, who had become a combination hospital roommate and guard dog. He slept in a guest chair, leaving the room only to get meals at the hospital cafeteria or to run to the medical staff library to double-check the dosage, contraindications, and side effects of every medication ordered for his wife.

  Pamela came to visit within an hour after Karen was out of the ICU. This impressed Karen, because it meant that Pamela must have been checking constantly, so she could arrive just as soon as Karen could comfortably receive her. Pamela had Suzanne and Dante with her, and the children appeared to be momentarily shocked at seeing their aunt in a hospital bed, bruised and bandaged with an IV line taped to her forearm, but they recovered quickly. Suzanne shuffled around the room sniffing the flowers and reading the cards, while Dante tried to amuse himself with the medical equipment. Pamela told Karen she looked great.

  “Liar,” said Karen. “There’s a mirror in the bathroom. I know what I look like. I look like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” said Pamela clapping her hands. “I got a part in the Shaker Heights Theater production of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ I’m going to be Mrs. Cratchit!”

  Suzanne chimed in. “Mom made Dante audition to be Tiny Tim, but he couldn’t remember his lines.” When Pamela advised her to shut up, Suzanne slouched to the window, looked out and muttered, “God bless us, every one.” Dante, meanwhile, was experimenting with the recreational potential of Karen’s IV bag, giving it a few tentative left jabs while quietly humming the theme song from Rocky.

  Jake, loitering in the doorway, offered to take the kids to the cafeteria for a treat, and his offer was enthusiastically and unanimously accepted. After they left, Karen realized that, strangely, this was the first time she had been alone in a room with her sister in almost a decade.

  “Do you still have a lot of pain?” asked Pamela.

  “On a one-to-ten scale,” said Karen stoically, “it’s about a thousand.”

  Pamela stiffened in her chair. “The bastard who did this to you should spend the rest of his life in jail” Karen watched her sister’s eyes fill. Was she going to cry? “I hope you’ll be out of the hospital by Christmas,” Pamela continued. “I think Dad has something special planned.”

  “Oh no,” groaned Karen. “I hope he’s not going to go overboard again trying to outdo Mom, professional tree-trimmers and caterers and all that. I just hate to see the waste.”

  “He might surprise you,” said Pamela. “Remember how Mom and Dad used to do Christmas? Very tasteful and authentic. Mom baked real stöllen and küchlein from scratch, they hung holly and mistletoe, and Dad would cut his own tree from the woods on Uncle Wayne’s farm.”

  “Oh, God,” said Karen, “and they’d ride us around the farm on that absurd old sleigh.”

  “That sleigh,” said Pamela with a tone of facetious snobbery, “was a genuine antique, handcrafted in Denmark, or someplace.”

  “It was so heavy Uncle Wayne’s horse couldn’t pull it, so he’d drag the thing behind his tractor. It was ridiculous.”

  “It was a blast, and you know it.”

  As Pamela reminisced at length about Christmas at home when they were little, Karen was amazed by the clarity of her sister’s memory, the way she could recall and describe their family’s holiday traditions, right down to the smallest details of specific tree ornaments. She knew Pamela’s memory was generally not as good as her own, but her sister was much better at recollecting this part of their childhood. Perhaps it was the children. Cookies, colored lights, and the exquisite anticipation of a debauchery of toys were all kid’s stuff. Pamela had gone almost directly from a household in which she was a child to one in which she was a parent. Karen had spent half her life in a childless home, where she and Jake celebrated Christmas Eve, when Jake didn’t have a gig, by listening to modern jazz versions of holiday tunes and mixing up a big bowl of forty-proof eggnog. She had apparently lost the Christmas of childhood somewhere along the way, but when she thought of how those jazz-and-eggnog eves usually ended, she decided they were a sweet alternative.

  “Remember Mom’s hand-painted nativity set on the mantel, with all the little animals and the Magi and everything?” said Pamela.

  “Yeah,” said Karen, “and I remember how you and I would rearrange the pieces in goofy ways, like putting baby Jesus on the back of a camel.”

  “And we’d put a sheep in the manger with its legs sticking straight up in the air, and then laugh ourselves sick.”

  “And none of the grown-ups ever noticed.”

  “Like hell we didn’t!” came a deep voice from the hallway. Gene Decker walked through the door with an armful of packages. He was wearing a plaid car coat and a wool cap, which told Karen he had taken the day off work. He blanched and took a half step backward when he saw his daughter.

  “Gee, Tootsie Roll,” he said, “you look fine.”

  “Dad, I look like excrement,” said Karen.

  Dante ran into the room, kicking over a potted poinsettia in his path, and leaped onto Pamela’s lap hard enough to make her wince. “Mom,” he asked, “what’s excrement?”

  When Jake and Suzanne showed up, both looking a little bored and exasperated, it became obvious that the room could not accommodate six people. So Pamela kissed Karen, hugged her father and then Jake, gathered her children and left. As the clamor receded down the hall, Karen was surprised to find that she felt closer to her sister and to her own childhood than she had in years. Somehow, Pamela’s walk down memory lane had been more soothing than the medication dripping through the IV.

  Jake stepped out for a cigarette, leaving Karen alone with her father. She asked him if he had made an appointment with the urologist in Evanston and he said that he had.

  “Did you figure out what Larry’s mysterious file was all about?” Gene asked.

  “You were right, Dad. It was a billing summary. The hospital wasn’t involved, so I went to my office and made the report to the government. One of the doctors involved caught me making the report.” Karen went on to explain how she had sustained her near-fatal injuries.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Gene. “You know, when you were about four months old, I was working on a bank loan my company had taken out. I noticed that the valuation of the company’s assets supporting the loan included a multimillion-dollar appraisal on some land that I knew was actually worthless due to contamination.”

  “Har-rumph,” said Karen.

  “Uh-huh. And I reported it. I barely slept for the next six months, I was so afraid of retaliation. I was sure I had goons following me.”

  “Was there a prosecution?”

  “You bet. Company paid a fine, couldn’t borrow for a while. There were layoffs, hurt growth.” He bit his bottom lip and blinked hard. “The head accountant got a year in the penitentiary. That man had a family.”

  “He got himself in trouble; you were just doing your job,” said Karen. “You did the right thing, Dad.”

  Gene Decker looked at his frail, wounded daughter, the bruises on her limbs and the pain and fatigue in her eyes. His jaw tightened. He touched her hand. “So did you,” he said.

  Before Karen could respond, they were interrupted by a voice from the hall. “Look at the flowers! Did somebody die?” Elizabeth Decker walked in wearing a bright red coat and a black fur hat. She stopped as abruptly as if she had walked into an invisible wall when she saw her daughter. “Dear Lord,” she gasped, shaking her head. “You look dreadful.”

  Karen raised an index finger in the air. “The only honest person in the family!” she announced.

  “Am I interrupting?” asked her mother.

  Gene cleared his throat and stood up, offering his ex-wife his chair. “No, not at all. I was just about to go. But before I do, Karen, I wanted to invite you and Jake to the house for Christmas.” He turned to Elizabeth. “I had Christmas dinner last year, didn’t I? So I guess they’ll be at your
place for dinner and at my place Christmas morning. Or is it the other way around?”

  “Look,” said Elizabeth, “it doesn’t seem to me that Karen’s going to be in any shape to run all over town on Christmas. If it’s all the same to you, Gene, why don’t I just make dinner for everyone at the house?”

  Karen thought it interesting that her mother called Gene’s place “the house,” but she made no comment. She watched her father’s reaction and found it comical.

  “Uh, well, urn,” he stammered. Karen noticed a little color rise in his cheeks. “Oh, um, well,” he said, “that would be fine.” Then, as if concerned his response had been too hesitant, he added, “I mean, that would be great!” But apparently abashed that he may now have sounded overly enthusiastic, he went on, “That would be just fine.”

  Jake returned from his smoke and declared the plans for a unified Christmas celebration “molto cool,” but said Karen needed to “take five” now. Over Karen’s protests that her mother had just arrived, Jake decisively ushered her parents out the door. Karen whispered to her mother, “I appreciate what you did, Mom, but you don’t have to do dinner at Dad’s house on my account.”

  “Maybe I’m not doing it on your account,” said Elizabeth with a wry smile. “Fact is, I wouldn’t want to miss it.” She leaned over the bed and Karen smelled face powder and stale Chardonnay. Her mother cupped her hand to her mouth and whispered, “Pammy said Gene’s driving out to Wayne’s farm to cut a tree. He’s going to try to get that old sleigh back to the house!”

  The next morning Joe Grimes came to Karen’s room, looking like he had just had a facial to buff up his fading ski-trip tan. His cologne overwhelmed the wilting flowers. Karen thanked him for what she called the “Rose Bowl float.”

  “Hey, it’s Christmas,” said Joe with an expansive flourish of his arms, as if basking in his own generosity. Karen knew that when Joe sent flowers, he charged it to the hospital. “And in the spirit of the season,” he continued, suddenly serious, “I’m replacing your telephone console and computer monitor, and I won’t even deduct the cost from your salary.”

  Karen studied his face. Total deadpan. She absolutely could not tell if he was joking. She was either looking at someone with a devilish sense of humor, or the most colossal jerk she had ever known.

  “Got another deal in the works,” he said, more ebulliently. “Gonna need your help. I’ve been talking to some of the execs and board people over at St. Pete’s.”

  “Consorting with the enemy, eh?” said Karen.

  “Who says they have to be the enemy?” said Joe. “We need to start thinking outside the box. Show more vision.”

  Outside the box. Vision. Joe with his irritating business-speak clichés. It was making her stitches itch.

  “I think I’ve got our friends across town interested in developing a health services coordination and cooperation venture, to create a more harmonious delivery system.”

  This made her neck start to ache like she was back in the ICU. “Could you translate that into English, Joe?”

  Joe plopped down into the guest chair closest to her and hunched forward. “I’m talking about entering into an agreement with St. Pete’s to stop providing the same services at both hospitals. They deliver most of the babies anyway, we could close our obstetric service. Give them orthopedics, too, they already own the spine clinic. That way we can concentrate on our heart and cancer programs, create Centers of Excellence. The beauty part is they get the high-volume stuff, but we get the high-margin stuff. Total win-win.”

  “Joe, you know competitors can’t divide markets. It’s an antitrust violation.”

  “It’s best for everybody. The quality of care would improve if we focused on what we do best. It would unify the provider community,” he said, putting his hands together, like he was about to pray, then interlacing his fingers for emphasis.

  “Perhaps. But the scheme is illegal.”

  “It would avoid wasteful duplication of costly technology. I know how you hate waste, Karen.”

  “I’m just telling you the law, Joe.”

  He sat back. “Now there is a law against cooperation? I won’t accept that.” Joe stood up, straightened his tie and brushed the wrinkles out of his suit. “I imagine you’re still quite debilitated from surgery. We’ll talk about this when you’re feeling better. You’ll find a way.”

  After Joe left, Karen remarked to Jake that it was amazing Joe had not even mentioned her report to the Inspector General or the collapse of his pet MRI project with the clinic.

  “One thing you’ve got to give Joe,” said Jake. “He keeps on truckin’.”

  Later that day Max Schumacher came to report that one of his friends at the police department had recovered Karen’s car battery and cellular telephone from Vincent Bernard’s garage-The police had asked if Karen wished to file a criminal complaint against Vincent Bernard. Karen declined, but told Max she did want to swear out a complaint against Dr. Edward Bernard for assault.

  When the police came to take Karen’s complaint against Dr. Bernard, the officer reported that, according to Dr. Bernard, Karen had been the one who threw the paperweight at the computer monitor. Since he, too, had received an injury—a small cut on the forehead—Dr. Bernard had said he would be swearing out a complaint against Karen, but would not do so if she dropped her complaint against him. The policeman said it was her word against his and in such cases the police could not make a judgment as to the credibility of the parties. The police officer explained that there was no evidence at the scene to support either party’s version. The traffic cop who had taken Jake into custody had reported the condition of the office to a hospital security guard named Billy Walker, who had tried to call Max Schumacher. Max had been at a basketball game, so Billy called the hospital CEO at home. On Joe Grimes’s instructions, housekeeping had cleaned up the whole mess Sunday morning. Besides, the officer concluded, the police department preferred not to get involved in a private dispute that was likely to be the subject of a lawsuit.

  Karen dropped her complaint.

  That night, Karen spiked a fever of 103. The night nurse reached the physician on call, who ordered a change in Karen’s antibiotics and had the nurse reserve an operating suite for the next day. Karen knew that once they started going back in looking for abscesses, her recovery could be complicated and take forever. For the first time in longer than she cared to admit, Karen prayed. Jake ran to an herbalist and returned with an assortment of leaves, stems, and seeds from which he brewed a tea that tasted like bitters and iodine. The taste was still in Karen’s mouth when she awoke the next morning to the touch of Jake’s lips on her forehead.

  “How’m I doin’?” she asked.

  He smiled and replied, “You’re cool as a Miles Davis solo.”

  Two days later, Anne Delaney came to report that Charles Packard from the Office of the Inspector General had contacted her. She said she had arranged to have the originals of Larry Conkel’s files delivered to Packard.

  “Did Joe try to stop you?” asked Karen.

  “He gave me a line about loyalty to our medical staff, but he backed off pretty fast when I pointed out that he could get dragged into it personally if we tried to withhold the files.”

  “With Joe, loyalty is no rival to self-preservation.”

  Anne then moved on to discuss other sundry legal matters, each represented by a neatly organized file folder resting on her ample lap. Karen was distracted from the details of Anne’s discourse by the unexpected comfort she derived from it. The familiarity of Anne’s voice and mannerisms, the reassuring sense of normalcy from being at least a little bit back to work, the calming distraction of having difficult questions to focus on and answer were all a part of the relief Karen felt. But she was feeling something other than relief: a unique sort of connection. Here, Karen realized, was her comrade-in-arms, the person who knew better than anyone else, better even than Jake, exactly what it was she did all day long and why it mattered.
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  Anne had not greeted Karen with hugs or cheek kisses or a box of chocolates. Instead, Anne had come bearing a rat’s nest of problems for Karen, but they were accompanied by Anne’s sweet, welcome acknowledgment that they were her problems, too.

  “You have a whole bunch of faxes on your desk from Ben McCormick,” said Anne, “and Lou Chambers’s process server has been here a couple of times.”

  “I’m going to let Emerson Knowles handle those suits from here on,” said Karen. “I think they’re under control. Anything else, Annie?”

  “What are you going to do about Carson Weber?”

  Karen considered telling Anne about the dictaphone tape of her conversation with Carson Weber, but decided to keep it to herself a while longer. She sat in silence, Anne’s question pressing down on her, awakening the pain in her gut. She looked at the wilting flowers around her and suddenly felt like one of them.

  Jake, who seemed to be monitoring Karen’s visitors with a stopwatch, materialized in the room. With uncharacteristic assertiveness, he invited Anne to lunch, practically lifting her from the guest chair and escorting her out the door.

  After they had gone, Karen said to herself, “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  The evening before Karen was to be discharged, Carson Weber came to see her. He looked at least as sick as he had when Karen had last seen him, but he was dressed in khaki pants and a cotton sweater. Apparently he was going to be out of the hospital before she was. He asked Jake if he could speak with Karen privately.

  “Jake stays,” said Karen.

  Weber shrugged and winked at Jake. Jake responded with a two-finger salute. Carson sat down and folded his hands in his lap.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened to you, Mrs. Hayes,” he said. “When I called Dr. Bernard I knew you were about to drop a dime on the clinic, but I had no idea he would do anything more than try to talk you out of it. I never would have called him if it had crossed my mind that he would get violent. I guess I underestimated how much of an asshole he is.”