by Ed McBain
Margaret Ludlum—according to the name plate—glanced up and cocked a pale, red eyebrow. “Yes?”
“It’s Maggie, right?”
“Can I help you?” she asked in a polite but detached tone. Tal offered a second assault of a smile then displayed his badge and ID, which resulted in a cautious frown on her freckled face.
“I’m here to see Dr. Sheldon.” This was Sam Whitley’s cardiologist, whose card he’d found in the couple’s bedroom last night.
“It’s . . .” She squinted at the ID card.
“Detective Simms.”
“Sure. Just hold on. Do you have—”
“No. An appointment? No. But I need to talk to him. It’s important. About a patient. A former patient. Sam Whitley.”
She nodded knowingly and gave a slight wince. Word of the deaths would have spread fast, he assumed.
“Hold on, please.”
She made a call and a few minutes later a balding man in his fifties stepped out into the waiting room and greeted him. Dr. Anthony Sheldon led Tal back into a large office, whose walls were filled with dozens of diplomas and citations. The office was large and beautifully decorated, as one would expect for a man who probably made a few thousand dollars an hour.
Gesturing for Tal to sit across the desk, Sheldon dropped into his own high-backed chair.
“We’re looking into their deaths,” Tal said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if I could.”
“Yeah, sure. Anything I can do. It was . . . I mean, we heard it was a suicide, is that right?”
“It appeared to be. We just have a few unanswered questions. How long had you treated them?”
“Well, first, not them. Only Sam Whitley. He’d been referred to me by his personal GP.”
“That’s Ronald Weinstein,” Tal said. Another nugget from the boxes of evidence that’d kept him up until three A.M. “I just spoke to him.”
Tal had learned a few facts from the doctor, though nothing particularly helpful, except that Weinstein had not prescribed Luminux to either of the Whitleys, nor had he ever met the Bensons. Tal continued to Sheldon, “How serious was Sam’s cardiac condition?”
“Fairly serious. Hold on—let me make sure I don’t misstate anything.”
Sheldon pressed a buzzer on his phone.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Margaret, bring me the Whitley file, please.”
So, not Maggie.
“Right away.”
A moment later the woman walked briskly into the room, coolly ignoring Tal.
He decided that he liked the Celtic dancer part. He liked “Margaret” better than “Maggie.”
The tough-as-nails part gave him some pause.
“Thanks.”
Sheldon looked over the file. “His heart was only working at about fifty per cent efficiency. He should’ve had a transplant but wasn’t a good candidate for one. We were going to replace valves and several major vessels.”
“Would he have survived?”
“You mean the procedures? Or afterward?”
“Both.”
“The odds weren’t good for either. The surgeries themselves were the riskiest. Sam wasn’t a young man and he had severe deterioration in his blood vessels. If he’d survived that, he’d have a fifty-fifty chance for six months. After that, the odds would’ve improved somewhat.”
“So it wasn’t hopeless.”
“Not necessarily. But, like I told him, there was also a very good chance that even if he survived he’d be bedridden for the rest of his life.”
Tal said, “So you weren’t surprised to hear that he’d killed himself?”
“Well, I’m a doctor. Suicide doesn’t make sense to most of us. But he was facing a very risky procedure and a difficult, painful recovery with an uncertain outcome. When I heard that he’d died, naturally I was troubled, and guilty too—thinking maybe I didn’t explain things properly to him. But I have to say that I wasn’t utterly shocked.”
“Did you know his wife?”
“She came to most of his appointments.”
“But she was in good health?”
“I don’t know. But she seemed healthy.”
“They were close?”
“Oh, very devoted to each other.”
Tal looked up. “Doctor, what’s Luminux?”
“Luminux? A combination antidepressant, pain-killer and antianxiety medication. I’m not too familiar with it.”
“Then you didn’t prescribe it to Sam or his wife?”
“No—and I’d never prescribe anything to a spouse of a patient unless she was a patient of mine too. Why?”
“They both had unusually high levels of the drug in their bloodstreams when they died.”
“Both of them?”
“Right.”
Dr. Sheldon shook his head. “That’s odd. . . . Was that the cause of death?”
“No, it was carbon monoxide.”
“Oh. Their car?”
“In the garage, right.”
The doctor shook his head. “Better way to go than some, I suppose. But still. . .”
Another look at the notes he’d made from his investigation. “At their house I found an insurance form for the Cardiac Support Center here at the hospital. What’s that?”
“I suggested he and Liz see someone there. They work with terminal and high-risk patients, transplant candidates. Counseling and therapy mostly.”
“Could they have prescribed the drug?”
“Maybe. They have MDs on staff.”
“I’d like to talk to them. Who should I see?”
“Dr. Peter Dehoeven is the director. They’re in building J. Go back to the main lobby, take the elevator to three, turn left and keep going.”
He thanked the doctor and stepped back into the lobby. Cell phone calls weren’t allowed in the hospital so he asked Margaret if he could use one of the phones on her desk. She gestured toward it distractedly and turned back to her computer. It was 3:45 and Tal had to meet Greg LaTour in fifteen minutes.
One of the Homicide Division secretaries came on the line and he asked her to tell LaTour that he’d be a little late.
But she said, “Oh, he’s gone for the day.”
“Gone? We had a meeting.”
“Didn’t say anything about it.”
He hung up, angry. Had LaTour just been humoring him, agreeing to help with the case to get Tal out of his hair?
He made another call—to the Cardiac Support Center. Dr. Dehoeven was out but Tal made an appointment to see him at eight-thirty in the morning. He hung up and nearly asked Margaret to clarify the way to the Cardiac Support Center. But Sheldon’s directions were solidly implanted in his memory and he’d only bring up the subject to give it one more shot with sweet Molly Malone. But why bother? He knew to a statistical certainty that he and this red-haired lass would never be step-dancing the night away then lying in bed till dawn discussing the finer point of perfect numbers.
“All the valves?” Seventy-two-year-old Robert Covey asked his cardiologist, who was sitting across from him. The name on the white jacket read Dr. Lansdowne in scripty stitching, but with her frosted blonde hair in a Gwyneth Paltrow bun and sly red lipstick, he thought of her only as “Dr. Jenny.”
“That’s right.” She leaned forward. “And there’s more.”
For the next ten minutes she proceeded to give him the low-down on the absurd medical extremes he’d have to endure to have a chance of seeing his seventy-third birthday.
Unfair, Covey thought. Goddamn unfair to’ve been singled out this way. His weight, on a six-foot-one frame, was around 180, had been all his adult life. He gave up smoking forty years ago. He’d taken weekend hikes every few months with Veronica until he lost her and then had joined a hiking club where he got even more exercise than he had with his wife, outdistancing the widows who’d try to keep up with him as they flirted relentlessly.
Dr. Jenny asked, “Are you married?”
“Widower.”
“Children?”
“I have a son.”
“He live nearby?”
“No, but we see a lot of each other.”
“Anybody else in the area?” she asked.
“Not really, no.”
The doctor regarded him carefully. “It’s tough, hearing everything I’ve told you today. And it’s going to get tougher. I’d like you to talk to somebody over at Westbrook Hospital. They have a social services department there just for heart patients. The Cardiac Support Center.”
“Shrink?”
“Counselor/nurses, they’re called.”
“They wear short skirts?” Covey asked.
“The men don’t,” the doctor said, deadpan.
“Touché. Well, thanks, but I don’t think that’s for me.”
“Take the number anyway. If nothing else, they’re somebody to talk to.”
She took out a card and set it on the desk. He noticed that she had perfect fingernails, opalescent pink, though they were very short—as befit someone who cracked open human chests on occasion.
Covey asked her a number of questions about the procedures and what he could expect, sizing up his odds. Initially she seemed reluctant to quantify his chances but she sensed finally that he could indeed handle the numbers and told him. “Sixty-forty against.”
“Is that optimistic or pessimistic?”
“Neither. It’s realistic.”
He liked that.
There were more tests that needed to be done, the doctor explained, before any procedures could be scheduled. “You can make the appointment with Janice.”
“Sooner rather than later?”
The doctor didn’t smile when she said, “That would be the wise choice.”
He rose. Then paused. “Does this mean I should stop having strenuous sex?”
Dr. Jenny blinked and a moment later they both laughed.
“Ain’t it grand being old? All the crap you can get away with.”
“Make that appointment, Mr. Covey.”
He walked toward the door. She joined him. He thought she was seeing him out but she held out her hand; he’d neglected to take the card containing the name and number of the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital.
“Can I blame my memory?”
“No way. You’re sharper than me.” The doctor winked and turned back to her desk.
He made the appointment with the receptionist and left the building. Outside, still clutching the Cardiac Support Center card, he noticed a trash container on the sidewalk. He veered toward it and lifted the card like a Frisbee, about to sail the tiny rectangle into the pile of soda empties and limp newspapers. But then he paused.
Up the street he found a pay phone. Worth more than fifty million dollars, Robert Covey believed that cell phones were unnecessary luxuries. He set the card on the ledge, donned his reading glasses and began fishing in his leather change pouch for some coins.
∞
Dr. Peter Dehoeven was a tall blond man who spoke with an accent that Tal couldn’t quite place.
European—Scandinavian or German maybe. It was quite thick at times and that, coupled with his oddly barren office suggested that he’d come to the U.S. recently. Not only was it far sparser than the cardiologist Dr. Anthony Sheldon’s but the walls featured not a single framed testament to his education and training.
It was early the next morning and Dehoeven was elaborating on the mission of his Cardiac Support Center. He told Tal that the CSC counselors helped seriously ill patients change their diets, create exercise regimens, understand the nature of heart disease, deal with depression and anxiety, find care-givers, and counsel family members. They also helped with death and dying issues—funeral plans, insurance, wills. “We live to be older nowadays, yes?” Dehoeven explained, drifting in and out of his accent. “So we are having longer to experience our bodies’ failing than we used to. That means, yes, we must confront our mortality for a longer time too. That is a difficult thing to do. So we need to help our patients prepare for the end of life.”
When the doctor was through explaining CSC’s mission Tal told him that he’d come about the Whitleys. “Were you surprised when they killed themselves?” Tal found his hand at his collar, absently adjusting his tie knot; the doctor’s hung down an irritating two inches from his buttoned collar.
“Surprised?” Dehoeven hesitated. Maybe the question confused him. “I didn’t think about being surprised or not. I didn’t know Sam personal, yes? So I can’t say—”
“You never met him?” Tal was surprised.
“Oh, we’re a very big organization. Our counselors work with the patients. Me?” He laughed sadly. “My life is budget and planning and building our new facility up the street. That is taking most of my time now. We’re greatly expanding, yes? But I will find out who was assigned to Sam and his wife.” He called his secretary for this information.
The counselor turned out to be Claire McCaffrey, who, Dehoeven explained, was both a registered nurse and a social worker/counselor. She’d been at the CSC for a little over a year. “She’s good. One of the new generation of counselors, experts in aging, yes? She has her degree in that.”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
Another hesitation. “I suppose this is all right. Can I ask why?”
Tal pulled a questionnaire out of his briefcase and showed it to the doctor. “I’m the department statistician. I track all the deaths in the county and collect information about them. Just routine.”
“Ah, routine, yes? And yet we get a personal visit.” He lifted an eyebrow in curiosity.
“Details have to be attended to.”
“Yes, of course.” Though he didn’t seem quite convinced that Tal’s presence here was completely innocuous.
He called the nurse. It seemed that Claire McCaffrey was about to leave to meet a new patient but she could give him fifteen or twenty minutes.
Dehoeven explained where her office was. Tal asked, “Just a couple more questions.”
“Yessir?”
“Do you prescribe Luminux here?”
“Yes, we do often.”
“Did Sam have a prescription? We couldn’t find a bottle at their house.”
He typed on his computer. “Yes. Our doctors wrote several prescriptions for him. He started on it a month ago.”
Tal then told Dehoeven how much drugs the Whitleys had in their blood. “What do you make of that?”
“Three times the usual dosage?” He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“They’d also been drinking a little. But I’m told the drug didn’t directly contribute to their death. Would you agree?”
“Yes, yes,” he said quickly. “It’s not dangerous. It makes you drowsy and giddy. That’s all.”
“Drowsy and giddy both?” Tal asked. “Is that unusual?” The only drugs he’d taken recently were aspirin and an antiseasickness medicine that didn’t work for him, as a disastrous afternoon date on a tiny sailboat on Long Island Sound had proven.
“No, not unusual. Luminux is our anti-anxiety and mood-control drug of choice here at the Center. It was just approved by the FDA. We were very glad to learn that, yes? Cardiac patients can take it without fear of aggravating their heart problems.”
“Who makes it?”
He pulled a thick book off his shelf and read through it. “Montrose Pharmaceuticals in Paramus, New Jersey.”
Tal wrote this down. “Doctor,” he asked, “did you have another patient here . . . Don Benson?”
“I’m not knowing the name but I know very little of the patients here, as I was saying to you, yes?” He nodded out the window through which they could hear the sound of construction—the new CSC facility that was taking all his time, Tal assumed. Dehoeven typed on the computer keyboard. “No, we are not having any patients named Benson.”
“In the past?”
“This is for the year, going back.” A nod at the screen. “Why is it you are asking
?”
Tal tapped the questionnaire. “Statistics.” He put the paper away, rose and shook the doctor’s hand. He was directed to the nurse’s office, four doors up the hall from Dehoeven’s.
Claire McCaffrey was about his age, with wavy brunette hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had a freckled, pretty face—girl next door—but seemed haggard.
“You’re the one Dr. Dehoeven called about? Officer—?”
“Simms. But call me Tal.”
“I go by Mac,” she said. She extended her hand and a charm bracelet jangled on her right wrist as he gripped her strong fingers. He noticed a small gold ring in the shape of an ancient coin on her right hand. There was no jewelry at all on her left, he observed. “Mac,” he reflected. A Celtic theme today, recalling Margaret, Dr. Sheldon’s somber step-dancer.
She motioned him to sit. Her office was spacious—a desk and a sitting area with a couch and two armchairs around a coffee table. It seemed more lived-in than her boss’s, he noted, comfortable. The decor was soothing—crystals, glass globes, and reproductions of Native American artifacts, plants and fresh flowers, posters and paintings of seashores and deserts and forests.
“This is about Sam Whitley, right?” she asked in a troubled monotone.
“That’s right. And his wife.”
She nodded, distraught. “I was up all night about it. Oh, it’s so sad. I couldn’t believe it.” Her voice faded.
“I just have a few questions. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, go ahead.”
“Did you see them the day they died?” Tal asked.
“Yes, I did. We had our regular appointment.”
“What exactly did you do for them?”
“What we do with most patients. Making sure they’re on a heart-friendly diet, helping with insurance forms, making sure their medication’s working, arranging for help in doing heavy work around the house. . . . Is there some problem? I mean, official problem?”
Looking into her troubled eyes, he chose not to use the excuse of the questionnaire as a front. “It was unusual, their deaths. They didn’t fit the standard profile of most suicides. Did they say anything that’d suggest they were thinking about killing themselves?”
“No, of course not,” she said quickly. “I would’ve intervened. Naturally.”