Authors: Michael Palmer
B
eacon Hill, largely pared down in the nineteenth century to fill in the Back Bay, was overbuilt with brownstones and low apartment buildings set along a tangle of narrow streets and alleys. Its varied blocks were home to many of Boston’s elite, but also to transients and virtually every class in between. Even though Eric had a Beacon Hill resident’s sticker on his Celica, the drive there from Watertown took considerably less time than it did to find a place to park.
“Do you go through this every time you bring your car home?” Laura asked.
“Parking is only half the fun,” Eric said. “The other half is the excitement of wondering whether your car will still be there when you want to use it again.”
“Theft isn’t much of a problem on Little Cayman. There are only six cars and three pickups on the whole island.”
“The lines to get resident parking stickers must be very short.”
They found Thaddeus Bushnell’s home with no difficulty. It was a run-down structure on the lower portion of the hill, the side farthest away from Eric’s apartment. There were three floors in the old brown-stone, but only one window on the first was lit.
“How’re you holding up?” Eric asked, as he scanned the place.
“I’m upset, and bewildered as hell.”
“You’re certainly not the only one. I promise we’re going to figure this madness out though.”
“I know. It really helps to feel I’m not in this alone anymore. Eric, I’m sorry if I keep harping back to this question, but are you sure about the tattoo?”
“Believe me, I wish I weren’t. I’m not sure why, even, but the memory of it is very clear to me. Much clearer than Scott’s—I mean, the patient’s face.”
“You don’t have to watch your words with me. Remember, I lived through my parents’ death. I just can’t believe this, that’s all. When I left Cayman to begin looking for Scott, I purposely began preparing myself for the worst. But not something like this.”
“Just hang in there a little longer.”
For the briefest moment an EKG pattern flashed in Eric’s thoughts—wide electrical complexes, spaced at eight-second intervals, gliding across an endless monitor screen.
The man was clinically dead
, he told himself.
There was nothing more that should have been done
.
He chased the pattern from his mind and rang the buzzer. They waited, and then he rang again.
“No one’s home,” Laura said.
Eric rang a third time, more persistently. They heard the sound of someone moving inside.
“What do you want?” The voice was thick and raspy.
“Dr. Bushnell?”
“What do you want?”
“Dr. Bushnell, my name is Dr. Eric Najarian. I’m
a resident at White Memorial. We need to speak with you.”
“Go away,” the voice said.
“Dr. Bushnell, please. It’s very important.”
“Nothing involving me is very important. Go away.”
They sensed the man beginning to retreat from the door. Eric pressed the buzzer again.
“It involves the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home,” Laura called out.
A few seconds of silence, and then the door opened a crack. An old man peered out over the safety chain. He was in his seventies at least, and was dressed in a robe and slippers. His silver hair was a disheveled mop. And even from several feet away, Eric could smell alcohol.
“Please, sir,” he said. “Please let us in. We won’t take much of your time.”
Thaddeus Bushnell checked them both up and down, and then pushed the door closed and fumbled the chain free.
“Thank God,” Laura muttered as the door swung open. They stepped inside and immediately exchanged bewildered looks.
The foyer of the place was dark. Back-lit by a dim lamp, Thaddeus Bushnell looked even older than they had first thought. He stood several feet away, leaning heavily on a metal walker, glaring at them.
“Now, what is it?” he growled.
Laura stepped forward to him, and instantly Eric saw the man soften.
“My name’s Laura,” she said gently. “Laura Enders. May we come in and sit down for a bit?”
The old man hesitated, and then turned and led them into a living room that was as depressing as a mausoleum. The furniture, which had probably been elegant at one time, was frayed and dusty. On the cluttered coffee table were several vials of pills and a half-filled bottle of vodka. There were empty bottles
on the floor. If Thaddeus Bushnell was conscious of them, he gave no sign. He maneuvered his walker to a worn, floral-printed easy chair, and sank down into an indentation that seemed permanently molded to his thin frame.
Eric introduced himself again.
“Thank you for seeing us, Dr. Bushnell,” Laura said, taking a seat near him.
Bushnell tapped a nonfiltered cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it on the second try.
“Place needs a woman,” he said. “It’s gone all to hell since Evie died.”
“Your wife?” Laura asked.
“Cleaning lady. My wife died nearly ten years ago. Ol’ Evie went a month or two after that. I don’t suppose you two want a drink?”
“No, but go right ahead,” Eric said.
The old man nodded, and then nodded again. Eric realized that he was drifting off. He leaned over, poured Bushnell a small drink, and held it beneath his face, shaking him gently with his other hand.
“The nights get real lonely,” Bushnell said, taking the glass. “This stuff helps pass the time.”
“Are you a pathologist?” Eric asked.
“Hell, no. I’m a GP. At least I was until I retired.”
“But you’re still a medical examiner?”
“As far as I know I am,” he said. “For a time I kept trying to get my name taken off the goddam county’s list, but they kept telling me to wait until they found someone else who was willing to take over. I tell you, there are so many incompetents in the government, it’s a wonder goddam Khrushchev hasn’t walked right in and taken this whole place over long ago.”
Laura gave Eric a sad look that said she hadn’t missed the reference.
“So you still do work for the county?” she asked.
“White Memorial, that where you said you worked?”
“I do. Yes, sir,” Eric said, glancing again at Laura. “I work in the emergency room.” Once more he could see Bushnell beginning to nod off. “Were you on the staff there?”
The man’s bloodshot eyes opened again.
“Thirty years or more,” he said. “If I could do it all over again, I’d be a goddam vet.”
“But you still work as a medical examiner?”
“You can’t believe it, can you,” the old man said. “Well, neither can I.” He seemed suddenly to perk up. “I keep hearing how this state’s got one of the most advanced forensic departments in the country. Well, I’m here to tell you that that is a bunch of hogwash. There’s no goddam money. There’s incompetence at every step of the line. There’s fancy equipment that no one knows how to use. There’s tests that get sent off and never get done. And there’s old farts like me still on the rolls because the state won’t come up with the cash to pay anyone else.”
“Do you actually do autopsies?” Eric asked.
“Hell no. If I suspect foul play in a death, I turn the whole thing over to one of the state pathologists. But they’re so damned overworked, it’s a wonder one of them hasn’t cut his thumb off during a post. In fact, for all I know, one of them has.”
He snorted a laugh at the notion, and then broke into a fit of coughing. As soon as he had calmed down, he lit another cigarette.
“Do you get called in on a case often?” Eric asked.
“Every few days, maybe. Sometimes I don’t bother answering my phone, though. It serves ’em right for not letting me retire.”
“Dr. Bushnell,” Laura said, “we’re trying to learn something about my brother. His name’s Scott Enders, but you would have known him as Thomas Jordan. This past February, you went to see his body at the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home. From what we can tell, you used fingerprints to identify the body,
and then signed the death certificate. Do you remember that?… Dr. Bushnell?”
The old man had nodded off again, his burning cigarette still dangling from his lips.
“I can’t believe he hasn’t fried himself yet,” Eric exclaimed, pulling the cigarette free and dropping it into an already-overflowing ashtray.
“Can you imagine him fingerprinting a case and searching out a next of kin?” Laura asked.
“I can’t imagine him leaving this house.”
“Is it worth pushing things further?”
Eric studied the man and then shook his head.
“He may have signed a death certificate,” he said, “but it’s doubtful he did any more extensive research than peeking into a casket.”
Laura took a tattered afghan from the couch and wrapped it around the old physician’s lap. Then, quietly, the two of them stood and left the house.
“Does this make any sense to you?” she asked as she closed the door behind them.
“No,” he said. “But I’ll bet it makes sense to one Donald Devine. Something really ugly is going on here.”
Hand in hand, they walked to where they had parked.
“Want to come up to my place for a bit?” he asked. “Verdi’d love to serenade you.”
“Another night, maybe. From what you’ve told me, Verdi sounds like my kind of parrot. Tonight I’ve got to be alone for a while to sort some things out. I
would
love you to walk me to the hotel though, if you want.”
They worked their way up Charles Street, then crossed Beacon into the Public Gardens.
“You know, I haven’t traveled a great deal,” Laura said, “but Boston is the most beautiful city I’ve been in.”
“I haven’t traveled at all,” Eric replied, “but Boston’s the only place I really want to live.”
“Does continuing to live here depend on getting that promotion at your hospital?”
“If I want to stay in some area of academic medicine, it probably does.”
“And your chances are good?”
“Fifty-fifty,” he said.
“Well, I hope you get it. But if you don’t, then maybe it’s because something better is in store for you. Yes?”
“Maybe.”
They walked onto the footbridge over the small swan-boat lagoon, and leaned on the concrete railing. Below them, the lights of the city reflected off the still water.
“Have you ever wanted something so badly you were willing to risk hurting someone to get it?” Eric asked suddenly.
“Hardly. My problem’s been never wanting anything badly enough to risk hurting
myself
to get it. Are you talking about the promotion?”
“It’s a hell of a jump right out of residency. Really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“And you have to hurt someone to get it?”
“Not exactly, but … it’s a long story.”
“Eric, I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I believe life is a whole string of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Some of them happen for us, some of them don’t. The worst thing that will happen if you don’t get the promotion is that something else
will
happen for you.”
“I guess.”
“Don’t you see that you’ve already accomplished something that has eluded most people—including me? You’ve found the thing you want to do with your life. You’ve sacrificed and studied and worked like hell, and you’ve made yourself a doctor. Wherever you go for as long as you live, there are people who are going to need what you can do. There are lives you will help change for the better. The promotion is just a thing.
The skills you’ve mastered are much, bigger than that.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
“No maybe’s. You cared enough about it to grind through college and medical school and residency. Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to say these things, because until then I hadn’t ever experienced that kind of caring and commitment. But now I know what it means to be willing to pay a price for something that’s important to you.”
“You mean finding your brother.”
“Yes! I feel totally committed to that, and I’d be willing to endure just about any amount of pain to see things through. But if it came to hurting someone else in order to accomplish what I want … well, I think I’d just find another way.”
“I appreciate your saying those things to me. I really do.” He thought of the caduceus pin. “Tell me,” he asked, “do you sense that the man I pronounced dead was Scott?”
Laura tossed a pebble into the dark water.
“Do you?” she asked.
Once again, the scene at the man’s bedside that February morning crystallized in Eric’s mind. There was no question that he had been distracted by the work he was doing on Russell Cowley, and quite aware that Cowley was a trustee of the hospital. Had his desire for the associate director’s position influenced his decision making? There was so much going on that morning. If he’d had just the derelict to think about, would he have given up as quickly?
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, then,” she said, “if you don’t know for certain, I guess we can still hope.”
She moved closer to him and put her arm around his waist.
“Are you working tomorrow?” she asked.
“Actually, no. I was scheduled to, but this afternoon Reed Marshall, the other chief resident, called
and asked if I would switch days with him. Some sort of appointment the day after tomorrow that he couldn’t get out of.”
“Well, good. In that case, how about letting me take you out for breakfast tomorrow? Afterward, you can take me to the Gates of Heaven to meet your friend Donald.”
“Sounds divine,” he said.
She laughed and turned to him. Before he even realized what was happening, they were kissing—softly at first, then with hunger.
“It’s been so long for me,” she whispered, her fingertips tracing the lines of his face. “So damn long.”
Eric slipped his hands beneath her sweater and explored the silky hollow at the base of her back. The taste of her … the smoothness of her skin … the subtle scent of her hair … one moment each sensation was distinct, isolated in his senses; the next there was only the woman. He felt giddy, intoxicated.
“Don’t stop,” he begged as she lowered her head to his chest.
She pulled herself tightly against him.
“Please hold me, Eric,” she said. “For now, just hold me.”
For nearly half an hour they stood there, holding each other as the reflected moon glittered off the water below. Then, without a word, she took his arm and they headed off toward downtown and the Carlisle.