Prophet (31 page)

Mrs. Westfall asked, “Could you hear the other girl’s voice at all?”

“No, not from where I was. My counselor and some other lady . . . maybe it was a nurse, but she didn’t look like one . . . were talking and I couldn’t hear. But I heard Annie say to the other girl, ‘Are you all right?’ and then somebody out in the hall with her, one of the counselors, told her, ‘She’s all right, just come in here,’ and then the doctor came into my room, and they closed the door, and he started doing the
abortion on me and . . .”

They could tell Mary was crying.

“And . . .” Mary struggled to speak. “And it just hurt so much . . . and I told the counselor, ‘What’s he doing, you said it wouldn’t hurt,’ and she just held me down, and I started screaming, I couldn’t help it, and the doctor yelled at me to hold still and he said, ‘You want your parents to find out?’ So I tried to keep quiet, but then I heard Annie screaming . . .”

Mary broke down completely.

Deanne also broke into bitter weeping, and Leslie embraced her.

THAT EVENING, TROUBLED
and torn with emotion, Leslie reported her findings to John, Carl, and Mom Barrett around the Barrett dining table, referring to her notes.

“From the way Mary described it, the doctors were in a hurry, rushing it, not gentle but cold and insensitive. Apparently Mary got through it without serious physical injury, but . . .”

“But Annie wasn’t so lucky,” said John.

“No,” Leslie agreed. “She wasn’t so lucky. I guess Friday is a busy day for them. According to Mrs. Westfall, the clinic runs a van to three different schools—Jefferson High, Monroe Junior High, and Gronfield Junior High—to handle the girls who can’t supply their own transportation. They do all their school referrals on Fridays and Saturdays so the girls can recover over the weekend and not miss school and hopefully get around their parents finding out.”

Mom asked, “You mean the schools send the girls over there?”

Leslie nodded. “The clinic gives a discount if any girl is referred by a school counselor. This is a business we’re talking about, involving a lot of money. We’re talking about fifty abortions per day for a price of $350 each, many of them paid for by state funds and the others paid for with cash or credit card only, in advance, with virtually no paper trail, no regulation, no accountability. There is room for corruption. But be that as it may . . .” Leslie eyed her notes again. “This particular day must have been hectic—like I said, on a good day the clinic will do up to fifty abortions—and Mary says the abortion was very painful and, she thought, rushed, and she was in a lot of pain afterward. The girls
spent about a half hour in the recovery room, and since there didn’t seem to be any major problems they were given a sheet of follow-up instructions and a month’s worth of birth control pills and taken out to the van. Mary says she was in a lot of pain, with a lot of bleeding, which eventually stopped. As for Annie, she had to be helped, practically carried, back to the van. They were taken out the back door of the clinic—so they wouldn’t be seen, according to Mary—and then taken back to the school where they spent the rest of the school day, which would have been an hour or so, in the nurse’s office, lying on beds and recovering.”

Carl added, “And the school records just marked them as being in school, not absent for that day.”

John responded, “So it was a good thing we checked with the teachers first.”

“Sly move.” Carl looked at his notes. “Mr. Pomeroy marked her absent from U.S. Government, fifth period, and . . . Mrs. Chase marked her absent from Art, sixth period. Deanne heard from three of Annie’s other teachers who taught morning classes, and they marked her present. So it matches what Mary said.”

John looked at Carl’s notes. “Gone for half the day, and her parents none the wiser. How’s that for a new interpretation of in loco parentis?”

“Well,” said Leslie, “it all has to do with privacy.”

“Yeah,” said Carl, “so Annie died privately when she could have lived publicly.”

Leslie didn’t argue with that. “Granted.”

“All that aside,” John interjected, “this whole thing raises some serious questions. How many women go through that place every week? How many minors? And what do we even know about the doctors, the staff, the hygienic standards?”

“Virtually nothing, and that’s my concern,” said Leslie. “As far as we know, over four thousand abortions are safely performed in this country every day, and we’re simply dealing with an anomaly—one very bad apple. But how do we know that for sure? How many other bad apples are out there? How can we find out? Besides, one is one too many. Listen, whatever Marilyn Westfall knows, she’s pieced together by talking to people who’ve either had abortions at that clinic or who have worked there. But it is in little pieces, none of it is provable, and
just try finding something out directly. The clinic can hide behind the reproductive privacy laws and never have to come out.”

Mom shook her head. “Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for those laws—and I didn’t vote for Hiram Slater.”

Leslie admitted, “I voted for both.”

John ventured, “You sound like you regret it.”

Leslie gave a wry smile. “I’m watching and listening—let’s just put it that way.”

“So how’s Deanne Brewer taking all this?”

Leslie breathed a deep sigh. “She’s holding up. It’s hard for her, hard for both of them, but they want to know.”

“We’ll have to be sure we don’t let Max get too riled.”

Carl asked, “But who are these doctors? We must be able to find that out.”

“Sure, we can find out,” said Leslie. “But it’s interesting how Mary has no idea who they were. Those doctors go through the whole thing so fast the girls hardly even see their faces. There are no doctor/patient relationships, no introductions, nothing. And along those lines, the clinic tries to minimize the paper trail by paying the doctors in cash, no 1099s, no W-2s.

“But if you’re looking for some way to link the clinic with Annie Brewer, I’ve thought of four things: Number One, every patient has a chart—a record of the procedure, what was done, what the results were, and so forth—and every chart has a little tear-off coupon at the bottom. After the doctor does the abortion, he signs the chart and the coupon, tears off that coupon, and puts it in his pocket. At the end of the day he then turns in a whole stack of coupons so he can get paid. Now that would be one way to tie a doctor to a patient.”

“So if Annie’s chart still exists, that would be evidence,” John said, “if she used her real name.”

“She didn’t,” said Leslie. “But Mary knew what her code name was: Judy Medford.”

“Judy Medford,” John rehearsed as he wrote it down.

“A lot of the girls use code names. The clinic doesn’t mind as long as the same name is always used by the same patient. Incidentally, Mary’s code name was Madonna.”

“So there’s still hope,” said Carl.

“Hm?” asked Leslie.

John nodded. He and Carl had talked about this.

Carl explained, “Well, think of it: Here comes Max Brewer into the clinic, asking if they did an abortion on his daughter Annie Brewer and making so much trouble they have to call the cops to get him out of there. If you were running that clinic and found out one of your patients died and her old man was after you, what would you do?”

Mom had no trouble with the answer. “I’d get rid of all the records. I’d get rid of anything that had anything to do with Annie Brewer.”

Leslie and John didn’t dive in to agree. Leslie countered, somewhat reservedly, “That would be . . . pretty dishonest.”

But John just looked at her, prodding further thought with raised eyebrows.

Leslie asked him, “Do you think they’d do that, John?”

John pursed his lips, scanned the table for the answer, then replied, “If they thought they could get away with it.”

Carl finished his point. “But if they didn’t know Annie Brewer’s phony name was phony . . .”

“They wouldn’t know which records to purge,” said John. “So we may still have a chance here.”

Leslie went back to her notes. “Okay then, here’s Number Two: Every woman, every girl, has to sign a consent form. Whether they understand it or not, whether the form really informs them of the dangers or not, they have to sign it to get an abortion. Number Three, the clinic probably has a daily schedule sheet for each day’s abortions. If they’ve kept that record, then Annie, alias Judy Medford, would be on it. Number Four, there might be a bookkeeping entry or a receipt for Annie’s $350. She did pay in cash, isn’t that right?”

John nodded. “I called Max about that, and he said Annie’s savings account shows a $350 withdrawal the Thursday before the abortion.”

“Okay . . . so there we have four possible documents that could establish Annie being at the clinic.”

“Now if we could only get those records . . .”

Leslie shook her head. “It’s going to take a lawyer, John.”

John searched the card file in his head for a name. “I know a lawyer we can talk to: Aaron Hart. Maybe he can get us a subpoena or something.” Then he scanned his notes, saying to no one in particular, “But
what do we have to show him? We’re sure now that Annie was at the Women’s Medical Center for an abortion on the 24th of May and that she died two days later, on the 26th . . .”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘sure.’ Our witness Mary has vanished back into the woodwork.”

“Hoo boy. We’ve got to hope we can draw her back out somehow. But besides Mary, we have handcopied excerpts from an autopsy report that suggests Annie died from a botched abortion. Dr. Meredith says we really need the original, along with the pathologist himself.”

“And there’s Rachel Franklin, who can assert that she was given a phony pregnancy test result, as if that has anything to do with it.”

Carl added, “And we’ve just heard about the $350 taken from Annie’s bank account.”

“And we have the circumstantial stuff,” said Leslie. “The van running from the three schools, and Jefferson High being one of them.”

“And the Friday factor, the . . . well, the coincidence of the day the school-referred abortions are performed and the day of Annie’s illness.”

“Well,” said Leslie, “I know one thing I’m going to do, and that’s get together with Deanne and try once again to track down Denning, the hospital pathologist. If he’s still on the planet anywhere, we’ve got to find him and get him to attest to the fact that Annie died from a botched abortion. But by all means let’s get an appointment with that lawyer before the trail gets any colder.”

“So . . .” John ventured, “you’re in?”

“I have my views on all this,” said Leslie, “and I’m no witch-hunter. Choice is still choice, and privacy is still privacy. But an innocent girl is dead. I’ve seen and heard enough. I’m in.”

JOHN TRUDGED UP
the stairs to his apartment at about 8 that night, fumbled with the key in the lock, and finally got inside, where he flopped on the couch, his forearm over his eyes, tired, troubled, not wanting to move, wanting only to lie there and process, process, process. He had to get away from the emotion and the momentum of this thing before he got carried away. Regardless of what the others thought, felt, were doing, or were going to do, what was
he
going to do? Where did he stand on all this? He had to sort it out before going
one step further.

All right. First of all, was he convinced Annie Brewer had died at the hands of a sloppy abortionist? Yes, he was. But that wouldn’t mean much if he couldn’t prove it, and proving it would be troublesome and, if he wasn’t careful, hazardous. Here he’d be, the supposedly impartial, reliable newsman, caught in an activity that would brand him a pro-lifer or, worse yet, an anti-choicer. That might be bad for ratings, and Ben Oliver wouldn’t like that.

But what about the wrongness of it? he wondered. Was what happened to Annie Brewer wrong? He thought so. Okay, how wrong? Certainly a skilled lawyer could demonstrate that the physician—indeed, the whole clinic—had acted within the law, according to their good faith judgment; and if so, the Brewers, and by association John Barrett and Company, would be left high and dry without a bona fide complaint.