Peter Clement - The Inquisitor

"You're talking about Stewart."

"Yes. Do you know him?"

That chuckle again.

He liked the sound of it. She came across as open, friendly, straightforward, and cooperative.

"You might say that. I was his second wife."

Oh, Jesus.

More chuckling. "Hey, it took him five years to drive me crazy. Of course, two people working in the same lab should never have married in the first place, but I'm surprised you've lasted this long with him. What's he done?"

Earl wondered if there were ethical proprieties to discussing a physician under investigation with that physician's ex-wife.

After a second's consideration, he decided no, not if he didn't reveal anything, and she did all the talking. "What I need to know is why he left NYCH in the first place. I mean, his credentials were good, but he's always been rather evasive about it, and I wondered if anything irregular had happened there."

No chuckles rolled across the line this time, only the sound of her breathing.

"Look, if you don't feel comfortable talking about this," he said, "perhaps I should speak with someone else."

"It's not that. I may be his ex, but I don't want to hurt him. Is he in trouble?"

Earl weighed his answer. "In a word, yes."

"And what's your part in it?"

"I'm trying to find out if he deserves the trouble he's in."

"Is this to do with some of the chatter I saw on the Internet yesterday about his near-death research? There are rumors going around that he may have been staging events with patients."

"That's part of what I want to find out."

More breathing.

"I know your reputation," she said after a few seconds, "and not just from recent events here. Stewart spoke about you before he left. We were already divorced, yet the guy had no one else to confide in. By then I'd stopped being mad at him all the time, at least enough to feel sorry for him, and we had a young daughter. So for her sake we tried to be civil."

Earl remembered a dark-haired teenage girl who had shown up in Buffalo a few times. Stewart had proudly introduced her around the hospital, but then the visits seemed to peter out. "Yes, I think I met her. Very pretty."

The woman let out an industrial-strength sigh. "I'm not surprised you never heard what happened in eighty-nine. Both the hospital and the medical school hushed it up." She sighed again, the sound more leaden than before, almost closer to a moan.

Earl leaned back in his chair and said nothing. The art of medicine is first and foremost to get people to tell you what's wrong, even when it's painful for them to do so, and his years in ER had made him good at it. He could tell when to prod and when to just listen. Over the phone, unable to see a face, he couldn't be as certain, but what he'd heard conveyed the kind of heavy-layered regret over long-lost dreams that could build up forever. In other words, she might be ripe to unburden herself.

"He left NYCH because a colleague of ours, Jerome Wilcher, committed suicide, and Stewart blamed himself." Another deep breath sounded, ingoing this time. "I wish I could say unjustly so, but I can't. They'd been longtime rivals in the department, and both were after the position of chairman. In the lab, they were equally brilliant, but Stewart outmaneuvered Jerome politically, a combination of being smarter, faster, and more ruthless at that game.

"Also, rumors began to circulate about the integrity of Jerome's experimental data. No hard accusations, just whispers- yet you know how devastating that can be to a scientist's credibility. Jerome had been in charge of research trials at academic centers all over the United States- visited them repeatedly- yet one by one they revoked his appointments and grants. After Stewart became chairman, Jerome lodged several formal complaints against him with the dean, claiming sabotage, but got nowhere. He published less and less, until in the fall of eighty-nine they found him swinging from the water pipes in his lab."

"Good God!"

"In a way, he finally got his accusations against Stewart to stick. Though nobody could prove anything, the dean didn't want Stewart around, in case the story leaked to the press. In exchange for a voluntary resignation, glowing letters of reference would be provided to anyplace that was interested in him."

Son of a bitch. "Is that when you took over the department?" Earl sounded more angry than he intended. But even though it had happened long ago, he despised the kind of smarmy moves by which hospitals passed their problem staff on to other unsuspecting institutions. Would it have changed his own recommendation that St. Paul's take the man? Maybe not. But he didn't like being lied to, not by Stewart, not by a whole administration, and especially not by his alma mater. What made his resentment feel so fresh? That kind of game still went on today, particularly at teaching hospitals, where they valued academic reputations more than truth.

"Down, boy," she said. "Not only didn't I benefit, but I got tarred by his brush, despite the divorce and the fact I'd been publishing before we ever met. They couldn't kick me out, but they made it clear with pointed hints that I could also leave. Nobody likes seeing faces around that remind everyone of how dirty their own research games got. But you know how it is in a center like NYCH: publish enough, and eventually anything can be forgiven, including having married the wrong man. I've been chair for five years."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to take what happened out on you."

"Don't worry. That's all water under a long-ago bridge."

If you say so, he thought, still getting the distinct impression he'd probed old scars that could still hurt. "Why didn't you leave?"

"The best reason in the world- Carol, the daughter you met. A teenager in high school with friends doesn't want to move away."

He couldn't think of anything else to ask and was ready to say goodbye when she added, "I don't think he could do what they're suggesting on the Internet."

"Pardon?"

"Tamper with data."

"Oh? Why?"

"He may be a son of a bitch when it comes to people, but science is like a religion to him. He wouldn't desecrate it."

She had a point. But his original question remained: would Stewart commit murder to save his reputation within that religion? Then, knowing the passions involved, Earl wondered what someone close to a wrongfully disgraced researcher might be willing to do. "This Jerome Wilcher- did he have any family?"

"All I ever knew about him is that he'd been divorced almost a decade earlier- apparently the guy was a womanizer- and his ex-wife didn't come to the funeral. No surprise there. She took him to the cleaners and, from what I heard, kept coming back for more, to the point that he apparently started hiding his assets. They never had kids, his parents were dead, and he had no siblings. There were a few red-eyed women at the service, and from the suspicious way they were eyeing each other I figured they might all have been his former girlfriends. Word had it that one of them actually went home after the service and tried to hang herself as well."

This time Earl remained silent, letting what she had said percolate.

"Why? You thinking somebody set Stewart up, avenging the way he sabotaged Jerome?" she asked after a few seconds.

"It crossed my mind."

"After all these years? I doubt it. Jerome could be an excessively self-obsessed, compulsive scientist, like so many of our breed. Heroes in the lab, losers in the real world, and especially lousy at marriage. However much Jerome's women missed him at the time, nobody I can think of would still care about him that much."

"That's harsh."

"You're probably more acquainted with the crossovers in the research game, the ones who treat people in addition to rats, like Stewart. They have a smattering of human graces. The purists, like Jerome, wilt in sunlight."