Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

Or how the other two matters she’d mentioned in her letter – I can’t leave and let them go unresolved – might tie in with the discrepancies in her phone bill. Suppose she actually reached Chaz at the maternity center and threatened to go public about the M and M cases if he didn’t let her go. That call could have been what got her killed. It would certainly be a conversation Chaz would not want revealed. If that were the case, however, wouldn’t it have been simpler for him just to admit she’d contacted him, then make up some benign story about what was said? He shouldn’t have had to risk an elaborate lie and claim he never even spoke with her. No, there had to be some other explanation.

But empty theorizing wouldn’t get him anywhere. He needed some way to check out his hunches.

He shifted his gaze to the morbidity-mortality reports that seemed to be so in order and looked at where Melanie Collins’s signature appeared.

Last night over the phone she’d gone on at length about Chaz. A lot of what she said was, “Kelly told me he berated her night and day… Kelly said his rages frightened her… Kelly felt repulsed when he wanted sex.” Maybe Kelly also confided how Chaz mismanaged his patients. Or perhaps Melanie had seen for herself.

But would Earl mind if he called her, after being so explicit about dealing with his former classmates himself? Surely not. That was for people like Tommy Leannis, who clammed up to outsiders.

He dialed her number and got a busy signal.

Try again later.

In the meantime he went back out to the Jeep and carted in the boxes that Dan had discovered in the White House. Now why the hell had his father collected all these? he wondered, first unpacking what amounted to stacks of birth records from the home and laying them out in piles on the floor. At least they were already in chronological order, spanning the years from 1955 to 1975. He made a quick estimate of the total by counting out one hundred of the documents, then using the height of them as a measure. Approximately thirty-two hundred women delivered their babies over the twenty-year period, a good two-thirds of them in the first decade of operation. Each record had a six-digit number, same as a hospital chart, but carried no identifying information about the mother other than her age and area code. The personal data, he figured, must have been kept separate for confidentiality reasons. Flipping through them, he saw that most of the women had been young, some lived in upstate New York, but the majority came from New York City. The specifics as to the infants – sex, physical status at birth, the presence of any congenital defects – was standard. The death certificates – he’d thumbed through only twenty-one of those for the home – were in keeping with the number of babies he would have expected to die, given the perinatal mortality rate of seven per thousand that prevailed at the time. The papers also indicated that a great majority of the infants became wards of the state in public orphanages, yet in a separate pile, the records showed that the home arranged private adoptions for 180 of the babies. The bottom line – everything seemed in impeccable order.

Next he laid out the birth records for the maternity center in Saratoga Springs. There’d be no site to visit there. Dan had stuck in a note saying the building had been torn down in the 1980s, replaced by a health spa.

The height of this pile reflected nearly double the number of births at the maternity center as compared to the home, six thousand by his estimate. But the place had approximately the same number of infant deaths, only twenty to be exact. Money and good prenatal care halved the going rate for mortalities.

He spent the next few hours meticulously studying the documents but still couldn’t find anything wrong. Another time, perhaps, when he wasn’t so tired, and he began to gather up the papers, wondering if for now he shouldn’t lock everything in the White House for safekeeping. But having had virtually no sleep for thirty-six hours, he settled on putting the records in his drug safe instead.

His gut started to burn like an overused muscle, the result of too much tea, no supper, and a whole lot of frustration. He made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk.

This time when he called Melanie, she answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

She sounded tired.

“Hi.”

“Mark! Are you still in New York?”

“No, I’ve retreated back to the woods.”

“Ahhh – that’s a waste.”

“I know.” He laughed.

“I’d like to see you,” she replied.

“Next time I’m in town.”

“Mark, I could use some country air.” It sounded like an order.

Whoops! “Great. Let’s arrange it sometime. But after hunting season’s over. It’s like a remake of Deliverance around here right now.” What were white lies for but to let everyone back out of embarrassing corners with feelings intact?

She gave her throaty chuckle. “How about a couple of weeks from now?” she persisted.

Oh, brother. On second thought, why not just have her come? Like nuts to the squirrels, it would give Nell and company enough to chew on the whole damn winter. “Melanie, I have to ask you something. Do you mind if we talk business a sec?”

“Shoot!” Her voice had snapped to attention.

“I’ve been going over old records related to Kelly’s death, specifically my father’s old medical chart on her. In it I found photocopies of M and M reports on two cases of dig toxicity in 1974, the year of her disappearance. Her name was on the order sheets, as well as yours. And get this, the staff person initialing the orders was hubby Chaz.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to make of them or why they’d be there. I wondered if maybe Kelly asked my father to review the cases because she thought there was wrongdoing somewhere.”

“On the part of whom?” She sounded astonished.

“Her husband. I thought perhaps she’d been looking for something to hold over his head in order to keep him at bay, as part of her plan to leave him.”

Silence reigned for a few seconds. “I see. I suppose that makes sense.”

“What I wanted to know, Melanie, was if you can recall anything suspect about Chaz Braden’s clinical work that year. In particular, do you remember any issues around his management of patients on digoxin?”

“Not generally. Do you know the patient names?”

“Not yet. I only have chart numbers.”

She chuckled yet again, the tone a pitch higher this time. “Sorry. You’ll pardon me if I don’t recall all the cases I wrote orders on. Will you be looking up the original charts?”

“No, Earl Garnet’s getting those-” He could have kicked himself. Blurting out to the likes of Melanie Collins that Earl was helping him – what an asshole move. More than anyone, with her intuition about Kelly being in love, she could nail Earl as the man. God, he sucked like an amateur at this sleuthing stuff. “I needed someone who’d been in her class to question her contemporaries,” he quickly added. “Had to twist his arm, yet he finally agreed.”

“But Mark, I could have helped you.”

Yikes. “Oh, I knew you would, Melanie. The thing is, since I’m basically questioning if Chaz’s competency was an issue back then, the inquiry could get nasty, and I thought it better to ask someone well beyond the long arm of the Bradens.” Amazing how quickly he could come up with a credible lie when he had to.

“Chaz isn’t the brilliant man his father is,” Melanie said, after a long silence. “But he makes up for it by being fastidious. Drives people nuts, the way he always double-checks and micromanages things, yet by putting in long hours does get things done. A real workaholic. So let’s just say he wouldn’t be chief without ‘Daddy’ pulling the strings. But out and out negligence? No way. Not even ‘Daddy’ could cover that up these days.”