Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“What about in ‘seventy-four?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Those days he was only a few years out of a cardiac residency and up-to-date in his training, so he appeared to do pretty well. As son of the big man, he certainly got the benefit of any doubts over his clinical abilities. I don’t think anyone in the hospital besides his father and friends of Kelly knew about his weekend drinking then. We only learned of it through her and what we saw for ourselves at parties up there. The truth is, most people at NYCH didn’t even realize what a bastard he was until much later.”

“So there could have been more chance of an error by him going undetected in ‘seventy-four?”

“It’s worth a thought, isn’t it? Certainly no one would have been keeping a suspicious eye on him. Listen, Mark, I have to go. Rounds start at seven, and Monday’s always a monster for consults in the ER. When you know the names of those patients, give me a call. And I’m penciling in a visit with you for two weeks from now.”

He thanked her and said good night. The first thing that came to mind after hanging up had nothing to do with the case.

If he kept picking the Melanies of the world, he told himself, he might turn into another Collins – a middle-aged physician coming on to horny, lonely thirtysomethings for sex and company. The thought gave him the creeps. Yet if someone as successful and good-looking as she could end up that way…

He eyed his desk. Paperwork and unopened mail, never something he attended to promptly in the best of times, had piled up more than usual since Kelly’s body had been found. And he had his own monster day tomorrow, the weeks before the snow flew always being a busy period, his elderly patients needing flu shots and final checkups before they tucked themselves in for the winter. Tucking in… exactly what he needed to do for himself. He was beat. He detoured by the closet, then took himself and his trusty bat to bed.

Monday, November 19, 8:30 A.M.

New York City

The rhythmic electricity in the streets of Manhattan never changed for Earl. Even in old thirties movies Fred Astaire could be dancing along Times Square, and in the background there would be the purring motors, strident horns, thousands of teeming footsteps and bobbing heads, all syncopated to the buzz of chattering voices and leaving little doubt where Busby Berkeley or Gershwin got their inspiration. These days, he figured, those same rhythms spawned the beat to hip-hop, but the sound remained the same, and it washed over him as he walked down Second Avenue toward New York City Hospital.

Standing in the building’s shadow, waiting for the red to change at the intersection of Thirty-third, he closed his eyes. The familiar cacophony carried him back in time, to the point he imagined he would open his eyes again to find Kelly, Melanie, Tommy, and Jack at his side, impatiently waiting at that same stoplight, fretting about morning rounds.

He blinked and was alone. The two who were dearest to him in those days were dead – Jack, his closest friend, who’d sacrificed his life for him, and Kelly. Tommy had parlayed his B-student vexations into the stuff of a grade-A whine-ass, and Melanie, always a coquette, had apparently become the female counterpart to a roué.

The light changed, and he started across, huddled in his raincoat as wind and drizzle gusted up Thirty-third from the East River.

The cement-and-glass structure where he’d been forged into a doctor loomed over him, its upper stories lost in fog. For an instant it reclaimed the hold it used to exert on his nerve, jacking up his heartbeat and giving the acid in his stomach a stir before it just as quickly became simply another hospital, no different from the hundreds he’d visited in various official capacities throughout his long career.

Still, when the sliding doors opened to receive him, and hospital smells assaulted his nose, he felt caught in the crosscurrents of then and now.

Security was as meticulous as in his own St. Paul’s, the officers checking photo ID, scanning him down for metal, even having him remove his shoes. “No stinky feet,” he murmured, smiling to himself and missing Janet after his night alone in the hotel.

His grin must have made him look suspicious because a frowning guard gave him another extra thorough once-over with his wand before sending him through. But they did have his visitor’s badge waiting. Mark had obviously been on the job as far as greasing the administrative wheels.

He set out for medical records, pushing through the rush of white-coated students, interns, and residents, all scurrying after the flapping white coats of their appointed staff person and engaged in the constant banter of questions and answers that had been the method of choice for teaching medicine since the days of Socrates.

“What’s the differential of a solitary swollen red joint?” demanded an elegant gray-haired woman leading her pack into the outpatient’s department.

“Traumatic, inflammatory, septic,” a blond young man with the shortest clinical jacket in the group snapped back at her.

“Very good. Now what’s the most likely diagnosis in the inflammatory category?”

“Which joint?” demanded a woman with red hair pulled back in a ponytail.

The staff woman’s eyes arched in a show of approval. “Good question. The case we’re about to see involves a knee.”

“Gout,” the redhead said without hesitation.

The group disappeared through a swinging door.

Earl passed a treatment room off ER where another youthful trainee, this one masked and gloved, frowned mightily as he wielded a suture and hemostat over a child’s lacerated cheek. Pulling the knotted thread tight, he reached for scissors on a sterile tray, fumbled them, and they fell to the floor. Glancing around, he quickly retrieved them and brought them back into his sterile field.

It’s not my turf, Earl tried to tell himself, then thought, What the bloody hell! “Excuse me,” he said, sticking his head in the door before contaminated steel touched flesh. “Get a new set and change your gloves!”

The young man went crimson behind the white mask, even his ears turning scarlet. “Yes, sir!” he said.

Earl watched him comply, then added, “You pull that again in this lifetime, I’ll personally bounce you from the program.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned back into the corridor, but not so quickly that he missed the who-was-that-mean-ass frown appear on the would-be doctor’s brow.

Memory led him the rest of the way through the labyrinth of elevators, stairwells, and hallways to the lower levels where, in the bottom layer, like a sediment of secrets, a low-ceilinged subbasement the size of a city block held a half century’s worth of clinical files.

“A tomb,” Kelly had once called it, striking a dramatic pose, “where the fates of a million souls are stored.”

The place gave him the creeps. There had been perks, however, to their working down here on chart audits, usually at night and often alone. Earl smiled, recalling how they had sometimes put the maze created by rows and rows of shelves loaded with charts to good use, quietly engaging in a few secrets of their own.

A plump, gray-haired receptionist greeted him at the front desk. “Ah yes, Dr. Garnet, Dr. Roper had us prepare what you have clearance to review.” Bifocals dangled from around her neck on a gold chain and a pin depicting Snoopy holding a paw to his mouth, the bubble caption reading SHHH!, decorated her collar. “Here is the woman’s chart; it’s still active. As you’ll see, she’s had a ton of visits over the years, and is now a patient in our geriatric wing. Been here three months. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to talk with her. She had another stroke thirteen days ago.”