Stephen White: Critical Conditions

“Yes.” I also got my iced tea. I squeezed a lemon into it and stirred in a packet of sugar. I liked the sweetener that came in either the blue packet or the pink packet but I could never remember which one I liked, so I used sugar unless Lauren was around to remind me whether I preferred the pink or the blue.

“That’s not all my patient is up against. Not only is his wife’s father connected, it turns out her sister is married to some entrepreneur gazillionaire.”

“I’m with you.”

“Good. So the custody eval starts a month ago. John Trent seems like he knows what he’s doing with it. He gets the appropriate releases and does a heads-up interview with my patient. Dani Wu sees the kids. Trent calls me once to ask my opinions and find out how the treatment is going. Between the lines he’s letting me know everything is going to come out like I think it’s going to come out. Kids will live with my patient, with liberal visitation for Mom.”

“But.”

“Yeah. ‘But.’ But earlier this week Trent calls again and says there are some new developments he’s checking out and that I shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about his recommendations, and he implies that now he’s leaning toward Mom.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s it. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About the possibility that Trent’s been compromised by all these power animals that the wife is related to?”

“Sounds far-fetched, Diane. For now I would just take him at his word. See what he has. Maybe the eval revealed some things you don’t know.”

Diane sat back on her chair and lifted her iced tea for the first time. After scoffing at my suggestion that there were things she didn’t know, she said, “Heck, I buy lunch for my favorite conspiracy theorist and this is all I get. I was hoping for a little more Oliver Stone-type intrigue from you.”

“Sorry. Seriously, how much leverage do political types have with people like us, Diane? What can they do? Anyway, you’re talking about interfering with a judicial procedure. The consequences would be devastating if that ever got out. The politicians are much more vulnerable in this situation than John Trent is.”

The specials arrived. Halibut in a chunky tomato broth with capers and chilis. I tasted it. It was delicious. I said, “You’re lucky this is good.”

She felt all around her on the bench and looked on the floor beside her chair. “And you’re lucky I didn’t order any wine. I think I forgot to bring my purse. You’re buying. You’ve heard about Trent’s kid?”

Diane usually forgot her purse. I knew I was buying. I said, “No. What about his kid?”

“Diagnosed with some terrible heart virus. Apparently it’s destroying her heart muscle. She’s real sick. It’s been on the news because of some insurance problems.”

“What kind of insurance problems?”

“One of the usual kinds. The insurers say the treatment the doctors want is experimental and the policy doesn’t cover it.”

I sighed at the familiar refrain. “That’s awful. How old is his kid?”

“Just a baby. Two and a half, I think.”

“Where’s she being treated? Children’s?”

“Yeah.”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad. Apparently, once the heart muscle is infected, the condition is often terminal.”

“God. What about a heart transplant? The insurance will pay for that, won’t they?”

“A cardiologist friend of mine-you know Harriet Lowenstein?-says the problem is the virus. They don’t know how to kill it. If they go ahead and plop in a new heart, it might get infected just like the old one.”

My food was getting cold. I was losing my appetite.

Diane continued eating between sentences. “John Trent is married to that investigative reporter who’s new on Channel 7. You know that at least, don’t you?”

“I don’t watch much television news these days. It stopped being fun last fall. And you know better than anyone that I’m not included in the local gossip circles. If you haven’t told me something interesting, then I probably don’t know anything about it.”

The mention of the events of the previous autumn caused a temporary hush between us. Diane’s husband, Raoul, had been an important part of all that. We didn’t mention it often now.

She dipped a crust of bread in some broth and left it on the lip of her plate. “Well, Trent’s wife-Brenda-is one of those investigative types, specializes in uncovering graft in government and business and industry. Her first big thing had to do with plastic recyclers. She apparently had them shaking in their recycled vinyl boots over kickbacks that were being shoveled to some local politicians.”

“Oh, I did hear about that, maybe from Lauren. One of the district attorneys involved asked Boulder County to supply a special prosecutor, I think. Didn’t some politicians have to resign?”

“Two mayors and a city manager that I know of. One of the mayors, I think from Thornton or Northglenn, even tried to kill himself. His wife walked into their garage, found him hanging from the rafters next to their Buick, and had herself a heart attack on the spot. Turns out the mayor wasn’t actually dead. He was just hanging there asphyxiating watching his wife have a coronary.”

Hearing that story, I should have totally lost my appetite. I did. “Did the guy live?”

“Not exactly the word I would choose to use, but he did survive.”

“What about the wife?”

“Noop.”

I used a sip of iced tea to cover my distaste with the story. “I bet Trent’s wife makes some enemies doing that kind of work.”

Diane shrugged. “Probably no more than a custody evaluator, though.”

“Touché. I guess you get used to it.”

“Have to be thick-skinned, like me. It’s part of the territory. She and John moved here for her career. He gave up a good practice for her. I have to remember that about him, give him some rope. It’s another sign that John Trent must be a progressive thinker.”

My ex-wife had been a producer at one of the Denver TV stations and I was well aware of the musical-chairs nature of local news markets. If John Trent and his wife had really moved to Denver from Kansas, she was moving from a small market to a much larger one. The pressure would be on.

I said, “I don’t know about that, Diane. But he must be a pretty devastated daddy. Are you worried that the situation with his daughter may be interfering with his judgment about the custody eval?”

“I’ve thought about it, but, you know, you and I have both gone through tough times and managed to get our work done. I’ll give John Trent the benefit of the doubt, too.”

“This is worse than anything you or I have gone through, don’t kid yourself. A sick baby? That’s as bad as it gets.”

“You’re probably right, but I’m not just blowing smoke about this political angle. Everybody can be goosed. I don’t trust what I’m seeing with this case. Custody-wise, it’s open-and-shut.”

One of Diane’s few faults was a tendency toward transient clinical myopia. “You always think you know best. You don’t know that it’s open-and-shut; you’re only seeing one side of it. He’s doing the eval, he’s talked to everybody, and you haven’t. Maybe he discovered something. Raoul knows all those people, doesn’t he? The people you’re concerned about, the conservative money crowd? What does he say?”

“He says leave him out of it.”

“Your husband is a wise man, Diane. I think I’ll take his advice. Why don’t you leave me out of it, too?”

“You’re both wimps, you know that?”

“I won’t speak for Raoul, Diane, but I certainly am.”

Her tone didn’t change noticeably as she asked, “How’s Lauren doing?”