“You really hate her, don’t you?”
“You bet I do,” said Gibby. “Wouldn’t you if you were a nurse?”
“So what are you going to do?” “Watch her. Mr. Benedict said he’d hold off for a few days. If we could catch her before the end of the week, he’d sit on my report without any action until then. But if we’re still sure then and can’t prove it—” she shrugged. “He can’t do any more than that. The hospital can’t afford to keep her.”
“All right,” said Ned Thompson, grimly. He poured more coffee, and stared up wearily at the clock. “If you’re going to nail her in that time, you’re going to need some help. You’ve got it.”
She was small, and wiry, and tied her brown hair into a bun on the back of her neck — which did nothing whatever to enhance her beauty. As Ned Thompson blinked at her across the nursing station he realized that he had simply never noticed her before. He had known she was there, he had seen her a dozen times — in the corridors, in the medications alcove, in the chart room. But there had been nothing about her to draw his active attention. She seemed deliberately a trifle dowdy, a quiet brown blob of nothing, standing at the counter, arranging medications in little cups on a tray. Three small syringes lay on the tray also, prepared for use, with little pledgets of alcohol sponge around the needles.
Jane Davis. A name as devoid of sparkle as the girl herself. Thirty-five years old, she looked forty-five. With a little care, Ned reflected, she could have looked twenty-five.
His eyes slid down to her arms, and looked quickly away. She wore a long-sleeved sweater of white wool, tight at the wrists. Nothing would be learned from her arms. She gave him a vacant smile as she moved out into the corridor with her tray. His smile was a barely concealed grimace.
Watch her, Gibby had said, and they had planned how to divide the job. Now he realized how impossible the plan would be to carry out. Fourth floor was mixed medical and surgical, but he had patients and obligations on all five floors of the hospital. Gibby had five floors of nurses to supervise. Even when he was on Fourth and free to watch, there were limitations. He could hardly walk into the nurses’ lounge. He couldn’t follow the woman into every room. He couldn’t be sure when a patient was to have a hypo, and then be there to see it given. He couldn’t even be sure that any hypo he happened to see given by her actually contained the narcotic in the amount that was charted.
He knew only one thing for certain: somewhere on her person she carried a small vial with a rubber stopper. Some of the narcotic ordered for some of the patients went into that vial, the patient receiving only a half or a third of the dose ordered. Sometimes all the medication went into the vial, with the patient receiving sterile water of saline in substitution. But the chart would say M.S. gr. ⅙ or perhaps Demerol 100 mg. or Dilaudid gr. ⅓ given per hypo, 3:40 P.M.
Search her handbag or her pockets? Gibby was very hesitant. She could try, if the opportunity presented itself. But it would have to be done with the utmost caution. Give the woman the faintest hint that she was being watched, and the game was over. Miss Davis would become ill, miss a day or two, perhaps-come back for a day, and then express her regrets to the hospital and leave for good.
“That’s why we can’t alert the whole staff on the floor,” Gibby had said. “Only you and I and Mr. Benedict know. We mustn’t let anybody else know.”
“What about the other interns?” Ned Thompson said. “Endicott spends a lot of time on Fourth. And Fischer could keep an eye on her.”
Gibby shook her head. “She’d get on to it too soon. She’d know she was being watched from the first day. Ned, this girl has been through this time after time. She knows all the tricks, believe me. I just hope she doesn’t know too many that I don’t know—”
Endicott was not told, and neither was Fischer. Ned had finished his rounds on Third and Fifth by noon, saw three new patients after lunch, and completed rounds on Fourth just at 3:00 when the shift of nurses changed.
Now he placed the chart he was writing back in the rack and walked down the corridor toward the surgical Solarium at the end of the wing. Davis was there, passing out medications. She didn’t even look at him. He stopped to talk to Mrs. Cartwright with the gall bladder, a large lady snoring in the corner bed. He checked her heart rate and examined her eyes and fingernails, and inquired about the itching that had bothered her. He wrote for a repeat serum bilirubin to be done in the morning, and added a homeopathic fraction to Mrs. Cartwright’s bedtime sedative dose (“I haven’t slept a wink for the last three nights, Doctor,” she complained, and he valiantly resisted the impulse to suggest that if she slept less during the daytime she would sleep more at night.) He checked Mrs. Cartwright very carefully, but his eyes never left Jane Davis.
And he saw nothing. Mrs. Barnes, back from surgery that morning, had received her first hypo. Ned made a mental note to check back in an hour and see how it was holding. But he knew he probably wouldn’t be able to if things suddenly got busy.
At the other end of the hall he stopped to see Mr. Wilcox, a routine visit with a conversation so well rehearsed that Ned could repeat it in his sleep.
“About time you got up here,” Mr. Wilcox roared. “I tell you, Doc, I ain’t staying in this bed another minute, so help me if I drop dead! Damn’ foolishness, lying around here running up a bill.” He beat hammy paws on a massive girth of chest. Mr. Wilcox’s coronary regimen did not agree with him, and never had since the night he was brought to the hospital, gray-faced and shocky, closer to death than he had ever dreamed he would venture. He had been cajoled, reasoned with, and browbeaten into complete bed rest for thirty days, but he had fought every inch of the way. “I tell you, if you don’t let me up today I’m going to pile out of bed and run the hundred yard dash up the hall.”
Dr. Thompson grinned. “You might make it up there, but you’d never make it back. Why not relax and enjoy it?”
“Relax! So help me, Doc, I haven’t moved a finger in two weeks!”
“Fine! You’re an awful liar, George, but fine! Maybe if the boss okays it we’ll let you up in a chair this week.”
George Wilcox’s florid face was suddenly serious. “No kidding, Doc, is everything really going all right?”
“We sure hope so. Looks like par for the course.”
“The cardiogram was all right?”
“It showed changes — the right kind, this time. Let’s keep it that way.”
Ned grinned and pushed out into the corridor. Back in the nursing station, Davis was returning again with her tray. Three new patients had arrived for him to see, two of them admitted for complete diagnostic workups. He sighed, and turned to the new charts. If only he could take her by the collar, turn her upside down, and shake that little vial out—
But he couldn’t. He glared at her back and headed down the hall to see the first new patient.
He found Gibby on Second an hour or so later and said, “Let me see your keys.”
“What for?”
“I’d like a look at the narcotics drawer.”
Gibby found the tiny master key on her ring, and pulled open a large drawer in the medications alcove. “It isn’t just narcotics — we keep our emergency box in here, as well as all of our injection-type medications. Keeps them all under the control of a single nurse so she knows what’s where, and what should be stocked. Take a look.”
He had seen the drawer open before, of course, but had never paid much attention to it. In a busy hospital the intern’s job was to decide when a sixth grain of morphine sulphate was to be given to a patient, and how often, and to write the order on the patient’s chart accordingly. It was the responsibility of the medications nurse to see that it was given. He had never, he reflected, even seen many of the medications he had ordered during his internship months. Now he lifted the narcotics tray out of the drawer, blinking at the tubes and ampules critically.