"This woman's my patient," the resident said.
"Could you please tell me what's going on?"
"I came here and found her dead in bed," Eric said. "Could someone please get the E.K.G hooked up.
I need an amp of epi now. Everyone get back-we're going to shock her again."
"What were you doing in here?" the bewildered resident asked.
Eric ignored the question, and twice more administered high-voltage shocks.
"Keep pumping, please," he ordered. "Give the epi. Have we got a tracing yet?"
Several medical students, the respiratory therapist, and a medical technologist added to the crowd that was building in the room. Seconds later Joe Silver raced through the door.
"Najarian, what the hell?"
Eric raised his hand, trying to calm his chief while at the same time scanning the E.K.G tracing.
There was no cardiac activity whatever.
"Give her an amp of bicarb, please," he said.
There was an edge of panic in his voice.
Joe Silver's eyes were blazing as he pushed through the crowd to the bedside. Eric felt a suffocating tightness building in his own chest.
"What in the hell are you up to?" Silver demanded.
"I came here to see Norma, found her dead in bed, and called a code."
"She was checked less than an hour ago and she was fine," a nurse offered.
"What are you doing in that?" Silver said, gesturing at Eric's white coat.
Around the bedside there was a mounting air of confusion. The nurse kneeling on the bed continued her compressions, and the respiratory therapist continued manual ventilation. But both of them, as well as the nurse drawing meds, were staring at the two emergency physicians, awaiting instructions.
To Eric the entire scene seemed like a grotesque tableau. Then Joe Silver inserted himself between Eric and the bed.
"Dr. Gordon," he said to the neurosurgical resident, "take over the resuscitation at the bedside. I'll handle the E.K.G. Dr. Najahan, please wait outside. I'll deal with you when we're through." He checked Norma's pupils, then turned his back to Eric and checked the E.K.G.
"She's fixed and dilated and straight-line, everyone. Could I have a milligram of atropine IV Keep pumping there, but switch if you're tired.
You're doing a nice job, but things don't look good… not good at all. Has anyone notified her family? If she's Catholic, better call a priest too."
Eric stared at his chief. At another time, just a few short days ago, he would have felt totally lost and humiliated. Now, he felt only anger. Heedless of the many eyes still fixed on him, he turned away from the bedside and stalked from the room.
The resuscitative effort lasted another twenty minutes, although Eric had correctly sensed the futility of it from the moment his fingers touched the side of Norma Cullinet's neck. He stood in the hallway, listening to the ri-uitless battle within room 814 and wondering whether Norma's death was a post-operative complication or in some way the result of her connection with Caduceus. He also began debating whether it was worth waiting to face the almost certain onslaught against him by Joe Silver, or whether he should simply march across the hall to the stairway and leave.
He was on the verge of selecting option two when room 814 began to empty. Most of those leaving pointedly avoided looking in his direction. Those who inadvertently made eye contact with him either shook their heads or quickly looked away. The upshot of this latest chapter in his nightmare was going to be badvery bad.
"That woman was one hell of a nurse."
Joe Silver, his eyes about level with Eric's chin, stood hands on hips, glaring up at him.
She was a murderer, Eric wanted desperately to say. Are you one, too?
But he knew that until he held proof far more irrefutable than the notes that were folded in his hip pocket, any attempt at attacking Norma Cullinet would merely be adding Joe Silver's shovel to those already trying to bury him.
"I'm sorry she didn't make it," he managed.
"Yeah, you seem all broken up," Silver said. "You gonna tell me what you were doing in there, or do you want to wait until after the pathologists tell us why she died?"
"It happened just as I said it did," Eric responded, holding on to his rage by only the finest of threads. "I came up here to talk to Norma about some things and found her dead; and I did my best to resuscitate her.
I don't think I did anything to deserve the kind of treatment I just received from you in there."
Silver looked as if he were about to spit in Eric's face.
"Your indignation doesn't even deserve a response," he said acidly, "but let me lay it out for you.
First, you're involved in a series of very bizarre, disruptive events, all of which suggest that you are drugaddicted, crazy, or most likely both. Next, you are told by me to stay away from this hospital until this whole business is straightened out. Yet here you are, dressed up like a goddam professor, in the room of a woman whose door says NO VISITORS, and she's dead."
"You've got it wrong," Eric said simply.
Joe Silver glared at him.
"Damn, but you're an arrogant son of a bitch.
Now, you just listen up, Najarian. I don't want to see your face in this hospital again until the pathologist's report on this woman is in.
If her death is on the up and up, you'll get your chance to explain all the other madness you're into. -But if she was murdered, I plan to be at the head of the line of those who win want to see you hung up by your goddam crazy Armenian heels and stoned."
Without waiting for a reply, he whirled and stormed down the eighth-floor oriidor.
"Well fuck you — very much, Dr. Silver," Eric said courteously.
"I'll try to be worthy of your understanding and confidence."
Furious, he ran down eight flights of stairs to the basement, threw his lab coat in a corner, and then took the tunnel to one of the side exits.
A chilly mist was swirling down from the heavy late-morning sky.
And although it was twenty minutes by foot to Bernard Nelson's apartment, Eric had no inclination to do anything but walk. He crossed over Cambridge Street and wandered up Charles-the same route he and Laura had taken on their first night together. It was a night that seemed several lifetimes ago.
He had come so close, so damn close. Now, rather than putting an end to their nightmare, he had only intensified it. If, as seemed quite possible, Norma Cullinet's autopsy showed her death to be murder, his unauthorized presence in her room, coupled with the other suspicions surrounding his sanity and drug use, would quickly vault him to the head of any list of suspects. One step forward, two steps back.
Perhaps the Najarian could become a new dance craze.
He picked up a copy of the Herald, wondering what new absurdities they had chosen to print about "Zombi Doc." What he found instead was a front-page teaser and page 3 spread on the robbery/murder at the Gates of Heaven. According to the write-up, there were no signs of forced entry, leading police to suspect the murderer was known to the victim.
Investigators were currently focusing on names in an appointment book recovered from Donald Devine's desk. Nowhere in the article was there mention of the macabre treatment room in the mortuary basement. Did the police choose to withhold that find, or had the room been dismantled before they even arrived on the scene?
Those questions were troubling, but not nearly as much so as the possibility that among the names in Devine's appointment book would be one Dr. Eric Najarian.
One step forward, two steps back.
Eric folded the paper, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and leaned against the corner of a building, physically and emotionally spent.
Across the street, three stories above a chic Italian bistro, two workmen undaunted by the rain were washing windows from a suspended platform. Eric was musing on the possibility of his one day earning a living in such a manner when the door to the cafe opened and Anna Delacroix stepped out, arm in arm with a man.