“Well, I’m a doctor. Suicide doesn’t make sense to most of us. But he was facing a very risky procedure and a difficult, painful recovery with an uncertain outcome. When I heard that he’d died, naturally I was troubled, and guilty too — thinking maybe I didn’t explain things properly to him. But I have to say that I wasn’t utterly shocked.”
“Did you know his wife?”
“She came to most of his appointments.”
“But she was in good health?”
“I don’t know. But she seemed healthy.”
“They were close?”
“Oh, very devoted to each other.”
Tal looked up. “Doctor, what’s Luminux?”
“Luminux? A combination antidepressant, pain-killer and antianxiety medication. I’m not too familiar with it.”
“Then you didn’t prescribe it to Sam or his wife?”
“No — and I’d never prescribe anything to a spouse of a patient unless she was a patient of mine too. Why?”
“They both had unusually high levels of the drug in their bloodstreams when they died.”
“Both of them?”
“Right.”
Dr. Sheldon shook his head. “That’s odd... Was that the cause of death?”
“No, it was carbon monoxide.”
“Oh. Their car?”
“In the garage, right.”
The doctor shook his head. “Better way to go than some, I suppose. But still...”
Another look at the notes he’d made from his investigation. “At their house I found an insurance form for the Cardiac Support Center here at the hospital. What’s that?”
“I suggested he and Liz see someone there. They work with terminal and high-risk patients, transplant candidates. Counseling and therapy mostly.”
“Could they have prescribed the drug?”
“Maybe. They have MDs on staff.”
“I’d like to talk to them. Who should I see?”
“Dr. Peter Dehoeven is the director. They’re in building J. Go back to the main lobby, take the elevator to three, turn left and keep going.”
He thanked the doctor and stepped back into the lobby. Cell phone calls weren’t allowed in the hospital so he asked Margaret if he could use one of the phones on her desk. She gestured toward it distractedly and turned back to her computer. It was 3:45 and Tal had to meet Greg LaTour in fifteen minutes.
One of the Homicide Division secretaries came on the line and he asked her to tell LaTour that he’d be a little late.
But she said, “Oh, he’s gone for the day.”
“Gone? We had a meeting.”
“Didn’t say anything about it.”
He hung up, angry. Had LaTour just been humoring him, agreeing to help with the case to get Tal out of his hair?
He made another call — to the Cardiac Support Center. Dr. Dehoeven was out but Tal made an appointment to see him at eight-thirty in the morning. He hung up and nearly asked Margaret to clarify the way to the Cardiac Support Center. But Sheldon’s directions were solidly implanted in his memory and he’d only bring up the subject to give it one more shot with sweet Molly Malone. But why bother? He knew to a statistical certainty that he and this red-haired lass would never be step-dancing the night away then lying in bed till dawn discussing the finer point of perfect numbers.
“All the valves?” Seventy-two-year-old Robert Covey asked his cardiologist, who was sitting across from him. The name on the white jacket read Dr. Lansdowne in scripty stitching, but with her frosted blonde hair in a Gwyneth Paltrow bun and sly red lipstick, he thought of her only as “Dr. Jenny.”
“That’s right.” She leaned forward. “And there’s more.”
For the next ten minutes she proceeded to give him the low-down on the absurd medical extremes he’d have to endure to have a chance of seeing his seventy-third birthday.
Unfair, Covey thought. Goddamn unfair to’ve been singled out this way. His weight, on a six-foot-one frame, was around 180, had been all his adult life. He gave up smoking forty years ago. He’d taken weekend hikes every few months with Veronica until he lost her and then had joined a hiking club where he got even more exercise than he had with his wife, outdistancing the widows who’d try to keep up with him as they flirted relentlessly.
Dr. Jenny asked, “Are you married?”
“Widower.”
“Children?”
“I have a son.”
“He live nearby?”
“No, but we see a lot of each other.”
“Anybody else in the area?” she asked.
“Not really, no.”
The doctor regarded him carefully. “It’s tough, hearing everything I’ve told you today. And it’s going to get tougher. I’d like you to talk to somebody over at Westbrook Hospital. They have a social services department there just for heart patients. The Cardiac Support Center.”
“Shrink?”
“Counselor/nurses, they’re called.”
“They wear short skirts?” Covey asked.
“The men don’t,” the doctor said, deadpan.
“Touché. Well, thanks, but I don’t think that’s for me.”
“Take the number anyway. If nothing else, they’re somebody to talk to.”
She took out a card and set it on the desk. He noticed that she had perfect fingernails, opalescent pink, though they were very short — as befit someone who cracked open human chests on occasion.
Covey asked her a number of questions about the procedures and what he could expect, sizing up his odds. Initially she seemed reluctant to quantify his chances but she sensed finally that he could indeed handle the numbers and told him. “Sixty-forty against.”
“Is that optimistic or pessimistic?”
“Neither. It’s realistic.”
He liked that.
There were more tests that needed to be done, the doctor explained, before any procedures could be scheduled. “You can make the appointment with Janice.”
“Sooner rather than later?”
The doctor didn’t smile when she said, “That would be the wise choice.”
He rose. Then paused. “Does this mean I should stop having strenuous sex?”
Dr. Jenny blinked and a moment later they both laughed.
“Ain’t it grand being old? All the crap you can get away with.”
“Make that appointment, Mr. Covey.”
He walked toward the door. She joined him. He thought she was seeing him out but she held out her hand; he’d neglected to take the card containing the name and number of the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital.
“Can I blame my memory?”
“No way. You’re sharper than me.” The doctor winked and turned back to her desk.
He made the appointment with the receptionist and left the building. Outside, still clutching the Cardiac Support Center card, he noticed a trash container on the sidewalk. He veered toward it and lifted the card like a Frisbee, about to sail the tiny rectangle into the pile of soda empties and limp newspapers. But then he paused.
Up the street he found a pay phone. Worth more than fifty million dollars, Robert Covey believed that cell phones were unnecessary luxuries. He set the card on the ledge, donned his reading glasses and began fishing in his leather change pouch for some coins.
Dr. Peter Dehoeven was a tall blond man who spoke with an accent that Tal couldn’t quite place.
European — Scandinavian or German maybe. It was quite thick at times and that, coupled with his oddly barren office suggested that he’d come to the U.S. recently. Not only was it far sparser than the cardiologist Dr. Anthony Sheldon’s but the walls featured not a single framed testament to his education and training.
It was early the next morning and Dehoeven was elaborating on the mission of his Cardiac Support Center. He told Tal that the CSC counselors helped seriously ill patients change their diets, create exercise regimens, understand the nature of heart disease, deal with depression and anxiety, find care-givers, and counsel family members. They also helped with death and dying issues — funeral plans, insurance, wills. “We live to be older nowadays, yes?” Dehoeven explained, drifting in and out of his accent. “So we are having longer to experience our bodies’ failing than we used to. That means, yes, we must confront our mortality for a longer time too. That is a difficult thing to do. So we need to help our patients prepare for the end of life.”