Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“I want number sixty-three fifteen on the boulevard.”
“In West New York?”
“Right.”
“We got a ways to go yet. I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
I watched the view of the river and the New York skyline across it, alternately spectacular and obstructed, depending upon whether someone had built a massive condominium between the cliff and the road. I could recognize only the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, and the Citicorp Building, the last looking like a white, visored robot. In the Hudson itself, an ivory and red excursion boat plowed northward. Back on my side of the river, the inland edge of the boulevard had gas stations, Elks and VFWs, and lots of funeral homes. Spaced among them was old-fashioned two-story immigrant housing, upgraded from wood to fieldstone by the second generation. Now it was being disfigured by picture windows and sun decks, courtesy of the yuppies who probably were pushing out the third generation.
“Next stop, buddy.”
“Thanks.”
Number 6315 was a five-story yellow-brick apartment building on the inland side. Ms. Zerle didn’t answer her buzzer any better than she had her phone. I tried the superintendent’s button and drew a gut-busting guy wearing a soiled plaid shirt and carrying a can of Piels. When I asked about Ms. Zerle, he waved to a stretch of grass and benches across the street and started to close the door. When I asked him how I’d recognize her, he said, “Can’t miss Agnes. She’s the only broad wearin’ both blue hair and a bikini.”
I thanked him and crossed the street.
I guess you could call it a park. There were a few young mothers with kids in strollers, speaking to them and each other in foreign languages or broken English. Mostly, though, there were old people, bundled up even in the warm May sunshine, perhaps three times as many women as men. Next to two young men stretched out on chaise longues was a woman in a tiger-stripe bikini. She looked near seventy, with that leathery surface the elderly get to their skin when they stay in the sun too long. The two men had black, close-cropped hair and a huge boom box radio between them. They were wearing a lot of coconut oil and a little span of Speedo trunks. The woman was tapping one finger against the slack flesh of her right thigh, following the music more than they were.
I said, “Excuse me. Ms. Zerle?”
She opened her eyes, levered up onto an elbow. “Yeah?”
“My name’s John Cuddy. I’d like some information about a doctor you might know.”
“What makes you think I know him?”
“What makes you think it’s a he?”
Zerle rolled back down dismissively. “Because in my time, women weren’t what you’d call encouraged to be doctors, so I don’t know many that are. And I don’t know you, and I’m not interested in answering any questions, so why don’t you beat it?”
“Ms. Zerle, I’ve come a long way on a tough job, and I’d appreciate just a few minutes. I’ve—”
“Hey, Agnes,” said one of the guys, looking first at me, then at her. “You want us to get rid of this guy?”
I was tempted, but I wasn’t there to fight. Before she could answer him, I said, “Ms. Zerle, Diana Ross sent me.”
The other guy cursed and started to sit up, but Agnes said, “Tony …” in a cautionary manner, and he stayed put. She turned to me and said, “Who told you to say that?”
“A guy at the hospital. He handed me this.”
She took the paper from me, unfolded and read it. She laughed, offered it back to me. “That’s his handwriting, all right. Why don’t we move over toward the river. That bench.” She said to the first guy, “Sal, watch my stuff, okay?”
He said, “Sure. Yell if you want us.”
“Thanks.”
Zerle moved toward the bench, me trailing. She strode purposefully, a woman used to walking in order to get from task to task during a busy day. While the unkindness of gravity made everything sag, Zerle still was trim and even graceful in the revealing suit. She sat down, crossed her legs, and said, “Who do you want to know about?”
“A psychiatrist who’s working in the Boston area now. I’m helping the defense of a college student. The student is, or rather was, a patient of his who’s accused of murdering a girl who was also a patient. There’s some indication that the girl and the doctor might have had a relationship outside the therapy group.”
“Son, if you’d come to the point, we might finish quicker. You mean sexual relationship?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, what’s the doctor’s name?”
“Marek. Clifford Marek.”
Zerle stood up, seemed suddenly chilled. She crossed her arms as Suley had at the hospital, but she shivered a bit and hugged herself.
I started to take off my jacket, but Zerle saw me peripherally and shook her head. “No, no. I’m not cold. It’s just … Your situation doesn’t sound like Marek. No, I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you’d better go.”
“Look …”
“Do you want me to call Sal and Tony over here?”
“No, and I don’t want to go a few rounds with them, either. But you’re the closest thing to a wedge into this case that I’ve found, and if that’s what it’ll take to open you up, then call them.”
Zerle sighed, then looked as if she wanted to spit. “Did … What’s the name of the patient they’re accusing?”
“His name is Daniels, William Daniels. He was the dead girl’s boyfr—well, lover.”
“Daniels.”
“Yes.”
Agnes Zerle took a minute, then made up her mind and asked, face to the river, “This Daniels, is he black?”
“S
ULEY’S A
female impersonator. On the side, that is, to make a few extra dollars. He does a great Diana Ross. You’d swear you were watching her. More tea?”
I said, “No, thanks,” and Zerle looked down into her own cup, wrapping her robe around her more tightly but not speaking. We had come back to her place so that we could talk privately, but she hadn’t wanted to get into it, so I was smart for a change and didn’t push.
“Yeah, old Suley—and he is old, don’t let that unlined face and swishy style fool you; Suley, he’s pushing forty-five-old. Suley is a talented fella, and a smart one too. He would have had my job when I retired if he just weren’t such a flamer that he made everybody upstairs nervous. So instead they bring in Smith from some small law firm she was running—as office manager; she’s not a lawyer herself—and old Suley stays where he is.”
Zerle played with her spoon, started to wring out a little more from the tea bag into her cup, then put everything down. She said, “If I talk to you now, what are the chances of me having to testify about it?”
“In court in Boston?”
“Yeah.”
“I could be cute and say I won’t know that until I’ve heard what you’ve got to say, but basically I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, either. But I think you ought to assume you might have to. This is a murder case, and I think that witnesses can be made to cross state lines if they have important enough information. It might be out of my hands.”
Zerle seemed to like honest better than cute. She sank back into the chair and started speaking, slowly, as though she were narrating for children.
“It happened in the early seventies sometime. The records would have the exact dates and all, if the records are still there, and they were there when I left four years ago. Marek came to us as a psychiatry resident. He was on a two-year program. I think he didn’t go right to medical school from college, because he seemed older somehow than the other residents, but I’m not too sure now. Anyway, he came in, and was assigned some groups, and individuals, and began treating them. It was a while before anything … before anybody started saying anything, but there was something not quite right about him. Like he’d have the most interest in some of the easiest cases and spend too much time on them and not enough on some of the real bad ones he had. Usually, that just means the chief resident or even somebody higher has a talk with him, and he straightens out his priorities. But with Marek, I don’t know, it didn’t seem so much like oversight on his part as intention, that he started to sneak the time to see these less sick patients. What was weird is that Marek was doing all right by his other patients—the real bad ones, I mean. He was doing average anyway, if you’re talking in terms of results. But anyone who dealt with him could tell he really had a knack of cutting through and getting to most of the sick ones, and so we kind of resented, I guess, his not spending the time with them so that his knack could work more good for them. Then some of the patients …” She looked up at me.
“Yes?”
Zerle looked down again. “The black patients, they started saying things, at first among themselves, then some of the braver ones to us—to me, that is. That Marek was, well, using them for sex. At first, you tend to dismiss that kind of talk. I mean, you really can’t take straight what most of the patients say because a lot of them are in there because of what they say. But the talk, not complaints so much as just gossip, started to get out of hand and then one of them …” She stopped, but this time she didn’t look to me for a prompt, so I kept still.
Zerle made a noise with her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “One of the patients got a cord off some blinds somewhere and hanged himself. He left kind of a note, about Marek. That tore it. I thought, if only I’d done something sooner. But the dead patient was black, destitute, and had no family we knew of, so nothing happened directly to the hospital. We had an internal review, and Marek left soon after that.”
Zerle didn’t appear to be close to starting again, so I said, “I had the impression that when Marek came to Massachusetts, part of the application was a certification from his last job and state, in Illinois, that he was basically competent and of good character.”
“Probably.”
“But how?”
“How?”
“How could Marek go from here even to Philly, which was his next stop, much less on to Chicago and then Boston, with this kind of a mess in his record?”
A faint smile of experience faded quickly. “We didn’t fire him, Mr. Cuddy. We allowed him to resign from the hospital’s residency program.”
“Why?”
“Because of what he did.”
“Yes, but why was Marek allowed to resign? Why didn’t you fire him?”
“I would have. But it wasn’t my decision to make, though I understood the necessity for it at the time.”
“Can you explain it to me?”
“I can try.” Zerle hunched forward, punctuating with her hands.
“Let’s say you run a hospital, okay? You’ve got lots of bills for lots of things, most of all new equipment. But you don’t really have enough money, not nearly enough, because the care costs more than we charge for it, and we don’t get even as much as we charge because of deadbeats or insurance companies short-sheeting us on reimbursements. Every department feels it’s understaffed, underpaid, and underappreciated. And every department is right. So you’re in charge, and a question comes up about this guy Marek, and you sit down with him and probably his lawyer, and the situation stacks up like this: Marek is willing to resign quietly, which cuts the hospital loose of a bad doc. The alternative for you is to fire Marek for what he did, both with the dead patient and with the others, and to report Marek to every certifying board in sight. Now, you do that, and it’s curtains for Marek as any kind of doctor in this country, so he’s got to fight it, and I mean to the end, with everything he’s got. And maybe one thing he’s got is some shady things that other people in the hospital have done, maybe things that were done to help the patients, but maybe some cooking of reimbursement requests or vouchers, or drug supplies, or anything that the media would jump on. So there you are. You’re in charge. What are your options?”
“Let him resign quietly or fire him and spend your overextended dollars on legal fees as he fights for his professional life?”
“You’ve got it. So which do you do?”
“I don’t know. One way you protect your institution, but at the expense of health care generally. I don’t know.”
“Add in something else. Add in that you might lose.”
“Lose?”
“Yeah. As in lose the fight. Maybe Marek fights and wins.”
“But you said—”
“That a bunch of fruity patients said he was doing all kinds of things to them that a good doctor shouldn’t. You ever met Marek?”
“Yes.”
“Impressive as hell, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“You’re on a jury. A postal worker, or maybe a housewife. You listen to the three or four black wackos presentable enough to put on a witness stand tell their side of it, then you watch some high-powered attorney that Marek’s hired rip the stuffing out of their stories. Then you see Marek himself up there. Calm, educated, persuasive. Embarrassed but forthright about these ridiculous claims. He tells the jurors not to judge his accusers too harshly. Who’re you gonna believe? Moses incarnate, or some nutcakes just a trifle softer than Suley?”
I thought about it. I didn’t think the hospital had been morally right, but it was hard to second-guess the decision as a business judgment.
I said, “About Suley …?”
She grew guarded. “Yeah?”
“When he gave me your name, he knew only that I was interested in Marek, not anything about a black patient being involved.”
“So?”
“So why would he have wanted to help me?”
“He was on the job maybe six months when Marek arrived. Some of us thought it was Suley who nudged the patients to come talk to me. Marek … I think Suley just thought Marek was a dishonorable man.”
When I finished with Agnes Zerle, we walked out to the boulevard. She pointed to a three-sided glass enclosure with a white bubble top and the New Jersey Transit logo on it. “You can catch the 165 back into Port Authority there. Funny, they used to call the company ‘Public Service’ in the old days. Now it’s ‘New Jersey Transit.’ Sign of the times, I guess.”
I thanked her again, and we shook hands. She walked back toward the apartment building, robe flapping around her legs and the determination gone from her stride.
I got into Port Authority about 4:30 P.M. After grabbing a quick bite at a workingman’s tavern on Eighth Avenue, I walked the rest of the way to Penn Station. I retrieved my bag from its locker and just made the next train to Boston.