The Deception Page 3

  “But the archdiocese has a twenty-million-dollar insurance policy protecting individual practitioners, isn’t that correct, Mr. Finnerty?” Monsignor Devlin’s voice was reassuringly confidential.

  Finnerty merely nodded. He knew that a lawsuit was a distinct probability. And he could see a brighter side to the tragedy. The defense of any lawsuit against the archdiocese would be steered to his firm, Roper, Cranston, Peabody & Weld—a great piece of business. Then it struck him. Why split this five ways? He was getting a little disenchanted with the partnership setup, especially since his name was not on the letterhead. Perhaps it was time to form his own firm, take the archdiocesan account with him. He had thought about it over the last few months. He had a tip that a twenty-man law firm was going belly-up. Terrific location, law library, teak flooring, polished oak staircase, even Winslow Homer prints on the walls. Time to get even with his crusty partners. Yes, Finnerty could see a rainbow peeking through the gloom, and a golden pot of billable hours gleamed at the end of it.

  Dante and Anna DiTullio were ushered into the Critical Care Unit of St. Anne’s by the chief of Neurosurgery, Dr. Jensen. The room was filled with silver canisters, monitors, vials, and IV machines. A mask over the inert form of Donna DiTullio was attached to a respirator. Her body was swathed in mummylike wrappings, and both legs were suspended by pulleys to overhead metal bars.

  A nurse checked the IV lines, then stood aside as Dante DiTullio moved toward his daughter. Two large eyes—doll’s eyes—stared blankly toward the ceiling. There was no movement, no recognition. Dante bent forward and kissed his daughter lightly on her withered lips.

  Dante started to sob, the tears spilling from his cheeks onto his daughter’s forehead. Anna DiTullio merely stood by her daughter’s bed, saying nothing, showing no outward sign of emotion. Inwardly, she was being torn apart. She fingered the rosary in her suit pocket.

  “Can she see or hear, Doctor?” Dante looked up at the chief of Neurosurgery.

  “Too early to say.” His voice was somber, professional. “CAT scans and MRIs show extensive damage in the temporal and occipital lobes.” The doctor touched the side and back of his head.

  “Those control eyesight and hearing. We’ve evacuated as much clotting as we could. Right now, the brain is swollen. That’s why we have those little burr holes in the scalp—to relieve edema.”

  “She’ll come out of it, won’t she, Doctor, when the swelling recedes?” Dante straightened up and looked at his wife. His once-keen eyes drooped with sadness.

  “We’ll follow her closely, Mr. DiTullio,” the doctor said. “Right now, every conceivable facet of our art and science is being utilized. She’ll have two attendants monitoring her around the clock.” He gestured toward the nurse.

  Dante and Anna DiTullio sat on the brown Naugahyde sofa in Dan Sheridan’s outer office, along with their nephew, Emilio Cantone, only recently admitted to the bar. Dante smoked a cigar while Anna and the young lawyer flipped through some outdated magazines.

  Judy Corwin, Dan Sheridan’s secretary, had taken their jackets, then slid through a side door into her boss’s office.

  “Wow, you could knock!” Sheridan had been adjusting his tie, peering into the mirrored surface of a statue of Justice. He patted his reddish brown hair. “I could’ve been in direlecto nudum pactum.” He turned and gave a raffish wink to his “spiritual adviser,” as he called her.

  “Here are my notes on the DiTullios. They’re the parents of Donna DiTullio. They’ve suffered a real tragedy,” Judy said.

  Sheridan’s voice switched from jaunty to sober. “I read about it in the Globe. She jumped five floors.”

  “The young lawyer, Cantone, just passed the bar. He told me on the q.t. that he’d be in over his head in a malpractice case, especially one against the cardinal.”

  “So he doesn’t want to sue God,” Sheridan mused. “I don’t blame him. When you sue God, you sure’n hell better win.

  “Show them in, Judy, and get hold of Raimondi. If we decide to take the case, I want him to run over to St. Anne’s with me and get what hospital records are immediately available, and have him take his camera. Get some snaps before they start changing things.”

  Judy ushered the DiTullios into the office and closed the door with a discreet click.

  For the next tear-wrenching hour, Dante DiTullio sputtered out the tragic events and Dan Sheridan listened.

  “This drug Capricet is still in the experimental stage,” Sheridan said. “I assume both of you signed the authorization for its use.”

  “I signed it,” Dante DiTullio said.

  “Did you read it before signing?”

  “No, I didn’t. Sexton kind of talked me into it. At first, the drug seemed to be working. We went in to see Donna a week later, and it was unbelievable. She was her old self.

  “But I’ve been reading, Mr. Sheridan. Look at all the lawsuits over Halcion and Prozac. I think there was something in Capricet that made Donna go off the deep end.”

  The young lawyer spoke for the first time. “We feel, Mr. Sheridan, sir, that the Atrium—way up on the fifth floor—was no place to take a psychiatric patient, especially one with a suicidal history, and leave her unguarded.”

  “I want you to sue for forty million dollars.” Dante DiTullio’s face flushed and both fists clenched into white knots.

  “We’ll see. It’ll be a tough road. St. Anne’s lawyers will put up all sorts of barriers. Is there any person or persons Donna was especially fond of during her hospital stay?”

  Anna DiTullio spoke up. “Yes, a nurse. She was Donna’s night nurse. I’m pretty sure her name was Assad—Karen Assad. Donna spoke of her often.”

  Sheridan jotted the name on a yellow pad.

  “All right, we’ll do a quiet investigation. I’ll review it with a psychiatrist friend of mine and let you know if we are going to take your case on.”

  “You come highly recommended, Mr. Sheridan. We could have gone to one of the big firms.…” Dante DiTullio’s voice had a testy undertone.

  “I know. We’ll let you know as soon as possible,” Sheridan said, coming out from behind his desk. “Now, you take care of yourselves.”

  Sheridan returned to his desk and sat down. He hadn’t tried a malpractice case in ten years. Why take on this one? Against the cardinal, no less. He studied the name of the nurse, then underlined it: KAREN ASSAD.

  3 Sheridan met his investigator, Manny Raimondi, in front of St. Anne’s Hospital. It was a busy place. Cabs were dropping patients off and picking them up. Many departing were hobbling on crutches; visitors carried flowers or stuffed animals. Three ambulances pulled up, their blue emergency lights flashing, and Sheridan watched the EMTs, the doctors, and the nurses spring into action. It didn’t matter who the patient was, whether he had Blue Cross or Medicaid, or even if he was a bank robber. If a human life was at stake, the medical cadre pulled out all the stops to ensure survival. Sheridan knew that if his life was on the line, St. Anne’s was where he would want to be.

  They sipped coffee at a table next to the florist shop as Sheridan made a rough sketch of the foyer. There was scaffolding throughout the Atrium, and Sheridan noticed some engineer types in hard hats talking with pinstriped executives. Also in the group was a priest, plain black suit, Roman collar. Sheridan recognized him as Monsignor Devlin, the cardinal’s point man. They were consulting plans and gesturing upward toward the skylights. It was clear that the open Atrium would soon be encased in unbreakable glass.

  “Let’s get a few camera shots from down here, Manny; then we’ll take the elevator to the fifth-floor passageway. Plenty of light in here. Don’t think you’ll need a flash. We don’t want to attract attention. And before we’re thrown out, let’s map the scene—the conference room where the group therapy took place, the doctors’ offices, the entire layout of the fifth floor. If someone interrupts you, tell them we’re from the construction crew.”

  Manny set his small camera for the light and starte
d to snap the Atrium’s interior. They proceeded to the fifth-floor passageway and shot it from all angles, taking pictures through the scaffolding of the foyer below.

  Sheridan paused a few moments. “What do you think, Manny? Should we take this case on?” He looked pensive, uncertain, which was not like him.

  “I’m no shrink,” Manny said as he clicked off several more shots, “but it seems to me that this was one hell of a place to hold a sit-in for a potential suicide. If the girl dies—not much of a case. But if she survives in a vegetative state—the monetary damages will be horrendous.”

  “I know.” For a moment, Sheridan looked off into some middle distance. “We’re talking about the Catholic church. I suppose if you count the cures of Jesus, the church has been in the health-care business for two thousand years. Win or lose, a malpractice suit will damage the medical facility and any medical practitioners who wind up as defendants. The media will see to that.”

  “What difference does that make?” Manny knew his boss was having some misgivings. “Suppose it was Beth Israel or New England Baptist? I’m sure we’d go ahead without any qualms.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Sheridan said without much conviction.

  The receptionist stopped them as they were about to enter the pantry. “May I help you?”

  “Oh, we’re from Clancy Brothers Construction,” Raimondi said, pocketing his camera, “with the scaffolding crew. Could we use the men’s room?”

  “Certainly,” the receptionist said. “It’s down the hall there on the left, past the last row of offices.”

  They all exchanged smiles. When out of sight of the receptionist’s desk, Raimondi completed the shoot—the conference room, the doctors’ offices—Sheridan pacing off distances as they went along. It was strangely quiet. There were no patients in the waiting room. The doctors were nowhere in sight, and their inner offices appeared to be closed. The two men returned to the waiting room.

  “Excuse me, Mrs.…” Sheridan smiled at the portly black receptionist, who appeared to be dividing her time between a paperback novel and picking at a computer.

  “It’s Miss … Miss Davidson. They call me Hettie.”

  “You had a pretty bad accident up here last week.” Sheridan frowned in a look of concern.

  “Supposed to say nothin’ about it”—she resumed her typing—“ ’cept if you’re from the insurance company.”

  “No, we’re just with the rigging crew. But it must have been horrible. Were you on when it happened, Hettie?”

  “No, it happened just before I came in. Way I heard it was, they all broke for coffee. The girl went out into the passageway over there and jumped.” Hettie made an arc with her hand.

  “Anyone with her at the time?”

  “Joe Sousa and Elaine Adamson were in the pantry.” She gestured ahead with her pen. “Doc Sexton yelled at her not to jump. All three, Joe, Elaine, and Doc Sexton, rushed to reach her but”—the receptionist shook her head—“she jumped.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sheridan said.

  “Do you know a nurse by the name of Karen Assad?”

  “Sure, she’s the night nurse on the psych ward in the Cushing Building. Nice lady. Comes over here sometimes.”

  Sheridan and Raimondi started to head back toward the passageway. Sheridan stopped.

  He returned to the receptionist. “Do you like baseball?”

  “Don’t like the game myself, too slow. Red Sox aren’t going no place, anyhow.”

  “Have to agree with you there, Hettie. But here are two box seats for the Yankees game tomorrow night. Maybe you can give them to your boyfriend.”

  “Might go with my girlfriend Lucie.” She took the ducats, flashed a wide toothy smile, and dropped them into her purse.

  “The two others who were in the group therapy session, did you happen to know their names, Hettie? As the receptionist, you would probably have a record.” It was a far-out question for a corporate type to ask—even a corporate construction type. This was privileged information, and he knew he might not be able to discover the names of psychiatric patients through legal channels, but she seemed amenable. She had noticed the box-seat tickets were priced at fifty dollars each.

  “Yes,” she said, bending forward and sneaking a peek left and right, “it was that TV girl … Phillips—you know, the one on Channel Three. And the other was some lawyer. Think his name was Marden.”

  “Well, enjoy the game, Hettie, and have a nice day.” Sheridan gave a two-fingered salute.

  Phillips and Marden. He tucked them away in the index of his mind. So far so good.

  Sheridan and Raimondi returned to the foyer. They sat for a few minutes, toying with cups of coffee, and watched patients checking in, orderlies pushing gurneys and wheelchairs, nurses—some in white, others in green scrubs—carrying X-ray films or wheeling various apparatus that always seemed to be topped by an IV hookup. It looked like chaos, but Sheridan knew that there was a subtle order to it all.

  “Manny, if I ever take a shot at home plate again, make sure I end up here at St. Anne’s.” Sheridan was referring to his semipro baseball team, on which he still played catcher on midweek afternoons.

  “Aren’t you getting a little old for that kind of stuff?” Manny said. “You’re what—forty-six?”

  “And holding. Hey, the old Chicago catcher Gabby Hartnett was almost fifty before he hung up the cleats. Same with Ernie Lombardi of the Cincinnati Reds.”

  “I think you’re nuts playing a kids’ game with a lot of Young Turks.”

  “Maybe so.” Sheridan laughed. “But Jesus, Manny, if they certify me as crazy, never take me to the St. Anne’s psych department.”

  “Okay.” Sheridan tossed his Styrofoam cup into a nearby bin. “We’ve got to make a trip to medical records, see if we can trap the DiTullio kid’s chart before it starts to change.”

  “Can we get a patient’s psychiatric chart, even with a permission slip signed by the father?” Manny said as he downed the remainder of his coffee.

  “Not really. Unlike regular hospital records, psychiatric charts can be obtained only through a court summons, and even then, only with the court’s permission. By the time that rolls around, all the euphemisms appear—the bullshit about the heroic doctors and nurses. The incriminating stuff mysteriously disappears.

  “And what I’d really like to get is the ‘incident’ report—the mortality and morbidity review. Unfortunately, our courts say that report is absolutely privileged.”

  Sheridan and Raimondi started to make their way to the medical records office.

  “Excuse me, Miss …” Sheridan smiled at a young woman behind the counter. He squinted at her name tag but couldn’t make it out.

  “May I help you gentlemen?” she said pleasantly. “I’m Sister Mary Ignatius, director of Medical Records.”

  Sheridan assessed her quickly. Close-cropped ash blond hair, large blue eyes, freckles sprinkled across her nose, good figure in her trim beige dress.

  “Sister … Wow, you could’ve fooled me! Where were these nuns when we were growing up, Manny? And so good-looking!” She was Irish—probably born there. He could tell by the way she gave a charming little upward kick to the end of a sentence. Maybe he had lucked out.

  “Cut the blarney,” she said. Her eyes narrowed in mock scrutiny, but her smile had a pixie twist to it.

  “Of course.” Sheridan caught himself. “I’m here to get the hospital record of Donna DiTullio. She was admitted three weeks ago last Wednesday. I have the authorization right here.” He extracted a paper from his inside jacket pocket.

  “Did you say DiTullio?”

  “Yes.” He slid the permission form toward the nun. “It’s properly signed by the patient’s father.”

  Suddenly, the crinkly smile drained from Sister Mary Ignatius’s face. “You two lawyers?” she asked, her voice now all business.

  Sheridan had left his telltale briefcase back in the office. Manny had on a black leather jacket, but Sh
eridan’s blue pinstripe probably gave him away.

  “Yes.” Sheridan had to level with Sister Mary, at least partly. “I’m the family’s attorney, and we need the hospital record for insurance purposes, disability, Medicaid, things like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s a psychiatric record, privileged under Massachusetts General Laws, Title Forty-eight, Section—”

  Sheridan decided to retreat graciously. “Oh, I’m sorry, Sister, I guess I should have checked the statute. Title Forty-eight, you say?”

  “We can’t surrender those records except by order of the probate court.”

  “Sorry to trouble you, Sister,” Sheridan said as he reached for the permission form and replaced it in his pocket. “It was a terrible tragedy.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sister Mary said. “Sorry you gentlemen had to make this trip for nothing.”

  “Only doing our job, Sister.” Sheridan saw an opening. “My cousin Eunice is a Sister of St. Joseph. Teaches at Regis College. Lovely lady.”

  Sometimes the chemistry is just right. Sister Mary permitted herself a half smile.

  “We’re Sisters of Charity here.” A hint of goodwill returned to her voice.

  “My favorite order.” Sheridan seized the moment. “Say, Sister, there’s a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical opening at the Wang Center Saturday night. It’s about the Irish uprising—sort of a Gaelic Les Misérables. I have two tickets I can’t use.” He extracted them from his wallet. “Maybe you’d like to go, take a friend or a cousin.”

  “Oh, that would be nice.” The crinkly smile was back. He slid the tickets toward her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Sorry I couldn’t help you out.”

  “Boy,” Raimondi said as they were hailing a cab, “that play is sold out. And those are Sheila’s tickets. She’s going to be one real sore fiancée.”