The Oath Page 9

  Now, pulling up a chair, Glitsky straddled it backward. He picked up on Ms. Tong's story as she was telling the inspectors that she'd offered to stay on for the night—he assumed she meant last night—and thank God she hadn't. "But Carla—Mrs. Markham—said she and the kids could handle things, I should go. They didn't expect many more people."

  "How many were there when you left?" Bracco asked.

  Ms. Tong considered a moment. "Her coffee group, mostly. Which is six other women. They meet every Friday morning. I think when they heard about Mr. Markham anyway, they brought some casseroles and things like that, so I thought she might have wanted me to stay and heat them up and serve them. But no."

  Fisk was nodding as though this was all somehow relevant. Bracco was taking notes on a yellow legal pad. At least, Glitsky noted with some surprise and relief, his new guys had put a tape recorder on the table. But he could see how they hadn't gotten very far if all of Tong's answers had gone this way. He decided to speak up, keep things on point, maybe give a little instruction while he was at it. "So, Ms. Tong," he said gently, "what time did you wind up leaving?"

  "Mrs. Tong," she corrected him. "A little before seven."

  "And there were only Mrs. Markham and her six friends in the house when you left? Nobody else?"

  She turned to face him. "Well, the kids and a couple of their friends, too. Ian's, really, not the girls'."

  "Two of them?"

  "I think so. Teenagers. They sat in here."

  "Two of Ian's friends, then," Glitsky said. "Do you know their names?"

  "One was Joel Burrill. He's here all the time. The other one, I think Mark, but " She shook her head.

  "How about the names of the coffee group women?" Glitsky asked.

  This was more promising, and Mrs. Tong brightened up slightly. "Well, there's Ruth Fitzpatrick, I know. And Jamie Rath. Oh, her daughter Lexi was here, too. She's in Siggy and Chloe's grade. Jamie lives right around the corner. I could show you."

  Glitsky made a little writing motion, signaling Bracco that he should be jotting down these names. To Mrs. Tong, he continued, "That would be good when we're finished here, if you don't mind. Now, as to the rest of the guests, was anyone else here when you left, or just the coffee group and Ian's friends? And Siggy and Chloe's classmate."

  "Well, of course Mr. Markham's assistant was here the whole time. Brendan, just crying and crying, worse than Mrs. Markham sometimes. Then there was Frank Husic next door. He's a very nice man. He heard about Mr. Markham on the radio and came right over to see if there was any way he could help." Mrs. Tong closed her eyes for a moment, then nodded to herself. "That's all when I was still here. After that I don't know."

  "So you didn't see Dr. Kensing?" Glitsky asked.

  Mrs. Tong's expression was instructive. She reacted visibly with recognition and, Glitsky thought, shock. "Dr. Kensing coming here surprises you?"

  It took her a moment to phrase one syllable. "Well " She stopped. The inspectors waited. Finally she shrugged. "Yes, I guess," she said.

  "And why is that?"

  Mrs. Tong was starting to close up. She drew her head down slightly between her shoulders.

  Glitsky kept at her. "Did you know Dr. Kensing, Mrs. Tong? Was he a friend of the family?"

  "Not exactly a friend, no. I didn't know him, but the name the name is familiar."

  Glitsky hadn't moved his chair, but he somehow seemed to have gotten closer to her. "And you wouldn't have expected him to come by? Why is that?"

  Before Mrs. Tong could frame an answer, one of the inspectors interrupted. Bracco, eager to show off what he'd learned, pumped in, "He was on call at the ICU when Markham died. He probably felt he should."

  Glitsky's gaze would have frozen flame. He turned mildly, though, back to his subject. "Mrs. Tong, I'm sorry. What were you going to say? Why you wouldn't have expected Dr. Kensing to come and visit?"

  "I just " She'd picked up the tension between Glitsky and his inspectors, and it didn't increase her comfort level. "I don't know," she said finally.

  In some ways, Glitsky knew, this interview and their interruptions might someday prove instructive to Fisk and Bracco, but it wasn't any solace at the moment, as a willing and cooperative witness was clamming up before his eyes because he couldn't establish a rhythm, which was halfway to rapport.

  But he wasn't through trying yet. She'd opened a different door a crack, and maybe he could get her to open that one. "All right," he said, "but you did say that Dr. Kensing wasn't exactly a friend. I believe those were your words. Didn't you say that?"

  "I think so. Yes."

  "Could you tell us what you meant by that?" He threw another, apparently benign look at his rookies, but it delivered the message loud and clear: Shut up and let her answer.

  "Well, he worked for Mr. Markham."

  "So you meant he wasn't exactly a friend because he was more an employee?" When she appeared to be considering that, Glitsky clarified it further. "As opposed to not exactly being a friend because he was more an enemy."

  They waited, and this time Mrs. Tong's check around the table revealed a universal and hopeful expectation that prompted a more open response. "His name came up sometimes," she began, "with Carla and her friends. I couldn't help but hear, serving them, you know? Actually, not so much his name as his wife's." Suddenly another thought struck her, though. "Should I be saying any of this? Do I need to have a lawyer with me?"

  Glitsky put his finger in that dike immediately. "I don't think so, ma'am. You haven't done anything wrong. You're not in any trouble." Having said that, he came right back at her, hoping a new question would trump the lawyer issue. "Why did Dr. Kensing's wife come up at this coffee group?"

  "She talked about divorcing him."

  The antecedents hung in the air in an unidentifiable jumble. "Dr. Kensing's wife?" Glitsky asked. "Was divorcing him?"

  "No." Mrs. Tong shook her head impatiently. "Carla. Mrs. Kensing was I think everybody knows this Mr. Markham had an affair with her."

  Fisk brought his baby face forward. It was alight with excitement and possibility. "With Dr. Kensing's wife?" he asked avidly.

  No, Glitsky wanted to say with his deepest sarcasm, with the golden retriever. But he bit it back. One more time, though, and he really was going to have to tell them to leave. He kept his own voice uninflected. "Are you saying that Dr. Kensing's wife—"

  "Ann."

  "Okay, Ann. She and Mr. Markham were having an affair? You mean it wasn't over?"

  "It was supposed to be. When it all blew up—"

  "When was that?"

  "About five or six months ago, just before Thanksgiving. That's when Carla found out. She kicked him out for a couple of weeks then. I didn't think he was ever coming back. But he did. She asked him back. If it were me, I don't think I'd have forgiven well, but that's me."

  "But Mr. Markham did come back?"

  Mrs. Tong nodded. "Swearing it was over, of course."

  "But it wasn't?"

  "I don't know." Now, a shrug. "Carla wasn't sure, I don't think. But she thought She told the coffee group she was getting a private investigator, and if he was seeing her again, she was leaving him." A silence settled for a long moment, after which Mrs. Tong turned to Glitsky and picked up the thread. "So when I heard Dr. Kensing had been here last night, you're right, I was surprised."

  Feigning a nonchalance he didn't feel, Glitsky leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. The information about Ann Kensing and Tim Markham made him reconsider two contradictory possibilities: first, that Mrs. Markham might have been depressed for a long while before last night, which would strengthen the argument for murder/ suicide; but second, here was an apparent possible motive for a murder.

  He would consider each more carefully when he got some time, but for now he had one more line of questioning for the maid. "As far as you know, Mrs. Tong, did Dr. Kensing know about the relationship between Mr. Markham and his wife?"

  "I think so, yes. When Car
la heard that they were getting divorced—"

  "Kensing and Ann? They're divorced now, too? Over this?"

  "I don't know if it's final yet, but I understood that they'd separated. At least when Carla heard they'd started the proceedings, she tried to make sure Mr. Markham wouldn't get named in any of the papers. So Dr. Kensing, he must have known, don't you think?"

  9

  Dismas Hardy was standing on the sidewalk on Irving Street talking with another lawyer named Wes Farrell. The two men had only met once or twice before, but the most recent time had been at Glitsky's wedding last September, where they'd independently and then together explored the limits of human tolerance for champagne. It was, it turned out for both of them, pretty high.

  Last night, Frannie had eventually shown up at the Shamrock, and she and Hardy had gone on their date—Chinese food at the Purple Yet Wah. When they got home, he couldn't get McGuire's story about Shane Mackey out of his head. This morning, he'd called around and discovered that Mackey's family had indeed hired an attorney—Farrell—to explore malpractice issues surrounding his death. After all the medical talk recently, then Tim Markham's death yesterday, he was curious to know more. Farrell would be a good source of information. He could also, he knew, be a hell of a good time. So when Wes got to his office at a little after 8:30, Hardy was standing outside on the sidewalk, holding a bottle of bubbly with a ribbon around it.

  Farrell greeted him like a long-lost brother, but then, seeing the offering, backed away in mock horror. "I don't think I've had a sip of that stuff since Abe's wedding, which is okay since I had about a year's worth that day if I recall, which I'm not sure I do."

  "It's like riding a horse," Hardy said. "You've got to get right back on after it bucks you off. Churchill drank it every day, you know? For breakfast. And he won the Nobel Prize."

  "For champagne drinking?"

  Hardy shook his head. "Peace, I think. No, wait a minute. Maybe literature."

  "It would have been good if it was peace." Farrell turned to let Hardy in past him. "I love how they wind up giving the Peace Prize to these world-class warriors. Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho. Yasser Arafat. Churchill would have fit right in. These guys aren't exactly Gandhi, you know."

  "Statesmen," Hardy said. "If you're a statesman you can kill as many people as you want as long as you're in a war, and then when you stop, everybody in Sweden is so grateful they give you the Peace Prize."

  "Except for the fact that Sweden doesn't give the Peace Prize."

  "It doesn't? Who does?"

  "Norway."

  "When did that start?"

  "Pretty early on, I think. All the other Nobel's come from Sweden, but Norway gives the Peace Prize. Don't ask me why?"

  "They're probably better statesmen," Hardy said.

  "I could be a statesman," Farrell said. "I'd like to kill lots of people." He was sitting now, rearranging the pens on his blotter. "Maybe then I could defend myself, which would mean I had a client."

  Hardy sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. "Things a little slow lately?"

  Farrell waved a hand vaguely at their surroundings. "Barely worth opening the office every day." He sighed. "If I didn't care so much about a couple of my clients "

  "The Mackeys, for example?"

  Farrell's shoulders fell. He wagged his head back and forth a couple of times in despair, then looked up through bassett eyes. "Don't tell me they came to you?"

  Hardy barked a note of laughter, then checked it. Losing business wasn't a laughing matter. "No," he said. "I promise. I'm not stealing your clients, Wes. But it is about the Mackeys."

  "What about them, besides that they've not only lost a son, but are screwed to boot?"

  "Screwed how?"

  "Because our great Supreme Court recently ruled, as you may have heard, that individuals can't sue their HMOs for medical malpractice because they don't practice medicine. They're business entities, not medical entities." He spread his palms, lifted, then dropped them in frustration. "Unfortunately, Diz, this rejects more or less exactly the argument I'd filed in behalf of the Mackeys and my other five clients. And master of timing that I am, I hitched my wagon pretty much full-time to this issue, figuring it was the wave of the future. Anyway, so now I've got to rewrite all the pleading on some new cause of action. Failure to coordinate care, general negligence, the admin of the plan caused the P.I., like that. But meanwhile, there's no billings."

  All the way back in his chair, Hardy sat with his arms crossed, halfway enjoying the rave. He knew the realities of billing. If you couldn't handle them, you didn't belong in the business. "So what happened with Shane?"

  "Shane is like textbook." Farrell shot up and went to his file cabinet, from which he pulled a thick folder. "Look at this. Check this out."

  Hardy stood and came over to the desk. Farrell had the medical records of everything that Moses McGuire had described in the Shamrock the previous night, but they went over it in a lot more detail, and with a final twist that made Shane Mackey's death even more tragic. One of Shane's doctors suggested that he might, possibly, have "something" that could respond to a new treatment being performed at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. But Shane's HMO had determined that this treatment was "experimental," so they would not cover him. Which meant the cost to Shane would be about three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. "And after months of agony, trying to decide if he should incur the cost, he went for it. He and his parents sold their houses, basically cashed out, and he went down to L.A., where guess what?"

  "He died," Hardy said soberly.

  "He died," Farrell repeated. "But I've got a witness down there who says that if he would have come in three months earlier, they might have saved him."

  Hardy whistled. "If he's credible, that could be worth a lot of money for you."

  "Yeah, but it's not coming in tomorrow, let me tell you." Farrell closed the folder. "Anyway, the bad part for me is that it's all omission, very hard to prove. Stuff somebody might have or should have done, but didn't because Parnassus doesn't allow—"

  Hardy straightened up, nearly jumped at the word. "Parnassus? That's the group here we're talking about?"

  A nod. "Sure. Shane worked for the city, so they covered him."

  "And what about your other clients? Were they with Parnassus, too?"

  "Sure. They're the biggest show in town, after all."

  "And with these other clients, somebody died every time?"

  "Yep."

  "Were they all omission cases, like with Shane?"

  "Not all. There was one little girl—Susan Magers. She was allergic to sulfa drugs and the doctor she saw forgot to ask. I mean, can you believe that? You'd think they'd have allergies flagged in the computer when they call the patient's name up, but they elected not to load that software about five years ago, save a few bucks." He shook his head in disgust. "But let me ask you, Diz. If you don't have a client, what's your interest in all this?"

  Hardy sat on the corner of the desk. "I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. I heard about Shane just last night and got to wondering if his fiance´e or his family needed any help, which brought me to you. But when I hear it's all Parnassus "

  "What's all Parnassus?"

  Hardy frowned, reluctant by habit to disclose information he'd been given in relative confidence. Instead, he temporized. "The name's just been coming up a lot lately. You heard about Tim Markham, didn't you?"

  "What about him?"

  Hardy looked a question—was Wes putting him on?—but apparently not. "He got killed yesterday. Hit and run."

  "You're kidding me!" Farrell's face went slack. "I've really got to start watching some nighttime television, reading the paper, something. When did it happen?"

  "Yesterday morning. They got him over to Portola, where he died."

  "God, in his own hospital. I love it. They must be shitting over there." Farrell broke a smile. "Maybe I could call his wife and see if she wants to sue them. Wouldn't that be sweet?"

  "
Sue who?"

  "Portola, Parnassus, the usual suspects."

  "Except that they didn't kill him, Wes. He got hit by a car."

  Farrell sat forward, still grinning, his elbows on his desk. "Listen to me, Diz. Did you know Tim Markham? Well, I did. He gets admitted to a hospital filled with the doctors he's been screwing for fifteen years, he's not getting out alive no matter what. I guarantee it."

  Hardy was smiling, too. "It's a good theory, Wes, but I don't think it happened."

  Farrell pointed a finger. "You wait," he said.

  * * *