Part 4
“Dr. Heddis is flying back. He should be here within two hours. Sorry to have called you at such an hour. Please keep on searching and consult Dr. Heddis immediately he returns. In the meantime, will you be so kind as to have a typed report of your findings in my hands by nine this morning? So kind of you!” Dr. MacArthur stated.
He ushered the chemist through the door and shut it after him. He turned to face the three men. He stood so erect that his wife would have known he had lost a battle and a tremendous one.
“Bear Sterling, did that body show a hypodermic puncture?”
“It did.”
“Then that syringe contained something ... I can’t seem to make my brain ... understand.”
At nine-fifteen, Dr. Henry MacArthur sat in his own office chair and peered intently at the innocuous findings of the second assistant chemist and the addenda which Dr. Heddis had written an hour before.
His long brow was pleated with straight thin wrinkles.
He was reading Dr. Heddis’ supplement with fascinated horror. It indicated, what he had feared, that the patient in Bed 11, Ward B, Medicine Clinic had not died of a sleeping potion. That somewhere in the Elijah Wilson....
His door into the corridor of the Administration Building was open. Except during meetings it was always open.
His secretary appeared in it and said, “Here is your mail, Dr. MacArthur.”
The tone of her voice braced him.
He smiled as she advanced and laid the letters upon the desk.
“I won’t dictate this morning, Miss Sadler. There is an important staff meeting. Please call off my appointment with the Woman’s Board, and that luncheon engagement with the man from the Duke Foundation ... and ... take all telephone messages unless they come from the staff, or Dr. Heddis.”
He was interrupted by the tall shadow of Cub Sterling.
The secretary turned and passed out.
Cub took the proffered chair and said, “Can they all come, sir?”
“I’m afraid not. Your father is doing a brain tumor on the Bishop’s aunt, Paton is scheduled for a hysterectomy on the president of the Woman’s College, Peters is demonstrating his new retina operation before some visiting medical students; but Hoffbein, Harrison, and Barton will be here, and we have the others’ approval to go ahead. I’m sorry they can’t come, but I do not feel I can assume the responsibility of delaying the meeting. Is Mattus coming?”
“No, sir. He’s doing my teaching rounds with the students.”
“Heddis believes....”
Dr. MacArthur slid the typewritten findings toward Cub. The young man lit a cigarette, looked away from them and frowned.
“Dr. MacArthur,” his voice had assumed its steely quality under which he always hid his emotions. He held out an envelope.
MacArthur took it automatically and asked, “What is it, son?”
“My resignation, sir.”
MacArthur straightened as though he had been struck by an electric eel. His blue eyes shot into Cub Sterling’s and he muttered:
“Are you afraid to face the music, Ethridge?”
“No, sir!”
“Then do it without hysterics,” MacArthur ordered, tearing the envelope into shreds as Prissy Paton’s purring voice interrupted:
“What, am I the first one here, MacArthur? Good morning, Ethridge. Pleasant morning. Cancerous through and through. No use removing anything. Fine woman, and great influence in her generation. Sewed her up again. No use. Will probably live several months. Are the rumors I hear true? Has there been another? I thought it was that yesterday. I said to myself, ‘it certainly has all the symptoms....’”
“Blow your bubbles out of the window, Boy Blue,” Dr. Harrison chuckled easing Dr. Paton into a chair. Then he walked over and shook hands with Ethridge Sterling, Junior, and with Dr. MacArthur.
He seated himself, took out his pipe and began talking of the tremendous discoveries of the ruins of Roman towns which had recently been ascertained in England by means of the airplane.
He filled the room with sanity. Dr. Paton went to his usual morning manicure, and Dr. Barton came in quietly, nodded, sat down and joined the listening group. Nobody noticed Flannel-feet Hoffbein’s entrance.
Dr. Harrison stopped and turned politely to Dr. MacArthur; like obedient schoolboys the other four men turned to MacArthur also.
“Gentlemen, I know it is most unusual and inconvenient to be called to a staff meeting without notice and at this hour. Still I believe the occasion justifies the summons. The thing of which Ethridge told you yesterday afternoon, is this morning.... At three A.M. the patient in Bed 11, Ward B, Medicine Clinic was found ... dead. There was an unexplained puncture from a hypodermic syringe in the left arm.”
“MacArthur,” Dr. Harrison’s voice had become an august bass, “are you s-u-r-e?”
MacArthur stood up and walked toward Dr. Harrison. In his extended hand was the typewritten sheet. He was even straighter than he had been in the autopsy room. For thirty-odd years his and Dr. Harrison’s great passion had been the Elijah Wilson Hospital. Harrison rose. They met in a patch of morning sunshine, which threw the sheen from Dr. Harrison’s head into a mirror over the mantel and back into Prissy Paton’s eyes.
Prissy gave a hysterical gasp and prepared to scream. Dr. Barton, in the voice he used with children, remarked, “Easy, sister. Easy!”
Nobody laughed.
Nobody registered it.
Hoffbein breathed like a returning pearl diver and enunciated carefully, “Read it, Harrison.”
As Dr. MacArthur returned to his chair and Dr. Harrison cleared his throat, the door into the corridor opened slightly and Princeton Peters’ peach-blossom face vied with the morning sun. Cub Sterling saw it and winced. Before any other man had taken it in, Princeton tiptoed into the room and his lavender eyes had assumed their death-mask purple.
With a precision which carried the force of bass waves against a rock ledge, Harrison began engraving into his brain and into theirs, the report of the second assistant chemist. As he turned the page to Dr. Heddis’ supplement, the men stirred nervously and Hoffbein’s eyes took on a mountain-out-of-molehill scorn.
Dr. Heddis’ addition stated: “The routine tests, afore referred to, are being checked by my first assistant, Dr. Maids, who returned with me; so far they reveal nothing other than the ingredients of a sleeping potion. These ingredients tally with those prescribed in the order filed upon the patient’s chart. Toxicology, like other branches of the Profession, is partly guess work. Since the cadaver bears evidence of a hypodermic puncture, and indications are that the potion was not administered that way, my belief is that this patient died of a syringe of some obscure drug.
“Therefore I am immediately beginning upon the obscure tests. It may take days to prove or disprove my conclusions. In the meantime, I repeat, a sleeping potion prescribed in capsule form, which the pharmacy compounded and the student nurse states she administered, explains neither the syringe puncture nor the death.
“Indications, it seems to me, point to an obscure and deadly drug. Possibly a drug which may be administered _per os_, and may have been so administered in the two previous cases. Any findings will be immediately reported to the General Staff or Dr. MacArthur.”
As the last words scraped into the consciousness of the men, a solemnity comparable to that which shadows the faces of pallbearers as they watch the coffin of a beloved comrade lowered, blanketed the staff. Whatever their petty hates and puerile quarrels, so far as the reputation of the Elijah Wilson was concerned, they agreed. It must not be damaged.
“He might be wrong,” Prissy quavered.
Nobody heard him.
“An obscure and deadly drug. Poison. And it may take days to discover it. Something we never heard of, probably.” Dr. Harrison’s voice seemed to be directed toward his own mind.
Dr. MacArthur replied:
“Let’s wait for Heddis on the chemistry, gentlemen. Ethridge and Mattus have spent the last two hours searching texts. They could find nothing. We would only waste time surmising.” Then, as though Prissy’s statement had just reached his brain he turned to him and said, “Yes, he might be wrong. But we can’t have this thing continue, and until he is proved wrong....” He shook his head slowly, “The effect was obvious. The woman is dead.”
For a full minute after Dr. MacArthur ceased speaking, no man spoke, and it was Prissy’s high treble which cut into their consciences.
“Ethridge ... er ... how was she last night?”
“I saw her around seven,” his voice took on its protective clip. “Her pulse was around a hundred. Considering her condition that was not odd. Her spirits were excellent. Eager for Father to go ahead with the operation. He saw her between eight and nine. Found condition quite in line with the way she was when I saw her. Is that your understanding, Dr. MacArthur?”
“And ... er ... by the way, where is your father?”
“He is doing a brain tumor, Dr. Paton,” Dr. MacArthur cut in.
“And how did your resident ... Doctor ... er?”
“Mattus.”
“Yes ... thank you ... Dr. Mattus, consider her?” Hoffbein slid his question into Cub.
“He saw her before she went to sleep around nine. He reports her pulse had dropped to around ninety; otherwise her condition remained unchanged. Anything else, sir?”
Hoffbein never answered verbally questions which did not flatter him. He shook his head thoughtfully.
By that time the staff had regained some measure of its equilibrium and Dr. MacArthur continued.
“Between the time Mattus saw her and three A.M. she was ... was....”
“I’m in favor of turning the whole thing over to the police,” Princeton Peters said most righteously.
“I’m not!” Dr. Harrison was vehement. “Outside of this room ... with the exception of Bear Sterling and Heddis ... no living person is aware of the situation,” he pointed the paper at Peters’ face. “Some linen is too foul to wash in public. Want to ruin the hospital, d’ye? We think we are pretty good at death and birth ... and we shall not be downed by....”
He waved the paper at them.
“Precisely....”
Then Dr. MacArthur realized he had expressed an opinion himself....
“What is your conclusion, gentlemen?” he hurried to say.
“Mistake to form one without an examination of the witnesses, I think ... if you can call them that ... suh,” Dr. Barton interposed.
“Quite. Ethridge and I decided upon that during the autopsy. And I have arranged with my secretary to call them quietly ... and separately ... in order to avoid.... We would have questioned them minutely this morning; but the seriousness of our decision ... whatever it is ... must be a responsibility we _all_ bear. D’y’see?”
“The night student nurse on Ward B is waiting. Shall I have her brought in, gentlemen?”
Hoffbein sensed a suppressed motion of Cub Sterling’s, a slight movement in the chair, an intangible gathering of forces.
“Isn’t this rather cruel?” Dr. Harrison suggested.
“Terribly. But how else will we ever...?”
Princeton Peters interrupted Dr. MacArthur.
“Murder is cruel, too.”
It was the first time the word had been mentioned. It rushed into the faces of the seven men like an angry wind.
During the ensuing vacuum, Dr. MacArthur lifted his telephone:
“Miss Sadler, will you please bring that pupil nurse to my office.”
The girl entered tensely.
Dr. Barton noticed her eyes were blue and too closely set; Prissy thought the face was sweet; Princeton Peters felt she had been nicely brought up; Dr. Harrison’s brain flashed “kitten lined with ox-hide”; Cub noticed her feet were flat, and Dr. MacArthur was too benevolent for a personal estimate.
“Won’t you sit down, Miss ... er....”
“My name is Evelina Kerr.”
Her voice held a note of defiance as she took the proffered chair beside Dr. MacArthur’s.
“My child,” he said soothingly, “this is probably the most trying duty you have had in your whole training ... and we regret that it is unavoidable. Will you please tell us plainly ... and as minutely as you can remember, exactly what happened after you went on duty in B Ward last night?”
She sat with her feet together, her hands folded in her lap, and a sullen calm in her voice.
“At nine o’clock, Dr. MacArthur, I went on night duty on B Ward of Medicine Clinic. Aunt Roenna ... I mean Miss Kerr ... was on the floor and Miss Kexter, the white nurse, who had waited to give me my instructions.”
“White nurse?” Princeton Peters’ voice was polite, but demanding.
“Slang for graduate floor nurse in charge,” Cub Sterling supplied.
The student nurse was silent in her resentment. Finally she continued:
“They left together. Then I took my temperatures, counted pulses, prepared the patients for the night.”
“The patient in Bed 11, Miss Kerr,” Hoffbein began in his mesmerizing voice. “How was she?”
The girl started and turned toward him with the underlying resentment of a schoolboy stopped midway through the multiplication tables.
“She was all right, Dr. Hoffbein. She had no temperature and....”
“Her pulse?” he interrupted again.
Cub Sterling stirred restlessly and lit a cigarette.
“It was between ninety and a hundred. By nine-thirty I had given all of my medicines....”
“Did she have any medicine?”
“Yes, Dr. Hoffbein, she did. She had a prescription of Dr. Sterling, Senior’s. A ... a sleeping potion.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“No, sir. It came up from the pharmacy filled.”
“Wasn’t the duplicate on her chart?”
“It was pheno-barbital,” Cub Sterling cut in raspingly.
The girl hesitated. She seemed to have lost the thread of her thoughts.
“Go ahead with the story, child,” Dr. MacArthur soothed.
She sat silent a moment and then continued:
“By ten o’clock I had finished my medicines, temperatures and pulses. The ward was quiet and I started to work upon the fever charts.
“The orderly was in the kitchen straightening up and fixing the breakfast trays. Two patients called for bed-pans. The orderly came to tell me that we were short two milk bottles. I telephoned the kitchens about them.
“Otherwise the ward was perfectly quiet, except for an occasional cough.
“At ten-fifteen, Miss Willis, the night supervisor in Medicine, made her rounds, and told me to watch the patient in Bed 11 very carefully.
“At eleven-forty I went to the medicine closet to prepare the hypodermic Dr. Mattus had ordered for another patient.”
“What kind of hypodermic?” Dr. MacArthur inserted.
“A strophanthin mixture. She’s a cardiac case.”
“A dispensary case of cardiac insufficiency,” Cub Sterling cut in.
Miss Kerr’s resentment was again expressed by silence. She seemed to be debating with herself.
“What happened?” Hoffbein demanded curtly.
For the first time since she had come into the room her speech came spontaneously.
“I ... I ... was boiling the syringe and had my back to the corridor door, and suddenly I felt someone passing in the corridor and turned around, and ran to the medicine closet door. There was no one in sight. And then I remembered the boiling syringe and went back to turn it off. I couldn’t leave until I had. It would have been ruined, and if the patient didn’t get her dose in time she might die.
“So I made myself finish filling the syringe and then went into the ward. There was nobody there, and all of the patients were sleeping, except Mrs. Witherspoon, who is queer in the head.
“I asked her if she had seen anybody and she said, ‘Yes.’”
The girl’s speech died in her throat and the seven men held their breath.
MacArthur regained his first.
“Whom did she say she saw, Miss Kerr?”
“She said she saw Dr. ... Dr. ... Sterling ... Junior....”
The girl turned her close-set eyes, acid with hate, upon Cub Sterling. Princeton’s lavender eyes, death-purple, Prissy’s green ones glinting, Hoffbein’s black ones deep as wells and the brown eyes of Doctors Barton and Harrison, gravely inquiring, turned upon Cub Sterling.
Only Dr. MacArthur’s eyes remained the same.
Cub Sterling answered the inquiry sharply.
“The patient is deranged, gentlemen. I was in my rooms.”
The door opened and Bear Sterling, his brows beetling, entered. Cub rose and gave him his seat. Dr. Harrison pulled up a vacant chair and motioned Cub into it. The chair was between his and Dr. Barton’s.
Prissy Paton looked at Princeton Peters and both of them decided they had better not speak ... now.
“And what happened next, Miss Kerr?” Hoffbein insisted.
“I went and asked the orderly if he had seen anybody and he said ‘No.’ So I went and looked at the patient in Bed 11 again. She was sleeping peacefully.”
Dr. Harrison leaned suddenly forward. His voice was acid:
“Did that deranged patient see anybody else?”
“No, sir.”
Then his voice stabbed:
“Did you?”
The close eyes shifted quickly. Her response came instantly:
“No, Doctor Harrison.”
A silence began stretching. The girl continued abruptly:
“Then I went back to my desk and finished my fever charts.”
“You did not call your supervisor?”
“No, Dr. MacArthur. I finished the fever charts and then made the midnight rounds. The patient in Bed 11 was still sleeping peacefully. I called in the rounds to my night supervisor and began studying my nursing manual. Three patients rang their bells between then and two. One wanted a glass of water and two, bed-pans. At two I gave the special medicines and then went back to my studying.”
“You did not look at the patient in Bed 11?”
“No, Dr. Harrison, she had no special medicine. At three I again made rounds and found the patient in Bed 11 was dead. I called my supervisor and failed to get her. I then called the general superintendent. She told me to draw the curtains around Bed 11 and wait further orders until Dr. Mattus came.
“He and Dr. Sterling, Junior, came within the next fifteen minutes. Dr. Sterling and Dr. Mattus rolled the bed off of the ward and into the elevator.
“I did not see the patient again. I finished my ward duties by seven, woke the remaining patients and told them that the patient in Bed 11 had been operated on in the night and removed to the Surgical Clinic, like Aunt Roenna told me to....”
“When did she tell you that?” Cub Sterling inquired.
The girl hesitated and flushed. For the moment she seemed to have lost her control.
“She didn’t. I had forgotten. Miss Willis, the night supervisor told me.”
“Thank you very much, Miss Kerr. Are there any questions any of you gentlemen wish to ask Miss Kerr, before she is relieved?”
“How long have you been in training?”
“Two years and five months, Dr. Harrison. I finish in December.”
“Thank you again,” Dr. MacArthur said as she rose, and then finished:
“Of all the people concerned in this, Miss Kerr, you are the youngest. Please do not forget that two years ago you took an oath concerning silence.”
Princeton Peters, who was sitting by the door, rose and opened it for her.
“Thank you, my dear!” he beamed.
No man felt she had told the entire truth.
After her departure, they sat silently awaiting the next witness. The horror of the thing seemed to have enveloped them.
The night orderly on B Ward entered. A thin, tubercular looking man with frightened eyes. Everything about him seemed collapsed, and yet still able to move.
Dr. MacArthur looked up:
“Good morning, William. How are you?”
The man’s appreciation spread over him.
“Well as can be expected, thank you, Doctor. How’s yourself?”
He turned to Prissy, Bear, Cub, and Harrison with a respectful “Good morning, Doctor.”
“William,” Dr. MacArthur began addressing him before he could enter into a personal conversation with each man, “were you on duty last night?”
“Yes, sir, I was. As usual. And a frightful night, too, sir.”
“How?”
“Well, Dr. MacArthur, to begin my rheumatism was bothering. And then everything seemed to have hid itself. And then that girl just in here was like a kitten on a brick, sir. Got my hair prickled, so to speak, by running back and asking me if I’d seen anybody on the ward about eleven-fifty and then saying she had _felt_ somebody.”
“Was there any basis for it?”
“None, sir, as I knows. It’s true I was in the kitchen during her feeling spell, so to speak. But, if you will pardon my remarking, sir, I been on that ward ten years coming August and it’s as hard to get past me as a watchdog, sir.”
“Yes, William. I know it is.”
“Thank you, Dr. MacArthur. Thank you.”
“How many times did the nurse come back?” Hoffbein smiled encouragingly.
“Only wunst. And then when she found the woman dead, sir! I was resting with my eyes shet, sir, and she well nigh scared me out of my wits!”
“Was she frightened?” Hoffbein insisted.
“It ain’t fur me to say, Doctor. I was too mad at having my rest ruined and too scared myself to see, sir. It wasn’t till Dr. Mattus came that I could stand away from the wall, sir. When Dr. Cub ... begging your pardon, son ... Sterling got there I was all right again.
“I been in the hospital long as most of you and I seen death every day, but....”
“And we know how proud you are of the hospital, William,” Dr. MacArthur cut in, “and what a help you have always been to it. So you must promise me, upon your oath, before these gentlemen, that you will not repeat to any living soul a single word of what you know or suspect about the trouble.”
Dr. MacArthur drew the old man’s eyes to his and William replied:
“I promise, sir.”
“Thank you, William.”
Dr. Peters held the door open.
The old man started toward it and turned midway.
“Dr. MacArthur, do I ... do I...?”
“You do. Tonight and every night.”
It was apparent that every man felt from the minute William began speaking that he was innocent. During his interrogation they had relaxed.
In the interim between his exit and the entrance of Peter Rathbone, Chief Pharmacist, the tension had fallen considerably.
“Baldy” Rathbone shook them out of a reverie.
He had a body like a triangle upside down. His wide shoulders showed strength and assurance. He was a youngish middle-aged man. A spreading part ran up the center of his scalp and connected his wide forehead with the bald spot on top.
He had been raised an orphan and worked his way through college at night, and then worked his way up at the Elijah Wilson. There was a sense of definite knowledge about the face and figure. His eyes bore the marks of childhood suffering, but his smile heartened the men.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
His voice was a deep resonant baritone.
“Sit down, Baldy,” Dr. MacArthur motioned to the “witness chair”; then a deep blush steeped his face, and he smiled. Rathbone returned the smile, took the chair, and ran his eyes over the staff. He had never seen any of them so perturbed.
Dr. MacArthur said carefully:
“Er ... er ... Rathbone, did you check the prescriptions?”
“As far as possible, sir. A compounded prescription, as you know, cannot be checked as to relative quantities and so ... but the ingredients from the remainder (I understood from the order that I was to have two capsules compounded, in case the first failed to take effect) were checked. They tallied as to substance, perfectly.”
“Who compounded the prescription?” Dr. Hoffbein queried.
“McInnis, my first assistant, sir. He can be trusted.”
He was interrupted by the telephone bell. It jarred the men like a steam siren. MacArthur’s, “Yes, Heddis. Are you sure? Soon as possible. Thank you,” held the eight men to a dead silence. A silence which screamed for knowledge.
Dr. MacArthur placed the hook too carefully upon the receiver, Hoffbein thought, and then he spoke:
“Coniine, gentlemen. One of the deadliest poisons. Heddis will be over in fifteen minutes.”
“Whew!” Dr. Harrison ejaculated.
“Hypodermic syringe, then,” Bear Sterling growled.
Cub Sterling jumped as though he had been shot.
They all turned toward him.
“What’s the matter, Ethridge?” Dr. Harrison put his hand on his knee....
“Nothing. Except she was giving hypodermics all night. She....”
Dr. MacArthur’s pointer nose had a dreadful struggle with his judicial brain.