Coma

D’Ambrosio checked the closet. The wardrobe had not changed. The two suitcases he had seen on his earlier visit were still there. D’Ambrosio was always thorough and it paid off. He knew, with high probability, that Susan had not left town. That meant she would be back. D’Ambrosio decided to wait.

Wednesday, February 25, 10:41 P.M.

Bellows was exhausted. It was going on eleven, and he was still at it. In fact he had not made rounds yet on Beard 5. He had to do that before he left for home. At the nurses’ station he got the chart rack and wheeled it toward the lounge. A cup of coffee would help him get through the work. Opening the door, he was genuinely surprised to find Susan in the lounge; she was hard at work.

“Excuse me. I must be in the wrong hospital.” Bellows pretended to go back out through the door. Then he looked back at Susan.

“Susan, what in hell’s name are you doing here? I was told in no uncertain terms that you had become persona non grata.” Without meaning to, Bellows’s voice reflected some irritation. It had been a terrible day—with the low spot being his discovery of Walters.

“Who, me? You must be mistaken, sah. I’m Miss Scarlett, the new nurse on 10 West,” said Susan, feigning a higher voice with a southern accent.

“Christ, Susan, cut the bullshit.”

“You started it.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Polishing my shoes, what does it look like I’m doing?”

“OK, OK. Let’s start again.” Bellows came into the room and sat on the counter top. “Susan, this whole scene has become very serious. It’s not that I’m not happy to see you, because I am. I had a fabulous time last night. God, it seems like a week ago. But if you’d been around when the shit hit the fan this afternoon, you’d understand why I’d be a little on edge. Among other things I was told that if I continued to cover and aid you in your, quote, ‘idiotic mission,’ I’d be out looking for a new residency.”

“Ah, poor boy! May have to leave Mama’s warm womb.”

Bellows looked away for a moment, trying to maintain his composure. “I can sense this conversation is going nowhere. Susan, you cannot understand that I have more to lose in this affair than you do.”

“Like hell you do!” Susan’s face lit up with sudden anger! “You’re so Goddamned self-centered and worried about your residency appointment that you couldn’t see a conspiracy if it involved your .... your mother.”

“Jesus Christ! The thanks I get for helping you. What the hell does my mother have to do with all this?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just couldn’t think of anything else which would come close to your residency in your warped value system.

So I took a chance on your mother.”

“You’re making no sense, Susan.”

“No sense, he says. Look, Mark, you’re so worried about your career that you’re blind. Do I look different to you?”

“Different?”

“Yeah, different. Where’s that old clinical expertise, that keen sense of observation that you’re supposed to have absorbed during your medical training? What do you think this is here under my eye?” Susan pointed to the bruise on her cheek. “And what do you think this is?” Susan garbled the last few words as she held out her lower lip, exposing the laceration.

“It looks like trauma. ...” Bellows extended his hand to examine Susan’s lip more closely. Susan fended him off.

“Keep your cotton-pickin’ mitts off. And you say that you have more to lose in this whole thing. Well, let me tell you something. I was attacked and threatened this afternoon by a man who scared the shit out of me.

This man knew about me and what I’ve been doing these last few days.

He even knew about my family. He even included my family in the threat.

And you say that you have more to lose!”

“You mean somebody actually hit you?” Bellows was incredulous.

“Oh come on, Mark. Can’t you say something intelligent? Do you think these are self-inflicted wounds to make people feel sorry for me? I’ve stumbled into something big, that I can tell you. And I have a scary feeling that it’s some large organization. I just don’t know how or why or who.”

Bellows looked at Susan for several minutes, his mind racing over her story, which seemed incredible, and his own experience that afternoon.

“I don’t have any literal wounds to show, but I had one hell of an afternoon as well. Remember those drugs I told you about? The ones that were found in a locker in the OR doctor’s lounge? They were found in a locker assigned to me, as I told you. Like it or not, I was immediately implicated. So I decided that I had to settle the whole thing once and for all by getting Walters to explain why I was still assigned to that locker when he had given me another.

“But Walters didn’t come in today. First time in I-don’t-know-how-many years. So I decided to visit him.” Bellows sighed and poured himself some coffee, remembering the grisly details. “The poor bastard committed suicide over this thing, and I had to be the guy who found him.”

“Suicide?”