Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

I reminded myself that I had no right to ask questions, and said my goodbyes, leaving her hunched over the little round table.

Downstairs in the lobby, I veered behind a couple of elegantly dressed women standing in front of the blinking activities display.

“Excuse me,” I said, “my grandmother is thinking about buying an apartment here. Could you tell me how you like living here?”

They turned and started talking at once, the gist of which was that the chef in the dining room put out a fabulous Sunday brunch, that there were always classes and workshops and outings planned, and that everybody who lived there was interesting. They could have done commercials for the place.

I nodded toward the blinking display. “I noticed that Dr. Coffey is going to do a talk about bypass surgery. Does he do that often?”

They sobered and nodded. “Yes, he does,” said one. “I suppose he’s operated on so many of the people living here that he needs to let us know that it’s available for us.”

I looked toward a tanned silver-haired couple striding out the door carrying tennis rackets. “Everybody looks awfully healthy. He can’t do that many bypasses.”

One woman fingered a string of cultured pearls at her throat and said, “Looks can be deceiving. Several people have been active one day and in the hospital the next. It’s really alarming.”

The other woman said, “Like Mary Kane. She had a big party for Sunday brunch, and that night she went into a diabetic coma. She just insisted on eating those cherry blintzes, and why not? She was eighty-five years old and she’d lived with diabetes for years and years. She knew what she could do and what she couldn’t do, but I guess that time she overdid it. Two days later Dr. Coffey did a triple bypass on her.”

I waited for the end of the story, and when neither of them volunteered it, I said, “And was it a success?”

“She never woke up. They had to transfer her to a hospital in St. Pete, and she was there for three months before she finally died. Dr. Coffey said she was just too frail to survive. Poor thing, and she never even knew she had anything wrong with her heart. All she knew about was her diabetes.”

“Almost the same thing happened to Mr. Folsom, remember? He seemed fine too, just complained of emphysema from smoking before he knew better. And then, boom, Dr. Coffey found four of his arteries blocked and had to do bypass surgery on him. He didn’t wake up, either, but he didn’t suffer as long as Mary did. He passed away just a few days after the surgery.”

They both fixed me with eyes frightened and resigned, while little warning bells went off in my head.

Thirteen

I said, “Dr. Coffey must be awfully busy.”

“Oh, he is! At least one person a week from here has a bypass, and that’s just the people living here.”

“It must be awfully hard for their families, having them die so suddenly like that.”

They nodded, but with a look of some disturbed confusion. “Actually, none of them has had a family. They’ve all been alone.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

While the valet retrieved my car, I calculated Dr. Coffey’s income from bypass surgeries. The going rate was around $150,000 per artery, so a triple bypass could bring him a cool half million. If he did just two of those a week, the million dollars Marilee had conned Coffey out of would be only a week’s income. In light of the fact that she had bought her grandmother an apartment that probably cost at least a half million, and in light of the fact that it sounded like some of his patients hadn’t needed the surgery anyway, it didn’t seem so bad for Marilee to have taken advantage of him.

I drove south on Tamiami Trail, passing Marina Jack, where a few cotton-ball clouds were reflected in the glassy blue water, and naked masts of sailboats stood sentinel around yachts sleeping in the sun. A million questions were running through my mind. Why did Cora say Harrison Frazier had ruined Marilee’s life? If Marilee knew Frazier, had she had her keys changed to keep him out? And where the hell was Marilee, anyway?

When I got back home, I put a Patsy Cline CD in the player, and Patsy and I sang together while I took the sheets off my bed and gathered up more laundry to put on top of the stuff in the washing machine. I added detergent to the wash and turned it on, and while the washer filled, Patsy and I sang another song. I got out the Swiffer and punched a clean cloth into its head, and Patsy and I sang some more while the machine started chugging. The thing about Patsy is that she kept it clean and simple. Nothing oily or mysterious. The world would be a better place if everybody thought like Patsy.