Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3, page 66
“Why is that?”
“Because yesterday afternoon, somebody took a shot at me.”
Eleanor Herbert’s teacup halted midway to her lips. “I’m glad to see that they missed.”
“They didn’t, exactly. Whoever it was, hit Detective Barent, with whom I had just finished having lunch. Lew Barent is my friend. He should recover but the incident sort of ruined our afternoon.”
“And you think that this shooting has something to do with Regina Cole? Why would you think that?”
Lenny and Dominick, not to mention sad, dead Joey and Don, might have been able to give reasons. Kurtz did not feel it prudent to mention any of these names to Eleanor Herbert. “Regina Cole’s death is an open case that Lew is investigating. Regina Cole worked at Easton. I work at Easton. Aside from that, I don’t know.”
Eleanor Herbert raised a brow. “It seems to me more likely that Detective Barent was the target. After all, murder is his business. It isn’t yours.”
“That could be,” Kurtz admitted.
“Then why don’t you mind your own business and leave Detective Barent to his? I doubt that he will appreciate your interfering in his work.” She said this without rancor and looked at him pleasantly over the top of her teacup.
“There’s more to it than that,” Kurtz said. She waited, smiling politely.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Harold Van Gelden?” Kurtz watched her face closely. The reaction surprised him. Her smile grew wider. He had been expecting something else—horror, maybe, or at least distaste. The picture that Kurtz had formed of Harold Van Gelden, from everything Barent and Bill Werth had told him, was that of a sadist, a man who abused his position as a therapist in order to torment his helpless patients.
“Of course,” she said. “He was my psychiatrist for many years.”
“What was he like?”
She looked at him. “Why do you ask? Doctor Van Gelden is dead.”
“You sound as if you were fond of him.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She looked out the window. A wide lawn sloped down to a sandy beach, where a willow tree bent with the wind. “He saved my life, or at least my sanity.” She frowned, and then she sighed and sipped her tea and gave Kurtz a reluctant smile. “That was a long time ago.”
“Could you tell me about it?”
“Why should I?” She said it almost absently, as if her mind were still elsewhere, then she gave a little shrug. “But then again, why not?” she said. “Why not?” She poured more tea into her cup and looked inquiringly at Kurtz. Kurtz shook his head. Eleanor Herbert stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea, tasted it and then said, “I was not a happy little girl. My mother died shortly after I was born, from an aneurysm in the brain. My father had little time to spend with me. I had two brothers, both considerably older than myself. Vincent was pleasant enough, but he had no real interest in a baby sister. Joe, my older brother, was my idol. I adored him.” Eleanor Herbert shook her head sadly. “Joe was caught in an accident, a building was bombed. The police never did discover who was responsible. Doctor Van Gelden owned a private psychiatric hospital. Joe was confined there for several years but he never recovered. Finally, one morning, he was found hanging from a doorframe, a suicide.
“For some reason, I blamed myself. Children are like that, you know. Children see the whole world as if it were an extension of themselves. They make associations. They see relationships that, frankly, contain no sense. Why should I have blamed myself for my brother’s illness, and later, his death? Why did I feel such guilt?” She shrugged again. A pained look crossed her face. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. And really, it doesn’t matter. I did blame myself. I felt guilty. I became depressed.”
“And so your family turned once again to Doctor Van Gelden?”
Eleanor Herbert nodded her head. “He was very patient with me, very gentle. He made me see that my perception of these things was warped and incorrect. It took me years before I could bring myself to realize, to believe, that I had nothing to do with my brother’s death.”
“It sounds,”—Kurtz hesitated—“as if you must have been lonely.”
“I suppose that I was.” Eleanor Herbert nodded primly. “I never went to school, you see, not as a young girl. I had tutors. Occasionally, I was allowed to play with Caroline McFadden and her brother Michael, who were the children of our housemaid, but my father was not entirely approving of these relationships.”
“Not exactly an egalitarian point of view,” Kurtz said. Not surprising, though. What fun would it be to have all that money if you couldn’t put down the help?
“They were not egalitarian times.” Eleanor Herbert smiled wistfully. “Caroline and her brother were the children of servants and I was the little queen, the heiress. It just wouldn’t do.”
“And so what happened, with Doctor Van Gelden, I mean?”
“Nothing happened. He was my therapist. I saw him once or twice a week for many years. He would come here, usually. A few times, I was driven to his office at the Institute.” She sipped her tea. “I don’t really remember. And then later on, after my husband died, I saw him again for a little while.”
“Were you on medication?”
She frowned. “I think so,” she said.
“But you don’t remember?”
“Why should I? It was many years ago.”
“True,” Kurtz said. “Tell me, have you ever heard of a woman named Claire Reisberg?”
She looked at him with faint interest. “No,” she said. “Should I have?”
“I suppose not,” Kurtz said. He sipped his tea. They chatted for another few minutes. Eleanor Herbert had a quick, lively wit. Despite her physical frailty, she had obviously kept up with current affairs. Finally, Kurtz glanced at his watch, and unable to think of anything else that might be helpful, he took his leave.
“Claire Reisberg,” said Moran. “She was thirty. The police report says she was blonde, blue eyes, about five-seven, one-twenty. It even lists her measurements.
36-22-36.”
“Sounds attractive,” Barent said. Barent had a bandage wound around his head and a persistent headache. He had been told not to come to work for at least three days but Harry Moran had stopped by the house to give him an update. Betty, who knew her husband well, apparently realized that keeping in touch with the case would be better for his blood pressure than sitting around and stewing. She left the two men alone and went out to the supermarket for some dinner.
“She must have been. The investigating officer was a guy named Jason Quinn. Quinn’s report doesn’t exactly say so but apparently he always had some doubts regarding the official version of the story. At least one member of the staff expressed the opinion that Claire Reisberg was having an affair with Harold Van Gelden. It seems that she was seen getting into Van Gelden’s limousine on at least three separate occasions.”
“Was Van Gelden married?”
“Divorced.”
“Before or after Claire Reisberg?”
“Before.”
“Gives him less of a motive, doesn’t it? And having an affair wasn’t illegal, not even then.”
“No,” Moran said.
“And while it makes you wonder, it certainly doesn’t constitute evidence that Van Gelden killed her.”
Moran shrugged. “The patient who was accused, a guy named William Burke, apparently had a history of sexual abuse. He had been accused of the rape of two High School girls. The charges were apparently true, but Burke’s family had money and so they cut a deal with the DA and incidentally made some pretty hefty contributions to his political campaign: confinement to the Van Gelden Institute rather than jail. It was reported that Burke made several advances on Claire Reisberg but of course she turned him down.”
“Did Burke deny the charges?”
“No. He admitted doing it but his lawyer claimed insanity.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that they kept Burke pretty heavily hopped up. Also, his brain had been fried by insulin shock, an early victim of Van Gelden’s theories. Supposedly, by the time of Claire Reisberg’s murder, he was disoriented as to place and time, a complete psycho.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her,” Barent remarked.
“The night nurse and an orderly both initially reported that Burke was asleep at the time of the strangling. Quinn is very clear about that. They later recanted the story. Claimed they must have been mistaken.”
“Not good,” Barent said.
“No. And there were traces of Claire Reisberg’s blood on Burke’s pajamas, so that was that.”
Barent pulled a cigar out of his pocket and stuffed it in his mouth. Betty didn’t let him actually light the things up inside the house but he liked to chew on them, get a little flavor of the tobacco. “Joseph P. Herbert, Junior also had a history of abusing women.”
“Correct,” Moran said. “Makes you wonder.”
“Yeah,” Moran shook his head sadly. “But it all happened over sixty years ago. Not much chance of getting to the bottom of it now.”
“Yeah,” Barent said. “I know.”
Chapter 24
“Dr. Kurtz, OR Six, stat.”
“What the hell…?” Kurtz glared at the overhead speaker in the surgeons’ lounge but nevertheless put down the tuna on rye that he had barely begun eating, rose to his feet and trotted down the hall.
Nobody paid him any attention when he first walked into the OR. An infant wrapped in blankets placidly sucked its thumb in an isolette. Nobody was paying the infant any attention, either, because a woman, anesthetized and intubated, lay upon the OR table with a resident pumping rhythmically on her chest while an anesthesia team stuck her in the neck for a central line. Three men in masks and gowns were working over her open abdomen and blood was flying everywhere.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kurtz muttered.
One of the men turned around: John Letterman, an obstetrician. Kurtz knew him from the OR but had never had much to do with him before. “Richard,” Letterman said. Sweat dripped from Letterman’s brow and his voice was ragged. “Could you give us a hand?”
“What’s going on?”
“Caesarian hysterectomy. Placenta accreta. She’s bleeding out.” Sometimes a pregnant woman’s placenta, instead of sitting nicely inside the uterus, eroded into the uterine wall, occasionally even through it. It was like a swiftly invasive cancer. Sometimes the patient started to bleed near the end of the pregnancy but sometimes there was no way to make the diagnosis prior to delivery. Since they were doing the case in the OR rather than up on obstetrics, they must have at least had some suspicions. Without drastic treatment, placenta accreta was almost always fatal unless the uterus was removed, along with any other tissues that had been invaded.
“Let me scrub,” Kurtz said.
“Hurry up.”
Kurtz stepped out of the room, hastily scrubbed his hands and forearms and stepped back in. A nurse held up a gown. He slipped his arms inside, then shoved his hands into rubber surgical gloves. A circulating nurse tied the gown around Kurtz’ back and he stepped up to the table.
A steady pool of blood welled up from deep in the pelvis. A suction catheter continually drained the blood into a canister. The woman’s uterus was boggy and swollen. Both broad ligaments, which contained the uterine blood supply, were clamped, which should have stopped any bleeding from the uterus itself. “Where’s she bleeding from?” Kurtz asked.
“Lower down,” Letterman said. “The placenta’s eroded into the vaginal wall, maybe the bladder. I think it’s got into a loop of bowel, as well.”
Kurtz glanced up at the head of the table. The arterial line trace on the monitor read a blood pressure of forty over twenty-three. The ECG showed a slow, agonal rhythm. The patient’s body shook every time the resident pumped on her chest. Kurtz looked down at the blood welling steadily up into the wound and asked, “Do you have a Satinsky clamp on the table?”
“No,” the scrub nurse said. “This wasn’t supposed to be a vascular case.”
“Then give me a DeBakey.”
The scrub nurse handed him a large, curved clamp. Kurtz reached into the opened abdomen and palpated the aorta. A pulse was barely detectable. He lifted up the aorta and squeezed the clamp around it. The bleeding from the pelvis perceptibly slowed. The blood pressure tracing rose to sixty over forty-two. The ECG picked up speed.
Letterman peered at the DeBakey. “You clamped the aorta,” he said.
“You got any better ideas?” Kurtz replied.
“Not at the moment,” Letterman said. He turned to the scrub nurse. “Give me a handful of lap pads.”
“How many?”
“As many as you’ve got.”
The nurse shrugged and handed him a mound of snowy white pads. Letterman began to pack them into the pelvis, putting pressure on the lower portion of the uterus and the bladder. “That won’t hold it for long,” he said. “But maybe we can catch up with the bleeding.”
The anesthesiologist, Vinnie Steinberg, was squeezing rubber bulbs with both hands, inflating pressure bags which were wrapped around units of blood. “We’re doing a little better,” Steinberg said. “Stop pumping for a minute.” The resident doing CPR looked at Letterman, who nodded. He stopped pumping. The blood pressure stayed steady at sixty-seven over forty. The heart rate picked up speed.
Better was hardly good. The patient was alive but it was a temporary gain. She couldn’t bleed at the moment because most of the blood supply to the lower half of her body was cut off and most of the rest was held in by the packs. They had maybe an hour, two at the most, to finish up and get out or everything below the cross-clamp would begin to necrose.
Blood flowed in through the IV lines. The pressure steadily rose. “Alright,” Letterman said, “let’s get to it.”
An hour later, the uterus was out and the oozing from the vaginal vault was again packed. If she lived, they would have to bring her back to the OR in a few days to take out the packing. Half the woman’s bladder, where the invading placenta had eroded, plus a three inch portion of the left colon, had been removed and sent off to pathology. They transferred the patient, still intubated, to the ICU on dopamine and epinephrine drips, the blood still trickling in, hopefully faster than it was oozing out.
“All bleeding stops eventually,” Letterman said. Not exactly a reassuring thought. Letterman smiled sheepishly at Kurtz and gave a tired shrug.
Maybe she would live, Kurtz thought. He hoped so.
Mickey Nolan’s face looked like a slab of concrete. It was pale and hard and marbled with old acne scars. His eyes looked out at the world with placid curiosity, impassive, even serene, the expression of a man who knew that humanity could no longer touch him. Nolan and Moran both sat in padded chairs, separated from each other by a pane of plexiglass.
“My name is Harry Moran. I’m a cop.” Nolan smiled slightly. “I’m investigating a murder in the city. I have some questions I’d like you to answer.”
Nolan said nothing but his eyes were still curious.
“Have you ever heard of a woman named Regina Cole?”
For the first time, Nolan spoke. “Why should I talk to you? What have you got to offer me?”
Good question. Not much, and both of them knew it. “We have information that a couple of your boys were involved, Joey Cork and Don Lonigan.”
Nolan yawned. “Never heard of them,” he said.
“No? Then I guess it doesn’t bother you that Cork and Lonigan are both dead.”
“Not at all,” Nolan said. “Why should it?”
Most big time crooks at least played the game of pretending to be fellow members of the human race. A little forced sympathy, a sad, regretful smile, maybe even a crocodile tear or two. These things might be protective coloration but they tended to put the listener at his ease. Not Mickey Nolan.
“Tell me,” Moran said, “you have any money in real estate, maybe a development near the Meadowlands?”
A tiny frown creased Nolan’s forehead. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.
“No, of course you don’t, but why not give it a try? Things can’t be too exciting in prison.” At least, they weren’t supposed to be. Prison was supposed to be boring. That’s why it was prison. Crooks dealt with this fact in different ways. Some worked out, pumping iron like it was a drug, sedating themselves into a few hours of dreamless sleep. Some (not many) took advantage of the time and enforced isolation to read books and write memoirs. Some got the equivalent of high school or even college degrees. A few of these played little jokes, using their newly acquired knowledge to file motion after motion with the criminal courts, all of which, by law, had to be properly responded to.
Mickey Nolan was plump and flabby. He had never, to Moran’s certain knowledge, checked a book out of the prison library. Nolan, despite his apparent circumstances, did not suffer from the usual boredom of prison. A string of visitors, old friends, family, lawyers, kept him entertained. No doubt bribes had been placed. No doubt the food that Nolan ate was just a bit better than the food that his fellow inmates had to live with. No doubt he had music in his cell and a television set of his own and probably access to a phone if he wanted one. Mickey Nolan was still the Godfather, even here.
Nolan shrugged. “I’m excited enough,” he said.
Moran frowned and scratched at his cheek in exasperation. “Does the name Vincent Herbert ring any bells?”
Nolan rose to his feet, calmly walked over to the door on his side of the room and banged on the bars. A guard peeked in through the tiny window. “Get me out of here,” Nolan said. “I’m bored.”
The door opened. Nolan stepped through it without looking back and the door closed.
Moran sighed and rose tiredly to his feet. Win some, lose some. He glanced at his watch. At least two hours to get back to the city. He hoped Barent was having a restful day.
It was Barent’s first day back at the office and it started off peacefully enough. Evidently, the boys had decided that he was not yet entirely a hundred percent, since they were making an unusual effort to keep the noise down and not disturb him. Barent found this touching and mildly amusing.
