North of Montana (17 page)

“My daughter has four kids, all boys,” Wild Bill says with a corn-ball wink. “Sometimes she loses entire days at a time.” He takes her elbow and eases her down on the bench, going on about his grandsons and getting her to talk about her baby. I’m starting to admire his style.

“What will happen to Dr. Eberhardt?” Claudia wants to know.

“He could lose his license to practice medicine,” Walker tells her gravely. “He could go to jail.”

She closes her eyes for a moment then looks off into the distance through gold-rimmed glasses; small, old-fashioned oval frames like they wore to sign the Constitution. She is bareheaded. The wind blows her straight shiny brown hair. It must look pretty when she bends to play the violin.

“Do you want to see him go to jail?” I ask.

“The angry woman inside me does.” She gives us a reassuring smile. “Not to worry—I won’t let her interfere.”

She has an artsy way of talking but seems sincere.

“Tell us how you became a patient of Dr. Eberhardt.”

She doesn’t balk at the tape recorder. She explains how three years ago last March she was crossing the street to go to a concert at the Gardner Museum when a kid in a Datsun Z nipped around the corner and bounced her off the windshield twenty feet into the air. She spent six weeks in the hospital in a body cast. Dr. Eberhardt was the senior orthopedist.

“He talked to me a lot. I was trapped in this cast and he talked to me, for which I was grateful.”

A tear forms and she wipes her eye. I am thrilled by the emotion. Save it for the witness stand, baby.

“I was worried I would never play again. He sat with me … and he promised I would.…”

Walker fishes out a pocket-sized pack of Kleenex and gives her one.

“I don’t know how long I was on medication in the hospital, but it was all those months afterward that he kept giving me pills.”

“What kind of pills, Claudia?”

“Dilaudid. Valium. Halcion when I couldn’t sleep. I was so doped up I couldn’t even listen to music anymore.”

“Were you able to go back to the violin?”

Claudia shakes her head. “She died.”

“Who died?”

“The musician inside of me.” She is pushing the stroller back and forth in short strokes. “I kept telling Dr. Eberhardt she was dying.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to be patient, that the healing process takes a long time, and gave me more pills.”

The crown of her head and the nap of the brown wool coat along her shoulders glisten with the first tentative drops of rain. The stroller cover is all the way down over the baby, who I assume is asleep since I have not heard or seen it. I can’t feel my fingers or toes. Walker writes in a small spiral pad.

“How long did this go on with Eberhardt?” he asks.

“For a year after I got out of the hospital. Then Allan came along and told me I should stay away from him, that he wasn’t good for me, he wasn’t telling me the truth.”

“Allan is your husband?”

“My helper.” A dreamy smile invades the tears. “My dear friend.”

“Did Dr. Eberhardt write prescriptions?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Where did you get the prescriptions filled?”

“Bay Pharmacy on Mass Ave.”

“Great.”

Walker says, “I‘ll check it out,” and makes a note.

“Were you addicted?” I ask. “Meaning that you couldn’t stop taking the pills if you wanted to?”

“Yes.”

I fix her right in the eyes. “Then how did you stop?”

“Allan helped me. That’s what he was there for.”

“Claudia, why do you think Dr. Eberhardt prescribed these drugs if he knew they could be dangerous?”

“I was depressed. My injuries weren’t healing. Maybe he thought I would make trouble for him.” She stands. “I’d better get the baby home.”

“It’s getting cold,” Walker agrees, a Boston euphemism for the onset of hypothermia.

“We’ll be coming back in a few weeks to take your deposition,” I tell her, walking toward the gate on numb wet stubs of feet. “And then we might ask you to fly to California at government expense to testify against Dr. Eberhardt. Would you agree to that?”

“The angry woman inside me can’t wait to get on the airplane,” Claudia says with a smile.

I turn off the tape recorder and smile back. “Bring her along.”

•  •  •

Walker and I are running for a phone booth in Harvard Square. Because they have made the Square a pedestrian mall and closed it to traffic, our cars are double-parked three blocks away. Hordes of students and homeless people seem intent on getting in our way. My plane leaves in a matter of hours and I still need to see Eberhardt’s former supervisor at the hospital.

“Too risky,” Walker is huffing. “Why I ruled it out in the first place. He’ll just get on the horn and tell your boy you’re onto him.”

“I’ll take the chance.”

“It’s foolish when we’ve got that Van Hoven gal all sewn up.”

“She’s not sewn up until we confirm her story.”

“Let’s get out to the airport, get something to eat.” Walker is plainly ready to quit. After all, it is past noon and we haven’t had our first Bloody Mary of the day.

A middle-aged woman has set down a canvas tote that says Save the Trees in front of a pay phone. I grab the receiver off the hook before she can remove her gloves, fiercely turning on Walker at the same time: “I’ve got to come back with something hard or they’ll skin me alive, do you understand?”

Dr. Alfred Narayan, chief of staff of orthopedics, will be glad to speak with us but is scheduled for surgery in forty-five minutes. No problem. We dash back to our cars and Wild Bill ably demonstrates how he got his name, leading me with red bubble flashing on a wild charge down Memorial Drive, across the Boston University bridge to Longwood Avenue. I have noticed horseshoe tracks embedded in the sidewalks of Boston at various spots where Paul Revere passed on his famous ride; well, they should have tire tracks to commemorate ours.

Dr. Narayan is waiting for us at the nurses’ station of the cardiac care unit: tall, aquiline, black curly hair cropped close, warm brown eyes, and pale brown skin. He is wearing a red silk tie beneath the starched white lab coat. The accent is not Indian but educated Oxford and he smells like lilacs during a wet English spring.

“This must be a serious business to send federal agents,” he says over his shoulder, leading us past gurneys and IV stands to the end of a hall.

There is no time for pleasantries.

“When Dr. Eberhardt was on staff, did he prescribe a lot of drugs?”

“Only what was called for.”

“Did he ever overprescribe?”

“Of course not.”

Walker: “Did you notice any drugs missing during the time he was employed?”

“No. We’ve never had a problem.”

The doctor looks back and forth at us, astonished by this line of questioning. Walker gives me a lugubrious shrug and turns toward the window where an electric trolley is passing beneath empty trees.

“Do you recall a patient named Claudia Van Hoven?” Dr. Narayan shakes his elegant head. “Three years ago,” I prompt anxiously, “she was hit by a car. Dr. Eberhardt took care of her.”

“I can pull the record.”

“That would be terrific.”

“You seem distressed,” he says with kindness. “Why not just ask me what you really wish to know?”

What I really wish to know is whether Dr. Narayan will leave his wife and fourteen children and live with me in South Kensington, but instead: “Was there anything in Randall Eberhardt’s behavior to lead you to believe he might have been exploiting patients?”

“ ‘Exploiting’ them?”

“Overprescribing drugs. Getting them hooked. Especially women. Making them dependent on him as a doctor.”

“Completely absurd.”

“Why? Health care fraud is a multibillion-dollar industry.”

“Randall Eberhardt is a talented, dedicated physician, sought after and respected. His work is impeccable, I’ll vouch for it personally. If you don’t believe me, have one of your own experts evaluate his charts.”

“Did he have any financial problems?”

“My God, the man comes from old Cambridge money. I can’t imagine it, no.”

Walker, seeing that I’m coming up empty and eager to get to the airport bar: “Thanks, doctor. We have a plane to catch.”

Desperate now: “What about his marriage?”

We are walking back down the corridor. Some poor person with rolling eyes is wheeled past us, wired and tubed.

“His wife, Claire, was a cardiac nurse on this ward. Their liaison was certainly the talk of the town at the time, but beyond that I’m out of my depth. Look—I’m being paged.” He calls to one of the RNs in green scrubs working a computer at the nurses’ station, “Kathy Donovan! Come talk to these people.”

Kathy Donovan sticks a pencil behind her ear and gets off the stool. She is what you would politely call “ample,” big bosom, big behind, walks like a Marine.

“Kathy knew Randall and Claire Eberhardt very well. Don’t hesitate if there’s anything else I can do.” Narayan shakes hands briskly and is off.

“How do you know the Eberhardts?”

“Claire and I grew up on the same block, two houses apart,” says Kathy Donovan in a husky voice. The Boston accent is blunt and unapologetic—“Claih,” “apaht.” “I was a bridesmaid at her wedding. Who are you?”

“FBI.”

She laughs uneasily. “What’d they do? Not pay their taxes?”

“Routine check,” Walker answers, baring his yellow teeth with a phony smile. He is really suffering from withdrawal now.

“We’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m on ‘til four. I could meet you after.”

That means I will miss my plane and have to catch a later flight or spend another night in Boston, neither of which I should do without authorization. But nobody is watching so I go with my gut.

“Fine. We’ll meet you after work.”

“Where?”

“Someplace we can get a meatball sub.”

•  •  •

As soon as we leave the hospital Walker peels off, claiming to be going back to the office to start checking for duplicate records of the prescriptions Claudia Van Hoven had filled at the Bay Pharmacy, but I am certain he ducked into the nearest sports bar and is still there.

I have some time, so I explore the area. You can see that a lot of professionals live around the hospital complex. I follow Huntington Avenue past fashionable old apartment houses—one like a Tudor mansion a block long, another with a fantastic Renaissance gingerbread roof—the people so conservative in their corduroys and backpacks and skirts down to the calf, the streets so clean and fancy-Dan it’s almost laughable to the dulled-out California eye, a cliché of the comfortable highbrow life, what do they do all day, go to the Boston Symphony? However, when I turn east on Massachusetts Avenue, according to Kathy’s directions, things change fast. I sit up and pay attention. Suddenly the income level has dropped like a plane catching wind shear, plummeting into poverty in the space of ten seconds.

The larger stores are all boarded up or barricaded by heavy gates, leaving Mom and Pop bodegas the only ones still open for business. Men sit in groups with their backs against the buildings or huddle in doorways of redbrick row houses scarred with graffiti. I look straight ahead because I don’t want to be a witness to a drug deal.

Suddenly figures are ahead of me. At thirty miles an hour I have to slam on the brakes. Two black teenage girls have picked this moment to waltz across the street against a red light, moving as slowly as humanly possible, close enough to my car to languorously run their long curved fingernails painted Day-Glo purple over the hood, challenging me through the windshield with burning eyes. I put my face in neutral and keep both hands on the wheel, although I know precisely where my weapon is on the right side of my belt and how long it will take to draw it.

I wait them out, aware of the screams of multiple sirens crisscrossing the neighborhood. Finally the girls realize I will not take the bait and run the rest of the way across the street, dodging speeding cars. I drive on but now I am alert and it stays with me all along Columbia Road, past torched buildings and vacant lots and the occasional graceful private residences, relics of a lost time, everything tarnished by a murky haze. The sky is a dirty white, lit from behind as if through a scrim. Here there is no long spring sunset. Instead, as the raw afternoon drains toward night, it seems that all the color is being sucked out of the world until the streetscape looks like a photo printed in metallic grays, the working-class enclave of Savin Hill perched on a rise over Dorchester Bay reduced now to silver faces of shingled homes with dead black window eyes, and tangles of tree branches in burned-out brown, only the signs of neighborhood bars lighting up the monotonous dusk with the promise of cherry red.

I park in front of St. Paul’s Church across from the Three Greeks Submarine Shop. A cold wind whips off the water. Ten blocks away the churches are storefronts with hand-lettered signs in Spanish; here they are Gothic brick but their rooflines are swayed as if their backs had finally been broken. I can see by the old ladies in shapeless coats and kerchiefs pulling empty shopping carts, and the ten-year-old American cars rotting away with salt, that this is a hardworking but tired place depleted by the endless Massachusetts recession, attacked by hostile neighbors, backed up against the bay with nowhere to go. It holds on only because its roots go very deep. Incidents of domestic violence must be through the roof.