Requiem for Moses (16 page)

After Koznicki shuffled through various reports on his desk, he selected one and replaced the others in order. “We begin with Dr. Green’s personal physician, a Dr. Garnet Fox. Dr. Fox said that Dr. Green’s health had been deteriorating. In the past six to eight months he had not been taking on any new patients. Also, increasingly, he had been referring many of his longtime patients to other physicians.

“He suffered from arteriosclerotic heart disease and a very painful back. The back pain was acute and chronic. His appetite had been off. Dr. Fox suggests the almost constant pain would cause a loss of appetite. But no cause was found for the back pain. Every known test was applied, but no physical cause showed up.”

“Which would mean,” Dr. Price broke in, “that either our technology at this point is inadequate—which is entirely possible—or the back pain was psychosomatic.”

“Thank you,” Koznicki said. “Dr. Fox further stated that there is a stockpile of medications for chronic pain, even specifically for back pain. However, with continued use, over time, the human body is able to tolerate larger and larger doses—and thus requires increased amounts in order to control the pain.

“Recently, Dr. Fox has heard Dr. Green state—and this is a sentiment that Dr. Green has expressed more and more often—‘I’d rather die than go on like this.’

“With all this background, Dr. Fox was not at all surprised when, yesterday, Mrs. Green called to say that she thought her husband had died.

“Dr. Fox asked her to describe what she saw. She said there was no pulse, no evident respiration. His mouth was open. His tongue was dry. He had a glassy, fixed stare. His body felt cold to the touch. He was a bluish color. And there was pinpoint dilation of the pupils.

“Again, given the condition Dr. Green had been in during the past months and his deep, abiding despair, Dr. Fox was convinced from the description the wife gave that Dr. Green was indeed dead.

“Dr. Fox was quite close to the Green family and wanted to spare the widow from all the details that must be attended to at the time of death. So he told her he would see to the medical requirements. All she would have to do was select a funeral home, have a grave site, and decide what, if any, religious service she wanted.

“Then, Dr. Fox called the medical examiner’s office. At his word, the M.E. signed to release the body. And Dr. Fox signed the death certificate, noting that death was caused by heart failure due to arteriosclerosis and hypertension. Chronic pain and loss of the will to live are bad enough, but they don’t cause death directly. However, in all probability, it was his weakened heart that took him.” Koznicki raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“That was it?” Father Koesler’s mouth had been hanging open in disbelief. “No professional person examined him!”

“That was it, all right,” Koznicki affirmed. “But I would suggest that, up to this point, everything that happened had a logical cause. Dr. Green was a very sick man. Even in the event his back pain might have been psychosomatic, psychosomatic pain can hurt just as badly as physically caused pain.

“The doctor was well aware of his patient’s chronic pain. He also was aware that his patient had lost the will to live. That plus his heart condition … Dr. Fox was expecting Dr. Green to die and was not surprised when the wife called. And when she described the body, he was convinced.

“The morgue is always overcrowded. When a physician testifies that a person—his patient—is dead and there is nothing suspicious about the death, the medical examiner’s office is all too ready to release the body. It is just one less that needs pass their examination.”

“Incredible,” Koesler said.

“That’s not all,” Tully added. “Mrs. Green didn’t know she was supposed to notify the police when there’s a death. But the condo’s manager did: He called and a squad car was summoned. The two officers went through the same drill as Mrs. Green did. With the same conclusion: Green was dead, and every indication was that it was natural causes.

“They’re supposed to call Homicide—a matter of routine. They did, and they assured us that the facts were as follows: Sick man died, no sign of anything suspicious. No foul play. Added to this, the family doctor was willing to sign the death certificate.

“The officer here who answered for Homicide made the decision, and told the uniformed guys, ‘We’re not going out.’ At this point, in light of what’s happened, this is now a CYA—”

“A what?” Koesler asked.

The others, familiar with the acronym, smiled. “It stands for ‘cover your ass,’” Tully explained. “This is a classic case where the family files a civil suit against the police and the city. So, before anything like that happens, we get on the stick: CYA. We investigate our own response to this call. We screwed up, is what it is. And before the lawyers get on our back, we find out what happened.

“And it turns out we are not the only screwups. For one, Dr. Fox is in it up to his ears, too.”

“This, of course,” Koznicki said, “is not the end of the story. The widow”—Koznicki smiled broadly, along with everyone else—“strange, I find it so natural to refer to her as a widow. But that is what we must discover: Was she a widow briefly?”

“Some of us were discussing that earlier,” Koesler said. “Not about last night, but this morning.”

“How’s that?” Tully asked.

“Is he … is Dr. Green alive?”

“Reportedly,” Koznicki said. “He has made no appearance since he was taken from the church last night. Except, of course, to his wife and the reporter … Patricia Lennon. We have been in touch with Mrs. Green.”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Inspector,” Koesler apologized. “You were saying about what Mrs. Green did after talking to the family doctor.…”

“Perfectly all right, Father. We are not gathered to deal in niceties and conventions; we are trying to clarify a most obscure phenomenon.

“In any case, after she talked to Dr. Fox, and after the officers visited and verified that the M.E. would release the body and Dr. Fox would sign the death certificate, she contacted her children. They said they would do whatever they could.

“She then contacted Kaufman Funeral Home and learned, after she told them about the Catholic wake, that they would supply a shroud and let her use their refrigeration. And that was all.

“By then, her children had arrived. David was sent to pick up the shroud. Mrs. Green contacted the McGovern Home, requested their best casket, and said that she and Judith would prepare the body.

“After McGovern picked up the body, Mrs. Green visited you, Father, and evidently got your permission for the wake. And that pretty much brings us up to date.”

Koesler shook his head. “I find it difficult to understand how Mrs. Green and her daughter could prepare the body—that, I take it, means they washed and clothed the body—and not discover that he was alive. If he was.”

“I think it would be helpful here,” Koznicki said, “if Dr. Price would comment on all this.”

Chapter Twelve

Koesler slid his chair back from the table. He expected Dr. Price’s presentation would be substantive, and he was eager to learn.

The doctor appeared to be fifty-something. Her tunic-type jacket made it difficult to discern whether she was bulky or slender. Her salt-and-pepper hair was short, naturally curly, and seemingly uncombed. Her habit of running her fingers through her hair made it look unkempt, but somehow attractive.

She spoke without notes or references. “The first thing I want to say, is that I like to think of a coma as the only death you could wake up from. That is”—she smiled, and bowed in the direction of Father Koesler—“unless you come up with a miracle. In that case, of course, you might wake up from real death.

“A person in a coma can and usually does have symptoms very similar to that of death. A person in a coma is very close to death and may easily go one way or the other.

“The mouth open, tongue dry; eyes dry, glassy; fixed stare; no perceivable pulse, no evident respiration. The body has low temperature, it’s cold, and is a bluish color; the person breathes only now and then—could be forty seconds between irregular breaths.

“If the man was dead, we wouldn’t be talking about
perceivable
pulse or
evident
respiration. And we wouldn’t be talking about breaths that come irregularly at something like forty-second intervals. We’d be talking about
no
pulse,
no
respiration, and
no
breath.

“But you don’t find the pulse or the respiration unless you search for it.

“As far as Mrs. Green was concerned, her husband seemed dead. And he really did look dead. Dr. Fox had had reason to believe his patient was nearing death. Dr. Green seemed to be
willing
his own death.

“You know how some people close to death may pull out of it because they have a strong will to live. Well, Dr. Green was going in the opposite direction. His statement was, ‘I’d rather die than go on like this.’ From the description Mrs. Green gave over the phone, Dr. Fox was convinced that Dr. Green was indeed dead. He agreed to sign the death certificate. From his account, the medical examiner’s office agreed to release the body.

“Thus far, no one had
checked
to see if there were any vital signs. No one outside of his family had even seen or touched the body.

“The police arrived and saw the same scene. The guy looked dead. They might have checked, except probably they were lulled by the assurance of the family physician that he would sign the death certificate and that the M.E. would release the body.

“The uniformed police called Homicide and lulled your officers into believing what everyone else already believed. So Homicide said, ‘We’re not going out.’

“Then Mrs. Green and her daughter prepared the body. They might have found a very faint pulse or an occasional shallow breath. But it would’ve been sheer luck if they had. They certainly weren’t looking for, or expecting, any vital signs—vital signs that, even if present, would be barely functioning.”

“So, Dr. Price,” Koznicki said, “you are suggesting that it is at least possible that Dr. Green was in a coma and not dead.”

“I
am
suggesting that Dr. Green
was
in a coma.”

“What about rigor mortis?” Koesler asked.

“What about it?” Price responded.

“I hate to bring it up because I think it destroys the side of this thing that I’m supposed to be defending—that what we’re dealing with here is a miracle.”

“How do you mean, Father?”

“Well,” Koesler explained, “to have a miracle here, Dr. Green would have had to be dead, truly dead. Now, you say he could have been in a coma. But, at least to this point, you cannot say it without fear of contradiction.

“I mean, okay, if he was in a coma, he would appear to be dead. But maybe he wasn’t dead. No one checked closely enough to make certain he was alive. So we are where we were at the beginning: He might have been dead; he might have been in a coma. Because no one checked carefully enough, we cannot prove or disprove one theory or the other.

“But what about rigor mortis? If Dr. Green was dead, wouldn’t rigor mortis set in?” Dr. Price was slowly shaking her head. Koesler found this somewhat disconcerting, but pressed on. “If not while Mrs. Green and Judith were handling his body, surely then, much later, when the undertakers were preparing the body, getting it in the shroud and everything? Wouldn’t especially those professionals have some doubts? No rigor mortis, no death, correct?”

Dr. Price smiled. “When Inspector Koznicki asked me to come here this morning, and told me what we were going to discuss, I anticipated some attention would be paid to rigor mortis. I am, of course, very practically acquainted with the process. But I foresaw that some of the questions and answers might be kind of speculative. So I did a little research.

“Rigor mortis”—even though some of her information had been gleaned from research books, still she used no notes—“usually begins occurring between two to four hours after death. But there is a large window of time during which rigor may set in. It can, indeed, occur as late as twelve hours after death. One specific case reported twenty-four hours before the process began.

“I can tell you honestly that if I were examining a corpse that had been pronounced dead six hours previously, but there was no rigor mortis present, I would not necessarily at that point be suspicious.

“So you see, Father, the fact that no one detected rigor does not speak to the issue of whether or not Dr. Green was dead. As I understand it, the morticians got the body in a matter of just a few hours. And there you are.

“Really, while this sort of thing does not happen frequently, it does happen.” She searched through her purse and took out a newspaper clipping. “I saved this news story mostly because of the age of the woman involved. Let me read it to you. I clipped it from
Newsday.
” She read:

Albany, N.Y.—When a national health magazine rated Albany Medical Center as the best hospital in New York state, no one claimed it could raise the dead.

But earlier this week a worker at the hospital’s morgue removed a body bag containing an eighty-six-year-old woman from the morgue’s forty-degree refrigerator—and heard breathing inside.

The woman, Mildred Clarke, of Albany, N.Y., was rushed into emergency, then to intensive care, where she was in critical condition Thursday.

“We’re at a loss for words,” said Greg McGarry, the hospital spokesman.

On Wednesday, an emergency medical team was called to Clarke’s apartment after a manager found her there rigid, cold, unconscious, without pulse and not breathing.

“Sound like what we’ve just been discussing, gentlemen?” Price smiled broadly, then continued reading.

“You look at this woman and you assumed she was dead,” said the manager, Lori Goodman-DiPietro.

She wasn’t alone. She said two emergency fire department medics, a police officer, the coroner, and two morgue attendants thought she was dead, too.

County Coroner Philip Furie checked her. “She was cold as ice … stiff as a board.”

Albany County does not require its coroners to be licensed physicians. Furie, an insurance salesman who was elected to his post, declared Clarke dead. She was taken to the morgue at the medical center.