Dead Certain

yourself served.”
    “Well, isn’t this just my lucky day,” he declared bitterly, showing no sign of picking it up. “Two lawsuits in one day. It’s too bad we had to close down our psychiatric unit because we didn’t have the money. But who knows, maybe there’s still a padded cell somewhere for me.”
    “Two lawsuits?” I inquired. “What’s the other one?“
    “Oh, you’ll love this. The family of a woman who died last week from a botched appendectomy filed suit against the hospital this morning.”
    “When did she die?” I asked, fearing the worst.
    “This past Friday.”
    “The family didn’t spend much time thinking about it,” I observed. Poor Claudia. I remembered her once telling me that emergency room docs get sued an average of once every four years, but to end up with a malpractice suit on your first patient was enough to drive a doctor into dermatology.
    “They didn’t need much time.”
    “Why is that?”
    “She was perfectly healthy except for her appendix.“
    “How can you be so sure?” I demanded, remembering what Claudia had said about her having been scheduled for surgery to remove her gallbladder.
    “I’m sure because I hired her. The woman’s name was Camille Estrada, and she was a professional patient.“
    “What?”
    “She was what they call an undercover patient, an employee of the consulting firm we use to evaluate our patient care. We’ve been having some problems on our surgical unit, so we had her admitted through the OBGYN service for some kind of vague abdominal problems, and Farah Davies dummied up a diagnosis that would require surgery.”
    “You mean she would have actually gone ahead and had an unnecessary operation?” I inquired incredulously.
    “No, of course not. We wouldn’t have let it go that far.”
    “So what about her appendicitis? Was that real?”
    “Yes. It was just coincidence that it ruptured while she was working.”
    “So what happens now? I assume that whoever operated on her carried malpractice insurance.”
    “Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. It appears that it was a member of the house staff who actually performed the procedure. It’s only a matter of time before the family finds out. They’ll subpoena the records, or they’ll depose the nurses. I’m telling you, Kate, our exposure on this is huge.”
    “I know you’ve been experiencing an unusual number of patient deaths,” I said. “How can you be so sure that this isn’t one of them?”
    “Who told you that we were experiencing a high rate of anomalous deaths?” demanded Massius sharply. “Gerald Packman,” I replied. It was the truth.
    “You listen to me, Kate,” replied Massius with a note of real menace in his voice. “There is no way the hospital can survive the lawsuit and the publicity it would generate if a story like that gets out. The hospital’s official position is that the attending surgeon behaved understandably but irresponsibly in leaving Mrs. Estrada in the care of an inexperienced resident in order to assist in what he perceived was a greater emergency. He had absolutely no way of knowing the fellow was incompetent and would botch the operation.”
    “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that no matter what other problems the hospital might have been experiencing on the surgical unit, problems that you deemed serious enough to justify hiring Mrs. Estrada to investigate, it was still the fellow’s fault that the patient died?”
    “What I’m saying, Kate, is that when you look at it from the point of view of the greater good of the hospital, the fellow is the only variable in the entire equation that’s completely expendable.”
     

CHAPTER 13
     
    The telephone is the lawyer’s scalpel and as I drove back to my office I wielded it as best I could to try and extricate my roommate from her perilous predicament. My first call was to the hospital operator to try and warn Claudia. She told me that Claudia was in surgery and unable to be paged. Suppressing my frustration, I asked her to connect me to Carl Laffer. I understood Claudia’s reluctance to have her connection with me made public, but under the circumstances I felt justified in using any ammunition that came to hand, and there was no doubt that this was my best weapon. Unfortunately, not just Laffer but also McDermott were in the operating room and unavailable. I left messages for each of them before pushing the END button on my cell