You Should Have Known (39 page)

“He said it was a privilege to be allowed into someone's life at the worst moment, when they wish they could tell everybody to go away. But they can't do that, because these are people who might be able to save their child's life. And how he's honored and humbled. And I read that and I said:
Hah!
That was it. Except he wasn't humbled, I knew that much. He was something, but he wasn't humbled.”

Grace just looked at him. “I don't know what you mean,” she finally said.

“I mean, he fed off that situation, of being at the center of intense emotions. He got a big charge from it. Even if he couldn't help the patient. Even if he couldn't
save
the patient, you know what I'm saying? He didn't care about that part. It was all the emotion coming at him. I think emotion fascinated him. Well,” he said with real nonchalance, “you're the shrink. You know all about it.”

She was finding it hard to concentrate. She made herself look hard at Robertson Sharp III. She found herself looking at the space between his eyebrows, which was sort of an eyebrow of its own. It was not a thing of beauty, but it was very interesting to look at.

“I don't know why people think you can't have a psychopath in a hospital setting. Why should we be immune? Doctors are such saints?” He laughed. “I don't think so.” He wasn't looking at her. It wasn't an important point in the way that the aorta had been an important point, she supposed. And he was hardly the type to notice that she was having some difficulty. For one thing, she could not breathe properly. The word, so blithely spoken, had pierced her like a spike. And then he used it again. “A psychopath is a person. A physician is a person. Presto!” Sharp said. He was trying to signal the waiter. He wanted something, apparently.

“We're supposedly healers. That's supposed to make us great humanitarians—just one assumption on top of another, and it all adds up to complete bullshit. Anybody's spent time in a hospital you know it's full of the biggest sons of bitches you'll ever meet in your life!” He laughed a little. Apparently this nugget of wisdom never got old. “Maybe they happen to be very adept at making a sick body better, but they're still sons of bitches. I once had a colleague—I won't say who. He's not at Memorial now. Actually, he might not be a physician anymore, which isn't a bad thing, probably. We were in a meeting once with the director of volunteers in pediatrics, long meeting about setting policy for the playrooms and entertainers. Afterwards I said something to him about what a long meeting it was. You know what he says? ‘Oh, I love do-gooders because they always do me so much good.' That's all he says.”

For the first time since she'd sat down, it occurred to Grace that she could actually go. Anytime she wanted, she could leave.

“I think…Jonathan cared about his patients,” she said carefully, though why she bothered she didn't have the faintest idea.

“Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe we don't get to understand what ‘cared about' means to somebody like Sachs.” He took another monster bite of his sandwich and chewed like a ruminant. “I'll tell you one thing. He didn't care about his colleagues, by any definition. He moved them around like chess pieces. He liked a lot of drama. If he got bored, he'd tell somebody about something another person had said, or who was getting it on with somebody else. Whether any of it was true, who knows? He couldn't be part of any team, anything with a common object. Especially if there was somebody involved who he didn't like, and he didn't like a lot of people. He put energy into his patient care, because he got something from that. He put a lot of energy into the family members. A lot. And some of the people he worked with, if they made his life easier. But he never paid much attention to other people if he couldn't use them, even if it was someone he saw every day. No return on the investment. So there were a lot of folks he didn't really notice, but they still noticed him. They found him very interesting, watching him operate. And you know, it takes a lot of effort to hold up the mask he had.” He seemed to consider. “Mask would not be the scientific term, I guess.”

It wasn't. But she got the idea.

“And those people saw a lot. All the nasty bits. The comments he made, the way he just froze you out. If he was supposed to be in a meeting and he didn't think he should have to be there, he seemed to find a way to disrupt it somehow, so it would all end up taking even more time, which never made any sense to me. And all those co-workers he was ignoring, if they hadn't felt so dissed by him, they might not have been paying such close attention. I think that's what did him in, actually.”

Sharp paused to dig his fork into the now soggy paper cup of coleslaw. It dripped as it rose to his mouth.

“It was an attending in radiology who came to me about it the first time. I had Sachs come in for a meeting. He was extraordinarily good-natured the whole time. He said he was going through a difficult period at home, and it wasn't something he'd like to see get around the hospital. He told me he and the woman had already decided to stop seeing each other.” He had set down his fork. His fingers, all ten of them, were on the tabletop. Grace saw that they were moving, as if he were playing, silently and only in his mind, a fairly complicated piano piece. “But then it happened again, with somebody on the nursing staff. I said, ‘Look, trust me, I have no interest in intruding into your life. This is none of my business. But you've got to keep it out of the hospital.' I mean, you can't object to that, right? And he always apologized and gave me some reason why it had happened and he was taking care of it. Once I had to call him in and he claimed he was being stalked by somebody. He wanted my advice on how to handle it. We spent the whole meeting going over hospital protocol and whether he ought to be making a formal complaint, after which he tells me what a great role model I am and if he's ever a chief he hopes he can provide the kind of leadership I do, blah blah. Utter crap, but then again, when he said it something in me sort of sat still and listened. So again, he took care of it, or at least I didn't hear anything else about it. But then he had something with Rena Chang. Dr. Chang. And I had to pay attention to that, because her supervisor came to me about it. But then she left. I never had to meet with him about that one. She went somewhere in the Southwest. Santa Fe, maybe?”

Sedona
, thought Grace, shuddering.

“I heard she had a baby,” said Robertson Sharp III.

“Excuse me,” Grace said politely. If she hadn't heard her own voice, she might not have noticed that she'd spoken. Then she was on her feet, staggering across the room. Then she was in the bathroom, on the toilet, with her head between her knees.

Oh God,
she thought.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Why had she asked for this? Why, why, had she wanted to know? Her mouth was full of the awful taste of tuna. Her head was pounding and pounding.

Rena Chang.
She of the smudge stick. She of the “parallel healing strategies.” Jonathan had laughed about her. They both had laughed about her. How long ago had that been? She tried to concentrate. She tried. But it wouldn't come. Before Henry? No, it had to be after. Had Henry been a baby? Had he been in school? She couldn't even get her mind around why this should matter. She had no idea how long it took her to get out of the bathroom.

When she got back, the waiter had removed both their plates. Grace slid back into the booth and sipped her now chilly tea. His phone was now on the tabletop. He had perhaps done a bit of business while he was waiting.

“Dr. Sharp,” said Grace, “I know Jonathan had a disciplinary hearing in 2013. I'd like to know more about that.”

“He had a few disciplinary hearings,” Sharp said a little gruffly. It was rather late in the day for him to start getting gruff with her, thought Grace. “One for accepting a monetary gift from a patient's father. Allegedly accepting,” he modified. “The father declined to speak to the hospital attorney. It had to be dropped. Then we had another one about the incident with Waycaster. In the stairwell.”

Where he had tripped, in other words. He had tripped in the stairwell, chipping his tooth, which had had to be repaired and was still, wherever it was at this very moment, a slightly different color from the teeth on either side. She assumed. Except that he had not tripped, she knew that now.

“Waycaster,” she said.

“Ross Waycaster. He was Sachs' supervisor at the beginning. I thought they got on okay. I never heard anything from either one of them about a conflict. But he confronted Sachs directly, about the situation with the Alves mother. It turned into a real scene. Four or five people saw it, and Waycaster had to have stitches afterwards. Even then I had to insist he file a complaint. There was a hearing about that, I can assure you. And then a separate one about the relationship itself.”

And here, finally, he stopped. He looked up at her, as if he were truly noticing her for the first time.

“I assume you know about that relationship.”

“I do,” Grace said solemnly, but she was marveling at him. That he had even asked! After the bludgeoning death of the woman in question, the disappearance of the man in question, and the assigned moniker (courtesy of the
New York Post
) that had emerged from the tabloid foam in the wake of that disappearance, it would be stretching credulity indeed to imagine she did not. The moniker was “Murder Doc,” and it had finally wormed its way through to Grace's awareness the previous week, via an AP story in the
Berkshire Record
(which was printed right next to an innocent local feature on lowering your heating bill). It was in this story that she also read, for the first time, that she—Dr. Grace Sachs,
sic
—had been eliminated as a suspect in the murder of Malaga Alves. It ought to have given her some comfort, but the concurrent revelation that she had once been under suspicion—no matter how briefly—quashed her relief. “The police haven't shared many details with me,” she told him.

He shrugged. He had no knowledge of what the police had or hadn't done.

“So if there's anything you'd like to share with me, I'd be glad to hear it,” she said, spelling it out for him.

Sharp pursed his lips. It made little difference to him, obviously.

“The patient was an eight-year-old boy with Wilms' tumor. Dr. Sachs was the primary doctor. The mother was here every day. One of the nursing staff came to me. She had concerns.”

After a moment, Grace prodded him. “Concerns.”

“They weren't discreet. They were not even trying. The RNs were extremely upset about it. Particularly after the warning he'd got. So I called him in again. I said this is going to stop or I'm going to file a complaint, and it's going to a full disciplinary hearing. This is back last fall sometime. Fall of 2012. Maybe…November? And he promised it was already over. He said—I think he said he was going through a difficult time. He was dealing with some things in therapy, and acting out.
Acting out
,” Sharp said with distaste. “I wonder where he pulled that out.”

Grace, for her part, did not wonder.

“But whatever he said he was going to do, it didn't happen. The next thing I was aware of, he and Waycaster got into it in the stairwell. But there were witnesses. As I said,” he assured her.

“Yes,” Grace said mildly. “You did.”

“And injuries. There were injuries.”

She nodded. She didn't think it was worth reassuring him anymore.

“So. Two separate incidents. Two separate hearings. But it was the latter one that was grounds for termination. And even then, I want you to know, I offered him an option. I said, ‘Look, you could go into a treatment program. Residential program. You couldn't get away with outpatient for a situation like this.' I thought I might be able to persuade the committee to accept a medical leave. I know we could have found a way it wouldn't read as termination. Not that I thought he was somehow going to get cured,” Sharp said. “I mean, they say it's not curable, don't they? Don't
you
?” he corrected himself. He was deferring to her professionally, she supposed.

“You did your job,” she said. It was as far as she was willing to go.

“As I said, it wasn't a question of his skill as a physician. He was a talented guy. He had all the nuts and bolts to be a great doctor. He made his own position here impossible.”

And then she felt her cell phone vibrate inside her jacket pocket. It was her father, or at least his home phone. “Hello?” Grace said, grateful for the interruption.

“Mom?”

“Hi, honey.”

“Can we go to a movie? We can go at three thirty. The one I want's playing on Seventy-Second and Third.”

“Oh. Okay. Grandpa's taking you?”

“Grandpa and Nana. Is it okay?”

“Of course,” she said. “What time's it out?”

It was out at six. They were going to stay at her father's tonight. It was the first time they had been back to the city since that day in December.

When she set it back down, she noticed Sharp actually looking at her. Maybe it had taken her own distraction to make him notice her presence.

“Your daughter?”

“My son. Henry.”

Who doesn't have a brain tumor
, she nearly added.

“He's going to the movies with his grandparents.”

“Jonathan didn't talk about his parents,” Sharp said. His gaze had wandered off again. “I didn't find out till last year he grew up a town away from me on Long Island. He was from Roslyn. I grew up in Old Westbury,” he said with meaning, though whatever he meant by it was entirely wasted on Grace. To a Manhattanite, Long Island existed as a single entity of Long Island–ness: Gradations of any kind were simply not processed.

“You know,” Sharp said, “that Best Doctors thing, they usually come through the hospital. They ask the press office to suggest a few people. They poll the physicians all over the city, of course, but they always work through the press office. Not this time. First time the hospital heard anything about it was when the copy arrived in the office. They were furious, I can tell you. I get a call asking, Did I know about this? Of course I didn't know. Why would
New York
magazine call Jonathan Sachs one of the best doctors? I mean, usually there's some national or international achievement, yeah? So I'm baffled like everybody else. And then one of the attendings comes in and shuts the door, and she tells me there's a connection. Somebody at the magazine is the aunt of a girl whose doctor is Jonathan Sachs. And she tells me for a long time she's been struggling, whether or not to say something. But she thinks now somebody should know about it, and the relationship is over the line, she says.”