The Cradle Will Fall

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WHEN Richard returned to his office after the meeting with Scott and the others, he stood for a long time staring out the window. In the pocket-size park in front of the courthouse a flurry of snow pelted the already frozen grass.

He glanced up at the sky. Vangie Lewis' body was being flown to Newark from Minneapolis on a two-thirty flight. It would be brought to the morgue, and tomorrow morning he'd reexamine it. There was something about her left foot or leg that he had noticed and dismissed as irrelevant. He pushed that thought aside. It was useless to speculate until he could reexamine the body. Sighing, he snapped on the intercom and asked Marge to bring in his phone messages.

She hurried in with a sheaf of slips in her hand. "None of these are too important," she said. "But I got the statistics on the Westlake obstetrical patients. In the eight years of the Westlake Maternity Concept, sixteen patients have died either in childbirth or of toxic pregnancies."

"Sixteen?"

"Sixteen," Marge repeated with emphasis. "However, the practice is huge. And all the women who died had been warned by other doctors that they were high pregnancy risks."

"I'll study the fatalities," Richard said. "Anything else?"

"Maybe. Two people filed malpractice suits against Dr. High-ley. Both were dismissed. And a cousin of his wife's claimed that he didn't believe she'd died of a heart attack. The prosecutor's office contacted her physician, Dr. Alan Levine, and he said the cousin was crazy. The cousin had been the sole heir before Winifred Westlake married Dr. Highley."

"I'll have a talk with Dr. Levine."

"And these are the people who filed the malpractice suits."

Richard looked down at the two names on the sheet of paper Marge handed him. Anthony Caldwell, Old Country Lane, Pea-pack, New Jersey, and Anna Horan, 415 Walnut Street, Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. "You do nice work, Marge," he said.

She nodded. "I know." He phoned Dr. Levine and caught him as he was leaving his office. They agreed to meet at the Parkwood Country Club.

Alan Levine was a Jimmy Stewart look-alike, which endeared him to his older patients. He and Richard enjoyed the easy cordiality of professionals who respected each other. At the club, Richard came directly to the point. "Winifred Westlake was your patient. Her cousin suggested that she did not die of a heart attack. What can you tell me about it?"

Levine sipped his martini and glanced out the picture window at the snow-covered fairway. "I have to answer that question on a couple of levels. First: Winifred for years had all the classic symptoms of a duodenal ulcer, except it never showed up on X ray. When she'd experience pain, I'd prescribe an ulcer diet and she'd feel relief almost immediately. No great problem.

"Then the year before she married Highley she had a severe attack of gastroenteritis, which actually altered her cardiogram. I put her in the hospital for a suspected heart attack. But after two days the cardiogram was well within the normal range."

"So there might or might not have been a heart problem?"

"I didn't think there was. But her mother died of a heart attack at fifty-eight, and Winifred was nearly fifty-two when she died. She was older than Highley by some ten years. Several years after her marriage she began to complain of frequent chest pains. The tests produced nothing significant. I told her to watch her diet."

"And then she had a fatal attack?" Richard asked.

The other doctor nodded. "One evening, during dinner, she had a seizure. Highley had his service call me. When I got there, he was still trying to revive her. But it was hopeless. She died a few minutes after I arrived."

"And you're satisfied it was heart failure?"

There was a hint of hesitation. "I was satisfied at the time."

"At the time." Richard underscored the words.

"I suppose the cousin's absolute conviction that something was wrong about her death has troubled me these three years. I practically threw Glenn Nickerson out of my office when he came in and as much as accused me of falsifying records. But he is a family man, active in his church, on the town council; certainly not the kind to go off half-cocked at being disinherited. And he must have known that Winifred would leave her estate to her husband. She was crazy about Highley. Why, I never could see. But I've got to hand it to him. He's an excellent doctor."

"Excellent enough to have chemically induced a heart attack in his wife?"

Dr. Levine looked directly at Richard. "Frankly, I've often wished I'd insisted on an autopsy."

They parted at the entrance to the bar. Richard fished in his pocket for change, went over to the public telephone and dialed the Essex House in New York. "Dr. Emmet Salem, please."

There was the repeated sound of a phone ringing. The operator broke in. "I'm sorry, but there's no answer."

"Are you sure Dr. Salem has checked in?" Richard asked.

"Yes, sir. He called specifically to say that he was expecting an important call and he wanted to be sure to get it. That was only twenty minutes ago. But I guess he changed his mind. Because we are definitely ringing his room and there's no answer."