Dr. Hoffbein, Psychiatrist, who was perfectly aware that the staff didn’t think so much of “black magic”, therefore enunciated his words with an incisive clarity and leaned forward:
“What is your personal impression, Sterling?”
He inserted his sentences the way other men did hypodermics.
Cub Sterling gave himself an angular brace and replied:
“Must be something other than natural causes, Doctor. Everything has been checked. Everything! Dr. MacArthur and I have combed the department. The superintendent of nurses has checked the supervisor, the head nurse, the graduate floor nurse, and I’ve gone over my internes thoroughly ... man by man ... and woman by woman.... The reason I’m bringing it before the staff is I’m stumped. Your experience ... then, too, medical patients are often in the hospital six weeks to two months. We can’t have the thing repeated....”
“Fear psychosis,” Hoffbein grunted.
Bear Sterling heaved his thick shoulders and began fingering his key ring. Hoffbein and his foolishness!
This small oddly shaped brass key, and people dying when you least expected, made him think of the door to the cupola of the Administration Building: the door nobody had ever entered since that night so many years ago when he had fixed Flossie Matthews for Ted Longstreet ... before he was old enough to see why a reputable surgeon never had any business....
Ted had held the chloroform rag, and after giving her a transfusion of his own blood, had fainted and fallen against his operating hand so that the scalpel punctured her femoral artery ... and Flossie hemorrhaged; and Ted lay in the pool of blood. When he came to, she was dead ... of chloroform. In the meantime he had tied the artery, somehow....
“Gone” ... he could still hear Ted’s voice and see that hoggish splotch of blood his coat made upon the white plaster wall as he leaned against it and stretched his slim hands out toward the lids of Flossie’s staring blue eyes.