Polite Dissent

Dr. Ben Casey has just left the urban clinic where he volunteers¹ when he stumbles across a man who has been beaten unconscious. He loads the unfortunate man in his car and rushes to the hospital.

Only after he has operated on the patient and saved his life does Casey discover that he has entered a political minefield. His patient is Marcus Tiberius, the deposed dictator of a small unnamed Caribbean nation.

Casey protests that he doesn’t care about his patient’s politics (or apparently his history of genocide), he just cares about his neurological health.

A police officer shows up, flashes his badge, and sets up a twenty-four hour watch over Tiberius. A short time later, the power mysteriously goes out. By the time the emergency generators have kicked in, the patient has been murdered.

Casey, with help from his associates, decides to play detective. First, he is able to determine that one of the hospital maintenance men is from the same small unnamed island as Tiberius. Upon seeing the former dictator admitted, he realized that he had a chance to avenge his family. He shut off the power, stole from chloroform from the OR, and in the dark snuck in and used the chloroform to suffocate the patient.

However, it turns out that one of the pharmacy technicians is also from this same country and also harbored thoughts of revenge. She stole some strychnine from the pharmacy² and slipped it in the patient’s water, then poured it down his throat.

Which of these avengers killed Tiberius? Neither of them. Casey reveals that it was the cop — actually a fake cop — who killed the dictator by stabbing him with an ice pick. Casey reveals he became suspicious of the faux-cop when he called it a “badge” instead of a “shield,” like a real policeman would³. Oh, and he was cleaning his nails with an ice pick too.

When the fake cop tries to escape, the real cops shoot him. Dr. Casey rushes him into surgery and saves his life, proving that the work of a surgeon never done.

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Notes:
¹Because chief neurosurgical residents always spend their extra time working as family physicians in clinics for the poor.

²Why would the pharmacy even carry strychnine?

³This seems a pretty flimsy reason. Every policeman I’ve known has called it a badge, not a shield (gee, maybe they’re all fake cops), but maybe things were different forty years ago. The cleaning-the-nails-with-an-ice-pick is still a dead giveaway though.