A Part of Them

	hristine Edmonson, my Century City law partner of six years, broke the news bluntly. "The nerdy little narcissist drowned himself." We'd been searching for Dr. Conner for two days, but still I was stunned.
	"The Coast Guard found his boat drifting free just off the Newport pier with nobody aboard," she said. "Robbie took it out Monday for what was supposed to be a quick spin around the harbor. What a jerk."

Despite the harshness of Chrissie's manner or maybe more because of it, I could tell that she was shaken.

"Why are they thinking suicide?" I asked. "Maybe he had a heart attack and fell overborard. Plus, the seas have been awfully rough lately. Maybe his boat hit a wave at high speed and threw him free. Where did they find his body?"

"At the moment, the police are only calling him a missing person. But come on, Larry, the guy never left the dock without his life vest on and his safety belt latched."

"Big boat like that," she said, "yet the loon couldn't swim a hundred yards to save his life."

"Maybe he was kidnapped," I said, "maybe for ransom."

"By thugs stupid enough to take him but leave his grand hunk of expensive fiberglass to crack up on the jetty? No, Larry, there's more to it. The police phoned while you were in court. It seems that our dear client left behind a parting message that they can't decipher. Lots of scribbling on a torn sheet of paper, your name at the top, then at the very bottom the words do what you have to do followed by watch what happens next." Chrissie stared at me for a clue. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

I told her I didn't understand, which was honest only to a point.

Chrissie left my office to answer a phone call, as unaware as ever of all that Dr. Conner had actually done for her.

I closed my eyes to help me gather my thoughts.

While there were a great number of traits that distinguished Robert Conner from all of the other fine plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, at that moment my mind felt overtaken by the one that only I, as Robbie’s attorney, truly appreciated. Robbie was a good doctor, a great surgeon, and dedicated to a fault. In fact, it would not be engaging in hyperbole to say that Dr. Conner left behind a small part of himself in every patient he ever helped.

Well, at least in every female patient.

Not that Robbie cared any less about his male clientele or applied his talents with any less diligence. If fact, Dr. Conner approached every operation as if it were not just a test but a final exam.

It didn’t seem to matter to Robbie that he'd performed thousands of successful surgeries over already glorious twelve year career. It didn't seem to matter much that his reputation was beyond reproach, that he’d come to be viewed as THE cosmetic surgeon to the most demanding troupe of beautiful people in the world—the stars and czars of Hollywood.

You see, Robbie Conner graded himself on every surgery he performed. If a morning's work didn’t come off without a hitch, he would deride himself privately as an over-the-hill has-been and then spend the rest of his day brooding over what he took privately to be incontrovertible evidence of his relentless decline.

Because of this, I can say with great assurance, Robbie Conner always made an earnest effort to do his very best with each and every patient regardless of gender, directing his full concentration to the execution of even the most trivial of routine surgical procedures.

Still, with the ladies it was different. With the ladies, Robbie Conner just couldn’t seem to help throwing in a little something extra.

I knew this to be the case because Robbie had confided as much to me only one week earlier. Although I'd first met Dr. Conner two years earlier when he'd performed my wife's liposuction, it was not until he retained me to handle a sensitive legal matter that I'd really come to know him. Robbie was a bachelor with few if any acquaintances close enough to be called friends.

As a child prodigy of sorts, he'd surprised everyone when as a seventeen year old Harvard graduate he'd accepted an offer to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins in lieu of pursuing a graduate degree in biophysics. Several of his mentors predicted not just a distinguished career in biomedical research but accomplishment on the order of a cure for cancer.

Robbie, however, found himself drawn to the field of general surgery, a blood and guts discipline demanding a high degree of craft and assertiveness but a comparatively minimal level of cerebration compared to most other specialties.

It seemed an odd choice. Robbie, after all, was a prime example of an extraordinary brain mismatched to an unremarkable body, a sleek dragster engine somehow crammed inside the chassis of a solid vintage Volvo. Short in stature and already balding, Robbie's slight stoop and coarser facial features yielded a less than commanding presence.

His most glaring physical limitation was the stubbiness of his fingers, fat little digits whose shape alone seemed inconsistent with basic coordination, let alone manual dexterity. One professor dubbed him 'Four Stumps and a Thumb'.

Unfamiliar with the concept of limitation, Robbie spent countless hours teaching himself the art of tying simple a suture, like a child trying to teach himself Chopin. Mastering a simple surgeon's knot proved more daunting than had a semester of quantum mechanics, but within a month Robbie was tying his knots faster and more securely than many of his peers.

He became a "regular" in the emergency room, where he spent much of his free time repairing simple lacerations the interns abandoned to the nurses. By the middle of his junior year, he could be found assisting the resident staff on the midnight repair of a gunshot wound.

By the start of his senior year, he was just as likely to be scrubbed in on a heart valve implantation as a dissection of a malignant brain tumor while his classmates watched in awe from the galleries.

And so it came as no shock when the Class of '83 internship matches were announced. Robert A. Conner became only the third graduate in the history of his venerable institution to be waived both through his internship and the requisite two years of preliminary general surgery and placed directly into one of the most prestigious plastic surgery training programs in the country.

At UCLA, Dr. Conner quickly mastered the array of complex flaps and grafts utilized in post-traumatic reconstructions, cancer surgery, and the correction of congenital deformities. By his second year, Robbie had authored two articles describing innovative conceptual advances in his field, a feat that spurned jealousy not only among his fellow residents but also within an elitist faculty quite taken with itself.

After all, Robbie, who made in known that he planned to set up his practice in Los Angeles, possessed the potential to upstage this group known to be fiercely protective of its own professional turf. Ugly rumors surfaced regarding Robbie's sexuality: Dr. Conner is a virgin, a closet gay, a eunuch, a this, a that.

It was during Robbie’s third and final year of residency training that he experienced what ultimately turned out to be his defining moment.

Robbie was observing Professor Bartley Kessel, the department chairman, perform a blepharoplasty designed to remove extra skin from the upper lids of an already attractive but haughty television news anchorwoman. Part way through the procedure, Robbie felt something poke against his eye. He blinked reflexively. To his horror, a stray eyelash floated down and landed smack in the bed of exposed raw tissue.

Robbie gasped while Dr. Kessel, a Board-Certified Bastard who'd become even more so with his apprentice's growing list of accolades, tensed up. Kessel, whose face appeared permanently fixed in a state of concentration, demanded silence in his O.R., and so Robbie resorted to sign language. Unaware of the stray lash, Kessel, whose stethoscope never left his lordly neck, frowned at the distraction. Robbie gave up; infections following eyelid surgery were rare.

Dr. Kessel completed his surgery with the tiny foreign body undetected and still in place, but, to Robbie's relief, the patient convalesced uneventfully.

Robbie's memory of the incident soon faded to that of a harmless prank perpetrated on an unknowing recipient, not Dr. Kessel so much as the patient herself, a minor celebrity who during her preoperative evaluation with the two surgeons had all but kissed Kessel's ass while refusing to even acknowledge Dr. Conner’s presence.

But from then on, each time Robbie saw the lady anchor reading the evening news teleprompter, he experienced an odd sort of sensation, a previously unfamiliar pleasure that he assumed must be the exhilaration that comes with getting away with a mischievous practical joke. But, alas, Robbie's interpretation was amiss.

(continued on page two)