Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  His eyes never stopped. They studied her face, gazed at her throat, examined the contours of her blouse, and looked repeatedly at her skirt and legs. The sound of her mother putting the dishes in the dishwasher reassured her.

  “What can you tell me about him? What was going on in his life lately?”

  “I’ve answered all these questions, Mr. McMurry.”

  His eyes were insolent and his mustache looked dirty. “Start at the beginning.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. There was no change in his life at all lately. No sudden moods, no problems or strange phone calls. No unusual letters. Nothing.”

  “Nothing happening in his business?”

  “No. His business was poetry, and he was preparing a new volume for publication.”

  “Tell me about his diabetes.”

  “He takes insulin.”

  “Pills? Needle?”

  “Needle. He’s taking a new kind of insulin, and he’s in a test group that’s using it.”

  His eyes moved slowly down to her shoes as he nodded. “Okay. I see. Who’s his doctor?”

  “I’d better write it down. He’s not in the phone book. He’s part of a private research clinic up on Madison Avenue.” She walked over to the secretary and made a note on a pad. Turning, she found him studying her figure hungrily. He took the address and smiled at her with his incongruously white teeth through his Rough Rider’s mustache.

  She opened the door fully and waited, relieved to be able to end the interview. She felt naked; she felt violated; she wanted to take another shower.

  “Okay,” he said, looking up from the note and taking one last wipe with his eyes. “I’ll talk to him. Dr. Jay Simmonds, it is.”

  The reception room and the doctors’ offices around it were furnished in antiseptic white, touched here and there with decorations in burnt orange. There was a faint medicinal odor that had come from a distance behind closed doors. Through hidden speakers, background music played discreetly.

  Brewer wondered which of the doctors the nurse was shacking up with—a soft blonde with a finishing-school face and a custom-made nurse’s uniform, gathered and tucked to show her bedroom figure.

  Brewer sat in Dr. Simmonds’s office, staring with fascination at four-color photographs in a medical magazine of an open-heart operation. Stainless steel clips and clamps bit red gouts of flesh cruelly.

  “Hello,” said Dr. Simmonds, entering. “Don’t get up.”

  Brewer looked at the heavy dark-haired man and held up his ID briefly. “I’m here about Kotlikoff. I’d like to get some background on his medical condition.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hear you have him on a new insulin.”

  “Yes. Insulin 147.”

  “I understand it’s taken with a needle.”

  “Insulin syringe, yes. Into the muscle tissue, once a day.”

  “What happens if the dose is too strong?”

  “If the dosage is too high, a chemical imbalance occurs, commonly called insulin shock. In that case, the patient needs to correct by eating a piece of candy or chocolate or an orange. He then should get himself to the nearest doctor or hospital. If the insulin level is too low, diabetic coma can result. That requires prompt medical attention.”

  “How is this stuff sold? Insulin 147.”

  “In a drugstore. The druggist usually has to order it. It’s still new.”

  “How is it sold?”

  “Do you mean is it proprietary? It’s sold only with a doctor’s prescription. So far there’s only one pharmaceutical company making it, and it’s sold only under the name ‘Insulin 147.’”

  “Can he take ordinary insulin in place of it?”

  “Oh, no. He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be off the Insulin 147. He just can’t casually take an injection of another type insulin, no—unless he’s doing it under the close supervision of a doctor who specializes in the subject and knows his case history, and his diet would have to be adjusted accordingly.” Simmonds paused. “I see what you’re driving at. If the people who kidnapped him want to keep him in good health, they’ll keep him on Insulin 147 and on the diet that goes with it. Okay?” Jay Simmonds thrust his hands into the pockets of his white jacket. “What else can I tell you?”

  “For the time being, nothing.”

  “Have you heard anything more about—?”

  “Not a boo. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me? Anything unusual about Kotlikoff, anything different about him lately?”

  “No. I know nothing about him.”

  “Hot damn,” said Brewer to the elevator door. “It’s going to be an arch-buster.” Dog work: upstreet, down-street, knocking on doors, a slow process of elimination that might net no results. Potentially, it might take at least two days of walking and asking, just to come up with an empty bucket. Kotlikoff could be in another city. They could have moved him to the Soviet dacha in Centerville, Maryland, or out on Long Island. He could even be dead and buried in a cellar.

  Anything, however, even the dogwork, was better than standing in the Sports Complex with a pool cue amidst the living dead, all watching the stairs for a sucker, like shrunken whores in a doorway.

  At least the weather was good. He passed a woman in an oversize sweater with rolled cuffs, shilling fresh daffodils from two armbaskets, her gray hair turning into hanks in the light air. “Daffodils,” she called in a quavering voice. “Daaaffodils.”

  The stores were getting their windows washed, and the traffic cops had their rain gear stashed: they looked uncomfortable in their heavy blue tunics. A nice day for walking.

  Brewer needed a street map, the bigger the better, a list of addresses and a new ID card. He walked briskly in the bright day across town on Forty-second Street, past the train station to his apartment. Along the way, he went into a stationery store and bought a street map of Manhattan and three felt pens. A legless beggar with a dog crooned two bits out of Brewer. Change my luck.

  With a pot of coffee and a fresh cigar he went to work, barely aware of the miscellaneous sounds coming through the airshaft and into his open window. In the Yellow Pages he turned to the listing he wanted: “United Nations Missions.” The list started with Afghanistan and ended with Yugoslavia. With a felt pen he placed a red circle on the street map for each address of a Communist country or a suspected friend. Most of them clustered over on the east side of Manhattan around the UN Building at Forty-second Street.

  He used the black felt pen to draw a heavy square around the general area. Almost all of the red circles were inside it.

  Next, he opened the Yellow Pages to “Pharmacies.” There were three pages of them just listing Manhattan pharmacies, and there was an additional half page of them under “Druggists’ Sundries.” He went through the list, one pharmacy at a time. For each pharmacy address that was inside his black box, he marked it with a green dot. It took him an hour and a half to select all the pharmacies that were within the black square and to mark them on his map.

  Next he made a new ID card.

  He got out the Bristol board, the Exacto razor knife, the ruler and hard pencil, the eraser and the Prestype sheets and the stylus. He began with the S in Special and laid out a line of type. Then another. He affixed his photograph with the mustache, added a thumbprint, added the name “Charles McMurry” in typewriter typeface and signed the card. He studied it critically. It identified Charles McMurry as a Special Agent, Federal Food and Drug Administration. He ironed the card into its plastic cover and fitted the card into the wallet window and opened it, glanced at it and closed it several times. Very presentable.

  It was nearly noon. He checked his disguise in the mirror, flashed his stunning smile in farewell and went back into springtime in the city.

  “I’m interested,” he said to the first druggist, “in all your prescriptions for Insulin 147.”

  The druggist stopped chewing his gum. “Insulin 147. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

 
“I got two people on it. If there’s anything wrong with it, they should know immediately.”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong with it. Insulin 147 is okay. I need to know how many prescriptions you have, who got them and who signed them.”

  “Oh, the doctors. You’re after the doctors.”

  “I have a lot of pharmacies to check. May I see your records?”

  “Okay, okay. I got two—yeah, I got three.”

  Brewer looked at the first prescription form. “What’s this say?”

  The druggist took it from him. “Look on the back for my translation. See? All doctors are illiterate. You got any idea how many doctors I have to call because I can’t read their handwriting? No, you don’t. Look, here’s the doctor’s name and address printed on his form. And here on the back is the patient’s full name and address. And here in this pharmacy log is the breakdown of the medicines. It’s my own system. I can find anything I want in minutes, going back ten years.”

  Brewer skipped lunch, eating a chocolate bar as he walked. There were eighteen drugstores on his map, and it took him three and half hours to study the records of the eighteen. Nine of them, exactly half, had no prescriptions for Insulin 147 and had never stocked it. The others had a few—two, three or four. One druggist had eight—the one nearest Jay Simmonds’s office.

  Brewer stopped for a beer after he’d checked out the last drugstore, and went over his handwritten list of patients using Insulin 147. Then he spread his map on the mahogany bar and ordered another beer. With his black felt pen he marked in dots for each of the patients. Several lived far outside his black box, and he decided to do them last. Finished, he looked again at the map: now he had red circles for missions, green dots for drugstores, and black dots for patients—almost all of it inside his black-boxed area. He counted twenty-three names of patients inside the box. His feet throbbed. His disguise itched.

  Not all the foreign mission buildings were indicated—there were a number of others, residences for foreign embassy personnel, infirmaries and offices that didn’t appear in any city directories. All of them, however, had full diplomatic immunity.

  The first name on the list was a man named Daniel Beneke. He lived in an apartment on the East Side, several blocks from the UN building. Brewer held up his ID to the eye at the peephole. “Federal Food and Drug Agent. I’m checking on Insulin 147—a Mr. Daniel Beneke.”

  Two locks were turned, and the door opened to the width of the chain lock. “What’s the matter with it? He’s not here. He’s at work.”

  “You his wife?”

  Through the narrow opening of the door, the small, dark eye in the middle-aged face studied him carefully. “Who wants to know? Are you from the Income Tax?”

  “No,” he said to the eye. “I told you. I’m Federal Food and Drug, checking on insulin.”

  The eye relented. “I’m his housekeeper. His wife is in Creedmore. Twenty years.” And, the eye conveyed, the mad wife was going to enragingly go on living in Creedmore for another hundred years.

  “How long has he been taking Insulin 147?”

  “Couple of weeks. What’s the matter? Is the insulin all right?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing wrong with his medicine. How long has he been a diabetic?”

  “Oh, years. Twenty, thirty years.”

  “Any adverse reactions to Insulin 147?”

  “Headaches.”

  “Headaches?”

  “Yes, for the first week. We told the doctor. Every morning, the needle, bang, the headache. But they changed his diet and the headaches went away.”

  “I see. What kind of work does he do?”

  “He’s in the actuarial department of an insurance company. What are you checking for?”

  “Just routine. We have to check every new drug on the market. Who’s his doctor?”

  “Dr. Simmonds.”

  By the time he’d knocked on his sixth door, he’d gotten a stock of medical phrases and a spotty understanding of insulin. There were five kinds, each in varying strengths; there were also regular urine tests against a color chart to gauge blood sugar. And various needle types and lengths, including a new disposable type. All six patients seemed to be bona fide diabetics.

  Number seven lived over by the East River. He had a Russian name: Zorin. Robert Zorin. The doorway to his apartment stood between two stores, a vegetable store with stands out on the sidewalk and a shoe store. Several old people sat in chairs by the curb, calling up comments to a woman over the shoe store, who leaned out of a window with her arms on a pillow. A group of youths clustered around a parked automobile; the hood was up like a patient with his tongue out.

  “Who you looking for?” asked the lady leaning from her window.

  Brewer paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Zorin. Robert Zorin.”

  “He’s right there,” she said. She pointed at the group of youths. “Bobby. This man wants you.”

  Bobby Zorin stepped away from the group and looked with great doubt and hesitation at Brewer. “Yeah?”

  “Federal Food and Drug,” said Brewer. “I’m doing a routine check on Insulin 147. I understand you use it.”

  “Yeah. Just started it about three weeks ago.”

  “I see you’re getting it from Crown Pharmacy.”

  “Yeah. I have a standing prescription for it.”

  “How is it?”

  “Okay. Like nothing at all. I don’t have as many ups and downs with it. I was using an NPH insulin before, which was okay, but this is better. How do you get a job with the government? You have to take a test or something?”

  “Yes. Civil Service. Do you—”

  “What kind of education? You need a degree?”

  “Yes. Do you—”

  “Shit. I’m trying to be a Russian translator, but it’s tough getting started.”

  “Oh, yeah? You meet many Russians?”

  “You can’t. They keep you at arm’s length, you know. I think they want to keep the jobs for themselves at the UN, you know? I learned to speak Russian from my grandparents. I’m in this control group for diabetes with the Russian guy who got kidnapped—Kotlikoff—and I tried to talk to him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, he’s a fake. You know him? Tall, skinny guy with a slow way of talking English. Draws out everything. I tried to read his stuff one night. It’s shit. I can’t read it. It’s poetry. I asked him to explain it, and he said he couldn’t. Imagine that? He wrote it, but he can’t explain it. He’s a fake.”

  “What did he say about your Russian?”

  “Oh. He said I had a perfect Moscow accent. He said I spoke Russian without a trace of a—you know, foreign accent. Then he said all my idioms were old-fashioned.” “You ever purchase insulin for anyone else—you know, other diabetics?”

  “No, no, you can’t do that. Every insulin is different; every diabetic is different.”

  “You seen Kotlikoff lately?”

  “Nah. Just when they were setting up the control group. That was about a month ago. He’s probably dead now.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Guy that age with diabetes—a strong emotion can trigger insulin shock or a diabetic coma. He could have died on them when they were dragging him away. That’s how my father died. After a car accident. He passed out. Everybody thought he’d hit his head. He died before anyone figured out that he was a diabetic.”

  Brewer didn’t need that. Now he had to worry about another potential cause of death. If Kotlikoff hadn’t been beaten to death, he might have died from diabetes. Brewer refused to think about it. Don’t die, you bastard; don’t, don’t, don’t.

  He passed the woman with the daffodils crooning her reedy song: “Daffodils. Daffodils?” She now had a young boy with her carrying a third basket. He bumped along behind her, indifferently gazing into store windows. His heart was elsewhere. The boy’s presence told Brewer it was after three o’clock. The odors in the apartment buildings also announced the late
ness of the day. Miscellaneous cooking odors filled the hallways as uncounted suppers stewed, bubbled, boiled and baked. So late in the day and he still had sixteen to go. He needed a dose of luck.

  By three-thirty, clouds had begun to reach across the sky, and the wind swung to the east and hardened at six knots. Without the sun, the day chilled and the wind promised rain. Brewer picked up his pace. He’d left his raincoat at home, and it was going to rain like a cow peeing on a rock.

  “I didn’t notice no difference,” said Number Eight. The dyed black of her hair had grown out from the roots. “But then, I’m a borderline case. I can almost take the pills. You’d look a lot better without that mustache.”

  “How do you take Insulin 147?”

  “Needle, of course. Right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, abdomen, left side, right side, then right arm all over again. Honey, I’ve got so many needle holes in me I feel like the tattooed lady in the circus. See?” She pulled up her blouse sleeve.

  “Nice.”

  “See?” She lifted the side of her skirt almost to her hip. She had no underpants on.

  “Nice.”

  She laughed, a contralto fruity laugh of neatly modulated innuendo. “Thought you’d like that. Tell my husband. He’s the Mayor of Sleepytime.”

  “Any headaches?”

  “Nah. Like I said, no difference.”

  “Is there any other diabetic who uses your Insulin 147?”

  She shook her head at him. “Honey, I would never do that. My daughter is in San Francisco and she’s a diabetic too, and let me tell you something. Even she can’t use my insulin. If I was to let another diabetic try my insulin, it could make her very, very sick. Die even. Are them your own teeth?”

  “Yeah. Are they yours?”

  “Yes.” She drew her lips back to show him. “Kissing sweet.”