San Diego Noir

by Maryelizabeth Hart

  “Afraid not,” she answered.

  Adam grinned. “Then can we just mess them up a bit?”

  Three days later, Katherine had a bad reaction to a new drug and died.

  Her funeral was every bit as horrible as you’d expect, with sobbing third-graders whose parents should have known better and shocked cronies of her parents and her grandmother who kept wailing, “It should have been me,” until pretty much everyone agreed.

  Molly went into a funk and stopped even going to the support group for a couple of weeks. She didn’t want me to take her anywhere, thank you very much, and said that she didn’t need anything and would be in touch if she did, as if I were some annoying telemarketer.

  I pretended not to be terribly hurt and went about my business, working long hours and trying to remember the old Molly I knew in high school, the one whose bikini was always the sexiest, whose laugh the most infectious, whose mind the keenest. The brilliant girl whose vibrant energy made it clear that she was going to live forever.

  Big. Fat. Lie.

  I don’t want you to think that I was unfeeling back then, that what’s happening to me now is my own karmic payback for being too blasé or smart-ass around four people whose lives were slipping away by the minute. I gave up wearing mascara altogether for that year, and the one that followed, when the slightest thing could trigger a memory of Molly or one of the others. And when Molly banished me that fall—which is what it felt like, banishment, no two ways about it—it broke my heart.

  Molly texted me Thanksgiving week and asked if I could come by Tuesday night after work. The pool house door was opened by a pleasant-looking Filipina caregiver wearing floral-patterned scrubs, a new and alarming addition. Molly introduced us, then shooed the woman up to her parents’ house and promised to call when we were finished.

  I was shocked at how much her appearance had deteriorated. She slumped in a wheelchair in baggy sweats. The expensive blond wig which had been styled before her treatment began, to perfectly match her sophisticated hairstyle, now looked absurdly out of place atop her pallid, steroid-swollen face.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been rude,” she began, and I tried to cut her off but she waved a hand to stop me. It was something she’d been working up, I realized, and I let her go on. It was a wonderful summation, a sad reminder that a world full of crummy lawyers was about to lose a really first-rate one. When she finished the apology she asked if I would do her a favor.

  “Anything,” I said, and meant it.

  “I knew I could count on you. It’s just too weird to tell my parents. And my brother is on Planet Frank, pretending that I’ve got a bad cold.” Her parents had always been fairly cool, as reactionary billionaires went. Her brother Frank was megaintelligent but socially inept, a physicist up at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

  “Let me guess. You want me to have your love child.” She laughed. “No? Okay, then. You must want to revive the Instant Karma project.”

  Her smile was weak as she shook her head. “Too late for me on that, though I suppose it’s never too late for justice. No, Tina, this is a lot simpler.” She explained that when she was first diagnosed, after a grand mal seizure in the shoe department of Nordstrom at the Grove, she worried endlessly about loss of control. Once her diagnosis was firm and irrevocable, she decided that she wanted power over when and how she would die.

  “But I’m a coward. And I didn’t want to do anything that would make a horrible memory for my parents, or whoever found me. So much for guns and knives. I kind of liked the idea of jumping off a skyscraper, or out of a plane, but I figured by the time I was ready, that wouldn’t be practical.” She waved a hand at the wheelchair. “As it isn’t. Anyway, one night I had an incredibly vivid dream.

  “I was in some kind of medieval court, like one of those period movies where everybody’s dressed in forty yards of satin. Mine was deep blue. We were speaking a language I’d never heard that sounded like chipmunks. Then, suddenly, huge doors swung open and warriors swarmed in, wearing ragged animal furs and carrying swords and shields. Everybody was screaming and slashing swords, but in the midst of it all I was totally calm. I looked into my lap and saw my hand, wearing an ornate ring with a huge ruby. Just as one of the warriors was about to pounce on me, I raised my hand to my mouth, unclasped the ruby, and swallowed a golden liquid.”

  Quite a dream, that. Mine tend to be about getting lost in parking lots, or being unable to find the right color pen on my way to the final exam for the course I didn’t know I was taking.

  “I woke up then,” she continued, “and went on eBay and found a poison ring. They’re big in Goth culture, in case you didn’t know, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I actually bought a couple, so I could pick the one I liked best once I had them all.”

  “The opal!”

  Molly never wore jewelry when she was younger, was one of the few women my age I’ve ever known without a single piercing. I remembered noticing the ring as we sat around the fire ring outside her pool house after Halloween group session, and how she laughed it off as something she’d had forever. I looked at her hands now and her fingers were bare again.

  She nodded. “The opal. And I got myself some potassium cyanide and I made my own poison pills, just like those guys in the spy movies who always have a fake tooth in their mouth in case they’re captured. It was almost comic, actually. I mean the stuff is poison, and it’s designed to kill as quickly as possible. So I had to keep from spilling anything or getting it on my skin while I was working. All I could think was that if I screwed this up, I’d be dead even sooner, and my final act on earth would be a failure.”

  Only Molly could think of the creation of poison pills in those terms.

  “How many billable hours did it take?” I asked.

  She chuckled. “You got me, Tina. Always could. Altogether, counting the online shopping and death pill construction, about four and a half, but that’s cause I was taking my time. Perfectionism is a burden.”

  This from the Torrey Pines valedictorian, the Stanford National Merit Scholar, the Boalt Hall law review editor.

  “So this is really the last loose end,” she said. “I’ve signed all the powers of attorney and health care directives and financial papers, and my affairs, as they say, are in order. Donating organs, I’m sorry to say, isn’t an option. My parents have sworn that they won’t haul me to a hospital and that I can die right here, in hospice, with all the painkillers I want. I’m past pride about pretty much everything, and it will be easier for my parents that way. Between you and me, I’m ready to cry uncle and go into hospice. My head hurts and the drugs will be better.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her simply. “However I can help …”

  She smiled and there was a spark of the old Molly again, looking up triumphantly after racing through the AP Physics exam. “You can take care of the damned poison rings. I don’t want my parents to find that stuff after I’m dead or for anybody to accidentally get into the cyanide. What I had in mind, if you’re willing, is for you to make it all disappear. Take it away and dispose of it for me, please.”

  I hesitated for a moment and she misunderstood.

  “Listen, if this is too much—”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But you need to promise me something. You won’t cut me off again. This is awful, Molly, but it tore me apart when you made me go away.”

  We both cried a bit then, and a few tissues later she told me where she’d hidden the rings and the poison, in a pretty little oval cloisonné box in her swimsuit drawer. I retrieved the innocuouslooking pink-and-gold box and found the opal and three other rather bulky rings nestled inside on black velvet, each holding a lethal gelcap. A miniature version of the cloisonné box beside them held a dozen more capsules.

  “I used up what I had,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not something you can just toss into the stew with the leftover vegetables.”

  We never talked about it again, and the whole episode was so crazy t
hat I just took the box home and pushed it to the back of the top shelf in my bedroom closet. I worked really hard and stopped by Molly’s every couple of days and at Christmas I brought her new music by her favorite artists. By then she was in bed all the time and heavily medicated, and I wasn’t always sure she knew I was there.

  Every now and then I’d think about her poison rings, and once or twice I even got down the cloisonné box. But I never opened it.

  Molly died on the last day of January. That was two years ago, and now it’s coming into spring again, in a year where I won’t reach Christmas. Maybe not even the Fourth of July.

  So here we are.

  I’m inches away from being reunited with Molly and Katherine and Kenny and my parents, if there’s an afterlife, and inches away from oblivion if there isn’t. I’ve gradually lost energy, as the doctors said I would, on medication that sufficiently masks my symptoms so that I sometimes forget for a few minutes just what’s happening inside my body. I stopped working a few weeks ago, but I’m an information junkie and still spend a lot of my waking time online, just like I always did.

  So I was onto the story immediately when it broke on the web midway through last Monday morning. Laverne Patterson had been named executive vice president of Western Health. The very same Laverne Patterson we used to rail about on Molly’s patio. The woman who got that big fat bonus for cancelling health coverage for people who faithfully paid their premiums until they got sick, when Laverne started digging and discovered their applications didn’t mention having had chicken pox in kindergarten.

  Whereupon she gleefully booted them out the Western Health door.

  It turned out that Western Health hadn’t gotten rid of her at all, they’d simply shipped her off to Houston for a while to rehabilitate her in the finance office, given her a couple of quiet promotions, and a few months back slipped her once again into the San Diego home office. Now she would be number two in the whole damn company, and the damage she could do from that position was terrifying.

  I’d been moping around, feeling bored and out of sorts, unwilling to start anything I couldn’t finish, which in my case meant not ordering dinner until after lunch was concluded. Suddenly I felt a spurt of energy, a sense of mission, a belief that I could do one last thing before checking out of the Hotel California.

  I could revive Instant Karma and take out Laverne Patterson.

  I decided to be fair about things, to give her the benefit of the doubt that she had so merrily denied to others. Maybe she led a secret life of saintliness, cleansed lepers on the weekends and rocked babies in the neonatal unit on her lunch hour. Maybe her charitable donations exceeded tax-deductible levels and she offered a triple-tithe to her church. Maybe I was so caught up in my own pity party that I was prepared to punish somebody who, like any good Nazi, was simply doing her job.

  Okay, I couldn’t be entirely objective.

  But though I searched diligently, I didn’t find anything to mitigate my belief that she was a thoroughly despicable person, someone who would continue to fight the afflicted under the guide of reasonable care, a woman without whom this would be a better world.

  It was absurdly easy to find out all about her personal life, mostly from information available online to anybody with a little interest and tenacity. Add in the tricks I knew from my years as a researcher, and some passwords to databases that I still remembered, and a picture emerged that made me quite comfortable with the decision I realized I had already made.

  Laverne Patterson lived in a gated community in La Jolla. Her husband had taken early retirement for health reasons, picking up a whopping pension from his city manager job in a Los Angeles bedroom community. He now seemed to divide his time among managing his investments, sailing his thirty-two-foot boat, and playing golf. He had remained in La Jolla while Laverne was exiled to Houston, and didn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d miss her very much, although he was quick with the platitudes when interviewed for business magazine profiles. Their photographs together always looked forced, even when they both wore their most practiced smiles.

  She was an attractive woman, a snappy dresser who used a personal trainer but admitted to a weakness for Nirvana Chocolates. She belonged to a ton of civic and business organizations, drove a Lexus, and said she’d love to learn to fly if only she had the time. Her favorite vacation spot was Hawaii where she liked to take long walks on the beach. She was sorry that her earlier bonus had been misconstrued, though she still maintained that honesty was always important and that she had never acted with malice.

  Clueless and mean, my favorite combination.

  I could do this, I realized. I could actually kill this woman.

  Well, maybe not put my hands around her throat and strangle her, or bludgeon her with a broken oxygen tank. I was always a little squeamish, to tell the truth, and that kind of in-close work would have been tough for me even when I had my full strength. But I could orchestrate her death. I just needed to figure out a way.

  And then two factoids jumped together in my mind, just how it used to happen when I was writing web content for a nonprofit fundraiser, trying to find a way to up the ante with the same hopelessly dull information. It was so incredibly trite that I just couldn’t resist.

  He was diabetic. She loved Nirvana Chocolates.

  I would send her a box of candy, delivered to the house, and there’d be no danger that he’d nip into it before she had her chance. I’d have it gift wrapped, anyhow. Pay cash, bring it home and shoot some potassium cyanide into each deep, rich chocolate truffle. Rewrap and send it by a shipping service to her home.

  With a card saying, Thanks for everything. I.K.

  And so that’s what I did.

  There were some comic moments working with the cyanide gelcaps and the truffles, and I was glad I’d bought three times as many as I thought I’d need. I wore gloves, of course, both to protect me from the poison and to avoid fingerprints, though I was fairly certain mine were in no database that could come back to haunt me. And because on one level it was all rather silly, I did wear one of the poison rings, a clunky silver number, for dramatic effect.

  It’s harder to inject poison into dense chocolate than you might think, a matter of physics, really, and I had to do some experimenting with truffle reconstruction to make it work. At one point a failed venture rolled clear across the floor, dangerously close to the bathroom door where Gwendolyn was howling her displeasure at being locked away for her own safety.

  The ones I botched went down the toilet, since I’d determined that entry into the sewage stream would diffuse the poison and render it harmless. In fact, I was a little dismayed to find out just how much terrible stuff was already in our local sewage stream, though too tired to care.

  When I was finished, I repackaged everything, boxed it, wrapped it, tucked the card among the packing peanuts, and sealed the white carton. I changed my appearance a bit and took it to a shipping store in a business park facility during a busy spell. I kept my nerves mostly under control, though I did drop my purse and have to gather its contents at one point.

  Then I went home to take a nap. There was no reason yet to monitor the Internet, and I was increasingly tired anyway, sometimes sleeping sixteen or eighteen hours a day. I even kept my phone turned off much of the time because there wasn’t anybody I wanted to hear from.

  I’d paid for next-day delivery and it was Wednesday, so the present would arrive tomorrow. On Thursday mornings, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Laverne always attended a business breakfast, so she’d be gone before it was delivered. If she paid attention to packages that came to her house, as women tend to, she’d open it tomorrow night and be unable to resist taking a bite out of a succulent chocolate morsel.

  Her last succulent chocolate morsel.

  I slept well and soundly, setting an alarm to wake me for my eight a.m. meds and returning to bed, then sleeping clear past noon. I spent the afternoon reading newspapers from around the world online
, pretending I wasn’t aware of every minute that passed. Then I was tired again, so I took another nap after my four p.m. meds. When I awoke, it was nearly dark.

  I went to the computer and found the story third on the headline list of my favorite news service: Western Health Executive Dies Under Suspicious Circumstances. It was breaking news with few details, just that Leonard Patterson had called 911 when his wife suddenly collapsed and that homicide detectives were investigating and had no comment.

  I’d expected to feel some kind of satisfaction and relief, vindication for those who had suffered at Laverne Patterson’s hands and would be saved from her future attempts to mold health care. But I didn’t feel much of anything, really.

  In a corner, Gwendolyn batted her favorite pink ball and I remembered running across the room to grab the cyanide-treated truffle that was rolling toward the bathroom door. I remembered reaching down and picking it up with the gloved hand that wore the heavy silver poison ring. I wondered if Molly knew what I had done.

  Then I checked my e-mail and found a message marked Urgent from my doctor’s office.

  I had been approved for the clinical trial, he told me, after somebody dropped out at the last minute. They’d been unable to reach me by phone but time was an issue, and I needed to get to Philadelphia for pretesting as soon as possible. There were no guarantees of the new orphan drug being tested, but it had proven promising in animal studies. Like most clinical trials, there was no way to know if I’d receive the actual drug or a placebo, but they were certain I would be as pleased by this surprising development as they were.

  Somebody had “dropped out” of the study. Had dropped dead, more likely, but that hardly mattered.

  I had a chance again. I might be cured. I might live and cheat those charities out of their speedy inheritance. Of course, I might also get the sugar pills, but then I was no worse off than I’d been to start with, except that I’d be in a hospital in Philadelphia.

  It was all terribly confusing, and I was getting tired again. I wished Molly were here, or somebody else I could talk to.