“Well now you have,” I told him. I didn’t tell him that he had put his finger on precisely what had been wrong about my marriage too. Counseling was over. He still looked worried, so I added, “I’m sorry if I made a big deal about it.”
“No, you were right. I was insensitive.”
“You can stop now,” I told him. “I don’t want to know any more bad things.”
“Not even about the time I talked my sister into going to a Halloween party as a black widow spider, and then I tied her extra legs together under the table so tightly she couldn’t lift her arms to eat?”
“What a brat,” I said.
“That’s what my mother said. She made me stand next to my sister for the whole party and feed her with a fork whenever she wanted anything.”
I laughed, remembering how many times David had set Allie up for embarrassment when they were little, only to have it backfire. “Where’s your sister now?”
“Costa Rica, off and on. She’s a biologist doing entomology research for the University of Pennsylvania.”
“So maybe you inspired her,” I offered.
“I like to think so,” he said, taking a bite of his brochette.
We chewed companionably for a while, confessions for the moment being at an end.
“I have a revealing activity in mind, if you’re interested,” he said after a while. “My favorite weekend outing. Care to come along some Saturday?”
“Do I get to know what it is first?” I asked him.
He grinned. “Do you want to? I thought you might like to be surprised.”
“It’s nothing to do with snakes, right?”
“I promise. I can also assure you I’ve outgrown my interest in arachnids.”
“In that case, I’ll trust you. You can surprise me.” He’d surprised me already. I hoped it wasn’t obvious how much.
“Next Saturday?” he inquired.
I shook my head. “I can’t next Saturday. It’s Casa Alegría’s Opening Weekend.”
“Casa Alegría? The House of Joy? That sounds like a whorehouse.”
“Does it?” I laughed. “It’s Bobbie Crystol’s new longevity spa. I think it sounds better in Spanish.”
“You’re going for the opening reception?” he asked.
“For the three-day weekend. It’s a miniversion of her total program,” I told him. “It’s pretty much a command performance.”
He looked serious, as he invariably did whenever Bobbie’s name came up. “Why is that?” he asked.
“Because my glorious future in the law is probably tied to keeping Bobbie Crystol happy,” I said. I was tempted to tell him about the job offer, but I’d promised not to. (Telling Isabel didn’t count. Any woman would understand that.)
He smiled. “The prospect doesn’t appear to excite you.”
I sighed. “It would have doubtful appeal in any case, but I’d feel better about it if I were one hundred percent sure she was harmless.”
He looked serious again. “And you’re not?”
“Well, no, not after talking to Dorothy Beekman. And frankly, I’m still suspicious about her reasons for picking me to do her legal work.” I saw his expression. “I’m not being overly modest or anything like that. It’s like having Arnold Schwarzenegger ask you to do his heart bypass operation when you’re a first-year resident in cardiology. It doesn’t compute.”
“I take your point,” he said.
“Believe me, it would be a lot better for me to ignore any doubts I might have on this subject,” I told him. “I can’t even tell you how much better. The law firm’s policy is not to ask a question if you don’t already know what answer you’ll get.”
“And does that work for you?” he asked gently.
“You sound like a shrink,” I said.
He smiled. “I am a shrink.”
“And I’m a lawyer, but I don’t think I want to be that kind,” I told him. “Not if I can help it.”
“Good,” he said.
Something about his expression tipped me off. “You do know something,” I told him. “I knew you had something against her. You’ve been trying to warn me off her since her name first came up.”
“I don’t know anything for certain,” he said scrupulously.
I waited. I was not letting him off the hook now.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “I have to get back soon.”
“Summarize,” I told him.
He took a big swallow of water. “These are only things I’ve heard—okay?—but I’ve heard them from several sources I usually find reliable.”
He looked at me to see if I’d absorbed the disclaimer. I nodded.
“It all goes back to drugs,” he said.
I sat up straight, startled. “Bobbie takes drugs?” I wouldn’t have believed it. She looked too healthy.
He shook his head vehemently. “No, no. Legal drugs. Pharmaceuticals.” He sighed. “Before managed care, if you were a pharmaceutical company, you could raise your prices almost at will for your drugs, so you didn’t have a lot of incentive to develop new products. Now, with the squeeze on drug prices, there’s a big push to increase the number of drugs you sell. And that means a lot of new drugs in development. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes, but I don’t see—”
He raised his hand. “You will. Drug development is big business. Very big business. It costs more than half a billion dollars to bring a product to market. After the research and development phase—the discovery and the preclinical testing on animals—you have to have clinical trials on human test subjects.”
“Human guinea pigs,” I suggested.
He made a face. “It’s necessary,” he said, “and it’s voluntary on the part of the subjects. At least it’s supposed to be.”
“Aha!” I said.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said, but he smiled. “Anyway, there’s enormous pressure to come up with new blockbuster drugs—like Viagra, for example—and to be first into the market. To do that, the companies have to speed up the process as much as possible. One way to speed things up is to bypass the traditional way of finding test subjects, which used to be to go to the medical schools and ask them to design the protocols and carry out the tests. Now drug companies are approaching private doctors directly, asking them to sign up their patients for the clinical trials. For which the doctors are handsomely compensated, of course.”
“Of course. Define handsomely,” I said.
“You can get anywhere from hundreds to thousands for every patient. You get bonuses for enrolling them fast. If you hustle, you can bring in an extra half million to a million a year.”
“Nice,” I said. “Let me guess: the handsome sums involved may tempt doctors to be less than scrupulous about who gets enrolled in these studies.”
“Well, it sets up a certain conflict of interest, to say the least. Medical professionals are enticing patients to enter these studies at a point when they’re exceptionally vulnerable and probably have no idea their physician has anything other than their best medical interests at heart.”
“It’s the balance thing again,” I told him.
He smiled. “It is?”
“Sure. The doctor has all the power in the relationship. He has knowledge and you don’t. You don’t want to hurt his feelings or make him mad at you, plus you think he must know best. So of course you say yes.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?” he asked me.
“Am I right?”
“Probably,” he conceded.
“Well, I was married to a doctor. That’s undoubtedly what started me off.”
“That’s right. I forgot,” he said tactfully.
Liar, I thought, but I didn’t hold it against him. “So the only thing standing between the poor, trusting patient and some risky study that might actually harm him or be bad for him in some way is the doctor who’s getting paid to sign him up. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I might
not put it that way, but that’s what it can boil down to. There’s a lot of potential for abuse,” he said. “There are testing companies that contract with doctors as clinical investigators, regardless of their specialty, so you can have people conducting trials in areas they know nothing about. There are lots of issues about the quality of the data, and the monitoring systems are patchy, to put it kindly. There is also,” he said slowly, “a real possibility of faking the data, because it stands to reason that if the trials work out, um, felicitously for the new product, you’re a lot more likely to be invited back as a researcher.”
“My God, you’ve made me scared to take cold medicine,” I told him.
“People have always been too cavalier about drugs,” he said seriously. “And that includes over-the-counter stuff.”
“So where does Bobbie Crystol fit into all of this?” I asked him.
He consulted his watch surreptitiously. “Well, these are private contracts, not public documents, so it’s very difficult to know for sure. But one of the benefits to doctors of conducting the research is that you get your name on academic papers describing drug studies, even though the companies really write the papers. Dr. Crystol’s name is on an awful lot of papers.”
“Meaning she’s conducted a number of these studies?”
“A very large number. Many of them in areas outside her specialty. It’s probably how she financed her original clinic.” He shrugged. “The rest is really just rumor. But the scuttlebutt is that there were a lot of problems.”
“Such as?” I pressed him.
“Adverse patient reactions, enrolling people medically inappropriate for the studies, that sort of thing.”
“Which she could cover up by convincing the poor patients that it was their attitude that caused them to be ill or have the adverse reaction or whatever.” I told him about my interview with Dorothy Beekman, although I had been planning to save it until I had more information. I thought it was fair to divulge what I knew, despite Lauren’s admonitions, since I hadn’t learned it through legal work I’d done for Crystol Enterprises.
Mark shook his head. “You can’t draw any useful conclusions. At this point, there’s no way to tell what she took, and it might very well be just a coincidence that she got sick after something Dr. Crystol gave her. I warned you about that before.”
“Well, something had you worried enough to be dropping hints all over the place. Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you earlier?”
“I knew what this client means to you, Becky,” he said quietly. “If I’d known anything…concrete, I would have told you. I told you I had concerns about the psychological manipulation of patients that goes on with some of these anti-aging, mind-body-spirit gurus. There’s a little too much charisma and not enough science for my taste. And throw Mexico into the mix…” He raised his hands. “They don’t exactly regulate the legal drug industry, and just about anything goes.” He grinned suddenly. “Which you would have found out for yourself if we had stayed for the speaker at the fund-raiser.”
“I was busy trying not to fall out of my dress,” I reminded him.
“I noticed,” he said in a voice that sounded surprisingly, gratifyingly unprofessional.
“I don’t know,” I told Isabel later. “I don’t think so, but I could have just imagined it.”
Isabel made a sound precariously close to a snort. “He asked you to lunch, he asked you on some mystery date, and he’s falling all over himself scoping out your little trip to Crystolandia, and you’re worried you’re just imagining that he’s interested in you?”
“Well, he kept emphasizing the part about being friends,” I told her.
“That’s a really good sign,” she said.
“‘I like you as a friend’ is what I told Russell Garon in sixth grade when he kept wanting to carry my books home from the bus stop. Ever since then I’ve always thought of it as a surefire turnoff.”
“Why didn’t you let him carry your books?” she asked me.
“It wouldn’t have been fair,” I told her.
“Jesus, Becky,” she breathed. “Sometimes I can’t believe you.” She sighed audibly into the phone. “Look, didn’t you give him a pretty hard time about being your shrink?”
“Former shrink,” I corrected her. “Yes, I did.”
“Well, you probably scared the poor guy to death. Made him feel like he violated the canon of ethics or something like that.”
“Isabel, it was years ago,” I protested.
“You don’t have to convince me,” she said. “Anyway, the f word is a good sign. Men who just want to manipulate you into bed don’t talk about being friends.”
“What do they talk about?” I asked, feeling as if I were in high school again.
“They tell you how hot you are and lick your earlobes,” she said.
I burst out laughing. “Be serious,” I said.
“You think I’m not? Do you want me to name names?”
“Yes,” I said.
She did.
“I’m convinced,” I told her, a little embarrassed. “Maybe he is interested in me, I admit it. What scares me is how perfect he is. I mean, I don’t want to blow this. I’m afraid if I actually put it into words I’ll jinx it.”
“Aha.”
“Don’t ‘aha’ me. I’ve just spilled my guts.”
“Well, you know he isn’t perfect,” she said.
“I do?”
“Of course. Doesn’t the part about lying bother you a little?”
“Oh, right. Sure,” I said. “It bothers me a lot. He made it sound as if he hasn’t told his mother he’s gay.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, unsuccessfully.
“You seriously think that’s a possibility?”
“Do you? You’ve met him.”
“No,” she said.
“Neither do I. He would have told me,” I said, certain this was true. “But there’s something.”
“Want me to check him out? It is my business, after all.”
“No,” I said emphatically.
“Are you sure? People have been surprised before this. I can do it very discreetly, and he’d never know.”
“I’d know,” I told her. “The man is as honest as they come. I want to trust that. About everything else I’m willing to be surprised. Besides, I really like the way I feel when I’m with him. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What’s ‘uh-oh’?” I asked her, torn between amusement and annoyance.
“You’ve got it worse than I thought,” she said.
“I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about,” I told her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The doorbell was ringing with maddening persistence. I was late getting started departing for Opening Weekend (despite years of being almost late for innumerable events, I always cut things too close), and now I would get stuck in traffic. I hadn’t used my suitcase in so long I’d forgotten the combination of the lock, and I’d wasted twenty minutes hunting it down. My hair was a mess. I couldn’t find Burdick, and I couldn’t leave until he was safely enclosed in the house.
Ding-dong.
I yanked open the door.
Ron the postman (or postal carrier, if you want to be precise)—computer genius, polymath, and all-round decent guy—took one look at my face and stepped back a little.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m just late for something.”
“I’ll hurry,” he said, meaning he wouldn’t tell me any jokes today or inquire why I was home early on a Friday afternoon. “I’ve got a Return Receipt Requested for you to sign.” He looked at me. “It’s from her.”
People obsessed with what’s happening to personal privacy on the Internet should realize that their suburban postman might have been keeping tabs on them for years. I mean, talk about personal profile. How can you have secrets from someone who knows what magazines you read and what packages you get, whether or not you get collec
tion notices, and how messy your garage is—not to mention someone who is, through unavoidable proximity, privy to the odd argument with your neighbors, your family, or your ex-husband’s new wife?
I knew exactly who he meant by her. I made a face. “Thanks,” I said, signing for the envelope.
“Good luck,” he told me.
When I had closed the door, I held the envelope by the corner, wondering if I should open it then or just stick it in my suitcase and deal with it later. Like Carole’s earlier letter, I knew it boded ill, particularly after that “I warned you” phone call.
Under the circumstances, I was afraid to put it off. I slit open the envelope, getting a paper cut on my finger.
I skimmed the contents of the letter. Advised to inform you, blah blah. Addition of beneficiaries to the trust, et cetera. I put the paper back in the envelope, marring it with a smear of blood as I did. I could deal with it later. At least she wasn’t closing the checkbook altogether or suing me for defamation of character. I stuck it in the side pocket of my purse. I would figure it out when I got to the spa.
Casa Alegría sat in the dry brown hills east of San Diego and south of the border, far enough away from the coast to escape the less upscale elements of Tijuana—the desperate hordes of sick, impoverished native women selling yarn bracelets and Chiclets for pennies, the feral children swarming over your car when you stopped for gas, the determined packs of American college students hell-bent on getting drunk, not to mention the political assassinations and narco-murders. (I haven’t even started on the poor donkey spray-painted to look like a zebra, so tourists could get their pictures taken with something wild.) Perfectly nice people lived in Tijuana, went to church, and raised their children, but you wouldn’t meet them driving through. It was not the sort of place to site a well-heeled life-extension clinic.
Alegre, the town closest to Casa Alegría, had been spared both the blights and the pleasures of urban life. There was little more to it than a plaza with a fountain, a band shell, the requisite pigeons, and one or two scruffy dogs.
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