Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  He bobbled his head, which I took for a nod.

  “Great. Thanks.” First things first. “Did you see me last night at your house?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is that a yes?”

  He shrugged again. Evidently, young Tim was confused about whether we’d crossed paths before.

  “Do you live with your mom?”

  He mumbled.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

  “No.”

  Strike one, I thought.

  “Who was the man I saw you with last night, Tim? Was that your dad?”

  “My great-uncle.”

  “Your great-uncle. Did you always live with him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you live with your mom?”

  More mumbling. Christ, what’s with kids and diction these days?

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Yes.” He said it firmly.

  “And your mom’s name is Dorothy Zhang?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She used to work on TV.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you say anything besides ‘yes’ and ‘no’?”

  “I said ‘my great-uncle’ before,” he reminded me, annoyed.

  “Of course you did. I forgot.”

  Now, I suppose I should say something about me and children: I’d really like to like them. Truly, I would. Scratch that, I’d really like to be “good” with them, which I assume has something to do with liking them. Being good with kids goes a long way in this baby-obsessed society. Especially with women. Especially with women of a certain age. I have this image of myself—totally fabricated—with my shirt off, about ten additional pounds of chest muscle, clasping a chubby bambino in my arms. Even I get all doey-eyed thinking about it. I post something like that on an Internet dating site, I’d be beating them off with a stick.

  As it was, kids made me about as comfortable as a severe case of jock itch. The odd things that came out of their mouths demanded responses. During that whooping cough outbreak in Atlanta, I kept misreading my audience. I would talk to a ten-year-old as if he were a toddler, then I’d overcorrect and speak to a seven-year-old like she was a professor in economics. I was totally unconscious of this, of course, but one of my supportive (female) colleagues pointed it out. Then she added, helpfully, “You really don’t get along well with kids, do you?”

  I’d get along better with them if they were twenty years older, I told her.

  Tim Kim crossed his arms.

  “Do you like gum?” I asked, and dug into my pocket for a pack I thought I put in there sometime during the last election. Maybe treats would help me worm my way into his good graces.

  “We’re not allowed to have gum.”

  “Right. This is school. I forgot.” Good thing, too. I looked at the half-pack in my hand and saw that the foil had come off the sticks, which were now coated in pocket fur. I jammed the pack into the pants. “Tim, do you know where your mom is?”

  “No.”

  Strike two.

  “Is she okay? Does she feel okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Base hit. Tim Kim’s eyes cut to the window behind me. I looked around to see Ginny Plough wiggling her digits at us. I wiggled back. My time, it appeared, was running out.

  “Now that you live with your great-uncle, do you talk to your mom sometimes?” I persisted.

  “Not now.”

  Interesting, I thought. Though my philosophy of parenting might be called reptilian—lay the eggs, then watch the little tykes emerge from the sand and embark on a peril-filled life—I had to admit I found Dorothy Zhang’s abrupt abandonment of her child a little weird, so I asked him, “Why’d she go away?”

  Tim shrugged. No big deal.

  “Was she trying to protect you?”

  Another shrug.

  “Why didn’t your uncle let me talk to you?”

  Tim clamped his lips together; he was in full mutiny now.

  I stuck up one finger, signaling another minute to the concerned principal. Ms. Plough nodded and turned away to administrate something.

  “Tim.” I reached into my pocket for my wallet, and took out the last CDC card I had left. The old 404 office and fax numbers were still on the card and I scratched them out, leaving only my cell. “You take this and tell your mom to call the number if you talk to her.” He took the card and studied it intensely, like it contained the answer to some great mystery, like whether the Harry Potter franchise really is kaput. “This is important: don’t show this to anyone else, Tim, and don’t tell anyone but your mom you talked to me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, without enthusiasm. “You said your name was Bert McBrooke.”

  My cover. Blown.

  “I never said that.”

  “You did. Last night.”

  “No, no…I, uh, said I had to burp and I was broke. I didn’t have any money ’cause I spent it on sodas. Don’t drink soda.”

  Please let this end… It didn’t; Tim was still engrossed in my card. “What’s ‘path-o-gens’?”

  “Put that in your pocket. Don’t show it to anyone but your mom,” I said curtly, not making a friend. He obliged, though, and slid the card into his jeans, his eyes now fixed suspiciously on me. “A pathogen is a disease that makes you sick.”

  “Why don’t you just say ‘disease’?”

  “Technically, a pathogen is an agent, usually an organism, that causes disease.”

  “Like bacteria?”

  “Like bacteria. But I worked—I work—with viruses. Viruses are like bacteria.”

  My card did say “Special Pathogens,” which was in the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, which was also on the card, so Mr. Smarty-Pants could have figured out the answer to his question from context. Seriously, though, it had taken mankind fifty thousand years to piece together the germ theory of disease, another thirty to discover viruses; Tim Kim was synthesizing this before my eyes.

  “Viruses are smaller than bacteria,” he informed me.

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t they call them small bacteria?”

  Like a man overboard, I looked frantically through the window to the office, hoping to see Ginny Plough. “Because viruses are different from bacteria in other ways.”

  “How?”

  “Well, viruses don’t have the ability to reproduce by themselves. Bacteria do. ‘Reproduce’ means to have babies.”

  “I know,” he said impatiently. “Why can’t viruses reproduce?”

  Because that’s the way it is, little man. “Because they evolved that way. Viruses need another cell to replicate.”

  “Why?”

  I was calculating exactly how long it would take to strangle him. “Well, Tim, in the beginning—”

  Just then, the heavens sent me a savior. Ginny Plough rapped on the door and stepped into the office. “Everything going all right in here, you two?” she inquired brightly.

  “Sure is,” I said. “We two were just finishing up a discussion of viruses and bacteria.”

  “Oh my,” she said. “I can’t stand things like that.” She shuddered. “I walked out of that Outbreak movie after ten minutes.”

  I gave my best grand-old-disease-hunter laugh. Ha ha ha.

  Ginny Plough led Tim from the office and traded him off to some hall-monitor type for return to, she informed me, science class. I hoped my little friend wouldn’t pull out the card and treat his fellow students to a dissertation on “path-o-gens.” Not only would my cover truly be blown, but I’d run the risk of being invited back to talk to the class.

  “Dr. McCormick, please tell me if there’s something I should worry about.” Anxiety clouded Principal Plough’s pretty, plump face. “We have four hundred children here—”

  “Who are perfectly safe.” I put a reassuring hand on her doughy shoulder. “There was some concern that Timothy had visited the Solomon Islands, where there’s been an outbreak of typhus. But it’s not him. It’s another
Tim Kim, down in Walnut Creek. We were just making sure.”

  “Oh…okay…”

  I patted the shoulder. “There’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about.”

  I wish I could say the same for me.

  62

  AS I WALKED OUT OF the school, past the big “Go Cottontails!” banner and the security guard, I contemplated infractions big and small. Big infractions included impersonating a CDC official. God forbid that Ginny Plough call up my former superiors to ask them exactly how much peril her four hundred pups were in from whatever disease. God forbid they find out I was using my old ID and cards. That kind of stuff could probably land me in jail.

  Come to think of it, there were no small infractions at that point.

  I walked west from the school grounds, toward the Napa River, toward downtown. Third Street took me over a bridge, past the courthouse, past the bail bondsmen. The irony of my surroundings wasn’t lost on me.

  So, Nate McCormick was fast becoming a small-time criminal. In keeping, I supposed, with my history. The fabrication of that old data back in med school, for example. Old habits, old dogs, so on and so forth.

  I beat myself up on that for a while, then decided to beat myself up on the hash I was making of this investigation. Sure, I thought, investigation. Obsession, maybe. “Investigation” was giving it too much credit.

  And just as I was about to go get arrested for something, my cell vibrated. Ravi.

  “We found the Lums,” he said.

  “Great—”

  “And the name’s not Lum. It’s Ming.” His voice didn’t sound quite as triumphant as I would have thought. In fact, he didn’t sound like Ravi at all.

  “Great work. Where are they?”

  “They’re home. In San Francisco.” He heaved a breath. “They’re dead, McCormick.”

  63

  SHOT IN THE FACE. POINT-BLANK. I could see the powder burns on her face. Beatrice Lum’s bandages were off now, and I didn’t know if they’d been blown off by the gun or not.

  I was kneeling on the pale blue carpet next to Mrs. Lum—Ming—looking down at the mass of glistening flesh—the unclean line of a lip partially devoured by tumor and surgery, the knob of oozing flesh next to her eye. The bullet’s entrance wound under her left eye was the cleanest mark on her.

  There was her mouth, open, agape, a black hole. Screaming.

  “They took the tongues postmortem. That’s why there’s not much blood.” It was Ravi, standing behind me.

  I’d come straight from Napa. Ravi had arrived earlier, greased my way inside, bullying cops left and right to get me into the house.

  “And the kids?” I asked.

  “At school when it happened,” Ravi said. “Daughter found them. Cops got here right after that.”

  “Jesus.”

  With a latex-gloved hand, I covered Mrs. Lum’s face again with the sheet. The forensic investigator had given us permission to look at the bodies, but not to touch. The couple lay as they’d been found. An arm poked from underneath each sheet, reaching for the dead hand of the nearby spouse. Dead fingers intertwined. I remembered Mr. Lum sitting by his wife’s hospital bed, gripping his wife’s hand.

  “Anything on the husband?” I asked Ravi.

  “Shot in the face, tongue gone.”

  “You two the doctors?” The voice behind us was too sharp, too loud. I turned to see a stubby man with a bristle mustache. A badge dangled from his jacket pocket.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ravi and I backed away from the corpses slowly, like stepping away from a ticking bomb.

  The Lums/Mings had been murdered in their living room in their house in the Sunset district, not far from Daniel Zhang’s place. Family photos in silver frames sat atop a baby grand piano. There was a small drawing in an enormous frame above the mantel, with a typed note stuck into a corner of the glass. One of those old picture lights hung over the top of the piece; the lamp was turned on.

  “You saw the Mings at SF General yesterday?” the cop with the mustache asked us.

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “Inspector Hindrick. Homicide.” I introduced myself, peeled off the latex glove, and shook his hand. Hindrick and Ravi shook hands.

  “Yes,” Ravi confirmed. “We saw them yesterday.”

  “Any idea as to what might have happened here?” Hindrick flipped out a small notebook.

  “No,” Ravi said. “We talked about her disease, is all.”

  “Yeah. That. Poor lady.”

  “Yeah,” Ravi said.

  “They were in the hospital under a false name,” I offered.

  “Huh,” Hindrick said. “Why?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “We only found out their real names today.”

  “What did they say their name was?”

  “Lum. They paid for the medical services in cash. Cashier’s check, actually.”

  “We’ll chase that down.” Hindrick wrote something in his notebook. “So, we’re guessing they didn’t want to be found at the hospital?”

  I thought about that again. If the Lums/Mings were trying to hide out, they certainly didn’t do a good job. They didn’t care if people knew they were at home, they cared if people knew they were at the hospital. Which meant they cared if people knew Mrs. Ming was sick.

  “I guess that’s what we’re guessing,” I said.

  Hindrick closed the notebook and aimlessly scanned the room. His eyes avoided the couple on the pale blue carpet. “Dunno, dunno,” he said. “Dunno who, dunno why. Robbery maybe. Jewelry’s gone from the bodies and from upstairs. Some electronics gone. They didn’t touch the Chagall, though.”

  “The Chagall?”

  “Drawing up there. It’s real. At least so says that little paper.”

  Ravi stepped over to the drawing, read over the certificate of authenticity plastered right there on the front of it. “I’ll be damned.” He turned his head, cracked a tiny smile that said tacky.

  Tacky, sure, but humanizing. It made me feel even worse about the mess on the floor in front of us. That drawing, with the ugly paper stuck into the too-big frame, seemed honest to me. We’ve arrived, it said. The people I knew from college and grad school, those trying like hell to claw their way into the upper middle class, would have put the Chagall in a small frame, prominently but not-too-prominently displayed. Then, in the first five minutes of conversation, they would direct you to it, let it drop the thing was genuine.

  “Drugs, maybe,” Hindrick said. “Medicine cabinet upstairs was raided.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, opened them. “She was taking Percocet and Vicodin for her pain.”

  No one said anything. “The prescribing doctor’s name would have been there,” I explained.

  Hindrick nodded, acknowledged the lost lead. After a beat, he closed the notebook and produced a card each for Ravi and me. “If you guys think of anything or find anything, you know, it would be a help.”

  Ravi did his part in the dance and handed over his own card. “You, too. We’re worried this might be something public health needs to be worried about.”

  “Yeah? The wife’s face?”

  “Yes.”

  He let his eyes linger on the covered bodies, then said, as much to himself as to us, “The tongues. This wasn’t a robbery.”

  My thought exactly.

  64

  THEY WERE A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, the Mings, the Lums, whoever they were. I hunched over the pictures on the baby grand. Mrs. Ming, pretty in her wedding dress, pagoda in the background. Mr. Ming, beside his bride, looking a little shell-shocked, like he’d gotten better than he deserved. But you saw them grow through the years, as you traced your way around the silver frames. There was a chronology here, black-and-whites and faded color toward the back of the piano, sharp color at the front.

  Mrs. Ming pregnant, her hair permed. Then the babies, the school play, the family vacation in Italy with the boy pretending he’s holding up the Leaning Tower. The little
girl with the cello, the same girl in a prom dress. The same girl who found her parents today. The shot of the whole family with an older couple on a busy street festooned with lighted signs sporting a mix of English and Chinese. The trip to Hong Kong? Then the final picture, back at the house, in front of the Chagall, just mom and dad. Mrs. Ming looked like a million bucks. Mr. Ming beamed.

  “Doc?”

  I turned. Hindrick again. “You want anything else with the bodies? The Medical Examiner’s wagon is going to be here soon.”

  “I’m finished,” I told him, then began to walk toward the front door. Hindrick stopped me in the hallway.

  “You said they paid their hospital bills up front, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “About forty thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of cash for a guy who ran a couple gift shops. On top of that, you got the Chagall. You got a new Mercedes in the garage. A lot of cash for a merchant like him.”

  “Maybe the shops did very well.”

  “Maybe. And maybe these folks were in over their heads.”

  I processed for a moment. “You’re thinking loan sharks?”

  “Dunno.” Hindrick sighed. “Not a lot of reason to cut out people’s tongues. Unless, of course, you’re trying to send a signal. This,” he gestured toward the floor, “would send quite a signal to others who owe.”

  “If it’s loan sharks, why didn’t they take the Chagall? Try to get some of their investment back?”

  “It’d be hard to fence. Black-market art doesn’t like double homicides. Besides—keeping with the theory here—they wrote these folks off. More valuable to the bad guys to make an example. Or, this is just a robbery. Some knucklehead who got carried away. One of those things.”

  Probably not one of those things. “You heard about those murders down on the Peninsula? The Murphy family?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Four dead. The husband mutilated. Yeah.”

  “I was friends with the husband. I found them.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Doc.”

  “I don’t know how many mutilations you get in the Bay Area, but it seems there might be a conn—”

  “I was already planning to call San Mateo, if that’s what you’re asking.”