Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  “That’s what I’m asking. And may I ask one more thing?”

  “We’re on a roll, aren’t we?”

  “Could you tell Jack Tang about this? I think he’ll be interested.”

  Hindrick gave a half-smile. “You’re in my head, Doc. Already called him. Inspector Tang was here an hour ago.”

  Having done my best to facilitate inter-and intra-agency communication, I stepped onto the front stoop. Night was closing in on day, and there was actually something of a sunset: an orange flake pinched between the ocean and the clouds.

  Ravi was there, smoking. He glanced at me, reached into his jacket, produced a pack of Marlboro Reds.

  “I keep them in my car, you know, for times like this,” he said, and shook the pack at me.

  I took a cigarette. It had been a year since one touched my lips, so my lungs weren’t prepared for the smoke. I wanted to cough. I stifled it, exhaled, took another drag. The nicotine flowed into my brain, kneaded it like bread.

  “The police think the Mings were involved with loan sharks,” I said.

  I watched Ravi light another cigarette off the glowing tip of his first. “At least they have a theory.” He stubbed the first out on his shoe, stuffed it back in the pack. “I’ve never been to a crime scene before.” His voice was quiet.

  “You should count yourself lucky.”

  “I don’t know, McCormick. It feels like we’re right where we’re supposed to be.”

  “At the scene of a double homicide?”

  “In the thick of it. This ain’t like hunting diseases, that’s for sure.”

  “You are hunting diseases, Ravi. That’s what this is all about.”

  Ravi drew on his smoke and was silent for a while, so that I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Then he said, “I know. I know what I’m doing.” He turned to me. “What are you hunting, McCormick?”

  Ravi was gone now, back across the Bay to catch the latest on American Idol or do whatever he did to forget a day like this. I stayed on the stoop, smoking my way through a second cigarette. My lungs felt as though they’d been worked over by sandpaper.

  I watched the van from the Medical Examiner’s pull up along the curb. I watched the ME’s crew pull their grim necessities from the van—two body bags, a stretcher.

  Sending a signal, I thought. Hindrick thought the signal was intended for other deadbeats, a screaming advertisement to pay up. But it was more than that. The Mings had lost their tongues. Murph had lost his tongue, eyes, and ears. The signal wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t vague.

  The ME’s men passed by me with a stretcher.

  Ears, eyes, tongues.

  Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. In other words, keep your head down and shut up. Shut up or be dead.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something, something more than symbolic mutilations. The guys from the Medical Examiner’s were busy zipping Mrs. Ming into a black body bag and loading her on the stretcher. I stepped around them and went to the Chagall. The purchase was six months before, if the date on the certificate could be believed. Maybe Hindrick was right, and the Mings were recently flush. Maybe they were flush from borrowed cash. Maybe the vig was too much for them.

  To the family photos on the piano. To Mrs. Ming staring straight at the camera looking very pretty, very young. A world different than the disfigured woman I’d seen in the hospital. Mr. Ming smiling at his wife, an arm reaching out to touch her cheek. Rarely had I seen a man look so proud.

  And why not? He had a great piece of art. If Inspector Hindrick was to be believed, he had a new car. And he had a stunning wife.

  A stunning wife…

  I cast my eyes over the photos from the previous years. Age stamped creases into Beatrice Ming’s face, it stretched tissue. From the bride to the pregnant woman to the woman in Pisa to the woman in Hong Kong, she looked older each time.

  Then that last photo. It was as if ten years had been erased.

  65

  MY INTERVIEW TO GET INTO med school had been with some bigwig hematologist. A real ballbuster. He likes you, you get in, one of the students told me. He doesn’t like you, well…Where else did you apply?

  The interview was held in the prof’s house, a massive thing with a garden that looked like it had been plucked from southern France. California was new to me—I’d been there for one day—and I was still getting used to the sunshine, the citrus trees. Penn State this was not.

  It was with that sense of dislocation that I rang the doorbell. Somewhere in the back, a dog yipped. The door was opened, not by the great man himself, but by a slight woman in her sixties. We exchanged niceties, and she told me the doctor was upstairs in his study. It was all a wee bit formal and more than a wee bit intimidating.

  The doctor sat behind a massive carved wooden desk, smoking a pipe. There was the welcome, some chat about Pennsylvania. Then, after I made some stupid comment about Big Ten versus Pac Ten football, he asked me abruptly, out of nowhere, “Did you happen to notice the color of my wife’s eyes?”

  And you know what? I had. “Hazel,” I said. “More green than brown.”

  He asked me how next year’s football team was shaping up.

  On the way out of his study, he shook my hand. “You’re a good noticer, Mr. McCormick,” he said.

  My acceptance letter came three weeks later.

  These are the thoughts I thought in a stiff bed in a motel near the airport, a place my grandfather would have called a “fleabag joint.” I hadn’t found any fleas yet, but the place was cheap as dirt and I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up the next morning scratching like a barnyard dog. It did have cable, though, and a “Hi-speed” Internet connection, and a coin box on the bed for Magic Fingers.

  So, I notice things. A good talent, I guess, for being a doctor, but it only gets you so far. You notice, for example, that a woman is not aging like she should, that there’s a little jog—or a big jog—in that normal progression. You notice that the reversal seems to occur after she goes to Hong Kong and before her face explodes in tumors.

  You think of distribution of the tumors, along the NLF, those “smile lines” that run from the side of the nose to the corners of the mouth. The tumors around the eyes. These were favored sites for so-called “injectables,” the cosmetic products that dermatologists and plastic surgeons pumped into the faces of the aged and aging.

  You notice that, but you have no idea what it means, how it ties into a raging case of dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans or being murdered in your home. Did Mr. Ming take out a mother of a loan from some shady types, buy a Chagall, buy a luxury car and jewelry, get his wife one of those massive cosmetic reworkings that the movie stars get? Did he use that same money to pay up front for medical expenses in an effort to keep their identity hidden from…from whom? From a guy with a tattoo? Did he then get rubbed out, as they say, and robbed because he couldn’t make good?

  It didn’t make any sense.

  What did make sense was that somewhere around the time she visited Hong Kong, Beatrice Ming had gotten something done and she’d looked great. Then something happened, and her face erupted. How and whether these things were related, I didn’t know. But I did know someone who could help me: a man I’d first met when he was a skinny, intense kid in his second year of medical school. Bill Yount. And if the slow Hi-speed Internet in my motel room was worth a damn, he’d set up a slick dermatology practice in San Francisco.

  I had just scribbled the address of Yount’s clinic on a scrap of paper when I heard a car door slam outside. My body went rigid. Quickly, I closed the laptop, killed the light, wished I still had the Smith & Wesson. I sat there in the curtained darkness, staring at the door, wondering how long the two locks on it would hold.

  Footsteps outside. Amber light from the parking lot leaked around the curtain. The light winked as someone passed in front of the window.

  For a moment, I heard only my breathing and my heartbeat. Then, footsteps again, growing fainter.<
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  I got up from the bed and went to the window. The curtain was about as pliable as cardboard and I moved it to the side. Nothing except for family of three piling exhausted from a beat-up SUV.

  Lying on the bed again, I tried to calm myself down. I failed.

  Time, I guessed, to go for broke. I found two quarters and dropped them into the coin slot, to see if Magic Fingers would tickle away the tension. The bed started to jiggle and vibrate and make a total freaking racket. It didn’t undo the knots of anxiety, but did tie me up nicely with nausea.

  So, I spent the next fifteen minutes sitting in a chair in my boxer shorts, one eye on the door, the other on a convulsing thirty-year-old bed.

  66

  NEXT MORNING, I AWOKE JUST after dawn. “Awoke” implies that I slept, and I’m not sure I did. Every car door slamming, every step outside, had me bolting up in bed, holding my breath, listening to the quiet nachtmusik of the motel.

  I went for a run, tried to burn off some of the adrenaline. But running along streets near the airport did nothing to relax me, so I returned to the motel and ran the stairs, up and down two stories, for about twenty minutes. Some derelict businessman and a teenager in a miniskirt gave me wide berth as they made their way down to the parking lot. I heard the guy mutter, “Asshole.” Nothing like encounters with random hostility to start your day off right.

  I showered, shaved, and packed up, got ready to quit this sty, with its crap Internet and its crummy locks. Yanking the charger from the cell, I noticed I’d missed a call. Blocked number. No message.

  Maybe it was Ravi. Maybe that tattooed bastard. Maybe it was the Murphys and the Mings, ringing me from on high, calling to let me know what a bang-up job I was doing with this justice thing.

  I put in a call to Millie Bao at CDC.

  “I think something’s happening in Hong Kong,” I said to her. “They need to be looking for DFSP with fibrosarcoma admixed.”

  “It’s after ten p.m. their time, Nate,” she pointed out.

  “Then they had a whole day.”

  “It’s not a reportable condition. Which means they don’t have the info in a database anywhere. Which means they have to do a little legwork. Which means I have to call in a favor to get them to do it.”

  “Empowering, isn’t it? Getting other people to do your work.” Not a flicker of acknowledgment from Millicent. “Not in the kidding mood?” I asked her.

  “Ellen got sick last night. Barfed all over her sister, the one who gets squeamish looking at oatmeal, and who, of course, barfed, too. No, not in the kidding mood, Nate.”

  “That’s a lot of barfing.”

  “Don’t think you’re getting off the babysitting hook. One day if I don’t find anything. Three, if I do. I’ll call you when I hear anything.”

  I shouldered my bags, eager to quit this freaky, paranoia-inducing place for good. I planned to set up camp outside Premiere Aesthetic Associates, PC, Bill Yount’s dermatology practice.

  Loaded down, I walked through the wakening motel. People were around now, packing up cars, moving toward the motel office. I opened the trunk of the Saturn, dropped my bags inside. When I closed it, something caught my eye: through the glass, I could see something white on the windshield.

  My first thought was: ticket?

  But as I rounded the car, I saw that the white thing was too thick to be a ticket. It was a clump of take-out napkins wrapped around something—half-eaten doughnut?—that raised the wiper from the windshield by a few inches.

  I plucked the small bundle from underneath the wiper. From the texture, I knew it was not a doughnut. Hot dog maybe. Sausage.

  There was a trash bin next to the motel office. As I walked the package over to it, I noticed a spreading stain in the white napkin. It wasn’t the greasy stain you’d expect from a hot dog or a half-eaten sausage. It was too red.

  Slowly, I peeled open the napkins.

  It was a human tongue.

  67

  “WHAT IS THIS TELLING YOU, Mr. McCormick?”

  I was sitting in the Bryant Street Police Station, fifth floor, looking at Jack Tang. Between us sat a paper cup from the Buena Costa Motel office. The tongue was inside it. At my feet sat my luggage.

  “I think it’s pretty clear,” I said.

  “I’m glad you see that.”

  “Kind of hard not to.”

  “Why do you think you got this message? Why do you think you weren’t assaulted? Or worse?”

  “Because I’m on the outside. They don’t want to touch me. Either that or they didn’t know where my room was.”

  “They knew where your room was.” He took a sip of the dark SFPD tar, grimaced. “Terrible,” he said. “How many more warnings do you think you’re going to get before things get extremely bad for you?”

  “I don’t know. Between five and eight?” I forced a smile; Tang didn’t.

  “I like you, Mr. McCormick. You’re kind of a jackass, but, hey, I can forgive that. I owe you one for bringing me into the loop here. But you are swimming into dangerous waters. I don’t want you or your friends to get hurt.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Funny guy.” He took the cup with the tongue in it and leaned back in his chair, holding it in front of him, regarding the white paper cylinder with the lump of flesh inside. Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. Or Homer contemplating the bust of Aristotle. I needed to bone up on my Rembrandt. Or my Caravaggio.

  “We found a large transfer of funds into the Mings’ bank account eleven months ago,” Tang said. “Upwards of seven hundred thousand dollars. I was on the phone with Hong Kong last night to trace the origin of the funds.”

  “How did you find out about the money?”

  “Some very sophisticated policing. It was written in their checkbook.”

  “Oh.”

  “We haven’t yet nailed down the details, but it looks like the windfall that might not have been such a windfall.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that maybe the seven hundred grand was borrowed.”

  I thought of telling Tang about my theory that Mrs. Ming looked too good, but stopped myself. I realized my view of events was being clouded by my training. Things biological, for me, are always the central elements. But perhaps I wasn’t seeing things clearly.

  “Hindrick and I also talked to Bonita Sanchez, down in San Mateo,” Tang continued. “There’ve been large deposits in Paul Murphy’s bank accounts over the past few months. Sixty thousand here, forty thousand there. You know anything about that?”

  I was shocked. “No. I don’t.”

  “Your friend never told you about money troubles? Gambling, drugs?”

  “I told Detective Sanchez that. I told you that. And if you’re suggesting he had to go to a loan shark for money, I don’t buy it. He had a great job, a nice house. He could have gotten money the way normal rich people do. He could’ve gone to a bank.”

  Tang shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to keep the loans from his wife. Maybe that nice house was too much for him. Who knows?”

  Right, I thought. Who knows? Whatever it was, though, Paul was doing it for the right reasons. The right reasons, right?

  “What about the people I told you about. Paul’s pictures?”

  “Look, there’s a lot of sick shit in the world. Maybe your buddy had a fetish thing going on.”

  I scowled.

  “Sorry,” he said. “He’s your friend. But look, if we had a thousand guys working on this, we could chase it down. We don’t. Public health is looking into the sick people, right?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “There you go. They do what they do, we do what we do. And as for you…”—he waggled the paper cup toward me—“you need to get out of here. Take a girl and head down to Santa Barbara. Go taste some wine. Just get out of here. Six people are dead, and I don’t want to see it be seven.” He stood. “I gotta break some news to you: your car’s going to be out of commission for at least
the next twenty-four hours. The forensics guys will want it for at least that long.”

  “Great.” I frowned. “Of course. You guys have any loaners?”

  “Stopped our car loaner program last week.” He picked up the cup with the tongue inside. “I got to get this bagged and tagged. Sorry about your car. There’s a rental shop a few blocks away.”

  He turned to leave. Then he turned back.

  “Go to Santa Barbara,” he said. “Go there today.”

  I thought of the Mings, who were dead because they talked to me. I thought of the Murphys, who might be dead because Murph talked to me. I thought of the poor bastards whose tumors were wrapping around nerves, bursting through flesh. “We’ll see,” I said.

  He stepped to me, leaned into me, his face only a few inches from mine. “Do not do this, Dr. McCormick. Do not be involved now. You will get hurt. I can guarantee you that.”

  Three different cars in two days. This time, out of homage to my old wheels, I chose a Corolla.

  While still in the lot, I dialed the hyperkinetic Sikh across the Bay. “You need to watch yourself,” I said. I told him about the body part on my windshield.

  “Jesus,” he said. He was quiet for a moment. “We found another one, McCormick. The fibrosarc strikes again.”

  “Another woman?”

  “Man. Monica put the word out to her old dermatology contacts, found out about a case two months ago at Kaiser Oakland. Caused some buzz there, even became a grand rounds presentation. Worst case of our kind of fibrosarcoma they’d ever seen.”

  Grand rounds were the weekly educational meetings held by the various departments in a hospital.

  “Grand rounds,” I said. “So they got a biopsy and pictures.”

  “Both, but the patient fell off the map. Didn’t even show up for the pathology results. Dropped his Kaiser coverage right after the first visit. We’re doing our best to track him down now.”

  “Is he a match to those pictures I gave you?”

  “We think he matches one of the guys. Yeah.”