Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  I listened. Most of this was new to me. The closest to transgender surgery we see in the ER is the occasional moron who puts his dick in a vacuum cleaner and skins himself. On the job . . . well, don’t even think about it, we have a pretty lousy record being sympathetic to that stuff. I wished I had chosen somewhere else for this meeting. I suddenly wanted a drink. Farzan was well versed in the issue, maybe even passionate. I doubted he was homosexual, but he knew the subject well. His argument still didn’t put the dead man on the plane in the picture until he got to his associate in practice, another Iranian-born, London-based surgeon, named Tahm Tahani.

  “I think my associate is the person implanting heroin-filled breast prostheses in these transsexual men.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and I could feel the waitress standing over the aisle end of the table before I could see her. She was a pro, and she was doing her thing, waiting to pick up the beat and get our order without listening in. That was all but impossible, but she faked boredom perfectly, pulling a dog-eared pad of checks and a pen from the pocket of her apron. Her name was embroidered across the bib, and it was soiled with the accidents and wet fingers of a long day. “Don’t usually see you this late, doc. What can I get for you boys?”

  I smiled. “Decaf espresso for me, Doris.” Ordering anything beyond the ten-gallon tureens of coffee sitting over the flickering gas flame was definitely testing the limits of the place, but nobody ever accused me of having common sense. Farzan ordered mint tea, which earned a stare from Doris and drove her away shaking her head. I waited to see Doris’s back before speaking again.

  “What are you talking about? Who is your associate?”

  “Tahm Tahani.”

  “Tahani? He’s a plastic surgeon?”

  “Yes, he has shared my office for some years now.”

  “Right. But why would you think he had something to do with this?”

  “For the usual reason, Wendell, money. Tahm is gay and something of a celebrity among the chic London set. He earns a great deal of money, spends lavishly, and everyone in the hip community, gay and otherwise, knows him.”

  “So why did he need money? Drugs?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. There’s a limit to what one can earn as a plastic surgeon. Tahm had invested millions of pounds of his money, and much of his family’s money, in a big property deal with some Russians, who had done quite well for him in the past. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. The deflated real estate bubble and the credit crunch stopped the project cold. Super-expensive time-share resorts were the first to go. The banks foreclosed, the project sank, and the investors lost everything. Tahm risked more than he and his family could afford, and probably borrowed money to do it.”

  “He’s not alone.”

  “Perhaps not. But his practice was thriving, and all in all, it wasn’t quite the end of the world. I suppose his family in Iran was vulnerable once their financial position changed, and he worried for them. He was under pressure. A month or two later he began working on weekends. It seemed odd but was certainly not my business. Just out of character. Tahm for all his talent was about playing, not working, and his weekends were sacred. I thought he was putting in the extra days to accommodate more patients, but he did only a few surgeries. Each time, they were breast augmentations, and each time, he employed people to assist him who didn’t ordinarily work for us. That seemed really strange.”

  “Did you confront him about it?”

  “Yes, kind of . . . well no, not really. Then one evening I was working late at the clinic. Tahm was gone and one of his patients showed up in a panic. I calmed her down and was finally able to examine her. She had tripped and fallen chest-down, and opened one of the breast incisions. It was superficial. Not dangerous and not infected. We cleaned the wound, re-sutured it, and prescribed antibiotics. But Miss Hayes, my nurse, kept trying to catch my eye, gesturing to the patient’s neck. I hadn’t noticed much with all the sobbing, but the patient had a man’s Adam’s apple and even some hair follicles under her chin. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t fully examine the patient, and I saw no need to press the issue, but I’m quite certain she was a male, or at least born a male.”

  Doris returned and planted our cups on the table, pulled a handful of sugar packets and Sweet’N Low from her bottomless pocket, dropped them onto the table, tossed off a “You need anything else?,” didn’t exactly wait for an answer, and retreated.

  Farzan emptied three sugars into his tea and mixed it with a studied intensity, as though he didn’t want to return to the conversation. So his buddy was doing breast implants on transgender men. Someone was going to do it. He obviously needed the business, and he might have been a bit more understanding than most. That didn’t make him a criminal. It wasn’t enough of a connection for me, but everything considered, it was not such a big leap from there to involvement in drug smuggling, and even connecting him to the death on the plane.

  “Things seemed to turn better for him quickly. He was away from the office a lot, ran around like your, your Energizer bunny, and seemed very different, and then he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? You mean totally out of touch?”

  “Yes. He didn’t show up at the office for weeks. He hasn’t called or returned voice messages or e-mails. Tahm loves doing all that twittering, or tweeting, and that has stopped. Everyone in our office is linked on the BBM system, so I can verify that my messages were received. But not answered.”

  “Interesting. How long has he been missing?”

  “For eleven days, until I saw him last night.”

  11

  I had no idea what all this meant. Probably not very much. Narcotics traffic between the UK and the U.S. is not a major route. What’s more, it isn’t my field of interest, and I was ready to turn the whole thing off.

  Farzan had told a credible story. True, swallowing it required a few leaps of faith, but I believed his partner had gotten involved with some bad folks, and his being in New York, possibly being on the receiving end of the heroin-filled implants, adds another level of suspicion. But I wasn’t a narcotics cop, and London was well out of our jurisdiction anyway. The information belonged with the UK authorities and local and federal people here. I had encouraged Farzan to contact them. I even offered to make a call on his behalf or hook him up with our local narcs. But our conversation ended coolly when I pointed out my obligation to mention the connection to local authorities. The drugs and the body had come through Kennedy, and it was a good bet that the doctor on the receiving end was either his friend Tahm or the local version. Tahm showing up in New York spoke strongly for him being on both sides of the transaction. He had called Farzan and pressured him to meet. Apparently, that had taken place shortly after Alice and I had left his hotel. It was a quick drink with Tahm talking nonstop, offering nonspecific apologies for his erratic behavior, and begging off to make the late flight to London. So if I bought the tale, it needed to be passed on.

  I went home and wasted an hour flipping through unread issues of The New Yorker and various medical journals that had taken over my bedside table. I tossed the throw-out pile in the direction of the wastebasket and started building a smaller keep pile at the bedside. It was hard to throw the journals away. They were serious and important, and they were all available online at a moment’s notice. All those leather-bound symbols of a studious physician were now just décor. I was behind the curve and running hard to catch up.

  I planned to have dinner this evening with an old buddy, and I was relegating Farzan to the background and resetting my outlook to normal when my cell phone sounded. I patted the quilt, pushed the magazines and newspapers aside, and followed the music to the phone. It was Rodriguez.

  “Hey, I was going to call you.”

  “Great, ’cause I need you to come downtown.”

  “Can’t. I have plans. What’s up?” I really didn’t like this guy.

  “Your little smuggling case is becoming more complicated. I think you
might know more about it than you’ve been letting on, maybe even without realizing that you know it. We need to flesh out the details, especially now.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I was going to call, but I can tell you about it now, if you have a few minutes.”

  Rodriguez waited before responding. “No. You better come down here. This is official business.”

  “Are you out of your mind? I tried to save someone’s life, period. Do I have to lawyer up or what?”

  “Whoa. Hold on there, doc. You’re not under arrest. We just need to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, well, shove it.” I ended the call and threw the phone back onto the bed. Before it even had a chance to bounce, I realized I was behaving like a jerk, but I couldn’t bring myself to call him back. I stood up and paced around the room. They couldn’t possibly suspect me of anything. I didn’t do anything. Maybe I should have called them directly after talking to Farzan, but that’s not exactly a crime. And he wasn’t involved, either.

  As I struggled through the maze of disjointed thoughts, the phone rang again. I knew it was Rodriguez.

  This time he was almost pleasant and nonconfrontational, but very firm in his “invitation” to join him at Midtown North, over on West Fifty-fourth Street. It was narcotic/prostitution central, and I wasn’t surprised that Rodriguez was based there. Even in their new, clean family clothing, the streets fanning out from Times Square remained a magnet to the trade. That’s where the marks were . . . the tourists.

  All told, it took almost half an hour to cancel my dinner plan and get the car, and another twenty minutes to drive ten blocks across town near curtain time. Midtown North was at the fringe of the Theater District. It was officially the Eighteenth Police Precinct, but no one used that designation. Cops called it MTN, and it was a busy place. I angled into one of those nose-first spots reserved for “official business” alongside the private vehicles of guys out on their shift. “Official” means whatever you want it to, so long as you’re in charge. The room Rodriguez told me to find was not an office. I double-checked the sliver of envelope where I had written the number. This was it. I could see light and activity through the frosted pane. It was obviously a large room, way above his grade. When I knocked on the pane, several voices answered. It wasn’t exactly harmony. The “yeahs” had it, but I might have heard at least one “come in.” I did. I shouldn’t have. Inside the room was a nasty-looking lot sprinkled liberally with brass buttons. Seeing grungy detectives with gold shields around their necks mixed in with uniformed brass was never a good sign. The worst of it was, they were all waiting for me.

  12

  The short story is, no one from the medical division was in the room, so it wasn’t about my job. My two friends from Narcotics were at the crummy old conference table with open folders of printouts and photos, and their pocket notebooks and cell phones in front of them. On the other metal and plastic folding chairs irregularly spaced around the table were the Homicide lieutenant Peter Secondi, two of his detectives, and C. B. Connor, commander of Midtown North. A heavy crowd. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that someone important was murdered in midtown Manhattan, and it was somehow drug-related. What I couldn’t figure out was what all this had to do with me.

  Connor introduced everyone, and nodded to Rodriguez, who spoke first. “Farzan Byarshan is your friend, correct?”

  Shit. This wasn’t going anyplace good. “I know Farzan Byarshan. Why?”

  “Mr. Byarshan is dead.”

  I made all the usual noises of shock and surprise. I really was shocked and surprised. Stupidly, my first words were to correct him, saying “Dr. Byarshan,” and we were off on the wrong foot yet again.

  Rodriguez was about to snap back, but he looked at the brass around the table and remained coolly professional. Score one for him. I poured it all out and I’m not sure whether or not they bought into my ignorance, but no one accused me of anything. They listened to my account of the afternoon without interruption, asked a few obvious questions, and filled me in on the circumstances. Apparently, Byarshan had been found dead by his wife, in their hotel room, barely an hour after our meeting. He was lying on his back in the entrance foyer, in a pool of blood. His throat had been slit from ear to ear. Mrs. Byarshan was a basket case. No surprise there; who would not have been undone by something so horrible. The last time she had seen him was at lunch. He told her he planned to see me later in the afternoon, and they went off in separate directions. He to our meeting, she for an afternoon of shopping. No one who interviewed Mrs. Byarshan had the slightest suspicion that she had anything to do with the death of her husband. Naturally, the usual investigation would have to take place, since most murders begin at home. But women were unlikely to kill large men in that manner, especially with no sign of a struggle. Alaleh sold her innocence pretty well. Most likely because she was innocent. She had receipts to substantiate her tour of the stores and a desk clerk and elevator operator to vouch for her time of arrival at the room. Being in the presence of a grieving Middle Eastern woman is enough to send the most callous Homicide detectives scrambling for the door. Anglo-Saxon restraint represses anguish and encourages a stiff upper lip. The Middle Eastern expression of grief crosses all castes. It is uninhibited, it is devastating, and it has been so for too many centuries to count.

  What the cops got from interviewing Alaleh Byarshan was me. So I held my tongue, looked thoughtful, and answered their questions. It was easy to retrace my steps for those few hours. The issue was never in doubt, and the way they shared the bits and pieces of information made that fairly clear. Still, I was their only connection to the dead man . . . or now, actually, two dead men, and the facts were too weird to be coincidence. I shared that point of view. The trouble came in convincing them that I was not holding back anything that could help shed light on the situation.

  “Let’s go over this again. Tell us about the connection between the victim, the mule on the plane, and the missing partner?”

  “Well, Farzan heard about the mule, put two and two together and wanted to discuss it.”

  “Right. And why do you think he chose to confide in you?”

  “Because he thought I was a cop, and we had a mutual friend.”

  “Right. And what did he say about the fact that it was you who dealt with the mule on the plane?”

  “Well, actually, nothing. And then when his missing partner showed up in New York, he made the connection and called me.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “I know,” I said, and meant it. Over the next hour the conversation kicked the same stones but didn’t change the landscape. I told them everything—well, practically everything. As much as I wanted to keep my relationship with Alice private, she was the link with Farzan Byarshan, so I included everything that I thought mattered and glossed over the private parts—no pun intended. Maybe I should have mentioned that we were lovers, but that didn’t seem pertinent, and I was enough of a gentleman to keep private things private. I assumed they’d read between the lines. But looking back on it, delicacy wasn’t a strong suit with Rodriguez and company.

  By nine thirty we had gone over the same ground at least three times, and I was excused. There were none of the dumb admonitions that cops were supposed to say at the end of an interview, and I didn’t feel like a suspect. I was confused. One of the screwed-up things about being a doctor is a feeling of omnipotence. The day after graduation you’re transformed from a know-nothing medical student into a person responsible for the lives of strangers. Believe me, you still don’t know a damned thing, but pretty soon you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and believe the bullshit that swirls around you all day. We do actually believe we are smarter than other people, and based on school performance and objective intelligence tests, some measure of that might be true. But there’s more to life than test scores, and with their heads in the books or the clouds, they become social misfits, bumping into life’s pillars and generally making a mess of things that less bri
ght people manage to negotiate gracefully. That’s why doctors have an unimaginably high rate of private-pilot accidents. We’re smarter than the weatherman. We can beat the thunderheads that scare most pilots out of the sky. I was confident that if I couldn’t make head or tail of what had been going on, neither could the room full of detectives.

  One of the Homicide cops, the lieutenant, was smarter than the average bear, and I use the term advisedly. Peter “Deuce” Secondi was six-four, easily two-fifty, with a shaved head, hard gray eyes you couldn’t stare into, and a confident manner matching his appearance. He was also a really good guy. Deuce and I had been friends for years. It was one of those things that grew out of mutual respect. He was pretty much the only real cop that I socialized with on anything like a regular basis. Deuce and his wife, Amy, listened to my nonsense through the divorce and have occasionally been surrogate family. He was all business in that room, and that was as it should be. His two detective “firsts” knew we were friends, and knowing Deuce, he made sure the others learned it from him before and not after the fact. I thought about waiting for him downstairs, but that was a bad idea. Tomorrow would be soon enough to talk, and I headed out onto Fifty-fourth Street.