Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  It was definitely a Mozart morning. Actually, most mornings are. I scrolled through the library and settled at Le Nozze de Figaro, as I knew I would. The perfect choice. All about lying and subterfuge, but at least it had comic proportions and great music. When the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra struck up the overture, all was well with the world. I was too sore to exercise, so I sat quietly on the edge of the bed for a short while before I stumbled into the bathroom to relieve myself. At least the plumbing worked. When I glanced over at the mirror, a one-eyed monster stared back and gave me a start. My face was covered with scratches and dried blood and was swollen, like a pumpkin with an eye patch. Even the good eye was puffy, but it didn’t hurt. I splashed water on my face, preparing to shave. The stinging put an end to that folly, and I settled for gently cleaning away the bloody crusts with warm water. The wash may not have made me look any better, but I felt as if I did. That was half the battle. The scruffy look would have to do for the next few days. I changed the makeshift eye patch for a clean, dry one, taking care not to open the injured eye. A corneal scratch usually heals in a day, but this one may have been deeper. I planned to be cautious, and the first order of business was a professional opinion.

  After showering, I dressed in gray pants, blue shirt, dark blue tie, and the soft tweed sport coat that had become part of my uniform. It was about as casual and understated as any in a college professor’s closet, which helped deny its custom-tailored cashmere heritage. I made coffee, toasted a bagel that was well beyond its sell-by date, disguised it with too much butter, and shared it with Tonto, who hadn’t left my side. He was unusually quiet and mindful of me, and he only came to life when I filled his bowls. Even the morning walk was at a slower, more mature pace. By the time we returned, it was eight thirty, and I had done all I could to postpone the inevitable.

  My car was a goner for the time being, and I made a mental note to get it over to BMW before the day was out. Having no interest in being stared at on the subway or standing on the street flagging taxis, I figured a car service would be best for the immediate future. The cell phone in my jacket pocket began vibrating before I could pull it out to make the call.

  “Hello.”

  “Dr. Black, this is Lieutenant Secondi, remember me?”

  “Right, Deuce, you were on top of my list. We have a lot to talk about.”

  I fell into a soft chair, got comfortable, and told Deuce everything. He was not happy. He asked a lot of questions and was very skeptical of Alison’s story, and of Alison in general, calling her “a person of interest at the very least.” On the plus side, he seemed to believe that I wasn’t holding back, but he didn’t come out and say it. His response to my tale was something like “Are you a fucking moron, or what? You’re a member of the department. You’re on the job and you make nice with a suspect in two murders. You’re fucked, bro, fucked.” And that was the nice part. He allowed his anger to ramp up, and he read me the riot act. When the smoke cleared, we agreed to meet at the coffee shop for lunch.

  With my day planned around meeting Deuce, I called Mrs. Black to tell her I wouldn’t be in until the afternoon. She was cold and quiet, and I knew I had put her in an unpleasant position.

  “I’m really sorry, but I’m having an eye problem and I need to have it checked out. Apologize to the other guys for me and have the sick ones come back at two.”

  “What happened to your eye? Can you see?” Her concern relieved me, and finessed her disapproval.

  “I have a corneal laceration and the eye’s swollen shut. See you later.” Indeed.

  My ophthalmologist bought the automobile accident story. Why shouldn’t he? The patch had to stay on for another day. Damage was minor and not permanent, and the eye was anesthetized again and painless; I was out on the street in half an hour. The autumn sun was nearly overhead, and walking south on Park Avenue was pleasant. The old apartment buildings on both sides of the grand avenue helped retain the heat generated by the steam pipes in the underground world of New York City so the planted cover of the subterranean railroad tracks beneath the center island continued to look more like summer than fall. I enjoyed seeing it with my one eye.

  New York is the only American city where people still walk. Like the rest of them, I had a cell phone to my ear. Everyone walks and talks. People have stopped noticing one another on the street. Pedestrians at crossings are blindly oblivious to danger and walk and talk and text. Try it. You automatically become one of them. I called the BMW dealer and arranged for the car to be picked up from the garage, called the garage and gave them a heads-up, and tried Alison’s cell. She didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected her to, and I left a message for her to call me. By Fifty-seventh Street, my interest in walking had waned, but it was too early to meet Deuce. I grabbed a cab and headed downtown to kill some time and think about things. The only conclusion I came to was that I wanted no part of the clandestine activities of my former lover. I planned to make that clear to Deuce and, when the occasion arose, Alison.

  24

  Deuce had already finished a cup of black coffee when I arrived. He took up a lot of the booth and stood out like the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. His loud check sport coat did nothing to camouflage his presence. Maybe that was the idea. Doris greeted me before he did, and I sat. It took him a while to acknowledge me, but then he smiled and we were friends again.

  “Where is she, Wendell?”

  “No idea.” Deuce raised his eyebrows and tightened his lips.

  “Really, I have no idea. She took off this morning and hasn’t answered her phone.”

  “That’s no surprise. We have her cell number, too, and whether she’s with us or against us, we can trace the phone as long as the battery is in place. Has she answered that number since she took a powder the first time?”

  “No.”

  “Right?”

  “So?”

  “So she’s wise to cop tricks. She’s either one of us or one of them.” Not exactly a conclusion.

  “Anything new on the dead guys?”

  “Nah.” Deuce shrugged his big shoulders. “Well, maybe. Rodriguez got a line on another surgeon tied into, or at least an acquaintance of, those two. Fancy Persian family, and he disappeared, too. No body yet, but he vanished.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow is right. By the way, you need to come up to MTN for an official visit. Too many open issues.” That was a conversation stopper. Then Deuce softened the blow by telling me it was simply to make a statement. I know too much not to be leery of that, but I trusted Deuce enough not to ask whether I needed a lawyer. I considered it but figured he would have been insulted. Anyway, I hadn’t done anything wrong . . . other than not rushing forward with information about Alison, and the shooting. Deuce must have seen the surprise on my face.

  “Not reporting an attempted murder doesn’t look good for a department member. Neither does withholding information.”

  “I just told you . . .”

  “Don’t bullshit me, doc.”

  I agreed to meet Rodriguez and a detective from Homicide at Midtown North at five. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “Have you talked to the feds?” I asked.

  “No. Not unless I have to.”

  Institutionalized animosity dies hard. The relationship between the federal agencies—particularly the FBI—and the NYPD has always been “town-gown,” the NYPD being the local yokels. Special agents are college-educated, well-dressed, and well-funded, and have an extremely high opinion of themselves. My cousin Harold, who had been an FBI lawyer, said the only thing they could catch was a cold. The NYPD brass subscribes to that point of view, but you’d never think it hearing the feds talk. Cops see them as self-important, holier than thou, condescending, ineffective glory-grabbers. Cops believe most crimes are solved on the street level, and the bureau has no street sense. So it’s hard for them to embrace working together when they feel patronized. Who knows what the feds think.

  “You have to contact the
m,” I said. “Use your connections at the bureau. Get the line on Alison. Find out if she’s MI6. Find out what the hell she’s doing.” I may have sounded a little hysterical when I meant to sound forceful, but I pressed on. “If there’s a big terror angle, someone over there should know about it. Everyone should be concerned; it can’t be a secret.”

  “Calm down. Obviously someone has to look into that. Maybe not me, but we need to find out who we’re dealing with, otherwise we’re gonna get bitten on the ass. You do what you have to do; I’ll get on this.” After that, there wasn’t all that much to say. I made a few runs at small talk, but my heart wasn’t in it. We ate in silence.

  Deuce left half of the second half of his turkey club sandwich on the plate when he pushed it away. I had never seen that before. I couldn’t bring myself to chew and had settled on pea soup. It was pretty good, but I lost interest quickly. Neither of us had coffee. I paid the check and we went out in silence. I never saw Rodriguez at the counter.

  The reception at the office ran from horror to laughter. The normal folks were solicitous and curious, but the doctors knew a minor injury when they saw one and had fun ragging on me about my swollen face and eye patch. Everyone bought the auto accident story. I told Mrs. Black the truth. She shook her head from side to side more than she really needed to, in either disbelief or contempt for my stupidity. I didn’t ask which. As quickly as I could, I closed the door to my office and separated myself from the questions. I wanted to call around for information about the missing surgeon, but I didn’t know his name, and asking blind questions was meddling in things that were not meant to be my business. For lack of anyone else to call, and for no good reason, I tried Alison. Before I could leave a message, my BlackBerry beeped an urgent signal from the news services. I scrolled down to a message that originated from Reuters.

  “A top U.S. security official warned Europe today that it faced a serious terror threat. The U.S. official stated that British and German terror cells allied with al-Qaeda were plotting an attack, which would most likely take place in the United States or Great Britain. The information is linked to seven German militants killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, on Monday. In France, police arrested twelve men in a village near Avignon, and charged them with possession of unspecified terror-related devices and two Kalashnikov automatic weapons. Information in a confiscated cellular phone led British police to an address in Manchester where two British citizens of Pakistani origin were arrested and charged with possession of equipment to produce weapons for terrorist purposes.”

  The alert wasn’t very different from dozens of news pieces since 9/11, and I read it through, but with my newly found sensitivity to the issue, I didn’t delete it.

  Festivities at Midtown North were no surprise. Another drab room, an ugly, rectangular table surrounded by four tired-looking guys in plain clothes thumbing through incident pads and manila folders. At the head of the table was the seat reserved for the guest of honor. It faced a heavy door with a metal mesh–covered window. The door clicked shut and locked loudly. The seating arrangement wasn’t haphazard. The interviewee was meant to be intimidated. It was laughable . . . unless you had nothing to laugh about. I was the guest of honor. Rodriguez was confrontational, as expected, and the Homicide detectives were quietly professional. They pressured me on Alison’s whereabouts, which I honestly denied any knowledge of. They asked how I came to be “involved” with the victims, and why I hadn’t reported my meeting with Alison earlier. I handled the first two easily, but I was surprised that Deuce had handed me over on the Alison business. Then I figured he didn’t consider it a hanging offense, and I wrote my defense off as romantic stupidity.

  I felt generally good about the interview, except, of course, for Rodriguez’s barely disguised hostility. But he did nothing to move the needle in the room, and there were no judgments or admonishments at the conclusion.

  “Thanks for your help, Dr. Black. Sorry to have to drag you over here,” said Detective Sergeant Richard Able, standing away from the table and clearly speaking to Rodriguez. I appreciated the gesture and shook hands all around.

  I went home, did the dog stuff, hung my jacket and tie on the doorknob, poured myself some Jameson’s, and set the heavy glass on the desk to the right of the computer. I flipped the lid of the laptop open and began a search for recent terror alerts. Scanning Google entries is great fun once you learn to let it flow. Follow the clues to the next entry. It was amazing to see how little the stories varied from paper to paper. The writing in the New York Times was better than most, maybe a little looser than it had been, but light-years better than the rest. The information was the same filler from the same source. No gaggle of reporters pecking one another for exclusives. No sources were cited other than government briefings and the occasional statements from Beltway sources, who didn’t know very much themselves. Few reporters spoke Arabic, Farsi, or Bahasa Indonesia, and fewer still had contacts within the rigid world of Islamic terrorists. Most of the stuff had been beaten to death by the twenty-four-hour news cycle on television, but the detail in press reports gave color and perspective to the stories. I was searching for links between drugs, terrorism, the UK, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In other words, a needle in a haystack.

  I needed to start with what I knew. A transsexual male with heroin-filled breast implants flew from Heathrow to New York and died for his trouble. A British surgeon of Iranian ancestry was murdered in New York. His associate in London, who very likely inserted the heroin-filled implants, had gone missing. A third Iranian-born surgeon seemed to be missing as well. They were dropping like flies.

  Low-backscatter X-ray scanning machines have been in operation at Heathrow for three years. The high-energy, low-penetration emissions penetrate clothing but not the body, unlike traditional diagnostic X-rays, so the scanner sees what is under the clothing, not what is inside the body. It also cannot penetrate certain kinds of plastic. A whole body wrapped in plastic would be impenetrable by this technique. Breast implants show up as breast implants. Differences in filling cannot be made by the scanner. A gun tucked into a bra lights up like a scoreboard. Anything beneath clothing is plain as day, especially body parts, and lots of people don’t like it. The person reading the scan is meant to be distant from the passenger. Body parts, faces, and names are protected, and the images immediately deleted. Not everyone believes that. The Bollywood movie star Shahrukh Khan found himself badgered to autograph copies of a scan made as he passed through Heathrow, which clearly showed his naked body, dangly bits and all. So much for protecting the identity of the innocent.

  If Alison was correct in linking the heroin-smuggling to terrorist activities, and if future anthrax-filled implants would elude the scanners at Heathrow, why kill the doctors? Obviously, to keep them quiet. But Farzan seemed to have had no clue about the big picture. He was alarmed about the drug smuggling and his friend Tahm. Would drug smugglers kill to protect an imaginative but minor route? Maybe this was a conversation I needed to have with Rodriguez.

  25

  In a week’s time Rodriguez had come to occupy a central role in my life. He was listed in my cell phone only as Rodriguez. No first name. For better or worse, he was the Rodriguez in my life. I hesitated before pressing the call button, nervous about how to start the conversation. Like the memorable opening words of the first call to a new woman. Stumble through the call and you feel like a jerk for longer than makes sense. Obviously Rodriguez had me spooked.

  “Rodriguez.”

  “This is Wendell Black. Dr. Black.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was trying to figure out why the drug smugglers killed Byarshan. What did they gain?”

  “Hey, he’s your friend. Why ask me?”

  “Cut the shit. You know I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Really.” He went over the same ground for the second time in as many hours. I held the phone away from my ear and made an exasperated face for my im
aginary audience. Why was I bothering with this jerk?

  “You know that just isn’t so. I’m trying to help here.”

  “Doctor, if you want to help, stop bullshitting me. You’re trying to get me to believe that by coincidence you happen to know everyone involved in a drug-smuggling ring and one, possibly two murders. I’ve been doing this for thirteen years. It don’t work that way. You’re in this up to your ears. Look at it, doc, you make what, a buck, buck and a quarter. Another buck and a half moonlighting. Live pretty high for a guy paying 57 percent in taxes. Fancy condo, $90,000 car, expensive trips, fancy girlfriends. Where’s the dough come from, doc? Get my point? I don’t know what you got on the lieutenant, but I’m not buying.” He cleared his throat twice. “Now, unless you want to make a statement, I gotta go.”

  Well, fuck you, too.

  I would be lying if I didn’t admit I never saw that coming. I was looking straight ahead and he slipped in an uppercut. This guy really believes I’m one of the bad guys. I was too shaken to protest, and as I thought about it, I was too pissed to defend myself. Let’s see where he takes that line of reasoning. I was not going to help him. If he went as far as requesting my tax returns, he wouldn’t get them casually. Let the prick make a formal request through his captain and the DA. The truth is, William Black and Co. takes good care of me. I do what I love and earn my way to a decent living. Dad was well educated by the first-generation route. City College, Columbia Law School, night jobs, day jobs, and scholarships. He left the law at twenty-nine, when Grandpa died. Someone had to run William Black, and he was it. I never heard him complain about the grind of borrowing big money to buy expensive presses just to keep up. Selling printing in a cutthroat environment and forever scrapping with the unions was not a walk in the park. He had been a young legal star, hoping to stay on at Columbia, until he couldn’t. Whatever he did, he did well. That was the lesson of his life. As William Black prospered, so did our family. Dad died in 1990, just as the digital world sandbagged the printing trades. No one foresaw the wholesale change in the way information was to be transmitted, including Dad. Profits shrunk and business contracted. He had already taken care of us in his trusts. We were safe, but it would have saddened him to see two generations of work circle the drain. Lucky for him, he didn’t have to. That job fell to my brother-in-law, which may be part of the reason I avoid spending time with my sister in LA. Families are complicated, and money doesn’t make it any easier.