Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  “Mr. Santana,” the officer says, “we found this man bound and gagged with adhesive tape in an alley two blocks in that direction. He says that not ten minutes ago a gringo put a gun to his head, took his costume, and tied him up. We’re looking for a clown with a red polka-dot suit, mask, and bright orange hair. From this fellow’s description, I doubt he’ll be hard to spot. Only ten minutes ago. There’s no way he can escape us. We’re closing in on the plaza.”

  Ray voices his approval, but he senses something is wrong. Anton Perchek had shot Orsino to death without a flicker of hesitation. An ally of his. Why allow the man in the clown suit, who has also seen his face, to live?

  He slips the Smith & Wesson beneath his belt and heads away from the plaza toward the alley where the clown was found. A tangled ball of adhesive tape shows him the exact spot. The alley is deserted. With firecrackers going off every few minutes, there is no way a gunshot would have even been noticed. Yet the man is alive.

  Not at all certain what he is searching for, Santana makes his way around the tawdry block. Then quickly around the next one. And the next. Litter from the fiesta is everywhere. A number of celebrants lie in doorways or between trash barrels in deep, alcohol-induced siesta. One of them, somewhat removed from any others, catches Santana’s eye. It is a young woman with a rather pretty face, perhaps in her early twenties. She is sleeping on her side, her back pressed against a building, covered to the neck with a tattered Mexican blanket. Ray approaches. But five yards before he reaches her, he knows she is dead.

  He pulls back the blanket. She is dressed only in a pair of white cotton panties, and she is pregnant—perhaps seven months, perhaps eight. A single bullet hole stares up at him obscenely from a spot just above her engorged left nipple. The blood that has oozed from it has already clotted. Santana bets that The Doctor had the woman’s clothes hidden away even before he took the clown’s;

  Driven by a jet of adrenaline, his legs are suddenly responsive. He pulls the revolver free as he sprints toward the main street. A juggler in a skeleton’s costume and mask is entertaining a crowd of fifty or so. Shielded by the corner of a building, Ray studies the crowd and then turns his attention to the street. Everyone seems to be involved in conversation, in commerce with one of the street vendors, or watching the juggler.

  Then suddenly he sees her. Across the street and a block away. She is walking slowly, unobtrusively, away from the crowd—away from him. What strikes him, though, is her very unobtrusiveness. Her feet are bare, her head covered by a shawl. An unremarkable pedestrian in a very remarkable scene. Unremarkable. The Doctor’s most valuable attribute.

  Santana moves ahead, keeping the crowd between himself and the woman. If it is Perchek, taking him will not be easy. There are dozens of potential hostages around, and scores of potential victims should any sort of shooting erupt. One move. That is all he has. If he is wrong, there will be one shocked, bruised woman. But nearly fifteen years as a cop tell him he isn’t wrong. One move.

  He remains in the shadows of the building for as long as he can. Then he breaks across the street and dashes toward the woman from directly behind her. At the last possible moment, she senses movement and begins to turn around. But Ray, his gun drawn, is already airborne. His shoulder slams into her back, sending her sprawling onto the rutted dirt street. The moment he impacts with her—the instant he feels the bulk and the tightened muscles—Ray knows it is Perchek.

  Shrieking in Russian, The Doctor spins to his back, struggling to free the gun in his right hand. But the loose maternity dress slows him, and Santana is ready for the move. He pins Perchek’s wrist with his left hand, and simultaneously thrusts the Smith & Wesson up into the soft flesh beneath his chin.

  “Drop it!” he barks. “Drop it now or it’s your fucking head, Perchek. I mean it!”

  The Doctor’s ice blue eyes sear him. His mouth is twisted in a snarling rictus of hate. Then slowly, ever so slowly, Anton Perchek releases his weapon and lets it drop from his fingertip.…

  Harry worked his neck around and realized he hadn’t moved a muscle for some time. Across from him, Ray Santana sagged visibly, exhausted from recounting the ordeal that should have killed him. Without speaking, Maura went to the kitchen and returned with coffee. Nobody spoke until she had poured three cups.

  “Can you tell us what happened after that?” Harry asked.

  “Nothing good. Perchek’s injection didn’t kill me, but over the last seven years I often wish it had. Something irreversible happened to the pain fibers in my nervous system. They fire off with no cause. Sometimes a little. Sometimes absolute hell.”

  “I assume you’ve seen doctors.”

  “Without the chemical Perchek used, they didn’t even know where to begin. Most of them thought I was crazy. You know how doctors are about things they didn’t learn in some textbook. They thought I was just after drugs or a government pension. Finally, I took a medical discharge from the agency and got one hundred percent disability. I go to AA and NA periodically, but the pain always wins out. Fortunately, I have a doctor and pharmacist at home in Tennessee who understand. So getting Percodan prescriptions is no problem.”

  “And your family?” Maura asked.

  Santana shrugged sadly.

  “My wife—Eliza—tried to understand what had happened to me and what I was going through. But with no encouragement or insight from any of the doctors, she finally gave up. Last year she got married to a teacher from Knoxville.”

  “And your son?”

  “He’s at the university. From time to time, when he can, he calls. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “This is very sad,” Maura said.

  “I was managing—at least until a few weeks ago I was. About a year after Perchek was locked up in the Mexican federal penitentiary just outside of Tampico, I got word that he was dead, killed in a helicopter crash during an escape attempt. I didn’t trust the report. In Mexico, if you have enough money, you can make just about anything happen—or appear to happen. There had been an explosion over water, I was told. The chopper blew up, there were several reliable witnesses. What was fished out of the Atlantic was identified as Perchek through dental X rays.”

  “You sound as if you weren’t convinced.”

  “Let’s just say that what I wanted to believe and what I believed in my heart were not the same thing.”

  “But how did you end up here?” Harry asked.

  “I got a call from an old friend in forensics at the bureau in D.C. That expert of yours, Mr. Sims, had sent down a number of prints for identification. One of them, a thumbprint, matched Perchek’s with about a ninety-five percent certainty. I wasn’t that surprised—especially when I learned it had been lifted from the room of a woman who had been murdered in a hospital. I came here and began making plans to get close to you. My friend in D.C. promised to give me a little time before identifying the print for Sims.”

  “But why didn’t you tell us who you were?”

  “Well, the truth is I wasn’t sure what side you were on. I thought maybe you had hired Perchek to kill your wife. I wasn’t even a hundred percent certain after that night in Central Park.”

  Harry groaned.

  “That was you. You shot that man.”

  “You look upset.”

  “I am upset.”

  “I saved Maura’s life. Maybe yours, too.”

  “If you had taken those men in instead of killing one, Andy Barlow might still be alive.”

  Now it was Santana who lashed out.

  “Harry, don’t be an ass. We’re dealing with killers, here. Not college professors, not social workers—killers. Got that? These people don’t stand around and let someone escort them to the police. They kill. It’s too bad about Barlow. He shouldn’t’ve died. But get it through your head—it wasn’t my fault.”

  “You’re dangerous, Santana,” Harry snapped back. “A walking stick of dynamite with a short fuse. You don’t really care who gets blown away as long as
Anton Perchek goes along with them.”

  “You’ve got that right, brother.”

  “Well, I might get booted out of my hospital because of what you’ve done, brother.”

  “Come on, Harry,” Santana said. “You might get reprimanded, but you won’t get kicked out. Your lawyer’s too good. Listen, we’ll go take the posters down. They’ve been up most of the night now, and that means they’ve already succeeded in rankling Perchek, which is pretty much what I wanted them to do.”

  “Rankling Perchek. You are really a piece of work,” Harry said, not at all kindly. “Have you heard how many times the goddamn phone has rung since you got here? That’s a growing percentage of all the nutcases in Manhattan, each one convinced I can be conned out of fifty thousand dollars. Rankling Perchek. Santana, just get out of here. I’m having enough trouble with my enemies without getting blindsided by my so-called friends.”

  Maura had heard enough.

  “Listen, you two,” she snapped. “Sit down and shut up for a minute, both of you. I don’t care how you feel about one another, but neither of you operating alone has much chance of getting this Perchek. Harry, you’re a doctor, not a cop. And Ray, you can’t get inside hospitals, and that’s where your man is. You two need one another. Face it.”

  Harry glared at Santana. Maura stalked across the room and stood over him, hands on hips.

  “Do you guys want me to make you shake hands like, we used to do after fights in junior high school? Okay, then. We stick together, and we try to clear things with one another before we do them. Deal?”

  “Deal,” the two men grumbled.

  “Well, come on, then,” Maura cut in before they could get started again. “We’ve got some posters to take down.”

  A small crowd clustered around the bulletin board outside the MMC surgical suite. There were nurses, technicians, and physicians, including an anesthesiologist, an ENT specialist, and Caspar Sidonis. Everyone, it seemed, was talking at once about the posters that had appeared overnight throughout the hospital.

  “You know,” one of the nurses said, pointing to the rendering of Perchek with a beard, “I actually think I’ve seen this guy.”

  “Janine,” another nurse said, “since you kicked Billy out last year you’ve seen most of the guys in the city.”

  “Not funny,” Janine said.

  “I agree, Janine,” Sidonis said. “And neither is this … this latest humiliation for our hospital.” At the first words from the cardiac surgical chief, all extraneous conversation stopped. “Everyone in the hospital knows that Harry Corbett killed his wife. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing her and so he killed her. It’s as simple as that. These drawings are just a smoke screen, a misdirection play. The man is absolutely certifiable, and so is the woman who drew these. They are the product of an alcoholic’s distorted mind, and nothing more. You’ll all see. I’ve had it up to here with Corbett and the way he’s manipulating everyone in the place. Fifty-thousand-dollar reward, indeed.”

  Embarrassed by the surgeon’s rambling outburst and the stories they all knew about his involvement with the murdered woman, the crowd quickly dispersed. As Sidonis turned to go, he nearly collided with a man in a full-length lab coat, whose photo badge identified him as Heinrich Hauser, a research professor from the department of endocrinology.

  “I agree with you completely, Doctor,” Hauser said in a dense German accent. “This Corbett makes trouble for everyone.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Sidonis replied.

  He glanced at the man, who was four or five inches shorter than he was, with gray-white, crew-cut hair, thick glasses, and yellowed teeth. The teeth disgusted Sidonis. Instinctively, he backed away, fearing a blast of bad breath. He had not seen the man before that he could remember, but he seldom took notice of anyone with whom he didn’t have important business.

  “Have a good day, now,” Hauser said.

  “Yes. You, too.” Sidonis paused and looked at the man once more. “Have we met?”

  The man’s ocher smile prompted Sidonis to look away.

  “I don’t think so, Doctor,” he said. “But perhaps we shall meet again sometime.”

  CHAPTER 33

  By nightfall the three-day heat wave had yielded to a pleasant summer rain. Harry left the apartment at ten-thirty and took a cab to the East Side. As instructed, he was wearing a baseball-style cap—the only one he could find in the apartment. It was Evie’s from her Washington days, navy blue with U.S. Senate in gold just above the brim. After reading the introduction to Desiree’s book, Between the Sheets, he couldn’t help but wonder if the cap was a trophy.

  Harry had been loudly rebuked by Owen Erdman for breaking their agreement and putting up the posters. But as Santana had predicted, he did not appear to be in danger of losing his staff privileges so long as they were taken down promptly. Harry would do MMC. Santana and the man he had hired to help cover every hospital in the city would take care of the six others they had done so far.

  When they had left Harry’s apartment, there was still a good deal of tension lingering between the two of them. Harry felt he could no longer trust Ray Santana to act in anyone’s interest but his own. To his credit, Santana did not dispute that point. But he maintained that any sacrifice, by anyone, that resulted in The Doctor’s death would have been worth it.

  They briefly considered bringing Albert Dickinson up to speed on the developments in the case. But neither of them were in favor of doing that. The chances of getting anything helpful from him were significantly lower than the chances of his causing more trouble for them. Perchek was arrogant and fearless, but he was not foolish. Dickinson would more than likely end up driving him underground—perhaps the worst thing that could happen. Since it was still not at all clear what The Doctor was doing in Manhattan or how he came to kill Evie, there was no way of predicting how long he would stick around.

  While Harry and Santana were off to tear down posters, Maura stayed at the apartment to screen phone calls. There was a steady flow of them now at about two or three an hour. Most of the calls were clearly cranks. But some sounded interesting. Maura dutifully logged each one and promised to get back to the caller.

  With fifteen minutes to go before he was to meet Kevin Loomis, Harry paid the cabby off at Park and Fifty-first and walked the remaining blocks. Although he wasn’t particularly worried about being followed, he had not forgotten his experience in Desiree’s apartment. He cut down to Forty-ninth and back, pausing in several doorways to survey the street. Nothing. It was a garbage collection night, and the light rain did little to wash away the stench from the mountains of plastic bags awaiting pickup. It had been a while since the last protracted garbage strike in Manhattan. On summer nights like this, he could understand why they seldom went unresolved for very long.

  Traffic was light, and the intersection of Fifty-first and Third was nearly deserted. With Evie’s U.S. Senate cap pulled low over his eyes, Harry leaned against a light post and waited. At exactly 11:05, a Yellow cab pulled up. The front passenger door swung open.

  “Get in, Doctor,” the driver said, his voice like number thirty-six sandpaper.

  “You Loomis?” Harry asked as the cab pulled away and headed uptown.

  “Nope.” The driver said nothing more until they neared Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh. “As soon as I’m across Fifth, jump out and hurry up to the corner of Sixtieth. You’ll be picked up there. I’ve already been paid, so just get out quickly and go.”

  He slowed until the light was just about to turn red, then spurted across the intersection just ahead of the oncoming Fifth Avenue traffic. The maneuver drew an angry volley of horn blasts, but ensured that no car could make it through behind them. Harry hurried up Fifth to Sixtieth. As soon as he reached the corner, a black Lexus rolled up. The door opened and Harry jumped in while the car was still moving. The driver, a good-looking man about forty, swung onto Central Park South and accelerated.

  “Kevin Loomis,” he said. “
Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff. I’m not even sure it’ll do any good. Stallings and I took every precaution we could think of when we went to meet at Battery Park, but somehow they still managed to follow one or both of us. Stallings was on the way back to his office from our meeting when he had his cardiac arrest.”

  “Who are they,” Harry asked.

  “They are the people I think are responsible for killing your wife. That’s why I decided to see you tonight. They’re health insurance people. They call themselves The Roundtable.”

  “You mean like the Million Dollar Roundtable?”

  “More like the Hundred Million Dollar Roundtable.… I’m part of it.”

  They turned onto the West Side Highway and headed uptown. Harry listened in near disbelief as Kevin Loomis described the secret society and his recent involvement with it. Harry liked the man immediately—the hard edge to his speech, the street-smart toughness underlying the newly acquired executive’s manners. If The Roundtable was as elite and exclusive as Loomis depicted, it was a bit difficult to imagine him belonging.

  As he listened, there were two things that struck Harry almost from the beginning. The first was the secrecy and mistrust—how little Loomis had been allowed to know about the other knights. It sounded more like a covert government operation than an old-boys club. The second was something about the man, himself. Clearly Loomis was saddened by what had happened—to Evie and to James Stallings. But while he certainly wasn’t flip or glib, neither did he seem that distraught or desperate—or even frightened. He sounded much calmer tonight than when they first spoke on the phone. Calm and detached.

  “As far as your wife goes,” Loomis said, “I’m just guessing at what might have happened. I’m assuming you had nothing to do with her death.”

  “Our marriage was on the rocks, just like the newspapers said. But I would never have harmed her.”