He took another sip. “Somnolux! How I wish that so called wonder drug had never been discovered!” He paused to effect. “I guess you know most of this by now, anyway, Detective. How the drug has side effects. Not many, mind you, but serious enough to raise questions about whether it was fully tested. Well, Sherry was terribly upset about all this. She wanted to warn the patients, to get out the word to the media. She wanted to do this despite the horde of Vandenberg lawyers who counseled against it. If she did this, I told her, not only would her brainchild Somnolux die a horrible death, but Vandenberg would find some way to fire her. And, she might never find another prestigious job like this, because her reputation would suffer. She would be known ad infinitum, not only as a whistleblower to a distinguished organization, but as the discoverer of a drug that made people do crazy things in their sleep.
“I told her not to do it all through dinner. But Sherry didn’t care. She said it was her public duty. I all but got down on my hands and knees, pleading with her. The Pollack name would be damaged. Not only she, but I would suffer.” He took a long slurp.
“You yelled at her, Phil,” Rhonda reminded him from across the couch. “You said she was a screw-up for allowing it to happen in the first place.”
Phillip sighed. “Yes, I suppose I did do that. I’m a bit hot-headed, just like my daughter. Or, more accurately, she’s a bit hot-headed, just like me. I suppose I goaded her into coming out with what she next said, which was that she was convinced that I never thought much of her.”
“She tried and tried to make you proud of her, Phil, but all you could do was criticize her,” Rhonda scolded.
“Yes, yes. That’s me. I’m a perfectionist. Mea Culpa once more. But I was proud of her! I am proud of her, whether she knows it or not!”
He sighed, and drained the glass. “Anyway, she ran off into the dark, and you know the rest.”
“Actually, I don’t know the rest, Dr. Pollack. Your wife told me you ran after her.”
“Rhonda!” he cried, before he stopped himself.
“She said you were gone half an hour before you came back alone.”
Phillip took a deep breath. “I ran after her, that’s right. But she had already disappeared in the dark. I had no idea where she had gone. You see, I don’t know New York City very well, Detective. I must have wandered around for – as you say, about half an hour – before I returned the restaurant alone.”
“I was beside myself,” Rhonda said to no one in particular.
“You never caught up with Sherry?” I asked her husband.
“No, Detective. I just told you so.”
“You didn’t follow her?” I persisted.
“How could I? It was dark, and she was gone.”
Something about all this didn’t sit well with me. Phillip had seemed to be forthcoming, talking a lot and well. I just had a hunch that there was more to this, but so far I had no witnesses, no evidence to the contrary. I stood up to leave. “How long will you be staying here?” I asked as I walked to the door. “I’d like to talk to both of you once more before you leave.” I figured at the very least, they’d be here a week, long enough for me to dig something up that I could throw in their faces.
“I’m sorry, Detective,” Phillip said. “But we’re going back home tomorrow. I’ve got work to do. And, frankly, I can’t stand to see Sherry like this. My daughter was such a brilliant, talented girl. So well turned out. So confident. So passionate. But now…..” He trailed off, his eyes staring off into space. “But she’s in good hands,” he began again abruptly. “I’ve got some specialists coming to examine her. Vandenberg’s paying the hospital bills. She’s got that fellow Henry, the nurse told us about. She’ll be all right.”
I looked over at Rhonda, her arms folded in front of her and her eyes on the ground, but Rhonda said nothing more.
HENRY
For the next few months, I’d go home, elated and exhausted, up and down, manic to talk to her and depressed to leave. Without Somnolux, I couldn’t sleep for shit. Sometimes I’d get drunk, and, yeah, I’d fall asleep, but then I’d be up at two in the morning with a hangover and nurse my sorry head till the morning. Carl said I was becoming a crazy man: headache some mornings, half-asleep others. I was making so many mistakes, he finally took me off prescription duty altogether. He told me I better get my act together, or he wouldn’t be able to keep me on the payroll, no matter how much he liked me.
It got so bad finally, that, one night at one in the morning, awake again after several slugs of scotch, I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. The overhead light turned my skin zombie gray, underlining my eyes with dark rings. I held the bottle of Somnolux open in my hand, three tablets remaining; I took one out and cradled it in my hand, lovingly. I shouldn’t. But I wanted to. I shouldn’t. But, dammit to hell, I wanted to.
Then I apologized to the mirror, to Carl, to my Mother, to the whole world for what I was about to do. I poured some water into the dirty bathroom glass, threw the pill down the back of my throat followed by half a glass of toothpaste water. Ahh, that felt great....I looked back into the little bottle. Only two left.
The next morning I woke up early feeling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Oh, yeah! I jumped out of bed, only to find that I had no pajamas on. Those, I found later, were sitting in the corner, under a pile of wrinkled clothes I don’t remember wearing. This should have been a clue, but nothing was going to ruin my day. I took a hot shower, ironed the pants and got dressed. Couldn’t find the Wheat Chex I had bought two days ago, so I made myself a couple of Pop Tarts, took a swig of orange juice and made my way down to the pharmacy.
I unlocked the steel gate and punched in the security code to turn off the alarm. I turned on the lights. Swept the floor. Checked the fax. Walked back to the staging area. Was just about to start work when I noticed something seemed out of sequence. The hypnotics were where the barbiturates were supposed to be. The barbiturates were where the benzodiazepines had been. Codeine was next to Valium. This wasn’t right. Codeine is a narcotic; Valium is a tranquillizer. One starts with “C”; the other starts with “V”. Carl would never have done that. I wouldn’t have done it. Even Nadia wouldn’t have done it. I took another look, squinting. It looked as if someone had spaced out the inventory so that it would seem more than it really was. I stepped back to view the whole thing. The whole thing screamed WRONG.
I got out my cell to call Carl. “Carl!” I said as soon as he picked up.
The sounds of a subway car screeching to a halt came through loud and clear. “Henry? What time is it? You in bed with some babe, telling me you can’t come in again today? ”
“No. I’m in the store. I think something’s wrong. I think...maybe someone broke into the store last night.”
“You sure? I put the alarm on myself last night.”
“The alarm didn’t go off. And the steel gate was still locked when I came in.”
“So what makes you think someone broke in?”
“The inventory looks...strange. Like someone took some stuff and moved some other stuff to cover it up.”
“You sure of this?” Carl asked. “You absolutely sure?”
I took another look at the back shelf. “Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure isn’t good enough. We’re not calling the cops if all you are is pretty sure. I’ll be there in half an hour. Wait for me.”
“Aren’t the benzodiazepines normally near the other sedatives?”
“Sure.”
“And Valium is never next to Codeine, is it?”
“Never.”
“Then I’m sure. Someone was in here last night.”
“Son of a bitch. Call the cops, Henry. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
I called the cops, and got the dispatcher.
“NYPD,” she said. “Is this an emergency?”
“Well, I don’t know. Someone broke into our pharmacy.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“No,” I said.
“When did it happen?”
“Last night sometime.”
“Ain’t no emergency then. Okay. Address?”
I gave her the address.
“Anything missing?”
“Yeah, I think so. Maybe some sedatives, painkillers. I don’t know yet. I have to take inventory.”
“I’m sending someone over. Should be there by the time you’re finished.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“That it?”
“Yeah.”
“Have a nice day.”
I flipped the phone closed and started to check what we had on the shelf against the computer printout. Some narcotics: a case and a half of mainly Demerol and codeine were missing. A couple of minor tranquillizers like Valium, and a load of imidazopyridines, chiefly Somnolux, some Sonata. Maybe two cases worth of painkillers were missing, mainly Oxycontin.
Now, Oxycontin’s label says it contains oxycodone, a very strong narcotic pain reliever similar to morphine. It’s strong medicine for people with serious pain, designed so the oxycodone’s slowly released over time. Big letters on the box say YOU SHOULD NEVER BREAK, CHEW, OR CRUSH THE OXYCONTIN TABLET, SINCE THIS CAUSES A LARGE AMOUNT OF OXYCODONE TO BE RELEASED FROM THE TABLET ALL AT ONCE, POTENTIALLY RESULTING IN A DANGEROUS OR FATAL DRUG OVERDOSE.
Dangerous, sure. Fatal, maybe. But what the label doesn’t mention is that if you do exactly what they tell you not to do: if you break, chew or crush it, you get the whole freaking thing in one big rush. That’s why Oxycontin’s a recreational drug. And that’s why Oxycontin has a street value of big bucks. Carl was going to pee in his pants when he found out about the Oxycontin.
“Hallo!” I heard. I walked out to the front of the store to find the same two cops who had come the night Sherry was attacked. They were arguing about something, but broke off the moment I saw them.
“Howzigohin’?” Anderson, the older guy, said.
“Yeah, how’s your girlfriend?” Koslowski asked.
“She’s sort of okay. Except she can’t wake up by herself. If the doctors give her Somnolux, she wakes up for a few hours at a time.”
“Hey, she was in the news!”
“Yeah.” I said. “But she’s still in the nursing home. She can’t live on her own anymore.”
“That sucks,” Koslowski said.
Anderson gave his partner a disgusted look
“Get off my back, Ted,” Koslowski shot back. “Everything I say...”
“So,” the older cop said, turning to me. “What happened here?”
I told them about the break-in, and what was missing.
The guy whistled. “Two cases of Oxycontin. You know what that’s worth?”
“That must have been what they were after,” Koslowski said. “The rest of it’s just gravy.”
They wrote this up in the report, took my name again, checked out the whole place. “So, the alarm wasn’t set off,” Anderson said, writing in his notebook. “The gate was locked. No signs of forcing. How do you suppose the perpetrator got in?”
I shook my head. “Beats me. Carl - that’s my boss - said he closed up as usual last night. He definitely remembers setting the alarm. And the gate was locked this morning. I had to open it with my key.”
“You were the one who opened up today?”
“Yeah.”
“Who, other than you, has access?”
Just at that moment, Carl walked in. “That would be Nadia and myself.” He put out his hand. “Hi, I’m Carl Mullins, the owner.” Then he excused himself and walked over to the back to see for himself what was missing. In a moment I could hear a muffled scream. “Shit! I knew it! They got the Oxycontin!”
“So,” Koslowski asked me, “Where is this Nadia?”
“She should be here any moment,” Carl said, coming out, his face all white. “But there’s no way it’s Nadia. She’s been working here for six years.”
“Unless we can figure out how someone got in from the outside without forcing the lock on the gate, Mr. Mullins, we’ve got to figure it’s an inside job,” the officer said. “Does Nadia know the alarm code?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “But it’s not her.” He looked over at me.
“Well, it’s not me!” I cried.
“Nah, it’s not Henry, either,” Carl said to the two cops. “He’s too much of a wimp. And it’s not me. So where are we?”
“Nowhere,” said Anderson, closing his pad. “Maybe check our informants to see if a load of Oxycontin shows up on the street....”
“We’ll get back to you if we have any leads...,” Koslowski said. “Have a nice day.”
The rest of the day went as usual, except for Carl asking every other hour where I had stashed the Oxycontin. “Very funny,” I said the first few times, but finally I just stopped answering him. My mother used to say, when my older brother and sister teased me, not to pay any attention and they’d go away. It didn’t work then, and it sure didn’t work now. Carl just kept it up until I finally exploded and told him to shove it.
“Can’t take a joke, can you, Henry?” Carl said.
I wondered, as I walked home, did he really think it was me? What about Nadia, anyway? Maybe her husband’s gas station went bankrupt, and she needed the drug money to put food on the table. Or maybe Carl’s jokes were just camouflage, and all the while, he had taken the stuff himself to cash in on the insurance. Or maybe, I thought, as I pushed my shopping cart through Food Emporium, it was an outside party who worked at the alarm company, who somehow managed to get a copy of the key to the gate. By the time I got home, I was so confused, I didn’t know who to blame. I dumped my keys on the kitchen table, turned on the TV, pulled out the bottle of scotch, and poured myself a big double. Then I collapsed on the sofa and watched mindless shit for the rest of the evening.
It wasn’t till I was ready to go to sleep: padding into the bathroom and opening the medicine cabinet with the intention of taking one of my last, lonely tablets that I figured anything out. Jammed into four little shelves sat sixteen boxes of Somnolux.
DONNA
Koslowski was sporting a Mona Lisa smile as he peeked through my open door. “FYI,” he said. “Anderson and I just got back from responding to a break-in at the Duane Reade on Broadway and 108th.”
“So?” I said, not even bothering to look up from my stack of papers.
“That’s where Henry Jackman works.”
“Really?” I said, looking up with newfound interest. “Tell me about it.”
Koslowski handed me a copy of their report. “A lot of stuff was taken. A case and a half of Demerol and codeine. Some Valium. Some sleep drugs, mostly Somnolux….”
“Somnolux,” I echoed, wondering who would steal a drug like that.
“Yeah, and two cases of Oxycontin.”
“Whoa. You know what’s that’s worth?” I cried.
“Yeah, exactly what we said.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Wasn’t the alarm set?”
“Well, that’s what makes it interesting. The alarm didn’t go off, even though the proprietor, Carl Mullins, says he set the alarm himself. The gate was locked, with no signs of forcing. Jackman was the one to open up today. He says everything looked normal. All three of the employees knew the alarm code, but, of course, they all deny any involvement.”
“Any alibis?”
“Everyone was home in bed with spouses,” Koslowski replied. “So they say, anyway.”
“Except Henry, whose girl friend is in a nursing home.”
“Yeah, that sucks, don’t it? Anyway, I guess we’ll just have to check our informants to see if a load of Oxycontin shows up on the street,” the officer said.
“Or,” I said rolling my chair over to the computer on the other side of my desk, “we could go for a search warrant.”
“For the pharmacy?” he asked. “You think one of them’s hiding the goods in the store somewhere?”
“Not the pharmacy. Henry Jackman’s apartment,” I said
, clicking on a desktop icon labeled “search warrant.”
“You think Jackman did it?” Koslowski said, laughing. “How do you prove probable cause with a guy like Jackman?”
What he meant was that to obtain a search warrant, an officer must prove to a judge or magistrate first that probable cause exists, i.e., that there is evidence to establish the need for the search. “Well, let’s see,” I began. “Not only was his girl friend attacked in his apartment; but he waited till the morning to report it. He’s reported to have a violent temper. And he’s got several mysterious girl friends squirreled away around the city, whom he invariably visits late at night. And, oh yeah, the guy takes Somnolux himself but has no current prescription. Now this: a break-in at the pharmacy he works in that’s obviously an inside job. Oh yeah, I think I can prove probable cause.”
Koslowski whistled. “And here I thought he was such a nice guy!”
* * *
It must have been a couple of weeks later around dinner time I drove myself down to Sherry’s nursing home. By now the media had all but lost interest in her, and the place was pretty deserted. A middle-aged woman in a white coat crossed the lobby on her way to one of the long hallways that radiated off the central hub like a star. Off to the side, a cluster of blue-haired old ladies gossiped, leaning on their walkers. A dark man in blue pushed a wheeled garbage pail squeakily past the deserted front desk. With no one to turn me away, I shoved my badge back in my jacket pocket and took myself down the hall to Sherry’s room.
I found her still in her bathrobe but awake and out of bed, propped up in the armchair, watching TV. Her hair was uncombed, and her dinner tray was relegated to the corner, mostly uneaten. I wondered whether Sherry needed help to dress herself and to eat, the daily tasks we take for granted.
“May I come in?” I said.
She seemed a total blank as to who I was. I reintroduced myself, describing how I’d been there shortly after she woke up, when her parents had been there.
Come Out Tonight Page 17