by Mike Lawson
She was ushered into the senior partner’s office.
“I assume,” the senior partner said, “that this has to do with your involvement with Mulray Pharma.”
“I wasn’t involved with Mulray Pharma, goddamnit!” Lizzie shouted.
The lawyer had never heard Lizzie swear before. In fact, he couldn’t recall her ever raising her voice before.
“I want you to sue those people,” Lizzie said. “They’ve damaged my reputation and the reputation of my foundation. I want them to pay for what they did. I want them destroyed.”
“I see,” the lawyer said. Then he hemmed and hawed for a while—for a lawyer, he wasn’t a very articulate man—before eventually telling her that suing Mulray Pharma was going to be extremely expensive.
“I don’t care what it costs,” Lizzie said.
“When I say it will be expensive, Lizzie… . Well, you’re not as wealthy as you once were, and you don’t have the resources to take on a long legal battle with a large corporation like Mulray Pharma.” Before Lizzie could respond, he added, “The other thing is that, quite frankly, I don’t think you can win.”
“Why not?” Lizzie asked.
“Because I’m afraid it’s going to be impossible to prove that you had no idea what Mulray Pharma and René Lambert were doing. I mean, I believe you,” the lawyer added quickly, “but it sounds somewhat, uh, implausible that they could be doing this right under your nose, so to speak.”
“But I didn’t know what they were doing! I thought we were just helping those people. And René dealt with the care centers and the medical end of things. I never got involved in any of that.”
“Lizzie, I suggest we wait a while before doing anything. I’m concerned that the government may discover that Orson Mulray has done something illegal—although it doesn’t sound like he did—and you could possibly be indicted as an accomplice. I think we should wait until things shake out a bit.”
“An accomplice?” Lizzie said.
“What I would like to do is issue a press release on your behalf. You have to tell the media something. The release will simply say that you had no involvement in Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials—I prefer the words no involvement to being unaware—and that you have no further comment as you’re considering legal action against the company. How does that sound for an opening salvo?”
“An accomplice?” Lizzie said again.
She rose from the chair where she’d been sitting and started toward the door. She staggered as if she were drunk, but the senior partner was sure that was due to her being tired after the long flight.
“Lizzie, shall I issue the press release?” the lawyer said to her back.
She waved a hand over her shoulder, a gesture that might have meant either Go ahead or I don’t care what you do.
The lawyer picked up his phone as soon as she left his office and said, “Carol, have Matthew drive Ms. Warwick home and make sure she gets inside without being hounded by the press. Tell him not to leave until she’s behind locked doors.”
Lizzie gradually became aware that she was sitting on the floor in her bedroom in front of an unlit gas fireplace. She was wearing a white terry-cloth robe and nothing else. She wondered how long she’d been sitting there—and why she was sitting there. On the floor of the fireplace hearth was an empty bottle, lying on its side. Next to it was another bottle, one that was upright and still a third full. The label on the bottle said: Kammer Williams Fine Pear Brandy.
She remembered that when she got home after meeting with her useless lawyer there had been a dozen reporters in her driveway. She remembered the nice young man who drove her home—although she didn’t know who he was—and how he shooed away the reporters and helped her unlock the front door. After she was inside the house, she called a number of her friends, or people she thought were friends—people who had been big donors and supporters in the past. She had just wanted to tell them her side of the story, but she was surprised that many of them didn’t return her phone calls and that those who did speak to her seemed unusually cool and guarded.
She hadn’t felt so alone since the day her mother died.
She also remembered that the phones kept ringing and ringing and that every time she answered one, thinking it might be one of her so-called friends calling back, it turned out to be a reporter, so she had walked through the house yanking the cords out of the phone jacks. It was after that that she’d decided she wanted a drink. She rarely drank, and when she did she drank white wine, but the wine was down in the basement and the idea of going down all those steps, then struggling with a cork puller … Well, it was just too much. She went to the liquor cabinet in the formal dining room and pushed bottles aside, unable to decide what she wanted to drink, until she saw a bottle of pear brandy.
She remembered thinking as she grasped the bottle: I have become my mother.
Her mother had been like her: a small, quiet woman, delicate and frail. She played the piano and loved the poems of Emily Dickinson and held tea parties in the garden. But the last two years of her life, her mother had roamed the enormous house in a bathrobe, rarely bathed, and sipped sherry and fruit brandies all day long. She committed suicide at the age of forty-two—the same age Lizzie was now—with peach brandy and sleeping pills. Her father said her mother killed herself because she was bipolar and clinically depressed and refused to take her medication, but Lizzie had always known that was a lie. Her mother had indeed been depressed, but her condition had been caused by her father’s cruelty and unfaithfulness and not a medical condition.
Her father. She adored him when she was a little girl. He called her Princess; she called him Big Bear Daddy. As she grew older, however, and saw what he was doing to her mother, she grew to hate him. He had been a huge, heavy, hairy man—aggressive, pushy, and loud—and when he ate, he was just like a bear, tearing into his food, taking huge bites, barely chewing before he swallowed. Whenever he was home—which wasn’t all that often—he would get drunk and scream at her poor mother, and his big round face would become an angry red man-in-the-moon. She also realized something else: Orson Mulray looked very much like her father.
She started drinking the brandy after she made the phones stop ringing, but it wasn’t just the phones she was trying to stop. She was really trying to stop the words that kept playing inside her head, like a needle stuck on an old phonograph record: I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault. What do I do? I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault. What do I do?
She thought brandy might make the words stop—but it didn’t. The only time the chant stopped was when she slept—and she took a few sleeping pills to help with that. She didn’t know how many hours she’d slept in the three days since she’d been back from Uganda, but she slept a lot. She was awake now, however—and the words were back.
I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault. What do I do?
She reached for the brandy bottle on the hearth but couldn’t find a glass. She knew she must have been drinking out of a glass. She wouldn’t have drunk straight from the bottle. At least she didn’t think so. Then she noticed a piece of paper lying on the floor near the overturned brandy bottle and picked it up. The paper had holes gouged in it and there was one partial sentence written on it in her handwriting. It said: I called this press conference to tell you … And that was all. She remembered then that she had thought about calling a press conference just as Orson Mulray had and giving her side of the story. And she remembered crying and stabbing the paper with her pen when she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make her look like a fool, or a liar, or both.
The foundation had been her life—literally, her entire life. She had no husband, no children, and no other interests. She had devoted 100 percent of her time, her energy, and her fortune to her work. When she wasn’t in the field tending to victims, she was raising money for victims. But who would give L
izzie Warwick money now?
I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault. What do I do?
And then she knew the answer.
Daddy’s Bulldog.
She rose from where she was sitting by the fireplace and began walking, slowly, in the direction of her parents’ bedroom, which like hers was on the second floor of the house. She passed a mirror as she walked, and caught sight of her reflection. Her bathrobe was open and she could see her thin, pale legs, a small, woolly red patch of pubic hair, and her small breasts. Her hair—which had always been naturally curly—hung in tangled, wild strands down to her shoulders. It looked as if she’d washed her hair but hadn’t bothered to comb it out afterward.
But she couldn’t remember taking a shower.
It seemed to take forever to walk from her bedroom to her parents’ bedroom. The house was enormous—four floors, eight full bathrooms, three half-baths, God only knew how many square feet. She hated the house because it was her father’s house and the place where her mother killed herself, but she inherited it after her father died and she moved back in as a practical matter, thinking it would be a good place for holding fund-raisers. And it had been. The table in the main dining room seated twenty-four and she had hosted parties attended by more than a hundred people.
She couldn’t sleep in her parents’ bedroom, however, and when she moved back into the house after her father’s death, she moved back into her old room. She had her father’s clothes removed after he died, but a lot of his other possessions were still in the house—golf clubs, fishing poles, skis, and all of his weapons and hunting equipment. The guns were all down in the basement in a big steel gun safe, and she didn’t know its combination, but she knew he kept the Bulldog in his bedroom.
She found the Bulldog where she expected to find it, in the nightstand on her father’s side of the bed. It had been manufactured by a company called Charter Arms and used .44-caliber ammunition, and she remembered her father saying it would blow a hole in a man the size of a baseball.
She sat down on the floor at the foot of her parents’ bed. It took her a while to figure out how to open the part where the bullets were kept, but she finally did and saw that the gun contained five bullets. She pulled one out and saw that it was a shiny, stubby, ugly thing. She studied it for a moment, surprised something so small could have such destructive powers, then put the bullet back in the cylinder, the chamber, whatever it was called. Then she just sat there for the longest time, holding the gun in her lap. It was a heavy weapon and for some strange reason, the weight of it was comforting.
She had always expected to work in the field until she was too old for such strenuous work, and then she’d raise money for the needy until she was too old to do that. When she died, her funeral would be held at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, the bishop would celebrate the funeral Mass, and the cathedral would be full of people: the rich and famous, the poor and unknown, all the people who had admired her and her work. She would be eulogized by someone important, maybe even the vice president.
But that wouldn’t happen now. Now her obituary would read: Lizzie Warwick, head of the infamous Warwick Foundation, the organization that helped Orson Mulray test drugs on starving Africans, died yesterday. Aside from her good friend Miriam Fullerton, whom she’d gone to grade school with, she wondered if anyone else would even attend her funeral. She should call Miriam, but …
She put the barrel of the Bulldog in her mouth—but she didn’t like the oily, metallic taste, the feel of the steel against her teeth. And then she imagined someone finding her, the back of her head blown open, blood and brains splattered all over the wall. That was just too … too messy. She removed the barrel from her mouth and placed it beneath one of her little breasts, against her heart.
That was better.
She begin to apply pressure to the trigger—she was surprised how much force it took—but then she caught sight of her reflection in the full-length mirror on the door of the walk-in closet. She looked like Medusa, with her uncombed, frizzy red hair springing out from her head in all directions. And her body, which was visible as the robe was still open … Well, it looked just … pathetic. She’d always been thin, but she’d hardly eaten a thing since she met that terrible reporter in Africa, and now she looked positively emaciated. Her rib bones were starkly outlined beneath her white, white skin, her legs were sticks, and her small breasts were droopy little sacks.
No, this wasn’t right.
This just wouldn’t do.
She stood up, closed her robe, and walked back to her bedroom. She was moving now like a woman with a purpose. The first thing she did was change the bed. She knew the tangled, sweat-soaked sheets must be terribly smelly. After the bed was made up with clean linens, she stepped into the bathroom attached to her bedroom.
She took a long shower and shampooed her hair. She dried her hair, combed it carefully—she even used a bit of gel to give it some style—then applied pale pink lipstick and just a touch of eyeliner. She put on her underwear—a plain white bra and white panties—then stepped into her closet to find something appropriate to wear. She finally decided on a dark skirt, a dark red sweater-blouse that was really too hot for the weather, and a pair of low-heeled pumps. She looked at herself in the mirror and said, “Good.”
She looked around the bedroom to make sure everything was as it should be, and saw the brandy bottles on the fireplace hearth. Now, that wouldn’t do at all. She picked up the bottles and took them to the kitchen and placed them in the recycle container beneath the sink. Moving even more quickly now, she walked back to her father’s bedroom, picked up the Bulldog, and carried it to the den. She placed the gun on the desk, walked to the front door, unlocked it, then returned to the den and took a seat in the plush red leather chair behind the desk. The chair had been her father’s and she’d never liked either its size or its color—but she liked it now.
She picked up the phone and when she didn’t get a signal, she laughed. She’d forgotten she’d unplugged all the phones in the house. She rose from her chair, plugged the phone cord into the jack, and made the phone call. She concluded with, “And thank you so much for your help.”
Phone call finished, she opened the drawer where she kept her best stationery and took out a single sheet of heavy bond paper manufactured by Crane & Co. She searched the leather cup on the desk for a good pen but could find only ballpoints—and ballpoint wasn’t acceptable. She knew she had a fountain pen somewhere and opened drawers in the desk until she found a blue box with a red velvet liner that contained an ivory-colored fountain pen given to her by a dictator—a man who had thanked her for all the work she did in his country as he starved his own people to death.
She took the pen and wrote: I didn’t do anything wrong and signed her name: Elizabeth Allison Warwick.
Then she placed the Bulldog once again against her chest.
35
Emma read the article in the Washington Post about Lizzie Warwick’s suicide.
It stated that before she shot herself, Lizzie called 911 and told the dispatcher the front door to her home was unlocked so the medics wouldn’t have to break it down, and she would really appreciate it if someone could come to her house right away. Lizzie apparently didn’t want to shock anyone with the sight of her decomposing corpse if she was found at some future date. Naturally, the article discussed all the good, generous things Lizzie had done since she formed her foundation—and quoted a number of prominent people lauding her commitment to the poor and helpless—but also noted that speculation persisted as to whether she had been a willing participant in Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials.
Emma felt horrible. She was the one who had sicced the press on Lizzie. Her intentions had been honorable—to get some law enforcement agency to investigate Mulray Pharma—and she’d believed at the time that Lizzie Warwick had been helping Orson Mulray. But Celia Montoya had told he
r—and now Emma believed her—that Lizzie had no idea what Mulray was doing. So now Lizzie Warwick—a fragile, gentle, good-hearted person—was dead, and it was Emma’s fault as much as it was Orson Mulray’s.
Now, more than ever, she had to make Mulray pay for what he had done.
The problem was that in the days following Mulray’s press conference it became apparent that no one in the U.S. government—the FDA, the Justice Department, or the FBI—felt compelled to investigate what had happened at the Warwick Care Centers. Whatever Mulray had done fell outside their jurisdictions, there appeared to be no imminent threat to the American public, and there was nothing to indicate that Mulray had committed any crimes. As for the politicians, they made stern faces and said that if Orson Mulray had indeed taken advantage of disaster victims, he may have done something unethical but, as far as they knew, he hadn’t done anything illegal. To a politician, there is a wide, wide gap between an unethical action and an indictable offense. What the politicians were really saying, but not saying out loud, was that the pharmaceutical industry was a major force both economically and politically, and that somebody had to be the guinea pigs so the industry could develop cures for diseases—and it was certainly better to use foreign guinea pigs than homegrown ones. If a dozen American grandmas had died to develop Mulray’s latest product, then the politicians might have chosen to take a harder look—but it wasn’t American grandmas who’d died.
Emma sat there thinking about Lizzie Warwick—and what her death meant in terms of all the people she might have helped in the future—until it was time for her appointment with the Alzheimer’s doctor. Emma had decided that she needed to know more about the disease, so she’d called a few friends—her network was vast—and they’d steered her to a physician at Georgetown University Hospital.