by David Linzee
“Oh, she wanted to give a chair. No problem about that. The tricky part was that she wanted to give it to the department of surgery. We had a hard time talking her into giving it to molecular micro. She didn’t know anything about the department, and she didn’t like what we told her. You know: it’s all germs and worms that get into people’s guts and do disgusting things.”
Peter nodded. No, getting around it, there was a lot of pissing, crapping, and barfing in molecular micro. “Why did it have to be micro?”
“Surgery didn’t have any candidates right then, and micro had two. Stromberg-Brand and this other guy who had a bit of buzz at the time.”
“Would that happen to be Ransome Chase?”
Marion nodded.
“And he lost out. Is that why Roger wants us to ignore him?”
Marian lifted her eyebrows and her chin and said, “No. There was a little more to it.” And waited.
Peter said, “Would this have had anything to do with Dr. Patel?”
Marian smiled and beckoned him in. He shut the door—unnecessarily, because the corridor and adjoining offices were empty. But it contributed to the atmosphere. There was nothing cozier than a fundraiser/PR writer end-of-day gossip.
“Patel was a postdoc,” Marian began. “At about this time she made a complaint that Dr. Chase had sexually abused her.”
“Wow.”
“It didn’t come to that much. She wasn’t saying he touched her or anything, it was oral sexual abuse she was complaining about.” She paused and her blue eyes sparkled. She was enjoying this as much as he was. “No, that term won’t do, will it? Verbal sexual abuse. I forgot if he was telling her dirty jokes or what. Anyway the complaint never reached the hearing stage. I don’t know what happened exactly. It went away, as these things generally do.”
Peter thought it over. “So the guy is up for a named professorship, and he picks this moment to harass a postdoc?”
Marian’s smile broadened. She was pleased with him. “Actually, the incidents she complained about had taken place six months to a year earlier. There was some comment about the timing of her complaint.”
“What did she say?”
“That she had decided to sit quiet and take it, but that later she decided she owed it to other women in medicine to speak out.”
“And is there an alternative explanation?”
“The lab she was a postdoc in was Stromberg-Brand’s.”
“Stromberg-Brand put her up to it, to sink his candidacy? And rewarded her with a tenure-track position?”
“That’s Chase’s version, anyway. He’s never stopped complaining. Very loudly. That’s why Roger declared him a nonperson. Of course, nobody’s much interested anymore. Six years have passed, and Chase’s research hasn’t gone anywhere. Stromberg-Brand’s has.”
Peter nodded. “What do you think, Marian?”
“Oh, I think the timing of the complaint is a little suspicious. But, to be fair to Patel, nobody who knows Ransome Chase doubts that he did what she complained he did. He’s a wild man.”
“Really? How wild?”
Marian stuck out her chin. “Let’s just say, I’m glad he doesn’t bear a grudge against me.”
Chapter 25
Renata arrived home at dusk. There was much to fault Don on, but he had excellent taste. He lived in the green heart of Webster Groves, less than a mile from SLO. His house had been added on to over the years but was still a cottage, a charming jumble of brick, stucco, and wood perched on a steep bank above a narrow lane. As she stood gazing up at it, she remembered a party at which some American had complimented him on the house and asked if he’d bought it because it reminded him of his old family home in a Cotswold village. Don had confirmed it with a fond, reminiscent smile. He did it so well that Renata almost believed him, even though she remembered perfectly well that they had grown up in a flat in a tower block in north London.
He hadn’t been half so convincing this afternoon, saying that all he’d done that weekend in Chicago was take Helen to the opera. Her certainty that he could not kill anyone remained unshaken, but it would be much easier to champion his cause if he didn’t lie to her.
She went in the front door and switched on the light. The living room was a mess. The police must have come back. They’d searched the place Sunday and decided to have another go today. Tired and hungry as she was, she went around the house, putting books back on shelves and cushions back on furniture, and wiping some nasty pink sludge off countertops and doorjambs. She supposed it was fingerprint powder. When she looked in the laundry hamper, her temper got the better of her. Digging Detective McCutcheon’s card out of her purse, she called his cellphone.
The line opened and she heard the roar of sports fans from a television. McCutcheon was relaxing, probably with the St. Louis Cardinals.
“Hello?”
“Detective McCutcheon, this is Renata Radleigh.”
“Yes?”
“I have a question. When are the Clayton police going to return my knickers?”
“Your what?”
“My panties. The people who searched the house took every pair of panties out of the laundry hamper. They must have been hoping they were Helen Stromberg-Brand’s. They’re not; they’re mine.”
She was rather hoping that McCutcheon would make a ribald joke or at least snigger in a dirty way, giving her a chance to rip into him. But he was as bland as ever. “I’ll look into it. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“You’re looking for evidence that she was here, aren’t you? Why are you doing that?”
“I can’t discuss the investigation with you.”
“Right. Then I’ll just assume The Clayton PD collects lingerie.” She waited, but McCutcheon chose to leave that one alone. “Did your superior okay another canvass?”
“What?”
“You said you requested another canvass. To look for the man Reyes saw. The man who was not walking his dog. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“Ms. Radleigh, please. I can’t discuss the investigation with you.”
“You’re not really investigating anymore, are you? I mean looking for the person who actually killed Helen. You’ve made up your minds my brother did it. You’re only looking for more evidence against him.”
The background noise dropped. McCutcheon was dialing down the remote to give her his full attention. “Ma’am, do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?”
“What? Of course I mind! I don’t want any of your condescending—”
“Please, ma’am. This thing is gonna drag on. The prelim, the trial, maybe the appeal. We’re talking years. You’ve got to calm down.”
Chapter 26
Peter Lombardo had bought the condo north of Forest Park when he was hired by Public Relations. It was still rather under-furnished. The tedium of his days at the office sucked up all his energy, and he spent his evenings drinking too much beer and eating microwaved meals in front of the TV, watching a movie—if possible with Natalie Portman, who was the woman in his life at the moment.
Tonight, though, he was sitting at the computer, drinking iced tea. In his first day at PR, Roger had told him something interesting: more people got on the Web looking for medical information than for anything else, even porn. Once upon a time, Roger had said, people who worked miracle cures were called saints. The afflicted built shrines in their name and made pilgrimages to them. Today, the healers were big shot research docs, and the shrines and pilgrimages were on the internet.
Peter typed “Helen Stromberg-Brand” into the search engine, which promptly returned eight and a half million hits. Even when he eliminated the ones for Stromberg Machine Tool Co., Ibsen’s Brand, and Helen of Troy sex aids, there were still millions.
Topping the list were scores of Adams University hits, in which Peter and his colleagues sang Helen’s praises. He skipped those, as well as the glossy site of the Amygdala startup. Plowing through the medical journals her papers had appeared in and th
e professional associations she belonged to, by-passing Mademoiselle and Redbook and Oprah, which had all profiled her, he finally reached the patients’ level. This was the phenomenon Roger had told him about: chronic UTI sufferers by the hundreds, condoling with each other, hallowing the name of Dr. Helen Stromberg-Brand, whose vaccine was almost in human trials and only a few itchy years away from the market.
He clicked on new search and typed “Ransome Chase” into the search engine. He had almost as many hits as Helen, but they were of a different kind. Adams University admitted that he was on the faculty, but that was all. No pharmaceutical companies, no glossy magazines, only second-tier scholarly journals. Peter found himself on the hopelessly unslick websites and Facebook pages of international aid workers and developing world health organizations. Chase was an expert on Chagas Disease and other infections that had been wiped out in America, but continued to be scourges in countries with primitive sanitation and—unfortunately for Chase—equally primitive public relations firms.
He soon encountered the man himself. Helen was a remote and glorious presence on patients’ sites, but Chase was all over the sites devoted to his diseases—suggesting, arguing, complaining, advocating. He came across rather well. He was tough with bureaucrats, demanding more funding and facilities, compassionate with sufferers, whom he responded to directly. Peter wondered if Sturm und Drang had ever sent a consoling message to a UTI sufferer. He doubted it. Chase did have more than a touch of the white coat syndrome. He started posts by apologizing for spelling errors he might make because he had been up for the last twenty-seven hours, saving lives in a slum clinic in Mexico City or Lima.
There were pictures, too. Now Peter saw why Marian had called Chase a wild man. He was big, taller and broader than everyone who was shaking hands with him or hugging him. He had a head of tousled, graying dark hair and a beard that covered his face from his collar to the rims of his oversize glasses. Peter found a portrait-size shot and printed it.
Why? Who was he planning to show it to, the cops?
He sat back from the screen and drained his tea. What did he have? Helen and Chase had competed for a named professorship. She had beaten him, probably by underhanded maneuvers. Result: she was hobnobbing with Keith Bryson while he was in some south-of-the-border clinic, being bled on and barfed on.
According to Marian, he was a sore loser. But angry enough to murder Stromberg-Brand? On the web, colleagues and patients spoke affectionately about Chase. He was a grouchy, plain-spoken, old-fashioned physician. A healer, dedicated to his patients. Like Bones on Star Trek. Not the murdering kind. Peter wished he could meet him, interview him about the Patel business.
For a few minutes, Peter toyed with pretexts for going to see Chase. But every scenario he imagined ended up with Chase indignant, Roger angry, and Peter himself embarrassed. And possibly unemployed.
“Nope,” said Peter aloud. That was the problem with living alone—sooner or later you started talking to yourself. If he had even a scrap of evidence, he would have gone to the police. But all he had was suspicion, or as Chase would probably call it, slander. Peter closed the search engine. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Time to search the freezer for something to microwave for dinner.
But he wasn’t hungry. He sat down again, fingers poised over the keys. Someone had told him that every musician in the world had a video on YouTube. He went there, and typed in “Renata Radleigh.”
There was only one clip of her. It had 599 views in five years, compared to Frederica von Stade’s 261,000-plus and Cecilia Bartoli’s 445,000. He went to the beginning of it. It was from a production of Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart at the Liverpool Opera. The number was “Voi Che Sapete.”
Mozart he’d heard of; otherwise he was clueless. Sure, Peter was Italian, and he’d had a grandfather who listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio every Saturday afternoon. But the opera gene must have been recessive in his case.
The still showed Renata Radleigh wearing an eighteenth-century wig with a pigtail, a long waistcoat and breeches. She must be playing a woman pretending to be a man, à la Shakespeare—though in the Bard’s day those were young men playing women playing men. Renata was gazing off to the side, smiling shyly. She looked much more than five years younger than the careworn woman he’d seen on TV this afternoon.
Peter put his hand on the mouse. Hesitated. Something told him it would be a mistake to listen to her. He thought about dinner waiting for him in the freezer. It was late. He was hungry.
No use. He clicked on play.
Chapter 27
As it happened, Renata was also watching YouTube. Someone had taped that afternoon’s press conference at SLO on their cellphone and posted it. She didn’t get far enough to see Bryson himself. What stopped her was the moment when Congreve disowned Don. “Suspended without pay,” he said, with brow furrowing and jowls flaring. “We are cooperating fully with the police investigation.”
Renata got up. Muttering to herself, she walked in circles through the downstairs rooms, her head bowed, arms folded across her middle. It was difficult, having a filthy temper while being obliged to kowtow to everybody in the opera world if you wanted to stay employed. It was taking all her strength to hold herself back from ringing Congreve and shouting down the line, “He got your bloody money for you, didn’t he?”
Presumably Congreve’s comment had not made the newscast Don had watched this afternoon. With Bryson on tap, what news producer would bother to show Congreve? Poor Don, babbling to her about Samuelson the Harvard man, so well connected at the courthouse. Perhaps it was just as well he was ignorant in jail. He stood a better chance of sleeping on the hard bunk in his cell if he thought he still had friends in high places. How it would appall him to know that the only person he could depend on was his sister, the aging journeyman mezzo-soprano, and that all she’d been able to do for him was bring the man who was not walking his dog to the attention of the police—who weren’t interested.
She flopped on the sofa and blew out her breath. Carmen opened tomorrow. She ought to be going over the score, making sure of the tricky bits in the role, the card song and the quintet at the end of Act III.
Years ago she’d played Carmen in a student production, and those roles you learned when you were very young stayed with you, or at least they did if you ran through them once in a while. Carmen’s part was so fun to sing that those run-throughs were no chore. Of course with everything that had been going on, it had been all she could do to rehearse the role she was actually going to perform.
She opened up the score, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was distracted by her memories of the moments before Bryson’s arrival: the coldly angry Bert, threatening to tell the world what had happened in Chicago, Congreve wheedling and placating, the usually glib Samuelson silent. What a transformation Keith Bryson had worked upon Bert in a few minutes upstairs in the office. Chicago had dropped entirely from view. Again she wondered at his perfect timing. What had brought one of the world’s busiest men so swiftly to St. Louis?
She listened to his own explanation: a great scientific discovery, a boon to millions of women, a fortune to be shared with Adams University, Bryson, and Bert. Her conviction strengthened that the police were looking in the wrong direction. It was the vaccine that had gotten Helen killed. But how?
It would be interesting to ask Keith Bryson.
She laughed aloud when that idea popped into her head. By now Bryson was probably aboard his executive jet, winging to one coast or the other. If he was still in town, he was staying at some luxury hotel, hidden behind layer upon layer of flunkies.
And yet, this afternoon she had been standing close enough to him to read the tag on his jeans. His waist was 30, his inseam 32. That emboldened her somehow. She thought that she could take it as read that he was staying in town for a while, having come so far. She could even go a little further, and assume that he had a pied-à-terre in St. Louis. It was even possible that h
er brother had the address. Whether he had ever met them or not, Don collected the addresses of important people.
She went into his office. The police search had been especially thorough here. His files and books were scattered about the floor. His computer was gutted; no doubt Detective McCutcheon and friends hoped to find electronic billets-doux from Helen on the hard drive. Renata could do without it, because fortunately Don was old-fashioned in some respects. His contacts being the most important thing in life to him, his address book had totemic status.
She opened the bottom drawer and there it was, the thick book with well-worn leather binding and gilt-edged pages that he’d had for years. Business cards and scraps of paper that had been tucked in slipped out as she lifted it and put it on the desk. The pages were full, and alphabetical order had gone by the board, but eventually she found what she was looking for:
BRYSON, Keith (partner of HSB) 4909 Laclede St L 63108
Chapter 28
Even if it hadn’t been the neighborhood of Adams University Medical Center, Bryson’s realtors probably would have chosen the Central West End for him. The city of St. Louis was the most battered and depressed of the American cities Renata had visited, but the Central West End, abutting the town’s nicest park, made a credible attempt at Manhattan-style urban glamour. It was a mix of old townhouses and stylish apartment buildings. She passed by sidewalk cafés where people were lingering over dinner on a balmy night and turned onto Laclede Avenue.
She spotted Bryson’s street number as she went by, but had to go down the block a ways to find a parking space big enough for Don’s absurd car. It was an ancient Jaguar saloon with a wooden dashboard, leather seats, a chugging, smoking engine, and a rusty, rattling body. She hoped it would remain in one piece long enough to get her back to Webster Groves.