by Diane Capri
“Are you saying you’re experimenting with cloning humans?”
“Not exactly, but kind of like that. Here’s the theory: a tissue sample with cells similar to those in breasts--”
“You mean pure fat?” I joked. I was relieved to see Carly smile, too.
“Not pure fat, but high in fat, yes. Anyway, those cells would be removed from the patient’s thigh or abdomen.”
“Those other gorgeous anatomic areas.” I was trying to lighten the mood, and Carly seemed to appreciate the effort.
“It’s surprising Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione have been able to make so much glamour out of so much blubber, isn’t it?”
By this time, we were both smiling, as Carly continued to explain the new process. When she’d finished, I asked her, “How close is this to becoming a reality?”
“Well, there are still a few things to work out. Three to five years away, at least.”
“It’s an expensive project. What if it doesn’t work?”
“We try not to think about that around here. ‘Negative thinking never solved anything’ is the researcher’s motto.”
Carly continued this charade all the way back to her office where she told me how pleased she was that I had come and asked me if I could join her for lunch. I told her I’d be delighted and we went out to my car.
Once we were out of the building and in my car, Carly slumped against the seat and closed her eyes. The charade had drained her.
I drove the few miles from the plant into downtown St. Petersburg and parked my car at the Vinoy, a large art deco hotel right on the water. We went in and were seated in the teak paneled dining room. After I ordered iced tea for both of us, I looked at Carly directly.
“At some point, you’re going to have to tell me what is going on. Why did we go through that charade back at the plant? “
Carly seemed no more willing to talk and no less ill at ease than when she first came to the house. Since she wasn’t willing to begin, I said “You need to know that George and I told the police who the body was.” Her eyes widened, she pushed herself away from the table and started to rise from her seat. I put my hand on her arm to keep her from leaving, or making a scene in a place where both of us were well known.
“We made an anonymous call from a pay phone. All we said was that the body could be Dr. Morgan. Nothing more.” She sat back down, slowly, and relaxed a little.
Then, more sternly, I said, “It’s time for you to fill in some of the details you left out, or I’m going to have to go to the State’s Attorney. This is serious business for me, Carly. I can’t have any appearance of impropriety around me or my office over a murder. I want to help you, but you’re not making it easy.”
“I saw you reading our Annual Report,” she said.
“So?”
“What it doesn’t say in there, and what you’d know if you read the local papers closely, is that the breast implant controversy came to a complete head and nearly destroyed the company when the FDA ordered a moratorium on the sale of silicone breast implants.”
“The report said the company had diversified its product by that time. How much of MedPro’s business was breast implants when the moratorium was declared?”
“Over fifty percent. We had to close one of our plants and lay off a lot of our sales and manufacturing people and we beefed up our other products.”
“That just sounds like prudent business, not the end of the world. People get laid off and plants close every day.”
“Yes, but the loss was devastating to a young company like MedPro. Dr. Morgan and the other two founders went from being multimillionaires to being in threat of bankruptcy overnight.”
“I don’t mean to sound heartless, but sometimes wealth easily gained is easily lost. And it’s not like any of those doctors are going to starve.”
“You’re right. And they were weathering the storm pretty well, under the circumstances. Dr. Young’s husband had just died, so she was an emotional basket case anyway. Zimmer went to our creditors and restructured our debt. We thought we were going to come out ok.
“But then the lawsuits and the publicity started. The public revilement of everyone associated with the implants was devastating, personally and financially.”
“A cynic would say it’s the price of fame,” I told her.
“You have no idea what it was like. We were under siege. Every day for months, the company was picketed by the Silicone Sufferers support group. We had to hire extra receptionists just to handle the calls. We got two feet of faxes and six feet of mail every day, most of it nasty. Our employees were constantly harassed. A lot of them quit because they were afraid to come to work. Every night for a month, we were the lead story on the six o’clock news.” Carly’s voice was becoming louder with each sentence. Other diners were looking at us.
“You mean, until a former NFL running back was arrested for killing his wife and the media had something new to report?”
She smiled weakly and calmed down a little. “I know it sounds like a nine-day wonder now, but it wasn’t then. None of us handled the pressure well. There were frayed tempers, shouting matches and shoving contests somewhere in the plant every day, and not only on the production floor. More than one-thousand complaints were filed against MedPro and our insurance was canceled. I became a litigation manager. Just answering complaints and discovery requests was more than a full time job. The shunts, catheters and kinetic products were not enough to keep us going. It didn’t look like we were going to get out alive.”
“So how did it all work out?”
“It hasn’t yet. We started preparing our bankruptcy petition, and were close to filing it when the bankruptcy of the largest defendant temporarily halted the litigation and gave us some breathing room.”
Carly stopped talking as the waiter brought our lunch and made a major production of arranging it on the table. By the time the bread waiter brought the rolls and the beverage waiter brought refills on our iced tea, a family of four could have ordered, received and consumed a fast food meal, at less than half the cost of our salads. I made a mental note to remind George that not every meal needs to be a dining experience.
Once we were alone, I asked, “What does all this have to do with Dr. Morgan? Are you saying he committed suicide over the business reversal, by shooting himself in the head, then bound and gagged himself, and jumped into the Bay?”
“Of course not. But Dr. Morgan had been calling me every day or two for about three months before he died.”
“Did he say what for?”
“Oh sure. Over and over, in fact. He wanted to make a presentation to our scientists at MedPro.”
“What kind of a presentation?”
“He wouldn’t say. He would only say that it was a presentation that had to be made to sophisticated scientists because lawyers wouldn’t understand it.
“He said he knew why women with breast implants were ill and he wanted to explain his theory. He was writing a book about it but, for old times sake, he wanted to give MedPro a preview. He didn’t mention what a successful defense would do to the price of his stock, but he didn’t have to.”
“But that’s a fabulous scientific breakthrough!” I said. Her face let me know how wrong that was. “If there’s a scientific explanation for women with breast implants becoming ill, then isn’t that something everyone would want to know?” I asked her.
“No. I mean, I guess it depends on what the explanation is. If the explanation is related to the product, then the answer is, MedPro doesn’t want to know. We can’t know. That will put our company out of business.”
I was beginning to see the problem. If the women’s illnesses were related to the product itself, then MedPro would be at fault.
“Did you set up the meeting he requested?”
“I took it to my superiors. They weren’t interested.”
“Why not?”
“What they told me, through the proper channels, was that Dr. Morgan is a crac
kpot. He’s a defendant himself in several hundred cases. They believed anything he might have to say would be an attempt to save his own skin, and the value of his stock. They didn’t want to be associated with him any more than they already were. It seems everything MedPro does these days ends up on the front page of the papers and on the evening news. If it became known that we were working with Dr. Morgan, we would be the laughing stock of the medical community and he would be forever associated with us in the litigation. They couldn’t believe that he had anything to offer that the best minds at the big, well-funded institutions weren’t able to discover. They just didn’t want to get involved with him.”
“But if he was an owner and founder of the company, why did he need you to set up a meeting?” I asked her.
“Dr. Morgan had been removed by the board and only owned his stock. Which, at that point, wasn’t worth much.”
“Why?”
She looked at me, trying to decide whether to answer. Finally, she shrugged. “This is very hush hush, Willa. If this gets out, MedPro would be in a lot more trouble than it is now, if that’s possible.”
“Keeping secrets is a lawyer’s stock in trade.”
“I know, but some lawyers are better at it than others.” She eyed me pointedly. I had, after all, made George call the police once already.
“True. All right. As long as I’m not required to disclose what you tell me, I’ll keep it quiet.”
“Dr. Morgan got into trouble with drugs a few years ago. He went to jail for selling cocaine and he lost his license to practice.”
“That makes him a man who’s paid his debt to society, not an ignorant incompetent without an intelligent idea.”
“Yes, but during the prosecution of his case, it was discovered that he’d been having sex with his patients while they were anesthetized.”
“You’re kidding! How did they ever prove that?”
“He videotaped the surgeries, and he kept the tapes. The police found them in a routine search of his beach house.”
The things you don’t know about your own friends and neighbors are amazing. “Then why did he think MedPro would be interested in his presentation after he’d been fired by the other two founders when he went to jail?”
“Because he said his discovery would prove MedPro’s innocence and the safety and efficacy of the implants. It was his way of trying to make it up to Young and Zimmer.”
“And saving his own ass in the bargain,” I said.
“That, too. Since Morgan lost his license, no medical insurer would touch him and no one else wants to be involved. He was begging me to schedule the meeting and, because he seemed so contrite and pathetic, I couldn’t turn him down cold. I did tell him that, unfortunately, my management wasn’t interested. The last time I talked to him, he told me someone was blackmailing him. He’d run out of money, and the blackmailer had threatened to kill him if he didn’t pay. He sounded really desperate. I told him I thought he was exaggerating and he got angry with me and hung up.”
“You never heard from him again?”
She hesitated before answering me, took a bite of her salad and washed it down. “No. He’d never given me a number where he could be reached. He always called me at prearranged times to talk. I’ve tried tracking him down through the Yellow Pages and directory assistance. I even hired a private investigator to look for him. No luck. When I heard they’d found a body in the Bay and about how long they thought it had been there, I just got this weird intuition that it was Dr. Morgan.”
“Then why did you call me? Why didn’t you just go to the police?”
Carly looked away for the first time in our conversation. Softly, she said, “Who would have believed me?”
“What do you mean? You could have told anyone. Why wouldn’t they believe you? You’re a lawyer, an officer of the court.”
She was impatient again. “I really don’t want to get into it. Let’s just say that I knew for sure there was no one I could go to with the information. I’m glad you notified the police. With your tip, at least they’ll check to see whether it’s Dr. Morgan or not. I really want to stay out of it from this point forward. I need this job, Willa, and I like it. There’s no one else to take care of me. I don’t have a wealthy husband, I don’t live on my own island and I don’t have a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Please,” she leaned forward, pleading, “don’t screw this up for me.”
Like the little boy who killed his parents and then complained because he was an orphan, Carly seemed to have no understanding of how much more serious she was making this situation than it already was. She acted like she’d just failed to appear for a court date, when what she had involved us both in was so much worse. Maybe tough love was what she needed now, I thought.
“I have no intention of screwing anything up for you, Carly. You seem to be able to do that all by yourself. Do you know what will happen if it turns out this body is Dr. Morgan and people learn you knew or had reason to believe it was him for over a month and didn’t tell? Your career as a lawyer will be ended. If you’re lucky, you won’t be arrested for obstructing justice, or murder.” My harsh words seemed to shake her.
“What do you mean? I certainly had no reason to kill Dr. Morgan. I don’t even know for sure if it’s him, for God sake.” She was genuinely shocked.
“Well you were concerned enough about it to come to my house and ask me a hypothetical question. You’re concerned enough about it that you wouldn’t allow me to talk to you in your office. What do you think, your office is bugged?”
“I know it is,” she said.
“How can you know such a thing?” I could hear myself getting shrill and insistent with her, but this was getting to be too much.
She explained with exaggerated patience. “The entire plant is under constant surveillance. Every phone call, in and out is recorded. All of the offices have video camera surveillance. The making of medical products is a highly competitive business these days. The company guards its secrets. Any breach of security and you’re out. No second chances.”
“Well if Dr. Morgan really had a solution to the breast implant health mystery, why would anyone want to kill him for it?”
She looked at me as if I had just revealed my own insanity. “Have you no idea what you’re saying? Do you realize how large a business this breast implant litigation has become? Fred Johnson, for one, is in this thing for millions of dollars. If there’s a logical explanation for this, do you really think the plaintiff’s bar is going to let go of all that money? And, if there really is a health hazard, do you think MedPro wants that to become public knowledge? The only peaceful coexistence lies in not knowing. As soon as we know, one side or the other loses.”
“But what about the women? Aren’t they the ones with the most at stake? Don’t they have a right to know whether they’re going to get sick or not from these leaking implants?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I never thought of you as naive. Don’t you understand the big business of litigation? Believe me, the number of people who would kill to keep such information quiet is limited only by your imagination.”
I refused to believe Carly’s words, but I would keep her confidence. At least for now. In turn, she promised to let me know if she heard from Dr. Morgan or if she heard any other information about his disappearance. We finished our lunch and I dropped her off at MedPro before heading back to my office, but only after she promised to return my calls and check in with me regularly. I thought then that I could trust her, but I was wrong.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tampa, Florida
Friday 3:00 p.m.
January 8, 1999
I intended to go back to the office, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. Nothing on my calendar until Monday morning. A good time to play hooky. I pulled over to the side of the road and put Greta’s top down.
Driving over the bridges, the water on either side, the wind blowing through the car and the top down rejuvenated my sp
irit, if not my hairstyle.
On the way home, I couldn’t help thinking about Carly and what kind of child she had been before she learned the big secret. Kate had two sons when Mom and I came to live with her. Later, Carly was born. Since I was ten years older, I learned about the birds and the bees a lot sooner, and I knew Kate had been widowed far too long to have another baby. The boys must have at least suspected, too, but Kate was so happy about the pregnancy and kept referring to the baby as “your brother or sister,” that none of us was willing to challenge her on it.
When Carly was born, and as she grew up, it just ceased to be important to all of us who Carly’s father was. To us, she was our sister, so it didn’t matter. And Carly never questioned it. Until the year she was ten. That year, her science class studied the gestation time for dogs, cats and human babies. She began to ask questions about why her appearance was so different from the dark hair and eyes her brothers had, and finally, the exact date of their father’s death.
From that point on, Carly began hounding Kate about the identity of her father. And the boys, being boys, wanted to know with whom their mother had had an affair. Kate refused to say, at least to her children. I don’t know what she told my mother at the time. Kate would only say that all her children were hers and they were brothers and sister.
For Carly, it was as if she had lost all perspective. I’m not sure ten year olds are supposed to have perspective, but Carly did. At least, until she decided finding out her father’s identity was to be her sole mission in life. She pestered all of us endlessly about it. She made a list of all the men she knew, and relentlessly questioned my mother, Kate and the rest of us about them. When did Kate meet each one? How? How well did they know each other? She kept completed questionnaires on all of them, and meticulously correlated their relationships with Kate to her birth date and what she calculated as her date of conception. She’d interview them in circumspect ways, always trying to find out if he’d been around at the right time, if he was the right age. Each time she ruled out someone she considered desirable, she’d go into a deep depression and refuse to talk to any of us for days. By the time I was in college, Carly had filled several loose-leaf notebooks of father contenders, viable and rejected.