Dante's Poison

by Lynne Raimondo

  I’d long been aware of my tendency to wall myself off from others. Maybe it was a consequence of growing up the only child of a widowed, overbearing father. Maybe it was knowing that I never had—or ever would—live up to his impossible expectations. I’d stayed away from Louis for three long years, telling myself he was better off without me. Was I about to make the same mistake with Hallie? All my activity of the past week, senseless as it now appeared, was just a way of avoiding the dismal truth of my failure to protect her. I could pretend all I liked that it was about bringing her assailant to justice, but in reality I was simply running—from fear, from shame, from my own damnable helplessness. It was time to stop. Let Bjorn—or Jane, if she ever decided to lift a finger in her own defense—figure it all out.

  I spent the rest of the morning getting myself cleaned up and making plans: to make my long-overdue appearance at the hospital, to get a head start on the week’s work, to see if Richard had made any headway about Mike. I had just picked up my phone to confirm the ICU’s visiting hours when it began ringing of its own accord. It was Annie, calling to tell me that Louis was ill.

  My blood pressure shot up like a Saturn V. “Does he have a fever? Have you taken him to the doctor?” I demanded in a cold sweat.

  Annie let the irony of my asking sink in for a moment before replying. “My father came over early this morning. He’ll be staying until Louis is better.”

  Which meant I wouldn’t be Skyping with my son that day. My ex-father-in-law, Roger, despised me with a vitriol that exceeded even Annie’s. So far, she and I had concealed from him the deviation from our custody agreement that enabled periodic contact with my son. It carried the bonus of not filling Roger in on what had happened to me since I’d left his employ. As far as Roger knew, I was still the same careless playboy who’d put his grandson in a grave, not the shambling mess I’d become. All things considered, I preferred to keep it that way.

  “That’s good, Annie,” I said hoarsely. “What does your father think it is?”

  “Just a bad cold. But we won’t be taking any chances,” she said, making no effort to keep the bile out of her tone. It sent a hot poker into my gut.

  “Uh-huh.” I fished about lamely for something to keep the conversation going. “What’s Louis doing now?”

  “Sleeping. He was up most of the night, but he’s resting quietly at the moment. He was asking about you.”

  “While your father was there?” I said, panicking again.

  “No, but that’s another reason for my call.” She lowered her voice. “I think we should tell him about our arrangement. I’m not comfortable with all the secrecy, and it’s only a matter of time before Louis lets on he knows you.”

  “Won’t your father try to shut it down?” It was what I feared more than anything else.

  “Probably,” Annie said, with a hard practicality that was new to her. “But I’m Louis’s mother. And not such a daddy’s girl anymore. That’s one small thing you did for me. God knows I don’t want you around us any more than he does, but we have to do what’s best for Louis. I’d like you to come out to Greenwich as soon as you can. Then the three of us will sit down, reach some kind of understanding.”

  I was already imagining the scene: me entering with my cane, Roger wordlessly gloating, Annie off to the side with a brittle twist to her mouth. It sounded like being the butt of every joke in a full season of the Three Stooges. I swallowed hard and said, “I’ll do whatever it takes to be a father to my son.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  After she hung up, I abandoned the idea of accomplishing anything productive that day. My thoughts would all be with Louis in his sickbed. And with his brother, in whatever place babies went when their tiny, vulnerable hearts stopped beating. I said a fervent prayer for them both and wondered how anyone could put their trust in a deity that treated its creations so carelessly. If I were running the cosmos, there would be no sick children and especially no dead ones. Even mental illness wasn’t reserved for the old. Hell, I knew of kids as young as ten being treated for serious depression . . .

  And that’s when the first piece clicked into place.

  “Explain this to me again,” Bjorn was saying. “Shrinks can prescribe any drug they want, but the drug companies have to pretend they’re not selling it to them? Sounds a little schizophrenic, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

  We were again in my office, where I was taking the first steps toward a radical housecleaning, aided by Yelena, whose sunny mood was still holding, though she steadfastly refused to say why. I began to suspect that she had her sights on a more hospitable job placement—though it was hard to conceive of another institution that would pay her an hourly wage just for keeping up with the latest issue of Glamour—and was softening me up for a letter of recommendation. She tramped out of the office with another box of paper I’d decided I could live without while I continued with my explanation.

  “It goes back to what I was telling you earlier. Compared to most other medical specialties, psychiatry is still almost as primitive as when doctors were leeching their patients. We know when people are suffering, and we can divide them into diagnostic categories based on their symptoms, but the brain is so complicated and difficult to study, we rarely know what’s causing the underlying problem. Genes appear to play a part, but that doesn’t explain why two people with the same genealogy can have radically different outcomes—for example, when one identical twin develops schizophrenia and the other doesn’t.”

  “So you’re basically in the dark when deciding what to do.”

  “That’s right. Take antidepressants, for example. We know that they’ve been remarkably successful in reducing rates of depression and anxiety, and that they work by altering levels of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that cause brain cells to fire. The most common antidepressants are called SSRIs—or ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors’—because they disable the function in the brain that reabsorbs the neurotransmitter serotonin, thereby maintaining a bigger supply. What we don’t have is any explanation for why SSRIs work. Study after study has attempted to link depression to a serotonin deficiency without turning up a shred of proof that it or some other chemical imbalance is at the root of the problem. Same with other illnesses like schizophrenia. It’s clear that we’re looking at a biological cause for most of these problems, but we’re still light-years away from understanding what it might be.”

  “So how do you choose one drug over another?” Bjorn asked.

  “Don’t quote me on this, but it’s mostly trial and error,” I said. “Oh, sure, there are studies showing that some drugs work better than others—most of which, by the way, are paid for by the drug companies themselves—but they’re just as often contradicted by different studies. Some drugs do seem to have fewer side effects, either alone or taken in combination with other medicines, which can be an important reason to choose them. But getting back to my depression example, when it comes to picking which drug to prescribe to the average patient, it’s about as scientific as throwing darts. You try something and see if the patient improves. If they don’t, you try something else. Which is where the antipsychotics, particularly the second-generation ones like Lucitrol, come into play.”

  “How? Aren’t they only supposed to be for the real nutters?”

  “In theory, yes, at least insofar as they were originally approved by the FDA. But the number of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disease is miniscule compared to the adult population with everyday problems like anxiety, insomnia, and eating disorders—not to mention adolescents presenting with those issues. The drug companies quickly figured out that their profits from a drug like Lucitrol would increase dramatically if doctors could be persuaded they were effective for a much larger group. Since the FDA prohibits marketing for non-approved or ‘off-label’ uses—including, most notably, children—their dilemma was getting the word out to psychiatrists without getting noticed.”

  “And you think that
’s what Atria’s been doing?”

  “Yes, if the documents you’re holding in your hand are any indication. It’s not immediately obvious and it took me a while to see it myself. But the list of ‘top’ Lucitrol prescribers in the Chicago area contains at least two child psychiatrists I know of and a few others with adult practices who wouldn’t be caught dead in a psychiatric ward. Couple that with the astronomic growth in the company’s sales revenue, and it’s obvious what Atria’s been up to. In fact, I blame myself now for not having put two and two together much earlier. The figures I gave Hallie to cross-examine that detective with also show revenue from Lucitrol sales well in excess of what you’d expect if it were just being used to treat serious mental illness.”

  “OK,” Bjorn said. “But if I understand what you’ve already told me, the medicos are free to prescribe whatever they want to whomever they want. Where does it show that Atria is egging them on?”

  “That’s harder to spot, but I think it’s reflected in some of the charts in the back, divvying up return on investment and comparing marketing expenses to sales of specific drugs. They’re spending a huge chunk of change on Lucitrol, which wouldn’t be reflected in the more generalized information they’re putting in their public financial statements. I’m betting they’ve instructed their sales staff to cover their tracks by keeping mum about the promotional efforts with doctors and that Gallagher somehow caught wind of it. If you could prove it, it would mean billions in fines and legal fees. And it might tell us why someone was hell-bent on putting Gallagher out of commission.”

  Bjorn agreed. “It would also explain the cold shoulder I got from the Atria employees you put me onto. They were practically shitting their knickers when I tracked them down. I’m afraid we’ll never get anything out of them.”

  I’d figured as much and was pondering various ways to break the logjam. But first I wanted to confirm a suspicion.

  Getting into Jane’s penthouse was much easier the second time around. Apparently she had instructed her watchdog that he was to roll out the red carpet the next time I was in the neighborhood, and he greeted me with only a half-suppressed snicker. Also departing from custom, Jane was waiting for me at her door.

  “Doctor, how splendid. I was wondering when you’d return.”

  I leaned over the threshold and sniffed. “What? No evidence burning in the hearth today?”

  She laughed. “What a suspicious mind you have. Come in,” she said, moving aside to clear a path for me. Once again I breathed in her unusual scent, musky like incense but tinged with some type of solvent.

  I remembered the way to the sofa and helped myself to a seat. The silk made a sliding sound as I settled in. I laid my cane on the floor and followed her with my ears as she took the seat opposite me.

  “That’s quite good,” she remarked. “But I suppose you’ve learned to compensate.”

  “For bad manners, certainly. I try my utmost to overlook them. Aren’t you going to offer me a refreshment?”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to dispense with the social niceties on this occasion. You caught me in the middle of preparing for a deposition.”

  “For Atria?”

  “Yes, they keep me very busy. But why don’t we get on to why you’re here. You look like a little boy just bursting at the seams with something to say.”

  “We’ll get to that. But first, let’s go back to the hearsay rules and admissions against interest. I checked with a friend of mine, another lawyer. It’s not an admission of anything if I lay out a possible scenario and you simply listen. I can’t see you, so no one can ask me if you looked guilty, though I imagine you’re a genius at the art of the poker face. If I’m wrong, you can just tell me, since denials don’t count as admissions either.”

  “I see you’ve done your homework. Proceed.”

  “So here’s one theory of what happened on the night your boyfriend died. He came to you with a story he was planning to write, one that would have implicated Atria in something illegal. Maybe he threatened to name you as a source. Or maybe he didn’t have to threaten, because you gave the story to him. That’s what your pals back at the State’s Attorney’s office would have supposed. According to them, you’d been feeding Gallagher confidential information for years.”

  “My, my, you have been digging,” was her only reaction.

  “Even a rumor to that effect would have shut down your practice in a heartbeat. You couldn’t allow that to happen. So after you dumped a quart of wine over Gallagher’s head you went back to your office to consider your options, and there, sitting on your IT person’s desk, was the solution. You knew Gallagher was under orders to stay off the servers at the Sun-Times, so any drafts would be on his computer at home, and you had a key to his townhouse. With me so far? You can just nod your head.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “I’m guessing Gallagher was only days away from publishing, so you had to act quickly. You knew his habits—that he’d be hitting the bars for hours that night—which gave you just the window you needed. You went to Gallagher’s home, erased his hard drive with the disc-wiping software and took whatever else you could find, and voilà—problem solved.”

  I noted she hadn’t denied anything so far. “Your only misfortune was that you were seen by our Mrs. Van Wagner while you were letting yourself in, and that someone else chose that exact night to slip Gallagher a Mickey Finn.” I stopped and let this sink in. “Unless of course it was you who poisoned him.”

  “I prefer we stick to the first hypothesis.”

  “All right. Assuming there was another murderer, what was the motive? Gallagher had been washed up for years. If it was some enemy from his past, why wait until now to kill him? The better bet is that somebody connected to Atria found out about the story and murdered him to keep him from breaking it. That would also explain the way it was done—hoisting Gallagher on his own petard, so to speak.”

  “Clever. You’re much better at this than I anticipated,” Jane said.

  “So now, let’s fast-forward to when Gallagher’s body had been dug up and you were arrested. You knew—or at least suspected—that he was killed to keep Atria’s secret from the authorities. But you couldn’t send the police in that direction without revealing what the company was up to. As I understand them, the rules governing attorney-client privilege are pretty strict. You could have asked your client for permission to spill the beans, but why would Atria give it to you, especially if the cover-up is what got Gallagher killed? And if you went ahead and disclosed a client confidence, you would have lost your license. Have I accurately summed up the situation?”

  “Almost,” Jane said, finally breaking her silence. “You’ve left out the most critical part: what I knew about Atria wouldn’t have helped me defend the murder charge. It would only have given the police another motive—one, I might add, that was far more credible than the idea I killed Rory just to keep him from marrying that little tart. Under the circumstances, my best option was to keep the knowledge to myself.”

  “Is that a concession or are we still speaking hypothetically?” I asked.

  Jane sighed. “That depends. Why don’t you first tell me what you think Rory stumbled onto.”

  “Atria’s been marketing drugs, Lucitrol prominent among them, for off-label use. It’s clearly illegal, and the last company that got caught doing it was slapped with a billion-dollar fine. Not a bad reason for somebody at the company to want to bury him, and the story along with it. Again, assuming the murderer wasn’t you.”

  “And you have proof of this?”

  “Enough to take to the authorities.”

  Jane regarded me silently for a moment. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Maybe. How far are you willing to trust your luck?”

  She got up then and went to stand by the window in apparent meditation. I wondered how much of it was an act.

  “All right,” she said at long last. “I don’t expect proving it will be as easy as you think
. If Atria has followed my advice, any wrongdoing has long since ceased. But on the chance that you really do have something incriminating to share, I’ll confide in you. It wasn’t just that Rory threatened to name me as the source of his wretched news piece. I was the source.”

  For the next hour, and over the pot of tea Jane insisted on making for us, she told me the story of her tangled relationship with Gallagher.

  “I first met Rory when I was starting out at the State’s Attorney’s office. He was a few years older than I, a media star, and devilishly handsome. Of course, I knew right from the start that he was a liar and a cheat where women were concerned, but then most men are.”

  I winced at this but couldn’t disagree.

  She continued: “But it didn’t bother me because I wasn’t looking for a commitment, or more significantly, marriage. I can’t have children. There’s a flaw in my makeup I’m not willing to pass on, and don’t see any point in two adults promising themselves to each other for life unless they intend to raise a family. Besides, I always knew my true marriage would be to my career. It’s the only thing that doesn’t bore me. Rory fulfilled my physical needs and could be terribly amusing, and as the years went by, it was easier to stay involved with him than to go searching for partners in singles bars.

  “A few months into our relationship were all it took to discover that his journalistic ethics were no more to be trusted than his steadfastness to me, which is to say that he bribed, paid for, or stole his way into every story he wrote. It put me on my guard, but not enough. In those days, I carried a lot of sensitive files home, long-term investigations I was working on at the State’s Attorney’s office or internal memoranda that would have made the headlines if they ever saw the light of day. One night, when Rory was sleeping over, I woke to find him reading through my papers, which he readily admitted he’d been doing for some time. I would have reported him, but as he explained to me, the damage was already done. By exposing him I would only have succeeded in exposing myself. At the time, I was still a mid-level assistant and hungry for advancement, so I let it slide on his promise it would never happen again.”