by Noreen Wald
But he’d survived the worst, hadn’t he? He could certainly handle Danny Mancini and Kate Kennedy.
Or could he?
Danny Mancini, a paradox, knew just enough to ruin Jack’s dreams. It wouldn’t be the first time.
And that nosy Parker, Kate Kennedy, might somehow stumble on the truth. He’d called Jeff Stein to complain about her tactics, but the Palmetto Beach Gazette was a weekly paper and its editor hadn’t been at his desk on such a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
He’d open the sunroof, but he didn’t want to mess up his hair. Though he had his presentation down pat, Jack had long ago recognized the value of style over substance, and the messenger being as important as the message. Image was everything, especially when explaining cryogenics. He wondered how many prospects Harry Archer had lined up for today’s talk. Small groups worked better for first-timers at a Lazarus Society meeting. Jack preferred close encounters with his potential patients. After all, one day he might be frozen alongside them.
Jack wished that Harry, formerly a very successful timeshares telemarketer, whose skills had transferred so smoothly to cryonics, would vary his script. Enough of Death Takes a Holiday. Why couldn’t he show Ghost? That should whet their appetites for a return appearance—of both body and soul.
Or Topper. He’d first watched Topper while playing hooky almost seventy years ago. Such a charming, classy movie. A movie that had changed his life.
Almost no one knew the truth about his past. He’d done everything he could to erase it. After only a brief reference to being born in New York City, and having attended Groton, his curriculum vitae started with his Yale undergraduate degree.
Swami Schwartz knew. So did Danny Mancini.
But Jack’s secret had been kept so well and for so long that not even Nick Carbone, whose father had been some sort of a paesan of Danny Mancini’s, ever knew Jack had lived in Brooklyn.
On that overcast Tuesday almost seventy years ago, he and Danny had skipped out of school right after Sister Margaret Rose’s religion class—where she’d taken attendance and they’d stolen two quarters from the mite box—jumped the subway turnstile and gone into the city to the movie theater.
As a straight-A student, he had no qualms about missing school. On the few occasions he’d given it any thought, Jack realized he never felt guilty about anything.
Sitting in the grand art deco theater with star-like lights twinkling in its ceiling, watching Topper interact with the elegant ghosts, Marian and George, and listening to their witty dialogue, Jack had made two decisions. He’d get the hell out of Brooklyn. And one day he’d speak like Cary Grant. Realizing those plans would take money, and his widowed mother, who cleaned houses for rich people on Park Avenue, had none, Jack made a third decision: He’d start running numbers for old Sam Schwartz, who’d been the most successful bootlegger in Brooklyn and still ran the biggest bookie operation in the borough.
A woman in a pickup truck cut in front of him, jolting him back to the present peril of navigating I-95.
He blew his horn and she stuck her hand out the window and made an obscene gesture. In some ways his poverty-stricken youth seemed genteel compared to today’s vulgar society.
Danny’s dad had delivered ice and his mother had worked in the garment district as a seamstress in a men’s suit factory. She’d outfitted Danny and Jack in John David rejects, turning Jack into the best dressed mob apprentice in the neighborhood.
How he’d loved running for Sam Schwartz, making money.
Schwartz’s son David, a spoiled brat in Jack’s opinion, had been mooning over Rashmi, the daughter of an immigrant from India who ran an import/export business. Their romance had cast a cloud over David’s Bar Mitzvah, the best party Jack had ever attended.
That same night the Raiders, a gang of young hoods from Coney Island, having had some success with extortion, petty theft, and bookmaking on their own turf, and wanting to take over Sam Schwartz’s, attempted to kidnap David Schwartz.
At thirteen, Jack, already over six feet, lean and tight, had been working out in the YMCA, where he won most of his boxing matches.
When one of the Coney Island kids pulled out a gun and shot David, hitting him in the arm, Danny ducked. But Jack kicked the gun out of the hood’s hand before he could fire a second time, grabbed it, and shot the Raider in both legs.
Sam Schwartz had packed Jack and his widowed mother off to Greenwich, Connecticut, with his eternal gratitude and a big chunk of change. The bookie then collected on some favors and Jack found himself enrolled in Groton. The first class he’d signed up for was Elocution.
He’d graduated as valedictorian, then went on to graduate magna cum laude from Yale, and second in his class from Harvard Medical School. And his sainted mother had lived to see most of her son’s triumphs.
Practicing medicine with distinction for over fifty years, he’d won too many awards to count. And he’d founded, then served as CEO of the most successful HMO in the United States.
He looked forward to one final accomplishment in these, his twilight years: the Nobel Prize in Science for his work in the field of cryogenics.
Thirty-Four
Dr. Jack Gallagher stood behind a podium fielding questions like a forties film idol being interviewed for Photoplay.
Marlene would have recognized him anywhere. With that shock of white hair, those incredible twinkling blue eyes and a tan that George Hamilton would envy, he looked even better than he did in his photographs in the Sun-Sentinel or in his appearances on the local television news stations.
He smiled warmly, acknowledging her entrance, while not missing a beat in responding to his current questioner, a squat lady swathed in a large patterned, mostly-purple print.
During the less than fifteen minutes that Marlene had been in the ladies’ room, crying off, then putting back on her mascara, the conference room had been miraculously transformed. The projector and movie reels had been removed and a table laden with tea sandwiches and eclairs had replaced the screen. The cream-color taffeta drapes were open, letting the sunshine in and revealing miles of aqua sea. A sexy, sun-kissed waiter holding a silver tray stood behind the table, serving white wine in crystal glasses.
Several more ladies of a certain age and two men, who had to be over ninety, had joined Harry Archer’s three recruits. Lazarus Society members in good standing, Marlene assumed. Gallagher’s audience sat, a few with straight, posture-perfect backs, some with visible signs of osteoporosis—listening in rapt attention to the squat lady, a new prospect, timidly querying the doctor. Softball questions, lobbed in awed tones.
Marlene couldn’t wait until Gallagher’s number-one fan ran out of platitudes. Her own interrogation would make Bill O’Reilly seem like a neutered pussy cat.
Whoa—what was she thinking? She had a role to play here. Dual roles, in fact: A convert to cryogenics. And an admirer of Harry Archer. So she couldn’t tick off Dr. Frankenstein.
Demurely—or as demure as a tough old New York City broad can appear—she accepted a glass of wine from the surfer hunk, moonlighting as a waiter, and took a seat.
Competing floral-scented colognes filled the room, vying for dominance.
As Marlene fought an urge to gag, the smitten squat lady asked, “Can you explain the process, Dr. Gallagher?”
“Oh yes, and could you please tell us more about where we’ll be residing while we’re waiting to come back?” Another new recruit in the front row, a tall lady with a blue rinse and a tight perm, gushed out her question.
Before the doctor could respond to either woman, Marlene’s hand shot up as if she had no control over her action, no explanation of why any semblance of rational behavior had run amok, other than the devil made her do it.
With great poise, and no apparent annoyance, Jack Gallagher’s bright blue eyes met Marlene’s and held he
r gaze. “You have a question, miss?”
“It’s Ms. Friedman, Doctor Gallagher. And, yes, I do.”
Smiling with great warmth, he opened his arms, palms up. “Delighted to have you here with us today, Ms. Friedman.” He rolled her name around in his mouth as if tasting fine wine, then swallowed. “Fire away.”
“When will we come back?” Marlene hesitated, not sure of her ground. “I mean, is there a game plan? Next month? Next year? Next century?”
“When?” He repeated, sounding pleasant, but puzzled.
“Right. When?” She raised her voice. “What’s the ETA for our resurrection? For our recycled bodies to return to life. Should our heirs keep paying the maintenance fee on our condos?”
A woman behind her gasped in disapproval. One of the old men hissed; it whistled through his false teeth. Marlene certainly wasn’t winning over any friends in the Lazarus Society.
“That’s a most intriguing question, Ms. Friedman.” The doctor chuckled, softly. “If you three lovely ladies will indulge me, I promise to address all of your questions.”
He might have missed a cue, but Jack Gallagher was back on script now.
“A brief history, if I may. Until recently, death, unlike Fredric March in the movie, never took a holiday. We died; we were buried. Case closed. And no matter what our religious persuasion, even those of us who believed in a final judgment, where our souls would reunite with our bodies as the faithful rose into heaven, never would have imagined in our wildest dreams that it might be possible for our dead bodies to return to health and to live again here on earth.” Marlene duly noted the “might.” Jack Gallagher sounded like a Yale-educated Elmer Gantry, selling something better than salvation: Immortality. However, she also heard undertones of Jim Jones and shuddered, thinking of the hundreds of men, women, and children who’d died in South America following the preacher’s order to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
Convinced that Kate’s theory about Swami Schwartz’s death being connected to both Life Preserver and the Lazarus Society was correct, Marlene now wondered, could Swami have quarreled with the doctor over his vision moving too fast? Going too far?
In his commanding, yet melodious, upper-crust accent, Jack Gallagher carried on. “Though the cryonics movement began in 1962, an association promoting cryogenics wasn’t formed until 1967. I joined as soon as I could. All these decades later, based on the pioneers’ and my own extensive research, I founded the Life Preserver Company to provide South Florida with the finest cryostasis research and testing in the entire country. Our ultimate goal, in addition to our ongoing lab work, is to offer the best treatment available anywhere in the world: careful screening of prospective patients, rapid on-the-spot worldwide care when needed—our patients may not die in South Florida, but we’ll be ready to assist them wherever and whenever necessary. The most sterile vitrification preparation in the industry, followed by outstanding and compassionate long-term patient care, with the finest quality of cryopreservation, using state-of-the-art suspension in liquid nitrogen.”
Still holding his audience captive, Gallagher paused to take a sip of water.
It occurred to Marlene that Harry Archer’s other prospects seemed far better clued-in to cryogenics, and in possession of far more information, obviously having gone through a much deeper indoctrination than she had. For her, listening to Dr. Gallagher’s lecture was like joining a class halfway through the semester.
But then, she’d aborted her conversation with Harry in the Breakers before he’d completed his sales pitch. Maybe she could channel her abrupt departure and her lack of knowledge into an advantage, inviting Harry to give her a private cryonics lesson over an intimate dinner. Hell, she’d even offer to treat. She caught up with Dr. Gallagher midsentence. “And we regret that some small rodents must die, but our research, primarily with stem cell testing and tissue transplants, requires sacrifice, so our human patients may live again.” Jack held up a colorful brochure. “One lovely lady inquired about the cryonics process. It’s fully explained here. In brief, I like to think of vitrification as the polar opposite of embalming. A second lady asked where the patients are housed. I rather like that image. I consider the freezing and suspension process as a long sleep, from which the patients will awake, fully cured. And Ms. Friedman wanted a time frame, an ETA.”
He nodded at Marlene, eyes bright, expression sincere. “That, my dear, is anyone’s guess. Science could catch up next year or, as you suggested, many years from now. Consider cryonics as an insurance policy. If you go into a grave or are cremated, you’ll have no chance of ever coming back. If you opt for suspended animation, you’ll have every chance. And that’s why I suggest the family plan, so you’ll return to life with people you know and love.”
The audience burst into applause.
“Enroll early to reserve your spot. Our costs, starting at $120,000 for a full-body suspension, are more than competitive.”
And what would he charge to freeze a head without its body?
“In some cases, a patient requires premedication. Most don’t. What is of paramount importance is retrieving the body promptly after death and beginning the vitrification process as soon as possible in a controlled, exceedingly cold temperature, applying the fluids carefully, taking care not to crack any tissue. It’s never good to keep a cryonics patient at high temperatures even for a short time, a special concern here in Florida. All transportation to our Life Preserver lab and our satellites abroad will be in temperature-controlled ambulances. For now, Life Preserver will preserve and freeze our patients, then transport them to another storage area. We’re totally prepared for long-term suspensions, and soon, we’ll be ready to accept and house patients here in Palmetto Beach, while science catches up and finds a cure for whatever caused their deaths.”
“Damn straight, sugar. You’d better be ready. Your first long-term-care patient arrives tomorrow.” Dallas Dalton had joined the Lazarus Society’s meeting.
Thirty-Five
The usually well-behaved Ballou peed on a leg of the couch. Kate sighed. She’d never get her other eye done.
“You’re a bad boy, Ballou.”
The little Westie lowered his head, his ears drooping.
Should she give him a time-out? Put him in his cage-bed? Show him who was calling the shots around here?
No, maybe he had another bladder infection like the one he’d suffered from after Charlie had died. She’d planned to take Ballou for a walk just before leaving for Palm Beach, why not do that now?
She ran into the kitchen, filled an old Tupperware bowl with warm water and ammonia, then wiped off the couch and the carpet. The dejected dog watched as she raced around.
Finished with her mop up, she washed her hands, grabbed her sunglasses—she’d do the other eye when she returned—her keys, a plastic bag, the pooper-scooper, and Ballou’s leash. He yelped and jumped, trying to lick her hand. “Stop that, I’m still mad at you. Now, come on, this is going to be the shortest walk of your life.”
Lifting him up, no easy trick, Kate carried the Westie through the lobby, even though Miss Mitford had gone off duty. “See, we obey the rules, Ballou. Good people carry their pets through the lobby. And good dogs don’t pee on the furniture.”
Ballou licked her cheek.
She headed for the front door. No walk on the beach. Since she didn’t want to return windblown and sandy, this brief outing would take place on A1A.
The brightness of the late-afternoon sun startled her. She moved her sunglasses from the top of her head to the bridge of her nose. Better. She turned south toward Fort Lauderdale. Cars buzzed by, their noise an intrusion on the pedestrian-free boulevard. Kate and Ballou seemed to be the only ones out there to enjoy the light breeze, the scent of jasmine, and the rustling palms.
They walked at a fair clip for the equivalent of two city blocks, Ballou e
videncing no interest in a bush or a tree or stepping off the curb to do his business. Contrary, wasn’t he?
Like Danny Mancini. Where had that stubborn old man gone? And why hadn’t she gone to visit him in the hospital? What could have happened to him? Had someone gotten into his room? Had a phone call lured him away? Was his disappearance linked to Swami’s death? It must be. But how? Could Dallas have been right? Had Danny poisoned his own godson? She doubted that. Had he run away? Or had he found out something that scared him off? Any chance he’d show up at Magnolia McFee’s tonight?
She blinked back a tear. Could Danny be dead too?
If her theory about Life Preserver and the Lazarus Society being connected to Swami’s death was correct, how did Danny Mancini fit into that scenario?
And if Jack Gallagher had killed Swami, it couldn’t have been to keep his master plan a secret. Dallas, Magnolia, Laurence, Danny, probably Tiffani and Sanjay, not to mention Jeff Stein and herself, all knew that Gallagher wanted to freeze, store, and revive the dead on premises. Even the town council had questioned if Life Preserver might eventually be providing more than just research. Good heavens, the egomaniacal doctor was taking reservations, selling storage space.
Greed worked as a motive, but Gallagher had tons of money. Did he really need total control of another company? What about his past? Past secrets often lead to present problems. Where had he grown up? And where had he acquired that Mid-Atlantic accent? The who, what, where, when, and why scoop. How she loved those details. Maybe she should consider Jeff Stein’s job offer. According to Dallas, Swami’s father, David Schwartz, and Danny Mancini had been best buddies in Brooklyn, tough guys, hanging out with gangsters, and they’d served together. Could the secrets—or the sins of Swami’s father and godfather—have been festering for over sixty years? Should she call Danny’s other godson, Nick Carbone? His parents might have talked to him about the old days.