by Ken Brigham
The walls of the place were bare except for some posters for old war movies—actors he didn’t recognize, their faces contorted into angry expressions, brandishing vicious-looking firearms. A glass display case with several conspicuous padlocks was in the center of the room. Hardy walked to the case and looked at the array of handguns the makes of which he didn’t recognize. No Glocks or Colts, at least not of sufficiently recent vintage to be familiar. Hardy took the picture of the old Colt Hammer model that he had printed out from the Internet from his pocket and unfolded it. He looked for anything resembling the gun in the display case, his gaze moving between the picture and the case, but nothing caught his eye.
“Can I help you?”
The man was probably in his forties, maybe a decade older than that. He wore army desert fatigues and tan combat boots. He was tall and thin, apparently fit. His head was shaved and a long scar traversed most of the right side of his face. His clipped pronunciation of the words said that he wasn’t from around there. The words came in staccato bursts, like gunfire, said without inflection.
“Yes,” Hardy answered. “I’m looking for a special gun. A vintage Colt hammer model from the early nineteen hundreds,” he spread the picture of the gun on top of the display case. “Do you have anything like that?”
The man studied the picture for a few seconds without speaking.
“You a cop?” the three words were shot rapid-fire directly at Hardy’s face—bang , bang, bang.
Hardy flipped open his badge and showed it to the man.
“Yep.”
“So, I read the papers, mister,” again the staccato fusillade of words. “You’re on the Bonz case,” a statement not a question.
“Yep.”
Hardy was being deliberately tough with the guy, reacting to his less than gracious welcome.
“I don’t have any guns like that.”
“Sold any?”
“The people who buy guns from me aren’t generally anxious to have the police informed of their purchases,” the man’s tone was softening some.
“I am less concerned about the anxieties of your customers than I am about who murdered Bonz Bagley, mister……I didn’t catch your name.”
“Bando, Harvey Bando,” he answered, not extending his hand or giving any other sign of amiability.
Hardy said, “So, Mr. Bando, unless you want to attract more attention to your little enterprise than I suspect you and your clientele would find comfortable, why don’t you tell me who you sold this gun to.”
Hardy could do the tough cop dance when he thought it necessary, but it wasn’t his favorite part of the job.
“OK,” Bando said, obviously losing the pissing match that he’d invited. “It was Jody Dakota. I’ll double-check the records, but I’m sure that it was him. I don’t generally handle guns that rare. Several years ago, when he was still performing, Jody Dakota came with a specific request for that gun, and I had to locate it and get it for him. Found a Texas dealer who had one. Jody paid a handsome price for it. Biggest sale I ever made, that’s for damn sure.”
Some years earlier, Jody Dakota had been a big deal in the country music business—Grand Ole Opry, platinum records, big concerts, international tours, the whole deal. Hardy recognized the name from somewhere in a remote recess of his memory, but hadn’t heard anything of him in several years. He assumed that the career of Jody Dakota (or whatever his real name was) like that of countless other music business has-beens had descended from its peak into that special place in Oblivion where those who revel for a spell in the bright lights and outsize paychecks that enable the illusion inevitably go to reminisce and nurse their wounded egos.
“Would that be the old country singer?” Hardy asked.
“Yep,” a single word shot straight to Hardy’s gut.
The last thing Hardy Seltzer wanted to do was get involved with the byzantine world of country music. Those were not his kind of people; that was not his world. And there would be publicity. Too much publicity. The public and the media would sympathize with the denizens of the world that fed the coffers of the city whose name was synonymous with that genre of the performing arts. It would be a losing proposition for the cops.
On the other hand, this could be progress toward identifying Bonz’s murderer. He was heavily involved in the music subculture in the past, probably around the time that Jody Dakota’s star was rising. There could be a connection. Hardy’s job was to find the killer, and he’d do whatever was necessary to get the job done.
As he drove from the parking lot heading back toward downtown, he took out his cell phone and rang Shane Hadley’s number.
Beth Bartalak decided to go for a run. She had come home from work early. She was spending less and less time at work recently—going in late and coming home early. She wasn’t sure why. It just seemed the right thing to do. She wasn’t sure why there seemed to be a lot of changes in her behavior lately. But that didn’t concern her. She was not in the habit of analyzing her behavior, just went with the flow….whatever. Beth Bartalak was not an introspective sort of person.
It was a sunny but unseasonably cool afternoon. The hilly trail through Percy Warner Park would be a good workout for Beth, and she anticipated the thrill that always came over her with strenuous physical exercise. It was a good feeling. She dressed in her brief running shorts and a short tee shirt, admiring her muscular legs and her flat belly in the mirror as she exited the Bartalak manse, trotted down the long winding driveway to Jackson Boulevard and jogged down to Belle Meade, turning left and heading for the entrance to the park.
There was a soft afternoon breeze, and the trail was shaded by the dense growth of hardwood trees that covered the park’s rolling hills. There were no other runners this early on a weekday afternoon. Beth lost herself in the rhythm of her footfalls on the paved path. Dappled spots of afternoon sun filtered through the tree leaves.
She thought about her dead father. Not the relic of a man wandering about the netherworld of lost cognition where he had been at the end. She detested those memories and repressed them as much as possible. She preferred to remember the robust small-town Texas defense lawyer who had made his name by skillfully navigating the nuances of the legal system to spare a long list of shady characters the consequences of their nefarious deeds. He loved beating the system. How many times had she heard him say that a man’s primary responsibility was to himself, the law be damned. Laws were the starting point for negotiations, not immutable rules. You did what you had to do to protect your interests and dealt with any complications after the fact. He had mastered the art of dealing with the complications and had made a comfortable living for many years employing that skill.
Beth still sometimes regretted that she hadn’t followed her father’s example and gone into law. But her father didn’t think she had the stomach for it. Law was a man’s world, he said. She still felt keenly her father’s obvious disappointment in the fact that his only child was a girl. She had tried to be what he wanted. He taught her about guns. Even got her a rifle and spent some time training her how to use it. Taught her to hunt a long list of animal species, the enjoyment of stalking a prey, and the satisfaction of a clean kill. But she couldn’t overcome the disadvantage of her gender in his eyes. She couldn’t be a man.
That part of the running trail in the park was up a steep hill, and Beth felt the burning in her thighs as she picked up her pace. The conversations with Rory Holcomb seemed a long time ago now.
She felt a sense of satisfaction, accomplishment, that bordered on exhilaration, as she reflected on how she had managed to deal with the Bonz problem. Although Cy probably didn’t fully appreciate its magnitude, Holcomb said it was a potential problem of major proportions. He had bet a fair amount of money on this deal, and Cy’s reputation with the local investment community was at stake too. She had mulled the plan over in her head for some time before actually carrying it out. It was a meticulously conceived plan; she was a detail kind of person.
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br /> Beth had a habit of running early in the morning before Cy awakened. Unbeknownst to her husband, she had started driving into downtown for her early morning run, making sure that her route included the short stretch of Printers Alley. She ran there every day for over a week, confirming that the alley was completely deserted on Sunday mornings. Cy slept in on Sundays, and Beth’s Sunday run was later than on weekdays. Not only was the alley deserted then, but also Bonz Bagley habitually appeared in that spot in front of his club early on Sundays, before anyone else was around. He would nod to her as she jogged by. She decided the risk was minimal.
And there was the gun. Beth’s father collected rare guns and admired them, but his guns were not just for display. He often said that there was no sense in having a gun if you couldn’t shoot it, so he only bought guns for which he could get ammunition. Beth inherited her father’s collection of bullets for each of the rare guns and using one of those prized possessions felt to her like a tribute to the man whose affection she had been unable to win while he was alive, a kind of validation of herself. She located a shooting gallery south of town and went there a couple of times, making sure that her chosen weapon was in good working order. Feeling the heft of the rare weapon in her hands and the shock of its discharge thrilled her. It brought back memories of the few times when her father had complimented her; she had become an excellent shot under his tutelage, and he took some pride in that at least.
Then, too, there was the thrill of the kill. She hadn’t really expected that, hadn’t thought about it. But there was the startled look in the old man’s eyes as she aimed the gun carefully at his face and pumped four rapid-fire shots into his brain, abruptly cutting short the old man’s protest. And the explosion of his eyeball as his face morphed into a hideous shapeless mass as he crumpled forward from his chair and sprawled headlong into the alley. She hadn’t anticipated the adrenalin rush—the anamnestic thrill of the kill that she had experienced many times hunting game with her father. The thrill of the kill. Her father’s words. Beth understood them better than she ever had.
Oddly, her only regret was killing the dog. But after she shot Bonz, the dog went into such a barking frenzy that Beth had to shut it up. It was easy. A single shot aimed just at the base of the animal’s neck. And it was necessary, like disposing of Bonz, eliminating whatever information lived in that old man’s brain. But the feeling was different.
The key to success, Beth thought, was managing appearances, perceptions. How many times had she heard Cy say that perceptions were more important than reality; more than that, perceptions are reality, he often said. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who knew anything about that seedy alley that someone sitting out there when no one was around was vulnerable. And there were surely some enemies lurking in the dark recesses of Bonz Bagley’s past. The entertainment business attracted some shady characters, and Bonz must have encountered some of them. All kinds of potential criminals probably hung around the alley, foraging along the fringes of the music scene. The last thing anyone would imagine was that the wife of a prominent university psychiatrist entrepreneur and important community personage would kill an aging and addled has-been Printers Alley club operator in broad daylight on a Sunday morning. Why? Impossible!
Beth was into the hilliest section of the Warner Park trail. She felt her thighs tightening and was breathing a little heavier. It felt uncommonly good.
She thought about her nemesis Katya Karpov. According to Cy, Katya was pressing pretty aggressively for access to the raw data from the clinical trial of the drug. No way was the bitch going to get at those data. The Printers Alley-Katya Karpov association crept into Beth’s mind. She thought that perhaps she should resume her observations of the habits of the alley denizens. There might be other situations where such knowledge would be useful.
Beth felt good. She smiled.
“Hadley here (hee-aah),” Shane answered the ringing phone.
He sat in the living room, nursing a glass of sherry. His worn copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes lay across his lap. It was opened to page 954, The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot. That story, at least the title, kept intruding on his consciousness. He had retrieved the book with the idea of rereading the story, but didn’t get past the first page before becoming again preoccupied with the Bonz Bagley case. That vision of the person fleeing down the alley, the odd gait. There was something familiar about the person that he still couldn’t bring to mind.
“Shane,” Hardy Seltzer replied. “Can we get together? I have some new information about Bonz’s murder that could be important.”
“Oh, Hardy, my man,” Shane said. “I was just thinking about the case. Of course. Can you come by my flat?”
“I’m just on my way back downtown from a visit with that gun dealer we talked about. I have to run by the office. How about if I meet you there in a couple of hours?”
“Jolly good, Hardy, jolly good.”
Hardy chuckled to himself. Jolly good indeed, he thought.
Chapter 10
Medical discoveries that have the potential to benefit people are often made in university laboratories. But the only way discoveries can actually get to the clinic is to commercialize them. In Cyrus Bartalak’s words, borrowing a favorite term from the venture capitalists, “monetizing university research is critical to the future of academic medicine.”
Cy could make an articulate and convincing case even to his most skeptical university colleagues, that it was no longer possible to rely entirely on philanthropy and federal grants to support the academic enterprise. And university laboratory discoveries had dollar value in the marketplace. Unless that value could be realized, even the most promising new drug would never get from the laboratory to the clinic where misery and pain could be relieved, and sick people could be cured.
There were the costs of keeping an academic enterprise operating. Those costs were always increasing, and money from commercializing discoveries was, more than ever, an important source that must be tapped. Even the federal government knew that. Institutions were required to do everything they could to move discoveries financed by government grants into the world of commerce. Years earlier, with the Bayh-Dole Act, congress wrote that expectation into law.
Cy Bartalak felt that he had mastered the process of moving laboratory discoveries into the clinic, and his efforts with this new Alzheimer’s drug were a textbook example. Do the laboratory work. Patent the discovery and any processes, reagents or procedures that could be remotely considered proprietary. Set up a company to handle further development of the drug. Then, for the initial studies in people, leverage university, philanthropy, and grant resources by attracting a few million dollars from high net-worth individuals (angels in venture jargon) who got a stake in the startup company. Ideally, these were local people who had the wherewithal to take financial risks, and the stomach for it. If you could get through phase I-II clinical studies and they looked promising, you had the ammunition to go for venture capital, the big investors mostly on the West Coast, and begin the phase III studies, the real test of safety and effectiveness—and the ticket to the big money. The new company could then be taken public and either partnered with or sold to Big Pharma, who would bear the exorbitant costs of finishing the phase III studies and, if the results were positive, completing the arduous process of getting final FDA approval and marketing the drug. There was big money to be made from the startup even if the drug never came to market and if it did even bigger rewards from royalties and escalating value of the startup company. Professor Bartalak had made considerable amounts of money this way for himself and the institution where he had worked previously. It was familiar territory.
Although initial small investors may have been angels to a startup company, that was not necessarily an appropriate description of the other aspects of their lives and activities. Their ticket to angelhood was that they had money, were susceptible to the promise of big returns on an investment, and were willing to take risks. There need
be no ethical or moral litmus tests. At least Bartalak didn’t think so. At heart, angels were gamblers. He, too, was a gambler, and he knew that nobody expected gamblers to be squeaky clean.
When he took on his new role at the university, Bartalak set about a very private task to identify potential angels in the city. After extensive research, he identified three promising candidates: Mitchell Rook, a highly successful lawyer who had parlayed his inside knowledge of several business ventures and his annual seven-figure salary into a considerable fortune and was always on the lookout for new opportunities—he was an alumnus of the university, a neighbor of Cy and Beth in Belle Meade and a fellow member of the country club there; Wilmington (Will) Hadley, a longtime physician to the bluestocking set, who in his retirement had taken to fairly aggressive investing with a lot of success—he was also a university alumnus and a member of the University Governing Board (Bartalak thought the university connections could work to his advantage); and Rory Holcomb, a real estate magnate with extensive local connections in politics and in the music business—his less than spotless history was fodder for gossip among the city’s well-heeled, but he clearly had plenty of cash and wasn’t very careful about what he did with it.
Bartalak had long ago observed that men (it was always men) who made a lot of money thought that made them smart, which in his experience was anything but true. He thought most of these people had more dollars than sense. They were easy prey for his brilliant and articulate presentations of the earning potential of a new biomedical discovery. He knew where their buttons were and how to push them (he was, after all, a psychiatrist). That, coupled with his history of previous financial success and the imprimatur of the prestigious university, made his start-up company, Renaptix, Inc., exclusive licensee of the rights to the new Alzheimer’s drug, an easy sell.