Deadly Science

by Ken Brigham

  “I understand the technicality. You do understand that this is a technicality. I don’t know what Katya Karpov is up to, but if you go ahead with the committee, complete investigation, that sort of thing, she’s going to be the one who’s hurt. And maybe you as well. It won’t do the university any good either, once the media get wind of it, which of course they will. I don’t envy you, Harmon.”

  “Cy, I’ll do what I have to do,” Corbitt said, rising from his chair. “Please give my best to Beth and keep me informed of her progress. I am really sorry about her illness.”

  Corbitt was obviously ending the meeting. Cy locked eyes with the dean for a second and then turned, walked to the door, and left the office without saying anything more.

  Back in his office, Bartalak felt that things were becoming clearer. He clicked on the contacts icon on his computer, scrolled down to Mitchell Rook’s number, lifted the receiver on the desk phone, and punched in the number. He would arrange a meeting with Rook, following up on the odd conversation they had had the previous day. The chances that the GPI deal might crash and burn seemed to be increasing. Cy needed to be proactive if he was to realize any of the reward he had been expecting from Renaptix. He had been counting on that money. He needed it.

  Coincidentally, when the call came through, the US attorney, Dom Petrillo, was sitting in Rook’s office. Professor Bartalak had been the topic of their conversation for the past hour or so. They had been reviewing their strategy for giving Bartalak the opportunity to show his true colors in a way that provided admissible evidence that he had committed a crime. This was not as easy as both of the men thought it should be. They had agreed earlier that Rook should let Bartalak know that he was looking for additional investments in the medical area. Rook had done that. If, as they suspected, Bartalak had what he thought was private knowledge of something that when it became generally known would deflate the value of Renaptix, he might be tempted to offer part or all of his share of the startup company to Rook at a price that did not take that private knowledge into account. If Bartalak did that, and they could prove it, they had a prosecutable crime. That is assuming Dr. Karpov would testify that Bartalak had received the incriminating information. Their direct informant, Rook’s pathologist friend, would be useless in court since his testimony would be hearsay and therefore disallowed. Rook needed to make sure that Katya Karpov would do it. He would have to contact her again when he could be more forthcoming about what they needed from her and why. If she was as honest as Syd Shelling seemed to imply, she shouldn’t be a problem, but that needed to be confirmed.

  Since Renaptix was not a publicly-traded company, the common “fraud on the market” charge couldn’t be made. But, it was still a crime to knowingly withhold information that would affect a stock’s value in order to sell the stock at a higher price than the seller knew it was worth. The tricky part was that Rook had to dangle the bait in front of Bartalak, make it irresistible, without it being so obvious that Bartalak would smell a rat. Rook was less worried than Petrillo about scaring Bartalak off. Hubris, which he had in excess, was often the Achilles heel of people who were smart but less so than they believed themselves to be; Bartalak fit that description. The two lawyers had enjoyed the long discussion of the nuances of law. That’s what had attracted them to the profession in the first place.

  Mitchell Rook was surprised when his secretary rang him and said that Dr. Bartalak was on the line. Mitchell took the call and after some idle banter, Bartalak asked him if they could meet later in the day, just the two of them, to talk. Of course, Rook readily agreed and suggested that Bartalak come to Rook’s office downtown at around three. After a brief hesitation, Cy agreed, and they ended the conversation.

  Hardy Seltzer felt that he was having more difficulty than he should be having completing the simple task of going through the marriage license records. Had he believed in Providence, he would have been tempted to invoke providential hindrance as an explanation.

  He had gone to the office the previous day—driven out Third Avenue, located a parking place with some difficulty and then wandered around the Old Howard School complex for a while until he found an office with a sign painted on the door that read “Marriage License Bureau.” Good, he found the place. However, there had been another sign that was handwritten on a blank sheet of letter-size paper that read simply, “Closed for the day.” Just that. No explanation. It was not a holiday. How can they just close for the day for no apparent reason, without any justification? Hardy thought. He was angry as he often was when confronted, far too often, he thought, with irresponsible behavior of government employees. Whoever runs this office should be fired on the spot! Assuming he ever found the Marriage License Bureau office open, he would have a word with the person in charge. Hardy was a government employee and took his work seriously. If his fellow employees didn’t do the same, they should be replaced. It was that simple. Justice! Dammit! Justice!

  Hardy had intended to go back to the Marriage License Bureau first thing this morning, but he was summoned again, unexpectedly, to the chief’s office. Hardy had stopped reading the morning newspaper since the series of articles berating the police department, often singling out detective Seltzer as a prime example of the department’s incompetence, started appearing under the byline of a free-lance journalist he had never heard of. Hardy feared that the morning paper featured yet another headline on the topic, and that had led the chief to bypass the organizational chain of command and summon Seltzer directly to a meeting.

  The chief’s office door was open and, after rapping lightly on the door facing and being invited in, Hardy entered. The chief sat with his feet propped up on his desk, staring out the window. Seltzer thought that the chief had aged visibly in the past couple of weeks. The furrows in his broad brow had deepened into ravines and his eyes were puffy and sad.

  The chief slid the morning paper across the desk toward Seltzer and said, “Have you seen this?”

  The headline below the fold on page one read:

  Bagley Murder Case: Dakota Charges Dropped, Police Clueless

  Seltzer had no desire to read the article but stared at the headline for a few minutes without speaking.

  “So, detective,” the chief finally spoke. “Clueless, are we?”

  “So X got Jody off without a trial? How’d he do that?” Seltzer said.

  “The case fell apart,” the chief answered. “Or more accurately, X dismantled it. Found a witness who’d put Dakota elsewhere at the time of the murder. Got the gun ruled out as evidence claiming you took it under duress and illegally, not that the gun was much help anyway. And Rory Holcomb, the Printers Alley real estate guy who told you of Dakota’s old grudge against Bonz refused to testify to anything. So no opportunity, no motive, no weapon…ergo no case! And, of course, as you’ll see if you read the article, the DA is more than happy to put the blame on us.”

  Hardy had thought a case against Jody Dakota had been building, but it had not matured. If the chief and the DA hadn’t been in such a hurry, this probably wouldn’t have happened.

  “So, answer my question, detective,” the chief continued. “Are we clueless?”

  Seltzer had kept the department brass pretty much up to date on the progress he and Shane were making on the investigation of Shane’s mystery woman theory. What Seltzer had not done was convey to his boss the fact that Seltzer had gradually become convinced that Shane Hadley was in fact correct, that Elizabeth Anne Reid was Bonz Bagley’s murderer. But, Seltzer was still troubled by their failure to come up with a motive and by the nature of the murder, the four shots to the head. And, of course, they hadn’t found her yet. They were relying heavily on the marriage license log to give them a name.

  The chief continued when Hardy still didn’t respond. “What about Hadley’s mystery woman? Have you found her yet?”

  “I think we’re very close, chief,” Seltzer responded. “And Shane has me convinced that he’s right about this. It’s a convoluted story, but
it’s starting to make sense. More than that, it’s starting to look like the only possibility.”

  The chief put his feet on the floor and leaned across his desk toward Seltzer.

  “Like I told you earlier, Seltzer, a possibility isn’t going to save your ass. Or mine! So how close are you? When can you give me something concrete? I want Bonz Bagley’s murderer delivered, accompanied by an airtight case!”

  “I think, chief,” Seltzer replied, “that there is a good chance we’ll identify the killer today, that is, have a name. If so, we should be able to wind the whole thing up in a day or two.”

  “Two days, then, detective,” the chief said. “I’ll give you two days, and if you don’t have this thing solved once and for all by then, you’re suspended without pay until further notice. I hate ultimatums, Hardy, but I really have no alternative.”

  “I understand,” Seltzer replied.

  He did understand, but he thought he was being made the fall guy in a situation for which maybe he shared some of the blame, but he didn’t deserve it all. There was plenty of blame to go around.

  Hardy went back to his office and decided to call the Marriage License Bureau before making another trip out there. The phone was answered by a female voice that Hardy thought sounded like it belonged to an older woman who assured him that the office would be open until three PM today. When he asked her what the usual hours of operation were each day, she replied that the office had no usual hours of operation. Due to reductions in staff resulting from budget cuts, she was the only employee there, and she was part-time. She opened the office when her other responsibilities permitted which was for a few hours most weekdays. She did not specify what her other responsibilities were. Hardy restrained himself from responding with considerable effort, hung up the phone, and left his office for the parking garage.

  By the time Hardy had located the LTD, driven out to Old Howard School, located a parking place, and walked to the Marriage License Bureau, his righteous indignation had subsided and he was concentrating on the task at hand. The elderly lady who greeted him from behind a small desk wore a name tag which read Myrtle Cathcart and under that How may I help you? Ms. Cathcart, apparently feeling that the information expressed on the tag that she wore was a sufficient greeting, did not speak when confronted by detective Seltzer but rather looked up from something she was reading on the desk and made a noise that sounded like something between a grunt and a sigh. She looked her visitor over briefly and looked back down at whatever was on her desk.

  Just do what you came here to do, Seltzer thought to himself.

  “Ms. Cathcart,” Seltzer said. “If I’m not interrupting, I would…”

  “Actually, you are interrupting,” Myrtle replied. “As you can plainly see, Mr.…..to whom am I speaking?”

  Seltzer brandished his badge and replied in his most authoritative voice. “Detective Hardy Seltzer, Metro police.”

  Myrtle glanced at the badge, clearly unimpressed, and said, “What do you want, detective?”

  Seltzer asked if he could look through the marriage license ledger, the book signed by the applicants, for a specific year, naming for her the year in which the record of Elizabeth Anne Reid’s existence in Houston ended. Myrtle Cathcart, with a grand show of how much this request inconvenienced her and sighing deeply, rose from her chair, located a step stool, and removed a thick black ledger from a high shelf behind her desk. She dropped the book on her desk with an emphatic thud and told Hardy that he could sit at a carrel across the room to look at it. He did not thank her but took the book and sat down at the carrel.

  Hardy lay the book down and removed the sheet of paper with the copy of Elizabeth Reid’s handwritten signature from the shooting range log on it from his inside jacket pocket. He smoothed the sheet out on the desk, opened the book, and started going through the pages of names carefully, line by line. Since the names had been entered in chronological order, and he had only the year and no information to indicate a specific date, there was no shortcut to the name he was looking for. It was not a difficult task, but it required prolonged concentration and tenacity. Hardy was pretty good at those things; they were skills that he had learned early in life and they had often come in handy in the practice of his chosen profession.

  The entire process took more than two hours, including a cigarette break that Seltzer could not resist taking as a brief respite from the boring and tedious task. It was the first smoke he’d had in two days, and it tasted uncommonly good. About three-quarters of the way through the thick book, the name Elizabeth Anne Reid appeared two-thirds of the way down the right-hand page. Hardy spread the copy of the signature from the shooting club out beside the signature in the book. He was not a handwriting expert, but the small carefully formed backwardly slanted letters in the two signatures looked identical to him. He took out his cell phone and snapped several close-up photographs of the page, making certain to get both the Reid signature and the signature of the groom-to-be in the pictures. He took a pen from his jacket pocket and copied the name of the groom, paying careful attention to the spelling, on the sheet of paper bearing the copy of Elizabeth Reid’s signature. Hardy didn’t recognize the man’s name.

  Chapter 31

  Dom Petrillo and Mitchell Rook would have preferred to wait a couple of days for the meeting with Cy Bartalak—there were still some i’s to dot and t’s to cross. But Bartalak had forced their hand, and they needed to be fully prepared for whatever the meeting revealed. If he took the bait and proposed to sell some or all of his stake in Renaptix to Rook, they needed that documented. The fact that Bartalak had agreed to meet in Mark’s office was a plus.

  So, after Bartalak and Rook talked, Petrillo put in a call to his people and arranged for a listening device to be installed in Manner’s office. It was a rush job, since there were only a couple of hours before the meeting and Petrillo met some resistance at first. However, shortly after he spoke about the matter with his superior, the technicians arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Batman Building and went about their work. The device was installed so that the overheard conversation would be recorded. In addition, Petrillo was set up in an adjacent office where he could listen to the conversation in real time. By two-thirty, the device was installed, all the arrangements made, and the technicians, except for the one who was stationed with Petrillo in the adjacent office in case there was a need for technical help, were gone.

  The Rook and Lipchitz receptionist on the thirteenth floor had been alerted to expect Dr. Bartalak. She greeted him when he arrived and directed him to the elevators to the fifteenth floor. She rang Rook’s secretary and told her that Dr. Bartalak was on his way. The secretary met Bartalak at the elevator and escorted him down the hall to Rook’s corner suite. She knocked lightly on Rook’s office door, and the lawyer opened it, greeted his expected guest, and ushered him into the office.

  Bartalak stopped suddenly on entering the space and stood stock-still for a few moments, not speaking. This was not the right place for this meeting, he thought. He should have insisted that it be on neutral ground somewhere, or even better, on his turf. Bartalak hated the décor of the office. A bunch of kitsch attempting to masquerade as serious art. Exactly what was that bunch of colored tubes mounted on the wall supposed to mean? And the steel and wood furniture? Where were the rich dark tones of polished cherry and the earthy smell of expensive leather that one had the right to expect in a successful lawyer’s office? Bartalak had been a little leery of Rook from the start and this office only reinforced that feeling.

  Rook allowed Bartalak to stand and survey the office for a few minutes and then said. “Please have a seat, Cy, and thank you for coming downtown.”

  Rook gestured toward one of the bright aluminum chairs that sat in front of the steel and wood desk. Bartalak didn’t like the looks of the chair, but he took a seat anyway, shifting around in an effort to make himself as comfortable as the hard chair permitted.

  “Yes,” Bartalak replied. “Of c
ourse. It’s true that I rarely get down here. No real reason to ordinarily. Most of my work is at the university and points south.”

  “I realize that,” Rook said. “But I appreciate you making this exception. May I offer you an espresso?”

  “Espresso would be very nice,” Bartalak replied.

  He was starting to relax some, recovering from the shock of the truly unexpected appearance of the space where Rook worked. He looked around as his host got up and went to a sideboard where sat a very interesting, and no doubt very expensive, espresso machine. Bartalak noticed the telescope over by the window and wondered what it was doing there. But then, he didn’t understand anything about this office.

  Rook returned with two China cups of steaming espresso resting on matching saucers and sitting on a small tray that also held a container of sugar and one of milk. Rook sat the tray on his desk and sat one of the cups directly in front of his guest. Bartalak picked up the small tongs and deposited two brown cubes of raw sugar into this cup, stirring it with the silver spoon that lay on the saucer.

  “How civilized,” Bartalak said. “We pay too little attention to the niceties in our usual rush, I’m afraid.”

  Bartalak was warming up his act, Rook thought.

  “True, Cy, true,” Rook replied, sipping at his coffee.

  Rook was content to bide his time. He would let Bartalak carry the conversation in whatever direction he wished.

  After a few minutes, Bartalak sat his cup and saucer back onto the tray and said. “So what do you think about this Renaptix thing, Mitchell? Pretty exciting, huh?”

  “It is exciting, Cy,” Rook responded. “Quite exciting. I admit to being more than a little surprised by the scope of what appears to be happening.’

  “Scope is right. As I told the group, this GPI deal is on the move. Renaptix is about to be worth orders of magnitude more than we’ve invested in it. And down the line, who knows?”