The Foolproof Cure for Cancer
By
Robert T. Jeschonek
*****
More Mystery and Crime E-books by Robert T. Jeschonek
6 Crime Stories
Crimes in the Key of Murder
Dancing With Murder
The First Detect-Eve
The Other Waiter
Who Unkilled Johnny Murder?
*****
The Foolproof Cure for Cancer
"I've had cancer three times," said Mr. Mayflower, teeth gleaming in a magnificent grin. "Each time in a different part of my body. Each time incurable and inoperable by the standards of so-called modern medicine.
"And I stand before you now without a single malignant cell in my body. The cancers are not merely in remission. They are gone forever."
As Tom Porter listened, he felt hopeful in spite of himself. In his search for a cure for his wife, Sydney, he had been down countless dead ends before, like a rat blundering through a maze with no exit...but he was still a sucker. His features were fixed in an expressionless stare, but underneath, he listened with all the goggle-eyed raptness of a child hearing the story of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Maybe there was a chance. After all, now he was dealing with Ignatius Yawheh Mayflower, the famous Billionaire Samaritan.
"How were you cured?" said Tom, shifting in his chair.
Mayflower winked and reached for the jewel-studded cigarette case on the glass-topped patio table. "I'll never tell," he said, drawing out a skinny black cigarette, "but I have no doubt we can do the same for Sydney."
Tom watched as the Billionaire Samaritan put down the case and lit the cigarette. Though he had read that Mayflower was at least ninety years old, Tom thought the billionaire didn't look a day over sixty. Mayflower had a mane of pure white hair, but his face was smooth and tanned. His tight, black turtleneck revealed a frame that was lean and muscular instead of shriveled and knobby.
With a sigh, Tom gazed out at the vast, sunbathed gardens fanning out below the mansion balcony where he and Mayflower sat. "I hope you're right," he said. "We've had so many disappointments."
Mayflower leaned over and patted Tom's forearm. "I won't let you down," said the billionaire. "You must know that, if you've been reading Good as Gold."
Tom nodded. Good as Gold, Mayflower's nationally syndicated newspaper column, was what had brought him here in the first place.
Mayflower received letters from readers in dire straits--the more dire, the better. Once a week, he picked the people he wanted to help and printed their letters in Good as Gold, along with an offer of help for the lucky few. The requests he granted could be anything from a hundred dollars for a pair of glasses for a poor child to a couple of grand for a struggling senior center or community library.
Tom had never seen a letter from someone begging for a miracle cancer treatment, but he had sent one anyway. Sydney had given him the idea, saying wouldn't it be nice if her problem could be solved so easily, and he had sent a letter even though he knew she hadn't been serious about it. He had never expected to hear back from the Billionaire Samaritan, had never believed it was more than a lark...and sure enough, his letter had never appeared in Good as Gold.
But to his surprise, he had gotten something better. A personal invitation to Mayflower's mansion, and a plane ticket.
He'd come, of course, because he'd had nothing to lose...and Mayflower was telling him everything he wanted to hear. It was filet mignon to a starving man, and he devoured it.
Even though, in his deepest heart of hearts, he didn't really believe the billionaire could save Sydney.
"I don't mean to sound ungrateful," said Tom, "but I can't help wondering. This miracle treatment...why haven't I heard about it? It's pretty big news, I'd say."
Mayflower chuckled, puffing out sweet-smelling smoke. "Have you heard the saying 'Money can't buy everything'?"
Tom nodded.
"It's a damn lie," said Mayflower. "You'd be amazed at what money can buy."
With that, the Billionaire Samaritan reached into a pants pocket and pulled out a rolled-up plastic baggie. "This is the cure for cancer," he said, dropping the baggie on the table in front of Tom. "We've had it for nearly a century."
Tom rolled out the bag and stared at the fine white powder inside. "Who's 'we'?" he said evenly.
"A very exclusive club," said Mayflower, sucking on his cigarette. "We also have a fountain of youth pill and a gas that reverses Alzheimer's, obesity, and sexual dysfunction all at the same time."
Tipping the baggie to one side, Tom let the powder trickle into one corner. "Again, I'm not ungrateful," he said, "but why not share this with the world? Why keep it to yourself?"
Mayflower chuckled. "Because I can," he said.
"Then why give it to me?"
"I may be selfish," said Mayflower, "but I'm lonely. I don't want to throw open the floodgates, but once in a while, I like to help someone who deserves it. Someone who appreciates it. Someone I can talk to for a little while.
"Now do you want the cure or not?"
"Sure I do," said Tom, rolling up the baggie and stuffing it into his shirt pocket.
"I thought so," said Mayflower, blowing out another cloud of sweet smoke.
"So what do I do with it?" said Tom. "How do I give it to her?"
"Mix it in her tea like sugar," said Mayflower, stirring a finger in the air. "Make sure she drinks it all down."
"And that's all there is to it?" said Tom.
Mayflower shrugged. "Easy-peasy," he said. "With one caveat. If you try taking it to a lab or selling it to anyone, we'll stop you. We'll be watching in ways you can't imagine, and we'll know if you try anything."
"Okay," said Tom. "I understand."
"Good, good," said Mayflower, looking pleased. "I'll see you in a week, then."
"A week?" said Tom.
"For the rest of the cure," said Mayflower. "And your assignment."
Tom frowned and leaned forward. "What are you talking about?"
Mayflower laughed. "That's just the first dose," he said. "You get the rest after you do a little work for me. After you make someone else's wish come true."
*****
Though Tom loved his wife, he hated to enter the apartment where the two of them lived. He loved her, but he dreaded seeing how far her illness had progressed while he'd been away.
It seemed to get worse every time he saw her...and this time, he'd been away for nearly three days, meeting with Mr. Mayflower. Whatever she looked like, whatever she'd become, he knew it wouldn't be good.
Sure enough, when he walked through the bedroom doorway, she looked terrible. Even with the lights out, he could tell that she had deteriorated significantly since the last time he'd seen her.
She lay in the bed with all the covers thrown off, her emaciated wick of a body curled into a fetal position. Her wrinkled nightshirt was stuck to her sweaty skin...the same nightshirt she'd been wearing when he'd left three days ago.
Incongruously, the room itself was festooned with Christmas decorations...part of Tom's futile effort to cheer her up during the holidays. Even though Christmas had been over for two months, he'd left the decorations up for whatever residual lift they could give her. As much as she'd always loved Christmas, though, none of it had done any good--not the wreath on the door or the candles in the windows or the dancing Santa on the dresser or the artificial tree in the corner, layered with colored lights and glittering balls. It had gotten to the point where Tom thought the decorations were doing more harm than good...but he had come to fear, superstitiously, that if he took them down, Sydney would die.
At the sound of his approach, she rol
led her hairless head on the pillow and stared at him with sunken gray eyes. Though she was just forty years old, her face was as pinched as an ancient crone's, the skin drained of luster and sucked tight over doorknob cheekbones.
"Tom?" she said weakly, her voice barely audible to him. "Is that you, honey?"
Tom took a breath and forced a smile onto his face. The room smelled like sweat and vomit and dust. "It's me," he said softly, fighting the urge to gag. "I'm home."
"Thank God," she said. A tiny smile flickered over her lips, then faded into a grimace. "It's been a bad couple days."
Tom wanted to turn around and walk back out--of the room, of the apartment, of the building--and he hated himself for feeling that way. He loved her, he truly did, but it was hard to take, seeing her reduced to this wasted, shadowy remnant.
Sometimes, he wasn't even sure if she was still alive at all. She might as well have been a ghost, for all the resemblance she had to the woman he'd married...for all the help all the medications and treatments had been to her.
But maybe, that was going to change today.
"How was Mrs. Gunderson?" he said, forcing himself to walk to the foot of the bed.
"She stopped coming after the first day," said Sydney. "Had to babysit for her daughter."
Tom closed his eyes and shook his head. Mrs. Gunderson had promised to look in on Sydney twice a day while he was away. The fact that she hadn't been around for two days explained why Sydney was in such a state of neglect. She was so weak she couldn't really take care of herself anymore.
"Why didn't you tell me when I called?" he said.
"I didn't want you to worry," she said. "How was the billionaire?"
"Interesting guy," said Tom. "You wouldn't believe his mansion."
Sydney coughed. "What did he have to say?" she said, her voice pathetically weak.
"He gave me something for you," said Tom, holding up Mayflower's baggie of powder. "He said it's the first treatment."
Sydney squinted up at the baggie from the dark pits of her eye sockets. "How many treatments do I need?"
"One more," said Tom. "If this works, I'll have to go get the rest."
A single tear crawled down her sunken cheek as she turned back to stare at the window blind. "It doesn't seem possible. It's just...too much to hope for...after what we've been through."
"I know," said Tom, "but we can't not try it. If there's any chance at all that it'll work, we have to try it."
Sydney said nothing in reply.
Tom looked at her, wishing things could have been different, wishing she'd never gotten sick. Wishing she could still get well and things could go back to the way they'd been in the beginning.
He wanted that more than anything. He wanted his wife back.
"I'm going to get this ready for you," he said, turning away. "I'll be back in a few minutes, and we'll give it a try."
As he walked through the doorway, he heard her moving on the bed behind him. "Tom?" she said.
He stopped and turned to look back at her. "Yes, honey?"
"I love you so much," she said, her voice breaking.
"I know," said Tom, mustering a smile though she looked so withered and pitiful. "I love you, too."
Then, he went to the kitchen and prepared her special tea just as Mr. Mayflower had instructed.
*****
A week later, on his way back to the billionaire's mansion, Tom could only think about two things. He stared at the inflight movie on the plane (he hadn't rented the headsets, so he couldn't hear the audio) and overheard the teenage girls chattering behind him, and he only thought about two things.
The first was this: in the oncologist's examination room, which had been such a chamber of horrors for Tom and Sydney for so long, Sydney had thrown her arms around him and kissed him full on the lips.
Fifteen minutes before the kiss, Dr. Singh had shown them murky MRI scans and told them the good news while wagging her head in disbelief.
"The tumor's shrinking," she had said. "I don't know why, but it's down to half the size."
Eyes wide in their shadowy caves, Sydney had stared at Tom, then turned back to the doctor. "You're kidding," Sydney had said slowly. "That can't be."
"How true," Singh had said. "But it is. I'm reluctant to use the word 'miracle,' but I'm at a loss to explain this development."
"Will it keep shrinking?" Sydney had said, her voice stronger than it had sounded in weeks. "Will it shrink away to nothing?"
Singh had shrugged and thrown her hands in the air. "Who knows? I don't know what's causing it, so I certainly can't predict the course it will take."
"But it's half the size," Tom had said.
"Half, yes," Singh had said, nodding, her expression more puzzled than pleased.
"So it's possible," Tom had said, "that it could disappear altogether."
"Anything's possible."
It was then that Sydney had gotten up out of her chair, fragile as she was, and flung her arms around Tom and kissed him with tears in her eyes.
And he had felt happy for the first time in many months. He had felt hopeful that Sydney would yet survive.
If he could complete his "assignment" for Mayflower, that is, and obtain the remaining dose of the cure.
That was the second thing he thought about on the way back to the Billionaire Samaritan's mansion: the "assignment."
"You get the rest after you do a little work for me," Mayflower had told him. "After you make someone else's wish come true."
The more he thought about it, the more Tom was consumed with curiosity. What could someone like Mayflower possibly want from someone like him? What could Tom do to grant someone's wish that a billionaire could not?
It didn't make any sense. After months of sky-high medical bills (his HMO claimed the tumor was a pre-existing condition and wouldn't pay for treatment), Tom's meager resources were wiped out. Maybe Mayflower expected some kind of service from Tom in exchange for the dose...but if so, what service could Tom possibly provide that Mayflower couldn't buy from someone else?
Maybe it was harmless after all. Maybe, Mayflower tried to perpetuate the cycle of good deeds by asking the recipients of his gifts to do something positive for someone else in return. Tom hadn't read of such an angle in Good as Gold, but maybe it was as simple as that. It was certainly the explanation he liked best.
It was also the explanation that he thought was least likely to be true. If Mayflower had wanted him to do perform a good deed, Tom doubted he would have held out the second dose of the cancer cure until he completed his "assignment."
As the limousine whisked him out to Mayflower's sprawling estate, Tom had a bad feeling. He tried to balance it out by remembering Sydney's excited kiss in the oncologist's office...but the closer he got to the Billionaire Samaritan, the more he focused on the possibilities that lay ahead, and the darker his mood became.
*****
"This is Hiram Fleason," said Mayflower, sliding an 8 by 10 photo across the glass-topped patio table.
Tom stared at the color photo of the thin-faced little man with wire-framed eyeglasses, a baggy brown suit, and a bad haircut. He was seated on a park bench, gazing blankly to one side, a brown paper bag in his lap and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper in his spindly hands.
Mayflower was wearing latex gloves like a doctor or dentist. "This is his address," he said, sliding a slip of paper with typeset printing on it across the table. "He lives in Seattle. You'll rent a car and drive up there this afternoon."
Frowning, Tom looked at the address without touching it. The bad feeling he'd had all day was getting stronger.
Mayflower pushed a silver key across the table. "This is the key to the front door of Mr. Fleason's house. Once you let yourself in, you'll be pleased to know, there's no security system to contend with."
Tom stared at the key, the bad feeling intensifying.
Next, Mayflower lifted a paper bag from under the table and put it down in front of Tom. "This is the gun
you'll use to kill him," the billionaire said matter-of-factly. "I suggest you throw it off a pier when you're done."
Tom's stomach wrenched. His instincts had been correct; the price for his wife's miracle cure was steep indeed.
"I think you'll find that a single shot between the eyes will be most effective," said Mayflower.
"Wait a minute," Tom said quietly, leaning back from the table. "I don't even know this man."
Mayflower grinned. "It's better that way, don't you think? Makes it easier."
"I don't know who you think I am," said Tom, "but I'm no killer."
Mayflower laughed. He pulled a black cigarette from the case on the table and lit it. "Not entirely true, my friend," he said. "You were a Marine, weren't you? Fought in the Iraqi war, didn't you?"
Tom nodded grimly.
"Killed your share of the enemy," said Mayflower. Raising one hand, he extended the thumb and forefinger like the hammer and barrel of a gun pointing at Tom's head. "Served with distinction," he said, flicking the thumb down as if firing the imaginary gun.
"That was different," said Tom.
"Not at all," said Mayflower. "You killed for a cause. This time, the cause is saving your wife's life."
Tom shook his head and pushed his chair back from the table. "That was war. This is murder."
"Think of it this way," said Mayflower, blowing out sweet-smelling smoke. "If someone put a gun to your wife's head, wouldn't you be willing to kill him to save her life?"
"This isn't the same thing," said Tom.
"Yes, it is," said Mayflower. "Because if you don't kill Fleason, your wife will die. It's really that simple."
Tom glared at the billionaire, infuriated at the way he was manipulating him...infuriated because he knew Mayflower was right. Killing a civilian outside the field of combat went against everything he believed...but if it was the only way to save Sydney from the cancer, how could he refuse?
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