Head Case

by Jennifer Oko

  It was catchy, to be sure. But it was the small print that spoke volumes.

  “I think I smell a rat,” said Polly, leaning closer to get a better read. “‘In conjunction with researchers at the world-renowned Leary Institute for the Advanced Study of the Brain, Pharmax Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has discovered that the debilitating effects of Fatico Dystopia are mitigated substantially by…’ Yadda, yadda, yadda. There’s a lot of scientific jargon here. Then it says ‘available for market next year. FDA approval pending.’”

  She looked up at Mitya. “This is what Olivia was doing. She was giving them the highly accredited academic ammunition they needed to go to market. That’s what paid for this dress,” she said, pulling the fabric away from her chest with a disgusted expression spreading across her face. Polly had been using my room as a walk-in closet. After the funeral, she had changed into the deep purple Diane von Furstenberg wool wrap dress I had just picked up at Saks. I never even had a chance to wear it. It looked good on her, though. But the tall brown boots she had pulled out from under my bed were too clunky. She should have gone with the black ones.

  “And you think …”

  “Yes. I think this is what got her killed,” Polly said. She shook the wet pamphlet. A few more drops of liquid splattered onto the linoleum floor. “Boris Shotkyn had nothing to do with it. I mean, he had something to do with it, but I think this deadline was a bigger threat to her than he ever was,” she said, pointing at the underlined date on the front page.

  “Okay,” Mitya said, more as a question than a consensus.

  “You know what I mean,” said Polly.

  “I think I do,” Mitya said and rubbed the space between his eyebrows with his thumb. It looked like he was pushing a button to help him process his thoughts. “Let’s piece this together again, though. Sort it all out.”

  Polly put the soggy pamphlet back down on the rat cage. Mitya had been “piecing things” together every hour or so, every time one of them had an inkling of an epiphany. It was starting to irritate me, and I wasn’t the only one.

  “Fine,” Polly said, crossing her arms. “Go ahead. Spell it out. Again.”

  “Fine,” Mitya said, crossing his own arms in response. “One: Your friend was shot to death by Boris Shotkyn, who was subsequently shot to death by someone else. Maybe Zhanya. More on that later.”

  “No,” Polly said, sitting down in my desk chair. “One is that Polly and I were giving out free drugs. Two is that we started to run out and the supply couldn’t meet our demand. Three is that we got more of them from Missy Pander.”

  “Right. Three, four and five … you got more popular, Olivia got more broke, you got me, Olivia got jealous.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Polly said, even though she’d been saying just that for months.

  “As you wish. Olivia had better things to do than hang out with you and your boyfriend. Then she re-met Missy.”

  “Right. We partied one night at the club and Missy hired Olivia to do some research. And then we ran out of drugs and got into deep shit with Boris.”

  “And needed even more drugs.”

  “Was that like eight, nine, ten?”

  “Whatever. Anyway, long story short, you blackmailed Missy, and then you put Boris directly in touch with her so we could stop being the middle-men, and let him work it out with her however he wanted, right?”

  Polly shut her eyes. “I never thought it could come to something like this. Especially not with Olivia. She had nothing to do with what we were doing with Shotkyn.”

  Mitya rubbed his forehead again. “I think something about her work had more to do with him than we could have thought, whether she knew that or not.”

  Polly rubbed her own forehead. People do that. Some might argue that such gestures are part of our neurolinguistic programming. Like when a person in front of you yawns and then you can’t help yawning yourself. “She told me she was working for Missy,” she said. “She told me that whatever she was doing was confidential.”

  “She forgot to mention it was also deadly.”

  “Do you need to keep being such an ass?”

  “I’m not being an ass, Polly.”

  “Yes, you are.” A small squeak came from her purse. “We should go.”

  “Let’s just finish this first.”

  Polly made a rolling motion with her hand, expressing her desire to speed things along.

  “Look,” Mitya said, “it’s no secret to me that Ziperal is a drug with issues.”

  “Right. So the question is, what was the nature of Olivia’s work for Pharmax? What did she know about the drug that she wasn’t supposed to know, or not supposed to share, anyway? I think we should ponder this elsewhere.”

  “We still need to fill in some more of the blanks, Polly,” Mitya said. “Not just about the nature of Olivia’s relationship to Missy, but also about what specifically is so worrisome about this drug that it was worth it to them to have Olivia killed.”

  “You mean aside for how insane it was making your aunt?”

  “Aside from that. Or maybe exactly that. Proof of that.”

  “Well, what else do you think we might find here? All of her research files are copied and sitting on my couch. Not that we can understand a word in there.”

  “Well, maybe we should see if Ivan Petrovich can help decipher it?”

  “Mitya, if he could decipher this crap, we probably wouldn’t be in this place to begin with. Shotkyn would have trusted Ivan’s scientific judgment and Olivia would still be alive. But you know as well as I do that his English is so bad he couldn’t decipher a McDonald’s menu.”

  “But the Latin terminology—” Mitya began.

  Another squeak came from the bag.

  Mitya and Polly looked at each other and nodded. The answer—possibly even the proof—was shaking in her (my) bag.

  Which is why Polly and Mitya are currently hovering over Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn’s makeshift laboratory, awaiting the results from his latest batch of testing, waiting for Ivan Petrovich to have a Eureka! Moment. Hopefully this time without burning down the house.

  50

  November 9 (A.D.)

  Different Place.

  Missy Pander’s Office, to be Exact.

  One Day after My Funeral.

  “What do you mean the study has been compromised again? What is this bullshit?” Stanley Novartny’s voice booms out of the speakerphone, which vibrates in the middle of Missy Pander’s otherwise immaculate desk. “I thought you said you took care of this. You said that Zack girl was safe, that she’s no longer a concern. She’s dead, right? Cremated!” He’s shouting so loud that there’s a feedback buzz at the end of each word. Missy reaches forward to turn down the volume but Novartny continues to berate her. “You can’t be safer than dead!” he says, maintaining the noise level on his end of the line. “And now you’re telling me we still might have a problem, that we might have to postpone the official launch? Do you have any idea what’s at stake? The fucking convention is a few weeks away! The commercials are already running!”

  “I know, sir. I know.” Missy glances over at Eugene Throng; he’s sitting on her purple couch with his ankles crossed and head hanging low in shame and fear. Missy raises an eyebrow at him, seeking reassurance or support or at the very least some obfuscating information to throw in Novartny’s direction. But there’s none coming. Instead, Eugene reaches into the pocket of his white lab coat and pops something into his mouth.

  “What, is that cyanide?” Missy says derisively, covering the microphone for a moment. “Don’t think you can snake out of this so easily, you little—”

  “Pander? Did you hear me?” Novartny is demanding. It isn’t hard to picture his pulsing temples and inflamed red face. “Are you going to clean this shit up or what?”
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  Missy removes her hand and leans forward over the speakerphone, a few stands of blond hair falling from her unraveling French-twist. The only sleep she’s gotten over the past few days was medicated, and it’s showing. “I’ll take care of it, I promise,” she says softly and then, moving her eyes over to the couch, mouths “well?” at Eugene Throng.

  This is his fault after all. All of it. At least according to Missy. He’s the one who’s been sounding hysterical alarm bells, insisting that the boss be told that the experimental laboratory (my laboratory) has been compromised, that the primary subject rat (that would be Raskolnikov) has escaped and that documents were missing, that my death alone could not protect the potentially damning and hence job-and-company-destroying information from leaking out. Information he was never supposed to have let me have in the first place. And now it’s clear that someone else has access to that same damning information. This is a bad state of affairs, but Eugene Throng felt it might get even worse if he didn’t at least get the big boss in on the loop. It seemed safer to fess up now, before things got even worse. So he inter-officed Novartny a confidential memo. Eugene reasoned that it was the lesser of evils, that maybe with one of the company’s top brass behind them, they had a slightly better chance of saving everyone’s ass, at least the asses of the people that mattered, that maybe this wannabe luminary captain of industry—or at least luminary captain of a department within that industry—could save the day. Unfortunately, this is not reasoning that Stanley Novartny cares to consider at the moment.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what you do, Pander, but don’t screw up this launch any more than you already have,” Novartny’s saying. “Pharmax has put more than $30 million into the Ziperal TR campaign, into this Fatico Dystopia crap you created. You fuck it up and you and that little shit Eugene Throng aren’t the only ones going down. And trust me, if you bring me down with you ... I don’t think I need to spell this out. You might be a fool, but you aren’t stupid. Do whatever it takes.”

  There’s a beep and the line goes silent.

  “Sir? Mr. Novartny?”

  “I think he hung up,” says Eugene, as shrill and high-pitched as ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if bats crash into walls every time he opens his mouth.

  “Oh, so you can speak after all?” Missy shoves the phone off her desk. The black plastic casing shatters as it hits the floor. “You shit. You could have backed me up here.”

  “With what?” Eugene squeaks. “You want to tell him that I’m overreacting, that I’m just being an alarmist? You want to tell him that our best hope is that you’re wrong, that maybe nobody outside of us knows about the drug’s complications, that all of the documents and studies and rats are just hiding in some safe place? Hey, maybe the rat opened a safety deposit box. How about that?”

  “Fine, so you can speak. Now please just shut up.”

  “No, I won’t shut up,” says Eugene, who, despite the fact that he’s in as hot a pot of water as she is, is feeling mildly gratified at having watched the color drain from Missy Pander’s immaculately painted face while she was getting berated by their boss. “You want to say that maybe Olivia Zack never mentioned anything to her best friend, the very same person who blackmailed you, the same person who put you in touch with the Mafioso thug to begin with? Are you comfortable with that?”

  He gets off the couch and leans over the broken phone. “Hey, Novartny, no worries! It’s all cool. That Polly chick, the one with the connections to the mafia? No need to concern yourself with her. She’s chill!”

  “Are you done?”

  “Yes,” Eugene says, impressed with the uncharacteristic chutzpah he’s just shown. He makes a mental note that at one and a half times the normal dosing, the drug continues to have a positive effect, at least on him, and the negative ones are still in check. He suppresses his smile as he returns to his spot on the sofa.

  Missy turns her back to him and stares out her wall of windows, contemplating the possible loss of her billion-dollar view.

  “Damn it,” she says, her back to Eugene. “I have to get to her. I have to find out what Polly knows. I have to make sure she stays quiet, whatever it takes.”

  Eugene shakes his head, almost enjoying himself. “Are you forgetting that when you had Olivia killed, your hit man went down as well? You think you have time to shop around for a new one? They don’t just come off the rack at Barney’s, you know. So good luck with that.”

  Missy frowns. “Fine, Mr. Genius, what exactly do you think we should do then? You know, had you actually done your job right the first time around, we wouldn’t even be in this situation. You destroyed all the negative studies in the company files. Almost all of them. How was I supposed to know we were repackaging such a flawed drug?”

  “It wasn’t that flawed,” Eugene squeaked. “The first release got FDA approval.”

  “That doesn’t even deserve a response. You know better than anyone here how meaningless that is. That administrator over there has company stock, or it was funneled to his wife or something. Either way, he’s a sold-out hack. He’s totally in our pocket.”

  “Regardless, it wasn’t my idea to create a new disorder with a prescription that called for a doubling of the dosage.”

  “Well, had you alerted anyone to your initial findings that higher dosing was so dangerous, maybe I wouldn’t have.” Missy shut down her computer and started packing up her briefcase. This conversation would get them nowhere. There was no point in parsing it out. They’d both done what they’d done because that was what their jobs had demanded of them.

  “Wait a second.” Eugene grabs Missy’s coat sleeve as she begins to walk out the door.

  “What now?”

  “Just a month.”

  “What?”

  “We just have to keep her quiet for a month. That’s nothing.” A slight grin began to spread across his face. “She couldn’t even submit the papers to publications with such little lead time, at least none that would take her seriously. An unaffiliated layperson? Forget it.”

  Missy rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “So, what grand idea are you concocting now?”

  “Nothing. Just trying to get some perspective. Look, all we need to do is let the marketing campaign get off the ground, let them put on a grand show at the annual convention. We don’t need to wait for FDA approval for Ziperal TR to establish Pharmax as the groundbreaker for this new disease; we just need people to be anticipating the drug’s release. We can sit back and watch the stock prices soar and then sell all our options and quit our jobs before the drug actually hits market, before the inevitable lawsuits started popping up. Based on precedent, it’s the company that will go down, not the individuals responsible. Remember the Neurontin case? Name one executive who was held responsible for any wrongdoing. I’ll bet you can’t.”

  With a fist on her hip, Missy sized Eugene up and down. “My, aren’t we suddenly Mr. Confident. What drug are you on?”

  51

  November 22 (A.D.)

  A Few Weeks After My Death.

  Thanksgiving.

  “I’ll take some more of that cranberry sauce, if you don’t mind.” Polly’s mom points across the table at the large ceramic bowl resting in front of Mitya. “Just a little bit.”

  “Sure,” he says with an eager smile. “Here you go.” Mitya scoops up a small portion and stretches his arm to dump it on Mrs. Warner’s plate. It lands on the table instead, splattering across the linen like a bird smashing into a picture window. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” he says, jumping up to help clean up the mess, only to knock an almost full wine glass onto the turkey platter. “Oh, sh—” man, I’m so sorry, I—”

  “No, no. Don’t be silly,” says Dr. Warner. “Happens all the time.” With a hearty laugh, the doctor pours his own wine onto his plate, drenching his dinner. “Hey, it’s proba
bly better than the gravy I made. Polly, you try it.”

  “Dad!” Polly looks at him like he’s possessed.

  In response, he takes her wine and splashes it across the entire table, saturating everything from the sweet potatoes to the fresh baked bread. “Oops! Seems like I missed the plate.”

  You’ve got to love this man. His daughter brings the mysterious boyfriend—and his family!—home for Thanksgiving. Everybody’s a nervous wreck, but just like that, swoosh, he cuts the tension right in half. Within seconds, everyone—Mitya, Polly, Polly’s parents, her great aunt Rosie, even Zhanya and Ivan—has spilled his or her drink and is celebrating and laughing with bacchanalian revelry.

  “A toast!” Dr. Warner holds up a bottle and refills each empty glass.

  “Oh, no!” Polly says, smiling and shaking her head. “Please don’t embarrass me, Dad!”

  Dr. Warner lovingly squeezes his daughter’s shoulder with one hand while he holds up his wine in the other, his face suddenly somber. “This is for Olivia,” he begins. “This is our first Thanksgiving without her since you girls started college. We miss her terribly, and wish more than anything that she could be here with us tonight.”

  Everyone raises a glass. “To Olivia,” they all say, nodding their heads solemnly.

  And then it’s silent. Polly’s mother fights back a tear. Her father stares at the napkin in his lap. Mitya gives Polly a gentle kiss on the cheek. After all, what is there to say?

  Actually, there’s quite a lot.

  Polly had been very specific when she asked her parents to open up their Thanksgiving. They had actually considered canceling it, given that it was happening so close to my death, but then Polly told her parents that she’d realized how important it was to celebrate one’s family and friends while you still had them. She said she wanted them to meet her boyfriend, his family as well. Oh, yeah, she said, she’d been dating this guy since June and it was starting to get serious. Sorry she hadn’t mentioned it before. But now she wanted them to meet him and his closest family. She wanted them to get a sense of where he came from. They responded enthusiastically and planned for an elaborate meal. And all of this was well and good, of course, but the truth—the real reason she wanted everyone at this table—was much bigger—and much more complicated—than she had allowed.