by Ed McBain
“You can go fuck yourself.”
The huge cop was laughing hard. “Shit, don’tcha feel like we’re finally breaking the ice here? I think we are. Now, I’ll drop you off back at your car, Einstein, and you can go on this secret mission all by your lonesome.”
His stated purpose was to ask her if she’d ever seen the mysterious woman in the baseball cap and sunglasses, driving a small car, at the Whitleys’ house.
Lame, Tal thought.
Lame and transparent—since he could’ve asked her that on the phone. He was sure the true mission here was so obvious that it was laughable: To get a feel for what would happen if he asked Mac McCaffrey out to dinner. Not to actually invite her out at this point, of course; she was, after all, a potential witness. No, he just wanted to test the waters.
Tal parked along Elm Street and climbed out of the car, enjoying the complicated smells of the April air, the skin-temperature breeze, the golden snowflakes of fallen forsythia petals covering the lawn.
Walking toward the park where he’d arranged to meet her, Tal reflected on his recent romantic life.
Fine, he concluded. It was fine.
He dated 2.66 women a month. The median age of his dates in the past 12 months was approximately 31 (a number skewed somewhat by the embarrassing—but highly memorable—outlier of a Columbia University senior). And the mean IQ of the women was around 140 or up—and that latter statistic was a very sharp bell curve with a very narrow standard deviation; Talbot Simms went for intellect before anything else.
It was this latter criteria, though, he’d come to believe lately, that led to the tepid adjective “fine.”
Yes, he’d had many interesting evenings with his 2% dates every month. He’d discussed with them Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. He’d argue about the validity of analyzing objects in terms of their primary qualities (“No way! I’m suspicious of secondary qualities too. . . . I mean, how ‘bout that? We have a lot in common!”) They’d draft mathematical formulae in crayon on the paper table coverings at the Crab House. They’d discuss Fermat’s Last Theorem until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. (These were not wholly academic encounters, of course; Tal Simms happened to have a full-size chalkboard in his bedroom).
He was intellectually stimulated by most of these women. He even learned things from them.
But he didn’t really have a lot of fun.
Mac McCaffrey, he believed, would be fun.
She’d sounded surprised when he’d called. Cautious too at first. But after a minute or two she’d relaxed and had seemed almost pleased at the idea that he wanted to meet with her.
He now spotted her in the park next to the Knickerbocker Home, which appeared to be a nursing facility, where she suggested they get together.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi there. Hope you don’t mind meeting outside. I hate to be cooped up.”
He recalled the Sierra Club posters in her office. “No, it’s beautiful here.”
Her sharp green eyes, set in her freckled face, looked away and took in the sights of the park. Tal sat down and they made small talk for five minutes or so. Finally she asked, “You started to tell me that you’re, what, a mathematician?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled. There was crookedness to her mouth, an asymmetry, which he found charming. “That’s pretty cool. You could be on a TV series. Like CSL or Law and Order, you know. Call it Math Cop.”
They laughed. He glanced down at her shoes, old black Reeboks, and saw they were nearly worn out. He noticed too a bare spot on the knee of her jeans. It’d been rewoven. He thought of cardiologist Anthony Sheldon’s designer wardrobe and huge office, and reflected that Mac worked in an entirely different part of the health care universe.
“So I was wondering,” she asked. “Why this interest in the Whitleys’ deaths?”
“Like I said. They were out of the ordinary.”
“I guess I mean, why are you interested? Did you lose somebody? To suicide, I mean.”
“Oh, no. My father’s alive. My mother passed away a while ago. A stroke.”
“I’m sorry. She must’ve been young.”
“Was, yes.”
She waved a bee away. “Is your dad in the area?”
“Nope. Professor in Chicago.”
“Math?”
“Naturally. Runs in the family.” He told her about Wall Street, the financial crimes, statistics.
“All that adding and subtracting. Doesn’t it get, I don’t know, boring?”
“Oh, no, just the opposite. Numbers go on forever. Infinite questions, challenges. And remember, math is a lot more than just calculations. What excites me is that numbers let us understand the world. And when you understand something you have control over it.”
“Control?” she asked, serious suddenly. “Numbers won’t keep you from getting hurt. From dying.”
“Sure they can,” he replied. “Numbers make car brakes work and keep airplanes in the air and let you call the fire department. Medicine, science.”
“I guess so. Never thought about it.” Another crooked smile. “You’re pretty enthusiastic about the subject.”
Tal asked, “Pascal?”
“Heard of him.”
“A philosopher. He was a prodigy at math but he gave it up completely. He said math was so enjoyable it had to be related to sex. It was sinful.”
“Hold on, mister,” she said, laughing. “You got some math porn you want to show me?”
Tal decided that the preliminary groundwork for the date was going pretty well. But, apropos of which, enough about himself. He asked, “How’d you get into your field?”
“I always liked taking care of people . . . or animals,” she explained. “Somebody’s pet’d get hurt, I’d be the one to try to help it. I hate seeing anybody in pain. I was going to go to med school but my mom got sick and, without a father around, I had to put that on hold—where it’s been for. . . . well, for a few years.”
No explanation about the missing father. But he sensed that, like him, she didn’t want to discuss dad. A common denominator among these particular members of the Four Percent Club.
She continued, looking at the nursing home door. “Why I’m doing this particularly? My mother, I guess. Her exit was pretty tough. Nobody really helped her. Except me, and I didn’t know very much. The hospital she was in didn’t give her any support. So after she passed I decided I’d go into the field myself. Make sure patients have a comfortable time at the end.”
“It doesn’t get you down?”
“Some times are tougher than others. But I’m lucky. I’m not all that religious but I do think there’s something there after we die.”
Tal nodded but he said nothing. He’d always wanted to believe in that something too but religion wasn’t allowed in the Simms household—nothing, that is, except the cold deity of numbers his father worshiped—and it seemed to Tal that if you don’t get hooked early by some kind of spiritualism, you’ll rarely get the bug later. Still, people do change. He recalled that the Bensons had been atheists but apparently toward the end had come to believe differently.
Together forever. . .
Mac was continuing, speaking of her job at the Cardiac Support Center. “I like working with the patients. And I’m good, if I do say so myself. I stay away from the sentiment, the maudlin crap. I knock back some scotch or wine with them. Watch movies, pig out on lowfat chips and popcorn, tell some good death and dying jokes.”
“No,” Tal said, frowning. “Jokes?”
“You bet. Here’s one: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. . . . Not screaming like the passengers in the car with him.”
Tal blinked then laughed hard. She was pleased he’d enjoyed it, he could tell. He said, “Hey, there’s a statistician joke. Want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“Statistics show that a person gets robbed every four minutes. And, man, is he getting tired of it.”
She smil
ed. “That really sucks.”
“Best we can do,” Tal said. Then after a moment he added, “But Dr. Dehoeven said that your support center isn’t all death and dying. There’s a lot of things you do to help before and after surgery.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Didn’t mean to neglect that. Exercise, diet, care giving, getting the family involved, psychotherapy.”
Silence for a moment, a silence that, he felt, was suddenly asking: what exactly was he doing here?
He said, “I have a question about the suicides. Some witnesses said they saw a woman in sunglasses and a beige baseball cap, driving a small car, at the Bensons’ house just before they killed themselves. I was wondering if you ever saw anyone like that around their house.”
A pause. “Me?” she asked, frowning. “I wasn’t seeing the Bensons, remember?”
“No, I mean at the Whitleys.”
“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “Their daughter came by a couple of times.”
“No, it wasn’t her.”
“They had a cleaning lady. But she drove a van. And I never saw her in a hat.”
Her voice had grown weaker and Tal knew that her mood had changed quickly. Probably the subject of the Whitleys had done it—raised the issue of whether there was anything else she might’ve done to keep them from dying.
Silence surrounded them, as dense as the humid April air, redolent with the scent of lilac. He began to think that it was a bad idea to mix a personal matter with a professional one—especially when it involved patients who had just died. Conversation resumed but it was now different, superficial, and, as if by mutual decision, they both glanced at their watches, said goodbye, then rose and headed down the same sidewalk in different directions.
Shellee appeared in the doorway of Tal’s office, where the statistician and LaTour were parked. “Found something,” she said in her Beantown accent.
“Yeah, whatsat?” LaTour asked, looking over a pile of documents that she was handing her boss.
She leaned close to Tal and whispered, “He just gonna move in here?”
Tal smiled and said to her, “Thanks, Detective.”
An eye-roll was her response.
“Where’d you get all that?” LaTour asked, pointing at the papers but glancing at her chest.
“The Internet,” Shellee snapped as she left. “Where else?”
“She got all that information from there?” the big cop asked, taking the stack and flipping through it.
Tal saw a chance for a bit of cop-cop jibe, now that, yeah, the ice was broken, and he nearly said to LaTour, you’d be surprised, there’s a lot more on line than wicked-sluts.com that you browse through in the wee hours. But then he recalled the silence when he asked about the cop’s family life.
That’s something else . . .
And he decided a reference to lonely nights at home was out of line. He kept the joke to himself.
LaTour handed the sheets to Tal. “I’m not gonna read all this crap. It’s got fucking numbers in it. Gimme the bottom line.”
Tal skimmed the information, much of which might have contained numbers but was still impossible for him to understand. It was mostly chemical jargon and medical formulae. But toward the end he found a summary. He frowned and read it again.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“We maybe have our perps.”
“No shit.”
The documents Shellee had found were from a consumer protection Web site devoted to medicine. They reported that the FDA was having doubts about Luminux because the drug trials showed that it had hallucinogenic properties. Several people in the trials had had psychotic episodes believed to have been caused by the drug. Others reported violent mood swings. Those with serious problems were a small minority of those in the trials, less than a tenth of one percent. But the reactions were so severe that the FDA was very doubtful about approving it.
But Shellee also found that the agency had approved Luminux a year ago, despite the dangers.
“Okay, got it,” LaTour said. “How’s this for a maybe, Einstein? Montrose slipped some money to somebody to get the drug approved and then kept an eye on the patients taking it, looking for anybody who had bad reactions.”
The cops speculated that he’d have those patients killed—making it look like suicide—so that no problems with Luminux ever surfaced. LaTour wondered if this was a realistic motive—until Tal found a printout that revealed that Luminux was Montrose’s only money-maker, to the tune of $78 million a year.
Their other postulate was that it had been Karen Billings—as patient relations director—who might have been the woman in the hat and sunglasses at the Bensons and who’d left the tire tracks and worn the gloves at the Whitleys. She’d spent time with them, given them overdoses, talked them into buying the suicide manual and helped them—what had Mac said? That was it: Helped them “exit.”
“Some fucking patient relations,” LaTour said. “That’s harsh.” Using his favorite adjective. “Let’s go see ‘em.”
Ignoring—with difficulty—the clutter on his desk, Tal opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out his pistol. He started to mount it to his belt but the holster clip slipped and the weapon dropped to the floor. He winced as it hit. Grimacing, Tal bent down and retrieved then hooked it on successfully.
As he glanced up he saw LaTour watching him with a faint smile on his face. “Do me a favor. It probably won’t come to it but if it does, lemme do the shooting, okay?”
∞
Nurse McCaffrey would be arriving soon.
No, “Mac” was her preferred name, Robert Covey reminded himself.
He stood in front of his liquor cabinet and finally selected a nice vintage port, a 1977. He thought it would go well with the Saga blue cheese and shrimp he’d had laid out for her, and the water crackers and nonfat dip for himself. He’d driven to the Stop ‘N’ Shop that morning to pick up the groceries.
Covey arranged the food, bottle and glasses on a silver tray. Oh, napkins. Forgot the napkins. He found some under the counter and set them out on the tray, which he carried into the living room. Next to it were some old scrapbooks he’d unearthed from the basement. He wanted to show her pictures—snapshots of his brother, now long gone, and his nieces, and his wife, of course. He also had many pictures of his son.
Oh, Randall. . .
Yep, he liked Mac a lot. It was scary how in minutes she saw right into him, perfectly.
It was irritating. It was good.
But one thing she couldn’t see through was the lie he’d told her.
“You see him much?”
“All the time.”
“When did you talk to him last?”
“The other day.”
“And you’ve told him all about your condition?”
“You bet.”
Covey called his son regularly, left messages on his phone at work and at home. But Randy never returned the calls. Occasionally he’d pick up, but it was always when Covey was calling from a different phone, so that the son didn’t recognize the number (Covey even wondered in horror if the man bought a caller ID phone mostly to avoid his father).
In the past week he’d left two messages at his son’s house. He’d never seen the place but pictured it being a beautiful high-rise somewhere in L.A., though Covey hadn’t been to California in years and didn’t even know if they had real high-rises there, the City of Angels being to earthquakes what trailer parks in the Midwest are to twisters.
In any case, whether his home was high-rise, low- or a hovel, his son had not returned a single call.
Why? he often wondered in despair. Why?
He looked back on his days as a young father. He’d spent much time at the office and traveling, yes, but he’d also devoted many, many hours to the boy, taking him to the Yankees games and movies, attending Randy’s recitals and Little League.
Something had happened, though, and in his twenties he’d drifted away. Covey had thought
maybe he’d gone gay, since he’d never married, but when Randy came home for Ver’s funeral he brought a beautiful young woman with him. Randy had been polite but distant and a few days afterward he’d headed back to the coast. It had been some months before they’d spoken again.
Why?. . .
Covey now sat down on the couch, poured himself a glass of the port, slowly to avoid the sediment, and sipped it. He picked up another scrapbook and began flipping through it.
He felt sentimental. And then sad and anxious. He rose slowly from the couch, walked into the kitchen and took two of his Luminux pills.
In a short while the drugs kicked in and he felt better, giddy. Almost carefree.
The book sagged in his hands. He reflected on the big question: Should he tell Randy about his illness and the impending surgery? Nurse Mac would want him to, he knew. But Covey wouldn’t do that. He wanted the young man to come back on his own or not at all. He wasn’t going to use sympathy as a weapon to force a reconciliation.
A glance at the clock on the stove. Mac would be here in fifteen minutes.
He decided to use the time productively and return phone calls. He confirmed his next appointment with Dr. Jenny and left a message with Charley Hanlon, a widower up the road, about going to the movies next weekend. He also made an appointment for tomorrow about some alternative treatments the hospital had suggested he look into. “Long as it doesn’t involve colonies, I’ll think about it,” Covey grumbled to the soft-spoken director of the program, who’d laughed and assured him that it did not.
He hung up. Despite the silky calm from the drug Covey had a moment’s panic. Nothing to do with his heart, his surgery, his mortality, his estranged son, tomorrow’s non-colonic treatment.
No, what troubled him: What if Mac didn’t like blue cheese? Covey rose and headed into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and began to forage for some other snacks.
“You can’t go in there.”
But in there they went.
LaTour and Tal pushed past the receptionist into the office of Daniel Montrose.