Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  “It’s fine.” Farley copied down the names and some other information and then handed a card to Covey. “Just take that to your lawyer.”

  The old man nodded. “His office is only a few miles from here. I could see him today.”

  “Just bring us a copy of the will.” He didn’t add what Covey, of course, a savvy businessman, knew. That if the will was not altered, or if he changed it later, the foundation wouldn’t do the cloning. They had the final say.

  “What about the . . . transition?”

  Farley said, “That’s your choice. Entirely up to you. Tomorrow or next year. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  At the door Covey paused and turned back, shook Farley’s hand. He gave a faint laugh. “Who would’ve thought? Forever.”

  ∞

  In Greek mythology Eos was the goddess of dawn and she was captivated with the idea of having human lovers. She fell deeply in love with a mortal, Tithonos, the son of the king of Troy, and convinced Zeus to let him live forever.

  The god of gods agreed. But he neglected one small detail: granting him youth as well as immortality. While Eos remained unchanged Tithonos grew older and more decrepit with each passing year until he was so old he was unable to move or speak. Horrified, Eos turned him into an insect and moved on to more suitable paramours.

  Dr. William Farley thought of this myth now, sitting at his desk in the Lotus Research Foundation. The search for immortality’s always been tough on us poor humans, he reflected. But how doggedly we ignore the warning in Tithonos’s myth—and the logic of science—and continue to look for ways to cheat death.

  Farley glanced at a picture on his desk. It showed a couple, arm in arm—younger versions of those in a second picture on his credenza. His parents, who’d died in an auto accident when Farley was in medical school.

  An only child, desperately close to them, he took months to recover from the shock. When he was able to resume his studies, he decided he’d specialize in emergency medicine—devoting his to saving lives threatened by trauma.

  But the young man was brilliant—too smart for the repetitious mechanics of ER work. Lying awake nights he would reflect about his parents’ deaths and he took some reassurance that they were, in a biochemical way, still alive within him. He developed an interest in genetics, and that was the subject he began to pursue in earnest.

  Months, then years, of manic twelve-hour days doing research in the field resulted in many legitimate discoveries. But this also led to some ideas that were less conventional, even bizarre—consciousness cloning, for instance.

  Not surprisingly, he was either ignored or ridiculed by his peers. His papers were rejected by professional journals, his grant requests turned down. The rejection didn’t discourage him, though he grew more and more desperate to find the millions of dollars needed to research his theory. One day—about seven years ago—nearly penniless and living in a walk-up beside one of Westbrook’s commuter train lines, he’d gotten a call from an old acquaintance. The man had heard about Farley’s plight and had an idea.

  “You want to raise money for your research?” he’d asked the impoverished medico. “It’s easy. Find really sick, really wealthy patients and sell them immortality.”

  “What?”

  “Listen,” the man had continued. “Find patients who’re about to die anyway. They’ll be desperate. You package it right, they’ll buy it.”

  “I can’t sell them anything yet,” Farley had replied. “I believe I can make this work. But it could take years.”

  “Well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made. You can pick up ten million overnight, twenty. That’d buy some pretty damn nice research facilities.”

  Farley had been quiet, considering those words. Then he’d said, “I could keep tissue samples, I suppose, and then when we actually can do the cloning, I could bring them back then.”

  “Hey, there you go,” said the doctor. Something in the tone suggested to Farley that he didn’t think the process would ever work. But the man’s disbelief was irrelevant if he could help Farley get the money he needed for research.

  “Well, all right,” Farley said to his colleague—whose name was Anthony Sheldon, of the cardiology department at Westbrook Hospital, a man who was as talented an entrepreneur as he was a cardiovascular surgeon.

  Six years ago they’d set up the Lotus Research Foundation, an in vitro clinic and a network of bogus charities. Dr. Sheldon, whose office was near the Cardiac Support Center, would finagle a look at the files of patients there and would find the richest and sickest. Then he’d arrange for them to be contacted by the Lotus Foundation and Farley would sell them the program.

  Farley had truly doubted that anybody would buy the pitch but Sheldon had coached him well. The man had thought of everything. He found unique appeals for each potential client and gave Farley this information to snare them. In the case of the Bensons, for instance, Sheldon had learned how much they loved each other. His pitch to them was that this was the chance to be together forever, as they so poignantly noted in their suicide note. With Robert Covey, Sheldon had learned about his estranged son, so Farley added the tactical mention that a client could have a second chance to connect with children.

  Sheldon had also come up with one vital part of the selling process. He made sure the patients got high doses of Luminux (even the coffee that Covey had just been drinking, for instance, was laced with the drug). Neither doctor believed that anyone would sign up for such a far-fetched idea without the benefit of some mind-numbing Mickey Finn.

  The final selling point was, of course, the desperate desire of people facing death to believe what Farley promised them.

  And that turned out to be one hell of a hook. The Lotus Research Foundation had earned almost 93 million in the past six years.

  Everything had gone fine—until recently, when their greed got the better of them. Well, got the better of Sheldon. They’d decided that the cardiologist would never refer his own patients to the foundation—and would wait six months or a year between clients. But Tony Sheldon apparently had a mistress with very expensive taste and had lost some serious money in the stock market recently. Just after the Bensons signed up, the Whitleys presented themselves. Although Sam Whitley was a patient, they were far too wealthy to pass up and so Farley reluctantly yielded to Sheldon’s pressure to go ahead with the plan.

  But they learned that, though eager to proceed, Sam Whitley had wanted to reassure himself that this wasn’t pure quackery and he’d tracked down some technical literature about the computers used in the technique and genetics in general. After the patients had died, Farley and Sheldon had to find this information in his house, burn it and scour the place for any other evidence that might lead back to the foundation.

  The intrusion, though, must’ve alerted the police to the possibility that the families’ deaths were suspicious. Officers had actually interviewed Sheldon, sending a jolt of panic through Farley. But then a scapegoat stumbled into the picture: Mac McCaffrey, a young nurse/counselor at the Cardiac Support Center. She was seeing their latest recent prospect—Robert Covey—as she’d been working with the Bensons and the Whitleys. This made her suspect to start with. Even better was her reluctance to admit she’d seen the Bensons; after their suicide the nurse had apparently lied about them and had stolen their files from the CSC. A perfect setup. Sheldon had used his ample resources to bribe a pharmacist at the CSC to doctor the logs and give him a couple of wholesale bottles containing a few Luminux tablets, to make it look like she’d been drugging patients for some time. Farley, obsessed with death and dying, had a vast library of articles on euthanasia and suicide. He copied several dozen of these. The drugs and the articles they planted in the nurse’s garage—insurance in case they needed somebody to take the fall.

  Which they had. And now the McCaffrey woman had just been hauled off to jail.

  A whole ‘nother story, as Covey had said.

  The nurse’s arrest had troubled Farle
y. He’d speculated out loud about telling the police that she was innocent. But Sheldon reminded him coolly what would happen to them and the foundation if Farley did that and he relented.

  Sheldon had said, “Look, we’ll do one more—this Covey—and then take a break. A year. Two years.”

  “No. Let’s wait.”

  “I checked him out,” Sheldon said, “He’s worth over fifty million.”

  “I think it’s too risky.”

  “I’ve thought about that.” With the police still looking into the Benson and Whitley suicides, Sheldon explained, it’d be better to have the old man die in a mugging or hit and run, rather than killing himself.

  “But,” Farley had whispered, “you mean murder?”

  “A suicide’ll be way too suspicious.”

  “We can’t.”

  But Sheldon had snapped, “Too late for morality, Doctor. You made your deal with the devil. You can’t renegotiate now.” And hung up.

  Farley stewed for a while but finally realized the man was right; there was no going back. And, my, what he could do with another $25 million. . . .

  His secretary buzzed him on the intercom.

  “Mr. Covey’s back, sir.”

  “Show him in.”

  Covey walked into the office. They shook hands again and Covey sat. As cheerful and blinky as most patients on seventy-five milligrams of Luminux. He happily took another cup of special brew then reached into his jacket pocket and displayed a copy of the codicil to the will. “Here you go.”

  Though Farley wasn’t a lawyer he knew what to look for; the document was in proper form.

  They shook hands formally.

  Covey finished his coffee and Farley escorted him to the lab, where he would undergo the MRI and give a blood sample, making the nervous small talk that the clients always made at this point in the process.

  The geneticist shook his hand and told him he’d made the right decision. Covey thanked Farley sincerely, with a hopeful smile on his face that was, Farley knew, only partly from the drug. He returned to his office and the doctor picked up the phone, called Anthony Sheldon. “Covey’s changed the will. He’ll be leaving here in about fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll take care of him now,” Sheldon said and hung up.

  Farley sighed and dropped the received into the cradle. He stripped off his suit jacket then pulled on a white lab coat. He left his office and fled up the hall to the research lab, where he knew he would find solace in the honest world of science, safe from all his guilt and sins, as if they were barred entry by the double-sealed doors of the airlock.

  Robert Covey was walking down the street, feeling pretty giddy, odd thoughts going through his head.

  Thinking of his life—the way he’d lived it. And the people who’d touched him and whom he’d touched. A foreman in the Bedford plant, who’d worked for the company for forty years . . . The men in his golfing foursome . . . Veronica . . . His brother . . .

  His son, of course.

  Still no call from Randy. And for the first time it occurred to him that maybe there was a reason the boy—well, young man—had been ignoring him. He’d always assumed he’d been such a good father. But maybe not.

  Nothing makes you question your life more closely than when somebody’s trying to sell you immortality.

  Walking toward the main parking garage, Covey noted that the area was largely deserted. He saw only a few grungy kids on skateboards, a pretty redhead across the street, two men getting out of a white van parked near an alley.

  He paid attention only to the men, because they were large, dressed in what looked like cheap suits and, with a glance up and down, started in his direction.

  Covey soon forgot them, though, and concentrated again on his son. Thinking about his decision not to tell the boy about his illness. Maybe withholding things like this had been a pattern in Covey’s life. Maybe the boy had felt excluded.

  He laughed to himself. Maybe he should leave a message about what he and Farley had just been talking about. Lord have mercy, what he wouldn’t give to see Randy’s reaction when he listened to that! He could—

  Covey slowed, frowning.

  What was this?

  The two men from the van were now jogging—directly toward him. He hesitated and shied back. Suddenly the men split up. One stopped and turned his back to Covey, scanning the sidewalk, while the other sped up, springing directly toward the old man. Then simultaneously they both pulled guns from under their coats.

  No!

  He turned to run, thinking that sprinting would probably kill him faster than the bullets. Not that it mattered. The man approaching him was fast and before Covey had a chance to take more than a few steps he was being pulled roughly into the alleyway behind him.

  ∞

  “No, what are you doing? Who are—”

  “Quiet!”

  The man pressed Covey against the wall.

  The other joined them but continued to gaze out over the street as he spoke into a walkie-talkie. “We’ve got him. No sign of hostiles. Move in, all units, move in!”

  From out on the street came the rushing sound of car engines and the bleats of siren.

  “Sorry, Mr. Covey. We had a little change of plans.” The man speaking was the one who’d pulled him into the alley. They both produced badges and ID cards of the Westbrook County Sheriff’s Department. “We work with Greg LaTour.”

  Oh, LaTour. . . He was the burly officer who, along with that skinny young officer named Talbot Simms, had come to his house early this morning with a truly bizarre story. This outfit called the Lotus Research Foundation might be running some kind of scam, targeting sick people, but the police weren’t quite sure how it worked. Had he been contacted by anyone there? When Covey had told them, yes, and that he was in fact meeting with its director, Farley, that afternoon they wondered if he’d be willing to wear a wire to find out what it was all about.

  Well, what it was all about was immortality . . . and it had been one hell of a scam.

  The plan was that after he stopped at Farley’s office and dropped off the fake codicil to his will (he executed a second one at the same time, voiding the one he’d given Farley), he was going to meet LaTour and Simms at a Starbucks not far away.

  But now the cops had something else in mind.

  “Who’re you?” Covey now asked. “Where’re Laurel and Hardy?” Meaning Simms and LaTour.

  The young officer who’d shoved him into the alley had blinked, not understanding the reference. He said, “Well, sir, what happened was we had a tap on the phone in Farley’s office. He called Sheldon to tell him about you and it seems they weren’t going to wait to try to talk you into killing yourself. Sheldon was going to kill you right away—make it look like a mugging or hit and run, we think.”

  Covey muttered, “You might’ve thought about that possibility up front.”

  There was a crackle in the mike/speaker of one of the officers. Covey couldn’t hear too well but the gist of it was that they’d arrested Dr. Anthony Sheldon just outside his office. They now stepped out of the alley and Covey observed a half dozen police officers escorting William Farley and three men in lab coats out of the Lotus Foundation offices in handcuffs.

  Covey observed the procession coolly, feeling contempt for the depravity of the foundation’s immortality scam, though also with a grudging admiration. A businessman to his soul, Robert Covey couldn’t help be impressed by someone who’d identified an inexhaustible market demand. Even if that product he sold was completely bogus.

  The itch had yet to be scratched. Tal’s office was still as sloppy as LaTour’s. The mess was driving him crazy, though Shellee seemed to think it was a step up on the evolutionary chain—for him to have digs that looked like everyone else’s.

  Captain Dempsey was sitting in the office, playing with one rolled-up sleeve, then the other. Greg LaTour too, his booted feet on the floor for a change, though the reason for this propriety seemed to be that Tal’s des
k was piled too high with paper to find a place to rest them.

  “How’d you tip to this scam of theirs?” the captain asked. “The Lotus Foundation?”

  Tal said, “Some things just didn’t add up.”

  “Haw.” From LaTour.

  Both the captain and Tal glanced at him.

  LaTour stopped smiling. “He’s the math guy. He says something didn’t add up. I thought it was a joke.” He grumbled, “Go on.”

  Tal explained that after he’d returned to the office following Mac’s arrest, he couldn’t get her out of his head.

  “Women do that,” LaTour said.

  “No, I mean there was something odd about the whole case,” he continued. “Issues I couldn’t reconcile. So I checked with Crime Scene—there was no Luminux in the port Mac was giving Covey. Then I went to see her in the lockup. She admitted she’d lied about not being the Bensons’ nurse. She said she destroyed their records at the Cardiac Support Center and that she was the one that the witnesses had seen the day they died. But she lied because she was afraid she’d lose her job—two of her patients killing themselves? When, to her, they seemed to be doing fine? It shook her up bad. That’s why she bought the suicide book. She bought it after I told her about it—she got the title from me. She wanted to know what to look for, to make sure nobody else died.”

  “And you believed her?” the captain asked.

  “Yes, I did. I asked Covey if she’d ever brought up suicide. Did he have any sense that she was trying to get him to kill himself. But he said, no. All she’d talked about at that meeting—when we arrested her—was how painful and hard it is to go through a tough illness alone. She’d figured that he hadn’t called his son, Randall, and told him, like he’d said. She gave him some port, got him relaxed and was trying to talk him into calling the boy.”

  “You said something about an opera show?” Dempsey continued, examining both sleeves and making sure they were rolled up to within a quarter inch of each other. Tal promised himself never to compulsively play with his tie knot again. His boss continued, “You said she lied about the time it was on.”