“It was two old cars, Ned. They made this block look pretty shabby, but Annie made you get rid of them.”
“I remember. That’s why you bought the house, because you didn’t want to see me bring home any more old cars that I like to fix. That’s why when your wife wanted to phone Annie and make sure it was all right with her if you bought my property, you wouldn’t let her call. And Mrs. Schafley, you knew Annie would be heartbroken if the house was gone. You didn’t call her, either. You didn’t help her save her house because you wanted me out of here.”
Guilt was written on both their faces, Harnik’s blustery red face and Mrs. Schafley’s wrinkled cheeks. Maybe they had loved Annie, but not enough that they hadn’t conspired to take her home away from her.
Don’t show them how you really feel, he warned himself again. Don’t give yourself away. “I’ll be going,” he said. “But I thought you should realize that I know what both of you were up to, and I hope you burn in hell for it.”
He turned his back to them and walked out of the house and down the path to the car. Just as he opened the door, he spotted a tulip pushing its way up near where the walk to their house had been. He could see Annie on her knees last year planting the bulbs.
He ran over, bent down, plucked the tulip, and held it up to heaven. It was his promise to Annie that he would avenge her. Lynn Spencer, Carley DeCarlo, his landlady Mrs. Morgan, Harry Harnik, Mrs. Schafley. What about Harnik’s wife, Bess? As he got in the car and drove away, Ned considered, then added Bess Harnik to the list. She could have called Annie on her own and warned her about the impending sale of the house. She didn’t deserve to live, either.
THIRTEEN
I wasn’t sure if I’d be intruding on Dr. Ken Page’s territory when I went back to the Pleasantville office of Gen-stone, but it was something I felt I had to do immediately. As I drove down I-95 from Connecticut to Westchester, I turned over in my mind the possibility that whoever had come to collect Dr. Spencer’s records had been from an investigating firm, maybe even one hired by the company itself.
In his speech at the stockholders’ meeting, Charles Wallingford had claimed, or at least insinuated, that the missing money and the problem with the vaccine were totally shocking and unexpected occurrences. But months before Spencer’s plane crashed, somebody had collected those old records. Why?
“I haven’t as much time as I thought.” That was what Nick Spencer said to Dr. Broderick. Not enough time for what? To cover his tracks? To secure a future in a new location with a new name, maybe a new face, and millions of dollars? Or was there some totally different reason? And why did my mind keep coming back to that possibility?
* * *
This time when I arrived at company headquarters, I asked for Dr. Celtavini and said it was urgent. His secretary asked me to wait. It was a good minute and a half before she said that Dr. Celtavini was busy, but his assistant, Dr. Kendall, would see me.
The laboratory building was behind and to the right of the executive office headquarters and reached by a long corridor. There, a guard examined my purse and sent me through a metal detector. I waited in a reception area until Dr. Kendall came for me.
She was serious-looking, aged anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five, and had a full head of straight, dark hair and a determined chin.
She brought me to her office. “I met Dr. Page from your magazine yesterday,” she said. “He spent a considerable amount of time with Dr. Celtavini and me. I would have thought that we had succeeded in answering all his questions.”
“There is one question that would not have occurred to Ken Page because it has to do with something I just learned this morning, Dr. Kendall,” I said. “It is my understanding that Nicholas Spencer’s initial interest in the vaccine was triggered by his father’s research in his home laboratory.”
She nodded. “That is what I’ve been told.”
“Dr. Spencer’s earlier records were being kept for Nick Spencer by the doctor who bought his house in Caspien, Connecticut. Someone who purported to be from Gen-stone went up and got them last fall.”
“Why do you say ‘purported to be from Gen-stone’?”
I turned. Dr. Celtavini was at the door. “The reason I say it is that Nick Spencer personally went to get those records and, according to Dr. Broderick who was holding them, was visibly upset to learn that they were gone.”
It was hard to judge the reaction on Dr. Celtavini’s face. Surprise? Concern? Or was it something more than that, something more like sadness? I’d have given anything to be able to read his mind.
“Do you have the name of the person who took the records?” Dr. Kendall asked.
“Dr. Broderick does not remember his name. He described him as a well-dressed man with reddish brown hair who was about forty years old.”
They looked at each other. Dr. Celtavini shook his head. “I don’t know any such person connected with the laboratory. Perhaps Nick Spencer’s secretary, Vivian Powers, could help you.”
I had a dozen questions I would have liked to ask Dr. Celtavini. My instinct told me that the man was at war with himself. Yesterday he had said that he despised Nick Spencer not only because of his duplicity but because his own reputation had been tarnished. There was no question in my mind that he was sincere about that, but I still felt something else was going on in his head. Then he addressed Dr. Kendall. “Laura, if we were sending for records, wouldn’t we be likely to use our own delivery people?”
“I think so, Doctor.”
“I do, too. Ms. DeCarlo, do you have Dr. Broderick’s number? I’d like to talk with him.”
I gave it to him and left. I did stop at the reception desk and confirmed that if Mr. Spencer wanted something of a business nature delivered to him, he would almost certainly use one of the three men employed for just that purpose. I also asked to see Vivian Powers, but she had taken the day off.
When I left Gen-stone, I was pretty sure of at least one thing: The guy with reddish brown hair who picked up Dr. Spencer’s notes from Dr. Broderick was not authorized to take them.
The question was, where did those notes go? And what important information, if any, did they contain?
FOURTEEN
I’m not sure when I started to fall in love with Casey Dillon. Maybe it was years ago. His full name is Kevin Curtis Dillon, but all his life he’s been called Casey, just the way I, Marcia, have been known as Carley. He’s an orthopedic surgeon in the Hospital for Special Surgery. Way back when we both lived in Ridgewood and I was a high school sophomore, he invited me to his senior prom. I had a crush on him that wouldn’t go away, but then he went to college and didn’t give me the time of day when he came home. Big shot, I remind him.
We bumped into each other about six months ago in the lobby of an off-Broadway theater. I had gone there on my own; he was there with a date. A month later he called me. Two weeks after that, he called me again. It’s very clear that Dr. Dillon, a handsome thirty-six-year-old surgeon, is not longing for my company too often. Now he calls me regularly, but not that regularly.
I will say that, wary as I am of having my heart broken again, I love every moment I’m with Casey. I was absolutely shocked when I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of months ago and realized I’d been dreaming that he and I were shopping for the cocktail napkins we would have at our parties. In the dream I could even see our names written in curlicues across them: “Casey and Carley.” How cute can you possibly get?
Most of our dates are planned ahead, but when I got home from my rather long day, there was a call on my answering machine: “Carley, want to grab a bite?”
It sounded like a great idea to me. Casey lives on West 85th Street, and often we just meet at a midtown restaurant. I called him, left a message saying okay, made careful notes of the day’s events, and then decided that a hot shower was in order.
The nozzle on my shower has been replaced twice, which hasn’t helped. It still squirts, then gushes water; the temperature cha
nge is downright traumatizing, and I couldn’t help reflecting on how nice it would be to soak in a warm and bubbly Jacuzzi. I had intended that when I bought my own apartment, I’d definitely bite the bullet and have one of those heavenly inventions installed. Now, thanks to my investment in Gen-stone, that Jacuzzi is a long way off.
Casey returned the call as I was drying my hair. We agreed that Chinese food at Shun Lee West was a splendid idea and that we’d meet there at eight o’clock and make it an early night. He had surgery scheduled in the morning, and I needed to get prepared for my nine o’clock meeting in the office with the guys.
I got to Shun Lee’s promptly at eight. Casey looked settled in a booth as though he’d been there a while. I joke that he makes me feel late even when he could set his watch by me. We ordered wine, looked over the menu, debated, and agreed to share the shrimp tempura and spicy chicken. Then we got caught up on the last couple of weeks.
I told him about being hired by Wall Street Weekly, and he was properly impressed. Then I told him about the cover story on Nicholas Spencer and began to think out loud, something I tend to do when I’m with Casey.
“My problem,” I said as I bit into an egg roll, “is that the level of anger I see directed at Spencer is so personal. Sure, it’s the money, and for some it’s only the money, but for many people, it’s bigger than that. They have an absolute sense of betrayal.”
“They thought of him as a god who would put healing hands on them and make them or their sick child well,” Casey said. “As a doctor I see the hero worship we get when we pull a very sick patient through a crisis. Spencer promised to free the whole world from the threat of cancer. When the vaccine failed, he may have gone over the edge.”
“What do you mean, ‘over the edge’?”
“Carley, for whatever reason, he took money. The vaccine failed. He’s going to be disgraced and has nowhere to go except prison. I wonder how much insurance he was carrying. Has anyone checked that out?”
“I’m sure Don Carter, who’s writing the business end of our story, will do that if he hasn’t already. Then you think that Nick Spencer may have deliberately chosen to crash the plane?”
“He wouldn’t be the first to take that way out.”
“No, I guess he wouldn’t.”
“Carley, I can tell you that research laboratories are hotbeds of gossip. I’ve talked to some of the guys I know. The word has been drifting around for some months that at Gen-stone the final results weren’t holding up.”
“You think Spencer knew that?”
“If everyone else in the business did, I don’t know how he’d miss hearing it as well. Let me give you a tip—pharmaceuticals are a multibillion-dollar business, and Gen-stone isn’t the only one trying desperately to cure cancer. The company which finds the magic bullet will have a patent that’s worth billions. Don’t kid yourself. The other companies are cheering that Spencer’s vaccine isn’t proving out. There isn’t one of them who isn’t working frantically to be the winner. Money and the Nobel prize are pretty good incentives.”
“You’re not exactly placing the medical profession in the best light, Doctor,” I said.
“I don’t mean to place it in any one light. I’m telling it as it is. It’s the same way with hospitals. We’re in competition for patients. Patients bring in income. Income means hospitals can keep up with the latest equipment. How do you attract patients? By having top doctors on staff. Why do you think doctors who’ve made a name in their field are constantly being recruited? There’s a tug of war over them, and always has been.
“I have friends in hospital research labs who tell me they’re always on the watch for spies. Stealing information about new drugs and vaccines is going on all the time. And even without outright theft, the race to be the one to discover the latest wonder drug or vaccine goes on twenty-four/seven. That’s what Nick Spencer was up against.”
I picked up on the word “spies” and thought of the stranger who had picked up the files from Dr. Broderick’s office. I told Casey about him.
“Carley, you’re saying that Nick Spencer took his father’s files twelve years ago and that some unauthorized person went back for the remainder of them last fall. Doesn’t that say to you that someone thought there might be value in them, and came to that conclusion before Spencer himself made that determination?”
“ ‘I don’t have as much time as I thought’—Casey, that was the last thing Spencer said to Dr. Broderick, and that was only six weeks before his plane crashed. I keep puzzling over that.”
“What do you think he meant?” Casey asked.
“I don’t know. But how many people do you think he would have told about leaving his father’s early notes in his old family home? I mean, when you move out and another family takes over, it’s not as though they want to keep storage bins for you. This was a special set of circumstances. The doctor had hoped to work in his own lab as a hobby. But then he claims he used the space for examination rooms.”
Our entrees arrived, steaming and bubbly, looking and smelling heavenly. I realized that I had not eaten a single thing since the bagel and coffee in the diner. I also realized that after I met with Ken Page and Don Carter at the office the next morning, I was going to have to take another ride to Caspien.
I had been surprised that Dr. Broderick saw me so readily this morning. It was equally surprising that he so quickly volunteered that he’d been in possession of some of Dr. Spencer’s records and that only months ago he had turned them over to a messenger, whose name he couldn’t remember. Spencer had always credited his father’s preliminary research as assisting in the development of Gen-stone. He had left those records behind at Broderick’s request. They ought to have been treated with great care.
Maybe they had been, I thought. Maybe there was no redheaded man.
“Casey, you’re a good thinking post for me,” I told him as I began to concentrate on the shrimp. “Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist.”
“All doctors are psychiatrists, Carley. Some of them just haven’t discovered that yet.”
FIFTEEN
It felt good to be at Wall Street Weekly, to have a cubicle of my own, a desk of my own, a computer of my own. Maybe there are some people who long only for the open road, but I’m not one of them. Not that I don’t love to travel—I do. I have done profiles on famous or at least well-known people that have taken me to Europe and South America, even one to Australia, but after I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, I’m ready to go home.
Home for me is the great, marvelous, wonderful piece of real estate called Manhattan Island. East side, west side, all around the town. I love to walk through it on a quiet Sunday and feel the presence of the buildings that my great-grandparents saw when they arrived in New York, one from the Emerald Isle, the other from Tuscany.
All of the above ran through my head as I put a few personal items in my new desk and went over my notes for the meeting that would take place in Ken’s office.
In the world of deadlines and breaking news, there’s very little waste of time. Ken, Don, and I exchanged greetings and got down to business. Ken settled behind his desk. He was wearing a sweater and an open shirt and looked for all the world like a retired football player. “You first, Don,” he said.
Don, small and neat, flipped though his notes. “Spencer went with the Jackman Medical Supply Company fourteen years ago after getting an MBA at Cornell. At that time it was a struggling, privately owned family company. With his father-in-law’s help, he ended up buying the Jackman family out. Eight years ago, when he founded Gen-stone, he folded the medical-supply business into it and went public to finance the research. That’s the division he’s been looting.
“He’d bought the house in Bedford and the New York apartment,” Don said. “Bedford initially cost three million, but with renovations and the escalation of prices in the real estate market, it was worth a lot more when it was torched. The apartment was purchased for four million, and then some
money went into it. It wasn’t one of those astronomically priced penthouses or duplexes, which is what some of the articles about him painted it out to be. Incidentally, both house and apartment had mortgages that were eventually paid off.”
I remembered Lynn had told me that she had been living in his first wife’s home and apartment.
“The looting of the medical-supplies division started years ago. A year-and-a-half ago he started borrowing against his own stock. Nobody knows why.”
“To keep this in sequence, I’ll jump in here,” Ken said. “That was at the time when, according to Dr. Celtavini, problems started to turn up in the laboratory. Subsequent generations of mice that were getting the vaccine were beginning to develop cancer cells. Spencer probably realized that the house of cards was about to fall and began to really loot the company. The feeling is that the meeting in Puerto Rico was just a step on his way to fleeing the country. Then his luck ran out.”
“He told the doctor who bought his father’s house that he didn’t have as much time as he thought,” I said. Then I told them about the records that Dr. Broderick claimed he had given to a man with reddish brown hair who said he was from Spencer’s office.
“What I found hard to swallow,” I said, “is that any doctor would hand over research files without checking to be sure the request was valid, or at least getting a signed receipt for them.”
“Any chance that someone in the company was getting suspicious of Spencer?” Don suggested.
“Not according to what was said at the stockholders’ meeting,” I said. “And it certainly was news to Dr. Celtavini that the files even existed. I think that if anyone might be interested in the early experiments of an amateur microbiologist, it would be someone like him.”