Silent Treatment (41 page)

“Come on, Harry,” Santana said. “You might get reprimanded, but you won’t get kicked out. Your lawyer’s too good. Listen, we’ll go take the posters down. They’ve been up most of the night now, and that means they’ve already succeeded in rankling Perchek, which is pretty much what I wanted them to do.”

“Rankling Perchek
. You are really a piece of work,” Harry said, not at all kindly. “Have you heard how many times the goddamn phone has rung since you got here? That’s a growing percentage of all the nutcases in Manhattan, each one convinced I can be conned out of fifty thousand dollars.
Rankling Perchek
. Santana, just get out of here. I’m having enough trouble with my enemies without getting blindsided by my so-called friends.”

Maura had heard enough.

“Listen, you two,” she snapped. “Sit down and shut up for a minute, both of you. I don’t care how you feel about one another, but neither of you operating alone has much chance of getting this Perchek. Harry, you’re a doctor, not a cop. And Ray, you can’t get inside hospitals, and that’s where your man is. You two need one another. Face it.”

Harry glared at Santana. Maura stalked across the room and stood over him, hands on hips.

“Do you guys want me to make you shake hands like, we used to do after fights in junior high school? Okay, then. We stick together, and we try to clear things with one another before we do them. Deal?”

“Deal,” the two men grumbled.

“Well, come on, then,” Maura cut in before they could get started again. “We’ve got some posters to take down.”

A small crowd clustered around the bulletin board outside the MMC surgical suite. There were nurses, technicians, and physicians, including an anesthesiologist, an ENT specialist, and Caspar Sidonis. Everyone, it seemed, was talking at once about the posters that had appeared overnight throughout the hospital.

“You know,” one of the nurses said, pointing to the rendering of Perchek with a beard, “I actually think I’ve seen this guy.”

“Janine,” another nurse said, “since you kicked Billy out last year you’ve seen most of the guys in the city.”

“Not funny,” Janine said.

“I agree, Janine,” Sidonis said. “And neither is this … this latest humiliation for our hospital.” At the first words from the cardiac surgical chief, all extraneous conversation stopped. “Everyone in the hospital knows that Harry Corbett killed his wife. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing her and so he killed her. It’s as simple as that. These drawings are just a smoke screen, a misdirection play. The man is absolutely certifiable, and so is the woman who drew these. They are the product of an alcoholic’s distorted mind, and nothing more. You’ll all see. I’ve had it up to here with Corbett and the way he’s manipulating everyone in the place. Fifty-thousand-dollar reward, indeed.”

Embarrassed by the surgeon’s rambling outburst and the stories they all knew about his involvement with the murdered woman, the crowd quickly dispersed. As Sidonis turned to go, he nearly collided with a man in a full-length lab coat, whose photo badge identified him as Heinrich
Hauser, a research professor from the department of endocrinology.

“I agree with you completely, Doctor,” Hauser said in a dense German accent. “This Corbett makes trouble for everyone.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Sidonis replied.

He glanced at the man, who was four or five inches shorter than he was, with gray-white, crew-cut hair, thick glasses, and yellowed teeth. The teeth disgusted Sidonis. Instinctively, he backed away, fearing a blast of bad breath. He had not seen the man before that he could remember, but he seldom took notice of anyone with whom he didn’t have important business.

“Have a good day, now,” Hauser said.

“Yes. You, too.” Sidonis paused and looked at the man once more. “Have we met?”

The man’s ocher smile prompted Sidonis to look away.

“I don’t think so, Doctor,” he said. “But perhaps we shall meet again sometime.”

By nightfall the three-day heat wave had yielded to a pleasant summer rain. Harry left the apartment at ten-thirty and took a cab to the East Side. As instructed, he was wearing a baseball-style cap—the only one he could find in the apartment. It was Evie’s from her Washington days, navy blue with
U.S. Senate
in gold just above the brim. After reading the introduction to Desiree’s book,
Between the Sheets
, he couldn’t help but wonder if the cap was a trophy.

Harry had been loudly rebuked by Owen Erdman for breaking their agreement and putting up the posters. But as Santana had predicted, he did not appear to be in danger of losing his staff privileges so long as they were taken down promptly. Harry would do MMC. Santana and the man he had hired to help cover every hospital in the city would take care of the six others they had done so far.

When they had left Harry’s apartment, there was still a good deal of tension lingering between the two of them. Harry felt he could no longer trust Ray Santana to act in
anyone’s interest but his own. To his credit, Santana did not dispute that point. But he maintained that any sacrifice, by anyone, that resulted in The Doctor’s death would have been worth it.

They briefly considered bringing Albert Dickinson up to speed on the developments in the case. But neither of them were in favor of doing that. The chances of getting anything helpful from him were significantly lower than the chances of his causing more trouble for them. Perchek was arrogant and fearless, but he was not foolish. Dickinson would more than likely end up driving him underground—perhaps the worst thing that could happen. Since it was still not at all clear what The Doctor was doing in Manhattan or how he came to kill Evie, there was no way of predicting how long he would stick around.

While Harry and Santana were off to tear down posters, Maura stayed at the apartment to screen phone calls. There was a steady flow of them now at about two or three an hour. Most of the calls were clearly cranks. But some sounded interesting. Maura dutifully logged each one and promised to get back to the caller.

With fifteen minutes to go before he was to meet Kevin Loomis, Harry paid the cabby off at Park and Fifty-first and walked the remaining blocks. Although he wasn’t particularly worried about being followed, he had not forgotten his experience in Desiree’s apartment. He cut down to Forty-ninth and back, pausing in several doorways to survey the street.
Nothing
. It was a garbage collection night, and the light rain did little to wash away the stench from the mountains of plastic bags awaiting pickup. It had been a while since the last protracted garbage strike in Manhattan. On summer nights like this, he could understand why they seldom went unresolved for very long.

Traffic was light, and the intersection of Fifty-first and Third was nearly deserted. With Evie’s U.S. Senate cap pulled low over his eyes, Harry leaned against a light post and waited. At exactly 11:05, a Yellow cab pulled up. The front passenger door swung open.

“Get in, Doctor,” the driver said, his voice like number thirty-six sandpaper.

“You Loomis?” Harry asked as the cab pulled away and headed uptown.

“Nope.” The driver said nothing more until they neared Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh. “As soon as I’m across Fifth, jump out and hurry up to the corner of Sixtieth. You’ll be picked up there. I’ve already been paid, so just get out quickly and go.”

He slowed until the light was just about to turn red, then spurted across the intersection just ahead of the oncoming Fifth Avenue traffic. The maneuver drew an angry volley of horn blasts, but ensured that no car could make it through behind them. Harry hurried up Fifth to Sixtieth. As soon as he reached the corner, a black Lexus rolled up. The door opened and Harry jumped in while the car was still moving. The driver, a good-looking man about forty, swung onto Central Park South and accelerated.

“Kevin Loomis,” he said. “Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff. I’m not even sure it’ll do any good. Stallings and I took every precaution we could think of when we went to meet at Battery Park, but somehow they still managed to follow one or both of us. Stallings was on the way back to his office from our meeting when he had his cardiac arrest.”

“Who are
they
,” Harry asked.

“
They
are the people I think are responsible for killing your wife. That’s why I decided to see you tonight. They’re health insurance people. They call themselves The Roundtable.”

“You mean like the Million Dollar Roundtable?”

“More like the Hundred Million Dollar Roundtable.… I’m part of it.”

They turned onto the West Side Highway and headed uptown. Harry listened in near disbelief as Kevin Loomis described the secret society and his recent involvement with it. Harry liked the man immediately—the hard edge to his speech, the street-smart toughness underlying the newly acquired executive’s manners. If The Roundtable was as
elite and exclusive as Loomis depicted, it was a bit difficult to imagine him belonging.

As he listened, there were two things that struck Harry almost from the beginning. The first was the secrecy and mistrust—how little Loomis had been allowed to know about the other knights. It sounded more like a covert government operation than an old-boys club. The second was something about the man, himself. Clearly Loomis was saddened by what had happened—to Evie
and
to James Stallings. But while he certainly wasn’t flip or glib, neither did he seem that distraught or desperate—or even frightened. He sounded much calmer tonight than when they first spoke on the phone. Calm and detached.

“As far as your wife goes,” Loomis said, “I’m just guessing at what might have happened. I’m assuming you had nothing to do with her death.”

“Our marriage was on the rocks, just like the newspapers said. But I would never have harmed her.”

“The people on The Roundtable are terribly paranoid. They were worried that Desiree was investigating them.”

“She wasn’t,” Harry said. “She was writing a book and preparing a tabloid TV report on the power of sex in business and politics.” He reviewed the night he had spent in Desiree’s apartment, omitting any mention of The Doctor. “Her involvement with your group was primarily research,” he concluded. “She probably went through your wallets when she had the chance. She figured out you were in the insurance business, but that was all she knew. I don’t think she had the faintest notion what you were meeting for.”

“Well, apparently The Roundtable didn’t buy that. I was there for the discussion, and there was not even a hint that they planned to track her down and kill her. But now I’m sure they did. I have no idea who actually injected her with that chemical. I would imagine it’s the same guy who carries out the terminations of policyholders who cost our companies too much money. Hell, for all I know, there may even be more than one of them.”

Harry decided to wait until he knew a bit more of Loomis and his motives before sharing the news of Anton
Perchek. They entered the Bronx on the Henry Hudson Parkway and continued driving away from Manhattan, toward Van Cortland Park. Harry remained uneasy about Loomis’s affect, and wondered if the man was lying or perhaps holding something back.

“Kevin,” he said, “why have you decided to tell me all this? I mean, you’re part of it. If The Roundtable is destroyed, there’s a good chance you’ll suffer, too.”

“There are a few reasons, actually. I’ve read a lot about you, and I don’t like what they’re doing to you—they’re destroying your life. You won a medal for getting shot up in Nam. I was too young to fight, but my older brother Michael lost a leg there. Also, the whole thing’s getting to be too much for me. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no angel. Far from it. I could do most of what The Roundtable wanted and not bat an eye. But I draw the line at killing people, no matter how sick they are or how much they’re going to cost us. I intend to turn state’s evidence and make some sort of deal with the DA’s office—that is, if I ever get my hands on any evidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing on paper. Nothing at all. Stallings was the only one who might have backed me up. I’ll go ahead anyway—tell the same story I just told you and name what names I can. But I suspect the lawyers for the other knights will cut me to shreds.”

“Maybe not. You know, all along I’ve had a theory about why whoever killed Evie seemed to be going out of their way
not
to harm me. I figured it was because I was the perfect fall guy—why get rid of me? Now I realize I’ve probably been right. With every sign pointing to me, you and Stallings weren’t likely to challenge The Roundtable.”

“Exactly. You said your wife’s killer has been trying to get you to kill yourself. That would have been the clincher. I don’t know about Stallings, but I would have immediately stopped suspecting The Roundtable.”

Harry turned to Loomis.

“What you’re doing takes a lot of guts,” he said.
“When you do go to the authorities, I’ll be right there with you, if that’s any comfort.”

“Thanks. But from what I’ve read in the papers, I’m not sure that would be a plus. The cops really hate you.”

Harry smiled.

“Touché. Kevin, listen. I’m thinking about something pretty far-out that might help us. Could you go over the criteria you remember from that sheet Stallings gave you?”

“I can do better than that.”

He handed over the printout of Merlin’s program—the criteria that had cost Beth DeSenza her job. Then he looped onto the Mosholu Parkway, heading back toward the Major Deegan Expressway and the city.

“How many companies are involved?” Harry asked.

“Probably five—that’s not counting my company or Stallings’s. I know two of them for sure—Comprehensive Neighborhood Health and Northeast Life and Casualty. What companies the other three represent, I don’t know yet, although I might be able to find out if I really work at it.”

“Don’t do anything to ruffle anyone’s feathers. These guys clearly don’t have much patience with people who upset them.” Harry studied the criteria. “The lowest projected cost to qualify for termination was—what again? Half a million?”