The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (29 page)

Puzzles,
puzzles....

Another puzzle was the
presence of those two burly apes I’d met—or who’d met me—in the
parking lot when I tottered down there after leaving Dane’s door
thinking: “Good night? What do you mean good night?”

Well, I just had to face
it: she’d made a mistake.

And, no question about it,
so had those two lobs in the parking lot. The ones I’d left on the
asphalt and expected to interrogate severely upon my return. I felt
the raw soreness underneath my left bicep, remembering I’d returned
to find only asphalt—and a new Mercedes Benz sedan speeding
away.

That wasn’t proof my
knife-wielding attackers had been in the Mercedes. But where else?
They sure as hell hadn’t left under their own power. I was waiting
with considerable curiosity to learn what Sgt. Bob Denn and his
LAPD computer would come up with.

Soon he was saying, “Got
it, Shell. You know how to pick ‘em, don’t you?”

“
What’s the
registration?”

“
Big shot this time. Hobart
Belking.”

He went on to give me
other info including the Belking’s home address, and I said, “Much
thanks, Bob,” and hung up.

Hobart Belking. Why wasn’t
I surprised? Hobart—very likely the “Hobie” written in a bold heavy
hand at the top of that “Visitors” sheet I’d signed at Omega
earlier today. Drug company multi-millionaire, maybe
half-billionaire. Wintersong’s buddy. Mighty hunter. But protector
of hoods and heavies? Stalker of game in the L.A. jungle? I guessed
I would have to ask Hobie himself about that.

Tomorrow.

I stripped, showered off
the L.A. smog and some more of my dried blood, put on a robe then
padded into the bedroom. It was still early, not yet nine p.m., and
I figured I’d see what was on the tube, catch the local news, and
get a full night’s sleep for a change.

But when I turned on the
bedside lamp, light splashed on that thick folder I’d placed on the
night table earlier, before driving to the Halcyon Hotel and Dane.
Yeah, the file of “excitements” that Hank Hernandez had given
me—or, practically forced upon me. I sighed.

Well, I had told Hank I’d
look at the stuff. Man’s gotta do what he says he’s gonna do. So I
plopped the file on my bed, plopped myself next to it, and looked.
And looked. I missed the TV news; didn’t even turn the set
on.

If Hank had told me I
might read even one of his articles or clipped-together “files” all
the way through, his misplaced optimism would have amused me. No
way anyone could have made me believe, in advance of the fact,
that—except for a half-hour break between ten and eleven p.m.—I
would read his strange, fascinating, and sometimes appalling
collection for six solid hours and sack out weary-eyed long after
three o’clock in the morning.

But that’s what I
did.

I had never read anything
like this collection of queer stuff before. It included newspaper
clippings, pages from medical journals, photocopied articles from
magazines with strange-sounding names, and numerous
others.

There were also a lot of
individual packets of stapled-together pages—some thin, only three
or four pages, others containing twenty pages or more—photocopied
from various books, with the top page of each a copy of the cover
or title page of the publication it had been copied from. Just
reading the titles was not only a shock but a peculiarly
eye-opening education. I didn’t read them all. But I read enough.
And before I finished I was wondering if Hank might not be the
sanest man I’d met in my life—but that was at three in the
morning.

At nine p.m.—probably what
got me started, the initial hook that pulled me into the rest of
it—I merely opened the folder and flipped through its contents,
wondering if there might be a little package on Wintersong, or even
Belking, info that could save me time and trouble, let me do
legwork the easy way. There was. In fact, there was a thick package
on each of them. I read them both.

There weren’t any
astonishing revelations, but when I’d finished I knew a good deal
more about both men and their relationship, which was very close
both professionally and socially. Part of the material consisted of
clippings from newspapers and magazines, but half a dozen pages
were typed, with no indication of who’d prepared them. Maybe Henry
Hernandez? Hank had said he’d made this file of copies for me, so I
found a red pen and marked a few paragraphs, underlined parts that
most interested me.

Corroborating what Dane
had said, I read that William Wintersong, M.D. had been offered the
position of Director of Research at Omega by Hobart Belking, who in
later printed interviews congratulated himself upon his “brilliant
choice.” It would have been difficult to argue with Belking about
that. For, working with the aid of a three-year
twenty-million-dollar grant from Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals,
before Wintersong’s first year as Director ended a steady stream of
new prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications had begun
flowing from Omega to Belking-Gray, and thence into hospitals,
doctors’ offices, and drugstores. And, of course, into
people.

Now, sixteen years after
becoming head of Omega, Wintersong was not only recognized in
financial circles as the “Wizard” who had overseen development of
products that helped Belking-Gray move from number 381 on the list
of Fortune-500 Companies to number 65—with a consequent
mouth-watering rise in the company’s stock price—but was also
respected and honored in the medical world as one of the country’s
foremost medical researchers.

Indeed, among honors of
which I’d been previously unaware—Dane hadn’t mentioned it to me
this evening—Wintersong had last year received the
super-prestigious Anderson J. Martin Award for his direction of and
personal contributions to the Omega effort culminating in
identification and isolation of the virus which, most orthodox
medical experts agree, caused IFAI. This was, of course, not a cure
for the invariably fatal disease, but it was unquestionably the
essential first step toward “finding and patenting” a cure, or at
least a treatment.

It was also the
breakthrough that enabled public health services and individual
physicians to test people for the presence in their blood of
antibodies to the IFAI virus. I learned, for the first time, that
the deadly microorganism—which I’d never before heard called
anything but “the IFAI virus”—had been officially designated by the
CDC as IFAI III, or Invariably Fatal Immunodeficiency Virus #3; and
that it was #3 because the #1 (I) and #2 (II) viruses isolated by
Wintersong and his expert team of virologists, serologists,
bacteriologists, chemists, and microbiologists, later turned out to
be not IFAI III, which or course hadn’t been invented yet, but
“foreign retroviral” contamination of the culture by some
still-unidentified substance in the nutrient medium necessary for
successful culture, or growth, of the elusive virus.

The ingredients finally
selected by Dr. Wintersong for that medium, after numerous other
combinations of nutrients had been tried without success—or the
laboratory cell culture “recipe” that finally worked—were listed,
and I read them with strange sensations, many of them in the area
of my abdomen and duodenum. Along with items completely
unintelligible to me, because they were apparently written in the
Latin spoken by illiterates on the streets of ancient Rome, were a
few I could comprehend: ground-up African Green-Monkey kidneys, pig
plasma prepared from blood syringed or sucked out of the live pig
hearts, yolks of fertile turkey eggs, extract of macerated unborn
(aborted) human embryos, beef broth from bouillon cubes, and
liquefied mouse livers.

How, I wondered, did they
happen to think of bouillon cubes?

But probably the most
interesting thing I learned during the half hour spent reading the
Wintersong and Belking packages was that Hobart Belking was an
ex-con. Well, sort of.

He’d grown up in the
south, only son of wealthy and politically-connected Furman
Belking, owner of a chain of “Furman’s” drug stores. Hobart was now
fifty-one years old, but when he was a callow youth of nineteen he
had been—allegedly—the leader of a teenage gang that stole
approximately two hundred expensive automobiles, stripped them, and
sold the parts to real criminals.

Belking and most members
of this crew were tried, convicted and jugged. But after sixteen
months of detention in a youth facility—or one day after his
twenty-first birthday—the Governor of the Southern state granted
him a full pardon, citing “new evidence” and “technical errors” and
a “miscarriage of justice,” and Hobie was then and thereafter free
as a bird.

All of that was part of
the typed information, and there wasn’t any documentation other
than dates and place of arrest and trial, plus the name of the
juvenile-detention facility. Still, those dates and names could be
checked, so there was a starting point; if, of course, there should
be any reason for starting.

However, Hobie’s juvenile
crime spree had occurred a long time ago, thirty-two years ago. And
in today’s climate a lot of otherwise functional citizens, some in
the name of “Christian charity” and some merely out of sincere
suicidal imbecility, think criminals should be automatically
forgiven for anything they did the day before yesterday.

It is perhaps unnecessary
to say that I am not one of those citizens. I figure it’s a
splendid thing to say “Bless you, my son” to the slob—and even mean
it—but then slam that steel door behind him. It’s splendid to tell
him, “Go, and sin no more,” but wiser to make sure he can’t go.
Often those guys just don’t pay attention to what you merely tell
them.

But I was thinking about
Belking specifically, and none of that really applied to Hobie, not
yet. I didn’t have anything actionable against him, nothing solid.
Not yet. Maybe tomorrow. But for now I was gratified to know about
the crime, or alleged crime, of his innocent youth. Maybe it hadn’t
been his alleged last.

What most sharply caught
my eye and most disturbed me about Belking-Gray was this: Even
after it became undeniably evident that thousands of people had
become injured and hundreds had become dead following repeated
ingestion of two of the company’s drugs, and the FDA withdrew its
approval of the two drugs, the giant pharmaceutical firm did not
immediately cease distribution and sale of the drugs.

Instead Belking-Gray filed
a lawsuit to prevent the FDA’s prohibition from taking effect. All
the power and pull and money of Belking-Gray, and personnel
including vice-presidents, comptrollers, scientists,
researchers—yes, including Omega Director William Wintersong, and
Hobart Belking himself—were utilized in the fight to prevent the
public from being deprived of these two drugs.

Only a few lines,
apparently from the record of those legal proceedings, were
included in the Hernandez file. Such as some of the company’s
arguments, to the effect that “when properly prescribed” the drugs’
side effects were minimal. And that “difficulties” had been
encountered in only a tiny fraction of patients while thousands had
benefited, many benefiting so much that some might even be “on
their way” to complete cure, or at least control, of their
incurable diseases. And, in view of all this, “... we, as a
responsible pharmaceutical corporation, cannot in good conscience
withhold the proven benefits of these drugs from those who need
them.”

They lost in court. At
least, they lost in the USA. So Belking-Gray then promptly withdrew
both drugs from circulation in the United States, having postponed
that action for nearly two years—and just as promptly shipped tons
of the drugs overseas, most of it to what are often called the
Third World countries, for distribution and sale to the people
there who might need the drugs benefits to make them
well.

I put down the pages, got
up, walked into my kitchenette. I wasn’t finished with Hank’s file,
but I’d finished the parts about Belking and Wintersong, and I just
wanted to get away from the rest of it for a minute or two. I got
out the bottle of Jim Beam, poured a hefty jigger into a glass and
splashed Perrier on top of the bourbon, then tossed in another
half-jigger of Jim. I swallowed a fourth of the drink, glanced at
my watch.

It was peculiar, quite
weird, as if I’d become3 temporarily telepathic, but when I noted
the time was 10:33 and decided to give next-door neighbor Paul a
ring and invite him over for talk plus a dollop of his favorite
horribly expensive brandy, at the very moment there was a knock on
my own door. It was the familiar clunk-clunk and a pause, then
another clunk—Paul’s knock, to inform me it was him, not a hoodlum
there with a cocked heater.

When I opened the door
Paul strolled inside smiling, unfolded his lanky frame and eased it
down onto the divan. Paul Anson, M.D., looked like a Hollywood
producer’s idea of a movie doctor specializing in treating Beverly
Hills women for ennui and annoyance—which was, in fact, a large
part of what Paul actually did. He was inconsiderately tall, an
inch or so over my own six-two, obnoxiously good-looking, lean and
rangy, in appearance not unlike a John Wayne clone in his mid
thirties.

I found the Remy Martin
Armagnac and a large bell-bottom glass for him, squatted on a
hassock while we jawed and drank for a few minutes. He was
enthusiastically telling me about a new patient, a budding
twenty-three year old actress named Veloris, who had consulted him
about a ringing in her ears.