Head Case (18 page)

50

November 9 (A.D.)

Different Place.

Missy Pander’s Office, to be Exact.

One Day after My Funeral.

“
What do you mean the study has been compromised again? What is this bullshit?” Stanley Novartny’s voice booms out of the speakerphone, which vibrates in the middle of Missy Pander’s otherwise immaculate desk. “I thought you said you took care of this. You said that Zack girl was safe, that she’s no longer a concern. She’s dead, right? Cremated!” He’s shouting so loud that there’s a feedback buzz at the end of each word. Missy reaches forward to turn down the volume but Novartny continues to berate her. “You can’t be safer than dead!” he says, maintaining the noise level on his end of the line. “And now you’re telling me we still might have a problem, that we might have to postpone the official launch? Do you have any idea what’s at stake? The fucking convention is a few weeks away! The commercials are already running!”

“I know, sir. I know.” Missy glances over at Eugene Throng; he’s sitting on her purple couch with his ankles crossed and head hanging low in shame and fear. Missy raises an eyebrow at him, seeking reassurance or support or at the very least some obfuscating information to throw in Novartny’s direction. But there’s none coming. Instead, Eugene reaches into the pocket of his white lab coat and pops something into his mouth.

“What, is that cyanide?” Missy says derisively, covering the microphone for a moment. “Don’t think you can snake out of this so easily, you little—”

“Pander? Did you hear me?” Novartny is demanding. It isn’t hard to picture his pulsing temples and inflamed red face. “Are you going to clean this shit up or what?”

Missy removes her hand and leans forward over the speakerphone, a few stands of blond hair falling from her unraveling French-twist. The only sleep she’s gotten over the past few days was medicated, and it’s showing. “I’ll take care of it, I promise,” she says softly and then, moving her eyes over to the couch, mouths “well?” at Eugene Throng.

This is his fault after all. All of it. At least according to Missy. He’s the one who’s been sounding hysterical alarm bells, insisting that the boss be told that the experimental laboratory (my laboratory) has been compromised, that the primary subject rat (that would be Raskolnikov) has escaped and that documents were missing, that my death alone could not protect the potentially damning and hence job-and-company-destroying information from leaking out. Information he was never supposed to have let me have in the first place. And now it’s clear that someone else has access to that same damning information. This is a bad state of affairs, but Eugene Throng felt it might get even worse if he didn’t at least get the big boss in on the loop. It seemed safer to fess up now, before things got even worse. So he inter-officed Novartny a confidential memo. Eugene reasoned that it was the lesser of evils, that maybe with one of the company’s top brass behind them, they had a slightly better chance of saving everyone’s ass, at least the asses of the people that mattered, that maybe this wannabe luminary captain of industry—or at least luminary captain of a department within that industry—could save the day. Unfortunately, this is not reasoning that Stanley Novartny cares to consider at the moment.

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you do, Pander, but don’t screw up this launch any more than you already have,” Novartny’s saying. “Pharmax has put more than $30 million into the Ziperal TR campaign, into this Fatico Dystopia crap you created. You fuck it up and you and that little shit Eugene Throng aren’t the only ones going down. And trust me, if you bring me down with you ... I don’t think I need to spell this out. You might be a fool, but you aren’t stupid. Do whatever it takes.”

There’s a beep and the line goes silent.

“Sir? Mr. Novartny?”

“I think he hung up,” says Eugene, as shrill and high-pitched as ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if bats crash into walls every time he opens his mouth.

“Oh, so you can speak after all?” Missy shoves the phone off her desk. The black plastic casing shatters as it hits the floor. “You shit. You could have backed me up here.”

“With what?” Eugene squeaks. “You want to tell him that I’m overreacting, that I’m just being an alarmist? You want to tell him that our best hope is that you’re wrong, that maybe nobody outside of us knows about the drug’s complications, that all of the documents and studies and rats are just hiding in some safe place? Hey, maybe the rat opened a safety deposit box. How about that?”

“Fine, so you can speak. Now please just shut up.”

“No, I won’t shut up,” says Eugene, who, despite the fact that he’s in as hot a pot of water as she is, is feeling mildly gratified at having watched the color drain from Missy Pander’s immaculately painted face while she was getting berated by their boss. “You want to say that maybe Olivia Zack never mentioned anything to her best friend, the very same person who blackmailed you, the same person who put you in touch with the Mafioso thug to begin with? Are you comfortable with that?”

He gets off the couch and leans over the broken phone. “Hey, Novartny, no worries! It’s all cool. That Polly chick, the one with the connections to the mafia? No need to concern yourself with her. She’s chill!”

“Are you done?”

“Yes,” Eugene says, impressed with the uncharacteristic chutzpah he’s just shown. He makes a mental note that at one and a half times the normal dosing, the drug continues to have a positive effect, at least on him, and the negative ones are still in check. He suppresses his smile as he returns to his spot on the sofa.

Missy turns her back to him and stares out her wall of windows, contemplating the possible loss of her billion-dollar view.

“Damn it,” she says, her back to Eugene. “I have to get to her. I have to find out what Polly knows. I have to make sure she stays quiet, whatever it takes.”

Eugene shakes his head, almost enjoying himself. “Are you forgetting that when you had Olivia killed, your hit man went down as well? You think you have time to shop around for a new one? They don’t just come off the rack at Barney’s, you know. So good luck with that.”

Missy frowns. “Fine, Mr. Genius, what exactly do you think we should do then? You know, had you actually done your job right the first time around, we wouldn’t even be in this situation. You destroyed all the negative studies in the company files. Almost all of them. How was I supposed to know we were repackaging such a flawed drug?”

“It wasn’t that flawed,” Eugene squeaked. “The first release got FDA approval.”

“That doesn’t even deserve a response. You know better than anyone here how meaningless that is. That administrator over there has company stock, or it was funneled to his wife or something. Either way, he’s a sold-out hack. He’s totally in our pocket.”

“Regardless, it wasn’t my idea to create a new disorder with a prescription that called for a doubling of the dosage.”

“Well, had you alerted anyone to your initial findings that higher dosing was so dangerous, maybe I wouldn’t have.” Missy shut down her computer and started packing up her briefcase. This conversation would get them nowhere. There was no point in parsing it out. They’d both done what they’d done because that was what their jobs had demanded of them.

“Wait a second.” Eugene grabs Missy’s coat sleeve as she begins to walk out the door.

“What now?”

“Just a month.”

“What?”

“We just have to keep her quiet for a month. That’s nothing.” A slight grin began to spread across his face. “She couldn’t even submit the papers to publications with such little lead time, at least none that would take her seriously. An unaffiliated layperson? Forget it.”

Missy rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “So, what grand idea are you concocting now?”

“Nothing. Just trying to get some perspective. Look, all we need to do is let the marketing campaign get off the ground, let them put on a grand show at the annual convention. We don’t need to wait for FDA approval for Ziperal TR to establish Pharmax as the groundbreaker for this new disease; we just need people to be anticipating the drug’s release. We can sit back and watch the stock prices soar and then sell all our options and quit our jobs before the drug actually hits market, before the inevitable lawsuits started popping up. Based on precedent, it’s the company that will go down, not the individuals responsible. Remember the Neurontin case? Name one executive who was held responsible for any wrongdoing. I’ll bet you can’t.”

With a fist on her hip, Missy sized Eugene up and down. “My, aren’t we suddenly Mr. Confident. What drug are you on?”

51

November 22 (A.D.)

A Few Weeks After My Death.

Thanksgiving.

“
I’ll take some more of that cranberry sauce, if you don’t mind.” Polly’s mom points across the table at the large ceramic bowl resting in front of Mitya. “Just a little bit.”

“Sure,” he says with an eager smile. “Here you go.” Mitya scoops up a small portion and stretches his arm to dump it on Mrs. Warner’s plate. It lands on the table instead, splattering across the linen like a bird smashing into a picture window. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” he says, jumping up to help clean up the mess, only to knock an almost full wine glass onto the turkey platter. “Oh, sh—” man, I’m so sorry, I—”

“No, no. Don’t be silly,” says Dr. Warner. “Happens all the time.” With a hearty laugh, the doctor pours his own wine onto his plate, drenching his dinner. “Hey, it’s probably better than the gravy I made. Polly, you try it.” 

“Dad!” Polly looks at him like he’s possessed.

In response, he takes her wine and splashes it across the entire table, saturating everything from the sweet potatoes to the fresh baked bread. “Oops! Seems like I missed the plate.”

You’ve got to love this man. His daughter brings the mysterious boyfriend—and his family!—home for Thanksgiving. Everybody’s a nervous wreck, but just like that, swoosh, he cuts the tension right in half. Within seconds, everyone—Mitya, Polly, Polly’s parents, her great aunt Rosie, even Zhanya and Ivan—has spilled his or her drink and is celebrating and laughing with bacchanalian revelry.

“A toast!” Dr. Warner holds up a bottle and refills each empty glass.

“Oh, no!” Polly says, smiling and shaking her head. “Please don’t embarrass me, Dad!”

Dr. Warner lovingly squeezes his daughter’s shoulder with one hand while he holds up his wine in the other, his face suddenly somber. “This is for Olivia,” he begins. “This is our first Thanksgiving without her since you girls started college. We miss her terribly, and wish more than anything that she could be here with us tonight.”

Everyone raises a glass. “To Olivia,” they all say, nodding their heads solemnly.

And then it’s silent. Polly’s mother fights back a tear. Her father stares at the napkin in his lap. Mitya gives Polly a gentle kiss on the cheek. After all, what is there to say?

Actually, there’s quite a lot.

Polly had been very specific when she asked her parents to open up their Thanksgiving. They had actually considered canceling it, given that it was happening so close to my death, but then Polly told her parents that she’d realized how important it was to celebrate one’s family and friends while you still had them. She said she wanted them to meet her boyfriend, his family as well. Oh, yeah, she said, she’d been dating this guy since June and it was starting to get serious. Sorry she hadn’t mentioned it before. But now she wanted them to meet him and his closest family. She wanted them to get a sense of where he came from. They responded enthusiastically and planned for an elaborate meal. And all of this was well and good, of course, but the truth—the real reason she wanted everyone at this table—was much bigger—and much more complicated—than she had allowed.

“Mom, Dad,” Polly says, interrupting the ad hoc vigil, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Oh, God. Are you pregnant?”

“Mom! No.” Polly rolls her eyes. “No, I’m not pregnant.” From the corner of her eye, she sees Mitya’s face turn beet red. “I’m nowhere near pregnant. But there’s something I need you to know. Something important.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said … Well, what is it, honey?”

Polly pauses, studying how the centerpiece candles are flickering, buying herself a little more time. Just say it, Polly thinks to herself. You can do this. It’s what Olivia would want.

Suddenly, one of the candles blows out and then, not a second later, it reignites. I watch the corners of Polly’s mouth turn up slightly. Mine would, too, if I had a mouth. My repertoire of party tricks is expanding nicely of late.

“I quit my job,” Polly blurts out. “Actually, that’s not true. They fired me.”

Mrs. Warner puts down her glass. “What? When?”

At the other end of the table, Dr. Warner throws down his napkin. “That is totally absurd! Don’t they know you just lost your best friend? How could anyone fire you at a time like this? What kind of people are they?”

“It’s okay, Dad,” says Polly. “Really. That’s not even what I am trying to tell you. I mean, it’s just a part of it.”

Her parents look at each other.

“Look,” Polly says, “this is going to sound crazy, but we don’t think Olivia’s death was accidental. We think—”

“Who’s ‘we?’” her parents ask simultaneously.

“We,” says Polly, acknowledging Mitya and his family with her eyes. “We think Olivia was murdered. Intentionally. We know she was. And so I haven’t been going to work. I’ve been spending all of my time trying to figure this out.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Mrs. Warner crosses her arms. “Why would anyone want to murder Olivia?”

“Polly,” says Dr. Warner with a sigh. “I know this has all been very hard for you. I can’t even imagine how hard. I’m sure you want to believe there was a reason for this horrific, random violence. It would—”

“Sir,” Mitya interjects. “Polly’s not imagining this.”

Dr. Warner looks at his daughter’s new boyfriend. He looks at her. “Who is this guy, anyway? Who are these people you’ve been hanging around?”

Ivan Petrovich coughs, but nobody pays him any mind. Nobody except Zhanya (dressed in a pink terry track suit for the occasion), who pats him on his knee and whispers in his ear that he should stay out of this.

“We have proof, Dad,” Polly says. “We know who’s responsible. We’re pretty sure of it. Actually, we’re positive we know who did this. And why.”

“Honey,” her mother says, “this is crazy. Listen to your father. He has a lot of experience with grief counseling, he knows—”

“No. Stop it.” Polly holds up her hand. “I need you both to listen to me. Just hear me out.” She bites her lower lip, then takes a deep breath and scans the table to make sure she has everyone’s attention. And then she tells them. Everything. She tells them about stealing drugs from her father (“You did what?” he shouts, but she implores him to refrain from comment). She tells them about meeting Missy. She tells them about the celebrities and the nightclubs and the slight taste of the trappings of fame. She tells them about her fall-out with me and how we were hardly speaking when I died. Then she tells them about my research, about Zhanya’s depression and subsequent reaction to the overdose of the pills, and how she tried to peddle some on the street. She tells them about Boris Shotkyn and his threats. She tells them about the photographs and about blackmailing Missy so they could get Shotkyn his pills and get themselves free of him.

“That’s all it took?” says Dr. Warner. “Photos?”

Polly shrugged. “I didn’t really think it would work either. But they were more powerful than I would have thought. Either that or there was something else Missy was concerned I might know about. And now we think we know what that was.”

Yes! I want to cheer. I try to make something flicker, find some way of saying “bingo! You hit it on the nose!” But the best I can manage is to push a small drop of cranberry sauce off of the edge of Polly’s plate and onto the table. Nobody notices.

“Are you safe now? Should we call the police?” her mother asks. “We should call the police. This Boris Shotkyn, he had people who worked for him, right? Are they still involved? Have they been threatening you?”

“Calm down,” says Polly, “We’re fine. Whoever killed him”—she strains not to even look at Zhanya—“did us a big favor. But let me finish.” And she tells them about the folders I had hidden behind the mirror, that I was privy to information she assumes I wasn’t supposed to be privy to, and—perhaps more importantly—she tells them what Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn has (thanks to Raskolnikov) figured out in his makeshift lab.

Her parents are dumbfounded.

After a few moments, Dr. Warner pulls himself together enough to quietly ask a question. “How are you feeling, now?” he asks Zhanya.

She nods, suggesting she is okay.

Mitya explains that he finally convinced her to go to a local clinic, where a real doctor gave her a prescription for fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, and she’s doing fine. Never better. She’s got a new lease on life.

“And the rat? Is he alive?” Dr. Warner asks, rubbing his brow.

“Nyet,” says Ivan Petrovich, speaking up for the first time since Mrs. Warner took his coat at the door. “The medicine. It toxic. It does wonderful, good stuff, yes. But then, with too much,” he mimes injecting a needle into his arm, “the brain, it, how you say,” he tightens his chubby hand into a fist, “the brain, it go phffft, like empty balloon.”

“Polly,” says Mrs. Warner, touching her daughter’s forearm. “You need to go to the police. Right away.”

“Oh,” Polly says. “We can’t.” She shakes her mother off and momentarily covers her own face with her hands. “I left that part out. The cops were in cahoots with Shotkyn,” she explains, focusing her eyes on the wine-soaked food on her plate. “At least some of them were. Anyway, we aren’t exactly innocent here. None of us. How could we even begin to explain this to them? Seriously, do you want the authorities to know your daughter was getting samples of medication from your office supply?”

“Jesus, Polly!” Her father slams his wine glass on the table, causing it to shatter into hundreds of pieces. “This is so appalling, I don’t even know where to begin.”

“I know,” Polly says, and brushes back a tear from rolling down her cheek. “But maybe you can begin by accepting my apology. And then maybe you can help us out?” Bravely, she turns to face her father.

“Help you out?” He shakes his head, still processing all the facts.

“It’s what Olivia would want,” Polly says, gathering up what confidence she can muster. “She’s dead. We can’t get her back. But she had information. She knew some very important stuff, potentially dangerous stuff, and she was trying to figure out what to do with. I’m sure of it. There’s a reason she cleared out her lab and took all of her research home. There’s a reason she hid those files behind the mirror. And now we have that information, even more information than she had, thanks to Ivan Petrovich. We want to make sure it gets into the right hands, but we don’t know what to do with it.”

“What to do with it?” Dr. Warner repeats.

“We thought you might know of someone at a medical journal or something. Someone who would be discreet about where the information came from. Maybe they could publish some of the research?”

Dr. Warner guffawed. “Research sent by a celebrity publicist and a bathroom chemist? No journal is going to risk their reputation on research like that. Much less their relationship with advertisers. Pharmaceutical companies fund most of those publications to begin with, they won’t risk that. Anyway, even if they showed interest, it would take months of retesting and vetting the studies before anyone would even consider going forward with publication!”

Mrs. Warner taps her plate with a spoon. “Enough, Stuart,” she says. “Settle down. You aren’t being helpful. In fact, you’re being a jerk.” She looks at her daughter but stops herself from reaching out to touch her. “Polly, let’s dial this back. What is it that you’re trying to achieve here? Is it that you want this Missy person behind bars or that you want to make sure this drug doesn’t get to market?”

“Both.”

“So you need to get some attention, somehow expose it all at once, right? Without indicting yourself, or at least controlling that information so you can protect yourself, yes?”

“Sure, but—”

“Well, isn’t that what you publicists do? Spin stories and get lots of attention for things that may or may not deserve it?”

“This deserves attention, Mom. Millions of doctors already prescribe the original form of Ziperal, in lower doses. The extended release tablets. Once the Fatico Dystopia campaign really takes off and people start asking for the targeted release pills, who knows what—”

“That’s what I am saying, dear. You need a campaign to compete with their campaign. Something that will make a big enough splash so that the press will pay enough attention, generate enough buzz or whatever you call it, that at the very least, the FDA would have to investigate the matter.”

“From everything Olivia ever told me, the FDA is part of the problem.”

“Well, then your campaign will have to cast enough public doubt that you won’t even need the FDA to keep the new version of the drug from going to market, and to get the older version off the shelves.”

“It’s a great idea, Mom, but it’s not like we have millions of dollars to throw at something like this.”

“I don’t know, Polly. Isn’t PR your game? Haven’t you been publicizing and promoting things all these years?”

“Sure, but—”

“Well, now you have a chance to make whatever you learned at that firm worthwhile. It’s about time you did.”

Polly looks at Mitya to gauge his reaction. He cocks an encouraging eyebrow. She looks at her father. “Can’t hurt to try,” he says with a shrug. She looks at Zhanya and Ivan Petrovich. They are both buttering wine-soaked pieces of bread. Then she looks out the window, across the Hudson River. The deep, orange-red sky settling over New Jersey. The warm light is dancing across the water and amber rays are reflecting off the gentle waves. Polly smiles. She sees something.

“Okay,” she says, still looking at the water. “I think I might have an idea.”