Better Off Dead (21 page)

The scene inside Helen's house was
considerably cooler. I stuck my head in the living room. Fanny and
Bobby were playing gin rummy. Helen was staring out of the window
at the darkness, her face taut, as if she expected someone to come
barreling out of the night at any moment to attack her.

Burly was in the hallway,
on his way to bed. Whistling
Mrs.
Robinson.
Off-key.

"A little tutoring on the side, Case?" he
asked. I thought that he sounded more amused than peeved.
Maybe.

"That kid's going to be a problem," I
predicted.

"Not for me, he's not." The bastard was
laughing as he wheeled away. God, but he knew how to get me. I
couldn't tell what he really thought about it.

"Casey, get in here," Bobby ordered
gruffly.

"Excuse me?" I asked. "And you are who? The
King of England?"

Bobby slapped an ace of hearts down on the
table and Fanny scooped it up. "I don't like that guy," he said,
scowling at Fanny as she rearranged her cards with triumphant
glee.

"He's just a kid. Relax," I said. "He wants
to help with the case."

"Not him. The other guy. The snotty
professor. Something's funny about him showing up here." He stared
at the two of spades Fanny had discarded with disgust. Fanny
giggled.

"He was just checking up on Helen," I
said.

"I don't think so." Bobby nodded toward
Helen. She was still staring out the window. "I think maybe you
better talk to your client."

"Do you mind?" I said. "It's rude to talk
about her like she's not here."

"She's not here," Bobby said. "That's my
point."

He was right. Helen was a million miles
away. I took her arm and pulled her back. "What's going on?" I
asked her. "Why did Lyman Carroll show up here?"

She shook her head. "I don't know, but I've
got a bad feeling about it." For a moment, I thought she might cry,
but her composure held. It was as if she had made a deal with
herself: in return for not functioning on a larger scale, for not
being able to take a step out of her front door, she would prove
her self-control on a smaller scale instead. She would not cry. At
all.

After a moment of deep breathing, she began
to tell me the whole story of Lyman Carroll. Not that there was
much of a story. She had known all along that the drug trial had
been pulled from him and given to Brookhouse. Partly because it had
been her fault. She had been Carroll's graduate student at first.
And she'd had a feeling he liked her, but he had never made any
overtures. Together, they had set up the protocol for the first
drug trial. He had been sloppy with it, she felt, unethical at
times. He'd wanted to fudge the reports. Just a little, she said.
Not change the results. But when people failed to show for their
weekly interviews, he had not always included that information.
Maybe he had even falsified a weekly interview or two. She had gone
to Brookhouse with the information. Brookhouse had notified the
drug company and taken over the trials. And Carroll had never
forgiven Helen for it. Especially when she started seeing
Brookhouse romantically. They rarely spoke after that and avoided
each other. Carroll had never attended the rape trial.

"Then why did he come out here tonight?" I
asked, though I suspected I knew: to find out if Helen had hired a
private investigator to track Brookhouse. But why would he care if
anyone was closing in on Brookhouse? So he could make his move and
take over the drug testing again?

Helen shook her head. "I don't know. But it
feels wrong. I don't think he's up to anything good."

"My point exactly," Bobby nearly bellowed.
He threw his cards down on the table. Fanny glared at him. "Just
because the doc says I've got to take it easy on my ticker, doesn't
mean I'm brain dead," Bobby said. "There's something I don't like
about that guy. He's a weaselly, pale little prick. With a stick up
his stuffy professor's ass. I'd watch out for him if I were
you."

Good
old Bobby. I could always count on him for a cool, measured
professional opinion. 

Some men deal with rivals by erupting with
jealousy and displaying their Neanderthal heritage. Others take the
smart route. They smile. They shrug. Then they rip your clothes off
and ravish you until morning.

Burly was one of the smart ones. The next
morning, I rolled out of bed humming like a tuning fork on caroling
day, then followed the scent of frying sausage to the kitchen.
Bobby D. was ensconced at the table, shoveling in pancakes with one
hand while lining up his heart pills with the other. No one else
seemed to notice this irony. Fanny was on chef duty and wore a
frilly pink apron that made her look like a giant bonbon. She
greeted me with a plate full of hotcakes and a stack of sausages
that ignited lust in Bobby's heart.

"How come she gets four pieces of sausage
and I only got one?" he complained.

"I'm the one doing all the work," I
explained with a smug smile.

Bobby grunted, annoyed that Fanny was
keeping him in line, even marginally. "Where's Hot Wheels today?"
he asked, using his favorite name for Burly.

"I wouldn't expect to see him before noon,"
I answered confidently. "Frankly, I'm surprised he survived the
experience."

Bobby ignored this reference to my sex life.
I think the very thought of it scares him. He stared at me intently
instead.

"What?" I asked, moving my plate out of his
reach. He was worse than Killer when it came to sausage.

"You need to pull out of that bullshit
undercover poking around," he said bluntly. "I told you not to talk
to the girlfriend of that professor. That guy showing up last night
was the result. Too many people know your face now. You're going to
get made any day. You better get out before you have your own civil
suit on your hands. Besides, Fanny is the one who got you in that
class, and I won't have them tracking it back to her. I don't want
her involved."

Fanny began to clean the counters with the
misplaced energy of the guilty.

"No, Casey can't give up now." Helen stood
in the doorway, her voice close to panic. How long had she been
standing there listening?

She was dressed in her bathrobe, her hair
still rumpled from sleep. "I know Casey is getting close," she
said. "I could feel something off Lyman last night. I couldn't
sleep. I think he's involved somehow. But I can't think how he
could be."

"Then sit down," I ordered her, "and let's
talk." I ignored Bobby's glare.

Over breakfast, I made her go through it all
again—her relationship with Lyman Carroll, her complaints about the
drug trial, her leaving to work with Brookhouse and their
subsequent affair. Then, of course, I brought her back to the night
she had been raped. By the time we reached this point, Bobby D. and
Fanny had quietly moved into the living room, giving us more
privacy.

"Could you be wrong?" I asked her. "Could
the rapist have been Lyman Carroll?"

Her reaction was immediate. "No," she said,
shaking her head. "Absolutely not. The man who attacked me was tall
and thin. Lyman is almost fat. You've seen what he looks like. I
would have—" She stopped and took a gulp of coffee. "I would have
noticed if the man who raped me was that overweight."

"So how could he be involved with the attack
on you?" I asked.

"I don't know. But I know the answer is in
that department somewhere. And you're the only one who can help me.
Promise me you won't give up now."

It was the first time she had shown any real
appreciation for what I was doing for her. What could I do?

I agreed to hang in there. Despite Bobby's
protests, I left in early afternoon to check on my furry lab
friends. It was Thursday, but there had been no time to alert the
study volunteers about the new interview night. My mission would
focus solely on mice.

The days I did not have to interview drug
trial volunteers, I still had to stop by Lab 14D and make sure the
specially bred mice in Lyman Carroll's study were happy and
well-fed—and not because they were nibbling each other's cute
little heads off. All was well in Rodentville. A small population
explosion in cage three had produced more pink morsels of mouse
flesh, but Mom did not seem in the mood to sample her young—surely
a good sign for the new tranquilizer being tested? All seemed
normal.

I checked the read-outs on the room
monitors. Temperature, humidity and light levels had behaved over
the past twenty-four hours. This, apparently, was a big deal: if
levels dropped below acceptable limits more than once within any
fifteen-minute period, the feds would come busting down the door to
free the mice, haul us away in chains and feed our carcasses to
attendees of the next local PETA meeting. At least, that was the
impression I got.

However, while little rodents were found in
abundance that afternoon, the big rats escaped me. I saw neither
David Brookhouse nor Lyman Carroll, though I did hear them arguing
behind closed doors at one end of the basement hall. It was a room
with a wall of one-way glass that was normally reserved for the
videotaping of subjects in psychological studies. The room was
supposed to be soundproof, but it was an old building and not even
meticulous renovation had brought about that miracle. I hovered
outside the door, ear pressed against metal, and could catch a
little of what was being said.

Lyman Carroll was mad as hell at David
Brookhouse. Best of all, the argument involved sex.

"Your behavior is endangering the grant,"
Carroll was yelling. "Can you not keep your hands to yourself for a
few more months at least? We agreed. There is a time and place for
everything. This study is not the place for you to indulge your
obsessions."

"You're one to talk. And I'm not touching
anyone in the study." Brookhouse sounded equally angry.

"No, you're just screwing
every other coed who walks in the door. Word gets out, David.
Word
is
out. It
was bad enough after your trial. It was a miracle we kept the
grant. We have a lot to lose here."

Unfortunately, Brookhouse calmed down during
this speech, so his reply was difficult to hear. I only caught
portions of it: "... my private business... nothing to do...
innocent... if you hadn't walked a gray area to begin with..."

Walked a gray area? Okay, so they weren't
professors of English.

I wanted to hear more, but a door banged
shut in the stairwell and I could not afford to be caught with my
ear to the proverbial keyhole.

As I drove back to Helen's, I thought about
what I had overheard. At least Carroll and Brookhouse had not been
discussing me. Or the existence of a private investigator on
Brookhouse's tail. It meant Carroll was keeping that little tidbit
to himself. But then he would—if Brookhouse fell, he was in a
position to take over a lot more than the drug trial.

"Do you think they know who you are?" Burly
asked me the next night. We were down at the pond, waiting for the
sun to set. I was perched on top of the picnic table and Burly was
in his wheelchair beside me. We were holding hands as the sun
inched toward the horizon. It was all very romantic—except that we
were discussing whether my undercover role had been blown.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe Carroll has
figured out who I am. But I don't think that Brookhouse has me
made. He'd never let me near him, or his study, if he knew who I
really was. He'd have fired me or called me on it before now."

"Unless he's waiting for a time to get you
alone," Burly mumbled.

I laughed. "Which one of us are you worried
about? If I end up going one-on-one with Brookhouse, I'll snap his
skinny ass in two."

I was going to illustrate my
testosterone-inspired claim by karate-kicking a bunch of small
green bananas off a nearby palm, but a distant buzzing stopped me.
The sound grew louder. Like a plane taking off... but in the woods?
That made no sense.

"Do you hear that?" I asked.

Burly heard it. And Burly knew it. "This is
not good," he shouted, wheeling furiously toward the oil drum
grill. "Are you armed?"

"God, no," I said. "Why?"

The answer swept into the clearing in an
avalanche of deafening sound. Motorcycles. Choppers. Six or seven
of them. All manned by refrigerator-sized human beings whose faces
were obscured by helmets and goggles. They wore an assortment of
leather and denim, cuffed, torn, their colors and emblems taped
over with black masking tape so that I could not tell which club
they were with.

There was no question why they were there.
The moment they saw us, they started shooting us the bird, shouting
insults and gunning their engines. They must have been waiting, and
watching, when Burly and I headed down to the pond. Talk about
sitting ducks. He was Donald and I was Daisy.

"Shit," Burly shouted. "Take this." He
tossed me a long barbecue fork, then grabbed a grill brush and
started swinging it as if testing a bat for weight.

I caught the fork and held it out in front
of me like a sword. What the hell was I supposed to do with it?
Stab some biker in the rump and see if he was done?

"Who are they?" I yelled at Burly over the
din of engine whine. The bikes roared into the clearing and bore
down on us. Burly positioned himself so that his back was protected
by the large metal grill. I stood beside him, determined that no
one was going to hurt him if I had my way.

"I can't tell who they are," he said. "But
there must be someone I know in there." Burly had been a biker. A
long time ago. In his pre-wheelchair lifetime.

"What the fuck do they want?" I wondered out
loud.