Boston Cream (26 page)

“You sure it wasn’t at gunpoint? Was the donor even conscious when he was brought in?”

“I told you before, I don’t know. I only entered once he had been prepped.”

“For all you know he could have been disposed of after the surgery.”

“That wasn’t my understanding,” he said. “I was told he was a willing donor.”

“How long before Daggett approached you again?”

“About three months. He told me he had found someone else who needed a kidney and didn’t trust the system to provide one in time. Of course, this person also happened to have the money to obtain one illegally. Daggett found out what these surgeries cost in hospitals and charged him double. Half a million.
And then he told me we were in business. Anyone who left the team would be killed. If I tipped anyone off, my son would be killed. He would pay us the same amount as before—ten thousand per team member, twenty-five for me.”

“How many have you done?”

“We’ve averaged one surgery a month, so about fifteen so far.”

“That’s more than enough to know the place inside out. So here’s what you’re going to do: sit down with a pad and sketch every inch of Halladay’s, every door, window and chimney. Write down who’s usually there the night of a transplant by way of security. Who packs a gun.” I moved in closer, advancing slowly, never taking my eyes off Stayner’s, backing him up until he was angled over the harvest table, his palms on the table to support him. “You’re going to show us how you get in, how the others get in. Are you usually patted down when you get there? Does anyone check your equipment? What does Reimer look like? Would they recognize him with a mask on? Come on, get writing. You’re such a Harvard genius, write it down.”

His arms were shaking from the strain. His elbows quivered and the table shook. An apple fell out of a basket of fruit and rolled along the table to the far end, where it dropped onto the floor.

“Quit crowding me and I’ll do it.”

“This isn’t crowding. Crowding will be if anything happens to Jenn because you left something out.”

I let him up. He stood up straight and brushed at his shirt. Smoothed back his hair, his hands still trembling. He got scrap paper and pencils out of a kitchen drawer and set them on the table. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “there’s a very good chance your friend is still alive.”

“Why?”

“The fresher tissue is when you transplant it, the better. And as in your supermarket, fresh is always better than frozen.
I can’t assemble the team twice in two days, so if Daggett is sick enough to do this to her, it will be tomorrow night, either before or after Mrs. McConnell’s surgery.”

“Insist it be done after.”

“You don’t insist with Daggett.”

“This time you do. Tell him you’re not feeling well, you have to do the McConnell transplant first. Tell him it doesn’t matter if the woman dies, so you’d rather do her after, when you’re tired.”

“He’s greedy enough to buy that,” Stayner said. “Okay, I’ll try it. The least I can do is buy you that time for her.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that Stayner could draw; he was a meticulous man and good with his hands. But his renderings of Halladay’s Funeral Home from a range of perspectives were excellent. He started with a street view, placing the mortuary on Wellington Hill Street with two other properties on each side. Then filled in the front and rear entrances with all doors and windows.

He talked me through the procedure in five-minute blocks of time from the team’s arrival, through the set-up, scrubbing and surgery itself: the swift laparoscopic removal of the organ; the stapling and suturing of the donor while the organ sat on ice; the insertion of the organ and the stapling and suturing of the recipient. The diseased kidney was not removed but left in to wither and die. Done sequentially, it took four to six hours, assuming no bleeding, misfired staples or other complications.

Stayner told me security during a transplant was usually limited to four men. The day shift and night shift would simply overlap for the duration.

“What about Daggett? Does he usually come?”

“He attended Michael’s, of course, and the first half-dozen or so. Then he seemed to lose interest. It’s more sporadic now.”

“When he does come, is he alone?”

“Never. He always has that hulking friend of his. Kieran.”

“Kieran’s out,” I said. “Jenn took him out before Daggett grabbed her.”

“Then he’ll have someone else,” Stayner said. “Daggett is never alone.”

He made a list of all his team members and the equipment they typically brought in with them for each procedure. “We don’t leave much at Halladay’s. Even with their security, you don’t want to leave anything of value in that neighbourhood.”

“Which means we can hide a gun in your stuff. I don’t suppose you’re handy with a pistol.”

“Not even if it were filled with water.”

“Any of your team?”

“Please, we’re surgeons.”

“Don’t get huffy,” I said. “You did plenty of damage by agreeing to Mrs. McConnell’s surgery.”

“Daggett forced me to—”

“Save it. Lerner could only bring the deal as far as you. You took it to Daggett. He didn’t know about it until you volunteered, knowing McConnell would pay ten times what you’d been throwing back. And that extra step helped get David killed.”

“You’re determined to blame that on me.”

“It’s that or punch more holes in your walls.”

R
abbi Ed let me into the house, wearing a cabled grey cardigan over a white Oxford shirt and black jeans. As he turned to shut the door, I went straight to the dining room table. I wanted no more of closed, quiet rooms filled with the leathery smell of old books full of high ideals. I wanted to be in the open with him, and with Shana if she chose to be part of this. And wasn’t that going to be fun?

The rabbi used a dimmer to fill the afternoon light in the dining room with a soft yellow glow. Shana was across the butcher-block island in the kitchen, dressed in jeans with a white blouse and a man’s suit vest over it. I smiled at her but could tell how forced it felt; she did too, I guess, because she didn’t smile back. But she did offer coffee. I said yes and she started putting a pot together, measuring out dark grounds from a Starbucks bag she took from the freezer.

“It’s terrible news about David,” Rabbi Ed said. “I’m simply heartbroken for his parents. They sound like wonderful people. I was so hopeful this was going to turn out right.”

“It hasn’t turned out so bad,” I said.

“What? How can you say that? David is dead. Your partner is being held hostage.”

“For you, I meant.”

He drew back as Shana looked at me with anger. She said, “That was totally inappropriate.”

“You got everything you wanted out of the deal,” I said to him. “McConnell would make sure you got federal funding. Urban renewal, that’s his thing. Zoning problems would go away. His wife would make a personal contribution to the capital campaign once she got the new kidney you lined up for her.”

“I know this has been an upsetting day for you,” he said in a soothing voice, the one he probably used to counsel his flock.

“You spent your life telling the truth, Rabbi,” I said. “So you’re not a very good liar. You said David never told you anything about the organ trade the night he was here.”

“That’s right.”

“But Mrs. McConnell’s operation was lined up the next day.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You’re the only link between all the players. You put the congressman and Stayner together. David had already told you about this, hadn’t he? During one of your confessional tête-à-têtes.”

“I told you I wasn’t prepared to discuss that.”

“He told you about the illegal operation he’d been dragged into and the death of one of the donors.”

“Jonah,” Shana said, “unless you can prove all of this I think you should just stop the wild accusations. This is our house you’re in.”

“Such a nice house,” I said. “Such a warm house. Built by such a warm-hearted man. A builder and a ribbon cutter, a pillar of Brookline. They ought to paint a mural of him on Harvard Street.”

“I said stop.”

“Let him stop me,” I said. “Tell me which part isn’t true,
Ed
. David is dead, there are no more confidences to keep.” I looked at Shana; she glared at me, her fists clenched tightly at her sides.

He took a deep breath, as if a man of his girth needed to fill himself with more air than most. “What are you, thirty-three, thirty-four years old?”

“Close enough.”

“What do you know about building a shul like Adath Israel? Yes, I cut the ribbons and broke the ground. From a small shul to an expanded one to a second building. I founded the day school, the men’s choir, the adult education program, the youth basketball club. For twenty-five years, there was virtually nothing in that building I did not initiate or bring to life.”

“So why quit?”

“I didn’t plan to. I thought I’d stay there until I retired. But it was time to build a new complex. We had outgrown the old one. It had always been a patchwork affair—one building here, one there, with a walkway connecting them, which could, by the way, fall apart any day. Through a developer I know, up came an opportunity to acquire land in a good location nearby and build the kind of synagogue Brookline should have: a new sanctuary and admin wing, a bigger school, more gym and childcare space. There were naming opportunities galore. Fantastic plans another friend of mine drew up for nothing. And the board of directors turned it down. They said it was the wrong time to build, what with the economy bouncing around like a basketball. I argued the opposite. Workmen were out of work. Materials were cheap. The land was there at a buyer’s price. They said no, no, no. It was too expensive. The timing was bad, it sent the wrong message, the naming opportunities might not be there—every excuse. And after twenty-five years, all the battles, Jonah, the joy, of course, the opportunity to do a lot of good, but the grief too, to have endured all that and be turned down by these pishers? That was it. I took a leave of absence, during which I looked at other opportunities, and came up with the idea of the Shul on the Hill. That’s why I left.”

“When did David tell you about Mr. Patel?”

“A few days after he died. David came by for tea after dinner. You were out that night,” he said to Shana.

“He confided in you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did he ask your advice?”

He lowered his head. Shana said, “Dad?”

“Rabbi, did he ask your advice?”

“Yes. He thought maybe he should go to the authorities.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That he had indeed saved a life, as Dr. Stayner had suggested. He had not done it for material gain; the money was more or less forced on him. He said he was going to send half to his parents and give the other half to the Patels.”

“What else?”

“I told him it was best to keep silent.”

“Dad!”

“Because it
was
best,” he insisted. “This Daggett character had them all in thrall. He would hurt Dr. Stayner’s son if he refused to take part. The others faced threats of violence or exposure. I said I thought it best if he just forgot it. Put it behind him.”

“And then you called McConnell.”

“I did not,” he said. “It’s not like I brokered this thing.”

“What did you do?”

“As it happened, I ran into the McConnells at a function the day after I saw David. And Lesley looked frightful, despite all the makeup. I’ve known them both for some time and the decline in her appearance was shocking. So I said, on compassionate grounds, maybe I could help them. He expressed his interest.”

“I bet he did. So you went to Stayner and asked if he could help.”

“Yes. And when he heard what McConnell would pay him, he jumped.”

“He swears he gives all his payments to the hospital.”

“Not one this size. I don’t know what he ever got before, but I believe Marc offered him a quarter-million. That’s what he offered me for the capital campaign. I didn’t ask him for anything, you understand. I didn’t extort him, despite what you believe. When I told him what I knew, without naming names of course, he told me straight out that I’d never have a zoning issue in Beacon Hill and that federal funds would flow to their maximum. All without a word from me.”

A religion of loopholes is ours, and he’d had a lifetime to master them. “How discreet of you. And just like that, your Shul on the Hill comes closer to reality.”

“I told you the night you came here I’m a man of action, Jonah, as you are in your way. I need a challenge. Something to build. When Adath Israel stalemated me, left me with nothing left to put my shoulder to, that’s when I knew I had to leave. And the new shul, back in Beacon Hill where fifty had dwindled to none, is where it is going to be.”

“Even if it cost David his life.”

“That’s quite a leap.”

“No, Dad,” Shana said. “Not really.”

“You’re taking his side?”

“This isn’t about sides. You knew David was troubled by what had happened. You made him go out and do it again.”

“How was I to know the next surgery would happen so fast? I figured by the time it all happened, this other doctor would be back in his place. I didn’t know David would be part of it.”

“Lesley McConnell, heiress to the Austin-Smith fortune, is dying,” I said. “As soon as Daggett heard her name, he smelled big money, his best score yet. He could have found half a dozen good matches through the testing program within hours, like he did with his son. And you know what happens after. He identifies the one with the worst money problems and makes them an offer. They either take it or they go missing,
because not all of them volunteer, Rabbi. If they don’t take the offer, he kills them.”

“Do you really know that for a fact?”

“You want facts? He’s going to take my partner’s organs too.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“They’re worth a fortune to him. He’ll take every last thing worth harvesting out of her.”

“Stop,” Shana cried, sobbing full out again. You wouldn’t think someone could cry all the tears she had cried that day and still have more inside.