Dante's Poison (29 page)

The music abruptly stopped again, and our MC said, “But seriously folks . . .” to further guffaws. “Our man of the hour, Rod Henderson, asked me to come out and keep everyone busy while he straightens his hairpiece . . . (pause for laugh track) and takes his Placeva . . . (more of the same). . . . So while we're waiting for him, I thought I'd tell you a joke. The devil visits an Atria rep's home office to make him an offer. He says, ‘I'll increase your commissions by fifty percent, your doctors will respect you, you'll have four months' vacation a year, and you'll live to be a hundred. All I want in return is that your wife's soul, your children's souls, and all of their children's souls will rot in eternity forever.'”

He paused again before delivering the punch line: “The Atria rep thought for a moment and asked, ‘What's the catch?'”

The room exploded into thunderous applause. If this is what passed for humor in corporate America, I decided, it was time to move to Canada.

It went on like this for another ten minutes during which I seriously considered the potential merits of deaf-blindness, when I felt a rough tap on my shoulder.

“This him?” a man asked in a distinctly hostile manner.

“That's right,” I heard my friend Gretchen say. “He tricked me. He acted like he was drunk.”

“Yes, ma'am” the man said. “Don't worry. We'll take it from here.”

While he was picking me up by the shoulders, I heard another voice say, “Take him to the office behind reception and lock the door. He can stay there until the police arrive.”

Later that night, Josh was none too happy about having to come and bail me out.

“You did suggest I'd be better off without the cane,” I observed from the passenger seat of his BMW. We were on the Kennedy, headed back toward the city.

“True. But if you'd asked, I also would have counseled against corporate espionage.”

The weak link in my spy mission had proved to be Gretchen, who after relating the entertaining tale of the drunken salesman to several of her coworkers, was overheard by her supervisor and soon found herself being dressed down for a serious lapse in protocol. A quick check of the hotel's guest log—in addition to Atria's personnel records—revealed the alarming absence of a “Mark Halliday,” whereupon a member of the muscle hired by Atria to watch over the conference had been summoned to fetch me. He and the head of house security had practically carried me out of the meeting and through the hotel to a closet-sized room, where I'd sweated under lock and key for hours.

“Besides,” Josh said, “As I understood it, you were just going there to mingle.”

“Which, as it happens, is the only thing I'm guilty of.” I hadn't told Josh about the photos still safely hidden away in my phone. “It isn't my fault I wandered into the wrong room by mistake.”

“I have a hard time believing you didn't know exactly where you were.”

So did the security goon, who'd laughed out loud when I'd given him my excuse for crashing the sales meeting. “Sure you are,” he said as he was confiscating my belongings. “And I'm the next Patrick Kane.” Happily, he and the house dick confined their search for stolen documents to the photo-taking application on my phone they were familiar with, overlooking the more blind-friendly program I'd used to capture the contents of the folder. With no proof that I'd been doing anything more felonious than trespassing, they'd finally given into my pleas to question the bellhop, Nick, who scolded me for forgetting his directions but corroborated my story. Still, it had taken a further phone call to Josh—and his promise to come and personally escort me from the premises—to finally spring me from captivity.

“You know you're lucky not to be spending the night in a real jail,” Josh rebuked as he shifted into a lower gear next to me. His anger, so unlike his usual self, hung like a thick cloud between us. “What would you have done if they'd decided to press charges?”

The truth was, I didn't know. In trying to pass for normal earlier in the day, I had succeeded brilliantly, but at what risk? I shuddered to think of what it would have been like spending the night in a county lockup somewhere, in the company of Hells Angels, meth addicts, and carjackers. Without my cane I couldn't prove what I was, much less hold my own in a prison cell. I fingered the bottle of pills in my pocket, which seemed to have grown noticeably lighter in the last several days—still to no discernible effect.

Josh took my silence for an answer. “I know what you're doing,” he said.

“Go ahead, analyze me. It's what everyone likes to do.”

“You're acting crazy because you feel responsible for what happened to Hallie.”

“Shouldn't I?” I asked bitterly.

“No, you should not. If you're right about the attack on her being intentional, it could have happened anywhere—with or without you in the vicinity. And do I really need to point out that you were hit from behind?”

“So?”

“So unless you had eyes in the back of your head, you still might not have seen him. You'd be just as in the dark as you are now.”

“That's a gentle way of phrasing it.”

Josh shifted to a more forgiving tone. “We're only a few blocks from the hospital. Why don't we go over there right now? Her surgeon said she could be coming out of it soon. She'll want to see you.”

I wanted to, but I couldn't. Not when there was still work to be done. My George Smiley caper had turned up one solid fact: something
was
afoot at Atria. Something important enough to necessitate a search of my phone to be sure there was nothing in it I wasn't supposed to abscond with. Something that quite possibly had gotten Rory Gallagher killed. Which raised another disturbing fact: what would they have done to me if I'd been caught red-handed?

A thunderstorm was brewing when Josh dropped me off at my building, and I had to butt my way through a virtual wind tunnel to get to the lobby door. I yanked it open and took the elevator up, finding when I reached my apartment that the door there was also stuck. It was ten degrees cooler than usual when I stepped inside, and I soon figured out why. Somehow the door to my terrace had become unlatched during the day and was now banging back and forth, sending powerful gusts and the first drops of the storm into the room. I hurried over and forced it shut against the shrieking wind. It was a good thing I'd been booted out of the conference. I didn't think a burglar would climb nineteen stories to rob me of my pitiful collection of worldly goods, but coming home to a rain-soaked carpet and ruined furniture might have required that I finally do something to replace them.

I cranked up the thermostat and felt around to survey the damage, which seemed to consist only of a toppled floor lamp and some mail that I'd left on a side table, now scattered across the floor. I righted the lamp and switched on the light for comfort. The tempest outside was shaping up to be a late-season extravaganza. Thunderclaps were exploding directly overhead, and the rain was raking the windows like tossed gravel. If I stood still, I could feel the building swaying back and forth.

I poured myself a tumbler of bourbon and went to my office to start the download from my phone, hoping the power wouldn't go off before I had a chance to examine my booty. While I was connecting the cable I discovered that my computer was cold, which was odd because I almost always left it on. When it had heaved itself back to life and the download was underway, I went to my bedroom to find a wide-open window. This was becoming tedious. It was high time I got maintenance up there to check on all the latches. I changed into pajamas and a bathrobe, downed a container of cottage cheese over the kitchen sink, and popped my last pill for the day. I counted off another ten minutes before heading back to my desk and opening the file, anticipating a treasure trove.

It turned out to be anything but.

Most folks are better off not knowing about prescription data mining, the now-common practice in which pharmacies and benefit plans sell prescription information to third parties, who turn around and sell it to the big drug companies. Despite a barrage of criticism, it's a hugely successful business, with some estimates putting profits in the area of $10 billion annually. To ward off arguments about invasion of privacy, the data that gets sold is “de-identified”—that is, scrubbed of any information that could lead back to a particular patient—but it still supplies Big Pharma with the name of the drug in question, the prescribing doctor, and the dosage, all of which gets passed on to drug-company sales personnel. With the information instantly available on their smartphones and laptops, drug reps know exactly how much of their company's products a doctor ordinarily prescribes, and can tailor their sales pitches accordingly.

Like most doctors, I knew the practice existed, but I was unprepared to hear it laid out so graphically in a PowerPoint presentation, setting forth the previous year's sales results for specific regions, subregions, and practices. I learned that Atria divided my profession into ten “deciles” according to how much medication each doctor prescribed. Compared to his peers, a decile 10 doctor was the highest-prescribing doctor; a decile 1 doctor prescribed on average very few medications. Decile 10 doctors, being the most potentially lucrative, were targeted by Atria for the biggest sales pushes, whereas decile 1 doctors were all but ignored.

I also learned that within deciles there were nicknames for various personalities based on their histories. A “spreader” was a doctor who generally did not favor one brand of drug over another but prescribed them equally across several name brands and/or generics. A “no see um” was someone like me who discouraged visits from drug company reps. A “sample grabber” was someone who couldn't get enough of the free drugs. Naturally, a “spreader” in decile 10 got the most attention, since it was there that Atria stood the best chance of capturing market share from its competitors. There were even several slides devoted to “superstar” representatives—Graham's name figuring prominently among them—and their most reliable prescribers of Placeva, Lucitrol, and other bestsellers in key geographic areas.

It was all as slimy as hell.

And perfectly legal.

A few years back no less an authority than the United States Supreme Court had overturned a Vermont law outlawing prescription data mining on First Amendment grounds. Since then, despite some grumbling in the profession, efforts to reform the system had focused on the creation of a program allowing doctors to opt out of sharing their information, which was currently subscribed to by less than 4 percent of the physician population. I wondered if the doctors who had turned down the program would appreciate seeing their names flashed on a screen in front of a thousand cheering salesmen.

I read late into the night while the storm thumped away—periodically jumping at the cracks reverberating through my building's Tinkertoy infrastructure—and in the end, the only thing I could do was shake my head. Was protecting this mountain of crap what had nearly gotten me jailed? To be sure, the bean counters must have worn out their eyeshades compiling the data, which ran to nearly twenty pages. After the PowerPoint there were charts of all sizes and descriptions and page upon page of figures comparing this, that, and the other thing to something else. There were enough acronyms—ROI, EBIDTA, R&D—to fill a dictionary, and more footnotes than I could count. You needed to be a CPA to figure out what most of it meant, but it sounded to me like all the other corporate Sanskrit regularly appearing in the
Wall Street Journal
and glossy annual reports, not the kind of deep, dark secret that would get someone like Rory Gallagher killed.

Toward two o'clock the next morning, I'd had enough. As if in sympathy for the punishment my ears had taken, my eyes were watery and aching when I turned out the last of the lights and folded myself unhappily into bed.