The Oath (40 page)

She leaned back into him, managed a goofy smile in the mirror through the toothpaste. “I don’t think I am. Aren’t you tired?”

“Not really. Evidently I slept during Vinnie’s game.”

“It wasn’t that bad. So what are you going to do?”

“I’ve got some reading material in my briefcase. Maybe if I blur my eyes just right, I can get it to make some sense.”

He was sitting at the desk in the bedroom, five of Driscoll’s purloined pages spread out before him. He wasn’t completely sure why these five had made his cut—none had more than a couple of lines. But something about each of them had seemed pregnant enough with some kind of hidden meaning to warrant one more round of conjecture.

“See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24.”

“Talk to MR—address complaints re: hands on at Port. PPG ult.”

“Medras/Biosynth/MR.”

“Foley. Invest. $$$. Saratoga. DA? Layoff? Disc. w/C.”

“See Coz. re: punitive layoffs—MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?”

And then a little voice said, “Go to sleep. This is not happening.” He must have made it to the bed because that’s where he was when he woke up.

G
litsky kissed his wife good-bye at the front door.

“If I’m around for lunch, I’ll call.”

“If I’m around, I might go out with you.” Treya gave him a mock-sad moue. “A year ago the mere thought of lunch with me would have made your morning. You’d have planned your whole day around it.”

“I know, but we’re married now, and you’re pregnant and all. It’s pretty natural, the romance going away with all that day-to-day stuff.”

She put an arm around his neck and brought her mouth up to his ear. “What was last night, then?”

“Last night?” Glitsky scratched at his scar, pretended not to remember. “Last night?”

She swung a hard elbow and caught him in the gut. “Oh, sorry.” A smile, then, “Shoot for lunch.”

Rubbing his stomach, he closed the door and came back into his kitchen, where Hardy sat at the table. He’d called an hour before and offered to drive Glitsky in to work, though he usually drove in with his wife. But Hardy thought he might have something on Markham, although he didn’t know what it was, and maybe Abe, now pulling up his chair, could help.

Hardy drummed his fingers. After twenty seconds, Glitsky said, “You want to stop that?” Then, “Ross looks like he’s in some kind of trouble, doesn’t he?” A minute later, he pulled one page over in front of him. “This one, maybe, it could be Mike Andreotti.”

“New to me,” Hardy said.

“The administrator at Portola. He’ll talk to you if I ask him to. He’s all cooperation with these homicides. I might even go with you. Where’d you get this stuff?”

“Jeff Elliot couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He said if I could, I was welcome to it.”

“Yeah, but where did it come from originally?”

“It was Markham’s, through Driscoll, then through Elliot.”

“Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance.”

“No, but I’ll take it.”

“At this point”—Glitsky was getting up—“I’ll take anything.”

If at Glitsky’s last meeting with him, Andreotti had been at the edge of physical and nervous exhaustion, now he was the walking dead. He didn’t even bother rising from the chair behind his desk, didn’t wonder that the new man, something Hardy, wasn’t a policeman or a DA or even a reporter. He just didn’t have any more energy to expend. He’d been at work all night, dealing with a sick-out of his nurses, scared off either by the rumors or sensing an opportunity for leverage in their struggle for higher wages. He didn’t know and really at this point didn’t care. The ship was going down anyway, and he saw no way to stop it.

And now these men had a puzzle for him. He got a perverted kick out of that. He was so beat he’d have trouble with the rules of tic-tac-toe, and they wanted him to decipher this puzzle. It was funny, really, if he had the strength to laugh.

“See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24.”

“No idea,” he said.

The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. “We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?”

Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. “See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What’s SS?”

This time, there was no hesitation. “Sinustop.”

“And what was your recommendation?”

“Well, it wasn’t mine. I’m just the administrator, but the PPG recommended—”

“Excuse me,” Hardy said. “What’s the PPG?”

Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. “The Parnassus Physicians’ Group. Basically, they’re the doctors that work here.”

“Okay.” Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, “And what did they recommend about Sinustop?”

“Just that we’d been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion.”

“But you didn’t implement it?” Hardy asked.

“No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position—I’ve got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I’m not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted.”

“You don’t like him much.” Glitsky didn’t phrase it as a question.

But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. “People become pricks around money and money’s been so tight here for so long…” Another shrug. “If it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else.”

“Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham,” Hardy reminded him.

“No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There’s a difference.”

“What’s the difference?” Glitsky asked.

“Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn’t have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding.”

“And Markham wasn’t?”

“Sometimes, but nowhere near the way Ross did. You think it was Markham who made the call on Baby Emily? No chance.” He pointed at Hardy’s page again. “Anyway, I guess that’s why he wrote that note to himself. He thought Ross went too far there again.”

“What about you, Mr. Andreotti?” Glitsky asked. “What did you think?”

Another weary sigh. “I know this always sounds terrible, but I’m an administrator. I resist the temptation to play doctor. I follow orders.”

But Hardy had what he needed, and had already gotten a hint on something else. “If we may, sir,” he began, translating the second note as Glitsky had done. “Talk to Ross and address complaints about hands-on at Portola. Parnassus Physicians’ Group ult, which must be ultimatum.”

“It was.” This wasn’t any mystery to Andreotti. He actually almost seemed to perk up slightly. “Sometime last year, Ross started coming by the hospital all the time—drop-ins, he called them. Checking up on our physicians’ procedures on everything from birthing to surgeries to ER procedures first, making recommendations to save a buck here, a buck there. Later actually advising doctors what they ought to do right while they were treating their patients. Now, when you realize that even the lowliest GP has a self-image just a notch below God’s, you can imagine how popular these visits were. Finally, the PPG issued an ultimatum that he had to stop and, mostly, he did. At least enough to satisfy them.”

“But not completely?” Hardy wanted to be sure.

“No. But the drop-ins fell off from twenty a month to maybe five and he stopped giving orders disguised as advice.”

“Do you have any record of the days he came? The actual dates?” Hardy asked.

Andreotti pondered for a moment. “No, I doubt it. Why would we? He wasn’t on staff here, so there’d be no personnel record. He just dropped in. Why?”

“No reason. Just curious.” Hardy kept it deliberately vague, pushed the other pages across the desk. “If we could just take one more minute of your time, Mr. Andreotti, does anything else strike you about these?”

The administrator pulled them over and took time now, one by one. “I don’t know Medras, but Biosynth is a drug manufacturer. Most of their stuff is low-rent, over-the-counter. They’re not real players, but I’ve heard a rumor they’ve got something big with the FDA right now.” He turned to the next page, looked up. “Foley is Patrick Foley. He’s corporate counsel. I don’t know who DA is.”

Glitsky knew that one. “The district attorney.”

A light was coming on in Andreotti’s eyes, but he made no comment, turning to the last page. “See Coz. re: punitive layoffs—MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?”

“Coz is Cozzie Eu. She’s the personnel director.” He labored over the rest of the note for a few seconds; then slowly he raised his head. “Tim was going to let Ross go, wasn’t he?”

Glitsky’s mouth was tight. “It’s a little early to say, sir. But thanks very much for your time.”

As they drove out to the Embarcadero Center and Parnassus Headquarters, the way they decided to phrase it to corporate counsel was that Hardy was an attorney working with the DA. That was true in all its parts if not quite literally. Pat Foley met them at the door, saw them through, then looked back along the hallway in both directions before he closed it. They didn’t get a chance to try out their explanation before Foley started talking. “You caught me just as I was going out, but my appointment is just over in Chinatown. Maybe we could talk as we walk.”

In five minutes, they were in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by pagodas and tai chi classes, some Asian porn shops, and a line of cars waiting for space in the garage below. High clouds had blown in over the night, and the morning air was chill with a brittle sunlight.

Foley’s dome shone even in the faded day. The few hairs that were left were blond, as was the wispy mustache. Thin-shouldered and slightly paunched, he was the picture of what a life behind a desk with tremendous financial pressure could do to a young man—he didn’t appear to be much over forty, if that. When he finally sat himself on the concrete lip of one of the park’s gardens, he was breathing heavily from the walk.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t want to talk about it in there. The walls have ears, sometimes.”

“Talk about what?” Glitsky asked mildly.

“Well, Susan said you were with homicide. I assume this is about Mr. Markham, or the other Portola deaths. Although I have to say I work almost exclusively with corporate matters. I’m not aware of any information I possess that might be useful to your investigation. If I was, as an officer of the court, of course I would have come forward voluntarily.”

Glitsky gave him a flat stare. “Do you talk that way at home?”

Before Foley could react, Hardy stepped in. “Do you really believe your offices are bugged?”

The one-two punch confused him. He couldn’t decide which question to answer, so he asked one of his own. “Is this about Mr. Markham then?”

The truth was that neither Hardy nor Glitsky knew precisely what this meeting was going to be about. The telltale initials MR did not even appear in Markham’s note. So though they both had their suspicions that Ross was somehow involved, they didn’t want to give anything away. “Do you have any idea what the word ‘Saratoga’ might refer to, Mr. Foley?” Glitsky asked.

“You mean the city down the peninsula, out behind San Jose? I think there’s another one in New York, as well, upstate somewhere, I believe. Is that it?”

Hardy and Glitsky fell into a more or less natural double team. Hardy followed up. “Have either of those cities turned up in your corporate work?”

Foley turned to his other inquisitor. He thought a while before he answered. “I can’t think of when they would have,” he said with a stab at sincere helpfulness. “We don’t have any business either place. Maybe a few patients live in the city out here, but that would be about the extent of it.”

Glitsky: “So the name hasn’t come up recently? Saratoga? Something Mr. Markham might have discussed with you?”

Foley passed a hand over his dome and frowned.

“Maybe not plain Saratoga,” Hardy guessed. “A Saratoga something?”

That flicked the switch. “Ah,” Foley said. “It’s an airplane. Sorry. I think Saratoga and I think Cupertino. I grew up down there, went to Bellarmine. But it’s an airplane. It’s the one John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying when he went down.”

Hardy and Glitsky exchanged a glance, and the lieutenant spoke. “Was the company planning to buy a plane?”

“No, it was Mr. Ross. That’s how it was brought to my attention.”

“In what way?” Hardy asked.

At this turn in the questioning, Foley actually turned and looked behind him. Wiping some perhaps imaginary sweat from his broad forehead, he tried a smile without much success. “Well, it came to nothing, really.”

Glitsky’s voice brooked no resistance. “Let us be the judge of that. What happened?”

“One night rather late, I think it was toward the end of last summer, Mr. Markham called to see if I was still working, then asked me to come up to his office. This was a little unusual, not that I was working late, but that he was still there. I remember it was full dark by this time, so it must have been nine or nine thirty. Still, he told me to close the door, as though there might be other people working who could overhear us.

“When I got seated, he said he wanted our talk to be completely confidential, just between the two of us and no one else. He said it was a very difficult subject and he didn’t know where he stood, even with his facts, but he wanted to document his actions in case he needed a record of them down the line.”

“What did he want to do?” Hardy asked.

“He wasn’t even sure of that. Eventually, he came to where he thought he ought to hire a private investigator to look into Mr. Ross’s finances.”

Glitsky kept up the press. “What made him get to there?”

“Several things, I think, but the immediate one was the Saratoga.” Foley was warming to his story, as though relieved that he finally had an opportunity to get it off his chest. “It seems that Mr. Markham and Dr. Ross had been at a party together one night at a medical convention they were both attending in Las Vegas a week or so before. They’d been close friends for years, you know, and evidently they went out together afterward alone for a few drinks, just to catch up on personal stuff. Well, over the course of the next couple of hours, Dr. Ross maybe drank a little too much, but he evidently made quite a point of telling Mr. Markham about the condition of his finances, which wasn’t good at all. His personal finances, I mean, exclusive of Parnassus, which was hurting badly enough as it was.”

“So Ross cried on Markham’s shoulder?” Glitsky asked.

“Essentially, yes. Told him he had no money left, no savings, his wife was spending it faster than he could earn it. Between the alimony for his first wife and the lifestyle of his second, he was broke. He didn’t know what he was going to do.”