Walking Through Walls (39 page)

The light on his answering machine was blinking impatiently. I started to listen, hoping that there would be a clue. Maybe someone from the hospital had called, maybe the funeral home had called—or maybe my father had called. Instead there were endless calls from endless strangers requesting endless healings. Everyone on that tape was sick or dying. Impatient, I fast-forwarded through the tape, making them all sound like cartoon characters leaving cartoon messages. I didn't want to hear any of the details. Each one of these messages was about someone's life in need of immediate assistance and repair. Were they all going to die without my father around to help them? I didn't want to know the answer. My attitude was, “Sorry, too late, you should have called yesterday.”

Lisa was hiding out in their bedroom. We had not formally met yet. I walked in and thanked her for letting me know that my father had died. She didn't quite know how to deal with me. Our initial discussion was awkward. I was not prepared to ask the details of what had happened. She muttered something about being sorry. I told her I needed to make some coffee.

In the kitchen, I saw that she had a white plastic Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. This told me everything about her that I didn't want to know. Having grown up on Cuban espresso, or at the very least coffee made with a Brazilian
colador
that looked like a white cotton sock stretched over a wooden handle, I felt that Mr. Coffee was appropriate only in the domain of the unenlightened. Mr. Coffee had no place in my father's house. This woman had to go. I certainly didn't like her before my father died. But now, having seen the Mr. Coffee, I blamed her for my father's death. I'm not quite sure why, but I felt that she'd killed him.

I refused to drink from Mr. Coffee and made some ginseng tea instead. While it brewed, Lisa mentioned that she would like to continue living in the house and continue my father's work. “Fat chance,” I thought. If anyone carried on, it would be me, and I didn't think that would be happening anytime soon. I think she'd known my father all of about six months. There was no way that she could have learned about healing or anything else about his work in that amount of time.

While I drank my tea, she handed me a large, ugly blue plastic bag as if it were some kind of peace offering. It was a horrible blue; the kind of thoughtless blue that they might use in making potties for the infirm or rubber sheets for the gurney. I couldn't stand touching the bag; it felt hot and dirty. There was something profoundly unpleasant about it.

As I opened the bag and peered in, my face was hit by an exhalation of warm, humid air. I blinked to protect my eyes. It was as if this bag held my father's last breath. When my eyes refocused, I was looking at the remains of my father from his ride to the hospital. His glasses, his watch, his ring, his crucifix with a Star of David superimposed on it, his wallet, and a dental bridge—all lying in a jumble at the bottom of this ugly blue bag. That was it? That was all I got? This was all there was of my father? His whole life added up to an indecent blue plastic bag filled with trinkets? The objects felt contaminated, as if they had touched something bad, something not my father. Something called death. I lifted my head, looked at Lisa, and said nothing.

She now volunteered, “All I know is that I was watching TV, and your father was in his study on the phone with one of his students, Ray. For no apparent reason, he began to have shortness of breath. He asked Ray to send him a certain kind of healing energy to open up the air passageways. They were on the phone for about forty-five minutes. Afterward, your father came out to the living room and began nervously pacing around. He was very agitated and said he wasn't feeling well. You know your father never got sick. I offered to call the paramedics, but he said no. When he collapsed, that's when I called. They got here as soon as they could. When they began to work on him, I saw your father leave his body. He was standing there watching everything that was going on. His expression was ‘So this is how this is done.' Then they took him to the hospital. He died on the way.”

I didn't believe anything she said to me. None of this made any sense. Something was very wrong with her and her story. How could my father be so stupid as to spend forty-five minutes on the phone with one of his students and not get to the hospital? Who was this Ray person? I had never heard of him. Forty-five minutes is a long time to be on the phone trying to get one of your students to relieve your chest pain—and not one of your stellar students, at that. Ray was clearly incompetant when it came to his basic healing skills. My father must have known he was having a heart attack. I know he always told me that a healer could never heal himself, in the same way that a surgeon could not operate on himself. But still, he could have done something, called someone. Something didn't add up.

My father had devoted the last years of his life to healing people, to picking them up after the medical profession had dropped them. Unfortunately, I also knew that he would never have put himself in doctors' hands and asked them to save him. Most likely he would rather die. And he did.

The phone had not stopped ringing. Each time the answering machine picked up, it repeated the same haunting message: “This is Lew Smith…” I didn't want to listen to the callers or the messages they were leaving. I thought about all these people who were home waiting for my father to call them back, to save them, to heal them. With my father gone, the funeral homes would probably notice a sudden uptick in business.

Back in the kitchen, I spotted a small orange prescription bottle on one of the shelves tucked next to my father's vitamins. I had never seen a bottle of drugs in his house, ever, and was surprised. Under no circumstances would my father have taken a prescription medicine.

I picked up the bottle and noticed that it belonged to Lisa. I read the label. One hundred tablets of Synthroid that had been filled two days earlier. When I opened the bottle, only three of the original one hundred tablets remained. Where did they all go? I needed to know more about Synthroid. I immediately went into my father's study and pulled out his
Physicians' Desk Reference.
Synthroid was normally prescribed for low thyroid condition. However, there was a small warning that adverse reactions could include hyperactivity, nervousness, heart failure, and cardiac arrest.

Where were those missing ninety-seven pills? I couldn't ask Lisa; she would lie to me anyway, so what was the point? Increasingly, it seemed that this woman who had suddenly appeared in my father's life was somehow involved in his sudden death. Was it for money? Or was it to take over his healing practice for the power and the glory? Or was she one of those female serial killers who preyed on elderly men in the hope that they would leave everything to her in their will?

Since childhood I had always been comfortable with conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable. I'm not talking about those general mass-market theories that implicated the U.S. government or the Communists in the killing of JFK, but rather the more esoteric ones such as the use of magnetic waves by the Soviets to control our minds to create a sympathetic environment for them to assume control of America. My father's death created an ideal situation in which to manufacture reams of mental documentation to explain his mysterious expiration. How could there be any other reason for his demise other than by nefarious means? Perhaps Lisa had won over Arthur through some strange psychic/tantric/sexual initiation, and he had turned on my father and assisted in his killing. Or maybe Lisa had poisoned my father and discouraged him from calling the paramedics while she watched him pace nervously around the living room as the poison constricted his arteries. This way he would die, leaving her what she imagined to be his millions. Or how about this: Chander Sen decided that he urgently needed my father on the other side for advanced healing instruction and accidentally ripped his astral body from the physical body? As a result, my father was unable to reunite his bodies and disappeared from the physical realm. I was comfortable with any of these theories. Given time, I would continue to build much more elaborate explanations for his sudden death.

In an effort to play detective, I copied down all the information on the prescription bottle and drove over to the supermarket, where I could use the pay phone without Lisa listening in. My first call was to the pharmacist at Super X drugs. “Can you tell me when prescription number 794627481 was filled?” I asked.

“December eleventh, two days ago.”

“And was it filled for one hundred tablets?”

“Yes.”

“Um, I have this bottle, and now there are only three tablets remaining. I think my father may have been given these pills or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, my father's dead, and all these pills are missing. Maybe he was killed with these pills.”

“Oh, I don't think so. The pills could be anywhere. Someone could have put them in another bottle or poured them down the drain or—”

“But I read in the
PDR
that this could cause a fatal cardiac event.”

“I'm not sure. I can look that up. Just a minute, please…”

“Thanks for your help. Bye.” I was afraid he was going to put me on hold and call the cops. Lisa had probably called him by now and told him not to say anything. I'll bet she knew what I was up to. She was probably busy covering up her trail fast.

Next I called a friend's father and asked for the name and number of an attorney. When the attorney answered, I gave him my name and began my story. “I think my father has been murdered. See, there were all these pills, and now there are only three left, and this pill can cause heart attacks, and there is this woman in the house who I don't know, and I think she wants his money because she says she's going to live in the house and—”

“Did you have breakfast?”

“No.”

“I think you're just upset and need some food. Go get some pancakes. It'll be fine. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”
Click.
As usual, I was having trouble getting people to believe me. This was no different than the rare occasions when I mentioned to someone that my father had this dead friend named Arthur. I was always met with the same wall of disbelief. My murder theory was not playing well either.

After the pharmacist and the attorney, I called directory assistance and asked for the number and address of the medical examiner's office. I pretended that I was in a movie and doing exactly what the son of a murder victim would do. I was writing the script as I went along.

“County medical examiner's office.”

“Hi, my father has just been murdered, and I need to get an autopsy.”

“Yeah, just a minute.” The operator barely covered the phone when she yelled out, “Jorge, I got one for you!”

“Detective Perez.”

“Yeah, my father's been murdered, and I need to get an autopsy done before this woman leaves town.” Perez took a deep breath filled with annoyance. I was obviously disturbing his
cafécito
break. I continued, “Well, there were all these pills, they were just filled a few days ago—one hundred tablets—and now there's only a few left, and my father's dead. And I read that these pills can give you a heart attack, so that's what happened. Now I need to get an autopsy before—”

Perez wasn't buying. “What'd you say your name was?”

“Smith. Philip Smith.”

“Okay, Mr. Smith. Here's what I think: I think you're overreacting a little bit, and you need to calm down and maybe think this thing through a bit more.”

“Yeah, but I need an autopsy, because I know you'll find the drug in his body.”

“But we're not going to do that. See…” Detective Perez was determined not to be helpful at any level. I hung up and got in the car and headed to police headquarters downtown.

At the police department, they just shuffled me around. I had already told the receptionist that I had a murder on my hands and needed to talk to the chief detective. All I got was an “uh-huh.” The receptionist pointed me to a room with scuffed-up bitter green walls and gray furniture to just sit and wait. There were another six people waiting along with me. Just one look at them, and I knew they had much worse problems than I did. About an hour later, Detective Gonzalez appeared—a compact guy with a crisp white shirt who didn't like to get his hands dirty. I pitched the Synthroid story one more time. He nodded. “We got one little problem here. Synthroid is instantly metabolized by the body, and the autopsy isn't going to show anything. Bury your father and call it a day.”

“Oh. I thought an autopsy could find anything.”

“Nope, only certain key drugs. Sorry.” He stood to leave.

What a dumb fuck. He lied to me, and I believed him. He was just too lazy and didn't want to bother to fill out the paperwork to do the job. I should have known better than to assume that this $16,000-a-year detective knew anything about medicine, much less pharmaceuticals. I was still a kid in many ways and didn't know how to push my way through the system.

Many years later, I told this story to a brilliant pathologist friend of mine, who said, “Of course Synthroid would show up in an autopsy. You can find anything if you bother to look for it.”