Wicked Fix (6 page)

"Why don't you go on over and hang out with Tommy

Daigle awhile? Let your dad and me have a conversation."

"You sure? He's pretty, um ... you know." Sam

waved his hands in a pantomime of something flying to

pieces.

"I'm sure," I replied as reassuringly as I could, and

to my relief he headed off. Tommy Daigle was a sensible,

good-hearted boy, and his company would be an

antidote to Sam's distress.

Now all I needed was an antidote to my own, but I

wasn't going to get that, either. Mounting the back

steps with Ellie, I could hear Victor in there muttering

to himself.

"Well, it took you long enough," he snapped as he

saw us.

Scrubbed and freshly shaved as usual, he looked

pink as a shrimp. But his eyes were narrowly anxious. I

looked at the coffeepot, nearly full when I'd left--Sam

had made the coffee, and since he believed it should

compete with battery acid, I'd hardly drunk any--and

empty now.

Then Ellie and I swung into action: I filled the coffeepot

and started it again while she got cups and saucers

and sliced bread for toast. I cracked eggs into a

bowl, adding milk and waiting for the butter in the pan

to sizzle before I dumped them in; she washed the

bowl, dried it, and put it away before the eggs had time

to need stirring.

Victor looked helpless and puzzled, as he always

does when anything useful is happening that does not

involve surgery.

"Doesn't anybody want to know why I'm so upset?"

he finally demanded.

Ellie put a glass of orange juice on the oilcloth

covered table in front of him. She had not wanted him

to move to Eastport any more than I had, but there

hadn't been much she could do about it, either. When

he wants something, he is as relentless as the hurricane

that had resettled her ancestors.

"Maybe you're upset because you have high blood

pressure?" she inquired. "That always puts you in a

bad mood. Drink your juice. Here's some aspirin to go

with it."

She dropped tablets onto the table. "I don't suppose

you've thought to take any, yet." Now that he

was here, she'd adopted my standard procedure for

dealing with him:

First, get him out of his immediate physical discomfort.

We would have skipped this, except that it so

much simplified stage two: getting him out of my house

and back into his own as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

Which was the hard part. I could have just banished

him as a general rule, I suppose, but that would

have been hard on Sam. And this morning, something

serious was up; how serious, I didn't know yet.

"Well, no," he admitted about the aspirin and

swallowed them grudgingly. He ate the eggs and toast

we fixed for him, too, and drank more coffee.

Ellie glanced meaningfully at me: Now he can vamoose.

Not so fast, I signaled back at her, because I was

watching Victor carefully and something about him

was different:

We'd bolstered his blood sugar, dosed him with

aspirin, and loaded him with caffeine until his eyes

should have looked like spinning pinwheels. It was not

the most politically correct way of dealing with a tiresome

ex-husband, I will grant you. But it worked,

which most of the time was all I cared about.

Now, though, Victor's mood was emphatically not

brightening. Meanwhile, the amount of money I had

invested in him at the moment meant that if he was in

trouble, I was, too.

"You did leave the tie in the bar, didn't you?" I

asked. "I mean, Ted Armstrong will be able to say so."

"N-not exactly." All he needed was a cartoon

cloudburst over his head. "I stuffed it in my pocket.

But it wasn't there when I got home. Maybe it fell out,

when I pulled out some hand wipes. I was on Water

Street."

Even that wasn't enough to make him look as unhappy

as he did. "So," I pursued, "what's the rest of

the problem?"

He looked distractedly at me, which was when I

really began feeling nervous; over the years I have come

to understand that if Victor doesn't have a malicious

gleam in his eye, something worse than Sam's coffee is

brewing.

"Tate," he replied. "After you left the restaurant.

He came in again, said he wanted to have our conversation."

Uh-oh. "And did you?"

He nodded morosely. "Classic textbook case. I'd

never met a real sociopath before."

"But you had met him before," Ellie pointed out.

"He said he wanted to talk with you again. Meaning, I

assume, that you and he had spoken earlier."

He bridled instantly. "Well, yes, but--look, I don't

want to tell you about it at all, if all you're going to do

is try to confuse me."

That's Victor: elbow-deep in somebody else's cranium,

he's a model of serenity. Anywhere else he's a

basket case, which was why I'd wanted him thoroughly

involved in a medical enterprise: it was the only way to

make him tolerable.

"Calm down," I told him. "What's the worst that

can happen?"

"That they're going to think I did it," he blurted.

Which was not what I wanted to hear. I stared at

him, not quite believing that I had. "Victor, what are

you talking about?"

"Maybe not the guy with the ear," he went on,

"although that's bad enough, and after all, it was my

tie they found in his throat. But with him, I didn't have

any motive."

And with Tate he did, he seemed to be implying.

Oh, this was just fabulous. He pressed his hands to his

head. "The police are probably on their way here right

now, and--"

"Victor," I cut in. "Just tell us what he said to you

after we left. What did he want to talk with you

about?"

Then Victor uttered the word that froze my heart.

"Blackmail," he whispered. I sat down.

"Tate was blackmailing me," he confessed, "or

anyway he was about to. And everybody in the bar last

night knew it."

Worse and worse. "How did they know?"

He shrugged miserably. "He said I was going to

hire him: big salary, unspecified duties. Said he'd been

digging into what he called my dark past, and that I'd

have to pay him money for it."

"He was just bluffing," I said flatly. "I hope you

told him to walk east till his hat floated."

Another dark thought struck me. "You didn't,

though, did you? Tell him to get lost."

"Not exactly," Victor replied very unhappily. "He

knew ..."

"About the malpractice lawsuit," I finished for

him.

Of course; nothing else could take the wind out of

Victor's sails so thoroughly.

Victor nodded. "Yeah, that," he uttered defeatedly.

It was what I'd been fearing, telling myself it

couldn't be. Because for one thing, how could Tate

know? There hadn't been much publicity around here,

although it had been in the papers briefly in the city. It

had been a fiasco, but only for Victor, and of course for

the patient whose death started it all in the first place,

in New York.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Victor protested for

perhaps the millionth time. "It was emergency surgery.

His prospects for surviving were minuscule. And," he

finished simply, "he didn't."

Which was all true, but afterward the patient's

family had raised a ruckus. And Victor, while apparently

blameless in the event, was staggeringly vulnerable.

Insurance investigators began looking into his

personal idiosyncrasies, many of whom were young

and female, some of whom had interesting habits of

their own.

It wasn't pertinent, but it could be made to look

absolutely awful. Eventually, the hospital's counsel advised

the institution to settle the lawsuit: to admit, tacitly,

that Victor had indeed done something improper

during the surgery. Whereupon, rather than agree to

any such thing, Victor had quit.

"What did you say to him?" I asked, crossing to

the window.

With Victor at the surgical helm, a trauma-care

center for Eastport had seemed like a good idea. It

would keep him busy at the one thing he was very good

at, and benefit the whole region. Furthermore, emergency

care has two fine attributes, financially speaking:

First, people need it. And second, insurance companies

tend to pay for it. Slow going at first, maybe,

but the Mayo Clinic was out in the boondocks when it

got started, too. Down the line, the thing could be a

gold mine.

Only, maybe not anymore. "When he threatened

to blackmail you," I went on, "and you let him know

he could get away with it by not laughing in his face

the way any sane person would have done, what did

you say?"

I didn't want to think yet about what I might have

to do to replace the money I'd put into in Victor's

trauma center start-up, much of it already spent, if it

turned out my investment was irretrievable. But that I

would need to replace it was a flat-out certainty.

I was financially well fixed, all right. But not that

well fixed. And now there was that awful word: motive.

Victor frowned down at his hands, which were

scrubbed clean as always. It struck me then that, at

eight o'clock on a Saturday morning, he'd already

showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes: white

shirt, navy slacks. Even his prissy little oxblood loafers

with the tassels on them looked professionally polished.

All normal for Victor. But ...

"Well," he admitted, "I'd had a few drinks. And

the look on his face, like he was daring me to do something.

Like he thought I wouldn't be able to. It ...

well, it got to me, that's all."

Bootsteps sounded on the porch, and Bob Arnold

came in. But the words were already coming out of

Victor's mouth.

"Reuben's mistake," he rushed on, "was letting

himself get backed into a corner, at the end of the bar.

So when I walked up to him, he had nowhere to go."

"Victor," I said warningly, but he didn't hear me.