A Fistful of Empty Page 16

  I clicked off my tape and nodded at the two of them. Shoate winced and grabbed Sylvia’s arm.

  “Do we have to?”

  “Yes, damn it. He has the data I need.”

  Sylvia thumbed down the recorder and began: “My name is Sylvia Francis. The date is November 12, 1990, and I am speaking without coercion or duress.” She stopped.

  “What do you want?”

  “How about starting with Terry Onslow. You can turn that thing off. This is just for my curiosity. I want to know if I got this right.”

  The waitress returned and asked if we were ready to order. We took refills on our drinks and I added some fried calamari to sop up some of the excess whiskey in me.

  “Terry Onslow found out that I was getting into the system and what I was doing. He sent me a message by electronic mail, asking me what I was doing. I told him I was running an alternative statistical analysis. He knew I wasn’t because it wasn’t indexed for the other investigators. So when I couldn’t bluff him, I tried to bribe him. We met. I told him I was working for another company now. He told me that he’d think about it. I decided to get out of the system and leave them with the false data. When I went back for it, it was gone. He’d hidden my data. So I said let’s meet my boss. He said no. He wasn’t interested. He was going to tell Schatzkin about what I’d done. I couldn’t let him do that. I’d worked too hard to come up with nothing.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it. Schatzkin said you weren’t pulling your weight. You wanted your own projects but your ideas didn’t merit the resources.”

  “That’s a lie. Schatzkin’s an egomaniac. He thinks he’s the only one that has an idea worth pursuing. Nobody else. Especially a woman. We’re only good for getting coffee for the big boys. There was no way I was going to be forced out and start over from scratch, like some graduate school lab assistant. Those compounds were my work, too. They could force me out, but not empty-handed. I made sure that I could get the benefits of that data, and all the work I did.”

  “Why not sneak in, duplicate the data, and take it out of the system?”

  “Because my PC wouldn’t run the package I needed to analyze the data. Anyway, I had to keep going back to look at each week’s data. I needed them to augment my trials and accelerate my results. They keep moving up the criteria for effectiveness. You don’t want to miss anything. It used to be that you had to wait for full infection to set in, but that takes years. Now they’re looking for highly correlated chemical changes that will tell you whether AIDS will take hold or not. The damned activists keep changing the rules, trying to hurry everything up.”

  “And with everything that’s at stake, too. All that money. Careers. Reputations.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.

  “Nothing. Just pumping a little irony. It’s how I stay in shape.”

  “You should be careful. It might fall on you.”

  “That’s touching. I think we’re getting to the good part. Why don’t you tell the recorder about Otto Kugler.”

  She thumbed the recorder again and began. “I located Otto Kugler at some skinhead bar. I knew about him and his run-in with Dr. Schatzkin from a previous research study. He wanted to be part of a study on analgesics and chronic head pain. Dr. Schatzkin rejected him because his psychological profile showed him to be likely to abuse the medications instead of following the prescriptions. I offered him a chance to get back at Schatzkin and make some money, too.”

  “You sure that was all? You sure you didn’t tell him about the research he was ‘derailing’? All those poor dumb pregnant nigger bitches.” I flashed a look at Shoate. “I mean, that’s the biggest population you were studying, right? Most of the pregnant women with AIDS are junkies and hookers, right? And most of them are black or Hispanic, right? You don’t look well, Fanny. Did you miss out on this part before?”

  “No, Mr. Haggerty, that’s not how it was. Whatever story Mr. Kugler concocted to boast to his friends was his creation. My offer was strictly money.”

  I pointed to the recorder.

  “I offered Mr. Kugler ten thousand dollars to get my data back from Terry Onslow.”

  I shook my head. “Well, you got what you paid for. So Kugler says to you, ‘What if he doesn’t want to give it to me? What should I do?’”

  Sylvia’s voice grew quiet and curiously flat, without inflection or timbre. “I told him I didn’t care. Do what you have to. I just don’t want to know about it.” She clicked off the recorder.

  “Thank you, Dr. Francis. I think that puts you in the stall next to me. Your turn, Ms. Shoate. You’re head of an 8A company, near the end of your run. You’re not competitive. No more easy money. No government handouts. Along comes Dr. Francis. She tells you what a whiz-bang she is. She’s got the hot new AIDS drug she’s working on. So you hitch yourself to this rising star. You’ll sell your company to one of the biggies. Take the millions or so they pay you. Retire rich and young. Out of the rat race. A credit to your race and gender. Now you just jump right in here.”

  “Honest, I didn’t know what the money was for originally. She said it was for more equipment. But I never got any receipts so I went to her and asked for an explanation. She said there was a problem. That the guy at BMR who was helping her transfer her data from there was trying to blackmail her. It was the first I knew that she was using their data for her trials, I swear …”

  “So you told her to stop, right?” The squid arrived and I squeezed some lemon over them.

  “No. I gave her the money. She told me we were very close to a major breakthrough. I had a buyer lined up for the company. If we had the data to support our claims, they were willing to buy us out completely.”

  “So what was the price? Ten percent of that is mine. Off the top.”

  Fanny looked at Sylvia for guidance and found none. “Three point two million.”

  “How much was deferred?”

  “None. Cash at time of sale.”

  “Three hundred twenty thousand. Plus my finder’s fee. Oh, this is sweet.”

  “I didn’t know anything about this man Kugler, or anybody being killed. I swear it. I thought it was blackmail, that’s all.”

  “That might have been true for a while, Fanny. But you’re here now. And I saw Sylvia here give you the bad news. Just a couple of days ago in Nottaway Park. Am I right?”

  “Yes. Yes. She told me that the blackmail money hadn’t worked. That somebody else had the data and what you wanted. I told her I didn’t have that kind of money. The company’s on the verge of bankruptcy. All our contracts are ending and we haven’t won a single one on our own.”

  “Bummeroo.”

  She went on. “I told her this had to stop. We couldn’t go any further. That’s when she told me everything. About hiring that man Kugler, and what you said. And the rest of it.”

  “Let’s go, Fanny. Confession’s good for the soul. Speak right into the mike.”

  She fumbled with the recorder. Sylvia took it from her, turned it on, and handed it back to her.

  After her preamble, she admitted, “Sylvia Francis told me that a man, who I now know is Leo Haggerty, said he would kill Otto Kugler, and provide us with the data necessary to complete her research and sell our company. I agreed to pay Mr. Haggerty for his services by giving him a percentage off the top from the sales of my company, Palmetto Research Corporation.”

  She clicked off the recorder and laid it on the table.

  “Is that sufficient?”

  “Yeah. It’ll do nicely. Looks like we’ve got a deal here. I’m not happy about giving up that front money, but I’ll just tack it onto my money off the top.”

  “What about the data?” Sylvia asked.

  “No problem, partner. First, let’s exchange recorders.”

  I set mine out in the middle of the table, pulled my hand away in renunciation, and waited for them to reciprocate.

  They looked at my tape, then my face, then their tape, then back to m
e again, like reluctant brides wondering what they were doing at the altar.

  “’Til death do us part, ladies. There’s three point two million reasons to go forward. That’s quite a pot of gold. What’ll it be?”

  Shoate’s meager will was sapped. She began her slump of surrender. Francis slid their recorder next to mine.

  “Tomorrow, after I’ve deposited this, I’ll come by your offices and deliver your data and the disk. You can draw up the note for my money and I’ll take that in return.”

  I leaned forward and chased the last bits of squid around the plate. Finishing them, I said, “How about drinks to celebrate? Champagne? My treat.”

  Sylvia said nothing. All that had gone before was one long involved insult, and it was just dawning on her that she would have to take it.

  “No, thanks. I don’t feel much like celebrating,” Fanny said wearily.

  “Really, why not? Is it the death count? Don’t let that bother you. Next, you’ll start thinking about all those pregnant girls, dying already, praying to God for something that’ll spare their babies from paying for their mistakes. All the ones still getting sugar pills because no one knows that the other drug works. Christ, you start thinking about that, next it’ll be all the babies that are gonna die. It just goes on and on.”

  They didn’t answer. Both of them were staring over my shoulder at the mirrored back wall. Arbaugh and two policemen stormed up the aisle toward us.

  Arbaugh’s mouth was set in a tight, grim line. Knowing how he savored his rectitude, he must have been quite a happy man.

  Sylvia grabbed the tape off the table before I could get it. She spun sideways in the booth and pulled a lighter from her purse. Popping out the tape, she held it to the lighter. First, it melted, then the cassette caught fire. Finally she dropped it on the table. As I poured water on the molten plastic, she snarled her vindication at me. “You’ve got nothing. Nothing. Do you hear me?”

  Fanny was starting to hyperventilate. She shook her head from side to side and tried to say “No,” but her gaping mouth hung empty. She couldn’t hold enough air to make the sound.

  I shook my head in commiseration. “Looks like there’s no pot of gold after all. We must be sitting at the wrong end of the rainbow.”

  Sylvia would not go quietly. She could hardly wait for her rights to be read when she grabbed Arbaugh’s lapels and tried to turn him toward me.

  “What about him? This man’s a murderer!” Arbaugh handed her to one of the officers. He reached over and guided Fanny out. She was still silently shaking her head. Arbaugh refused to look at me. The one that got away.

  Sylvia leaned back against the policeman guiding her out, and screamed at me: “That man’s a murderer! A murderer!”

  I shook my head sadly as if they were the ravings of a madwoman. Still, no one approached my table.

  38

  Commonwealth Attorney Monroe and Walter O’Neil slid into the booth. I detached the button microphone from my collar and handed it to her. I put the recorder in my pocket. She didn’t need it.

  “That was pretty slick, Mr. Haggerty.”

  I shrugged. “Stage magic, that’s all. I didn’t want them worried about whether I was wired and searching me. So I stuck the recorders right under their noses and petted them and made like they were our best friends.”

  “Well, it worked. We’ve got plenty on both of them, and it’s all good stuff. The chain of evidence is sound. No question of alteration of the tapes. Plenty of witnesses to what they said. It’ll be a pleasure putting them away.” She shook her head. “Greedy pigs. What they did to those girls and their babies.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it was greed. They just felt entitled to it. Somebody owed it to them. They were just making sure things were fair. You can do anything thinking like that.”

  “Not in Fairfax County, Mr. Haggerty.” She wasn’t smiling. “By the way, we informed D.C. about that girl you said you found, and Terry Onslow turned up in the morgue. He’d been there as a John Doe for three days. Some campers found the body down in Mason Neck. He was pretty messed up. Some animals had been at him, but the burned palms were a match. Well, I have to leave. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Haggerty. Bring the data disk and any other evidence you have. We’ll take your statement, too. When you testify, you’re out of the woods.”

  “He’ll be there, Lisa. He’s done everything he said he would.”

  “See you tomorrow, Walter,” she said, and left.

  “What now, Leo?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go home. See if Sam’s there. See if I can get out of her woods.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, but thanks for asking.”

  “If there is, just call. And I’m sorry about Arnie and Sam.”

  “I know.”

  We said goodbye outside the restaurant. I watched him walk to his car, get in, and pull away. Such a simple action. I couldn’t get myself to move or to go anywhere. I’d finished my agenda, done what I wanted to do. And for my efforts I had a fistful of empty. Now I had to honor the claims others had on me, and I couldn’t move.

  I don’t know how long I stood there. There really was nowhere to go. I was a man on fire. If I ran from myself, I’d only fan the flames. I stood there until I surrendered to that fact. Once I had surrendered, I was free to leave and go where I had to.

  39

  The office was closed, but I entered carefully. I didn’t want to see anyone, and hoped that no one was being ambitious.

  I walked by Kelly’s desk and peered down the hall. The office doors were open. Each room was dark and silent. I sat on her desk, called my answering service, and left a message for Schafrath Brown to bring Randi home. Grateful for my employee’s punctuality, I opened the door to my office. The urn was not on my desk. If that asshole … No, there it was on the file cabinet. I picked it up. It was obscenely light, a lie to the weight of my memories. We were so far apart that even in my hands, I couldn’t recognize my friend. Cremation is an atheist’s act of faith. Everything is here, left behind, and never to be seen again.

  “Let’s go home, Arnie,” I said, carrying my friend out of one darkness to another.

  His house was a ruin, like mine. I placed the urn on a table, stepped past the overturned furniture, and walked down the hall to his armory. Arnie had no will and no family. The courts would appoint an executor to pay his taxes and debts and to dispose of his property. The money from that sale would go to the state. I know. I tracked down a number of lost heirs to stop just that from happening. I was only a friend and had no rights to anything of his. That was okay. I had no intention of arguing about it.

  I pushed open the door to the armory. There was plenty of damage inside. Kugler hadn’t been able to open Arnie’s gun cases, so he’d pushed them over and defaced them with whatever was handy. Many of the other weapons he couldn’t use, so he trashed them. The blowguns, crossbows, and calthrops were strewn all over the place.

  I cared about one thing. Arnie’s sword. Kugler had thrown it into a corner. Philistine that he was, he had no idea that it was the most valuable thing in the house. Four years in the making. The work of Japan’s last living swordmaker of national treasure rank. All of that was nothing to me either.

  The samurai’s soul is his sword. His life is the tempering of his will until it is as pure and decisive as the edge of his blade. Then they are one. I reached down and picked up the sword. It was undamaged. I found the lacquered wooden sheath and slid the blade inside.

  I took the blade with me back to the foyer. There I picked up Arnie’s ashes, and made my way across his living room and out the patio door to his garden.

  I knelt before the pool on the stone where Arnie used to meditate. Bonsai and white stone slabs were terraced around the waterfall that filled the pool. I placed the blade beside me and held the urn in my hands.

  Goodbye, Arnie. Not many have the courage to live the way you did. Certainly not I. You were a mig
hty foe and a loyal friend. I’ll miss your cockeyed sense of humor that relished every adversity. Like your blade, your honor shone in every light. I hope you knew that.

  He who saves a life is responsible for it. That’s what they say. Twice you took that burden. I hope it wasn’t too heavy. You are only memories now, but they are good ones. Very good ones. You will be missed.

  I stared into the pool until I had composed my death poem. I opened the lid of the urn and slowly shook the ashes into the pool. They drifted downward, dissolving and then disappearing. I spoke as the last ones fell on the water.

  The stone mountain sleeps.

  The last storm has passed his slopes.

  Somewhere it is spring.

  40

  Before I left Arnie’s house, I called Sam and told her that it was safe to go home and that I was on my way there.

  I pulled up facing the house and cut the engine. It looked like my house, a place where I was welcome. The familiarity was deceptive. The shape was the same. The basic matter unchanged, but something ineffable was altered. Each surface, each item had been seasoned with memories. Like me, they had vibrated to the harmony of laughter and been battered by harsh words, absorbed tears one day and the sweat of delight on others. Tonight, that was missing. All the history had been buffed away.

  I walked past Sam’s car, and noted that it was parked on the street. What did that mean? Home, but reluctantly? Not quite here? Ready to go?

  There was a light on in the living room, but the rest of the house was dark. I pulled open the storm door and walked into my future.

  Everything was right where I left it. On the floor. Sam sat in the slashed recliner. The pole lamp next to it was on and shone down on her. She was wearing a long black leather coat. Her hands were stuffed deep in the pockets, like she was afraid of what they might do with room to move.