A Fistful of Empty Read online

  I scooped up the other magazines and tossed them into the trashcan. Something slipped out of one of them. I picked up four photographs of a black woman having sex with two white men. There were no markings on the back.

  There’s a pure, white, Christian motive if I ever saw one, Harold. Let’s kill the men so we can fuck their women. Run that one past Jesus and let me know what he says.

  20

  I lay there waiting for my beeper to go off, like the timer on a roast. Then I could climb out of my pan and do something useful. No such luck.

  I found my magic wand and pointed it at the TV set. Each channel annoyed me more than the one before. After a couple of laps around the dial, I settled on a music video show. The host was groveling before an infuriatingly successful rock star. If he got his nose any further up his guest’s ass, he’d have to breathe through his ears.

  They took turns masturbating each other’s egos on national television and then introduced a hot new band that “El Supremo” had discovered. I counted the number of superlatives in the introduction and concluded—according to the second law of hype, which states that the number of superlatives is inversely related to their meaning—that this band couldn’t plug in their amps.

  Thirty seconds of confirmation was all I could stand. I lay there but could not rest. I felt like I had poison ivy in my veins.

  This was a dangerous time. My mind wasn’t focused. There was no telling where it might wander off to. Somewhere out there, in the tall grass of life, there was a hole of grief. If I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t look where I was going, I was going to fall right into it. And maybe just not come out for a while. But that was a luxury I couldn’t afford right now. If my foe caught me there, he’d pull the earth up over me and I’d never get out.

  I pushed off the bed and went into the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face and took a reading in the mirror. My hair rose up like a stand of sea oats. No way could I invest this stubble with any cachet. Bloodshot eyes and a two-thousand-yard stare just added to my charm.

  There was nothing else for me to do except unpack. I’d put it off as long as I could. It was a surrender to the idea that I’d be here a while.

  My dop kit was already in the bathroom. That just left some clothes to put in the dresser. When I finished that, I put the suitcase on the small table and threw the dirty clothes into it. When I was down to my last change, I’d take the dirty stuff out to the dumpster, trash it, buy new, and start over. Laundry was another luxury I didn’t have time for.

  I pulled Sam’s photo out of the side pocket and propped it up on the desk. That picture was almost five years old. There were strands of gray in her hair and crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, but she was just as beautiful as the day I met her. When I was young, I’d see a beautiful woman and wonder if she was passionate, too. Now I knew that a passionate woman is always beautiful.

  She never called sex “making love.” She wasn’t sure what love had to do with it. The way we went at each other, she said, it was more like making fire. Tinder and flint. Flint and tinder.

  I ran my hand over the picture. Her hair didn’t move. She didn’t smile.

  My beeper went off and brought me back from the edge of reverie. The pull was strong, into memory, desire, and regret. They had powerful claims to lay. Claims I could not ignore forever. Some day I would not fight them, but not now, not here.

  21

  I dialed the number on the beeper. A woman’s voice answered.

  “This is Leo Haggerty. I’m returning your call. Who is this?”

  “Oh. My name is Ellen Moffatt. Talisha Scoggins said you were looking for Terry Onslow, something about him being away at a family funeral.”

  “That’s right. Do you know Terry?”

  “Yes I do. We work in support services for Dr. Schatzkin’s project. Talisha said you wanted some information about Terry. Can I ask why?”

  “Sure. I don’t think Terry’s at a family funeral. I think he’s in deep trouble. I’m a private investigator and I came across Terry’s name while investigating some very bad people. I think they might have him. That’s why he isn’t at work.”

  “That can’t be right. Terry is as quiet a guy as you can imagine. I don’t think he’d know how to get in trouble.”

  “I wish that were true, Ms. Moffatt, but I don’t think so. How well did you know Terry Onslow?”

  “Not really well. I don’t think anybody at work did. We talked in the office. Ate lunch together sometimes. Every once in a while he’d come out with us after work over to Clyde’s or the American Café. But he wasn’t a party animal, that’s for sure. Mr. Neat and Tidy, we called him.”

  “Why?”

  “Terry is a neat freak. His workstation was always immaculate. He’d never even loosen his tie when we were out.”

  “What kind of worker was he?”

  “I guess the company was happy with him. He was real punctual. Worked a full eight hours.”

  “I guess I mean did he have any unusual skills, something he was particularly good at, something he did differently from other members of your group?”

  “Well, Terry was pretty much our troubleshooter. He was real good at debugging programs when problems showed up. He was real patient and real detail-oriented. So he was good at finding glitches and fixing them.”

  “Was there anything he did that no one else in the pool did?”

  There was silence. “Ms. Moffatt?”

  “Yes. Look, I don’t want to get in trouble. You aren’t working for BMR, are you?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Look, I have no interest in getting anyone in trouble. I’m trying to get Terry Onslow out of some trouble. What do you know?”

  More silence. “Please, Ms. Moffatt, Ellen, I think Terry’s in the kind of trouble that gets you dead. What do you know?”

  “Okay. Terry did one thing that nobody else did. He worked nights on computer security.”

  “Okay. So what’s the problem?”

  “Well, everybody in the pool was supposed to rotate that job. But we all hated it. We’ve all got families. All of us except Terry. Like I said, he wasn’t big on going out nights. So we worked out a deal where we logged in nights as if we were there but let Terry stay late to watch things. Then each paycheck we’d pay him for the overtime. It wasn’t like no one was doing the job. Terry was there. God, he was better at that stuff than any of us. Watching those screens used to drive me crazy. Nothing ever happened.”

  “Tell me about this security job. What did he have to do?”

  “Do you know anything about Dr. Schatzkin’s research?”

  “Only a little. He’s testing drugs to block the transfer of AIDS from mothers to the fetus.”

  “Right. Well, we have doctors all over the country testing a variety of compounds. These doctors put their data on our system from their offices, or the hospitals. Some of them are in California, so they put data on, you know, like two or three hours after we close up here. So there has to be someone here to make sure that it all goes in right. Answer any questions the doctors might have. Fix problems. It’s right up Terry’s alley. All this data stays in what we call a buffer. Then on Fridays it’s loaded all at once into the ongoing data of the study.”

  “Why did you say he worked on computer security? I don’t see the security part of this.”

  “Well, that’s what Dr. Schatzkin calls it. After all the problems his project has had, he’s gotten pretty hyper about things.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Well, first there were the GLPs and blacklist calls.”

  “What are GLPs?”

  “Good Laboratory Procedures. Someone was calling the FDA and telling them he wasn’t using good lab procedures. So we had investigators all over the place.”

  “Was he?”

  “Absolutely. He’s a by-the-numbers guy. Very scrupulous. We run so many analyses on his data they scream when we boot them up.”

  “What about blacklists?
”

  “Oh, there was a call that we had a blacklisted researcher on staff. Someone the FDA has caught cheating before. That was just a nuisance call.”

  “Any other problems?”

  “We got a crank call that said we had a virus in the data. That really freaked Dr. Schatzkin out. He shut everything down. Called in outside consultants. They found nothing. We were afraid he was going to fire us all, just to be sure. Start over with new people. I guess he decided it was some prank. We always thought it was a con by these computer consultants to drum up business. Call in a virus, then come by to check out the system for plenty of money. You know there’s nothing there, so it’s easy money.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “A while ago. Four or five months, maybe. Then it all stopped. I don’t know when. We haven’t heard anything for a couple of months, I guess.”

  “When did Terry start doing the security work every night?”

  “About six weeks ago.”

  “Who’s doing it now? One person? Or are you all rotating it?”

  “To tell you the truth, nobody is. We figured we’d just let Terry keep doing it when he got back.”

  “In case Terry doesn’t come back, you’d better get someone on it. Make sure that nothing funny is going on.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Anything else unusual about this project? Rumors about the staff, anything?”

  “Not really. One investigator left, that’s all.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dr. Francis. She came on as part of Dr. Schatzkin’s team. It never seemed to work out. So she left.”

  “What didn’t work out?”

  “She had her own ideas about what combinations to investigate and she wanted to run her own parallel studies. Dr. Schatzkin told her no. This was his project. He’d designed it and he’d run it his own way.”

  “What did Dr. Francis do?”

  “She threw a fit. Then she sulked, I guess. Coming in late, leaving early. She badmouthed Dr. Schatzkin to everyone. Sounded like a jilted lover, if you ask me.”

  “Do you think they were lovers?”

  “No. Not really. She threw Dr. Schatzkin some cleavage, and some batted eyes. It was pretty funny, actually. He didn’t even notice that she wore a skirt. If Schatzkin can’t put it under a microscope, he isn’t interested.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She went over his head, to the board of directors, to get backing for her own projects. The way I hear it, there was quite a row. Schatzkin made allegations that she’d falsified part of her vita. Something about leaving projects before they were finished. Stealing credit for research papers from students who did all the work, that kind of stuff. Anyway, the board backed Dr. Schatzkin and she quit and went to another lab.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Another R&D place. I don’t remember.”

  “Was this before the crank calls and so on?”

  “Let me see. No, actually they ended before she left. A few weeks, maybe a month before.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. It was before. After she left, things were real quiet. Until this.”

  “Listen, if I need to, can I get back to you to check some things out?”

  “Sure. I hope you’re wrong about Terry. He’s a nice guy. A little dull, but a nice guy.”

  “I’ll be by tomorrow to drop off the money for your information.”

  “I didn’t call for the money. I called because I was worried about our little thing with Terry and the overtime. I’ll straighten that out with everybody tomorrow.”

  “If you or anyone else sees anything strange with the data, call me at this number. Right away. Okay?” I read off my beeper number.

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “Where Dr. Francis went. She went to Palmetto Research Corporation.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Just up the hill from us.”

  22

  Ellen Moffatt had moved me a bit closer to connecting Terry Onslow with my mystery man. Energized by that bit of progress, I went to the desk and did some homework.

  I slipped on my glasses and scribbled some notes in my address book. When I finished, I emptied my jacket onto the desk. I threw Onslow’s towel in with the rest of the dirty laundry, and spent the next hour analyzing his check stubs and credit card slips. Nothing. Mr. Neat and Tidy. No strange purchases, enigmatic entries, or puzzling patterns.

  I pushed back from the desk and wished for an Irish whiskey. Instead, I set about to pull together what I knew about Onslow, X, and the disk.

  Onslow was on the computers at night. He was monitoring the data loading. He saw something happen, something funny in Schatzkin’s project. Then what? He approached whoever it was about what he’d seen and they sicced X on him. Probably exit Onslow. But he’d obeyed the first commandment of computers: Backup, Backup, Backup. The disk in the locker.

  I tried to put some spin on that scenario. Perhaps someone had bought Onslow to spy on the data collection. Keep them informed. A competitor, perhaps? He was their inside man, but he decided to blackmail them. Same ending.

  There were no funny payments in Onslow’s bank book, but that meant nothing. Maybe we should do a full asset search on him. Surprise, Leo, you can still think like a pro when you have to.

  Who would benefit from knowing about Schatzkin’s research? Or tampering with it? I’d need to know more about what was on the data disk before I could answer that.

  I was starting to flag. I scooped together Onslow’s papers and made a stack of them. Tomorrow they’d go in the evidence box in my trunk. I called Sam and got Sandy’s answering machine. I held on to see if she’d pick it up, but no one did.

  I checked in with my answering service and left a message for the Rev.

  Nothing left to do but try to sleep. I got under the blanket, punched the pillow into submission, and lay there. And lay there. Under my blank flagstone face there were beetles and worms, and they loved the dark. It was their time. I’d tried to banish them, to will them away, to will sleep. I might as well have tried to nail a board to the sea.

  First thing out from under was Arnie’s face. My friend, but so different. For him, life was a test. Honor and courage the subjects. Death the examiner. Nothing else mattered but how you faced it. True as far as it went, but there were other things that mattered. The niche you filled in another’s heart that helped them face life. A life rich with pleasure was not incompatible with honor and courage. Perhaps it eroded it, compromised it. Arnie had little to lose when he died. He wore his life lightly, and stepped from it easily. He faced death well but skimped on life, tasting few of its pleasures.

  I drank more deeply, and I was afraid. Afraid to die, afraid to leave all this behind. I would need more courage to live, to live with this fear. Maybe more courage than I had.

  Why had I gone with him? We were friends. He needed me. That was only part of it. I never thought it would come to this. I believed in his charmed presence. Nothing ever touched him. We would get close to the edge. One more time, for old time’s sake. We would dance close with death. Hold her cheek to cheek. Step lightly together. Spin, dip, and slip away, flushed but safe.

  One time too many, Leo, one time too many. I wasn’t like Arnie. I was connected. To him, to Randi, to Sam. I’d drawn and quartered myself. The only question left was when the horses bolted, where would the pieces fall?

  23

  My beeper went off and I groped for it on the nightstand. Reed Lewis’s number. I reached for the phone and dialed it.

  “Good morning, Leo,” he crooned.

  “Is it? What have you got?” I sat up and pulled my .45 out from under the pillow.

  “I think I know what this guy Onslow found and what he did with it.”

  I waited. “Yeah?”

  “
It’s too complicated to do over the phone, Leo. You have to come over so I can show it to you. I also did some homework with a couple of guys who do a lot of biomed programming. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you.”

  “On my way, Reed.” I hung up and got dressed.

  Onslow’s papers went in the trunk. Then I stopped at a McDonald’s and got a couple of breakfast McSomethings and a McCoffee.

  I knocked on Reed’s door, and when he opened it, marched in holding breakfast high.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Yeah, but thanks. Sit down. I want to show you what was on that disk.”

  Reed picked up a sheaf of papers and handed half to me. I sat down, unpacked, and set the food aside. He had his copy of the papers in his hands.

  “Okay. You have two different sorts of information there. Pages one to six are raw data files. At least that’s what my friends think. You were right about the first column. Those nine-digit numbers are Social Security numbers. Probably doctors, turning in data on field trials. The second column, see where it says ‘01’ for every one, that’s the group for the data. Drug tests are done double-blind. No one, except the original researcher, knows who has been assigned to what drug and who has a placebo. That removes experimenter bias in measuring and reporting data.

  “Look at the data. There’s five blocks. Five compounds being studied, or four and a placebo. Okay. The rest of the columns are variables in the subjects, lab results, blood tests—I can’t tell. Only someone who knows the study can tell you what they refer to. The last column is the date the data was entered. These batches are entered on Fridays. See, page one’s data is September ninth, page two is the sixteenth, and so on. You with me?”

  I nodded.

  “All right. Flip to page seven. These pages are analyses based on that raw data. Once I figured out that this was medical research, the reports became clear. They’re laid out in the standard report format required by the FDA for drug testing. Now the columns have headings that mean something. Look across the top: means, standard deviations, and so on. The last column is the important one. It says t >