“I used up what I had,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not something you can just toss into the stew with the leftover vegetables.”
We never talked about it again, and the whole episode was so crazy that I just took the box home and pushed it to the back of the top shelf in my bedroom closet. I worked really hard and stopped by Molly’s every couple of days and at Christmas I brought her new music by her favorite artists. By then she was in bed all the time and heavily medicated, and I wasn’t always sure she knew I was there.
Every now and then I’d think about her poison rings, and once or twice I even got down the cloisonne box. But I never opened it.
Molly died on the last day of January. That was two years ago, and now it’s coming into spring again, in a year where I won’t reach Christmas. Maybe not even the Fourth of July.
So here we are.
I’m inches away from being reunited with Molly and Katherine and Kenny and my parents, if there’s an afterlife, and inches away from oblivion if there isn’t. I’ve gradually lost energy, as the doctors said I would, on medication that sufficiently masks my symptoms so that I sometimes forget for a few minutes just what’s happening inside my body. I stopped working a few weeks ago, but I’m an information junkie and still spend a lot of my waking time online, just like I always did.
So I was onto the story immediately when it broke on the web midway through last Monday morning. Laverne Patterson had been named executive vice president of Western Health. The very same Laverne Patterson we used to rail about on Molly’s patio. The woman who got that big fat bonus for cancelling health coverage for people who faithfully paid their premiums until they got sick, when Laverne started digging and discovered their applications didn’t mention having had chicken pox in kindergarten.
Whereupon she gleefully booted them out the Western Health door.
It turned out that Western Health hadn’t gotten rid of her at all, they’d simply shipped her off to Houston for a while to rehabilitate her in the finance office, given her a couple of quiet promotions, and a few months back slipped her once again into the San Diego home office. Now she would be number two in the whole damn company, and the damage she could do from that position was terrifying.
I’d been moping around, feeling bored and out of sorts, unwilling to start anything I couldn’t finish, which in my case meant not ordering dinner until after lunch was concluded. Suddenly I felt a spurt of energy, a sense of mission, a belief that I could do one last thing before checking out of the Hotel California.
I could revive Instant Karma and take out Laverne Patterson.
I decided to be fair about things, to give her the benefit of the doubt that she had so merrily denied to others. Maybe she led a secret life of saintliness, cleansed lepers on the weekends and rocked babies in the neonatal unit on her lunch hour. Maybe her charitable donations exceeded tax-deductible levels and she offered a triple-tithe to her church. Maybe I was so caught up in my own pity party that I was prepared to punish somebody who, like any good Nazi, was simply doing her job.
Okay, I couldn’t be entirely objective.
But though I searched diligently, I didn’t find anything to mitigate my belief that she was a thoroughly despicable person, someone who would continue to fight the afflicted under the guide of reasonable care, a woman without whom this would be a better world.
It was absurdly easy to find out all about her personal life, mostly from information available online to anybody with a little interest and tenacity. Add in the tricks I knew from my years as a researcher, and some passwords to databases that I still remembered, and a picture emerged that made me quite comfortable with the decision I realized I had already made.
Laverne Patterson lived in a gated community in La Jolla. Her husband had taken early retirement for health reasons, picking up a whopping pension from his city manager job in a Los Angeles bedroom community. He now seemed to divide his time among managing his investments, sailing his thirty-two-foot boat, and playing golf. He had remained in La Jolla while Laverne was exiled to Houston, and didn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d miss her very much, although he was quick with the platitudes when interviewed for business magazine profiles. Their photographs together always looked forced, even when they both wore their most practiced smiles.
She was an attractive woman, a snappy dresser who used a personal trainer but admitted to a weakness for Nirvana Chocolates. She belonged to a ton of civic and business organizations, drove a Lexus, and said she’d love to learn to fly if only she had the time. Her favorite vacation spot was Hawaii where she liked to take long walks on the beach. She was sorry that her earlier bonus had been misconstrued, though she still maintained that honesty was always important and that she had never acted with malice.
Clueless and mean, my favorite combination.
I could do this, I realized. I could actually kill this woman.
Well, maybe not put my hands around her throat and strangle her, or bludgeon her with a broken oxygen tank. I was always a little squeamish, to tell the truth, and that kind of in-close work would have been tough for me even when I had my full strength. But I could orchestrate her death. I just needed to figure out a way.
And then two factoids jumped together in my mind, just how it used to happen when I was writing web content for a nonprofit fundraiser, trying to find a way to up the ante with the same hopelessly dull information. It was so incredibly trite that I just couldn’t resist.
He was diabetic. She loved Nirvana Chocolates.
I would send her a box of candy, delivered to the house, and there’d be no danger that he’d nip into it before she had her chance. I’d have it gift wrapped, anyhow. Pay cash, bring it home and shoot some potassium cyanide into each deep, rich chocolate truffle. Rewrap and send it by a shipping service to her home.
With a card saying,
And so that’s what I did.
There were some comic moments working with the cyanide gelcaps and the truffles, and I was glad I’d bought three times as many as I thought I’d need. I wore gloves, of course, both to protect me from the poison and to avoid fingerprints, though I was fairly certain mine were in no database that could come back to haunt me. And because on one level it was all rather silly, I did wear one of the poison rings, a clunky silver number, for dramatic effect.
