“You’re a civilian, Geller. There’s a limit on what I can tell you.”
“Then you must think I have something to tell you.”
“Why?”
“This cup of what you call coffee. If the conversation was over, you’d have sent me on my way. You didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. Because I do think you know more than you’ve said.”
“I told you I’d share whatever I found and I did.” At least my legs were crossed when I said it. “So who is he?”
“The Irish are a lot less structured than the Italians,” Gianelli said. “You got more gangs than families. But my connections in organized crime tell me McCudden and Walsh used to work for a guy named Sean Daggett.”
“Used to?”
“He got sent up on a state weapons charge, just came out not that long ago. Well, maybe a year. And seems to be keeping straight. Hasn’t done dick since he got out.”
“What was he into before?”
“The usual. Extortion, gambling, hijacking, armed robbery.”
“What kind of gambling?”
“Christ, I don’t know-numbers mostly.”
“Poker?”
“Cash games, you mean? I suppose. Why?”
“Just a wild swing,” I said. “David played on his computer so we thought maybe he’d ventured into a live game.”
“With what? We looked at his bank statements, the man had nothing.”
Unless I told him about David’s money, the story had all the credence of a federal budget. And if Sammy Patel wasn’t telling about his half, I was staying quiet about David’s. “Never mind. Like I said, a wild swing. So what does an Irish gangster want with a nice Jewish doctor?” I asked. “Those two thugs didn’t just happen to accost him for his wallet. Can we at least agree on that?”
“Of course we can. And don’t think Betts and Simenko wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t in front of you.”
“A kidnap with zero possibility of ransom. His parents have nothing except their house and I’ve seen it: it’s the kind of place the next owner will knock down. I asked his boss if he could influence donor lists and the answer was no. The only other thing he had in the world was his skill.”
“Maybe someone needed an operation done outside the box. The kind only he could do.”
“A transplant?”
“You know how impossible it is to get a kidney here?” His voice took on a different colour as he said it. A personal note.
“You know someone on a waiting list?” I asked.
“I did,” he said. “My brother-in-law. My wife’s younger brother. Great kid. He died waiting for a transplant, must be eight years ago now. He was thirty-eight when he passed. Anyway, all I’m saying is it’s not easy watching someone getting sicker and sicker when a transplant would help.”
“You think someone procured an organ on their own and demanded he implant it?”
“It sounds dumb, I know, but you said yourself, apart from his skills, what did he have? A simple mugging gone wrong, we’d have found his body by now.”
“But you’d need more than one guy to perform that kind of operation.”
“How many more?”
“I don’t know, but it’s got to be a few. I’ll ask Dr. Stayner. So what are you going to do about Daggett?”
“Me? Nothing. What’s Daggett got to do with me? He doesn’t live in Brookline and as far as I know he has no place of business here.”
“You have reason to believe a crime took place.”
“Maybe. But even if I believe it, there’s nothing I can act on. The best I can do is work behind the scenes a bit, see what else I can find. Just don’t expect me to bail you out of anything. You’re on your own here.”
Didn’t I know it.
I called Jenn as soon as I was out of the Brookline station and filled her in on my lovely chat with the Boston PD. I was pissed at Gianelli, pissed at the mugs from Boston. My heels were pounding bits of mica out of the sidewalk as I stalked toward my car.
“What do you think of Gianelli’s theory?” I asked.
“That David was kidnapped and made to operate on a gangster? That had to have been a Bogart movie.”
“Who plays the surgeon? Fredric March?”
“Or Leslie Howard. And are they supposed to have kidnapped an entire team? What did they do, show up with a bus?”
“Unless they already had a team in place and just needed one more. Look, I know it sounds too film noir,” I said, “but Gianelli and I agreed on this much: the fact that McCudden and Walsh were involved tells us this was no random mugging, it was a legitimate kidnap attempt. I think the poker angle is bullshit.”
“So do I.”
“And two different people have told us David couldn’t have manipulated the organ donor waiting list. We know ransom was out and there was nothing for him to embezzle. So what else did David Fine have in the world worth taking him for, if not this very special expertise of his, this world-class talent?”
“Maybe he witnessed something.”
“What, like a Mob hit?”
“It’s no less wacky than the Bogart script.”
“Still doesn’t explain the ten thousand he had. All right. Maybe I’ll find out something at dinner tonight. David might have gone to Rabbi Ed for help that night and he might know where he is.”
“That’s two mights in one theory, Holmes. And where he went that night is not necessarily where he is now.”
“No. Listen, I’m going to drive back to the hotel and drop off the car. I want to take the T to dinner.”
“The T-aren’t you a local boy!”
“I want to take the same ride David took, if he took it, get off where he did and walk to Rabbi Ed’s from there. I doubt there’s any sign of anything after two weeks but I’ll walk it. Try to see it through his eyes.”
“Good idea.”
“Plus you need the car.”
“To do what?”
“See what Carol-Ann Meacham does on a Friday night.”
Stayner himself didn’t call-he had left for the weekend-but one of his residents, Tania Hutchison, phoned me as I was walking into the hotel lobby. “According to Dr. Stayner,” she said, “the minimum team required to perform a simple transplant such as a kidney would be five. You’d need a lead surgeon, an assistant surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a scrub nurse and an OR nurse.”
“That’s it?”
“Ideally, you’d have one more nurse, but he said you could get by with five if the organ is coming from a cadaver.”
“And if not?”
“With a live donor, we always have two teams. The organ is taken out by one team, carried next door, where a second team one implants it while it’s fresh. Meanwhile, the first team tends to the donor. Prepares him or her for post-op care.”
“Can it all be done by one team?”
“Yes … but it would take a lot longer. They not only have to do it all, they’d have to rescrub in between.”
“What about space? How big a theatre would you need?”
There was a moment of silence while Tania considered it. “Not that big. You really just need a table with good light, and room for the team and their instruments. You could do it in the type of room where simple day surgeries are done. Cosmetic surgery, arthroscopy, that type of thing.”
