handed her a flyer for the Grove Isle Christmas party, turning it over to the blank side. “Start with Bruce. Write down a personality trait you really like, then compare him with Solomon on the same characteristic.”
“Does this come from Cosmo or did you make it up?” Victoria said, grabbing a pen from her purse and starting to write.
Jackie peered over Victoria's shoulder at the list. “No contest. The Bad Boy wins.”
“C'mon, Jackie. This is serious.”
“Okay, then give Solomon a chance. He's gotta have at least one quality you like.”
“He has wonderful parenting skills. You can see that with Bobby. Plus…”
“Hang on a sec,” Jackie said. “Aren't you beating around the bush? No pun intended.”
“You mean sex.”
“Ye-ah. What about Bruce, other than the fact he's hung like a Clydesdale?”
“He's good. But maybe a trifle mechanical…”
“Mechanical is fine for a dishwasher, but from what you said about the Bad Boy…”
“Solomon makes me laugh and he makes me lunch…”
“And he makes you come. Combo platter. Excellent. C'mon. If you had to make a decision, which by the way you do, who's it gonna be?”
“What would you do?”
“Can't help you, Vic. But I might be interested in your discard.”
Victoria tried to focus, tried to see through the clouds of indecision. It's fine to celebrate the power of multiple orgasms, but that's surely no reason to spend your life with the perpetrator…
“If you've gotta think this hard,” Jackie said, “you're gonna make the wrong decision.”
“I can't just go with my emotions. I need to analyze all the factors.”
“You're getting a man, not a mutual fund.”
Victoria took a deep breath. “Bruce and I have similar interests. Similar values. Our love is perfectly logical. Perfectly rational. I made a commitment to him, a reasoned, thoughtful commitment. He's everything anyone could want. I mean, no one's perfect, right?”
Jackie didn't answer, so Victoria just kept going. “I'm going to marry Bruce. And that's final.”
Forty
NO HUGS, NO KISSES, NO ERRORS
On a quiet Sunday night-Victoria wouldn't return his calls and Bobby was reading the encyclopedia-Steve sat at the kitchen table, snacking on red peppers and goat cheese and drinking Grolsch, the Dutch beer. He turned on the laptop and started Googling.
First, he plugged “Replengren” into the search window, and bingo, a hundred references popped up. A synthetic hormone manufactured in Germany, Replengren regenerated damaged brain cells in rats, but not without side effects, including impaired motor skills. The FDA was considering whether to approve the drug for testing on humans, but so far, no decision had been made.
Holy shit.
Would Kranchick jump the gun with an experimental drug?
He put her name into the search engine and came up with a dozen monographs and research papers she'd written over the years. He'd found these earlier when he did his original homework, coming up with her article “Unlocking Your Inner Rain Man.” But this time, he was looking for something specific. Using the FIND function, he searched everything she'd written for the word “Replengren.”
Nothing. She'd never mentioned the drug.
He set about reading Kranchick's papers anyway. He skipped the highly technical studies with charts of acid secretions and diagrams of brain electrical activity. He skimmed the ones speculating on the cause of autism, everything from measles in pregnant women to food additives and PCBs. He spent more time-a two-beer read-on a savant syndrome piece in which Kranchick predicted that transcranial magnetic stimulation would soon produce startling mental feats in both autistic and nonautistic persons.
What he read twice, highlighting with a yellow marker after printing it out-just as Victoria would have done- was the oldest and least technical of all the articles. It was an opinion piece in a medical journal from Kranchick's first year of residency at a Baltimore hospital. He'd read it before but it had meant little then. Now, viewed in the context of Replengren, it took on new meaning. In the article, Kranchick criticized a hospital's decision to fire a researcher who'd purposely induced psychotic episodes in schizophrenics by giving them amphetamines.
“Didn't Edward Jenner inject smallpox into an eight-year-old boy in order to come up with a vaccine?” she wrote. “Didn't Walter Reed allow infected mosquitos to attack Cuban workers in order to discover the cause of yellow fever? Didn't Louis Pasteur test his rabies vaccine on children even before he tried it on animals?”
Steve felt his heartbeat quicken. What was the question he'd just asked himself?
Would Kranchick jump the gun with an experimental drug?
Some questions are too easy. Why not ask: Is Pincher a prick? Is Zinkavich a ton of truffled pork? He skipped to the last paragraph of Kranchick's article.
“Advances in medicine require courage, vision, and the uncompromising ability to go where others fear to tread. The greater good demands no less.”
The greater good.
Steve wanted to ask Kranchick who gave her the right to play God. But that could wait. He had his trial strategy to consider and another Grolsch to drink. How could he prove that Kranchick was giving an unapproved drug to the patients at Rockland? The handwritten note Cadillac snatched from the wastebasket wasn't admissible. And how would he even tell Victoria about it? He could imagine their conversation.
She: “Dammit, Solomon. What you've done is unethical and illegal.”
He: “But we learned the truth. When the law doesn't work…”
She: “Live with it! You can't decide what laws to follow and what to ignore. Who gave you the right to play God?”
He: “Touche.”
Even after polishing off another Grolsch, he didn't know what to do.
By Monday, the cold front had pushed out to sea, and the morning was sunny and warm. Parked under the portico at Brickell Townhouse, listening to Bob Marley ask, “Is this love?” Steve waited for Victoria. He figured he had not seen her in thirty-two hours, nineteen minutes, and forty-six seconds. Roughly.
This morning they would begin selecting a jury in the Barksdale trial, and sometime after dark, they would start taking testimony in Bobby's case. He was up to his ass in Pinchers and Finks. But at the moment, all he could think about was Victoria.
Thirty-two hours and twenty minutes ago-make it twenty-one-she had climbed out of the straw, leaving him alone and forlorn. He had dialed her number three times on Sunday; she never picked up, never returned his calls.
She's pretending it didn't happen. Well, he could do the same.
But it wouldn't work. Their lovemaking was playing on an endless loop in what was left of his brain.
A moment later, she came flying out the lobby door in full trial uniform: double-breasted charcoal suit and a simple strand of pearls. Looking serious. Businesslike. And beautiful. She good-morninged the doorman, tossed her briefcase into the backseat, and hopped in. “Sorry I'm late.”
No “Good morning, sweetheart.” No peck on the cheek. Not even a smile.
“No problem,” he said.
Sooner or later, she'd have to confront it. He felt like shouting: “I told you how I feel. Now you tell me.”
In sullen silence, he drove up Twelfth Avenue toward the Justice Building. This was how it was going to be. No hugs, no kisses, no errors. So much he wanted to say, but the atmosphere was all wrong. The harsh sunlight of day had replaced the flaming torches, the Cuban love songs, the swirling snow. Besides, hadn't he already laid it all
