a bottle of sugar pills.”
“Lou, I’m being serious about this. I want to understand why you won’t question the rationale of going to a supposed health provider, paying good money, possibly putting yourself at risk of death, when I’m telling you all you’re getting is a placebo effect. Help me understand.”
“Maybe it’s because I can go and see this chiropractor guy.”
“I still don’t understand. What do you mean you go because you can go?”
“It’s harder than hell to get in to see my general practitioner. His office is like a fort with a couple of witches who act like they need to protect him from me, the grunt. And when I do get in to see him, he tells me to lose weight and stop smoking, as if that’s easy, and I’m in and out so fast that half the time I forget why I went in to see him in the first place. Then I call up the chiropractor, they take your call right away and are pleasant. If you want to speak to the chiropractor, you can. If it’s an emergency and you want to come in right away, you can. And when you do get into the office, there’s not the hour-long wait, and when you see the therapist, you don’t have the feeling he’s rushing you through an assembly line like a hunk of meat at a slaughterhouse.” For a few moments there was a silence. As a benefit of controlling his own emotion to a reasonable degree, Jack could hear Lou’s breathing. The man was mildly vexed. Jack cleared his throat. “Thank you!” he said. “You’ve taught me something I needed to know.”
“You’re welcome,” Lou said with little sincerity.
“I said I have been looking into alternative medicine, and I’ve been mystified by the general public’s willingness to embrace it despite the fact it appears to me to be nearly worthless efficacy-wise, yet it costs the public billions upon billions of dollars a year.
Herbal medicine alone, I found out, rakes in some thirty billion, which reminds me, do you take any herbal medicine?”
“Occasionally. When my weight spikes over two hundred pounds, I go on a weight-loss kick, which includes an herbal product called Lose It.”
“That’s not good,” Jack said. “As your friend, I’d advise you not to use it. Many herbal weight-loss products, especially those from China, are accidentally contaminated with lead salts or mercury salts, or both. On top of that, often the natural plant content has been known to be purposefully contaminated with dangerous pharmaceuticals to be assured that there will be some sort of a mild positive effect, meaning weight loss. My advice is to stay away from such remedies as much as possible.”
“You are such a wonderful bearer of good news today. I’m so glad I called.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “But I’m pleased you’ve called. You have actually taught me something I needed to know, although probably something I didn’t want to know—
namely, why the public is so willing to embrace alternative medicine and resistant to hear why they shouldn’t.”
“Now you have me curious,” Lou said. “What did I teach you?”
“You taught me that conventional medicine has a lot to learn from alternative medicine.
The way you described your experiences with the two is truly telling. Alternative medicine has good customer relations with their patients, treating them like people, making the visit a positive social experience, even if there is no real curing going on.
Conventional medicine, on the other hand, too often is the opposite, acting more as if they are doing you a favor. And worse still, if conventional medicine thinks they cannot help you, they ignore you; you’re out in the proverbial cold.” Jack couldn’t help but think that’s where he and Laurie were right now, treading water while they waited until JJ’s allergy to mouse protein went down, if it was going to go down. That was not a given.
“Why do you say you didn’t want to know that?” Lou asked.
Jack had to think for a moment, because the question had to do with his crusade, which had to do with JJ’s illness. Jack did not want to talk about JJ. “I didn’t want to know because learning that there is a legitimate reason for people to want to use alternative medicine means that my efforts to expose its limitations and even its risks will probably fall on deaf ears.”
“Sometimes I think you are the most irritatingly arcane person I know. But let me add another reason why people will fight you tooth and nail about alternative medicine: Alternative medicine doesn’t seem scary. If you say a handful of people die every year from going to an alternative-medicine therapist, they won’t blink an eye. Thousands upon thousands more people die who go only to conventional medical doctors than the people who go to a chiropractor. In fact, people who go to chiropractors want to believe in chiropractic specifically because they don’t want to go to conventional doctors, where they might get a diagnosis that will involve discomfort and pain and possibly death. At the chiropractor, that never happens. Everything is optimistic, every complaint can be treated, and it doesn’t hurt, and even if it is placebo, who cares?” There was another period of silence until Jack said, “You’re right!”
“Thank you. Now let’s get back to our respective work, because we’re on city time. And one last thing, keep the forensic tips coming, because this last one on Sam Parkman was right on target.”
“But isn’t there going to be a problem with the Parkman case about the blood being circumstantial evidence? I mean, there’s no way to prove when the wife’s blood got on the shirt. The defense can argue it was a month ago or a year ago.”
“That’s not going to be a problem. The cheerleader girlfriend is singing at the top of her lungs, trying to avoid being considered an accomplice. The DA is very happy and considers the case a slam dunk.”
After Jack hung up the phone, he sat unmoving for a time. What little wind he’d had remaining in the sails of his alternative-medicine crusade was gone. Again, he felt discouraged. He took all his notes and dumped them back into the large envelope. Then, instead of returning it to his center drawer, he opened his bottom drawer containing the framed photo of Laurie and JJ, and tossed it in. He then kicked the drawer shut.
Prepared to get down to real work, Jack reached for his inbox with the intention of lifting out the material onto his blotter to begin to sort it. But his hand never made it. His phone’s jangle again pierced the room’s stillness. Sure it would be Lou with another thought about the alternative-medicine issue, Jack answered the phone as informally as he did earlier. But the caller wasn’t Lou. It was perhaps one of the last people in the world Jack expected to hear from.
16
11:30 A.M., FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
Dr. Jack Stapleton, I presume!” The clear, mellifluous tenor voice came over the receiver like a breath of fresh air. It was somehow familiar to Jack, and his brain desperately scanned though its auditory memory bank.
Jack was silent a moment. Listening more closely he could hear a slight wheeze.
Someone was still on the line but deliberately not speaking. Almost half a minute went by before Jack said, “We’re going to be here awhile unless I get a bit more information.”
“It’s one of your oldest and dearest friends.”
The voice was again familiar, but Jack could not quite pin it down. “Since I’ve never had a surplus of friends, this should be an easy task, but it’s not. You have to give me another hint.”
“I was the handsomest, tallest, smartest, most athletic, and most popular of the Three Musketeers!”
“Will wonders never cease,” Jack said, now at ease. “James O’Rourke. Although I can grant you the other less significant qualities, I’m going to contest the tallest.” James burst out with his familiar high-pitched laugh, which grated on Jack’s nerves like sandpaper on the tips of his fingers, just as it had when they met at Amherst College in the fall of 1973.
“The moment I hear your voice, do you know what I visualize?” James said with another giggle.
“I can’t imagine,” Jack said.
“I see you walking out of Laura Scales House at Smith College, lugging the bust of Laura Scales, with your face as red as mine would have been. It was hilarious.”
“That was because Molly stood me up,” Jack said, quickly defending himself.
“I remember,” James said. “And you did it in broad daylight.”
“I brought it back the next month with great fanfare,” Jack added. “So no harm done.”
“I remember. I was there.”
“And you’re hardly the one to be throwing stones,” Jack said. “I can remember the night you carried out the
