On, Off

Forbes ceased the drone to look surprised. “The thermostats actually work.” He opened a door. “Our reading and conference room. Which completes the floor. Shall we go to my office?”

Addison Forbes, Carmine had decided within a very few moments, was a complete neurotic. He sported a sinewy, gaunt leanness that suggested an exercise freak with vegetarian tendencies, was about forty-five years of age – the same age as the Prof – and not much to look at if you were a movie director searching for a new star. Facial tics and abrupt, meaningless gestures with his hands larded his conversation. “I had a most severe coronary exactly three years ago,” he said, “and it’s a miracle that I survived.” Clearly it obsessed him, not unusual in medical doctors, who, Patrick had told him, never thought that they could die, and became atrocious patients when mortality thrust itself upon them. “Now I jog the five miles between the Hug and my home every evening. My wife drives me here in the morning and picks up yesterday’s suit. We don’t need two cars anymore, a welcome economy. I eat vegetables, fruit, nuts and an occasional piece of steamed fish if my wife can find some that’s genuinely fresh. And I must say that I feel wonderful.” He patted his belly, so flat that it caved in. “Good for another fifty years, ha ha!”

Jeez! thought Carmine. I think I’d rather be dead than give up the greasies at Malvolio’s. Still, it takes all kinds. “How often do you or your technician take dead animals down to the first-floor refrigerator?” he asked.

Forbes blinked, looked blank. “Lieutenant, I have already told you that I am a clinician! My research is clinical, I don’t use experimental animals.” His brows tried to go in opposite directions. “Even if I have to say so myself, I have a genius for giving each individual patient exactly the right anticonvulsant medication. It is a widely abused field – can you imagine the gall of a fool general practitioner taking it upon himself to prescribe anticonvulsants? He diagnoses some poor patient as idiopathic and stuffs the poor patient full of Dilantin and phenobarb, when all the time the poor patient has a temporal lobe spike you could impale yourself on! Tch! I run the epilepsy clinics at the Holloman Hospital, several other hospitals, and I’m in charge of the Holloman Hospital EEG unit attached to the epilepsy clinic. I don’t concern myself with ordinary EEGs, you understand. There is another unit for Frank Watson and his neurological and neurosurgical minions. What I’m interested in are spikes, not delta waves.”

“Uh-huh,” said Carmine, whose eyes had begun to glaze halfway through this semi-diatribe. “So you definitely don’t ever dispose of dead animals?”

“Never!”

Forbes’s technician, a nice girl named Betty, confirmed this. “His work here concerns the level of anticonvulsant medications in the bloodstream,” she explained in words Carmine had a hope of understanding. “Most doctors overmedicate because they don’t keep track of drug levels in the bloodstream in long-term disorders like epilepsy. He’s also the one the pharmaceutical companies ask to try new drugs out. And he has an uncanny instinct for what a particular patient needs.” Betty smiled. “He’s weird, really. Art, not science.”

And how, Carmine wondered as he went in search of Dr. Maurice Finch, do I get out of being buried under medical gobbledygook?

But Dr. Finch wasn’t the man to bury anyone under medical gobbledygook. His research, he said briefly, concerned movement of things called sodium and potassium ions through the wall of the nerve cell during an epileptic seizure.

“I work with cats,” he said, “on a long-term basis. Once their electrodes and perfusion cannulae are implanted in their brains – under general anesthesia – they suffer no trauma at all. In fact, they look forward to their experimental sessions.”

A gentle soul, was Carmine’s verdict. That did not put Finch out of the murder stakes, of course; some brutal killers seemed the gentlest of souls when you met them. At fifty-one he was older than most of the researchers, so the Prof had said; research was a young man’s game, apparently. A devout Jew, he and his wife, Catherine, lived on a chicken farm; Catherine bred for the kosher table. Her chickens kept her busy, Finch explained, as they had never managed to have any children.

“Then you don’t live in Holloman?” he asked.

“Just within the county line, Lieutenant. We have twenty acres. Not all chickens! I’m an ardent cultivator of vegetables and flowers. I have an apple orchard and several glasshouses too.”

“Do you bring your dead animals downstairs, Dr. Finch, or does your technician – Patricia? – do that?”

“Sometimes I do it, sometimes Patty does,” Finch said, his wide grey eyes looking at Carmine without guilt or unease. “Mind you, my kind of work means I don’t do a lot of sacrificing. When I finish with a pussycat, I take the electrodes and cannulae out, castrate him, and try to give him to someone as a pet. I don’t harm him, you see. However, a cat may develop a brain infection and die, or simply die of natural causes. Then they go downstairs to the refrigerator. Mostly I take them – they’re heavy.”

“How often does a dead cat happen, Doctor?”

“It’s hard to say. Once a month, maybe only every six months.”

“I see you take good care of them.”

“One cat,” said Dr. Finch patiently, “represents an investment of at least twenty thousand dollars. He has to come with papers that satisfy the various authorities, including the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. Then there is the cost of his upkeep, which has to be first-class or he doesn’t survive. I need healthy cats. Therefore a death is unwelcome, not to say exasperating.”

Carmine moved on to the third researcher, Dr. Nur Chandra.

Who took his breath away. Chandra’s features were cast in a patrician mold, his lashes were so long and thick that they seemed false, his brows were finely arched and his skin the color of old ivory. His wavy black hair was cut short, in keeping with his European clothes; except that a master cut the hair, and the clothes were cashmere, vicuna, silk. A buried memory unearthed itself: this man and his wife were known as the handsomest couple in all of Chubb. Ah, he had Chandra now! The son of some maharajah, rolling in riches, married to the daughter of another Indian potentate. They lived on ten acres just inside the Holloman County line, together with an army of servants and several children who were tutored at home. Apparently the swanky Dormer Day School was not swanky enough. Or might give the kids too many American ideas? They enjoyed diplomatic immunity, quite how, Carmine didn’t know. That meant kid gloves, and pray he wasn’t the one!

“My poor Jimmy,” said Dr. Chandra, voice sympathetic but not oozing the tenderness Cecil’s did when speaking of Jimmy.

“Give me Jimmy’s story, please, Doctor,” Carmine said, gaze riveted on another monkey, its legs crossed nonchalantly, seated in a complicated Plexiglass chair inside an enormous box with its door open. The beast was minus its tennis ball hat, revealing a pink mass of dental cement in which was embedded a bright green female connector. A bright green male plug had been inserted into it, and a thick, twisted cable of wires in many colors ran to a panel on the box wall. Presumably the panel connected the monkey to a lot of electronic equipment in nineteen-inch racks around the box.

“Cecil called me yesterday to tell me he’d found Jimmy dead when he went in to see the monkeys after lunch,” the researcher said in the most pear-shaped English accent Carmine had ever heard. Nothing in common with Miss Dupre’s or Don Hunter’s accents, different though they were from each other. Amazing that such a tiny country had so many accents. “I went downstairs to see for myself, and I swear to you, Lieutenant [another leftenant], that I deemed Jimmy dead. No pulse, no respiration, no heart sounds, no reflexes, both pupils dilated. Cecil asked me if I wished Dr. Schiller to perform an autopsy, but I declined. Jimmy hasn’t had his electrodes implanted for long enough to have been of any experimental value to me. But I told Cecil to leave him be, that I’d check again at five, and if he hadn’t changed, I’d pop him in the refrigerator myself. Which is what I did.”

“What about this guy?” Carmine asked, pointing at the monkey, which bore the same expression as Abe when dying for a cigarette.

“Eustace? Oh, he’s of immense value! Aren’t you, Eustace?”

The monkey transferred its gaze from Carmine to Dr. Chandra, then grinned ghoulishly. You are one arrogant bastard, Eustace, thought Carmine.

Chandra’s technician was a young man named Hank, who took Carmine to the O.R.

Sonia Liebman greeted him in the anteroom, describing herself as the O.R. technician. The anteroom was given over to shelves of stores to do with surgery; it also contained two autoclaves and a formidable-looking safe.

“For my restricted drugs,” Mrs. Liebman said, indicating the safe. “Opiates, Pentothal, potassium cyanide, a bunch of nasties.” She handed Carmine a pair of canvas bootees.