Dead File (18 page)
He’d called her half a dozen times since he went to Maui. How are you? How’s everything going? I’m bored out of my mind here. Today, a long, dreary seminar on the virtues and the downsides of antioxidants. You don’t know how much I appreciate you holding down the fort at the company. We’ll have dinner on Monday night when I get home; I can’t wait to give you your Christmas present. And you know what
I
want for Christmas, baby—it’s been way too long.
Kendyl was all out of illusions. She didn’t believe for a minute that Carter was bored in Maui. Or that he was pining for her. In fact, if she were honest with herself, she’d admit that she’d felt the juice draining out of their relationship even before Gillian died. But he needed her now. And she would use that need for all it was worth. They were inexorably tied together, she figured, because each one would always know what the other one did that night.
Question to herself: Knowing everything she knew, did she still love him? She sighed. Fact was, that didn’t really matter.
The Hawaiian evening was sultry, still, and fragrant, imbued with the lush dissonance of whispering trees, nocturnal wildlife, and the ever-drumming surf. Carter Rose reclined on the broad terrace of his suite at the beautiful Kea Lani, gazing out toward the ocean beyond the palm-lined beach, the day’s
New York Times
on his lap, a vodka martini in his hand, and the sounds of Verdi faint in the background.
Everything was under control. Kendyl was back in the fold. Sandie Schaeffer was non compos mentis. And Penthe was in Los Angeles with his due-diligence team. This Maui conference held nothing for him, really; it was just a place for him to be to stay out of Goodman’s way for the time being. And a pretty damned wonderful place it was.
He took a sip of his drink. Kendyl. They were certainly in bed together right now, figuratively speaking. But the way he saw it, after a little distance from all of it, he could cut the cord. Still, there was no reason to get her incensed; he’d been playing with fire that night at Spago. Or with sparks, at least. Best to keep everything calm with her, fully contained. Like with a wildfire.
The doorbell to his suite sounded its chimes. “Come in, sweet Leilani,” he called. “Door’s open.”
A
gain, uniformed LAPD patrol officer stood outside Sandie Schaeffer’s small room in the Intensive Care Unit
a
at Cedars. The patient was actually sitting up in bed. Her father watched her solicitously from his wheelchair. Dr. Stevens was perusing her chart, making notes. A nurse stood on tiptoes, changing one of her IV pouches.
“She’s having a very good day,” Bill Schaeffer said by way of greeting Maxi. “She’s been talking. And making sense.” He was beaming.
Maxi settled into a chair in the corner of the small ICU room and studied the patient. Propped up on pillows. Looking tired but semi-aware. Eyes focused ahead in the middle distance. Some color in her cheeks. Saying nothing. But seeming to listen.
“Maxi Poole is here,” her father said.
“Hi, Sandie,” Maxi put in.
No audible response, but her eyes flickered and Maxi knew she’d heard.
“You look wonderful,” she said. And Sandie’s gaze slowly shifted over to her.
“She does look good, doesn’t she,” the doctor said, a statement rather than a question.
“I’m glad to see you sitting up, Sandie,” Maxi went on, encouraging the patient.
At that, Sandie whispered, “Maxi Poole.”
“Yes. How are you feeling?” Maxi ventured.
“Feeling … fine,” the patient mouthed with what seemed like great effort.
Maxi’s eyes scanned the small hospital room and settled on some brightly wrapped packages on the side table. “Maybe you can open your holiday presents soon,” she said, to encourage the patient to talk.
To Maxi’s astonishment, Sandie launched into a halting, stream-of-consciousness riff about Chanukah and Christmas. How she and her mother and father had always celebrated both, observed the Jewish festival of lights and also had a Christmas tree. She talked about presents she’d loved. And the music, the food, the fun. Nobody in the room dared breathe. When she trailed off, she settled back into the pillows and closed her eyes. Which seemed to signal that she was finished, at least for now.
“Isn’t this remarkable?” her father said quietly.
“It’s wonderful,” Maxi breathed.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “You seem to bring her out.”
“I told you, I’ll be here any time you think I can help,” Maxi offered.
Sandie Schaeffer knew something. She saw something the night she was attacked, and Maxi wanted to be there when she was finally able to talk about it coherently. It would be an explosive story, and she’d have an exclusive.
“She’s tired now,” Dr. Stevens said. “It’s enough for today. Why don’t you go home and get some rest, Bill.”
“Thanks, Doctor,” Schaeffer said. And to Maxi, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
The cafeteria at Cedars, on the ground floor of the sprawling medical center, was more than half filled with visitors and hospital personnel. Bill Schaeffer wheeled over to a table in the middle of the room and came to a stop, but Maxi beckoned him to keep going. He followed her in his chair, past the metallic palm trees on the wall, to a booth at the far end that had just been vacated. “A little privacy here,” she said. “What’ll you have, Mr. Schaeffer? I’ll go fetch.”
“Black coffee,” he said.
“Don’t you want a bite?”
“What about you?” he asked.
“Sure, this’ll be dinner.”
They settled on grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and green salads. Schaeffer had coffee and Maxi had tea. She’d brought the tray over to the booth and set out their food and drinks. Schaeffer had pulled his wheelchair up to the table, and Maxi scooted into the banquette against the wall. The two ate slowly, making small talk, mostly about Sandie’s progress. Then Maxi got to it.
“Your formula for glaucoma, Mr. Schaeffer—”
“Please, call me Bill.”
“Bill. Can it change the color of a person’s eyes?”
“Yes,” he said. “It can turn the iris brown. But it doesn’t happen all the time. Maybe a third of the time.”
There it was. “Did you ever give any of the product to Gillian Rose?” she asked him.
“Yes, early on. She wanted to do a parallel analysis with Xalatan in her own labs, make sure there were enough dissimilarities to ensure getting a patent.”
“And you
trusted
her with it?”
“Well, sure. She said if we couldn’t get a patent, there was no reason for her to go forward. She wanted to clear that up right away, before she wasted any time or money. That seemed reasonable to me.”
“Did she tell you the results of her testing?”
“No. I assume she didn’t have results yet.”
“And like Xalatan, is your formula highly contaminative?”
“No, it isn’t. That’s one of its strong points. After a lot of experimenting I came up with a cocktail of three nearly inert elements that together render my drug much more stable than what’s now on the market. When it’s perfected it’ll be easy to handle, which is a major hurdle with this medication.”
“How much of it did you give to Gillian?”
“One vial.”
“And when you gave it to her had the contamination factor already been eliminated?”
“Not fully. Not to the extent that it is now. But I did warn her about it. And she had my papers on the testing process. None of the material has been published yet, but every change has been meticulously documented along the way, and Gillian had all the literature. She knew about the contamination problem.”
“Do you have any reason to believe she might have used the product on herself?”
“Why would she do that?”
“Did you specifically tell her not to?”
“No, but it wasn’t necessary. It would be like giving you a can of arsenic to poison rats in your attic and telling you, By the way, don’t eat this stuff. Gillian wasn’t stupid. We weren’t even at patent-pending status yet, and she knew exactly what we were dealing with.”
“Mr. Schaeffer … Bill … Gillian’s bright blue eyes were something like a dark, inky brown when she died.”
Schaeffer looked at her in silence, his intelligent eyes clouding over. “How do you know that?” he asked finally.
“I was there that morning. I saw her body less than an hour after they found her. And my cameraman shot tape. We enhanced it, and there’s no mistaking that her eyes had turned a smoky, unnatural brown.”
Schaeffer looked visibly troubled. “I don’t know what to say. I find it hard to believe . . .”
“Could your drug have killed her?”
“No. But it could have impaired her vision if it wasn’t handled properly.”
“Let me ask you something. In the one-third or so cases that you say might experience a change of eye color, would that change be temporary or permanent?”
“Well, we’re far from completing the double-blind studies to know for sure, but at this point I’m thinking it would be temporary.”
M
oving efficiently from place to place, Maxi produced her piece for nightside. She wrote the track in her office, voiced it in the recording studio, viewed the tape and cut it back in an edit bay, and dashed off the ins and outs at a vacant computer terminal in front of the assignment desk.
Wendy was producing the Eleven tonight, so Maxi waited for the show to start ensconced in her favorite spot out in the noisy newsroom. She’d pulled up a chair next to Wendy’s desk, Wendy having the storied ability to produce the show, write the readers, monitor her crews in the field, check over the reporters’ pieces, keep her eye on the clock, and gossip at the same time.
“So whaddaya think?” she asked Maxi now. “Foul play?”
“Hard to know. If not foul play, incredible negligence.”
They were talking through Maxi’s story, a six-year-old boy found dead in a residential swimming pool in Brentwood, where he’d attended a kids’ pool party two days before. The question was, had his body been there the whole time, the result of an accidental drowning, or was he killed somewhere else and his body dumped there? The police, the homeowners, neighbors, and others said they couldn’t possibly have overlooked his little body slumped in a corner of the deep end of the pool, even though the pool was murky. Big human interest. If this case didn’t go to criminal court, it would most certainly go to civil court and be widely covered on local TV news, as well as on the cable channels and radio talk shows.
Reporter Laurel Baker came out of an edit room and pulled up a chair beside them. “So what’s up, ladies?” she asked.
“I recut the Ayala boy for the Eleven,” Maxi told her.
“Was he murdered?” Laurel asked.
“Don’t know. A strange story.”
“I interviewed Gregor tonight,” Laurel said. “I can’t believe he talked to me.” Wayne Gregor was the LAFD fire captain and arson investigator who’d just been charged with setting fires in retail stores. It always amazed journalists that even foursquare criminal types seemed to love seeing themselves on television.
“What’d he say?” Wendy asked as she continued to click away at her keyboard, writing the lead for the show.
“He sez he didn’t do it,” Laurel said. “And he’ll be exonerated in court.”
“We’ve heard that tune before,” Wendy observed dryly. “We’ll lead the second block with it. A minute-fifteen total, Laurel, with ins and outs.”
“You gotta give me a minute-forty-five,” Laurel begged. Laurel always wanted more air time.
“He’s a talking head,” Wendy pronounced. “You don’t have the other side. No DA, no victims, no colleagues from the fire department, nobody. A minute-fifteen is all I’m giving Gregor.” Laurel heaved a terribly-put-upon sigh.
“Tomorrow’s the arraignment,” Wendy said. “This one’ll mushroom—they’ll be coming out of the walls to rat him out next week. You’ll get your face time, Laurel.”
“So,” Laurel tossed out, rallying, “have you two heard the latest?”
“What latest?” Maxi asked. Laurel was consummately plugged into the newsroom grapevine.
“After yea many decades, the suits are going to take a pass on
Reordan.” Anchorman Rob Reordan’s contract was up, and he was currently in negotiations.
“I thought they were talking,” Wendy put in.
“They’re asking him to take a pay cut,” Laurel explained. “A huge pay cut. Less than half.”
“That’s the way of the business in this economy,” Maxi said. “It’s still a lot of money. He should go for it.”
“Too much pride,” from Laurel.
“Rob’s gotta have more money than Oprah by now,” Wendy piped up. “An L.A. icon for half a century. Since television news began, practically. He always made the big bucks. He’s a hundred years old, for God’s sake. He should give it a rest.”
“Too many ex-wives to support, too many kids to educate,” Laurel said. “He lives in a condo at the beach. Doesn’t even have any decent furniture, just college-dorm crap from Ikea.”
“How do you know that?” from Maxi.
“He lured me over there one weekend on the pretext of having proof about the mayor’s chief of staff taking kickbacks from government contractors. He said I couldn’t say who it came from and he couldn’t bring his notes into the station—”
“So he got you in his crib and he tried to seduce you,” Wendy finished for her.
“Couldn’t believe it,” Laurel said. “All I could do was laugh.”
“No story?” Maxi asked.
“Of course no story,” Laurel said. “But that’s when I saw his beach condo, decorated with fishnet and lava lamps.”
“I’m sure he likes it that way,” Wendy said. “Makes him feel young.”
Wendy Harris was not one of anchorman Rob Reordan’s biggest fans. At this point in his life and career, Rob more or less phoned it in. He refused to cover stories, never offered story ideas, didn’t get involved in series planning, didn’t bother to attend meetings. He just ambled in twenty minutes before his shows, went to Makeup, had his beautiful white hair sprayed down, slid behind the anchor desk, and read the words off the TelePrompTer. But Los Angeles loved him, so the station had never wanted to let him go. Until now, evidently.
“Did he actually tell you they were going to drop him if he doesn’t take the pay cut?” Maxi asked Laurel.