The Placebo Effect (30 page)

One of the Scots raised his glass and winked at her. Then turned to the bar and stared at her in the mirror.

Trish felt for the pepper spray in her purse. She knew how to look after herself. For a moment she thought of Decker; she hoped he knew how to look after himself. He's a bit old, she thought, but interesting in a way that the young man, who just turned his chair around and straddled it, was not.

Theo tried to control the coughing fit but found that he was on his knees, his pills scattered about the dust-ridden floor like tiny coloured rabbit turds. It was getting worse and he knew it. He braced himself for the inevitable second wave and it came even quicker than he thought. He rolled onto his back and, through the stacks of books, saw the snow swirling in squalls across the window.

He tried to recite Auden's poem “Stop All the Clocks” to distract himself. He knew that only time would end the fit and his greatest enemy was panic. The damned pills sure didn't help! Well actually, the one he took in the middle of the night stopped the cough just like that—like magic. But the two he had just taken didn't do squat.

His head slammed back against the floor as a new and more powerful wave of coughing forced the air from his lungs.

If Decker had been there, he would have picked up the pills and forced Theo to take more of them, but Decker wasn't there. Who the hell knew where Decker was.

He curled into a ball and waited for the beating to end, but these were not kicks from outside—these were boots with steel toes launched with incredible force from inside. He got to his knees, grabbed the edge of a bookshelf and tried to stand. The entire shelf of paperbacks tumbled down onto him.

On the floor again he saw that the book he'd been searching for about the Junction before the amalgamation had fallen in front
of his face. He pulled it to him. As he did he cleared the way to two of his pills. He scooped them up and shoved them into his mouth.

They dissolved quickly, and much to Theo's surprise, he could feel them working. His cough softened and then disappeared.

Eddie rolled out the new rug in the guest room, then stood back to see if it matched the recently painted walls. It did. He pulled a small table near to the bed and turned on the new lamp there. Too harsh. He replaced the bulb with a 50 watt diffused lightbulb. Turned it on and turned off the overhead.

The old doll sat on the bed with the new coverlet—and watched closely.

Eddie carefully removed the brace from his leg and lay on the bed and thought of the future he'd paid so dearly for—a future where his daughter would lie on this bed in this room in this house and they would be a family again.

Leena shook the snow from her down coat as she entered her apartment on Montrose. She liked her place—it was in the student ghetto and there was life on the street until pretty late. She liked that. She wasn't very good with silence.

She'd just been to the cemetery. It was sad that hers was the only rock on her husband's gravestone. She felt older than her years—much older. But that's how she felt, and she no longer fought it. She heated some soup and wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her evening. She didn't sleep much anymore. So she began to clean. When she came upon the shoebox in the back of her closet she stopped.

She poured herself a glass of red wine and took the shoebox to the small table in the bay window—and as the snow built up on
the windowsill she read Decker's love letters from almost twenty-five years ago.

Garreth Sr. had had enough of hints and innuendos from his son. He was not a cop anymore, but he had been for almost forty years. And retirement gave him lots of time to think. And if this Decker Roberts was who he thought he was—the boy who had sent his life and career to hell—well, he'd sure as shit be waiting for him when he got back to town—and Toronto boys always came back to ol' T.O., like bad pennies.

So he sat in his rental car and tilted his hip flask, allowing the warming glow of good scotch into his mouth, while across the way through the falling snow he watched the house on Strathallan Wood in the North York section of the city where he had first met Decker Roberts. It had been cold that day too—very cold. And there had been a dead little girl, whose image never left Garreth's mind unless he drank her away.

AS SOON AS DECKER GOT TO CINCINNATI HE E-MAILED THE
voiceover dialogue to Trish, then headed to Mike Shedloski's address. He needed more ammunition before he confronted the head of Yolles Pharmaceuticals.

Decker was not a good actor—had never been a good actor. But he understood acting and actors—how it and they worked. Just as he had never been a good musician but he understood what made music, music and not noise.

He knew how actors transformed. He knew that self-definition was at the core of the process—as long as the actor's centre was still and deep, images could be dropped into the pond of the self, like a pebble dropped into a mountain lake, and the person would change. If Decker thought of himself as Seth's father the pond would change and others would see him as older. If he thought of himself as Dr. Roberts' son he would be perceived as his youngest. So as soon as he'd left the bus he'd summoned his deep knowledge of himself then dropped the idea of himself as Dr. Roberts' son into the still waters and sensed the concentric circles move outward. The change in Decker was subtle. It wouldn't fool a photograph, but when someone showed people a picture of him a confused look might cross the viewer's face. Yes, it looked like Decker, but it didn't match their perception of the person they had met. It would not buy Decker much—but every bit of confusion could help.

Henry-Clay had stood silhouetted against the tall building on the other side of the Ohio River with his back to Yslan since she'd come into his office—like some dumb shot from
The Fountainhead
, Yslan thought. Then it occurred to her that this guy's personal motto could well be I will never work so another man may eat. Then she amended it to an appropriate gravestone for this creep: He never worked so another man could eat.

Henry-Clay saw the slender NSA agent's image in the glass beside his. He was tempted to move so his reflection crept on top of hers. He felt a familiar stirring in his loins, then turned slowly—much as he had on the website with Decker—to find the woman had extraordinary translucent blue eyes. Something odd in the genes, he assumed.

He was shorter than she thought he'd be and there was something rubbery about his lips and hands and eyelids, but his eyes never wavered and they betrayed, if not intelligence, at least a quickness—a fire.

Henry-Clay was surprised how much better looking she was in person than in the reflection in the windowpane or in the images Senator Villianne had sent him. He was pleased that the rest of the information the good senator had sent matched up perfectly with the woman standing on the far side of his desk.

“I'm sorry I had to make you wait, Special Agent Hicks.”

She knew he wasn't the least bit sorry to make her wait, but said, “Be that as it may; Decker Roberts.”

His lips formed an almost perfect O, and Yslan thought he might blow a bubble.

“Who?”

Damned close to Disney's Cheshire cat.

“Decker Roberts,” she repeated.

“What an odd name. Shouldn't it be Roberts Decker, like the actor Roberts Blossom?”

Home Alone
—another film that grew on you like mildew.

“No, it's Decker Roberts. Tell me everything you know about Decker Roberts.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Do you enjoy a late-night dinner, Special Agent Hicks?”

“Decker Roberts.”

“Would he enjoy one?”

“Okay, Mr. Yolles. I'm a federal agent and I can have you arrested.”

“For asking you out to dinner?”

“For withholding evidence, impeding a federal investigation—”

“Enough, Special Agent Hicks. If you don't want to go out with me, just say as much.”

It was his lips. Yes, it was his lips. Like a tropical fish's. No. It wasn't just that. His mouth was way too small for his big head, but his lips were too big…

Then he puckered and blew her a kiss.

Decker first persuaded the Realtor to show him the place despite the fact that it was a mess, then asked to be left alone in the apartment—Mike's apartment.

He knew that this place—because of Mike—was important. Exactly why he couldn't say, but at least it was somewhere to start.

The apartment was surprisingly spare; no, not spare, Decker realized—balanced. Volumes, colours, shapes—all in a pleasing balance. It reminded Decker of some of the colonial buildings he'd been in. A perfect human ratio of height to width to length—the same ratios that da Vinci illustrated in his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man.

The only unbalanced part of Mike's apartment was the interior of his refrigerator, where junk food reigned supreme. Opened bags of potato chips of various kinds, flavours, and shapes—dill pickle was evidently his favourite—were scattered higgledy-piggledy with half-eaten cans of different types of ravioli—evidently cheese was his favourite—and takeout Chinese containers—General Tso's chicken took pride of place.

The smell was none too pleasant.

Decker closed the refrigerator, embarrassed that he had invaded Mike's privacy—as if he'd found a stack of girlie mags. He passed by the beautifully balanced pile of junk that formed a Celtic cross in the living room and entered Mike's bedroom. Surrounding the surprisingly small bed were several of Mike's balancing-act statues. Decker looked from one to the next. His eyes stopped at the statue that vaguely looked like Mike himself. Something was wrong with it. There was one, and only one, piece out of symmetry—a slender black laptop was squeezed between the speakers that formed the statue's left arm and the three printers that made up his chest.

Decker carefully removed Mike's computer.

He fired it up and contacted Eddie. Within five minutes Eddie had the computer's codes and full control of the machine. Ten minutes later Eddie found Mike's research for Yolles Pharmaceuticals, entitled “The Reality of Placebo Ratios—The Oddest Balance.”

8.6 again
, Eddie wrote to Decker

8.6?
Decker wrote back.

It's the same pi factor that Martin Armistaad based his market predictions on.

Martin Armistaad?

A fraudster, now in Leavenworth Penitentiary, but he accurately predicted, among other things, the exact day in the eighties that the market crashed.

I don't see how that helps us, Eddie.

Just saying, your guy's not alone.

Decker pulled his fingers away from the keys. He wanted to be sure that he didn't write what was in his head: “no kidding.” He was going to ask Eddie another question, then decided against it and typed,
“Thanks”
and without waiting for a response shut off the machine. He didn't know why, but he felt that the next important thing he needed to confront Yolles he'd have to find on his own. He thought about that for a moment—did he have to find it on his own, or did he want to find on his own without
Eddie's help? Or it was safer to find it on his own? He didn't know the answer to his own questions.

He closed the bedroom door and stepped into the living room. The sun was setting, throwing long lines of refracted light across the floor. Decker glanced down and then to the windowsill to see what was causing the rainbows on the floor. There on the sill was a miniature version of an office building. The tiny thing was made of match and Popsicle sticks and bits of glass through which the light was refracting.

Decker knelt to get a better look, and as he went to touch the miracle of both miniaturization and balance a building six blocks across town came into his line of vision—and to his amazement he saw that the tiny statue was a perfect replication of the building across the way.

Decker found himself holding his breath. Then he remembered Mike's sign: “Who's Jumping Now?”

Decker sat back on his butt on Mike's floor, opened the man's computer, and searched for the building on Google Earth. He found it, then quickly found its history—and the fact that Henry-Clay Yolles' paternal grandfather had jumped to his death from the building after the crash in twenty-nine.

Decker stared at the building and nodded. This could be of use—something personal. The more he knew about Henry-Clay Yolles, the better chance he had of forcing him to back off. Stage-trained actors always wanted to find textual support for behaviour. But Decker knew that the fucked-up hard-wiring of the human heart is much more important and powerful. Iago gives his reasons for hating Othello—“I hate the Moor: And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets he has done my office,” and that Othello passed over him and awarded someone else a promotion. But neither is the reason for his hatred—his hatred is hard-wired and totally irrational. Decker hoped it was the same with Henry-Clay Yolles and the Treloar Building.

Decker tucked the laptop under his arm, then realized it was exactly where the computer had been on the statue. He stepped
back, just brushing the balancing Celtic cross statue behind him—it fell to the floor. Decker stared at the dozens and dozens of pieces on the carpet. Pieces of nothing that Mike's genius had balanced into something of beauty, meaning. Tears sprung to Decker's eyes, and he felt the world spin on its axis. Then he was on the floor desperately trying to resurrect Mike's creation, but all the king's horses and all the king's men…

Decker stepped out into the hallway. The Realtor looked up from his BlackBerry and said, “Great place, no?”

Decker didn't answer—he was thinking about “Who's Jumping Now?” Decker sensed the pieces coming together, like the events of a script he was charting—they were all about there. Shortly it would be up to him to direct them like a stage play. No; for a man like Henry-Clay Yolles, a picture was worth a gazillion words. So not a play—a multimedia event. A multimedia event guided by a semblant order.