by Greg Iles
In the annals of Pulitzer award dinners, our ceremony became a legendary disaster. Before the great Duncan McEwan got around to presenting my award—which the committee had graciously invited him to do—he ranted for three and a half minutes, excoriating the modern press, the George W. Bush administration, and, most of all, his nemesis: television news. Dad made it plain that he’d lived through the golden age of journalism and that the lowly hacks who tarnish the art today aren’t fit to polish the boots of Robert Capa, I. F. Stone, or Stanley Karnow. He called me up to the dais only as an afterthought and handed down my Pulitzer certificate with a curt nod.
Eight weeks after that dinner, my son was born, ten days before his due date. A few hours after Adam entered the world, my mother got on a plane and flew up to D.C. alone. She told us that Dad had been too busy to leave Bienville on short notice, but even my wife knew this was a pathetic excuse. Still, we pretended it was true, for my mother’s sake. Mom later admitted to me that Dad had started drinking as soon as he heard that Molly’s water had broken, and he was in no shape to travel by air. I certainly had no desire to swallow my pride and carry Adam south to meet his grandfather, like a supplicant seeking the approval of his paterfamilias. (I’d already gathered that he wasn’t happy with our naming the baby after my lost brother.) Besides, the prospect of putting Molly—who was already suffering from postpartum depression—in a room with her alcoholic father-in-law when he was likely to act like an asshole was something not even my mother could face.
I don’t know how Dad reacted when my Adam drowned. I imagine he drank even more than usual, probably until he was comatose. By that time, I didn’t care. My father had cut the cord binding him to us, and I felt no obligation to mend it. If my son’s death gave me a better understanding of the pain he’d endured after losing two children, it did not incline me to excuse his past behavior.
A soft rapping sounds at the side door of my parents’ house. I pop up from the chair and let in Dr. Jack Kirby, a bald, deep-voiced man who always reminds me of Lloyd Nolan, the doctor on Peyton Place. Jack’s defining quality is gravitas, which you tend to find in physicians who’ve practiced nearly fifty years.
“Afternoon, Marshall,” he says, shaking my hand as the smell of cigarette smoke wafts in with him. “I’m going to tell Duncan about his tests first, but I’d like you to stick around afterward, if you would. No matter what happens. I want to tell you something about Sally Matheson.”
This takes me off guard. “Sally Matheson?”
“You’ll understand when I tell you. Let’s get this over with first.”
We find Dad sitting in his worn La-Z-Boy recliner, which is aimed at the fifty-five-inch television he uses for target practice every day. Even now, CNN is running in the background, its anchor and pundits muted. Dr. Kirby chooses a chair far enough away from Dad to avoid any thrown object that might come his way.
Dad’s face is expressionless, immobile, a classic example of what doctors call the “Parkinson’s mask.” He developed this quite early, according to my mother, and she finds it one of the most difficult manifestations of the illness to cope with. Even on the rare occasions when Dad feels pleasure or happiness, he cannot smile in a way that can be recognized by anyone but her. Thanks to expert administration and monitoring of his medications, he experiences very little in the way of tremors or jerks, and this has been a blessing to them both. I think Dad would have withdrawn completely into their house had he suffered those classic symptoms. Even so, the less visible complications have come close to breaking his will. Difficulty swallowing, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, hallucinations . . .
Even with his masklike face, Dad appears to be glowering at his old friend Dr. Kirby. Red eczema blotches mark his parched yellow skin, and his shock of white hair looks almost wild, which tells me he hasn’t let Mom cut it in a while. The yellow tinge to his skin has been there for the past three months, but looking at him in the late-afternoon light spilling through the window, it seems to have worsened.
“Duncan,” Dr. Kirby begins, “you’re not going to be happy about this visit. But I’ve given you all the rope I can. I got your latest liver enzymes back today, and there’s no good way to put this: you’ve crossed into end-stage liver disease. You keep drinking, and your liver will kill you long before the Parkinson’s lays you low.”
Dad takes this with the stoicism he always displayed when I was a boy—as though he’s heard nothing that must be acknowledged, much less attended to immediately. Jack Kirby understands him well enough to know that the prognosis was heard. Now he drives it home, as my mother sits silently on the sofa, wringing her hands.
“I’ve known you since we were boys,” Jack goes on. “And I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to realize that your intended goal may be to die from cirrhosis before the Parkinson’s reaches its final stage. But let me tell you why that’s a bad plan. You’ve been living with heart failure for a while now. Combined with that, liver failure might not give you the result you want. It might cause your kidneys to fail. Or all your issues together might stress your system badly enough to trigger a stroke, or even a series of them. You might have to sit in a wheelchair all day. You might be permanently bedridden. Then you wouldn’t be able to drink unless Blythe held the bottle and let you suck it through a straw. And I know she’ll draw the line there.”
Dad still has not acknowledged his friend’s words. He’s watching Wolf Blitzer give some paid flack airtime to canonize his employer. Sometimes I wonder whether Dad’s reticence is the result of shame over what the disease has done to his formerly powerful voice. The resonant baritone that once steadied Stars and Stripes reporters in Korea, pushed back Ku Klux Klansmen in 1960s Mississippi, and delivered heartbreaking eulogies over friends has been reduced to a reedy whisper, a ghost of its former self.
“You could live quite a while that way,” Dr. Kirby continues. “The Parkinson’s would continue to progress, but your lovely bride would be feeding you by hand and wiping your butt twenty-four-seven, and for a long time. That’s not right, Duncan. Not if it’s in your power to prevent it. You know that.”
Dad sits with unusual stillness for several seconds. Then without looking at Kirby he whispers, “She put you up to this, didn’t she?”
“No, damn it,” Dr. Kirby says firmly as my mother closes her eyes. “About the only thing Blythe ratted you out for is living on ice cream. I know it’s tough for you to swallow, but you’ve got to eat some mashed-up vegetables to survive. You’ve lost nearly fifty pounds since my original diagnosis, and we don’t want to add diabetes to your list of problems.”
“I want to see those tests,” Dad demands, his head jerking suddenly. “I want to see if they’re as bad as you say.”
With his jaw set in anger, Dr. Kirby pulls a folded sheaf of paper from his inside coat pocket, carries it over to the La-Z-Boy, and drops it in Dad’s lap. “There you go, you hardheaded son of a bitch. You don’t know enough chemistry to read them, but you can see the red warning highlights, with low or high screaming off every line.”
With quivering hands, Dad struggles to hold the papers in his grasp. Dr. Kirby mutters something and does it for him, even though he knows this is a pointless charade.
“Did you see what Trump said today about the New York Times?” Dad asks as he studies the quivering papers before his face.
“I don’t give a goddamn what he said. I stopped caring a long time ago.”
“Not caring is the same as begging for fascism,” Dad grumbles.
Dr. Kirby stares down at him for a while. Then he says, “I tell you what, Duncan. I’m going to have a word with Marshall outside. I need to talk to him about something for the newspaper. A Medical Society statement on Medicaid expansion. I’ll look back in before I go, after you and Blythe have had a chance to talk.”
“Go right ahead.”
The doctor motions for me to follow him back to the kitchen, but even there, we’re too close to my father for comfort. At Kirby’
s suggestion, we step out onto the small redwood terrace that overlooks the wooded backyard.
“Poor Blythe,” Jack says. “I see it all the time. All the men I grew up with act like kings in their dotage. They expect to be waited on hand and foot, regardless of how obstinate they are or what silly whims they come up with. I’ve seen a man send his wife and children thirty miles in every direction to find him a goddamn Nehi soda.”
“I can imagine.”
The doctor sits on the redwood bench against the rail and squints up at me. “Marshall, before I speak, I want to be very clear that everything I’m about to tell you is off the record. Is that understood?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m about to break a bunch of HIPAA regulations, or laws, and you’re going to keep quiet about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And please don’t call me ‘sir.’ It’s Jack, all right?”
“All right, Jack. Off the record.”
He takes out a cigarette, a Winston, and lights it. After blowing out a long stream of blue smoke, he holds up the cigarette and says, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
“Noted.”
“All right. In the next day or two, an autopsy on Sally Matheson is likely to say she was healthy when she died. But in truth, she was ill. Very ill.”
My reporter’s radar throws back a hard echo. “Really? If she was that sick, why won’t the autopsy pick it up? Are they getting that local pathologist to do it? Like they did with Buck Ferris?”
“I don’t know who’s doing the post, but medical fraud isn’t my worry. About four months ago, I diagnosed Sally with a rare condition called amyloidosis. It’s a blood disease. A progressive one. You’ve probably heard of amyloid proteins—they’re what’s deposited as plaques in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. But there are different types of amyloidosis. Some you can live with a long time, others you can’t. Sally had an incurable type.”
“Did she know that?”
“Oh, yes. But she told me she didn’t want anyone to know she was ill—not even Max and Paul. She was adamant. And my policy with longtime patients like Sally is to honor their wishes. At least until it becomes a serious risk to them. Of falls, et cetera.”
“Were you treating her for this condition?”
“Symptomatic treatment. There’s really no treatment for the disease itself. Not for her type. She was a borderline candidate for a bone marrow transplant, but she ultimately decided against it.”
Jack’s revelation has already altered my perception of both Sally’s death and her husband’s alibi. “You still haven’t said why the autopsy won’t pick up her illness.”
“The disease is subtle, at first. And they won’t be looking for it. Tests involve collecting twenty-four hours’ worth of urine, doing skin fat tests, things like that. Depending on the extent of organ damage at this point, a first-rate pathologist might detect it, but my guess is it’ll slip through.”
“How bad was her prognosis?”
“With her type . . . pretty grim. For a proud, beautiful woman like Sally, it would be tough to endure.”
In some fraction of a second I recall with perfect clarity Paul’s TV-pretty mother teaching us to gut, clean, and fry fish at Lake Comeaux. “How long would she likely have lived beyond last night?”
Dr. Kirby scratches his chin. “Hard to say. I learned long ago that physicians make poor oracles. As long as a year, but more likely seven or eight months. Possibly less.”
“Christ. This is some kind of week we’re having.”
Kirby’s eyebrows go up. “We?”
“Everybody. The whole town.”
“I’d have to agree with you there.”
“Why have you told me this, Jack?”
Dr. Kirby takes a long drag on his Winston, then lets the smoke out slowly. “I read your story on Buck Ferris. I’m glad you wrote it, but I’m probably one of the few. And I was worried that if you wrote about Sally’s death in the same way, you might get out ahead of your skis, suggesting it was murder.”
For a few seconds I wonder if Dr. Kirby has come here at the behest of Max Matheson or someone else in the Poker Club. But Jack Kirby is no great friend to the Poker Club, and he’s certainly not a member of their little cabal. “You’re saying Sally might really have killed herself. And not because of any affair Max had. Because of this illness.”
Kirby shrugs. “In my experience, when patients kill themselves, it’s not usually a single stressor that causes it. There’s preexisting depression, which Sally didn’t have for most of her life but did after this diagnosis. Then something else pushes them over the edge.”
“Like the betrayal of an old friend?”
“Possibly. I’ve heard the rumors, of course.”
“Have you heard a name?”
“Three or four. Some more plausible than others. I don’t want to dignify any of them. But with Max they could all be true. He’s a legendary pussy hound.”
Dr. Kirby’s casual use of this term reminds me that his courteous manner is a veneer he preserves for business hours and mixed gatherings. At heart, he’s a Southern male who spends his holidays and summers in hunting camps and fishing cabins. He sees life as it is, and he’s quite capable of speaking with crude candor.
“I understand, Jack. I appreciate you telling me this.”
He nods and takes another drag off the Winston, quickly burning the cigarette down to a stub.
“Are you going to tell anybody else this information?” I ask.
“I think I’m pretty much obligated to pass it on to the police. Don’t you?”
“Yeah. I faced a similar dilemma earlier today. Someone left a photograph in my car, a tip having to do with Buck’s murder. I’d like to keep it to myself, but I’ll give it to the sheriff just before I publish it.”
Dr. Kirby rolls his eyes. “For all the good it will do, right?”
“With our sheriff? You’re right.”
“Can you tell me who the photo implicated?” he asks.
“I shouldn’t.”
“I shouldn’t have told you about Sally.”
I give him a wry smile. “What do you know about Dave Cowart?”
The doctor scowls. “A belligerent redneck. Some of the crooks in this town are old-time rogues, you know? Best drinking companions you could hope for. Not Cowart. He’s stupid and greedy and doesn’t have a lick of moral sense.”
“Well, I’m about to make an enemy of him. Probably his boss, too. Beau Holland.”
“Another prize ass.” Kirby throws down the cigarette butt and grinds it out with his patent leather shoe. “Beau Holland comes from a long line of arrogant, effete bastards.”
“It shows.”
“Do you carry a pistol?”
Dr. Kirby asked this as casually as he would inquire if I carried a pocket watch. “I started last night.”
“Good. Wear it night and day. If you’re going to make enemies of Cowart and Holland and their pals, you need to keep your head on a swivel.”
The doctor’s matter-of-fact warning sobers me. “Sounds like you know some firsthand information about them.”
Kirby looks off into the trees. “I’ve lived in this town a long time, Marshall. That Poker Club’s a unique little organization. When they want things to happen, sooner or later those things happen. Sometimes you can trace it back to direct action by a member, but more often you can’t. Take civil rights. I know of no direct ties between the Poker Club and the Klan or even the White Citizens’ Council. In fact, I don’t think the members give much of a damn about skin color. If you’ve got the money to live where they live, you’re mostly welcome—schools being the exception. They don’t like their kids going to school with blacks. They don’t mind a few black football players peppering the teams, but they don’t want their daughters dating them.”
“The old miscegenation bugbear is still alive and well.”
“Yes, indeed. But the Poker Club has funneled enough money to black leade
rs in this county over the years that things have stayed just how they like them. And if a few colored boys got killed back in the day for not knowing their place, well . . . nothing led back to the Poker Club.”
“That was a long time ago, Jack.”
“Not to me. But if you want more recent history, I can think of five or six men who ran afoul of the Poker Club in the last twenty years and wound up ruined or dead.”
“Murdered?”
Dr. Kirby turns up one palm. “It’s never that cut-and-dried. One-car crash. Hunting accident climbing through a fence with a rifle. Another guy got caught up in his own bush hog, bled to death.”
“And nothing traced back to the Poker Club?”
“Never.” Dr. Kirby looks back at me. “Sounds a lot like Buck Ferris drowning in the Mississippi River, doesn’t it?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Remember what I said about your pistol. Make sure you don’t have any accidents.”
“I hear you.”
The doctor gets to his feet with a groan. “I’d better get back in there and take a last stab at your father. I’ve still got one more house call to make.”
I smile at him. “You’ve got some lucky patients, Jack.”
A shadow passes over his face. “In general, if I’m going to see somebody at the end of my day, they’re pretty unlucky. But that’s life, son. Enjoy it while you’re still young.”
I walk to the side door with him but don’t go in myself. “I don’t feel too young these days, Jack.”
He stops and turns back to me. “Then you’re blind. If you could see yourself from eighty-three, where I’m standing, you’d know different. Get yourself a pretty girl and make some babies. That’s all that matters. You can use that Pulitzer of yours for a doorstop in the nursery.”
Like a lot of people, Dr. Kirby mistakenly assumes that the Pulitzer Prize is a statue, like an Oscar. “I’ll try to do that,” I tell him. Then I stick out my hand, and he takes it, his grip surprisingly firm for his age.
His wise eyes find mine once more. “I told your father the truth, Marshall. If he keeps drinking, he’ll be dead in a month. Maybe even a week. His liver could quit any time. His heart, too. You need to prepare your mother for that.”
