The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  Ben stared across at her in stunned silence. Althea Satterfield’s words precisely.

  “A…a friend in Chicago just said those exact words to me not an hour ago.”

  “They did come in loud and clear.”

  “I don’t believe this. Anything else?”

  Madame Sonja shrugged and shook her head.

  “Nope. Some days are better than others for me. This one isn’t much.”

  “You think that was just…luck? Coincidence?”

  “Do you?”

  She led Ben to the door.

  “Well, thanks for your drawings and your help,” he said, shaking her hand and heading down the walk.

  “I hope you find your man,” she called after him.

  “So do I.”

  “And I hope you find your cat, too.”

  With no feeling for where he was headed or what he was going to do, Ben found himself on a small road that dead-ended at a grassy patch overlooking what his map said was the Inland Waterway. Madame Sonja’s parting reference to Pincus’s disappearance had shaken him, as had her reiteration of Althea’s odd suggestion.

  Start with what you know.

  The phrase wasn’t all that unusual, he reasoned, and maybe the words weren’t precisely the same ones his neighbor had used. And as for Pincus, he was focused on his failure as an investigator and on handing over five hundred dollars in cash, but in addition the disappearance of his strongest connection to the world of the living was very much on his mind. He must have said something about the cat. That had to be it. In all likelihood, he had said something in passing and just couldn’t remember having done so.

  There was no other explanation for what had happened—no other explanation, of course, except the obvious. Was it possible that a woman with a zodiac tattooed on her forehead, living in a tiny house on an undistinguished street in Florida, had somehow tapped into his thoughts? If there were people running about with that ability, why didn’t everyone know? How many times had he walked right past a tent at a county fair offering readings for five dollars?

  He remembered talking with Gilbert Forest, a physician friend whose foundation of medical beliefs had been badly shaken by a traditional Chinese doc, who had cured an inoperable cancer in one of Gilbert’s patients using only acupuncture and what he called “vitamins.” Since Ben believed in very little at this point in his life, the biggest danger posed by Alice Gustafson and Madame Sonja was to those many things he didn’t believe in.

  Start with what you know.

  As the sun rose higher and the wet heat grew more intense, Ben set his case file on the ground beside him, and started going through it a page at a time, searching for some angle he had missed. Perhaps the renderings of Glenn would stir some memory in one of the hematologists, he mused. Not likely, he quickly decided.

  Okay, okay, Callahan. Aside from the fact that you’re not much of a detective, what else, exactly, do you know?

  Ben’s gaze drifted out over the glistening water. When it returned to the papers in his lap, he was looking down at the article about the woman, Juanita Ramirez. The three photographs accompanying the text, typical of the tabloids, were grainy. There was one of the woman, one of the puncture wounds above her buttocks, and one of a likeness of the motor home in which she had been kidnapped, held prisoner, and operated on. The motor home…

  Ben pulled out the transcript of the interview Gustafson had with the woman. The parts he considered important were highlighted in yellow. The part he needed at that moment was not.

  AG:

  Can you describe the motor home where you were held prisoner?

  JR:

  I only saw the outside once, when they stopped to ask me directions, and then pulled me inside. It was big. Real big. Most of it was gray or silver, and there was like a maroon or purple design on the side, sort of like a swirl pattern, or a wave.

  The woman’s description wasn’t much, Ben acknowledged, but it was something. He had done the police stations and the hospitals and the hematology offices and the surgicenters, all the while searching for the man he called Glenn. His plan, now that he had Madame Sonja’s renderings, was to make the loop once again, hoping against hope that someone might connect with the face. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Who had told him that?

  “All right, Callahan,” he muttered, “you’ve been calling yourself a detective. So detect.”

  Two hours and four motor-home dealerships later, he was losing faith. Beaver, Alpine, Great West, Dynamax, Road Trek, Winnebago, Safari Simba. The list of RV makers seemed endless. Damon, Forest River, Kodiak, Newmar Cypress, Thor Colorado. Almost every one of them had a model or more with a design on the side that could have been the one described by Juanita Ramirez.

  By midafternoon, his feet and back were aching, and the super-stuffed burrito he had eaten at Taco Bell, usually a staple in his diet, was making more encore appearances than the Rolling Stones. A hundred and fifty dollars a day—maybe ten dollars an hour for the time he had put in. He had done quite enough. Alice Gustafson should have found some other way to spend Organ Guard’s money. Even though he didn’t care much about her minuscule organization and its arcane mission, he really had tried his best. Now it was time to give up and go home.

  Three hours later, through lengthening late-afternoon shadows, he swung the Saturn up the short driveway to the Schyler Gaines Mart and Gas, the fifteenth gas station he had visited since deciding to quit the case and return to Chicago. He had managed to add a pounding headache to the persisting miseries in his feet and back. Callahan’s Syndrome, he decided to call it—CS for the purposes of fund-raising.

  The brainstorm that kept him on the road long enough to develop the syndrome was a circle he had drawn on his map, ten miles around the spot where Glenn had been killed. Armed with catalogues from the RV dealers and the pictures of Glenn, he had decided to go down fighting, visiting every gas station he could locate within the circle. Given the single-digit miles per gallon of the largest RVs, the one he was searching for had to spend as much time at the pump as in the trailer parks. Perhaps, he decided, pigheadedness should be added to the symptoms of CS.

  The station, three miles off the highway in Curtisville, might as easily have been on the other side of a time portal. It was a rickety-looking red clapboard structure with a peaked, shingled roof, and a small porch, complete with two rocking chairs. The hand-painted sign over the door was faded and peeling. Out front was a single gas pump that, while modernized at some point from the glass-topped Esso pump standing off to one side of the tarmac, still looked outdated.

  It was to the good that the active pump was a fair distance from the porch, because the man Ben assumed was Schyler Gaines was seated in one of the rockers smoking a pipe. With his bib overalls, plaid shirt, dirt-stained Caterpillar cap, and gray beard, he might have been teleported to the mart from Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch. Ben pulled the Saturn to a stop not far from the corner of the porch and approached the man, who eyed him with some interest, but said nothing. The smoke from Gaines’s pipe was cherry-scented and not at all unpleasant.

  “Good afternoon,” Ben greeted him with a half-wave, mounting the first step to the porch and leaning on a rail that he guessed was a fifty-fifty bet not to hold him.

  Gaines pulled out a gold watch on a chain and checked the time.

  “S’pose you could still say that,” he replied, sounding exactly as Ben might have predicted.

  “My name is Callahan, Ben Callahan. I’m a private detective from Chicago, and I’m looking for a man who was run down and killed on Route Seventy, south of here.”

  “He ’uz killed an’ yer still lookin’ for ’im?”

  “Let’s try that again. Actually, I’m trying to learn about him. No one even knows his name, let alone what he was doing out on Route Seventy at three in the morning.”

  “Big Peterbilt three-eight-seven hit ’im head on—back cab sleeper, contoured roof cap.”


  “You know the truck?”

  “Stops by here for gas from time t’ time. I got a diesel pump out back. Charge a dime less than the stations on the turnpike, but it adds up when yer pumpin’ a hunnert gallons. Guy named Eddie’s the driver.”

  “Eddie Coombs. I spoke to him. He’s still pretty messed up over what happened.”

  “I’ll bet. It’s a crackerjack rig he got. Six-hunnert horsepower Cummins engine. Fella who got hit couldn’t a had much time to knowed it happened.”

  “I think that’s the case,” Ben said. “Well, here are some computer drawings of what the guy might have looked like.”

  He passed the renderings over, suddenly feeling strangely foolish and impotent. What was he doing here? What could he possibly expect to learn from this laconic old man? Why had he ever said yes to Alice Gustafson in the first place? Rocking and puffing, Gaines studied the pictures for a time, then handed them back, shaking his head.

  “Don’t mean nothin’ t’ me.”

  “I didn’t think they would,” Ben said. “You got some cold Coke in there?”

  “I do. Just short a havin’ ice in the can if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know exactly.”

  Ben used the back of his hand to wipe a sheen of sweat from his forehead.

  “Cans are in the cooler. Jes’ leave a dollar on the counter. I’m enjoyin’ this bowlful too much t’ git up.”

  The Coke, icy as advertised, washed away a bit of Ben’s consuming feeling of futility. He left a five by the antiquated register, took Madame Sonja’s renderings, and headed back to his car. Would Alice Gustafson accept Oh, well, I tried? Doubtful. More likely, she’d want her money back.

  Just start with what you know.

  Ben opened the driver’s side door, then stopped and returned to the porch with the brochures and his absurdly long list of RV models.

  “Mr. Gaines, I’m also looking for a motor home,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A motor home. You know, like an RV. Would have been here somewhere around the time this fellow was killed. Maybe from up north, maybe really big, maybe gray with darker gray or maroon markings. Here are some brochures of possible candidates.”

  “That would be a thirty-nine-foot Winnebago Adventurer,” Gaines said matter-of-factly, without bothering with the brochures. “Oh-four or oh-five, I would guess. Ohio plates. Pulled in fer a fill. Took more’n seventy gallons.”

  Ben felt his heart skip a beat.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Not too much t’ tell. The couple drivin’ her didn’t seem like the RV type.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you know. Too young, not country enough, movin’ about quicker’n most RV owners move. Bought three sandwiches and three chips even though there ’uz only two of ’em.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “I got a memory for cars ’n’ trucks. Not people. She ’uz quite pretty, though. I do remember that. Cute bottom on her. Pardon me for sayin’ that. I may be old, but I ain’t dead.”

  “It’s perfectly okay, Mr. Gaines. Is there anything else you can remember about the RV or the people?”

  “I didn’t notice until it was pulling away, but I don’t think there ’uz windows in the back. As you’ll see from them brochures, that ain’t the usual.”

  “No windows. Are you sure?”

  “If’n I said it, then I’m sure. What is it? You deal with people that sez what they don’t mean?”

  “I’ve been known to, yes.”

  Ben was aware of his pulse snapping in his fingertips. This whole business about the Adventurer could be nothing, but in every fiber he believed it was the RV described by Juanita Ramirez. He began rapidly processing ways he might use the limited information he had just gathered. How many people in Ohio buy a thirty-nine-foot Winnebago motor home? Did the manufacturer keep records? How far would seventy gallons have taken such a beast? The questions weren’t much, but after nearly a week of abject frustration, they were palm trees in the Sahara.

  “Mr. Gaines,” he said, “you’ve been very helpful. Is there anything else you can think of about this RV? Anything at all?”

  “Nope. Except—”

  “Except what?”

  “I s’pose it might help if’n I gave ya the license plate number.”

  “The what?”

  “They paid for their gas an’ supplies with a credit card—a Visa, I think twuz. I got burned once real bad by a trucker with a stolen card, so now I always write down the license number on the credit card slip.”

  “And you still have the imprint?”

  “A course I do,” Gaines said. “You wouldn’t think much a me as a businessman if’n I didn’t.”

  Seven

  And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged by any external influence?

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book II

  Time is a flexible concept in Rio. Unless you are talking business meetings, and serious business meetings at that, half an hour late means perfectly on time.

  “I love it,” Natalie whispered to herself, smiling at the description in the Varig in-flight magazine.

  If anyone ever needed eight days away in a city where half an hour late meant on time, it was she. Images of dancing with a mysterious stranger at an all-night salsa club and running on the spectacular black-and-white mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana had dominated her thoughts since the invitation from Doug Berenger to replace him and present a paper at the International Transplant Congress. Now it was about to happen.

  For a time, she had flipped through the Air Shopper and made a mental list about what she might buy for her mother and niece and a few of her friends. For her girlfriends and Hermina, it had to be jewelry made of Brazil’s legendary precious and semiprecious stones; for Jenny and Terry, polished agate bookends; for Doug, perhaps a high-end replica of the Christ the Redeemer statue.

  She set the guidebook aside and peered out the window of the 747, trying to catch a glimpse of the city through scattered clouds. Night had settled in, but even after fifteen hours of flying, she wasn’t particularly tired. Out of Daylight Savings Time for their winter, Rio was just two hours ahead of Boston, and thanks to the luxury of business class, she had been able to get plenty of sleep. The married heavy-equipment salesman sitting next to her, a veteran traveler, had made several ill-disguised forays into forming a connection, had been politely rebuffed each time, and finally had retreated into a Grisham novel, which it looked like he might finish before they landed.

  Because of what they had been told was a problem of dense traffic, the plane had been circling Antônio Carlos Jobim Airport for most of an hour. Of all those on the flight, Natalie decided, she probably cared the least about the delay. With the help of a couple of glasses of Merlot, her type A personality had been downgraded to possibly an A minus. Antônio Carlos Jobim. What other city in the world had an airport named after a composer—and a jazz composer at that?

  “…the girl from Ipanema goes walking…”

  Natalie checked to ensure that her travel documents were in order, and was debating between opening her laptop and closing her eyes when the plane banked to the right, then leveled off. She felt the landing gear grind into place and then engage. Moments later the orders for landing were given in English and Portuguese. Her ear felt tuned to the language, thanks largely to nine days of study, tapes, and as many conversations with her mother as she could handle. There were differences between Brazilian and Cape Verdean Portuguese, some of them striking, but she had always had a knack for languages, and had made quite a bit of progress.

  Eight days in Rio. She had always believed that living well was the best revenge. Maybe she should send postcards of thanks to Cliff Renfro and Dean Goldenberg.

  The landing was flawless, and customs was much better organized than she had anticipated from her experience in São Paulo. Her guide to Rio had prepared her for winter temperatures in the mid- to high fi
fties, and also suggested that she buy a cab voucher inside the airport rather than trust the meters. She pulled on a light leather jacket as she entered the main terminal, and easily found the taxi kiosk. As she was putting the change and the voucher into her wallet, she began to feel light-headed and vague. The sensation was unpleasant and disturbing, but easily explainable by the long flight and the Merlot.

  Outside the terminal, the air was cool and fragrant, despite the chaotic traffic. The Jobim Airport was twenty miles north of Rio. She had been looking forward to her first encounter with the magical city, but all she could think of at that moment was getting inside a cab and getting to her hotel. Her presentation wasn’t scheduled for two more days, so there was no reason at this point to be rested. Besides, according to the guidebook, nightlife in Rio didn’t even begin until the early morning. After a few hours of rest, she would be ready to try some of it out.

  The red dress, she decided, mentally choosing one of three she had brought. She had no intention of being foolish in a city known for punishing such behavior, but she was adventurous, and she loved dancing—especially to Latin music. The concierge at the hotel would direct her to a place that was both fun and safe.

  Near the taxi queue, a uniformed attendant took her bag, checked her voucher, and led her over to a yellow cab with a blue stripe around it. Her feeling of disconnection intensified as she slid into the backseat.

  “Inter-Continental Rio Hotel,” she heard herself say.

  The driver, a dark man in his thirties, turned and smiled at her, but said nothing. His features were indistinct, and as the cab pulled away, Natalie tried unsuccessfully to focus on his appearance. The ride toward the city was also a blur. More than once, she thought she might be close to getting sick. Sooner than she had anticipated, the driver pulled off of the highway. In a short time they were driving through a poorly lit slum. Natalie felt a jet of adrenaline drive much of the uncertainty and vagueness away.

  “Where are we going?” she asked in Portuguese.