“Well, there’s the new Herbal and Holistic Medicine Unit,” she ticked them off on her fingers for dramatic effect. “And Weight-loss and Body Recontouring Unit, Substance and Psychic Dependency, Cosmetic Re-engineering, Glandular and Hormonal Re-balance, and of course Dr. Varner's own Personal Preference Surgery.”
“Ah, Personal Preference Surgery. I remember now.”
“You remember? You mean you've been here before?”
“Oh, my, yes, I'm one of the Doctor's former patients.”
“One of Doctor Varner's? Ree-ally?”
I leaned forward and whispered, “That's why I must see him.”
“Personal Preference?” she asked again, still not sure.
“Yes! And very personal, as I'm sure you know.”
“Oh, yes!” Her eyes flashed.
“So,” I gave her a big smile, “if you could be a big dear and give him a message that Peter Talbott has come back to see him, I just know he’ll pop right out and see me.”
“Well,” she seemed to glow. “If you'll have a seat for a smidge, I'll let him know you’re here. But with his schedule, it may still be quite impossible.”
She picked up the telephone and I stepped to where I had a full view of the double doors that led back to the clinic, and waited for the explosion. It didn't take long. Within a minute or two, a fat little man in a white smock with a stethoscope hanging around his neck burst into the waiting room. “What is the meaning of this outrage!” he sputtered. His nervous eyes darted around the small lobby until they settled on me. “Who are you?”
“Me? I'm Peter Talbott.”
“Peter Tal…?” he frowned, almost losing it.
“Yeah, the real one,” I answered, a confident smile forming on my lips. Weak link? One look at Varner and I knew that with a little pressure, he'd crack like a hot chestnut. “And I think we should talk, don't you?”
“Talk? Talk to you?” he scoffed. “Why should I?”
“Because it's me or the State cops and there's nothing your pals Tinkerton or Greene can do to help you then. You’re going down.”
The receptionist was in shock as she watched the show unfold. Her eyes moved back and forth between us like a referee at a tennis match. “I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Varner,” she pleaded. “I had no idea.”
“That is all right, Bruce, it isn't your fault.” Varner reached out and patted her hand. “We don't want you to pop any stitches, now do we.” Varner turned and held the door open for me. “All right, come back to my office. If you insist on talking to me, we will talk.”
I glanced over at Bruce as I walked by, but she didn't look very happy about the situation. “A former patient?” she hissed. “I should have known.”
Varner ushered me through the double doors into the clinic and down the corridor to the left. The thin blue carpet of the lobby quickly gave way to gray-flecked linoleum, white semi-gloss enamel, and harsh fluorescent lights. His office was two doors down. I felt supremely confident as I walked in and took a chair across from his desk. It was Varner who was fidgeting nervously as he closed the door behind us. I knew I had him.
“See here. I don’t know who you are, young man, but I run a legitimate business here. What right do you have to come here and bother me and my staff like this?”
“You mean Bruce? Oh, he'll get over it. You? I doubt it.”
“I shall have you arrested.”
“Go ahead,” I leaned forward and pushed the desk phone toward him. “Call the cops. If you don't, I will, but it won't be your buddy Virgil Dannmeyer who comes this time. It'll be the State Police and the State Attorney General's Office with search warrants. Neither Tinkerton nor his Washington pals can help you then.”
His face turned red, and he was having trouble pulling off the outraged innocence act.
Behind him, the wall was covered with framed diplomas, medical degrees, and board certifications. “Anias P. Varner, Doctor of Medicine,” I read aloud. “You weren't in the Marine Corps, were you?”
“The Marine Corps?” he sounded flustered. “What are you…?”
“I assume they talked to you — Tinkerton and Greene?”
“Tinkerton and Greene? I have nothing to do with them. If they did something illegal, it is none of my business. None whatsoever.”
I pulled the newspaper clippings from my shirt pocket. “None of your business? Let's see. The Pryors? The Skeppingtons? The Brownsteins? Edward Kasmarek? And now, a couple of bogus Talbotts? Do those names ring a bell?”
His eyes shifted nervously from me to the door.
“None of your business?” I laughed at him. “You signed the death certificates, Doctor. You ID’d them. And you put down the cause of death. No autopsies. No fingerprints. No questions. No nothing. That's a felony. A whole bunch of them.” My eyes bore in. “But was that all you did, Doc? Falsify a few records? Help with the paperwork? Sign a few forms? Or did you help kill them, too?”
“No! No. I swear.” He shook his head violently from side to side denying it, but I could see he was cracking and I’d barely started. “I never touched those people. That was all Tinkerton’s work.”
I smiled, my voice turning cruel and sarcastic. “When the real cops get finished with you, Doctor, you'll lose your license and you'll probably end up in the slammer, taking care of other people’s ‘personal preferences’ for a long, long time.”
“I only did what Tinkerton told me to do,” he cowered. “Don't you know who he is? Who he is working for?”
“Probably for himself, but you're too dumb to see that.”
“No! No, you have it all wrong.”
“Yeah? Well, I'm sure he'll clear it all up at your trial. A stand-up guy like Ralph Tinkerton? He'll step forward and set everything straight, won't he?”
“You cannot touch him, you fool.”
My eyes narrowed. “Watch me.”
“He is protected, him and the sheriff.”
“Really? He can talk about the White House all he wants, but those are your state licenses hanging on the wall, Doctor, and the Ohio Attorney General isn’t going to accept his Washington ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Not this time. Even if they do, it won’t help you. You have a half dozen bodies to answer for, Doctor. You’re the fall guy. Tinkerton and his friends are going to run away from you as fast as their feet can carry them.”
Varner slumped back in his chair, his eyes glazing over as the slow realization caved in on him. “I did nothing,” he muttered. “Nothing.”
“Then come downtown with me.”
“What? Downtown?” he mumbled, not understanding.
“Yes, downtown, now, to the State Police Headquarters. If you come clean and tell them everything you know, you might be able to save yourself. If you don't, Tinkerton's going to leave you holding the bag, and you know it.”
Varner blinked. “The State Police? Me?”
“You aren't a stupid man, Doctor. It's all unraveling now — the whole thing. That makes you a liability and makes me your only chance to get out of this thing alive.”
I felt a slight draft on the back of my neck. As I turned my head and looked over my shoulder, the office door had swung open and behind me stood Sheriff Virgil Dannmeyer.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Doc,” he snarled as his hand swung down at me. It was holding a black leather sap and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It caught me hard on the back of the head.
The lights went out as I heard him say, “Semper Fi, asshole!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A short ride to forever…
If you've never been knocked cold by a sharp blow to the head, it is a little hard to describe. I remember back in sixth grade when Howie Schmidt and I were playing in his basement and I ran headlong into one of the steel posts holding up the first floor. It took three weeks to get the “Bong” out of my ears. Later, there was the JV football team in high school. At 168 pounds, I was the third-string guard on a three-string team, until we ran a sweep around left e
nd and I met Willie Sanders coming the other way, helmet-to-helmet. I woke up five minutes later and ten yards back. That was when the coaches suggested I switch to track, or to swimming, or to debate.
The hit Dannmeyer gave me was somewhere in the middle. Most of the time I wasn't completely under. Sometimes I heard things and sometimes I understood them, but I couldn’t manage to do both at the same time. There were voices, but they were far off and hollow, like the echo at the other end of a long pipe, and they didn't make any sense.
“You talk too damned much, Doc,” I heard a gruff voice say.
“I told him nothing. Nothing.”
“No? Keep it up and you’ll find yourself up in Oak Hill with the rest of them.”
“Don't you threaten me, Dannmeyer.”
“No, I'll let the Captain do that.”
“I should never have...”
“You got that right. You never had the balls for it. Neither does your collection of fruits in the beds back there, but you like playing around with them anyway, don’t you, ‘Doctor’? And to keep doing that, you need the money.”
“Dannmeyer, you bastard!”
“You knew the rules. You never shoulda let this guy inside, you never shoulda talked to him, and you never shoulda opened your big yap about what we're doing.”
“Dannmeyer, I swear...”
“Stow it. The captain's gonna have your ass when he gets here. He set this place up for you. Without him and all the Federal money he got you from HEW, you and your bunch of fruits and nuts would still be running around the back alleys of Guadalajara.”
“You are a pig.”
“Yeah, I am. And don't forget, Larry Greene's always got room for one more. But don't worry. When you're gone, I'll clean up all the little ‘loose ends’ around. Won't that be fun?”
I heard Dannmeyer's obscene laugh fade away down that long tunnel and everything went silent again.
I came out of it slowly, like a deep-sea diver coming up from the bottom, reaching out for the twinkling, silver surface high above, until my eyes finally popped open and the bright lights blinded me. I was flat on my back on the hard linoleum floor of Varner's office, squinting, blinking, and staring up at the ceiling. Everything in the room floated around in circles. As my vision cleared, I became aware of two faces high above me leaning into my field of vision. One was Dannmeyer, dressed in his brown sheriff's suit, and one was Ralph Tinkerton in his suit coat and tie. I tried to focus on each of them, but the back of my head throbbed with a dull, aching pain.
“I'll bet that really hurts, now don’t it?” Dannmeyer chuckled. “Nice to see I haven't lost my touch, but that wasn’t nuthin', Podner. See, I got ways of hurtin' people that they ain't even given names to yet.”
I closed my eyes again and lay there until my head stopped throbbing. Slowly the pain faded enough for me to feel my tongue, my toes, and my fingers, and I took roll call. Hands? They were pinned beneath me and I couldn't make them move. Handcuffs? Probably Dannmeyer's, I realized. I slowly opened my eyes again, knowing there was no sense putting it off. This time, I focused on Tinkerton's face. He stared down at me, his cold gray eyes as dull and emotionless as a cruising shark.
“Well, if it isn't our tourist friend from California, or Boston, or wherever you say you are from, and my very favorite jokester.” Tinkerton gave me a cold, thin smile. “The paper bag with the drink you left in the lobby? Sheer genius, Peter. However, you're developing a nasty habit of intruding into places where you don't belong, dangerous places, and making a pest of yourself. Not that I didn't warn you, but now it's too late.”
I looked from Tinkerton to Dannmeyer, then back again. “Is he your muscle, Ralph?” I asked.
“My ‘muscle’?” Tinkerton seemed amused at the thought. “Oh, come now, Peter. That term is so pathetically out of date. Today all it takes is a telephone call, maybe a fax or an e-mail to www.hit man.com, for all I know. With my contacts, a quick glance in the right quarters is all I’d need to eliminate a clown like you.”
I fixed Tinkerton with a hard stare. “I'm a Special Investigator with the State Attorney General's Office. If you come downtown with me right now, I'll forget the assaulting a police officer charge and see what I can do to help you negotiate a plea on all the rest. It's not much, but it's the last chance we're going to give you.”
Tinkerton stared down at me, speechless, and then broke out in a gut-wrenching belly laugh. “My God, but you do have nerve! I love it, I love it!”
Dannmeyer frowned. He didn't look nearly as happy or as confident. “You don't think it could be true then?”
“Not a word of it, Virgil,” Tinkerton answered.
“You're positive about that?” I asked him.
“Yes, I'm afraid I am,” Tinkerton answered. “If anything like that was going on downtown — and I mean anything — I would have known about it weeks ago.”
“So, who is he then? Just some crazy drifter?” Dannmeyer asked hopefully.
Tinkerton studied me for a moment. “No, that would be far too simple. He is no drifter and I know he is not crazy.”
“All right, then who is he?” Dannmeyer asked, frustrated.
“Ah, that is the question, isn't it, Virgil.”
“I'm Peter Talbott,” I said. “Like I told you.”
“I don't think so,” Tinkerton shook his head confidently. “The real Peter Talbott died in a car wreck in Baja a year ago, right after his wife. I have a copy of the death certificate and a photograph of the grave in LA.”
“That was some dumb Mexican kid who stole my car. The grave is empty now and the Mexicans rescinded the death certificate. Check it out.”
Varner shifted uncomfortably. “Ralph, you don't suppose...”
“Shut up, Doctor,” Tinkerton snapped. “You talk too much.”
“But the computers? Aren't they supposed to check all that stuff out?”
Tinkerton looked down, studying me. “The ‘wizards’ warned us the system isn’t perfect, that something like this could happen. They said it was ‘statistically inevitable,’ but controllable. When you need a husband and a wife, both of whom are dead, with the right timing, age, and background from as far away as we can find them, the choices are somewhat limited. There is always a minor but manageable chance that someone could notice.”
“You think it's that simple?” Dannmeyer asked.
“That, or he is lying again.” Tinkerton cocked his head and looked down at me with a sadistic smile. “That is the question, isn’t it? How much does our new friend ‘Peter’ really know and how much of it is pure crap.”
“He's wrong, Virgil. You don't really think I'd come walking in here alone, do you?” I said confidently. “You're the one who's going to end up holding the bag.”
“I don't think so,” Tinkerton sighed. “But you are right about one thing. Virgil and I can't take any chances, can we? We’ve got to make sure,” Tinkerton's eyes flashed, “because there is one little question that I’ve got to have an answer to, one you are going to give me, if it takes all night.”
“Boxers or briefs?” I asked.
“No,” he laughed along with me. “Back in my office, you dropped the magic name of Jimmy Santorini on me. Perhaps you thought you were being cute, or perhaps you threw it in blind, not really knowing about the Pandora’s Box you were opening up, but that move cost you your amateur standing. You can save yourself a whole lot of pain if you tell me what you really do know about him.”
“Santorini? He ran a little wine bar up in Carmel. Or was that Santoucci?”
“Did Jimmy hire you?”
“Hire me? I can't cook pasta and I'd drink up all his Cabernet. It'd never work.”
“Was it that bastard Rico Patillo or someone else in New Jersey? Or some little staff toad over in Justice.”
“Washington? DC? Never even visited the place.”
“Good! That's what I expected,” Tinkerton smiled. “More jokes. I'm glad you didn't lose that fabulous sense of humor of
yours. If you had opened up and started talking, I still wouldn't have believed a word you said, but it might have confused things. I wouldn’t have known what was true, what was a lie, and what was just a bit of creative stretching. This way, we'll assume that everything you say is a lie until the very, very end.”
“The ‘very, very’ end?” I asked. “That sounds a bit melodramatic even for you, Ralph.”
“Very melodramatic, but in the end you’ll tell me the truth and you won't find it one bit funny.”
“You're sure about that?”
“Sergeant Dannmeyer and I have done this before, ‘Peter,’ in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, in Saudi Arabia after the first war, and in a half dozen hellholes in between,” Tinkerton's smile slowly faded. “So, I will know when you’re telling me the truth. I assure you, I will know.”
He turned toward Dannmeyer. “Run another NCI record check on him, just to be sure. If you come up with anything new, anything at all, let me know immediately.”
“What if he shows clean again?”
“It doesn't matter,” Tinkerton shrugged. “He's going to disappear all the same.”
Dannmeyer looked down at me with a sly grin. “What about that truck of his?”
“Drive it down to the east side and dump it near the Interstate.”
“The east side?” Dannmeyer sounded pained. “Oh, come on, Captain. A nice Bronco like that? Jeez, they'll have it picked clean by midnight.”
“Sometimes you can be an idiot, Virgil. That's the whole point.” Tinkerton snapped. “Now see to it!” He looked up and turned his attention to Varner who was cowering in the corner, giving him an equally hard look as he motioned toward me. “Doctor, if you please.”
Above me, I saw Varner's worried face come into view. He held a hypodermic needle in his fingers. Carefully, he swabbed my arm with a cotton ball and alcohol before he stuck the needle in.
Dannmeyer laughed. “Alcohol? You gotta be kiddin’, Doc. The guy's going to be dead by midnight and you're worried about him getting some germs?”
Varner looked flustered. “Don't tell me that! I don't want to know what you're doing, Dannmeyer. Just get him out of here. I'm sick of this whole business.”
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