Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  “Oh,” Shane replied, smiling, “I am quite sure the artist was murdered, at least in a technical sense. However, some blanks need filling in to confirm that suspicion. And, of course, to identify the killer…or perhaps killers. There seem to be so many possibilities.”

  Hardy Seltzer was shocked and showed it.

  “How in holy hell can you be so sure about that?” he said.

  “Gestalt,” Shane replied.

  Hardy made a mental note to add the word to his list.

  “Perhaps, given the circumstances,” Shane continued, “an artistic metaphor is more appropriate. You see, my man, there is a picture emerging here but it is not finished yet, non finito, the Italians would say.”

  Another potential entry to Hardy’s lookup list.

  “However,” Shane continued, “the picture is complete enough to allow a perceptive observer to sense the intended message.”

  Seltzer was thinking hard about exactly how he could present this to his superiors without sounding a complete fool. It was not immediately obvious to him that it would be possible to do that. He really did trust Shane’s remarkable powers of perception, even when the logic was not entirely clear. Shane just seemed often to know stuff before it was obvious to anyone else. Even Shane wasn’t very good at explaining how he knew nonobvious stuff. He just did. And he was usually right. Usually. In this case, usually might not be good enough for Hardy Seltzer. His career, the principal investment of his entire life, could be on the line. Was Shane Hadley’s hunch (gestalt?) enough to justify the risk? Well, was it?

  Seltzer’s cell phone launched suddenly into a fully orchestrated version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Hardy answered the call without checking caller ID.

  “Seltzer,” a long pause. “Mmm, hmm. Got it. I’m downtown. Be there is a few minutes. Tape a perimeter and keep the scene intact.” He ended the call.

  “And?” Shane queried.

  “That hatter guy,” Hardy answered. “He somehow escaped from the hospital and holed up in the Fitzwallington house. He had a gun and chose to play shoot out with the guys in blue. He lost the game.”

  Chapter 16

  Solving the enigmatic riddle of Richelieu Jones required the naïveté of a second-year medical resident. The young man had not yet learned to ignore the obvious and so he spent some time on the Internet exploring the origin of the term Mad Hatter. He discovered that the term resulted from the effects of mercury poisoning on the brain, but that the use of mercury in the converting of animal pelts to felt had long since been abandoned. Nowadays, hatters went mad at about the same rate as everybody else so that the term no longer had any practical value. Still intrigued by the possibility and refusing to let the facts spoil his brilliant theory, the resident spent more time talking to Mr. Jones. To his delight, the resident discovered that this hatter had, several years ago, reverted to the old mercury-based felt making methods. And, Mr. Jones linked that change in his felt making procedure, and other Francophilic behaviors, to the discovery, resulting from the genome analysis done as part of the university’s brain health study, that his ancestors were French Canadian, probably fur traders. Unfortunately, Mr. Jones had flown the coop before specimens for measurements of mercury levels could be collected to nail down the diagnosis.

  It was the geneticist, Harold Werth, his large head bobbing slightly back and forth nervously, who told this story to Katya Karpov. It was immediately obvious that Dr. Karpov was not pleased.

  The eventual decision about what genomic information to reveal to the participants in the brain health study was debated broad and long and never reached a consensus. Werth had argued forcefully for total disclosure, not just ancestry, but physical traits, disease proclivities, the whole shebang. Karpov was not at all convinced that total disclosure was such a good idea. So much of the interpretation was more speculation than hard fact, and the possibility of unanticipated consequences was enormous. The Institutional Review Board would not approve feedback of speculative genome interpretations to the participants anyway. However, Katya was convinced that people who volunteered to participate in a study deserved something tangible from it. And revealing ancestry information seemed to give them something of value (a lot of people paid commercial companies for that information) and seemed unlikely to cause harm. So that was the compromise reached in the end, although it didn’t please everyone, most notably Harold Werth. Dr. Karpov was now confronted with the very real possibility that their diligent efforts to prevent harm to the study participants resulting from the gene studies had failed miserably.

  “Well,” Katya stood up from her chair and paced about her office, obviously upset, “we have here an SAE, Harold. A goddam SAE in a study where there wasn’t even any intervention. How did we let that happen?”

  SAE, serious adverse event, was the dreaded bane of any scientist doing studies in humans. Usually an SAE was a bad reaction to a new drug or something like that. But an unusual reaction to ancestry information that turned out bad? Were investigators responsible for that? Katya was interested in assigning responsibility for Mr. Jones’s mercury poisoning but even more concerned about the larger question of assigning responsibility for how genetic information was dealt with. Maybe this was a major flaw in the design of this study. Should she cancel the whole thing?

  Dr. Karpov knew that Richelieu Jones had somehow escaped from the hospital. She was more than a little disturbed by the fact that hospital security was that porous. Had she known that Mr. Jones lay at that very moment stone cold dead on the front steps of the former dwelling of Bechman Fitzwallington, not far from the body of a metropolitan policeman whom the Mad Hatter had managed to take down with him, God only knows how she would have reacted. Talk about a serious adverse event? Richelieu Jones had suffered the most serious and most adverse event possible. Dr. Karpov would discover that soon enough.

  “OK, Harold,” Dr. Karpov sat back down behind her desk and tried hard to engage the eyes of the geneticist. He continued to stare at the floor before him and gently nod his large head. “I think we have to cancel the entire brain health study. Throw out the data, shred the records, purge the computers. We’re risking doing a lot more harm than good with this, Harold. A lot more harm than good.”

  “Come now, Katya,” Werth responded, his head bobbing back and forth more rapidly, as though searching for a frequency that would sync with the rhythm of his speech, “we both know that you know better than that. Destroying records would probably be a felony, for starters, and I don’t think you are looking to commit a crime as a means of atoning for what you surely see as an honest mistake in study design. You are a wise woman, and that would not be wise.”

  Katya was not sure that wisdom had anything to do with it, but she realized that she was overreacting and needed to gather her wits in order to deal with the situation. She did, however, believe that even honest mistakes could have negative consequences, and negative consequences demand responsibility. Dr. Katya Karpov was painfully aware that she sat behind the desk that was the buck’s terminal stop.

  Werth continued, “Stuff happens, Katya. Clinical research always carries risks, and sooner or later, any active investigator is going to come up against the probability of having done harm while trying to do good. You can’t worry too much about that.”

  “How about informed consent, Harold? Was Mr. Jones told that providing him with genetic information about his ancestry could result in major changes in his behavior that could result in mercury poisoning that would drive him mad? Of course not. No way could we have anticipated that.”

  “Unanticipated consequences are a major part of the stuff that happens,” Werth replied. “And this study promises to tell us a lot about how the brain functions or fails to. It could lay the groundwork for major advances in early recognition and treatment of cognitive decline. Risks? Sure. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that. We are even asking people to take risks that can’t be defined or anticipated. If you think that’s unethical or immoral
or whatever, then you’re in the wrong business, Katya.”

  “You’re preaching to me, Harold,” Katya said. “Apparently a talent of yours that I hadn’t been aware of. I strongly prefer that you stick with your chosen scientific profession,” she smiled, beginning to have some success as recollecting her wits.

  Werth also smiled and finally looked directly at Katya. “Steady as she goes, Katya,” he said. “Steady as she goes.”

  After Werth left her office, Katya sat for a while going through in her mind the things she had to do: report the SAE to the review board; convene the scientific advisory group to review the event and make recommendations; report the situation to the funding agency, and collect all of her faculty and staff involved in the study to thoroughly analyze how they were going about the entire project. All of that had to be done before making any big decisions. After all, they were not actively recruiting new participants anymore.

  Rationalizations, she thought. They come so easily. Not much help to the Mad Hatter of Music City.

  Shootouts tend to attract attention. If you want to drum up a crowd and aren’t too concerned about the threat of bodily harm, just choose up sides and start shooting at each other. You will draw a crowd.

  So, the scene in the vicinity of the Fitzwallington house in Germantown where the Mad Hatter of Music City had chosen to engage the Metro Police Department’s finest in a gun battle was pretty much chaos. The chaos lasted longer than the shooting of the Mad Hatter and the lone policeman whom he had managed to mortally wound in the brief and very lopsided battle. The chaos lasted plenty long to greet the arrival of Hardy Seltzer. Hardy pushed his way through the crowd and ducked under the yellow crime scene tape.

  Anyone who has not experienced the intangible bond that develops among people who routinely risk their lives in the everyday practice of their profession cannot understand the impact of the first sight of the dead body of a policeman on a living colleague. Seltzer just stood still, staring at the body of a young officer whom he had come to know pretty well. A good cop. Young wife. Couple of kids. A common enough story. But the tragedy and the threat were as potent as ever. No matter how many times you’d been forced to play your assigned part in the story, the tragedy of human potential snuffed suddenly out, and the knowledge that you could be next were excruciatingly real. And the love of a brother or sister, a comrade-in-arms, now lost. That, too.

  Hardy looked up at the body of Richelieu Jones sprawled lifeless on the front porch steps and spoke to Harvey Schorr, the officer who had come over to stand beside him. Hardy did not look at the officer, his head still mired in a treacly morass of thoughts and feelings.

  “What the fuck happened?” Hardy said.

  The officer was shocked at the profanity. Hardy Seltzer rarely used serious obscenities and didn’t admire profanity in others. Most of the guys respected that.

  “Apparently,” the officer responded, trying hard to keep his voice steady, “the hatmaker guy, his name is Richard Jones, just showed up here out of the blue with a gun. A guy who lives next door saw him pacing about the front porch and waving a handgun. When Jones discharged a couple of rounds into the air, the guy next door called 911. When we got here, Jones had barricaded himself inside the house. We waited him out for a while, but a crowd was gathering, and we feared collateral damage. We called to him on the bullhorn with no response. Then Officer Henderson started toward the front door intending to attempt to establish direct contact with Jones. But Jones came rushing suddenly out the door firing his gun. We returned fire but Henderson took a fatal round before we could bring Jones down. I dispatched one of the officers to apprehend the guy who called 911 so we could at least question him.”

  “We’ll pull all the stops on this one,” Seltzer said. “And we’ll need to have another look at the Fitzwallington matter. We’ve got a dead cop, Harvey. A dead cop. And too many goddam coincidences. I hate coincidences, Harvey. The brass may not like this, but they’re just going to have to live with it.”

  “Almost certainly mercury poisoning,” Shane said.

  He was responding to Hardy Seltzer’s puzzled musing about why Richilieu Jones had behaved so irrationally. Hardy was really troubled by his colleague’s death and didn’t have a lot of sympathy for the man who had killed him. But Seltzer was also troubled by what seemed to him a situation where two people died for no good reason. Why? He was haunted by the question ever since the Germantown scene at the Fitzwallington house had been burned into his brain. Why?

  “In this day and age?” Hardy said. “What I learned from Master Google about the Mad Hatter thing was that it didn’t happen anymore because mercury-based felt making had been abandoned long ago in favor of more modern nontoxic methods. Isn’t that so?”

  “That is apparently quite so, my man,” Shane responded. “However, I suspect our Francophilic friend is a special case.”

  Shane and Hadley were sitting on the Printers Alley deck. It was not a prearranged meeting. Hadley walked from his office on the square down Second Avenue and up the hill to Printers Alley. He was ostensibly on his way home, but decided to wander through the alley on the off chance that he would encounter Shane. Indeed, Shane was sitting on his deck, fondling a glass of sherry and watching the afternoon passersby disinterestedly. He was thinking about the Fitzwallington case, trying to fit some more of the pieces of the puzzle together, when he spotted Hardy Seltzer ambling down the alley and called to him, inviting him up. Maybe the meeting wasn’t prearranged. Or maybe it was. Depends on who one deems responsible for the business of making prearrangements. Shane had barely had time to retrieve and fill a glass for his guest before they fell into a conversation about the afternoon tragedy in Germantown.

  Their conversation was interrupted by the throaty purr of Katya’s Boxter and the dull roar of the ground level garage door opening beneath where they sat.

  “Ah,” exclaimed Shane, “the lady of the house arrives.”

  “Perhaps I should go,” Hardy said. “We can talk later.”

  Dr. Karpov had been stewing about the Richelieu Jones thing ever since Harold Werth had told her the up-to-date story. She was even more concerned when she heard on the radio news as she drove home that Jones had been killed by police gunfire as he appeared to be assaulting the house of the dead artist. Damn! she thought.

  Katya shoved the French doors open with a bit more force than necessary and strode out onto the deck. She pulled up a chair and sat down opposite Shane and Hardy as Seltzer was making motions toward leaving.

  “Please, Hardy,” Katya said, “don’t leave.” She motioned him back to his seat. “I would like to tell both of you what I know of Richelieu Jones with a sincere hope that you can tell me something more that will ease my mind. I fear the wall separating science and crime that I’ve been trying so hard to maintain may be beginning to crumble. It scares me. That possibility really scares me. I respect what you guys do. Really respect it. But I just don’t want to have anything to do with crime if I can avoid it. Until now, I thought I could do that, but maybe not.”

  She looked at Shane. He looked uncomfortable.

  “Mercury poisoning,” Shane said. “Is that the topic you wish to discuss?”

  “How did you figure it out, Shane?” Katya asked.

  “A couple of those damned coincidences that I so loathe,” Shane replied. “Did I not know better I would begin to think that the whole of human experience is nothing more than bloody chance.”

  “Not a very enlightened view,” Katya said. “But, what coincidences?”

  “Coincidence number one I think of as the riddle of the bullet and the genome,” Shane said. “My and Richard Jones’s life course were each dramatically altered by separate, unrelated, but temporally coincident events. The same day that a stray bullet lodged in my spine, Richard Jones was informed that his genomic analysis from the aging brain study he had volunteered for at the university revealed that his ancestry was largely French Canadian. The biologic consequences of my e
xperience on that day compelled a major change in my life that persists until now. Richard’s emotional response to his genomic information resulted in his exaggerated Francophilia.”

  Shane paused for a few moments, wheeled himself over to the railing and stared down at the few people milling around the alley.

  “You said coincidences, plural,” Hardy Seltzer said.

  “Yes,” Shane answered, turning to face Katya and Hardy, “Richard’s mental deterioration had been apparent for a while. I really should have made more of it. And I was aware that he was doing something different about processing of the material for his hats. Again, I just didn’t realize the significance. I didn’t really look into it until Jones was caught effacing Fitzwallington’s house. That’s when I connected the change in his felt processing methods with the changes in his behavior and looked up the basis of the connection.”

  “So,” Katya said, “you think the genomic information caused Mr. Jones to revert to a mercury-based felt making method with the result that he went mad from mercury poisoning and now is dead.”

  “Along with one of my colleagues,” Seltzer inserted.

  “KiKi,” Shane said, “if you’re trying to work up a heavy case of guilt, you might want to first give the situation a bit more thought. I don’t see how anyone could have predicted Jones’s reaction to the information.”

  “Outlier! Of course he was an outlier. But that’s not an excuse. Our business is to recognize outliers and deal with them as who they are. We, me and my scientific colleagues, have some responsibility here. No doubt about that.”

  “Perhaps while you are castigating yourself about that, you might also ponder the fact that your attempt to wall off human science from human crime is futile. People behave in complex ways, my love.”

  Katya sighed. “You make a poor pedant, Shane,” she said. “You really should stick with your detecting thing.”

  Hardy Seltzer had listened intently to Shane and Katya’s conversation, but his mind was still haunted by the fact that a colleague had died because of what appeared to be a random and unpredictable sequence of events. No rational explanation. Seltzer was very much committed to rational explanations. Coincidences bewildered him.