The Last Goodbye

by Reed Arvin

  “I didn’t.”

  “Right. So there we are, just on the verge of the thing. But we can feel it. Like there’s a little fog, and in just a few seconds exactly the right wisp is going to move to the left and there it’s going to be, what we’ve worked years to discover.” Robinson’s eyes were wide. He was high on the pure ecstasy of science, drawn back into his love of his work. “Then,” he said, “I made my fatal error.”

  “Which was?”

  Robinson looked out the window, suddenly listless. There was fatigue in his eyes, the long suffering of a terrible defeat. “Ralston,” he said. “Charles Ralston, king of thieves.”

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  “Hubris. Ego. Stupidity. All mine, as it turned out.” He looked down into the coffee, retreating into the past. “I was at a seminar up at Columbia.”

  “Where Ralston was working.”

  “Right. Look, I was excited, okay? I mean . . . We were going to save a lot of people from dying. It’s pretty hard to keep that to yourself.”

  “My God. You mean you—”

  “Not much,” Robinson interrupted. He rubbed his temples, deep in regret. “Just the slightest little bit. But I lost my head. I remember my words exactly. ‘P137 has suddenly become very important in my life.’ I think I even smiled when I said it. I thought it was wonderfully cryptic.”

  “It is, actually.”

  Robinson shook his head. “Not to Ralston. I didn’t know it, but he had been working on the same thing at Columbia. And they were getting nowhere. He was headed in the wrong direction, naturally. I told you he’s mediocre.”

  “So you said.”

  “Mediocre, but not an idiot. I had given him the keys to the kingdom. He knew a lot about enzyme synthesis, but nothing about where to take that knowledge. Once he knew where to look, it was only a matter of weeks before he had it wired.”

  “Wasn’t your research patented?”

  Robinson shook his head. “The disclosure form was sitting on my desk. And I had made an enabling statement.”

  I reached back into my law school memory. “A public utterance, which, to a person of reasonable expertise, allows them to duplicate your technology.” I shook my head, stunned. “You voided your patent before you even got it filed.”

  Robinson nodded. “Ralston got on the phone to Stephens, who was living in New York. He was already famous for patent expertise, especially in the area of pharmaceuticals. On Stephens’s advice, Ralston resigned from Columbia the next day.”

  “So Ralston beat you to it?”

  “By the time I knew what happened, Stephens had a beautiful, airtight package.” He shrugged. “The rest, including my career, is history.”

  “I take it Emory wasn’t amused.”

  “It was the single greatest humiliation in their history. Those grad students had slaved, and I’m talking twenty-four-seven, for months. They were going to be a part of something historic. And boom, one stupid statement from me and it’s up in smoke. I couldn’t show my face.” Robinson picked up his cup, drank a sip. “I vanished for a while. I was mud in the academic world, and no labs would take a risk on me. It got so bad I took a job as a rep, calling on doctors.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. That was hell. Horizn was making a fortune on my research, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Stephens didn’t make my mistakes, obviously. Their patents were untouchable.”

  “What kind of fortune are we talking about?”

  Robinson shrugged. “There’s an exploding patient population, reaching epidemic proportions in the third world. Ralston has a treatment that every one of those people needs to take for the rest of their lives. So you can call it billions.”

  “So let me get this straight. Your career is in tatters. Ralston is riding high. And somehow, you get resurrected. How did you get connected to Grayton?”

  “Look, I like to heal people, okay? It means everything to me. But this is an ego game. You say Ralston was riding high? Don’t forget it was on my research. So I went to Grayton. I told him that what Ralston was doing was fine, as far as it went. But there was a way to beat him.”

  “Which was?”

  “Go deeper. Forget treating the disease as a chronic condition. Mount a serious attempt at a cure.”

  “And Grayton bought that?”

  Robinson nodded. “You have to be willing to take chances or you lose. Grayton was trying to hang on, but it’s hard to compete with the multinationals. And I knew more about hepatitis than anybody, including Ralston and his team. For all its beauty, Horizn’s drug is one generation removed from the most cutting-edge proteomics. I ought to know, since I invented it. So I told Grayton that if he wanted to try, I could take years off his start time. Somebody like Eli Lilly wouldn’t bite on me, not with my past. But Grayton has to take different risks. So we made a deal.” Robinson looked past me, his eyes focusing on an unknown place in his mind. “And it was beautiful. The old man lined up everything I needed. People, equipment, every resource. It was going to be my resurrection.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And then everything went to hell.”

  “Do you have any idea what happened?”

  Robinson shook his head. “I’ve gone over it a thousand times. I’ve checked our data and rechecked. And I’m telling you, those people should be walking around right now without a hepatitis molecule in their bodies. Instead, they’re in morgues.”

  I sat thinking quietly awhile. “Let’s assume Ralston is behind the hack into your system,” I said after a moment. “What’s behind that? Is he just trying to steal your drug, like he did the last time?”

  Robinson looked up in surprise. “Steal it? Robinson wouldn’t want Lipitran if I gave it to him.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Lipitran is a cure, not a chronic treatment. Who wants to cure people when you can just treat them forever?”

  “So what is it, then?”

  “If we come to market, his company is worth zip. If Lipitran goes wrong, he gets to keep selling his drug for the next twenty years.” He looked down into his coffee. “Seven dead people takes care of that, don’t you think? Lipitran is as dead as those patients.”

  Robinson was fading back into his depression. “So here’s what we have,” I said, forcing his attention back on me. “We’ve got your computer, downloaded for Ralston. He knows exactly what you’re doing. He desperately wants to stop you.”

  “Okay.”

  “But we have no idea how.”

  Robinson shook his head. “Which is where the air comes out of your idea,” he said bitterly. “Believe me, I want you to be right. But we’re just throwing around theories in a coffee shop. I was there, in the lab. There are only two ways for this to go wrong. He’d either have to alter the compound itself or change the dosage to toxic levels. And he couldn’t have done either.”

  “Start with the compound.”

  “Strike one, pal. There is no place—and I mean no place—where Ralston could have compromised the purity of that compound. It was made completely in-house. I checked its purity myself, repeatedly. It was continuously monitored until the moment it was given to patients.”

  “All right. Then how about the dosage?”

  Robinson shook his head. “Strike two. I supervised every treatment. Nothing went wrong, and there were no adverse reactions at the time.”

  I nodded. “That still leaves us one strike.”

  Robinson smiled grimly. “Wrong. Strike three is that maybe this is just fate. Maybe those eight people were just unlucky enough to have the worst doctor on earth. Me.” He stared at me, anger and disappointment etched on his face. Then he pounded his fist on the table. A few people around us glanced over, and I motioned for him to calm down.

  “No,” he hissed. “No. I’m telling you, the science on this is perfect. The compound was right. The dosages were on the money. There must be some other way for him to have screwed me.”

  “You mean screwed t
hem, don’t you, Doctor?” I said quietly.

  Robinson looked down. “Yeah, them,” he said. “Screwed them.”

  “Look,” I said, “my agenda is a little different. I want justice for one person, and that’s Doug Townsend.”

  Robinson looked at me. “You’ve got a problem there,” he said. “I can understand that Ralston might have hired him to break into Grayton’s computers. And I can follow that after he outlived his usefulness, they would want him dead. But if all that is true, they would have known Doug was in the clinical trial. And if they knew that, they would never have bothered to shoot him full of fentanyl.”

  “Because they would have known he was dead already.”

  “Who screws up the perfect crime? Killing him again is pointless.”

  “Agreed. And murder involves the police, the last thing they would want.”

  “Okay, then. Maybe you ought to start considering the possibility that somebody else killed your friend.”

  “I’m taking this one day at a time. But we’re fighting the same war. If you really have a cure for hep C, you have to fight. You can still save all those lives.” I paused. “And get the man who destroyed your life for the second time.”

  Robinson looked at me. “I’ll do anything I can, but I’ve given you what I know. If these people figured out how to screw with that test, they’re operating on a level so high it’s unprecedented.” He stood, picking up his bag of seeds. “Right now, we got nothing,” he said.

  “We?”

  Robinson looked down at me, wary optimism struggling through a mass of defeat. He wanted to believe in what I was telling him down into his fibers. But he also knew he couldn’t take another shock. If he let himself connect with me and we went down in flames, whatever was left of him was going to land in a psychiatric ward. He was dangerously close to there already. But he pulled himself together enough to say what I needed to hear: “When you get more, you know where to find me.”

  I don’t know what the price of a human being is. I grew up believing in the infinite price tag, the one set by God. We all had the dignity of the Creator, and anybody who tried to lower the price with a bullet or a knife had to pay the difference with his own. In those days, human dignity was a zero-sum game. Nobody had the right to mess with the totals, because we all were affected. But it gets harder and harder to cling to that idea. Lately, in the court of Judge Thomas Odom, I’ve seen a human life go for as little as twenty bucks—the small, sad collection of paper and metal an unlucky victim got capped over by a hyped-up, needy addict. And I’ve seen the same murder buried on page ten of the newspaper, while the whole town went nuts saving a squirrel who got caught in a drainpipe. So, in the absence of a consensus, you have to choose whom to believe. Either we’re all connected to each other by some common soul, in which case, killing is wrong, wrong, wrong. Or we aren’t, and the strong eat the weak. The answers couldn’t be more different.

  The thing is, you don’t expect people who sell medicine for a living to be confused on that subject. You expect them to be firmly on the side of the living, without any ambiguities. You can almost believe that, until you realize how much money is at stake, and then all the old battles over human nature come back to haunt you. Because history shows that once a few billion dollars are on the table, nobody is what I would call safe.

  That was the moment I started to hear the clock ticking in my mind. Tic, tic, tic: It was Tuesday, and the next Monday morning Charles Ralston and Derek Stephens were going to be the recipients of an unfathomable transfer of wealth when tens of thousands of people bought into the future of Horizn’s hepatitis treatment. Tic, tic, tic: According to Robinson, a successful test of Lipitran would have put every penny of that into jeopardy, and even the future of Horizn itself. Tic, tic, tic: To be fair, Robinson was badly damaged, crushed by guilt and defeat. It was theoretically possible his hatred for Ralston stemmed from that, and that he was deluding himself about the rest. Too much failure doesn’t just make the world look terrible—it makes the world look pissed off at you specifically, custom-designed to make your life miserable. Robinson was pretty far down that road. Which led me to this: I had six days to find out what price tag Ralston and Stephens would put on eight people, most of whom were drug addicts and down-and-outers. I needed to find out if they believed in the zero-sum of mankind. I needed to find out if they were monsters.

  Everything was clear. I knew exactly who the bad guys were, and I knew exactly who I wanted to save. I understood everything, and I cherished that clarity. It was beautiful, and it lasted about fifteen minutes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “JACK? WHEN ARE YOU coming to the office?”

  “First things first, baby. How are you? Did Stephens freak out or what?”

  “There’s someone here, Jack. Someone to see you.”

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly five. “Yeah? Did I miss something on my schedule?”

  “It’s Mr. Stephens.”

  I snapped to attention. “He’s there? Now?”

  “Um hmm.”

  “In my office?”

  “Um hmm.”

  “Tell him not to move.”

  “I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Derek Stephens didn’t look pissed off. He didn’t look like he was holding his sense of calm together with a titanic effort, either. He looked like it was just another day, and he had never even thought of combining the words Sammy, Liston, and Ferrari. He rose—smiling, inexplicably—from one of my waiting chairs with so much casual insouciance it was as if he was welcoming me into his office. I’m telling you, it’s like a gift. He even spoke first. “Jack,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. I was hoping you had a few minutes.”

  I looked at Blu. “You okay, baby?” She nodded, her face blank. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you go out and get a little coffee?”

  “There’s coffee here, Jack,” she said. Her voice was unsteady.

  “That’s all right, baby,” I said. “Take a little time. I’ll see you here in a few minutes.” Blu looked at Stephens a second, then picked up her purse. “Sure thing,” I said to Stephens. “Right in here.”

  I walked into my office, tossed my sunglasses on my desk, and motioned to a wing chair opposite my desk. Stephens looked around, probably trying to figure out how I practiced law in the same square footage as his executive bathroom. But even though I’ve been known to sling my share of bullshit in court, inside my office I take none. Zero. Zip. After my talk with Robinson, I was prepared to take even less than that. It was entirely possible that I was in the room with an unprincipled murderer. It was also possible I was dead wrong about that, so I took as neutral a tone as possible. I sat down, let him stare at my still-swollen left eye and said, “What’s on your mind?”

  Stephens sat there looking at me, a slight smile playing on his lips. After a while he said, “I’ve got an idea, Jack. Let’s you and I be friends.”

  I returned the smile. “Gee, I don’t know, Derek. Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because that way, I can give you friendly advice, as opposed to the other kind.”

  “I wasn’t aware I needed either.”

  Stephens shrugged. “The people who need it the most usually aren’t. But I have the feeling we got off to a bad start. Let’s try it again.”

  I decided to give him some rope, just to find out what he wanted. “I’m all ears, Derek old pal,” I said.

  “You’ve been poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Jack. Specifically, up the skirt of the wife of Charles Ralston.”

  Okay, so this is going to be ugly. That’s fine, I can go there, no problem. “You’ll forgive me for not wanting to hear that from somebody with a pathological need to screw secretaries.”

  Stevens smiled, as though he were thinking, Good. You have spunk. That makes this so much more interesting. “Not that this is the topic, but you don’t approve of my relationship with Blu?”


  “I’m afraid my answer wouldn’t be entirely complimentary.”

  Stephens waved his hand magnanimously. “Not a problem.”

  “The thing is, Derek, Blu’s really a very sweet kind of girl. Heart of gold, but not very sophisticated. You, by contrast, are an effete snob who thinks that because you’ve read a few books you’re better than other people. But that’s a matter of taste, so that’s not what’s really bothering me.”

  “And what is?”

  “The fact that you’ll date my secretary for a while, and you’ll definitely take her to bed. You’ll enjoy her very considerable charms for as long as you find them interesting. But doing anything that means regarding her as a complete, living human being—like marrying her, for example—isn’t something you’d do in a million years. Not that I want you to marry her, naturally, but that isn’t the point. The point is, you wouldn’t marry Blu because then you’d have to introduce her to your Fortune 500 buddies as representative of your taste in women. You’d be afraid she’d embarrass you at a dinner party, like maybe lean over and ask you which fork to use or who the poet Dante was or what’s the big deal with Kandinsky’s paintings, anyway? Or maybe she’d say something sweet and simple like she was thinking of having your bedroom painted cornflower blue, and all your New York tight-ass friends would roll their eyes, and that would kill a guy like you. No, Derek old pal, you aren’t going to marry Blu McClendon. But you’ll definitely use her for a while, and you’ll drop her when you’re done. She doesn’t know how to recognize your particular kind of slime because it’s not in her nature to think along your lines of evil. I, on the other hand, am a man who knows a bastard when he sees one coming. And the more I think about you, the more I despise my own gender.”

  Stephens sat listening, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closed. The smile playing on his lips flickered, and he looked at me. “It’s a tragedy you lost your compass, Jack. Sincerely. You would have been marvelous.” He leaned forward. “I’ve been checking up on you, naturally. I can’t have you snooping through Michele’s underthings without doing that.” He pressed his fingertips together thoughtfully. “Short version, since I’m a little pressed for time. You were talented, you were bright, and once upon a time, you were ambitious. But you yielded to the wrong temptation, and here”—he looked around my office disparagingly—“you are.” At that second, I made a silent vow: If he says her holy name, I’m going to punch his face. Stephens kept on talking, his voice as steady as a contractor’s level. “What was it, two years ago? Just a few years out of law school. You were up at Carthy, Williams and Douglas. Good firm, and you had good prospects. Then came your little indiscretion, and you fell off the rails. The point is, you’ve already blown yourself up once on the altar of a beautiful woman. Do you really want to make the same mistake again?”