My face flushed with rage and I exchanged gazes with my cousin. This inspector was trying to annoy me on purpose—or maybe they’d sent in the worst of the policemen, the one who scored the lowest on all his exams. If they even had any exams.
Harrison whispered, “Calm down. Easy.” For emphasis, he gripped my wrist.
I glared at him, and he made long eye contact with me, refusing to blink. “You like this room? The day has turned so beautiful outside it’s a shame to waste it in this hole. Fresh air, sunshine at last—wouldn’t it be great? If I arrest you, you’ll spend the whole weekend in a cage, like one of your lab pigs, till your lawyer can bail you out. And a murder suspect… tut-tut. Everything would be so simple if you’d just tell me everything. How is this eyedrop patent connected to the body of a naked woman in that pit? Someone threatened her? Wanted to take something from her?”
“The test tube,” I hissed as low as I could.
“Will that be all, Inspector?” asked Harrison, getting impatient.
I thought we were finished and started to rise from my chair, tottering toward the door, but he waved a hand.
“We’re not done yet.”
“No, no. Either you charge him or let us go. This has gone way beyond—” “Just a few more questions.”
Harrison gazed irritatingly at his Ulysse-Nardin vintage watch. As we went back to our seats he pointed again at my urinalysis, which lay peacefully on the table. “I bet that you, Mr. Mil-bert Greene, more than anybody else in this room, should be interested to know how—”
I half-shivered, half-shrugged, feeling alarmed again. “This must be a mistake. I want to go to sleep. Can’t we continue another time?” I exchanged a pleading glance with my lawyer, and before he had a chance to say anything I offered, “You can have a policeman sleep in my apartment if you think I’m going to run away. I would give you my passport if I knew where it was.”
Ramzi sighed and closed his eyes.
“Johanna,” I continued. “She’s the one you should be interested in. And… and there’s a psychopathic killer from Ireland or wherever the hell, who’s wandering around loose, right here among us.”
The inspector slumped back on his chair and regarded me severely. What had caused his change of heart? It couldn’t be my urinalysis. Something else had happened. It must be significant if it made him weary of my saga about the mad Irishman and the blonde with the mole under her nostril who sang Mozart arias and whom nobody but me had seen. All this time he had been waiting for something.
Someone knocked on the door. After a short-tempered “Yes” from Ramzi, a female cop entered and handed him something. They whispered with their backs to me, and the policewoman left the room without even rewarding me with a glance.
When the inspector turned back in my direction his eyes blazed with extreme fury. “This was found in the professor’s apartment. Our lab has confirmed that there are traces of your… fluids all over it.”
Ramzi threw a bag containing a pair of underwear on the desk.
“And the professor’s.”
He stretched the waistband over the fabric. On the waistband there was a sketch of a squared-off butterfly stitched in tortoiseshell and yellow. I knew it. A gift from my beloved sister, a personal dedication she had embroidered. One of Leanira’s jokes.
I LOVE MY BUTTERFLY
34
“So how bad is it? What do they have on me?” I asked my cousin when we were alone again in the adjacent room.
“You fucked your boss.” Harrison fondled his bald cabeza, a vexatious grin still smeared on his face. “Chill out, okay? That’s what they think. That there was something going between the two of you.”
“I’m sick and tired of hearing that. She’s two decades older than me.”
“Some guys actually get off on older women.”
“Not me!”
“Old and lonely,” my cousin persisted and immediately continued, “They gave me a glimpse at the file.”
“Just a glimpse? Not the whole thing?”
“No, not yet. It’s just preliminary. But I snooped a bit, and it is pretty close to an arrest.” He neared his thumb to his index finger for effect. “I asked them to hold their horses. The mustachioed guy obliged. We have a window of opportunity here, my dear, but it will close soon. If…”
“If what?” I cried. “What did you promise them in return?”
He swallowed, shifting his body as far away from me as possible. “Your cooperation.”
“And what was it up to now, if not full cooperation? You honestly think I have any reason not to cooperate?”
“You… listen carefully, Milbert. It’s no longer some kindergarten mischief. They may have a case.” I tried to interrupt, but he silenced me. He shoved a plastic cup at me and said, “Drink some cold water,” then he cocked his dimpled chin toward the sink. He was sending me to wash my face. I don’t know who invented the idea that it was refreshing. On me it had the opposite effect—my eyes itched, and my nose oozed even more profusely.
“I don’t need it.”
“Amanda has Girl Scouts at five thirty, some kind of a community-commitment thing. So, let’s make it short.”
He was not embarrassed to look repeatedly at his watch. After all, I was the one who would end up staring at empty brick walls after he was gone. He didn’t even loosen his tie, or indicate he’d be settling comfortably in the chair.
Harrison spoke in a low voice, as if sharing a secret. “You’ve known the professor for a long while, right?”
“What do you mean by ‘known’? For a few months, I guess. She teaches first-year physiology, and now I have this basic science thing in her lab. That’s about it. And there is… was… nothing, I repeat, nothing more to it.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say. They think you two had something going. Now that you work in her lab as—what’d you call it?—her personal assistant, she told you about her golden egg, the ocular panacea. Then along came the blonde you were talking about, and the old lady got pissed off. Last night she called, you went over to break up with her, you had a quarrel, and then—perhaps unintentionally, I have the impression they are willing to be flexible on this point—you pushed her or she fell into the pit.”
I watched him in mute paralysis. It was a terrifying feeling—my body’s muscles, including my vocal cords, my source of pride, were not responding to me. Despite his earlier vow, Ramzi wasn’t buying a word about the Irishman anymore. That psycho had stripped me of my underwear, probably dipped it in Efron’s vagina, and now was laughing his head off while I really was in deep shit.
Harrison leafed through the binder, removed his foldable D&G glasses, and played with the thin arms. They looked like the limbs of a praying mantis. “You woke up at one a.m., took an Uber in the middle of the storm, and went to her—you miserable sucker—all that to bring her a test tube?”
“But I couldn’t find it, so I went without it.”
Harrison’s eyes widened briefly as he scratched his head but said nothing.
“Efron sounded distressed.”
“Why didn’t she go to the police? Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“And tell them what? That my boss gave me something to keep till Monday but now she wants it back? At that point I had no idea how severe the situation was. By the time I realized there was a problem, I was being beaten up by that Irish nut. Then Efron and I were busy running for our lives.” I searched his face in frustration. “You see? Nobody believes me now. Who would’ve believed me then?”
“It will help a lot—I repeat, a lot—if you could explain how come she ended up half-chewed in a pit, and you naked but unscathed by the river.”
I was mute. That part of my life seemed to be missing, like absence epilepsy.
He sucked his lips petulantly. “I do not know what you were drinking or using, but wh
en they found you by the river, you stank of alcohol and something else. You saw the urinalysis for yourself. These substances can cause hallucinations, Milbert. These are well-known side effects, especially if this was your first time using. I really shouldn’t have to explain that to a med student.” His upper lip curled mischievously. “And then Valentina, Magdalena, and Johanna appear, nude, in your wet dreams.”
“I didn’t take anything.” Any mention of Johanna stabbed me hard inside. “She’s an Austrian doctor—”
“It doesn’t change the fact that they found you wasted, not far from the pit. You. Not Johanna, or any other woman. The police have at least two witnesses who saw you loitering around in suspicious circumstances at about the presumed time of death. And it was your underwear that was found in her apartment, on her bed.”
He almost begged me to interrupt him, but I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
“And you don’t remember a thing.”
“A black hole,” I said, nodding wearily. “Time lost, like an epileptic seizure.”
“The neighbors claim they heard voices earlier from her apartment. Broken glass, punching and stuff. Help you remember anything?”
“I told you. The Irishman had turned her living room into a mini-golf course. Some balls shattered the windows. Then he tied us up and took us down in the elevator to the garbage dump. Somehow, we managed to escape. But from that point on my head draws a blank.”
I had the impression that Harrison believed me. But at that moment my own cousin was in absentia. A certain glaze coated his eyes like a membrane. He was probably fantasizing about my adventures, because he drooled, and a blue-movie reflection appeared in his pupils.
His scalp glowed. Maybe he’d polished it with sesame oil.
“Boy, Milbert, with all your high GPA and analytical mind… Even if she was a good fuck, what made you so desperate? Unwise, most unwise.” He tapped his finger merrily on a word highlighted on the binder. Underwear. His radiant bald head swung from side to side like a Faberge egg. “I do love it! Forgetting your underwear at the crime scene. It’s definitely original!”
He roared with laughter and I swung a punch at him. But only the desk received the blow and the papers danced.
Harrison gasped, his face turning almost blue, but shook his head when I offered him cold water. He was having a good time at my expense, the bastard. But villain or not, right now he was my only ally, an ally with legal training.
I blew my nose and wiped the gunk off my eyes. Harrison gave me the connoisseur gaze of one who saw a lot of junkies behind bars. My urinary test printout gave him no peace. It would be difficult to convince a judge that I was an innocent lamb. Therefore, he dug deeper. “Any idea what it was… that stuff you took?”
“For the umpteenth time. I don’t do drugs!”
“So what is this methyl… sergid? And how the fuck did it end up in your bladder?”
I groaned with a mixture of despair and anxiety. “I did not take anything. Not deliberately.” His forehead wrinkled. “It’s not like someone offered me a joint and I agreed. Someone must have spiked my drink with it.”
“What drink?” Harrison snorted. “You said you had nothing to drink.”
“I remember only one beer. One. In my bathroom. Johanna must have—”
“You gave these samples voluntarily?” he interrupted.
I nodded. He paused for a moment, enough to make me panic. “What? Have I done something wrong? You told me—”
“On the contrary. Excellent, excellent. This is an important point in your favor, cooperation with the police.” He browsed through the file. “So, let’s see if anything comes back to you. An out-of-town couple goes down in the elevator around four in the morning, after hanging out with the folks in the other penthouse. The woman claims she saw a young male outside the lobby door, knocking hard on the glass—a young male who fits your description.”
Suddenly my whole body shook with terror. It took me a full minute to recover. My eyes began to tear, and I blew my nose with a fanfare.
“Jesus!” Harrison said. “You really are wiped out.”
He was about to stand up and leave the room, as I grabbed him by the wrist. “Wait! what about the psycho? Are they going to do something about him? And Johanna—aren’t they…?” I started to sneeze again.
“I had hard time convincing them. Remember, you’re the only person—”
“Maybe about him. But Johanna came to the lab. Many times. Somebody in the university must’ve seen her. Believe me, she is quite noticeable.”
“Relax.” He patted my arm. “I already took care of that. They’re sending someone to sit with you and build their sketches.”
Harrison said he needed to photocopy some pages from the file, so he left me alone in the consultation room.
While he was away, I was paired with Antoine, who looked more like a frustrated artist than anything else. He simultaneously carried on his head a large bald patch and a mane of hair around the back of his scalp, pulled into a ponytail.
Antoine was an expert at building sketches. For half an hour he assembled Gibbons as if from horizontal Lego slices, like a television game show. The end result was pretty realistic. The image would be distributed to the computer screen of every squad car in the state—it might even go nationwide.
With Johanna it was much easier. I gave him the details of her height, weight, and physique. He really was amazing; his final sketch was the spitting image of Johanna. But when I mentioned the dark mole under the left nostril, and guided Antoine to the exact location, the artist nodded, clicked on his mobile phone, and showed me a photo of Marilyn Monroe.
“Just need to move the mole a bit to the right, ha?” he chuckled.
Harrison returned after an eternity and, overjoyed, broke the good news that I was being released, but must remain in town.
He explained to me that this was a major achievement. It was rare that murder suspects were released. But my clean record, as well as Harrison’s reputation, did the trick. I was ordered not to leave town and to check in twice a day, at eight and eight, at the precinct.
I wanted to give the inspector my opinion on these restrictions, but Harrison snatched me away from the counter at the last minute, lest someone had regrets and decided it would not be a bad idea to let me chill in a cell for a night or two.
35
I left the police station in Harrison Zucker’s Caspian Blue Metallic Volvo C70.
The rays of the setting sun painted the spaces between the houses in shades of amber and orange. Trees shook off remnants of the last rain. Lights burned in some of the windows.
On our way, Harrison explained the meaning of “house arrest.” Then he tapped a button on his mobile phone and called his wife, Olivia. He managed to put on the headset and rip the iPhone out of the console jack just as she started screaming at him. Amanda had finished her scouting event half an hour earlier than scheduled and was waiting for him with the troop mother, Lindsey, in front of the closed branch office. Lindsey had offered to take her home, but they lived across the river and wouldn’t make it before dark—and Lindsey couldn’t drive after dark. Dammit, Harrison!
It was refreshing to witness Harrison rendered speechless. He mumbled something and hung up.
He steered the Volvo off the highway, climbed through Lexington Road, and made a left turn toward Frankfort Avenue. When he approached the corner, I told him to drop me off there. “It’s only six houses to my apartment,” I said. “I’ll walk from here; you don’t have to bring me right to the door. I’m a big boy, and I’m not planning to do anything other than sleep. Really sleep.”
The truth was, I would feel awkward if he got into trouble with Olivia because of me.
The Volvo slid in a half-turn toward Kennedy, and his eyes screened the street cautiously. Everything seemed safe. Did my dear cousin Harrison belie
ve me after all?
As I reached for the door, Harrison leaned into the backseat, saying, “I almost forgot.” He pulled out a cellphone and handed it to me.
“I borrowed this one for you. It’s a company phone—my secretary Shirley’s—but she’s on maternity leave. The number is on the back. And don’t lose it.” But then he leaned and snatched it back, “Wait, let me check something…” He flipped through some screens. “Here it is. Leo, our tech wiz, downloaded Itstillworks. It’s an app—it’ll forward calls from your old number to this new phone.” Then he gave it back to me and pushed me out. “Go. Go straight home and lock the door; put the chain and the alarm on when you go to sleep.”
After we parted, Harrison opened the window on his side and leaned out.
“I’ll wait here until you’re inside. Give me a signal.” As I was closing the door he shouted, “And don’t forget the terms of your agreement. Please behave!”
I looked around at the neighboring houses and driveways. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I turned, waved to Harrison and took a shortcut across the front lawn.
Although I was more exhausted than ever, I bounded up the stairs, setting a new personal record. I could measure my pulse in my sinuses. I allowed myself to breathe only after I had locked the door behind me with the double bolt. The chain was too short, but I nudged the door with my knee and managed to connect it to the frame rail.
I just wanted to shower and hop into bed. I pressed my forehead against the door, hoping to fend off an impending migraine. Without turning, I reached for the light switch—and cursed.
The bulb had burned out again. Not critical; the outside light would do. I peeled my glasses off my sticky earlobes and put them on the half-table. I stayed cocooned in my coat but kicked off my shoes. I took two steps down the hall and stumbled upon something sharp on the floor.
I needed more light, so I went to the window and opened the blinds. As the slats separated, the glass behind them vibrated in the hissing wind. I didn’t dare open the window.
An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Page 18
