by Kyra Davis
“No, I mean like he started drinking or taking drugs, or maybe it’s the reverse. Maybe he stopped taking the medication that was stabilizing him. Regardless, it’s not our business.”
I slumped back in my seat. “But don’t you think things are kind of adding up?” I asked, my voice taking on a plaintive tone. “A woman claiming to be his wife showing up at the hospital. His neighbor saying he didn’t have a wife…”
“Yes, it’s adding up,” Anatoly admitted. “He used to be a stable man. Then he lost his job, his wife and then, finally, he went into a downward spiral.”
I stared down at the business card, the super villain name glaring back at me in bold, black ink.
“I’ll try to track down Anita London this afternoon to ask her if she wants the dog,” Anatoly was saying, “and…oh, I’m sorry, I have another call coming in. A client.”
“Yeah, sure of course, you should take that,” I said, distractedly.
“Don’t overthink this, Sophie. Let this one go.”
I stayed on the line long enough to hear it go dead.
And then I pulled the phone away from my ear and dialed up Gundrun Volz office once more.
“Nolan-Volz, Gundrun Volz’s office, can I help you?”
“I’m sorry, we were disconnected before. My name’s Sophie Katz and I’m doing a freelance piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“Oh, yes, do you have follow up questions for Mr. Volz?” the woman asked, still sounding bored-sexy.
Follow-up questions? What the hell was she talking about? “Yes,” I said, working hard to keep the question mark out of my voice.
“If you’d like to leave your name and number I’ll pass along your request.”
I mechanically recited my information as I tried to figure out what exactly was going on.
“The article is running in four days, yes?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” I said, deciding that sticking to the one syllable word was probably my best strategy.
“So you’ll need to hear from him soon,” she reasoned. “Are you requesting an in person meeting or will another phone call suffice?”
“In person is probably best,” I said, a little doubtfully.
“I’ll see what I can do.” I thanked her, hung up, got out of my car and half walked, half ran back to the salon. I got there just as Marcus was walking out the door, a shiny, tan windbreaker pulled over his broad shoulders.
“You’re back,” he noted as I approached breathless and smiling.
“If I was going to investigate London’s death,” I asked, “where do you think I should start?’
Marcus’ lips curled up until his smile matched my own. “Well, let’s see, you claimed you weren’t able to follow most of what London said to you in Anatoly’s office, right? That it just sounded like the fragmented ramblings of a conspiracy theorist?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Do you think you might have understood him better if you were a conspiracy theorist?” he asked, slipping his hands into his jacket pocket.
“Maybe, but I’m not.”
“Do you know any?”
My brow creased as I tried to come up with a name. In the distance, there was the sound of angry honking from multiple cars, above me somewhere the sound of a low flying plane.
And then it hit me. I glanced up at Marcus to see from the look on his face that he had thought of someone too.
Together we said, “Jason.”
“What’s considered delusional today will often been seen as prophetic tomorrow.”
--Dying To Laugh
Dena was not thrilled when I told her what I wanted, but Jason leaped at the opportunity to explain his conspiracy theories to a captive audience. At his request, we were to meet in Sutro Heights Park at five-thirty pm and since Marcus didn’t have any more clients and Ms. Dogz needed a walk, I decided to take both of them along.
“Why are we meeting in a park again?” Marcus asked as I struggled to fit my Audi into a parallel spot relatively near our destination. In the cup-holder was a light Salted-Caramel-Mocha-Frappucino with an add shot and extra whipped cream (Marcus didn’t understand why one would get a “light” beverage with extra whipped cream proving he was not properly acquainted with the complicated dance between justification and denial). Ms. Dogz was skidding from one side of the backseat to the other as she tried unsuccessfully to squeeze her muzzle through the cracked windows.
“Not enough privacy in a café,” I said, reciting what Jason had told me.
“We could have met at your place,” he said.
“You remember that time when someone bugged my house?” I asked as I finally got my car correctly positioned.
“That was eons ago,” Marcus complained.
“I don’t know what to tell you.” I reached for my drink and took a long, luxurious sip of caffeinated sugar and fat. “Jason just thought the park was better.”
“The wind is picking up and I just did your hair!” he snapped as I turned off the ignition.
I swiveled in my seat so I could face him. “Marcus, this meeting is about life and death.” I paused to take another sip before adding, “and the blowout looks so cool when it’s flowing in the breeze.”
Marcus grunted his disapproval as he got out of the car. I leashed up Ms. Dogz and we trekked over to the main entrance of the park. Jason was already there, standing between the two stone lions. The looks carved into the feline faces had always struck me as both bemused and sort of judgy, expressions that seemed out of place here, in this seaside park built on the grounds of the ruined Sutro Mansion. But Jason, with his blonde goatee, camouflage pants, red flannel shirt and black printed T-shirt gave their bemused judgment a needed bit of context.
“How are you?” I asked as Jason stepped in to give me a hug. Ms. Dogz eagerly sniffed his pant leg.
“I’m as well anyone living in a corrupt Capitalist dystopia can expect to be,” he answered cheerily. He gave Marcus a quick bro hug before turning back to me. “Like the hair.”
“Thank you,” Marcus and I said simultaneously. I let the leash slip over my wrist as I reached up to run my fingers through my newly styled locks but Marcus slapped my hand away. “Mess with it and I cut you,” he growled.
Jason crouched down so he was eye-level with the dog. “So this is Sophie?”
“Wait, what?” Marcus asked, surprised. “Her name’s--”
“Ms. Dogz,” I snapped. “That’s what we’re calling her.”
“Got it, sorry,” Jason smiled. He started to stand again but then suddenly stopped short. “Is that my leash?”
“Wait, what?” Marcus said again.
I felt my face heating up to about a thousand degrees. “Oh, yeah,” I stammered. “Um, Dena lent it to me. I’d give it back now but, well,” I gestured to the dog who clearly needed to be leashed.
“No, no it’s okay,” Jason said, a little uncertainly. “We have more.”
“You’re serious?” Marcus asked. “This is serious?” I stuck my straw in my mouth and pointedly looked away.
“I did like that one though,” Jason noted, taking no mind of Marcus. “It’s a good length.”
It was possible this was the worst conversation these lions had ever been cursed to overhear. “In all the chaos of last night, I forgot this was the leash Dena used on you,” I explained. “Only a death and a stolen dog could distract me from something like that, but there it is. So now we’re both just going to have to pretend that you have never ever been attached to this thing. It is very important to me that we both go into immediate states of denial. Can you do that?”
Jason rolled his eyes and scratched the back of his neck. “You don’t have to get puritanical about it. Dena and I just have a different way of expressing sexual affection--”
“That is not denial!” I shouted. “I swear to God, Jason, if you say one more word about this I will throw this Frappuccino in your face--”
“Okay, okay.” He laughed holdi
ng up his hands in surrender. “Come on, let’s walk and talk…” he hesitated and then lowered his voice, “about what we came here to talk about.”
Marcus and I gave each other looks. There was no need to speak in code or whispers. We were entering magic hour. The picnickers had all packed up. The few tourists still here were busy trying to rub away goose bumps as they made their way back to their cars. That left us and a handful of locals, identifiable by their pragmatic layered clothing and shaggy eternity scarves, milling about, sneaking in a few moments of solitude in this sanctuary that was allowed to grow over the cracked foundation of a fallen estate.
We followed Jason as he led us down the dirt path that had once been a curving driveway. “Dena filled me in on everything as soon as she got home from your break-in last night,” Jason explained, kicking a small stone out of the way with his Doc Martens.
“It was not a break-in,” I protested. Ms. Dogz was zig-zagging all over the place. First there was something she had to smell to her left, then her right. It took both attention and skill to keep from tripping on the notorious leash. “I had a key,” I went on. “The neighbor let me into the building.”
“Yeah, but the neighbor let you in after you lied to him, right?” Jason asked with a small smile. “Not judging. You did what needed to be done. Tell me what London was afraid of. Who or what did he think was after him?”
“Everything?” I laughed then caught myself. It was bad luck to make fun of the dead. “He was going on about the New World Order, our government and institutionalized racism or something like that. And then he was ranting about the pharmaceutical industry, I remember he mentioned Rispolex and oh, what was the other one…Thilodeen? Thiophene? I can’t be sure.”
“Thalidomide,” Jason said, in a slightly hushed voice.
I blinked in surprise. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“It is?” Marcus asked, then stopped briefly to disentangle himself from the leash. “How’d you know the name of the drug, Jason?”
“There have been class action lawsuits against both the makers of Rispolex and Thalidomide,” Jason explained. We passed a cluster of evergreens and the marble stones that once formed a pillar. “Both drugs caused the users to alter their bodies in really bad ways. Rispolex caused heart murmurs and sometimes caused serious damage to the heart valves of people taking the drug. And Thalidomide caused deformities in the babies of the mothers who took the drug. Rispolex was such a fuck-up the company that developed it went under.”
“London didn’t have any deformities,” I said as I thought back to the waif of a man I had met only a day ago. “And from what I saw, I don’t think London had a heart attack. Were either of those drugs made by Nolan-Volz?”
“Never heard of Nolan-Volz. Why?” Jason asked.
“It’s a pharmaceutical development company. Aaron London used to be an executive there. V.P. of R&D.”
Jason stopped in his tracks. “A dude who worked for a money-hungry, industrial, blood-sucking drug pusher, claims he’s being poisoned, then keels over in the street and you’re confused about what’s going on?”
“Ooh, I see where you’re going with this,” Marcus chimed in. “Maybe somebody at Nolan-Volz was skimming off the top or, oh, I know! Maybe they were stealing the company drugs and dealing them to addicts! Profiting off the opioid epidemic!”
“No,” Jason said sullenly. “That’s not what happened.”
“It could have,” Marcus said, a bit defensively.
“You’re not thinking big enough,” Jason insisted. “It wasn’t an individual at the corporation who offed him. It was the corporation itself! I bet you anything this guy’s death was a corporate decision.”
“You mean like they discussed it at the board meeting?” Marcus asked, dryly. “Agenda item number one, ‘How to increase market share, item two, how to assassinate former employees, item three research and development—‘”
“These companies are evil! They make poison!” Jason sputtered. “They convince parents to medicate their kids in order to fit them into a broken educational system! They push their speed on college kids using the guise of treating their supposed ADHD!”
“Speed treats ADHD?” Marcus asked, but Jason was on a roll.
“They give us heart medication that destroys our livers, liver medication that destroys our hearts, they literally inject cancer patients with artificial toxins and call it treatment. They try to squash news and research proving the benefits of homeopathic medicine, like Gaba, ox bile and medical marijuana! What this country needs is homeopathic weed, not pharmaceutical speed!”
“Ox bile?” I asked weakly. “People take, like, actual ox bile?”
“And speaking of weed,” Marcus chimed in, “have you been smoking, honey? Because you’re sounding a little paranoid.”
“There’s a difference between being paranoid and being clear eyed,” Jason replied, almost petulantly. “That’s why you asked to pick my brain. I’m clear eyed. And ox bile is fucking awesome. Does great things for your digestion. But you wouldn’t know that because Big Pharma won’t let you know that!”
I sipped at my drink and sent up a silent message of thanks to Big Pharma for protecting me from ox bile propaganda. Ms. Dogz was pulling me toward a different trail and I gestured for the guys to come along as I let her take the lead. The small victory seemed to cheer her and she trotted in front of us, ears flapping joyfully in the air. “London also said something about a medical ethics professor at NYU exposing some issues with pharmaceutical testing,” I said, as I tried to replay my whole conversation with London in my head.
“Several years back, a professor was talking about how she found that there were a lot of companies who weren’t disclosing the results of their trial studies before getting FDA approval to put new drugs on the market,” Jason explained. “She went public about it, talking to anyone who would listen and sending her study out to as many publications as possible. She helped expose the issues that led to the whole Rispolex shit-show. She became a real hero to those of us who are trying to stand up to Big Pharma. But did the FDA listen to her? Do they care that they’re being deceived? No. They don’t give two fucks. They did nothing to address the problems she brought to light. The guys in the FDA are just putting in their time until one of the pharmaceutical companies they’re supposed to be regulating offers them a big-pay-check job in their corporate offices.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Marcus asked, articulating what I was thinking.
“Because I’m woke.”
“The thing is,” I jumped in before Marcus had a chance to comment on how totally awkward it was to hear a thirty-something-year-old white man who spends his nights on a leash use the word woke, “a lot of what London said really was pretty out there, even by…er…clear eyed standards.”
“I doubt that,” Jason sniffed.
“It wasn’t all about pharmaceuticals,” I continued. “He was freaking out about the entire medical establishment. He thought hospitals were doing unnecessary procedures on homeless people. I mean even you’d have to agree, that’s nuts.”
Once again, Jason came to an abrupt stop. Marcus followed suit, I tried to follow suit but it took a little tugging on Ms. Dogz before she agreed to let me stand still.
“Jason?” Marcus asked. “Is everything okay?”
But Jason was busy with his phone, his fingers tapping away at the screen until he found what he was looking for. He held up the phone so we could all see the archived L.A. Times article. The headline read: 3 Hospitals Accused Of Using Homeless For Fraud.
I handed my Frappuccino off to Marcus, snatched the phone out of Jason’s hand and started reading.
“Three hospitals were exposed for literally searching for homeless people on the street,” Jason summarized even as I read the words for myself. “They offered them a couple of bucks to come stay at their facilities for a few days, gave them a false medical diagnosis and then did tests and procedures on them so they could bill Medi
care.”
“Wait a minute, what?” Marcus put his free hand against his chest as if grasping at his heart. “That can’t be true.”
“It was on MSNBC,” Jason continued. “Just your typical predatory, corporate, Machiavellian behavior. They managed to bilk the system for something like sixteen mil. One more reason to hate L.A., right?”
Marcus was turning a little green. “Did they…hurt anyone?”
“They didn’t kill anyone but they fucked a few people up, yeah.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Marcus muttered, staring down at creamy brown remnants of my drink.
“Then you should be getting sick every day,” Jason said, enthusiastically. “If we were all paying better attention it would be a non-stop vomit fest! Come on, my brother, you gotta get yourself woke!”
Marcus held up his hand in a Stop-In-The-Name-Of-Love like gesture. “Try not to get all Rachel Dolezal on me.” He studied Jason for a second before adding, “I will admit, you’re quite a fountain of knowledge when it comes to bizarre news stories. You never even met the man and yet you seem to be a regular Aaron London cryptographer.”
“This happened,” I said softly, still staring at the article. “He wasn’t just making things up.”
“What else did he talk about?” Jason asked eagerly.
“Um, the New World Order?” I offered. “LSD…something about Nazis. He was definitely upset about Nazis which…now that I think about it, might not be so unreasonable these days.”
“MkUltra!”
I looked at him blankly as he took his phone back from me and started walking again, as if too amped to stand still. Marcus, Ms. Dogz and I dutifully followed.
“What’s MkUltra?” I asked.
“The American government hired Nazi doctors,” he explained, “some of whom were accused of war crimes, to help them develop chemical weapons and design ways the drugs could be tested on unsuspecting civilians. New moms who went in for postpartum depression, unsuspecting military personnel, individuals who were considered undesirable, those are the people that were considered fair game by our government. They dropped acid in people’s drinks and fucked with their heads. And they got Nazis to help them do that. Nazis. You don’t believe me? Google that shit. MkUltra.”
