Bitter Paradise

by Ross Pennie

  She studied her face in the mirror and dabbed her mascara-smeared cheeks with a tissue. Sure, he had saved the tiny messy carcass in a clean sandwich bag. And he had asked Hamish to get the thing tested for Zika virus ASAP. But why did life always have to get complicated? Why couldn’t the concerns of her early pregnancy simply be nausea and vomiting?

  At least, she told herself, Zol’s visit with Tiffany hadn’t been a bust. Now they knew that her Dundas flower shop was infested with Aedes albopictus, which had hitchhiked there on Vander Zalm’s tulips. Zol was preparing the cease and desist order to close Blossoms by Tiffany until the mosquitoes were eradicated. Stephanie Polgar would be dealing with the Vander Zalms’ Virgil operation in the same way.

  The lead Tiffany had given Zol about a cut-price, cash-only, no-receipts dentist named Dr. Elle was promising and gave the investigation something specific to hone in on. How many dentists in the city could be named Elle? Finding her through the Hamilton Academy of Dentists should be a piece of cake. Unless . . . Natasha didn’t like the sound of the dentist’s cash-only business model. The fact that her patients, like the polio cases, might be predominantly vulnerable immigrants was unsettling as well. If the woman was operating underground like the Botox “doctors” who gathered clients in people’s homes and injected them at kitchen tables, finding her would be close to impossible unless someone talked.

  A few minutes later, Natasha was at CUMC taking the stairs to the third floor. According to the various online sites she’d visited these past few days, gentle exercise was good for morning sickness. It seemed to be working.

  On Ward 3-South, a general medical ward, she showed her ID card to the ward clerk and explained she was here to speak with Emmalita Pina and Bhavjeet Singh Malik. The clerk gave her their room numbers, pointed out that both were in isolation in private accommodation, and asked Natasha to follow the instructions posted outside their rooms.

  When she stopped at Emmalita’s room and was confronted by the reality of the isolation measures, a shudder of apprehension shot down her spine. Was she exposing her fetus to unnecessary risk? She knew she shouldn’t be too worried about getting polio. Its mode of transmission seemed too tangled to be a threat. But should she be concerned about acquiring Zika, a virus that could damage her unborn child’s brain? It was foolish to worry, she told herself. There were no mosquitoes in hospital isolation rooms, and transmission from patients required intimate contact. She put on the gear and entered the room.

  Emmalita Pina was a sad-looking sight, more waif than thirty-year-old woman. She didn’t move when Natasha approached the bed but did open her eyes and mutter something that sounded like Hello miss.

  Natasha explained why she was there and that she had only a few simple questions. Emmalita’s answers were brief and so barely audible that Natasha had to lean in close to hear her.

  The story of Emmalita’s single visit to Blessica’s dentist came out in monosyllables. Natasha had to ask more leading questions than she usually liked but did ascertain that Emmalita’s tooth had bothered her for weeks. Blessica arranged for the two of them to have appointments on the same afternoon, and they went together on the bus. Emmalita’s toothache had been so severe that day that she could barely remember the bus ride and recalled nothing of the visit except that a female doctor froze her mouth and put a filling in the problem tooth. Blessica paid the dentist’s thirty-dollar fee — which sounded like a remarkable bargain — and Emmalita promised to pay it back as soon as she found a new job.

  Before entering Bhavjeet’s room a few minutes later, Natasha went through the same performance with the protective gear. The boy was alone and looked more lively today than yesterday afternoon. His eyes were brighter and he was more inclined to talk. He was more comfortable conversing in Punjabi, though she had to strain to catch his rural dialect. It was a relief — to both of them — that his overbearing auntie was nowhere in sight.

  “I’d like to know about your sore tooth, Bhavjeet,” she said. “How did it start?”

  He wasn’t sure. The pain in his jaw began a few weeks back, well before he came to the hospital. As the pain got worse, his face swelled and he started to shiver. His aunt and uncle drove him to a dentist who his uncle said would charge a reasonable fee for her work, not like the others.

  “Where was the dentist’s office?”

  The boy looked back at her with a doleful face and shrugged. “I was thinking about the pain in my face, nothing else.”

  “Well, was it near your uncle’s home?”

  He shook his head and screwed up his face as if recalling the misery. “Long way. Very much long.”

  “So, the dentist was in a different part of the city from where you’ve been living?”

  “Auntie gave me cold cloth. I hold it over my face to help the pain.”

  “So you didn’t see where your uncle was taking you?”

  “I see but not pay attention.” His gaze drifted to the floor. “Sorry.”

  “What about after you arrived at the dentist and your uncle parked the car. What did the building look like?”

  He shrugged again and offered nothing.

  “I really need your help, Bhavjeet,” she told him. “Was the dentist in a tall building, the kind with an elevator? Or was it —”

  “No elevator. Look like my uncle’s townhouse.”

  Good, they were getting somewhere. “Do you remember anything else about it? Something special like a high fence, fancy cars parked outside, a vicious dog, a big store next door?”

  Bhavjeet thought for a moment then said, “She work in garage.”

  “Who? Who worked in a garage?”

  “Lady dentist. No cars inside. Her surgery only.”

  A cut-rate dentist working out of a garage in a townhouse — this fit their assumption that the mysterious Dr. Elle was running an unlicensed operation. There were thousands of townhouses in every district of the city, many of similar design. The woman and her Parvo-W-contaminated instruments could be anywhere.

  “Can you tell me what she looked like? Young? Older? Dark skin? Light skin? Long hair? Grey hair?”

  The boy scrutinized the little of Natasha’s head and body that were not covered in protective gear then said, “Longer hair than yours, miss. Same colour. Skin lighter.”

  “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

  He shook his head and mimed a surgical mask covering his nose and mouth. “She was having one of those things.”

  “The whole time?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Now, what did she do for your toothache? Did she pull your tooth?”

  Bhavjeet nodded and held up two fingers. “First, spray for the pain. Freezing second.” He mimed a series of injections with a long needle followed by two brisk twists of the wrist.

  “And then she pulled two teeth?”

  He nodded, opened his mouth, and pointed to a large fleshy hole in his lower jaw. It was crisscrossed by black sutures.

  After Natasha figured she’d milked all the information out of Bhavjeet she was going to get, she said goodbye then removed the gear, washed her hands in the sink provided — twice — and smothered her palms and fingers in alcohol-based hand sanitizer. She looked down at her still-flat stomach and whispered, “Okay, Junior. I’m doing everything I can to keep you safe.” It would be a lifelong task. She was beginning to realize that.

  Upstairs in the ICU, she stopped at the nursing station and looked at the whiteboard. Jamila, Barry, Blessica, and Thuy were still on the list. Lewis Feldman was not.

  One of the nurses recognized Natasha and approached her with slow, measured steps. She had that universal I’ve-got-bad-news look on her face. “I’m afraid Mr. Feldman passed away about an hour ago.”

  “I’m so sorry. I noticed a lot of activity in his room yesterday. The crash cart and everything.”

 
“He had a bad night. We did everything we could but . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s heartbreaking when a patient dies alone. I wish he’d had some visitors. We had him heavily sedated, of course, but he would have known they were there.”

  “No one came to see him?”

  “A woman who used to work with him was here once, a few days ago. She seemed nice enough but stayed no more than a minute or two.” The nurse offered Natasha a knowing look. “She was terrified she’d catch his polio and barely stepped past the door.”

  “Have you been able to notify Mr. Feldman’s family?”

  “That’s the awful thing. There’s no next of kin listed in his chart, and when the doctor dialled the one number we had for him, a landline, all he got was one of those recordings that tell you the number is out of service.”

  After being cast aside by the crumbling department-store empire for which he’d worked, Lewis Feldman had been so cash-strapped he couldn’t pay his telephone bill. At sixty-three, he’d been out of a job, cut off by the phone company, and likely struggling with his teeth. Like the nurse, Natasha was saddened by the loneliness of the man. And frustrated that she was still no closer to finding the elusive Dr. Elle. There were still the families of Thuy Nguyen, Barry Novak, and the two kids from Cathcart Elementary that might help pinpoint the dentist. Hamish was working with Thuy’s husband and sister. Muriel Simon was getting the secretary at her school to phone the families of Céline and Juan-Carlos to see what she could dig up. That left Barry Novak, the labourer-cum-bus-driver, to Natasha. He was sedated and ventilated, but his chart said he was married.

  When Irene Novak answered the phone on the second ring, Natasha’s heart skipped a beat. She explained why she was calling and held her breath for a helpful answer.

  “Heavens, dearie. I don’t do dentists. Never have. Why, even the mention of the word can send me into a dead faint. You see, I had every tooth in my head pulled when I was twenty-one. And now, with a full set of dentures in perfect condition, no one ever comes at me with needles and drills.”

  “I see. But what about Mr. Novak? I do need to know if he’s been to a dentist lately.”

  “Then you’ll have to ask my husband when he comes around. I have no idea.”

  “Did he mention having a toothache lately? Or has he shown any signs of a frozen mouth, a new filling, maybe a pulled tooth?”

  “Now, miss, you’ve got to stop using those words. You’ll send me crashing to the floor.”

  “Are you sure you can’t help me, Mrs. Novak? If you whisper the name of his dentist, I’ll let you go immediately. After that, I promise I’ll never bother you again. Please, that’s all I’m asking. Just a name and address.”

  “She’s a woman, and he pays cash to keep the cost down because we don’t have insurance. He’s never told me her name. And now I’m hanging up, dearie.”

  Sitting like a ninny with a dead phone in her hand, Natasha didn’t know which bothered her most: her anger, her frustration, or how ridiculous it was to be listening to the dial tone.

  Chapter 41

  Jesse emptied the garbage bag containing the contents of Darryl Oxman’s locker onto the kitchen table. His roommate, Morgan, wouldn’t be home from work until five at the earliest, so he had the entire afternoon to examine the stuff uninterrupted. As a law student, Morgan knew about discretion and confidentiality. But she’d gone into law because she was fascinated by what she called the messy narratives of other people’s lives. She’d have a heyday pestering Jesse over Darryl’s stuff and dreaming up hypotheses about the poor guy’s narrative. Until he’d proven himself to Dr. Zed, Jesse didn’t need that kind of interference. And besides, he had signed a confidentiality agreement as a condition of his employment at the Health Unit, and there was no way he was going to breach it.

  Darryl had replaced the mall-issued padlock on his locker with one of his own. Of course, no one had a clue what the combination might be. Mr. Melville, red-faced at Darryl’s flaunting of the regulations, got one of his maintenance men to crunch the lock with bolt cutters. Why a shopping mall needed to keep such a tool handy, Jesse had no idea.

  The locker contained a complete change of clothes that were more or less wrinkle-free and neatly hung up — white cotton t-shirt, plaid sport shirt, chinos, Toronto Blue Jays ball cap, sneakers, and a windbreaker. Presumably, Darryl had worn these civvies on his way to work and changed into a uniform when he got there. Going through a dead man’s trouser pockets was creepy, and Jesse had to force himself to do it. He found an open pack of chewing gum (none of it already chewed, thank God!), half a roll of cough drops, a wad of used Kleenex (ugh!), a small penknife (a nice little piece with a deer-antler handle), and a set of earbuds (smudged with Darryl’s earwax!). In the windbreaker’s pocket was a Sony CD Walkman with a patent date of 1990 on the back. (The guy certainly was a Luddite.) Apart from a comb and half a bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength, Darryl had kept no grooming aids or toiletries at work. Alongside the locker’s original padlock with its key in the lock, there were two keys on a Toronto Maple Leafs ring, neither of which was for a car.

  At the bottom of the garbage bag were three ballpoint pens, an HB pencil with an eraser at the end, a pad of blue Post-it Notes, and three paperbacks: Prime Numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis, The Fibonacci Sequence: Nature’s Code, and Ultimate Sudoku: 300 Challenging Puzzles.

  Fascinated since high school by the role of prime numbers in keeping encrypted messages safe on the internet, Jesse picked up the prime-number book and flipped through it. It was written for a general audience, and the chapter titles referred to many of the fun facts he already knew. Next, he picked up the Sudoku book. Knowing whether Darryl used an indelible pen or an erasable pencil when working on a puzzle could help sketch the guy’s character (and help fill in his narrative). Was he one of those who wrote tiny numbers in the corners of the squares to help with the solutions? Or was he a purist who kept everything in his head and wrote in ink even when solving the most infuriating puzzles?

  For a paperback, the Sudoku book felt heavy. When Jesse opened it and flipped past the title page, he found that most of its centre had been cut away to create a recess. Inside was a pocket-sized daily planner. He remembered his dad using such a thing, a leatherbound Moleskine. Nowadays, most people kept track of their agendas on their smartphones. But, of course, Darryl didn’t have a phone. Melville had said the guy didn’t trust them.

  His heart racing at what Darryl’s hidden planner might reveal — and, if Jesse was honest, would cement his promotion to Dr. Zed’s investigative team — he lifted the little volume from its hiding place. He turned immediately to Darryl’s entries for April this year, his mouth dry with excitement. A numbers guy who hung his clothes neatly in his locker and aligned his sneakers perfectly on a piece of newspaper was bound to have his dental appointments noted with the doctor’s contact details written out for easy reference.

  The planner showed that Darryl visited a doctor three times in April: at nine o’clock on the morning of Friday the 6th and at three o’clock on two Monday afternoons, the 9th and the 16th. Wow! This had to be the Dr. Elle that Dr. Zed was so desperate to locate. But when he tried to read what should have been the doctor’s name and address, Jesse’s heart sank into his gut. Darryl had written the appointment details in code. The doctor was listed as Dr. 8-4. What followed, which might be her address, was part code and part riddle: Marble Taker 11 + 59.

  Jesse opened Google Maps on his phone and searched for Marble Street, Hamilton. Google drew a blank immediately. Similarly, it found nothing under Marble Avenue (or Lane, Crescent, Boulevard, or Court). He switched to regular Google and typed in marble, Hamilton, Ontario. The first hit to come up was Marble Slab Creamery on Upper James Street. It was followed by ten local places that sold marble, granite, and quartz countertops. Google Maps showed that the creamery was located in a strip mall devoted exclusive
ly to eateries. There was nothing nearby that looked remotely like a dentist’s office. The countertop places were in the rural outskirts of the city, well away from dental-office territory.

  He wondered who else dealt with marble and might take it from one place to another. Cemeteries, he figured. They made marble headstones. But a dentist wouldn’t work there. What about a marble quarry? Was there one nearby? No. Google said there weren’t any quarries mining marble anywhere in Ontario.

  He pulled a pencil and a scrap of paper from a kitchen drawer and started doodling. Sometimes it helped him to think. And sometimes it just made a mess of a blank sheet. If marble wasn’t the name of a street or a business, what was it? Darryl had liked number puzzles. What about crosswords? Had he been keen on those as well? If so, why didn’t he have a book of crosswords in his locker? Maybe he’d stuffed it into a pocket of the uniform he’d been wearing when they’d carted him off to the hospital.

  Jesse typed Marble Taker into Google. The first dozen hits were faraway businesses selling commemorative marble plaques and tablets. No help there. He pressed his pencil firmly into the paper as he doodled, desperate for creative thoughts to pop out of nowhere. He examined Darryl’s entries again.

  The words Marble and Taker were capitalized. Was that significant? Perhaps the clue was asking for the name of the person who took the marbles. Did the dentist share a name with a childhood acquaintance who had duped Darryl out of his marbles? A clue that personal would be impossible for an outsider to solve.

  But what if the clue wasn’t personal? What if someone famous took the marbles in question? Google was great at finding famous people.

  He asked Google: Who took the marbles?