Extreme Measures (1991)

by Michael Palmer

  Over the long minutes that followed, only one car drove past the darkened mortuary. Laura zipped up the thin black leather jacket Bernard had given her, and pressed herself tightly against the building. She had tried calling Eric any number of times since the nightmare on Harrison Avenue, but without success. In a way, she was grateful. He almost certainly would have insisted on coming along, and if for any reason they were caught in their illegal entry, the negative publicity would doubtless kill whatever chance he still had for the White Memorial promotion.

  A couple, holding hands, crossed the narrow street just two doors away. Laura froze, easily holding her breath for more than a minute until they had let themselves into their building. She glanced down at the doorknob. What is taking so long? She thought about the man who had called himself Roger Ansell. He had probably once stood somewhere right on this street, watching as she and Eric paid their visit to Donald Devine. Did he have a wife? Children? First Scott, now him. Regardless of the reasons, it seemed stupid and senseless and sad.

  The taps--two of them from inside the mortuary--were barely audible. Laura responded with two of her own. Bernard Nelson opened the door, and she stepped into a darkness that was so complete, so palpably dense, that she instantly relived the moment when her flash failed during a night dive in a massive undersea grotto called the Sultan's Cave.

  "Wait a minute," she whispered. "I've got to let my eyes adjust."

  "There's no light for them to adjust to," Nelson said. "Here." He passed her a pair of surgical gloves and then a slim penlight, which cast a narrow but surprisingly potent beam. "Just keep it low, away from our faces."

  "Hey, I dive for a living, remember? There's no verbalizing eighty feet down, so we live and die by using our lights the right way."

  "Sorry. Sorry I took so long too. The security system in this place turned out to be rather sophisticated."

  "Are you sure it's deactivated?"

  "That's the weird thing. The system wasn't on in the first place. We could have used one of the keys on my Ring of Truth and been safely inside in two seconds. God, there's enough formalin in the air here to grant eternal pickling."

  "It really does smell like death."

  They moved carefully from the foyer to Devine's parlor, Laura keeping her flash fixed on the floor while Nelson swept his beam along the walls.

  "What are we looking for?" Laura asked.

  "Oh, shelves, bookcases, drawers, a wall safe--that sort of thing. If this Devine is the meticulous little mouse you describe, I'd be amazed if he doesn't have records of whatever he's into. I wish I felt comfortable turning on a light, but frankly, that's a risk I'm not willing to take except as a last resort. If our divine friend happens to return, even a sliver of light through those shutters could warn him and cost us escape time."

  Bernard pulled a tool from his kit, popped open the drawer of Devine's imitation Chippendale desk, and rifled quickly through its contents, scanning sheets, then carefully replacing them.

  "Pull every book off those shelves, Laura--carefully," he said, motioning to one wall. "Check to be sure each is what the binding says it is, and then set it right back where it was."

  It took twenty minutes to finish with the room, and another ten to search the small chapel adjacent to it.

  "This is tougher than I thought it was going to be," Laura said as they picked their way through the rear door of the chapel into the casket room.

  "It gets even more difficult if the proprietor of the establishment walks in on us."

  Laura squinted, trying to adjust her vision to the new room, which was smaller and if possible even darker than the others. There seemed to be four or five caskets displayed on stands of various heights. The walls were overhung with maroon velvet drapes, which emitted a mustiness competitive in intensity with the formalin.

  Laura attempted to ignore the odors by breathing through her mouth. As she scanned the floor, trying to get some sense of the space, she stepped forward, bumping against one of the caskets. She put her hand out to steady herself, and set it down on the waxen face of a man. Laura gasped, recoiling against another casket as her penlight clattered to the floor. Immediately, Nelson's flash sought her out.

  "That casket." She struggled to clear the sudden hoarseness from her throat. "There's a body in there."

  Bernard played his light down her arm, past her pointing finger, into an ornate, velvet-lined coffin, and finally onto the face of a man.

  Laura gasped. "That's Donald Devine!"

  The mortician, his hands resting peacefully on his vest, stared sightlessly upward. In the center of his forehead, just above his wire-rimmed spectacles and just below his pomaded hairline, was a single small bullet hole, surrounded by a halo of dried blood.

  "Less than a day, I'd guess," Bernard murmured, touching the back of his hand to Devine's pallid cheek and then hefting the corpse's arm, which seemed stiff and plastic. "But I'm really not very good at that sort of stuff. I can tell you for certain that he didn't do this to himself."

  "This is horrible."

  "Maybe. But it tells me that you were right. Your friend here was into something shady. And whatever it was, he was obviously in over his head."

  "Should we keep searching?"

  "I doubt we'll find anything that whoever made this little hole didn't find, but you never can tell. Besides, with the danger of Mr. Devine walking in on us lessened considerably, I think we might even risk turning lights on as we go."

  "If you think it's all right. Do you mind if we skip this room though?"

  "Not at all."

  "You know, I think he lived upstairs. Maybe it would be worth looking there."

  "Maybe it would at that," Bernard Nelson said.

  The staircase to Devine's apartment was off the back hallway. The apartment itself consisted of an eat-in kitchen, a TV room, and two bedrooms, one of which was a small museum, overfilled with a startling collection of medieval weapons and armor, including mace-and-chains, broadswords, crossbows, lances, daggers, and several helmets.

  "The mouse that roared," Nelson mused.

  "This place is truly creepy," Laura said. "How about I do the bedroom and you do Camelot?"

  "Just be sure there are no unshuttered windows before you turn oh any lights," Nelson cautioned. "Check behind the drapes and pictures, and under any throw rugs. Mark my words. This guy kept detailed records of whatever he was into, and he kept them in a safe. Say, you wouldn't have an extra cigar on you by any chance?"

  "Sorry. But listen, if we find the safe you predict, I'll buy you one--whatever kind you want."

  "What a sport."

  "Only one, though, and only if we find that safe."

  Just ten minutes later, they did. Laura was trying to move a large oil painting--some sort of rural scene--when she backed against a black spoke-backed chair, set on a small Oriental rug. The chair did not budge. Laura dropped to her knees and lifted the edge of the rug. The legs of the chair were bolted through it to the floor. Between the bolts she felt a small recessed latch. Releasing the latch, she tipped the chair backward. The rug and a hinged portion of the oak flooring tilted upward with it. The strongbox, a foot or so square with a dial lock and heavy metal handle, was concealed in the space below.

  "Bingo!" she cried. "Mr. Nelson, you are truly a prince of your profession."

  "I hope you're still considering that apprenticeship offer of mine," he said, first examining the lock, then rummaging through his medical bag for his stethoscope.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes pressed against the floor, listening to the tumblers of Donald Devine's safe.

  "There's a gizmo that does this electronically," he muttered, "but I'm just too damn cheap to invest in it. Besides, half this business is the challenge, right?"

  Laura sat on the dead man's bed, trying to draw some sort of connection between Devine and the drug dealers who had killed not only her brother, but almost certainly Roger Ansell as well. Ansell and Devine: two men violently dead
on the same day, and both of them connected in some way to her. She shuddered at the thought.

  "Easy," Nelson was urging. "Easy ... easy ... and ... voila!"

  He grasped the handle and slowly swung it down ninety degrees. At the moment he pulled the small door open, they heard the sound of voices beneath the window.

  "Quick, the lights!"

  Bernard gathered up what he could from the safe as Laura shut off first the bedroom light, and then the others upstairs. Stygian darkness returned to the apartment as the front door was unlocked and opened.

  "To the stairs," Nelson whispered. "Up here we're trapped."

  They felt their way to the stairs and tiptoed down, reaching the first-floor rear hallway just as the light snapped on in the front parlor. Reflexively, Nelson opened what appeared to be the basement door. The two of them stepped onto the staircase beyond it and pulled the door closed. Save for a sliver of light beneath the base of the door, they were once again enveloped in blackness. They huddled on the staircase, Laura midway down and Bernard near the door, listening as what sounded like two men moved toward them.

  "Can you hear what they're saying?" she whispered.

  "One of them's furious because the other didn't get Devine's records before he killed him. The other one's whining some sort of apology."

  "Do you have your gun?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Well, what are they saying now?"

  "I think one of them's headed upstairs. The other one may be coming here. You'd better move down a few more stairs; in fact, go all the way to the bottom. If he opens this door, I'm going to need some room to help him make a rapid descent."

  "Just be careful. It's pitch-black down here. I can't see a thing."

  "Shhhh."

  From upstairs they heard one of the men shout something.

  "I'll be right up," the second voice called back from just outside the basement door. "I'm sorry, boss," they heard him say. "I didn't understand what you wanted me to do. Honest I didn't."

  Several minutes passed. Laura remained motionless in the darkness on the bottom basement step. Above her, she could faintly discern the bulky silhouette of Bernard Nelson, pressed against the door.

  "What's happening?" she whispered.

  "They may be leaving or looking for us. I can't tell. Not another sound until I'm certain they're gone--"

  His voice dropped off suddenly. Laura could hear muffled footsteps and voices. Then she saw shadows moving in the thin slit of light beneath the door. Her heart skipped as a shoe scuffed against the wood. Bernard Nelson remained still. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the footsteps began to recede to another part of the house. Fifteen silent minutes went by. The light beyond the door was turned off. Another fifteen minutes passed, then still another. Finally, Laura could stand the tension no longer.

  "What's going on?" she asked.

  "Beats me. I think they're gone."

  She worked her way up several steps.

  "Do you want to risk opening the door?"

  "I think so. First see if you can find a light down there. Maybe there's a way we can get out of here without going through the house."

  Laura backed down the stairs and felt along the wall until she found a switch. After an hour of near total darkness, the bright overhead fluorescent lights were blinding. Bernard Nelson made his way down to her as Laura blinked and rubbed her eyes into focus.

  Then the two of them stood side by side, staring incredulously at the space in which they had been hiding. The room was perhaps fifteen feet square, painted gleaming white, and equipped with a stretcher, a cardiac monitor, and other sophisticated-looking medical equipment. One wall was lined with shelves of linens, bandages, medications, and solutions. Against the wall opposite the stretcher were a small desk and chair, and hanging just over the desk, a set of metal and leather limb restraints.

  "Well, I'll be damned," Nelson muttered.

  "It's like an intensive care unit."

  "Not like one, child. It is one."

  They walked about the room, looking over the equipment and checking in the wastebasket and desk drawer.

  "I'm no doctor," Nelson said, "but this stuff looks like state-of-the-art to me."

  "I agree. Look at this medication. There must be fifty different drugs here. This place frightens me."

  "I'd be worried if it didn't." Nelson held up the folders and ledger he had taken from Devine's safe. "Maybe these will give us a clue. From what I could tell, our friendly visitors found the safe, so, there's no sense going back up there. Whether they're upstairs or outside watching the house, I don't know, but I vote we try to get these out of here. Are you game?"

  "The sooner we get out of here, the better."

  They turned out the lights, tiptoed back up the stairs, and then, ever so slowly, opened the door.

  Are you sure there're no messages for me? Najarian, Eric Najarian ... No, you don't understand. I'm not registered at the hotel; Laura Enders is. But she might have left a--Look, forget it. When she does get in, just leave her a message that Eric called, and that I'll call back later.... That's Eric Na--"

  The desk clerk had hung up.

  Eric snapped the receiver back in place and wandered across the virtually deserted street. He was in one of the seedier areas of Allston, just half a block from the Sproul Court address that Anna Delacroix had written down for him.

  For nearly two hours he had been calling Laura, both at her hotel and at his apartment. From what he could determine, she had phoned him at the hospital at least twice during the day, but had left no message other than that she had called. He was beginning to worry, but not unduly so. It was only a quarter often. He would finish his business with Anna Delacroix and then go straight to the Carlisle.

  A city within the city, Allston's crowded tenements and triplexes were home to many college students, as well as to ethnic pockets of Vietnamese, Thais, Hispanics, Haitians, Pakistanis, and first-generation immigrants from various Eastern European countries.

  Sproul Court itself was a dingy, poorly lit, deadend side street, lined with wooden three-story structures, most of which had porches off the second- and third-story flats. All of the buildings, it seemed, had a shop or store of some sort on the street level The posters in the windows of the businesses suggested that the main clientele in the area was black.

  With some time to spare, Eric wandered the length of the street, past the "grocerette" and the package store, Craissou's Tailor Shop, and the Treasure Island Used Clothing Boutique. There was little that was quaint about the decaying buildings, sooty windows, and trash-cluttered alleyways, and he found it difficult to connect the street in any way with the enigmatic, exquisitely beautiful woman he was to meet there.

  Still, he felt tense and excited. If she was true to her word, Anna Delacroix would provide the proof he could use, along with the fruits of his library investigation, to convince some of the powers at the hospital--and even more importantly, to convince Reed Marshall--of the validity of his tetrodotoxin theory. He would then gain some allies, and his efforts could shift from determining whether such poisoning was possible to why it had happened ... and how.

  Although he had not yet found a specific description of the cardiographie pattern in tetrodotoxin poisoning, he had catalogued a number of accounts of the clinical presentation, all of which included the classic signs of rapidly progressive heart failure: shortness of breath; intractable coughing; cyanosis, first of the lips and fingertips, then later of the face, hands, and feet; frothy fluid building in the chest and welling into the throat; air hunger leading to panic leading to even worse air hunger; and finally somnolence, loss of consciousness, and death.

  "Dr. Eric, over here."

  Anna Delacroix was standing in the shadow of a storefront, not far from one of the few lampposts on the street. She was wearing a wide floppy-brimmed hat, and had a bandanna of some sort tied loosely about her neck.

  "Did you believe I'd come?" he asked.

>   "Of course I did. You have doubts, and you are desperate to have those doubts assuaged."

  "Can you assuage them?"

  "Not I, but there is a man inside this store who has some things to say that you will find most interesting." She gestured at the window behind her, which was filled with the trappings of a hardware or dry goods store. The uneven hand-painted letters on the glass said simply: BENET'S. Beyond the display, a dark shade was drawn. "I had to convince him that you would never divulge his name to anyone," she went on. "You will honor that pledge?"

  "Of course."

  "Good. Because as you will see, any indiscretion could cost either him or me our lives." She looked at Eric gravely.

  Anna led him into the alley, knocked once on a side door to the shop, and entered. Inside, seated on a stool, was a gaunt, willowy man with silvering hair and a face that spoke of illness or perhaps merely of a life of too much pain. He shook Eric's hand with no firmness. Anna introduced him as Titus Memmilard, her mother's brother and once the proprietor of Benet's, which was now run by his family.

  Titus mumbled a greeting. His speech was slow and thick, and his accent, which Eric assumed was Haitian, was so dense that Eric had to concentrate to understand the man's words.

  Benet's was a cluttered melange of tools, fabric, electrical supplies, canned goods, and grain. It was illuminated by a single low-wattage bulb, suspended beneath a metal reflector. Whether intended or not, the effect of the subdued lighting, the drawn shade, and the hushed tones was dramatic and mysterious.

  "You wanted proof of your suspicions," Anna said. "Well, my uncle here is that proof. Look into his eyes as you listen to us, and you will know that what we share with you is the truth. Once, he was the most vigorous and vibrant of men--a musician and a poet, a leader in our community. Now he is a shell. Our troubles began several years ago when word began spreading around our community of the arrival here from Haiti of a most powerful houngan--a priest with the power and knowledge of vodoun. The houngan, we were told, was to be known only as Mr. Dunn."

  At the mention of the name, Titus Memmilard seemed to stiffen.