Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  “So you’re adamantly opposed to what I’m doing? You think I’m misguided? Demented? Deceived?”

  “I think you’re a murderer—nothing more.”

  “Let’s put this philosophical commitment of yours to the test, shall we? After all, ‘virtue untested is not virtue at all.’”

  “Don’t tell me—you’re going to offer me a position with your company.”

  “I wouldn’t insult your intelligence. Tell me: how is Dr. McKay’s health?”

  Nick stiffened.

  “I only ask, of course, because of the seriousness of her situation. You’re aware, of course, that Riley McKay is dying.”

  Nick almost stood up. He caught himself and did his best to regain the appearance of ease. “That’s a lie,” he said.

  “I can show you the transplant list for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center if you like—a list she’s been on for more than six years now.”

  Nick paused. Leo.

  “Are you just learning this now? How very awkward. I have to say I’m a little surprised, since I understand that your relationship with Dr. McKay has become … personal.”

  Nick suddenly realized that he was slowly shaking his head. He stopped.

  “End-stage renal disease is such a sad affair. The body begins to run down, the kidneys no longer able to purify the blood of all its pollutants. Like the rivers of Pittsburgh used to be—yes, that’s a very good analogy. Choked with pollution, poisoned by toxins, life slowly ceases. What a tragedy that would be, considering what an outstanding human being Dr. McKay has become—but I don’t have to tell you that, now, do I? I’m afraid she’s in quite a predicament; she has a very rare compatibility problem that will make it virtually impossible for her to obtain her transplant in time—by conventional means.”

  “What are you asking me to do—trade someone else’s life for Riley’s?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything at all. All I’m saying is: Don’t underrate your influence. Never underestimate the power of love. And let’s not forget the influence that Riley McKay’s death would have on you. Why, you’ve just barely come out of your cocoon, haven’t you? Your new wings are barely dry. You’ve entrusted your heart to someone for the first time in—how long has it been, Dr. Polchak? And now she’s going to be taken away from you, and who knows what you’ll do then. You might very well crawl right back into that shell of yours and never come out again—and who could blame you?”

  Nick stared at Zohar’s face, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. In his ears he heard an even, buzzing sound.

  Zohar smiled. “That’s another skill of mine—I know people. When you walk into a hospital waiting room; when you interrupt a family freshly grieving over the loss of a loved one; when you have less than an hour to find a way to say to them, ‘I want your husband’s liver and pancreas—someone is waiting for them across town’; then you learn to read every facial expression, you learn every nuance of posture and voice. And when I look at you, Dr. Polchak, do you know what I see? I see fear.”

  “Funny,” Nick said, “that’s what I was about to say to you.”

  “Me? And why should I be afraid?”

  “I’d say you have plenty of reason. My friend Leo—the man you had murdered—he always left his windows open. When I found his body on the floor, I noticed mosquitoes all over his walls. I collected those mosquitoes, and I extracted the blood from their guts—blood from the man who killed my friend. When your boy Santangelo followed us to Tarentum the other night, I broke into his car and took his water bottle. I have a sample of his DNA, Dr. Zohar, and when I match it against the blood from those mosquitoes, I’ll be able to prove that he was in the room the night my friend was murdered.”

  Zohar clapped his hands in delight. “Dr. Polchak, believe me, you have my most profound respect and admiration. But let’s reexamine this little plan of yours. You say you’ll be able to prove that Mr. Santangelo was in the room the night your friend was murdered—but why shouldn’t he be? After all, you were interfering with an FBI investigation—he had contacted your little group before. And these mosquitoes of yours—can they tell you if Mr. Santangelo arrived before or after your friend expired?”

  Nick said nothing.

  “That seems a rather important point. And one other little item: have you considered that those mosquitoes may also contain samples of other DNA: your friend’s, Dr. McKay’s … even your own? Now what will the authorities make of that?”

  Nick’s thoughts raced, but they settled on nothing. His mind was a fog; Zohar’s words ricocheted inside his skull like small-caliber bullets.

  Zohar looked down at his plate again and picked up his knife and fork. “I wouldn’t worry about Mr. Santangelo if I were you; I’d worry about Dr. McKay. Because she’s going to die, Dr. Polchak, she is most certainly going to die—unless we do something about it.”

  Nick slowly rose from the table. To his surprise, his legs were unsteady. He looked down at Zohar. “One last thing: What about Sarah McKay? What’s her social drawback? Why was she chosen as one of your donors?”

  Zohar squinted at him. “Is it possible that you’re not as clever as I thought?”

  Nick stared at him blankly, his eyes darting like the fireflies on the Tarentum Plateau.

  “Well, I could talk all day,” Zohar said, “but as you can see, my lunch is growing cold. And besides—don’t you have some mosquitoes to catch?”

  Nick turned to the door and staggered out.

  Nick looked at his watch again. It was almost six o’clock now, ten minutes later than the last time he looked. He folded his arms and slumped despondently in the chrome-and-plastic chair. Across the hallway, a bulletin board was push-pinned full of departmental notices regarding fall registration, graduate teaching schedules, and a hundred other bits of minutiae relevant to graduate-student life. Nick had read all of them—several times.

  He heard a sound; he jumped up from his chair. A student rounded the corner and padded quietly down the long corridor toward Nick, thoroughly absorbed in a fall course catalog.

  “Have you seen Sanjay Patil?” Nick called out to him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Dr. Sanjay Patil—he’s a professor of molecular biology here.”

  “Sorry. I never had him.”

  “You don’t have to take a class from him to know who he is. Have you seen him? I’m trying to locate him.”

  “Have you tried his office?”

  Nick slumped down on the chair again and rocked back against the wall. “Try his office—now, why didn’t I think of that? Look in the most obvious place first! And here I picked the most obscure place I could think of, just hoping he might wander by. Thank heaven you happened by—I might have been here all week.”

  The student avoided eye contact as he passed by.

  Nick glanced at his watch. He bolted out of his chair again, sending it clattering across the linoleum floor. He turned to the door beside him and tried the knob; it was locked, just as it was the last six times he tried it. He cupped his hands and peered through the glass into the darkened room. The laboratory was a molecular biologist’s toyland, complete with an ultracentrifuge, an electron microscope, a PhosphorImager, an X-ray diffractometer, and two state-of-the-art Applied Biosystems PRISM 377 DNA sequencers. The lab had everything a researcher could ever want—except for one critical, missing element: Dr. Sanjay Patil.

  Nick began to pace the long corridor, his footsteps echoing behind him in the evening stillness. He thought again about Julian Zohar’s words. Was it true? Was Riley really dying of her kidney disease? Would Leo purposely remove her name from UPMC’s transplant waiting list, hiding the truth from him? He thought about Leo, and he knew instantly that he would. He would have done it to protect Riley—he would have done it to protect him. That was Leo—always trying to protect someone, but in his trusting and unsuspecting manner, unable to protect himself.

  Riley. Is that what she tried to tell him last night? Is that what she
meant when she said, “There’s something you don’t know about me”? Is that why she constantly pulled away from him, half-surrendering and half-resisting his advances? But why didn’t she tell him long ago? Why didn’t she trust him with this? Did she think he’d run away, refusing to get involved with a doomed woman? Or maybe she thought he would love her all the more—like a martyr—out of pity—as a service. Somewhere in his mind, a light began to dimly glow. He remembered something Leo used to say: “The heart has reasons that the mind knows nothing of.” Zohar was right: Nick had a remarkable facility for making connections—but not connections like this.

  Was it true what Zohar said—that Riley would never find a kidney through the official allocation system? “She is most certainly going to die,” he said, “unless we do something about it.” He felt a bead of cold sweat run down his back. He had been asked to make a deal with the devil himself—hadn’t he? “I’m not asking you to do anything,” Zohar said—but wasn’t he? The devil never asks, Nick thought; he just reaches into your mind and creates fear or panic or desperation, and before you know it, the deal is done.

  For the last four hours Nick had visited a very dark place within himself—a place he barely knew existed. Could he sit idly by and watch Riley die, her precious lifeblood slogging to a standstill like some toxic river? Nick had risked his own life a hundred times, but the life of someone else—the life of someone he loved—that was a different matter. Would he do nothing to save her? Wasn’t her life worth more than that of some despicable wife-abuser or a hopeless gutter bum? Wasn’t her life worth more than … anything? “Let’s test this philosophical commitment of yours,” Zohar said. Nick shivered; the stench of sulfur was all over him.

  And what if she did die? What then? Zohar’s words flew in his face like a spray of acid. “She’s going to be taken away from you, and who knows what you’ll do then? You might very well crawl back into that shell of yours and never come out again.” Did Zohar really know what was in Nick’s heart? Had Nick become that obvious, that transparent? Or were his insights just an educated guess by a master manipulator, an off-the-cuff cold reading by the king of all con men? It didn’t matter; either way, his words hit way too close to home.

  Nick felt like an embarrassed child exposed in some shameful misdeed. He felt ravaged, he felt violated. He felt; that was the problem. For the first time in years he had opened his heart, and where had it got him? His work was sloppy, his thinking muddled. He had been a step behind Zohar from the very beginning—no, not a step, a mile. Now here he was to drop off Santangelo’s DNA, the last of his physical evidence—and was it all for nothing? He tried to remember Zohar’s words. Did Santangelo have a perfect excuse for being there that night? Could he claim that he visited Leo before the murder—could the blood from the mosquitoes prove nothing more? Worst of all, could Leo’s death be blamed on Nick himself? He tried to focus his mind; he tried to sort out all the complexities of these options. But he was so tired, and he was in so much pain—more pain than he had felt in years. All he could do was push on and hope to somehow sort it all out along the way.

  He heard footsteps from the opposite end of the hallway. He turned to see Sanjay Patil rounding the corner toward him. “Nick,” he said simply.

  “Where have you been?” Nick shouted. “I’ve looked everywhere for you—I’ve been waiting for hours!”

  “Let me see.” Sanjay handed his attaché case to Nick, who held it out for him like a tray. He flipped the brass latches, lifted the lid slightly, and peeked inside. “There it is—yes, I thought so—I have a life.” He closed the lid and took the attaché back again. “You should get one yourself,” he said. “I recommend it highly.” He turned to the laboratory door and searched for his keys.

  “Sanjay, this is a matter of life or death!”

  “That is what your messages said—all of them—the ones you left at my office and on my pager and on my e-mail and with my research assistant and the four you left on my answering machine at home.”

  “Where have you been all day?”

  “Have you ever heard of a day off? It is a fascinating new concept introduced to the Western world sometime in the last three millennia.”

  “I thought you’d come in some time today.”

  “Ah. You see, you misunderstand the concept of the day off. The idea is to not come in—to not work at all, all day long. A radical idea, is it not?” He pushed open the door and looked at Nick. “Do you know that you filled my answering machine with your messages? My wife called. She tried to leave me a message, a reminder to pick up my daughter from cello practice. But she could not, because of all your messages.”

  “So your daughter got an extra hour of cello practice.”

  “Two hours.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s how you get to Carnegie Hall.”

  Sanjay squinted at him. “What is my daughter’s name?”

  “What?”

  “My daughter—what is her name? What is my wife’s name?”

  “Mrs. Patil?”

  “You see? That is the problem with you, Nick Polchak. Everything is work for you—everything is life or death. You will never respect the lives of other people until you get a life of your own.”

  “Sanjay, I’m trying to get a life of my own—but I’m about to lose it if you don’t help me.”

  Sanjay studied his face. “Truly? Life or death?”

  “Truly.”

  He stepped into the lab and flipped on the light switch. Bank after bank of fluorescents hummed on, flooding the room in blue white light. Nick picked up the water bottle from the floor beside his chair and followed.

  “I have the results for you,” Sanjay said. “We were able to identify four separate DNA sequences from the mosquitoes you captured.”

  “Great. Now I want you to do a sequence on this.” He handed him the water bottle.

  “What is this?”

  “It should contain trace amounts of saliva. I want you to separate it in your centrifuge and then run it through one of your sequencers. I’m looking for a match with one of the four DNA samples from the mosquitoes.”

  Sanjay frowned. “But we already have a match.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You brought me the mosquitoes preserved in alcohol, sealed in a plastic bag—yes? You said you were searching for a match.”

  “That’s right—a match with this.”

  “I assumed you had given me all your samples. We already found your match.”

  Now Nick looked confused. “A match with what?”

  Sanjay turned to the counter and picked up the Ziploc bag. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, opened the bag, and carefully removed a single blond hair.

  “With this,” he said. “There were four of them in the bag with the specimen jar.”

  Nick turned for the door and ran.

  You throw like a girl,” Sarah said. “Watch me.”

  She sailed the walnut-sized rock toward the side of the building; it struck the corrugated siding with a metallic clack just inches from the single remaining windowpane. They stood in the road beside the Mencken Breaker, the multitiered structure once responsible for crushing large, sooty lumps of anthracite into smaller, cleaner nuggets. True to its name, at any given time half the windows in the Breaker were broken. Now, years after the mine had been abandoned and the building closed down, just a single piece of glass remained. Sarah reached down for another stone.

  “Let it be,” Riley said. “If it’s lasted this long, maybe it deserves to live.”

  Daylight was almost gone now. The bony pile, hiding the sun behind its jagged crest, cast a premature gloom across the roadway. They started back toward home, past the old barracks where the single miners once lived, taking the same path their father had taken ten thousand times on his way home from the Mencken Mine. Riley stared at the gravel path, imagining that she was placing her feet in exactly the same ruts and furrows that her father once followed. Ruts and furrows—that
’s what a coal town was made out of—and once in them, it was almost impossible to escape.

  “Remember summer mornings?” Sarah said. “If you slept with the windows open, you woke up with a ring of soot around your nose.”

  Riley nodded.

  “And the water in the sink always had a layer of coal dust on it. Remember that?”

  Riley said nothing. Sarah frowned.

  “And the mountain lions—they used to sweep down from the hillsides and carry off the small children for dinner.”

  Riley nodded, then stopped abruptly. “What children?”

  “Where are you? You haven’t been paying attention all day.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  Sarah shook her head. “You always were a worrier.”

  “It’s part of being a big sister. It comes with the territory.”

  “No, it’s part of being a mom—that came with the territory too, didn’t it? But you’re not my mom, Riley—you never were.”

  Riley hooked her arm through Sarah’s. “Can’t a girl look out for her baby sister?”

  “I’m not your baby sister anymore; I should be looking out for you now.”

  “For me? Why?”

  “Well, let’s see. Hmm. That’s a tough one. Wait—I know. How about the fact that you’re dying, and I’m not?”

  Riley dropped her arm. “I’m not dying,” she said.

  “C’mon, Riley, get real. Have you heard anything from UPMC Presby?”

  “You know I haven’t. The odds are a million to one.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? It’s called a waiting list, Sarah—there’s a reason for that.”

  They walked in silence for the next few minutes.

  “I like Nick,” Sarah said.

  “Really? What do you like about him?”

  “He’s intense. Especially those eyes of his—they’re spooky.”

  “I like them. When he really looks at you …”

  Sarah nodded. “I think Nick’s the best one you’ve brought home in a long time. Do you love him?”