Side Effects (1984)

by Palmer, Michael

“Why don’t we save explanations, Dr. Becker, for a time after our new business arrangement has been consummated.”

  “I need time to think.”

  “Take it. Take as much as you need up to, say, twenty-four hours.”

  “The intrinsic problems of the hormone may be insurmountable.”

  “A chance I will take. You owe me this. For the troubles you have caused at our testing facility, you owe me. In fact, there is something else you owe me as well.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wish to know the individual at the Omnicenter who has been helping you with your work.”

  Becker started to protest that there was no such person, but decided against testing the man’s patience. In less than twelve hours a messenger would deliver the Estronate paper and slides to The New England Journal of Medicine, making the hormone, in essence, public domain. He had already decided that exposure of his true identity and the risk of spending what little was left of his life in prison was a small price to pay for immortality. “Forty-eight hours,” he said.

  Redding hesitated. “Very well, then,” he said finally. “Forty-eight hours it will be. You have the number. I shall expect to hear from you within two days. The Estronate work and the name of your associate. Good-bye.” He hung UP.

  “Good-bye,” Becker said to the dial tone. As he drew the receiver from his ear, he heard a faint but definite click. The sound sent fear stabbing beneath his breastbone. Someone, almost certainly William, was on the downstairs extension. How long? How long had he been there?

  In the cluttered semidarkness of his study, Willi Becker strained his compromised hearing. For a time, there was only silence. Perhaps, he thought, there hadn’t been a click at all. Then he heard the unmistakable tread of footsteps on the stairs.

  “William?” Again there was silence. “William?”

  “Yes, Father, it is.” Zimmermann appeared suddenly in the doorway and stood, arms folded, looking placidly across at him.

  “You … ah … you surprised me. How long have you been in the house?”

  “Long enough.” Zimmermann strode to the bookcase and poured himself a drink. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. Light from the gooseneck reading lamp sparked off the heavy diamond ring on the small finger of his left hand and highlighted the sheen on his black Italian-cut loafers.

  “You were listening in on my conversation, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, perhaps.” Zimmermann snapped a wooden swizzle stick in two and used one edge to clean beneath his nails.

  “Listening was a rude thing to do.”

  “Me, rude? Why, Father …”

  “Well, if you heard, you heard. It really makes no difference.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just how long were you listening in?”

  Zimmermann didn’t answer. Instead, he walked to the printer, picked up the Estronate manuscript, and turned it from one side to the other, appraisingly. “A half million dollars and then some. It would seem there is some truth about good things coming in small packages.”

  “Give me that.” Becker was too weak, too depleted by the drugs, even to rise.

  Zimmermann ignored him. “Wilhelm W. Becker, MD, PhD,” he read. “So that’s who my father is.”

  “Please, William.”

  “How good it is to learn that the man John Ferguson, who so ignored and abused my mother all those years, was not my father. The Serpent of Ravensbrück. That’s my real father.”

  “I never abused her. I did what I had to do.”

  “Father, please. She knew that you could have come home much more often and didn’t. She knew about your women, your countless women. She knew that neither of us would ever mean anything to you compared to your precious research.”

  Becker stared at his son with wide, bloodshot eyes. “You hate me, don’t you?” There was incredulity in his voice.

  “Not really. The truth is, I don’t feel much for you one way or the other.”

  “But I was behind you all the way. My money sent you through school. Your position at the Omnicenter, how do you think that came about? Do you think Harold French just happened to drown accidentally at the moment you were experienced enough to take over for him? It was me!” Becker’s hoarse, muddy voice had become barely audible. “If you care so little about me, William, then why have you helped me in my work all these years? Why?”

  Zimmermann gazed blandly at his father. “Because of your connections, of course. Your friend Redding triples what the hospital pays me. You suggested my name, and he arranged for me to get my professorship. I know he did.”

  “He got you the position on my say-so, and he can have it taken from you the same way.”

  “Can he, now.” Zimmermann held up the Estronate manuscript. “You lied to him. You told him there were still flaws in the work. Why? Are you thinking that once he finds out you have sent this off for publication, he will just walk away and leave us alone? Do you think he won’t find out who I am? What I have been helping you do behind his back? Do you?” He was screaming. “Well, I tell you right here and now, Father, this is mine. I have paid for it over the years with countless humiliations. Cyrus Redding will have his Estronate, and I shall have my proper legacy.”

  “No!” Even as he shouted the word, Willi Becker felt the tearing pain in his left chest. His heart, weakened by disease, and sorely compromised by amphetamines, pounded mercilessly and irregularly. “My oxygen,” he rasped. “In the bedroom. Oxygen and nitroglycerine.” The study was beginning a nauseating spin.

  For the first time, William Zimmermann smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t hear you, Father,” he said, benevolently. “Could you please speak up a bit?”

  “Will … iam … please …” Becker’s final words were muffled by the gurgle of fluid bubbling up from his lungs, and vomitus welling from his stomach. He clawed impotently in the direction of his son and then toppled over onto the rug, his face awash in the products of his own death.

  Stepping carefully around his father’s corpse, Zimmermann slipped the Estronate paper into a large envelope; then he removed the disc from the word processor and dropped it in as well. Next he copied a number from the leather-bound address book buried under some papers on one corner of the desk. Finally, he stacked the three worn looseleaf notebooks containing the Estronate data and tucked them under his arm. He would phone Cyrus Redding from the extension downstairs.

  The pharmaceutical magnate evinced little surprise at Zimmermann’s call or at the rapid turn of events in Newton. Instead, he listened patiently to the details of Willi Becker’s life as the man’s son knew them.

  “Dr. Zimmermann,” he said finally, “let us stop here to be certain I fully understand. Your father, when he was supervising construction of the Omnicenter, secretly had a laboratory built for himself in the subbasement?”

  “Correct,” Zimmermann said. “On the blueprints it is drawn as some sort of dead storage area, I think.”

  “And the only way to get into the laboratory is through an electronic security system?”

  “The lock is hidden and coded electronically. The door is concealed behind a set of shelves.”

  “Does anyone besides you have the combination?”

  “No. At least not as far as I know.”

  “Remarkable. Dr. Zimmermann, your father was a most brilliant man.”

  “My father is dead,” Zimmermann said coolly.

  “Yes,” Redding said. “Yes, he is. Tell me, this bleeding problem, it has been eliminated?”

  “Father modified his synthesis over a year ago. It was taking from six to eighteen months after treatment for the bleeding problem to develop. The three patients you know about were all treated a year ago last July. There have, to our knowledge, been no new cases since. Keep in mind, too, that there weren’t that many to begin with. And most of those were mild.”

  “Yes, I understand. It is remarkable to me that you were able to insert your testing program into Carl Horner’s computer system without his e
ver knowing.”

  “As you said, Mr. Redding, my father was a brilliant man.”

  “Yes. Well, then, I suppose we two should explore the possibility of a new partnership.”

  “The terms you laid out for my father are quite acceptable to me. I have the manuscript and the notebooks. Since the work is already completed, I would be willing to turn them over to you, no further questions asked, for the amount you promised him.”

  “That is a lot of money, Doctor.”

  “The amazing thing is that until I overheard your conversation with my father, I had not fully appreciated the valuable potential of the hormone.” Zimmermann could barely keep from laughing out loud at his good fortune.

  “Are you a biochemist, Doctor?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “In that case, I should like to reserve my final offer until my own biochemist has had the chance to review the material, to see the laboratory, and to take himself through the process of synthesizing the hormone.”

  “When?”

  “Why not tomorrow? Dr. Paquette, whom you know, will meet you at your office at, say, seven o’clock tomorrow night. My man Nunes will accompany him and will have the authority and the money to consummate our agreement if Dr. Paquette is totally satisfied with what he sees.”

  “Sounds fine. I’ll make certain the side door to the Omnicenter is left open.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Dr. Zimmermann. Paquette has keys.”

  “All right, then, seven o’clock.… Was there something else?”

  “As a matter of fact, Dr. Zimmermann, there is. It’s this whole business with the Omnicenter and that pathologist.”

  “You mean Bennett?”

  “She has proven a very resilient young woman. Do you believe she was convinced by her conversation with our man at the Ashburton Foundation?”

  “No. Not completely. She said she was going to continue investigating. The woman currently hospitalized here with complications from Estronate treatment is a close friend of hers.”

  “I see. You know, Doctor, none of this would have happened if you and your father hadn’t conducted your work so recklessly and independently.” His voice had a chilling edge. “Don’t you feel a responsibility to this company for what you have done?”

  “Responsibility?”

  “If we are to have a partnership, I should like to know that the millions I have spent on the Omnicenter will not be lost because we were unable to neutralize one woman.”

  “But she has been neutralized. A serious mistake on a pathology specimen. She’s been put on leave by her department head. Isn’t that enough to discredit her?”

  “I am no longer speaking of discrediting her, my friend. I am speaking of stopping her. You heard my conversation with your father. You know the importance of keeping Estronate a secret. It has been bad enough that Dr. Bennett is threatening, by her doggedness, to bring the Omnicenter tumbling down about our ears. If she uncovers Estronate, we stand to lose much, much more.”

  “I’ll see to it that won’t happen.”

  “Excellent. But remember, I don’t handle disappointment well. Until tomorrow, then, Doctor.”

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  William Zimmermann made a final inspection of the house, taking pains to wipe off anything he had touched. The precaution was, in all likelihood, unnecessary. The houseboy was due in at eight in the morning, and the death he would discover upstairs would certainly appear due to natural causes.

  As he slipped out the back door of his father’s house, a fortune in notebooks and computer printouts under his arm, Zimmermann was thinking about Kate Bennett.

  The nightmare was a juggernaut, more pervasive, more oppressive it seemed with each passing hour. Its setting had changed from the clutter of her office to the deep-piled, fire-warmed opulence of Win Samuels’s study, but for Kate Bennett, the change meant only more confusion, more humiliation, more doubt.

  I know what it looks like. I know what it sounds like. But it isn’t true.… I don’t know who did it.… I don’t know.… Dammit all, I just don’t know.

  Jared’s return earlier in the evening had started on a positive note—an emotional hug and their first kiss in nearly a week. For a time, as they weaved their way through the crowds to the baggage area, he seemed unable to keep his hands or his lips off her. It seemed he was reveling in the freedom of at last truly acknowledging his love for her. I accept you, regardless of what you are involved in, regardless of what the impact might be on me. I accept you because I believe in you. I accept you because I love you.

  But as she shared her nightmare with him, she could feel him pulling back, sense his enthusiasm erode. It showed first in his eyes, then in his voice, and finally in his touch. He was trying, Kate knew, perhaps even trying his best. But she also knew that confusion and doubt were taking their toll. Why would a company as large as Redding Pharmaceuticals do the things of which she was accusing them? The Ashburton Foundation had an impeccable reputation. What evidence was there that they were frauds? Why would anyone do something as horrible as switching biopsies? How did they do it? Weren’t there any records of the tests she had run at the state lab? How did the letter about Bobby Geary fit in with all this?

  I know what it looks like. I know what it sounds like. But it isn’t true.

  With each why, with each I don’t know, Kate felt Jared drifting further and further into her nightmare. By the time the subject of his father and sister came up, she was feeling isolated, as stifled as before, perhaps more so. They were nearly halfway home to Essex.

  “That is absolutely incredible,” Jared had said, swinging sharply into the breakdown lane and jamming to a stop. “I … I don’t believe it.” It was the first time since his return that he had said those words. “After all these years, why wouldn’t he tell me my sister was alive?”

  “I don’t know.” The phrase reverberated in her mind. “Perhaps he was trying to spare you the ugliness.”

  “That makes no sense. You say he took you to this institution to convince you to turn down the position at Metro and concentrate on having babies?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Jared shook his head. “Let me be sure I have this straight. My father, who has never communicated all that well with my wife to begin with, sends me out of town so that he can take her to an institution in the middle of nowhere and introduce her to the sister he had led me to believe died thirty-odd years ago. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Jared,” she said, her voice beginning to quaver, “nothing has made sense to me for days. All I can do is tell the truth.”

  “Well, if that’s the case,” he said finally, “I think I’d like to find out first hand why my father has been holding out on me.”

  “Couldn’t we at least wait until—”

  “No! I can’t think of a damn thing to do about Bobby Geary or the Omnicenter or the Ashburton Foundation or the runaway technician or the goddamn breast biopsies, but I sure as hell can do something about my father.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he had swung off and under the highway and had screeched back onto the southbound lane, headed for Boston.

  Now, in the uncomfortably warm study, Kate sat by a hundred-and-thirty-year-old leaded glass window, watching the fairyland Christmas lights of Louisburg Square and listening to her husband and her father-in-law argue over whether she was a liar, a woman in desperate need of professional help, or some combination of the two. Jared, in all fairness, was doing his best to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it had, purely and simply, come down to her word against his father’s. When taken with the other issues, the other confusions she had regaled him with since his landing at Logan, it was not hard to understand why he was having difficulty taking her side.

  “Once again, Jared,” Win Samuels said with authoritative calm, “we dined together—Jocelyn’s special duck. After dinner we talked. Then we went for a long drive in the country. I hadn’t been out of the house all
day and was getting a severe case of cabin fever. We did stop at the Stonefield School; I’m on the board of trustees there. But I assure you, Son, our visit was quite spur of the moment. We were only a few miles from the school when I remembered a set of papers in the back seat that I was planning on mailing off tomorrow to Gus Leggatt, the school administrator. While we were there, we did look in on some of the children. Largely because of our visit, on the way home I was able to share my fears with Kate about what happens to the rate of birth defects in children of older mothers. Kate explained the advances in amniocentesis to me; facts, I might add, that I found quite reassuring. I mentioned your sister, certainly, but I never implied she was alive. I’m sorry, Jared. And I am sorry for you, too, Kate.” He looked at her levelly. “You’ve been under a great deal of pressure. Perhaps … a rest, some time off.”

  Time off. Kate sighed. Winfield had no way of knowing Stan Willoughby had already seen to that. She rose slowly, and crossed to Jared. “Stonefield School is listed in information,” she said wearily. “Broderick, Massachusetts. If the snow doesn’t get any worse, I can drive us there in forty-five minutes to an hour. That should settle this once and for all.”

  “Do you want to come with us, Dad?” Jared asked.

  “There is no reason to go anyplace,” Win Samuels said simply. “Kate, Jared’s sister had severe birth defects and died exactly when he thinks she did, thirty years ago. Perhaps you had a dream of some sort. Strands of fantasy woven into reality. It happens, especially when one has been under an inordinate amount of stress such as you—”

  “It is not stress! It is not stress, it is not a dream, it is not the desperate lie of a desperate woman, it is not … insanity.” She confronted him, her eyes locked on his. Samuels held his ground, his face an expressionless mask. “It is the truth. The truth! I don’t know why you are doing this, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish. But I do know one thing. I’m not going to break. You manipulate the people in your life like they were pieces on some some enormous game board. Jocelyn to king’s knight four, Jared to queen three. Not your turn? Well you’ll just throw in a few thousand dollars and make it your turn.”