Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  We’d bolstered his blood sugar, dosed him with aspirin, and loaded him with caffeine until his eyes should have looked like spinning pinwheels. It was not the most politically correct way of dealing with a tiresome ex-husband, I will grant you. But it worked, which most of the time was all I cared about.

  Now, though, Victor’s mood was emphatically not brightening. Meanwhile, the amount of money I had invested in him at the moment meant that if he was in trouble, I was, too.

  “You did leave the tie in the bar, didn’t you?” I asked. “I mean, Ted Armstrong will be able to say so.”

  “N-not exactly.” All he needed was a cartoon cloudburst over his head. “I stuffed it in my pocket. But it wasn’t there when I got home. Maybe it fell out, when I pulled out some hand wipes. I was on Water Street.”

  Even that wasn’t enough to make him look as unhappy as he did. “So,” I pursued, “what’s the rest of the problem?”

  He looked distractedly at me, which was when I really began feeling nervous; over the years I have come to understand that if Victor doesn’t have a malicious gleam in his eye, something worse than Sam’s coffee is brewing.

  “Tate,” he replied. “After you left the restaurant. He came in again, said he wanted to have our conversation.”

  Uh-oh. “And did you?”

  He nodded morosely. “Classic textbook case. I’d never met a real sociopath before.”

  “But you had met him before,” Ellie pointed out. “He said he wanted to talk with you again. Meaning, I assume, that you and he had spoken earlier.”

  He bridled instantly. “Well, yes, but—look, I don’t want to tell you about it at all, if all you’re going to do is try to confuse me.”

  That’s Victor: elbow-deep in somebody else’s cranium, he’s a model of serenity. Anywhere else he’s a basket case, which was why I’d wanted him thoroughly involved in a medical enterprise: it was the only way to make him tolerable.

  “Calm down,” I told him. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “That they’re going to think I did it,” he blurted.

  Which was not what I wanted to hear. I stared at him, not quite believing that I had. “Victor, what are you talking about?”

  “Maybe not the guy with the ear,” he went on, “although that’s bad enough, and after all, it was my tie they found in his throat. But with him, I didn’t have any motive.”

  And with Tate he did, he seemed to be implying. Oh, this was just fabulous. He pressed his hands to his head. “The police are probably on their way here right now, and—”

  “Victor,” I cut in. “Just tell us what he said to you after we left. What did he want to talk with you about?”

  Then Victor uttered the word that froze my heart.

  “Blackmail,” he whispered. I sat down.

  “Tate was blackmailing me,” he confessed, “or anyway he was about to. And everybody in the bar last night knew it.”

  Worse and worse. “How did they know?”

  He shrugged miserably. “He said I was going to hire him: big salary, unspecified duties. Said he’d been digging into what he called my dark past, and that I’d have to pay him money for it.”

  “He was just bluffing,” I said flatly. “I hope you told him to walk east till his hat floated.”

  Another dark thought struck me. “You didn’t, though, did you? Tell him to get lost.”

  “Not exactly,” Victor replied very unhappily. “He knew…”

  “About the malpractice lawsuit,” I finished for him.

  Of course; nothing else could take the wind out of Victor’s sails so thoroughly.

  Victor nodded. “Yeah, that,” he uttered defeatedly.

  It was what I’d been fearing, telling myself it couldn’t be. Because for one thing, how could Tate know? There hadn’t been much publicity around here, although it had been in the papers briefly in the city. It had been a fiasco, but only for Victor, and of course for the patient whose death started it all in the first place, in New York.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Victor protested for perhaps the millionth time. “It was emergency surgery. His prospects for surviving were minuscule. And,” he finished simply, “he didn’t.”

  Which was all true, but afterward the patient’s family had raised a ruckus. And Victor, while apparently blameless in the event, was staggeringly vulnerable. Insurance investigators began looking into his personal idiosyncrasies, many of whom were young and female, some of whom had interesting habits of their own.

  It wasn’t pertinent, but it could be made to look absolutely awful. Eventually, the hospital’s counsel advised the institution to settle the lawsuit: to admit, tacitly, that Victor had indeed done something improper during the surgery. Whereupon, rather than agree to any such thing, Victor had quit.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked, crossing to the window.

  With Victor at the surgical helm, a trauma-care center for Eastport had seemed like a good idea. It would keep him busy at the one thing he was very good at, and benefit the whole region. Furthermore, emergency care has two fine attributes, financially speaking:

  First, people need it. And second, insurance companies tend to pay for it. Slow going at first, maybe, but the Mayo Clinic was out in the boondocks when it got started, too. Down the line, the thing could be a gold mine.

  Only, maybe not anymore. “When he threatened to blackmail you,” I went on, “and you let him know he could get away with it by not laughing in his face the way any sane person would have done, what did you say?”

  I didn’t want to think yet about what I might have to do to replace the money I’d put into in Victor’s trauma center start-up, much of it already spent, if it turned out my investment was irretrievable. But that I would need to replace it was a flat-out certainty.

  I was financially well fixed, all right. But not that well fixed. And now there was that awful word: motive.

  Victor frowned down at his hands, which were scrubbed clean as always. It struck me then that, at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, he’d already showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes: white shirt, navy slacks. Even his prissy little oxblood loafers with the tassels on them looked professionally polished.

  All normal for Victor. But…

  “Well,” he admitted, “I’d had a few drinks. And the look on his face, like he was daring me to do something. Like he thought I wouldn’t be able to. It … well, it got to me, that’s all.”

  Bootsteps sounded on the porch, and Bob Arnold came in. But the words were already coming out of Victor’s mouth.

  “Reuben’s mistake,” he rushed on, “was letting himself get backed into a corner, at the end of the bar. So when I walked up to him, he had nowhere to go.”

  “Victor,” I said warningly, but he didn’t hear me.

  “I reached for him.” Victor held up his hands, to show how he’d done it. They were surprisingly large, capable-looking hands with long, muscular fingers.

  “I put,” Victor went on, “both of them on his throat, and I located his carotid arteries. And I pressed them, so he’d know I could find them again if I needed to.”

  I waited hopefully for Arnold to cut in and ask what had happened next. But he didn’t, confirming my suspicion that he already had more on Victor than even Victor’s big mouth had given him.

  Just then Sam burst in. “Mom, you won’t believe—”

  He stopped. “Or maybe you will. You okay, Dad?”

  “I’m fine, Sam,” Victor said. “I think Arnold has something to say to me, though. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Arnold opened the small paper sack he was carrying. Inside was a zip-lock plastic bag. “Recognize this?”

  Victor peered studiously at it. “Yes, I do. It’s my scalpel. From my collection of historical items. How do you happen to have it?”

  You had to hand it to the guy. He’d known Arnold was coming, and he’d been home to clean up and change clothes, so he must have known the scalpel was missin
g; that collection was his most prized possession. At that point, I’d have been falling apart.

  “Found it at the murder of a guy named Reuben Tate,” Arnold said. “Who I understand you had a few words with at the Mexican place last night.”

  “That’s right. This,” Victor went on, indicating the blood-caked object in the plastic bag, “is the most valuable of my items. Dr. Cushing, the pioneer neurosurgeon, used it himself.”

  Suddenly it all seemed to come over him, all he had been saying, and what Arnold was doing here. But even then he didn’t panic.

  “It would be,” he finished, “a pity to lose this instrument. Do try to see that it’s well taken care of, won’t you?” he asked Arnold respectfully.

  That’s the other thing about Victor: he is capable of these small instances of grace, during which you just can’t figure out how he manages to be such a jerk the rest of the time.

  Arnold sighed heavily. “Dr. Tiptree, I’m placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”

  And so on. When Arnold finished, Victor got up and pushed his chair in carefully. “I’ll be calling an attorney, Jacobia. I’ll put the house up if it comes to a question of bail.”

  He didn’t know that in Maine there is, for all practical purposes, no bail on a murder charge. But I nodded; it didn’t seem like a useful thing to tell him, just at the moment.

  “I’ll watch your place till you get home, Dad,” Sam said, his face full of shock, and Victor smiled encouragingly at him.

  “Good boy. I’ll be back soon, though. Don’t worry about me.”

  Then without further ado he went out ahead of Arnold, who even after informing Victor of his rights hadn’t asked where he’d been the night before, once he’d departed the Mexican restaurant.

  So I believed that Arnold must already know.

  And unfortunately, I was correct.

  After which everything got worse.

  A lot worse. “Dad didn’t come home at all last night,” Sam said.

  It was a couple of hours after Victor had gone, and we were crouched in the back hall, applying steel wool to the old cast-iron radiator that has lurked there since the house got central heating, nearly a hundred years ago. Sam had gone all over the scabrous, red-enameled surface—what had someone been thinking?—with a paint scraper; afterward we would vacuum and wipe it thoroughly, preparatory to painting it.

  “I got in, and he wasn’t there,” Sam went on. “So I thought he might be out looking for me. You know how he gets sometimes, like he can’t think straight and he goes off half-cocked.”

  Oh, did I ever. I rubbed a patch of red enamel from one of the delicate fern patterns cast into the antique radiator iron.

  This, by the way, is not the method the old-house manuals tell you to follow when you are repainting antique radiators. Their method consists of:

  Removing the radiators; I mean, actually physically taking them out of the house.

  Hiring a professional to sandblast them down to the bare metal.

  Spray painting the radiators, keeping in mind that silver or gold paint inhibits heat radiation, and

  Hooking the radiators back up to your heating system, again with professional assistance.

  This advice has the marvelous advantage of requiring other people to do most of the heavy work for you. But it ignores several crucial real-world facts about old radiators, such as their weight, fragility, and rusted-solid connections to your household plumbing. Following the old-house manual’s advice on the topic, in other words, can be a quick route to radiator hell.

  On the other hand, stripping one slowly is a fine way to let your emotional engines idle while you are trying to figure out what to do next.

  “So then what happened?” Ellie prompted Sam gently.

  She’d been going around with the vacuum cleaner, trying to get the little chips of red enamel up off the floor before Monday decided that they were edible.

  Sam sighed, moving the steel-wool pad. “So I went looking for him. By then it was way after midnight.”

  Coming in to find Bob Arnold in the process of arresting his father, Sam had been carrying some things he and Tommy had spent the previous afternoon fooling around with. Now they lay on the kitchen table, forgotten: a pocket-sized, U.S. Coast Guard-issue Morse code instruction book bound in blue imitation leather, and a flat, 1950s-era cardboard box, its brightly illustrated cover proclaiming that it contained a genuine Ouija.

  “Because you know Dad,” Sam continued. “He wouldn’t’ve tried going to Tommy’s, if he wanted me, or called there. It would have been, like, too obvious.”

  The Ouija board gave me an uneasy feeling. But I figured that with all that was going on now, Sam might forget about the dratted thing.

  “Anyway, I got my bike, rode downtown, out to South End, and back again on County Road. But no Dad. So then I started getting worried about him. I went back and sat around awhile waiting for him.”

  “Nothing on his answering machine, or anything like that?”

  He shook his head, working his way along the side of the old radiator a final time with the pad of steel wool.

  “Nope. I thought of that. You know, that maybe he went out for some other reason, somebody’d called him. Then I went through the house to see whether I could figure out what he’d been doing before he left.”

  “And?” I ran my hand over the now-smooth antique heating fixture. Before there were furnaces, my old house had been heated with stoves, and originally with open fireplaces; the chimneys remain, and when the wind blows hard they howl like a chorus of demented banshees, one in each room.

  “And it turned out that while I’d been out hunting for him, he must have been back. Because when I first came home—”

  Sam glanced at me; there had been, since Victor’s arrival in town, a problem in the definition of just what constituted Sam’s home: my house, or Victor’s? In the end, Sam had decided on both, but he tried not to rub my nose in it.

  “When I first went in,” he rephrased smoothly, “I looked in his study. Everything in there was neat and normal like always.”

  A few feet away, Ellie had been gazing out the kitchen window while she listened, watching the purple grackles moving en masse across the lawn, a glossy regiment. Now she looked over alertly.

  “And the second time?”

  “He’d been there, in a hurry,” Sam said. “Or I thought he had. His desk drawer was open, and the cabinet where he keeps the old instruments, the antique things from his history collection. That was open, too, and it didn’t look so perfect to me, lined up all careful the way he always keeps his stuff.”

  Victor had bone saws, trephines, gadgets that looked like nutpicks, all of it once the absolute height of high-tech medical equipment; he had collected such things since he was a medical student, buying them at auctions or from private estate sales.

  “Like somebody,” Sam finished, “had been in there, looking for something. But I just assumed it must have been Dad. Because who else?”

  Deliberately, Ellie took a mixing bowl out of the cabinet and got out the ingredients she needed for baking cream scones. She thinks best, she always says, when she is cooking.

  “Were the doors locked? Of his house, I mean?” She knew Sam had keys.

  “Nah.” Sam shook his head. “He does it like everybody else around here does now, locks when he goes to bed. Otherwise—”

  He made a frittering gesture with his hands, indicating the general daytime attitude to locking up in Eastport. People walk in and leave things on hall tables all the time: baked goods, jars of homemade marmalade, borrowed Tupperware.

  “It’s mostly,” Sam summed up, “wide open.”

  Which, with a valuable historical collection in the place, I thought was pretty silly. Victor didn’t even lend Tupperware, because he didn’t own any; too hard to sterilize properly. But he had probably enjoyed the idea of not locking and had gone overboard with it.

  Ellie put on my green plaid
apron with the moose-pattern trimmings and the moose heads chain-stitched in green embroidery floss. In it, I always resembled the animal depicted upon it, but she looked fetching.

  “So you never did find out where your father was, or what he was doing?” she asked.

  Sam finished wiping the radiator, went into the kitchen, and sat at the kitchen table. “Well, not what he was doing,” he said reluctantly. He began turning the Morse book around and around on the table.

  “But you know where he was?” I put in worriedly.

  Because if he did know and hadn’t said so, it must have been somewhere—

  “In the cemetery,” Sam said miserably.

  —bad.

  He sighed again. “I went out on my bike twice, see. And the second time, I rode through Hillside Cemetery. Dad was on one of the benches.”

  “Are you sure it was your father? It was dark.”

  Ellie cracked two eggs expertly, reserving a little white for the glaze and beating the rest into the bowl with some milk. In the bowl already were the flour, sugar, and butter, and the Bakewell Cream powder, which as a substitute for ordinary baking powder is like using rocket fuel instead of gasoline.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “I’m sure. He didn’t speak, though, so I guessed he wanted to be let alone. So,” he shrugged, “I did.”

  “Move over,” Ellie said, shooing him to the side. Sam pushed the Ouija board in its box and the Morse book out of her way, as she deftly floured her hands and kneaded the scone batter twenty times, then flattened it into a pancake shape on the table.

  “So you went home,” she said. “Back to Victor’s, I mean.”

  He nodded, watching her cut the pancake into a dozen wedges, then transfer the wedges to a baking sheet. Finally she spread them with beaten egg white and drizzled granulated sugar between her fingers until the sugar stopped soaking into the egg white.

  “Was Reuben’s body already there, by any chance?” Popping the baking sheet into the oven, she dusted her hands together briskly and competently. I took her point: Although the blood had indeed seemed reasonably fresh when we found him, he could have been there a while.