The Bad Break

by Jill Orr

  “Can you elaborate on that?” I asked.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Can you tell me who this key investor is?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Can you tell me the nature of their disagreement?”

  “No.”

  “How did Dr. Davenport’s exit affect your study?”

  “How do you think?” Brandon’s face darkened.

  “So is it fair to say you were angry with him for leaving you high and dry?”

  “Angry doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said. “I was planning to sue him for breach of contract.”

  “But he was killed before you could do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some people would say that’s a pretty strong motive for murder . . .” I knew I was dangerously close to crossing the line, but I didn’t care. I was onto something, I could feel it. And I now had Brandon’s full attention.

  “Listen,” he said in a low, controlled voice. “I didn’t have anything to do with Arthur’s death. Him quitting the study was going to be a huge pain in the ass, and of course I was mad about it, but not mad enough to kill. What we have is going to be so big, I’ll have doctors lined up around the block to get in on it.” Brandon clenched his jaw again and I could see a little vein in his forehead begin to bulge out. Clearly, I’d hit a nerve.

  Ridley jumped in to break the tension. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We are just trying to get at the truth. Our boss is expecting us to come up with something or else we will get in very much trouble.”

  “I understand,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “All I’m saying is that the guy had a lot of irons in the fire, if you know what I mean. Maybe he pissed off someone else—someone who isn’t as civilized as I am.”

  The way he said the word civilized gave me chills. There was something about Brandon Laytner that set me on edge. I felt certain that he wasn’t the type of person you’d want to cross.

  “One last question, Mr. Laytner,” I said before he could kick us out. “Were you arguing with Arthur Davenport on the Wednesday before his death—on the corner of Plantation and Somerset Drive around 3 p.m.?”

  His face went blank. “No. Why? Did someone say I was?” He whipped out his phone, tapped it a few times, and then held it up to me, display facing out. “Look. Wednesday 3 p.m. I had a meeting with my accountant, Ross Childers. You can call him to verify if you want.”

  I would definitely do that, but I could tell by the confidence with which he’d said it, the meeting would check out. Was it possible Arthur was arguing with another big bald tattooed guy? Or Did Susan Pettis just get it entirely wrong?

  “Well, I need to get back to work,” Brandon said, suddenly standing up. Apparently the interview was over. “But if you have any other questions, feel free to call me anytime,” he said, handing Ridley a card. “All my numbers are on there. Home, cell, office. Call anytime. Seriously.”

  Yeah, Brandon, we all get how seriously you’d like Ridley to call you.

  Ridley took the card and rewarded him with a big smile and a long, lingering handshake. I thought he might die of happiness.

  But as soon as we were out of the office and back in my car, she wiped the doe-eyed look off of her face and shuddered. “That guy is a creep.”

  “He sure is.”

  “So what do you think?”

  I had to admit it felt good that Ridley was so interested in what I had to say. She was one of the only people who seemed to actually be interested in my theories. I was feeling warmer toward her by the minute, and wasn’t entirely happy about it.

  “I can’t say for sure. I need to do some more digging around.”

  “But I was helpful?” There was something so sincere and hopeful in her voice, it tugged at my heart. I did not want to be yet another person who falls at the feet of the all-mighty Ridley. I was trying really hard not to like her, but she was making it tough.

  “Yes, Ridley,” I said begrudgingly. “You were very helpful.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I dropped Ridley off at Ryan’s parents’ house and drove back to the office. I couldn’t stop thinking about Brandon Laytner and how he casually threw out there that his supposed new wonder drug was tobacco-based. And tobacco leaves were found at the scene of the murder. There had to be a connection there. Could the leaves have come from Arthur himself? Or were they evidence left by his killer? As much as I wanted to explore these questions further, as I walked in to the Times office, I was reminded by stupid Spencer that my current assignment had nothing to do with murder, suspicious CEOs, or tobacco leaves.

  “No hard feelings about the Davenport story, eh?”

  “Nope,” I said, biting back a torrent of hard feelings.

  “It wasn’t personal, you just messed up. Your loss was my gain, amiright?” He held up a hand to give me a high-five.

  I glared at him and used every ounce of self-control I had in my body to not smack his hand into his own forehead. My angry reaction seemed only to amuse him.

  “You’re too easy, intern. I was just kidding,” he laughed. “Sorry Kay took you off the story. Hey, if you want to, we can kind of work together on it? Like share sources, theories, that kind of thing.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. He wanted me to help him? Was he on crack? “That’s okay. I’ve got my hands full with the obit.” I turned away to illustrate just how busy I was.

  “I was just offering since Holman’s gone. I thought maybe you’d like to see what it’s like to work with a reporter who isn’t certifiably insane. That goofy Canuck puts the ‘eh’ in crazy, know what I’m saying?” He laughed again, this time harder.

  My anger spiked. I’d had it. It was one thing to condescend to me, but to insult Holman was taking it too far. Holman was a great reporter and a stellar human being, albeit a little quirky, but to hear him disparaged by this overgrown frat boy made my blood boil. I was about to let that nationalistic son-of-a-bitch have it when he started laughing again.

  “Geez, you should see your face right now,” he said. “You need to learn to take a joke, kiddo. Relax.”

  I didn’t consider myself overly sensitive, but if there is one thing that really lit my fire, it was people telling me to relax. I used to get that kind of thing all the time in college. It was usually some random guy who just told some off-color joke that I didn’t laugh at. Relax, they’d say, lighten up. It made me want to punch them in the throat. So far I had never resorted to actual violence, but Gerlach Spencer might be my first victim.

  “You know—” I started to say, but his phone rang (he had a “Who Let the Dogs Out” ringtone) and he cut me off by answering it. “Oh yeah?” he said, looking right at me. For a minute I thought it was someone calling to tell him I’d been out working on the story. I froze, waiting. But then after a few silent seconds he said, “Be right there.” He lowered his phone and gave me a self-satisfied smirk. “That was one of my sources calling with a tip on a lead in the Davenport story.”

  “Who?” I asked. “What’d they say?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to work on the story with me?” He snorted out a gruff laugh. “Guess you’ll just have to wait to read about it online like everybody else.”

  Hey Riley,

  Okay, so it sounds like this Kreplach guy is a total nothingburger. But I have something that I think is perfect for this situation! Bestmillenniallife.com just launched their BURN BABY BURN app for iPhone and Android. It’s available in the App store for a one-time fee of $4.99, but trust me when I say it’s totally worth it!

  The app allows u to choose from a drop-down menu of frustrations typical in Millennial life and then provides u with customizable responses. Example: Next time this Spencer dude calls u an intern, u simply find “underestimate” on the drop-down menu, select “co-worker,” select “male,” select “age-range 35+” and the app will instantly generate a burn like this one: “Whatever, you pimple-hunting kebab basket.”

  The beauty
of the BURN BABY BURN app is that although the burns are totally random, people from older generations will think they are Millennial code for something and spend forever wondering—or better yet, Googling—what it means. How hilarious is that? There is seriously nothing funnier than an old person trying to figure out slang on the internet! It was actually developed by some guy in IT as a joke against his parents, but the people up the food chain at BML.com loved it so much they totally monetized it. Turns out, it’s one of our biggest sellers. Anyway, in the wise words of Ryan Gosling, “Hey girl, you need this.”

  xx,

  Jenna B.

  Personal Success Concierge™

  Bestmillenniallife.com

  CHAPTER 26

  Fuming, I went back to my desk to focus on a couple of my more mundane stories: a write-up on the progress of the new roundabout at the corner of Fifth and Towns and a piece on last week’s ice cream social at the Methodist Church. Once I got through those, I decided to focus on the obit. I knew I needed to knock that out of the park if I was going to impress Kay enough to be put back on the crime beat in the future. So I pulled up the draft of the obit I had and gave it a quick read. It was coming together, but was still missing something. I had the basic outline of his life covered well enough, his early life, family history, professional achievements—still, it felt dry and stale. I needed to do more showing and less telling, as my high school English comp teacher would have said. Dr. Davenport was by all accounts a good doctor who meant a lot to his patients. What I needed was a glimpse of him from that angle. Maybe I could start with a vignette, a story in which Arthur Davenport was doing something so characteristic of him that readers who knew him would nod their heads and smile, and make the readers who didn’t know him wish they had.

  I combed through page after page of notes, but I couldn’t find that one ace-in-the-hole story that I was looking for. But the theme that kept emerging as I looked over what I’d learned about Dr. Davenport was that his work defined him. Nearly everyone I spoke to called him either a “workaholic” or said he was “unbelievably dedicated” or something along those lines. I thought back to Flick’s advice about wanting to bring the deceased back to life, if only for a few paragraphs. Yes, it would have to be a story about his life as a physician, as someone who saved people’s lives, that would open this obit. But I didn’t have anything I could use yet. I picked up the phone and dialed Tuttle General.

  Fred Kander had taken the position of hospital administrator four years ago, at the age of twenty-nine. Most people in Tuttle Corner were openly skeptical about a man his age being able to run the hospital that served four counties. But run it he had, and last year Kander had been credited with implementing several cost-saving strategies, while lowering readmission rates and extending primary-care volume.

  When I explained that I was writing Arthur Davenport’s obit, Fred said he’d be happy to talk to me.

  “Losing Arthur,” he said solemnly, “especially in this way, has been quite a shock to the entire Tuttle General family.”

  “I’m sure it has,” I said. “Can you tell me a little bit about his place in the hospital system?”

  “He consistently received the highest ratings from patients. In recent years, we’ve been focusing on collecting data about all aspects of the patient experience here, and when it came to bedside manner, Dr. Davenport consistently ranked near the top. His patients loved him. And not only that,” he added, “but his complication and death rates were far below average.”

  “Meaning that most of his patients did well after their procedures?”

  “All surgery involves risk, and even the best practitioners have patients whose outcomes are less than ideal—sometimes related to the procedure, sometimes because of other underlying conditions. But Dr. Davenport’s patients did better, on balance, after their procedures than patients who saw other doctors. Even within our own system.”

  That was interesting. “Were any of his colleagues jealous? Did they feel threatened by Dr. Davenport’s success rate and likability?”

  Fred sounded surprised at the question. “If any of his colleagues had a problem with him for any reason, no one told me about it. Arthur was really looked up to around here. He mentored many of our younger physicians. He focused on his patients, on the work. He led by example. Always the first one in and the last one out. Just a great doctor overall.”

  “How did he handle it when the outcome wasn’t good?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how did Dr. Davenport handle those people who had complications or didn’t survive? I would imagine that in thirty-plus years of practicing medicine, that scenario had to come up more than few times.”

  “Of course,” Fred said, now a hint of defensiveness crept into his tone. “Cardiac patients are often very sick people, and no doctor is able to make every patient better.”

  “Right. So how did Dr. Davenport, specifically, handle those sorts of cases?”

  “Always with the utmost compassion. He was invested in his patients’ lives—he often attended their funerals or made donations in their names after they passed. It was quite touching.”

  Now there was a great angle! I needed a story about that to open the obit. “Really? Tell me more about that.”

  “Just last month Arthur made a very generous donation in the name of one of his patients, the mother of one of our employees, who died rather unexpectedly after a procedure. She was a lifelong smoker—from what Arthur said, that was probably the root of her health issues. Anyway, Arthur made a donation to the Foundation for a Smokefree America in her name. He said he felt that was one way he could bring meaning to her death.”

  “Can you share the name of the patient with me? I’d love to talk to her family and maybe get a quote from them for the piece.”

  “Sorry. The privacy laws around here are very strict, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  Of course. HIPAA privacy regulations were really cramping my style. And then the thought hit me like a lightening bolt: I did have access to one place that kept a listing of people in Tuttle County who died, the family members they left behind, and even where they’d like contributions sent to in their name. I was an obituary writer after all. And it was time to hit up the morgue.

  CHAPTER 27

  I’m not sure what you’re looking for.” Flick stood over me, frowning.

  Back in the day, the name for the storage room in most newspaper offices where they kept back issues was “the morgue.” Nowadays, most of the information, at least in the recent past, could be accessed online. The Times, seeking to straddle the old world in which print journalism was a thriving part of the community and the new one in which technology ruled, had both. In the basement room that had been used for years as our morgue, you could still find eons of old print editions and files crammed with clippings and photos—plus, Kay Jackson had added a dedicated computer that could digitally access more recent content from the archives.

  “I thought I might be able to find the patient of Dr. Davenport’s that Kander mentioned if I searched the obits for women who died last month of a cardiac-related illness, and those that listed Foundation for a Smokefree America as their charity of choice.”

  “But you don’t even know if this woman was from Tuttle County,” said Flick. “The hospital draws from a four-county area.”

  I ignored him. This would be a great lead for Arthur’s obit, and it was worth doing some research to find it. I typed in another barrage of search terms hoping the computer would bring up something useful.

  “Besides, the obit often won’t give the cause of death. Are you going to search every woman who has died in Tuttle over the past two months, call their families, and ask who their doctor was?”

  I kept on looking. If Flick was going to be negative, I would just ignore him. I was able to isolate the death notices and obits for the month of September in Tuttle County. While it was true that this wasn’t a comprehensive list of everyone who
had died, it was probably pretty close.

  After watching me click through story after story, Flick finally said, “There might be a smarter way to go about doing this.”

  “Flick,” I said, my frustration finally getting the best of me. “You’ve been pushing me to dig deep, to work harder in the writing of this obit, and here I am doing that. I know you aren’t a big fan of technology, but this is how people do research these days. This machine here,” I tapped the side of the computer, “has all the information I need.”

  “You know what other machine has all the information you need?” He tapped the side of temple. “This one right here.”

  “You know who this woman is? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I wanted to teach you that you don’t get answers to the questions you don’t ask.”

  Helen Wynette Krisanski, known to her friends and family as Heely, died suddenly during a stay at Tuttle General Hospital. She was sixty-seven years old.

  Born and raised in Henrico County, Helen Krisanski grew up playing along the banks of the James River, and it was from there that her lifelong love of horticulture began. Fascinated by all things grown from the ground, Helen had a green thumb like no other. She always said it was fate when she met and married her husband, Charles Krisanski, because he had just inherited his family’s farm and was looking for someone to help him run it. Heely and Charles remained partners in love and farming until his death in 2015.

  Unable to keep up the farm herself, Heely moved to West Bay, VA, in early 2016 to be closer to her children. She quickly found work on an indigo farm, one of the first in the area. “Heely had a way with the indigo that none of the rest of us understood,” said Craig Luetkemeyer, the owner of Luke’s Farm, where Helen worked. “It was like those plants grew just for her. None of the rest of us could get ’em to do anything. But they just sprouted under her care.”

  Helen is survived by her son, Jonathan Krisanski, 42, and her daughter, Lauren McCarty, 38, both of West Bay, VA, and thousands of budding indigo plants.