Mind-Altering Murder p-5

by William Rabkin

  “Don’t tell me,” Shawn said. “His plane crashed.”

  “You think that’s funny, but you’re closer than you know. There was a problem with the electrical system in the office where they work. He went to get a cup of coffee from the machine and was electrocuted.”

  Shawn felt a chill run through his body. “Is that the last of them?” he said carefully. “The last of your coincidences?”

  “As far as I know,” O’Hara said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s more than enough,” Shawn said. “More than enough to tell me none of these deaths was coincidence.”

  “Then what?” O’Hara said.

  “They were murders.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good.”

  That sounded right. Gus had been practicing his closing line for half an hour now, and he thought he had finally perfected the intonation. As long as he made sure to add that note of surprise to the last phrase, as if he had just stumbled across the formulation in the middle of speaking it, all taint of self-righteousness disappeared.

  Gus was ready. He’d been preparing for this staff meeting for a week, although in a way his entire tenure at Benson Pharmaceuticals had been a warm-up for what he was about to do. “We are doing well, but we can do even better by doing good,” he said again, this time with a perfect little fillip of surprise when he hit that last phrase.

  Gus glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes until the meeting started. Just enough time to practice his presentation one last time. He straightened his tie, shrugged his shoulders like a fighter entering the ring, and stood to address his imaginary audience. And he froze.

  He knew his closing; there was no doubt about that. But that was all he knew. The beginning and the middle were completely gone.

  Gus snatched the index cards off his desk and riffled through them quickly. He recognized his handwriting, but he couldn’t read any of it. What were these words scribbled down? What was it he was supposed to say? His mind was blank.

  There was a gentle knocking, and the door cracked open. Jerry Fellows’ beaming head appeared in the doorway. “All ready?”

  Gus dropped the index cards and let them scatter all over his desk. “Ready for my career to end.”

  Jerry pushed the door open and wheeled his steel mail cart into the office. “Now you’re just being silly, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re going to be great.”

  “I’ve been here for weeks,” Gus said. “Before that I was a half-time salesman, and not a very good one at that.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Jerry said. “I can see the fire in your eyes. I bet you had that in your last job.”

  “One of them,” Gus said. “But I don’t think it was for the sales route.”

  “Then maybe you were simply waiting for this opportunity to come along,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah, the opportunity to humiliate myself completely,” Gus said. “Look at the new guy. He’s barely got his business cards, and he’s already telling us how to restructure the entire company. Who do I think I am?”

  Jerry left his cart behind and walked up to Gus. “I can’t answer that, but I can tell you who I think you are,” he said. “I think you’re the kind of man who sees an opportunity to make the world a better place and won’t rest until he seizes it. I think you’re the kind of man who knows he could hide behind his desk and make a lot of money for doing not much of anything but chooses to risk his job for the chance of helping the company and its customers. I think you’re the kind of man this company needs and that Bobby cherishes.”

  Gus felt some of his panic start to ease away. “Really?”

  Jerry gave him one of his leprechaun grins. “But what do I know about anything?” he said. “I’ve been pushing a mail cart for thirty years, so pretty obviously I don’t have a clue about how business works.”

  Gus looked at his watch again. He still had a few minutes before the meeting. He scooped his index cards into a pile and flipped through them to make sure they were in order. “And why is that, Jerry?” he said. “I’ve seen how D-Bob promotes people around here, and I’m getting an idea of the kind of person he likes. Seems to me if you’d wanted to be an executive you could be running the place by now.”

  “That would be one of those questions that answer themselves,” Jerry said.

  “You mean the part about if you wanted to, right?” Gus said.

  “When I go home at the end of the day I leave my mail cart right here,” Jerry said. “It never wakes me up with a phone call in the middle of the night, it never demands I come in on a weekend, and it doesn’t add ten years to my age because of stress. I went through my world-changing phase when I was young, and I managed to get over it. Now I’ve got a nice little apartment, and thanks to Bobby’s generosity I won’t have to spend my golden years standing outside BART stations with a Styrofoam cup, asking for spare change. So why would I want any other job in the world?”

  “That’s a good question,” Gus said. “Maybe I should get a mail cart.”

  “Only one per company,” Jerry said. “Besides, I know people, and I can see you wouldn’t be happy in any job where you weren’t making a serious impact on the world. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with your drive since Carlton Eastlake had this job.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met him,” Gus said. “Is he running one of our foreign branches now?”

  “Not unless we’ve got one in heaven,” Jerry said, doffing his cap and touching it to his chest.

  “He died?” Gus said.

  “Almost a year ago now,” Jerry said, replacing his cap over his mop of red hair.

  “What happened to him?”

  “It wasn’t that he ate too many oysters, just that one of those he ate turned out to be the wrong one,” Jerry said.

  “Food poisoning?” Gus said.

  “One of the few things this company doesn’t make a pill for,” Jerry says. “It’s always felt like some kind of tragic irony there. But his loss to the company wasn’t ironic at all, especially since he was the only one pushing on the very same issue as you.”

  “He was interested in orphan drugs?” Gus said.

  “It was a passion for him, just as it has been for you,” Jerry said. “I really thought he would be the one to convince Bobby that was the direction the company should be moving in. And he might have, if it hadn’t been for that mollusk. And so does history move on.”

  “I didn’t realize that other executives had tried to broach this subject,” Gus said.

  “It doesn’t come up a lot,” Jerry said. “It’s easy to explain how you’re going to alleviate suffering by developing drugs for diseases, even if they only affect a tiny percentage of the world’s population. It’s a lot harder to figure out how to make money doing it. But I really think you’ve come up with a novel and exciting approach.”

  “I appreciate that,” Gus says. “I hope the executive committee agrees with you.”

  “There’s only one person on that committee who really counts,” Jerry says. “If you can convince Bobby, the rest of those sycophants and parasites will fall in line.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for,” Gus said, picking up his note cards and sliding them into the breast pocket of his suit coat. “Wish me luck.”

  “One second, if you don’t mind,” Jerry said. He reached across the desk and straightened Gus’ tie, then stepped back. “Now you’re perfect. I think you’ve got a better shot at making this work than Jim Macoby ever did.”

  Gus was halfway across the office before the last of Jerry’s words struck him. “Jim Macoby?” he said. “Jim Macoby was planning a presentation on orphan drugs?”

  “That he was,” Jerry said. “Until that sad accident with the coffeemaker.”

  Gus took a long look at Jerry to see if the mailman was sending him any kind of coded message. He’d just told Gus that the last two executives who attempted to do what Gus was about t
o try died in freak accidents. Was there some kind of warning there?

  “You’re going to be great in there,” Jerry said without a trace of subtext or hint of caution. “I look forward to hearing all about it.”

  Gus took one last look at Jerry, then headed out of his office.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Turn off the television and do your homework.” That was what Gus’ father used to say to him whenever he came home from school, went to his room, and flipped on the little black-and-white TV that sat on his desk. “Turn off the television and go outside and play,” he’d say on the weekends when Gus chose to indulge in his favorite activity. “Homework makes you smart. Sports make you strong. TV just rots your brain.”

  Even at the tender age of ten Gus knew that was wrong. TV didn’t rot his brain; it filled him with knowledge. What was he going to learn from school? How to add stacks of numbers, how to spell the names of state capitals. What could he learn from watching television? Everything.

  Especially if he was lucky enough to come across one of those “very special episodes” that existed to instruct and educate its viewers. Did his father know how the grand jury system could be used to intimidate, harass, and ruin an average citizen who came up against the district attorney’s office? Gus did, because he’d seen it happen to Jim Rockford. Did his father know that sexual assault against innocent young girls was wrong? Gus did, because he’d shared Natalie’s terror on The Facts of Life. Did his father understand how much harm alcoholism could do to a family? Elyse Keaton’s adorable younger brother taught Gus all about that, too.

  Gus had tried to explain this to his father, but it never did any good, and every time he tried he ended up losing TV privileges for a couple of days. Finally he gave up.

  Now Gus was standing in front of the executive committee of Benson Pharmaceuticals, proposing a plan to restructure a large piece of the multinational company to refocus its mission on the manufacture and distribution of drugs to aid people suffering from orphan diseases. And it was all because he’d watched TV as a kid.

  Specifically it was because he had happened to flip on the set one afternoon when he was avoiding a mountain of math homework, only to find that his usual afternoon lineup of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and What’s Happening!! reruns had been replaced by a baseball game. Desperate to find something to keep him away from the rigors of mathematics, he had flipped over to the UHF band and started twirling the dial slowly, hoping to find anything that looked remotely entertaining.

  When he saw Oscar Madison testifying before a jury, he stopped. He’d only seen a handful of The Odd Couple episodes, but they had all made him laugh. So he settled in for a few premath chuckles. It took a couple of minutes for him to realize there was something strange about this particular episode. For one thing, it wasn’t funny. Okay, that could happen to the best of sitcoms, but in this case even the studio audience wasn’t amused. There wasn’t a single chuckle on the laugh track. Second, people kept calling Oscar “Quincy.” And he seemed to have a surprisingly large number of lab coats in his wardrobe for a sportswriter.

  By the time he finally realized he must be watching whatever show Jack Klugman had starred in after The Odd Couple, Gus was hooked. Because while this Quincy guy might not be as lovable as Oscar, what he had to say was as compelling as anything he’d ever seen on TV.

  In the show Quincy started off by investigating the tragic death of a teenage boy. But the mystery quickly petered out as the crusading M.E. found the real culprit: a rare disease. Rare but not incurable. There was a drug that could have saved him. Unfortunately there were not enough people suffering from the disease to make it profitable to manufacture the cure for it.

  Even as a young boy Gus had been shocked by this revelation. He knew it was wrong and he wanted to do something to change it. And while there wasn’t a whole lot he could do in his preteens, that desire never left him, and had helped move him toward his first job in the pharmaceutical industry.

  Now Gus felt the spirit of Jack Klugman flowing through him as he delivered his presentation to the executive committee of Benson Pharmaceuticals. He tried to capture Quincy’s mixture of compassion and outrage, his passionate devotion to the cause with the self-deprecating awareness that he was just one little guy taking on the system. While he was preparing he’d even flirted with the idea of using Quincy’s signature attitude and informing the committee that if they didn’t do exactly what he said thousands of people would die and it would be their fault, but at the last minute he decided that kind of confrontation wouldn’t go over well with D-Bob.

  Now that his presentation was almost finished, Gus glanced around the room to see how it was going over. D-Bob was smiling happily and nodding at all of Gus’ key points, but Gus had been at the company long enough to know how little that meant. D-Bob liked ideas, and he liked people who were passionate about them. If Josef Mengele’s grandson had appeared in the boardroom and laid out a case for kidnapping children off the street and conducting medical experiments on them, D-Bob would have smiled and nodded exactly the same way through the presentation. Then, when Mengele Junior was finished, he’d lay into the guy, tear apart every one of his points, and throw him out of the building. He’d probably end up calling the police. But during the presentation he’d be the soul of courtesy.

  Gus would find out later what D-Bob thought of his idea. But he wasn’t going to have to wait to learn where his colleagues would come down. They hated his plan. At least that was how they all looked. Gus knew he could be misinterpreting their hostile stares, though. It was just as likely that they hated him, too.

  “We are doing well,” Gus said, “but we can do even better by doing good.”

  Gus stopped and dropped his hands to show he was finished and ready to field questions. But the three executive vice presidents sitting across the table from him looked like they were more interested in throwing knives than queries.

  Of all the angry faces staring at him, none was angrier than that of Stephen Ecclesine, who was in charge of worldwide manufacturing. His shaved scalp had turned bright red, nearly matching the hibiscus flowers in his tie, and even the diamond stud in his nose seemed to glow more brightly than usual. Gus had generally managed to avoid Ecclesine during his tenure at Benson, mostly because until he’d joined the executive committee he was never sure if the bald hipster usually dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans was a member of the team or a local musician hoping to make a few bucks volunteering for clinical trials. But now that Gus had spent a few hours sitting in meetings with Ecclesine, he had seen that the club-crawler outfit was a disguise to hide the classic company man. Ecclesine was interested in only two things in life: the success of his division and the amount of money that success would bring him.

  Ecclesine had hated Gus from the first time they met. Not out of any particular animus, but a basic theory that the existence of any other human being could present an obstacle between him and the sack of gold he was searching for. Now that Gus had finished presenting a plan that would cost manufacturing millions in retooling and re-equipping the company’s factories, Ecclesine was just about ready to declare war.

  The woman next to Ecclesine presented a much more welcoming face. Like most of the women she hired to work in her sales force, Lena Hollis had spent her teen years on cheer squads, and along with the perpetual tan and the toned muscles she’d never lost that perfectly gleaming cheerleader’s smile. But Gus knew that smile too well, having been on the receiving end of it every time he tried to ask one of his high school’s cheerleaders out on a date, or even offered help with homework. It looked friendly, but the message it sent was You are so far beneath me that it’s not worth my effort to be rude. The fact that she was flashing it at him now was telling him that she considered his plan so pathetic it wasn’t even worth arguing over.

  That wasn’t the case with Ed Vollman, but then it never was. Vollman, who was in charge of the company’s worldwide finances and operations,
had never found any plan, or any subject for that matter, that was not worth an argument. The oldest person on the executive committee by at least two decades, Vollman tried to show he was as vital as any of his youthful counterparts by staying perpetually angry.

  Vollman was capable of flying into a rage over a badly stapled report or a coffee with a micron too little soy milk in it. But Gus had never seen him quite as furious as he was now. The only thing holding him back from exploding into a tantrum was his awareness that D-Bob hadn’t weighed in on Gus’ plan yet.

  That was clearly what was keeping the other two at bay, as well. They were all desperate to tear into Gus’ proposal, but they didn’t dare make their opinions known until they knew which way the boss would come down on it. It was true that D-Bob always insisted that there was no penalty for bad ideas at Benson Pharmaceuticals, but it was equally true that it was never a good idea to get too far out of synch with the guy who ran the company.

  And so they waited. Gus turned to the end of the table to see if D-Bob was ready to offer an opinion. The broad smile on his face suggested he was.

  “That is a profound and moving idea, Gus,” D-Bob said, his ponytail jiggling in agreement. “Everyone in this business is aware of the problems with orphan diseases, of course, and I’ve heard elements of your plan in other presentations. Specifically the notion of encouraging foreign governments to establish crown corporations that we would then run on management contracts is something we have explored in the past and still find potentially interesting. But you’ve managed to put together a lot of diverse ideas in a way that they become complementary pieces of a grander whole, and that is new. Of course what is really fresh and different about your proposal is the idea that we could afford to do all this if we were willing to greatly reduce the profits we make as a company. I’m sure that Ed will have some strong opinions on that score.”