The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “If this man whose body they brought in today had been taking pargyline, would there be any way to detect it short of an autopsy?”

  “In the first place, Lieutenant, this was a man with diplomatic status according to the scuttlebutt. He was some kind of Israeli government figure, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but not necessarily with diplomatic status.”

  “Anyway, a VIP. They’ve probably picked up the body already and taken it to the funeral home.”

  “Back to my question.”

  “Yeah.” He frowned and closed his eyes. “Israel—a lot of sun there?”

  “He wasn’t coming from Israel. He had spent a week in California.”

  “More sun.” Oshun opened his eyes and nodded. “It might cause a rash or a heavy sunburn if he had been on pargyline. But that wouldn’t prove anything. You knew the man, Lieutenant?”

  “Slightly.”

  “But you saw him. Did he have a rash, reddish spots here and there on his face, possibly on his hands?”

  “I don’t remember. Give me the name of the doctor again.”

  Stephan Hyde, the doctor’s name. I jotted it down. Then I suggested to Oshun that he should not make this a subject of conversation among his friends.

  “Afraid I’ll undercut you, Lieutenant?”

  “No. I’m afraid of other things.”

  When I got back to our apartment, Fran was still awake, waiting for me, more disturbed than I could remember her being in a long time. “It’s two o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I was so worried, Harry.”

  I took her in my arms and reminded her of an old, old agreement. She was married to a cop. That precluded worry, otherwise we’d both go crazy.

  “Did you find him, Harry?”

  “Put up a pot of tea and I’ll tell you the whole story. It leaves us nowhere, but it’s sure as hell interesting.”

  When I had finished, Fran stared at me for a while—just sat there silent, staring.

  “Well?”

  “Suppose this kid is right.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never handled anything like this before. Things don’t come packaged this way. My inclination is to forget the whole damn thing. Life is full of coincidences.”

  “Why did you tell the kid not to talk about it to his friends?”

  “I don’t know—just a feeling.”

  “My heart breaks for Deborah. She’s a wonderful woman. Oh, I’m terribly tired, Harry. Let’s go to bed.” Then she added, “What kind of a feeling, Harry?”

  I dodged that and asked her whether she knew what kind of plans Mrs. Alan had made.

  “As far as I know, the body is being flown back to Israel, on the evening El Al flight, I think. Deborah will go with it. She’s staying with Oscar. Did you know that when Shelly spent a summer in Israel on a kibbutz, it was the kibbutz where Deborah was born? That’s how they know each other so well—poor dear.”

  “I didn’t know that, no. Tell me, Fran, did you notice that Asher Alan had a rash?”

  “What?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. For heaven’s sake, Harry, let’s go to bed.”

  Before I left for the precinct in the morning, I told Fran that I wanted to talk to Deborah Alan, not as a person with condolences but as a cop. At first Fran protested that Mrs. Alan deserved the privacy of her grief, but when I mentioned that I was moving along Fran’s own line of thought, she said she’d try to arrange it with Shelly. “But I’ll be at school, Harry, so I’m not sure when or how.”

  “Whenever. Just leave word at the precinct.”

  Sergeant Toomey was double-parked in front of the building, and he mentioned an argument with a meter maid. “Snotty kid, says she’s coming back in half an hour, and if I’m still here, I get a ticket, cop or not.”

  “That’s what you call integrity. How does it look for today?”

  “Not very heavy. A couple of cases.”

  At the precinct, I gave out the squad assignments and took Bolansky and Keene aside. I told Bolansky that I wanted him to start on Madison Avenue and 96th Street and hit every drugstore down to Madison Square. I told him that I did not for a moment believe that he would have to work his way down to the Twenties, but that was the scope of it. He was to find a drugstore that had filled a prescription for Stanley Curtis. The doctor’s name on the prescription would be Stephan Hyde. The prescription should be on file, and he would ask the pharmacist to let him have the prescription long enough to make a Xerox copy of it. I supposed that legally the pharmacist would not have to surrender the prescription or even reveal it, but I could anticipate no reason why he should not show it to Bolansky. I suggested that the prescription might be between three and four weeks old.

  Keene’s job was to visit the two restaurants, Revier on 63rd and La Siene on 51st Street. I told him to check the newspaper files for the exact date of Curtis’s death and then to find a copy of the restaurant check for Curtis’s table. If the commotion was such that no check had been presented, then he was to try to find out exactly what Curtis had eaten. With Asher Alan, it might be less difficult. He had eaten at Revier only the day before.

  “I’ll do my best,” Keene said, “but you know, Lieutenant, I can’t imagine a restaurant owner who’s such a callous son of a bitch that he’d try to collect a bill after a diner dropped dead. The more likely thing would be to tear it up and never even put it on the books.”

  “That’s true and very likely, but then you could possibly find a waiter or a floor captain who might try to piece something together.”

  “I’ll certainly give it a shot.”

  The telephone rang, and it was Oscar, but I could barely make out what he was saying. Downstairs, the uniforms had brought in a gang of eighteen kids who had been terrorizing subway riders. They were all underage and would be back on the streets within hours, and they were taking advantage of the juvenile status by screaming their heads off. The door to my office had a wire vent, so I could hear all the noise and I shouted for Oscar to speak loud. What I pieced together was that Mrs. Alan would talk to me if I came right over.

  I told Toomey to take over, then I poked my head into Captain Courtny’s office and told him I was leaving to have a talk with Mrs. Alan.

  “Who?”

  “The widow of the Israeli who died yesterday.”

  “Should I ask you why?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like anyone’s death,” Courtny said unfeelingly, “but on the city’s time, I don’t make condolence calls.”

  “It’s the way he died.”

  “I hear he had a stroke. But if you want to make something out of it, go ahead.”

  “You’re a generous man.”

  “Butter up if you want to, but don’t get snotty with me, Harry. And if you think you got something, I want to hear what you got before I go home to my wife and kids.”

  He had no wife and kids. He was a strange, sour, lonely man, and like as not, come midnight, he’d still be in his office, feet up on his desk, drinking beer and reading the arrest reports.

  Having no desire for a driver tagging along with me all day, I took the car myself and double-parked in front of Oscar’s apartment house. Shelly opened the door for me, and when I asked how Deborah was, Shelly shook her head. “She was all right last night with that crowd here, but then it struck home. She didn’t sleep much. She fell asleep about four. She’s inside taking a bath now, and the people from the consulate are due to pick her up in about an hour.”

  “Was she reluctant to talk to me, Shelly?”

  “Oh, no. She knows you’re here as a cop. She’s not only heartbroken over her husband’s death. She’s bitter.”

  “Oscar? Is he here?”

  “He had to leave for school. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Wrapped in a long flannel robe, Deborah Alan joined us in the dining room. Her hair was tied in back of her head, and her bloodshot eyes were encased in dark hollows.

&n
bsp; “If you’d care not to talk,” I began to say, “I’d just—”

  “No!” she interrupted sharply. “You’re a policeman, Mr. Golding. You are not here to offer condolences or to tell me how sorry you are that my husband is dead. There isn’t any sorrow, except in a wife’s heart. That’s the world we live in. You’re here because you think there’s been a crime. You think my husband was murdered. Yes?”

  “I think there’s at least a serious question.”

  “I think he was murdered!” she said flatly.

  “Why?” I asked gently.

  “Because I knew him. Why should he have a stroke? There was no reason for him to have a stroke. He was a strong, healthy man.”

  “Tell me something, please, Mrs. Alan. Did he have a rash on his face and hands.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. You eat something doesn’t agree with you, you have a rash.”

  “But did he have a rash?”

  “A slight rash, yes, on his face. Just a few red spots. I covered them with some pancake.”

  “And was he taking any medicine?”

  “Yes, some pills. Three a day. He got them in California.”

  “And where are they now? Do you have them?”

  “No. They were in the medicine cabinet in the hotel.”

  “What hotel?”

  “The Regency,” she said. “We were in room 1908, but people from the consulate were there this morning, and they packed my things.”

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said. “I’ll use the phone in the study,” I explained to Shelly, who was sitting with us, hanging on to every word. In the study, I called the precinct and told Toomey to get over to the Regency and find that bottle of medicine. If it wasn’t there, he was to question the chambermaid, if the room had been cleaned. If he still could not turn it up, he was to go down to the Israeli Consulate and try to find out whether the medicine was in her luggage. “And with charm, Toomey. Charm. They’re diplomats. Please, charm with everything.”

  Back in the dining room, I said to Mrs. Alan, “California—was that where the medicine came from? I mean, you got it there?”

  “Yes.”

  Then she told me a story which, under different circumstances, would have been perfectly reasonable—but then, everything I touched in this case was reasonable until you scratched at the surface. During the Alans’ stay in Los Angeles, a number of fund-raising parties were given, at which the Alans were the guests of honor, the main drawing card. I knew from my own experience that this was a usual procedure. The Israeli need for foreign exchange was so desperate that regardless of what diplomatic circumstances brought an important Israeli to our shore, the diplomat was also used as a magnet for fund raising. At one of these fund-raising parties, in a large Beverly Hills mansion, Deborah had fallen into conversation with a man who told her his name was Dr. Herbert Green, a very ordinary name that might or might not be Jewish. She had mentioned her husband’s exhausting schedule, and she thought she had said something about her husband’s high blood pressure.

  “Not that it was ever high enough to require medication,” she assured me. “But when you are eating restaurant food morning, noon, and night, you load your body with salt.”

  He was very sympathetic, this Dr. Green, and he thought it might be a good thing for Asher Alan to stop by at his office. He told Mrs. Alan that she should put aside stories she had heard about the exorbitant fees American doctors charged. He would consider the examination as his small contribution to Israel. This question of the fee was more important than it might sound, considering the international attention that had been paid to Asher Alan. If not exactly a poor country, Israel was nevertheless a place always short of cash, and its people traveling abroad counted every dollar. Deborah’s statement about her husband’s blood pressure not being high enough to require medication is also open to question, since she did mention a fainting incident, which may well have been the result of very high blood pressure. As I said earlier, Asher Alan was a robust, heavily muscled, high-colored man whose physical strength and well-being belied the notion of illness, but possibly the fainting incident helped him to agree to visit Dr. Green. When he returned from the visit, he told Deborah that he had been given a clean bill of health, except for a warning about his blood pressure. Dr. Green had given him a prescription for pills he was to take, two pills, three times a day. She also mentioned that during this Los Angeles interval, Alan had been relatively depressed. By the second day after taking the pills Green prescribed, Alan’s mood had changed. The depression had lifted and physically he felt better.

  “Did he see Dr. Green again?” I asked Deborah.

  “No.”

  “Did you ask any of the people you met there about Green?”

  “No—he was so engaging.” She stared at me hopelessly, and then she began to cry, whispering through her tears, “What am I going to do? What can I do?”

  Shelly sat down beside her and put her arms around her.

  “One more question?” I said.

  “What good are the questions? You only make her more miserable,” Shelly said.

  “Please,” Deborah said, nodding.

  “Where did you have the prescription filled? Or did your husband have it filled?”

  “I did.”

  “Where?”

  “In Beverly Hills.”

  “But where in Beverly Hills? Can you remember where?”

  “I don’t know Beverly Hills that well, Lieutenant. It was a corner store. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Toomey was back at the precinct when I arrived, and he told me he had failed in his search for the medicine bottle. The baggage had been removed and whatever remained in the room had gone into the trash compactor. Toomey had then called the Israeli legation and had spoken to the attaché who had done the packing. No, he had not packed any medicine bottles.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Toomey said.

  “There are ways, Toomey.”

  I put through a call to the Beverly Hills police, where I found myself talking to a Sergeant McNulty. I gave him the doctor’s name and Alan’s name.

  “You know, Lieutenant,” he said to me, “we got a lot of drug-stores.”

  “Corner stores.” And then I added, “McNulty, I’ll write your name in gold. Anything you’re looking for in New York, you got a whole precinct working for you.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  It was less than an hour before he called back. The prescription was for pargyline.

  “Do you have the address—the doctor’s?”

  “Yeah—It’s an empty office.”

  Chapter 4

  “THE PHARMACY?” Dr. Stephan Hyde said. “Of course I know what pharmacy he used. Bromstein’s, between Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth on Madison. An excellent chemist—and very careful.”

  Dr. Hyde was an elegant man, in an elegant office. I noticed two well-equipped examining rooms, which appeared, granting my quick glance, to have every instrument known to modern medicine. An exaggeration, of course, but the rooms were well and expensively equipped. His office bespoke money and taste, and since Fran had trained me through the years to recognize antiques and to know something of stuff such as rugs and hand-blocked wallpaper, I could do what the Internal Revenue people call an outside search. The “partner’s desk” would fetch at least thirty thousand at auction, and each of the Queen Anne chairs would go for at least five thousand. Behind the desk and facing it were two Chippendale armchairs that would have made Fran weep with envy and the curator at the Met salivate with greed. I hesitate to put a price on them. On the floor was a silk Kirman that was unquestionably real, even to my untutored eye.

  The doctor himself was equally elegant, silk shirt, silk tie, embroidered vest, blue cashmere jacket, gray trousers, and natty Italian shoes. He had a long, narrow face, thin black mustache, and a combed but not polished head of hair. And he was most cooperative when I told him that I was looking into a few puzzling facts relative to the death of
Stanley Curtis.

  “Delighted to be of some help. I’m very uncomfortable about Stanley’s death,” Hyde said. “Of course, a decent physician is always devastated when one of his patients dies, even if the patient suffers from some incurable ailment. But Stanley was not a sick man, which makes it all the more a cause of anguish.”

  “Might I ask you the nature of the prescription you gave him, and why you prescribed it?”

  “It was a placebo.”

  “What!”

  “Oh, yes, simply a sugar pill. Oh, Stanley had a bit of high blood pressure, but nothing to worry about. But he was a man with great faith in medicine and, if I may say so, considerable faith in myself. The public figure was one thing, the inner man another. The inner man was dependent, the perfect candidate for placebos.”

  “Isn’t that something of a swindle, the use of placebos?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” taking no umbrage at my suggestion. “It’s a legitimate and frequently miraculous part of medicine, and very old, too—a path for the body to follow to cure itself. And you know, Lieutenant, for the most part, the body cures itself, not the physician. It’s incredible what belief can do.”

  “Did you see him again after that? Did you take his blood pressure to note the effect of your placebo?”

  “A placebo would never work with you, Lieutenant. You doubt everything. No”—the first trace of acerbity in his voice—“I did not examine him again. He was killed a week later. Damn it, Lieutenant, the man was a dear friend!”

  “Then you shouldn’t object to my lack of belief in terms of his death. I am trying to find out what killed him.”

  “We know what killed him. He died of a massive stroke.”

  “Was it indicated?” I asked sharply. “You are his physician. You examined him a week before.”

  “A stroke is rarely indicated, as you put it. If it were, perhaps we could prevent it.”

  “What would you say if I told you that the drug delivered to Curtis’s home was not a placebo but pargyline?”

  “I would say your statement is ridiculous. All we have to do is to call the pharmacist. Shall I?”

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t. Not at this moment.”