by Wally Duff
104
After I finished talking to the Irregulars, there was one other thing I had to do, and I needed to do myself. I wasn’t crazy. I was positive Sullivan had been murdered.
I breastfed Macy and took her to Alicia’s. Once again, all I would miss would be her nap.
Using the Internet, I found out Sullivan lived in an apartment on West Deming Place in Lincoln Park. The first fifteen minutes of my investigation was wasted searching for a parking place. I found one two blocks away and walked to the front door of his brownstone building, which was the third one from the corner. It was midmorning, so there almost no activity in his neighborhood.
This was not a place that had a doorman or security cameras, and the front door wasn’t locked, so I stepped into the entryway where the mailboxes were located. According to the addresses on the boxes, Sullivan lived in 1-A.
Glancing around, I slipped on latex gloves and took out the lock pick gun and torque wrench from my backpack. I had his mailbox open in ten seconds. It was empty, as was the slot below it for his newspaper.
The lock into the building itself was flimsy. I had the second door open almost as quickly as the mailbox. The stairs going to the upper floors were to my left. 1-A was to my right. I knocked on the door, and there was no response. I used my equipment to open the lock and sneak inside.
The air was cold and musty. I checked the thermostat on the wall to my right. It was set at sixty-two degrees.
The living room was to my left. The fireplace was cold. A newspaper was on a side table next to a reclining chair. It was dated the day before I discovered his body.
I walked down the hall and found a small kitchen. There were a few old items in the freezer but no fresh foods in the refrigerator. There were no dishes in the dishwasher.
The bedroom and bathroom were in the back. The bed was made, and the curtains were pulled down. There were empty hangers in the closet. There were no shoes on the closet floor. I hunted around for a suitcase but didn’t find one. His underwear and sock drawers were empty.
Opening the cabinets in his bathroom, I found his toiletries were missing. I turned on the faucet, and it took a few jerks of the old pipes before any water appeared. It was rust-colored before it cleared.
Was Sullivan dead? Or was he out of town? Or was I completely crazy? I was positive I saw a dead man, and now I was in his apartment and it looked like he’d gone on a trip.
Walking out the front door, I realized I was making myself nuts and I didn’t need to. No story was worth screwing up my mental health, and I never did think the builder story was all that interesting or challenging to begin with.
Zhukov? Let the feds and the Russian Mafia fight it out. It could be dangerous and I didn’t need that.
The Warren story was worth pursuing. Diane might have hired the missing-fingered man to kill all the Hamlin Park Irregulars, and we had to stop her.
But right now, all I wanted was to go home and play with Macy.
Part 5
105
Saturday morning, the Irregulars were in the locker room at XSport Fitness after finishing Cas’s core class. I sat in front of a locker with my head down. Sweat dripped off my forehead into my eyes, off the tip of my nose, and onto the floor. I draped a towel over my head and face to absorb the moisture.
“Alan thinks you don’t get it, Tina,” Molly said.
“Get what?” I asked through the towel.
“I can’t understand you,” she said. “You’re mumbling.”
I wiped my face and ran the towel through my hair. “Sorry. What did Alan mean?”
“Yesterday, we were at his house playing Wii Guitar Hero, and he asked me how the story with Diane was coming. I told him about your cool plan to trick her into buying fake supplements, and that’s when the trouble started.”
“Trouble?”
“He started talking about sick cars at MidAmerica Hospital, and he said you didn’t understand anything.”
“Cars?”
“Uh-huh. Sick ones.”
I dropped the towel on the floor and used my foot to wipe up the puddle of sweat. I grabbed another fresh towel off the counter.
“What a minute,” I said. “Did he use the term ‘auto’?”
“Yeah, cars.”
“Did he say anything about autoimmune diseases?”
“I think so, but then it got confusing.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That’s what I don’t know.”
“Try this. Tell me what you remember.”
“I can’t.”
“Did he write it down?”
Molly has a reading disability. If Alan wrote anything down, there was no hope that she would comprehend what he was talking about.
“No. He wasn’t speaking in English, and I couldn’t understand him.”
“What language was he speaking?”
“I don’t know. He sounded like one of those foreign spy guys in the movies. The more he talked about you and the car stuff, the worse it got. He began yelling in that foreign language and then shut off the Wii and went to his room.” She paused. “And it was too bad.”
“Too bad?”
“I was winning.”
106
I pushed a bundled-up Macy in the stroller as I walked home from XSport Fitness. The issue of autoimmune diseases kept surfacing and it bugged me, so I called Eddie.
“Remember when I wrote the article about Dr. Mike Doyle?” I asked.
“The Fat Doctor?” Eddie said.
“That’s the guy.”
“I remember that you called me during my freshman year in med school and said one of your sorority sisters took his supplements trying to lose weight before your spring break trip to Cabo, and she almost died of kidney failure.”
“You helped me figure out what happened by talking to the professors at your medical school.”
“But they were never able to prove his formulation caused her renal disease. His product was considered a supplement, which wasn’t under the FDA’s jurisdiction, and thus, no one tested it before it was released to be sold.”
“Her family sued Doyle, but he was arrested and his company went bankrupt. There wasn’t any money left, and the suit was dropped.”
“Stuff like that happens all the time with over-the-counter supplements. No agency regulates the potential side effects of the products unsuspecting people buy.”
“Do you think Fertig’s cancer-curing supplements might be doing something like that?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe causing autoimmune diseases.”
“That’s a mighty big jump from a supplement contributing to kidney failure to them causing an autoimmune disorder.”
“Why? I don’t understand the difference.”
“An autoimmune disease is caused by an overactive immune response which makes the body attack its own cells.”
“Why does this happen?”
“No one knows, but I’ve never read that it might be caused by ingesting a plant product from South America.”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot since Peebler talked about cancer therapy when we had dinner at their house. If Fertig did discover that supplements from South America did cure breast cancer, how did they do it?”
He laughed. “If I knew that, I would win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.”
“Sorry. I guess what I mean is, would his supplements change how the body’s immune system works and the result would be that the patient’s own body could kill the breast cancer cells?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Eddie?” I said. “Are you still there?”
“Sorry, I was thinking about what you said.”
“And?”
“Maybe Fertig’s supplements did reset the body’s immune system to recognize the abnormal breast cancer cells and destroy them. The result was a cure of the cancer, not from his surgery but from the supplements.”
“Then what happens when the su
pplements are stopped?”
“Well, it might not be a clear-cut and obvious response as a recurrence of the cancer. Maybe the immune system is damaged or permanently altered and begins seeking other cells to kill. It begins attacking normal cells in multiple organs. The result would be an autoimmune disorder like Graves’s Disease, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, or Sjögren’s Syndrome.”
“How do you treat diseases like that?”
“With immunosuppressive drugs to slow the progress of the disease, but these are chronic and basically incurable.”
“How would I prove his supplements did this?”
“Check all the recent admissions to MidAmerica Hospital who have an autoimmune diagnosis. If they had breast cancer and were on Fertig’s supplements but then stopped it before they became ill, that would be strongly suggestive of a cause and effect.”
107
Saturday afternoon, I was in the Creative Hair Salon to talk to David and Rick. Carter watched the girls. Marcia was having her hair colored by Rick. In the next chair, David cut Frankie’s hair.
I sat on a stool at David’s station.
“We have to assume Diane is spending a fortune to find the source of Fertig’s supplements which he discovered in the South American rain forest,” I began. “At this point, Diane is playing with these patient’s lives — duping them — and the patients are getting sick and dying because of her deception. My fear is that if she’s successful in bringing Fertig’s supplements back to Chicago, no one will ever know what she’s done because I won’t have any proof and there’ll be no story.”
“If one of her guys finds Fertig’s stash down there, she’ll knows it’s the real deal,” Frankie said. “All we have to do is stop her delivery guy and steal the product. Then, when we approach her, she’ll have to deal with us and we nail her.”
“How are we going to know if and when she finds it?” Rick asked.
Frankie leaned forward and examined David’s progress with his hair. “Plant listening devices in her home.”
“I can do that,” I said. “It’s about time I bugged somebody else for a change. I have enough in my house that I can use a few of those. The FBI will never miss them.”
David turned to me. “The FBI is listening to the details of what you say? My, that is kinky. Why on earth are they doing that?”
“I checked last night, and they still aren’t monitoring me, but they have compromised my computer.”
“How?” Rick asked.
I told them.
“Why?” David asked.
“It’s about Zhukov. They want to know what happened to the money he stole, and they seem to think I know where it is.”
“If you find it, please let Alan know,” Marcia said. “He was devastated when he lost everything.”
Everything? Huh?
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“You have no idea how bad it is,” she said. “He had saved what to him was a large sum of money from his medical practice. He wanted to endow an academic chair at his medical school. It meant a great deal to him, and when the money disappeared, he was crushed.”
“I feel so sorry for him,” I said.
“And it happened at a most inopportune time,” she said. “First, his brain blew up, and then recently, Zhukov lost all Alan’s money.”
“At least he still has your money,” Rick said. “You could endow the chair in his name. No one would know which one of you gave the money.”
“The old fool won’t let me help him,” Marcia said. “He wanted to do it on his own.”
108
A tear trickled down Marcia’s cheek. Rick handed her a Kleenex, and she dabbed at her eyes.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if we had someone on the inside?” David asked. “A person Diane trusts and won’t realize is being a spy for us?”
“Any suggestions?” I asked.
“What about Leslie Van Horn, her hairstylist?” Marcia asked. “She would never suspect him of anything. I certainly wouldn’t.”
“Has he recently said anything about Diane to you guys?” Frankie asked.
“We were with Leslie Van Horn last night at The Max, and he said Diane seems to be increasingly volatile emotionally,” David said.
“Two days ago, she was completely undone when she was in his salon and she yelled at her own precious doggy,” Rick said.
“Doggy?” Frankie asked.
“Bear, her Tibetan Mastiff,” David said. “She wanted to bring that monster here when she first bought him, but we wouldn’t let her, which is why she fired us and hired Leslie.”
“But to answer your question, Leslie said she was in such a snit about events at the hospital that she snapped at her poor pooch,” Rick said. “He was positively devastated and peed on the floor.”
“A terrible mess,” David said. “Thank God it wasn’t here. I can’t imagine how much a beast that size can urinate, can you, Rick?”
“Gallons, I would imagine.”
“Enough with the freakin’ dog story,” Frankie said. “Will Leslie help us?”
“I’m sure he will,” Rick said. “The employees in his shop positively hate Diane.”
“Does he ever go to her home to do her hair?” Frankie asked.
“He does,” David said. “She used to summon us there on a moment’s notice when she found a stray hair out of place.”
“Maybe Leslie could plant the bugs for us,” Frankie said.
“Is this installing business difficult?” David asked. “I mean to tell you, Leslie is a whiz with hair, but I’m not sure how mechanical he is otherwise.”
“Why don’t we break into Diane’s house and plant the bugs ourselves?” I asked.
“The boys and I have been watching her house and office, and she has serious security around her,” Frankie said. “It would be risky but it’s doable. If she suspects we’re making a move on her by installing listening devices, she’ll figure out something’s going down and she’ll be suspicious of anything that happens.”
“Maybe we want her to know we’re interested in Fertig’s supplements, then she won’t realize what I’m actually going to write about her,” I said.
“Which is?” Rick asked.
“Autoimmune diseases.”
“Tell us,” David said.
109
I told them about my conversation with Eddie concerning autoimmune diseases.
“Eddie thinks the lack of Fertig’s supplements might be making the breast cancer patients sick, right?” Frankie asked, when I finished.
“He does,” I said.
“Then we don’t need to be planting any bugs at Diane’s,” Frankie said. “Like Eddie said, check out the hospital admissions. Be a slam dunk.”
“How would Tina go about getting this information from the hospital?” Rick asked. “The security forces there will be on the lookout for her big time.”
“That’s why I think we should try and plant the bugs,” I said.
Frankie shrugged his shoulders. “Lost me, babe.”
“Diane knows I’m trying to write a story about her. She’s waiting for us to do something. If we plant listening devices at her home or office, or even in her car, she’ll think that we’re behind it and wonder why we’re doing it. Leslie will give her the clue.”
“I must be dense, but I don’t understand any of this,” Marcia said, punctuating her remark with another loose cough.
“I have to admit I’m a little confused myself,” David said.
“Same here,” Rick said.
“We have Leslie tell her that he heard from a client about Fertig’s supplements, not his surgery, curing breast cancer,” I said. “Diane will be puzzled about where Leslie heard this, but she won’t want him to know she’s interested and she’ll be afraid to ask. Then you two,” I nodded to David and Rick, “arrange to have her see you with Leslie, maybe out to dinner. She’ll put it together and know why he is asking her about the supplements.”
David raised hi
s carefully plucked eyebrows. “Delightfully Machiavellian, sweetie. Congratulations.”
“We plant listening devices in places where she or her security minions will find them,” Rick said. “She wonders who is doing this and why, and then she remembers that Leslie asked her about the supplements.”
