Brainy-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  “Then let’s find out,” I said.

  We walked over to the bar.

  “Gotta’ sec’, guys?” I asked.

  They didn’t seem happy to see me.

  “Is everything okay?” David asked.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “He got away.”

  David glanced at Rick but didn’t say anything about my choice of gender identification.

  “And we think you two know who he is,” I continued.

  “We do, but we never dreamed he was Zhukov’s killer,” Rick said. “You have to believe us. If we had known, we would have told you immediately.”

  “Even though it violates his trust in us,” David said.

  “His trust?” Linda asked. “You need to explain that.”

  “Not all of the ladies here tonight are lucky enough to have loving partners of the same sex,” Rick said.

  “You mean some are married to women?” Cas asked.

  David nodded. “More than you would guess. People trust Rick and I to keep their identities a secret so their spouses don’t find out.”

  “You’re saying this man is married and you are covering up for him,” Linda said.

  “We are,” Rick said. “He’s a late bloomer, as it were.”

  “He began coming in about four years ago,” David said. “He was shy at first, but he quickly adjusted.”

  “He became Genieva,” Rick said. “He played the piano in our show three years ago, but we haven’t seen him for a long while.”

  “We were stunned to see him tonight,” David said.

  “He was radiantly happy the last time we saw him, which is why we kept his identity secret,” Rick said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do we know him?”

  “You sure do, sweetie,” David said. “It’s Dr. Alan Peebler.”

  144

  When I arrived home, I banged through the back door and headed for the computer room.

  “And hello to you,” Carter said, as I blew past him. He was seated on the couch editing articles written by his staff.

  I paused at the head of the stairs. “Sorry about that, but I’m so excited,” I said. “I think I finally have the Zhukov story figured out.”

  “Do you know who killed him?” he asked.

  “I do. I need to go on the computer and go through my files to make sure I’m right.”

  I sat down in front of my computer and began checking my Zhukov files. This time, I didn’t care who found out what I was going to type on my keyboard. This story was going to be finished before the feds or the Russians could react to what I was going to type.

  Zhukov had lost all of Alan’s money. Alan had a motive to kill him. But if he killed Zhukov, what did Alan do with the money?

  I found it in Marcia’s file. She told me Alan wanted to donate money to his medical school. I thought it was Harvard, since that was what the diploma on his office wall said, but that wasn’t his first medical school. That was the Saint Petersburg Pavlov Medical University.

  It was recent news, so it only took six minutes to find the answer. The day after the killer downloaded the files from Zhukov’s computer, a total of one hundred fifty million dollars was donated to the Saint Petersburg Pavlov Medical University by an unnamed person. There were several endowed chairs included in the donation. I recognized one name. A chair in neurodiagnostic medicine was named for Dr. Alan L. Berman.

  But what about Zhukov’s body? Where was it? I sped through my notes again until I found the answer in Alan’s file.

  Got it.

  I knew where Zhukov’s body was buried.

  145

  The permutations of Zhukov’s story whirled through my head as I drove in my van. David and Rick’s house was close, and it didn’t take me long to drive there.

  There were no empty parking slots on the street, so I went around into the alley and parked behind their home. When I saw a bike leaning against the wall of their detached garage, I knew I was in the right place.

  Holding the Glock in my hand, I wore the backpack with my equipment but didn’t think I would need it. When I turned the doorknob and found the back door open, I knew I was right.

  I walked in. He stood on his head in the far corner of the great room.

  “Appropriate, don’t you think?” Alan asked.

  “It is, since that’s the position you were in when I first met you,” I said.

  I held the Glock at my side. He rolled out of his headstand and stood up. “It took you longer to get here than I anticipated, but I am so glad you finally made it.”

  “I had to come. It’s a terrific story.”

  “I was counting on you feeling that way.”

  “You were?”

  “You wanted to write Zhukov’s story, and now you will be able to.”

  “I have a few questions.”

  “I would be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  “Do you have Alzheimer’s?”

  “Four years ago, I made a breakthrough with my Alzheimer’s research,” Alan began. “I discovered an intravenous isotope to be used with a PET scan that would identify the beta amyloid deposition before the onset of dementia symptoms. It would be the first step in developing a treatment paradigm before the plaques destroyed function. As part of the trials, we needed normal volunteers. Who better to do this than the primary researcher?”

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  “But the test came back abnormal.”

  “It was the only abnormal result from all the controls we tested. There was only one possibility. I had Alzheimer’s.”

  “Why did you fake the symptoms?”

  “The pivotal question in this story. I am told that a fiction writer begins a book with a ‘what if’ question.”

  “They do.”

  “What if you were asymptomatic when you learned you had Alzheimer’s? What would you do?”

  “No symptoms at all?”

  “None.”

  “I would get a second opinion.”

  He smiled. “You would have made a good doctor. And if the second — and even third — opinion confirmed the first one, what would you do?”

  “Cry a lot.”

  “No, no, no, you cannot do that. What would you do? Travel before your cognitive skills eroded? Write a book? Go to plays and movies? What would you do?”

  “Spend my time with my two kids and my husband.”

  “But then they would see you deteriorate. Would you want that to happen?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why not right the wrongs that had been done to you before you deteriorated into a vegetative state?”

  “You decided to kill Zhukov.”

  He nodded. “I had only one financial goal in my life. I wanted to make the medical school from which I graduated better so those young people could come to the United States and not be second-class doctors.”

  “It’s hard to picture you being a second-class doctor.”

  “But that’s what they thought of me in the United States. I had to go back to school here so I would no longer be stigmatized as an FMG.”

  “Which you hated.”

  “Wouldn’t you? I graduated from Harvard and became famous in my field, but that putz Zhukov absconded with all my money.”

  “You shot him so you could take back the money he stole from you.”

  “That money and, as it turns out, so much more that he had taken from his Russian friends, but you came along and made me alter my plans. I had to come back the second night to download the contents from his computer, which you already knew since you were hiding in the kitchen with Molly.”

  “Molly told you we were there?”

  “She did. We have become great friends. She even showed me the DVDs that Zhukov recorded when I was previously there with him and which she found.”

  “Did you know Zhukov was recording your encounters together?”

  “I did not. Quite titillating, I must say. I immediately went on a diet because I
looked so fat.”

  “A video recording does add a few pounds.”

  146

  Alan checked his watch. “I hate to end this but you might want to leave before they get here.”

  “They?” I asked.

  “Members of the Russian Mafia. When you told Marcia they had planted listening devices in your home, I checked your van and found a Russian GPS tracker under your left rear fender. That gave me the perfect denouement to this story.”

  “You used me.”

  “I did. I hadn’t been to The Max for a good long time to validate to David and Rick my descent into my dementia. I knew you would be there to work on the story about their event. You knew what Zhukov’s killer looked like. I went to The Max so you would see that killer.”

  “You?”

  “It was.”

  “And when I recognized his killer, I would chase her to your condo.”

  “Yes, and once you arrived there and figured it out, I knew you would come here. I counted on the Russians following you.”

  “But why do this?”

  “It’s the only way I can keep them from harming Marcia.”

  “Suicide by Russian Mafia. They kill you and leave her alone, and you don’t have to deteriorate into dementia since you’ll be dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does Marcia know about your plan?”

  “I left her a note that explains that I am going to disappear forever and not to search for me. She knows how I feel about this dreadful disease, and she’ll think I killed myself.”

  “I can’t let you do this.”

  “Oh, I think you can and will. If you prevent this from happening, the Russians will come after everyone involved, including you and your family and the rest of the Hamlin Park Irregulars. It won’t be pretty.”

  I elevated the Glock and pointed it in his direction. “I’ll take that chance. I can’t let them murder you.”

  “What would you be willing to do to write the other stories?”

  “Which ones?”

  “Sullivan and Diane Warren.”

  I heard car doors slam in front of the house.

  “They’re here.” He pulled out a folder. “I’ll give this to you if you leave right now. It explains everything.”

  147

  I didn’t hesitate to leave. I was terrified of the Russians. I’m a mom and a wife. No story is worth that risk.

  But I wanted to know what happened, so I sprinted to my van, immediately found the GPS tracker Alan mentioned and threw it as far away as I could. I roared out of the alley and double-parked a block away where I felt safe and could still see David and Rick’s house.

  I was too far away to hear any gunfire if that was the method the Russians used to kill Alan. I did see four men walk out of the house and look up and down the block before they drove away.

  It didn’t take long to find out what they did with his body. Five minutes after they departed, there was an explosion followed by flames leaping from the roof. As I watched the fire burn out of control, I opened the file Alan had given me and found the answers to the details I had missed.

  He obviously knew how to impersonate Alzheimer’s patients since, as part of his practice, he saw them on a regular basis. With his mad cow disease, no one would suspect him of being capable of committing a murder. It was easy for him to shoot Zhukov in the forehead, but only after immobilizing him with a Taser and forcing him to tell Alan the password to his computer and his escape plans.

  Initially, Alan buried Zhukov in his own backyard, but I gave him a better solution when I told him about how Frankie’s guys had buried the missing-fingered man in David and Rick’s basement. That night, he dug up Zhukov’s body and put it next to the RPG man.

  Alan didn’t stop with Zhukov. Marcia had suggested that everyone wanted to kill his or her builder. Alan agreed with her, but he took it one step further. He began killing the subcontractors who had angered him too. They were buried in the basement close to Zhukov.

  David and Rick had mentioned they were going to have a meeting with Sullivan, and thus, Alan knew Sullivan would be at the house. Alan took an Uber to the house and found Sullivan inside. Alan killed him with a nail gun.

  Alan’s first move was to immediately go outside and park Sullivan’s truck a block away to avoid leaving any tire tracks near the house. He walked back in the middle of the street to avoid leaving any footprints and then used a broom he’d taken from the house to sweep snow over his and Sullivan’s footprints into the house. The rapidly falling snow provided a much-needed assist, as did a neighbor who parked in the space Sullivan had used.

  Alan fired the nail gun at David and me to frighten us off. This gave him time to bury Sullivan’s body and all the evidence in the basement before I returned with Janet and Tony.

  He walked out the front door, carefully stepping in the tracks I’d made in the snow after I sprinted from the house fearing that I would be killed. This time he didn’t need the broom to sweep away his tracks.

  Running to Sullivan’s truck, he then drove it away and left it on the South Side with the keys in it, where it would be stolen — another trick he learned from me when I told him about Luca and Enzo leaving the RPG man’s van in a neighborhood where it was sure to be stolen. He took an Uber home.

  Molly saw the freshly turned dirt in the basement when we went back to David and Rick’s home with Alan to hunt for clues, but I ignored her request to go down there and check it out. Alan wrote that was the only time he feared we could catch him.

  His final murder made him the happiest. He killed Diane Warren using superglue. After he knocked me out with the Taser, he wrapped her body in a tarp and dropped it out the same window I had looked out of when I first walked into the room. He boarded the plane and paid the pilots to fly to Chile, telling them it was at Diane’s request. He paid them to keep the plane there for the next six months.

  He disembarked from the plane before it flew away and waited until we left before he removed her body. He buried her in the basement next to Sullivan.

  He knew what the Russians would do to him, but they didn’t start the fire. He did. Before the Russians arrived, he buried packets of accelerant with each body in the basement. Included in the packets were special chemicals he’d invented that would turn the bodies to mush making them impossible to be tested for DNA.

  The bodies would be totally destroyed beyond all recognition by the fire. When the Russians walked in, he triggered a timer. They killed him and left.

  When the timer went off, Alan burned down David and Rick’s home. His body would be found in what remained of the house, but he didn’t care because he had no DNA in any file in the United States and no one would know it was him.

  The police report would say an unknown man, possible a homeless person seeking shelter in the partially constructed house, might have started the fire.

  Alan covered all his bases.

  148

  Part of the story Alan had given me was missing, but I had already figured out on my own. He did one other thing when he found out he had Alzheimer’s. He came out of the closet. It must have been scary for him at first, until he realized David and Rick would keep Marcia from finding out.

  That was why he bought a condo close to The Max. He could sneak out at night and ride his bicycle down there. On bad weather days he took an Uber. He changed clothes and transformed into Genieva. If he had a visitor over to his condo, no one would find out.

  In a way, despite the tragic aspects of the events, this was a terrific love story. Alan kept his other life secret from Marcia so her high society friends wouldn’t find out about him and she wouldn’t be humiliated. He willingly gave up his life to protect her from the Russians.

  I closed the folder with Alan’s “what if” question buzzing around in my brain. What would I do if I still had all my marbles but I knew for certain that I had Alzheimer’s and there was no cure? What would I do?

  What would anyone do?

&n
bsp; Carter was still up when I returned home. “Did you figure it out?” he asked.

  “Some of it,” I said, “but I had help with the rest. But I have to confess something to you. I told you there was no living person in Zhukov’s office when I arrived for the interview. What I left out was that he had been killed by a single gunshot wound to his forehead.”