Freeze Frame (10 page)

In the dream, I tried to tell my father
something but the telephone kept interrupting. Each time I spoke,
the thing rang.

Rinnggggg.

I struggled to open my eyes.

Rinnnggg.
Part of the dream was
real...I reached for the phone on the bed stand.

"Hello?"

"Darcy...it’s Manny. I almost hung up."

"What's up?"

"The DVD.”

"What about it?"

“Darcy...what do you know about subliminal
persuasion?”

“Subliminal persuasion? Manny, what are you
talking about?”

"How soon can you be here?"

"You at home?"

"Yeah."

"How do I get there?"

It took fifteen minutes to drive to
Rodriguez’s condo near Detroit's New Center Area. I turned into the
parking lot, barely avoiding a speeding sports car on the way
out.

I found the address and pulled into an empty
space. I pressed the button at the front door and waited. I hit the
button again. Voices came from the next building and three people
emerged laughing. Inside, a stereo blared an ancient Motown
song.

I tried the knob; it turned easily. I pushed
the door open and stepped inside, finding myself in a small dark
foyer. The only light came from the hallway straight ahead.

"Manny?" I called. “Manny!”

I proceeded slowly into the narrow hallway
and called once more. Manny kept his condo as orderly as his
office, so my heart skipped when I noticed a chair tipped on its
side.

In the sparse light, I saw another hallway to
my left, on the far side of the living room. I approached it, and
looked right. Light came from underneath a closed door at the end
of the hall. I reached it, pushed the door and it creaked open.

Nothing could have prepared me for the scene:
blood everywhere...red splotches and streaks on the white
wall...Manny Rodriguez in a red-soaked circle on the beige
carpet.

"Manny! My god!"

Rodriguez opened his eyes, staring blankly.
Trying to move, his limbs jerked sporadically. I rushed to him,
kneeling at his side. I lifted his head and rolled it to the left.
Rodriguez coughed, and spit red on my blue parka.

"Manny, what happened?"

"The...DVD...they..." Every word a struggle.
"They took it..."

"Who, Manny? Who did this to you?"

Manny was fading fast. His eyes closed, then
opened. This time the stare was blank. I reached up, pulled a
pillow from the bed and pushed it under his head. I grabbed the
telephone on the desk and hit nine-one-one. I gave the address to
the woman, and told her to rush an ambulance.

Then I found the bathroom -- in time to throw
up into the toilet.

34

Saturday, Oct. 16 -- 12:10 a.m.

I followed the ambulance to Henry Ford
Hospital, five minutes from Rodriguez's condo.

Rushing through the automatic glass doors, I
found myself a few feet from the reception desk. The expression on
the face of the chubby, middle-aged African American woman at the
desk told me to stop there.

"I'm looking for Emanuel Rodriguez. He was
just brought here by ambulance."

"Are you a relative?" The woman typed
something on the computer in front of her.

"No. A friend."

"I have no record of an Emanuel Rodriguez.
You say he just arrived?"

"Minutes ago.”

"It’ll take time to process him," the woman
said. "Have a seat in the waiting room."

"You’ll call me?"

"Check back in ten minutes."

I walked into a small, brightly lit waiting
room overflowing with people. I picked up a Newsweek and found an
empty chair next to an older woman. Niles VanBuhler's picture
peered at me from the cover. The story inside featured VanBuhler’s
surprising success in the spring primaries.

I tried to read, but my mind wandered. What
had Manny found? Who had beaten Manny and stolen the disc? Were
Bacalla or Roland involved somehow?

"Pardon me."

I looked up to see a tall black man in the
uniform of a Detroit patrolman.

"Are you the lady who found the man they just
brought in?" the policeman asked. "The man who was assaulted?"

"Yes. How is he?"

"I wouldn't know, ma'am. But I need your
name, address and telephone number so our detectives can reach
you."

"Why isn't someone here, now?" Rodriguez’s
beating deserved more than the mechanical recording of names and
phone numbers.

"Busy night. A detective will call you
tomorrow. Now may I have your name?"

I gave the policeman the information, then
decided to check on Manny. But the woman at the desk said his
information still hadn't reached the computer.

I found a bank of telephones in the small
snack room and decided to tell someone from the agency what was
happening. My first call, to Matt Carter, found his answering
machine.

Reluctantly, I called Sean Higgins. He
answered on the sixth ring.

"Sean? It's Darcy James."

"Darcy? What’s up?"

"It's Manny Rodriguez, Sean. He's in the
hospital."

"Hospital?"

"He's been beaten. Badly. They just brought
him to Henry Ford Emergency."

"How is he?"

"No word yet. I just thought...well, I
thought someone from the agency ought to know."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes."

As I replaced the receiver, the woman at the
reception desk motioned to me.

"Still nothing on the computer," she said.
"But I called upstairs. Mr. Rodriguez is in intensive care. His
condition is 'critical'."

"Can I see him?"

"Sorry. Not unless you're a member of the
immediate family."

I thought fast. “His brother is on the way.
He'll be here in twenty minutes."

***

"You're his brother." I caught Higgins by
surprise as he walked through the automatic doors. “He’s in
intensive care.”

"His brother? Who's going to believe
that?"

"The receptionist seems pretty busy. I don’t
think she’ll ask for identification.”

"What floor's he on?"

"Four, but you need a pass." I led Higgins to
the desk.

"This is Manny Rodriguez’s brother."

The woman looked at Higgins for a moment, as
I held my breath. She finally opened a drawer, withdrew a numbered
visitors’ badge and handed it to him.

“ICU’s on four.”

Higgins started for the elevators with me
close behind.

35

I described the scene at Rodriguez’s condo,
and the trip to the hospital. As we reached the elevator, the doors
on our left parted, and I followed Higgins inside.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"With you," I said. "Until someone stops
me.”

The doors closed and a moment later opened on
the fourth floor, the hallway vacant. The numbers and arrows on the
wall across from the elevator told us to go right for the Adult
Intensive Care Unit.

"I still don't think this is a good idea...I
mean your being here," Higgins whispered.

"The place is deserted. Who's going to see
me?"

The answer came two seconds later.

"Your passes, please." We found ourselves
confronted by a woman as tall as Higgins, and nearly his weight.
Standing hands on hips, she reminded me of a WAC drill
sergeant.

"You need a pass to be on this floor," the
woman said, walking closer. Her tag read "Dahner, Head Nurse,
Intensive Care."

"We’re here to see Manny Rodriguez." Higgins
held out the plastic pass. Dahner examined it briefly, returned it
and looked at me.

"Where's yours?"

"I...I don't have a pass," I said. "I'm the
one who found Mr. Rodriguez.”

"Sorry. No pass, no visit. You'll have to
leave."

"Can you at least tell me how he is?"

"The doctor just left. He's alive. Vital
signs are stable. That's all I can tell you."

Not exactly Florence Nightingale. She turned
to Higgins. "You can have ten minutes."

"Is he conscious?"

"No." The way Nurse Dahner said it, it
sounded like it would be a long while, if ever, before Manny
regained consciousness.

36

Higgins followed the nurse through two metal
doors into the Intensive Care Unit. Here, rooms with glass walls
provided visual access to the patients inside. Through the glass
Higgins heard the whirring, beeping and hissing of machines that
kept those patients on this side of an even thinner wall between
life and death.

Nurse Dahner took a sudden left into a
glass-walled room. Higgins followed; as he walked inside a shock
hit him like a rushing lineman. Even a career witnessing
concussions, compound fractures and worse on the football field
hadn’t prepared him for what he saw. Manny Rodriguez lay surrounded
by metal IV-stands, each draped with a bottle dripping fluid. Tubes
were everywhere: nose, arms, chest...running underneath the covers.
His eyes had swollen shut, and a respirator had been inserted in
his mouth.

Higgins stood riveted to the floor, staring
at the inert form, hearing the beeping and whirring of the machines
that kept Rodriguez alive.

He had seen enough: it was time to get the
hell out of there.

“How is Manny?” I asked as Higgins stepped
out of the elevator.

“Unconscious. I can't tell you any more than
the nurse did.”

We walked toward the lobby of the emergency
room, echoes of our footsteps piercing the silence. I couldn't help
thinking about Rodriguez and how much his positive attitude meant
to the creative group -- and to me.

"What do you figure his chances are?" I asked
Higgins.

"I'm not a doctor."

We avoided stating the obvious: that the
bruised and bleeding body we had seen tonight bore small
resemblance to the man we knew, and its chances of regaining the
spark of life we knew as Manny Rodriguez might well be just as
small.

37

Now

The good news came just past five o’clock.
Ken Cunningham telephoned to say AVC had named Adams & Benson
agency of record for their entire business.

Winning the AVC account called for a
celebration. Higgins rummaged through the pantry closet and came up
with half a fifth of Johnny Walker Red. He poured an inch or so
into two tall glasses, added ice and water and we took them out on
the deck. I was anxious to hear details of the AVC presentation,
but first I wanted to know if Ken Cunningham was still on our
side.

“We didn’t have much time to chat,” Higgins
said. “He was at the airport and his plane was ready to leave.

“He asked me to tell you he’s behind us. But
of course insisted again that we turn ourselves in.”

We talked about how the additional AVC
business might change our lives. Both of us would gain additional
responsibilities and, presumably, increases in salary. That is, if
we managed to solve our present dilemma.

Higgins nodded off first, having gone without
sleep for twenty-four hours. He headed for bed just after
seven.

I stayed awake mulling over our situation. I
couldn’t get Manny’s last words out of my mind.

What do you know about subliminal
persuasion?

What did I know? I had read a few articles
about the subject, but never really delved into it. If it somehow
lay at the heart of why people were being murdered over the Avion
disc, I owed it to Manny and the other victims to find out. I
decided to visit the Gaylord library the next morning.

38

Now

Tuesday, Oct. 19 -- 9:24 a.m.

Gaylord’s Otsego County library is small by
big city standards, but it wasn’t books I was after. I needed
access to the internet. I still doubted that subliminal messages
could influence the subconscious, but Manny had found something on
that DVD. Something important enough that someone had tried to kill
him.

I tried to minimize the risk of being
recognized by pulling my shoulder-length brown hair into a bun and
donning a scarf. Sunglasses completed my feeble disguise and it
seemed to work. No one looked twice as I strolled past the checkout
desk and into the room housing about half a dozen computers.

A
google
search of “subliminal
persuasion” coughed up a collection of subliminal help tapes for
sale. I also found reports on that famous movie theatre
experiment.

The man’s name was James Vicary, and back in
late 1957 he used a device he invented to flash the words “eat
popcorn” and “drink Coke” onto a movie screen in Fort Lee, New
Jersey. The words appeared every five seconds for 1/3000 of a
second, too fast to be recorded by the conscious mind. According to
the theory, though, the subliminal suggestion passed into the
subconscious. According to the article, Vicary claimed the theatre
registered an 18% gain in the sales of soda, and a 57% increase in
popcorn sales.

The news created a media blitz followed by an
almost hysterical reaction from a public fearing they might be
brain washed in other ways. But Vicary failed in subsequent
attempts to duplicate the results and subliminal persuasion faded
into the nation’s subconscious.

I clicked through a few more pages when a
couple of articles I had never seen before caught my eye. One from
Time
magazine featured a Russian scientist’s experiments
curing drug addicts with subliminal messages in the
mid-eighties.

If drug addicts could be cured through
subliminal persuasion, could they also be created?

Another entry reported the FBI considered
using subliminal telephone messages to convince David Koresh's
followers to turn on him during the Waco confrontation in the early
nineties.

It got even more interesting. I found a
title: The CIA and Subliminal Research. Calling up the entry, my
eyes followed down to a paragraph reporting that an article
“Operational Assessment of Subliminal Perception” had appeared in
the CIA’s classified journal, Studies in Intelligence. The date of
the original article? Early 1958, right on the heels of Vicary’s
1957 movie theatre experiment. A rundown of its contents showed the
CIA’s interest in subliminal persuasion and its efforts under a
top-secret initiative code-named MKULTRA in the mid-to-late
Fifties.