Head Case (16 page)

45

November 5 (A.D.)

Now.

You see her? She’s down there now. She’s walking slowly away from the yellow tape, trying to seem inconspicuous while talking on her BlackBerry, trying to act like a generic passerby. She looks fairly cool and collected, but Missy was already incredibly hard to read. I wouldn’t want to play against her in a game of poker.

“No, no. That’s not what I said,” she’s saying.

“Is she dead or not?” I can hear a man’s voice vibrating out of Missy’s earpiece. The voice is squeaky and high and it is very familiar.

“Dead,” Missy says emphatically.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Eugene. I’m positive.”

Well, well. It seems Missy Pander put a hit on me after all. I knew too much, and by now she’s probably ascertained that I’ve been priming to squeal. I had to be silenced, of course I did. And now she had the connections to make that happen. Talk about a backstabbing co-worker, right? Well, at least on that level, it makes sense—in a pathological sort of way.

“And what about the other person who was shot?” Eugene’s voice could shatter glass. “What about him?” Him? Who is this him? Does he mean Shotkyn?

“I don’t know. That wasn’t me. But I’ll take it.”

There’s a pause in their conversation. “So what now?” Eugene asks.

“I don’t know. I have to think.”

“Well, are you sure no one else knows about the research? Is there anyone else outside of Pharmax who might have access to this information?”

“I’m not sure,” Missy Pander says very quietly. But in her head I can hear loud and clear that she’s thinking, “Polly War
ner. Polly might know.”

Part Three

46

November 5 (A.D.)

A Little While after My Head Exploded.

7:45 P.M.

“She’s gone. Polly, she’s gone.”

“Mitya? Is that you?” Polly asks, clutching the phone with both hands. “Oh, thank God, I was so worried, I didn’t know—”

“Polly, listen to me.”

“Where are you? Jesus, I was freaking out.” Polly swings her legs out of the fetal position that she’s been curled up in and places her feet firmly on the floor between the milk crate and the couch. “Is Ivan Petrovich okay? Did you see him? Did you talk to Shotkyn? Was he responsive? What did he say? What about Missy? Did she show up? Did you meet her with her? Did she have the supply?”

“Polly, stop. Listen to me.”

“What?” she says, the word getting caught in her throat on the exhale. It sounds like a high-pitched whine. 

“Baby?” Mitya lowers his voice, trying to sound comforting. “Are you okay?”

“Me? Yes. Why?” Polly glances at the clock.  More than an hour has passed since I was supposed to have shown up, and the television station has switched over to a syndicated talk show. “God, I’m so relieved to hear your voice.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in my apartment. Where I said I would be. So, what happened, what—”

“Good. Thank God you’re safe. This is so all so fucking crazy. Are you sitting down?”

Polly nods, which is sort of ridiculous because it isn’t like she’s talking on a videophone.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Mitya begins.

“Tell me what?” She closes her eyes as it begins to register that something is seriously wrong.

“Your friend Olivia—”

“Did you see her? I’ve been waiting for her. She said she was on her way home, but it been almost two hours—”

“Polly, she’s gone. They shot her. The bullet went right through her skull.”

Polly takes the phone from her ear and looks at it as if to make sure that it’s working properly. She looks at her reflection in the funhouse mirror across the room, as if to get a check on reality, to make sure she’s really there, in the apartment, hearing this. I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that from her particular angle, her head appears pear-shaped, her nose seems stout—she looks like Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh. “It’s awfully hard to be b-b-brave, when you’re a very small animal,” I want to tell her, quoting the famously nervous pig himself. 

“Polly?” Mitya says loud enough that Polly can hear his voice come out of the receiver even though she’s holding it at arm’s length.

She puts it back to her ear. “Mitya, what the hell are you talking about?”

Polly looks at the television set and recalls the reporter mentioning that a young woman had been shot. No, no. There’s no way, she’s thinking. Olivia had nothing to do with any of this. She couldn’t have. She didn’t even know the first thing about it, about Boris Shotkyn, about Ivan Petrovich, about any of it. “I made sure of that,” Polly says, whispering at her reflection. “I made sure of it.” 

“She’s dead, Polly. I’m so sorry.”

“What are you talking about? This is insane. Why was Olivia even down there? She was supposed to be on her way home.”

“I don’t know. All I know is that Shotkyn sent Ivan Petrovich to get her. He said they needed to talk.”

“What? Why? What do you mean? Why would he need to talk to Olivia? Why would he even know who she is?”

“I wasn’t there. But when I went to the Rasputin Café to meet with Shotkyn, to talk about splitting ... he was on the phone when I got there. He didn’t see me come in at first, and I overheard him talking about it. I heard him say something about getting rid of ‘the researcher girl.’ He mentioned her name. Olivia. I couldn’t imagine what other researcher girl named Olivia he might be talking about. It had to be your roommate.”

“So you’re not sure it was her then? He could have been talking about someone else.” Polly closed her eyes. Maybe this was all just a big misunderstanding.

“I saw her, Polly. I saw it happen. I was there.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“When he realized I’d overheard him, I had no choice.”

“No choice?”

“He said if I didn’t keep quiet, he would kill me too. And then they forced me into their car. I was in the car, Polly. I was with them when they got there, when they caught Ivan’s car. I tried to stop it, but—”

“How close were you?” Polly says. “How did you know it was her?”

I have to say, I’m touched. Polly’s boyfriend has just told her he was kidnapped at gunpoint, but right now her primary concern seems to be me, her old friend Olivia Zack. Maybe I’ve been underestimating her loyalty after all.

“You’ve only met her a few times,” she says. “Maybe you mistook—”

“Polly—”

“No, but it makes no sense. It couldn’t be Olivia. None of this makes sense. You were clear with him, right? With Shotkyn? I thought you said everything was almost all worked out, that we got him what he wanted and we could be finished working with him?” Polly started chewing on her thumbnail. “Who was he talking to?”

“What?”

“Who was he talking to on the phone when you heard him mention Olivia’s name? Or what you think was her name?”

“I did hear her name, Polly. He said her name and I saw her. I saw it happen.”

“But who was on the other line? Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know, Polly. I really don’t know.”

Polly looks around as if there might be something in the apartment that could give her a clue about what’s happening. If I could, I would just break through this ethereal wall and tell her that, as I am now piecing together, it was Missy Pander on the other end of the line. But I can’t.

“Polly? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah,” she says. “I’m just trying to understand …”

“One of Shotkyn’s guys shot her. We tried to stop it. I tried …” Mitya pauses.  “He’s dead, too, though.”

“Who? Ivan Petrovich?”

“No. Boris Shotkyn.”

“You killed him?”

“No, it wasn’t me. Polly? Are you there?”

Polly looks back at the mirror and I struggle to find my reflection next to her, or more importantly to enable her to see my reflection. Nothing’s there. Not even a cartoon. It’s so surreal, watching her watch herself as she learns of my death, thinking of me so intensely and yet unable to conjure me up. I suppose “frustrating” might seem a more logical word to describe this situation, but it isn’t what I feel. To feel such a sentiment, I think I would need a better-functioning anterior cingulate region of my brain, which I obviously don’t have anymore. So, mostly, I’m curious. That’s the closest adjective I can think of. I want to reach out and touch her, to tap her shoulder or whisper in her ear. There must be a way to do that. Aren’t ghosts supposed to do that sort of thing all the time? Move curtains and make creaky noises? Why can’t I figure this out? I can get into her head, but I can’t touch it. I’m starting to be able to read her thoughts, but I can’t tell her mine. Man, I suck at the afterlife.

“Can I call you back?” Polly says. Without waiting for a response, she hangs up. She tries to dial my cell one more time, just in case.

It should go without saying that I am in no position to answer it. Anyway, the phone is no longer with me. With my body, I mean. It’s with the police. Evidence, or so they say.

After a few rings, someone with a male voice picks up. “Police Sergeant Jeffers here—”

Polly tosses the phone as if it stung her. She pulls herself up and goes into the bathroom to splash her face with cold water. 

“Just hold it together, Polly,” she says to her reflection. “You have to hold it together. You have to figure this out.” She closes her eyes for a brief moment and then leans in close, her nose almost touching the mirror. “This is all your fault, you selfish bitch. You connected Missy and Boris Shotkyn. You owe it to Olivia to hold it together now. You owe it to her to figure this out.”

I have to say, considering the way she’s beating herself up, she’d be a good specimen for my study of guilt right about now. But honestly, this is really both of our faults. Not the actual pulling of the triggers, but the whole mess to begin with. I’m as culpable as she is, if you really get down to it. I just wish I could tell her that. I wish I could tell her that I’m sorry, too. I wish I could tell her that it wasn’t just me that Missy Pander would like to see dead.

47

November 8 (A.D.)

A Few Days Later.

“Here,” Mitya says, handing Polly a cold bottle of beer.

She takes it and pats the cushion next to her, inviting Mitya to join her on the couch.

He settles down as he takes a swig from his own bottle. “You okay?”

Polly fiddles with the brewery label, the condensation causing it to peel off the bottle.

“Long day,” she says as she satisfactorily removes the whole square of paper without a tear. She places it down on top of one of the many piles of files I had been stacking around the house, files Polly hasn’t bothered to move over the course of the past few days. She’s been too busy making arrangements.

They’ve just returned to our apartment, Polly fittingly dressed in the suit I had bought at Bloomingdales for that first Pharmax meeting, Mitya in a black jacket that looks like it’s been sitting in a closet for more than a decade, gathering a thin but indelible line of dust in the seam of each shoulder.

Mourning attire.

My funeral was brief, which was what I wanted. At least Polly got that right.

Aside from my parents and a smattering of friends and relatives, not many other people showed up, not the hordes you might expect for someone whose life had been, as the media folks were fond of saying, cut tragically short just three days prior. There were about a dozen people I had never seen, funeral crashers who had read about my murder in the paper earlier in the week. It was good enough entertainment for a Thursday afternoon, not that any salacious details had been added after the tabloid excitement of the breaking news. An innocent young woman had been caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a turf war and it had nothing to do with me. Either out of laziness or ineptitude, for the media (and therefore for everyone else), that was the end of the story. My funeral announcement came in the form of one of those public notices you find in the back of the obituary page, a small paragraph in microscopic font that basically said I had once been alive, but now I was not. You could have seen that much for yourself at the Christie Brothers Funeral Home on 79th and Amsterdam Avenue at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

Polly’s parents were there of course, and as expected, they were much more demonstrative in their grief than my own stoic flesh and blood. Dr. Warner repeatedly blotted his face with an increasingly soggy tissue, and Mrs. Warner emitted rhythmically short but loud sobs while my own parents looked like they were suffering through a sleepy, subtitled art house film. Lillianne Farber had sent an overflowing bouquet of flowers with a note that she was currently at an ashram in Indiana (much closer than India) and therefore unable to attend, but sent her sincere condolences. There was a sprinkling of my colleagues from the lab, and a few of our college friends hovering in the pews reached out to give Polly brief pecks on the cheeks and hollow hugs as she slowly walked up toward the pulpit to read the eulogy, if you can call it that.

I don’t mean to sound critical. I know this wasn’t easy for her. She had spent the previous couple of days trying out different words and phrases in front of our mirror, trying to figure out how to commend me and celebrate my life without seeming like she was reciting a script penned by a writer from Hallmark. Or like she was a big hypocrite, since by that point most of the people closest to us knew we were hardly speaking, and since—perhaps more importantly—she blamed herself for my death, though she was still clueless about exactly how and why it had happened. Sure, Ivan Petrovich told her that he had been sent to get me, that Boris Shotkyn wanted a third party to verify the purity of the pills being delivered, that Mitya had told him that I was an expert on Ziperal and all that. But how Shotkyn had known that about me, or more specifically why I had been shot—why there was gunfire at all—that was still a big mystery. No one other than Polly seemed even remotely interested in figuring it out, though.

I watched her as she repeatedly tore up the latest revision, swearing like a drunk sailor as she shoved it into the recycling bin under the kitchen sink. It was a difficult task, writing a eulogy for a person whose death you felt responsible for. Honestly, though, some of the blame should be laid on me; if I had wanted a glowing eulogy, I could have been more considerate of that when I was still alive. If you want ovations at your funeral, you need to actually accomplish something in your lifetime.

“Olivia was a good friend,” Polly said before looking out at the pews and realizing how few friends I actually had. She paused.

Even if there wasn’t exactly a sea of people, there were at least enough eyeballs on her to cause a little stage fright. And she hadn’t taken any Fralenex, Sanitol, Beta-Blockers—nothing, not even peppermint Certs. Never again, she had vowed after she learned that my dead body had been smothered by Ziperal. No more drugs. Well, at least not unless absolutely necessary and prescribed by a licensed medical doctor. So it was just Polly and her brain up there on the pulpit, trying to remain calm and composed all on their own. I would have been holding my breath for her if I could have.

She did it instead, after inhaling deeply like she had been taught in her yoga classes.

She exhaled slowly as she spread the pages of her speech across the podium and studied them. She read a few lines to herself. After a moment, she shook her head and picked them back up, carefully stacking the sheets together and looking toward the minister who had been randomly assigned to handle my service.

“I don’t need this,” she said. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and turned back to look at all the people looking at her. “I wrote that stuff to tell you all about my friendship with Olivia, to let you know how important she is—I mean she was—to me and how she was such a hard-working and gifted scientist, how she was so smart and such a good friend. Typical eulogy stuff. You’re welcome to read it.” She waved the sheets of paper above her head and walked over to the priest, who was sitting on a folding chair off to the side of the dais. “Just ask this guy. He can get you a copy.” She crossed her arms as if she had a chill, and returned to her spot at the podium. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’ve been struggling all week with what to say here, but I just realized that none of you are who I want to talk to. I want to talk to Olivia.”

Polly took a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose.

“Olivia,” she said, looking up and scanning the recessed lights. “I hope you’re okay up there. Or wherever you are. Well, wherever you are, if I know you, you’re probably casing out a funny angle to look at me from, trying to ascertain if I look like Olive Oyl or Eeyore or something.” Polly smiled, but nobody got the joke. No one laughed.

“Ols,” she continued, finally focusing for seemingly no particular reason on the elaborate and gaudy chandelier hanging over the center of the room. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I know you know that. And, if anything, it should be me in that coffin, not you. I’m so sorry.”

A rustle swept over the pews, a few whispers waved through the aisles.

All anybody actually knew, all the papers had said and all the police had divulged, was that I had been an innocent bystander in a neighborhood turf war. Why I was in a taxi in Brooklyn was never questioned. No assumption had been publicly made, nor had it been established that there was any connection, however tenuous, between me and the people responsible for my death. It was increasingly clear that the police were not going to go there. They weren’t going to go anywhere with any of it. In fact, if you go down to Brighton Beach, you might notice that Sergeant Jeffers and the undercover gang are all walking the beat in spiffy new suits. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out where the funding for their fashions came from. Someone has to keep the market going, right? The grannies depend on it.

Polly wiped a tear with the back of her wrist. “I know if you were able to say something to me right now, you would probably be trying to reassure me like you always do—I mean did—telling me that’s nonsense, that of course it isn’t my fault because I wasn’t the one pulling that trigger, that I wasn’t even there. God, you would probably somehow even turn this around and find away to take the blame yourself.” She blew her nose. “You were right, though. I took our friendship for granted and lost sight of things. Of what was important and what mattered most. Everything spun out of control, and it’s completely my fault. I should have listened to you.”

People were sitting up, pressing their coccyx bones into the hard wood benches. Could Polly have been involved in this somehow, they wanted to know. Could Olivia’s best friend actually been responsible for her death? Was there more to this story than an easy-to-dismiss case of wrong-place-at-wrong-time?

Polly wasn’t an idiot. There was a limit to what she would tell.

She took her eyes off of the lights and looked directly out into the audience. “She was coming to see me. I was upset and she was coming to see me. She left work early and unwittingly got into that taxi and …” she stopped short.

A woman was sitting alone in the back pew, a wide-brimmed black hat covering her blond up-do, large dark glasses shielding her eyes. She tipped her head to acknowledge Polly’s recognition of her, and why not? As far as anybody knew, Missy Pander had no reason to hide. Except that … well, maybe I should give myself a little more ghostly credit. Missy Pander hadn’t actually shown up for my funeral. She had no reason to. It wasn’t like she was mourning my loss.

The moment Polly shifted her eyes, the woman was gone.

Polly looked back up at the chandelier. “Olivia,” she said, so sotto voce that no one else could hear. “I swear I saw something.” 

Which is exactly what she’s saying to Mitya now, as he rubs the back of her neck on the couch just a couple hours after they came home.

“Mitya,” she says, “I saw something. I think Olivia was at the funeral. I mean, more than just her body in the casket. She was there.”