The Cyclops Conspiracy (6 page)

“Yes, she does. Ironically, that’s what Daddy hated about her.”

“Hated? I thought they were fond of each other. Didn’t you say she paid for the funeral?”

“She did. But from what I could piece together, he didn’t care for her, and they didn’t talk often.”

“Why?”

“I guess business isn’t as good as it once was. I’m not privy to all the details.” She hesitated, thinking, then said, “Daddy was in personal financial trouble. He used a lot of capital from the Colonial to fund his own pursuits. He resented having to be bailed out.” She uttered the last word as if it were bitter on her tongue.

“I thought he sold the Colonial to cash in. Chrissie, you make him sound like he had an addiction,” said Jason, lowering his voice. “Was he drinking the profits?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Chrissie, shaking her head. “But he did have an addiction.”

“Something chemical? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Another kind. More of an obsession.”

“Meaning?”

“Jason, do you ever get paranoid?”

“Sometimes. Doesn’t everyone get that way now and then?”

“Exactly. Everybody gets paranoid. But it usually lasts a short time. Then rational, normal people come to their senses. My father wasn’t that way.”

“What are you saying? Your father was perpetually paranoid?”

“He was a conspiracy nut. He was always looking for the sinister twist, always hunting for bad guys in smoky back rooms. He said the conspiracies were there. You just had to look for them.”

“Chrissie, I knew your father. I never saw any of that. And he never mentioned anything like that to me. Ever!”

“It started after you left.” Christine absently stirred what was left of her drink with a spoon. She wanted to add that she associated Jason’s leaving with her father’s new, deviant attitude, but refrained.

“What kind of conspiracies?” he asked.

“Anything and everything. Local, national, international. To him, the world was Machiavellian. Every organization had the seeds of conspiracy in it, he said. Governments, corporations, agencies—everyone
was up to underhanded, back-door manipulations. He was always looking for them. He collected lots of documents trying to prove it.”

“So when, exactly, did your father become delusional?”

“Just a few months after you left the Colonial.”

Jason looked away, studying a waitress serving another table. “No way,” he murmured. “I don’t believe it.” Jason had a faraway look in his eyes. Chrissie sensed he was remembering the past. She was about to ask him what had happened all those years ago, when a fresh round of drinks arrived.

“Shouldn’t you slow down?” Jason urged. Chrissie noticed him looking at her empty drinks.

Christine ignored him. “It got worse in the last six or seven years, you know. Conspiracies consumed everything in his life. Money. Relationships. He pushed me out.” She locked eyes with him, her voice thicker now. “His whole life became that stupid box of files.”

He played with the edge of a napkin and then tried to change the subject. “You look tired. Good, but tired,” he whispered.

“Thanks, I think. I
am
tired. It’s been a long week. I still have a lot to do to settle Daddy’s affairs. I can’t believe he’s gone. At first, it was almost a relief, but each day it gets harder. I had to identify his body. That’s something I never want to do again.”

He reached over and squeezed her wrist. “I’m sorry.”

The waitress arrived to take their orders. Christine pulled her arm away.

“I’m hungry. We should order,” said Jason.

“Yes,” she said, tears welling.

After the waitress moved out of earshot, he defended his mentor. “Your father was a good man, incredibly passionate about pharmacy. There wasn’t a detail he missed. He was a perfectionist, and he demanded it of his pharmacists and his students.”

“That was one of the things that drove me nuts about him,” she said wistfully. “He was the most anal man I’ve ever known. Did you
know he folded the end of the toilet-paper roll into a nice little point, like they do in hotels?”

Jason chuckled. “That’s what made him a great pharmacist. In our profession, you have to look at the smallest details. Miss a decimal point or misinterpret a doctor’s scribble, and it could mean big trouble. That was one of the first lessons he ever taught me. I remember, early on, I filled a prescription for an old man. He was on heart medication, digoxin, and he had liver failure. The doctor made a mistake, prescribed the higher dose. With his advanced age and kidney disease, the larger strength could have been disastrous. Your dad knew the patient and his condition. He let me fill the prescription, then as I was about to dispense it incorrectly, he stopped me and said I was about to kill the man. Of course, he didn’t let the patient know what was going on. Later we called the doctor and had it changed.

“The man had a wife, three children, and eight grandchildren. Your father described his hobbies, his concerns about finances and the stock market. How his kids were busy and didn’t come by enough. Your father always took the time to know his patients. Not just their medications and medical conditions. He knew their stories. He said if I screwed it up it would affect a lot of people, not just the patient. ‘Every prescription should be filled like it was for your own mother,’ he always said.

“I looked at your father very differently after that. Before, patients were just a disease, a medication, and a prescription to me. Your father made me see that there were real people behind what we do. That was the first time I realized how important what I do is.” Jason stopped, a faraway look clouding his eyes.

“Go on,” she said softly.

“We always need to be at our best, perfect. He told me never to forget that. And I haven’t.”

“Are you okay?”

He nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Just remembering too much.”

“Is that what happened back then, Jason? Daddy put too much pressure on you?” Christine asked.

“No, that’s not why I left. It was something else completely.”

“Are you ever going to tell me why you
deserted
me?”

Jason winced as though the word hurt to hear. “Someday soon,” he said. “Not tonight. You’re drunk.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re close.”

Through the fog of the vodka, tequila, and gin, she read anguish in his face. “You make him sound like Superman.”

“To me he was. He certainly wasn’t paranoid. He didn’t drink and he certainly didn’t drink and drive.” Jason opened his mouth to continue, but stopped.

“People change,” she said.

The waitress returned with a thick hamburger and steak fries for Jason and an oriental chicken salad for Christine.

“You were going to ask me a question,” she said.

Jason nodded, slathering mayo on his burger. “Something’s been bothering me about your father’s death.”

“Yeah?”

“What was your father doing in Smithfield when he died?”

“I have no idea. The police officers asked me that too. Maybe he just went out for a drive.”

“After drinking?”

“I told you, we weren’t talking much. He could’ve kept it hidden. What are you trying to say?”

“What I’m trying to say is, in the last thirteen years, did you ever see him take a drink? Beer, wine, whiskey?”

“No, never.” Christine had never thought of it that way before. Perhaps she wanted to believe he father had been drinking. It would explain his obsessions.

“Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Christine replied. “Are you the same person you were thirteen years ago?”

“I guess not.” Jason took a large gulp of his gin and tonic.

“So what happened to that, Jason?”

“I was young and didn’t know what I wanted.”

“What about now? Do you know what you want now?”

“Your Honor,” Jason said, chuckling, “counsel is badgering the witness!”

“I think I deserve some answers.”

Jason screwed his face up and bit into his burger. A minute passed. They used the food as a distraction. Jason finally broke the silence.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Are you going to keep answering questions with questions?”

Christine could sense the thoughts bounding inside his head like overheated molecules.
He wants to spill out the whole mess
, she thought.

* * *

She’s an enigma
, Jason thought. He had expected a barrage of questions about their breakup. In a way, he wanted her to be angry. It would be easier to talk about it if she were angry. She would have her guard up, her defenses in place. He could take comfort in the fact that his words would hurt less.

But she was drunk and in no condition to discuss their history. He wanted her at her best, he rationalized. The last thing he wanted was latent, raging emotion combined with alcohol-fueled irrationality.

“Do you remember how we met?” he asked.

Christine looked away, remembering the past. “You were a petrified little extern, waiting for Daddy to come back into the office, trying to figure out the answer to that stupid question he asked all his students. Of course I remember.”

* * *

Thomas’s tiny office was tucked behind the pharmacy department in a dark corridor. Uneasiness besieged Jason like swarming mosquitoes. At six foot four, Thomas Pettigrew towered over the technicians and pharmacists he worked with and supervised. His hands were so large he could hold a dinner plate by the edges with one meaty mitt. His eyes were older, more intense versions of his daughter’s, framed by crow’s-feet and mottled skin. His white, flowing hair always seemed to be in desperate need of a trim, which, coupled with his full-length white lab coat, gave him an Einstein-like appearance.

Pettigrew appeared absolutely gigantic inside the closet-sized office. Cramped and miserable, insignificant and puny under Pettigrew’s gaze, Jason sat stiffly in the uncomfortable metal chair. His knees rubbed the front panel of the dented metal desk as he fended off the barrage of questions. “Ums” and “ahs” drifted from Jason’s lips like chaff in response to Pettigrew’s barrage of questions. Jason later learned it was part of Pettigrew’s strategy, his game. He didn’t care what your answers were. He wanted to see how you handled the stress. The pharmacist’s workday was a pressure cooker. It produced diamonds or spit out chunks of dirty, bituminous coal. Jason was failing miserably. Forty minutes after it began, Pettigrew stopped and peered unblinkingly at Jason for a few seconds. An eternity yawned. The old man asked a final, unhurried question. “What philosophy should dictate your practice of pharmacy?”

Jason opened his mouth, unsure what answer might spew forth. Pettigrew raised a long, slender hand, cutting him off. “You and I,” Pettigrew said in his powerful baritone, “have undertaken a respected profession. Did you know that pharmacists are more trusted than doctors and clergy?”

“No.”

“They are. We are a respected bunch. I’ve had patients tell me that their doctor instructed them to do such and such. But they wanted to ask me before they did anything.”

Jason nodded nervously, already aware he had never considered his professional mantra.

Pettigrew held up a bony finger one more time. “I want you to think about your answer for twenty minutes. I have to check some prescriptions. When I come back, I will hear your response. If I’m pleased, I will consider taking you on as my extern. It should be one short sentence, appropriate and succinct. Then be prepared to defend it.” Pettigrew stood and left the small office, brushing past Jason.

A minute later, she poked her head in the door, her lips wide in an impish smile. Dark brown eyes glimmered with a hint of mischief through the curtain of soft brown tresses. Jason smiled weakly, trying to push his dilemma into a cerebral closet.

“Are you the pharmacy student?” she asked.

Jason nodded. His throat was dry, tongue thick.

“Did he ask you the question yet?”

Jason gave her a vacant stare.

“You know, the same one he asks every extern. ‘How are you going to be the best pharmacist’ or something like that?” The girl-woman added air quotes around the word “pharmacist.”

Jason nodded a second time. “He’s coming back in a few minutes. Got any advice?”

“I sure do.” She smiled. Her eyes sparkled with devilry as she turned and walked away.

Like a largemouth bass taking the bait, Jason followed her into the cramped hall. She was leaning against a wall. She beamed. “That didn’t take long.”

“Are you having fun?” Jason hissed.

“I sure am. So do you want the answer?”

“I want this externship. If you have information that will help me, I’d like to know what it is.”

She looked him up and down. “I like a man that goes after what he wants.”

“You’re just playing games. You don’t have any advice.” He turned to reenter the office.

“Oh, I have the exact answer he’s looking for,” she explained.

Jason stopped, wondering who this woman thought she was. “And how do you know that?”

“Because he told me.”

“Who are you? Do you work here?”

“You can call me Chrissie. And I work here, in a manner of speaking.”

“So what’s it gonna take to get the answer?”

“Dinner.”

“Dinner? Do you do this with all the externs, Chrissie?”

“No, as a matter of fact, you’re the first,” she replied.

“I have two questions. Why am I so privileged? And why don’t I believe that?”

“You better decide,” she declared. “He’s gonna be back soon.”

“First, tell me why you want to help me.”

“Because you’re cute. I saw you come in. You’ve got a nice ass.”

He huffed and looked away, certain he was being played.

“So what’s it gonna be?”

“Okay, I’ll buy you dinner. But only if I get the externship. Deal?”

“Uh-uh. Maybe you won’t use the answer I give you. It’s dinner or nothing. What you do with that information is up to you.” Christine twirled strands of hair around a finger. “Deal or no deal?”

* * *