"Why don't you go on over and hang out with Tommy
Daigle awhile? Let your dad and me have a conversation."
"You sure? He's pretty, um ... you know." Sam
waved his hands in a pantomime of something flying to
pieces.
"I'm sure," I replied as reassuringly as I could, and
to my relief he headed off. Tommy Daigle was a sensible,
good-hearted boy, and his company would be an
antidote to Sam's distress.
Now all I needed was an antidote to my own, but I
wasn't going to get that, either. Mounting the back
steps with Ellie, I could hear Victor in there muttering
to himself.
"Well, it took you long enough," he snapped as he
saw us.
Scrubbed and freshly shaved as usual, he looked
pink as a shrimp. But his eyes were narrowly anxious. I
looked at the coffeepot, nearly full when I'd left--Sam
had made the coffee, and since he believed it should
compete with battery acid, I'd hardly drunk any--and
empty now.
Then Ellie and I swung into action: I filled the coffeepot
and started it again while she got cups and saucers
and sliced bread for toast. I cracked eggs into a
bowl, adding milk and waiting for the butter in the pan
to sizzle before I dumped them in; she washed the
bowl, dried it, and put it away before the eggs had time
to need stirring.
Victor looked helpless and puzzled, as he always
does when anything useful is happening that does not
involve surgery.
"Doesn't anybody want to know why I'm so upset?"
he finally demanded.
Ellie put a glass of orange juice on the oilcloth
covered table in front of him. She had not wanted him
to move to Eastport any more than I had, but there
hadn't been much she could do about it, either. When
he wants something, he is as relentless as the hurricane
that had resettled her ancestors.
"Maybe you're upset because you have high blood
pressure?" she inquired. "That always puts you in a
bad mood. Drink your juice. Here's some aspirin to go
with it."
She dropped tablets onto the table. "I don't suppose
you've thought to take any, yet." Now that he
was here, she'd adopted my standard procedure for
dealing with him:
First, get him out of his immediate physical discomfort.
We would have skipped this, except that it so
much simplified stage two: getting him out of my house
and back into his own as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Which was the hard part. I could have just banished
him as a general rule, I suppose, but that would
have been hard on Sam. And this morning, something
serious was up; how serious, I didn't know yet.
"Well, no," he admitted about the aspirin and
swallowed them grudgingly. He ate the eggs and toast
we fixed for him, too, and drank more coffee.
Ellie glanced meaningfully at me: Now he can vamoose.
Not so fast, I signaled back at her, because I was
watching Victor carefully and something about him
was different:
We'd bolstered his blood sugar, dosed him with
aspirin, and loaded him with caffeine until his eyes
should have looked like spinning pinwheels. It was not
the most politically correct way of dealing with a tiresome
ex-husband, I will grant you. But it worked,
which most of the time was all I cared about.
Now, though, Victor's mood was emphatically not
brightening. Meanwhile, the amount of money I had
invested in him at the moment meant that if he was in
trouble, I was, too.
"You did leave the tie in the bar, didn't you?" I
asked. "I mean, Ted Armstrong will be able to say so."
"N-not exactly." All he needed was a cartoon
cloudburst over his head. "I stuffed it in my pocket.
But it wasn't there when I got home. Maybe it fell out,
when I pulled out some hand wipes. I was on Water
Street."
Even that wasn't enough to make him look as unhappy
as he did. "So," I pursued, "what's the rest of
the problem?"
He looked distractedly at me, which was when I
really began feeling nervous; over the years I have come
to understand that if Victor doesn't have a malicious
gleam in his eye, something worse than Sam's coffee is
brewing.
"Tate," he replied. "After you left the restaurant.
He came in again, said he wanted to have our conversation."
Uh-oh. "And did you?"
He nodded morosely. "Classic textbook case. I'd
never met a real sociopath before."
"But you had met him before," Ellie pointed out.
"He said he wanted to talk with you again. Meaning, I
assume, that you and he had spoken earlier."
He bridled instantly. "Well, yes, but--look, I don't
want to tell you about it at all, if all you're going to do
is try to confuse me."
That's Victor: elbow-deep in somebody else's cranium,
he's a model of serenity. Anywhere else he's a
basket case, which was why I'd wanted him thoroughly
involved in a medical enterprise: it was the only way to
make him tolerable.
"Calm down," I told him. "What's the worst that
can happen?"
"That they're going to think I did it," he blurted.
Which was not what I wanted to hear. I stared at
him, not quite believing that I had. "Victor, what are
you talking about?"
"Maybe not the guy with the ear," he went on,
"although that's bad enough, and after all, it was my
tie they found in his throat. But with him, I didn't have
any motive."
And with Tate he did, he seemed to be implying.
Oh, this was just fabulous. He pressed his hands to his
head. "The police are probably on their way here right
now, and--"
"Victor," I cut in. "Just tell us what he said to you
after we left. What did he want to talk with you
about?"
Then Victor uttered the word that froze my heart.
"Blackmail," he whispered. I sat down.
"Tate was blackmailing me," he confessed, "or
anyway he was about to. And everybody in the bar last
night knew it."
Worse and worse. "How did they know?"
He shrugged miserably. "He said I was going to
hire him: big salary, unspecified duties. Said he'd been
digging into what he called my dark past, and that I'd
have to pay him money for it."
"He was just bluffing," I said flatly. "I hope you
told him to walk east till his hat floated."
Another dark thought struck me. "You didn't,
though, did you? Tell him to get lost."
"Not exactly," Victor replied very unhappily. "He
knew ..."
"About the malpractice lawsuit," I finished for
him.
Of course; nothing else could take the wind out of
Victor's sails so thoroughly.
Victor nodded. "Yeah, that," he uttered defeatedly.
It was what I'd been fearing, telling myself it
couldn't be. Because for one thing, how could Tate
know? There hadn't been much publicity around here,
although it had been in the papers briefly in the city. It
had been a fiasco, but only for Victor, and of course for
the patient whose death started it all in the first place,
in New York.
"I didn't do anything wrong," Victor protested for
perhaps the millionth time. "It was emergency surgery.
His prospects for surviving were minuscule. And," he
finished simply, "he didn't."
Which was all true, but afterward the patient's
family had raised a ruckus. And Victor, while apparently
blameless in the event, was staggeringly vulnerable.
Insurance investigators began looking into his
personal idiosyncrasies, many of whom were young
and female, some of whom had interesting habits of
their own.
It wasn't pertinent, but it could be made to look
absolutely awful. Eventually, the hospital's counsel advised
the institution to settle the lawsuit: to admit, tacitly,
that Victor had indeed done something improper
during the surgery. Whereupon, rather than agree to
any such thing, Victor had quit.
"What did you say to him?" I asked, crossing to
the window.
With Victor at the surgical helm, a trauma-care
center for Eastport had seemed like a good idea. It
would keep him busy at the one thing he was very good
at, and benefit the whole region. Furthermore, emergency
care has two fine attributes, financially speaking:
First, people need it. And second, insurance companies
tend to pay for it. Slow going at first, maybe,
but the Mayo Clinic was out in the boondocks when it
got started, too. Down the line, the thing could be a
gold mine.
Only, maybe not anymore. "When he threatened
to blackmail you," I went on, "and you let him know
he could get away with it by not laughing in his face
the way any sane person would have done, what did
you say?"
I didn't want to think yet about what I might have
to do to replace the money I'd put into in Victor's
trauma center start-up, much of it already spent, if it
turned out my investment was irretrievable. But that I
would need to replace it was a flat-out certainty.
I was financially well fixed, all right. But not that
well fixed. And now there was that awful word: motive.
Victor frowned down at his hands, which were
scrubbed clean as always. It struck me then that, at
eight o'clock on a Saturday morning, he'd already
showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes: white
shirt, navy slacks. Even his prissy little oxblood loafers
with the tassels on them looked professionally polished.
All normal for Victor. But ...
"Well," he admitted, "I'd had a few drinks. And
the look on his face, like he was daring me to do something.
Like he thought I wouldn't be able to. It ...
well, it got to me, that's all."
Bootsteps sounded on the porch, and Bob Arnold
came in. But the words were already coming out of
Victor's mouth.
"Reuben's mistake," he rushed on, "was letting
himself get backed into a corner, at the end of the bar.
So when I walked up to him, he had nowhere to go."
"Victor," I said warningly, but he didn't hear me.