“Mmm, I’ll give you the outline. Winston is a narcissist; he wants women to… service him. Not, you know, interactive sex; he wants what he wants. When he gets what he wants, his interest in sex goes away. If you understand what I’m saying.”
Virgil rubbed the side of his nose, then said, “Okay. What about the tigers? Could he do that?”
She thought for a moment, then said, “Possibly. He lives high and there’s a rumor that he can’t practice medicine anymore. He might need the money. I looked up his degree and it’s legit, but the rumor is, he did something really bad and can’t practice.”
Virgil nodded: that was interesting. “No details?”
“No. I looked him up a lot on the Internet, but couldn’t find anything,” she said.
“What about Sandra Gupti-Mack?”
“Yeah. Sandy Mack graduated from high school down in Farmington and sold real estate for years, and then she went off to India for about fifteen minutes one year and came back as a guru with a dot on her forehead and a hyphenated name that she hopes sounds Indian,” Monty-McCall said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hyphenated names, obviously, if they’re legitimate. She does what she calls psychotherapy and peddles her homemade pills all over the country. She even wrote a book about it: The Buddha’s Apothecary. Now, I’ll tell you what: it would not surprise me at all if she used animal-based medications. She brags about being a traditionalist ‘compounding pharmacy,’ so she’d need the raw product.”
“But you don’t think she’s totally legitimate?” Virgil asked.
She finished the wine with a gulp, pulled a hand across her lips, and said, “Huh. That bitch wouldn’t know an ethic if one bit her on her butt. The Buddha’s Apothecary. Are you kiddin’ me? It’s like the Buddha was a drugstore clerk in his spare time. A soda jerk or something. She’s gotten rich with her pills. I’ll tell you something else that didn’t occur to me until right now. If she had some real honest-to-God tiger, she could roll her tiger pills out there for a million dollars. Maybe more. How many pills could you get out of a tiger? A hundred thousand or more?”
“I have no idea.”
“Bet she does.”
–
Monty-McCall was refilling her beer mug with wine when Virgil left. Her information had been fairly tepid, with a few interesting raisins: that whole thing about Peck having a questionable history. And Virgil got in his truck thinking about female alcoholics, and how they were less visible than men-except when they got behind a steering wheel. Usually though, they’d sit home and hammer the white wine, instead of going out to a bar and drinking and falling down in public. He liked an after-work beer himself, had no problem with people who liked to take a drink. Sometimes, though, you could see what was coming: Monty-McCall was killing herself.
–
Sandra Gupti-Mack was next up. She lived in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, in a gray two-story house that probably dated to the prewar years. Two bicycles were chained to the white-painted railings on a tiny front porch, and a bronze statue of the seated Buddha gazed at passersby from a wall niche that once had been a window. The Buddha was positioned on a rug, the rug providing a platform for the bolts that held the statue in its niche. Evidence, Virgil thought, of the existence of Buddha-statue thieves.
Above the Buddha was a sign much like Monty-McCall’s: “Dr. Sandra Gupti-Mack, Psychotherapy and Traditional Medicine”; beside him was a yellowing copy of The Buddha’s Apothecary.
Gupti-Mack was home, too.
A tall, heavy, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who trembled like an aspen when she opened the door, Gupti-Mack was dressed all in white, a blouse that looked like a doctor’s hospital jacket with matching white slacks with bell bottoms. She was barefoot; she had a black dot in the middle of her forehead, not quite centered between her eyebrows.
When Virgil introduced himself, she said, “I have a client at the moment. I’ll be with her for another twenty minutes, and I have another client a half hour after that…”
“I’ll walk up to the corner store and get a Coke and come sit on your porch and wait,” Virgil said. “Come get me when your client leaves. I won’t need a half hour.”
She nodded, reluctantly, and closed the door. He walked up the street, got a Coke, came back and sat on the porch, and watched the people go by. Mostly women, getting into their lives. Uptown was where you went after you graduated from the university and got a job in marketing at Pillsbury or General Mills, but still had that butterfly tattoo on your shoulder blade, hip, or ankle.
As he was sitting there, an ancient man hobbled by, assisted by a cane. He looked like he’d been dressed by somebody else, in a floppy-brimmed boonie hat, a T-shirt that said “Chairman of the Board” over a black-and-white photo of Frank Sinatra, and faded madras shorts. He was wearing black over-the-calf socks and sandals. His legs looked like they came off a café table.
He stopped on the sidewalk and eyed Virgil. “What are you looking at?”
Virgil said, “Mostly, the girls going by.”
“Oh. Yeah. I used to do that,” the old man said. After a moment’s thought: “I just can’t remember why.”
He went on his way.
–
A half hour after Gupti-Mack said she’d be twenty minutes, a red-eyed woman walked out, dabbing at her eye sockets with a Kleenex. As Virgil stood up, she said, “I hope you’re not here to harass Dr. Gupti.”
“No, I’m not,” Virgil said.
“You’d better not be. My husband’s a lawyer and he’d be on you like a permanent wave.”
“I’m…” Virgil realized he had no place to go with the conversation-he didn’t even know what a permanent wave was-so he fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “If your husband thinks he needs to talk to me, my number is on the card.”
“I’m sure he’ll do that,” she said. She scuttled off down the sidewalk to a blue Prius and stared at him through the windshield with the electric ferocity only a Prius owner could summon, as he knocked on Gupti-Mack’s door.
Gupti-Mack let him in and said, “My last session ran long. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it. I only have fifteen minutes or so until my next one…”
The house smelled like incense, which was no surprise; the only surprise was that it smelled so good. “I’m the BCA agent assigned to recover the tigers stolen from the zoo,” Virgil began. “I’m sure you’ve heard about it, so I’ve been contacting people with knowledge of the traditional medicine community, seeing if they could point me in any particular direction…”
Gupti-Mack asked the usual questions about where he’d gotten her name and why he’d come to her in particular, and Virgil replied with the usual evasions, and finally she said, “I have no idea who might have taken the tigers. I was shocked when I heard. Shocked! When I saw in the paper this morning that you police believe somebody in the traditional medicine community was involved… well, I dissolved in disbelief. Absolutely dissolved.”
“Do you use any tiger products in your compounding?” Virgil asked.
“Absolutely not! Never! Is that why you’re here? Because you think I took these tigers to make medications out of them? That’s… that’s… absurd. Should I have a lawyer here?”
“If you’re not involved in the theft, of course not,” Virgil said. “We’re trying to get the tigers back alive and if somebody snatched them to make them into pills, we might already be too late.”
“Then if you don’t suspect me, what exactly do you want?”
“You know lots of people in this community. If people took the tigers to make them into medicines, they’d have to have a way to market them,” Virgil said.