“I will?”
“Of course you will. We Kincaids aren’t quitters, are we?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Was there something else?”
There was, of course. What he wanted to say, what he really wanted deep deep down to say was “Mommy, I’m scared. Mommy, I think some bully wants to hurt me and I don’t know how to stop him.” But he couldn’t say that. That would never do.
“Benjamin?”
“Yes?”
“You know … sometimes your father would get so busy with his practice and his surgeries and his research that his head would swim. He wouldn’t know what to do next. But he never let it get the best of him. He’d smile, put his arm around me, and say, ‘We’ll get through this. If the creek don’t rise.’ ”
Ben smiled a little. “That’s nice. I wish he had said that to me.”
“Didn’t he?” There was a rustling on her end of the phone. “You know, when I visited you last, I tried to tell you everything I could remember about your father. But you haven’t mentioned him since then.”
“I’m sure you already know everything I could say.”
“But I don’t. I don’t know anything about when you visited him in the hospital that last time. Or when you saw him in … in … well.”
After all these years, she still couldn’t say it. In jail.
“There really isn’t much to tell, Mother. I barely remember myself.”
Ben couldn’t have been more surprised when his father showed up at his apartment. He had been opposed to Ben’s moving out of the family house. Why would you want to live in some grungy old apartment, he asked, when we have one of the biggest mansions in Nichols Hills not ten miles away? He had refused to visit. But now here he was, on Ben’s doorstep, just hours after Ben learned that his mentor, his father in situ, was trying to prosecute his father in fact on charges of criminal fraud and murder.
“Ben, I need your help.”
“Um, sure, come on in.” He was embarrassed by the condition of his apartment: barely any furniture, clothes and books and records strewn all over the place. He knew his father was a firm believer in the tenet that “you can tell a great deal about a person from the way he lives.”
“It’s not for me. Personally, I think this is all a load of crap. But your mother is quite upset about it, and I know you don’t want that.”
“No, of course not.” Ben pushed some clothes off a chair and motioned for his father to sit. He didn’t. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, don’t you know? You work there, don’t you?” A deep furrow crossed his forehead. “Ben, you haven’t screwed up another job, have you?”
Ben felt his jaw clenching. “No, I’m still at the DA’s office.”
“Then you know they’re trying to railroad me.”
“I found out about the grand jury investigation today.”
“You didn’t know till today?”
“No. They intentionally kept me out of it.”
“Well, hell’s bells. And I thought you were going to be such a big help. I’ve known about it for weeks. I probably know more about it than you do.”
“Probably.” Good, Ben thought. Let his father think he’s a moron. At least he wouldn’t ask him to do anything that…
“It’s like this,” his father explained. “You remember me telling you about the EKCV?”
He did. The Edward Kincaid cardiac valve. A synthetic implant designed to regulate and stimulate the flow of blood through the major arteries. For patients with fallen arterial veins or serious heart problems that couldn’t otherwise be repaired, it would be a godsend. What made it truly special— indeed, unique—was that although artificial, it was made from new synthetic materials that were all but indistinguishable from natural organic material. Compatibility was virtually universal.
“Last I heard,” Ben said, “you were trying to sell stock in a new corporation to raise funds to market the valve nationwide.”
“Right. That was Jim Gregory’s idea. You know lawyers—they always know how to come up with some cash. Well, except you, of course.”
Ben heard himself chanting a mantra like a yogi. Don’t let him get to you. Don’t let him get to you.
“So he puts out a prospectus, finds a brokerage firm, prepares an initial offering. All that lawyer stuff. Charges me nearly twenty thousand bucks. But boy, did it work. You wouldn’t believe it. We raised almost four million bucks on the first offering. Value of the stock shot up almost overnight.”
“You must have been very happy.”
“Damn straight. It was like a dream come true. Course, then we had to prove the damn thing worked. Make it viable.” He paused for a moment, glanced down at his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe we rushed it. Some bad information got out. Suddenly there was this big rumor that the emperor had no clothes, you know? Jim kept saying we needed results. Had to stave off a shareholder derivative action. So I agreed to put the EKCV into action.”
“You mean—on people?”
“Well, that’s the only way to know whether it really works. If you want to use it on people, eventually you’ve got to try it out on people. We chose our initial subjects very carefully. All were people with serious cardiac problems, people who otherwise had very little chance of living more than a year. All were willing volunteers.”
“What happened?”
“They died. Two of them. Not right away. Hell, no. Then we would have known we had problems. No, everything seemed to be fine and dandy for the first three weeks. But then the synthetic materials began to deteriorate. We still don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was stomach acids, maybe respiratory fluids. We just don’t know.”
“People died?”
“It happens. Experimentation always has risks.”
“But … they died.”
“They knew what they were getting into. They volunteered of their own free will. And we had every one of them sign waivers, thank God, or we’d be up to our armpits in civil suits. With the waivers, I thought we were free and clear. Who would’ve thought the DA would try to press criminal charges? They’re making a big deal out of the fact that we didn’t get FDA approval. And the hell of it is, they won’t even say what it is they’re going to charge me with. Don’t I have a right to know the charges against me?”
“For the moment, there are no charges against you. That’s for the grand jury to decide. What the DA plans to try for is a matter of strategy.”
“Strategy. That’s what I’d like to know about.”
The gnawing in Ben’s stomach intensified. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Hell, they won’t tell us anything. I’m supposed to go into that jury room tomorrow all by my lonesome and they won’t tell me beans about what they want to know. How am I supposed to prepare?”
Ben tried to choose his words carefully. “If you don’t know the answer to a question, or don’t recall, just say so.”
“Oh, right. That’ll look good, won’t it? The grand jury will charge me in a heartbeat.”
“The truth of the matter is, grand juries usually do whatever the prosecutors want them to do. You should focus on the trial.”
“What a defeatist attitude. Typical of you.”
“What?”
“Face it, Ben. You’ve never had much fight in you. You’d rather run from a fight than win it. Do you know this pissant Jack Bullock?”
“Uh … yes.”
“What’s he got up his ass, anyway?”
“I’m not sure what …”
“This seems to be a vendetta for him. Has he got some problem with people who are richer than he is?”
“I don’t think so. He just can’t stand to let …” He struggled for a neutral word. “… people he believes have committed crimes get away with it.”