The charter officers who launched Eugenix Corporation had included Jasper Frayne as president, his wife, Lucille, as vice president, and Roscoe Giddings as secretary/treasurer. The Fraynes had lived in New York City at the time, while Giddings was a cut-rate lawyer chasing ambulances in Wyoming, Delaware, a few miles from the capital at Dover. Giddings on the board made everything legitimate, at least on paper, and the state was satisfied once it received the stipulated fees.
None of the named Eugenix officers had any background whatsoever in the fields of education, medicine, biology or any other discipline that would have helped the corporation to attain its stated goals. A background check on Jasper Frayne described him as a Wall Street stockbroker, cashiered from the exchange in 1958 on allegations of insider trading. He had paid a fine of twenty-seven thousand dollars to the SEC, avoided any jail time and resurfaced six months later as a “corporate analyst” with several major clients on his string. Three of the client corporations, incidentally, were said to be front groups for syndicate investments, while a fourth—Laredo. Chemical, in Texas—specialized in flooding Third World markets with substandard medicines and drugs.
The medical connection, Remo thought. Or was it?
Mrs. Frayne had been a high-school cheerleader and home-economics major who dropped out of college, married well and afterward confined her interests, to the New York social scene. The only “genes” she understood were the designer kind, with fancy labels on the ass. Her listing as vice president of the. Eugenix Corporation was almost certainly a sham to keep the lion’s share of stock in her husband’s hands, but such shenanigans were hardly criminal—in fact, they ranked as standard operating procedures in the corporate jungle. As for Roscoe Giddings, he had been the local front required by law, and nothing more. His office satisfied the mandate for a Delaware address, and almost certainly provided him with extra tax breaks for a minimal investment of his time.
Where were they now?
The record showed Eugenix posting heavy losses for the last five years of its existence, finally going belly-up and filing for bankruptcy in February 1984. The corporation’s creditors were left without a prayer of making up their losses, and they couldn’t even slap a lien on lab equipment, since the previous December a fire of undetermined origin had razed the corporation’s sole research facility in Belding, Michigan. Arson experts declared the blaze suspicious, but they never proved complicity by anyone, on the Eugenix payroll, and the corporate insurance finally paid off around Thanksgiving.
The Fraynes dropped out of sight for eighteen months, then surfaced with a hefty wad of cash in Coral Springs, Florida, where they apparently retired. Lucille made the mistake of purchasing a new Mercedes-Benz, which tempted her to drive a bit too fast. On June 4, 1987, driving south from Stuart, she misjudged her own ability to pass three semitrailers on the turnpike, met a fourth truck heading north and she was history. Closed casket, R.I.P. Since then, her husband was reputed to enjoy the company of younger women who disrobed for tips at nightclubs in Fort Lauderdale.
The lawyer, Giddings, had no luck to speak of, either. Six months after Eugenix Corporation folded, he went on retainer with the Alvarado brothers, late of Medellin, to help them organize a trucking company, ostensibly involved in hauling citrus fruit from Florida to New York and New England. The brothers seemingly grew paranoid when federal agents picked off several truckloads of cocaine in transit through the wilds of Georgia and Virginia. Suspicion fell on Giddings, and the lawyer disappeared. He had been missing thirteen days when hunters found his vintage Caddy in the woods near Jacksonville, with Roscoe’s headless body in the trunk. His;head was never found, but rumor had it that the eldest Alvarado brother, Rico, had it shrunk as a dashboard ornament.
So much for traveling in style.
The Belding fire had wiped out all Eugenix personnel and payroll records, scuttled the computer data banks, reduced the work of two decades to ashes. A covert scan of records at the FDA and U.S. Patent Office turned up nothing to suggest the company had broken any new ground in the area of drugs or medical procedures—no new products whatsoever, for that matter. There had likewise been no applications for a research grant of any kind, a circumstance that, while peculiar in the world of medical experiments, was hardly grounds for an investigation. Federal auditors would surely have been grateful for a corporation that eschewed the public trough, assuming they were conscious of Eugenix in the first place.
What, exactly, had Eugenix Corporation done for something like a quarter of a century? Was it connected to Laredo Chemicals in some way, picking up the slack when that esteemed conglomerate dissolved in 1970? If it was all one great, extended scam to swindle Third World customers, what use would the Eugenix team have for the body of a hit man executed in Nevada?
The only person still on record who could answer Remo’s questions would be Jasper Frayne, in Coral Springs, Florida. He might be hesitant to talk, but there were ways around that problem. Remo could be damn persuasive when he set his mind to it, and getting nowhere fast on an assignment always put him in the mood.
He booked the next flight out of Reno for Miami, and advised Chiun to pack his steamer trunk.
All things considered, life hadn’t been hard on Jasper Frayne. He had experienced his share of setbacks and embarrassment like anybody else, but you took the bitter with the sweet and kept on rolling, or you gave it up and pulled the plug.
If there was one thing Jasper Frayne could never tolerate, it was a quitter.
Like Lucille, for instance.
Despite the fact that she was drinking on the afternoon she totaled the Benz, Frayne would never buy it as an accident. She had been going through the Change and giving everybody hell about it, trying quacks for size like they were some new Paris fashion, taking pills that made her alternately loopy and depressed. Frayne always figured that she meant to slam that semi rig head-on, though he would never say that to the pricks from the insurance company. Hell, no. They would have screwed him altogether, and why should he do anything to cost himself a quarter million?
Check the dictionary under stupid, and you would not find his picture, no damn way at all. It was too bad about Lucille, of course, but things were getting stale between them anyway. Frayne was cultivating an enthusiasm for the game of jai alai, which let him slip out two, three times a week to nudie bars in Lauderdale, and he suspected that Lucille had found diversions of her own. So what? She was entitled, after all, and jealousy had long since faded in the stretch, along with love.
Frayne missed his wife of twenty-seven years, in the abstract, but not for long. It was a new, wild world out there, and never mind the crap you heard on television, how the sex was hard to find with everybody scared to death of AIDS., In Jasper Frayne’s world, money talked and bullshit walked. The past eight years, if anyone had asked him, Frayne would have to say that he was living, bet your ass.
He hardly thought about Eugenix anymore, at all, except when there was something in the paper to remind him. Like the bullshit in Miami, back in April, with the two Colombians. He would have shrugged it off, another case of scum eliminating scum, except the shooter had been captured and refused to give his name, then offed himself in jail. The dicks at Metro-Dade had put his mug shot on the tube for three nights running, asking anyone with information to call in, and Frayne had nearly shit himself the first time he had seen the photographs.
That face.
He wasn’t likely to forget it, even after all this time. The old crowd had no hold on him these days, at least in theory, since they knew he was a man who could be trusted taking secrets to his grave. It looked like they were getting careless, though—or cocky. Convinced that no one in the world could crack their secret, they let their guard down just enough to start the Feds asking questions.