Paquette promised me nothing like this would happen." Reese began feeling a tightness in his chest and dropped a nitroglycerine tablet under his tongue, vowing that if this discomfort was the start of the big one, his last act on earth would be to shoot Kate Bennett between the eyes. "Our friend says for you to remain cool and not to worry.
However, he would like you to find some effective way of… diverting Dr. Bennett's interest away from the Omnicenter until we can fix up a few things and do a little more investigating into the two deaths in question."
"What am I supposed to do? 7' "That, Mr. Reese, I do not know. Our friend suggests firing the woman."
"I can't do that. I don't hire and fire doctors, for Christ's sake."
"Our friend would like something done as soon as possible. He has asked me to remind you that certain contracts are up for renewal in less than a month."
"Fuck him."
"Pardon?"
"I said, all right. I'll think of something." Suddenly. he briohtened.
"In fact, " he said, reaching into his desk drawer, "I think I already have."
"Fine, " Carl Horner said. "All of us involved appreciate your efforts.
I'm sure our friend will be extremely beholden when you succeed."
Reese noted the use of when' instead of if, but it no longer mattered.
"I'll be in touch, " he said. Replacing the receiver, he extracted a folder marked "Schultz/Geary." Inside were a number of newspaper articles, the official autopsy report, signed by Stanley Willoughby and Kathryn Bennett, MDS, and an explanatory note from Sheila Pierce. Also in the folder were a number of laboratory tests on a man named John Schultz-a patient who, as far as he or Sheila could tell, never existed in Metropolitan Hospital. While the chances of some kind of coverup weren't a hundred percent, they certainly seemed close to that. Sheila, he thought as he readied a piece of paper in his typewriter, if this works out, I'm going to see to it that you get at least an extra night or two each month. "To Charles C. Estep, Editor, The Boston Globe."
Reese whispered the words as he typed them. He paused and checked the hour. By the time he was done with a rough draft, the pathology unit would be empty. A sheet of Kate Bennett's stationery and a sample of her signature would then be all he needed to solve any number of problems.
The woman would be out of his hair, perhaps permanently, and Cyrus Redding would be-how had Horner put it? — extremely beholden. "Dear Mr.
Estep…"
As Norton Reese typed, he began humming "There Is Nothing Like a Dame."
Thursday 13 December
"Do you think God is a man or a woman, Daddy?"
Suzy Paquette sat cross-legged on the passenger seat of her father's new Mercedes 450 SL, parked by the pump at Bowen's Texaco. Behind the wheel, Arlen Paquette watched the mid-morning traffic glide by along Main Street, his thoughts neither on the traffic nor on the question he had just been asked. "Well, Daddy?"
"Well what, sugar? " The attendant rapped twice on the trunk that he was done. "Company account, Harley, " Paquette called out as he pulled away.
"Which is it, man or woman?"
"Which is what, darling'?"
"God! Daddy, you're not even listening to me at all." She was seven years old with sorrel hair pulled back in two ponytails and a China doll face that was, at that moment, trying to pout. Paquette swung into a space in front of Darlington Army/Navy and stopped. Never totally calm, he was, he knew, unusually tense and distracted this morning. Still, it was Second Thursday and that gave him the right to be inattentive or cross, as he had been earlier with his wife. He turned to his daughter.
She had mastered the expression she wanted and now sat pressed against the car door displaying it, her arms folded tightly across her chest. In that instant, Paquette knew that she was the most beautiful child on earth. He reached across and took her in his arms. The girl stiffened momentarily, then relaxed and returned the embrace. "I'm sorry, sugar,"
Paquette said. "I wasn't listening. I'm sorry and I love you and I think God is a woman if you're a woman and a man to someone who's a man and probably a puppy dog to the puppy dogs."
"I love you too, Daddy. And I still don't know why I should have to pray to Our Father when God might be Our Mother."
"You know, you're right. I think that from now on we should say… Our Buddy who art in Heaven."
"Oh, Daddy."
Paquette checked the time. "Listen, sugar, my meeting is in half an hour. I've got to get going. You be brave, now."
She flashed a heart-melting smile. "I don't have to be brave, Daddy.
It's only a cleaning."
"Well then, you be… clean. Mommy will be by in just a little while.
You wait if she's not here by the time you're done." He watched as she ran up the stairs next to the Army/Navy and waited until she waved to him from behind the picture window painted Dr. Richard Philips, DDS.
Then he eased the Mercedes away from the curb, and headed toward the south end of town and his eleven o'clock Second Thursday meeting with Cyrus Redding, president and chairman of the board of perhaps the largest pharmaceutical house in the world. The. meeting would start at exactly eleven and end at precisely ten minutes to noon. For seven years, as long as Paquette had been with the company, it had been like that, and like that it would remain as long as Cyrus Redding was alive and in charge. Nine o'clock, labor relations, ten o'clock, public relations, eleven, product safety, an hour and ten minutes for lunch, then research and development, sales and production, and finally from three to three-fifty, legislative liaison, department heads meeting with Cyrus Redding, one on one, the second Thursday of each month. The times and the order of Second Thursday were immutable. Vacations were to be worked around the day, illnesses to be treated and tolerated unless hospitalization was necessary. Even then, on more than one occasion, Redding had moved the meeting to a hospital room. Second Thursday, raises, new projects, criticisms, termination-all, whenever possible, on that day. The factory covered most of a thirty-acre site bordered to the south and west by pine-covered hills and to the east by Pinkham's Creek. Double fences, nine feet high with barbed wire outcroppings at the top, encircled the entire facility. The inner of the two barriers was electrified — stunning voltage during the day, lethal voltage at night and on weekends. The only approach, paralleling the new railbed from the north, was tree lined and immaculately maintained. Two hundred yards from the outer fence, a V in the roadway directed employees and shippers to the right and all others to the left. A rainbow
sign, spanning the approach at that point announced, REDDING PHARMACEUTICALS, INCORPORATED DARLINGTON, KENTUCKY 1899
"The Most Good for the Most People at the Least Cost" Paquette bore to the right beneath the sign and stopped by a brightly painted guardhouse, the first of a series of security measures. He found himself wondering, as he did on almost every Second Thursday, if knowing what he knew now, he would have left his university research position in Connecticut to become director of product safety. The question was a purely hypothe ical one. He had taken the job. He had agreed to play Cyrus Redding's game by Cyrus Redding's rules. Now, like it or not, he was Cyrus Redding's man. Of course an annual salary that, with benefits, exceeded four hundred thousand dollars went far toward easing pangs of conscience. Suzy was the youngest of three children, all of whom would one day be in college at the same time. He stopped at the final pass gate, handed the trunk key to the guard, and drummed nervously on the wheel while the man completed his inspection. It hardly paid to be late for a Second Thursday appointment. + Over the hundred and eighty years since Gault Darling led a band of renegades, moonshiners, and other social outcasts to a verdant spot in the foothills of the Cumberlands, and then killed two men for the right to have the new town named after himself, Darlington, Kentucky, had undergone any number of near deaths and subsequent resurgences. Disease, soldiers, Cherokees, floods, fires, and even a tornado had at one time or another brought the town to its knees. Always, though, a vestige survived, and always Darlington regrew.