Chapter 27 Eye in the Sky #2
“Sure, I’ll do it,” he says after listening for a few minutes. “It’s probably better to go somewhere private. Why don’t you come down to the house and have lunch? My housemate is at work. We can have the whole place to ourselves.”
Margaret can’t remember the last time anyone invited her to their house for a meal.
A sudden wave of something washes over her.
Not shyness. Margaret is never shy. Not nerves.
It’s more a warm feeling of anticipation.
Like when she was a little kid, and her father (her real father) said he was going to take her to dinner.
He plopped her into the passenger seat of his shiny blue semi (minus the long trailer, of course) and they rumbled off, her feeling like a queen as she looked down on everyone they passed on the road.
They ended up at McDonald’s, where her father bought her a cheeseburger and chocolate milkshake, which to her five-year-old mind was almost a banquet.
“I only have an hour,” she tells Joe.
“I’ve already got something on the stove and my place is five minutes from campus.”
“I also brought a lunch.”
“Can it keep?”
Margaret ponders the hard-boiled eggs and cheese sitting in the breakroom refrigerator. Maybe embracing the unexpected also means doing the unexpected.
“I’ll be there,” she says.
Joe is right and the drive to his house takes exactly five minutes.
It’s a small stucco house in a neighborhood of other small stucco houses.
The lawn is slightly overgrown and weedy with dandelions, but there are roses and a pretty wisteria and Margaret decides she likes this little enclave more than the fancy neighborhood where neighbors quibble about the length of their grass and how many pets you can have.
She rings the doorbell, the sound of the buzzing bell releasing a pulse of panic.
Aren’t you supposed to bring something like wine or flowers when someone invites you for a meal?
And yet, how can someone expect a gift when you’ve only been invited twenty minutes before?
She is not a magician. She wonders if people who often get invited to meals keep a supply of wine and scented soaps on hand for just such occasions.
Another puzzle of polite society to be worked out.
Dr. Deaver’s house may not have surprised her, but Joe Torres’s house does. The living room is decorated with two fat armchairs, a beautiful leather couch, a thick throw rug, a big terra-cotta pot containing a healthy-looking areca palm and huge, moody-looking paintings that cover two walls.
“My housemate,” Joe says as if reading her mind. “He’s an interior designer. We roomed together in college. Come into the kitchen. I’m basically not allowed to set foot in here.”
Margaret follows him, the rich scent of cooking filling the compact kitchen.
“The rice is just done,” Joe says and gestures toward a round table set in a windowed alcove. It looks out onto a Japanese flowering apricot (Prunus mume) with a redwood fence behind it. “Have a seat. I’ll serve, if it’s OK with you.”
“That would be acceptable.” Why is she talking like that? “I mean, that would be nice.”
He brings over two fragrant bowls of what he says is a chicken curry and sets one in front of Margaret, then carries over two tumblers of ice water and joins her.
Margaret inhales the scents of cumin, ginger and garlic. “I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. It’s the only dish I can make besides spaghetti.” He grins. “Dig in.”
Which they do.
They talk about spaghetti for a while, Margaret telling him about how difficult it is to grow tomatoes where she lives and how she settled on a variety called Early Girl, which are amazing when eaten right off the vine, and him saying the best tomatoes he ever had were at a small restaurant in Spain.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Spain,” Margaret says. “I read that Barcelona is beautiful.”
“It was a little village outside of Barcelona, actually.” Joe forks curry into his mouth and chews. “My last assignment was there.”
“A travel article?”
“Not exactly.”
Margaret waits.
“It’s too beautiful a day for a downer story.” He looks out the window to the apricot tree.
“You can tell me if you want. I don’t mind a downer, as you call it. Sometimes, it’s better to speak of things.”
She never speaks of her sister and her role in her disappearance. Maybe if she did, it wouldn’t be like chromic acid, still eating holes in her heart.
“You really don’t need to hear it.”
“If you need to tell it, then I need to hear it.” Margaret sets down her fork to let him know she is ready to listen.
His story comes out in halts and starts: He’d tracked down a guy who’d exposed an oligarch’s financial crimes and had to go into hiding in Spain.
Joe had flown over, careful to cover his tracks, but apparently he hadn’t covered them well enough, or maybe he had.
It’s a question that he’d never been able to answer.
Over a series of encrypted texts, Joe had convinced the whistle-blower to tell his story, and while they were meeting at the man’s hideout on a beautiful and warm summer day, a motorcycle had pulled up and a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through an open window.
The man, who’d just gotten up to retrieve a bottle of wine, was hit by a full blast of the flaming liquid and burned to death.
“I managed to get out, but not before, well, you know.” He turns his head slightly and Margaret sees the violence imbedded in the tightness of the scarred skin. “Anyway, that’s when I decided I needed to get out of journalism for a while.”
The faint sound of a dog barking comes through the window.
“So, you came here?”
It seems an odd place for a man like him to land.
Joe lets out a little blow of breath. “The thing is, being in the hospital gives you plenty of time to think. Morphine and bad food will do that to you.”
The corner of his mouth twitches up in a quick grin.
Margaret gives a slight nod. “I can see where it might.”
“And what I kept coming back to was this: Why would I want a job where people wind up dead because of me? What byline would be worth that?
“When I told my editor that I was going to quit for a while, he said that the guy had a target on his back long before me and the fact he died wasn’t my fault.
My reporter friends said the same thing, but that’s a little hard to swallow when you watch a guy go up in flames in front of you.
When I got out of the hospital, I moved out of my apartment, stored my stuff and vagabonded for a while.
I was as messed up inside as I was out. I lived in my truck, backpacked, visited every national park from California to Colorado. ”
“Did it help?”
“Sort of. A little. Then I ran out of money. Bobby, the guy who owns this house, kept in touch with me and when he heard I was down and out in Hurricane, Utah, he sent me a hundred bucks, said he had an extra bedroom, and told me to ‘hurricane’ my butt here.”
“In other words, take a quick and direct path.”
“Yes. I told him I wasn’t going to freeload, and he said he had just the job for me. That his uncle was a custodian and was about to retire from Roosevelt. He could pull a few strings.”
Margaret doesn’t mention the state of the breakroom coffeemaker and the unemptied trash cans she sometimes had to haul to the dumpster. Even she knows it’s not polite to insult the uncle of a homeowner in whose kitchen you’re eating curry and enjoying the burgeoning blossoms on his apricot tree.
“Turns out, it’s the perfect job for right now. It’s physical, simple, nine-to-five—actually four-to-midnight—and nobody gets hurt. I clean, which, weirdly, has kind of cleared my mind too. Wax on, wax off, you know.”
Margaret frowns slightly.
“Karate Kid. Nineteen eighty-four. It’s this movie about learning karate but there’s this part about something simple teaching complex lessons. You’d have to see it to understand. Also, it was kind of a cleaning joke.”
He lifts an eyebrow.
“Oh yes. I see it now.”
“Anyway, who knows what will happen, but it’s good for the moment.”
He gestures his fork toward Margaret’s bowl.
“You should eat before it gets cold.”
Which Margaret does. He’s right about cleaning. It does soothe the soul.
She scrapes her bowl empty.
“Shall we get down to it, then?” Joe asks. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.”
—
The woman on the phone from Windsor Compounding Pharmacy is helpful. “Of course, Dr. Blackstone. I can check that order for you,” she says.
“I don’t have all day,” Joe says to the representative. He winks at Margaret.
She admires the smoothness with which Joe impersonates a man he’s never met. He’s got just the right amount of arrogance in his voice.
“Of course,” the woman says. There is the sound of fingers against keyboard. “Is it the 1.0 percent atropine?”
“That’s it,” Joe says.
Margaret feels the slight rush of adrenaline. How can Joe stay so calm? Blackstone had, indeed, ordered a shipment of the poisonous liquid.
“It looks like we can’t send you another supply until April 30. I’m sorry.”
Joe frowns at Margaret. She lifts her shoulders. Blackstone regularly orders atropine?
“And can we say again how sorry we are that we sent your order to your office instead of your home,” the woman continues. “We here at WCP appreciate your business and are doing all we can to fix our processing system to avoid further errors.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Joe says. “It certainly was upsetting.” He raises his eyebrows at Margaret in a question. She has no answer.
“Again, thank you for your business, Dr. Blackstone. We appreciate it. We’re also glad we can help your son through this difficult situation.”
“I’m counting on better service next time,” Joe says. “I’ll be in touch.”
He hangs up and turns to Margaret. “Why would Blackstone need atropine for his kid?”
Margaret remembers the little boy with the blue-framed glasses in Blackstone’s kitchen.
“Atropine eyedrops can be used to treat myopia in children, but what he’s ordered is rather a high dose. Usually it’s .01 percent, although there’s evidence the higher dose is more effective.”
“So, could Blackstone have used that to poison Deaver?”
Margaret ponders the question. “He’d have to use more than the two missing vials I saw in his office.”
Joe squints in thought. “Could he have made up the story of his son’s myopia and saved up enough vials over the months to kill Deaver?”
“That could be, but the woman said there was a limit on refills. That meant there must have been a prescription. If the atropine were for the lab, he could have ordered as much as he wanted.”
“Unless he intended to cover his tracks by forging a prescription and asking to have it sent to his house.”
“Good point.” Margaret looks at her watch. It’s eight minutes to one. “I’ve got to get back, but thank you for doing this. I have a lot to think about.”
“No problem,” Joe says. “In fact, why don’t I try to figure out if I can see if the prescription was written by a real doctor or if it was forged?
It’s a lot harder now with HIPAA, but I can try.
” The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act protects patients from having their healthcare information exposed.
Margaret stands. “I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” Joe says. “Like I said, I don’t mind exercising a little journalism muscle if it can help someone, and this seems like a good cause.”
“Well, thank you for the curry and for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” Joe says, “and thanks for listening. It’s good to talk these things out.”
He walks her to the front door. “You’ll have to bring me a couple of those Early Girls when they’re ripe.”
“I will.”
Margaret wonders if she will even have a job at the university by then.