That afternoon in Ashton’s lab, the global solution to my amateur detective problem jumped onto my lap! I had keystroked into the computer my decapeptide binding data. The program would analyze it according to simple theoretical equations. The computer was halfway through the curve-fitting session when Margo walked up.

     "Ben, can you tell me how long you’ll be on the computer?"

     Polite but firm. She was a lot of fun, but when it came to getting the job done, Margo was like the female N.C.O. who ran the Colonel’s front office.

     "No problem. I can break out any time. Here you are," I said, exiting my program.

     "Thanks, Ben. I’ve got to get these orders out today." She slid into the chair as quickly as I slid out.

     "Mind if I watch?"

     "No, I like it when men watch." Her jokes were becoming more risqué by the day.

     She opened up a file called "ORDERS.TXT." The screen showed chemicals they’d ordered, with dates of requisition, supplier, catalog number and price. She said the file contained everything they’d ordered for the last 12 years! I had to keep her talking about it.

     "That’s pretty high-tech, Margo. And I’ll bet you were the one who set it up."

     "Who else do you think did it, silly!"

     She told me about using the computer to keep track of the contents of her freezer, containing all their pharmacological agonists and antagonists.

     "What do you call the file?"

     "FREEZER, stupid."

     "That can’t be, Margo. FREEZER-stupid has too many letters in it for a file name.

     "Ben, you’re a real card!" she said, jabbing me in the ribs.

     In a jocular mood, I produced a big, insincere grin.

     "This Freezer-stupid file must be a great help to Dr. Ashton when he gets a new idea. He can come over here, sit down and find out if you have the right toxin in stock."

     Margo burst into smile and threatened to poke me in the ribs a second time.

     "You’re not a card, Ben. You’re a tease. My boss can’t even find the power switch on this computer. He sits in his office and thinks. I do the ordering, keep inventory, set up the experiments and even wash the glassware. No, that’s not really true. I don’t have to wash the glassware when we have a graduate student in the lab."

     Now it was my turn to poke her in the ribs. Margo had a winning combination of Old Florida common sense and Annie Oakley humor. And she had just cracked open the Ashton case! Here was the complete list of every toxin that Ashton ever put his hands on!

     It took all my willpower to keep still until Margo finished her ordering. Then I asked her an important question.

     "Have you ever done any experiments for Dr. Ashton, giving the peptides, like my decapeptide, to animals by mouth. If they are going to be used for Parkinson’s disease, the patient can’t go to the doctor for an injection every day."

     "No, Ben. Our lab has never fed any of the peptides to rats. There’s some reason why these peptides may never be used as drugs."

     As she exited her program, I said, "Thanks. You don’t know how much you have helped me to understand this stuff."

     We almost touched hips when I slid into the chair as fast as she slid out. Margo made a funny face and said, "That was awfully fast."

     "I crave your warmth, Margo." This earned me another poke in the ribs.

     I pretended to computer-fit data until Margo went to the other lab across the hall. Then I quickly called up her file manager program and copied "ORDERS.TXT" and "FREEZER.TXT" onto a small diskette, which I put into my backpack.

     Borrowing three supply catalogs from the shelf, I retreated to the library where I played the diskette into my own lap-top computer. I loaded the "ORDERS.TXT" file into memory and flipped through a bunch of screens. It was a 140 KB file in word processing format — no structured data base or anything fancy, but very complete. I clicked through the file, blocking out and copying out into a secondary file every interesting nonprotein toxin. An hour and a half later, I had an 18 KB file from which to select my short list for Dr. Westley.

     The three borrowed catalogs listed 95% of the compounds. They were easy to look up because Margo’s file supplied catalog numbers. And the catalogs were also quite obliging, supplying a paragraph of description of each toxin, the receptors they worked on and their pharmacological action. And they listed its EC50, the concentration at which the toxin is 50% effective.

     Now I could make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many milligrams Ashton needed to bind half of the receptors in a grown man. But in some cases the chemical company had made the calculation already by listing the LD50, the lethal dose for mice or rats. So I could calculate the lethal dose for Cooper by scaling the rat dose to a 70-kilogram man. Rob McGregor would probably agree that Cooper would weigh in at about 280 rats.

     And how much did it cost to buy a lethal dose? For some toxins it would cost $50,000. But 13 of the toxins could be purchased in lethal quantities for between $500 and $3,000. That wouldn’t blow the supply budget of an NIH-funded biomedical laboratory. So now I had a short list of 13 orally deliverable compounds.

     Next question: Could we detect them? Seven of them had chromophoric groups which would absorb light or give off fluorescence for the detectors on our HPLC machines back at the M.E. lab. Three others had chemically or electrochemically reactive groups which could be used for detection.

     The remaining three toxins would have been a problem, except that the companies sold "antibody-based radioimmunoassay" tests for them. So old Steve Burk and his helper Jake Brown wouldn’t have any trouble testing for these 13 toxins in Cooper’s frozen blood samples. Finally, I verified that Ashton had ordered seven of the 13 compounds in the last two years! Mission accomplished.

     I was overwhelmed by a feeling of pride while working this information into spreadsheet in my laptop computer. A little after eight, I went back to Ashton’s lab and printed it out on his laser jet. I also photocopied the catalog entries for the 13 candidate compounds and stuffed it all in an envelope. Not a bad day’s work!

     It was around 9:30 as I rode by the Faire Isle complex. It wasn’t really too late to drop off the information at Dr. Westley’s. Straddling my bike by the guard house, with an inevitable line of luxury cars behind me, I was surprised to learn that Dr. Westley wouldn’t receive me.

     "Please tell him that I have something important to drop off."

     The guard repeated my words into the phone, listened for a second and then said, "Yes, sir, I will tell him." He hung up and told me, "You can leave it with the concierge at the first-floor entrance."

     The valet parking people sneered as I dropped my kickstand, leaving the bike freestanding in the motor entrance. I took out the envelope, addressed it to Westley, walked past a surly doorman and gave it to the well-groomed and manicured concierge, faster than she could think up a patronizing insult.

     Back at the motor entrance no one tipped my bike, and I didn’t tip anyone either. I rode away, elated. This amateur sleuth work was an enjoyable application of intellect. If Ashton were the murderer, it would be "bingo" for one of these 13 compounds. Yes, I’d handed the Old Man his answer on a silver platter — a silver platter so worthy of him.

     Of course, he’d have to order the compounds, work up an assay and identify one of them in Cooper’s blood. But the case should be cracked by Christmas time. Hopefully, Burk and Brown wouldn’t screw up too badly, because I wouldn’t be available to get them back on track. I had to maintain a sacred choirboy innocence.

     The next morning, I devoted myself to my course and lab work in good spirits but found it hard to stay indoors past noon. With book in hand, I sat on a park bench under a tree on the mall between the med school and the medical library. But the book couldn’t hold my attention, which drifted to girl-watching.

     I treated myself to an evening at Captain Walley’s restaurant on the Coconut Grove waterfront. It’s one of those indoor/outdoor restaurants in a fisherman’s shack motif. To get to it, you have to walk through a boatyard, past the enormous I-beam scaffolds on which they store motorboats, one over another, up to 30 feet high. During the day it was interesting to watch them taking down boats and putting up boats with a tow-motor fork lift the size of a small battle tank.

     At the bar I noticed Sam and Lou, a couple of Coconut Grovites who were regulars there. Sam spotted me immediately and made one of his "come over here" gestures, like he was calling back his dog who had crawled out under the fence. Sam was an inboard motor mechanic. Half his clients were dopers who relied on Sam to get that last couple of RPM out of their Cigarette boats for their midnight runs. Lou had a carpentry shop on the edge of the Grove and was making a bundle doing finishing work on town houses.

     "Hey, Ben, ain’t seen you around for a while," chided Sam, scratching his closely cut blonde beard. Then he flashed me a toothy grin to tell me it was all right.

     "Well, Sam, I’ve been taking a couple of courses. They’re keeping me kind of busy."

     "Hey, Ben," said Lou in mock disapproval. "I hope you ain’t got so serious about them courses that you can’t enjoy a good brew and a good puff ever’ once in a while."

     "You've got a point there, Lou," I said, matching his cadence.

     Lou made a big show of shaking his head at Sam, as if this Candidi kid had no sense at all. Sam shifted weight on his bar stool, pulled up on his jeans, and smiled back at Lou.

     "Now, Lou, you know that Ben don’t puff. He’s workin’ at the place where they take readings on that stuff in your blood. Ben cain’t do nothin’ that ain’t legal. He’d lose his job."

     I felt a Sam-and-Lou comedy routine coming on.

     "That’s right, Sam," drawled Lou, pulling up his T-shirt and scratching his potbelly. "Now we can’t go raggin’ and ribbin’ Ol’ Ben here, ’cause some day we might be dependin’ on him to get us out of a jam."

     "What kind of a jam’s that — that we’d need Ol’ Ben to help us outta?" asked Sam, playing the straight man.

     "Like when you an’ me is having a night on the town and they pick us up and haul us downtown to Ben’s medical examining place. And they’s got us laid out there. And Ol’ Ben here is the one they send in to do the examining!"

     "So what’s Ben goin’ to do for us then, Lou?" asked Sam, already laughing in anticipation of the punch line.

     "Well, Sam, what if Ben dips his cocaine meter in your blood and starts gettin’ readings?"

     "Well?" asked Sam.

     "Well, maybe Ol’ Ben could do you a favor and write in some zee-rows on his ree-port!"

     We shared a big laugh. The barmaid came over and asked, "Want another round, guys?"

     "Sure, I’m running a tab," laughed Lou, waving a finger over a pile of dollar bills and change sitting on the bar under his pack of Marlboros.

     While our laughter was still resonating, I took a big breath and said, "Now look, Lou. You’ve got it all wrong. At the Medical Examiner’s we don’t examine guys from the tank. We examine stiffs. If they send me over to you with my cocaine meter, there ain’t nothing I can do for you."

     This cracked them up. When their stomachs stopped shaking, I caught the barmaid’s eye and yelled over, "This round’s on me." So I drank a couple of brews and shared a dozen laughs with Sam and Lou. Their humor kept me on my toes. They bad-mouthed every institution, organization and sacred-cow belief in the world and then goaded me into defending it.

     Lou would say something like, "Now I don’t take much stock in that slick-talking president an’ his wife. But Ol’ Ben, here, he’d probably say that . . ." And then he’d attribute to me a ridiculous political opinion and give me a hard time no matter what I said. But Lou always made sure the result was funny.

     When his comic delivery started to sag, I’d pitch him a pompous slow-ball, and he’d bat it out of the park. The second beer gave me a good buzz, and I caught myself looking over at the barmaid. She was awfully cute in her hip-hugging shorts and halter top, and she flashed me back a nice smile. It reminded me that I’d been a long while without a girlfriend. I ordered a "Walley’s Catch." I needed food to sop up the beer in my stomach. Then the juke box came on with a series of guitar chords that brought our conversation to a halt:

     THUMP, THUMP . . . THUMP, THUMP . . . Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump.

     Then came the unmistakable three-part harmonic humming of Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was "Southern Cross." One of those musicians had spent some time around here, and the song had become an anthem for the Old Timers in Coconut Grove. The babble of conversation diminished as people succumbed to the heavy acoustic beat of the hummed entrance. The guys sang about getting out of town on an 80-foot sailboat making for the Southeast Trade Winds on a downhill run to Tahiti. By the time the first three verses were chanted, everything in the bar had fallen in step with the rhythm: Every snap of a cigarette lighter, every smoky exhalation, every pull on a brown bottle, every crack of the pool balls. Lou started humming along when it got to the part about the midnight watch and remembering how he’d tried to call his girl from a noisy bar in Avalon.

     Sam joined in on the first chorus, singing under his breath and looking off in the distance. Suddenly, I understood the power of this song to quiet the noisy bar. It was our song, a manifesto of masculine independence. It was a story of manhood affirmed by the faint light of a constellation of distant stars seen only from the Southern Hemisphere. And it was a lamentation on the search for the perfect girl.

     The song had now transformed to a majestic vocal pyramid, a three-part, close-in, harmonic declaration of having sailed around the world looking for a woman/girl. Sam sang along, audibly now. Yes, larger spirits were calling. Fate may have tested you and even bested you. But you stay the course. Hold true to our credo. Someone else will come along and help you forget.

     I swear that Lou was all choked up at the end of the song. No one looked at anyone or said anything for a long time after.

     I bought the guys another round and ate my "Walley’s Catch." "Southern Cross" was followed by Jimmy Buffet, whose shallow tenor voice and thumping acoustic guitar dissolved the serious mood. It was good music for chugging along. Chug-a-lug!

     After finishing dinner, I excused myself and went over to the pay phone at the corner of the bar, pulled out a quarter and punched in the Old Man’s number. Called him up from a noisy bar in Coconut Grove. What better way to cap off the evening than to receive a favorable response from him. I couldn’t hear him well with the juke box playing and the noise from the pinball machine off in the corner. And Sam and Lou slid off their bar stools and started a game of pool. The table was right in front of the phone.

     "Dr. Westley, I’m sorry to have caused consternation with your help last evening, but I did want to get the information to you."

     "Yes it was quite interesting, and I assume of some relevance," he said. I could barely make out his words over the background noise.

     "Yes, indeed," I replied. "It is a list of the compounds in use in the laboratory in which I am now working. All you have to do is assay for them, and you will know whether you have a match."

     "Yes. Very well. Proceeding on that assumption, we have already ordered them."

     "Good! Then there is not too much for me to do but to wait until you have done your work."

     "And you are certain that these compounds are worthy of assay?"

     "They have all been ordered and used in the subject laboratory. They all have the desired effect at the indicated doses. They were selected from a longer list which included prohibitively expensive compounds and protein-based compounds."

     Lou gave me a funny look and exclaimed, "Well, la-de-da!"

     Westley said, "Yes . . . very well . . . quite. Of course, we could fall back on the longer list if need be."

     "Of course."

     Westley asked stiffly, "What shall be the explanation as to how I came across this remarkable information?"

     "You might say I left it at your residence by accident when I came for dinner last time. You took a peek before giving it back to me."

     "Very well. Cheers."

     "Cheers," I replied and hung up.

     Sam and Lou were both eyeing me.

     "Hey, Candidi!" yelled Lou. "What kinda courses you taking? Theory of pushing high-grade coke?"

     "Yeah," said Sam. "Sounds like he’s got a good customer list. Cheerio! High-grade assay!"

     "Hey, Ben!" Lou called out brightly. "What’s with this ‘Cheerio Coke?’ Are you selling rocks that’s got little O’s in ’em?"

     I smiled in denial, but it didn’t do any good. I had to come up with something.

     "Think what you want, guys. But don’t come sniffing around my boat. My pet alligator will get you!"

     Lou and Sam broke into raucous laughter, and I broke for the door.

     A week passed uneventfully. Burk didn’t call me for any work at the M.E. Office, and Westley didn’t invite me to his residence. The courses were going well, and I was making good progress on my experiments in Ashton’s lab. In fact, I had almost completed the project. I had a preliminary draft of a report, but I wouldn’t quit Ashton until Westley told me that I’d done enough sleuthing. With a little luck, Ashton might submit my work for publication before he was hauled away in handcuffs.

     Over lunch, McGregor revealed to me the worst of Cooper’s sins: crucifying his inherited administrative assistant, Mrs. Epstein. She had difficulties processing his receipts for lunch and had complained to him. Cooper and his cronies had eaten every day at departmental expense. Usually, they sent a work-study student to get $20 from Mrs. Epstein, to go to a sandwich shop and to come back with a receipt. Eventually, the central accounting office refused to reimburse Mrs. Epstein for so many sandwich and grocery receipts.

     "It looked like the Department was feeding Cooper five days a week, which it was," McGregor said. "But Cooper still insisted that Mrs. Epstein ‘take care of it.’ So what does she do? She took some of her own credit card expenses for restaurants. And the University accepts them. Then she takes this money and uses it to replenish the petty cash box so that Cooper can keep getting his sandwiches."

     "She went out on a limb for him," I summarized.

     "Now get this: When Cooper starts making these sixty-thousand-dollar deals with his buddy’s company using NIH money, Mrs. Epstein balks. I mean, this was too much. What he was doing is a Federal crime that you can go to jail for. So Cooper blew his stack and decided to take revenge. He hires a new assistant and grooms her for Mrs. Epstein’s job. Then he sics the new assistant on Mrs. Epstein, trying to make her retire. Mrs. Epstein was sixty-four and was going to retire soon anyhow. Now the new understudy ‘discovers’ what Mrs. Epstein did with her credit card receipts and brings this ‘evidence’ to Cooper. And Cooper calls in a University auditor . . ."

     "And indicts her for his own crime?" I asked incredulously.

     "Yes. And the auditor gives her the third degree. Mrs. Epstein was proud of her seventeen years of service. The University auditor and the Administration kept her in the dark about their ‘findings,’ and it literally tore her heart out. Then Cooper told her not to report to work, pending the ‘outcome of the investigation.’

     "She had a stroke in her apartment and wasn’t found for sixteen hours. It crippled her, but her mind was still as sharp as a tack. She blamed Cooper for her stroke. Now get this: She has three adult children in New York and Chicago. The son is a neurosurgeon and the daughters are lawyers! So the family wants to sue and demands information on the ‘wrongdoing’ and the audit. And the whole thing winds up getting settled out of court. It was a large sum for her nursing expenses and plus a sizable restitution."

     "Sounds like the University got its hand slapped," I said in encouragement.

     "But, you know, the Dean was on Cooper’s side the whole time. God knows why. Maybe he was getting kickbacks, too. Several of us were ready to testify for Mrs. Epstein’s suit. She was a Jewish mother, in the best sense of the word. We all loved her, even the new hires. Cooper treated her outrageously."

     "Beside you, who was outraged?"

     "All of us ‘Old Timers’."