"You be careful you not unplug freezer. It have many important samples," Dr. Dong Chiu admonished the men working in the ceiling. He had draped plastic over Ledbetter’s Revco liquid nitrogen freezer. Ledbetter’s door was closed, presumably to avoid noise and dust.
I had an early morning appointment with Dr. Kozinski next door. He said my reputation had preceded me, and that he would be glad to have me do my next rotation in his lab.
Outside, I found Dr. Chiu still guarding the freezer. Next, I made the mistake of stopping by McGregor. He suggested some alternative calculations and changes in our manuscript. These tied me up in his lab for a couple of hours. I left just as the workmen were finishing.
I attended a departmental seminar. Ledbetter sat at the table with the other faculty. He seemed to be in an expansive mood, joking with the guest speaker from another institution.
The next afternoon, I wasn’t surprised to see the fat-and-thin detectives coming down the hall. They did not return my nod of recognition. They walked right past me and into Ledbetter’s lab. I stayed outside, some 50 feet down the hall, pretending to read the bulletin board. After several minutes, they emerged with Ledbetter in tow. He wasn’t handcuffed, but he definitely wasn’t going of his own accord. As they passed by, I pretended to read the inner pages of a flyer titled Post-doctoral Research Opportunities at the National Institutes of Health. And I pretended to not notice Ledbetter’s searching glances as they waited for the elevator.
"The questions shouldn’t take more than an hour," said the fat one.
"You people must realize that we do not have infinite time. I am scheduled for an important conference call with . . . a collaborator on a manuscript at four-thirty. You must have been over this ground many times with many members of the faculty, months ago. If you want to learn medicine, and if you consider yourselves qualified, you should take your college transcripts down to the Admissions Office and — "
The insult was cut short by the closing elevator door. Back in McGregor’s lab, I fiddled with the manuscript. I imagined Ledbetter riding in the unmarked car to his appointment with the stenographer in the room with the one-way mirror.
At 4:30 I got a message to call "Steve." Old Burk told me to come over to troubleshoot the GC mass spec, reporting not later than 5:30. I should finish up at Bryan and take all my stuff with me, because it would probably take most of the night. They were getting phantom peaks and needed to run important assays tomorrow morning.
Before going over there, I grabbed a bite at the hamburger joint. Burk claimed to be doing some after-hours work himself and instructed me to report to his office before leaving. An hour of running baselines didn’t turn up even a hint of a phantom peak. I told him there was nothing wrong with the instrument. He said to replace the guard column, repeat the run at several different temperatures and do a calibrating series.
"But that will take three hours."
"Just do it."
Every so often, Burk came in with a copy of Forensic Pathology in his hand and checked my progress. At a 10:45, I brought a couple feet of strip chart showing nothing but clean peaks and flat baselines.
"Great job, Candidi. Well, why don’t we finish off the evening with a beer at your Captain Walley’s. We could throw your bike in the back of my wagon and be there in no time."
This was obviously an offer I couldn’t refuse. I was not expected at Rebecca’s that night, so I went along with it.
Riding shotgun, as Burk barreled his eight-cylinder Bronco down I-95, I tried a couple of times to jump-start a conversation. But Old Burk just wasn’t interested in my material. So what the hell — I just told him what was on my mind.
"I guess these high-rise four-wheel-drive vehicles are pretty good when you get stuck in traffic. All you have to do is hop the curb and drive across people’s yards."
This unleashed a cascade of anecdotes about his urban exploits with his gas-guzzling toy. At Captain Walley’s, I managed to switch the conversation to pharmacology, Burk’s graduate work at Lexington, Kentucky, life in Miami and his golf game. We sat close to the seawall, at the same picnic table where Rebecca and I had our pre-Thanksgiving date. Our "Walley’s Girl" was a 19-year-old redhead with the charming accent of the Emerald Isle. We exchanged some small talk when she brought our pitcher of beer. Burk remained fixated on her breasts.
A four-year-old boy was running around and zooming dangerously close to the edge of the seawall. At high tide it was a five-foot drop with three feet of water. At low tide it was an eight-foot drop with bare rocks. The kid’s parents, Swedes or Danes in their early 30s, paid no attention. Every time the child ran within three feet of the seawall, I held my breath.
"Awfully late for that little rug rat to be out, don’t you think?" Burk remarked.
"Parents are probably Scandinavian tourists."
"Yeah, fits with the blond hair. I hear that those Swedish girls are good fucks. And pretty easy to get in the sack. You know anything about that?"
"Didn’t you have any Swedes at Lexington?"
"No. That’s why I was asking. You must have had a few at Swarthmore."
"Not really," I said, "but there’s a Swedish technician here in the Biochemistry Department at the Med School. I talked with her a month ago. She said she came here to get her freedom . . ." (Burk’s pupils dilated) ". . . from taxation." Burk frowned.
The rug rat did another bombing run on the seawall, and I winced.
"You’re really worried that the brat will go over the side, aren’t you?"
"Yeah. Look, I’ll take care of the brat, and you take care of the mother."
"You know, Candidi, you kind of remind me of that guy in a book they made us read in college lit, Catcher in the Rye."
"You might not be too far off, Burk — in more ways than either of us can guess. Look, it’s getting late."
Burk looked at his watch. "Right, it’s twelve-fifteen. Let me give you a ride home."
"It’s just two blocks to my landing."
"Look, your bike’s still in my Bronco, so we’ll unload it there."
He drove me to the landing and stuck around while I unchained my dinghy and chained my bike to a tree. And then he stood there while I rowed out to the Diogenes. I was halfway to the boat before his tail lights lit up, and he pulled away.
Grant Johnson provided the first indication that it was not a typical morning at the Department of Pharmacology. "They’d better not come fucking around in my lab," he said to no one in particular, as he entered the elevator on the fifth floor. I stepped out to find a gaggle of cops blocking the hallway near the Revco freezer. The whole department seemed to be wandering around in a state of shock — students, technicians, post-docs and faculty alike. A couple of University security guards stood on the periphery.
The Revco freezer was wrapped with yellow tape marked "Police Line." A man in a brown work uniform stood on a step ladder over the Revco, his head stuck in the false ceiling. A minute later, he handed down some equipment. One piece looked like a boom box with a radio antenna. Another looked like a diver’s weight belt, but proved to be a battery power pack.
"Don, could you hand me up a bag for this last one."
What came down was about the size of a video camera. When he replaced the ceiling panel, I noticed a two-inch diameter hole. Dr. Dong Chiu complained periodically that they were getting dust on the Revco.
The police technicians entered the air conditioning equipment room located behind a louvered, aluminum grating that served to collect the return air at the end of the hall. Two of the grates were bent, making a two-inch gap, which lit up nicely when they entered the room and flipped on the lights. A couple minutes later, they were wheeling out several cubic feet of equipment. Yes, a trap had been set and sprung. And a trap was now retrieved.
If anyone saw what went on last night, it had to be Sheng-Ping Chow. He was practically living in Dr. Kozinski’s lab.
"What happened here, Sheng-Ping?"
"Oh, Dr. Redbetter come here last night. He open lab and go to freezer. And creaning man come and say he policeman. Dr. Redbetter, he run away and other creaning man come grab him. Before I can do something, creaning man tell me that he police officer. Then rots of police come. They take vial from Dr. Redbetter and put in dry ice box. They take pictures of freezer."
"What did Dr. Ledbetter do?"
"Oh, first he try to run away. When they get him, he say they can’t take vial. It part of important experiment. Then he try to grab it back. Then he scream that they have no right to come here and fuck up his experiments. Oh, he mad! He mad like when technician take wrong vial and mess up two-month experiment."
"What did the cleaning people look like, Sheng-Ping?"
"Oh, they black. You say Haitian. Like regular creaning people. I not believe them either, but they show me police badge."
"What did they do with Dr. Ledbetter?"
"He under arrest. They read him Miranda and put on cuff-hands. Just like in TV. They say he kill Dr. Cooper. Dr. Redbetter say they idiot. He say they use ‘fuzzy logic.’"
Hopefully, Ledbetter had grabbed Sample # 930105.
It had been good thinking on Westley’s part, keeping me away from the scene with that fool’s errand for Burk.
"Thanks, Sheng-Peng."
"Ben, you think Dr. Redbetter kill Dr. Cooper? Some people say Dr. Redbetter very mad at him. But some people say Dr. Cooper just die sudden death. What you think?"
"I don’t know any more than you do."
Taking to heart Dr. Westley’s advice, I kept my head down. I retreated to a corner of Kozinski’s lab and worked hard. Everyone else spent the day in hallway conversation, and I heard it all through the open door.
Ashton told someone, "I’m glad that they didn’t decide to go into my lab. They could have made up any story they want with the things I’m working with."
Peter Moore said, "A good working scientist has been victimized by those idiots downtown."
Dr. Fleischman said that it was a throwback to the days of Stalin.
Hallway conversations told me that the police were cataloging Ledbetter’s notebooks and making photocopies of everything. And when I left at seven that evening, they were still working. They had their own lock and alarm on the Revco freezer. In the mail room, everyone’s pigeonhole contained a memo from Dr. Moore, saying we should not take notice of "recent events affecting members of the Department."
I went home to Rebecca and "innocently" told her what everyone else in the Department had learned. She remembered that Ledbetter was the crazy one, but she didn’t say anything about our conversation at Elliott Key.
The next day, the Department was still in chaos. Gordon Taylor was strangely subdued. It would be many weeks before he would deliver another "Sergeant Major" joke.
That evening, I found a thick envelope in my Coconut Grove post office box. It was from the M.E.’s Office and contained a series of predated invoices for service between November and mid-January, plus a check for $9,320 made out to my instrument repair service. When I added this to previous payments, it came to a few dollars more than the agreed-upon $12,500. So we were squared away. A typewritten note requested that I sign and return the predated invoices, which I did.
It was an evening scheduled for the Diogenes. I removed the backup tapes from the battery compartment and spent an hour snipping and burning them in a tin can. This, I thought, severed my last physical link with Dr. Ledbetter. Other links, I could not easily sever — links in people’s minds.