So much for resting a few days in Bimini. As Malcolm motored out of sight, I hauled anchor and headed south to Victory Cay. Passing Turtle Rocks, I remembered my plan to take Rebecca diving there. Couldn’t even visit the reef myself. My scalp was oozing and swimming might make the infection worse. The first night was spent at Gun Cay. Next, I made a day and night run at 099 degrees to Joulters Cay, north of Andros Island. I spent the next several days putting distance between myself and all authority, sailing by day and anchoring at night.
There weren’t many boats around, and those I did see showed no interest. It was a short jump to Frazers Hog and Berry Islands. Then I sailed east across the deep water of the Northeast Providence Channel to Current Isle and on to Eleuthera, that long strip of coral that extends so many miles.
The sailing was like the dreadful ecstasy of an opium trance. It served no purpose except to occupy my mind and kill time. The infection went systemic, and the fever must have lasted a week. The sailing was a dream of Rebecca at my side, yet out of reach, with time, like sand, slipping through my fingertips — no beginning and no end — like the endless expanse of water before me.
As the morning sun rose, I looked over the side of my anchored boat into my exotic garden of coral, sea fans, sand and striped fish. Forgetting my festering scalp, I plunged into the beautiful garden, disturbing it by only a ripple. The plunge was a daily rebaptism that washed away the memories of Miami and cleansed my mind of bad thoughts. Every day I moved another 10 miles along Eleuthera and planted my anchor in a new coral patch.
Slowly, as weeks rolled by, I came back to myself. De Maupassant and Dostoevski were on board. Dostoevski fit my mood, and slowly brought me back to reality. As I regained capacity for emotion, I switched to de Maupassant, who made me lovesick for Rebecca. Then my mind slowly wandered back to science. Next, came an outpouring of meta-scientific ideas. How the ship is like a cell, how its master is like its DNA, and how its thin, fiberglass hull is like the fragile cell membrane. Together, master and ship can survive all challenges the sea has to offer.
I have my ship, and his name is Diogenes. He’s all that I have left, and survival is my game.
My entire life was on hold until the verdict on Ledbetter was rendered.
Uncertain whether I was still in the pharmacology program at Bryan Medical School, I studied halfheartedly from Goodman and Gilman’s pharmacology book. My mind often drifted back to sociobiology — like the Scientific American article on chimpanzee sociology. Crowded into laboratory colonies, chimps do the same as people crowded into organizations: some start bossing. After the bossy ones achieve control over their cage-mates, aggressive boss chimps have healthy hormone levels. And, of course, the submissive chimps get unhealthy hormone levels. Perverse old Mother Nature! Always rewarding the bad guys.
Paper and pencil in hand, I tried to summon philosophy to the rescue. I wrote down two contradictory theses: Thesis 1: People must suppress selfish inclinations if civilization is to exist. Thesis 2: Society’s self-serving manipulators will use the framework of civilization to trap you in a self-destructive spiritual cage. What would Dr. Westley’s Old English Sheepdog have to say about this? Was Old Anglican Westley any better than I at fathoming The Divine Scheme of Things?
The philosophical brooding must have drained my lymph, because my spiritual strength gradually returned. I set sail for New Providence and anchored on the south side of the island. For fear of being discovered, I didn’t put in at Nassau on the north side. I rowed ashore, chained up my dinghy and set off on my bike. After pedaling over 20 miles of bumpy asphalt and crushed coral, I found a telephone that would accept my credit card number. I spent two full days trying to call Rebecca, but could not get through. Finally, I settled for a lengthy telegram. As the days wore on, I became curious about the trial. New Providence had a newspaper but there was little information from Miami.
My miniature black-and-white TV didn’t yield anything useful. There were plenty of AM radio stations to listen to — Island D.J.s and endless rumba from Cuba. I spent a lot of time scanning for a Miami station and finally picked up a news and talk station with a weak, unreliable signal. After many hours of listening to it fade in and out, I was rewarded with something about "another day of expert scientific testimony in the murder trial of — "
Two days later, the trial was the subject of a call-in talk show. The ether was better, but the show was like seeing the world through the eyes of a dimwit.
"All scientists are crazy, anyhow."
"Sure they would poison each other. They poison rats and dogs."
"You can’t trust doctors. And scientists are just like doctors. So you can’t trust scientists, either."
"They should be finding a cure for AIDS instead of killing each other."
"This ding-blasted thing reminds me of that Woody Allen movie. If they had this guy in the freezer, maybe they should of turned him over to the Deep Freeze Society. Maybe they should of waked him up in a coup’la hundred years when they get cures for them poisons."
The next day, the topic of talk show conversation was lesbian love triangles. So eight weeks after leaving Miami, I set sail for Bimini hoping to pick up a stronger radio signal.
I moored in Bimini Harbor and made occasional forays into Alice Town, mostly to send telegrams to Rebecca. It was past the point of trying to call her on the phone. If she lost faith in me and went back to her old boyfriend, a phone call couldn’t change it. Worse yet, I wouldn’t know what to say if she asked about my role in the Ledbetter thing. Better to telegraph my love to her at $2 a word.
Bimini must have had a repeater station because my TV picked up the Miami stations nicely. It was "Tough Guys Week" on the independent channel. For a week of evenings, I compared myself with Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.
Immediately following The Deep Sleep, Eyewitness News broke the story:
"The seven-week-long murder trial of Dr. John Ledbetter, Professor of Pharmacology at the Bryan Medical School has just come to an end! After three hours of deliberation, the jury turned in a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. The trial told a story of professional jealousy leading up to murder by poisoning. Weeks of testimony by expert scientific witnesses told a story of a carefully crafted poison formulation based on state-of-the-art pharmaceutical technology."
The screen showed pictures of the GC-mass spectrometer in the M.E. Lab.
"Through careful and methodical analysis, Dade County Medical Examiner Dr. Geoffrey Westley was able to prove that Dr. David Cooper was murdered by three micro-encapsulated toxins, injected into a hamburger which he ate at a meeting at work. The most dramatic portion of the trial was when the jury was shown actual video footage of Dr. Ledbetter’s arrest while attempting to destroy the sample with which Dr. Cooper was murdered. Painstaking scientific analysis was presented by a large panel of scientific experts from universities across the country. The method of toxin release from the preparation was actually patented by the defendant, Dr. John Ledbetter, for use in pharmaceutical products, and may still be used to cure diabetes."
While the male anchor read this, the screen showed footage of attorneys questioning witnesses. Then came a dramatic scene, looking down on the Revco freezer as a latex-gloved hand opened it and removed a vial. Then came a down-the-hall shot of a man approaching with a mop, a couple seconds of animated but mute conversation, and Dr. Ledbetter running away and being tackled by a second "janitor." All three concentrated on the vial like it was a football in play. The screen faded and blended to a courthouse steps interview with Alan W. Smith, the prosecuting attorney:
"It was the high-tech crime of the century. A murder which was as brilliant in its execution as it was evil in its intent. Our office has never had such a complex case. A major share of the credit goes to Medical Examiner Westley, whose expertise and insight identified this bolt-from-the-blue death as the intentional poisoning which it was."
The screen faded and blended to a face and chest shot of the Old Man, sitting in the leather chair in his office.
"It was a murder, most foul," he said in a soft but resolute voice with Shakespearian overtones. "As soon as the case and the details surrounding the tragic death of Dr. Cooper came to my attention, we took the extraordinary step of freezing and storing his remains at liquid-nitrogen temperature, together with the remains of his fatal lunch which we were lucky to retrieve from his wastebasket. In this manner, we were able to put the evidence into — to use a fanciful science fiction expression — into stasis, permitting us time to conduct a thorough scientific investigation requiring months of effort. I wish to thank the Miami Police Department for some excellent footwork, so to speak, and Dr. Ledbetter himself for providing us with a few shortcuts.
The unseen male reporter asked, "Is it fair to say that this is your most puzzling case, Dr. Westley?"
"Well, Miami offers so many puzzling cases. But I should think that my most intriguing case was the one of the opened skull of a 4,000-year-old mummy, which I investigated for the Egyptians a while back. We had considerably greater obstacles in that investigation since the evidence was, as it were, considerably more dusty, so to speak — "
The picture faded and the screen returned to the studio anchorman who turned in his chair to face his weatherman.
"Well, Jack, after that dry performance do you have any rain for us?"
So I now had hope. Hopefully, Joe Kazekian had taped everything so I could know for sure. The TV weatherman showed a tropical wave and predicted some stormy weather.