“All right! Let’s try that toast again!” Jack said when the waitress brought Lou’s glass of Vermentino. Jack held up his own glass of wine, and the others followed suit. “To Laurie’s return to OCME; to JJ’s resilience, since he’s been acting entirely normal; and to Leticia’s memory and scholarship fund!”
The three friends clicked glasses and then took healthy swallows of their wine.
“What’s this about a scholarship fund?” Lou asked after putting down his wineglass.
“We tried to think of something to honor Leticia’s memory,” Jack said. “A neighborhood college-scholarship fund was what we came up with. Laurie has been in contact with Columbia University, and they seem to like the idea as a nice addition to their efforts of neighborhood outreach. Laurie and I have already started the funding by setting up a yearly stipend and inviting others to do the same. Plus, we’ve also started planning various neighborhood fund-raisers. We think it will be good for the community.”
“I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate,” Lou said. “Great idea!”
“What’s been going on in the legal arena?” Laurie asked. “I’ve been curious ever since you stopped by the house and told us about the corporate raids.”
“It’s been a mixed bag, as usual,” Lou said. “All the big honchos have been bonded from all three companies except for Benjamin Corey. They are all to be arraigned this week and, of course, all will plead not guilty, including Corey. What the prosecution is doing now is putting serious rollover pressure on the lesser officers to cop a plea in exchange for testimony on the big guys. It’s going to work, for sure, thanks to all the evidence obtained during the raids in unlocking the secrets involving all the organized-crime shell companies. More important, the comfortable relationship between the Long Island Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza is a thing of the past, at least in the short run, and I hope in the long run as well. Thanks to you, we are going to see a lot less crystal meth around town.”
“Why wasn’t Benjamin Corey bonded?”
“Because of the international warrant for his arrest on the murder charge for the security guard in Kyoto, Japan. He would have been bonded if it had been just the white-collar crime. If anybody is a flight risk, it’s him. Right now his biggest effort is in trying to fight extradition. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Even if he prevails on the extradition issue, he’s still got to face the money-laundering charges. I mean, I just can’t understand it. A guy with that kind of background and education: it was as if he was trying to see just how much he could get away with.”
“I see it more like a Greek tragedy,” Laurie said. “The fatal flaw of greed evidencing itself in an individual who most likely started out with an altruistic desire to help people, just like ninety-nine percent of other medical students.”
“But how could that happen? I don’t understand it.”
“It’s the unfortunate marriage of medicine and business. In the mid-twentieth century you could do well in medicine, but you really couldn’t become truly wealthy. All that changed when medicine in this country did not emerge as a responsibility of government, like education or defense, as it did in most every other industrialized country. Add to that the U.S. government’s inadvertently contributing to medical inflation by passing Medicare without effective cost controls, by generously subsidizing biomedical research without maintaining ownership of the resultant discoveries for the American public, and by its patent office awarding medical process patents, like for human gene sequences, which it’s not supposed to do by law. I tell you, the medical patent situation in this country is a total mess, which is already starting to haunt the biomedical industry, but that’s another issue.
“Unfortunately,” Laurie continued, “today if a doctor wants to become truly wealthy, and a lot of them do, it is reasonably within their grasp by choosing the right specialty, getting involved in the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance industry, the specialty-hospital industry, or the biotech industry. All these industries say they exist to help people, which they can, but it is more of a by-product, not the goal. The goal is to make money, and do they ever.”
For a few beats Lou merely stared at Laurie. Then he chuckled in a mocking manner. “Do you expect me to understand what you just said?”
“Not really,” Laurie agreed. “Just take from it that I am not surprised that someone like Ben Corey could be enticed from being an individual with true interests in becoming a caring doctor to an individual whose main goal is to become a billionaire. Most, if not all, medical students are altruistic to begin with, but they are also competitive. They have to be, to get into the best college, to get into medical school, and to do the best to get the most coveted residencies to get into the best medical specialty, meaning, most likely, the one that pays the most so they can pay down their student loans the fastest. What they don’t realize is that the profession in this country has drastically changed over the years, mostly because of economics.”
“What about the new healthcare legislation? Isn’t that going to help?”
“In a generous moment I might say it is a start. At its core, there is the goal of some sense of social equality in regard to medical care as a resource and a responsibility of government. But in this country medical care is a competitive stakeholder industry, and the new legislation doesn’t change that; it just re-sorts the relative power of the stakeholders. I’m afraid the ultimate effect is going to be more pressure for costs to rise, since, like Medicare, there aren’t enough specific cost controls.”
“Jack, do you feel as negative as Laurie does?” Lou asked.
“Absolutely,” Jack said without hesitation. “Don’t get me started!”
“Let’s change the subject,” Laurie suggested. “What about JJ’s kidnapping issue? What have you learned?”
“Well, as I mentioned when I first got here, we now know for certain it was staged specifically to get you, Laurie, off Satoshi Machita’s case. Ransom demands were actually a cover for the plan. I’m also happy to report that we now have in custody the trigger-man who killed Leticia. His name is Brennan Monaghan, but the person really behind the event we’ve now learned is one of the capos of the Vaccarro family named Louie Barbera, with whom I have had run-ins in the past. I’d be ecstatic if this episode was going to put him away, but that’s not going to be the case. Once again, he’s going to walk.”
“How can that be?” Laurie demanded.
“From the police’s perspective, it’s the trouble with using the likes of CRT. As we discussed that fateful night when I introduced you to two of their principals, their primary goal is to resolve the kidnapping to the benefit of the victim and the victim’s family. Their methods don’t take into account that any evidence obtained illegally is unusable in a court of law, as is the situation in JJ’s case. CRT found out where he was being held essentially by kidnapping and drugging a Vaccarro underling, a hardly kosher strategy from a legal perspective. It’s a good thing they have such good defense attorneys; otherwise, they wouldn’t still be in business.”
“I’d rather have JJ back than have adhered to the niceties of the law,” Laurie admitted.
“Of course you would,” Lou agreed. “That’s why I suggested you employ them. That advice was from me as a friend, not as a policeman. As a policeman, I wouldn’t have done it, since their methods often trample constitutional rights, and such behavior is certainly not good for society as a whole over the long haul.”
“What about Vinnie Amendola?” Laurie asked. “Is he still on the lam?”
“He’s been back for over a week,” Jack said. “We’ve been so caught up in the scholarship and nanny business, I forgot to tell you.”
“Thanks a lot,” Laurie said mockingly. “Well, what’s the scoop? Is he in any kind of trouble? Did he write the threatening letter?”
“He did,” Lou explained. “Ultimately, he’d been found by the authories in south Florida and brought back here to New York on a warrant.
He was extremely cooperative, and no charges have been filed even though he was an accomplice of sorts. Everyone recognizes he was being extorted and in a difficult situation, fearing for the lives of his daughters and wife. On top of that, he did, after all, warn you with his letter. You’re not interested in filing any charges, are you, Laurie?”
“Heavens, no,” Laurie said, with an expression suggesting it was the last thing in the world she would want to do. “I’m looking forward to thanking him for trying to warn me.”
At that point the waitress came with their Caesar salads. Everyone pitched in to try to make room on the small glass-topped wrought-iron table. When the waitress withdrew, Lou raised his wineglass.
“Let me make a short toast. To forensics and what it can do for law enforcement! It’s the one thing we have that the bad guys don’t have!”
With nods and laughter from the three friends, they all clicked glasses for the second time.
Robin Cook, Fatal Cure
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