I looked at the window. Raindrops slid slowly down the dirty glass, streaking it dirtier. In the alley, a homeless prowled the garbage cans. “What’s this got to do with the elderly suicides? If you have a point to make, make it.”
“They weren’t suicides. They were murders.”
“Murders? Some psycho knocking off old people? What makes you think so?”
“Not some psycho. And I don’t think so. I know.”
“How?”
“All eight elderlies were taking J-24. That’s the Kelvin code name for the neuropharm that ends situational isolation. It was a clinical trial.”
I studied Bucky, whose eyes burned with Bucky light: intense, pleading, determined, inept. And something else, something that hadn’t been there in the old days. “Bucky, that makes no sense. The NYPD isn’t perfect, God knows, but they can tell the difference between suicide and murder. And anyway, the suicide rate rises naturally among old people, they get depressed—” I stopped. He had to already know this.
“That’s just it!” Bucky cried, and an old Greek couple at a table halfway across the room turned to stare at him. He lowered his voice. “The elderly in the clinical trial weren’t depressed. They were very carefully screened for it. No psychological, chemical, or social markers for depression. These were the . . . when you see old people in travel ads, doing things, full of life and health, playing tennis and dancing by candlelight . . . the team psychologists looked for our clinical subjects very carefully. None of them was depressed!”
“So maybe your pill made them depressed. Enough to kill themselves.”
“No! No! J-24 couldn’t . . . there wasn’t any . . . it didn’t make them depressed. I saw it.” He hesitated. “And besides . . .”
“Besides what?”
He looked out at the alley. A waiter pushed a trolley of dirty dishes past our table. When Bucky spoke again, his voice sounded odd.
“I gave five intense years to J-24 and the research that led to it,
Gene. Days, evenings, weekends—eighty hours a week in the lab. Every minute until I met Tommy, and maybe too much time even after that. I know everything that the Kelvin team leaders know, everything that can be known about that drug’s projected interaction with existing neurotransmitters. J-24 was my life.”
As the Church had once been. Bucky couldn’t do anything by halves. I wondered just what his position on “the team” had actually been.
He said, “We designed J-24 to combat the isolation that even normal, healthy people feel with age. You get old. Your friends die. Your mate dies. Your children live in another state, with lives of their own. All the connections you built up over decades are gone, and in healthy people, those connections created very thick, specific, strong neural structures. Any new friends you make in a nursing home or retirement community—there just aren’t the years left to duplicate the strength of those neural pathways. Even when outgoing, undepressed, risk-taking elderlies try.”
I didn’t say anything.
“J-24 was specific to the neurochemistry of connection. You took it in the presence of someone else, and it opened the two of you up to each other, made it possible to genuinely—genuinely, at the permanent chemical level—imprint on each other.”
“You created an aphrodisiac for geezers?”
“No,” he said, irritated. “Sex had nothing to do with it. Those impulses originate in the limbic system. This was . . . emotional bonding. Of the most intense, long-term type. Don’t tell me all you ever felt for Margie was sex!”
After a minute he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Finish your story.”
“It is finished. We gave the drug to four sets of volunteers, all people who had long-term terminal diseases but weren’t depressed, people who were willing to take risks in order to enhance the quality of their own perceptions in the time left. I was there observing when they took it. They bonded like baby ducks imprinting on the first moving objects they see. No, not like that. More like. . . like . . .” He looked over my shoulder, at the wall, and his eyes filled with water. I glanced around to make sure nobody could see.
“Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other. In knowing each other. Not each other’s memories, but each other’s . . . souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the psychological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost were each other.”
I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an illusion.”
“No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone, share something intense with them?”
I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself, unstoppable.
“What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said, greater pleasure. And all of those responses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just reverses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the rate of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples . . . does it only work on men and women?” A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained. I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you . . . have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him, to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer. My liberal, tolerant daughter. But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the territory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.
Bucky didn’t look offended. “All right. But just imagine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our whole tiny lives . . .” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.
“And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a . . . what did you call it? A neuropharm. They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”
“No,” Bucky said.
I stared at him. , ,
“It would have taken years. Maybe decades. Its too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”
“You knew there was no approval.”
“Yes. But I thought . . . I never thought . . .” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those unlogical flashes, and I saw that there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that had led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths depressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his hair, or hating
himself. Bucky, to whom guilt was the staff of life.
I’d seen him try to kill himself over leaving the Church. I’d watched him go through agonies of guilt over ignoring answering-machine messages from Father Healey. Hell, I’d watched him shake and cry because at ten years old we’d stolen three apples from a market on Columbus Avenue. Yet there he sat, disturbed but coherent. For Bucky, even serene. Believing he’d contributed to murder.
I said, “What neurophar
ms do you take, Bucky?”
“I told you. None.”
“None at all.”
“No.” His brown eyes were completely honest. “Gene, I want you to find out how these clinical subjects really died. You have access to NYPD records—”
“Not any more.”
“But you know people. And cases get buried there all the time, you used to tell me that yourself, with enough money you can buy yourself an investigation unless somebody high up in the city is really out to get you. Kelvin Pharmaceuticals doesn’t have those kinds of enemies.
They’re not the Mob. They’re just . . .”
“Committing murder to cover up an illegal drug trial? I don t buy it, Bucky.”
“Then find out what really happened.”
I shot back, “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know! But I do know this drug is a good thing! Don’t you understand, it holds out the possibility of a perfect, totally open connection with the person you love most in the world . . . Find out what happened, Gene. It wasn’t suicide. J-24 doesn’t cause depression. I know it. And for this drug to be denied people would be . . . it would be a sin.”
He said it so simply, so naturally, that I was thrown all over again. This wasn’t Bucky, as I had known him. Or maybe it was. He was still driven by sin and love.
I stood and put money on the table. “I don’t want to get involved in this, Bucky. I really don’t. But—one thing more—”
“Yeah?”
“Camineur. Can it . . . does it account for . . .” Jesus, I sounded like him. “I get these flashes of intuition about things I haven’t been thinking about. Sometimes it’s stuff I didn’t know.”
He nodded. “You knew the stuff before. You just didn’t know you knew. Camineur strengthens intuitive right-brain pathways. As an effect of releasing the stranglehold of violent thoughts. You’re more distanced from compulsive thoughts of destruction, but also more likely to make connections among various non-violent perceptions. You’re just more intuitive, Gene, now that you’re less driven.”
And I’m less Gene, my unwelcome intuition said. I gazed down at Bucky, sitting there with his skinny fingers splayed on the table, an unBucky-like serenity weirdly mixed with his manic manner and his belief that he worked for a corporation that had murdered eight people. Who the hell was he?
“I don’t want to get involved in this,” I repeated.
“But you will,” Bucky said, and in his words I heard utter, unshakable faith.
Jenny Kelly said, “I set up a conference with Jeff Connors and he never showed.” It was Friday afternoon. She had deep circles around her eyes. Raccoon eyes, we called them. They were the badge of teachers who were new, dedicated, or crazy. Who sat up until 1:00 A.M. in a frenzy of lesson planning and paper correcting, and then arrived at school at 6:30 to supervise track or meet with students or correct more papers.
“Set up another conference,” I suggested. “Sometimes by the third or fourth missed appointment, guilt drives them to show up.”
She nodded. “Okay. Meanwhile, Jeff has my class all worked up over something called the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, where they’re supposed to inform on their friends’ brothers’ drug activity, or something. It’s somehow connected to getting their Social Services checks. It’s got the kids all in an uproar. . . . I sent seventeen kids to the principal in three days.”
“You might want to ease up on that, Jenny. It gives everybody—kids and administration—the idea that you can’t control your own classroom.”
“I can’t,” she said, so promptly and honestly that I had to smile. “But I will.”
“Well, good luck.”
“Listen, Gene, I’m picking the brains of everybody I can get to talk to me about this. Want to go have a cup of coffee someplace?”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.” She didn’t look rebuffed, which was a relief. Today her earrings matched the color of her sweater. A soft blue, with lace at the neck. “Maybe another time.”
“Maybe.” It was easier than an outright no.
Crossing the parking lot to my car, I saw Jeff Connors. He slapped me a high-five. “Ms. Kelly’s looking for you, Jeff.”
“She is? Oh, yeah. Well, I can’t today. Busy.”
“So I hear. There isn’t any such thing as the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, is there?”
He eyed me carefully. “Sure there is, Mr. S.”
“Really? Well, I’m going to be at Midtown South station house this afternoon. I’ll ask about it.”
“It’s, like, kinda new. They maybe don’t know nothing about it yet.”
“Ah. Well, I’ll ask anyway. See you around, Jeff.”
“Hang loose.”
He watched my car all the way down the block, until I turned the corner.
The arrest room at Midtown South was full of cops filling out forms: fingerprint cards, On-line Booking System Arrest Worksheets, complaint reports, property invoices, requests for laboratory examinations of evidence, Arrest Documentation Checklists. The cops, most of whom had changed out of uniform, scribbled and muttered and sharpened pencils. In the holding pen alleged criminals cursed and slept and muttered and sang. It looked like fourth-period study hall in the junior high cafeteria.
I said, “Lieutenant Fermato?”
A scribbling cop in a Looney Tunes sweatshirt waved me toward an office without even looking up.
“Oh my God. Gene Shaunessy. Risen from the fuckin’ dead.”
“Hello, Johnny.”
“Come in. God, you look like a politician. Teaching must be the soft life.”
“Better to put on a few pounds than look like a starved rat.”
We stood there clasping hands, looking at each other, not saying the things that didn’t need saying anyway, even if we’d had the words, which we didn’t. Johnny and I had been partners for seven years. We’d gone together through foot pursuits and high-speed chases and lost files and violent domestics and bungled traps by Internal Affairs and robberies-in-progress and the grueling boredom of the street. Johnny’s divorce. My retirement. Johnny had gone into Narcotics a year before I took the hit that shattered my knee. If he’d been my partner, it might not have happened. He’d made lieutenant only a few months ago. I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half.
Suddenly I knew—or the Camineur knew—why I’d come to Midtown South to help Bucky after all. I’d already lost too many pieces of my life. Not the life I had now—the life I’d had once. My real one.
“Gene—about Marge . . .”
I held up my hand. “Don’t. I’m here about something else. Professional.”
His voice changed. “You in trouble?”
“No. A friend is.” Johnny didn’t know Bucky; they’d been separate pieces of my old life. I couldn’t picture them in the same room together for more than five minutes. “It’s about the suicides at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home. Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith.”
Johnny nodded. “What about it?”
“I’d like to see a copy of the initial crime-scene report.”
Johnny looked at me steadily. But all he said was, “Not my jurisdiction, Gene.”
I looked back. If Johnny didn’t want to get me the report, he wouldn’t. But either way, he could. Johnny’d been the best undercover cop in Manhattan, mostly because he was so good at putting together his net of criminal informers, inside favors, noncriminal spies, and unseen procedures. I didn’t believe he’d dismantled any of it just because he’d come in off the street. Not Johnny.
“Is it important?”
I said, “It’s important.”
“All right,” he said, and that was all that had to be said. I asked him instead about the Neighborhood Safety Information Network.
“We heard about that one,” Johnny said. “Pure lies, but somebody’s using it to stir up a lot of anti-cop crap as a set up for something or other. We’re watching it.”
“Watches run down,?
?? I said, because it was an old joke between us, and Johnny laughed. Then we talked about old times, and Libby, and his two boys, and when I left, the same cops were filling out the same forms and the same perps were still sleeping or cursing or singing, nobody looking at each other in the whole damn place.
By the next week, the elderly suicides had disappeared from the papers, which had moved on to another batch of mayhem and alleged brutality in the three-oh. Jenny Kelly had two more fights in her classroom. One I heard through the wall and broke up myself. The other Lateesha told me about in the parking lot. “That boy, Mr. Shaunessy, that Richie Tang, he call Ms. Kelly an ugly bitch! He say she be sorry for messing with him!”
“And then what?” I said, reluctantly.
Lateesha smiled. “Ms. Kelly, she yell back that Richie might act like a lost cause but he ain’t lost to her, and she be damned if anybody gonna talk to her that way. But Richie just smile and walk out. Ms. Kelly, she be gone by Thanksgiving.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”
“Not me, they don’t.”
“Maybe even you, Lateesha.”
Jenny Kelly’s eyes wore permanent rings: sleeplessness, anger, smudged mascara. In the faculty room she sat hunched over her coffee, scribbling furiously with red pen on student compositions. I found myself choosing a different table.
“Hi, Gene,” Bucky’s voice said on my answering machine. “Please call if you . . . I wondered whether you found out any . . . give me a call. Please. I have a different phone number, I’ll give it to you.” Pause. “I’ve moved.”
I didn’t call him back. Something in the “I’ve moved” hinted at more pain, more complications, another chapter in Bucky’s messy internal drama. I decided to call him only if I heard something from Johnny Fermato.
Who phoned me the following Tuesday, eight days after my visit to Midtown South. “Gene. John Fermato.”