“No need,” Harrington replied. “Besides, you have a dinner date, don’t you? With the mutual friend mentioned. Maybe he’ll give you the details.”
I felt a weird cerebral jolt. I was meeting Hooker Montbard at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor in an hour. I hadn’t seen Hooker since he’d left JFK for the Explorers Club the previous night… or, at least, told me he was going to his club.
“Doc?” Harrington said. “You there?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to relax, take a few days off. In terms of the business we discussed, you did another competent job.”
Competent: wild praise from Harrington. And it was true that Navarro was dead.
I said slowly, “You’re not asking me to drop my interest in finding out who-”
“We already know. You need to let it go, because what you’re pushing for is a waste of energy. I need you back, rested up, in good shape.”
“Don’t patronize me,” I said. “I won’t drop it. We are talking about Tinman?”
I didn’t have to explain the code name to Harrington.
“You’ve got the right person. If he murdered that girl, I suspect it was to cover up for his idiot son-even the worst of us occasionally do noble things. But the police will never charge him because the guy we’re talking about has taken a long, long trip. Dr. Hank Tomlinson has…”
Harrington allowed his silence to provide the word: disappeared.
EPILOGUE
In the middle of February, I had a total of two full weeks to myself and I spent them doing whatever I damned well pleased whenever I damned well pleased.
I hung out at the marina. Traded stories with the fishing guides, bought lunch for Javier Castillo’s widow and daughters, and got tipsy one night with my sisterly cousin, Ransom Gatrell. We ended up aboard a water-soaked old Chris Craft named Tiger Lily.
Tiger Lily ’s owners, two respectable businesswomen, decided that at least once a year the only rule should be there are no rules, so one thing led to another, as it always does when the destination is known in advance.
I exercised twice a day, running the beach, then swimming to the NO WAKE buoy off the West Wind Inn or jogging through Ding Darling Sanctuary and doing laps at the public pool.
Pull-ups were done on the bar beneath my lab. Descending sets, beginning at twenty, then nineteen, eighteen and on down to one. If my Sunday voice signaled there was absolutely no way in hell to do one more, I reprimanded the traitor by starting with one pull-up and working my way back up to at least five.
Sunday voice: It’s the voice we all hear that tells us to quit, take it easy, wait until tomorrow, why bother?, what’s the use?
To discredit the voice, all I had to do was imagine Farfel coming toward me with the power drill… or spend five minutes on the phone with Otto Guttersen.
Otto hadn’t had much free time either. For three days after Will Chaser’s escape, the man was the darling of daytime television, although he refused to discuss what he had endured as a captive after Mazar-Sharif, and he also insisted on wearing an absurd white ten-gallon hat.
Because Guttersen was funny and honest, and a relentless advocate of his teenage ward-“Toughest little cuss you ever met, I bleep thee not”-network producers tolerated the man’s quirks.
But Guttersen finally breached the limits of free speech by offending the guardians of political correctness. He told a national audience that Minnesota’s ACLU stood for Adolescent Commie Lutheran Yuppies, then went off on a tirade about sportswriters, calling them candy-asses for not voting his favorite Twins pitcher into the Hall of Fame.
“What crawled up your knickers?” he fired back when the host rebuked him. “Only thing your screener said was don’t bitch about Ethiopians or call my boy a half-breed delinquent.”
That was the end of the man’s TV career. It was also the beginning of unexpected problems.
The Minnesota Family and Children Services Agency decided that Guttersen’s remarks justified an investigation. If Otto and Ruth Guttersen had assumed the legal role of guardians, why weren’t they in New York to intervene when William Chaser was kidnapped?
The agency sought an injunction through federal courts-the boy was Native American, after all-demanding that he be housed in a neutral place, at least until the completion of three months of post-traumatic stress counseling. When the Guttersens agreed that counseling was a good idea, bureaucrats turned it around like a weapon, charging that a former POW who himself had refused counseling might be a dangerous influence on a fourteen-year-old.
So the bureaucrats had won-temporarily. Will would soon be transported to an Oklahoma safe house administrated by a psychologist who had treated Will earlier. The psychologist told reporters that she had no personal bias in the case other than an interest in synesthesia, a perceptual handicap the boy sometimes suffered.
Twice a day, Guttersen telephoned me. When he lost his temper and went off on some rant, I swung the conversation toward more positive things. The most positive was the fact that Guttersen, a paraplegic, had stood on his own dead legs and wrestled Rene Navarro to the ground.
Unless a person believes in divine healing-I do not-there had to have been a cellular awakening in the man’s neurological system since his injury.
Otto wouldn’t tell a TV host what Farfel had done to him, but he told me. His motor cortex had been damaged. The strip of brain is only centimeters beneath the skull, dead center at the top of the head.
When Guttersen offered to explain, I stopped him, saying, “No need. I already know how he did it.”
Farfel had almost done it to me.
With Tomlinson’s help, we assembled research papers and forwarded them to Guttersen’s neurologist, who probably thought we were a pain in the ass but accepted the data with thanks.
A study from the University of Washington School of Medicine was among several that offered hope. It dealt with brain plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to sprout new synaptic connections and access latent neuron pathways, unused conduits that an emergency situation might unmask.
“Kind of like a lizard growing a new tail,” Guttersen had responded when I told him about it.
Lizard?
“Exactly,” I said.
W hat pleased me most, though, during that empty time was being alone.
Low tides were midmorning, and I had my Maverick loaded with buckets, killing jars, a net and a single iced bottle of beer ready to go each day. I walked the exposed bars, collecting anemones, brittle stars and calico crabs for my tanks, and I dug five dozen sand worms- Loimia medusa -to fill an order from New Mexico, and then a dozen live angel wings for the Department of Architecture, University of Nebraska.
Angel wings are fragile shells, moon white, thin as onion skin yet durable. A professor wanted to graph the structural makeup and apply the data to an amphitheater his classes were designing.
Because my company, Sanibel Biological Supply, requires a telephone and a computer, I wasn’t totally isolated in the world that is Dinkin’s Bay. Along with regular business calls, I also began receiving the occasional hang-up call.
It is something that should concern anyone, but I was doubly concerned because I have lived a life that is doubly complicated.
According to caller ID, the calls came from a pay phone in Fort Myers. After the fourth time the phone rang and I listened to an indecisive silence before hearing click, I contacted a friend, and discovered the pay phone’s location: a health club only five blocks from Memorial Hospital.
That afternoon, I mailed a typed note to Dr. Leslie DiAngelo but left it unsigned.
I hope you have recovered. On Fridays, sunsets are pleasant here.
I also made it a point to speak with Hooker Montbard when I could. He was still planning his expedition to Central America and I was still eager to go. I was also eager to find out the parallel reasoning the man had pursued to discover the truth about Tinman.