Sprague was staring into nothing. "He was very troubled. He was sick in his heart. Bitter, of course, but a ... a good man. Could a good man like David do something so horrific ... so terrible?"
"No."
His gaze found mine and was so haunted I could barely maintain eye contact. "I keep hearing what he said to me, so many times ... 'Alan, it takes dead cells to create a vaccine.' Could he have done such a thing, Mr. Hammer? Could he have equated the drug problem with such a ... a radical treatment?"
I stood. "No. I'm sure not. You've lost a friend, and you're upset, and your imagination is getting away from you."
He rose, sighed heavily, struggled to form a small smile. "I hope so. I hope that's all it is. Thank you for the reassurance ... it may help me to sleep tonight. It may." He nodded toward the framed saying on my desk. "I hope you'll consider giving that a place of prominence here in your office, Mr. Hammer. In memory of a great, if troubled, man."
We shook hands across the desk, then he nodded almost shyly, and was gone.
I picked up the framed piece and looked at the flowing script: "At the darkest moment comes the light."
I propped it against a wall, then went into the outer office, and over to the closet to grab my hat, and Velda, on her feet, said, "Hey! Where are you off to? And what was that all about?"
"You don't want to know," I said.
My plan was to find Billy Blue at Dorchester Medical College, and for him to let me into Dr. Harrin's office. But the kid made it easy for me—he was in Harrin's office already, the door ajar, seated at his late mentor's desk, slumped over with his head on his folded arms, like a napping grade-school kid. He'd been crying.
"Billy?"
He popped up. "Oh ... hello, Mr. Hammer."
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. I took my hat off and said, "I'm sorry, kid. I was right there, but I couldn't do anything about it."
He came out from around the desk, as if I'd caught him at something. He wasn't crying now, fresh out of tears, but their trails, both wet and dry, streaked his cheeks. With his short haircut and baby-face features, in the blue-and-white-striped T-shirt and jeans, he looked younger than his age, the wholesome kid Dr. David Harrin wished he'd had.
I motioned the boy over to a beat-up two-seater sofa between file cabinets and we sat down, the framed slogans and sayings on the walls all around and behind us.
Billy asked, "Do you know when the funeral's going to be, Mr. Hammer?"
"No. I figure Dr. Sprague's probably handling the details. Pretty tough, kid. You hanging in there?"
He swallowed and nodded. "I had a phone call this morning, from Dr. Harrin's lawyer. I'm supposed to go around and talk to him next week—about the college trust fund the doctor set up for me."
"The doc thought the world of you, son."
He was shaking his head. "What do I do now? Where do I go for advice and...?"
I put a hand on his shoulder. "You take the financial help Doc Harrin left you, and you get educated, and you make the kind of life for yourself he'd have been proud of."
"I'll do my best, Mr. Hammer, but ... God, it hurts."
"I know. I know." I squeezed the shoulder. "Look, can you give me a couple of minutes in here alone, Billy? I need to do some snooping. Wait in the hall for me, would you?"
"Will it help get the bastards who killed him?"
"Might."
"Okay," he said, nodding, and he snuffled snot and did as he'd been told.
I went over to the desk. I had only one idea, only one card to play; either I'd gotten the message from Harrin or I hadn't. I picked up the crystal lighter from the desk, with its many flat edges and its naturally abstract design. Tried to light the clunky thing several times, and got nothing.
I give David a nice new present, Sprague had bitched, on our first meeting, and he doesn't even bother to put fluid in it.
Turning the lighter over revealed a metal plate that would allow me to get inside and change the flint and put in fluid, if that was what I had in mind.
It wasn't.
But I took off that plate, anyway, hoping I'd seen the light like Harrin asked ... and found an envelope, rolled up like a fat little scroll. I withdrew it, flattened it out on the desk. The envelope was blank and unsealed. Its contents consisted of several sheets. One page, under Harrin's letterhead, was addressed to me.
For Mike Hammer, it began, followed (with no further preamble or explanation) by two lines—one, tomorrow's date and a time; and the other, the street address and number of a certain Port of New York pier.
Also included was a carbon copy of a bill of lading, with a handwritten sheet of stationery paper-clipped to it:
On behalf of the Evello Family, Jerome Elmain of the Village Ceramics Shoppe will be present for pickup at this time and date; he will have his own copy of the bill of lading. Jay Wren has been attempting to discover the time and date of the shipment in order to intercept it. I do not believe he has had any success.
If you are reading this, I am no longer in a position to carry out my plans. You will only need this bill of lading should you wish, for whatever reason, to intercept the shipment.
I ask that you honor my intentions, but cannot insist that you do so. In fact, some shred of doubt about the sanity of my actions has compelled me to share this burden with you. I do apologize. But the decision, Mr. Hammer, will now be yours.
D.H.
This was obviously the much-awaited big shipment of heroin. But was it in fact fatally toxic? Or had what Dr. Sprague heard from his tortured friend been a fantastic fantasy of revenge?
If so, it was an incredibly elaborate one....
And the tone, the words, of the message seemed to confirm the story Harrin told Sprague as no parable, nothing at all hypothetical. Ask any junkie in New York out there, from the Junkman to the freaked-out kids Davy Harrin hooked, they would all say they were dying for dope. Maybe they didn't know how right they were.
If a huge supply of fatally contaminated heroin hit these hungry New York streets, the overnight death toll would be staggering.
And the Syndicate would take the rap, and the public outcry for justice would be loud and harsh and relentless. Harrin had envisioned the families and friends of victims rising up with guns and knives and clubs and anything they could get their hands on, to take bloody vengeance like villagers with torches storming Frankenstein's castle.
Would there be riots, vigilante action, if such a thing happened? Very possibly. But certainly the shared tragedy would create a new and undeniable demand that law enforcement grow itself a spine, and make the war on crime a real one, not just a slogan.
Could the Mafia really be brought down by such a demented scheme?
No way, I thought, shaking my head.
Then my eyes caught one of the framed sayings: "The man who says it can't be done is interrupted by the man who did it."
Others spoke to me, too: "Keep Cool and Obey Orders," "The king can do no wrong," "Let Them Eat Cake," "Caveat emptor" ...
"Jesus," I said to the empty office. "You really did it, didn't you?"
And the clever, even foolproof ceramics delivery system, from molds to pottery, was in place to do the late Harrin's bidding. Had Harrin played intermediary for Evello, or had he been attempting to overturn the longtime mob boss? And in either case, would the good doctor have invested his ill-gotten gains in charity or medical research or perhaps even to buy and contaminate another cash crop of junk, to feed the rest of the country his deadly vaccine?