Dante's Poison Read online

  I caught the whiff of a felt pen as she took down my alias.

  “Office?” she asked.

  “Westchester,” I said with my fingers surreptitiously crossed. How many Fortune 500s didn’t have at least one office in Westchester? She didn’t object and took this down too.

  “Here,” she said, sliding something scratchy across the table. “You’ll have to keep that around your neck so the security detail will know you’re legit.”

  I located the plastic pouch attached to a length of string without too much difficulty and said, “Thanks. I hope I haven’t put you to too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. Will you be around for the whole conference?” She stopped and added forwardly, “I wouldn’t mind having a drink if you’re free later on. You have nice eyes.”

  If only she knew. “Er, thanks, but I’m in a relationship.” And even in my heyday I drew the line at robbing the cradle.

  “Figures. The best ones are always taken. Here, you’ll need this, too. But remember the rules: it goes right into the shredder after the meeting.”

  There was no other option but to swipe at the thing she was holding out to me. My fingers closed clumsily on a thick laminated folder.

  Gretchen giggled. “Now I get it.”

  “Get what?” I asked, feeling myself start to color. Had I given myself away that easily?

  “I was wondering why you looked so out of it. You had a few on the plane, didn’t you?” she accused.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and feigned embarrassment. “You won’t tell anyone will you? I got upgraded to first class and it was hard to stop at just one mimosa.”

  “I’ll bet. But you better let me walk you in. It’s still dark in there. Come on.”

  I slid around the table and fell in behind her. Just inside the door, Gretchen flipped the switch on several lights, and the ballroom lit up like a baseball park. “Take any seat you like, but if I were you I’d stick to the back row,” she said in amusement as she retreated from the room. I inched forward and found the last row of folding chairs without making too much of a commotion. I slid my hand along their backs until I came to the one farthest from the center aisle, sinking into the seat just as my knees were about to give out. I checked my pulse, which was racing like a Belmont thoroughbred, and vowed—unless fortune were ultimately to shine on me—never to leave my cane behind again. My hands were slick with perspiration, and I dried them on my trouser legs before opening the folder Gretchen had given me and spreading it on my lap. Much as I needed a breather, this was no time to relax. I could have company at any moment.

  I got out my phone and began snapping pictures.

  A short while later, I was lounging peacefully with the folder resting innocently on the floor underneath my chair as the first of the conferees started rolling in. What started as a drop here and there soon turned to a flood as bodies swelled to fill the warehouse-sized space. The salesmen laughed and cracked jokes and called out each other’s names, their voices rising and falling like a hive of buzzing insects. All of the seats around me were soon taken, and before long there was also a phalanx of bodies pressed up against the back of my chair. Business meetings at my hospital were never this well attended. Or this lively. Based on the atmosphere, it could easily have been opening night at the Oscars. I soon figured out why by eavesdropping on the two fellows next to me: Atria’s recently ended fiscal year had earned it record-breaking profits, and the salesmen were anticipating the announcement of whopping bonuses.

  All at once music began to swell from loudspeakers placed in the four corners of the room, and the din of conversation receded. I recognized the opening bars of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, which drew loud laughter. While the music continued to mount, someone tested the microphone up front with a deafening screech and said, “Wait, wait, you guys. You’re playing the wrong tune.” The music abruptly stopped, to be replaced by the theme song from Rocky. Even more laughter broke out. Scratch the Oscars. It appeared we were in for vaudeville.

  The music abruptly stopped again, and our MC said, “But seriously folks . . .” to further guffaws. “Our man of the hour, Rod Henderson, asked me to come out and keep everyone busy while he straightens his hairpiece . . . (pause for laugh track) and takes his Placeva . . . (more of the same). . . . So while we’re waiting for him, I thought I’d tell you a joke. The devil visits an Atria rep’s home office to make him an offer. He says, ‘I’ll increase your commissions by fifty percent, your doctors will respect you, you’ll have four months’ vacation a year, and you’ll live to be a hundred. All I want in return is that your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, and all of their children’s souls will rot in eternity forever.’”

  He paused again before delivering the punch line: “The Atria rep thought for a moment and asked, ‘What’s the catch?’”

  The room exploded into thunderous applause. If this is what passed for humor in corporate America, I decided, it was time to move to Canada.

  It went on like this for another ten minutes during which I seriously considered the potential merits of deaf-blindness, when I felt a rough tap on my shoulder.

  “This him?” a man asked in a distinctly hostile manner.

  “That’s right,” I heard my friend Gretchen say. “He tricked me. He acted like he was drunk.”

  “Yes, ma’am” the man said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take it from here.”

  While he was picking me up by the shoulders, I heard another voice say, “Take him to the office behind reception and lock the door. He can stay there until the police arrive.”

  Later that night, Josh was none too happy about having to come and bail me out.

  “You did suggest I’d be better off without the cane,” I observed from the passenger seat of his BMW. We were on the Kennedy, headed back toward the city.

  “True. But if you’d asked, I also would have counseled against corporate espionage.”

  The weak link in my spy mission had proved to be Gretchen, who after relating the entertaining tale of the drunken salesman to several of her coworkers, was overheard by her supervisor and soon found herself being dressed down for a serious lapse in protocol. A quick check of the hotel’s guest log—in addition to Atria’s personnel records—revealed the alarming absence of a “Mark Halliday,” whereupon a member of the muscle hired by Atria to watch over the conference had been summoned to fetch me. He and the head of house security had practically carried me out of the meeting and through the hotel to a closet-sized room, where I’d sweated under lock and key for hours.

  “Besides,” Josh said, “As I understood it, you were just going there to mingle.”

  “Which, as it happens, is the only thing I’m guilty of.” I hadn’t told Josh about the photos still safely hidden away in my phone. “It isn’t my fault I wandered into the wrong room by mistake.”

  “I have a hard time believing you didn’t know exactly where you were.”

  So did the security goon, who’d laughed out loud when I’d given him my excuse for crashing the sales meeting. “Sure you are,” he said as he was confiscating my belongings. “And I’m the next Patrick Kane.” Happily, he and the house dick confined their search for stolen documents to the photo-taking application on my phone they were familiar with, overlooking the more blind-friendly program I’d used to capture the contents of the folder. With no proof that I’d been doing anything more felonious than trespassing, they’d finally given into my pleas to question the bellhop, Nick, who scolded me for forgetting his directions but corroborated my story. Still, it had taken a further phone call to Josh—and his promise to come and personally escort me from the premises—to finally spring me from captivity.

  “You know you’re lucky not to be spending the night in a real jail,” Josh rebuked as he shifted into a lower gear next to me. His anger, so unlike his usual self, hung like a thick cloud between us. “What would you have done if they’d decided to press charges?”

  The truth was, I didn�
�t know. In trying to pass for normal earlier in the day, I had succeeded brilliantly, but at what risk? I shuddered to think of what it would have been like spending the night in a county lockup somewhere, in the company of Hells Angels, meth addicts, and carjackers. Without my cane I couldn’t prove what I was, much less hold my own in a prison cell. I fingered the bottle of pills in my pocket, which seemed to have grown noticeably lighter in the last several days—still to no discernible effect.

  Josh took my silence for an answer. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “Go ahead, analyze me. It’s what everyone likes to do.”

  “You’re acting crazy because you feel responsible for what happened to Hallie.”

  “Shouldn’t I?” I asked bitterly.

  “No, you should not. If you’re right about the attack on her being intentional, it could have happened anywhere—with or without you in the vicinity. And do I really need to point out that you were hit from behind?”

  “So?”

  “So unless you had eyes in the back of your head, you still might not have seen him. You’d be just as in the dark as you are now.”

  “That’s a gentle way of phrasing it.”

  Josh shifted to a more forgiving tone. “We’re only a few blocks from the hospital. Why don’t we go over there right now? Her surgeon said she could be coming out of it soon. She’ll want to see you.”

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Not when there was still work to be done. My George Smiley caper had turned up one solid fact: something was afoot at Atria. Something important enough to necessitate a search of my phone to be sure there was nothing in it I wasn’t supposed to abscond with. Something that quite possibly had gotten Rory Gallagher killed. Which raised another disturbing fact: what would they have done to me if I’d been caught red-handed?

  A thunderstorm was brewing when Josh dropped me off at my building, and I had to butt my way through a virtual wind tunnel to get to the lobby door. I yanked it open and took the elevator up, finding when I reached my apartment that the door there was also stuck. It was ten degrees cooler than usual when I stepped inside, and I soon figured out why. Somehow the door to my terrace had become unlatched during the day and was now banging back and forth, sending powerful gusts and the first drops of the storm into the room. I hurried over and forced it shut against the shrieking wind. It was a good thing I’d been booted out of the conference. I didn’t think a burglar would climb nineteen stories to rob me of my pitiful collection of worldly goods, but coming home to a rain-soaked carpet and ruined furniture might have required that I finally do something to replace them.

  I cranked up the thermostat and felt around to survey the damage, which seemed to consist only of a toppled floor lamp and some mail that I’d left on a side table, now scattered across the floor. I righted the lamp and switched on the light for comfort. The tempest outside was shaping up to be a late-season extravaganza. Thunderclaps were exploding directly overhead, and the rain was raking the windows like tossed gravel. If I stood still, I could feel the building swaying back and forth.

  I poured myself a tumbler of bourbon and went to my office to start the download from my phone, hoping the power wouldn’t go off before I had a chance to examine my booty. While I was connecting the cable I discovered that my computer was cold, which was odd because I almost always left it on. When it had heaved itself back to life and the download was underway, I went to my bedroom to find a wide-open window. This was becoming tedious. It was high time I got maintenance up there to check on all the latches. I changed into pajamas and a bathrobe, downed a container of cottage cheese over the kitchen sink, and popped my last pill for the day. I counted off another ten minutes before heading back to my desk and opening the file, anticipating a treasure trove.

  It turned out to be anything but.

  Most folks are better off not knowing about prescription data mining, the now-common practice in which pharmacies and benefit plans sell prescription information to third parties, who turn around and sell it to the big drug companies. Despite a barrage of criticism, it’s a hugely successful business, with some estimates putting profits in the area of $10 billion annually. To ward off arguments about invasion of privacy, the data that gets sold is “de-identified”—that is, scrubbed of any information that could lead back to a particular patient—but it still supplies Big Pharma with the name of the drug in question, the prescribing doctor, and the dosage, all of which gets passed on to drug-company sales personnel. With the information instantly available on their smartphones and laptops, drug reps know exactly how much of their company’s products a doctor ordinarily prescribes, and can tailor their sales pitches accordingly.

  Like most doctors, I knew the practice existed, but I was unprepared to hear it laid out so graphically in a PowerPoint presentation, setting forth the previous year’s sales results for specific regions, subregions, and practices. I learned that Atria divided my profession into ten “deciles” according to how much medication each doctor prescribed. Compared to his peers, a decile 10 doctor was the highest-prescribing doctor; a decile 1 doctor prescribed on average very few medications. Decile 10 doctors, being the most potentially lucrative, were targeted by Atria for the biggest sales pushes, whereas decile 1 doctors were all but ignored.

  I also learned that within deciles there were nicknames for various personalities based on their histories. A “spreader” was a doctor who generally did not favor one brand of drug over another but prescribed them equally across several name brands and/or generics. A “no see um” was someone like me who discouraged visits from drug company reps. A “sample grabber” was someone who couldn’t get enough of the free drugs. Naturally, a “spreader” in decile 10 got the most attention, since it was there that Atria stood the best chance of capturing market share from its competitors. There were even several slides devoted to “superstar” representatives—Graham’s name figuring prominently among them—and their most reliable prescribers of Placeva, Lucitrol, and other bestsellers in key geographic areas.

  It was all as slimy as hell.

  And perfectly legal.

  A few years back no less an authority than the United States Supreme Court had overturned a Vermont law outlawing prescription data mining on First Amendment grounds. Since then, despite some grumbling in the profession, efforts to reform the system had focused on the creation of a program allowing doctors to opt out of sharing their information, which was currently subscribed to by less than 4 percent of the physician population. I wondered if the doctors who had turned down the program would appreciate seeing their names flashed on a screen in front of a thousand cheering salesmen.

  I read late into the night while the storm thumped away—periodically jumping at the cracks reverberating through my building’s Tinkertoy infrastructure—and in the end, the only thing I could do was shake my head. Was protecting this mountain of crap what had nearly gotten me jailed? To be sure, the bean counters must have worn out their eyeshades compiling the data, which ran to nearly twenty pages. After the PowerPoint there were charts of all sizes and descriptions and page upon page of figures comparing this, that, and the other thing to something else. There were enough acronyms—ROI, EBIDTA, R&D—to fill a dictionary, and more footnotes than I could count. You needed to be a CPA to figure out what most of it meant, but it sounded to me like all the other corporate Sanskrit regularly appearing in the Wall Street Journal and glossy annual reports, not the kind of deep, dark secret that would get someone like Rory Gallagher killed.

  Toward two o’clock the next morning, I’d had enough. As if in sympathy for the punishment my ears had taken, my eyes were watery and aching when I turned out the last of the lights and folded myself unhappily into bed.

  I tossed and turned most of that night, haunted by fantastic dreams. I was in a cavernous place lit by green light, surrounded by mountains of trash. Mike was there, cooking a rat on an open grate. He offered me a chunk on the tip of his knife, the gold in his chipped tooth
gleaming. But I couldn’t stay for dinner. I was already late for my appointment with Melissa. Then I was walking through endless tunnels limned with mold and dripping wet. I needed my cane, but it was back in my room. In the distance a single light burned, and I hurried toward it, finally becoming aware of the footsteps at my back. I quickened my pace, but the footsteps kept gaining. I reeled and turned to find the Red Queen leering at me with wide, toothless lips. Remember, she said, what the dormouse mouse said. Then her guards were upon me, and I was falling, falling . . .

  I woke to find myself half out of bed in a tangle of sheets and breathing like an ultra-marathoner. I untwisted myself and got up, feeling forward with my toes. I went to the kitchen and poured myself another shot of bourbon, downing it in a single gulp and waiting for my pulse to subside before returning to bed.

  When I woke again it was late morning and pale sunlight was streaming through the window, the storm having finally taken itself off. In the bathroom I splashed water on my face and peered at my ghostlike reflection in the mirror. I went to the kitchen and put on a pot of tea and drank a big glass of water to ease the hangover. I took another pill and switched on the television, idly registering the white noise while I went back over the events since the previous Sunday. The attack on Hallie and me. The bizarre note left for me in reception. Jane’s challenge—or was it?—to find out something she knew and wouldn’t tell me. My trip with Bjorn to confront Gallagher’s nephew and the discovery of the other note. My certainty, although I had nothing to prove it, that the thread running through it all was Atria and whatever had both terrified its employees into silence and come close to getting me arrested.

  The exercise left me thoroughly depressed. I’d spent almost a week tracking down clues and was still no closer to understanding how or why Gallagher had died than when I’d started, all the while neglecting what should have been my first and only responsibility.