Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven of Darwin's Theories.

Chapter 7

Minutes later, the door whoomped open again, with an out-of-breath Tommy standing at the doorway.

“Professor Darwin? Is now all right?” He said in-between huffs of air.

“Yes, Tommy, sit on down. Would you like a soda?”

“Sure!” He beamed and landed hard on the chair. Darwin handed him a Coke and Tommy opened it and took a swig.

“So is this a normal student-teacher conference, I hope?”

Tommy was in the middle of his sip when Darwin asked him this and after finishing it looked at him quizzically for a moment.

“No! It’s about all those drugs I found the other day.”

“Of course it is. And what about it?”

“Well, I was wondering if you’d figured any of it out yet. Like, had any leads or clues or anything.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, actually. For starters, you found that bag in Coach Trunk’s office, right?”

Tommy nodded.

“And could you elaborate a little further about what you think his connection to all of this is?”

“Well...I guess he’s, like, giving them to players and stuff.”

“Right. So: how has Coach Trunk been since that bag “disappeared.”

“Oh, awful!” said Tommy. “He’s been all angry and kicking chairs around and making us do dead sprints and is just kind of going nuts--or even crazier than usual.”

“And the players? Any of your teammates seem...off...lately?”

“Yeah. Mad Dog--you know, Steve Brennan--well, he’s been out sick the past few practices. Some of the other guys don’t look so hot, either. One of them passed out during a sprint yesterday. Which isn’t good: we have that big homecoming game next Friday and all.”

Withdrawal symptoms, thought Darwin.“Have you seen anyone around, at practice or with the coach, that isn’t usually there lately?”

Tommy thought about it long and hard. Darwin felt the buzz fading from his drink.

“Oh! There was this one guy...looked kind of rough, like you wouldn’t usually see around campus. He was wearing this slick-looking pinstripe suit and black shoes. Kind of hard look on his face, you know Like--” Tommy furrowed his brow and clenched his teeth impersonating the face “--like he was waiting for someone to hit him or him to hit someone. And he said something to Coach that made Coach real angry and told him to come back when he has something for him and then he’d see about it.”

Mind-boggling sentence structure aside, Darwin pieced together the scene: the man in the suit was the connection who came to collect for the drugs, only for Coach Trunk to balk at paying him because he didn’t have the drugs anymore. Darwin thought that maybe it was time to have a conversation with the coach.

“Tommy, you haven’t told anybody about our little...investigation...have you?”

Tommy stared at him blankly.

“About what you brought me and that I took from you: you haven’t said anything about it to anybody, have you?”

Tommy’s eyes fell to the floor. God d****t, thought Darwin.

“Tommy: who did you tell?”

In the library on the third floor where the media and communications section took rows and rows to cover the extensive amount of books that had been written, denounced, re-written, argued into oblivion, and then reconfigured to fit newer ideas and extend publishing contracts by educators on film, media, and communications theory over the past 40 years, there was a quiet carousel devoid of noise or traffic. Tommy and Darwin walked up to the sole person occupying this space on this Thursday afternoon.

“Professor Darwin! Tommy?”

“Hi, Annie. I think we need to have a little talk.”

Darwin sat down at the carousel next to her and Tommy to the other side. Darwin explained the sensitive nature of what Tommy had discovered and that it was a scandal that so far had no other proof than the bag of pills that Tommy had brought to Darwin, and that so far the only people that could be implicated in this crime are Tommy and Darwin himself.

“I understand that you’re looking for a good story to break in the school paper. You have my sympathies; I know that this school doesn’t usually have big scandals to report on…”

“Unless you’re involved,” said Annie sarcastically, and Darwin had wished he wasn’t getting so familiar with his students.

“Yes. But this can’t be written about. Not yet. So far we have nothing except two people who look like they have a lot of drugs on them.”

“I know you and Tommy don’t have anything to do with this!”

“I know you know; but the way it looks now, a student and his professor have a massive stash of pills that could have come from anywhere.”

“But Tommy’s telling the truth! And everyone knows that you’re the detective on campus.”

Darwin winced inside: he really didn’t want to be known as the campus detective. Then again, he was the idiot who put up that sign outside of his office.

“Maybe: but so far, I’ve come up with nothing. But when I figure out what’s going on, you’ll be the first to know, OK? Just keep it under your hat for now. A good investigation only works if everyone plays it cool. So you, and Tommy, need to play it cool for now.”

Tommy nodded behind Annie in agreement even though she couldn’t see him.

“OK. Right. But when you find out anything…”

“You get the scoop. Deal?”

Annie stuck out her hand and Darwin took it. They shook.

“Deal.”

“Great. Meanwhile, Tommy, maybe you shouldn’t be coming by my office for a while. I’m going to be digging around and I don’t want you caught up in any nasty business.”

“Sure thing, professor.”

“Good.” Darwin stood up to leave. “And Annie?”

“Yes, professor?”

“Not a word.”

It was past 12:30 AM when Nova knocked on Darwin’s apartment door. He had spent the hours since leaving campus jotting down notes and questions that he wanted answered, trying not to drink too much, and smoking more cigarettes than usual. There was some dark undercurrent to Nova that he had never noticed before; but, in his usual foolhardy fashion, he misinterpreted the excited screams of warning and natural instinct to run away from somebody in his mind as ones of love and caring. It was, he admitted, a rotten trick for his brain to pull on him, and he regretted kissing her that afternoon for the rest of the day.

She came in without a word, took off her coat, and remembering where the rack was since she had last been in his apartment some two months earlier, hung it up.

“Do you have the letter?” She asked.

Darwin was taken aback by this.

“Before we get to that, I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Do you have anything to drink?”

Darwin cocked his head.

“Of course you do.” She walked through the living room and into the kitchen on the right side and opened the fridge. “Vodka, scotch, beer...you have more of a bar than you used to keep.”

“I have more reasons to drink these days.”

She laughed but caught herself once she realized she was one of those reasons. She took out the vodka bottle.

“Let me; I remember how you like your cocktails.” Darwin took the bottle from her but she held onto it for a moment.

“Hold the olives.”

They both sadly smiled at this line. He mixed two cocktails and poured them into martini glasses. Handing her one, Darwin motioned for her to sit at the kitchen table where his notebook and pen lay.

“So: how about you tell me all the things you haven’t yet?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No more lies, please. If you really want my help you have to shoot straight with me from here on out.”

She took a sip from her drink then set it down on the table.

“Where do you want me to start? The fraud, the malfeasance, or the blackmail?”

“Blackmail’s fine for a start. What do you know about who’s blackmailing you?”

“I know they know enough about medicine to have found out I skewed the results of my doctoral thesis. And that I’ve been running trials on the drug with those faked results.”

Now Darwin took a drink and wondered how far this went.

“Have you been running trials on humans?”

There was a pause. God d****t, he thought. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table, took one out, and lit it.

“Terminal patients.”

“Excuse me?”

“Only on terminal patients. People who are going to die anyway. There are exclusions for trials on these patients: they sign consent forms and waive the right to malpractice if the treatment doesn’t work or...damages them further.”

“How many?”

“Does it matter?”

“It helps me narrow down the suspects if I know how many.”

“Darwin, I don’t think it’s any of them, really..”

“How many?” He asked firmly, indicating the conversation would be over if she didn’t answer.

“12.”

“How many have since passed?”

She paused and took a drag.

“12. All 12 have died.”

Now he reached for a cigarette.

“So that leaves 12 people with families wondering what happened to their relatives that were part of your drug trials. That...could be a lot of people.”

“I can tell you this: it’s a man, between his 30s and 50s, and it’s most likely a son of a patient.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because he told me. In one of the communications we had, he said that I did something to his father and he knows about the fake results. Said he read my research and saw where I skewed the results. He said...that I’d have to pay so he didn’t reveal what I’ve done.”

This last statement hung in the air along with the fumes from their cigarettes.

“I need a list of your trial patients.”

Nova nodded.

“You’re not running these trials still, are you?”

“No, it was cancelled, labelled inconclusive by Dr. Matthews. But that’s just a part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

“We received a grant for the research and trials. From that academic presentation where you and I..” she trailed off. “Anyway, it was for $200,000. The trial ended early and we only spent $70,000 on developing the drug. So the group that gave us the grant are expecting a reimbursement by the end of the year. The trouble is...the money’s all gone.”

Darwin took a deep long drag off his cigarette.

“Where’d it go?” He asked, staring up at the smoke he just exhaled.

“Dr. Pendler. He embezzled it. Told me about it. Said that he needed the money, that his wife just filed for divorce. I thought it was a crazy but also figured hey, it was grant money, and my hands weren’t clean in this anyway. We never thought they’d ask for it back--I mean, who gives a grant and asks for a refund?--but this one was different. It was contingent on a successful trial run. The people who gave the grant expected a cut in the drug’s profit if it passed trial. So Pendler took $130,000 from the fund, Then we all got the notice about reimbursing the unused portion.”

“Nova--and I’m going to say this in the nicest way I can--you’re really dumb for such a smart person.” Darwin took a sip of his drink and then stood up, now pacing the kitchen.

“I just never thought it’d go this far. I just wanted to move forward with my work. I thought, hey, get a paper to a conference and generate some interest in this work. But then we got the grant, and Dr. Matthews wanted to publish and start trials, and Dr. Pendler thought he could skate away with the money, and then I started getting blackmailed…”

Darwin looked out of his kitchen window and looked out over the row of houses along the lake. Only when he turned to stub out his cigarette did he see that Nova was crying. He put out his smoke, sat back down next to her, and put his hand on her shoulder. She raised her head from her folded forearms on the table, still sobbing.

“I’m so sorry, Darwin. I...I didn’t want to drag you into this. Didn’t want you to know…”

“Know what?”

“Know that I was such a bad person.” She put her head back down and kept crying.

Darwin took his notebook out and started writing. It was one of the few things he knew how to do at moments like this: start writing and writing and hoping that he would find the answer by the end of a sentence. Nova stopped crying and quietly sipped her drink. She lit up another cigarette while Darwin quickly wrote. She had seen him do this before when working out a problem and waited until he was done. After she had poured herself another drink and lit another cigarette his hand finally came to rest.

“OK: here’s what we’re going to do. Your blackmailer is already breaking the law in what he’s doing. I say call his bluff. Either he exposes you--to which you can claim either ignorance or blame a miscalculation, even citing the rejection letter from the Journal as evidence that your mistake wasn’t caught in time before trials, or he does nothing. As for Dr. Pendler: let him hang for his crime. You had nothing to do with that part. The paper trail will eventually lead your granter to his accounts anyway. You may come out of this with a bit of a tarnished name, but you’ll come out of this without jail time.”

Nova sat with these conclusions for a moment, dragging her cigarette and taking a sip from her drink.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Because I took the money.”