Diamond Solitaire (25 page)

"Strange place for a meeting."

Flexner gave a shrug. "My circumstances are pretty unusual right now, for reasons unconnected with this. It was simplest to meet him someplace outside the office."

"Battery Park? Why not his hotel?"

"Battery Park is a short taxi ride from my office. It's also a place a stranger to New York could find easily."

"So did you go there?"

"Sure, but I was delayed. He wasn't there." Flexner leaned forward in his chair as if a sudden thought had come to him. "What happened to this guy? Is he okay?"

"You tell me what happened to you," said Eastland.

"I turned up at Battery Park—"

"No," said Eastland, who was letting nothing by. "You tell me what delayed you."

"A smoke alarm."

"What?"

"A smoke alarm went off in a storeroom on the twentieth floor."

"What time?"

"Around six forty-five, just when I was ready to leave. Someone had dumped a cigarette in a trash bin. It ignited some tissues."

"In a storeroom?"

"That's where it was found. The result is I didn't get down to Battery Park until twenty-five after seven, and the guy wasn't around. I looked around, I asked—"

"Okay," said Easdand. "So let's make this very clear. Did you at any point instruct anyone else to meet Detective Diamond?"

"No. I just told you. I went myself."

"Who else knew you made this appointment? Your secretary?"

Flexner shook his head. "I handled it myself."

"Is your phone system secure?"

"So far as I know."

"You said that you consulted the records on this woman. Did somebody fetch them for you?"

"No, we have them on computer. We keep records of all our sponsorships and research programs. I accessed them on the modem I have in my office."

"Anyone see you?"

"I was alone in there. Look, would you mind telling me what happened?"

"Detective Diamond was met by a woman who said she was sent by you. You know about this?"

Flexner swayed back in his chair, frowning. "Sent by me? No, I don't. I didn't speak to anyone."

'Take your time, Mr. Flexner. Think back. You're quite certain you mentioned this meeting to nobody?"

"Positive."

"Maybe someone overheard you speaking on the phone. Is that possible?"

"I was alone in my office. The door was closed."

"Yet this woman—who called herself Joan, by the way—found Detective Diamond in the ticket office, told him you were unable to get there and drove him in a black limousine to the waterfront area in the West Forties, where some goons were waiting to work him over good and sink him in the Hudson."

"I can't believe this." To his credit, Flexner was looking as if he meant what he said. He'd gone extremely pale.

"You'd better," Eastland told him. "And you'd better start thinking who this woman is, and why it was necessary to do that to a guy you arranged to met. You don't have to answer right off."

"He's dead?" Flexner asked.

"Go over it in your mind, Mr. Flexner. There may be something you forgot. I'll be back."

Flexner was left staring. There was only the sound of the interview room door being closed.

Eastland came into the room where Stein and Diamond had been following the interview. "Well?"

"I'd like to question him," Diamond said. "I still want the information he was going to give me."

"You think he's speaking the truth?"

"He made a pretty good impression."

"Yeah?" said Eastland with heavy irony. "Maybe none of this happened. That's a phantom black eye you have."

"I still want to question him."

"Not yet"

"This is urgent"

"We can break this guy, no problem," Eastland bragged.

"He claims he told nobody he was meeting you. That's got to be horseshiL"

Diamond contained himself, but with difficulty. There was a real danger that Naomi's plight would be overlooked in the eagerness to break David Flexner. Breaking him, as Eastland candidly put it, was not the way to get the crucial information. "Listen, I think we should test the truth of what he's saying this way. He arranged to meet me. That's not in dispute. So he must have had something to pass on about Naomi's mother."

"It was a blind, just to set you up."

"Let's find out Let's ask him what he can tell us. If he
is
telling the truth, it may lead us to Naomi."

The lieutenant obviously wasn't impressed. He spread his hands as if his point had just been proved. "Peter, my friend, you were asking about research the woman was doing seven, eight years back. That's not going to tell us who's holding the kid tonight."

"It scared someone into wanting me killed. It can't be all that remote," said Diamond. "Let him talk while he still has an interest in cooperating. If you go in there and scare the shit out of him, we may get nothing."

"Keep him sweet, you mean?"

"Play along with him. It won't take long, for God's sake."

Eastland weighed the suggestion. "You could be right."

"I'll do it," Diamond offered.

"You? No way. He thinks you're stashed away in the morgue, and we don't want to disillusion him. Okay, Diamond, we'll play it your way for a while. Just tell me what you would have asked him."

Diamond outlined the strategy. Without going all the way to convincing Eastland, it seemed to mollify him somewhat.

In a few minutes, the questioning started up again. Eastland went straight to the point. "Tell me about Yuko Ma-suda."

"There isn't much. I haven't met her," David Flexner replied. "She's just one of thousands who have carried out postgraduate research funded by Manflex or one of its associate companies."

"She's unimportant?"

"I didn't say that. According to our records, we've been sponsoring her research for ten years or more. She's written some papers on the treatment of drug and alcoholic comas using sympathomimetic drugs."

"Using
what?"

"They imitate the effects of the sympathetic nerves. Adrenalin and ephedrine are examples."

"I've heard of Adrenalin."

A sigh from Flexner betrayed some impatience.

"Alcoholic comas, you said?" Eastland continued. "You mean these drugs pull the patients out? Restore them to their senses?"

"Inspector, all my information comes from a file entry on a computer. I am neither a biochemist nor a doctor."

"Okay, okay. And what else does your computer tell you?"

"The usual stuff. Her age, address, qualifications. She isn't one of our employees, you understand, just a postgraduate research student"

"Does the file show that she is married?"

"Yes. Masuda is her married name."

"And is her child mentioned?"

"It wouldn't be. That's irrelevant to us."

"She's based in Japan?"

"Yokohama."

"And she's been doing research continuously since when?"

"1979."

"Long time."

"Research sometimes does take a long time."

"Do you get updates on her work?"

"Not personally. The company keeps tabs on all our research programs."

"Did you know mat she's been missing from her home for a couple of months?"

"No, I didn't know mat. It wouldn't necessarily come to our attention for some time unless someone reported it"

There was a pause in the questioning, as if Eastland was reluctant to move on, but couldn't think what else to ask. finally he said, "Is there anything else on this woman's record that you planned to tell Detective Diamond?"

"No," answered Flexner. "Naturally, I wanted to be as helpful as I could, but that's all I could have told him. You've heard it all."

"Forgive me, but it doesn't sound like the secret of the Sphinx," Eastland commented. "Why did you need to meet with Diamond like a couple of CIA agents? Why not simply call him on the phone and tell him what you had?"

Flexner shrugged again. "I guess I wanted to be sure who I was dealing with. We don't give out information about people as a rule."

"You didn't trust him?"

"I thought it right to meet him and make sure. I couldn't invite him to the office. He'd have had to run the gauntlet of the press. They're camped outside my building."

"I've seen them. You're getting plenty of attention," said Eastland. "This is the wonder drug you're about to launch?"

Flexner shifted position in his chair. "Look, this has no bearing on the matter of the Japanese woman."

"How do you know?"

"It's unrelated."

"We'll judge that for ourselves, Mr. Flexner."

"I'd rather not discuss the drug. If any of what I said leaked out prematurely, it could get us suspended on the stock market."

"Everything you tell me stays within these walls," Eastland assured him while the unseen watchers in the room across the corridor continued impassively to follow the interview.

David Flexner passed his hand agitatedly across his mouth. "You're putting me in a difficult position."

"The hot seat."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm putting you in the hot seat."

"Oh." An unhappy smile flickered across the young man's lips. "You appreciate that I only took over as Chairman quite recently, when my father died," he explained. "Frankly, the business hasn't gone too brilliantly for some while. We slipped badly in the pharmaceuticals league table. Our competitors like Merck and Lilly have developed new drugs and gotten away from us. And quite recently our stock market rating took a dive because of a fire at one of our major plants in Italy. The place was gutted."

"And that hit confidence here?"

"Manflex Italia is our main European subsidiary. The investigation is still going on. We could be dealing with a case of arson."

"But you hope to restore confidence with this new drug, is that it?" said Eastland.

David Flexner gave a nod. "One mass-selling product can make a hell of a difference. Without saying more man I have to, I can tell you that Prodermolate—"

"Prodermolate?"

"PDM3. It's one of thousands of compounds that we patented over the years. The great majority never come to anything. Well, it happens that this drug—which was developed getting on twenty years ago—is more effective than anyone suspected."

"For what?"

"Forgive me, but I can't tell you that, Lieutenant We're due to make an announcement in a couple of days and the future of Manflex rests on it. And thousands of jobs. We're under tremendous pressure to leak the information before Tuesday. I can't tell anyone, not even you, not even in this place."

"You can't withhold information," said Eastland in a voice more offended than threatening. "I need to know."

"I'm sorry, but—"

"You think I'm going to rush out tomorrow and buy shares in Manflex?"

"Well, no."

"I have better things to do than gamble on the stock exchange, Mr. Flexner. If I wanted to be a rich man, I wouldn't be in this job."

"But I'm under an obligation."

Eastland lifted his voice a fraction.
"You're
under an obligation? What about me? I have to find a child, a handicapped child, as a matter of fact, who is in real danger of losing her life. This isn't hide-and-seek, it's child murder unless I find her."

"Murder?"

After a sufficient pause, Eastland added, "We've had one killing already."

The quickness of Flexner's reaction, a spasm of shock that produced a rictuslike baring of the mouth, showed that he was primed for the bad news. Clearly he took the statement to mean that Diamond was the victim. This was the fear most on his mind. In a tone that showed he was about to capitulate, he said, "I wish you'd told me right out."

"You haven't been entirely open with me. Tell me about this drag," said Eastland with the timing of a skilled interrogator. Flexner had whitened noticeably. "You give me your word it goes no further?"

"Secrets are my business."

"Okay. I, um, I'm not the best-informed person to talk about the potential of the drug, but I gather it was patented back in 1975 at Cornell. The original research was carried out on a grant from Beaver River Chemicals, who became a subsidiary of ours when my father took them over about 1976. Nobody found much use for the stuff. That's the way things are. You discover thousands of compounds and register them without knowing if they're any use. Not many are chosen for development, which is extremely costly. It can run into millions. Professor Churchward has discovered that PDM3 is effective in regenerating the nerve cells of the brain."

"Is that special?"

He looked pained that such a question had to be asked. "I said regenerating. It's unknown to science. It's a tremendous breakthrough. It means that we can arrest the process of mental aging."

"Alzheimer's?" said Eastland.

"Yes, but more than that, vastly more. PDM3 fosters the production of new cells. We can foresee its being used to sustain the brain at peak efficiency into advanced old age."

"For anyone?"

"Exactly."

"So it's a surefire money-spinner," Eastland said in a swift descent to market economics. "On Tuesday, you're launching this drug?"

Flexner raised his hands like a man looking into a gun barrel. "No, no. That's still at least a year off. We're staging a conference to report on the work so far and announce that we're going into the third stage of testing, which is extensive preclinical trials."

"But the mere fact that you are starting the trials will lead to massive investment in Manflex."

"That is likely."

"You mentioned a professor just now."

"Churchward. He's at Corydon University, in Indianapolis. I flew out there to see him last week. He's leading the teams at work on PDM3."

"Did you form a good estimate?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did you like the guy?"

"I didn't have to."

"Trust him, then?"

"My judgment is that he's a good scientist, or I wouldn't be putting our resources into the drug."

"So you see a bright future, Mr. Flexner."

"For mankind, with an advance like this? Certainly."

"For Manflex Pharmaceuticals."

He looked faintly embarrassed. "I expect so."