Diamond Solitaire (27 page)

There was nothing to detain them any longer. Knowing that he would keel over if he didn't get some sleep soon, Diamond asked for a lift to his hotel.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

One can only guess at Lieutenant Eastland's thoughts next morning when he arrived at the station house to find his office occupied by Peter Diamond wearing just an unbuttoned shirt and red jockey shorts. The fat Englishman was standing with the phone anchored between his shoulder and his fleshy jowl. The desk was heaped with clothes, some discarded, some obviously back from the cleaner. Judging by the clutter of phone books, notepads, pens and screwed-up tissues, he had been installed there for some time. "Beef, for a start," he was saying. "Have you got beef? ... Right. What else? Liver, I should think. Lamb, yes ... Well, as much as you can manage at short notice ... Excellent. How soon? ... Oh, give me strength! I'm talking about lunchtime today. . . . Yes,
today ...
Right, I know you will. I'll call you back around noon.... One o'clock, then. No later." He put down the phone. "Morning, Lieutenant. Did you oversleep?"

Eastland regarded him with glazed, red-lidded eyes.

Diamond told him, "My clothes came back."

"So I see."

"There's just time to get down to the Sheraton Center."

Eastland said, "This used to be my office."

Diamond announced in the same up-lads-and-at-'em tone, "The conference opens at eleven."

"Conference?"

"Manflex. Remember? This is the big one, when they unveil the wonder drug. David Flexner will be there and so will Professor Churchward. We've got to be there."

"Who do you mean—
weT

"You and I. Sergeant Stein as well if you want."

Eastland ran his fingertips down the side of his face as if to discover whether he'd shaved yet "The Sheraton Center, you said?"

"Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third."

"I know where the Sheraton is," Eastland said in a growl.

"Snap it up, then."

"Diamond, you have all the finesse of a sawed-off shotgun."

To be charitable to Eastland, he hadn't seen Diamond so animated before. The Englishman was unstoppable. Within three minutes they were in a car heading downtown.

"I've been turning things over in my mind," Diamond said, as if to explain the transformation. "Last night, the scene at Leapman's house seemed all wrong."

"Wrong?"

"What we found."

"The ballpoint?"

Diamond stared in surprise at the lieutenant. "No. The ballpoint wasn't wrong. That was a genuine find. Just about everything else was wrong."

"For instance?"

"The damage to the front room. It looked impressive at first, as if there'd been a fight, but what did it amount to in breakages? One smashed TV screen. The shelf unit had tipped across the sofa and some books and things were on the floor, a chair was overturned and lying across a table and that was it"

"The phone was pulled from its socket," Eastland added.

'True—but it wasn't damaged. To me, the scene looked as if it had been staged by a rather fastidious owner who didn't want to damage his living room more than was necessary."

"You think that was staged?"

"I think it's more than likely."

"Aren't you forgetting the bloodstains?"

"No, I haven't forgotten them. First, consider the state of the bedroom where the child was held. Immaculate—apart from the ballpoint There was no other evidence that Naomi had ever been there. Not so much as a hair on the pillow. Wouldn't you expect some sign that she'd been removed from there in a hurry?"

"Maybe she was already downstairs when the fight started," said Eastland.

"Dressed in her coat and shoes and everything? They're not in the house."

"Whoever took the kid must have taken her things."

"Picked them up with his bloodstained hands and helped her into her coat? Does it sound likely?"

"Do you have a better explanation?" asked Eastland.

"Then there's the matter of the car," Diamond continued as if the question hadn't been put. "How did the assailant—what do you call him, the prep?—how did he travel to the house. On foot? If he came in a car, where is it, because he couldn't have driven
two
vehicles away from the house after the attack."

"Two perps," said Eastland doggedly. "One drove his car, one drove Leapman's."

'Taking Leapman with him?"

"Yeah."

"All right—then why was it necessary to take Leapman as well as the child?"

"Maybe they killed him. There's enough blood, for sure. They got rid of the body."

'To hinder your investigation, do you mean?"

"Sure," said Eastland. "They carried him to the garage, loaded him in the car and then opened the garage door and drove out with the body in the back. That way they avoided carrying him out into the street in the view of the neighbors."

"And that's how you see it?"

"Do you have a better explanation?" Eastland asked for the second time.

"Let me take you back a bit," said Diamond. "Leapman definitely took the child to his house at some stage. We found the ballpoint where I said it would be. We agree on that, right?"

"Uh huh."

"Look at this from Leapman's point of view. Yesterday when David Flexner arranged to meet me at the ferry, Leapman was listening. Either the office or the phone was bugged. He has links with organized crime and he alerted his criminal friends and asked them to meet me and dispose of me, while he created a smoke alarm diversion at Manflex Headquarters to delay David Flexner. Is that a reasonable inference from the facts as we know them?"

"It's conceivable."

"Conceivable? I was dumped in the river. You won't question that?"

"No, I don't question that."

"Leapman must have believed I was dead, but he still had a problem, because you—the cops—brought David Flexner in for questioning the same night. He couldn't understand how you made the connection, but he knew how dangerous it was. It was getting too close to home. And home was where he was holding Naomi."

Eastland was waking up. "He didn't want the cops calling. This is not a good time in his life to get arrested."

"Right. If he's going to cash in on PDM3, it's essential that the conference goes ahead. Are you with me so far?"

Eastland only gave a shrug and said, "Let's say I've been listening."

"Now, Leapman isn't the spokesman for PDM3. He's just the Vice Chairman. It isn't absolutely necessary that he puts in an appearance at the conference. David Flexner and the professor can handle it. The only thing liable to ruin the day—and the big hike in his shares—is if he—Leapman—has a visit from the cops and is found to have the child in his possession. That would be a disaster."

"So?"

"So he arranges to disappear. He will take the child with him, leaving no evidence that she was ever in the house. First he dresses the child and puts her in the car. Then he tidies her room so well that you wouldn't know she was ever there."

"Unless you were smart enough to look under the mattress," said Eastland in a bland tone that didn't amount to mockery, but wasn't respectful either.

Diamond's eyes narrowed, and one of them hurt. The black eye was still swollen. He sensed that he was being sent up, but he refused to be deflected. "Then he fakes the attack. Tips over several items of furniture and smashes the TV screen."

"How about the blood? You telling me it was ketchup?"

"No."

"Self-inflicted?"

"I don't know."

"That's a switch."

There followed an interval when neither man spoke. Diamond needed to draw breath and Eastland was gathering himself to demolish the theory. "It's one hell of a scenario to build on one ballpoint," he said finally. "In a nutshell, you believe Leapman arranged the scene himself, leaving us to deduce that he was beaten up and probably murdered?"

"Yes. I think you'll find that the only prints are his own. Probably he wore gloves to handle the baseball bat and the phone."

Eastland supplied unexpected support here. "It's true that whoever handled those objects wore gloves. That much we have established. And you think Leapman is alive and well? He drove off with the kid sometime before we arrived?"

"That's it"

"Where to?"

"I've no idea, but at least we know who to look for. We can put out a description."

"We circulated details last night," Eastland said with a yawn.

"No response?"

"None."

Diamond didn't have to be told about the problems tracing cars in New York.

"What's your reaction, then?"

"To what?" said Eastland.

'To what I've just been telling you."

"I don't buy it."

And that was that

They arrived at the Sheraton Center and shared an elevator to the third floor with a throng of people wearing name tags marked with the Manflex logo. The conference was to be in the Georgian suite. Young women in red blazers and white skirts were handing out information packs. Diamond took one and saw with grim satisfaction that an amendment sheet was included:
Mr. Michael Leapman, Vice Chairman, will
not, after all, be chairing the session with Professor Churchward.
His place will be taken by the Chairman, Mr. David
Flexner.

Seated inconspicuously towards the back, Diamond and Eastland watched David Flexner enter, accompanied by the professor, a slim, brown-suited man with cropped hair who took a chair beside the podium. Flexner was the first to speak. He addressed his large audience confidently, unaffected, it seemed, by the alarms of the previous twenty-four hours. After welcoming everyone, he briefly outlined the history of Manflex under his father's management, listing the principal drugs for which the firm was known. This was a stage of the proceedings when a few latecomers were still finding seats and many of the audience were looking around them to see which faces they recognized.

To a scattering of polite applause, the man in the brown suit was introduced as Professor Alaric Churchward. Gaunt and pale, but well in control, Churchward surveyed the audience with pinpoint blue eyes for a few seconds before opening with an attention-grabbing statement. Some four million Americans, he said, could no longer remember the names of their friends and families. They couldn't put names to everyday objects, such as chairs and tables. They were sufferers from Alzheimer's disease and they included people who had held highly responsible and demanding jobs. The roll of victims of Alzheimer's was as impressive as it was distressing, including the actress Rita Hayworth, film director Otto Preminger, mystery writer Ross Macdonald and artist Norman Rockwell. The cause was unknown; it was likely that a number of different areas of the brain contributed to the symptoms. Research scientists the world over had been working intensively for the last fifteen years to find a successful treatment.

He summarized the main targets of the research in a way that signaled something new and revolutionary, describing how the bulk of the work had concentrated on finding ways of increasing supplies of the brain chemical acetylcholine, which has a vital and mysterious process in the functioning of the memory. The brain's supply of this chemical was known to diminish rapidly with the onset of Alzheimer's.

Churchward went on to say that his own approach (and now more pens came out in the audience and tape recorders were switched on) was different because it was directed toward the nerve cells themselves. For twelve years, teams of scientists under his direction based in America, Europe and Asia had made animal studies to test the effectiveness of certain compounds as protective agents that could delay, or even prevent, nerve cell death. In the last eight years their work had been concentrated on a compound known as Prodermolate, or PDM3, that had proved to be something more than a protective agent

Alaric Churchward was quite a showman. Having got to his product, he kept everyone in suspense by introducing film footage of some Alzheimer's patients he had tested five years previously, prior to the administration of PDM3.

The bemused people who were shown on the screen being asked which month it was and when they were born and who was the current president of the United States were not exclusively the elderly that Peter Diamond associated with the illness. There was a woman of forty-seven and a man of fifty-two, although the others were over sixty-five. The spectacle of people of intelligent appearance puzzling over quite basic facts was profoundly disturbing, particularly a couple of men who demanded angrily to be told who they were and where they came from.

"I guess this is the 'before,' " Eastland commented to Diamond.

"Is it? I don't mink I... Oh—I see what you mean." In his concentration on the film, he must himself have sounded mentally lacking. These pathetic people moved him more than he had expected. Progressive loss of memory was a deep-seated fear of his own, and he had no difficulty in identifying with their distress.

After the lights were turned up, the professor talked at length about PDM3, a technical briefing couched in scientific terminology that Diamond found increasingly difficult to follow. His attention drifted back to the poignant images of the Alzheimer's patients.

Then the room was darkened for another sequence of film, the "after" interviews. Introducing them, Churchward explained that some of the volunteers (as he insisted on calling them, rather than patients, or subjects) had been administered with PDM3, and some, as a control, with a placebo.

The film was eloquent. The effects on those who had been given the drug were striking. Not only did they answer the questions they had found so baffling before, but they went on to give unsolicited accounts of the improvements in their lives. They could dress themselves, go for walks, use shops, write letters. In the standard word test, they had averaged a seven-point improvement. The results contrasted cruelly with the steady deterioration of the group who had taken the placebo. For Diamond, cynical as he felt about the sales pitch, it was difficult to remain detached, difficult not to wish that every one of those sad, benighted people had been given the drug.

In a neat
coup de thedtre
when the lights went on, Churchward was seen to have been joined by a man and a woman, whom he introduced as people just seen in the film, volunteers whose lives had been transformed by PDM3. Each answered two or three questions lucidly and testified to the improvement in their memory and concentration. They left the platform to spontaneous applause.