Repairman Jack [04]-All the Rage (4 page)

"And you don't want to put Vicky in the middle of all that—making identification, testifying, all for what? At best, his lawyer will get him off with a fine and a suspended sentence."

Gia shook her head and sighed. "It's not fair. He attacks me, scares my little girl half to death—he shouldn't be able to just walk away."

"Well, he's not walking. Looked like he wound up with a broken leg."

"Not enough," Gia said, staring at Vicky's face. "Not nearly enough."

"My sentiments exactly," Jack said. He leaned over and kissed the top of Gia's head. "Gotta run."

"Where are you going?"

"Gotta see a guy about something."

"You've got that look…"

"I won't be long."

She nodded. "Be careful."

Jack let himself out onto Sutton Square and walked toward Sutton Place in search of a cab. Usually Gia would try to stop him, telling him to stay calm and stay put. But not tonight. Someone had frightened her daughter—
touched
her daughter—and she didn't want anyone thinking he could do such a thing and get away with it.

Neither did Jack.

He knew the guy could've killed her, and looked like he'd meant to. Jack tried to keep that fact at a distance, to maintain an oblique perspective. Not easy to do, but he knew if he got too close, if he thought about where Vicky might be now if he'd been delayed a single heartbeat, he'd blow again.

Needed to be cool and deliberate in his approach to this guy. Had to find a way to pound home the message that he must never try something like that again, not to any child, but especially not to Miss Victoria Westphalen. Jack considered Vicky his daughter. Genetically she had another father, but in every other way, in every corner of Jack's mind and heart, Vicks was his little girl. And someone who looked like Porky Pig had tried to kill her.

Bad move, Porky.

4

Mount Sinai Medical Center was right up the street from the museum, so Jack figured that was where the rioters and their victims would wind up. When he got there and saw all the cops and a few handcuffed guys in crested blue blazers, he knew he'd figured right.

The emergency department was in chaos. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies hurrying back and forth, doing triage, seeing the most serious cases first. Injured men, women, and even a few children were milling around or sitting with dazed looks on their faces. Some of the blazered guys were still causing trouble, shouting curses, struggling with the police. A disaster scene.

As Jack wandered around the waiting room, looking for Vicky's attacker, he picked up bits of the story. The wild men were all graduates of St. Barnabas Prep. Jack had heard of it: a rich kids' school located in the East Eighties. Seemed their twenty-fifth-reunion dinner party never got past the hors d'oeuvres. Arguments broke out toward the end of the cocktail hour. Over what? The quality of the canapes? Not enough horseradish in the cocktail sauce? Whatever. The arguments grew into fights that spilled out onto the street and from there escalated to a riot.

They were calling it a "preppy riot." Swell.

But where was the particular Porky preppy he wanted? Jack adopted a confused look and wandered into the treatment area. Peeked behind curtains and saw scalps and faces being stitched up, fingers and wrists being splinted, X-rays being studied, but no sign of the bastard he sought.

A security guard—big, black, with a no-nonsense air about him—stopped Jack. "Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm looking for a friend," Jack said.

"If you're not being treated, you'll have to return to the waiting area." He pointed over Jack's shoulder. "The lady at the registration desk can tell you if he's here."

Jack started to move back toward the waiting area. "I think he broke his leg."

"Then he's probably in the casting room, and you can't go in there."

"OK," Jack said, moving off. "Back to the waiting room."

Halfway there, he stopped a young Asian woman in green scrubs.

"Where's the casting room?"

"Right there," she said, pointing to his left, then continued on her way.

You're sharp tonight, Jack thought sourly, staring at the wooden door with the black-and-white casting room plaque dead center at eye level. Walked right past it.

He glanced up the hall. The security guard was turned away with his walkie-talkie against his face, so Jack pushed open the door and stepped inside.

And there he was. Dirty, disheveled, his hair matted with blood, he lay on a gurney with a nurse by his side and a doctor wrapping his right leg in some sort of fiberglass mesh. His looked different with his eyes glazed and jaw slackened from whatever they'd shot him up with to keep him quiet, but this was the guy. Porky. Jack felt his jaw muscles bunch. Would have loved, dearly loved, a chance to give the doctor cause to work on the other leg and both arms and maybe carve some bacon off his hide, but the cop watching from the head of the gurney would surely object.

Jack stood statue still, scanning the room. Had only a few seconds before he was spotted. Especially didn't want Porky to see him—might accuse him of tossing him off the steps—but now that he'd found him, Jack wanted his name. Spotted a clipboard atop some X-rays on the counter to his left. Snagged it and stepped back into the hallway.

The top sheet was an intake form, with "Butler, Robert B." printed across the top. A West Sixty-seventh Street address. Jack knew the building—a luxury high-rise maybe twenty blocks from his place. He memorized Butler's unit number, leaned the clipboard against the door, and headed for the exit.

Jack and Robert B. Butler, graduate of St. Barnabas Prep, had been living just a short walk away from each other for who knew how long. About time they got acquainted.

THURSDAY

1

Jack was up early and on his way downtown, enjoying the mild May weather. Too nice a morning to ponder his as yet unscheduled confrontation with the porky prep. Jack hadn't yet figured on the right approach to Mr. Butler, but it would come. Right now he was headed for a meeting with a new customer. Because she was a referral, and because he trusted the referrer, he'd agreed to meet Dr. Nadia Radzminsky on her turf. At this hour her turf was a storefront diabetes clinic on Seventeenth Street, between Union Square and Irving Place, next to a laundromat.

Jack stepped inside and found the front area filled with a jumble of races and sexes, all shabbily dressed. The young mocha-skinned, white-uniformed nurse at the desk took one look at him and seemed to know he didn't belong. Not that he was all that well dressed, but his faded flannel shirt, worn jeans, and scuffed tan work boots were still a few cuts above what everyone else here was wearing.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Dr. Radzminsky. She's expecting me."

The nurse sifted through the papers on her desk and came up with a yellow sticky note. "Yes. You're Jack? She said to take you right in."

She led him through a curtained doorway, past a pair of curtained examining rooms—he caught a whiff of rubbing alcohol from the one on the right—to a tiny office in the rear. A young woman with straight dark hair cut in a bob sat behind the desk. She glanced up and smiled as they entered. She looked very young—couldn't be a day over twenty. Too young to be a doctor.

"You must be Jack," she said, rising and extending her hand. She stood about five-four and had a compact frame, a stocky build—solid without being overweight.

"And you must be Dr. Radzminsky."

"Nadia, please," she said, pronouncing it "Nahd-ja." "Only my patients call me Doctor." She had a big open face, a welcoming smile, and bright dark eyes. Jack liked her immediately. "Thanks, Jasmine," she said to the nurse.

Jasmine closed the door behind her.

Nadia pointed to one of the chart-laden chairs. "Just put those on the floor and have a seat."

She offered coffee and poured him a Styrofoam cupful from a Mr. Coffee on a shelf.

"We've got sugar and Cremora."

"Two sugars'll do."

"My only vice," she said, sipping from an oversize black ceramic mug with nadj printed in big white letters along the side. "An indispensable habit you pick up in residency."

"Can I ask you something straight off?" Jack said.

"Sure."

"No offense, but are you old enough to be a doctor?"

She gave him a tolerant smile. "Everyone asks me that. Yes. I'm cursed with a baby face. A blessing if you're a model or an actress, but not when you're a doctor, especially a woman doctor trying to inspire respect and confidence. But trust me, I'm a fellowship-trained, board-eligible endocrinologist."

"That's hormones, right?"

"Right. I do glands—thyroid, parathyroid, adrenal, pituitary, pancreas, and so on. Diabetes is one of the mainstays of endocrinology, which is why I'm here, but my special interest is in steroids."

"Muscle juice?"

Another smile. "Anabolic steroids are just one kind. Cortisone is another; so is estrogen. Remember what that guy whispered to Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate!"

"Sure. 'Plastics'."

"Right. One of my professors did the same thing for me once. He said, 'Steroids… the future is steroids.' And over the years I became convinced he was right. Even got to contribute some original research to the field. But enough about me, what about you? Whatever did you do for Alicia Clayton to make her recommend you so highly?"

Jack wasn't going to answer that. "How do you know Alicia?"

"High school. We weren't really friends, but we were both A students so we had advanced classes together. She went away to college, but now she's back and we keep running into each other. We're friends now. I told her about a problem I had and she gave me your number." Nadia cocked her head at Jack, a puzzled look on her face. "She said I could trust you with my life."

Hope she didn't give you any details, he thought.

"Is your life in danger?"

"No. But the way she said it—what on earth did you
do
for her?"

"I'm sure Alicia can fill you in on all the details."

"That's just it. She won't say anything further than it was sometime around last Christmas." Nadia smiled. "She said you were discreet too, and now I see what she meant."

As pleasant as this young woman was, Jack wanted to get to the point. "What can I do for you, Nadia?"

"It's about my boss."

Please, not a sexual harassment thing, Jack thought. A stalker he could handle, but innuendo and suggestive behavior were too slippery.

"The guy who runs this place?"

"No. The clinic is run by a hospital, and I just volunteer here."

"You give these folks insulin shots?"

"No. A nurse handles that. I monitor their charts, test for end organ damage, manage the cases. We treat mostly homeless folk here. Imagine being a homeless diabetic—no place to keep your insulin chilled, no way to check your blood sugar, unable to buy clean needles."

Pretty grim, Jack thought. And now he could see how Nadia and Alicia Clayton had connected. Alicia ran the pediatric AIDS clinic near St. Vincent's, just a few blocks to the west of here.

She went on. "My paying job—which I've only had for a couple of weeks now—is with a pharmaceutical company called GEM Pharma. Ever heard of it?"

Jack shook his head. Merck and Pfizer, yes, but never GEM.

"It's a small company," she said. "Mostly they manufacture and market generic prescription drugs—antibiotics, antihypertensives, and such on which the patents have run out. But unlike most companies of their type, GEM does basic research—not a lot, but they at least make a stab at it. That's why I was hired—for their R and D Department."

"A couple of weeks and already your boss is hassling you?"

"No. Someone is hassling
him
. At least I think so."

Good, Jack thought. It's not sexual. "And why's that?"

"I saw him arguing with a man in the corporate offices. They were down the far end of a hall. They didn't see me, and they weren't shouting, so I don't know what the argument was about, but I saw the other man shove him, then walk out, looking very angry."

"Not a disgruntled employee, I take it."

"No, but the man looked vaguely familiar. It took the rest of the day before I could place him. Then I remembered. He was Milos Dragovic."

Well, well, well, Jack thought, remembering a guy who'd contacted him recently about a beef with Milos Dragovic. Two customers interested in Dragovic in as many weeks. That boy do get around.

Nadia was staring at him. "I can't believe you haven't heard of him." She must have misinterpreted his silence.

"Oh, I have. Everyone's heard of the Slippery Serb."

That was what the
Post
had dubbed Dragovic a couple of years ago. And he lived up to the title. He'd faced indictments for gunrunning, racketeering, procuring, even murder, and had walked on every one. A sharp dresser who hobnobbed with celebrities at all the in restaurants and hot nightspots, Milos Dragovic had replaced John "the Dapper Don" Gotti as the city's chic hood.

"You're sure it was him?" Jack said.

"Totally. I dug out an old copy of
New York
magazine that had a cover story on him. Milos Dragovic, no question."

"And he's pushing your boss around. Any idea why?"

"That's what I'd like you to find out."

"Well, since your guy works for a drug company—"

"He's one of the founders."

"Even better. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that Pharmaceuticals of a less than legal nature must be involved. Why not call the cops and tell them the Slippery Serb is shaking down your boss? I'm sure they'd love to know."

"Because Dragovic may have something on him, some secret he's blackmailing him with. And he may already have coerced him into doing something illegal. I don't want to see him go to jail or get hurt."

As Nadia was speaking, Jack picked up on something: a timbre in her voice, a look in her eyes as she spoke about her boss at a job she'd had for only a few weeks. More than just a professional relationship here?