The Prodigal Son (3 page)

Millie had always been his biggest feminine headache, he had thought because she was also his most intelligent daughter. Like all of them, she had been sent to St. Mary’s Girls’ School, which for masculine company tapped the resources of St. Bernard’s Boys. Including, over eighteen years ago — September 1950, so long ago!— a special-case boarder from South Carolina, a boy whose intelligence was in the genius range. On the advice of their priest, an old St. Bernard’s boy, his parents had sent him to Holloman for his high schooling. With good reason. They were African Americans in a southern state who wanted a northern education for their precious only child. Their Catholicism was rare, and Father Gaspari prized them. So Jim Hunter, almost fifteen, arrived to live with the Brothers at St. Bernard’s: James Keith Hunter, a genius.

He and Millie met at a school dance that happened to coincide with her fifteenth birthday; Jim was a few days older.
The first Patrick and Nessie knew of him came from Millie, who asked if she could invite the boarder at St. Bernard’s for a home-cooked meal. His blackness stunned them, but they were enormously proud of their daughter’s liberalism, taking her interest in the boy as evidence that Millie was going to grow up to make a difference in how America regarded race and creed.

It had been an extraordinary dinner, with the guest talking almost exclusively to Patrick about his work — not the gruesome side, but the underlying science, and with more knowledge of that science than most who worked in the field. Patrick was still groping his way into forensic pathology at that time, and freely admitted that conversing with Jim Hunter had administered a definite onward push.

A shocking dinner, too. Both Patrick and Nessie saw it at once: the look in Millie’s eyes when they rested on Jim, which was almost all the time. Not burgeoning love. Blind adoration. No, no, no,
no
! That couldn’t be let happen! Not because of a nonexistent racial prejudice, but because of sheer terror at what such a relationship would do to this beloved child, the brightest of the bunch. It couldn’t be let happen, it
mustn’t
happen! While every look Millie gave Jim said it had already happened.

Within a week Jim and Millie were the talk of East Holloman; Patrick and Nessie were inundated with protests and advice from countless relatives. Millie and Jim were an item! A
hot
item! But how could that be, when each child went to a different school, and their teachers disapproved as much as everyone else?
Not
from racial prejudice! From fear at
potentially ruined young lives. For their own good, they had to be broken up.

The fees were a burden, but had to be found; Millie was taken out of St. Mary’s and sent to the Dormer Day School, where most of the students were the offspring of Chubb professors or wealthy Holloman residents. Not the kind of place parents with five children and a sixth on the way even dreamed of. But for Millie’s sake, the sacrifices had to be made.

An instinct in Patrick said it would not answer, and the instinct was right. No matter how many obstacles were thrown in their way, Millie O’Donnell and Jim Hunter continued to be an item.

Even looking back on it now as he tramped through County Services was enough to bring back the indescribable pain of those terrible years. The misery! The guilt! The knowledge of a conscious social crime committed! How could any father and mother sleep, knowing their ethics and principles were colliding head on with their love for a child? For what Patrick and Nessie foresaw was the suffering inflicted on Millie for her choice in boyfriends. Worse because she was prom queen material, the most gorgeous girl in her class. The Dormer Day School seethed with just as much resentment as St. Bernard’s and St. Mary’s — Millie O’Donnell was living proof that a black man’s penile size and sexual prowess could seduce even the cream of the crop. Girls hated her. Boys hated her. Teachers hated her. She had a black boyfriend with a sixteen-inch dick, who could possibly compete?

The trouble was that their teachers couldn’t protest that the friendship caused a drop in grades or a lack of interest in sport; Jim and Millie were straight A-plus students; Jim was a champion boxer and wrestler, and Millie a track star. They graduated at the head of their respective classes, with a virtual carte blanche in choice of a college. Harvard, Chubb, or any of the many great universities.

They went to Columbia together, enrolled in Science with a biochemistry major. Perhaps they hoped that New York City’s teeming, hugely diverse student population would grant them some peace from their perpetual torments. If so, their hopes were dashed at once. They endured four more years of persecution, but showed the world they couldn’t be crushed by graduating
summa cum laude
. Patrick and Nessie had tried to keep in contact, go down to see them when they wouldn’t come home, but were always rebuffed. It was as if, Patrick had thought at that time, they were growing a carapace thick enough and hard enough to render them invulnerable, and that included shutting out parents. He and Nessie had gone to their graduation, but Jim’s parents had not. Apparently they had given up the fight, just as strenuous on their side to sever their son from his white girlfriend — and who could blame them either? It takes maturity to know the pain …

The day after they graduated, Jim and Millie married in a registry office with no one there to wish them well. It was near Penn Station; they walked, carrying their suitcases, to board a crowded, smelly train to Chicago, traveling on student passes. In Chicago they changed to another crowded, smelly train that
ambled on a poorly maintained railbed all the way to L.A. For most of the two and a half days they sat on the floor, but at least at Caltech they’d be warm in winter.

At the end of the two-year Master’s program Jim was starting to be known, his color beginning to be an advantage north of the Mason-Dixon Line — until people learned he had a beautiful white biochemist wife. However, the University of Chicago was willing to take Mr. and Mrs. Hunter as doctoral fellows — back to cold winters and cheerless summers.

When they received their Ph.D.s they seemed to meet a solid wall of opposition. No matter how much a school wanted Dr. Jim Hunter, it wasn’t prepared to offer employment to his wife, Dr. Millicent Hunter. He was one of the biggest whales in the vast protein ocean, whereas she was a sprat. As post-doctoral fellows
or
as faculty, the financial outlay for two Hunters was considered excessive. If this was complicated by the inter-racial nature of their union, no one was prepared to say.

After six years in Chicago they were poorer than ever, never having actually held a job. Their grants contained a subsistence-style living allowance, and on that they subsisted, dressing from K-mart and eating supermarket bargains. A Chinese meal to go was a luxury they indulged in once a month.

Then their luck turned.

In 1966 the President of Chubb University, Mawson MacIntosh, was actively looking for racial misfits — and also for potential Nobel Prize winners. Jim Hunter looked good on both counts; M.M. was determined that Chubb should stay in the forefront of academic integration at all levels. Without any
idea that Dr. Millicent Hunter was the Holloman Medical Examiner’s daughter, M.M. sent a quiet directive to Dean Hugo Werther of Chemistry that the Doctors Hunter be given two faculty positions. They were not in the same lab and her post involved some teaching, but they were both in the Burke Biology Tower, and would be seen together. Millie pleased M.M.; biochemistry was a discipline that visibly changed while you looked at it, so teachers were rare. Whereas Dr. Jim Hunter was a breaker of new ground, his mind that of a true genius. Only his having a beautiful white highly educated wife told against him, and that could not be seen to matter. The couple had been married for years, so probably had nothing left to learn about racial discrimination.

Thus it had been that over two years ago Millie had phoned out of the blue and asked if she and Jim could beg a bed for a couple of nights. Admittedly four of the O’Donnell daughters were gone, but of spare bedrooms there were none; Carmine had come to their rescue by giving them use of his apartment in the Nutmeg Insurance building before he sold it upon his marriage.

Overjoyed though they were at the return of Millie and Jim, Patrick and Nessie discovered very quickly that whatever they could offer was too little, too late. The Doctors Hunter were armored against the world so strongly that even parents couldn’t find a weakness in the rivets. And what could they have done differently? Fear for a child leads to all sorts of hideously wrong decisions, Patrick reflected as he tramped up a set of cold stone stairs. If only Jim had looked like Harry
Belafonte or at least been an ordinary brown! But he didn’t, and he wasn’t.

If the relationship between the Doctors Hunter and her parents was a rather distant one, it was also genuinely friendly. What Patrick and Nessie continued to fear was simple: how could a fifteen-year-old possibly own the wisdom to choose the right life’s partner? One day either Millie or Jim was going to wake up and discover that the childhood bond was gone, that a cruel world had finally managed to separate them. So far it had not happened, but it would. It would! They had no children, but that was probably deliberate. Until now, they plain couldn’t afford a family. The steel in them! It amazed Patrick, who had to wonder if his own comfortable marriage to Nessie could have taken one-tenth of the blows Millie and Jim took every day.

Over two years last September since they came to Holloman!

Carmine was in. As he came through the door, Patrick had to smile. His first cousin was napping in the extremely efficient way he had perfected over hundreds of hours waiting to be called as a trial witness. What had happened last night?

“Did you and Desdemona toast the New Year too lavishly, cuz?” he asked.

Carmine didn’t jump or twitch; he opened one clear eye. “Nope. Alex is teething and Julian is like his daddy — a very light sleeper.”

“You would have them so close together.”

“Don’t look at me. It was Desdemona’s idea.” Carmine swung his feet off the kitchen table he used as a desk and opened both eyes. “Why are you slumming, Patsy?”

“Have you heard of tetrodotoxin?”

“Vaguely. It’s been suggested in a sensational Australian case some years ago — the symptoms fit, but they couldn’t isolate a poison of any kind. The Japanese flirt with it, I found out during my years in the occupation forces as a Tokyo M.P. Blowfish, blue-ringed octopus and some other marine nasties. According to my sources, it’s fully metabolized and out of the system before autopsy can detect it,” Carmine said.

Patrick blinked. “You perpetually amaze me, cuz. I presume it has to be logged in a poisons register if it’s anywhere near the general public, but what happens if it’s nowhere around the general public, yet goes missing?”

“That depends on whether you’re ethical, or the type who covers his ass. Ethical, and you report its loss to
someone
. If inclined to cover your own ass, you write ‘accidentally destroyed’ or ‘out of date and discarded as per regulations’ in a register. But I presume this victim is ethical, right?”

“Right. My problem daughter, Millie. She’s been working with the stuff, had enough left over to kill six heavyweight boxers, divided into six glass ampoules of a hundred milligrams each — yes, yes, I’ll slow down! She put the six ampoules into a beaker, stuck the skull-and-crossbones on it, then shoved it in the back of her lab refrigerator.” Patrick frowned. “She didn’t tell anyone it was gone until she came to see me. I advised her to remain silent, to tell no one further.”

“Who else knew it was there?”

“Only Jim. She told him, in passing. Not his field.”

“Was it labeled, apart from the poison sticker?”

“She didn’t say. But while she may be too honest to forge an entry in her register, she is highly organized, Carmine. It would have been coded rather than named. Anyone poking through her refrigerator wouldn’t have known what he was looking at,” Patrick said. “My girl’s worst fault is that she’s too trusting. An untidy worker she’s not. The trust baffles me, I confess. How can you trust a world that shits on you the way Millie’s world shits on her?”

“It’s her nature,” Carmine said gently. “Millie is an honest-to-goodness saint.” He caught sight of the railroad clock on his wall. “Lunch at Malvolio’s?”

“Sounds good to me.”

As soon as Merele cleared the dishes away Carmine returned to his cousin’s problem.

“You’d better look up tetrodotoxin’s clinical symptoms,” he said. “If anyone took it with nefarious intentions, a gurney holding a victim is going to roll through your morgue doors, and the faster you can screen for tetrodotoxin, the better your chances of finding it. In fact, why don’t you tell Paul you’re running a little unofficial test to keep your technicians on their toes? Tell him they’re to look for abstruse neurotoxins like tetrodotoxin. It won’t fool Paul, but your technicians are used to your — er — unofficial exams. Let Paul in on it, he’s no gossip, Patsy.”

“Well, I have to keep my technicians on their toes now my lab is the major one in the state. I’ll look, Carmine — and look hard.” His face puckered; he fought for control and found it. “This isn’t fair! Millie doesn’t need extra grief.”

“She did exactly the right thing in reporting her loss,” Carmine said, voice level. “Had she concealed the theft, you might easily have missed a tetrodotoxin death at P.M. If the thief’s motive was nefarious, he was looking for a rare and undetectable poison. And that means he’s knowledgeable. A biochemist or biologist, or maybe a doctor.” Carmine frowned, toyed with his spoon. “Given Jim’s relationship to Millie, he’s out of the picture, and that means someone else knew about the tetrodotoxin.”

Patrick shivered. “Carmine, don’t! You’re talking as if the thief really does have murder in mind. I mean, this is all pure hypothesis! A bottle washer does her glassware once a week, there are electricians and plumbers — Millie doesn’t work in a vacuum.”

“Calm down, cuz, of course it’s hypothesis. We’ll cross the bridges as we come to them, but it never hurts to be fully prepared. I can already note that Dr. Millicent Hunter informed the Medical Examiner and the police that she found six hundred milligrams of tetrodotoxin missing from her laboratory refrigerator — what else could she have done? The substance wasn’t named, though it bore a generic poisons sticker — that really is suspicious, Patsy. She’s sure nothing else went missing — hang on.” Carmine slid out of the booth. “I’ll be back in a minute — and lunch is on me.”