Margaret Truman's Deadly Medicine Read online

  He bumped into Jayla at Renewal’s headquarters while there for a meeting.

  “I heard about your dad,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks,” she replied.

  “No word on who killed him?”

  She shook her head and swallowed a tear.

  “From what you’ve said about him he was quite a guy.”

  He sensed that she wasn’t in the mood for further conversation about her father’s untimely demise and quickly said, “Up for lunch? My meeting will wrap up before noon. My treat. I’m in the mood for something French, like Mon Ami Gabi. Best onion soup and steak frites in the area.”

  “I don’t think so, Nate, but thanks anyway. I brought something from home.”

  “How about lunch tomorrow? Or dinner tonight? Same place.”

  She was about to decline his offer but thought of Flo’s advice to get out more. The pleasant evening she’d spent with the Smiths and their friends influenced her decision making. “All right,” she said, “dinner would be nice.”

  He picked her up at seven and they drove to the restaurant on Woodmont Avenue where a valet took the car. The popular French bistro was bustling, and while they waited at the bar for their table to be vacated, Cousins ordered a perfect Manhattan, and a white wine for Jayla.

  “I’d never been here before,” she said, “but some of my friends have. It has a wonderful reputation.”

  “Yes, it’s great. I come here often to entertain media people. I have a house account. How does it feel to be back in the grind?”

  “It feels good,” she said. “It takes my mind off—well, off other things.”

  “Walt Milkin is really high on you, Jayla. He told me that you have a very bright future in medical research.”

  She wasn’t prepared for the compliment and uttered a weak, “That’s nice to hear.”

  He offered his glass, and they touched rims.

  “I suppose that medical research is in your genes,” he said.

  “I guess it is, although I don’t think I could ever be as devoted to it as my father was.”

  “What sort of research was he involved with?” Cousins asked casually.

  “He was trying to develop a pain reliever using indigenous plants grown on Papua New Guinea. There are thousands of them, and the natives use many to cure all sorts of ailments, asthma, antiseptic for wounds, orthopedic pain, hypertension, even cancer at a small hospital on one of the islands. You name it.”

  He laughed. “They really work on all those problems?”

  “They do as far as the natives are concerned,” she said, sipping her wine.

  “Maybe a placebo effect?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but my father believed that there were legitimate physical medicinal values to those plants. The trick was to find the right combination, and the proper processing of them.”

  “Your table is ready, Mr. Cousins,” someone from the restaurant staff said. “I’ll bring your drinks to you.”

  Cousins ordered another drink; Jayla nursed her wine. Upon his recommendation they ordered onion soup and the chilled seafood platter for two, lobster, jumbo shrimp, oysters, and salmon tartare. Jayla took in the handsome dining room, tables covered with pristine white tablecloths, the glassware glimmering in the flattering light. The man across the table from her sat quietly, his attention directed at her.

  “How is your new agency doing?” she asked.

  “Fine, couldn’t be better. I just hired my fourth person. The pharmaceutical industry is under a lot of scrutiny these days, pressure from the government. It’s never needed smart PR as much as it does now. The whole health care industry is in chaos, especially prescription painkillers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is underwriting programs to prevent prescription drug overdoses. It’s reached epidemic proportions.” He sipped. “So tell me more about your father’s research, Jayla. That is, if you don’t mind talking about it.”

  She had no reason to hold back on details, yet she did. Nor did she talk about the letter and plastic sleeves containing seeds that her father had left for her that rested securely at the bank. She didn’t have a tangible reason to withhold the information from Cousins, or from anyone for that matter. It wasn’t that she intended to do anything with the envelope’s contents—at least not at the moment. It was more a matter of the highly personal nature of those items, a love letter from her dear father combined with his narrative of what strides he’d made with his research. Since returning to Washington she hadn’t told anyone what he’d left her.

  “Did he have others working with him?” Cousins asked.

  “Just one assistant,” she said.

  She hadn’t thought of Eugene Waksit in a while and wondered what he was doing.

  “Maybe he can carry on your father’s work,” Cousins said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Nate. He’s a bright guy, but I assume he’ll move on to another lab, another clinic, maybe go to work for a hospital in Australia. He was educated there. So was my father.”

  She thought of Waksit again, and of her father’s detailed scientific notes and packets of medicinal plants that had gone missing from the laboratory. She’d wondered initially whether Waksit had removed those notes and plants, but had quickly dismissed the notion. Among many things her father had instilled in her was to avoid thinking the worst of people—unless they gave you a tangible reason for it. Her father had placed his faith in Eugene, and that should have been good enough for her.

  Still …

  “So,” Cousins said as they awaited the arrival of their dinner, “tell me about Jayla King.”

  She laughed. “What is there to know? I work for Renewal Pharmaceuticals the way you did until you resigned.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “No one can be that modest,” he said. “I mean Jayla King the person. You were born and raised in Papua New Guinea. That’s a part of the world I know nothing about, absolutely nothing.”

  “Well, let’s see,” she said. “It’s off the northern coast of Australia, a series of islands with Port Moresby as its capital. That’s where I was born and brought up. Most parts of the mainland can be very primitive. My mother was descended from the Chambri tribe. They live in the Sepik region named after the Sepik River, a village called Pagwi. It’s a fascinating, poorly explored place. It has thousands of plant and animal species that have never even been examined and named. It’s not an easy place to navigate. The last I knew there were more than eight hundred separate languages spoken.”

  “Whew!” he said. “How can people communicate with each other?”

  “There’s an accepted general language, sort of a Pidgin English. It’s called Tok Pisin.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

  Their dinner was served and they dug into the sumptuous platter, and a basket of warm bread.

  “Enjoy it?” Cousins asked when they were finished eating.

  “Very much.”

  “Let’s get back to my knowing Jayla King a little better,” he said. “I take it that your ending up working at a pharmaceutical company was not a coincidence. Did you work with your father in his lab?”

  “A little, not much. He spent most of his day in his clinic treating people. He was such a warm and sympathetic man. He considered it a personal failure when a patient died.”

  “Sounds like he was a missionary as well as a physician.”

  “In a way he was.”

  “What was he working on when he died?”

  She sighed and sat back. “He was convinced that he could create a new pain reliever from the local plants that didn’t have all the serious side effects of our modern drugs.”

  “Like what Renewal is working on,” Cousins offered.

  “It’s different,” Jayla said. “We’re trying to synthesize a new pain reliever from existing chemical compounds. My father’s goal was to accomplish the same end using naturally grown products.”

  “And?” Cousins said, eyebrows r
aised.

  “And?”

  “Had he succeeded?”

  She realized that she’d said more about her father’s work than she’d intended, and simply answered, “He thought that he was making progress.”

  “Maybe you can build upon his work, Jayla.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, folding her napkin and placing it on the table. “Dinner was delicious.”

  “Dessert?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “After-dinner drink? I think this dinner deserves their best Cognac.”

  “Please, go ahead,” she said, “but I’ll pass.”

  * * *

  He walked her to the door of her apartment building in Foggy Bottom.

  “I’m glad I had the chance to learn more about Jayla King,” Cousins said.

  “There isn’t much to learn,” she said. “See you at work tomorrow? Oh, that’s right, you don’t work at Renewal anymore.”

  “But I might as well. I spend most of my time there. Can we do this again sometime soon?”

  “Only if we talk more about you than about me,” she said.

  The moment when he might have attempted to kiss her good night passed. He squeezed her hand, wished her a good night’s sleep, and walked away.

  She turned on the TV in her apartment, the talking heads on a cable news channel providing background noise as she changed into pajamas and a robe. She settled at a desk in the living room to catch up on some bill paying, which she’d fallen behind on while away. Meticulous in the way she structured her approach to her finances, she used a spreadsheet on which she entered each bill and the date it was due. It was a system that she’d developed for herself and she was pleased with the way it worked. When she’d leased the Honda CRV she currently drove, the manager at the dealership had complimented her on her high credit score.

  As she prepared to pull an invoice from its folder in the “Bills To Be Paid” section of the file drawer, she suddenly sat back and surveyed her desktop. Something was different. Her father had always stressed the importance of paying attention to detail. As a result her approach to keeping the desktop neat and organized bordered upon an obsessive-compulsive disorder, although she knew she didn’t suffer from that. She simply enjoyed order in every aspect of her life, including the externals. She wouldn’t leave the apartment for work unless items on the desk were square to each other, pens and pencils lined up, nothing askew and out of alignment. To leave for the day without having made her bed, or ensuring that every item of clothing wasn’t where it was supposed to be, was unthinkable to her.

  But something on the desk was wrong. She was convinced that she hadn’t left the pads and pencils where they were now. But could she be certain? She mused. It had been a hectic period in her life, racing to make the flight to Papua New Guinea, the turmoil surrounding her father’s murder, returning to Washington and catching up on what she’d missed, including paying the bills, going back to work, and always the letter her father had left her occupying her thoughts.

  She forced a laugh and shook her head. “You’re getting messy,” she said aloud, and after squaring the items on the desk got back to paying her bills.

  That chore completed, and envelopes ready to mail the next morning, she settled back to watch two guests debating a decision the president had made regarding another hot spot in the world that had potential ramifications for the country’s national security. Eventually she turned off the TV and headed for the bedroom, pleasant memories of the evening at the Smiths’, and the dinner with Nate Cousins accompanying her. But before climbing into bed she returned to the living room, switched on the lights, and surveyed the desktop where everything was now the way she wanted it to be. She turned off the lights, smiled, climbed into bed, and was asleep in minutes.

  CHAPTER

  8

  WEWAK, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

  Walter Tagobe was drunk. He’d been drunk since arriving in Wewak.

  He sat at the bar in a shabby, fragrant waterfront pub next to a small house that had been converted to a hotel of sorts, more a rooming house, and stared vacantly at the glass of amber whiskey in front of him.

  His first day away from his native village of Pagwi in the Sepik River basin had been exhilarating for the forty-year-old Tagobe. Aside from six years spent as a youngster in a Catholic missionary school for the “slow-witted” he’d never left Pagwi and had lived in the makeshift home on stilts he shared with his wife and two young boys his entire adult life. Walter may have been slow-witted, the label the nuns had assigned him—feeble-minded others termed it—but he wasn’t stupid. In some ways he was intellectually superior to the other men in his family, although admittedly that was a low bar to vault. Walter had sold wooden bowls he fashioned from fallen trees to tourists until Dr. Preston King had arrived one day to examine a four-acre parcel of land he’d purchased, and on which he intended to grow native plants. Walter thought it was strange to farm plants that were easily collected in the jungle, but he was delighted when the doctor said that he needed someone in Pagwi to oversee the acreage. He hired Tagobe on the spot.

  It was a gift from the heavens as far as Walter was concerned. He would be paid a small monthly stipend, which elevated him to almost regal status among the tribe, and despite the frequent expressions of resentment and envy from others he threw himself into the work, hiring local men to plant the species of plants that the doctor wanted, and making sure that the tract was well watered and that local youths didn’t use it for play. He took to wearing a used blue suit jacket and a pair of pants he’d bought from a traveling merchant to better identify himself in his new executive role, despite the oppressive heat and humidity of the river basin, and boasted to his wife that he would eventually be called to Port Moresby to work at Dr. King’s side. His wife scoffed at his pretentions and called him “long-long,” crazy in local parlance, which didn’t quash Walter’s unrealistic dreams of becoming an even more important man.

  When the two big white men with blue eyes arrived with a tractor fitted with a large blade, Walter was at the small farm tending to the plants.

  “Hello,” one of the men said, smiling. “Name’s Paul. This is my pal Joey. We’re here to bury the crops. Dr. King who owns this plot of land wants the plants overturned and burned to make way for new ones.”

  Walter’s only contact with the doctor was when King came to the area and gave him instructions.

  Joey handed him an envelope.

  “Open it,” Paul said. “The doctor wants you to have it.”

  Tagobe did as instructed. In the envelope was money, more money than Walter had ever seen before.

  “The doctor says that he wants you to go to Wewak and wait for him there. That’s what the money is for, to take a taxi to Wewak, check into a hotel and—” Paul grinned. “Find yourself a woman and enjoy yourself.” He laughed and slapped Walter on the back of his blue suit jacket. “You know, pal, go and have a good time, lots of pretty girls there.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and wrote on it. “You go to this hotel. Nice place. The doctor will meet up with you there. Right Joey?”

  Walter smiled. The doctor wanted to meet him in Wewak. That was good. Important men went to hotels to meet with other important men. And so Walter Tagobe wrapped a few belongings in a woven bilum bag, told his wife that he would be gone for a few days “on business,” and took his first ever taxi ride to Wewak where he found the seedy hotel and secured a room. Despite the soiled sheets and single chair with a broken leg repaired with duct tape, it was palatial compared to the bamboo hut in which he and his family lived in Pagwi. Life was good for Walter Tagobe.

  After checking in and paying four days in advance, he shoved the remaining cash into a pouch under the waistband of his pants and went to the adjoining bar where he ordered a meal of turtle in sago, a wrap for the meat, and a glass of rye whiskey, and waited for the arrival of Dr. Preston King.

  The bartender, who was also the owner, eyed Tagobe suspiciously, his hand n
ever far from the wooden club secreted behind the bar. His clientele certainly weren’t upscale, but he seldom served illiterate natives straight from the jungle.

  Tagobe stayed at the bar into the evening, becoming more inebriated with each refill of his glass. The bar began to fill up, mostly waterfront workers, many of them Australians. A group of them began talking with Tagobe, who was pleased to have the attention. In his drunkenness he didn’t realize that they found him amusing and were deliberately getting him drunk.

  “You say you’re a big man, mate?” one of the men said.

  “Very big,” Tagobe managed in his Pidgin English, smiling broadly as he tried to keep up the conversation with his newfound friends. “I work for a doctor, Dr. King.”

  “Who is this doctor? What does he do?”

  Tagobe tried to explain but wasn’t getting through. He reached into the pocket of his blue suit jacket and withdrew the slip of paper on which the man had written the name of the hotel. “See? Doctor comes here to see me soon.”

  One of the Australians noticed the name printed in red at the top of the paper, “Alard Associates.” He pointed it out to one of his buddies. “Paul Underwood works for them, doesn’t he?”

  “I think so. Where is Paul these days, Port Moresby?”

  His drinking pal said, “I saw him here in Wewak yesterday, him and his buddy Joey drinking it up at the Lizard Lounge. He’d just come from Port Moresby.”