Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (16 page)

A man like that wouldn’t go around dispensing stuff that would kill people.”

“I’ve known Marcus Aptaker longer than you have,” Lanigan said. “When I first came on the force. I had the night beat in the Salem Road area. Drugstores used to keep open till midnight those days, and Aptaker’s was where I’d stop in to warm up, he had a hot plate, and many a cup of coffee I had courtesy of Marcus Aptaker, while we chewed the fat. I like Aptaker, but he’s one of those rigid, straitlaced types, that kind sees everything as black or white, nothing in between, and when he thinks someone has wronged him, I can imagine him feeling he’s judge and jury – and maybe even executioner. You remember his son, Arnold?”

“Yeah, seems to me he used to work for him.”

Lanigan lay back in his swivel chair and brought his heels to rest on the open bottom drawer, with his head cradled in his interlaced fingers, he stared up at the ceiling and said. “That same boy, Arnold, he kicked him out two, three years ago, for pilfering the till.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes, the boy was playing around in the nightclubs and gambling joints in Revere, and he’d run up a bill that he gave an IOU for, they were pressing him for payment and threatening him, I suppose, with those boys you don’t pay up, and you get your arms and legs broken. So I guess Arnold dipped into the till, and his old man caught him at it and kicked him out.”

“How come I never heard of it?”

“Because you were in Washington taking that FBI refresher course that I euchred the town into putting up the money for.”

“Oh, And what happened? Did Aptaker come to you?”

“Not then. Marcus Aptaker paid the IOU and told the collector he didn’t want him to set foot in his store again.” The chief lowered his feet to the floor and sat bolt upright. “But that kind, they never let well enough alone; they can’t stop pushing, the collector laughed at him and said the store was a public place and he’d come in any time he felt like it, that’s when Aptaker came to see me, he wanted me to warn him off. Said he’d kill this guy if he didn’t stop bothering him.”

“What could you do if this guy was from Revere?”

“He’d just moved into town. It was Joe Kestler.”

“Joe Kestler?” the lieutenant said. “I didn’t know he was in the rackets. I thought he was in business with his old man, mortgages and such.”

“I don’t know that he is in the rackets.” Lanigan said mildly. “He told Aptaker he’d bought that IOU, or discounted it.”

“So what did you do?”

“Oh, I went to see Kestler.”

“And what did you tell Kestler?”

Lanigan grinned. “It wasn’t so much what I told him as what he thought I told him, all I said was that I didn’t want any trouble in the town, that he was new here and if he wanted to live nice and peaceful, he wouldn’t go starting fights. I suppose in other places that kind of warning by the chief of police meant that if he didn’t keep his nose clean, he’d have all kinds of trouble with the authorities, that his property was likely to be reassessed, or that the building inspectors would be down to condemn his wiring or his plumbing, as far as I know, he stayed away, at least, Aptaker never complained to me again. Too bad Kestler didn’t continue to keep his distance, but I suppose with his father sick –”

“Hey, just a minute, Hugh, are you saying – why, that was all of three years ago.”

“Yeah, but some things get worse with time.” the chief said. “Aptaker’s boy never came back, the longer it lasted, the more it would hurt. Besides, if Kestler did stay away, this was the first chance Aptaker had to get back at him.”

“But the medicine wasn’t for Joe, the one he’d had trouble with. It was for his father,” Jennings objected.

“Yeah, I thought of that,” said Lanigan. “But all that appears on the medicine label is the initial J, and that applies to both the father and the son, because the father’s name was Jacob. Now if the father was sick, wouldn’t the son have come in for the medicine? So if the son didn’t, maybe he was the one who was sick and didn’t pick it up because he couldn’t.”

Eban Jennings shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe it, not Marcus Aptaker.”

“You can’t tell what people are going to do, Eban, not by what they seem.”

“But it doesn’t add up,” Jennings protested. “Aptaker has a fight with Joe Kestler three years ago, so he kills his father three years later?”

“His son left home because of that fight. Eban, and Marcus had plans for him, the store isn’t just a business with Marcus. It’s a tradition that he meant Arnold to carry on, that makes a difference.”

“Well, look here. How would he know that the new pills would do him any harm? Answer me that.”

“He wouldn’t, of course, not for sure. But according to Doc Cohen tetracycline was developed for people who are allergic to penicillin. So, being a druggist, Aptaker would know there was a good chance that it was being prescribed because the patient was allergic to penicillin. In that case a penicillin pill would do a lot of harm even if it didn’t actually kill the patient. One thing is sure – Town-Line Drugs made a mistake in a matter that drugstores never make a mistake on –”

“So what do you plan to do?”

“Well, I guess I should ask Mr. aptaker a few questions.”

“But how do you know it was Marcus Aptaker that made the switch?” Jennings asked. “How do you know it wasn’t the other pharmacist, Ross McLane? Now there’s a sonofabitch if ever there was one, he’s grouchy and sarcastic and don’t know how to talk to a person. Now get this, Hugh, when a customer comes in to buy something, it’s Marcus that waits on him. Why? Because McLane don’t know how to deal with a customer, he barks at you, ‘What do you want?’ like you’re interrupting him and he’s doing you a favor.”

“What are you getting at, Eban?”

“What I’m saying is that when customers are in the store like there must have been Wednesday because of the storm coming, it’s Marcus who’s out front. So McLane is in back working on prescriptions.”

“But McLane is new in town,” the chief pointed out. “About a year,” said Jennings.

“And we don’t know of any connection he had with Kestler.”

“That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. McLane used to have a drugstore in Revere, and that’s where Kestler comes from.”

“Well…”

“Look. Hugh, suppose you hold off talking to Aptaker for a couple of days, while I do a little snooping around Revere and see if I can come up with something.”

Lanigan nodded. “All right. I guess it can wait a couple of days, but I don’t want any long drawn-out investigation, because in the meantime Dr. Cohen is taking it on the chin.”

Except for Dr. Cohen’s certainty that Lanigan was his friend and wanted to help him, he could not understand why he had abjured him not to confront Aptaker about the mistake in the prescription.

“Let me check into it first. Doctor.” Lanigan had said. “I don’t understand. What is there to check?”

“Well, a mistake was made, there’s no question about that. It could be a matter of straight out negligence, or it could be something else –”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I want to find out.”

“What’s wrong with my going there and finding out for myself?” Dr. Cohen asked.

“Well, in a sense the police department is a party to this, because we have official custody of the pills. For that matter, we even delivered them. I’m not sure, for instance, that I should have shown them to you. I mean, if we’re involved, then it’s part of the official file on the case. If Kestler should bring a malpractice suit, a smart lawyer could make something of your being my doctor and my showing you evidence without the knowledge and not in the presence of the other party and his attorney, he could suggest, for instance, that we connived to switch them. Believe me. I’ve had plenty of cases go sour over something like that. I’d like to make some inquiries.”

“How long would it take?” Dan asked.

“Oh, I don’t know – a day or two,” the chief replied.

“Well, I guess I could wait a couple of days, but I don’t want it to drag along. It could hurt my practice.”

“I understand. I’ll get on it right away.”

Cohen’s first impulse on discovering the truth had been to call Dr. Muntz and the rest of his colleagues and tell them. On reflection, however, he decided against it. For one thing, he still resented the way they had reacted to the news of his difficulties, and for another, he did not want to suggest that he himself had had any doubts of the correctness of his treatment, he planned to tell them, of course, but only incidentally when the matter came up again in casual conversation.

But here it was Tuesday afternoon, and the occasion had not as yet arisen. It may have been his imagination, but he thought he detected a certain coolness toward him on the part of his associates. Yesterday they had gone to lunch without him, he had been closeted with a patient, but one of his colleagues could have called on the interoffice phone and asked if they should wait for him.

And for the rest of the afternoon, it had seemed that they had avoided him. To be sure, they had all had full schedules, but there were always a few minutes between one appointment and the next, even on the busiest days, when they would drop into one another’s office for a cigarette and a little arm-stretching relaxation. Not once had one of the doctors so much as waved to him during the entire afternoon. Dan had expected that Al Muntz would at least have asked him about the retreat, after all, he had got involved with it on his urging. It would have given him an opportunity to tell of his experience of the weekend as a preface to what had happened subsequently in Chief Lanigan’s office. But Muntz did not refer to it.

Tuesdays, both Kantrovitz and Muntz conducted clinics at the hospital, but they usually managed to get back to their offices before the noon hour. Today, however, neither returned by the time Cohen was ready to leave for lunch, and when he looked in on DiFrancesca, he was told, “Why don’t you run along, Dan, the wife is picking me up, we’re going to look at a new rug.”

Was it all coincidence? Or was he being oversensitive, maybe even slightly paranoid? He phoned Lanigan in the hope that he might have news for him. But Lanigan was not in his office.

“Will you have him call me when he gets in?”

“Right.”

All afternoon he waited for the call, and when it did not come by closing time, he decided to do something on his own. Surely there could be nothing wrong in just seeing Marcus Aptaker, in just talking to him, he would not mention Kestler’s prescription, he could just stop by for – for some cigars, they could talk about – about anything, the way they usually did when he stopped by and Aptaker happened to be free, then if Aptaker should happen to mention Kestler…

The letter from the temple came in the morning mail. Except for a momentary tightening of the lips, Marcus Aptaker gave no indication of his disappointment, but he was abstracted all morning and had to force a smile when he faced a customer, he waited on trade, he checked in a shipment of merchandise, he answered the phone, he rang up sales and made proper change or recorded the amount on the customer’s charge card, but it was all automatic, his mind elsewhere, wrestling with the problem.

There was no point in appealing to Safferstein for renewal of his lease as the letter suggested, since Safferstein had been trying to purchase the store for his brother-in-law. Now he would not have to buy; he had only to wait the few months for the lease to expire and then take it over. Safferstein had originally hinted that he was prepared to pay a good price, but obviously his purchase of the block changed that, aptaker felt certain that if Safferstein were willing to go through with his offer to purchase – and it was doubtful that he would now – it would be on the basis of buying the stock as depressed merchandise and the fixtures for only what they would bring in the secondhand market. Goodwill was out of the question.

He toyed with the possibility of renting another store. It would mean a sizable investment in new fixtures, but if his son were with him, it would be a logical move. But that expectation, he now realized, had been little more than a daydream and even less likely now since his son’s short visit home. It became clear to him that he was alone now, and sixty-two, too old to start a new business.

It flashed across his mind momentarily that he might speak to Kaplan and ask him to reconsider or perhaps let him make a plea directly to the board of directors of the temple. But why should they give him special consideration when he was not even a member of the congregation?

He faced the immediate problem of deciding what he was going to tell his wife. In his mind, he rehearsed the tone and attitude he might adopt, he must not let her know how much he was hurt. “I suppose it’s just as Well, I’ve worked hard all my life and it’s time I took a rest, maybe we could take a trip, and then with my Social Security and yours and with what I’ve saved up, we should be able to manage, maybe I could get a part-time job just to keep busy. I’ll admit I wouldn’t have sold out, but now that it’s happened, I’m kind of glad.” But would she believe him?

McLane arrived a little after noon, and after giving him a few instructions, Aptaker went into the prescription room to eat the lunch which Rose prepared for him every day.

He ate quickly, as he invariably did in the store, taking large bites of his sandwich and helping it down with gulps of coffee, as had happened a couple of times before, when he finished eating, he felt a lump in his chest, he drank a glass of water slowly, and that gave him some measure of relief, he wanted to belch but couldn’t. Finally, he yielded to the urgency of the dull ache and mixed a little bicarbonate of soda in a glass, that indeed induced a belch, but the relief was momentary, and almost immediately he felt the pressure in his chest again.

McLane looked at him with some concern. “Got a heartburn? Here, take one of these,” he said, picking up a tin from the patent-medicine counter. “They’re good. I’ve tried them.”

Marcus chewed on the tablet and then took another, and again there was momentary relief; but the pressure came back again. It occurred to him that the pain and pressure might be from his heart rather than from indigestion. When McLane wasn’t looking, he opened a small bottle of nitroglycerin tablets and put one of the tiny pills under his tongue, almost immediately there was a sharp tightness in his head. It did not last long, and by the time it was over, the pain in his chest was gone.