BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

“Doc Mayr… Is Dr. Mayr? She okay?”

The man nodded toward a black van, parked across the street. “Don’t reckon she is. I’d say no.”

“You saying? You got to be kidding.”

“Smoking, they reckon. Smoking in bed. Makes you think. Don’t you think it makes you think?”

Ben framed a question—when did it start?—but never got to ask it before a cop lifted her hat and, down the stone steps of Doc Mayr’s destroyed house, two women in waterproofs—one walking backward—stretchered a zippered gray bag.

Drinks were lowered and chatter eased to whispers until only the hiss of rain, the hum of distant traffic, and the raucous squawking of displaced blue jays broke the silence on Vedado Way.

Fifty-eight

ON THE thirty-third floor of the 1280 West building, Theodore Hoffman sat on his balcony and filled a dry palm with Eucerin. All afternoon and into this evening, a cold front had teased the metro area heat island, bringing driving rain and fork lightning. Now it was passing, moving off toward the coast. Harsher, drier, air was tumbling in.

Armed with rubber-lined binoculars, he’d sat here since sunset, seeing what in the world he could see. Sixteen miles east—past forests of Pinus Taeda and Quercus Georgiana—he’d watched Stone Mountain glow gold and fade to gray. Then he reverted to upper Midtown’s towers. The nearest: Promenade. To the right: One Atlantic Center. Further off: GLG Grand.

He smeared his right arm, then his left, with the moisturizer, and massaged his shoulders and chest. From inside the apartment drifted a ballet by Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake, Act III, “In the Castle of Prince Siegfried.” The hero begs forgiveness, breaks the sorcerer’s spell, and finally gets the girl. The old story.

Hoffman toweled his hands, stepped through a sliding door, and slipped into a Moroccan camp vest. Then he pulled open a closet, unfolded an ironing board, and plugged a Rowenta Steam Force into an outlet.

At eleven, he’d catch up with Channel 2 news. They’d been running Midtown Blaze since breakfast. The pictures were sickening, thanks to that motherfuckin’ dickhead. Who else would want to torch Trudy Mayr? That wasn’t authorized, but there was no going back. Hoffman would wait a few months, quit BerneWerner, and relocate to Boulder or Denver.

Maybe Monica Frankman would anchor at eleven. She’d bring a touch of class to the tragedy. Like Fox, she’d go heavy on the “old lady fried” angle but wouldn’t leave it hanging with sensation. She’d fill out the story with a public service message: be cautious when smoking in bed.

Hoffman pressed his legs into a pair of black chinos, stepped into the bathroom, and returned with a mound of damp clothes. He licked a middle finger, tapped the Rowenta’s heat plate, and shook out a white dress shirt. Brother, how he hated the shirts. The collars were enough to make you bundle your laundry and haul it to conference hotels.

But time was getting on. He’d better check on the kid. They’d not spoken since the meeting with Marcia. Doctor Dickhead called earlier, not mentioning his contribution to the day’s top news, and suggested “the module man may prove a problem.”

Hoffman threatened him. “Lay a finger on Ben and I’ll bury you alive.”

And he would have.

HENRY’S BOY sounded nervous, his voice tight and raw. “Yep, hello, this is Ben.”

“Hey, you got a new phone?”

“This afternoon.”

“Sorry about that. All a tad confusing, I know. Send the bill to Crampton, why don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guess you picked up the news then? Damn tragedy. Tragedy. We’re all shocked, I can tell you. I’m shocked. Just unbelievable. Saw all the smoke this morning and wondered what that was. Right across Midtown you could see it.”

Beats of silence: Ben wasn’t convinced. “They said she was smoking in bed.”

“Damn right, what I heard. Damn nasty way to go. And to think of her yesterday, all guns blazing. That meeting must’ve cranked her all up.”

“Said nicotine helped her condition.”

Hoffman trained his eyes on the Four Seasons Hotel but tuned his attention to sound. The stakes were high. What he needed to hear were the words “no problem,” or some similar sign of acceptance. “Be a warning to others, though. Do not smoke in bed. Biggest cause of domestic fires.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ben wasn’t buying it. He sounded too cool. Surprised, but too cool.

Or was he?

“Guess, like, she’d be glad for people to know about that. Help others and everything. Quite a lady.”

Hoffman parsed the words like a polygraph examiner. Invisible needles flickered between his ears. The great transformation to fiber optics and package-switching made it trickier than the days of end-to-end copper wire. Lie? Obfuscation? He’d once caught them all. These days, ninety percent.

What happened to Trudy Mayr was as plain as the burning crosses that once lit party nights on Stone Mountain. But Hoffman knew the Louvieres. He knew what made them tick. He’d iron this situation free of wrinkles.

“Now look, Marcia’s saying maybe we need to get some kind of tribute going in DC tomorrow. Minute’s silence thing, or something along those lines. You think we should do that?”

“Me? I don’t know. Guess, I suppose. Don’t know about the protocol myself. Would have been her day, what with the vaccine being her baby and everything. Sure gonna be weird there without her.”

Weird there without her? So, he expected it would happen. “Respect’s the protocol. That old girl was one fine lady. Broke the mold after making Trudy Mayr.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I was thinking how maybe we should name our scholarships in her honor. Reflect the more scientific approach Marcia wants to get going. What you think about ‘the Dr. Gertrude S. Mayr Scholarship in Science’?”

“The Dr. Gertrude S. Mayr Scholarship in Science. Sure has a ring to it. Keep her memory alive.”

“And I know, I just know, she’ll be up there someplace, beaming down, so proud.”

“Like an angel thing.”

“Hell, they’ll make the old girl a Seraphim.”

Hoffman studied the view: busy for a Sunday evening. Traffic was backed up around the arts center. Over in Promenade, half the offices were blazing. In the