"I"m not sure."
Chapter 47
THE PATHOLOGIST DIDN"T even bother to look up from his lunch. "You"re a friend of Larry"s, right?" he asked me.
Truth be told, I didn"t know Larry from Adam or the man in the moon, but I did know the woman with the Joint Terrorism Task Force who worked with Larry at the New York Port Authority, whose brother at the NYPD forensics lab was a friend of the guy in the Queens medical examiner"s office sitting before me at his desk with a diet peach Snapple in one hand and a half-eaten ham sandwich on rye in the other.
Call it six degrees of O"Hara needs a favor.
All starting with two words I saw on the television perched above the counter at the Heavenly Diner.
A CNN reporter was standing outside Kennedy Airport. The sound was muted, but the headline in big white type above the news crawl was screaming, at least to me. NEWLYWEDS DEAD.
As soon as I hung up with Joe, I immediately began calling in favors from my days with the NYPD. I needed details. I needed access.
Maybe these honeymooners dying so soon on the heels of the Breslows was nothing more than a coincidence, but as I learned the gruesome details of what happened at that Delta terminal, it was easy to think otherwise.
The hard part would be getting confirmation. Fast.
The totally uninterested pathologist-officially the deputy chief medical examiner-finally looked up at me in his cramped office in Queens. His name was Dr. Dimitri Papenziekas, and he was a Greek with a Noo Yawk att.i.tude. "Hey, I"m not freakin" Superman," he informed me.
Yeah, and I"m not the Green Hornet. So now that we have that settled...
"How fast?" I asked. "That"s all I need to know."
How fast could he complete a test to determine if cyclosarin was present in the airport couple"s bodies?
"Tomorrow afternoon," he said.
"How about tonight?"
How about you go screw yourself? said his expression. And that was screw spelled with an f, by the way.
"Okay, okay...make it tomorrow morning," I said as if I were the one doing him the favor.
Dimitri took a bite of the ham sandwich, his head bobbing in thought as he chewed.
"Fine, tomorrow morning," he said. Then he wagged his finger. "Just don"t be one of those guys who call me in a few hours to see how it"s going. That"s when I really take my time."
"Yeah, I hate those guys," I said. "Those guys are d.i.c.ks."
Christ, good thing he said that. I would"ve called him for sure. That would"ve gone over well, huh, O"Hara? Like a fart in a crowded elevator.
No, the next morning was okay. I didn"t need to press him. Besides, more important than the "when" was the "who," as in, Who else would know he was doing me this favor? No one, I hoped.
"So this is just between the two of us, right?" I asked, wanting to make sure.
"That"s what Tiger Woods said," he shot back.
He laughed while I wondered if that was actually a yes or a no. Finally, he a.s.sured me that I had nothing to worry about. No one would know.
"Thanks," I said.
"Don"t sweat it. Any friend of Larry"s is a friend of mine," he said. Then, of all things, Dimitri winked. "And if you actually ever meet Larry, you can tell him I said so."
Chapter 48
HURRY UP AND WAIT.
That was pretty much the feeling I had as I returned home to Riverside for an overnight holding pattern, my next move at the mercy of a ham-sandwich-eating Greek pathologist who didn"t like to be rushed.
In the meantime, I still owed Warner Breslow an update. After dialing his office, I was told by his secretary that he was out. "But let me patch you into his cell," she quickly added.
Clearly, I was on the guy"s short list.
"What"ve you got?" he asked right off the bat. There was no polite chitchat upfront. h.e.l.l, there wasn"t even a h.e.l.lo.
My update covered everything I knew on what I said was "our Chinese angle," including the fact that I was waiting on a full background check on the one Chinese pa.s.sport holder who"d stayed at the Governor"s Club.
What I didn"t say a word about, though, was my trip to the Queens medical examiner"s office and the possible connection-or lack thereof-between Ethan and Abigail"s murder and the death of those honeymooners out at the airport. Until I got my answer back on the cyclosarin question, there was no point getting into it.
"Are you sure you don"t want me to call my friends at our emba.s.sy in Beijing?" Breslow asked. "You know, maybe expedite that background check?"
The impatience in his tone wasn"t so much with me as it was with the general concept of waiting, something billionaires never seemed to be very good at. My only play was to make clear what exactly he was waiting on.
"With all due respect to your friends at the emba.s.sy," I said, "the kind of background check we"re talking about doesn"t exactly come through official channels."
That wasn"t me at my most subtle, but sometimes less isn"t more. More is more. Especially with a guy like Breslow.
"Fair enough," he said. "Call me as soon as you know anything else."
"Will do."
I hung up the phone, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and quickly flipped through the mail that I"d brought in. There was no second coming of a Bible or any other mysterious package.
In fact, bills and catalogs notwithstanding, the only actual "mail" was a postcard from Marshall and Judy, who were on their Mediterranean cruise. On the front was a picture of Malta. On the back, in Judy"s handwriting, was a brief essay on the history of Malta. Of course. The only thing not Malta-related was her postscript. "Don"t forget to water my garden!"