“That was me in younger days,” Brennan said.
Brennan stood behind the table, fussing with papers. He was a large man, with white hair, a fleshy nose and fleshy ears, and querulous green eyes that matched the green of his necktie. A white shirt and gray suit completed his ensemble. His face was finely hatched with burst capillaries, which could be a sign of too much golf, too much drink, or both.
As Virgil walked away from the elevator, Brennan came out from behind the table to shake hands, and asked, “Is Sergeant Trane still working this case?”
“Yes, but she’s in court today,” Virgil said. Brennan pointed at a chair, and Virgil took it. The receptionist came back unasked with a can of frosty-cold Diet Coke, a glass full of ice, and a napkin to protect the desk. Virgil thanked her, said, “I don’t need the glass,” and she took it and went away.
When she’d closed the door, Brennan said, “Sergeant Trane had concluded that our case didn’t have much to do with the murder of Barth Quill.”
“She’s probably right,” Virgil said. “I’m running out of leads and thought I should take a look. We’ve had a couple of minor breaks in the past couple of days, and maybe something in the suit will, mmm, mesh with those.”
“I see... You haven’t read the actual suit, though?”
“No, I read Margaret’s summary of it. A short summary.”
“All right. Let me give you a little more. It’s basically a nuisance suit, and if we settle—and we just might—the biggest benefactoris going to be a sleazy fellow member of the bar named Robin Jones. He’s an associate with the Larry Hardy firm over in Minneapolis. You know, ‘Call Me Lare,’ the billboards?”
“Wait a minute! Hardy’s involved in this?”
Brennan’s heavy white eyebrows arched. “Shouldn’t he be?”
“I talked to him last night,” Virgil said. “We—Sergeant Trane and I—arrested one of his clients on prostitution charges. She’s directly connected to the Quill murder. A witness. We talked to them for half an hour, and Hardy never said a thing about this lawsuit.”
Brennan leaned back in his chair, and said, “That is extremely interesting. Extremely. The suit was filed against the university and not Dr. Quill directly, but I’ve had some rumblings from Jones about amending the suit to go after Quill’s estate. Which I understand is quite large.”
“It is,” Virgil said. “Many millions.” He drew his hand down over his eyes, thinking, and finally added, “It’s interesting, but I don’t see how it would tie to the murder.”
Brennan: “The plaintiff, in the original suit, made a series of statements about assurances she got from Quill before she and her husband agreed to the operation that led, indirectly, to her husband’s death. With Quill dead, he’s not available to counter those claims. Which is why I suspect that Jones is talking about amending the suit. It wasn’t likely to be especially successful against the university, which also indemnified Dr. Quill on charges of malpractice. But now if the plaintiff should claim that Quill personally made fraudulent promises about the success of the operation, then they might be able to split the estate away from the university. A successful suit against Quill’s estate could be lucrative.”
“I don’t know enough about the suit...”
“Then here it is in a nutshell,” Brennan said, making a steeple with his fingers. “Carl McDonald was quadriplegic. He’d been an electrician with a company called The Brothers Electric. One day he fell off a ladder, landed on the back of his head, and pinched off the spinal cord at the neck. He still had some mobility in his left arm, hand, and fingers, but little control. And that was all he had. Quill agreed to take him as a patient, and after some time an operation was done by a team of surgeons under Quill’s direction.”
“I understand that Quill doesn’t operate himself,” Virgil said.
“That’s correct. Anyway, after the operation, McDonald did in fact recover further use of his left arm, hand, and fingers. He went through a period of physical therapy in an effort to maximize the use of all three. He also used pills, administered by his wife, to control pain in his neck, as well as elsewhere—new pain, his wife says, the result of the operation. When he got home, after the main round of physical therapy, his wife left the pain pills on a bedside table, and, while she was out shopping for groceries, McDonald managed to get ahold of the bottle and remove the lid with his teeth. He swallowed all the pills and was dead by the time his wife got back.”
Virgil stared for a minute. “He committed suicide? And Quill’s team is being sued for malpractice?”
“Yes. McDonald’s wife claims the operation was a failure and even created new pain—that’s the malpractice part—and that Quill and his team should have known that McDonald would require extensive psychological counseling in the wake of the failure. She claims that Quill told them that McDonald would make a substantial recovery. When I asked him, Quill denied sayingthat, and his team backs him up: they say he never said such a thing.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, we have a bereaved wife suing a big, rich university and a big, rich doctor, and the decision will be made by a jury that—”
“Isn’t big and rich. Got it,” Virgil said. “You haven’t said so, but the wife, and Hardy’s firm, may stand to benefit from Quill’s murder.”
“I probably wouldn’t actually say that out loud myself,” Brennan said with a grin. “But if somebody else suggested that, I wouldn’t object.”
“I gotta talk to Margaret,” Virgil said, looking at his watch, “right now. We don’t want to make any deals with Hardy’s client. Not yet.”
“Feel free,” Brennan said. He pointed to a door in the side wall. “If you would like some privacy, that goes into my personal bathroom.”
—
Virgil stepped into the bathroom—a wood-lined cubicle that included a steam shower—wondered, in a brief fit of paranoia, if the room was bugged, and called Trane. She was in an interview room with Cohen and Hardy and stepped out to take his call. Virgil told her about his conversation with Brennan, that Hardy might benefit, possibly in a significant way, from Quill’s murder.
“What are you telling me? You think Cohen might have done it?”
