bottle as he said, “He’s a grown man, Jessie. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. It’s not up to you to go tearing up Old Lady Fenster or parade over to San Antone to yell at the doctors. Especially since he’s been workin’ with ’em ever since you left.”
My radar went off. San Antonio wasn’t the Parkinson’s capital of Texas. Houston was.
“Talk to me about San Antone,” I said, shedding my anger a hair. “Why’d he go there?”
Hank toyed with a coaster. I knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of his mouth. “Your great-uncle decided last year he’d check into a cure on his own. He found a lab that was workin’ on one and talked to ’em.”
My heart sank. “Don’t tell me. They agreed to make him a guinea pig.” At his nod, I added, “And he chose them because they’re using an extract of some damned insect saliva in the formula.”
Hank looked at his hands as he said, “They’re still workin’ on the cure. The head guy at the lab, Dr. Thompson, he said the drug had been tested on mice okay. The San Antone fellas just need a little more time.”
I got mad all over again. “It doesn’t sound like they have time. What’s this outfit called?”
“Cradion Pharmaceutical.”
“And they’re hooked up to Scooter’s regular doctors how?” I demanded.
“They offered the trial drug and assigned Dr. Thompson to his case. His G.P. just oversees his checkups.”
“Did his insurance pick up the cost?”
“Not much of it. The Slapdash is mortgaged up to its neck.”
I bit my lip. Damned old fool and his damned fool ideas. “He should’ve paid a hit man. It would’ve been cheaper and faster.”
“Ever’body did their level best, Jessie. Sometimes it just don’t work out.”
“I should have tried harder.”
“We all could have.”
“No. I mean I should have gone to court, got him declared incompetent, and then put him in decent care when he was first diagnosed. I should have been here to make sure the doctors were going to help him, not hurt him.”
Hank stared at me, mouth tightening with what might have been anger. “He’d never forgive you for doing that to him. You got no call to be trying to run his life when he’s still kickin’ around like a mean old hoss.” His bearded chin stuck out a little as he said, “He wouldn’t have tried to tell you what to do.”
I waited for Hank to finish. Behind him, the band’s guitar player slipped the strap over his head and twanged a string, prompting a pretty brunette in tight jeans and boots to drag her man onto the scraped-up dance floor. A group of cowboys in the corner laughed over a hand of cards.
When Hank ran out of things to say, I stood. “See you around.” I headed for the door.
“Jessie,” he warned.
“It’s okay. I won’t bother anybody.” I threw a few bucks on the bar for Marian on my way out.
On the porch, cool wind brushed my cheeks. Only then did I feel the sticky wetness of tears. The man I knew as a father was dying because he was too stubborn to do anything else. A homeopath had given him false hope and some bogus pharmaceutical company had made him a guinea pig and thanked him for it by killing him.
But I was the one who hadn’t been here. I hadn’t done what needed to be done.
If anybody had put the first nail in Scooter’s coffin, it was me.
Chapter 2
Hammarbya paludosa. The Bog Orchid. Officially extinct in Britain, the last wild one had been stolen in December of 2001 from a secret site in the Yorkshire Dales and sold on the black market, probably for around ten grand.
Normally when you think of orchids, you think of the gorgeous, vibrantly colored petals of Phalaenopsis, or the pure seduction of Paphiopedilum, commonly known as lady’s slipper. Orchids are the most blatantly sexual flowers of any on earth, rampant in their attractions, decadent in their enticements.
The Bog Orchid is a runt. It’s a dull stunted foxglove of an orchid—long spikes studded with greenish, waxy-looking leaves that are actually flowers. Ugly thing.
Kew Gardens never succeeded in reproducing it despite their best efforts. There may be a few in Northern Ireland, but no one’s saying if or where.
Most orchid collectors have a couple of rare orchids like this one to trot out at flowering parties and green their guests with envy. The idea is to have lots of different orchids to show one’s taste, one’s style, one’s sensibilities.
Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III has over fifty Bog Orchids.
I knew because in the thirty minutes I’d been kept waiting in Building 6, I’d counted them: fifty-seven ugly plants, fifty-seven ugly flowering spikes, 942 ugly flowers.
Tardiness is the privilege of the billionaire who feeds me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind. It kept us honest; we always knew where we stood. But von Brutten had pulled me away from Scooter, and I was ready to get this show on the road. In the time I’d not been counting, I’d been mulling over how to tell him I wasn’t going on a fishing expedition for him, at least not while Scooter was still around.
“Dr. Robards.”
I turned. A bow-tied, black-jacketed butler stood in the greenhouse’s doorway. His high forehead sprouted a light humidity sheen. The Bog Orchid does need, after all, a bog.
“Hullo, Sims,” I said. “How’s it going?”
He bowed. “Mr. von Brutten requests your presence in the morning room.”
Well, hell. That’d be a twenty-minute walk. “Then why did he send me here when I arrived?”
“I am afraid I cannot say, Dr. Robards, but I am sorry for the inconvenience.”
I wondered if all butlers were taught to speak without either expression or gesticulation. Sims might be being truthful about what he didn’t know, or he might not, and I’d never know. Couldn’t help but like the guy. “Lead on,” I said.
Von Brutten’s estate, fancifully called Parsifal, was a sprawling thousand-acre ranch fetched up against a low ridge about an hour outside Spokane, Washington. The ranch had two lakes and a great view of the Columbia River. I’d been in about half of von Brutten’s greenhouses, Buildings 1 through 9. The other half he kept to himself. It rankled, not being trusted. But if I’d been robbed blind for my plants as often as he had, I might be a little picky about my buddies, too. The only reason I knew those greenhouses were there was because I’d seen the satellite photos. Sometimes it helps to date the right people.
When it came down to it, as much as I hated to admit it, I owed Daley for getting me this job. My first year out of grad school, I managed to track down Cattleya turneris in Costa Rica, a rare blue orchid the year blue was all the rage in collecting circles. Plucked it right out from under
