John Sandford - Escape Clause

“All right. What I really need to know is whether you suspect any suppliers or manufacturers of the animal products of selling illicit products-like tiger or rhinoceros parts.”

“No, although I’ve never given it much thought. They’re all pretty commercial-there’s not a big demand for the products, so you have a few small retail suppliers nationally, most of them selling through the Internet. I know anecdotally that there’s a demand for some tiger products, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an underground Internet thingy that sold some of it. I do know there is a man here in Minnesota who collects bear gallbladders and ships them to China,” she said.

Toby Strait , Virgil thought. “I’ve heard about him and I’ve got him on my list to talk to,” Virgil said. “Do you know either a Dr. Winston Peck, MD, in St. Paul, or India Healer Sandra S. A. Gupti-Mack in Minneapolis?”

The corners of Monty-McCall’s mouth turned down and she said, “Where did you come up with those names? They can’t be on your expert lists-they must be suspects.”

Virgil leaned back. “I’d prefer not to say… but if you have any information?”

She’d already drunk half the mug of wine and now took another gulp and did a fake shiver as she swallowed. “Winston Peck is a creep. Believe me, I know. He did a seminar on traditional medicines, oh, five years ago, where we met. I was talking to him afterward, and one thing led to another, you know, and he asked me out. We went out a couple times… To cut it short, he’s a sex freak. I would have nothing to do with him.”

“Violent?” Virgil asked.

“Not… dangerously. He didn’t try to drug me or anything. He didn’t try to rape me. He’s simply creepy.”

“Do you want to define ‘creepy,’ or do you want to pass?” Virgil asked.

“Mmm, I’ll give you the outline. Winston is a narcissist; he wants women to… service him. Not, you know, interactive sex; he wants what he wants. When he gets what he wants, his interest in sex goes away. If you understand what I’m saying.”

Virgil rubbed the side of his nose, then said, “Okay. What about the tigers? Could he do that?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Possibly. He lives high and there’s a rumor that he can’t practice medicine anymore. He might need the money. I looked up his degree and it’s legit, but the rumor is, he did something really bad and can’t practice.”

Virgil nodded: that was interesting. “No details?”

“No. I looked him up a lot on the Internet, but couldn’t find anything,” she said.

“What about Sandra Gupti-Mack?”

“Yeah. Sandy Mack graduated from high school down in Farmington and sold real estate for years, and then she went off to India for about fifteen minutes one year and came back as a guru with a dot on her forehead and a hyphenated name that she hopes sounds Indian,” Monty-McCall said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hyphenated names, obviously, if they’re legitimate. She does what she calls psychotherapy and peddles her homemade pills all over the country. She even wrote a book about it: The Buddha’s Apothecary . Now, I’ll tell you what: it would not surprise me at all if she used animal-based medications. She brags about being a traditionalist ‘compounding pharmacy,’ so she’d need the raw product.”

“But you don’t think she’s totally legitimate?” Virgil asked.

She finished the wine with a gulp, pulled a hand across her lips, and said, “Huh. That bitch wouldn’t know an ethic if one bit her on her butt. The Buddha’s Apothecary . Are you kiddin’ me? It’s like the Buddha was a drugstore clerk in his spare time. A soda jerk or something. She’s gotten rich with her pills. I’ll tell you something else that didn’t occur to me until right now. If she had some real honest-to-God tiger, she could roll her tiger pills out there for a million dollars. Maybe more. How many pills could you get out of a tiger? A hundred thousand or more?”

“I have no idea.”

“Bet she does.”

–

Monty-McCall was refilling her beer mug with wine when Virgil left. Her information had been fairly tepid, with a few interesting raisins: that whole thing about Peck having a questionable history. And Virgil got in his truck thinking about female alcoholics, and how they were less visible than men-except when they got behind a steering wheel. Usually though, they’d sit home and hammer the white wine, instead of going out to a bar and drinking and falling down in public. He liked an after-work beer himself, had no problem with people who liked to take a drink. Sometimes, though, you could see what was coming: Monty-McCall was killing herself.

–

Sandra Gupti-Mack was next up. She lived in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, in a gray two-story house that probably dated to the prewar years. Two bicycles were chained to the white-painted railings on a tiny front porch, and a bronze statue of the seated Buddha gazed at passersby from a wall niche that once had been a window. The Buddha was positioned on a rug, the rug providing a platform for the bolts that held the statue in its niche. Evidence , Virgil thought, of the existence of Buddha-statue thieves.

Above the Buddha was a sign much like Monty-McCall’s: “Dr. Sandra Gupti-Mack, Psychotherapy and Traditional Medicine”; beside him was a yellowing copy of The Buddha’s Apothecary .

Gupti-Mack was home, too.

A tall, heavy, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who trembled like an aspen when she opened the door, Gupti-Mack was dressed all in white, a blouse that looked like a doctor’s hospital jacket with matching white slacks with bell bottoms. She was barefoot; she had a black dot in the middle of her forehead, not quite centered between her eyebrows.

When Virgil introduced himself, she said, “I have a client at the moment. I’ll be with her for another twenty minutes, and I have another client a half hour after that…”

“I’ll walk up to the corner store and get a Coke and come sit on your porch and wait,” Virgil said. “Come get me when your client leaves. I won’t need a half hour.”

She nodded, reluctantly, and closed the door. He walked up the street, got a Coke, came back and sat on the porch, and watched the people go by. Mostly women, getting into their lives. Uptown was where you went after you graduated from the university and got a job in marketing at Pillsbury or General Mills, but still had that butterfly tattoo on your shoulder blade, hip, or ankle.

As he was sitting there, an ancient man hobbled by, assisted by a cane. He looked like he’d been dressed by somebody else, in a floppy-brimmed boonie hat, a T-shirt that said “Chairman of the Board” over a black-and-white photo of Frank Sinatra, and faded madras shorts. He was wearing black over-the-calf socks and sandals. His legs looked like they came off a café table.

He stopped on the sidewalk and eyed Virgil. “What are you looking at?”

Virgil said, “Mostly, the girls going by.”

“Oh. Yeah. I used to do that,” the old man said. After a moment’s thought: “I just can’t remember why.”

He went on his way.

–

A half hour after Gupti-Mack said she’d be twenty minutes, a red-eyed woman walked out, dabbing at her eye sockets with a Kleenex. As Virgil stood up, she said, “I hope you’re not here to harass Dr. Gupti.”

“No, I’m not,” Virgil said.

“You’d better not be. My husband’s a lawyer and he’d be on you like a permanent wave.”

“I’m…” Virgil realized he had no place to go with the conversation-he didn’t even know what a permanent wave was-so he fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “If your husband thinks he needs to talk to me, my number is on the card.”