Due Diligence (10 page)

“What's that mean?”

“Each secretary copies all of her computer files onto specially labeled disks. The firm collects them and stores them somewhere off the premises just in case a fire or other disaster destroys our original computer records. Rachel, I bet some of the documents I typed from Bruce's dictation tapes are still on one of those backup disks.”

“How do you get them back?”

“I'll just ask. The gal in charge of our computer systems is the one who takes care of the off-site storage. I'll have her get me my old backup disks tomorrow. I'll give you a holler if there's anything on them.”

“That's great, Karen.” I paused. “You need to be careful, though.”

“Why?”

“Just like I said before. Hiram Sullivan doesn't like me poking around. You could get in a lot of trouble if he found out you were helping me.”

“I'm not afraid.”

“You need to be cautious, Karen. When you ask for those backup disks, be sure you have a plausible explanation for why you need them.”

“I'll pretend that I accidentally deleted one of the documents. It's happened before.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

“Well?” Benny said after I hung up. He was in the process of cracking open his fortune cookie.

I shrugged. “We might still get lucky.”

Benny read his fortune. “Ahhh,” he said with a smile. “Talk about luck.”

“What's it say?”

In a silly Chinese accent he read aloud, “Soon you will savor pleasures of heavily sedated JAL stewardess in Hong Kong basket.”

I broke open my fortune cookie and pulled out the fortune. “Ahhh. ‘Soon obnoxious friend will receive full frontal lobotomy he so urgently requires.'”

Chapter Nine

Karen called the following morning with news that she had been able to retrieve two documents from Bruce's R&D directory: one created two weeks before his death, the other about a week before his death. She had printed them both for me. I worked out the pickup arrangements and then called down to the clerk's office at the U.S. District Court to leave a message for Jacki, who was on her way there to file a brief for me. Jacki called ten minutes later, and I told her to drop by Smilow & Sullivan for a package that would be waiting out at the front desk with her name on it.

As I waited for Jacki's return, I pulled out the folder of materials she had copied for me last night at the St. Louis University Law School library after her evening class. I had asked her to find me some information on Phrenom, the drug Bob Ginsburg had described as the crown jewel of Chemitex Bioproducts. Jacki had copied the relevant pages from the
Physicians' Desk Reference
. I skimmed through the listings for Phrenom Injection, Phrenom Capsules, and Phrenom Tablets, all three of which were also identified by their generic name: Phenylpyrrole Sodium. According to the heading entitled “Indications and Usage,” the drug was to be used for “the relief of symptoms associated with the following conditions, but only after other therapeutic measures have been tried and found unsatisfactory: active rheumatoid arthritis, active juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, active osteoarthritis, and acute attacks of degenerative joint diseases of the hips and knees.”

I had also asked Jacki to find me some biographical materials on Douglas Armstrong's days as head of what had then been known as Armstrong Bioproducts. She had photocopied seven pages from a
New Yorker
profile than ran several months ago. I settled back to read it. Most of the story was already familiar to me—and no doubt to thousands, or even millions, of others. Indeed, Jacki's cover note to me stated that Armstrong had also been profiled in recent issues of
Vanity Fair, People
, and the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
. Obviously, the senator's spin doctors and PR flacks had been hard at work getting their candidate ready for the big announcement.

According to the article, Douglas Armstrong was a thirty-three-year-old physician when he founded Armstrong Bioproducts in 1970. During the early 1960s, young Dr. Armstrong had spent three years in the Peace Corps stationed in Costa Rica. He worked in a clinic in the poor section of San Jose and his wife Edie taught mathematics in a village school outside of town. He had long been intrigued by botanical drugs, and on many weekends he traveled into the rain forests with Indian guides to gather samples of the plants that formed the basis of many of the folk cures of the country.

One folk medicine that had particularly fascinated him was the tuber of the peloto plant, which grew only in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. Although the tubers had an extremely bitter carrot flavor that made them nearly inedible, they were nevertheless eaten raw by the women in the tribe. As Armstrong observed, all of the women shared one thing in common: a total absence of any symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, a painful and crippling form of arthritis that afflicts millions of women every year, most of whom develop it between the ages of thirty and fifty.

His fascination with native pharmacology remained strong after he returned to the United States. In 1970, he mortgaged everything he owned to start Armstrong Bioproducts. His goal was to replicate and manufacture in the laboratory the more promising botanical drugs he had observed in the rain forests of Costa Rica. He was convinced that somewhere within the bitter tubers of the peloto plant was the active ingredient of a powerful arthritis medicine that could bring relief to millions of people, if only he could figure out how to isolate it and produce it in large quantities in a laboratory.

The early years at Armstrong Bioproducts were lean ones. Twice creditors of the company tried to force it into bankruptcy, and both times the company fought them off with the brilliant legal maneuverings of Armstrong's attorney, Sherman Ross. Operating on a shoestring budget, Armstrong and his small staff of researchers worked on isolating the active ingredient in the peloto tubers. In 1977, the company received FDA approval for Phrenom Injection—the drug that transformed the fortunes of Armstrong and his company almost overnight. He took the company public in 1979 and, in the six hours it took for the initial public offering to sell out, he went from a net worth of $57.25 to a net worth of $12 million.

Eighteen months later, his wife of twenty-one years died of ovarian cancer. Their marriage had been an extraordinarily close one, the intimacy actually enhanced by Edie's inability to have children. Her death threw him into a depression that lasted nearly a year. “I lost my bearings when I lost Edie,” Armstrong told the reporter for the
New Yorker
. When he regained them, he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, sold all of his holdings in Armstrong Bioproducts, crisscrossed the state of Missouri in a marathon campaign, and won his very first election by an astonishing fifty-eight percent of the vote.

The article made a passing reference to Sammy Heller's hostile takeover of Armstrong Bioproducts several years later. According to the reporter, Douglas Armstrong was no longer a shareholder of the company at the time. As I was making a note to do some further checking on Sammy Heller, the outer door opened and Jacki came in, grousing under her breath. I heard her fumbling around in the other room.

“Hello?” I called.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” she grumbled as she walked into my office, hunched over. She had the package from Karen in her left hand. Her right hand was clutching her left breast.

I stood up, worried. “Jacki, are you okay?”

“No.”

“Is it your heart?”

“Hah,” she laughed derisively. Her blond wig was slightly askew. She placed the manila envelope on my desk. “Here's the package from Smilow and Sullivan.” Still bent over, she turned to go.

“Wait a minute, Jacki. Tell me what's wrong.”

“Never mind.”

“Jacki!”

She froze. After a moment, she turned to face me, her right hand still clutching her left breast. Her eyes were red.

“Tell me, Jacki,” I said gently.

She sighed, blinking back the tears. “If nothing else, I've got one helluva defective products claim.” She was wearing a long-sleeved navy blue shift with a white sailor collar. The shift was cut loose and ended just below her knees. “You ready for this?” she asked.

She straightened up and moved her hand away from her left breast. I stared at the fabric, half expecting to see blood or an alarming discoloration, but there was nothing visibly amiss. Then I heard a faint clattering, as if someone were dropping tiny pebbles to the floor. I leaned forward over the desk to look at the floor. There were about twenty little black and white pellets scattered on the floor around her feet. They were dropping down, one by one, from under her dress.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Birdseed.”

“Birdseed?” I repeated.

“Watch this.” She placed her hands on her hips and wiggled her upper torso vigorously. When she stopped, I watched in astonishment as the birdseed came tumbling down in a torrent. When the downpour ended, there was a pile of birdseed on the floor between her legs and dozens of loose seeds strewn on the floor around her.

Slowly, I moved my eyes upward, battling against the urge to grin. Afraid I'd lose it if we made eye contact, I paused at her chest level. Her left boob had disappeared.

Birdseed
? I glanced down at the floor and then back at her missing boob. I could feel my lips quiver.

Please God, don't let me laugh
.

I heard a chuckle. I looked at Jacki's face. Her eyes were shiny with tears but she was smiling. “Can you believe this?” she asked. “Birdseed falsies. They're supposed to look and move like real ones. I pay extra for them and then the damn seam rips. Thank God I'm not outside, or I'd be fighting the pigeons off my chest. It would have been a scene out of Hitchcock.”

“Oh, Jacki,” I said, aiming for sympathy and almost getting there.

I started giggling, and then both of us exploded with hysterical laughter. We laughed so hard that we ended up on our hands and knees on the floor, tears on cheeks. It was just what the doctor ordered. Both of us needed a good belly laugh.

Twenty minutes later, when we'd cleaned up the birdseed and Jacki had headed back to the lingerie store like a Marine commando on a search-and-destroy operation, I settled in my chair and opened the package Jacki had picked up from Karen Harmon, the one containing the two documents she had typed from Bruce Rosenthal's dictation tapes.

Both documents were still in rough-draft form and consisted of sentence fragments, key words, and other notes that no doubt had made far more sense to Bruce than me. Reading through them, I could almost hear Bruce dictating the entries as he paged through the R&D files at Chemitex Bioproducts.

The first document was dictated about two weeks before he died. It appeared to be notes of his review of laboratory research files on various attempts to develop antiseptics, fungicides, and psoriasis agents. His notes summarized the contents of those files in a neutral, dispassionate tone, and ended each section with the phrase:
“Not promising
.” In all five pages, he raised only one question, and that was in the section on fungicides:

Need to check PDR—didn't Squibb solve this problem w/Myco products?

The other document, dictated eight days before he died, appeared to be notes of his review of laboratory research files on arthritis medications. Like the first document, it began in a neutral, dispassionate tone. The first section covered research on steroids and ended with the phrase,
“Not promising
.” The second covered something called “Newer NSAIDs” and ended with the same phrase. But the final area, which started at the bottom of page four under the heading “Other” and ended on the following page, consisted entirely of a series of increasingly agitated questions and comments:

Primax? Where?

Cross-referenced materials not there—Filing glitch?—Need to locate—Need to ask

What's going on with Guillain B?

Where are Primax files???—must find

Be sure to look for LGB—Sounds like typical G-B syndrome

Cross-reference to Phase Two Trial?—Need to check date—Phase Two Trial?—Not possible!?

Those were the last words in the document:
“Not possible
!?”

Karen called while I was still pondering Bruce's list of questions and comments.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I'm baffled. Do you know what any of these abbreviations stand for?”

“Such as?”

“LGB?”

“No.”

“PDR?”

“I think so. There's a big fat book called the
Physician's Desk Reference
. Bruce has a copy in his office. So do some of the other guys. When they talk about it, they call it 'the
PDR
.'”

“I know the book,” I said, making a note. “What about Primax?”

“I've never heard of that.”

“How about NSAIDs?”

“Sorry.”

“That's okay. This stuff could be a big help, Karen. At least now I have something more to go on. Bruce seemed disturbed by what he had found in those last files.”

“You can say that again.”

“I assume that whatever bothered him would bother someone else with a background in pharmacology or chemistry. What I need to do,” I mused aloud, “is to get my hands on the files that bothered Bruce, and then turn them over to an expert that I trust to explain them to me.”

“I'm already working on it,” Karen said proudly.

“What do you mean?”

“I called down to Chemitex just before lunch. I talked to one of the girls who helped coordinate copying documents when Bruce was down there going through their files. I told her that I needed another set of the R and D documents that they copied for Bruce if it wasn't too much trouble. She said she'd check to see if the documents they copied for him were still tagged.”

“Karen, I appreciate your help, but you really shouldn't have done that. You could get in a lot of trouble.”

“Don't worry. I followed your advice: I have a story all set if anyone asks.”

“Okay, but I really don't want you doing anything more without clearing it with me first. I know you want to help, and you've been terrific so far, but you're too visible down there. First of all, you could get fired.” I paused, lowering my voice. “Second of all, I don't know what we're dealing with. I'm assuming that something Bruce was involved with at the office got him killed. It could have been completely unrelated to this Chemitex due diligence, but probably not. You've already gone way beyond the call of duty, Karen. If Chemitex sends you those documents, that'll be fabulous. But if not, don't worry about it. I'll find another way to get them. It's really better for you to keep a low profile for a while.”

“Okay,” she said dejectedly.

“Don't be down, Karen. You've done a terrific job so far. You've given me plenty of great leads. Let me run them down, see where they lead. I'll figure out our next move. I promise I'll let you know everything I find. Okay?”

She sighed. “Okay.” She sounded a little more chipper.

'Your fiancé would be proud of you.”

It was almost one o'clock when I hung up. I stood and stretched as I gazed out my office window. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in the Central West End—a perfect day for walking. I strolled down Maryland to the St. Louis Bread Company, picking up the current issue of the
Riverfront Times
on the way. I bought myself two sourdough rolls and a cup of espresso and took my tray out to one of the sidewalk tables. I munched on my rolls and read the paper and sipped my coffee and tried to pretend that I was on the Left Bank in the 1920s, waiting at the Cafe du Dome on the Boulevard Montparnasse for Ernest and Gertrude and Alice and Scott to arrive. But I couldn't concentrate on the newspaper or the fantasy because I couldn't keep Bruce's series of questions out of my mind: