Head Case Read online

  “Neurochemistry,” I corrected.

  Missy laughed. “Same thing in the end, isn’t it?”

  “If I want to make money and pay off my student loans, then yes, I guess it is,” I said, which we all thought was somehow funny. And then, as we were laughing, Polly caught Missy’s eyes and made an exaggerated tooth-wiping gesture with her finger. Missy got the message and took out her compact. I immediately felt bad that I hadn’t told her myself. Guilt. It would have been great if I’d actually been able to nail the molecular structure of that.

  “Oh, how embarrassing!” Missy said, pulling a tissue from her purse. She removed the offending smudge and thanked Polly for saving her from future embarrassment. “Speaking of which ...” She made an exaggerated point of checking her watch again. Then she opened a compact and, as she spoke, reapplied more lipstick to her mouth. It was Chanel, the lipstick. That beautiful, shiny black of the case; the rich, deep red of the paint. “I probably shouldn’t do this,” she continued as she snapped the compact shut and put it back in the purse, “but I’m running late for a dinner meeting. Do you think it would be okay if I left some samples with you guys today? Could you give them to your dad?”

  “I suppose,” Polly said. “I mean, sure. Why not?”

  Missy opened up the small suitcase that was at her feet and pulled out a few boxes.

  “Here are thirty sample packs of the 20 milligram pills, seven-day supplies. Do you think that’ll be enough?” She looked up at Polly, and then, clearly realizing that there was no way Polly would actually know such a thing, she piled up a few more on the couch.

  I sat down next to the pile and picked one up to take a closer look. The box itself was white, but there were rosy pink circles dotting it up. It looked more like a box of candy than anything else. “Ziperal?”

  “Ziperal Extended Release. ER. It’s our newest antidepressant,” she said. “We just got final FDA approval a couple months ago, but it’s been a hot seller in France.”

  “Yeah. I’ve read about it. It has a very rapid selective dopamine induction. The studies I read were extremely positive.” I opened one and removed a small blister pack with six capsules. “There were some concerns about mania in cases of overdose, but there are also some interesting off-label uses,” I said, raising an eyebrow and smiling. “Increased sex drive, weight loss, energy enhancement. I read somewhere that it might even be good for treating impotence ...”

  Missy laughed, perhaps a little too heartily. “Well, I’m not supposed to talk about any of that,” she said. “But we think this could be a blockbuster.” She put one more box on the pile. “That ought to do it.”

  “A blockbuster?” asked Polly. She took the box I was holding. “Nice graphics.”

  “The next Prozac,” explained Missy, looking up at us as she started to zip up the bag. “And if I meet my quotas, it could mean a huge promotion for me. I’m getting a bit tired of this traveling salesman business. It’s hard on the heels.” She smiled and pointed at her stacked pumps. “A promotion would be nice.”

  “Polly,” I said, nudging her with my elbow, “what about those new pro-bono cases your dad said he was taking on? Maybe these could be helpful?”

  “Oh, right,” she said and turned back to Missy. “He could probably use some more, if you don’t mind.”

  “OK, just to be safe, how about we make that fifty. And here, take some of these.” She took out a few boxes of a different drug and then checked off something in a notebook. “I’ll just mark this as signed. And, Olivia,” she said, “if you ever have questions about your studies, or if you’re looking for a job when you finish up, call me. I might be able to help.”

  Then she zipped up the bag, picked up her purse, and walked back through the Secret Gateway, leaving us with three hundred and fifty small rose-colored pills, three boxes of stimulants and a calling card.

  12

  Late April (B.D.)

  A Little Less Than Seven Months Ago.

  You would think that with scores of new medications hitting the American market each year and hundreds of billions spent buying them, there would be a pill for everything. And, to some degree (and with the glaring exception of a cure for the common cold and some rare diseases), there pretty much is. Whether they work well or not is another matter. But if they do work (and thank God many do), then there’s the question of what else they can do, what side effects they can cause, and what off-label uses they might have. Especially psychiatric drugs. That is what interested me. I mean, that is one of the main reasons why I decided to study what I decided to study. As I’ve noted, I’m fascinated by the chemistry of the brain. One small molecular structure, when introduced in the proper quantity, can change the way you think, feel, dream, love ... you name it. You are still you, but something about you—your short fuse, your anxiety, your short attention span, your propensity for buying clothing you cannot afford (I should probably have focused more attention on figuring out that last one)—has changed.

  The problem is that with medication, you often get more than you paid for, and that’s not always a good thing. It’s like shopping for a car. Imagine you’re looking for an energy-efficient, politically correct hybrid compact but you leave the dealership with a gas-guzzling SUV. Crazy, right? Drugs can do that, especially psychopharmaceuticals. You take an antidepressant, and while it helps elevate your mood, it might also make you constipated, give you dry mouth, and ruin your libido (or give you excellent regularity, a juicy mouth and an enhanced sex drive—it’s not always all bad). Maybe your mood disorder is more of a fast-cycling dysthymia than a generalized depression, but the drug you’re on is not so specific—it treats everything from cigarette addiction to anorexia. Good or bad, that seems rather inefficient to me. What if you could more accurately target what ails you, clear away the riff-raff and target only the teeny tiny transmitters in your brain that only regulate, I don’t know, say, envy? Clean it up. Break it down. Isolate and treat only a single emotion and nothing else. Guilt, love, insecurity. Melancholy, anger, compassion. You name it. Every emotion—every mood—has a unique chemical component, and they all travel their own unique pathways in the brain. If you can isolate and identify those components, you can change them.

  That’s my theory, anyway.

  And our casual foray with pharmaceutical swag seemed like it could provide a living laboratory to test my theory out. Beyond my rats, I mean.

  I sound like Dr. Evil. But that isn’t what I mean. Look, they—Lillianne, Vivian and all their friends—would have taken these drugs anyway. Ultimately, if they didn’t get their sedatives and stimulants from us, they would have bought them from someone else. But they wanted them from us. We were cheap (not that cost was an issue, but our drugs were free, and who doesn’t like a freebie?), and we were safe. Lillianne said she trusted Polly to keep her secrets; after all, it was Polly’s job to make her look good. As for me, I was a value-added part of the deal. I could tell our skinny new friends what the maximum dosage was, making estimated guesses of how, say, Fralenex would interact with a Slow Gin Fizz. I’d never enjoyed going to nightclubs before, but it was different now. I have to admit I was getting some pleasure out of it, sitting in the VIP lounges, making recommendations while observing what the different combinations would do, whether there were amusing interactions, whether there were side effects, and what would make a lecherous creep fall asleep at the bar.

  Of course there were side effects. There always are when drugs are involved, but they’re not always the kind that you might be thinking. I mean, sure, yes, occasionally you might find Reuben Manns sprawled out on a couch with an unwelcome dizzy spell, or Vivian massaging her temples because she had a massive headache. Sometimes my prescriptions misfired. But some of the side effects were not chemical at all. Well, not in the direct sense of the word.

  And some of those side effects kicked in almost imm
ediately, as witnessed that night when we entered the lounge.

  “Polly!” Lillianne squealed when she saw us come in. “Olivia! Over here!”

  We had called her the day before to tell her about out latest score—that we had befriended a drug rep and had enough interesting pills to supply the entire cast and crew of Gladiator.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Lillianne had said, laughing. “I’ve heard that working with Russell Crowe can be nerve wracking. It might take more than you’d think.”

  Now here she was, rubbing her hands together, bouncing up and down on the red velvet settee. “So, what did you bring, anyway?” she asked, reaching for the oversized periwinkle bag that was quickly becoming a ubiquitous part of Polly’s attire.

  Polly playfully slapped Lillianne’s hand. “Down, girl,” she said, undoing the strap that kept the bulging items from spilling out. “Here, take a look. But don’t be greedy!”

  Boy, had the dynamic between Polly and Lillianne changed.

  So had the dynamic between Polly and all of her clients, for that matter. Once the word was out that Lillianne Farber had invited Polly Warner into the “in” crowd (and word travels fast in the A-world), everyone from the child stars she had to escort to auditions to the bitter has-beens whose embarrassing arrest stories she had to spin for the press saw Polly in a whole new light. They started to treat her more like a person and less like a poorly trained mutt. Even her boss started to treat her with more respect and give her better assignments. Her job, while perhaps not intellectually stimulating, was at least starting to be a lot of fun.

  It changed her. She started trying out a brasher, more confident and energetic swagger, and there were times when I barely recognized her myself. Before you could say “dopamine release,” there Polly was, whispering into the reporter’s ear that the dress was in fact Gucci, not Chanel, as the starlet had just stated to the camera as they walked down the red carpet. There she was picking through the selection on the sales rack at Barney’s, while telling the writer for the Times Style section that if he wanted to talk about Lillianne’s new deal with Target, she would have to call him back; she was in the middle of an important meeting. And soon there we were, Polly and her little sidekick (me), trying to flag down taxis in front of our apartment three or four nights a week, all dolled up for yet another night on the town.

  13

  November 5 (B.D.)

  Earlier Today.

  Back in the Cab.

  5:23 P.M.

  I looked out the taxi’s window and tried to figure out how to escape from this mess. Or at the very least, if I should try to escape from this mess. Maybe it made sense to stick along for the ride and see where it took me. Maybe.

  Lumpkyn’s phone rang. It sounded like he had uploaded the ringtone of “Hava Negila,” hardly the soundtrack one would expect to hear at a moment like this. Dah dah, dadada. Dah dah, dadada. All cheerful and celebratory like that. Completely not appropriate for the current mood in the car.

  “Blat!” he shouted without answering it.

  He was eyeing the phone like it might attack him, but he continued to let it ring.

  It stopped.

  It rang again. Whoever it was that was calling called back.

  Reluctantly he picked up his headset and plugged it into his ear. “Da?”

  He nodded emphatically. Then he said something in Russian, angrily. And then he pulled the cord out of his ear and chucked it and the phone onto the floor in front of the passenger seat.

  The car swerved into the right lane and pulled a quick right off the drive. We were a third of the way down the east side of Manhattan, not far from the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel.

  He pulled up to a curb and reached into the glove compartment.

  My heart stopped for a moment, but then I saw that it was not a gun or bullets that he had taken out. It was a map of Brooklyn.

  It occurred to me, having now ascertained that this odd man was most likely unarmed, that this might be a good time for me to try to unlock the door and bust out.

  I was about to start slamming the heel of my boot against the door frame when Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn’s phone rang again. He leaned forward to pick it up off the floor and said something that stopped me in my mental tracks.

  “Okay,” he said. “Da, da, Mitya. The dockyard. We meet her there.”

  Her?

  He peeked at me through the rear-view mirror. “New plan,” he said, pointing at the part of the map just opposite the southern tip of Manhattan.

  “Was that Mitya?” I asked, and unleashed a litany of my confused concerns. “What’s at the dockyard? You mean Red Hook? Is Polly meeting us? Is that who you meant? I thought she was at home, on the Upper West Side? Why are we meeting her in Red Hook?”

  He turned around. “You know this place?”

  I nodded. Red Hook, Brooklyn, once a seedy dockyard, was now a thriving gentrified neighborhood, complete with an Ikea, art galleries, an MTV “Real Life” set. And yes, a whole bunch of trendy nightclubs.

  “I know it,” I said. “The other side of the Battery Tunnel.”

  “You know how to get there?” he asked.

  God, looking back now, about a half-hour later, he was unwittingly asking me to help him drive me to my doom. Unfortunately, I knew the way.

  14

  June 8 and 9 (B.D.)

  Five Months Ago.

  The hottest nightclub in Red Hook was housed in a former fish-packing warehouse located next to a pier that had been transformed from an old commercial shipping dock to a highly gentrified strip-mall, complete with shops like the Gap, Barnes and Noble, and not one but two Starbucks. The club was called Charity, a name probably more interesting for its incongruity than for any good deed performed on the club’s behalf, though the owners did claim to donate a portion of each evening’s proceeds to some indeterminate organizations. Truthfully though, if anything, the charity came in the form of beverages too expensive to actually get drunk on. What I mean is that unless you were super rich or super beautiful, you could count on not having to suffer from a super hangover the following morning, because it just cost too much. Unless, of course, you smuggled in your own inebriants. Or your friends bought your drinks.

  Or unless you (or Polly, as was the case here) fortuitously (or inauspiciously, if you ask me) wound up, en route to the bathroom, walking inadvertently into the path of Mitya Stoopsky, the luminary downtown DJ and recent subject of adulation on the gossip sites. Famous mostly for the fact that he’d been spotted canoodling with just about every ingénue, from Mary-Kate and Ashley to a recently divorced Ashlee, and who, not seeing where he was going, thanks in part to the stuttering strobes and sight-altering black lights, accidentally turned and splashed his beer all over the diaphanous blue silk tank top Polly had just borrowed from me. The one I had bitterly fought over and won the right to purchase at a designer sample sale the weekend before, and that was now so cunningly yet tastefully displaying her lithe figure underneath. Polly, oblivious to the DJ’s celebrity (and benefiting from a chemically enhanced ego boost), acted appropriately pissed off. The DJ, not used to be spoken to in such a voice in such an environment, said he was actually charmed by the response, and then offered to get her a fresh drink from the bar.

  God, it irritates me even now to think about that night, about the way Polly was giggling and swooning over Mitya when he returned to his booth, the way she was moving her hips when she danced in that clinging damp shirt, the way she completely disappeared on me when it was time to go home.

  I spent almost half an hour looking for her. I tried to call, but there was no way she could hear her phone ring. I left a message that I was ready to leave and then returned to the purple-lit ladies’ room, poking my head under the doors of the bathroom stalls, placing my face much closer to the wet tiled floor than
I would have preferred. “Polly?” I asked three different times to three different pairs of high-heeled shoes. Finally I left the bathroom and pushed myself through throngs of sweaty dancers, getting elbowed and dripped upon as I maneuvered across the main dance floor, just in case she had boogied her way out there.

  In the middle of the floor, I saw a woman dressed in a sheer blue tank top, and reached out to tap her shoulder. “Polly?” I shouted over the music, but she didn’t even have to turn around before I realized it wasn’t her. Frustrated, I figured I might try to get one more drink, buy Polly a little more time to show up and give me a little relief, but unlike our normal wait-staffed hangout in the VIP lounge, people on the main floor were packed three to the bar.

  “Fuck it.” I spun around to return to our exclusive corner of the club, where I’d left my purse.

  Suddenly, I felt a cold liquid splash across my chest.

  “Hey!” I said, but the beefy guy whose beer was being absorbed by my shirt hardly registered what he’d done.

  “Hey, Tom!” he called to someone ahead of him, holding the half-empty glass over his head. “Get me another one, would you?” Then he walked away without even acknowledging me. Not only was my white top now transparent, apparently I was, too. There couldn’t have been a stronger signal that it was time to leave.

  I sighed and took a moment to prepare myself before elbowing my way back across the dance floor. Once through, I passed the snaking line for the bathroom and skulked over to the VIP lounge.

  The bouncer with control of the velvet rope sized me up and down.

  “Are you going to let me in?” I asked, crossing my arms over my breasts.

  “Nice shirt,” he said, reluctantly unhooking the latch. “Where’s your friend?”