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  Bottom Line

  ( The Destroyer - 37 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The president is calling. Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret agency known as CURE, took the phone from the bottom left drawer of his desk and answered with a sigh, "Yes, sir." The President of the United States could not directly assign CURE to do anything, he could only suggest. The one and only order any president could give CURE would be for its immediate dissolution. And five presidents now hadn't quite done that. Though all five were often tempted. "What do you know about the Lippincott case?" the Southern voice asked. Smith regurgitated a two-page, single-spaced capsule of hard information. "Uh, huh. Well, I hear there's a plot to kill all the Lippincotts, and it has something to do with animals. Weird experiments, like," "I see," Smith gagged. "Yeah, and I think it involves my having the Lippincotts use their clout to open up new trading markets in China." The hint was clear. The White House would like the Destroyer to take a look at the situation. "You'll be using those two, I suppose?" Smith rolled his eyes upward, "I imagine so." "Whatever you say," he drawled, "just, er, um, tell them to keep the deaths down.

  DESTROYER 37: BOTTOM LINE

  by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER ONE

  If distrusting people had been an Olympic event, Zack Meadows would have scored perfect tens.

  He did not trust jockeys with Italian names. He was convinced they sat around in the clubhouse, hours before the races, deciding who was going to win what. How they always managed to select winning horses on which Zack Meadows didn't have a bet, he ascribed to simple Mediterranean devious-ness.

  He didn't trust policemen. He had never met a cop who wasn't on the take and who didn't have a summer house. Nor did he trust civil service examiners. Because three times they had turned him down for appointment to the police department, a job he wanted badly so he could go on the take and buy a summer house. He also didn't trust real estate people who sold summer houses.

  Zack Meadows did not trust women who came to him and said they wanted their husband followed because he was running around with another woman. This usually meant the wife was hooked on another man at the moment and was thinking of divorce but would probably soon change her mind and try to beat Meadows out of his fee. Meadows handled this

  by first following the wife who hired him to find out who she was running around with, then if she dropped him later, he would peddle the information to the husband.

  Nor did he trust swarthy people, guys who sold hot watches, blacks, liberals, cab drivers, Jews, doctors, bookies, life insurance companies, American car manufacturers, foreign car manufacturers, and places that claimed they could replace your car's muffler in twenty minutes for $14.95.

  Not that he regarded himself as distrusting. He thought he was softhearted, the original patsy, just occasionally working his way toward realism. Being suspicious was just part of an urban survival kit in dog-eat-dog New York City. Zack Meadows sometimes thought he might be happier living in the north woods in a log cabin. But he didn't trust well water and who in his right mind would trust animals not to attack when your back was turned?

  So why did he trust this nervous little man who sat in front of Meadows's cigarette-scarred desk, twisting his gloves nervously hi his hands, and having difficulty meeting Meadows's bleary-eyed gaze? Particularly when the man's story made no sense; he had trouble telling it, and after ten minutes he still hadn't been able to get it out.

  "Now let's try again," Meadows said. "You're starting to eat up a lot of time and I'm not making any money sitting here listening to you yap."

  The little man sighed. He was delicate appearing with long thin hands and the skin of his fingers bore brown blotches as if he made his living working with chemicals.

  "Have you ever heard of the Lippincott family?" he asked.

  "No," said Meadows. "The last car I owned was built by one of their companies and I bought gas from then: oil companies and I'm in hock to six of their banks and if I ever get any time off I watch television on networks that they own. The only thing I don't have is pictures of them on my money and I figure that'll be next when they buy the rest of the country. Of course, I heard of the Lippincott family, you think I'm stupid?" Meadows took a deep breath that raised his shoulders and expanded his fatty cheeks. Sitting behind his desk, he looked like an outraged blowfish.

  The small man seemed to tremble. He raised a hand as if to ward off an attack.

  "No, no, I didn't mean that," he said quickly. "That's just a way of speaking."

  "Yeah," growled Meadows. He wondered if this guy would be done before it was time for him to call his bookie. There were Italian jockeys riding in both the first and second today at Behnont. It was a sure daily double.

  "Well, the Lippincotts," the man said nervously. He glanced toward the door of the seedy third-floor office and then leaned closer to Meadows. "Somebody is trying to kill them."

  Meadows sat back in his squeaking swivel chair and folded his arms. He assumed his expression of disgust. "Sure," he said. "Who? England? France? One of them nigger countries that change their name every week? Who the hell can kill the Lippincotts without declaring war on America first?"

  "But someone is," the little man said. His eyes met Meadows directly. Meadows looked away.

  "So what are you telling me for?" he asked. "What's it to me or you or anybody?"

  "Because the Lippincotts don't know about it but I know. I know who's going to try to kill them."

  "And?"

  "I think saving their lives ought to be worth a lot of money to us."

  "Why us?" asked Meadows.

  "Because I can't do it myself," the little man said. Sentence by sentence, his voice was getting stronger. His hands were no longer wringing out his gloves. It was as if, once having taken the first step, he was committed and with the commitment came an end to nervousness about what he was doing.

  His name was Jasper Stevens. He was a medical technician and he worked for a private research laboratory that was funded by the Lippincott Foundation. As he talked, Meadows tried to picture the Lippincott family in his mind.

  There was the father, Elmer Lippincott. He was eighty years old but nobody had told him, so he acted like thirty. He had just married some young blonde. He had made his fortune starting as a roustabout in the oil fields and as he admitted in later Ufe, "I got rich because I was a bigger bastard then anybody else there." He had the face and eyes of a hawk. The press sometimes referred to him as an eccentric but that wasn't really true. It was just that the elder Lippincott, dubbed "The First," did just what he damn well pleased.

  He had three sons. Elmer Jr. was called "Lern," and he was a kind of superboss who handled all the

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  Lippincott manufacturing interests: car companies, television factories, modular home construction.

  Randall was the second son, in charge of the family's finances. He ran the banks, the mutual funds, the brokerage houses, and the overseas investment companies.

  Douglas, the youngest son, was the diplomat. He testified before the government when they were discussing tax incentives and balance of payments and how to improve trade. He dealt with the heads of foreign countries when the Lippincotts wanted to start some new oil exploration or build a new overseas auto plant.

  Meadows was surprised at how much he remembered about them. He had seen an article about them in one of those people magazines a month earlier when he had gotten a haircut. It was an old magazine, without a cover, on the barber's table. Inside there was a picture of the Lippincott family.

  There was Elmer the First, seated in the back, with his new blonde young wife standing by his side. And stan
ding on the other side of the chair were the three Lippincott sons. Meadows had been surprised at how little they looked like their father. There was no steel in their faces, no hardness. They had the look of soft, well-fed men, and he remembered having thought that it was a good thing that the old man had been the oil roustabout and not his sons because they didn't look like they could fight their way in out of the rain. Except for maybe the youngest one, Douglas. At least he had a chin.

  It took two hours for Jasper Stevens to tell his . story to Zack Meadows because it had a lot of technical terms in it and Meadows kept going back over

  it and over it, trying to get it clear in his mind, but also trying to trip Stevens up in an untruth.- But the man's story was consistent. Meadows found himself believing him.

  Finally, Meadows said "So why'd you come to me?"

  Jasper Stevens smiled. "I think somebody should be willing to pay handsomely for all the information I've got. And I don't know how to go about it."

  Meadows laughed and Stevens winced. "Information? You don't have anything. You've got a few facts and a couple of names and some ideas. But you don't have any evidence. Nothing written down. No reports. Nothing that couldn't be denied by somebody just saying that you're a liar."

  Stevens began twisting his gloves again.

  "But you believe me, don't you?" He made it seem very important to him.

  Meadows thought for a moment. "Yeah, I believe you. I don't know why but I do."

  This turned out to be critical because Jasper Stevens had no money with which to pay Zack Meadows for his lime, but the deal they quickly arranged was a fifty-fifty split of anything they got from the Lippincott family. Stevens nodded glumly. He had apparently been expecting a bigger share.

  After Stevens had gone, Meadows sat for a long time in his chair, trying to avoid the lumpy tape patches that covered the rips in the chair, which he had found in the street one night several blocks from his ratty office on Twenty-sixth Street. Then he got tired of all that thinking and decided to save himself the bookie's vigorish and went to Belmont where the

  Italian-surnamed jockeys in the first and second races ran dead last.

  Flossie was lying on her bed, eating chocolates and watching television, when Meadows let himself into her apartment, using an entire ring of keys to get past her battery of anti-burglar locks and bars and alarms. He and Flossie had been "going together" for five years. Meadows spent most nights at her apartment and even though she was the one person in the world he totally trusted, she did not have a key to his apartment farther downtown. Nor had he any plans to give her one.

  She looked up as he finally got past the last burglar barrier. She was wearing a pink negligee that was frayed at the edges. On her ample belly were chips of chocolate from the family-sized bar of Nes-tle's Crunch she was eating. Her dyed blonde hair was uncombed.

  "If it isn't the world's greatest gumshoe," she said. Meadows carefully relocked all the security devices before turning around and announcing, "I've got a big case."

  Flossie looked interested. "Oh? How much retainer?"

  "None yet," Meadows said.

  She looked away from him in disgust and turned back to her black and white television set where four people, obviously chosen for serious genetic defects, were attempting to win a dollar and change by making fools of themselves, something God had already seen to at the moment of their births. "Yeah," she sneered. "Real big case." "It is," he said. "It really is." "I'll believe it when I see some green."

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  "Green, hah? Well, let me ask you this, lady. You ever hear of the Lippincott family?"

  "Of course I heard of the lippincott family. You think I'm stupid?"

  "Well . . ."

  "They hired you?" Flossie asked. She adopted a pose of full attention as if ready to make the great effort to rise from the bed if the answer was what she wanted to hear.

  "Not exactly."

  Flossie collapsed back onto her three pillows, like a punctured balloon.

  "But I'm going to save their lives," Meadows said.

  Rising almost up once had been enough for Flossie, particularly when it turned out to be a false alarm. She contented herself with "Yeah, sure. And Idi Amin wants me to marry him."

  "Not likely," said Meadows. "He likes his women skinny."

  "Oh, yeah," said Flossie. She choked on a rice krispie imbedded in the chocolate and coughed a lot. When her breath returned, she said, "Oh, yeah? Well, you want yourself a skinny blonde, you go get one. See if they put up with you for long, big gumshoe."

  Suddenly it became very important to Zack Meadows that he impress Flossie. He went to the kitchen table, swept aside the debris with his arm, and picked up a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen that commemorated the opening of a new ribs joint on Twenty-third Street.

  "What are you doing?" Flossie demanded.

  "Important case. Got to put it all down."

  "Oh, yeah. The Lippincott case," she said.

  8

  "It really is," said Meadows. He wondered why he went to such lengths to please Flossie, who had been a stripper till she got old and a prostitute till she got fat, and then was just a barfly hanging around the West Side bars, cadging drinks, when Meadows met her. She held the space in his heart that some men filled by owning a dog. Meadows didn't trust dogs; they seemed always to be conniving, preparing to bite him. And if Flossie's disposition wasn't exactly the unquestioning devotion of a Great Dane, it wasn't bad either. Meadows had always mistrusted women, but somehow he felt sure that Flossie wasn't about to go tipping on him.

  And besides, her dirty little apartment was only two blocks from his office and it was a good place to flop when he didn't want to ride the subway home.

  He worked on his notes for two hours, trying to write out the story Jasper Stevens had told him. The floor near the table was covered with crumpled yellow sheets that Meadows threw away because they didn't have just the touch he wanted.

  "What's that?" Flossie asked. "A Tan letter to Elmer Lippincott?"

  "Business," Meadows said.

  "Yeah, sure," Flossie said. Meadows heard her flicking channels on the TV set, looking for the most insipid of the game shows, turning up the volume to annoy him. He smiled to himself; she wanted him to pay attention to her, that was all.

  But he had other things to do.

  When he was finally done with the letter, whicH turned out to be half the size he expected it to be, he stood up and looked over at her with a triumphant smile.

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  "You got an envelope around here?" "Try the drawer under the sink. There's Christmas cards and things in there," she said.

  Meadows rooted around in the drawer until he came up with a blue-tinted envelope almost six inches square and he folded his yellow pages neatly and stuffed them into the envelope. It already had a stamp on it. Meadows knew Flossie was watching as he sealed the envelope and printed an address on it.

  He walked to her side and casually dropped the envelope onto her big belly.

  "If anything happens to me, I want you to promise that you'll see that gets delivered."

  Flossie glanced down. The envelope was addressed to: "The President of the U.S., Washington, Personal and Confidential."

  He expected her to be impressed. She looked at him and said "What's going to happen to you!"

  "You never know," he said. He turned toward the door.

  "Hey, you're serious, aren't you?" Flossie said.

  He nodded without turning.

  "You going to take care of yourself?"

  "You know it," he said.

  "I wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

  "I know," Meadows said.

  "Before you leave, would you get me the bottle of Fleischmann's under the sink?"

  He handed her the bottle, let himself out through all the burglar barriers, and started downstairs. Inside the apartment, Flossie took a swig from the bottle of rye, looked at the envelope, smirked and tossed it toward the corner. It la
nded on a pile of clothes.

  Meadows allowed himself the unaccustomed lux-

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  ury of a taxicab to get to the Lifeline Laboratory. It was in a brownstone building on East Eighty-first Street, a building distinguished from its neighbors only by the visible fact that it had a small identifying, plaque next to the front door, and the invisible fact that it alone, of all the buildings on the block, was not overrun with roaches, a condition New Yorkers accepted with their accustomed stolidity despite the fact that apartments on the street rented for $275 a room.

  There was only a small light in the front window of the Lifeline Laboratory, and Meadows walked quietly around the back. There was no sign of a burglar alarm on the back door. This probably meant one of three things: one, there was a hidden burglar alarm. This was highly unlikely because the primary use of a burglar alarm in New York City—where the police could take thirty minutes to respond to a call, thus allowing burglars to strip everything including the wallpaper from the walls—was as a deterrent. Therefore, the more visible the alarm the better.

  Two, there might be a guard on duty. Meadows decided to hold that in abeyance.

  Three, the people at Lifeline Laboratory were nuts and didn't think they'd be burglarized.

  Mçadows decided that nobody was that crazy so he rejected that possibility. Back to possibility two: the laboratory had a guard on duty. That was probably the light in the front of the building.

  Zack Meadows didn't trust guards. He had been a private guard once and knew what they did. They brought their bottle, their girlie magazines, and thirty

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  minutes after everybody went home for the night, they fell asleep.

  He got into the building by slipping the back lock with an expired credit card. Meadows didn't carry credit cards anymore because he could never remember what he had charged and he was sure the credit card company was making up most of the items on his statement.

  Enough light came through the uncovered windows for him to be able to walk through the dark laboratory. It was a large room with tall laboratory tables, eight feet long, topped with white formica. There were five of them in a row on his right side. On his left were cages, stacked neatly from floor to ceiling, and he was startled for a moment when he heard the high-pitched squeaking of rats, but then he realized they were safe in the cages. There were other animals in cages too, but he could not tell what they were in the semi-darkness and he was careful not to walk too close to them.