CHAPTER 9
When he left the laboratory, Burton planned to go to a fish market, but a wiser thought prevailed and he headed for Pier One, his favorite seafood restaurant. He was well-known there, and he went back into the kitchen and talked the chef into selling him a gallon of bouillabaisse, a large tossed salad, and two loaves of garlic bread already prepared, so that he could just warm them in the oven.
Sheila had a large, lush apartment in the Twin Towers complex, a much-desired location that was close to the medical center and convenient to shops, grocery stores, fine restaurants, and theaters. There was, however, a corresponding higher rent to go with all that convenience. When he’d followed her to Houston from Dallas, Ramsey tried staying there with Sheila. However, less than a year after they’d moved into the place, Burton moved out, claiming that a man who only made fifty-six thousand dollars a year could not afford to live in a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment.
He said, sarcastically, “Maybe a doctor making a quarter of a million dollars writing little words on a prescription pad can, but an honest scientist can’t.”
Sheila wanted to know what that had to do with it, since their salaries were communal, but he’d answered that he was not a man to be subsidized by a woman, especially a woman bearing the title of MD.
It had hurt her at first, but then, six months later he’d made some remark about having left, and she’d said innocently, “Oh, you moved out? When was that?”
The apartment was on the tenth floor of the complex and had a sunken common room that was almost as big as his lab. It was a corner apartment, and the two sides of the combination living room and dining room were almost all glass, giving a sweeping view of the city.
Since Sheila had picked out the apartment, he made constant references to what all that open glass did to her heating and cooling bills. Of course, he personally liked the feeling of openness that the huge glass walls gave and insisted on keeping the drapes pulled back to, as he said, “Teach you a lesson about the British Thermal Unit.”
In the kitchen, he transferred the bouillabaisse from the container they’d given him at the restaurant into one of Sheila’s large copper-bottomed pots. As per the chef’s instructions, he put the pot on the stove and turned it to very low. While the soup heated, he transferred the salad to a wooden bowl, covered it, and put it in the refrigerator. He unwrapped the bread, put it on a cookie sheet, and shoved it in the oven.
He saw by the kitchen clock that it was a little after six, so he figured he had about another hour before Sheila could fight through the never-ending evening traffic and make her way home. He found two bottles of chardonnay in the wine closet and put them in the refrigerator to chill.
When that was done, he took several clean pots and pans, along with a few useful-looking utensils, and put them in the sink, sprayed them with liquid soap, and then ran them full of water.
He stepped back and surveyed his work. From all appearances, it looked as if a neat, careful cook had been at work in the kitchen, cleaning up behind himself as he went. He smiled with great satisfaction. So much for Sheila’s opinion of his neatness and culinary acumen.
Finally, he gathered up every trace of the packages and containers he’d brought with him from Pier One and consigned them to oblivion down the central garbage chute that was also part of what you got for thirty-five hundred a month, a figure he considered obscene for a place in which she mostly just slept. Why, there had been years when he’d lived on less than that figure for twelve entire months.
Finally satisfied that all was ready, he mixed himself a drink and settled down to wait for Sheila to get home. She’d play hell making fun of either his cooking or his cleanliness.
* * *
When Kevin and Angus got back from their visit to the vet, Kevin had a strange look on his face. When asked about it, he’d ducked his head and said he had to hurry and leave before the traffic got so bad that by the time he got home, it would be time to come back to the office
Kat thanked him for taking Angus and gave him a peck on the cheek, which made him blush down to the roots of his hair. As he walked out the door, he turned serious again and said that the vet wanted to talk to Kat, but that she’d call her in the morning.
Kat was puzzled, but as soon as she got Angus settled in his bed, she got back to the chase for Ramsey’s computer files. She’d been trying, without success, for two hours to access Ramsey’s computer and was getting frustrated.
She had easily gotten the phone number of Ramsey’s computer and enough personal information from Ramsey’s personnel file to access a dozen computers. The young man in Personnel had been a pushover. The most difficulty she’d experienced with him had been disengaging herself from his presence by promising to go for a drink with him someday before hastening back to her laboratory.
Finally, she was just about to give up and admit defeat. Some of the passwords she’d tried had elicited responses from Ramsey’s computer such as “SORRY, WRONG NUMBER,” or “WASHING MY HAIR,” or “OUT WITH STING,“ whatever that meant.
Mostly, she’d just gotten a blank response and a blinking screen that meant nothing was happening between the two machines. She had written down a list of at least fifty possible passwords, and she began to slowly and patiently try them again, using every conceivable combination of the information she could think of.
* * *
It was about ten o’clock and they had finished dinner and were sitting on the couch before the window that led out onto the terrace. At least Sheila was on the couch. Burton was sitting on the floor at her feet, leaning back against her legs—one of his favorite positions, especially after a few glasses of Chivas had mellowed him out enough to forget that she was a dreaded MD.
She was holding a glass of white wine in one hand and teasing his hair with the other. “Burton, I think you should take up a new occupation,” she said out of the blue.
He half-looked around. “Yeah?”
“Yes. That bouillabaisse is every bit as good as they have at Pier One. In fact, it tasted remarkably like what we had there just last week.”
He looked a little uncomfortable and covered his discomfort by taking a large sip of his Chivas before answering, “Bouillabaisse is bouillabaisse. It all tastes alike. I told you, it’s nothing but fish soup. It’s child’s play.”
Above his head, she smiled slightly. She had changed when she’d gotten home from the business-cut suits she wore at work to a loose, colorful silk lounging gown. Sheila Goodman was five years younger than Burton Ramsey, but in some ways, she felt very motherly toward him. She had loved him almost as soon as she’d penetrated the supposedly angry, swaggering, defiant personae he presented to the world and had seen the sensitive, good-humored, and dedicated man within. She figured she was the only person in the world he’d let see that deep inside him.
Sheila had blondish hair, and her face was more pleasant than pretty. She was small, almost too small for Burton’s massive size, but she had a trim figure and prominent breasts and the kind of metabolism that didn’t run to fat. At times, Burton called her “Sheena of the Jungle,” because as calm and reserved as she appeared in public and in her business life, she underwent a wonderful loss of inhibition in bed.
She was a warm, caring, forgiving person, and Burton Ramsey would have loved her if she’d been fat and ugly. He’d once told her so, but quickly, before there was any chance it might sound like he was paying her a compliment, he’d said, “But that doesn’t mean I want you to go all the way on this thing. You’ve nearly got the ugly down pat. No use adding fat to it.”
But he hadn’t fooled her. She’d just smiled secretly to herself. She was secure with Burton, but she did wish he’d grow up a little faster.
“No, I mean it. I think you should apply to Pier One as a consulting chef,” she repeated.
He turned around and looked her full in the face, suspicious that she hadn’t fallen for his little trick. “What’s the matter with you? By God, this time you can’t possibly claim I left a mess. I did everything but put the big stuff in the dishwasher, and I would have done that if I’d known how.”
“Oh no. It was fine.” She took a sip of wine. “In fact, some of the pots and pans looked like they hadn’t even been used.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Why, nothing, dear, except that you must have done such a good job of scrubbing them out.”
He squinted his eyes and scowled at her. “I smell some sort of crack coming. Some snide remark.”
“Oh no, dear.”
He gave her another hard look. “A fine state of affairs this is. A man fixes his wife dinner after he’s worked hard all day, and his thanks is some sort of smirking attitude. A wife, by the way, who won’t even take her husband’s last name.”
She sighed. “Now, Burton, you are going to keep telling that story until you begin to believe it. It was you who requested I go back to my maiden name. If I remember, you said you did not want your vaunted name attached to an MD. I did it reluctantly and only after you threw one of those fits you ought to have patented. Besides, I’ve never even had it legally changed.”
“You really mind, don’t you? Tell you to do something and you do it halfway.”
“I keep expecting you to come to your senses one of these days. Burton, you’ve been keeping up this MD nonsense so long it’s become a habit. People think you’re strange enough as it is. I know you were hurt, and I know how much you wanted to go to medical school. But if you continue with this fetish—”
“Fetish!” He turned around and glared at her. “Damn it, Sheila, don’t call such a strong passion of mine a ‘fetish.’ ”
“I was an MD when you married me.”
“You’re different.”
“Burton, you don’t feel that way anymore, and you know it. And for God’s sake, get rid of the silly, personalized license plate. That’s disgusting and undignified.”
“FUMD?”
“Yes.”
He smiled slyly. “Nobody knows what that means.”
“Oh right! Nobody under the age often. Especially around a medical center.”
“Listen, my girl, I’m about to get rich, and then we’ll see just how often you climb up on your high horse of acceptable social beha—”
“ ‘High horse’! When is anyone allowed to climb up on any kind of horse around you? Even a pony. If they try, you just take that big baseball bat of a tongue of yours and knock them off. Or wave one of those big bully fists around.”
“Speaking of bullies . . . do you know Kaitlyn Williams, ex-neurosurgeon, presently at BioTech pretending to be a researcher?”
“I’ve heard of her. Hers is a big name in medical circles. At least her family’s name is.” She looked at Burton and narrowed her eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t tell me you’ve managed to have a run-in with her? Burton, from what I hear, she’s shy and gentle and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
He told her the whole story, beginning with Williams’s visit to his lab on Saturday morning to take a dozen of his rats, and ending with the final episode, in which he’d forced Williams to recount her disgrace.
“Well, I can’t say she acted very professional, but you didn’t have to treat her like that. Damn it, Burton, why do you persist in acting so in opposition to your true character? Do you take some sort of perverse pleasure from it?”
He scrunched up his shoulders as she rubbed his neck. “I used to think I hated that silly bitch. That smug, silver-spoon-in-the-mouth bitch. I’d pass her in the hall and she would drop her eyes, like she didn’t want to look at someone as lowly as I.”
Sheila shook him a little. “Why do you call her a ‘silver-spoon-in-the-mouth bitch’?”
He shrugged against her hands on his shoulders. “Well, you said her family was very prominent in medical circles, and they obviously paid her way through medical school . . .”
“Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong, Burton. Her dad was a general practitioner and her mom was an internist. Back in the day, they opened a clinic in the Fifth Ward in Houston—probably the worst and most dangerous area of the city at that time. They treated everyone who came through their doors, regardless of ability to pay. They even lived above their clinic in a two-room apartment. Their memory is so revered because of what they did, not because they were wealthy or from the high society.”
He craned his neck to look back at her. “Then, how did they afford to send their daughter to college and medical school if they were so poor?”
“They didn’t, Burton. Word is, Kaitlyn joined the navy and paid them back two years for every year of college and medical school she attended. That’s why she is just getting started in her research career, even though she’s in her mid-forties.”
With that, she gave him an extra-tight squeeze on his shoulders.
He moaned a little. “Right there, don’t stop,” and then he continued his thought. “Well, maybe I did misjudge her if that’s the case. But it’s weird that she did that to me ’cause I’d finally begun to respect her—although only just a little,” he hastened to add before she got the idea he’d gone soft. “She’s got a lot of pluck, and in the monthly meetings she’s never kowtowed to Captain Sunshine and she gave him back as good as she got.”
“Uh-huh, kinda like me, huh?”
He turned to look at her with a hurt look on his face. “You do know I really do respect and admire your gumption and drive, don’t you?”
“You didn’t hate her, Burton. You don’t really hate anybody. But you’ve been playing this game so long you’re starting to get confused. I know you didn’t move out because I’m an MD. You moved out because you insisted on paying the rent and you couldn’t afford it. It was my fault. I should never have picked this place out while knowing how you are. But I thought that since we loved each other, our money was communal and that we could afford this place with both our salaries. But never mind. As soon as the lease is up, we’ll live wherever you say. In a Motel Six if that will make you happy.”
It was a dark night, and toward the east, storm clouds were rolling in. Now and then through the wall of windows they could see a thrust of lightning zigzag its way through the black clouds. He smiled. “My girl, very shortly, we will not have to worry about money. I am going to make us very, very rich.”
“You keep talking about that. This doesn’t have anything to do with all those trips you’ve been making to Mexico, does it?”
“Better brush on up your Spanish, my girl.”
“Oh no. I’ve no intention of living in Mexico.”
“Wherever I goest and all that. Says so right there in the Bible.”
“It’s a woman who says that. Ruth. And she says, ‘Whither thou goest.’ And I’m not saying, ‘Wherever thou goest to Mexico.’ Listen, why do you have to be such a bastard? If you can help Dr. Williams, why don’t you just do it? You would be surprised how painless it is to be nice for a change.”
He shook his head. “Oh no. Not on this. I’m not showing this serum to anyone except somebody with a check in hand that’s got a lot of zeros on it. A whole lot of zeros.”
She heard the fervor in his voice and grabbed him by his short-cropped hair and pulled his head back so she could see his face. “Have you got something good, Ramsey? Something really good? Important?”
He smiled as well as he could, considering the position his head was in. “More important than you could believe.”
“Are you still working on the serum to improve the dialysis machines?”
He answered, “Have I told you any different?”
She looked closely at him. “Why do I have the feeling that the laboratory you are contracted to, BioTech, may have to read about this in the newspapers?”
His eyebrows raised. “Because you have a suspicious mind?”
She let go of his hair. “You’ll never get away with stealing the formula from BioTech and selling it as your own. It’s been tried before by people greedier than you and it hasn’t worked. You may be a hell of a researcher, Burton, but a lawyer you most definitely are not, and it’s lawyers who draw up those contracts, and it’s lawyers who make them stick.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
“And then there’s that satellite office business. Conroe, isn’t it? I know you’ve been paying rent on another office there. What is that all about?”
He got up from the floor, lay down on the couch, and put his head in her lap. “How do you know about Conroe? What have you been doing? Snooping?”
“Ramsey, I balance your checkbook.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because you like to pretend to be the absentminded professor type.”
“Oh yes. I forgot.” He was examining her breast, massaging the nice large nipple through the thin material of her silk dress.
She was very conscious of his roving fingers. “Plus, you can’t add or subtract. Which makes it difficult to balance a checkbook.”
“Well, BioTech is welcome to everything they find at Conroe. And it won’t be insignificant, I can assure you that. They’ll feel very lucky they caught me cheating and very fortunate to have had an association with the eminent blood man, Burton Ramsey, Ph.D.”
“But they aren’t going to get the real goods, is that the idea?”
He continued playing with her breast. “Now you are getting the idea, sweetie.”
“Meanwhile, after having dazzled them with your footwork, you are going to steal quietly off into the dark in Mexico with the sho’ ’nough stuff.”
“There ya go. And nobody the wiser.”
“Bullshit, Ramsey. You won’t fool the lawyers at BioTech any more than you fooled me with that dinner.”
He raised his head off her lap and gave her a hard look. “What’s that supposed to mean? You trying to start a scene?”
“Ramsey, a scene is what you do in front of other people. You’re thinking of a fight.”
“What do you call it if you have it in the bedroom?”
“A hell of a lot of fun if you do it right.”