Survival Of The Fittest

33

Sally Branch speared a piece of mussel from a nest of linguini and stared at it clinically.

She was thirty-one but had a teenager's eager, nasal voice- Valley Girl inflections overlaid on long, articulate phrases- thick, wavy chestnut hair, a broad, plain, freckled face, brown eyes, and a knockout figure enhanced by a black knit dress. A white lab coat was draped over her chair.

She said, “Malcolm was never a very communicative person but he got worse after he met her.”

“How long before his death did you have contact with him?” said Milo.

“A few days before, we had lunch in the PlasmoDerm cafeteria.” She colored. “I saw him and sat down. He seemed preoccupied but not depressed.”

“Preoccupied by what?”

“His work, I assume.”

“He was having work problems?”

She smiled. “No, on the contrary. He was brilliant. But every day something new comes up- specific experiments.”

Milo smiled, too. “You'd have to be a scientist to understand?”

“Well, I don't know about that.”

She ate the mussel.

I said, “So he never actually talked about something bothering him.”

“No, but I could tell.”

“The breakup,” said Milo. “Was it friendly?”

She swallowed and forced another smile. “Is it ever really friendly? He stopped calling, I wanted to know why, he wouldn't say, then I saw him with her. But I got over it- I guess I kept thinking Malcolm would come to his senses. Listen, I know I sound like just another jealous woman but you need to understand that suicide would have been a totally illogical choice for Malcolm. His life was going great, he never lost interest in his work. And he liked himself. Malcolm was someone who truly liked himself.”

“Good self-esteem?” said Milo.

“Nothing obnoxious but he was brilliant and knew it. He used to make wisecracks about winning the Nobel prize but I knew it wasn't a total joke.”

“What was he researching?” I said.

“Cell permeability- moving ions and chemical compounds of increasing complexity through cell walls without causing structural damage. It was still at a theoretical level- mouse cells. But the practical potential was enormous.”

“Getting drugs into cells without damage,” I said.

“Exactly. Drugs are basically cellular-repair agents. Malcolm was studying drugs that enhance tissue growth in burn patients. He described it as playing with toy trains on a cellular level.”

“Cellular repair- like patching up defective chromosomes?”

“Yes! I suggested that to Malcolm but he said he'd stick to medications. That it was possible inborn defects shouldn't be tinkered with.”

“Why's that?”

She looked at her plate. “Malcolm was a bit… stodgy. A determinist- he believed some things should be left alone.”

“Healing burns was okay but genetic problems shouldn't be fixed.”

“Something like that- I don't want to make him sound unsympathetic. He wasn't. He was kind. But extremely brilliant people are sometimes like that.”

“Like what?” said Milo.

“Snobs.”

Milo picked up a piece of garlic bread and ate it. “If he didn't commit suicide, what do you think happened, Dr. Branch?”

“He was murdered. Detective Connor said he had a wound on his forehead from falling but couldn't it also mean someone came from behind and slammed him down on the table, then injected him with the potassium chloride?”

“Any suspects in mind?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Zena. The only thing I can't figure out is why.”

“Is she a large woman?” said Milo.

“No, on the contrary. She's tiny- a real shrimp. But coming from behind, she could have compensated for that.”

She coiled linguini around her fork. “She took Malcolm from me but that's not why I suspect her. She's a nasty little witch. Very taken with her image: bad little girl. When she worked at PlasmoDerm she'd walk around with weird reading material- magazines on body-piercing, serial killers, those violent, X-rated alternative comics. One time I saw her handing something to Malcolm in the hall and went up to him later. He showed it to me. A photo of a man with a wire connecting his tongue to his penis. Piercing both. It nauseated me.”

“What was Malcolm's reaction?” I said.

“He said, “Isn't that strange, Sally?' As in, why would anyone do anything so foolish.”

“Was he repulsed by it?” I said.

“He'd have had to be. Did he show his repulsion? No, Malcolm rarely showed feelings.”

She put the fork down. “This conversation is frustrating me. He's coming across as an oddball and he wasn't. He was just different because his IQ was up in the ionosphere. Even at PlasmoDerm he stood apart.”

“Zena Lambert was a clerk at PlasmoDerm,” I said. “Who'd she work for?”

“The maintenance office- keeping track of the janitors. See what I mean?”

“Not exactly intellectual stuff,” said Milo.

Her shoulders sagged. “I'll never understand it. What could Malcolm have seen in her? The only thing I can come up with is she was a good listener. Maybe I challenged him too much. We used to have little debates. About technical things. Social issues- I'm an unapologetic liberal and as I said, Malcolm didn't have much patience for… problems. We debated all the time, I thought he enjoyed it.”

“You think Zena may have been submissive to him?” I said.

“That's what doesn't make sense! Submissive's the last thing you'd call her. At PlasmoDerm she had a reputation for being cheeky. Relating to the professional staff as if she were one of them.”

She pushed away her plate.

“Now I sound like a snob, too. But the fact is, Zena was a file clerk who acted as if she had a doctorate. Insinuating herself into conversations she couldn't have really understood- pretentious. That sums her up better than anything: intellectually pretentious. Yet, Malcolm became infatuated with her.” Her eyelids quivered.

“Was there anything appealing about her?” I said.

“I suppose you could think she was attractive. In a contrived way. She has a decent figure- meet her, judge for yourself.”

“Where can we find her?”

“Malcolm said she was working at a bookstore named Spasm. An amusing place, he called it.”

“More body-piercing?” said Milo.

“Probably. Spasm. Does that tell you something?”

“Was she fired from PlasmoDerm?”

“Malcolm said she left.”

“When?”

“Two weeks before Malcolm's death.”

“Any idea why?”

“No. Her occupational history wasn't of very much interest to me. I was glad she was gone…” She looked down at the table. “I guess I was hoping with her out of the immediate environment, Malcolm and I might reconnect.”

“Was she at his funeral?”

“There was no funeral,” she said, still studying the white linen. “Malcolm's parents had him shipped back home and they cremated him. Look, I know you think the fact that she took him from me is coloring my opinion, but the facts are clear: She got her hooks into him, and not long after, he was dead. For no good reason.”

I said, “Detective Connor told us she got Malcolm into some kind of high-IQ group-”

“Meta. People who thought Mensa was for dummies. Malcolm went to a meeting with Zena and joined up. He said it was great even though the food was lousy and the wine was cheap. To me it sounded like losers with nothing to do but talk about how smart they were.”

“What did Malcolm like about it?”

“He said it was a pleasure to meet like-minded individuals- but how selective could they have been? Zena was a member!”

She smoothed her hair back and let it fall and the thick waves reverted to their original shape.

“I'm glad someone's finally looking into it. Maybe if Malcolm's parents had insisted, it would have happened sooner, but they didn't want to rake things up.”

“That's unusual,” said Milo. “Parents generally deny suicide.”

“You'd have to know Malcolm's parents. Both are professors of physics at Princeton- Dudley and Annabelle Ponsico. He's mechanical, she's particle, they're both geniuses. Malcolm's sister is a physical chemist at MIT and his brother's a mathematician at Michigan. We're talking major gray matter in the lineage but none of them talk. They just calculate.”

“You met them?”

“Once, last Christmas, they all visited and we had dinner at their hotel. Silent. The person I spoke to after Malcolm's death was the father and he just said let it rest, young lady, Malcolm has always been a moody boy.”

“A moody boy,” I said.

“Quaint,” she said. “But he's English. Maybe it was too soon after and they didn't want to hear about foul play. I guess I was insensitive.”

I'd read Ponsico's file this morning. Both parents had been interviewed over the phone by Petra Connor. Both had been grief-stricken, saying only that Malcolm had never done anything “unexpected” before but that he had been subject to mood swings since adolescence and, at age fifteen, had been treated for a year by a psychiatrist for sleep disturbance and depression.

Things he'd never told Sally.

“Did anyone else from PlasmoDerm belong to Meta?” said Milo.

“No one I know about. Why?”

“You suspect Zena. We're trying to learn more about her.”

“Well, that's all I know- would you like to see a picture of Malcolm?”

Before we could answer she produced a color snapshot from her handbag.

She and a tall young red-haired man in a rose garden. She wore a sundress, a big straw hat, and sunglasses and stood with her arm around Malcolm Ponsico's waist. He was well over six feet, narrow-shouldered, slightly overweight. The red hair was curly and thinning and he wore a ginger Abe Lincoln beard with no mustache. He had on a red polo shirt and brown slacks and had the loose-muscled stance of someone with no use for mirrors. She was grinning. His expression was noncommittal.

“We took this at the Huntington Library. An exhibit on Thomas Jefferson's scientific letters.”

Milo gave her back the picture. “Those letters on Malcolm's computer screen- DVLL. Mean anything to you?”

“Probably some devil reference that she put there. That's exactly the kind of thing she would have gone for.”

“She was into satanism, too?”

“It wouldn't surprise me- the salient point here is she stole him and got him involved in who-knows-what and soon after he was dead. I'm not a paranoid person, gentlemen, but the facts speak for themselves. Ask anyone who knows me, my reputation is for being dependable, level-headed, rational.”

Her fingers twisted around one another. “Perhaps that's the problem- I was too rational. Perhaps, if I'd yelled and kicked and put up a fuss when she went for him instead of standing back and assuming Malcolm would come to his senses, he would have understood how I really felt about him. Perhaps if I'd emoted, he'd still be alive.”