Miracle Cure

They were also sexy as hell.

The phone interrupted his thoughts. Michael reached behind him and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hi, Michael.”

“How’s it going, Harvey?”

“Not bad. Look, Michael, I don’t want to keep you. I know the show is about to go on.”

“We got a couple of minutes.” There was a crashing sound in the background. “What’s all that noise? You still at the clinic?”

“Yep,” Harvey replied.

“When was the last time you got some sleep?”

“You my mother?”

“Just asking,” Michael said. “I thought I was going to pick you up at your apartment.”

“I didn’t have a chance to get out of here,” Harvey said. “I had one of the nurses rent me a tux and bring it here. It’s just so busy right now. Eric and I are swamped. Without Bruce here.”

Harvey stopped.

There was a moment of silence.

“I still don’t get it, Harv,” said Michael carefully, hoping his friend was finally ready to talk about Bruce’s suicide.

“Neither do I,” Harvey said flatly. Then he added, “Listen, I need to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“Is Sara going to be at the benefit tonight?”

“She’ll be a little late.”

“But she’ll be there?”

Michael recognized the urgency in his old friend’s voice. He had known Harvey almost twenty-four years, since a second-year intern named Dr. Harvey Riker took care of an eight-year-old Michael Silverman, who had been rushed to Saint Barnabas Hospital with a concussion and broken arm.

“Of course she’ll be there.”

“Good. I’ll see you tonight, then.”

Michael stared at the receiver, puzzled. “Is everything all right, Harv?”

“Fine,” he mumbled.

“Then what’s with the cloak-and-dagger phone call?”

“It’s just . . . nothing. I’ll explain later. What time you picking me up?”

“Nine fifteen. Is Eric coming?”

“No,” Harvey said. “One of us has to run the store. I have to go, Michael. I’ll see you at nine fifteen.”

The phone clicked in Michael’s ear.

DR. Harvey Riker replaced the receiver. He sighed heavily and put a hand through his long, unruly, gray-brown hair, a cross between Albert Einstein’s and Art Garfunkel’s. He looked every bit of his fifty years. His muscle had turned to flab from lack of exercise. His face was average to the point of tedium. Never much of a hunk to begin with, Harvey’s looks had soured over the years like a two-dollar Chianti.

He opened his desk drawer, poured himself a quick shot of whiskey, and downed it in one gulp. His hands shook. He was scared.

There is only one thing to do. I have to talk to Sara. It’s the only way. And after that . . .

Better not to think about it.

Harvey swiveled his chair around to look at the three photographs on his credenza. He picked up the one on the far right, the picture of Harvey standing next to his partner and friend, Bruce Grey.

Poor Bruce.

The two police detectives had listened to Harvey’s suspicions politely, nodded in unison, jotted down notes. When Harvey tried to explain that Bruce Grey would never have committed suicide, they listened politely, nodded in unison, jotted down notes. When he told them Bruce had called him on the phone the same night he leaped from the eleventh-floor window at the Days Inn, they listened politely, nodded in unison, jotted down notes . . . and concluded that Dr. Bruce Grey had committed suicide.

A suicide note had been found at the scene, the detectives reminded him. A handwriting expert had confirmed that Bruce Grey had written it. This case was open and shut.

Open and shut.

The second picture frame on the credenza held a photograph of Jennifer, his former wife of twenty-six years, who had just walked out on him forever. The third photograph was that of his younger brother, Sidney, whose death from AIDS three years ago had changed Harvey’s life forever. In the picture Sidney looked healthy, tan, and a touch on the chubby side. When he died two years later, his skin was pasty white where it was not covered with purple lesions, and he weighed less than eighty pounds.

Harvey shook his head. All gone.

He leaned forward and picked up the photograph of his ex-wife. He knew he had been as much to blame (more) for the failed marriage as she was. Twenty-six years. Twenty-six years of marriage, of shared and shattered dreams, rushed through his mind. For what? What had happened? When had Harvey let his personal life crumble into dust? His fingertips gently passed over her image. Could he really blame Jennifer for getting fed up with the clinic, for not wanting to sacrifice herself to a cause?

In truth, he did.

“It’s not healthy, Harvey. All that time working.”

“Jennifer, don’t you understand what I’m trying to do here?”

“Of course I do, but it’s gone beyond the point of obsession. You have to take a break.”

But he couldn’t. He recognized that his dedication had gone off the deep end, yet his life seemed so minor when he considered what the clinic was trying to achieve. So Jennifer left. She packed and moved to Los Angeles where she was living with her sister, Susan, Bruce Grey’s ex-wife. Yes, Harvey and Bruce had been brothers-in-law as well as partners and close friends. He almost smiled, picturing the two sisters living together in California. Talk about fun conversations. He could just hear Jennifer and Susan arguing over which one had the lousier husband. Bruce would probably have gotten the nod, but now that he was dead the girls would raise him to sainthood.

The truth of the matter was that Harvey’s entire world, for better or for worse, was right here. The clinic and AIDS. The Black Plague of the eighties and nineties. After watching his brother ravaged and stripped to brittle bone by AIDS, Harvey had dedicated his life to destroying the dreaded virus, to wiping it off the face of the earth. As Jennifer would tell anyone who would listen, Harvey’s goal had become an all-consuming obsession, an obsession that frightened even Harvey at times. But he had come far in his quest. He and Bruce had finally seen real progress, real breakthroughs when . . .

There was a knock on his door.

Harvey swiveled his chair back around. “Come in, Eric.”

Dr. Eric Blake turned the knob. “How did you know it was me?”

“You’re the only one who ever knocks. Come on in. I was just talking to your old school chum.”