What happens when a surgeon turns his eye from the operating room to crime fiction? In "Stone Hearts", Craig R. Smith, MD, cardiac surgeon and former Chair of the Department of Surgery, builds a medical caper rooted in transplant, intrigue, and the peculiar moral weather that hovers above and beyond the hospital.
Follow along each Friday as we release the novel one chapter at a time. You can also see more on Dr. Smith's Substack, Long Incision.
1974
Elias slept all the way back to Ithaca on the Dog, took a long shower in his dorm, and slept obliviously until it was time to start the next academic day. Back home, Jean distracted himself by diving right into the task at hand. The Nightmare on Mulberry Street was only days old by the time Jean had broken the four one-kilogram bricks of Mexican marijuana into one-ounce aliquots sealed into zip-lock plastic bags. He worked his Mettler balance and shorted each ounce by just enough to generate a few extra baggies. It went against his principles to cut the whole four kilos with a diluent like oregano, although the bricks were such high quality that only a rare customer would notice. As Jean exclaimed over the phone to Elias: “This is premium shit! Mostly buds, almost no stems. We should be able to get fifty-sixty bucks an ounce, maybe even seventy-five at Columbia!” The LSD and the pharmaceuticals didn’t need any repackaging beyond dividing the stash between the brothers. Jean was eager to sell out and cut another deal with Mr. Soriano. “Get down here as soon as you can to pick up your stock,” he admonished Elias on the same phone call, “and get your ass open for business!”
Reggie remained missing. Weeks had passed with no bulletins or announcements from his parents or anyone else, which Elias hoped was indirect proof of life. No one was answering the phone number Elias had for Reggie at Glassboro. Elias considered driving to Glassboro to look for him but decided against it, reasoning that a man too angry to make contact or collect his comped share was a man best left alone. That tactic also neatly avoided the risk of awkward apologies. Elias didn’t like to think about other possibilities.
Elias’s head was yanked out of the sand several weeks later. A Vice Dean to a Vice Dean pulled him out of the crowd streaming out the double doors of his Economics lecture and escorted him to the Dean’s Office. He was taken to a small conference room where he was greeted by two New York State troopers. Their Smokey Bear hats rested on the table in front of them, flanking a telephone that was connected to what Elias guessed was a loudspeaker and microphone. The older of the two gestured graciously for Elias to take a seat opposite them, then politely introduced himself. “Mr. Bessette, I’m Staff Inspector John Spooner, New York State Police.”
Although he would be pigeonholed as Black, Spooner was more of a warm cinnamon, solid without appearing fat, and almost completely bald. Elias guessed he was approaching fifty. Spooner gestured toward the man seated next to him. “My partner—the big strong guy with all the pretty hair—is Captain Clint Ellsworth. I keep him around to protect me.”
The younger man smiled and nodded politely. He was indeed tall and fit, with handsome, clean-shaven features and a full head of militarily trimmed light brown hair. Both men reached over the table to shake Elias’s hand.
Elias saw his future crashing onto the reef. Spooner seemed eager to make him feel comfortable. Why? Elias was afraid to move, his heart pounding, his face frozen in an insincere smile. He was glad the handshakes were over before his palms got so sweaty. He reminded himself to breathe. Why don’t you try looking a little more guilty? he thought.
Spooner continued. “We understand you’re a good friend of Reginald Taylor.”
“If you mean Reggie Taylor who graduated in my class at Severance High School, yes, we were pretty good friends.”
“Yes, that Reginald Taylor. We’ll assume you only know one. We’d like to ask you a few questions about him.”
That wasn’t the opening query he’d been dreading most. Only two days ago Elias had returned from a quick visit home carrying a duffel bag full of leisure products, and sales were already brisk. Reggie was one thing. The prospect of years upstate as some skinhead’s bitch was quite another.
“All we know right now is that Mr. Taylor is missing,” Spooner said, “and we don’t have a very good idea exactly when he went missing.” Elias allowed himself another glimmer of hope for his future—and for Reggie’s, of course. “You see, his parents were in Europe somewhere, and reported him missing only…” He looked down at his small notebook. “…five days ago.”
Spooner leaned earnestly towards Elias. “This is where you come in—his parents say you’re one of their son’s best friends. They’re standing by to talk to you on the phone, right now. They want to ask you to be helpful, and, you know, put you at ease. Is that alright with you?”
That request felt impossible to deny. Elias raced through a memory search over all the years he’d known Reggie and could only remember meeting his mother once—she had seemed like an aloof, faded beauty—and he’d never met his father. Spooner added “They’re on separate extensions at home.” He picked up the telephone receiver and laid it on the table. “Can you hear me, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor?” A male voice crackled through the connected loudspeaker, with a faint, tinny echo coming from the receiver. “Yes, we can! Can you hear us?” “Yes,” Spooner confirmed, “and Mr. Bessette is sitting here in front of me, so go ahead whenever you’re ready.”
Mrs. Taylor took the lead, her voice high-pitched and quaking. “Elias, thank you for speaking to us.” She accented the second syllable in his name—an almost universal, biblically faithful mispronunciation, and he didn’t correct her. He had long ago stopped wondering why his family chose to accent the first syllable; it was simply who he was. “We know Reggie considered you one of his true friends. He didn’t seem to have lots of those, especially when he went back to Severance. We’re desperate for help from someone, anyone, to figure out what’s happened to our son!” Faded beauty or not, this woman did not sound aloof. She sounded like any mother in distress.
The male baritone voice came back on the speaker. “Elias, this is Reggie’s dad.”
Elias realized he should have corrected Mrs. Taylor, or he’d be getting the same treatment from the troopers. “It’s EL-ee-us, sir, if you don’t mind, and I’m very sorry to hear this!”
There was a pause on the line. Elias heard what he imagined was a deep breath drawn through clenched teeth. “We’re more than sorry, young man, we’re getting desperate!” Elias thought he sounded sincere. “Nobody seems to know anything and we just hope you can shed some light. Thank you for taking our call.”
Elias struggled to process unsettling parental emotion while plotting how to respond without giving anything away. He promised himself time in the future to ponder how quickly he’d surrendered to his instinct for self-preservation.
Elias eagerly volunteered “The last time I saw Reggie was at a party at the Levine’s on Saturday night of that long weekend in February.” That felt like a safe reveal. Nothing had happened at the party that anyone other than Elias could tie to Reggie’s disappearance. It might even help present a good impression if he offered up a few corroborating witnesses. “I can tell you most of the people who were there, if that helps.”
Spooner scribbled briefly in his little notebook, pulled out a calendar to help Elias pinpoint the exact date, then quickly finished his entry. “Your party was quite a bit before our last-seen date, so probably not necessary,” said Spooner, “but I’ll keep your offer in mind.”
The Taylors came back on the speaker, talking over each other, pleading with Elias—had he heard anything at all from Reggie since the party, even the simplest phone call? “No,” Elias lied.
“If you think of something, or he contacts you, please let us know!” said Mr. Taylor. The Taylors effusively thanked Elias again—with correct pronunciation. The speaker broadcast a loud click when they hung up. Elias had to admit it was a remarkable impersonation of distraught parents.
Spooner put the receiver back in its cradle. He seemed persuaded that Elias knew nothing about Reggie’s whereabouts since that weekend, almost as if being interrupted with information would have been annoying. Elias tried to avoid eye contact with Ellsworth, who had adopted a stony neutral expression that worried him—maybe the younger guy wasn’t quite as eager to take Elias out of the case.
Spooner shared with Elias that Reggie had been seen last in a class at Glassboro on a Friday back in March. “Any chance you remember where you were that day?” He graciously placed the calendar back in front of Elias, and made an “x” on the date with his pencil.
“I was at school. Bio and inorganic chem meet every Friday morning.” True enough, and there would be witnesses; Spooner hadn’t specifically asked him to account for the entire day.
Spooner added that Reggie’s parents had found his car sitting in their driveway when they returned from Europe. The caretakers and neighbors had not seen him come or go since the last confirmed sighting in Glassboro.
“We have a photo Captain Ellsworth’s team took when they arrived to search the Taylor family home,” Spooner said, and slid a 4x6 print in front of Elias.
“Yes, sir, that’s his car!” Elias said, but he kept the photo pinned to the table with thumb and forefinger of both hands, studying it….
“Something wrong?” asked Spooner. Ellsworth looked alert.
Elias flipped the photo back across the table. “No, sorry, sir—no problems, just want to be sure I’m right. No question that’s his car! You don’t see many of those.”
Ellsworth raised his eyebrows and turned his head towards Spooner, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. Captain Ellsworth took over. “His parents got even more upset when my team searched the house and found his passport missing,” he said, in a strong, deep voice. “Worse, to them, a Cartier watch is missing. According to the parents, it’s a ‘priceless heirloom’—their words—that was very important to their son. A gift from his Grandfather.” He paused and studied Elias, who did his best to hold his gaze and give nothing back. “Important to mention, everything in Mr. Taylor’s room was neat as a pin, not a hint of burglary, we didn’t pull anything but family or employee prints. It all suggests he’s the one who took both items. Does that sound like your friend?”
“Hard to know, sir,” Elias waffled, “that doesn’t mean much to me. I was only in his room a couple times, years ago.”
“Do you know anything about the watch? Ever seen it?”
“No, sir, never heard of it,” Elias said, relieved to give an honest answer.
Spooner emphatically closed his little notebook and pushed back his chair. Both men thanked Elias for his help, using the correct pronunciation, and gave him their business cards with the numbers to call if he learned anything. “Anything at all,” Ellsworth said, “even if it seems pointless or unrelated. There’s no body, and so far the hints add up to Reginald being alive.”
“Excuse me, sir, but can I ask if the passport has been used?”
Ellsworth stared at him in a way that made Elias expect to hear “Thank you for that imaginative contribution to our investigation!” He finally said “Not that we know of.”
Elias reasoned with himself on the walk back to his dorm. The question of Reggie’s welfare was temporally related to the Bessette leisure products business, and Elias fully accepted responsibility for recruiting Reggie to one phase of a business engagement. Reggie’s behavior at Tubby Hook made no sense and he’d acted over strenuous objection. Reggie and the business were two things, not one. In Economics 102, Reggie had been learning about moral hazard, moral equivalency, and moral relativism. None seemed to fit here, but were there other shades of morality? The Bessette leisure-products business certainly had legal dimensions, and possibly some ethical ones, but moral? Not so clear. In the Reggie situation, what Reggie elected to do was dumb, but hard to see a moral stain on any of the parties.
Elias was feeling a little better when he arrived in his room. He still had to be worried about what the troopers might turn up. He was particularly wary of Ellsworth. Or was Spooner more cunning, playing a more sophisticated good-cop game?
None of his rumination pushed that photo out of his mind. It showed the Austin Healey neatly parked in one of the three parking spaces, the front bumper and passenger side squarely aligned with the stone lawn border.
Elias had a crush of customers in the college market around Ithaca as the term ended. Students were eager to deal with the devil they knew rather than worry about finding a new one somewhere else over the summer. The brothers had earned back Silvio’s loan in twelve days, but after a few seconds of deep soul-searching Jean decided to take the full float and paid him off at thirty days. Elias sold out before he left Cornell, which put him 30% ahead of his expected revenue even before he and Jean began working the regional high schools and colleges in June.
The two salesmen had skimmed off an ounce or two of grass for personal use. They both eschewed downers and were wary of acid. Elias had set aside some speed, which only seemed prudent, considering the academic demands of pre-med at Cornell. He worked shifts as a minimum-wage cashier in a retail establishment near his parent’s house—a faintly plausible cover for his cash flow that also helped him feel legitimate and useful. By mid-August the brothers were almost sold out. Only a few hits of acid and some of the barbiturates remained. Elias had earned enough to cover just over a year of expense above tuition. Assuming Jean kept their shelves full, all he had to do was maintain his loyal customer base and in another two or three years he’d be set up for most of medical school—if he stayed out of trouble. Jean could keep hustling, or not, but Elias could move on.
Elias was halfway through his sophomore year at Cornell when a short column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times caught his eye. The bold print read “Brutal Murder In Little Italy.” The victim was placing an order at a sidewalk food cart on Hester, near Mulberry Street. A man wearing a balaclava head covering walked up behind him and beat him savagely with a baseball bat, then fled on foot. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. Among the crowds on the street only a small group of visitors from the Netherlands had seen anything. They described the assailant as a young man, average in height, who was probably white. The blood-splattered bat was found in a dumpster two blocks away but had no retrievable fingerprints. The article included a mug shot of the victim, who was described as a known associate of organized crime figures. Elias recognized him instantly as the younger man from the Nightmare on Mulberry Street.
Previous chapters:
Chapter 8: The Brothers Bessette
Related:
- A Conversation with Dr. Craig Smith on His Novel “Stone Hearts,” the Art of Writing, and the Surgeon’s Imagination
- For Us the Living: Reflections on 9/11 from Dr. Craig Smith
- Nobility in Small Things: A Look Back at The Leadership of Craig Smith, MD