by Rex Burns
“It is the truth! Swear to God—nobody tried to kill anybody up in Clear Creek. And we didn’t come anywhere near your goddamn office except tonight. I swear to God!”
“Is this what you literary types call an inveterate liar, Dev?”
“Sad but true, Bunch.” I smiled at Benny, who didn’t like what he saw there. “How much do you think we can get for his bones and blood?”
“What you mean? What you people talking about?”
Bunch shook his head. “Not much. They’re in pretty shitty condition.”
“And they’re going to get worse.” I smiled again.
On the quiet street outside, a sound of motorcycle engines cruised through the darkness. Benny’s eye lit up. “You fuckers better let me go. You don’t let me go, they’re coming back here.”
“You really believe that?” asked Bunch. “Come on, Benny, you believe they’re coming back for you?”
He said nothing, Adam’s apple bobbing dryly.
“I wish they would. But they’re not that dumb, Benny. You’re here all alone with us. Just you. Now, who tried to kill my partner? I want a name.”
“It wasn’t us! The only time we seen you is when you came sneaking around the ranch. We want to know what the fuck you’re doing that for—what the fuck you took our dog for!”
“Why didn’t you just ask?”
The eye blinked. “Well, you was messing with us.” He added, “You mess with us, we kick the shit out of you.” It made sense to him.
“Like tonight?”
“Yeah, well, you jumped us. You was ready for us.”
“Was Billy Taylor with you tonight?”
“Who?”
Bunch hooked his foot under the chair and pulled it out from under the man, who crashed hard to the floor. Then he placed a large shoe on the man’s shin and pressed down. “You heard me. Yes or no?”
“Ow—goddamn, you’re breaking my leg!”
“Answer, scumbag. I’m tired of playing with you.”
“Yes! Goddamn, yes—get off!”
Bunch lifted him by his leather vest and stood him against the wall, hauling him off the floor high enough to be eye level. Outside, the motorcycles made another slow pass, but Benny wasn’t listening. “We got your goddamn dog. You want him back, you tell Billy Taylor to come get him. Hear?”
“I hear!”
“Tell Taylor to come on his bike and come alone.”
“Where?”
“We’ll call you and say where and when. What’s your phone number?”
He told us, voice hoarse from his weight pressing his throat against Bunch’s fists.
We walked him down the stairs to the parking lot. Somewhere at the far end of Wazee Street we could hear the motorcycles. They seemed to be stationary, waiting, trying to decide what to do next.
“Benny,” I said, “I don’t believe that crap about you people not trying to kill me. In fact, I bet you were the one.”
“No, man! It’s the truth—nobody I know of did anything like that.”
“Benny, if they do try again, they’d better do it right. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I understand. But I’m not giving you no shit, man. We didn’t do it. That’s the truth.”
“A pleasure talking to you, Benny. Give our regards to Taylor.”
We watched him stumble quickly toward the sound of the motorcycle engines. A short time later, they popped and roared and faded into the night.
I asked Bunch, “What’s this about giving Taylor the dog?”
“Hey, it came to me right then! All we got to do is set it up right—it’s a chance, Dev.”
Hell, it was the only chance. “You think Benny was lying about the shooting?”
“Sure.” Bunch added, “But he was convincing, wasn’t he?”
“Why not? He’s had a lifetime of practice.”
CHAPTER 14
IT TOOK TWO or three days before Sergeant Kiefer got back to me. For one thing, I was far down on his list of chores somewhere below “Miscellaneous,” but still above “Circular File.” For another, he didn’t have much good to tell me. “Dev, I’m not going to be able to help you much.”
“Why’s that?”
“I asked a few questions here and there, trying to find out things about Antibodies Research. This morning I got a call from the DA’s office. An assistant over there—he tells me to lay off.”
“They’re working up something?”
“No. He tells me I’m on the verge of harassing a respected businessman and causing material damage to a legitimate business that, according to all the evidence available, has broken no laws.”
“The DA pulled you off it?”
“This assistant did. Art Maddox. I made a couple calls anyway, and Dev, I got to tell you, the people who own stock in Antibodies are some of the biggest names in town. They’re making a potload of money and they don’t want to see anything bad come down about it.”
“Do they have any idea what’s going on?”
“I doubt it. My guess is they don’t look past the profit statements. I know for certain they don’t want anybody—that is, me—asking anything that might embarrass the company and shake these profits. I’ve been told to stop nosing around unless I have indisputable evidence of criminal activity. Period.”
I couldn’t ask Dan to put his career on the line. Not yet, anyway. “Gilbert swings a big stick.”
“More likely, whatever stockholders he talked to. I checked him out, by the way. No criminal record.”
“I’m sorry to get you in hot water, Dan.”
“Hey, I’ve backed off. No trouble.” He went on, “But if you do get something ‘indisputable,’ I’d like to shove Maddox’s nose in it. All the way up to his goddamn eyebrows.”
“All I have is circumstantial. It won’t help much.”
“Well, like I say, I can’t do anything more. But you keep poking around and I’ll keep a quiet ear out. Somebody’s sweating for some reason, and it’s interesting.”
It also took some time to set up our meeting with Taylor; Bunch muttered something about arranging a meet and took off. I called Schute and gave him the news that we should have something definitive on Taylor in three or four days.
“That’s cutting it goddamn close, Kirk. Will it do the job for us?”
“It should,” I said. The quiver in my mind didn’t quite make it to my voice. “My associate’s arranging the—ah—situation right now.”
“I don’t want to hear about that part of it. Just send me the results.”
“Will do.”
Jerry Kagan finally called too. “According to my friend at Empire State Hospital, the donor—a Mr. Martinez—was on life support when the transplant took place.”
“He was still alive?”
Jerry paused. “Technically. Perhaps he even had some brain activity. But he wasn’t expected to live and his next of kin must have signed the donor form.”
“What did he die of?”
“I heard it was a drug overdose, but couldn’t confirm it.”
“He was flown to New York on life support?”
“Apparently so. I don’t know for certain. It was an interesting operation—the blood was so rare, they had to give it to the recipient as a transfusion. Took it out while the kidney was being removed.”
“What about the corpse? What did they do with it?”
“I don’t know. Routine disposal, I guess. Or returned it to next of kin.”
“What if there were no next of kin?”
“Then I’m not sure. Most hospitals send the cadaver to potter’s field or use it for medical study.” He added, “I didn’t ask my friend about that. He was reluctant enough to tell me as much as he did.”
“All right, Jerry. This is a big help and I owe you more than a dinner.”
Bunch returned to assure me that Schute would be happy soon. “I called those scumbags, Dev. I told Taylor where to be and when.”
“You talked
to him?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “At least he said it was him.”
The location was a little-used county road in a small canyon between Golden and Boulder. “Think he’ll show up?”
Bunch nodded. “He’ll show up. But he won’t be alone.”
“Fine,” I said. “This time we’ll be ready.”
And finally, late in the afternoon, I heard from Percy.
“I managed to talk to this Dr. Rosenberg, Devlin. If talk is the name for something so brief.”
“Not much help?”
“Oh, he said he did the operation, all right. Was justifiably proud of it, in fact. But who the donor was, where he came from, and what happened to him afterward was downright irrelevant to his interest in the case. His concern was with the living recipient and only a local corner of the recipient at that. He’s a specialist, you see.”
“Did he know what happened to the body?”
“He didn’t. But I located a nurse on the team. The remains were cremated.”
“Cremated?”
“There was this generous act by the next of kin, Devlin lad, that allowed the hospital to recover what other organs they could and cremate the remainder, thereby saving the hospital the cost of shipping the corpse back for burial.”
So much for any dental records or other positive proof of identity.
“The nurse said it wasn’t all that unusual. Out-of-town donors are often cremated and sent home in a tin box. It’s known as getting your ashes hauled.”
“But he had no relatives, Perce.”
“All I know is what she told me: that she saw the authorization form and saw the orderlies remove the body after the operation.”
“There’s a paper trail on the cremation?”
“Of course! This is New York—everything aboveboard and honest. In fact, I took the liberty of photocopying the death certificate and cremation authorization. I can fax them out if you want.”
“Yes—send them on.”
“Will do.”
It took about twenty minutes for the documents to be processed through a system that was always crowded at the end of New York’s working day, and I faxed a photograph back with one final chore for Percy. When the machine stopped chirping, there they were: a copy of the New York State certificate of death for one John Martinez and an authorization for disposal of remains by shipping them back to Antibodies Research, who would return them to the Martinez family. The signature on the line for next of kin was Mary Martinez. It was a name I didn’t recognize and apparently wasn’t supposed to. There was, however, a notary seal witnessing Mary’s signature. The name of the notary was Phyllis Whortley, and that was familiar … Whortley—on a nameplate … a brass nameplate on a desk: small letters perched on the corner of Gilbert’s secretary’s desk.
Either Gilbert or her secretary had signed as Mary Martinez, and Phyllis notarized the signature to make everything nice and legal on paper.
It wasn’t much evidence to bring into court, but it was one more stitch in the fabric, and it looked as if circumstantial was the only kind of evidence we were going to get.
Bunch had been making calls to the dozen or so air ambulance firms and came up with another tidbit: “John Martinez was flown out on a chartered plane from Arapahoe Airport, Dev. Wings Ambulance Service. He was accompanied by the service’s medical flight team.”
“Was he on life support?”
“Yeah. That’s why booking remembered so easily. Said they don’t get much call for long flights with full life support, so it was a big thing. Big cost, too, but the check was good.”
“Who paid?”
“Empire State Hospital.”
“Was Antibodies involved?”
Bunch nodded. “Mark Gilbert signed the release for the funds; Dr. Morris Matheney signed the medical release.”
Matheney’s nurse told me he was on afternoon rounds at Warner Memorial and wouldn’t be back until around four. I told her I’d wait and settled down to leaf through one of the thousands of National Geographic’s that find their final resting place in medical offices.
“He’s going to be a little late this afternoon,” she told me once. “He just called from the hospital.”
“I’ll wait.”
The silence of the small lounge with its half-dozen chairs was broken only by the occasional rattle of the telephone and the distant buzz of voices out of sight down the hallway. It was almost five before the nurse leaned over her office’s half-door to tell me the doctor would see me now.
This time there was a definite chill in the air; he neither rose nor offered to shake hands, and the brown eyes above the Lincoln-style beard were defensive and angry. “I’ve told you before, Mr. Kirk, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
I smiled. “But that was before you heard what I have to say.”
Matheney leaned back, his beard thrusting out a trifle more. His voice didn’t ask what it was, but his eyes did.
“When Nestor Calamaro was officially invisible, he had no existence. But then he became important to some people, and as a result he began to exist.”
“Exactly what point are you trying to make?” Matheney’s eyes, magnified by their lenses, stared at me without blinking.
“He exists on paper now. As a Mr. John Martinez. He was flown by Wings Ambulance Service to Empire State Hospital in New York. He exists on paper there as a brain-dead organ donor with—you guessed it—extremely rare Rh null blood. He exists on another piece of paper as a corpse cremated after the transplant. And he still exists in the memory of the medical team that did the transplant and who have recognized a photograph of Nestor Calamaro as John Martinez. In fact, Nestor has more existence since he was killed than when he was alive.”
The only motion in the doctor’s face was his lower lip, which curled inward so he could nip at a spur of dry flesh with his front teeth.
“Nestor still exists in your files, too, doctor.”
His head jerked to one side in a quick negative. “Not with that blood he doesn’t. The Nestor Calamaro I treated had type A blood. You can look in those files, Kirk.”
“But the Nestor who was tested at Warner Memorial, under your authorization, had Rh null blood. What are the odds of that kind of blood showing up in two people named Nestor Calamaro here in Denver?”
The teeth nipped again. “How did you—? You must have broken into my files!”
“Yeah.” I placed a photograph on his desk. “Here’s a picture I took of Nestor’s file—the one sitting in that drawer right now. If you look closely right here, you can see where someone changed the blood type.”
“That’s burglary! That’s theft—you can’t—”
“Before you get too self-righteous, doctor, please remember that the rules against obtaining evidence illegally apply only to public officials such as the police. I’m a private citizen. The evidence I have is admissible in court.” It wasn’t all that true, but—who knows?—the Supreme Court and its new conservatives could find that way.
“Why are you telling me this? Why haven’t you gone to the police with this … this story?”
“Because Nestor was murdered and I want to know who killed him. And who killed two pregnant women who have no existence at all now.”
Now the eyes only stared emptily.
“And why. Why someone with your ability and achievements would become so greedy as to feed off the lives of the helpless.”
Something hardened again in the man’s eyes—his professional competence was being challenged, his image of himself as a doctor questioned. “You think I wanted that money for myself?”
“It didn’t go to a victims’ compensation fund, did it?”
“You know nothing—nothing!”
“Tell me it was for charity. Tell me it was for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of humankind.”
“It was! You with your comfortable ignorance—you have no idea what medical research costs, no idea what thresholds we’re on! Thres
holds we can cross with just a little more effort!”
“The rats in the Antibodies laboratory? Is that your threshold?”
“Yes! Hybrid protein. If those experiments are successful, transplant surgery can become as routine and as risk-free as tonsillectomies!”
“And that makes it worth Nestor’s life?”
He didn’t hear my comment. Instead, he leaned tensely across the desk. “My God, Kirk, think what it will mean to develop a protein that kills transplant-attacking cells in human beings! Think of the benefits from eliminating the risk and the cost of all the anti-rejection drugs that we use today! The protein will not only be more powerful but selective—that’s the key. A protein that selectively attacks those T-cells which reject transplanted organs, but that doesn’t depress the patient’s general immune system!”
“Surely, doctor, there are other ways of getting funding for your research.”
“The government funded us for five years and then pulled out when we were this close. Bureaucracy! Some goddamn bureaucrat in Washington said we weren’t making satisfactory progress—as if this kind of research could be scheduled like a construction project. It’s a dead end, he said. It’s not cost effective. That was the term he used: ‘cost effective.’ He measured the human benefits against dollars and said we weren’t cost effective!”
“But you decided to be cost effective,” I said. “You took illegal immigrants and sold their bodies to fund your research.”
“We used the same criteria to make a decision that Washington used on me. I had no choice! They forced it on me—what else could I do? We’re this close to creating the protein, and to quit now—to give up all that we’ve accomplished … .” He shook his head. “That would be the criminal act—in the larger scale of things, that would be the truly criminal act.”
Behind their thick lenses, his eyes stared at me and beyond. “The wonder of it—the awe-inspiring wonder of that kind of freedom for transplanting. Think what it will mean not just for organ transplantation but cell transplants, too. Islets that can rebuild injured tissue. Even create whole and healthy tissue out of malformed births! Retarded children made normal. Alzheimer’s victims brought back to their former abilities, diabetics … epileptics … . Criminal act? No, cost effective—it was cost effective to use two or three marginal individuals for the benefit of the entire human race. Human beings are slaughtered by the hundreds every day—wars, accidents, suicides—every day all over the globe, humans are slaughtered to no purpose or benefit. Three. Three faceless, noncontributive aliens, whose benefit to humanity will far outweigh anything they could ever have achieved in life!”