LOST TO THE WORLD

by Libby Sternberg

  “Yeah, Sue and Steve can sure go at it sometimes,” Sean said, trying to keep the conversation flowing.

  “If you’re Sue’s cousin you might want to talk to that husband of hers,” the woman said, not hiding her indignation. “He sounds like he ‘goes at it’ a little too much, if you ask me.” The little girl tugged at her again and she retreated after a quick goodbye.

  So the Schlagers had argued the night before, loudly enough to annoy their neighbors, probably disturbing that little girl’s sleep. And now Susan Schlager was missing. Maybe Susan and her boss had been lovers. Her husband finds out and goes after the boss, then his wife?

  Sean looked at the lonely little house, wondering what secrets it held. He’d come back in the afternoon, when Steve Schlager was home. Maybe even Susan would turn up by then.

  Now it was back to Hopkins to catch up with that Dr. Rollins, maybe poke around to learn more about Susan Schlager.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT OCCURRED TO SEAN on his drive back into the city that waiting for Steve Schlager to show up that afternoon could pose a problem. Sean needed to be home on time or risk Mrs. Buchanan’s wrath again. He couldn’t be lingering after hours should Steve Schlager’s shift end beyond five o’clock. Sal would have to pick up that slack.

  Sean stopped at a pay phone at Hopkins to call his partner, but Sal didn’t pick up. He didn’t let it ring long enough for another detective to catch the call. He didn’t want a message sitting on Sal’s desk if O’Brien should start nosing around.

  He hung up the phone feeling like a slacker. Maybe if he called Mrs. Buchanan…no, he discarded that idea. The woman was so prickly lately she might lecture him once again about finding other help. He’d have to try to catch up with Sal later.

  He made his way upstairs to the research labs, thinking how he had to get his thoughts together better on everything. Here he was on his third or fourth trip back to Hopkins, scrambling to pick up scraps of info. And here he was still trying to think of ways to rejigger his schedule so he could do some after-hours work if need be. There was a girl in the neighborhood who looked like she was in high school. Maybe she’d be good enough to use for a couple hours here and there. He’d find out this weekend…

  He exited the stairwell and nearly collided with the polio secretary Julia.

  Her face looked tired. Shadows circled her eyes and she leaned heavily on her cane. He remembered what Dr. Spencer had told him about the smell of hot wool and how a polio never forgot that odor. He was about to apologize for his lack of sensitivity the other day when she snapped at him.

  “Did you have to tell Dr. Jansen that I was the one who let you know he was in Dr. Lowenstein’s lab? I didn’t think you’d tell him I tattled on him! I wasn’t doing that when I asked about the lab being opened up…” It was as if she had been stewing over this, just waiting for him to arrive. Her free hand flew to her face as if to stop the outburst from reaching his ears.

  Her hand wasn’t really free, though. She’d been carrying a sheaf of papers which now dropped to the floor. Mrs. Wilcox heard the commotion and came into the hallway. Both she and Sean bent to pick up the papers for Julia, typed sheets filled with scientific verbiage, an article of some sort.

  “Is there a problem, Julia?” Mrs. Wilcox asked her.

  “No. I’m sorry. I’m so clumsy,” she murmured.

  “Maybe you can show me to Dr. Rollins’s office,” Sean said, trying to make her feel at ease, useful. He looked over at Mrs. Wilcox. “I didn’t catch him earlier.”

  Julia looked at Mrs. Wilcox, too, as if asking permission.

  “You go ahead,” Mrs. Wilcox told Julia. “Show him the office.

  “All right. But—but I did need to ask you something.” She said it as if she didn’t want Sean to hear. Mrs. Wilcox looked at her watch and handed her the papers she’d retrieved.

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s just some travel arrangements for Dr. Jansen. I’ll stop by later.”

  Sean handed her the papers he’d collected as well. After thanking him, she nodded her head down the hallway. Even though he now knew where Dr. Rollins’s office was, he wanted to talk more to Julia.

  “This way,” she said and led him past Mrs. Wilcox’s office into a different part of the labs. Hopkins was really an amalgam of buildings, wings added on to the original medical school and hospital, adjacent buildings purchased and refitted. The one they entered now was a completely different building joined to the other one by a slightly sloping hallway.

  “Is Dr. Jansen going somewhere?” he asked her as nonchalantly as possible.

  “To a conference,” she said. “Now please don’t go telling him I told you.”

  “I could get that information from a number of sources,” he lied. “Where’s he headed?”

  “California.” She tried to pick up her pace but her fatigue got the best of her and she had to stay at his side. “He goes to them all the time.”

  “Is he presenting that paper?” He pointed to the papers she now firmly grasped in her free hand.

  “No, that’s for another publication entirely.”

  “It must be interesting working for a researcher.” He’d get no information out of her if she was nursing a grudge against him.

  “It’s all right.”

  “But being around all these discoveries—” He swept his hand in a half circle in front of him. “And you get to read it first. In those papers you type.”

  “This paper,” she said, holding up the article, “is a meticulous account of how Dr Jansen used chimpanzees to weaken the polio virus. It’s very thorough—but not an exciting document to type.”

  “But it’s a step toward a cure?”

  “Not a cure. That would be something completely separate.” Her voice softened. He was beginning to get her good graces back. “A vaccine.”

  She stopped to talk to him. “It’s a tedious process. The doctors pass the virus through the monkeys, keeping track of which strain they’re using and which monkeys they infect—chimps don’t naturally contract polio, you see, they have to be infected with it—and as the one virus moves through monkey after monkey, it should weaken until it’s so weak it won’t hurt you, but it would still be able to provide the antibodies to make you immune from infection in the future.”

  He nodded, interested in the information and glad she was warming to him once again. He offered to carry the article for her, apologizing for taking her away from her work, and was gratified when she handed it over. It wasn’t that it weighted her down. It just made her “off balance,” he noted, to carry anything.

  They continued down the hall and around a corner, now walking past older labs, their counters filled with huge glass jars and tubing and the smell of formaldehyde.

  “But Dr. Salk, in Pittsburgh, isn’t taking that approach,” she said, clearly proud of her grasp of the work. “He’s inactivating the virus—killing it—and trying to come up with an effective vaccine with a dead virus.”

  “It would still work?”

  She nodded but didn’t look at him. He noticed that when she walked she was careful to keep her eyes on her path. “Yes. And it would be less risky. A live virus always carries the risk of infection, you see. And in polio work, that risk is not one that some people want to take any longer.”

  “Because of the kids?”

  “There was a vaccine trial many years ago, apparently, that ended up infecting a lot of kids. Dr. MacIntyre, my old boss, told me about it. It’s bad enough when things go wrong and it’s adults getting treated. But when it’s children…”

  “So that’s why they’re focusing on the killed virus approach….”

  She laughed a little. “Some doctors think the live virus is the only sure way to guarantee immunity. Dr. Albert Sabin leads that charge. They all argue as much as politicians!”

  When she laughed, her face lost its musty sense of fatigue. Her eyes shone and her pert nose wrinkled. He noticed she had a faint smattering of fr
eckles on her cheeks, covered over with a brush of powder.

  “Hopkins could have been at the forefront of the vaccine work,” she said, “when Isabel Morgan was here.”

  “She was a superior secretary, I take it?”

  She laughed again, this time throwing him an amused glance. “She’s a doctor—like the men! She actually devised a killed-virus vaccine. She grew the polio virus in monkey brains and then inactivated it with formaldehyde—formalin, it’s called. Then she immunized other monkeys and they didn’t catch the disease!”

  “Why isn’t it being used?”

  “You don’t just run out and try something like that on people,” she said with a touch of condescension. “There are lots of questions you need to answer first. Like what if the immunity in the monkeys didn’t come from the dead virus but from a small part of the virus that survived the inactivation? And how much formalin is just enough to kill it so that it still triggers antibodies when injected into folks? Doctors can argue for days over stuff like that— how many cc’s of something to put into a syringe.”

  “You sound like you could be one of them with all you know.”

  “When you type their papers over and over you pick up stuff.” She turned another corner where they stood in front of a stairwell. He didn’t want her to have to go down it with him. But he wanted to keep talking to her.

  “What happened to Dr. Morgan—did she die?” He stopped at the stairwell.

  Julia shook her head. “Might as well have. She left Hopkins to get married.”

  He looked at her, studying her face. “I take it you don’t intend to do the same.”

  She blushed deeply but didn’t answer. “Dr. Rollins’s office is down a flight. I could introduce you.”

  “No, that’s all right. You can go back to your office. I’ve troubled you enough.” And then he remembered what Dr. Spencer had told him about the hot packs and how he’d wanted to apologize to her.

  “I’m sorry for the other day, about my coat,” he said, feeling uncomfortable. “I had no idea what that smell would mean to you. Someone explained it to me.”

  Two bursts of red flamed her cheeks, and she looked at the floor, brows coming together.

  “For goodness’ sake, don’t be ridiculous. You couldn’t help it. I was—” And here she glanced at him briefly, panic flitting across her bright eyes. “I was upset. That’s all. Really. It had nothing to do with—” She lifted her cane and put it down again. “With this.”

  It had everything to do with that. And her embarrassed response to his apology did as well. He couldn’t seem to strike the right note with her.

  “Susan Schlager still hasn’t called in?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “She do this sort of thing before—not tell anybody where she is?”

  “No. She’s usually a good worker.”

  “Know anything about her husband?”

  He saw her pause, evaluating whether to say something. “Nothing except that whatever he says, Sue does.” Perhaps realizing how gossipy that sounded, she hastened to add in a softer tone, “Sue is a good wife.”

  He nodded.

  “About your boss, Dr. Jansen. One more thing—this conference in California he’s attending. Could you give me the information on that?”

  She frowned.

  “I won’t say anything to him about you giving me the info, I swear. I’ll say I heard it from another doctor,” he said. “I just want to see if it matches up with other information we have,” he lied.

  “All right. But it’s at my desk. I’ll have to phone you.”

  “Here’s my card.” He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a card with his phone number on it. “Thanks for all you’ve told me. Learned something. I’ll tell my boys about it.”

  Her face relaxed again. “It’s no trouble really. I—I enjoyed talking with you.” And, as if to prolong their time together, she added, “It is exciting work. To be part of it, that is. It will help millions of people.”

  She turned and left him.

  His interview with Dr. Rollins a few minutes later was short. Nothing new to discover. The man had only collaborated with Lowenstein on the one article. And he’d been touched by how Myron insisted Rollins take all the credit. Lowenstein’s name hadn’t even been on the final published paper.

  ***

  Late afternoon when the sun’s rays cut across the west like a knife to Sal’s eyes, the young detective sat hunched in his car again waiting outside the Schlager house. After a frustrating morning exploring the world of cleaning ladies and housemaids who worked for the research doctors at Hopkins—and finding few at home to talk to—Sal had returned to the office to talk briefly with his partner. Sean had offered him a kingdom if he’d work late by staking out the Schlager household.

  Sal didn’t need a kingdom, but he could do with a cold beer. It was warm in the car, and he wouldn’t mind a foamy Natty Bo’ to take the edge off the day.

  Sal sized up the neighborhood while he waited. He couldn’t help compare every place to his own family’s locale in the eastern section of the city where working class folks lived—tall, narrow row homes with marble steps, populated with people whose first language wasn’t English and who still shopped in markets where they could speak in their native tongues.

  The Schlagers’ neighborhood was the next step up and out from that, still row houses but with a little more square footage on their small plots of land, land that grew grass, not concrete, and closer to the county line and to green parks with open spaces.

  He’d taken a slow drive through the alley out back before knocking on the door and then setting up his watch. Yards were tiny but big enough for patches of green and long clothes lines where the day’s wash had been dried and folded in late afternoon before the man of the house returned. The Schlager household’s line, however, held a man’s shirt and work pants, stiffly flapping in the breeze, left out too long.

  At a little before six-thirty, a big blue Chevy pulled up and parked. A tall burly man with reddish hair unloaded a couple bags of groceries and let himself into the Schlager home, using his key. Susan obviously wasn’t around to greet him.

  How would Sean play this? For the past hour, Sal had been turning that over in his head. Reveal he was a detective at first or merely start asking questions, leading up to the revelation of his association with the police? Which would get more information from the guy?

  Aw hell, he’d let instincts guide him. Sal got out of his car, pushing his hat back on his head and rubbing his tired brow. He twisted his stiff neck this way and that and, thus loosened up, approached the door. After a few knocks, it opened in a rush and Steve Schlager, cold beer in hand, stood before him, not saying a word.

  “I’m looking for Susan,” Sal said simply, watching for a reaction from the man’s ice blue eyes.

  “She’s not here.” His voice was lightly accented, his high right cheekbone marred by a thin scar. His eyes told Sal nothing. Sal glanced behind the man. A television flickered in the shadowed living room. Furniture looked new but there were few pieces of it—a small sofa and one chair plus the TV.

  “Where is she?” Sal countered.

  Schlager narrowed his eyes and put his beer on an unseen table. He stepped forward. “What’s your business with her?” He looked ready to fight.

  “Police business,” Sal said, not giving way. “It’s about her boss.”

  At this, Schlager visibly relaxed, but he didn’t move back. “She’s not here,” he repeated. “She’s visiting her aunt.”

  “The one on the Eastern Shore?” Sal asked, remembering her whereabouts before the murder.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “Do you have her telephone number?”

  “She doesn’t have one.”

  “What about her name?”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “No Aunt Rita or Mabel or Henrietta?”

  “She always says she�
��s going to see her aunt. No more.”

  “And you don’t wonder? What if she had car trouble?”

  The man shrugged as if he hadn’t thought of that.

  Sal tried a different tack. “How you know it’s her aunt she’s going to see and not somebody else?” he asked in a soft, insinuating voice.

  Schlager got the meaning. His face reddened and his jaw tightened. “I would know,” he said. “Believe me, I would know.”

  “When’d she leave?”

  “Last night.”

  “When she expected back?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Sal pressed him on a few more details, but there was no more information to be had. Either the man really didn’t know or was damn good at pretending he didn’t know. The most he learned was that Susan’s maiden name was “Dugan.”

  He looked at his watch and sighed. He’d grab a beer at the corner tavern near his place, then head home. Tomorrow, he’d try to find any Dugans he could on the Eastern Shore, hoping this aunt Susan was visiting was a spinster from her mother’s side of the family.

  ***

  As it turned out, Mrs. Buchanan wasn’t angry with Sean that night. She was asleep in the chair by the door, the radio playing accordion waltzes.

  For this he’d hurried home. He’d left the office in such a rush, he’d not had time to go through all of Lowenstein’s papers, so he’d brought some home with him. He’d have a photo of Lowenstein from NYU soon. Maureen O’Donnell had called while he was out, telling him she was putting a yearbook in the mail to him.

  He walked past Mrs. Buchanan into the kitchen where the loaf of bread he’d bought the day before was on the table with an untidy slice cut from it. His heart gave a leap at that sight. Danny had obviously cut it himself. The boy came padding out of the bedroom to Sean and hugged his leg.

  “I fixed dinner for Robby,” Danny whispered.

  “You did now, did you?” He hoisted Danny up and kissed his cheek. His face was cool. No fever. “What did you make?”

  “Sam’iches.” Danny nodded his head seriously.“Butter and lettuce and jelly. But he wouldn’t eat it.” This too was accentuated with a grave shaking of his head. His lower lip stuck out in a pout.