“So what happens when a Boca Babe wants a baby, but is having difficulties? No problemo. She just gets another servant. We already know that third-party arrangements exist. You can pay for an egg donor if your own eggs are defective. Or if your eggs are fine, but your uterus is the problem, you can get a surrogate to carry your fertilized eggs.
“Now what if you have a uterine problem, but you don’t want to use a surrogate? You want the experience of pregnancy and childbirth all to yourself, because of course you deserve it. What do you do?
“The answer is obvious. Uterus donation. Just get somebody else’s healthy uterus transplanted into your own body.
“Remember that ‘UD’ that was on Gladys’s medical chart? All this time I was thinking it must originally have been IUD? Wrong. I made an assumption. How many times have I told you—Never assume! When you do, you make an ASS of U and ME.
“So, it was really UD all along—uterus donor. The Isis Clinic has been running an illegal organ transplant scheme. Taking uteruses from defenseless Mayan women and transplanting them into infertile Boca Babes. Turning one hell of a profit, too, I’m sure!”
Lana eyed me with disbelief. I could just read her mind: “Girl, you have gone off the deep end. I’ve never heard of any uterus transplant. You’re talkin’ science fiction!”
“I knew you’d say that,” I replied. “That’s why I looked it up on the Internet.” I might have had the slightest tone of superiority in my voice.
“In point of fact, a human uterus transplant was done in Saudi Arabia a few years ago. It didn’t work out because the recipient’s body rejected it. That happens with all organ transplants, unless the recipient is given antirejection drugs. The problem with that is, the drugs would probably harm the unborn child. So at that point, the doctors were saying they were working on finding a way around that. Then a couple years ago, some scientists in Sweden performed a bunch of successful uterus transplants in mice resulting in healthy live births. So the point is, the potential for successful human uterus transplants has been empirically established. It’s just been a matter of time till it’s achieved.
“And what I think is that Farber has achieved it. He just hasn’t let on to the scientific community ’cause he’s raking in some major moolah. Not to mention, committing some seriously egregious ethical violations.
“And that ain’t all,” I continued as Lana eyeballed me. “I think the Mayan men are in on the deal. Remember the Indigenous People’s Liberation Front? How I never figured out how they were funding their little gunrunning operation? Here’s how. They were forcing the women to undergo hysterectomies, then using Farber’s payments to buy the arms. It was a wombs-for-weapons trade!”
Lana raised her snout just above the waterline.
“All right, I just might buy that tall tale,” she seemed to be saying. “But where does the murder come in?”
“I’m one step ahead of you,” I crowed. Maybe the slightest hint of a smirk crept onto my face.
“Okay, Gladys was having post-hysterectomy problems. Symptoms of menopause—hot flashes, night sweats, so on. She goes back to the Isis Clinic for help. But why should Farber help her at that point? He’d already gotten what he wanted from her. There’s no incentive for him to provide follow-up care. It’s not as if he can bill Gladys’s nonexistent insurance company. And she’s not exactly a private-pay client, either.
“So he tells her to get lost. Except he doesn’t count on one thing—Gladys has her legal papers now. So she can go to the public health clinic without fear of Immigration right next door, unlike the other Mayan immigrants.
“So here’s what I think happened. Gladys innocently remarked to Farber that she would go to the public health clinic. I don’t think she realized at the time that she was putting herself in danger by telling him that. But he realized the implications immediately. If Gladys were to seek care elsewhere, her hysterectomy would be discovered, and it wouldn’t be long before he was found out and his whole scheme unraveled. So Farber had to kill Gladys.
“I think the realization hit Gladys later. The poor woman must have come to understand that her life was in jeopardy. That’s why she gave Eulalia the two scraps of paper—one from the Isis Clinic and the other from the Indigenous People’s Liberation Front—hoping that if anything happened to her, someone would connect the dots.”
I finished, and Lana and I sat there in melancholy silence. I’d found the truth, and it was the pits. The depth of humanity’s depravity and greed was astounding.
Lana got over it first, the cold-blooded beast. She flipped her tail, sending a splash of swamp water into my face.
“So Gladys sent a message from beyond, and you deciphered it,” she seemed to say. “Now get off your ass and do something about it!”
Chapter 31
I CALLED the contessa. The contessa called the cops. The cops called on the Isis Clinic. It was as simple as that. With the recent death of Eulalia, which had already been reported by the hospital as suspicious, combined with the contessa’s clout, an arrest warrant was issued for Farber, together with a search warrant for the premises. The authorities swooped in, with the media not far behind. At the same time, a medical team from the public health clinic was dispatched to the tomato fields to find out how many other Mayan women had had hysterectomies.
A couple hours later, I sat in the cop shop on one side of a two-way mirror, together with the contessa, watching a police detective interview Farber. He had declined his right to counsel. Apparently, his ego led him to think he could represent himself better than anyone else could. However, he soon realized that the gig was up. Confronted with the impending evidence, he started to sing like Pavarotti, angling to cut a deal.
“So you admit you were performing hysterectomies on Mayan women, then transplanting the uteruses?” the cop asked.
Again Farber’s ego seemed to be getting the better of him.
“Yeah, I admit it,” he said. “Hell, I’m proud of it. Do you realize the magnitude of this scientific breakthrough? This is the apex of assisted reproductive technology. I have gone where no one has gone before! I’ve brought unspeakable joy to countless women who would otherwise live out their lives in hopeless despair!”
Jeez, the despicable douchebag was acting as if he deserved the Albert Schweitzer Prize or something.
“And it was a pretty lucrative venture, too, right?” the cop asked.
“Sure. I paid the Indians a few hundred dollars per unit, then turned around and sold the product to consumers for a hundred thousand. Of course, the first pregnancy with the new uterus didn’t always come to full term. With the antirejection drugs, more often than not there’d be a miscarriage. So usually we had to go through several cycles, just like with IVF. Each cycle would be another fifty grand. So all in all, the net from each transplant was right around 200K. Our earnings went up every quarter.” He said this in the most genial and enthusiastic of tones, as if he were cozying up to a bunch of potential investors.
I glanced at the contessa. She was sitting erect in her chair, eyes fixed straight ahead, face pale, jaw rigid. I knew if she had her way, Farber would blow out the fuses on Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. However, I wasn’t sure her circle of influence extended all the way up to Tallahassee.
Furthermore, it was starting to look as if Farber wasn’t going to cop to anything but the transplant racket.
“What do you know about the Mayan arms dealing?” the cop asked him.
“The Mayan what?” Farber asked. He looked confused. Then he seemed to put two and two together.
“Whoa, hold on, buddy,” he said, putting both hands up in front of him. “I don’t know anything about any arms. Whatever the Indians did with the fair price I paid for their goods, that’s their business. I have absolutely nothing to do with that.” He looked deeply offended.
I kind o
f had to believe him on that one. I couldn’t see him giving a rat’s ass about what happened in some Central American banana republic, as he no doubt viewed it.
The cop seemed to be hip to that likelihood as well, because he changed his line of inquiry.
“Okay, doctor,” he said, “so you had a highly profitable venture going. Now supposing someone, like Gladys Gutierrez, was about to take some action that would imperil your income stream. Well, as a prudent businessperson, you would understandably take countermeasures to head that off, isn’t that right?”
Farber hauled out that smirk of his.
“You are not going to pin that one on me,” he said. “I am a medical man, not a murderous maniac.”
Then he looked straight at the mirror. I knew he couldn’t see me on the other side, but his eyes bore right into mine. I’ll confess that a chill ran down my spine.
He said, very slowly and deliberately, “Read my lips: I did not have homicidal relations with that woman!”
Damn! He had channeled George Bush the Elder and William Jefferson Clinton, all in one compound sentence.
And just like them, he was lying through his porcelain-capped teeth. I was sure of it. Or was I?
The questioning stopped soon thereafter. The contessa and I left, and I headed for home.
It was now well past midnight. The day’s clouds had cleared from the sky, and the stars shimmered brightly. It should have been symbolic of the clearing up of the case. I should have been feeling gratified.
But I wasn’t. Something was still nagging at me. Damn Farber. He had managed to get under my skin. Something was still off about the whole scenario.
I rounded the final curve in the road and approached my boat dock up ahead. I shifted the Hog into neutral, coasted to a stop, then reached forward and turned off the key.
And then the full truth hit me.
Chapter 32
I PILOTED THE airboat across the swamp toward my cabin. The River of Grass was alive with night sounds—frogs croaking, ducks quacking, storks flapping. Here and there a gator floated by. None of them provided any comfort for me, though.
I reached the cabin, brought the boat up to the side of the porch, and cut the engine. I took off my earmuffs and pulled out my earplugs, then stepped onto the porch to tie up the boat.
Lana’s glistening eyeballs appeared above the waterline, staring me down.
“So what gives?” she seemed to be asking.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me get my drink, then I’ll tell you all about it.”
I went in, got my Hennessy, then sat down on the porch and filled Lana in on the evening’s events.
“So Farber didn’t kill Gladys?” she asked when I finished.
“No,” I replied. “It was Tricia Weinstein.”
Lana flipped her tail. “Say what?” was her question.
“Okay.” I said. “Here’s how it came to me. It was really a bunch of inconsistencies. First the music.”
“Music?” Lana repeated.
“Yeah. The couple times I visited Tricia at her house, she was listening to the Eagles and ABBA—seventies stuff. She was really getting into it both times. Now, Chuck told me that our favorite music is always the stuff we listened to in high school. So then it struck me. If seventies music was Tricia’s favorite, she must have been in high school then. So she must be in her forties now. I gotta tell ya, she’s lookin’ good. I took her for her early to mid-thirties.”
Lana rolled her eyes. “Well, duh,” she was saying. “This is Boca. You should have known nobody’s as young as they look.”
I ignored her and went on.
“So maybe she could fool people with her face, but she couldn’t fool her reproductive system. Her time was up. She was infertile.”
Lana seemed to think that over.
“Now, inconsistency number two,” I continued. “Tricia is the Queen of Organization, the Mistress of Planning. But she told me her pregnancy had been a ‘wonderful surprise.’ I should have known. It doesn’t fit. Her pregnancy must have been planned way in advance, like everything else in her life. No way would she just leave it up to chance. So I realized that when she told me that, it was because she had something to hide. And that something was her uterus transplant.
“Here’s what happened. Tricia was on the waiting list for a transplant at the Isis Clinic. One day, she went in for a pre-op appointment. After her appointment, she stopped in the restroom on her way out. Gladys was in the exam room next door. The walls are thin in there. She overheard Gladys telling Farber that she was going to go to the public health clinic to get treatment for her menopausal symptoms.
“Well, that posed a direct threat to Tricia, because the whole scheme would come unraveled, and then she wouldn’t get her new uterus and get the baby she desperately wanted. She couldn’t let that happen.”
“Wait a minute,” Lana said. “Tricia didn’t know Gladys at the time. How did she find out who she was?”
I glared at her bulging eyes.
“I don’t know that,” I admitted.
“And why didn’t she just pay Gladys off to keep quiet about her hysterectomy instead of killing her?”
“Who knows?” I snapped. Lana was getting on my nerves with her questions. “Maybe she figured payoffs are a bother. People always get greedy and want more and more. Once you start down that road, you’re trapped. You become a blackmail victim.”
Lana didn’t respond to that, so I continued.
“Okay, inconsistency number three. The first time I was at Tricia’s house, her husband came by asking about his missing red tie. But she didn’t do what most people would in that situation. She didn’t try to help him remember where it might be. Like, she didn’t ask him when was the last time he had it on, or what he was doing when he took it off, or if he had looked in certain places. She just said she didn’t know where it was and suggested he wear a different one.
“Now here’s one thing I don’t get,” I said before Lana could get it in herself, “with all her planning and organization, why did Tricia use her husband’s tie to commit the murder? It just seems too spontaneous, especially since she knew he’d been photographed in the tie the night before. She must have had a better plan, but something went wrong.
“Anyway, she strangled Gladys with the tie, and then everything was back on track. She went ahead and got her uterus transplant. That’s why she has a ‘caesarean’ scar. It’s not from a caesarean delivery, it’s from the uterus replacement.”
Lana’s unblinking eyes bore into me.
“That’s all well and good,” she was saying. “But who’s gonna buy it? A prosecutor will laugh in your face. There’s no evidence, not even circumstantial.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “How the hell am I going to get justice for Gladys?”
With a sigh I stood up, then bent over to pick up my empty glass. Suddenly, something big and hard hit my ass with a thwack, and I went down. What the hell?
I pushed up off the ground with my arms and turned around just in time to see Mark Cohen standing over me, holding a canoe paddle aloft, ready to bring it down on my head. Tricia Weinstein stood beside him, her hair jutting out wildly, her dark eyes gleaming with lunacy. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a canoe docked on the far side of the porch. Guess I didn’t have to worry about going after the killer anymore, since she’d come to me. And brought her husband for reinforcement.
I did a quick body roll to the right, and the paddle came crashing down an inch away from me, breaking through the wooden slats of the porch.
Mark struggled to dislodge it.
“Get her, honey, get her!” Tricia screamed.
Mark pulled the paddle out and raised it overhead to strike at me again. It looked like we were in for the mother of all climax battles here. It was time once
more for some Krav Maga action. I caught Mark’s wrist on the downswing, then pulled him forward, using his own momentum against him and bringing him down next to me.
We rolled around, each trying to get on top. The whole time Tricia kept up the screaming.
“After everything I’ve gone through to have this baby, do you think I’m going to let you stop me? Do you have any idea what it’s like to see all your friends having babies while you can’t? And the humiliation of fertility treatments?”
Mark was on top of me now. He gripped his fingers around my throat. I struggled to breathe. Tricia continued her harangue.
“Do you know what it’s like to have an organ transplant? And then to be pregnant at my age? I’m in so much pain and so tired I can hardly move. But it’s all going to be worth it. And you are not getting in my way!”
“It’s okay, baby,” Mark gasped to her as he continued to strangle me. “I’m taking care of it.”
I slid my arms between both of his and pushed outward with all my strength. His arms flew to his sides. I shoved the palm of my hand right into the space between his nose and upper lip. His head snapped back, and his body followed.
I reached for my gun in my boot, but he was already on me again. Tricia stepped closer, trying to get at me, too, but her huge belly made her movements ungainly. Mark and I rolled again—right into Tricia’s legs. Then—SPLAT! She went over the edge of the porch and straight into the swamp.
I crawled over to the edge. Tricia was thrashing like crazy in the murky water. But wait. There was way too much thrashing going on here to be caused by two arms and two legs. Then I saw it: A long ridged tail and a protruding snout. Lana! She was about to attack Tricia!
“Oh my God!” Mark yelled, freezing in place.
My inner vigilante wanted to let justice take its course. But then my conscience kicked in. There was an innocent life at stake here—and I don’t mean Tricia’s.
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