A Perilous Conception

by Larry Karp

  Iggy was behind the counter, working on a lock. As he looked up, his bland expression of welcome to a customer morphed into surprise, then into his trademark left-sided grin. The right side of Iggy’s mouth doesn’t move. It’s called Bell’s Palsy. The nerve that supplies the lower part of the face on one side sometimes stops working, nobody knows why. “Hey, Mr. B, how you doin’?” Iggy crowed. “It’s been a while. You got a job for me, or is this a social visit?”

  Irwin McKeesport, a.k.a. Iggy the Key, has been my friend and occasional Guy Friday for more than five years. When it came to appearances, God was not overly kind to Ig. Besides having a dead facial nerve, he was barely five-two, with close-set beady eyes that made him look snakey, a honker that would’ve given Durante jealousy fits, and cheeks that were relief maps of a teenager’s long-lost Battle of Acne.

  But Iggy’s the best lock-and-key man in Emerald, hands down. I got to know him when I was going after a scuzzbag who’d been getting into places he had no right to get into, departing with choice items of high market value, and more often than you’d expect by chance, finding a woman on the premises and leaving her with the most disgusting, sadistic injuries I’ve ever seen.

  Then, one morning when I came into the station, here was this round little character with a half-paralyzed face, waiting for me. Iggy broke down and cried while he told me about the creep who’d been putting the screws to him to get doors open, and the six-inch purple bruise he showed me over his right kidney was evidence enough of the way the bastard worked. “He told me if I didn’t make him keys, he was gonna kill me, inch by inch,” Iggy said. “You know, tweezers and ice picks and shit. But I can’t stand what he’s doin’. One of these times, he’s gonna kill one of them poor women. If you gotta lock me up, go ahead, but just get him stopped.” Then, Iggy told me where the next attack was going to happen.

  I told Iggy to get the guy his key. Next night, when the weasel slipped the key into the lock, I was waiting for him.

  Iggy was double-dip grateful to me for getting the sadist off him, and for getting him off without jail time or even a court appearance, and he’s returned the favor many times over. Cops do well to have a guy like that in the wings. Better yet is knowing they can trust the guy.

  “Not a social visit, Iggy,” I said. “I’ve got a job for you. Interested?”

  He rubbed his chin, then looked at me, all squinty-eyed. “I ain’t never gonna say no to you, Mr. B. You want something, all you gotta do is say what. And you notice, I ain’t asking any questions.”

  I laughed. “You’ve got a way with words.” I set the wooden box on the table in front of him.

  The little guy had you-gotta-be-kidding-me all over his face. He jabbed a finger at the box. “Mr. B, I don’t believe this. You need the help of a professional to get this piece of shit open?”

  “I could crack it with a knife blade, or stomp it into splinters, Ig. But I’ve got no idea what’s inside, and whatever it is, I want to find it in the right number of pieces. And I need to have the job done very privately.”

  Doubt spread across Iggy’s pan. “It ain’t gonna blow up on me, is it?”

  I shrugged. “No idea what’s inside. Tell you what. Get me a key, then stand back, and I’ll open it.”

  He marched off, not another word, down the stairs into the basement. Inside three minutes, he was back, holding up two flat keys. “If at least one of these don’t do the job, I’ll eat that box.” He slid the first key into the slot, wiggled it, twisted his wrist. “Close.” Then he withdrew the key ever so slightly, and worked it gently back and forth. “I can feel…yeah.” The key spun 180 degrees. He threw the lid open.

  We gawked into the box, then at each other. “Dip me in shit,” Iggy whispered. He chugged out from behind the counter, threw the lock on his front door, turned the cardboard sign to Closed, and pulled down the shade behind it. Then he came running back to stand beside me and rubberneck over the box. “Whew, talk about long green. How much d’you think that is?”

  I pulled a handful of bills out of the box, riffled the stack. “All hundreds,” I said. “Let’s start counting.”

  It took only a few minutes. “I’ve got fifty-four,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Forty-six.” Iggy pulled a grimy handkerchief from his pocket, wiped at his forehead. “That’s ten K even.”

  “Not what you’d find when someone’s been dropping change into a piggy bank. Smells like a payment.”

  Iggy nodded. “Question is, was it one gonna be made, or one received?”

  “Could be either. This was in a carton with stuff from a woman who vanished about eight months ago. No idea whether she got the money or was going to give it, but either way I can’t see her leaving it behind if she decided on her own to go off where nobody could find her.”

  Iggy jerked his head in the direction of the box and the two piles of hundred-dollar bills. “So now what?”

  “So now you get me a key that any moron can use to open or lock this box.”

  Iggy pulled the key he’d used out of the lock, held it up to the light, and squinted. “Piece a cake. I can fix this one in two minutes.”

  “Good. And after you do that, I’m betting you’ve got a spot out back with a good heavy lock where we can stow this box away.”

  He froze. “You’re gonna leave that dough here? Ten grand?”

  “Trust me, Ig. I need to leave it in the safest place I can find. Who’s going to have a better lockup than you?”

  He shook his head, then picked up the box. “Come on, I’ll show you where. I don’t want to worry if I die from a heart attack or a stroke or something, and you can’t find it, you’ll beat the crap out of me.”

  Chapter Seven

  Baumgartner

  “Bernie, God damn it to hell. Talk to me.”

  I blinked at Irma across the living room, in the antique rocker. Her mother’s chair, her mother’s daughter. Another minute, she’d be blowing fire out of both nostrils. “What do you want me to say?”

  “How about telling me where your head was. What were you thinking about? A case, right? Your case.”

  “My case, yes.”

  “Surprise, surprise. So tell me about your case. I can’t stand another whole evening of you just sitting there, like I don’t exist.”

  “I could never think you don’t exist. And I’m sorry, but you know I can’t discuss an open case with you.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, I know. I just thought, maybe once…forget it. Do you think tomorrow you’ll be permitted to tell me what you think of the tulip fields.”

  Oh, shit, I forgot. “Irma, I’m sorry again. I’ve got to go up to the Medical Library tomorrow and do some research.”

  “For your case, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So it doesn’t matter you promised we’d go up to La Conner tomorrow and walk through the tulip fields.”

  “Yes, it matters. Problem is, I made the promise before this case hit. I really am sorry, Irma, but I need to pick up some background in a hurry. We can go see the tulips next weekend.”

  “Next weekend? In case you haven’t noticed, today’s April thirtieth. The tulips are all but done. The biggest tulip fields outside of Holland are an hour’s drive away, and as far as we’re concerned, they might as well be in China. We put off going last weekend and the weekend before because you had too much work to do. And please don’t tell me, ‘I’m a cop.’ Say that, and I’m going to lose it. I’m sick and tired of being married to the Emerald Police Force. By the time they finally kick you out, we’re going to be too old, too sick, too whatever to do anything else.”

  “Irma, how many times do we need to go down this road? I live to investigate crimes, and right now what I want most of all is find out why some poor schizo shot a lab scientist and then killed himself. Ca
n’t you understand that?”

  Irma swallowed hard, then started talking like an automatic machine. Imagine moving out of a howling wind into the eye of a hurricane. “Bernie, I just felt something snap. When I first met you, I thought the way you were dedicated to justice was sexy as hell. You went after me in bed the way you went after your bad guys. Back in ‘fifty-three, people really did believe marriage was for life, and I bought it, one hundred percent. But in twenty-four years, a person learns fanatics are no picnic to live with. You’re only fifty-two. You’ve still got time. Don’t give yourself a heart attack. If life gives you lemons—”

  “Irma,don’t tell me to make lemonade. Please? If I quit the force, what I’m going to make is bile, and I’ll taste it every minute of every day. Cop work is what counts for me. Anything else would be just passing time till I fall over dead. I think I’d probably shoot myself if all I had to look forward to every day was the ocean out past the rail of a cruise boat. Look, maybe I can get done at the library early enough, and we can run up to La Conner afterwards.”

  Irma jumped out of her chair. “That’s it. I give up. You could at least spare me the lies. We both know you’re not going to be home early tomorrow. Fine. Enjoy yourself. But count me out. I swear, you’re going to drive me to…do something.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her I wished I could give her what she wanted, but before I could say a word, she stomped off, into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came sailing past me in the other direction, didn’t look at me, just barged up the stairs. Then the bedroom door slammed.

  Chapter Eight

  Baumgartner

  I wouldn’t have said it to Irma, but a library wasn’t really the place I’d have picked to spend a whole nice Sunday. I was there at nine o’clock, and the place was deserted, so it was easy to buttonhole one of the librarians, explain what I was looking for, and have her get me started. She checked through indexes in magazines called Nature and Lancet and The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and inside of an hour, I had a pile of magazines with articles about Sperm Density Gradient Separation, and research on eggs and embryos.

  Only two articles were on Density Gradient Separation, and they said less than I’d heard from Laurie Mansell the day before. I was through them inside fifteen minutes, then went on to the write-ups about eggs and embryos.

  Not that it was easy going, but after my talk with Mansell, I could follow the gist of the work. There was a lot about fertilizing mouse eggs that had been treated with different chemicals, or too much carbon dioxide, or not enough oxygen, or the wrong temperature, and then looking at the chromosomes in the embryos, to see which stuff made a mouse embryo get too many chromosomes, or too few.

  From what I could understand, human eggs and embryos were even fussier than mouse tissues. The culture medium had zero room for errors in measuring out all the different chemicals that went into it. The water had to be sterile, and come from a certain company. The petri dish had to be a particular brand, or else something in the plastic would kill the embryos. The temperature had to be right on, same for the carbon dioxide concentration. Almost every article ended with something like, “These findings will need to be corroborated by more extensive studies.” Which was going to be tough, given that human eggs were so hard to come by.

  Toward mid-afternoon, my eyes started to go glassy, but then I noticed something. A lot of the articles were written by a couple of guys named Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, or occasionally, Steptoe and Edwards. Some of their work had to do with how chromosomes in embryos looked and behaved, but it was obvious that their real interest was a procedure they called in vitro fertilization, where they fertilized eggs in the laboratory, then kept the embryos alive and developing normally in an incubator. Edwards and Steptoe said some day, doctors would treat infertile couples by taking an egg from a woman and sperm from her husband, mixing them together, then putting the embryo into the woman’s uterus. In other words, “test-tube babies.” That, I’d heard about, on TV and in newspapers.

  All of a sudden, I was wide awake. I separated out the articles by Edwards and Steptoe, and went through them again, more carefully. Most were research pieces, and a lot of the stuff was pretty technical, past what I could understand. But what came through loud and clear in the most recent articles was that Edwards and Steptoe had been able to grow embryos right up to the point where they’d be ready to implant in a uterus.

  I looked through a couple of Review Articles, and those filled in some blanks for me. Edwards and Steptoe made the point that “test tube baby” isn’t the right term, because fertilization and those first few days of embryo development take place in plastic petri dishes, the same as in Dr. Hearn’s mouse experiments. Edwards had done work on mice, too, which sounded like carbon copies of Hearn’s experiments. Also, Steptoe, the guy who got the eggs for Edwards, was some kind of gynecological superstar with an instrument called a laparoscope, which he used to take eggs out of a woman’s ovary without having to cut open her belly. I filed that away for future reference.

  At that point, I went up to the desk where my librarian-friend was sitting, staring at the ceiling, and asked if she could find me more articles on in vitro fertilization. She did, in spades. There were pieces in scientific journals, more of the same like I’d been reading, but there were also little books, transcripts of conferences about in vitro fertilization, where scientists talked about their experiments and the general state of the research, and the effect that work was going to have on society.

  One doctor with a lot of initials after his name thought artificial fertilization techniques were going to be the end of family life as we know it, and we should never, ever, use them, but another doctor with the same number of initials said it would be a great thing for infertile couples, so we should hop on the stick and get it done. Some of the writers were in favor of in vitro fertilization because it would let people be born who otherwise would never exist, but others worried that the procedure might produce defective babies, and since there wasn’t any way to test it out without actually doing it, we should be smart enough not to try it at all. They kept using the word “hubris,” which I finally went and looked up. Pretty heavy stuff.

  Seven in the evening by the time I left the Medical Library. I hadn’t stopped to eat all day, I had a killer headache, and my eyeballs felt like they’d gotten a rubdown with 1500 grit sandpaper. But I knew a whole lot more than I had the day before. One thing I knew for sure. This was the hottest field in medicine. A one-way ticket to Easy Street was ready and waiting for the first doctor who produced an in vitro baby. That doc would die with a gold spoon in his mouth, and he’d know that people would be talking and writing about him five hundred years in the future. Something like that could really pump up the head of a guy like Sanford.

  ***

  Irma was going to throw a fit. Earlier in the day, I thought maybe I could get through the research stuff in time to run her up to La Conner and see the tulips. But from the minute I glommed onto in vitro fertilization, I couldn’t think about anything else till I walked in the door of my house. “Irma, I’m home,” I shouted, and got myself ready for the barrage. But nothing happened. I shouted again, still no answer.

  I ran up the stairs, looked in the bedroom. No Irma. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either. So I went back downstairs, into the kitchen, and there was a note on the table. “I went up to La Conner with Henry Streator.”

  Henry Streator is one of my brother-cops. He lives a couple of blocks away. Irma got to be friends with Henry’s wife Bessie, mostly on an I’ll-listen-to-your-cop’s-wife-sob-story-if-you’ll-listen-to-mine basis. The four of us would go out to dinner, maybe a movie, once every week or two. But then last year, Bessie died, dropped dead on the street one day, only forty-eight years old, and since then, Irma hasn’t been able to do enough for poor Henry. I dropped the note back on the table, and went out to get s
ome food.

  Chapter Nine

  Sanford

  I wiped a napkin across my mouth, then looked at my mother, down at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. “Good dinner, Mom.”

  Which it was anything but. ‘Inspired’ is not a word I’d ever use to describe my mother’s cooking. That evening’s slab of unseasoned cod, broiled to near-rubber, took even more than the usual amount of water to get down.

  Mom humphed. “If you’d managed to pay a little attention to Carmel, you’d be getting good meals every night.”

  My mother’s never been able to see more than one side to either a story or a person, and the side she sees when I’m involved is never one favorable to me. “Carmel was a labor room nurse,” I said. “She knew what it would be like, married to an OBGYN.”

  Mom tightened her lips. “She still had a right to some of your attention. You could have at least taken in a partner.”

  One of the red highways on my mother’s map. “I did, Mother, twice, in fact. It didn’t work out.”

  “Because you didn’t want it to work out.” She pointed toward Dad, who hadn’t said a word in the past ten minutes. “Your father had partners, and when they were on call, he was off. Why couldn’t you ever let another doctor deliver one of your patients now and then?”

  “I’ve told you, Mom, things are different now. Pregnant women like to know that barring some emergency, their doctor will deliver their baby, and they tell all their friends that’s the way it goes in Dr. Sanford’s office. When Dad was practicing, the University docs wouldn’t set their hands on a patient if they could possibly avoid it, but now they’re trying to sell themselves to the public as genius professors. I’ve got to be able to compete with that.”

  Dad aimed the points of his fork in my direction. “You could’ve been a professor yourself, Colin. You had a brilliant record in med school.”