by Larry Karp
“Thank you,” I said. “I feel a lot better now.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sanford
When Barbara came in to tell me Baumgartner was back to take up another lunch hour, I forced a smile. “Tell him as soon as I’m done with the morning patients.” She forced a smile of her own, and ducked out the door.
This was past being a minor annoyance. Joyce was clearly on edge, and I’ll admit, I was feeling antsy, myself. Rumors were coming out of England, thicker and faster every month, and if Baumgartner dragged it out long enough, Steptoe and Edwards might sneak under the wire and scoop me.
It didn’t take me long to get through Ms. Chapman’s list of questions about her fibroid tumors. A couple of minutes after she left, Barbara showed Baumgartner in. Quick handshake, then he dropped into the chair across the desk, gave me a long study, then said, “The insemination procedure you did on Mrs. Kennett, the one with the Density-Gradient sperm? That was in your office, here, right?”
“Yes.”
“Who was in the room?”
“Besides Joyce and me? My nurse and Dr. Hearn.”
“Which nurse?”
Now, what was he after? “I’m pretty sure it was Ruth Ellen Marcus.”
“Would you please ask her to come in here for a few minutes.”
“She’s in the lunch room, and I really don’t like—.”
“I know. But I’d appreciate it if you’d make an exception this one time.”
I didn’t like the idea of leaving Baumgartner alone in my office, but no choice. I pulled Ruth Ellen out of the lunch room, and hustled her back.
Baumgartner’s greeting to her was honey butter on a biscuit. Big smile, an apology for interrupting her lunch, and a promise to take as little of her time as possible. “Ms. Marcus, you helped Dr. Sanford do an unusual procedure on Mrs. Kennett last August. Do you remember that procedure?”
Ruth Ellen glanced my way.
Baumgartner raised a finger. “Over here, Ms. Marcus. No cheating on this exam.”
She giggled.
“Do you remember the procedure?”
Ruth Ellen nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. Very well.”
Baumgartner smiled again. “Good. Tell me about it.”
Ruth Ellen returned the smile. “Well, sir, Dr. Sanford told me he wanted me to help because I was the senior nurse in the clinic, and it was a very important procedure. He said Dr. Hearn had developed some kind of treatment to make the uterus more receptive to an embryo. Kind of like a ‘baby glue.’”
I coughed. Baumgartner flashed me a silent warning, then turned back to Ruth Ellen. “Go ahead, Ms. Marcus. What about that baby glue? How did Dr. Sanford use it?”
“Well…while Dr. Sanford and I got Ms. Kennett up in stirrups, Dr. Hearn took this little plastic dish out of an incubator she’d wheeled over, looked in the dish through her microscope, and said, ‘It’s a go.’ Then Dr. Sanford put in a vaginal speculum, did a sterile prep, checked Ms. Kennett’s cervix, and passed an insemination catheter into the uterus. He said that was a practice run, and it went fine, and now he was ready. Dr. Hearn gave him another catheter attached to a small syringe. He put that catheter up inside Ms. Kennett’s uterus, and pushed the syringe. It was over so fast I couldn’t believe it.”
“What was in the syringe and the catheter?”
Ruth Ellen shrugged. “I guess…well, I really don’t know, exactly. Whatever the treatment was to…you know, the ba…” She giggled, then started to cry.
“Baby glue?” Again, Baumgartner smiled.
She wiped a hankie over her eyes. “Yes. I’m sorry. I know it sounds silly, but that’s what I remember.”
“No need to be sorry, Ms. Marcus. You were a big help, thank you. Go on back and finish your lunch.”
We watched her sail out of the room and push the door shut behind her. Baumgartner looked around at me. “Baby glue.”
Not a question, but I took it as one. “I don’t remember word-for-word what I told her about the procedure, but it was along the lines of we’d been trying to get better quality sperm that would swim faster and stick to the egg better. She must’ve gotten ‘baby glue’ into her head.”
Baumgartner shot me a heavy dose of skepticism. “You injected the treated sperm up into the uterus. I thought artificial inseminations were done in the vagina.”
“The turkey-baster technique, you mean.”
He grudged me a smile.
“If I’d been doing the usual kind of artificial insemination, you’d be right,” I said. “But for intrauterine insemination, where you’re trying to give the sperm that much of a head start, you have to use a micro-syringe with a tiny amount of fluid, a small fraction of a c.c. More might make the uterus cramp and push the sperm back into the vagina.”
Baumgartner scratched at his forehead, sucked his cheeks in, blew them out. “Aren’t testicles outside of the body because body temperature is too high for them to make sperm?”
“Yes. So?”
“So what did you need the incubator for? Why didn’t Dr. Hearn just bring over the syringe in some kind of a sterile wrap?”
“Because the temperature in the testicles isn’t nearly all the way down to room temperature. It’s in between room and body temperature, so that’s where Dr. Hearn had set the incubator.”
Baumgartner took a pen out of his pocket, fiddled with it for a few seconds. “Dr. Sanford, wasn’t Dr. Hearn playing Edwards to your Steptoe? Looking at embryos in that plastic dish, before she loaded them into the syringe for you to inject? She and you were doing in vitro fertilization, weren’t you?”
Careful. Buy a little time. “You’ve been doing your homework, Mr. Baumgartner. You get extra credit for all that voluntary reading.” Then, before he could say anything, I added, “Sorry, shouldn’t have said that. I can see where your research gave you that idea, but the problem is, a lot of clinical procedures are similar. From appearances, I guess we could’ve been doing IVF, but we weren’t. Even if we had been, though, what of it? It may be controversial, but as far as I know, there’s nothing illegal about it.”
“No, Doctor, it’s not illegal. But murder is, and so is blackmail.”
“Wait a minute. Blackmail? Where’s blackmail coming from?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that.”
“I don’t have a clue. Are you trying to say I was blackmailing someone? For what?”
He rocked back in his chair, then came forward again. “Try this. Shortly before Alma Wanego vanished, she received ten thousand dollars, cash.”
“Wanego…that’s the lab supervisor you mentioned yesterday. Lucky her.”
“Maybe not so lucky. No one’s seen her since September tenth of last year. But the money didn’t disappear with her. Now, here’s where we get specific. I know you have accounts at Vancouver Mutual and First Bank of Emerald, and if I need to, I’ll get a warrant to examine those accounts. What I think is I’ll find is that you withdrew ten thousand dollars early last September, maybe part from each bank, so you wouldn’t trigger an IRS review of a five-figure withdrawal. Do you want to save us a little time, or do I need to go through the motions?”
I shrugged. “Do what you need to do. You might find some withdrawals around that time.”
“And that would be a mere coincidence?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right. If you coincidentally took ten thousand dollars out of your accounts last September, what was it for?”
“Probably to make a bet on a horse race.”
“Oh. Right. And the horse had to be dragged over the finish line.”
“Something like that.”
“And you made the bet through a bookie, and didn’t keep any paper.”
“Would you have?”
Baumgartner looked as if he was having trouble keeping a straight face. “Dr. Sanford, please. Is that really the best you can do? You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d blow ten grand on a horse race.”
I laughed. “When you practice medicine, you learn in a hurry that people never stop surprising you. Isn’t it the same in police work? Fact is, I make a lot of fair-sized withdrawals and deposits because I like to play the horses, and most of the time, I win. Ms. Wanego may have had ten thousand dollars, but that doesn’t mean I gave it to her. I’m not a lawyer, but it sounds circumstantial as hell.”
I thought he was going to read me the riot act, but no. “Dr. Sanford, I can prove that right before Ms. Wanego disappeared, she called your office, found that Ms. Kennett’s pregnancy test had turned positive, and then told someone she was looking at a big payday. Good enough for you?”
Too good, I thought. “Not to offend you, Mr. Baumgartner, but this ‘someone’ of yours who Ms. Wanego talked to? Is she for real?”
“Count on it. In my business, bluffs are dangerous, because guys like you will call them. Now, why don’t you quit with the shuffle-off-to-Buffalo bit. Don’t make me go through getting a warrant and examining your bank records, so I can check the numbers on the bills Ms. Wanego received against the ones you got from the bank. We both know they’ll correspond. Just tell me why you paid her that money. Save both of us at least one more meeting.”
I leaned all the way back in my chair, arms behind my head. “All right, Mr. Baumgartner. Let’s try a little hypothetical. Suppose Ms. Wanego came to me and said she’d seen the accident, that it got her attention, and made her wonder what was going on in the lab that Dr. Hearn had to call me over urgently. Suppose she also wondered what might happen if Dr. Camnitz heard about the incident. He’d certainly look into it, and if he found out Dr. Hearn was working on human oocytes, she’d lose her job. Ms. Wanego might’ve said she could use a little money, and for, say, ten thousand dollars, she could manage to keep her mouth shut. Now, if she had said that to me, I probably would’ve felt obligated to protect Dr. Hearn’s job. The work was her idea, of course, but we were in it together, and as a PhD, her income was nothing to write home about. But I would’ve made sure Ms. Wanego knew it would be a one-time payment, that my sense of obligation could go only so far, and that if she ever did anything to cause Dr. Hearn to lose her job, she could count on my reporting her to the police for blackmailing me. Again, this is just a hypothetical. I didn’t know Ms. Wanego.”
“But you did hear she suddenly vanished from the lab. Do you happen to remember how you found that out, and when?”
“I’m not really sure, but I think it was some time in early fall. Dr. Hearn mentioned it in passing. She said I should go easy on giving her oocytes for a while because her lab supervisor had left without notice and she’d have to take time to get the replacement up to speed. I think if you check my operative records, you’ll see my retrievals did fall off by a fair amount around then.”
From Baumgartner’s face, you’d have thought I’d just said it was a nice day. “It still bothers me that Ms. Kennett’s conception was right in there with the accident,” he said, very quietly.
“And I’ve already told you, there was no connection between the experimental accident and the Density Gradient Separation.”
“If it really was just a Density Gradient Separation.”
Keep moving. Throw him off balance. “I think you need to accept the ten thousand dollars as a coincidence.”
“I’ll decide what I need to do, thanks.” He sucked at his lip, looked out the window. Then he turned back abruptly. “I sure wish I could take a look in that missing log book of Dr. Hearn’s.”
Straight out of left field. Guess he figured two could play a game. Underestimate this guy, I’d be the biggest damn fool in Emerald. I paused, just for a moment, then said, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
He laughed, actually laughed, then pulled himself to his feet. “Be seeing you.”
Weird, I thought, but all right. I checked my watch. Time to get a sandwich and coffee before my first afternoon appointment.
***
After the office closed for the day, I took the elevator down to the skybridge, cut across to the hospital as if I were going to see a patient, then took another elevator to ground level, and went outside. No way Baumgartner could have followed me through that route without having me see him. No sign of him all the way to the parking garage under my apartment building, or along the road to Sunset Bluff. When I turned the corner and parked in front of Joyce Kennett’s house, no car was behind me.
Now that Baumgartner had straight-out accused me of doing IVF, I wanted to be make doubly sure Joyce stayed strictly on our page. Touchy situations are better handled face-to-face than over the phone. Whenever I had bad news for a patient, one of the nurses called her and got her right into the office. Start discussing cancer or birth defects by telephone, the discussion spirals out of control in a hurry.
When I rang Joyce’s bell, I expected Mrs. Enright to answer, but it was Joyce who came to the door, Robbie up on her shoulder. She patted his back. Her skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones, eyes reddened, eyelids at half-staff.
“Bad night?”
“He hardly stopped crying.”
Robbie let out a monster of a belch. Joyce responded with a wan smile. I laughed. “That should help.”
“Yeah.” She sat on the couch, swung Robbie down so his head was in the crook of her arm, then picked up the bottle, and worked it between his lips. Then she looked back to me. “What’s going on?”
“That detective, Baumgartner, paid me another visit. He’s managed to figure out we were doing IVF, but I don’t see any way he can prove it. I thought you and I ought to touch base, though. We can’t have him blow the whistle before we’re ready.”
To the background of quick sucking noises, she said, “I think we’d better schedule that press conference.”
“But it’s not even a week—”
“Dr. Sanford, I’m exhausted. My mother needs to go back home in a few days, and then I’m on my own. If money were coming in, I could hire a nanny. I can deal with the publicity better than this waiting, on top of giving full baby care.”
“I know how you’re feeling,” I said, like someone negotiating a path through a mine field. “But we need to be careful. If we go ahead now, with the cops still investigating what happened to James and Dr. Hearn, that could give us some pretty bad press. It might make people hesitate before they throw money at you. There could even be attempts to legislate restrictions on the procedure. It could set the work back years. Decades.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Joyce snapped. “If those doctors in England beat us out, there goes my money and Robbie’s. Bad press, good press—I think any press we get will give me more coverage, not less. I want to go ahead now.” She took the empty bottle from the baby’s mouth, slung him up to her shoulder again, patted his back.
“I understand,” I said. “I really do. In my business, I go through stretches where I think I’m never going to see my bed again. But you’re forgetting something. Even if you can handle negative publicity, Robbie would be another story. Starting off in life under a cloud of ugly tabloid articles could haunt him as long as he lives.”
She pounded the baby’s back harder. Fortunately, he produced another pair of burps. As she laid his head into the crook of her arm, he gave a satisfied little sigh, then closed his eyes.
She was on the point of losing it. I talked fast. “I want to go ahead, too, believe me. But we’ve got to think of Robbie. It can’t be long till Baumgartner gets something new and more interesting to investigate. Once he closes this case, we’ll be home free.”
She looked out the window, then turned her head back. Eyes icy, mutinous. “You practically tied yourself in knots, pe
rsuading James and me to do this, and it worked. I’m grateful…I really am. But what finally decided me to look past the risks of being Number One was having you tell us it would not only give us a baby, it’d also make us rich. With James’ problems, that sounded like the best insurance policy I could buy, and if I miss out cashing in that policy…Dr. Sanford, I’ll give you till next Monday. By then, if you aren’t ready to make an announcement, I’ll call the papers and do it myself.”
“I can’t promise—”
“This is not negotiable. Say no, say maybe, and I’ll pick up the phone right now.”
To win a war, sometimes you need to concede a battle. “All right. I’m guessing a week will be long enough.”
“It better be. Otherwise, Robbie and I will take our chances, and you can either be on the bus, or under it.”
I felt as if a bus had already had a go at me. My neck and shoulders were one massive spasm. Time for a good workout. Hit the treadmill, pump a little iron, toss a few at the punching bag, and I’d be back in the pink.
Chapter Eighteen
Baumgartner
After dinner that evening, I sat Iggy down in his living room, and gave him a Reader’s Digest update. The little guy was all ears. “Well, I guess you don’t never know,” he muttered. “Doc Sanford, pullin’ a fast one? My mother goes to him, and so does a lady-friend of mine. To hear them talk, you’d think he was God.”
“To hear him talk, you’d think the same thing. And slippery? He talks in slug trails. You should’ve heard him, playing games with me, dancing, dodging, having himself a ball. Giving me goddamn hypotheticals. But he’s right at the middle of everything going on in this case. All I need to pin him to the wall is that missing log book from the lab.”
“And you think you know where it is, huh?”
“Yeah, I do. That wise guy, bragging about how much he learns about people from his medical work, and isn’t it the same in my line? Well, one thing I’ve learned is that when I tell someone I wish I could look at a log book, and his eyes glance off to the left for a fraction of a second, he’s telling me that’s where the log is.”