Sleeping With the Crawfish

by D. J. Donaldson

  “You were old enough to remember being happy, but not old enough to recollect anything else.”

  “When did you prepare all this?”

  “A few minutes before I picked you up. The same question you just asked occurred to me, too.”

  “So you made it up in two minutes.”

  “More or less.”

  “You’re very good.”

  “I should have thought of it before we ever talked the first time so I could have had it written out for you to study.”

  “Now I’m getting worried. I was thinking you had this totally planned and were in full control.”

  Tabor glanced at her, his face deadly serious. “In an operation like this, you never have full control. That’s why I gave you the Ladysmith. You are wearing it?”

  “I have it.”

  “Ultimately, you’re the one you’ll have to depend on, not me. I thought I’d made that clear. If I didn’t, and you want to back out, now’s the time.”

  “I don’t want out. It was just a comment.”

  “Just so you fully understand. . . .”

  Before letting her out at the garage, Tabor had some final words for her. “I’ll take you first to the house we’ve rented for you so you’ll know what it looks like and where it’s located. We’ll leave your car there and I’ll show you the institute. Then I’ll take you back to the house and you’ll return to the institute alone and apply for that job. Don’t be surprised if they want you to start immediately. You’ve cleared your time?”

  Kit nodded.

  He waited until she’d maneuvered her car out of the garage and relocked the sliding garage door. She then followed him out of the Quarter.

  She’d cleared her time all right, but Nolen hadn’t been happy about it. He’d been able to get his perpetually unemployed half brother to fill in for the next week, but he told her she needed to decide whether she was working for him or not.

  About an hour later, Tabor pulled to a stop in front of a small gray clapboard cottage with dark red shutters and white trim. He motioned for her to go into the dirt driveway first.

  As she got out of the car, a mockingbird perched in the boughs of a nearby live oak welcomed her with a dazzling display of trills and runs. The large lot on which the cottage sat was screened on three sides by thick stands of bamboo that gave the place the kind of privacy she had always prized and which, in her present living arrangement, was distinctly lacking.

  She thought Tabor might show her the inside of the cottage, but when she looked at his car, which was still running, he beckoned. She walked around to the passenger side and got in.

  “Don’t I even get a house tour?”

  “You’re not planning on staying here, so why bother?”

  “What about the answering machine you were going to set up?”

  He raised his open hand, thumb up, and flicked the air. “Already done.”

  “Whose voice is on it?”

  “Yours.”

  “How did—”

  “I called your apartment in New Orleans while you were out and recorded the message you’ve got on that machine.”

  “Aren’t you resourceful.”

  “I try. Ready to see the institute?”

  “I guess.”

  Agrilabs, Inc., was exactly two and three-tenths miles from the cottage. It was three stories of white cut stone inset with long narrow silver strips that Kit guessed were the windows. The institute name along with the motto, “Toward a world without hunger,” were lettered on all four sides of a big white box on the roof.

  “Looks like a big birthday cake,” Kit said.

  “Don’t let appearances fool you,” Tabor replied. “John Wayne Gacy used to dress up like a clown.”

  They returned to the cottage, where Tabor shut off the engine and turned to face her. “What’s the address of this house?”

  Without looking, Kit correctly recited the black numbers beside the front door.

  “What’s the name of the street?”

  She also got that right.

  “Spell it.”

  She rattled off the correct spelling.

  “What’s your Thibodaux phone number?”

  In this, too, she was perfect.

  Tabor reached in his shirt pocket for a plastic card. “Here, this tells you how to access the answering machine inside from your phone in New Orleans so you can check on any messages the institute might leave for you.” He plucked two keys from the change box near the gearshift and gave one to her. “In case you want to get in this house for any reason. This one”—he gave her the other key—“is for a car we’ve provided for you. It’s parked behind the house.”

  “Why do I need another car?”

  “We don’t want them learning your identity by tracking your license plates.”

  “I’m driving a rental car.”

  “What name did you use when you rented it?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Always leave your car behind the house and take ours to the institute.” He reached again into his shirt pocket. “Here’s the registration.”

  Kit looked at the form he gave her and saw that the owner of the car in question was Kate Martin.

  “It’s new, so try not to hit anything,” Tabor said.

  “Glad you mentioned that. I was planning on running into a couple of mailboxes on the way over.”

  Tabor grinned. “You’ve got my pager number?”

  She nodded.

  “When you get home, call me and leave your number. I’ll—”

  “I know. You’ll get back to me within fifteen minutes.”

  “One final point. If you encounter the slightest hint of trouble at Agrilabs, clear out. Any questions?”

  “None come to mind.”

  “Then it’s time to go.”

  KIT TINGLED ALL OVER and her heart bobbed against the roof of her chest. She felt like a character in a Dick Tracy comic with an arrow over her head labeled “Fraud”. But it was too late to back out now. She took a deep breath and went in.

  The door opened onto a carpeted foyer in which she found a tendinous woman who could have begun drawing her IRA tomorrow with no penalty seated at a wooden desk large and fine enough for the CEO of Chrysler. Her black hair was obviously a wig. Behind her sat a large fish tank beautifully decorated with a bank of shale and luxurious green plants that, unlike the woman’s hair, were real. The two dozen fish in the tank looked in perfect health. If the fish tank was any indicator, Agrilabs certainly knew how to manage plants and animals.

  “Good morning. I’m here to apply for the opening you have for a lab tech.” Suddenly, the gun on Kit’s ankle felt as big as a cannon. Already so close to the desk that the woman behind it couldn’t have seen the gun if it were on the outside of her slacks, Kit still took another step forward.

  “How nice,” the woman said. “I had a feeling we might find someone today. Don’t you sometimes have an intuition things are about to happen and then they do?”

  “I think everybody does,” Kit said, unable at the moment to remember a time she did.

  “You brought a résumé?”

  Kit got the fake résumé Tabor had prepared for her from her bag and offered it to the woman.

  “Rose is the one who needs to see that.”

  “Rose?”

  “She’s in charge of all the techs. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  She called for Rose Lewis on the intercom. “There’s a sofa if you’d like to sit.”

  Afraid that if she sat, the Ladysmith might show, Kit said she’d prefer to stand. A few minutes later, through the glass doors to the rest of the first floor, Kit saw a short, stocky man with a florid complexion step into the hall and head for the foyer. He came through the door and looked at her. “So you want work?”

  With a shock, Kit realized it was a woman—one whose picture wouldn’t look out of place in a text on endocrinology disorders.

  “I’d love to work here.”

&
nbsp; “Is that your résumé?”

  Kit stepped forward and was in the act of handing it to her when the woman said, “I asked you a question.”

  “Yes. It’s my résumé. I was about to give it to you.”

  “Well, do it.”

  Kit handed her the phony document. To keep from worrying about the lies on it, she busied herself thinking of all the ways the troll reading it could lose the chin whiskers.

  After a few minutes, Lewis gave her a hard look and said, “I guess you wouldn’t mind waiting out here while I make a few phone calls. . . .”

  “Not at all.”

  Kit watched Lewis as she walked back to the room where she’d been before coming to the front. Obviously, she was planning to check the references in the bogus résumé. No reason to be nervous—Tabor had said that was covered.

  A quarter of an hour later, when Lewis hadn’t returned, Kit was convinced something was wrong. Maybe instead of calling the numbers on the résumé, she had checked with some security database that had flagged Kate Martin as a fraud. Kit had almost decided to get out of there when she saw Lewis coming back.

  Was it good news or bad? You certainly couldn’t tell from the expression on the woman’s face. She came through the glass doors and walked over to Kit.

  “According to your former employers, we shouldn’t hire you; we should build you a shrine and worship at your feet. Let’s get a few things straight on the front end. I’m Rose Lewis, senior research associate and tech coordinator. If you’re hired, you’ll be assigned to one of the staff scientists, who will direct your daily activities. But ultimately, you’re accountable to me. So I’ll be watching your performance closely to see that it measures up. One complaint about you and you get a reprimand. Two complaints and you’re gone. Your résumé says you’re single. That doesn’t mean divorced, does it?”

  “No.” Lord, they were going to give her the job right this minute, just as Tabor had predicted.

  “Good. If we need you beyond five o’clock, there’ll be no kids to worry about, and no former husbands making trouble. On the other hand, being single suggests you’re not a good risk for long-term employment.” She leaned forward and fixed Kit with an unblinking stare. “We would be very unhappy if after we’ve trained you, you get married and quit.”

  It was difficult for Kit to keep quiet and not respond to this insufferable ranting. The single most consoling fact allowing her to retain her composure was the knowledge that she was armed and dangerous.

  “Your workday starts at eight o’clock, not two minutes after, or one minute after. You’ll be given a fifteen-minute break in the morning and another in the afternoon. You get an hour for lunch. This is a salaried position budgeted at nineteen hundred a month. If you’re needed beyond five o’clock, you won’t be paid for the additional time. We don’t allow visitors, so you’ll have to meet your boyfriends outside.”

  She called up a facial expression one might use after finding a condom in the orange juice. “I suppose men find you attractive. I don’t want you flirting with any of the doctors and disrupting the activities here. These men have serious work to do and you’re not to be diverting their attention. Any report you have encouraged them will result in immediate dismissal. Are these conditions acceptable?”

  “I can live with them.”

  “Any reason you can’t begin immediately?”

  “None.”

  Lewis turned to the woman at the desk. “Get her through the necessary paperwork, will you? Give her a key to the side door and to Dr. Mudi’s lab; then call me.”

  When Lewis was out of earshot behind the glass doors, the woman at the desk said, “Don’t mind Rose. Her bark is worse than her bite. Well, a little worse.”

  Tempting as it was, Kit suppressed the impulse to comment on how well the bark analogy fit. She thought about asking if Mudi was the director, but decided not to do that, either, as it might seem an odd question.

  On the initial form she filled out, she wrote her first name as Kit before catching herself. Changing it was an easy matter, and she suspected Tabor had purposely chosen Kate as her fictitious identity for just that purpose.

  A flurry of paper later, Lewis returned and showed Kit to a locker that would be her very own. After a quick lesson on how to custom-set the combination, they went to a lab on the second floor, where they found a dark, bearded man and an Oriental girl standing over an illuminated view box.

  “Dr. Mudi, this is Kate Martin, your new tech. I hope you find her work satisfactory. If not, I want to know it.”

  The tone of Lewis’s remark to Mudi strongly suggested he was not the director.

  Mudi bowed faintly as Lewis turned and stalked out. “Do not trouble yourself over that woman,” he said in an Indian accent. “I wouldn’t tell her if she was about to step on a crocodile. This is Jenny Ling. You will like her tremendously.”

  The girl beside him had a face that belonged in Vogue. She had shiny black hair, flawless skin, and a tiny heart-shaped mouth. She wore a lot of makeup but did it well.

  “Welcome to Buchenwald,” she said. “Delousing begins in fifteen minutes.”

  Obviously, American-born.

  “What are you looking at?” Kit asked.

  “I trust you are familiar with gel electrophoresis?” Mudi said.

  He was referring to the process in which a mixture of proteins was loaded into slots at one end of a thin gel cast on a solid plastic support and the individual proteins were segregated into different regions of the gel by an electric current. “I’ve run my share,” Kit said.

  “What we are doing is this,” Mudi explained. “We have supplemented the culture medium of immature bovine muscle cells with growth hormone and I now want to compare the protein profiles of treated and untreated cells to see what effect this had. But we are getting no patterns at all.”

  After what Tabor had said about the place, Kit was surprised to hear Mudi was working on such a mundane project—one clearly within the stated purpose of the facility. She stepped to the view box and looked at the gel. Instead of a series of thin blue lines indicating separate proteins, the gel was a smear of blue from top to bottom. She looked at Mudi. “Did you put an enzyme inhibitor in the extraction buffer?”

  “We did not.”

  “That’s likely the problem. When you broke the cells open, their endogenous enzymes digested the other proteins, breaking them down into a hodgepodge of fragments that caused the smear. Try adding an inhibitor like PMSF next time.”

  “Hodgepodge,” Mudi said. “What a lovely word. It means . . . heterogeneous mixture, yes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “‘Hodgepodge.’ It sounds like something sticky to eat.”

  “It does at that,” Kit said, smiling.

  “Now you must have a tour. Then, after Jenny shows you around, I want you both to prepare more samples . . . with enzyme inhibitor. Kate, I’m liking you already.”

  When they were out in the hall, Kit said, “Mudi seems pretty easygoing.”

  “He’s a sweetheart.”

  Jenny took Kit on a brief tour of the place and introduced her to some of the other technicians, whose projects all seemed as appropriate and straightforward as Mudi’s. She found the facilities superb and all the instrumentation state-of-the-art.

  “And this is our walk-in freezer,” Jenny said, leading Kit into a small room largely filled by a white metal box. “It’s wired so if the temperature goes up even a few degrees, a buzzer will sound. If you ever hear a noise so loud it makes you want to spit nickels, that’s probably what it’ll be.” She pointed to a card taped on the door. “These are the phone numbers for the refrigeration man. If you’re here alone and it goes off, call him and report it.”

  “How come there’s so much junk in here?” Kit said, looking at the piles of equipment lining the wall opposite the freezer.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it? We’ve been replacing a lot of our old equipment with newer models and the discards end up her
e. I don’t know why—maybe they’re waiting to have it all hauled away at once. Anyway, that’s about what there is to see.”

  On the way back to Mudi’s lab, they passed a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  “What’s in there?”

  “That’s Dr. Woodley’s area. He’s the director. Only he, Lewis, and Tom Ward are allowed inside.”

  “Who’s Ward?”

  Jenny’s beautiful face twisted into a grimace. “He’s sort of a handyman. If I were you, I’d stay away from him. He’s said some obnoxious things to me and a few of the other women, and I think he’s dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  “About two months ago, he and a deliveryman got into it—over what, I don’t know—and they began shoving each other. When Ward started to get the worst of it, he pulled a knife.”

  “So why is he still around?”

  “You tell me.”

  “What’s Woodley like?”

  “I don’t have much contact with him, but he seems like a nice man, very regimented, though. They say he brings the same thing in his lunch every day—two cheese sandwiches on rye and a bottle of Evian.”

  “Pretty Spartan meal.”

  “And if it’s not raining, he and Rose Lewis will be sitting next to the bayou out back on folding chairs set up under the big tupelo gum from twelve-thirty to one-thirty every day of the week.”

  “Are you saying they’re . . . involved?”

  “Heavens no. I don’t think Rose likes men, if you know what I mean.”

  “She sure didn’t cut me any slack.”

  “Maybe you’re not her type.” Shocked at her own words, Jenny’s eyes widened. “Shame on me.”

  As they walked back to Mudi’s lab, Kit mulled over what she’d learned. Clearly, the director’s office and lab held whatever secrets the place harbored. But how the devil was she going to get in there?

  12

  Broussard always flew first class, certainly not for the food, which even in that favored nation was a gruesome experience, second only to losing all power in the aircraft and plummeting to the ground. Rather, he went first class because he couldn’t fit in the other seats.