by Dick Cluster
“Well, I didn’t want to sit back and wait, leave it to the experts. And a lot of shit we had to play by ear, you know. Suzanne didn’t always know what I was feeding you, and I didn’t always know about her.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. “How much did you already understand about what happened to Caroline? Before we talked to Lena Hanson, I mean?”
“That Caroline lost her life because of something she knew or guessed. Scat told Suzanne that much, but not the who or the what. What do you kill to cover up? Something that will ruin you or land you in jail, something that nobody else knows. The thing was, lots of people already were aware of most of the things Scat had done. So it had to be something worse, something that couldn’t be fixed. That was the direction I wanted to push your thoughts.”
“You did that,” Alex conceded. “But if you hadn’t kept me in the dark, I might not have almost gotten Suzanne killed.”
“ ‘Almost don’t make it better’ is what my grandmother used to tell me. It doesn’t make it worse, either.”
Alex let it go. She wasn’t going to play contrite child to his grandfather, and he knew it.
* * *
In June, Graham Johnston went on trial in the Carroll County courthouse in Ossipee, New Hampshire. He was charged with the murder of Caroline Davis and the attempted murder of Suzanne Lutrello. He pled complete innocence of the first charge, and innocence by reason of temporary insanity to the second.
Rosemarie Davis attended every session of the trial, but Alex drove up only on the day he had to testify himself. He looked out at the crowd, spotting Dennis MacDonald and Pamela Parker, each sitting alone. He wondered again where Lena Hanson was, and what her real name might be. After his testimony, during the noon recess, he sat with Rosemarie on a green wooden bench beneath the Civil War monument outside. She recounted Paul Jakes’s testimony that he and Lowell Johnston had disposed of Nilda Fernandez’s body because they did not want their “escort service” to be disrupted by the scandal of her suicide. Rosemarie also told him what more she’d been able to learn about Nilda Fernandez, whose family she had hired a Yellow Pages detective to find.
“She was murdered by hypocrisy,” Rosemarie said, “as far as my opinion is concerned. She seems to have felt that now, tainted as she would be in the eyes of any court, she would never regain the custody of her son. I think that may be why she argued so vehemently with Caroline— to assure herself that this taint was not real. Her suicide note said that she would prefer for everyone to think she had simply gone away. So those two men were carrying out her wish, at the same time as their business forced the wish upon her.”
Alex asked whether she thought the jury would convict Graham Johnston of her granddaughter’s murder.
“I really don’t know,” Rosemarie said. “I sit there each day and watch their faces— shocked, intrigued, excited, bored. I thought they believed you, today. In my heart I root for a conviction, for my team, for compensation, for an eye for an eye. These are deep feelings, very deep. But I think about prevention. Does the verdict matter, will any verdict keep all this from happening again? It may be that the jury’s decision matters less than the fact that the story is getting told.”
When the trial resumed for the afternoon, Alex did not go back inside. He put on a pair of sunglasses, so as not to meet curious onlookers’ eyes. In the sunlight he let his muscles relax, his lungs swell and shrink naturally, his abdomen grow full. Slowly he shifted his weight, turned from his hips, allowed the motions of tai chi to flow outward into his arms and hands. The statue of the Civil War soldier was substantial but lifeless. Alex tried to make himself insubstantial but alive.
What Rosemarie had said comforted him. From the beginning, he had flailed about, off balance, never really rooted, never seeing the parts clearly in a line. Much of the damage, which had already been done, was beyond repair. Yet Rosemarie had not hired him to fix anything. She had hired him to find out what happened— to find out what she had been told was unknowable, or known only to the fates that combined to bring about the end of her granddaughter’s time. Now it was known to her, the cause of that particular untimely death. That was one less monkey on her back.
Alex kept flowing through the form. He’d progressed since the winter— through Wave Hands in Clouds, and High Pat on Horse, and through the long sequence of kicks that followed. He came to the second Cross-Hands, which marked the halfway point of the tai chi form. Then he tried to sink into his feet as he let his arms float slowly down. He took a few deep breaths, removed his sunglasses, and crossed the grassy common to the place he’d parked his car. The engine started easily, without the choke, and the tachometer showed a nice, even 850 rpm. With proper maintenance, Alex thought, some machines could function well for a reasonably long time. He put the car in gear and headed for home.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Steve Halpern, given to meditation in motion in many forms, long ago introduced me to both cross-country skiing and tai chi chuan. For my knowledge of tai chi I am also grateful to Arthur Goodridge, Linda Harrington, John McMahon, and the writing of Master T. T. Liang. They are not responsible for any distortions of that art in this book. I am grateful to my students at the University of Massachusetts at Boston for sharing their spirit and their thoughts. For timely, constructive, and mutual criticism, it has been a pleasure to be a member of a writers’ group with Candice Cason, Frances Lang, Lucy Marx, Barbara Neely, and Kate White.
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The next Alex Glauberman mystery is OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE.
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What they said about OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE:
“Intriguing … with enough fodder here for science enthusiasts and suspense fans. A nice step up.”
—Kirkus
“Cluster’s evident knowledge of the locales (Boston, London, Berlin) and his engagingly offbeat characters mark him as a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
More info at www.booksBnimble.com
Also by Dick Cluster:
Alex Glauberman Mysteries
RETURN TO SENDER
REPULSE MONKEY
OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE
Non-fiction:
THEY SHOULD HAVE SERVED THAT CUP OF COFFEE: Seven Radicals Remember the 60s
THE HISTORY OF HAVANA with Rafael Hernandez
Translations from the Spanish:
A CORNER OF THE WORLD by Mylene Fernández Pintado
VITAL
SIGNS by Pedro de Jesús
FRIGID TALES by Pedro de Jesús
OPHELIAS by Aida Bahr
HAVANA REVISITED: An Architectural Heritage; Cathryn Griffith, Ed.
THE CUBAN MILE by Alejandro Hernández Díaz
CUBANA: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, with Cindy Schuster; Mirta Yáñez, Ed.
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We hope you enjoyed Repulse Monkey and wonder if you'd consider reviewing it on Goodreads, Amazon ( http://amzn.to/1GcbGDy ), or wherever you purchased it. The author would be most grateful.
About the Author
Dick Cluster is the author of the novels Return to Sender, Repulse Monkey, and Obligations of the Bone. He has written both crime novels and history books, as well as popular economics (another mystery, for sure). Some of these have been translated into Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian.
He landed in Havana’s José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by that city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, bus, car and other means. He is co-author of The History of Havana and a translator of Cuban literature. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, about U.S. radical movements of the ’60s and ’70s, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs, about the U.S. economy. He taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he was Associate Director of the University Honors Program.
Praise for OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE, the THIRD book in the Alex Glauberman series:
“Intriguing … with enough fodder here for science enthusiasts and suspense fans. A nice step up.”
—Kirkus
“This medical thriller begins with blackmail and continues with attempted murder … Mr. Cluster has written another page-turner with the return of protagonist Alex Glauberman. As stethoscopes hang, so does the reader. Highly recommended.”
—New Mystery Magazine
OBLIGATIONS
of the BONE
An Alex Glauberman Mystery
Book Three
BY
DICK CLUSTER
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Obligations of the Bone
Copyright 1992 by Dick Cluster
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
eBook ISBN: 9780986178306
Originally published by St. Martins Press
www.booksbnimble.com
First booksBnimble electronic publication: April, 2015
DAY MINUS ONE
1. Engine Block
The night before he met Jay Harrison, Alex Glauberman sat at home listening to all ten and a half minutes of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” again. For all its streetcar visions and holy medallions, he was thinking, this was a love song really. It was a particular type of love song, a wooing song. Like, if I keep telling you how great you are, maybe you’ll let me come see you sometime. He was also noticing for the umpteenth time how the words to this song were engraved on his brain— even if he never would know what the hell Dylan had meant by matchbook songs or curfew plugs.
Words that stuck with you that way were the kind of thing poets described as being in your marrow, Alex thought. Not only words, but all kinds of triumphs and tragedies and trivia: the things you grew up on, whether those were pop music or classical drama or the Dodgers or the horses or protest marches or patriotic wars. Your marrow was the place you stored the stuff that made you who you were. What made this Dr. Harrison a big deal was that he arranged for people to live, temporarily, without it.
Alex felt queasy about the idea of living without any marrow. The scientific terminology, in the medical journal article his own doctor had given him, centered on the processes involved. The authors— and H. J. Harrison of Boston’s Dennison Center for Cancer Treatment and Research was among them— wrote in a dry and technical fashion about harvesting, cryopreserving, reinfusing. They didn’t take much note of the patient, the one who was waiting, doing nothing, doing without.
When the song ended, Alex let the turntable click off. He turned out the light, went into the bedroom, and lay down next to Meredith, who was asleep. He felt an impulse to say something flattering and persuasive to her. He wasn’t sure what, so he didn’t wake her up, only hugged her tight.
The next morning she wished him good luck with Harrison before they each went off.
Alone in his shop, Blond Beasts, Alex started installing new oversize pistons in a rebored engine block. The shop, located in Union Square, Somerville, was called Blond Beasts because Alex specialized in Nordic, Northern European cars. When he looked at the reamed-out Volvo cylinders he started seeing bones and marrow again. Inside your bones were cavities, spaces, and inside those spaces was where the marrow dwelled. Removing it and then replacing it would be sort of like rebuilding an engine: you broke the machine down to its basics, and then you put it all back together again.
I could try that image out on Harrison, Alex thought. With doctors, it helped if you could make them feel you already knew what they were talking about. Otherwise they thought you couldn’t understand— or rather, to be fair, they thought you couldn’t understand in the time they had available for you.
After he fit the rings and bearings and piston rods, Alex sealed it all up underneath the cylinder head. He checked the tightness of each bolt with his torque wrench to be sure the pressure was even, nothing was out of equilibrium, nothing overtaxed. He stuck the card representing this particular customer into the antique Bendix time clock that he’d found in a Maine junk shop and finally managed to repair.
This particular customer, whose name was Lisa, happened to be a nurse. She’d called first thing in the morning to ask how the rebuild job was coming, and, fishing for background, Alex had asked her some questions about the reputation of the Dennison Center. One thing she’d told him was the nickname of the place in Boston medical circles. “We say, ‘We’re sending Mrs. So-and-So over to the Death Star today.’ ”
Not a cheerful nickname, Alex thought. Nor was it, at first glance anyway, a cheerful place. Like a hotel lobby, the big room on the ground floor was sectioned off into small areas where you could sit and wait in well-stuffed chairs. It was different from a hotel lobby in that the ceiling was low and the lighting flat, fluorescent. Everybody was there for a common purpose, and they all knew it. Near where Alex stood, a man in a wheelchair talked with bent head and slurred voice to what Alex took to be his wife and grown-up kids. “Didn’t I tell ya?” the son said, like a coach trying to pump up a Little Leaguer who had successfully drawn a walk.
Another father walked by with a kid slung on his hip. The man turned left out of sight under a hanging sign, black letters on clear Lucite. Alex turned his head slightly sideways and squinted the double image away. PEDIATRIC. Probably leukemia, Alex thought. For some of these people, he knew, medical intervention would save their lives. Then they could put their illnesses behind them and move on. For others it wouldn’t, and they might not leave this place at all.
Death Star, Life Star. From his own experience with cancer and medicine Alex had concluded that survival depended on a combination of technology and will, and mostly, he was convinced, luck. For the first, you probably couldn’t do better than this place here. The Dennison was a high-magnitude star in a galaxy fairly bursting with the newest and best medical toys. Its sleek glass tower stood smack in the middle of the Longwood Medical Area, a triangle of Boston health-care powerhouses framed by the Fenway, Huntington Avenue, and the border of suburban Brookline where so many of the doctors lived. The Medical Area included at least a half dozen affiliated hospitals plus the Harvard Medical School. In a geography text, Alex thought, its products ought to be listed as doctors and discoveries and cadavers and cures.
ALL PATIENTS MUST CHECK IN HERE BEFORE APPOINTMENTS, the sign at the fr
ont desk said, but Alex wasn’t a patient here, not yet anyway. When it was time for his appointment he went directly to the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor, looking for room 486. The numbering system was complex, with arrows pointing in many directions, the scheme complicated by diverging hallways that seemed to lead to separate units or suites. A bit intimidated in spite of himself, Alex stood next to a cart full of rubber-banded bundles of mail. After a minute the kid in charge of the cart stepped out of an office. He was wearing headphones and bobbing his head energetically, but he took off the phones and politely directed Alex to take a left and then a right.
Room 486 was locked. Next door in a cubicle labeled 485, Alex found a woman sitting at a desk, talking on the phone. She wasn’t a kid, she was closer to Alex’s age, with a square, pleasant face and short black hair beginning to be streaked with threads of gray. She was wearing a sweatshirt that had a picture of some sculptures and hieroglyphics and said CLEOPATRA AND THE ART OF ANCIENT EGYPT. If she was Harrison’s secretary, Harrison wasn’t a stickler about formality in office attire. Carol Wagner, Alex’s doctor, had said she thought he might like Harrison. She’d said, “He isn’t a run-of-the-mill Dennison Center type.”