Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “What happens,” Alex said, “if we don’t get her marrow back?”

  “If we don’t get it back, we have to try for an allogeneic transplant instead of an autologous— that means we try to find somebody whose marrow is a close enough match, instead of using her own. Sometimes a brother or sister will work, or sometimes you find a match through the national computer data base. But there are a lot of buts. Linda Dumars doesn’t have any siblings, I already checked that out. We’ll try the donor data bank, but the process takes six weeks, when you’re lucky enough to find somebody at all. And after transplant there are still a lot of risks from GVH— graft-versus-host disease. In the meantime… well, let’s just say a whole lot of things could go wrong. So let’s get her marrow back, that’s tonight’s project. This morning’s actually. We’re supposed to make the trade at dawn.”

  “Dawn on a beach,” Alex said, “and we’re leaving now.” Jay had just told him that this exchange was crucial. Where would it happen? Maine? Someplace far out on the Cape? “Will it take us that long, or are we getting there early to set up some kind of trap?”

  “No trap. The caller said you’re supposed to start walking up the beach from a certain parking lot at sunrise, with the bag over your shoulder. An unknown spot on an empty beach is a tough place to set a trap. We’re taking the kidnapper at his word. Or her word, whatever.” He’d explained earlier that the caller had used a computer-generated voice, had sat at a keyboard somewhere and typed in the message. You could get the necessary hardware and software for any personal computer, Jay had said.

  “I’m supposed to start walking,” Alex said. “Is that because the person collecting the money thinks you would recognize them?”

  “Or because they want me to think so? All I know is they said it shouldn’t be me. Otherwise I wouldn’t trust it to anybody else. No heroics, no theatrics, just make the trade. I know the beach, so I can tell you about the terrain anyway. It’s in Truro, if you know the area at all.”

  Truro. Near the end of Cape Cod, the last place before Provincetown. Alex was pleased to have figured the possibilities right. He rolled down his window and looked up at the night sky.

  The stars seemed extra twinkly. That was his damn double vision again. He’d had it for three weeks now. When he did highway driving, sometimes he found it more comfortable to shut one eye. A particular malfunctioning nerve, the neuro-ophthalmologist had explained, caused a particular muscle to fail to align the right eye quite correctly with the left. It could be a virus; that sometimes happened. Considering Alex’s history, though, Wagner and the neuro-op had gone for a brain scan and a spinal tap right away. Only a remote possibility, Carol Wagner had assured him. A very remote possibility of metastasis of the lymphoma to the spinal fluid or the brain. The tests had been negative. This wasn’t completely conclusive, but it made the remote possibility even more remote. Now there was nothing to do but wait and see whether the double vision went away. Alex supposed he could run this all by Jay for a free third opinion, if conversation flagged and they needed to talk to stay awake.

  Jay turned onto Storrow Drive, heading downtown. He’d pick up the Mass Pike in Allston, then the Expressway, then Route 3 following the coast south. He was driving fast. An hour, maybe less to the bridge over the canal. Another hour out the bent arm of the Cape. “What time is sunrise?” Alex asked.

  “Five twenty-eight, according to the meteorologists. So we’ll be early. It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

  “You weren’t a Weatherman or anything? That couldn’t be what the blackmail note was about?” The blackmail note might not be connected to the theft, Alex knew, any more than the double vision had to be connected to his disease. But the note was something to hold on to when everything seemed to be just so much guesswork, empty space. If Jay had been hiding something before, maybe he’d come clean about it now.

  “No, I wasn’t. I told you— no bombs, no kidnappings, nothing like that. Maybe on that trip out West we fantasized about snatching Henry Kissinger, you know, but fantasies are legal the last I heard. Maybe we did a few illegal substances, but I’m not running for office, and even if I was I could say that I’m very, very sorry and anyway those substances never did anything for me. I’m not even running for medical director, for Christ’s sake. I’m just a scientist and a doctor, or a doctor and a scientist. I admit to being confused about which order, okay?”

  “Okay,” Alex said. “Sorry.” Jay had a right to be touchy tonight. They drove in silence past the left-field wall of Fenway Park, under the Prudential Center, downtown along the old New York Central right-of-way. Foster remained shadowy, as vague as the hand that had pulled Linda Dumars’s marrow out of the swirling vapor. Linda Dumars, a shape under plastic, was shadowy too— except for the fact she had two little kids and was married to a doctor, and that Alex could be her, she could be him.

  “What do you know about how it got taken?” Alex asked. “Did you find out who’s been in and out of the blood bank, or are you keeping completely quiet till we get it back?” He adopted Jay’s assumption that this trade was going to happen as planned.

  “Nobody keeps track of who goes in and out of there. You saw how we just waltzed in ourselves. We had to go by Edie— she was in the room just outside the cryo room— but she’s not always there, she goes out for meetings, lunch, she’s got stuff to do in other parts of the blood bank. But yeah, we questioned. So now we’ve got a long list of names, probably incomplete, of people who did or might or might not’ve stepped into the back room. Including all the blood bank staff. And the woman that cleans there, who was a substitute, not the regular one today. And the delivery guy from the gas supplier, who came this morning. Not to mention you and me. I argued we could hold off questioning people till we make the trade, but I couldn’t get Dan or Sandy to back me on that.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Dan Weinstein is medical director of the transplant unit. Dan and I go back together, I was a fellow under him. Sandy Sorenson’s medical director of the blood bank. Everything has a medical director who sits in an office; the medical director’s always an M.D. Dan’s insisting to the high gods that I get to handle this my way, so far.”

  “So this isn’t exactly being kept quiet, but so far no police.”

  “Not as quiet as I might have hoped. I hope it’s quiet enough that we don’t piss the kidnapper off. Nobody knows the ransom arrangements; I drew the line there. Fire me later, I said.”

  Jay let those words hang while he maneuvered in front of a trucker and around the sharp curve that got them up onto the elevated Fitzgerald Expressway, a mass of poorly patched potholes over half-exposed steel. On this road there was always lots of traffic, even now. It was scheduled to be torn down before the end of the century, though nobody knew for sure whether the money existed to rebuild the thing underground.

  “Doctors think a lot of themselves,” Jay said once they were up and doing sixty-five over the ruts. “We think a lot of ourselves because of all the secrets we know about how the body works, and then we think a lot of ourselves when we forget all that scientific certainty and talk about certain decisions coming down to a hunch. I’m playing a hunch about the kidnapper. Not who they are, but how they think. I’m also playing a hunch that you’re the right person to send with the money. Because I can trust you to identify with the patient above anything and anybody else.”

  You know it and I know it, Alex thought. And maybe too you trust me more than some SWAT team because we seem to share things out of a common past in which helmeted cops and federal agents were definitely not on the same side as us. To the left, out on a point jutting into Dorchester Bay, was UMass, where Meredith taught. The dark buildings, brick on stilts, looked lumpy in the night. Rumor had it, Meredith said, that the fortress design was supposed to discourage student demonstrations and building takeovers. The campus had been designed at the cusp of the sixties and seventies. So had the decoration on the next point south,
the big gas tank painted with an abstract design by Sister Corita Kent. It remained a matter of debate whether the left edge of the blue stripe was a profile of Ho Chi Minh.

  “So,” Alex said. “It’s a long drive. You never got time to tell me about Foster this afternoon.”

  7. Just Because You’re Paranoid

  “He was driving that van, the way I told you, and he was AWOL, technically a deserter since he’d been gone for a lot more than ninety days. He’d walked off an army base in Germany a few years before, spent most of the time in France, and now he was coming back to test the waters. He was kind of scary-looking at first. I mean, here’s this big husky black guy, head shaved, full beard. I had a moment of doubt when he first stopped. Who he is today, what he could be into, I don’t have a clue. He could need money to get his kid out of the inner city while the kid’s alive and not addicted. There’s just too many possibilities and not enough information. In my gut I don’t think Foster is the kidnapper. Yet I don’t have a shred of data to back that up.”

  “So just tell me some about that trip,” Alex said.

  Jay didn’t say anything for a while, just drove, as the highway came back down to ground level and veered away from the coast. He kept his thoughts to himself until past Braintree, and then he said, “That trip. You ask me to tell you about riding with Foster and Dee, and all of sudden I start to feel lonely. I start to remember this business about being a mascot again.”

  “A mascot?”

  “No, not really a mascot. I had a job, a function, but… See, Dee and Foster picked me up when I was at personal and political loose ends. I’d been working in this printing collective. We printed movement leaflets and posters, newspapers, stuff for antiwar groups and community organizers, the Black Panther Party chapter— were you in Boston then?”

  “Not yet,” Alex said. “In May of ’seventy-one, I guess I was traveling up and down the west coast. I’d been busted in D.C. a year earlier— after Kent State, Jackson State— if that’s a credential. I got thrown out of college, too.” He put a sarcastic twist on the words. He was still half-expecting Jay to pull some skeleton out of the closet if he could pass some additional test.

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t, but after college I worked in this collective, and we worked pretty hard. Half of our customers didn’t have any money, we were always looking for quasi-commercial jobs to keep the thing afloat. By the time I’m talking about, though, the operation was on its last legs. I had said I was leaving. Then Dee and Foster said, want to go to California? So I went. It turned out they had a job for me to do.”

  Workaholic, Alex was concluding. Always some kind of project: printshop, underground railroad. Didn’t quite have it in you to be a hippie, Dr. Jay.

  “So what was it they wanted?” Alex asked as casually as he could.

  “Protective coloration. Like a lizard that can change the color of its skin. Old van, rebuilt as a camper, big black man, white woman with this long blond hair? Cops were pulling over freaks for the hell of it, you know, plus the chance they’d find an ounce or two and chalk up an arrest. Plus here it was this race and sex thing. Foster wasn’t hot, I mean nobody was after him, and he had a phony passport that looked good. Still, if he got busted a fingerprint check would show he wasn’t really who the passport said.

  “So there I was on the shoulder, a kid with long hair and a backpack and a thumb. Dee was driving, and Foster must’ve said something like, ‘Why don’t we pick up that hippie so we blend a little better with the landscape, babe?’ Whenever Foster got to feeling paranoid— no, that’s not fair. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Whenever he got nervous, he’d ride in the back of the van, on one of the bunks. Dee and I would ride in front, and one of us would drive. So that was one thing. Also I think they each wanted a kind of buffer, ’cause it turned out they’d jumped into this cross-country trip as soon as they met. They both wanted the journey to work and not to come flying apart too soon.”

  “And when you think about it, you get lonesome.…” Alex heard himself sounding like a shrink on automatic pilot, just reflecting back whatever the client said. There were similarities about shrinks and detectives, he’d thought more than once.

  “I remember how I felt. Like at night, when they’d get in the van and I’d sleep outside. You can imagine, I was jealous. Not of Foster because Dee was, after all, what, she must have been thirty, which seemed awful old to me then. I was jealous of their situation, though.”

  “So what else happened on this trip?”

  “Oh, we had a good time. We picked up some other hitchhikers, teenage runaways, so they were around for a while. We got across the country and we didn’t get busted after all. We hit the Pacific someplace up in Mendocino County, sneaked across somebody’s property and spent a last night there on the beach, toasting the waves, the ocean— though I remember being conscious, too, that Vietnam was what was on the other side.”

  Alex tried to picture these people, this crew, but so far they were only stick figures Jay was doodling, and Jay’s mind didn’t seem to be on them anymore. He was doing seventy-five now, as if getting to the beach early would do any good. For the first time, Alex thought to wonder what effect this theft was going to have on Jay’s career, his reputation. Up till then he’d focused only on the patient, but that wouldn’t be true for the man next to him. When Jay started talking again, he was explaining about his career, but from the other end.

  “I stayed out in the Bay Area. I worked on a project for military resisters— I think I said that before. I knew a lot of chemistry from college. I was going to be a research chemist until, you know, Dow, napalm, soured me on that. Anyway, in San Francisco, I worked nights in a medical lab to pay the rent. Eventually I got seduced by the idea of medicine. It seemed very clean and well-intentioned and precise. I got into med school at Cal, and then it was like traveling through a long tunnel where nobody even knows there’s a world above, below, or on either side. Once people get into that tunnel, once they invest the time and money and everything, there’s not usually any more detours even when they come out on the regular road again. Maybe that’s why there’s a lot of doctors that are no good with patients. Once you find out, it’s too late to go be a disc jockey or a travel agent or stockbroker or whatever it is. Anyway, that’s how I got where I am.”

  “Uh-huh,” Alex said. “And does it still seem…?”

  “Clean and well-intentioned and precise?” Jay might have been defensive about his choices in that long speech, but now he seemed happy Alex had brought him back to his point. “Not exactly, no. We work miracles, sometimes. Yet a half-mile away, in Roxbury, you’ve got infant mortality rates that rival the Third World. Death Zones, as the medical statisticians say. Poverty, crack, lack of access to prenatal care. In adults you’ve got treatable cancers and heart conditions that don’t get diagnosed until it’s way too late. I like what I do. I don’t think it’s saving the world, unlike colleagues I could name.”

  “Does that attitude make you unpopular?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. But, I get the Center’s name in the paper and I bring in grants. Look, I think we better talk about what you’re going to do when we get to that beach.”

  “How well do you know it?” Alex asked. “I don’t know Truro much.”

  “First camping place of the Pilgrims,” Jay said, “speaking of the underside of the American Dream. They stole a cache of Indian seed corn, cooked it, and ate it. Didn’t know it was the beginning of a trend. But the ocean beaches are wonderful. I’ve never seen beaches like those anyplace else for the combination of surf and fine sand and big high dunes behind. I own a house, a summer place, there. If the kidnapper did any research he might know that— he, she, they, it. Maybe they know and they’re trying to taunt me. Not enough data, again.”

  “What can you tell me about the layout?” Alex asked.

  “Every few miles there’s a road access, where there’s a hollow, usually, a break in the dune.
You’re supposed to start where they said, at sunrise, and walk north. The next road is maybe a mile, mile and a half up the beach. Somebody could come ashore from a boat in a dinghy or a kayak, I guess, though the surf is apt to be rough, and it’s not usually done. Somebody could come along in a four-wheel-drive, along the beach. They could hike along the beach on foot, or they could climb down from the dune. You’ll be all by yourself. From the dune, with a rifle, maybe a good shot could take you out. I don’t see why they would, but it’s a possibility I thought I ought to raise.”

  Yeah, now, Alex thought. When it’s too late to get anybody else. But it didn’t matter. He was going, of course. He thought that Linda Dumars, whoever she was, would do the same for him. “Do I just hand over the money? Or do I demand the merchandise? Do I inspect it? How do I know it’s real?”

  Jay let out a long sigh, indicating he’d been over Alex’s questions in his mind quite a few times.

  “You just hand it over. Whatever they give you, don’t open it until you get it back to me and this tank. If they don’t give you anything, I still don’t see how we have any choice. Maybe the idea is we get another call that says the stuff is under a crate of toilet paper in some storeroom in the basement. For the moment, all we do is act in good faith. We do unto others as we’d have them do unto us.”

  “Listen, Jay,” Alex said. “Suppose we don’t get it, and you’re looking for that matching marrow, and either you take a long time to find it or you don’t find it at all. What happens? How long can she live without producing blood components, all of that?”

  “Do you remember the Bubble Boy? Well, that was different, he had aplastic anemia, but he lived inside a sterile environment for eleven or twelve years. Somebody in Linda Dumars’s situation, debilitated from the side effects of her treatments… you know from experience, for instance, what chemotherapy does to the gut. All kinds of opportunistic infections find an easy toehold. Without bad luck, a few weeks shouldn’t be a problem. With good luck, a few months, maybe more.