by Dick Cluster
“All I’ve got is Paul, no initial,” Alex complained. “I don’t know who puts these samples together in the first place, they don’t seem to do much of a complete job. We’ll just try sending Paul O. the questionnaire, I guess.”
“And the questionnaire, what will it want to know?”
“Whether he’s come down with any kind of cancer.”
“So it makes his day, right, if he gets to say no?”
“Yes,” Alex said, “It makes his day. Thanks a lot, really.” But he knew that Paul O. was not his man, because according to Jay the right Paul Foster had been AWOL in France that year. He pressed disconnect and then tried directory assistance in the Baltimore area code. Eventually, Jay Harrison would get billed for all this, as he would for all the time Alex was devoting to this business instead of the shop.
“I say go for it,” had been Jay’s reaction when Alex asked whether to pursue what he’d originally been hired for or to wait. “No cops, nothing like that, but if it really was Foster, then he tipped me off himself, and he shouldn’t panic at a gentle, negotiating-type approach.”
Once he’d gotten over his initial shock, Jay had again been determinedly upbeat. “I’d do the same thing if I were the kidnapper,” he’d said between bites in the coffee shop where they stopped to refuel. He’d gestured with the bitten-off arc of his doughnut as he made his point. “I’d buy a little time to launder the money or get out of the country or whatever I had to do. To buy time, you have to seem like a credible threat. The note sounds kind of unbalanced, but the procedure was careful as all hell. The contact stayed too far away for you to grab her, and I doubt that she’s the kidnapper, I doubt she knows where the stuff is hidden at all. Too easy for you to disable and capture her, if you were an undercover cop with a gun. Plus the site was well chosen. Up there is scrubby woods and beach plum thicket, honeycombed with old sand roads. By now the money’s either buried or taken to a house or riding in somebody’s trunk miles ahead of us. My hunch is still to take them at their word, but I don’t like doing nothing any more than you do. It never hurts to hedge your hunches, in a careful way.”
Directory assistance provided numbers for five Paul Fosters— one of them Paul O.— and three P. Fosters, too. This time the longitudinal study was going to involve a sample of students exclusively from Morgan State.
“Morgan State?” the first man to answer said. “What are you, kidding me? Huh?”
“Excuse me?” Alex said.
“Morgan State? You not only got the wrong guy, you got the wrong color too. You’re calling from Boston to ask me did I go to college at Morgan State? Geez, you’re wasting somebody’s money. And why was that again?”
“We’re following a particular group to see how many might’ve developed different kinds of cancer over the next twenty years.”
“Well, if I was the one you want, I’d be telling you, ‘Yo, mind y’own mu-fuckin’ business, bro.’ ” The man’s laugh faded slowly. “No offense,” he added. “I’m seeing you as a white man, but no offense if you’re not.’’
Alex said, “Thank you for your time, sir,” and hung up.
Two other numbers gave him reactions that were equally baffled, though different in tone. If nothing else, by this time Alex had learned it was uncommon for white people to attend Morgan State. Two more respondents gave him simple nos, one hung up on him, and three didn’t answer. He tried Paul O. in Pikesville for the hell of it and got an answering machine. He decided to put Foster aside and see whether he could get anywhere with Dee. Maybe Dee had stayed in touch with Foster. Maybe they were on each other’s Christmas card lists. Abandoning Foster, he felt both disappointed and relieved. If he’d reached the man, then Linda Dumars’s life might again have depended on Alex’s finesse.
No Dee Sturdevant, however, was listed on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Her name wasn’t really Dee; originally, Dee was short for Double, according to Jay. Her first and middle names started with the same letter, though Jay couldn’t remember what. Alex went through his Dennison Center spiel and asked the operator to look for anything like Carol C. Sturdevant or Penelope P. The operator was willing but came up empty. Alex tried the San Francisco school department and eventually ended up with the municipal employees’ pension fund. Yes, the clerk at the pension fund said, they had current addresses of anyone that had any rights, if the employee or ex-employee kept them informed. But they couldn’t divulge it. Why didn’t Dr. Whoever send them the questionnaire, and they’d pass it on?
“Well, he told me he wants addresses,” Alex said. “It’s something about the statistics, the sampling procedure. He needs to know exactly how many get sent out for sure, and whether they reach the person or get returned by the post office. I know you have rules, other agencies have said the same as you. I could have the boss call your supervisor, if that would help…”
“Look, wait a minute, why don’t I see if we’ve got her at all. Before we get into any federal cases, okay?”
“Okay,” Alex said. “That’s Sturdevant, Dee.”
“What department?”
“Um, she was a teacher, the last we know, though that’s about twenty years ago.”
“Board of Ed. Hold on, let me put that in. Okay, nope, no Dee, D-e-e.”
“That could be a nickname, maybe Delores…?” Once she’d gotten involved in the search, Alex hoped, she’d be willing to scan the records for alliterations too.
“Sure, Delores, Deanna, Desiree— where’d you get this name in the first place, out of somebody’s address book?”
“Worse. It’s a sample of kids from a particular neighborhood. You know, where there’s apparently an unusual incidence of certain kinds of tumors, maybe from the water supply. We’re relying on the memories of people who used to live there, what they last heard. It could be important, though, in terms of people being able to get their medical bills paid, if it turns out there were toxic wastes involved.” The story was false, but that didn’t bother Alex much. The story could very well be true.
“Oh, I got you. Well, don’t tell anybody I gave this out, but let me see what I can do. Nope, I got a Jacob Sturdevant, down in San Diego now, and Agnes Amelia Sturdevant, still up here. That’s the only ones from Board of Ed. If I was Agnes, though, I might call myself anything when I was a kid.”
“Can I beg you for her telephone number? Agnes Amelia? Just to check whether she’s the right one. If she’s not I’ll have to keep searching for the right one, that’s the thing.”
“You got it. If she is the right one, I hope she turns out to be okay.”
“Me too,” Alex said. “It gets depressing, tracking down sick people.”
“Yeah. I can imagine.” She gave him both the phone number and the address and wished him luck. Alabama Street, San Francisco. Alex tried but failed to remember where that was, if he’d ever known. His San Francisco memories were mostly vague and suffused with nostalgia, though they circulated like the current in an electromagnet, creating a field that always made him want to go back. He called directory assistance yet again and worked his way up to somebody who was willing to punch in the number and see what name came up, though not without calling Dr. Harrison’s office to double-check. The number for Dee was listed to a Roger Giddings, but at the correct address.
Alex called the number, almost giving up on the tenth ring. The voice that suddenly answered was female and annoyed. If Dee had been thirty then, she’d be fifty now. The exasperated “Hello?” didn’t sound fifty.
“Hi,” Alex tried without too much hope. “Could I please speak to Dee?”
“Mom’s at work. Can I take a message?”
Okay, Alex thought, let’s hear it for Mom.
“Is there any way I can reach her? This is important.”
There was a hesitation, followed by, “Who’s this?”
“My name is Alex Glauberman. She wouldn’t know my name, but Jay Harrison referred me to her. He’s a doctor. It’s about a patient of his. It’s kind of urgent.
We need to locate a man named Paul Foster, and we thought she might know where he is. If she doesn’t, we need to try some other way.”
“A doctor? A patient? You sure you’re looking for the right person? Who did you ask for?”
“Dee Sturdevant. If that’s your mother, could you call her at work and ask her to please call me. I’m in Boston. She can call me collect.”
“Okay,” Dee Sturdevant’s daughter said, sounding more friendly if only because she now had a way out of this conversation and back to whatever it had pulled her away from. “Sí, cómo no? What’s your number?” Alex gave it to her. “Bye.”
A half hour later, Dee Sturdevant called back. She said she remembered these names he’d dangled in front of her daughter. She wanted to know what the hell this was all about.
“I’m working for Jay Harrison,” Alex said, “I’m sorry to disturb your daughter and to disturb you at work. I’m hoping you might be able to help me reach Paul Foster for him.”
“Pardon my up-front-ness,” Dee said, “but you sound like a telephone solicitor reading off his crib sheet. I don’t need a Sears charge card, and I’m not looking for a new long-distance phone company, no. If you were a phone solicitor, by the way, I would have hung up on you now. But I haven’t. In fact, I called you. So, once more, whoever you are, what’s this about?”
Alex gambled. He couldn’t use the longitudinal study ploy, nor did he want to tell her the real story over the phone. Telling the real story amounted to accusing her ex-boyfriend of a life-threatening extortion, making this accusation over a tenuous wire connection she could easily break. “If you know how to contact him, I’ll fly out today and tell you in person, how about that?”
“You’ll fly out today? From Boston?”
“Yes.”
“Then this must be important, no matter how bogus it sounds.”
“It is, I promise.” He calculated the flying time to California and corrected for the time change. “I could get there this evening, tonight. You do think you could find him if you decided to? Or you could at least give me a lead I could follow up?”
“Are you telling me what I think, or asking me? Oh, all right, yes. I wouldn’t put you through this if I didn’t think I had an address for him as of a few years ago. But my offer doesn’t come with any guarantees.”
Meaning, Alex thought, that if his reasons weren’t good enough, even if he had some way of pressuring her, that address would turn out to be a dead end. If she liked his reasons, at the other extreme, maybe she could take him right to Foster, even tonight, if he lived out there.
“Of course,” he agreed. “Should I, uh, come to your house?”
“Do that. Twelve-thirty-one Alabama, in the Mission, just below Twenty-fourth.”
12. My Marrow Burning
It was only a minor triumph, finding Dee, but Alex figured Jay would be cheered by any kind of triumph, and so might Linda Dumars, depending on what Jay was letting her know. However, when Alex called, Deborah McCarthy told him Jay couldn’t be reached, beepers or no beepers, because he was in conference with the high gods. She assured him, though, that she’d call Jay’s travel agent right away to authorize a round trip to San Francisco on Jay’s account. “Save your taxi receipts and so on,” she added. “And good luck.” When Alex got off the phone with the travel agent, Meredith came in, fist pumping in the air. That meant she’d had a minor triumph too.
“Emily Dickinson,” she said. “The first half is Dickinson. All that up through the ‘culpabler than shame’ is the first two stanzas of one of her poems. She didn’t title her poems, so ‘The Bone That Has No Marrow’ is more or less its name. After the first two stanzas the kidnapper seems to have gone off on his or her own. How did you do? Did you find your man?”
Alex told her about not finding Foster, about finding Dee, and about his plane.
“I’ll drive you then. Let’s go.”
The airport sat on a peninsula directly across the harbor, but the drive involved fighting the traffic back into town and then through the Callahan tunnel. Halfway through the tunnel, in the section with the drips and missing ceiling tiles, Meredith said, “This is the first of your investigations I’ve ever envied you.” She said this abruptly, without introduction, which wasn’t unusual for her. Anyway, the background was clear. Meredith had always tolerated rather than approved of Alex’s sideline before.
“Because it’s straightforward and heroic, for once?”
“No, I don’t mean about the missing lifeblood. That’s— envy is hardly appropriate, I just hope she comes through. And I hope whoever would toy with her for profit gets what they deserve. No, I meant what you’re doing for Harrison right now, what he originally wanted. It’s such a universal temptation, to want to find out whatever happened to all the people one wonders about— and one wonders whether they wonder about one. Ugh. I mean, and I wonder whether they wonder about me.”
“They wonder,” Alex told her. Maybe this was how to say something flattering and persuasive, the way he hadn’t been able when he’d wanted to try and match “Sad-Eyed Lady” two nights before.
“ ‘That Phillips,’ they say, ‘the one who always sounded so sure of herself, who had the great red hair that made her stand out, and those level green eyes that never missed a thing.’ I bet they have a hard time imagining you older. In my imagination, going backward, I think you always must have seemed already grown up. They worry that while they’ve been screwing around, you’ve been knowing and doing just what you want.”
That was how he thought of her, garbled as it might have come out. She was tenacious about what she wanted, though she provided much of it for herself. Sometimes he thought she’d spent the first two years of their relationship wanting him not to be dying. When it turned out he wasn’t, for now anyway, it was hard for both of them to know how to follow that act.
“Sure they do,” she told him. “They say, ‘Oh, yes, I recall Phillips, the snippy bitch. Gone to America, I heard. Never satisfied, Phillips. Next it’ll be Australia, like as not.’ ”
“If that’s what they say, they’re envying you.” Alex took Meredith’s hand off the stick shift and kissed it. A few minutes later, when they said good-bye at the airport curbside, they kissed for a long time. Alex wished they were someplace less public, more horizontal. Meredith pressed hard against him, breasts and belly and pelvis, and then suddenly laughed through their joined lips.
“What?” Alex said, smiling.
“What Shakespeare would say. Did say.” She lowered her arms to his waist and leaned back. She took one hand away, used it to brush the hair out of her face. When they made love, Alex sometimes caught her watching him, not with anything like detachment, but with a kind of merriment of observation. Her straight red hair, parted in the middle, seemed a kind of silky armor that kept the world apart from her head. She put her hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out a torn-off sheet of notebook paper. She read:
“To the wars, my boy, to the wars!
He wears his honour in a box, unseen
That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home
Spending his manly marrow in her arms.
Therefore to the war!
“All’s Well That Ends Well, Act Two, Scene Three. That’s what a man’s marrow was for, according to the Bard. You can use it up fucking or fighting, but you’ve got to choose which. It was different for the little kicky-wicky, of course. Don’t look at me like that.” She held up the scrap of paper and read again:
“My eyes are grey and bright and quick in turning
My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow
My flesh is soft and plump
My marrow burning!
That’s marrow from the woman’s point of view.”
“You just happened to be carrying these around with you, Professor?” Alex said.
“Not just. I found the Dickinson poem in a concordance. I wanted to know what the kidnapper had to choose from, if he or she gathered the material that way. That wa
s the only marrow in Emily’s concordance, but Shakespeare’s, for instance, had quite a lot. And the dictionaries of quotations also offered a large variety, of male authors anyway. Why did the kidnapper choose that particular poem? That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
“And?”
“I don’t have a good idea yet. He or she seems fixated on guilt and obligation, but whose we don’t know, do we? To the wars, my boy. See what Foster’s former kicky-wicky can tell you.”
“You’re a nutcake,” Alex said.
“Takes one to know one. Most people think I’m overwhelmingly sane.”
Alex kissed Meredith once more and then hurried to pick up the tickets the travel agent had reserved. There were matches you didn’t mess around with. His and Meredith’s had, somewhat to his surprise, turned out to be one of these. His daughter had stated this with a certainty Alex had found touching, if naive. Maria had seen women come and go in his life when she was younger, and apropos of some recent conversation about job applications, she’d said, “To tell you the truth, I really can’t see you and Meredith breaking up.”
Slumped in a chair by the gate area, Alex thought of sending Meredith a postcard from San Francisco, even though it wouldn’t get to her until after he was back. Someplace he’d like to be with her, like Golden Gate Park or the Francis Drake Hotel. His message would be, My marrow burning, too.
But marrow burning reminded him of marrow melting, and the reality of this journey and his investigation returned. Linda Dumars’s reality came crashing down on his and Meredith’s small triumphs and pleasures and problems like a wave engulfing the moats and spires of sand castles at the beach.
13. Dolores Park
A lot of cities, Alex thought, could pretend that’s all they had ever been. You joined in the pretense. You went around seeing pavement and buildings, construction, human design. In San Francisco, though, you knew all the time that the streets and buildings were only a skin. Really you were living on a peninsula full of little mountains and deep valleys, where the daily drama wasn’t rush hour but the sun’s struggle to fight through the moisture coming off the ocean. And once in a while, just to remind you what was what, the whole place shook. Sooner or later the continent would slough both the peninsula and its skin into the sea.