Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  The rear end hit first, crumpling like a can. Shards of steel that used to be the trunk split the cardboard shipping box and the insulated container inside. Smoke and cold rushed out. There was nothing left to keep the temperature of Linda Dumars’s frozen stem cells below that of the comfortable desert air.

  DAY ONE

  16. Rhymes With Tinder

  Alex followed the receptionist’s directions to a door with a frosted-glass panel such as an old-fashioned dentist’s office might have had. Now it was part of a suite of offices belonging to an audio-visual production services firm. He knocked once and got no response, knocked louder and knocked louder again.

  “Come in,” a voice yelled in answer to the third knock. “The door’s open.” The mix of annoyance and openness made Alex think of Dee’s daughter, Sierra, blurting out that her mom wasn’t home.

  Barbara Binder stood over a videocassette deck with a light-weight headset furrowing her black hair, brushed and shiny and parted on one side. She was, if anything, more attractive than the teenage girl in the photo. Her figure was nearly as good as ever, the sultriness not all gone but softened, the air of expectation replaced by a comfort with herself as she stood there and worked. She wore a gold-colored chain with a blue stone that crossed a vein on her neck. Her face was worn enough not to be mistaken for seventeen. If she was conscious of Alex’s inspection, she ignored it. She pushed a last button on the deck and another on an audiocassette player, then nodded and took the headphones off.

  “Are you here to get the TBC?” she said with a smile. “After I called, the Amiga went out on me too.” Alex knew that smile. He didn’t know TBCs or Amigas, but he knew she wanted some piece of equipment fixed. Some customers radiated nervousness, afraid you were going to cheat them. Others took your competence for granted but wanted speed, which they tried to purchase with goodwill.

  “No, sorry. If you’re Barbara Binder, I’m here to talk to you. My name is Alex Glauberman. If you have a few minutes…”

  “Binder,” she said, the smile vanishing. She corrected Alex’s pronunciation, as the receptionist had not bothered to do. “It rhymes with ‘tinder’ or ‘cinder,’ not with ‘blinder’ or ‘kinder.’ I thought you were from the repair shop. The time-base corrector… How can I help you, then?”

  “I was referred to you by Paul Foster, sort of.”

  “Paul Foster? I’m sorry. Is that somebody I did some work for? I don’t remember…”

  “Foster,” Alex said. “Everybody just used to call him Foster. When I say he referred me, I mean I was trying to find him. Somebody I talked to, a woman named Dee Sturdevant, suggested that I talk to you.”

  That was true, literally, and also it kept Jay’s name out of the conversation awhile. Alex had called Jay from the airport to report in, and Jay had reported back that there was no new word from the kidnapper, and that Linda was running a fever of a hundred and four. Jay had been rushed, or sounded rushed. He had thanked Alex for flying to the Coast and back. They’d made an appointment for two o’clock; after the noon conference, Jay said.

  Alex’s report had been succinct and had not included Dee’s diary. After hanging up he had opened the phone book, not because he expected to find Barbara Binder but because he couldn’t think what else to do for the woman with the fever of one-oh-four. Now he was here in this nondescript professional building sandwiched up against the Turnpike where the Back Bay met the South End. He was more interested than ever in the question Dee had posed to him about Jay’s omission. One thing Alex had learned the hard way was the importance of being suspicious of clients whom he liked.

  “You mean…” Barbara Binder kept her face neutral, cool, businesslike, but her fingers trembled. She didn’t do anything about them. “That Foster? That Dee?”

  “You all met traveling across the country in a converted delivery van. I think at the time you were running away from home.”

  She smiled a wide, fond, surprised sort of smile, very different than the one she’d greeted him with. She came around the editing table to lean against the edge closest to Alex. She folded her arms in front of her, crossed them in front of her chest.

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember them. But who are you and why are you trying to find Foster? And why did Dee, whom I haven’t seen since I was an adventurous teenager, refer you to me?”

  “I’m an auto mechanic, your guess wasn’t far wrong. I’m also— have also been— a cancer patient, and that’s how I got to know a doctor named Jay Harrison. One of Harrison’s patients, a woman named Linda Dumars, is in a lot of danger right now, life-threatening, because something disappeared from the hospital where she is. There’s some reason to think Foster could be connected with that disappearance. I went to Dee to try and find him. She didn’t think you could help with that. She just noticed that Jay hadn’t seemed to want to tell me about you.”

  “No, he seems to want to hush me up, sweep me back under the rug. Probably there could be mountains of reasons why.” She stood up straight and put her hands in the pockets of her pleated slacks. “But I still don’t see what you—”

  “I don’t blame you. I’m not the police, or hospital security, I’m just somebody Jay asked to help him look into this. When push comes to shove, it’s Ms. Dumars whose interests are my interests, not Jay’s. I think you can see why. If you want to check on my story, you can call either the doctor or the patient at the Dennison Cancer Center. Although neither one of them knows I’m here. Or I can tell you the whole story from the beginning, if you have time.”

  “Well, I— frankly, I don’t know what to say. I’m supposed to show a rough cut to a client in half an hour.” She took her hands out of her pockets and put her fingertips on either side of her mouth, a strangely old-fashioned gesture but one that kept her fingers still. She struck a lot of poses, Barbara Binder. That was her way of dealing with something— men who couldn’t see past her body, perhaps. Alex remembered the woman in the wetsuit who’d collected the ransom. She’d struck poses too.

  “This is really embarrassing to me,” Barbara said after a minute’s thought. “I don’t know anything about whatever is wrong at any hospital, but I did try to get in touch with Jay, recently. I got brushed off in a way I found… I don’t know. Surprising. No, insulting. He didn’t tell you anything about that?”

  “He didn’t,” Alex said. “He didn’t mention you at all.”

  “If you’ll come back in an hour, when I’m done with my client, I’ll make the time to talk.”

  Just in case, Alex spent the hour outside, lounging against the railing that overlooked the Pike, breathing exhaust and leafing through the diary again. When he went back up to Barbara Binder’s office, she was sitting behind her workbench, waiting, and she had a question for him. If she’d called Linda Dumars, the patient had most likely been in no condition to talk; if she’d called Jay, she didn’t say so. If Jay had said Alex was overstepping his mission, she kept that to herself too.

  “How the hell did you find me?” Barbara Binder wanted to know.

  “You’re in the phone book. It didn’t have to be you, but it’s not that common a name. When I called the number, I got—”

  “Francie, out front. I used to be on my own, but now I’m in this sort of group practice, I guess a medical person would say. We’re each listed under our own names. But that’s not what I meant. When you were here before, I forgot that none of those people knew my last name. I had a, well, a traveling name. I was into a whole concealment trip, as we used to say.”

  “I know. You called yourself Ellen, but Foster made it Barbarella because Henri screwed it up. Dee lent me her diary, so I’m sort of an expert historian of all that by now.” He hoped historian had the proper dispassionate, neutral sound. “Let me tell the history of this current problem, okay?”

  Alex told her about Foster’s letter and the kidnapper’s messages and the beach and the visit to San Francisco, from which he had just returned. She sat with her hands folded on the workbench,
her expression neutral, except when he showed her the photocopied pages, showed her the page that had Dee’s conversation with the boyfriend’s mother when they sent the boyfriend home. Then she put her hands to her cheeks again, but only briefly, and said, “You don’t understand how embarrassing this is. Only it isn’t anything compared to what you’re telling me about this woman’s life possibly depending on what you find out— which I have to believe is true. Do you want to sit down? Let me figure out how to start.”

  There was a swivel chair without arms at another bench full of equipment. Alex turned it around and sat down. Barbara Binder, once briefly Barbarella, started to pace back and forth. Every now and then she’d stop to pick up something— a screwdriver, a microphone, some stapled sheets of paper she could roll into a cylinder and point with when she chose. She didn’t move like the woman in the wetsuit, Alex decided. That one had waved and swung her arm in a fashion calculated to draw attention. Barbara seemed both more and less genuine than that.

  “I had no idea he was here in Boston until I saw that article. I looked at the name and the picture, and I said, ‘Uh-huh, that’s him.’ So I wrote him a letter. I told him some of my memories and suggested we could get together and talk about old times. I didn’t know what would come of it— you know, old lovers getting together, you never know whether it’s a good idea or not.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said in a way meant to be encouraging. “Uh-huh.”

  “Not that this would really be old lovers, it was more like… I don’t know what to call it. That was part of why I wanted to see him. I wanted to get the various views, camera angles on what happened, so I could straighten that memory out. I’m talking about how I contacted somebody that had once been genuinely nice to me but also had taken advantage of me at the same time. When I was very young. Well, young anyway.”

  “How young were you?” Alex asked.

  “Well, I mean, people get married at that age, and pregnant a lot younger, but I know I was young. Just turned seventeen. So when I thought about being in touch with him again, seeing him, I was all flutter-flutter-flutter. Like a teenager. Even though I told myself I’ve been tempered by good and bad experiences. Even though I told myself he’s sure to be old and dull and over the hill. I thought he might not answer, of course. It just never occurred to me he’d have his secretary brush me off.”

  “His secretary?”

  “She sent me a note. I’d written him on my new stationery, trying to show I was grown up and professional too, I guess. For a few days after I wrote him I pawed through my mail here— bills, junk mail, catalogs— looking for his letter. I pawed through message slips, expecting one to be from him. I told myself it was too soon, what was I getting so anxious about? But in just a few days, there was an envelope on Dennison Center stationery. I felt so relieved. And pleased. At least I hadn’t made a complete fool of myself. I opened it up and got a very nasty slap in the face.”

  “Do you have the letter? What did it say?”

  She stopped pacing and gave him a quizzical look. “You really don’t know, do you? It said, ‘Dear Ms. Binder: Dr. Harrison has received your communication but wishes me to tell you he does not wish to accept your invitation at this time.’ Or words to that effect. It was a form letter, I mean, that she called up off her disk. If that happened to you, what would you do?”

  “Probably,” Alex said, “I’d send a nastier note back.”

  “Would you really? Probably you would, but then you’re a man. I told myself the sensible thing would be to forget it. Why waste any energy on somebody that acts that way?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I don’t think it’s sensible to just sit and take it. You didn’t accept your own advice, did you?”

  “No. I looked him up in the book, the way you did to me, and went to his house. I let my finger hover over the bell, but I didn’t ring it. Instead I walked away and sat in my car, just watching, thinking maybe he’d come in or out, maybe I’d learn something, or he’d recognize me, or he wouldn’t. But nothing happened. I still couldn’t let it rest. One time I called him at home, just to see who would answer. Nobody, only his machine. I even went and got a look at his secretary, like that would help me figure out whether she brushed me off by her own initiative. She could be getting it on with him on the side and hoping to marry him like in a romance magazine. Believe me, I was like somebody in a romance magazine.”

  “You do sound kind of obsessed,” Alex agreed. He added, “His secretary, Deborah McCarthy, is already married, by the way.”

  “I know. I saw her ring. And yes, that was the name signed to the note, McCarthy, if that’s what you’re trying to find out. But vanity knows no bounds. I thought, well, so what, they could still be having an affair.”

  “They could. Did you save her letter? In case we wanted to confront her with it?”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Barbara Binder said. She pointed a warning finger at Alex, a finger that shook just a little bit. She was a woman both self-possessed and nervous. “I’m telling you all this because of the patient that’s in trouble. I’m rapping it all down like you’re a tape recorder or a biographer, a dispassionate observer, okay? I’m not asking for any help, thank you. Anyway, I don’t have much doubt about the affair part.”

  “That you made it up, you mean?”

  “No, uh-uh. Obsessed, you said? I called it a mania, but I think obsessed is good too. It was just, maybe I went celebrity crazy. Maybe I wanted to know how come I’m not briefly famous, how come it’s him? Or else maybe he’s always been lurking in the back of my mind as a… well, a future I expected to catch up with, but never quite did. It’s hard to explain, unless you already know what I mean. Anyway, I went back to his house one more time, to spy on him. I don’t know what else to call it. And I turned out to have guessed right about the secretary, after all.”

  “You did?” Alex said.

  “I did,” Barbara Binder said decidedly. “I watched her leave his apartment on a Sunday morning, when she ought to have been with her husband or at church.” The words were supposed to be humorous, but she shook her head sadly, as if still in the process of letting it all go. “I thought of marching up and introducing myself, saying, you remember my letter, right? But that would be childish. She was having a hard enough time. I once made the mistake of falling for a boss.”

  “You saw her, but not him?” Alex asked. He meant maybe Deborah McCarthy had just stopped by to feed her boss’s cat or something like that.

  “Just her, but I saw the way she looked all around to see who might be watching her leave. Guiltily. Like she didn’t want to be so obvious, but she couldn’t stop herself. Believe me, I know that way of leaving somebody’s bed, somebody’s house. And I thought, Ms. Barbarella, you’ve been sitting out here in your car for an hour on a Sunday morning spying on a man you haven’t seen for twenty years. Now you know he’s like any other middle-aged executive. Isn’t it time for you to go on back to your own life?” She shook her head again, more grimly than sadly this time. “After that, I just packed it away.”

  “Uh-huh,” Alex said. “I appreciate you telling me all this, I really do.” He waited. “That’s all?”

  “Don’t look so disappointed,” she said, laughing suddenly. “I mean, I know this situation is very serious, but you can’t be pinning all your hopes on me. I’m afraid I’m just giving you a sideshow. It’s like when you pick up a rock, and whatever you’re looking for, you find all these other interesting creatures living their crawly lives underneath.” She started to walk again, dusting here and there, picking things up and putting them down. “Look, I hope this doesn’t make me sound lonely or desperate or like I’m haunting the personals ads, because that’s not really the case. Are you, um, going to be reporting all this to him?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Alex said. “If I find out anything about which one brushed you off, Jay or Deborah, and why, do you want me to call you?”

  “I want to say don’t bother, but yes,
I still would like to know. Or if you need to line us all up and find out who’s not telling the truth…”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Listen, if I can help, I will. And, when you can, would you give my regards to Dee? Tell her she was really more of a formative influence than Jay, even if I wouldn’t go all flutter-flutter-flutter at the thought of having lunch with her.” She shrugged. “You know how these things are.”

  “I do,” Alex said. This wasn’t about influences. It was about whatever made you feel somebody else was inside your skin, and vice versa. Fucking them, making love with them, talking your hearts out— you needed that merge to get your balance back, paradoxical as it might sound. That was what had gone on with her and Jay twenty years ago. From her side, at least, it wasn’t settled yet. “So,” he said, “I’ll let you get back to work. Unless there’s anything else.”

  “Not that I know of. I bet there are things about Jay and all of them I’ve completely forgotten, just like there’s other things that burned their way indelibly into my seventeen-year-old brain. I’ll tell you something I think about, sometimes, which happened the night before we met up, when it was just me and poor old Ernie on the road. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what you want to know…”

  “That’s okay,” Alex said. He told himself the truth must be that he enjoyed the role of cut-rate shrink. He liked picking up the rock and seeing what wriggled around underneath.

  “Oh, we got a ride, a long ride, in a big open flatbed truck. You know what I mean? Not a semitrailer, but big, and without any sides?”

  “A straight job, truckers call it.”

  “A straight job? Well, this one was full of hitchhikers, not particularly straight, in the old-fashioned 1960s meaning of the term. It was cold, really cold, everybody was huddled up against the back of the cab to cut down on the wind. Ernie and I were last on, so our spot was close to the edge. I was on the outside, because I was tough, you know, I wasn’t going to have him protecting me. All night I rode along the edge there, hanging on to a handle that was attached to the back of the cab. I can still feel that handle. It was rusty and had flaking paint. I was terrified I was going to fall asleep and let go of it. I could have had a very short life.”