by Dick Cluster
Alex gulped inside, picturing Maria’s onrushing adolescence again. Today was Wednesday. On Friday she’d be back with him for a week, and he’d see what new enthusiasms or sullen silences she brought this time. Week by week it seemed to change, especially as the school year dwindled down.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said. “Well, I’ll be in touch.” He left Barbara Binder laying hands on her equipment. He didn’t see why his client should be afraid of her. His client’s secretary might be another matter, except this wasn’t his take on Deborah McCarthy at all. He would have figured her for somebody who knew better than to mix sex with the power to hire and fire, who knew how to keep them separate before anybody got inside anybody else’s skin or bed.
He’d have to confront Jay about all this, sooner or later. But first he needed Jay to vouch for him with Linda Dumars’s nurse.
17. Blind Dates
Boston boasts a few hills of its own, but no valleys in between. Boston’s hills tend to slope off into flatlands, many of them former marshes landfilled with old riverbed mud. Alex rode an Arborway streetcar underneath such a flatland, emerging onto the surface of Huntington Avenue in time to pass between the Museum of Fine Arts on one side and Northeastern University on the other. He got off at the corner of Longwood Avenue, near the foot of Mission Hill. From here on, Huntington formed a boundary not only between the hill and the flat but between residential, poor, and working-class Boston on one side and the institutional, well-endowed Medical Area on the other. Along Huntington some of the city’s entrepreneurs were known to peddle cocaine to the daytime-only residents, doctors among them, heading home toward Brookline or Newton or suburbs farther west.
This particular corner, Longwood and Huntington, had a special place in Boston’s recent social history. Here, a few years back, a black man intent on robbery had allegedly hopped into the car of an unwary white suburban couple on their way from childbirth class. Robbery had turned to savage, senseless execution, the bereaved and wounded husband had told police. “A family’s shining life destroyed,” the city’s prestigious daily had rhapsodized, filling page after page with the random viciousness of the crime and with the couple’s previous personal and professional bliss. An arrest was made in a nearby housing project. A man was charged with the vicious crime. A month later, the bereaved husband jumped off the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River when his perfect murder started to come awry. It had nearly worked, purely and simply because he’d invented a demon in whom he knew the police and the DA and the press and most white and worried citizens would believe.
Alex walked up Longwood without incident and then twisted his way to the Dennison through old narrow streets that served the hospital towers now. He watched a truck full of gas cylinders back out of a loading dock. NEW ENGLAND CRYOGENICS, the logo on the truck’s rear gate said. GASES. FREEZING AND WELDING SUPPLIES. Some tanks were fat and silvery and equipped with gauges, like the liquid nitrogen tank Alex had seen in the blood bank. Others were narrow and rusty with flaking paint, familiar to Alex as the compressed oxygen tanks that welders used. Rusty with flaking paint was how Barbara Binder had described the handle on the back of the big flatbed she’d nearly fallen off of. He wasn’t at all sure why she’d told him that story. He wasn’t at all sure how much of the rest of her story to believe. Maybe she’d written a letter and Deborah had swiped it. Maybe Jay had gotten the letter and wanted to keep his distance. Or maybe Alex was being led around by the nose and Barbara hadn’t written any letter at all.
Though the Dennison’s lobby didn’t seem any different than two days before, up on the seventh floor a security guard stood by the double doors with red stop signs that led to the transplant ICU. The guard accompanied Alex to the unit desk, then went back to his post. The woman running the desk said Yvonne was inside the sterile area. Alex would have to talk to her on the phone. Alex turned his back and spoke softly into the receiver. “You showed me around for Dr. Harrison on Monday?” he prompted. “He told you I was a potential patient, if I remember right. Actually I’m an investigator. I’m trying to help about Ms. Dumars’s marrow. You can check with Dr. Harrison or his secretary. I’m wondering whether I can talk to you for a few minutes, maybe if you have your lunch break soon?”
“Surely,” Yvonne Price told him. If she was surprised she didn’t show it. “I can meet you in the cafeteria. I’ll be down there about noontime. In the back room.”
The cafeteria had been empty when Jay had steered him there after the blood bank tour. Now it was crowded with medical personnel and service staff and patients’ families. Alex got in a line for soup and salad, joined another line for a cup of coffee, and managed to grab an empty table in the back room. As in the front room, the walls and tabletops were a deep green, deeper than traditional hospital green, with blond wood trim. The only difference was that more of the service staff seemed to be grouped here in the back. At least, there were fewer ties and fewer stethoscopes. The white men in blue uniforms, with keys on their belts, were probably maintenance or mechanics. The black men and women in white pants would be housekeeping and orderlies. It occurred again to Alex how easy it was for almost anyone to move unnoticed around a hospital, regardless of age or race or class, as long as they had the requisite uniform, and knowledge, and nerve. But to come up with a plan like kidnapping bone marrow? That was what he wanted to talk to Linda’s nurse about.
Yvonne came in carrying a tray and slowly looked the place over, nodding here and there. Another woman stood with her, looking around too. She was younger than Yvonne, early twenties, with deep brown skin. She had high cheekbones, a long jaw, and a face altogether as sharp as Yvonne’s was round. Yvonne saw Alex and pointed. The other woman squinted one eye at him and shifted her chin to the side in an expression that was lively, almost funny, but that clearly said she was checking him out. Either Yvonne had brought along some protection, or else this other woman had something to tell.
“This is my girlfriend Wallia,” Yvonne introduced her. The accent was on the second syllable, the li. “She’s a nurse here too. Anything you would say to me to you can say to her.”
“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” Alex said as the two nurses sat. “How is Ms. Dumars? Is she doing okay?”
“She’s doing her best. She’s already got a fungal infection, inside. We’re trying different antibiotics to see if we can find the one that will keep it in check. She’s running a high fever and she can’t keep anything down.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. He’d been wanting to meet Linda, to give her a chance to call some shots. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but sometime on that flight from California he’d started thinking of her as his client, even if Jay was paying the bill. Apparently he’d have to call the shots for her, for now. “Well, I’m sure you don’t have much time, so I ought to get to the point. Jay hired me to look into some anonymous mail he was getting. Now he’s got me looking into this mess, quietly. You checked with him?”
Yvonne did not smile now. “With Dr. Harrison’s secretary, yes.”
“He told me to call him Jay. It’s not that way with the nursing staff?”
“Hospitals are set up like ladders. It’s all what rung you’re on. It isn’t any different no matter what I call him, you know.”
Wallia nodded vigorously. “A hospital is like an army. From the generals down to the privates. The privates wash the sheets and clean up the shit.”
“Anyway I’m stubborn,” Yvonne said. “The man you’re working for is all right, not bad, but he doesn’t always notice who’s inside the body doing what he wants done.” She picked up a fork and looked in a deadpan way at her lunch, ravioli in an orangy-colored sauce. “Now what did you want to ask me about?”
“What nobody’s said out loud,” Alex pointed out reasonably, “is that it takes somebody with a fair amount of knowledge to plan something like this. They need to know the procedure, the timing, how to handle the specimen. A lot of things like that. If there wasn’t anything els
e to go on, I’d suspect a doctor. Wouldn’t you?”
Wallia laughed and stuck her chin out. She looked as if she’d blow a long plume of smoke if cigarettes were allowed. She said, “That’s the kind of questions this attending upstairs hired you to ask?”
“He hired me,” Alex said. “I ask what I think will get me somewhere.” He hoped that was convincing. Would it be more convincing if he looked like William Hopper or Tom Selleck? It might matter, though, that what he’d just said was true. Wallia gave Yvonne a look he couldn’t read.
Yvonne finished chewing and put down her fork before answering. “You’re asking me do I know how far Dr. Harrison or any other one might stoop if they need a lot of money fast?” she said. “There’s not a doctor in this place I know well enough to answer that about. I don’t think Harrison would— it’s hard to credit— but somebody stooped low enough. Either that, or somebody really messed up.”
Wallia nodded agreement. Alex said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean— and anybody who works in any hospital will tell you this— enough things go wrong in the normal way. Sometimes it’s things go wrong, and somebody that made the mistake doesn’t want to take the blame. So they point at somebody else, or they point without using their finger, if they can find a way.”
“ ‘I told the nurse to call for that medication’,” Wallia put in. “ ‘It wasn’t reported Mrs. X was allergic.’ ‘That damn Susie Q. didn’t have me paged when the family came in.’ ”
Alex nodded. If a handbrake cable or a brake line went within a month after a car had been in his shop, the customer would be as likely as not to say, “I was wondering whether there’s a possibility it could have been damaged while you were repacking the bearings.” They said that even if they didn’t know whether you packed bearings in a suitcase or surrounded them with foam peanuts or what. These nurses were talking about something different, more devious, but it involved the same human tendency to want to blame somebody, anybody, and definitely not yourself.
“What kind of a mistake could they be covering up, in this case? In confidence, of course.”
Yvonne lifted her head just a fraction of an inch, and she gave a tired fraction of her empathetic smile. She knew what Alex’s promise to keep his sources confidential would be worth if something like this were really going on.
“Supposing something went wrong about the marrow specimen between the OR and that tank,” she said. “I’m just saying it could’ve been that Dr. Harrison messed up, handling the specimen, or it could’ve been somebody else on the transplant team, or the cryo tech in the blood bank too. If something like that happened, and all I’m saying is if, one way to cover that up is to make the marrow disappear by some kidnapper you pull out of the air. If it never comes back, nobody ever knows there was anything wrong.”
That wouldn’t account for the advance warning in the Foster letter, but there was always the possibility of coincidence. Or it could be that the person knew about the Foster letter, and that knowledge prompted them to choose this extreme way of covering up. Did Yvonne know about the letter?
“Is that what you believe happened?” Alex asked.
“No. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what to believe, so I just go in there and tell her don’t worry, we paid the money to the one that took it, now everything is gonna be all right.” She looked at her friend as though this didn’t quite cover it.
“Yeah,” Wallia said, “tell him. You got to tell somebody. He’s the first one that asked.”
Whatever it was, Yvonne delayed. “I don’t know what to believe,” she repeated. Then, “Well, I just told you what I tell her. I didn’t say what she tells me.”
Alex waited. Yvonne looked at her watch and forked up another ravioli. She put it down uneaten. “Understand, I’m talking about a woman that’s shot full of medications, that’s sore and sick and run-down. She can’t even get out of her bed ’cause of the number of tubes we got her hooked to. Patients like that say a lot they don’t mean. Usually it all just blows over like a cloudy day.”
Wallia said, “What you said about how it looks to be a doctor. It doesn’t have to be one of the doctors here. The patient told Yvonne she thinks maybe it’s her husband. Her husband’s a doctor, some kind.”
“Pediatric.” Yvonne said. “Some specialty, g.i. tract or something. The first day she said to me, ‘Yvonne, it’s Tom, Tom’s trying to kill me. He paid somebody to take that box out of that tank. Now he’s got the money, he’s gonna let me die and run off with somebody else.’ A lot of the time the women patients worry about their husbands and boyfriends. They’re expecting they’re going to run around with some woman that’s not locked up— somebody healthy, somebody pretty, somebody that’s got their own mammaries, if that’s what it is they’re in for. Or somebody that’s got their own hair. I told her about that, it’s a common thing we see, but she said, ‘No, no, I mean it. He’s ashamed to divorce me, but he wants me out of his way. He’s always been a sneaky bastard.’ ” Yvonne emphasized sneaky, not always or bastard. Probably this was what Linda had done. “That’s what she said. Then she stopped, and the sedative took. Later he came in to see her. I asked her, you know, how did the visit go? She just said it was fine.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“As far as I know he’s got two arms and two legs and no horns or tail. He came with her when she got admitted and stayed till she got out of surgery, from harvesting the marrow, you know, and then he mostly turned her over to us. He’s not over our shoulder all the time like some doctor husbands, doctor wives. He’s got his practice up in Boxford or Topsfield or some place, and he’s supposed to be at home there too, looking after those two kids, even though they got a woman from Central America to do that work. The kids came in when she first came on the unit and looked at her room and all the equipment with big round eyes, and Mommy told ’em to be good and mind Daddy and Juanita, and they could come back when she’d be feeling better and in between they were supposed to write.”
Yvonne looked at her watch once more and said, “I got to finish eating now and go back up. If you want to keep digging on this, you could talk to Kevin Royce, next door. She probably said a lot more to him. Wallia can tell you about what she calls the blind dates. Wallia used to be up on the unit. She works down in outpatient now.” With that Yvonne turned her attention to the rest of the meal. She chewed and swallowed methodically, without appearing to taste what she ate. Alex thought she was letting him know she’d given as much as she was going to give.
“The patients can’t see each other, right?” Wallia picked up. She preferred talking to listening, Alex thought, though she could listen all right too. “All the staff, visitors, can see all of them, but they can’t see each other, like in some kind of riddle or quiz show almost. But the patients know what each other are going through, and they get real close over the telephone sometimes. Sometimes there’ll be an organizer kind of thing, just like in any group. Somebody likes to be the busybody, the boss. That one calls around to everybody, they find out who’s having a good day, a bad day, what all their counts are and all. So that’s kind of a group thing. But sometimes it’ll be people will pair off, and get real close that way, even though they can’t see each other. That’s what I call the blind date. Then one of ’em will get done, and go visit the other during contamination, that means the last couple days when the one that’s done can start getting exposed outside the airflow and sterile care. Sometimes they’re not what they pictured, and it gets kind of embarrassing. Other times it’s different. What happens to them afterward, I’d like to run a study on that. I’d try and get a grant, if I had the letters after my name.”
“Pairs?” Alex said. “These tend to be opposite-sex pairs?”
“A lot,” Wallia said. “I can see you thinking about nine-hundred numbers.” Alex hadn’t been, until she suggested it. For a month nobody else could touch you. When you were up to it, you might spent a lot of time touching yourse
lf. Another study, Incidence of Phone Sex Among Patients in Isolation Rooms. By categories: male-female, female-female, male-male. Or maybe, Development of Flirtation Techniques in the Absence of Visual Cues. Each one had experienced or was about to experience what the other one was going through. Talk about getting inside each other’s skins.
“And Linda Dumars might be confiding in this Kevin Royce, you think?”
Yvonne said, “They’re on the phone together a lot. You can visit him if you get Dr. Harrison’s permission.” She took one more mouthful, looking with distaste at the rest of what was on her plate.
“One more question, please,” Alex said. “Do you have any idea, one way or the other, whether there might be anything romantic between Dr. Harrison and his secretary? Someone has suggested to me that there is.”
Yvonne shook her head. “I don’t think I can help you about that.”
Alex looked at Wallia, who seemed to him to be suppressing a grin. But all she said was, “Rumors like that are cheap in a place like this. Sometimes there might be something to them. Sometimes it’s just a way to make the place a little more alive. You know, you don’t look much like a detective. I don’t really see you sneaking up to people’s bedrooms, taking pictures through the window and all.”
18. Tom Dumars, in the Doghouse, With an Axe