by Dick Cluster
You’re your own worst enemy, his father had said to him more than once. His father had been fond of pet sayings, and ready to trot them out whether they meant anything or not. What you heard repeated over and over had an influence on you. He wasn’t his worst enemy, though. Potentially, the woman sitting next to him was, if she lost faith in his ability to pull the fat out of the fire and decided her best chance was to go straight to the police. He patted her hand. He lifted the little plastic cup from her ear, kissed the ear, and whispered, “I’m sure everything is going to be all right.”
He realized he’d always hated giving assurances. He’d always hated it whether the assurances were true or false.
22. Putting the Kid Back In
At ten thirty in the morning Alex was in his shop, slowly turning the handle of a vise-grip attached to a thread-cutting tap. He knew now that Linda was okay, loosely speaking; he’d called and spoken to Deborah, and she’d been able to tell him this much. So he concentrated on painstakingly cutting threads into the hole he’d drilled inside a small segment of light-alloy steel rod. This cylinder was going to be the new cam for the door lock on an old Volvo 122. After he made the threads on the inside, he’d have to grind off a portion of the outer surface. Then the thing ought to work. It was better, he’d told the customer, than investing the time and money in trying to find a replacement door. When the phone rang, he jumped. The vise-grip sprang loose and landed on his toe.
“Yeah? This is Alex,” he growled into the phone. It was probably one of the backed-up customers, wanting to know when they could get rescheduled. Sometimes he shut down for a day or two to pursue an investigation, sometimes he did it because Maria was sick. Customers who couldn’t get used to the vagaries of dealing with a one-man shop mostly moved on. The rest stayed, and in return they got personal service like the grinding of this cam. He would have let the answering machine take the call, except it might be important. It might be Foster, calling back with a new thought or a change of heart. It might be Jay, with good news.
“Alex,” Deborah’s McCarthy’s voice said. “You better get right down here.”
“What?” Alex said. “Did the stuff, the marrow, did it show?”
“No. Not yet. But somebody tried to steal another sample.”
“No,” Alex said. He felt as if somebody had rammed something, a rod like the one for the cam, up his gullet from the inside. He felt constricted and raw from his gut up into his mouth. He felt the presence of somebody who purely and simply wanted cancer patients to die.
But Deborah had said tried to. If there was a guard at the transplant unit, there must have been a guard at the blood bank too. With a big effort he swallowed and talked. “They got caught?”
“No. I don’t know what happened, exactly. Jay’s down there now, with the police and all. In the sperm bank.”
“The sperm bank?”
“That’s where they tried to get specimens out of this time. Um, frozen semen. Jay just called up from there. He wants you to meet him, right away.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. The choking, strangled, feeling subsided. The sensation of being in the presence of pure malevolence faded away. Sperm banks were a good idea. Before he’d had chemotherapy, given his new relationship with a younger woman, he’d decided the prudent thing to do was to make use of one himself. Still, they weren’t like blood banks. You could live without getting your frozen semen back. You could even be a father. Not biologically, if your treatment happened to leave you permanently sterile, but when it came to fathering, biologically was hardly the most important part. Stealing semen was like stealing diamonds. Antisocial, no doubt, but no big deal. In this case, it might even provide an important lead.
“I’ll be right down. Somebody won’t be able to lock their car door, that’s all.”
“Okay,” she answered. “It’s in the basement, the other side from the blood bank. That’s where he wants you to come.”
No pun intended, Alex presumed.
Only as he started his car, his trusty if somewhat battered ’75 Saab 99 EMS, did the implications of an attempted sperm-napping hit him like the truck that went barreling past to make the yellow light on Somerville Ave. If this had been done by the same person who took the marrow, it wasn’t the act of a kidnapper or kidnappers about to deliver the goods and close up their own shop. It wasn’t what you’d do first thing in the morning before catching a plane for Acapulco and chalking up a job well done.
On the other hand, Alex considered as he forced his way out the driveway into the traffic, how could they expect to get a ransom for some guy’s frozen sperm cells if they hadn’t made good on Linda Dumars’s marrow yet? He didn’t like the way none of this added up. Suddenly he felt in the presence not of evil but of madness once again. He didn’t know what else to call it but madness. It was the unbalanced, erratic feeling he’d gotten from the note Jay pulled out of the cooler two mornings ago. Unbalanced and erratic, whether the kidnapper composed the rhymes or copied them or both.
Alex drove up Webster Avenue over the old Boston & Maine tracks, then turned right onto Prospect Street into Cambridge, across Cambridge to the Charles and across the river into Boston. He drove like any Boston driver, treating yellow lights as hurry-up signals and pedestrians as moving obstacles, passing on the right when there wasn’t any room on the left. Inside twenty minutes he was snaking his way up the tight spirals of the Dennison’s lot.
He sprinted to the stairway door, where a uniformed Boston policeman stood. The cop looked him over but didn’t say anything. Somebody was making a show of force. Alex thought about how many specimens of all sorts, more and less essential, were vulnerable to this kind of theft. Once the word spread to potential copycats, every blood bank, sperm bank, lab, and operating room would have to be guarded. Which would never work, because you just couldn’t run a hospital that way. The only alternative was a show of force, so the potential copycats would at least have to feel they might get caught.
There weren’t any armed guards in the doorway under the sign that said SPERM BANK. That would have been enough to scare the already skittish clientele away. A card on the door said HOURS FOR DEPOSITS, 9-12 A.M. MON., TU., TH. Today was Thursday. In the waiting room, a few customers— patients— sat reading magazines, or flipping through them anyway. If they knew what had happened earlier, they didn’t show it. They were waiting for their appointment times and their little jars.
When Alex asked for Dr. Harrison, the woman behind the desk nodded toward a short hallway that ended at a closed door. Through the door was a lab area where six folding chairs had been set up in what space the equipment allowed. The equipment included microscopes and two freezer storage tanks, insulated barrels like the one in the blood bank, the one the marrow had been stolen from. On the chairs sat five people— Jay Harrison, a uniformed security guard, a woman in a white lab coat, another woman in a skirt and sweater, and a man in a dark suit. The woman in the skirt and sweater, short and plump, was talking. Her face was flushed, her tone nervous and excited. She and the security guard were young, in their twenties. Everybody else seemed to be Alex’s age. Nobody introduced Alex. He sat in the empty chair.
“So Mary came out and said she didn’t remember that one, the one the nurse wanted to know about. She said the nurse told her it was for a follow-up test, not a deposit, we thought maybe that was why we didn’t remember. We get familiar with the regular depositors, but the follow-ups, you know… So the two of us together were looking at the appointment book. Next to the appointment book just happened to be this memo about tightening lab security, not leaving samples unattended, that came around I guess to lots of labs.”
She hadn’t been making eye contact as she told her story, just letting her gaze flicker around the circle, but now she focused on each in turn to see whether anybody was going to offer any clues. Nobody did, so she went on, choosing to talk to the security guard this time. He was a short, wide, brown-skinned man in a tan uniform. “So I saw this memo, an
d I guess that’s why I left Mary to dig through Tuesday’s slips while I went in back just to check. I went in and like I told you— like I already told him, Ramon— she had the top of one of the long-term tanks up. Whichever doctor she worked for, I didn’t see what business she had in there. I said, like, ‘Excuse me.’ She whipped around and then scooted for the door.” The woman pointed to a door which had to lead from the lab directly to the main corridor outside. “I got a hand on her sleeve, but she jerked it away. I gave Ramon the button that came off.”
Ramon produced the button, passing it to Jay Harrison, who passed it to the man in the suit. A shade of doubt crept across this man’s high forehead and puckered his plump upper lip. He had a small, turned-up nose and sandy hair, regulation businessman’s cut. The cut didn’t quite disguise that he was starting to grow bald on top. He didn’t seem like a plainclothesman, Alex thought, but he might be from some high-priced private investigative firm. He put the button in his pocket without showing much interest. “That was later,” he said. “Let’s try to stay in sequence. What happened after she jerked her arm away?”
“She scooted out the door. I couldn’t chase her because I was worried about the tank. I yelled for Mary and tried to figure out how to shut it right. It was all steaming— evaporating I mean. Mary came and helped with that. By then it was too late to run after her. Anyway, we had some very nervous guys out front wanting to know what all the yelling was about. Mary called security and that’s when Ramon here came. We went and walked around, him and me, up and down the hall, but I couldn’t see anybody that looked the same as her. We found the cooler packed with dry ice, right outside in a shopping bag, like I explained before. There wasn’t any specimen in it.” She shrugged. “I think I would’ve recognized her, but I can’t swear to it. When she first came in, she was just somebody in whites with a name tag. I told you, it’s the busiest time. I’m just glad I thought to go back and check.”
“You deserve to be glad,” the man in the suit told her. “You hit the ground running, I’d say. Try to picture what she did when she first came in.”
“Uh-huh. She said, ‘Hi, I’m Marcia’— I think it was Marcia. ‘From Dr. Weinstein’s office.’ Or Bernstein maybe. Some kind of ‘stein,’ anyway. And the patient was named Johnson, wasn’t he, Mary? Only she didn’t say the patient’s name to me, just she wanted some lab values, they weren’t in the data base. So I sent her back. Was it Johnson?”
“Ernest Johnson,” the woman in the lab coat said. She was thin and curly-redheaded, rather flat-chested, with long legs in white pants, red sneakers on her feet. “She said he hadn’t been here to make a deposit, just to get tested, the way Donna said before. Patients that have finished their treatment, we do counts on them. That’s another function of the lab.”
“Counts,” the man in the suit said. “You mean their sperm counts?”
“Spermatazoa quantity, yes,” Mary replied. “Semen volume, sperm quantity, morphology, and motility.” Why did she feel compelled to one-up the questioner on the jargon, Alex wanted to know.
Jay said, “You could elaborate a little more on that for Special Agent Fridley, Mary.”
Aha, Alex thought. Thank you, Dr. Harrison. Only one firm or department of government boasted special agents, and Jay wanted him to know who this man in the suit was. Alex felt all his organs stiffen just a little bit inside him. What some ancestors must have felt when they heard a wolf howl in the forest, not fear so much as an immediate sense of being on guard— that was how Alex felt about the FBI.
Mary said, “Oh. Yes. I meant whether they have deformed heads or deformed tails. How fast they swim, and how straight.”
“It’s like watching the swimmers in a crowded pool through a high-powered telescope,” Jay added helpfully. Special Agent Fridley gave him a baleful look.
“Could you elaborate on what made her request believable?” Fridley said.
“We remember most of the names of the regular depositors.” Mary smoothed out her white coat, as if trying to smooth out or brush off any blame. “Usually they’ve been in for a pre-analysis, and then they come four to six times to make deposits, depending on counts and volumes and how careful they want to be about improving the chances for an eventual insemination to succeed. We recommend twelve to fifteen vials per patient— twelve to fifteen for each child they’d like to be able to conceive. Each deposit tends to yield two to five vials, and they don’t always succeed in making a deposit each visit, if you really want to know.”
She smoothed her sleeve. “The point I’m making is that regular depositors might come in for up to six or more visits. So this Marcia, or whoever she is, was smart to say her patient was a follow-up. That could be somebody that was never here before, but wants to find out whether his treatment left him sterile. Or it could be somebody who has specimens on deposit and needs to know whether he has to bother to keep paying the rent. Treatment can last for months, and then the patient probably wants to wait for a while more and let his counts come back up, if that’s what they’re going to do.”
Alex knew all this, though there was no reason to think that Special Agent Fridley did. Alex had stopped paying the rent and told them to throw away his deposits, because a test had showed that his counts were fine. The sperm-banking had been a kind of insurance, just as Meredith’s resumes circulating around two countries were now. Alex directed his attention back to Mary, the technician.
“So it could be a name we used to know,” she concluded, “but by now we’ve forgotten.” She stopped and set her mouth in a line as if challenging anyone to think of any technical information she’d left out.
She was mad somebody had messed with her domain, Alex thought. Fridley was somebody to take that out on now. But maybe not. Maybe she too once got asked a lot of unconstitutional questions about a roommate who visited Cuba to see what was there for themselves, or who sat in at a Congressman’s office. Or maybe she didn’t think the best way to fight drug abuse was to hire a mayor’s ex-girlfriend to talk him into scoring some crack. These days the FBI was refurbishing its image as the pursuer of “America’s Most Wanted,” but a lot of people remembered that it also functioned as the government’s political police.
“Do you have anything to add to Ms. Forziati’s description of this Marcia’s appearance?” Fridley said in a carefully neutral tone. He was looking at Donna, the receptionist, the one who’d been talking when Alex came in. “Height, weight, age, hair color, jewelry, clothing?”
“Mm, about as tall as me— that’s five-seven— blond hair in curls, like a perm. She was kind of young, I think. I don’t remember rings or earrings, but she might have had some jewelry, probably did. I didn’t really have a chance to look at her, I told you, I was on the computer, and the appointment list. She had a white coat, sort of like Mary’s. Some of the nurses wear coats and some don’t. It was a long coat. I thought she might be a supervisor or specialty or something. That’s another reason I might not’ve given her a harder time.”
“By long, would you mean overcoat length?”
“No, just you know, like that.” She pointed at Mary’s lab coat, which came partway down her thighs. “On a tech that doesn’t mean anything, but on a nurse or a doctor, you know they’re somebody higher up.”
“We don’t always conform to this,” Jay put in. He was wearing a sports jacket today, no white coat at all. “But the general rule is the longer the coat, the higher the rank. Attendings and fellows long, interns and residents short, among the medical staff. It may be some throwback to the Middle Ages, scholars’ gowns, I don’t know.”
“And you’re in charge of the bone marrow transplant unit?” Fridley said, troubled, looking at his notes or making a show of looking at them, Alex couldn’t tell which.
“No, Dan Weinstein is medical director. I’m attending physician for April and May. He does the politics and paperwork, I troubleshoot; that’s the distinction between directing and attending. That’s why you’re dealing with me. If yo
u needed to talk to my superior, or I needed my superior to back me up, then that would be Dan. Then there’s the chief of medicine and various other high gods over him.”
Fridley lifted his chin as if sensing some condescension from the doctor. Then he turned to Alex. “You’re Glauberman?” he asked.
“Alex Glauberman, Jim Fridley,” Jay said, performing introductions. “As I explained, Alex is a patient of a colleague, besides being the one who delivered the money. Alex, Jim wanted you down here so he could interview you about the delivery. Jim is a specialist in kidnappings from the regional office of the FBI.” Alex watched a vein pulse in Fridley’s neck, just above his collar. He noted this was the first time anybody had said anything about kidnapping or ransom. Fridley turned to Ramon and asked where he’d been stationed or on patrol, how long it had taken him to get down to the sperm bank. Then he said, “You’re all confident nothing was stolen?”
“I pulled up the rack and counted the specimens,” Mary announced. “The number was right. It’ll take me a while to double-check all the labels against our records so I can be sure.”
“To hold a patient’s sperm for ransom,” Fridley asked Jay, “wouldn’t the criminal have to get away with all of that particular individual’s specimens? Otherwise the patient could hope that even a single vial remaining would be enough to get the desired result. If one individual is fertile and the other is potent, well, that’s a lesson many young ladies have learned to their dismay.”
“It would depend how nervous the patient was, how much he wanted to conceive a child,” Jay said. “But yeah, I think you’ve got a point. How hard would it be to scoop them all?”