by Dick Cluster
“Yeah,” Alex said. But he didn’t see how it could have. “Well, I didn’t tell you then, but I told you now.” His words sounded stupid. They reminded him of the words of a certain Oakland cop to Huey Newton, in a story he’d read about the early days of the Black Panther Party’s street-corner monitoring of the police. “Are you a Communist?” the cop had demanded of the Panther, and Huey had retorted, “Are you a Fascist?” The cop had taken refuge in, “I asked you first,” and Huey had parodied, “Well I asked you second,” and given the cop a look that asked what kind of moron playground shit was this. For that reason if no other, Huey Newton had been slated for everything that happened to him next.
“You told me now,” Fridley repeated sarcastically. “And one more time now, do you think it’s the same woman that you say you handed over the mailbag full of money to?”
“I did hand it over, though I don’t know whether it was full of money because I never thought to look. I don’t know, honestly, whether she’s the same person or not. I think she might be. That’s the best I can do.”
“Then I’m through with you for now,” Fridley said. “Frank, get him the hell off the beach.”
Fridley pulled the ranger aside for a few words, and then the ranger drove Alex back down the beach. The south wind blew the fine sand against the windshield. If Corcoran wanted to know any more about ransoms or murders or stolen bone marrow, he didn’t ask his passenger. When they got to the lot, there was no more chopper. Instead a tow truck operator was hoisting up the front end of a pink Chevy Nova. Corcoran said it was the car they thought the dead girl had come down in. She must have parked it there and then walked along the beach. She’d left her purse locked in the car.
Yes, Alex thought, and depending on when she got off work she could have made it here by, say, three thirty this morning. Had she come alone and been followed or surprised? Or had she come with somebody who killed her and disappeared up the steps? The jogger must have found her body shortly after dawn. “This is as far as I can take you,” the ranger said. “You’re going to have to get back off Cape on your own.” He shrugged, but just with his shoulders. His mustache didn’t twist into either a smile or a grimace. “He says he wants you out of his way.”
“So you’ve got orders to maroon me?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it that. It’s about a mile down the road to Route 6 there. You can thumb your way home, or else flag down the bus from P-town when it goes by a little before noon. Look, it’s a nice day. It’s spring. It’ll be a nice walk.” He turned to survey the back of the Jeep, littered with coffee cups and newspapers and boxes that had held several dozen doughnuts once. He said, “There’s no food left, but if you want you can grab yourself something to read.”
Alex took him up on the offer. He found the morning’s Herald and the Globe sports section, reporting on the Red Sox victory whose last three innings he already knew all about. He also found a Dennison Center house organ, the Weekly Wrap-Up. The Wrap-Up’s logo included a man with a stethoscope and a woman bent over a microscope. Both figures were contained within the outline of a gift-wrapped package shaped like the Dennison’s glass tower. Presumably all this was stuff Fridley and his minions had left behind.
30. Stuck Out His Thumb
The government vehicle dipped onto the beach, out of sight. The tow truck pulled Sandra Stewart’s car the other way down the narrow blacktop road. Soon it disappeared among the trees. That left Alex alone in the lot, alone except for a fisherman messing with his gear. The fisherman, who was somewhere between forty and fifty with white-speckled kinky hair, straightened and then turned around. He eyed Alex with the kind of curiosity that people who belong someplace reserve for people who don’t. This struck Alex as slightly strange, since the fisherman was a burly dark-brown man. African-Americans were about as common out here as they were in Fenway Park.
“Catch anything?” Alex asked. He hoped that any conversation, however trifling, might lead to a ride. The man only scowled into his bucket through the wire-rimmed glasses he wore.
“I was going to offer you these papers to wrap them in,” Alex went on. His mouth had gotten ahead of his brain, which was noticing that the car was a beat-up white Peugeot, a 505 from the early ’80s, the model with which the French carmaker had gone beyond mechanical ignition and carburetors, and Alex had stopped working on the relatively rare breed. In Alex’s experience, the only Americans who hung on to Peugeots did so out of some nostalgic or romantic notion about France. Once they would have smoked Gauloises. Even back when everybody smoked cigarettes, the people who smoked Gauloises had been surrounded by an aura of unhealthy decadence, of being just that much closer to the edge. Alex didn’t know what symbols people now in their twenties used for this purpose, but he suspected Sandra Stewart had done it somehow.
And Foster, had he once smoked the pungent, musky French cigarettes in the deep blue pack? Could this possibly be him now, disassembling that fishing rod and getting ready to stow it in his Peugeot 505?
The fisherman shook his head disgustedly, as if at Alex’s silent question. Dropping everything but the Weekly Wrap-Up in the trash can, Alex kept going. He could always stick out his thumb once the man got his gear packed and was ready to deal with the rest of the world again. Alex walked away from the ocean and from the blood soaked into the sand.
Could Jay have killed her? Could Jay have sliced neatly with a scalpel and left the woman there to drain and grow cold? He’d had time. So had Tom Dumars, if he could have steered straight and stayed awake. Or wasn’t it that simple? Was there some more indirect connection, some more complex system of levers and hydraulics that accounted for the fact that this dead woman had been in the same room as those two doctors late last night? The undulating road offered just what the ranger, Frank Corcoran, had promised: slow passage through a rare, fragrant, gentle spring day. Alex’s feet landed on top of the dancing shadows of new green leaves. But he kept seeing Jay and Tom in the bar, Jay and Barbara on the couch, Jay and Dee and Foster in the van rolling west. And Linda Dumars, just a shape on a hospital bed.
That hole in the beach, which could have cost one woman her life, might hold some hope for the other woman still. If anything had been buried there, what else but Linda’s bone marrow could it be? Yet the fact that somebody had died at that spot made it seem ever less likely that the marrow could be in careful and businesslike hands. A week ago Linda Dumars had taken her chance, had done the brave and medically indicated thing. Now the part of herself she needed most was quite probably dried up and gone. Alex Glauberman, would-be savior, could only put one foot in front of the other down a seaside lane.
The fact was, Jay Harrison’s parting shot last night had been well-aimed and true. Alex had assumed he must possess a special aptitude, a special calling for this mission. Maybe he didn’t. More to avoid these thoughts than in hopes of learning anything, he opened the Weekly Wrap-Up to read as he walked. His own shadow darkened the glossy, half-tabloid-size pages. He scanned headlines about fund-raising drives and testimonial dinners, then turned the page.
The next two pages were about research projects. Upbeat headlines accompanied head-and-shoulder file shots of the investigators. The pictures were crisp and clear, the boldface words proudly announcing advances in the use of monoclonal antibodies and interferon, strides in the attempt to isolate elusive oncogenes. In other circumstances Alex might have read these pieces, but not now. Turning to the center spread, he found a special feature entitled “Marrow Transplant Unit Success Rate High.” That explained why Fridley brought this fluff along.
Alex stopped for a minute to scan the article. He stood on the side of the road by a vine-covered trellis that formed the gateway to the yard of a shingled cottage. Nothing was blooming yet, but the vines, actually branches, were thorny. Alex supposed there might be roses here in a month.
Jay’s boss Daniel Weinstein led off the article, citing statistics about remissions, length of stay, and rates of complications of var
ious sorts. He also talked about the increasing willingness of insurers to pay for marrow transplants, though Alex was sure Jay or Carol Wagner had told him insurers were getting balkier about uses for which there wasn’t documented high rate of success. Alex’s eyes skipped to the half-page photograph, a group shot of the unit personnel. His eyes held fast to a man on the left side of the front row, a man with a big smile for the photographer, a toothy smile on a boyishly appealing face. Alex knew this face. In his mind it was linked with the face of the bartender, the woman dead on the beach. Why?
He thought back to the day he’d delivered the money. He tried to picture the men he’d seen go by in the Cherokee and the fisherman who’d come over the dune. That wasn’t it, none of those had been this man. He checked the caption, which identified everybody, first row, second row, left to right. The caption said this was Gordon Kramer, the senior resident. That meant the one who’d gone to med school with Dr. Steinkuhler, the one she said was Jay’s research assistant and protégé, though Deborah McCarthy had suggested maybe not. The man Steinkuhler said would be Jay’s next fellow, but Deborah said was off interviewing for a job someplace else. Alex shut his eyes, remembering that he’d talked to Kramer on Monday. He recalled that the resident had been clad in scrubs and a gown and cap. His face had been pale. The pallor plus the getup had made Alex think of a nun.
Alex opened his eyes and looked back at the photograph. Yes, this was the same guy, though he looked different in civilian dress. That didn’t account for the feeling that he was somehow connected to the woman on the beach.
Then he had it. This was the man who last night had been wearing a bandage over his eye. The one who had been sitting at the bar, Sandra Stewart’s bar, and had turned around to see what the commotion was all about. Alex took two quick steps through the vine-covered trellis and down a flagstone path. But he saw the cottage was just a summer place; no phone service would be connected now, and anyway the door would be locked and the shutters nailed up tight. His best bet was to run back to the lot and press the fisherman into service, however reclusive the fisherman might be. He started running, fast, with his head down. A motor sound stopped him, a sound to which he was attuned. He knew even before he looked up that the dirty white Peugeot would be rolling providentially along the road. Alex stuck out his right thumb and waved his left hand rapidly to try and indicate distress. He was about to jump out and block the road when the driver pulled over and pushed open the passenger door.
“You need a lift?” the fisherman asked. “I thought you might need a lift, but you didn’t say so. You need a lift, you got to speak up.”
“What I need, please, is a ride to a phone at least. And toward Boston, too, if you’re going that way.” Alex tried to ignore the man’s gruff, slightly bullying tone. He found it harder to ignore the deep and raspy voice. He had to say, “My name’s Alex Glauberman. And you?”
“Glauberman. I thought so. Somebody named Meredith, with a British accent, told me I should try to grab you down here. Only I didn’t want to grab you in public. I told her my name’s Paul Foster. She said if I hauled ass I could catch you down here with the Feebies and police.”
“You told her your name’s Paul Foster?”
“I did. It once was. I used to operate under that name, though not since a long while ago.”
31. The Chicken or the Egg
Mary Forziati bent over her binocular microscope, watching the sperm cells swim like tadpoles. Really they were much less complex than tadpoles. It was just a figure of speech to refer to the bobbing, rounded part as a head and the long blindly whipping part as a tail. These weren’t organisms, just specialized human cells. Yet they did look like animals, animals that lived all crowded together like the alligators she’d once seen crawling all over each other in the pen of a Florida alligator farm. Cells or tadpoles or alligators, it was hard to believe that every guy on the street had millions of these critters bumping into each other between his legs.
A lot of this batch were swimming helplessly in circles. They were never going to fertilize anything that way. Some of them looked kinked and crooked, and some had deformed heads too. She noted the quantities of each type and compared them with the notes describing a sample taken from this same specimen before freezing. All in all, most studies showed that previously frozen sperm were about fifty percent as effective as the ones contained in fresh semen were. Still, even fifty percent was fifty percent of millions and millions per vial. It was a number like the federal budget, hard to comprehend.
Mary found it a lot easier to comprehend releasing one egg a month, like some kind of very fussy chicken, though she knew this comparison to be unscientific too. Did chickens have periods if their ova went unfertilized? She knew a lot of human physiology, from study and from picking it up around the hospital. She didn’t know much about other species, though.
When she thought about it, she figured out an answer that made sense to her. Chickens had no wombs, that was why they had to lay their eggs as eggs and then sit on them all that time. Without a womb you didn’t have any menstrual blood. Satisfied with solving that puzzle, she went back to the one that had been bothering her for twenty-four hours now.
If you wanted to make off with some frozen semen, why come when the bank was open for deposits, the way the pretend nurse, the would-be thief had? Why come when Donna was here and all those nervous, jumpy guys were waiting their turns out front? Why not come on one of the quiet days when the bank was closed, and Donna was up in Dr. Taylor’s office, and she was alone here in the lab? Half the time she didn’t even lock the door when she went out for coffee or to the bathroom, because that was always when Taylor decided he needed something, and as chief urologist and sperm bank director, he felt it beneath his dignity to carry around keys. As if only janitors did that, or maybe he was just forgetful, but anyway he didn’t like being confronted by a locked door. Now everything would be different. But until now, nobody used to lock up anything except meds.
So that nurse, or whoever she was, hadn’t planned very well. She hadn’t planned very well, or she’d been in a hurry, so she couldn’t wait until this morning, say. Why would somebody need to steal sperm in a hurry, that’s what Mary was trying to figure out. By now she knew what was missing from the blood bank, of course. Her own blood froze, thinking about the woman whose chances of recovery had plummeted as a result. She’d gotten the secret out of Edie. Edie had felt responsible, so of course she’d been eager to talk.
Why in a hurry? She’d been over lots of reasons, but now she thought of a new one. Maybe the thief hadn’t been for real. Maybe this had been a diversion. Maybe she’d wanted to fail, wanted to attract attention, to divert attention from something else. But from what?
Mary let that idea rest while she finished up her notes on this sample. Then she chucked the rest of the vial. This semen had been donated for research purposes. No swimming up anybody’s vaginal canal for those guys. Whoever they had belonged to could manufacture umpteen million others to do the job. There was a wastefulness about the whole thing that was very much like a man. It was like the way the FBI agent had to unload all that stuff about the history of kidnapping— to prove he was an expert, to prove it did make sense to hold semen for ransom, the same as holding the vice president of a bank.
Maybe she was judging him harshly, but then she’d never had too much respect for the FBI. They were what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he decided the people needed to be protected from their government by a bill of rights.
The next sample had fared a lot better. More of the little critters swam straight, and fewer had cockeyed “heads” or “tails.” She noted the numbers, along with the necessary data about freezing technique, duration of storage, and donor age. When the computer eventually crunched all this data, the findings were supposed to allow better prediction or improvement of fertilization rates. In the back of her mind she was still thinking about the FBI agent, about dragnets and dissidents. What if the maybe-nurse had
been running away from somebody? Making a fuss to attract attention and thus protection, like Cary Grant at that auction in North by Northwest? No, these wild theories were only getting her further and further from the mark.
Hiding, though, there might be something to that. Not trying to hide herself, but trying to hide. Like… no movie came to mind. Suppose that woman had come in here not to take something out of the tank but to put something in? This didn’t explain anything, Mary thought with some disappointment. It didn’t explain the timing, certainly, which was where she’d started. Yet it was an intriguing idea, that somebody would try to hide something here in her long-term storage tank. Unlikely, but simple to test. You didn’t have to feed a year’s worth of data into any computer. You just had to look in the tank.
But she’d looked in the tank. Yesterday she’d checked the whole rack, thoroughly, painstakingly. So the only place anything could be hidden was underneath, in the very bottom, under the rack. That was possible. You couldn’t see down there, not with the rack in the way, not with all the vapor rising up. To check this she’d need a long pair of tongs, longer than the regular ones for getting vials out. Someplace there was a pair of extra-long tongs. Oh, under the sterilizer. She was just picking them up, ready to test her unlikely hypothesis, when somebody knocked at the hallway door.
That was how she happened to have the tongs in hand when she opened the door to find a white-jacketed man in the act of pulling a stocking cap down over his head. He barged in, shoving her backward with a hand against the base of her throat. By reflex she jabbed at his face with the tongs. It was a ski mask, the kind with eye holes but nothing else. She saw a rip appear beneath the right eye, and inside the rip a patch of white skin and a red scratch. She knew she ought to jab the pincers into the man’s eye, but she couldn’t. What was happening? While she hesitated, he got a hand on the tongs and forced her arm down. He kicked the door shut behind him. For a moment they stood frozen that way. Blood welled out of the scratch under his eye and soaked into the knitted stretch fabric around the rip. He twisted the tongs out of her grip and flung them behind her. There was the sound of shattering glass.