by John Case
VF: Who’s ‘Gunther’?
CB: Gunther is a VW van. An old VW van with bald tires, bad brakes, and a temperature problem. He’s always overheating, and I practically had to push him over the Rockies. Not a safe car. And to save money, I slept in it – sometimes by the side of the road, sometimes in parking lots. I still can’t believe I did it.
VF: So – did something terrible happen to you?
CB: No, but that’s not the point. Most people were unbelievably nice, but things happened that could have been . . . I don’t know . . . dangerous.
VF: Like what?
CB: Like the guy who tried to drag me into his car. Or the guy who climbed on top of the van and wouldn’t get down – totally stoned.
VF: But still, you made it, right? Isn’t that what counts?
CB: No. I was lucky. Someone else might not be.
VF: Good point. But I have to ask: Who is your favorite Laker?
The interview went on for another page or two. When Lassiter was finished with the piece, he put the story aside and reached for another article. But then he changed his mind. The story about the VW van . . . there was something about it that connected to something else. But what?
And then he remembered. There was an article in L.A. Style about the time she disappeared. The headline was ‘Th-Th-Th-That’s All Folks! Callista Bows Out!’
Did he have it with him? He’d left most of the ‘Callista’ material in D.C., bringing only what he hadn’t read and a few key articles that he’d culled along the way. The L.A. Style piece ought to have been there, and so it was. He pulled it out of the stack from his briefcase and flipped through its pages, looking for the detail he wanted.
The article was an interview at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Callista had stayed after selling her house. It was a stylized piece that was as much about the writer as it was about the actress. Irrelevant but precisely observed details crowded every paragraph. Callista’s eyes were ‘a bruised indigo.’ She answered questions ‘with the syncopated cynicism of a lover who’s been badly burned.’ What does that mean? Lassiter wondered.
The prose was arranged around a photograph of the star. She sat, in shorts and a blouse, with her bare legs crossed (‘the only sign of tension an occasional impatient twitch of one toe’).
She was casting off the imprint of the city. That much was clear. The house was gone, the furniture sold, the Bentley sent back to the studio whence it came. In the hallway to her suite, a single suitcase waited by the door.
I asked her what she was planning to do. She sat awhile in the tent of silence that she’s inhabited since the trial, then shook her great mane of hair and said, ‘I’ll think of something.’ As she spoke she swirled her straw and watched the condensation slide down the outside of her glass toward the table.
‘Isn’t there anything you’ve kept?’
She shook her head.
‘No clothes? No pictures? What about the Mercedes?’
‘I sold it,’ she replied. Behind her a lizard streaked up the sunstruck bungalow wall, so fast it seemed an hallucination. Callista grinned. She put on her sunglasses and stood up. It was clear that the interview was over. ‘I thought I might as well ride out on the horse I rode in on,’ she said. And then she turned, and she was gone.
Lassiter put the article down and frowned. He was disappointed. He’d thought there was more to it. But still: the horse she rode in on. Well . . . that was Gunther. If you took her literally, the horse she rode in on was a VW van. That’s what brought her to California: Gunther.
He got on the phone and called Gary Stoykavich in Minneapolis. ‘You got anything for me?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Well, let me ask you something: Can you find out what kind of car Williams drove when she was living there?’
‘I already know that,’ the detective said. ‘And there were two cars – not one. She had a Honda Accord that she bought local, and a VW.’
‘A bug?’
‘No. A van.’
‘Really!’ Lassiter said.
‘Yup. And the funny thing is – when she left, that’s what she took. I mean, she abandoned the Honda. Left it in her parking slot and took the damn van. Of course, maybe she had a lot of stuff. So maybe the van was more useful. That’s what Finley thinks, anyway.’
Lassiter’s heart sank. ‘So Finley knows she had a van.’
It was a statement, not a question, and Lassiter felt empty, as his short-lived excitement crashed and his new ‘lead’ began to fade into just another dead end. If Finley knew she’d left in a van, he’d have tracked it to the ends of the earth.
‘Oh, hell, yes,’ Stoykavich said. ‘Finley ran Marie Williams and her Social through every DMV in the United States – including Alaska.’
‘And he came up empty?’
‘I think he found a whole lot of Marie Williamses, but none of ’em owned a VW van. Or, if they did, he checked ’em out and they weren’t her. They were some other Marie A. Williams.’
Fuck, Lassiter thought.
‘Did I just rain on someone’s parade?’
‘No,’ Lassiter lied and, thanking him, hung up.
In fact, the parade ground was a bit wet. The simple truth was that Grimaldi and his friends had a three-or four-month lead in trying to locate Callista. And while they had no doubt concentrated their efforts on eliminating those who were easiest to find, three or four months was a long time. On the other hand, Lassiter thought, I’m probably better at this than they are. And if I’m having this hard a time, Grimaldi isn’t likely to be doing much better.
Unless Drabowsky and the FBI are helping him. In which case . . .
He walked over to the window and looked out at the gray urban landscape. Sleet ticked steadily against the pane, until the wind gusted and a cloud of ice crystals rattled the glass.
He rubbed his eyes and sat down. He tried to imagine ‘Marie Williams’ – or whatever she was calling herself – driving the van into the woods somewhere. Letting it disintegrate. Or maybe she’d abandoned it on a city street, walking away from the car as she’d walked away from so much else.
But no. If she’d wanted to walk away from it, she would have walked away from it. But she didn’t. She rode out on it – and she was still riding. Which meant, what?
If she still had the van, its registration was probably in her new name. Whatever that was. Wherever she might be.
He took a deep breath and exhaled. He realized that he was operating almost entirely on instinct. Simply because the woman had been born in Maine, and a photograph had been taken of her in Maine – or, at least, of someone who looked like her in what Dicky Biddle claimed was Maine – did not mean that she lived there.
On the other hand . . . why not? She had to be somewhere, and even if the evidence was thin, it was at least more likely that she’d be found in Maine than . . . Finland.
Lassiter reached for the phone. There were only a million people in Maine, so how many VW vans could there be – and how many of those would be owned by women? He got the number for the Department of Motor Vehicles in Augusta and dialed it. But, of course, it was closed. He’d have to call back on Monday morning.
With a sigh, he picked up the next article from the ‘Callista’ file. It was a story about ‘palmistry’ from a women’s magazine in which the handprints of four celebrities were reproduced and analyzed by a team of chiromantists. According to the team, Callista suffered from ‘an excess of melancholy.’
The next day he caught the T to Cambridge and got out at the stop across from MIT. Immediately, he wished he’d taken a cab. The sidewalks and gutters were a mess. Tons of salt had melted the snow, but there was nowhere for the water to go. It sat in lagoons beside the curbs, forcing pedestrians into long detours and occasional, athletic leaps.
Torgoff’s office was in the Biology Department of the Whitaker College of Health, Science, and Technology. Torgoff was waiting for him – a compact young man with black hair and a cheerful smile.
He was casually dressed in blue jeans, hiking boots, and a red T-shirt that sported identical images of Roy Orbison under a banner that read, ONLY THE CLONELY.
‘Sorry I’m dressed like this,’ Torgoff said as he got to his feet to shake hands. ‘But then, I always am.’
The office was small and piled high with stacks of books and papers. The walls were covered with charts and lists, a Tibetan calendar, Post-its, and cartoons about mad scientists. A dusty and battered model of the double helix, constructed of green garden twine and pieces of white poster board, hung from the ceiling like homemade flypaper. An easel stood next to the desk, and on the desk itself, amid piles of papers, was a Rubik’s cube – an object Lassiter hadn’t seen for years. Torgoff gestured to a chair as he fell back into his own, an ergonomic masterpiece in green corduroy.
‘How much do you know about genetics?’ Torgoff asked.
Lassiter looked at him. Shrugged.
‘It’s not a trick question,’ Torgoff said. ‘If I start talking about lac operons and RNA polymerase transcription – I might lose you. Which wouldn’t be good. So why don’t you just, you know . . .’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Whatcha got?’
Lassiter thought for a moment. ‘Mendel. There was a guy named Mendel. There’s heredity –’
‘Good! Heredity’s big!’
‘Dominant and recessive genes.’
‘Can you explain them?’
‘No, but – I used to be able to. And then –’ He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and, seeing the homemade DNA molecule, said, ‘The double helix.’
‘You know what it is?’
‘It’s DNA,’ Lassiter said. ‘Though, actually, I guess I know more about DNA tests than I do about DNA. I couldn’t tell you what DNA is. Per se.’
‘Give it a shot.’
‘Well . . . each of our cells contains something called DNA. And the DNA from one person to another is unique. Somehow. Like fingerprints.’
‘Thank you, O.J.! What else you got?’
‘That’s about it. I wouldn’t know a chromosome from a Pontiac.’
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh!’ Torgoff was nodding his head like a golf pro who’s asked to see a few swings and, having seen them, suddenly realizes that the lesson is going to have to start with the words, This is a golf club . . .
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ve established that what you know about genetics is precisely bupkis. Which is fine. No problem.’ Torgoff made a clacking sound in the back of his mouth and pressed his hands together. ‘The next question: your assistant said you’re interested in Baresi.’
‘Right.’
‘So which is it? Are you interested in genetics, or are you interested in Baresi?’
‘Mostly . . . I guess I’m interested in the research that he did.’
‘Okay! So we can forget Mendel. Except . . . maybe not. Because Mendel and Baresi were a lot alike. Both of them were asking basic questions. And both of them were way ahead of their time.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, when Mendel was in the garden, making notes about peas, everyone else was hung up on Darwin. Who, as you may have heard, made the case that organisms evolve in response to environmental pressures – though he couldn’t tell you how they do it.’
‘But Mendel could.’
Torgoff shrugged. ‘Not really. But he figured out a couple of things. Like the fact that hereditary characteristics are passed from one generation to the next, independently of one another. In other words, some people with blue eyes are color-blind – and some aren’t. It’s called the ‘Principle of Independent Assortment.’ And he understood dominance, too. He saw that when you breed tall plants with short plants, you get tall plants – not medium plants. It’s only when the hybrids are rebred with one another that the recessive genes kick in – and then you get short plants and tall plants. You with me?’
‘Check.’
‘Well, this is a big deal. What Mendel did was to set out some of the rules of inheritance. In effect, he solved one of the oldest mysteries in the universe – not that anyone noticed. They were all looking at Darwin, and they continued to look at Darwin for another thirty years! Until some other scientists undertook the same experiments and, searching the literature, discovered that what they’d actually done was reinvent the wheel. Mendel was there before them.
‘Which is pretty much what happened to Baresi,’ Torgoff continued. ‘When Baresi was doing his best work, everyone was looking at Watson and Crick.’ The MIT professor picked up the Rubik’s cube and began to twist it as he talked.
‘He got his doctorate in biochemistry when he was what – twenty-two? Something like that. Anyway, it was 1953. Which, to a geneticist, is like 1776 or something. It’s a big year! There was tremendous excitement at the prospect of some basic problems finally yielding to solution. And DNA – this enormous molecule that’s present in the cell of every living organism – was at the heart of it all.
‘By then, everyone knew that DNA was the key to inheritance. But how did it work? How did it regulate chemical actions within the cells? Because that’s what it does. It synthesizes proteins.’ Torgoff paused. ‘You with me?’
‘In a sense,’ Lassiter said.
‘Never mind. The point is that DNA regulates some extremely complicated processes. And before any of them could be understood, someone had to figure out the molecule’s structure. Which they did. In ’fifty-three a couple of guys named Watson and Crick put together a physical model of DNA. That’s it up there.’ He raised his eyes to the double corkscrew of twine and poster board hanging from the ceiling. ‘A double helix. Twisted ladder. Whatever you want to call it.
‘So we’re talking about a very exciting time to come out of the university with a doctorate in biochemistry. Because once the structure of DNA was understood, however primitively, it became possible to imagine that we might one day understand how DNA makes copies of itself, how genes work, and a lot more.
‘Now, at the time, Baresi was working at the LeBange Institute –’
‘Where’s that?’ Lassiter asked.
‘Bern. Switzerland. It’s a hotbed for this kind of thing. Always has been. Anyway, he started out in a fairly conventional way, working with E. coli –’
‘Bacteria,’ Lassiter interjected.
‘Exactly. It’s a very simple organism that’s easy to culture and reproduces like crazy – so it’s popular in labs. Like everything else that’s alive – except certain viral organisms and these wacky little things called prions – E. coli is made of DNA, same as you and me. So it’s more or less ideal for the purposes of study. Not that Baresi stuck with it. After a year or two he shifted to blood studies –’
‘“Shifted”?’
‘It’s not that different. When we talk about “blood studies,” in this case, we’re talking about red blood cells. And the thing about red blood cells is that they’re like bacteria in two very important ways. One, they don’t have nuclei. And two: they’re easy to get. We’re making them all the time.
‘Now, this was cutting-edge research that Baresi was doing, but it was nothing like the next step that he took. And before I tell you what that was, you need to understand that Baresi wasn’t just a genius – he was an inductive genius – someone capable of forming extraordinary hypotheses. And like most inductive geniuses, he was more or less indifferent to prizes and the opinions of his colleagues. He didn’t rush after “the next big thing.” He just did what he wanted. Which is to say that he took off in directions that were entirely his own.’
‘What does that mean?’ Lassiter asked.
‘In Baresi’s case, it means that he abandoned the blood studies to work on nucleated cells.’
‘Why was that so revolutionary?’
‘Because it was so hard to do, especially at that time. We have some cell lines now that are pretty dependable, but in the fifties? No. Nucleated cells are difficult to culture and they don’t always live so long. This would have been a real problem, because i
f old Baresi had a cell line die out on him prematurely – and this was not at all unlikely – Baresi would have had to toss out months of work. I’m still not sure how he managed it.’ Torgoff paused. ‘But I can tell you why he did it.’
‘Oh?’
‘Sure. He was after the mother lode.’
‘And what’s that?’ Lassiter asked.
‘Cellular differentiation. And you can’t investigate that without working on nucleated cells. Because differentiation isn’t something that happens in single-celled organisms. It happens only in cells with nuclei.’ Torgoff sat back, looking content.
After a moment Lassiter said, ‘This is going to come as a shock, Doc, but I don’t know what “differentiation” means. Not exactly.’ He thought about it for a moment, and added, ‘Not at all, in fact.’
Torgoff smiled happily. ‘Ah, well – differentiation. I’ll explain.’ He took a deep breath. ‘As I’m sure you’ve heard,’ he began, ‘we start out as a fertilized egg – a zygote. Which is a single cell. Now, inside the nucleus of that egg is a tangle of chromosomes, which are strands of DNA to which specific genetic information is attached – in the form of genes. In case you’re wondering, the number of chromosomes found in the cells is the same within each species – dogs have seventy-eight. Fish have ninety-two. You and I each have forty-six – half from Mom, and half from Dad. Half from the egg, and half from the sperm that penetrated it. Got the picture?’
Lassiter nodded, and Torgoff continued. ‘Our genes – and there are hundreds of thousands of them – are scattered around on the two pairs of twenty-three chromosomes. One gene for eye color, another for blood type, and so on. It’s not really that simple, but . . . you get the point. It’s all there, right from the beginning, in that one fertilized cell. And then the cell starts to divide.’ Torgoff put his hands together and pulled them apart. ‘The next thing you know, there are two cells – and then four, and so on. And each of these cells, the early embryonic cells, contains the same genetic material – DNA, chromosomes and genes in the same amount. And it’s this stuff that decides who the little guy’s gonna be. You, me, or Babe Ruth.