“What now?” Kit asked. “Make an announcement?”
“Not yet. I’d like for Al Vogel to examine that fabric first. He should be able to analyze it and characterize the toxic component.” He looked at his watch and frowned. “We’ll never get to the lab before five. Cut us a few more pieces of each sample. I’m gonna see if he’ll stay until we can get there.”
CHAPTER 12
In the four outbound lanes on the Mississippi River Bridge, much of the working population of the city sat baking in the late-afternoon sun. As Kit sped by going the other way, jealous eyes watched her pass. Up ahead, in his white T-Bird, Broussard abruptly changed to the inside lane without signaling.
They reached the Justice Center at five-twenty. The figs in the lobby seemed, if anything, a little yellower than on Kit’s previous visit, but the trash in the planters had been cleaned up and the slashed wallcovering had been replaced.
With their arrival, Vogel flicked the light off his microscope and jumped up to greet them. “You made good time,” he said.
“Not much traffic comin’ in,” Broussard replied.
Vogel’s eyes shifted to Kit. “Hello Kit, did you hear? Doctors say that fellow on Bourbon Street who swallowed the half dollar is going to be just fine.”
“No Al, I didn’t hear that,” Kit said, unable to keep from smiling.
Broussard gave them an uncomprehending look.
Vogel gestured toward the manila envelope in Broussard’s hand. “That what you want me to test?”
“These are the fabrics that weren’t toxic. Dr. Franklyn has the toxic samples.”
Kit gave Vogel the thermos they’d used to safely transport pieces of the Escadrille’s roof liner. “If I were you, I’d label it so it doesn’t get opened without proper precautions,” she said.
Vogel pulled a piece of red tape from a spool on the counter, ran it around the seam where the cup met the body, and scrawled on the tape with a Magic Marker. “That should do it,” he said, holding his handiwork up for Kit’s appraisal.
“There’s pretty good evidence that the toxin’s effect is blood group specific,” Broussard said.
“Type O is susceptible, type A is not,” Kit added.
“Glad to hear that,” Vogel said, “since I’m an A.”
“Me too,” Kit said, as though through their common blood type they shared other things as well. She gestured toward Broussard with her head. “He can’t be in our club. He’s an O.”
“I don’t think you want to trust your life to the kind of data we have so far on that point,” Broussard said to Vogel. “Have you got a way to protect yourself while you work?”
“There’s a fume hood in the other room with arm sleeves in it. I can do everything inside that. You say this toxin came from a car?”
Kit gave Vogel a condensed version of the day’s experiments. When she finished, Vogel sucked his teeth and said, “Boy, you watch your diet, cross only at the corner, wear seat belts, and somebody sells you a dining-room table with radioactive legs, or something like this happens.” He shrugged and turned his palms to the ceiling. “But what can we do…?” He put his hands in his lab coat. “I can’t possibly have anything for you in less than forty-eight hours.”
“That long?” Broussard said.
“Even then, I’ll have to work practically around the clock.”
“Two days it’ll have to be,” Broussard said.
As they walked to the elevator, Broussard pushed a lemon drop into his cheek and offered Kit one, which she declined. On an illuminated wall panel, they followed the elevator’s descent from the floors above. When the doors opened, the rich aroma of pipe tobacco spilled out.
“You and Vogel seem to know each other better than I thought,” Broussard said, pushing the “L” button.
“We had dinner together Saturday night. He’s a nice man. I just wish he could work faster. Two days is a long time.”
“I’ve got another case back at the office you can work on, and I’d also like for you to get together with the photography people at LSU and work with them to edit our film down to a concise story of five minutes or so. That’ll keep you busy until Vogel’s through.”
*
As Broussard pulled from the parking lot, his thoughts were on the strange new syndrome they had discovered. Excess salivation, scleral hemorrhages accompanied by a preoccupation with childhood songs, and a compulsion to kill. It was a bewildering array of symptoms for which he had no explanation. And that made him angry. He could spot cancer of the pancreas, myocardial infarction, peritonitis, tertiary syphilis, and a bookcase full of others in an instant because they all produced symptoms that could be explained by the physical findings at autopsy. So why should the effects of the Escadrille toxin be any different? He was sure they weren’t different, and that in turn meant he had missed something when he had done the postmortems on the toxin victims. He had been fooled! Death from a severed spinal cord. It was such an obvious conclusion in the Huey P. Long case, he had dropped his guard and let something get past him. But what? What the devil could account for those apparently unrelated symptoms?
A growl from behind his belt announced the dinner hour, and he responded by popping another lemon ball. As current president of the Southern Gourmet Society, he had kicked off the year’s annual dinner six weeks ago by raising his glass and saying, “To the enjoyment of good food, an activity better than sex, as it can be practiced three times a day for as long as you live and has virtually no possibility of producing unwanted children.” It was a toast made only partly in jest. But while he rated food above sex, he did not rate it above work, especially when his ability was in question. Dinner tonight would be late. He had an urgent appointment in the tissue-holding room off the morgue.
In the vending area just inside the hospital’s side entrance, his belly sang out again, much louder this time, and he had to slip two quarters into a snack machine and eat a packet of chocolate cookies to keep it quiet.
In all the years Broussard had been medical examiner, he had never thrown away a single slide made from autopsy material. They now nearly filled a room next to his office, where they stood on edge in dark green cabinets, the reference numbers on them allowing him to locate any case he wished in under two minutes. While useful, the slides only represented a minuscule sample of tissue, and he had often found himself wishing he had kept the organs from which they came. As that was physically impossible, he had done the best he could, keeping all viscera from each autopsy for one month before discarding them. Tonight he was glad he did. There was a brain he wanted very much to examine, and because of his reluctance to discard remains, he still had it.
The morgue lay behind a pair of windowless double doors off the vending area at the end of a dingy tunnel illuminated by bare bulbs in wire cages. To those unaccustomed to old hospitals, it would have seemed a cheerless place. But Broussard had breathed its air and trod its worn cement floor so long, it had become a part of him, an integral piece of all he was. And he was satisfied with the way it looked.
Near the corridor’s end, he slid a key into the lock on a pale-green door with THR stenciled across it and went inside. The fixtures overhead flickered and caught, bathing the porcelain pots on the wooden shelves lining both sides of the room with a cold impersonal light. The Hollins fire had made Barry Hollins’s brain difficult to study and Leon Washington’s had been impossible. That left him only the brain of Freddie Watts.
He checked the logbook for the accession number of Watts’s brain, then scanned the shelves for the correct pot. When he found it, he carried it to the stainless steel table at the far end of the room. From a shelf over the table, he pulled out a pair of disposable rubber gloves and slipped them on. Placing the pot lid on the table, he reached into the formalin and withdrew a gauze bundle. A few quick snips with a pair of surgical scissors and he was able to peel the gauze away from the brain inside, which earlier he had sliced crosswise like a loaf of bread to study its internal appearan
ce. Since he now wished once again to examine its surface, he pushed the slices together and reached for the combination desk lamp and magnifying glass clamped to the back of the table. Through the magnifier, he scrutinized every furrow and every sulcus. With a gloved finger, he slowly traced each of the major blood vessels to their smallest ramifications… and found everything normal.
He then took up each slice and examined the patterns of gray and white that rippled and changed from region to region and section to section. His medical-student days were long behind him now and he had forgotten the names of most of the structures he saw, a situation that gave him no concern. The brain had more named structures in it than anyone could be expected to remember, but they could all be looked up in books. The important thing was to be able to tell the normal from the abnormal, and he was as good as anyone at that… So why couldn’t he find the answer? Everything looked so tormentingly healthy. The ventricles were clear and undilated, the white matter was smooth and flat, the gray zones were… Hello! There!… A gray mass the size of a small marble in the lower portion of a section through the frontal lobes seemed to be… Yes, it most certainly was. And the one on the other side, too. Both definitely had a reddish tint superimposed on the gray.
He brought one of the suspect areas closer to his eye, but the magnifier was too weak to provide the needed resolution. With the thrill of possibility racing through his veins, he dashed from the room, ignoring his own rules against carrying human material uncovered through the hospital halls.
The elevator had never moved so slowly and he was practically dancing with impatience by the time it arrived. It was empty, as he had hoped, and he made it all the way to his office on five without a stop.
He plopped into the chair in front of his ancient Nikon dissecting scope and slipped off his glasses, letting them dangle against his chest. Anxiously, he shifted the brain slice around until the suspicious area was centered in the field. He then zoomed up on the mag and clamped his tongue lightly between his teeth in glee. There was loose blood among the neurons. The owner of this brain had suffered a tiny stroke!
There it was! A thread linking the symptoms. Scleral hemorrhage—brain hemorrhage. The toxin selectively damages the small blood vessels in both areas! But it was such a small area of the brain to produce such diverse effects.
He reached for his glasses and scanned his bookshelves. From a cross-section atlas of the human brain, he located the affected area and traced a label line to the words “amygdaloid nucleus.” Seeing the word again after so many years sent a synaptic flutter through his own brain. But it quickly fizzled. In Willingham’s Medical Physiology, he found a section titled “Function of the Amygdaloid Nuclei in Behavior Patterns.” The first sentence leapt off the page at him. “Stimulation of different portions of the amygdaloid nuclei can cause almost any type of behavior pattern.” He ripped through the remaining text, devouring it like a starving animal. “Stimulation of some regions produce fear, some produce aggression, and others, gastrointestinal activity such as vomiting, sniffing, salivation.”
“Salivation! Aggression!” He spoke the words aloud as he closed the book.
He had been exposed to enough neurophysiology to know that partially compromised circulation can cause neurons to fire uncontrollably, much as if they were being stimulated electrically. It all fit! The Escadrille victims were being driven by hyperactivity of certain amygdaloid neurons! He lay back in his chair and sunned himself in the light of his intellect. But suddenly, he thought of a symptom as yet unaccounted for and the light dimmed.
What about the childhood songs that each victim heard? There was nothing about that in the section on the amygdala. He tapped the table impatiently with the fingers of one hand and probed the dark corners of his memory. Hiding there he found another fundamental of neurophysiology. The center of auditory sensation was the superior temporal gyrus and adjacent areas.
Off came his glasses. Sliding the brain section to the left, he examined the cortical material making up the auditory area. Carefully, he moved along the rippling gray line of neurons that lay just below the surface. Clear there… Clear there… He moved slowly, methodically. Clear there… But not clear there! He had found another affected area, much harder to see than the amygdaloid lesion and barely bigger than a lentil. It was also present on the opposite side.
One by one, he pulled down every book in his library that might contain information on the location of musical memory. Finally, he found the case of Mr. “M,” a thirty-six-year-old construction worker who had been struck in the head by a falling hammer. Every time the surgeon’s forceps touched a particular bone chip in the man’s brain, the patient said he heard a song he hadn’t heard since he was a child. So clear was the sound he later maintained that the surgeon had been playing a recording while operating. A diagram accompanying the case study put the bone chip right where Broussard had found the lentil-size lesion in Watts’s brain.
When Charlie Franks solved a difficult problem, he had to tell someone about it. But with Broussard, it brought an inner peace that did not need to be shared with anyone. Now he could eat.
*
On the way home, Kit stopped at Gambini’s, a small grocery with a high-priced deli that was worth the extra money. She started her shopping trip at a tall wicker basket full of long loaves of French bread in red-and-white paper sleeves. Feeling the bread give deliciously beneath her grip, and remembering that it was also good in the morning, hot with lots of butter, she decided on two loaves instead of one. A half-pound of imported Swiss and the same amount of pastrami, both sliced thin but not paper thin, and a big pickle that they allowed customers to fish out of a glass jar with a pair of wooden tongs rounded out her purchases. As Mr. Gambini, a thickly built man with deep lines etched in an olive complexion, wrapped her pickle in white butcher paper, he asked for perhaps the twentieth time whether she was engaged yet, and she responded as always, “Not yet. I’m waiting for your missus to let you go.” As usual, he laughed convincingly.
Her mailbox was jammed absolutely full, an event that had become all too common since buying two magazine subscriptions from a little girl with bright brown eyes who was “this close” to winning a trip to Washington, D.C. She tossed the mail into the bag with the groceries, made sure the little dog was nowhere around, and took it all inside. After checking her answering machine for messages, she sorted everything on the kitchen counter.
Boyd-Jenkins was having a big sale and their “special” customers were invited to a one-day preview before the rabble would be allowed in. Congratulations KIT FRANKLYN, you are a winner… All of it but one piece went back into the grocery bag for deposit later in the blue Dumpster behind the building. The single item she saved carried the return address of her parents back in Speculator, New York.
Judging by the familiar hand that had printed the address all in caps, it was a letter from her father. In truth, any letter from her parents would be from her father, now retired from the bank of Speculator, where he had progressed to first vice-president. Like Kit, her mother was no letter writer.
The envelope had a bulge in it caused by a pen with BANK OF SPECULATOR printed in white down two sides. Puzzled, she put the pen on the kitchen counter and unfolded the letter.
“Dear Kitten,”
She dropped the letter to her side and sighed at the ceiling. Would he never understand how much she hated that name? She continued reading.
Everything was fine; her mother was as busy as ever with her charities and women’s groups. They had to replace the hot-water heater and got Bob Drinnan to do it. “You remember Bob; Lester and Ida’s boy (she didn’t). And since we haven’t heard from you in months, figured maybe you needed something to write with.”
As she replaced the letter in its envelope, she wished her father would just forget his crazy vendetta against the phone company and have the thing put back in. He’d stand a lot better chance of getting a call from her than he would a letter. But as this was not likel
y, she would try to get off a few lines to them real soon. Maybe tomorrow.
Conscience salved, she made herself a sandwich, filled a tall glass with cold buttermilk, and carried them into the living room to catch what remained of the local news.
She had just sampled the buttermilk when a woman who would look great if it weren’t for her nose said, “… and here’s David with the weather.” David! Yikes! She jumped to her feet. In all the excitement of testing the car, she had completely forgotten she was to have dinner with David at Commander’s Palace.
When David arrived at seven, she was ready, and he had no idea how close he’d come to finding her in her pajamas. The date was one of their better ones. They managed to get through the salad without a single disagreement. And the memories of all past arguments faded when the Reisling and prime rib arrived.
*
It was around nine-thirty when the phone rang in Kit’s empty town house and the caller failed to leave a message. A few minutes later, a figure dressed in dark clothing slipped through the rear gate to the patio and, hidden by the stockade fence, examined the lock on her back door with a penlight.
Shortly after he had begun work on her door, the sound of voices and music drifted over the fence. Dropping to his knees, the figure switched off his light and waited motionless for the danger to pass.
“You really think Darryl is cute?” a young girl said.
“Don’t you?” her companion replied.
“I asked you first.”
“Well, yeah, I guess he is… unless you don’t.”
The voices and the music went by and began to fade. When they could be heard only as muffled sounds in the distance, the figure went back to work and soon had the door opened.
He was pleased to find himself in the kitchen; precisely where he wanted to be. After placing his small metal tray of tools on the kitchen counter, he took a flashlight with a flat base and a pivoting head out of the tray and set it up on the counter so that its beam played over the refrigerator. He spread out the tools he would need and set to work. When the job was finished, he scooped the counter clean and dumped everything in his tray. As he left, he paused and placed an object on the cement apron beside the back door, then stole back to his car, which was waiting in the shadows.
Cajun Nights Page 15
