by Dick Cluster
“I’ll call you later, honey,” the woman said, holding up a finger to let Alex know she’d only be a minute more. “My daughter is home from school today,” she told him after she hung up. “More tired than sick, though, I think. Are you looking for Dr. Harrison or who?”
“Dr. Harrison,” Alex told the secretary. “I’m Alex Glauberman. I have an appointment with him at two.”
“Oh, right, Mr. Glauberman,” she said. She looked at her watch. “He’s still at rounds, he’s giving a talk today.” She looked Alex up and down. She said, “You’re not quite what I expected. I mean, you don’t look like Humphrey Bogart or Magnum P.I.”
“No,” Alex said. He sometimes ran into this problem himself. Growing up in the fifties, his image of detectives had been formed by watching Perry Mason on TV. Mason himself had been a lawyer, but for his legwork he’d depended on a hired hand named Paul Drake, played by William Hopper, Hedda Hopper’s son. A detective, Alex had therefore thought, was a big blond hunk with a business suit and a Hollywood face. Even Sam Spade, in the book if not the movie, was supposed to look like a “blond Satan,” whatever exactly that was. Alex on the other hand was tall but thin— some said cadaverous— with black curly hair and a black beard. He smiled his slightly cockeyed, thin-lipped smile, the one his oldest friend had once told him made him look like a friendly, furry shark. Friendly and furry had sounded wrong, like a teddy bear. The shark had kind of appealed to him.
“No,” he repeated. “But at best I’m a part-time detective. Mostly what I do is fix cars.” He handed her one of his business cards, which featured a drawing of a horned creature, half car and half beast. Kim had contributed the drawing, the same friend who’d made the comment about his smile.
“Oh.” The secretary frowned, knitting her penciled brows together till they almost touched. “I didn’t mean anything critical, I was just looking for something to say. My name is Deborah McCarthy. Jay should be back any minute. He had to give a presentation. Today is attending rounds. All the attendings take turns giving lectures.”
“Alex,” Alex reciprocated. He shook hands with Deborah. “What are attendings?” He’d needed to teach himself some medical jargon over the past few years, but still he generally felt everybody in hospitals was talking in code.
“Huh? Oh, attending physicians. The attendings take turns supervising the fellows, who supervise the residents, more or less. Jay’s the attending on the transplant unit this month. If I can help you understand how things work around here, while you’re waiting.… Sit down, anyway. I guess he’ll want you next door in his office, not the examining room there.” She jerked her head toward a doorway that led out of her cubicle.
“Thanks,” Alex said. Since she seemed sufficiently garrulous, he asked, “Do you know what he wants me to look into, by the way?”
“I do, but I better let him tell you that himself. You know about him getting his picture in People, right?”
“No, actually,” Alex said. “I have to confess I don’t.”
“Oh. Well, why should you, unless you’re an addict? To the magazine, I mean. He treated this baseball player. A catcher for the, uh, the St. Louis Cardinals, I think that’s the team. Larry Mitchell, a nice guy. So they did a feature on it, they called it, ‘A Big-League Catcher Fights to Nail Cancer at the Plate.’ ” She repeated the headline with an amalgam of sarcasm and respect.
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. He had spotted this story in the local sports pages, if not the glossy weekly. The ballplayer had only been a second-string catcher, but that plus the lymph cancer plus the high-tech medicine had made him a celebrity of sorts. Anyway, the words lymph cancer always jumped out at Alex, however buried on the page.
“But Dr. Wagner seems to feel you’re somebody to boast about too,” Deborah added as if he might need placating. “Doctors like to brag about their patients, just like mothers do about their kids.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said again. Wagner had been pleased, definitely, when Harrison had called her last week to ask for the name and number of her patient who did investigations. “I don’t have any idea what Jay would want,” Wagner had said when she called Alex to alert him, “but if I were you I’d look into it. You don’t need any special connections to be accepted as a patient in his study, if you were to be a candidate for that treatment someday. Still, I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“No,” Alex had said, determinedly meeting her cliché with one of his own. “And clients for my investigation business don’t grow on trees.”
2. Closers
Harrison might run an informal office, but he seemed to be in some kind of uniform himself: he returned from attending rounds in scuffed black dress shoes, gray flannel slacks, a dress shirt and knit tie, and a doctor’s white coat with name tag attached. He wasn’t fat, exactly, just an average, rounded middle-aged American male. His face was clean-shaven and pinkish, topped by brown hair in a dry, expensive cut.
None of this impressed Alex one way or the other. He did, though, like the way the doctor bounced on his toes for a minute between catching up on messages with Deborah and focusing in on him. The bounce testified to high energy. It also seemed like a kind of discipline, a fast-track meditation, a way of separating one thing from the next. Harrison stuck his hand out to be shaken. The fingers were short and squared off. Not surgeon’s fingers, blunt ones.
“Next door’s my burrow,” he said. “Let’s go in there.”
Walking into Jay Harrison’s burrow, Alex could see more of what Carol Wagner had meant. The small room had been done in some special wallpaper with very delicate Japanese nature scenes on a creamy background tinged with blue. No diplomas hung there, just some framed photographs that Alex guessed were super-enlarged images of cells. And on the back wall on either side of the single window were blown-up photos of baseball players in uniform. Dennis Eckersley peered from the mound, sharp-eyed yet bemused. Big Lee Smith glowered impersonally.
Both former Red Sox, Alex noted. The Dennison Center was the favorite charity of the Red Sox and of many sports-world figures besides, and treating that catcher Mitchell would only have tightened Harrison’s links. But something more particular about Harrison’s choice of posters occurred to him.
“Those are both ace relievers.” He found it a bit odd they were two right-handers. A matched pair, righty and lefty, would have been more scientific, more of a representative sample, he thought. Unless maybe this was a representative sample: one white ballplayer and one black. Many people thought such concerns were no longer relevant these days. He added, “Your marrow transplant operation is a kind of relief pitching, if I understand it right.”
Jay Harrison looked Alex over with blue eyes that seemed a little lost inside the padding the cheeks and forehead had acquired over the years. He gestured toward a chair at right angles to his own. This was the patient’s chair, the one that allowed the doctor to swivel ninety degrees and face the patient with no desk in between. They’d come in here from the examining room— Alex noted a connecting door— and sit here and discuss the good or bad news.
“You do understand it,” the doctor said. “In baseball terms, the question is whether our protocol, our treatment, can be a closer. We don’t just want to stave off the opposition for another inning or two, we want to get the game won. We hope to produce a significant number of permanent cures instead of temporary remissions. Carol said she treated you about two or three years ago. Nodular lymphoma, isn’t that right? And you’re doing very well?”
“Yes,” Alex said. He’d been diagnosed with this particular cancer when Meredith, on their third night together, felt a funny lump in his neck. There had been similar lumps— tumorous lymph nodes— in his neck and groin and armpit. When the swellings had started getting in the way of organs and vessels, Alex had spent five months taking a mountain of very unpleasant pills for one week out of every three. Since then his own immune system had kept in check whatever small population of malignant cells had survived. As mali
gnancies went, nodular lymphomas were relatively lazy and also relatively responsive to drugs. But they tended, sooner or later, to come back. That was where bone marrow transplants came in.
“If I understand it right,” Alex continued, “we’re talking about something like reboring and rebuilding an engine. You clean the body out, then put the essential parts back in. When I do it, I go buy new pistons from a shop. You have to reuse the old ones, though.”
Harrison smiled. It was a smile of approval, but a mischievous quality crinkled the comers of his eyes. Alex felt accepted into a secret society. If this was really a job interview, it seemed to be going okay.
“Well put,” the doctor said. “You need bone marrow, can’t run without the stuff. The cells in bone marrow are the ones that replenish all the crucial kinds of cells in the lymph and the blood— lymphocytes, leukocytes, red cells, platelets, all of that. The problem is that the treatments we use to clean out cancers, chemotherapy and radiation, kill bone marrow cells for the same reason they kill cancer cells: they interfere with cell reproduction, so they zap any cells in the body that are reproducing very fast. So what we do is take out a quart of marrow from your hipbones, clean it up in a test tube, and cryopreserve it in liquid nitrogen. Then we zap you with much higher doses than we’d otherwise dare. Then we thaw your frozen marrow, put it back in you, and let it regenerate itself and your blood supply. We keep you in the shop for about a month while that’s happening. Then we let you go home, we cross our fingers, and we wait. Sometimes a relative’s or even a stranger’s marrow can be transplanted, as you may have heard, but your own marrow is safest and best.”
“Yes,” Alex said. He’d heard most of this before. But Harrison obviously liked to talk medicine, and Alex wasn’t one to turn down free information.
“I say ‘you’,” Harrison added, “but I don’t mean you personally, necessarily. If you should have a recurrence, the treatment would depend on the exact type of cell deformity, the size of the tumors, and other factors, as I’m sure Dr. Wagner has explained. The transplant procedure is still classified as experimental in most cases, and it does entail risks. Until your marrow regrows, you’ve shut down the factories that produce the components that make your immune system work. Killing off the marrow is like giving yourself AIDS, or putting yourself through Chernobyl, except that it’s only temporary, until you get your previously harvested marrow reinfused. During that period while you’re myelosuppressed— while your counts of all these blood cells are down— you could get any kind of bug and not be able to fight it off. It’s a risk, though we have enough experience in the use of sterile environment and antibiotics to keep that risk small.”
Harrison leaned back, letting his eyes take a quick tour of his pictures and his wallpaper while those sobering words started to sink in. Then he watched Alex without trying to hide his observation. Alex was warming to Jay Harrison. Not too much bullshit here.
“So,” the doctor said after a while. “That’s my research. Carol says you sometimes take on research too.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “It’s a sideline. People come to me by accident or through word-of-mouth, and I’m strictly self-taught. But I do have a lot of experience taking things apart and seeing how they work. I started doing that with other people’s problems during chemotherapy, when my psychological and pharmacological situation pushed me to, um, be myself, only more so. To do things I’d only imagined doing, if you see what I mean.”
This much was a variation on the set speech that Alex delivered often enough, if always with some distaste. He didn’t like having to justify himself. Besides, in the few years he’d had this sideline, he’d drawn some conclusions about the type of clients who came to him. They came to him because they had stories that were either too screwy, too illegal, too countercultural, or too damn obviously a pack of lies to lay in front of a shingle-on-the-door private detective or the taxpayer-funded police.
Jay Harrison tapped his fingers on his desktop. “I see what you mean,” he said. Then he opened a desk drawer and took out a triple-folded sheet of paper, which he handed across. It was a photocopy of a short typewritten letter. The letter asked Harrison to send ten thousand dollars to a certain post office box. The writer called the money a loan but didn’t say anything about terms or interest or paying the money back. Alex drew the obvious conclusion.
“Blackmail?”
Harrison scratched his head and then shook it. “Somebody thinks it’s blackmail. But as far as I can figure out, they haven’t got anything to blackmail me with.”
3. A Beautiful Person Stops
Alex read the note again:
It’s been a pretty long time but I guess you still remember me, Jay. It’s hard times for me now and I could do with a loan of maybe ten thousand or so. I hope you can see your way to this, because if you can’t then I have to tell some people some of the things I know. My name is Foster. We met on the Baltimore Beltway on a hot sunny afternoon when I stopped to pick you up, me and my girl. About the loan, you can send it all in cash in a package to this address. I give you two weeks, that’s all.
There was no signature, just the single paragraph and a return address, a post office box in Baltimore, Maryland, zip code 21218.
“Oh yeah.” Harrison nodded, and Alex watched the corners of his eyes get that amused, approving look again. “It’s been a long time, but he’s right, I still remember him. He picked me up hitchhiking, May of 1971. I haven’t seen him since. But apparently he saw my picture in the magazine when he was standing in line to buy groceries or whatever. The letter came addressed to me here at the hospital. Regular white business envelope, Baltimore postmark. Almost three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks,” Alex said. The sender had given a deadline of two. Had he made good on his threat, whatever the implied threat had been? “Why am I sitting here now?”
“To be honest, you weren’t my first resort. The first thing I did was call the cops.”
“And showed them the letter?”
“I showed them a letter. I mean, I had Deborah type a substitute that was more or less the same. Only the name was Arnie Johnson, a name I pulled out of the air. The place was the New York Thruway, and Deborah said as long as I was doing that why not make the weather cold. I told the cops I didn’t know any Johnson and I didn’t know what incident this could be about. Do you see why?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “It’s a chain letter. You send the blackmail note to ten friends and soon you get a hundred thousand dollars tax free.” He watched the doctor’s forehead come down like a knight’s visor. Harrison didn’t need to put diplomas on his walls, but he liked to demonstrate that Doctor knows most, and he didn’t seem to like being challenged about that. Or maybe it was simply a habit, the way Alex too often let sarcastic comments get away from him— his father’s philosophic patience, as he sometimes put it, but his mother’s smart mouth. “Sorry,” Alex added. “But I’m not one of your medical students. You don’t have to quiz me about why you’re feeling inside the patient’s armpit. Just tell me what you want me to know.”
Harrison’s frown slowly dissipated. “Okay,” he said finally. “You’re not a student, an intern, or even a resident. We’re fellow professionals, that’s what you want me to see?” He laughed, a surprisingly infectious laugh. He said, “Let me get at it another way. You ever hitchhike, before you were up to your ears in cars?”
“Yeah, some.”
“Some,” Harrison repeated. “Then you’ll know what I mean if I tell you it was hot, maybe eighty, the way it can get suddenly hot in the Middle Atlantic states around the beginning of May. I was standing on the shoulder. It was a bad place to hitch, a place nobody had any reason to slow down. Everybody’s roaring past at sixty-five, seventy, and I’m feeling like an ant that might get stepped on or reverberated to death by this herd of elephants roaring by. I’m also starting to give the finger to the rear ends of cars, even though I know it’s a spoiled and stupid thing to do. Then all of a sudden the
world is a beautiful place because a beautiful person stops for me, a person who understands the importance and kindliness of picking a stuck hitchhiker up. I’m inside a delivery van made over into a camper. The van’s picking up speed, while I’m lying on a nice soft bunk listening to Coltrane blow his sax.”
All those words came out in an even cadence. This wasn’t a spurt of unexamined memories tumbling from a suddenly loosened faucet, it was something to which the doctor had given some thought before he spoke. Still, Alex thought he caught a glimpse of a younger Jay Harrison, less confident but brasher— a kid who might just speed-rap, letting rivers of unconsidered thoughts pour out.
“That’s one of the things I liked about hitchhiking,” Jay Harrison went on. “Besides that, it was a cheap and interesting way to meet people. I liked the sudden interchange of ups and downs. Anyway, the point is, there was a Foster. That’s who was driving the van, and he didn’t just take me a few miles, he took me all the way to California. I thought I was headed for Boston, but I couldn’t turn California down. So I do owe him a favor, if not a ten-thousand-dollar one. I didn’t want to get him in any trouble, unless I was sure I had to, so I took the liberty of showing an amended letter to the police. I told them it was Greek to me but still I was concerned, I didn’t want the reputation of the Center damaged by some crazy unfounded accusations against myself, I just wondered could they maybe get the PO box checked out.”
Sure enough, Alex thought, Jay Harrison was not exactly run-of-the-mill. He’d come up with a scheme that might get him some information while protecting this Foster’s identity. When the cops came to call, Foster would see that his old friend Jay was protecting him, but Foster would also see that the old friend wasn’t taking any shit.
“The police did their job. This is a prestigious institution, after all. They found out that the post office box belongs to a travel agency, a real operation, nothing suspicious about it at all. They showed me a list of all the employees, and even the family members of the employees who handle the mail. None of them was Johnson, of course, but none of them was Foster either. The closest thing to a connection would be that all the owners and employees, like Mr. Foster, are black. No connection at all, really. Two weeks went by, and nothing happened. I said thanks, just some nut I guess.”
