by Dick Cluster
“This is my lawyer,” Alex said. “If you want a police reference on me, you could try Sergeant Robert Trevisone in Cambridge. We’ve crossed paths a couple of times.”
“I did that already. I did that as soon as they told me you were the one to deliver the ransom. Sergeant Trevisone told me he liked you personally, but he didn’t see any prima facie reason I should believe anything you said.” Fridley paused and smiled that cold smile. “Or words to that effect. I’m done with you for now. Unless you’re due for a medical consultation or treatment, I don’t want to see you down here again. We’re dealing with an individual’s life. Her medical care is in the hands of professionals. So is her protection from criminals. Can I make that any clearer for you?”
“No, sir,” Alex said dutifully.
You could skirt around the truth and you could play thrust-and-parry games, but the one thing you shouldn’t do with any brand of cops was directly challenge their authority. Not unless you were prepared to spend a lot of time or money to make your point.
Tom Dumars put his quote-unquote real sickies in the General, Jay had said. Massachusetts General Hospital sprawled downtown on flatlands along the Charles River, a part of Boston’s former West End, across Cambridge Street from the back side of Beacon Hill. The General and its associated clinics and hospitals formed a medical area all their own. This was where Alex’s nurse customer who had told him about the Death Star worked.
Parking in one of the multifarious MGH lots, Alex hiked to the main lobby and, after several tries, managed to locate his customer, Lisa, on a house phone. She put him in touch with a unit clerk in pediatrics whose name was Patricia Fallon. Alex told the unit clerk that he was working for Dumars’s wife, who just wanted to know who Dumars’s girlfriend was. Patricia Fallon said that— only because Lisa had vouched for him— he could come up and explain this some more. She gave a series of instructions involving the White Building, the third elevators on the left, and the brown and green zones.
Comparing Mass General to the Dennison Center was like comparing Manhattan to Boston, Alex thought. He worked his way through corridors that were long and busy. Eddies of patients flowed past with the aid of legs, crutches, wheelchairs, and carts, themselves lost in a sea of medical personnel with IDs dangling from coats of various colors and lengths. When Alex got to the right place, Patricia Fallon said she could leave the desk just long enough to walk down to the end of the floor with him and back.
The unit clerk was not long past twenty. She had wavy black hair that cascaded about a round and wide-eyed face. Her large round glasses added to the effect. “Look, um,” she said as they walked down a corridor that smelled of antiseptic, with the sound of canned television laughter coming from many half opened doors. “I know Lisa said you were a good guy, but I don’t know about this. I wouldn’t want anybody gossiping about my love life. Not that I’m involved with anybody married or anything. But it happens. Who’s to say what ought to get passed on in any, you know, particular case?”
Looks could be deceiving, but Patricia Fallon did not strike Alex as a sharp-edged, argumentative type. If she didn’t have anything to tell, she wouldn’t be starting off debating the principles of the thing. He asked, “Is Tom Dumars the kind of guy it happens with?”
“The kind of guy? Well, yeah, I mean that’s the reputation he has. The kind, he likes to take your hand, rub you on the shoulder, nothing you could prove that he was really up to anything by. I’ve heard there’s girls here that have gone out with him, maybe, from time to time. So you could say he’s that kind of guy, yeah.”
“Would you say there’s somebody working here that he might be seeing regularly these days?”
“No,” Patricia Fallon said. She sounded relieved, as if she were responsible for the moral purity of the unit, or as if she’d have to deal with the fallout when and if such an affair went wrong. As the person who made the place run, in fact if not in name, she probably would.
Then what?, Alex wondered. He thought about Kevin Royce and Linda Dumars, the hothouse relationships that could grow up in places like this. Was Tom Dumars involved with a teenage patient? No, the ward clerk wouldn’t consider spilling that to a stranger looking to provide ammunition for the wife’s presumed divorce case. If Patricia wanted to blow the whistle on something like that, she’d either go up the chain of command or file an anonymous grievance with the state. What about a patient’s mother, though, a single mother in particular, who might develop quite a dependence on him? Alex tried to see a handsome and personable shithead of a doctor strolling down this corridor with his consoling arm around somebody’s slender waist. The doctor could nurture in himself a mix of compassion and attraction that he could justify as a part of his job, his burden.…
“Dumars’s wife is in the hospital, at the Dennison Center,” he said, upping the ante a little. “She’s really not doing very well.”
“Oh,” the unit clerk said. “Oh, um, I heard his wife had cancer, yeah. I didn’t know she was hospitalized. It must be tough on her, if she thinks he’s out having a good time with somebody else.” They’d reached the end of the corridor, a picture window with a view of Cambridge and the Museum of Science. Around the corner was a play area, mostly empty now, just a few toddlers building quietly with colored wooden blocks. Patricia Fallon turned to face back the way they had come. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the desk.”
“Suppose it wasn’t just a doctor running around and his wife getting suspicious,” Alex pressed hurriedly. “Suppose I could show you that a patient’s life depended on finding out about this?”
“What are you talking about? Huh? I know the mind and the body, they’re so much connected, but you don’t sound like you’re talking about his wife. You sound like you’re talking about malpractice.” She uttered the last word in a whisper, as if she were saying hell or goddamn in a church.
“No, I am talking about his wife, unfortunately. I’m talking about the fact that something went wrong with her procedure, something technical, that didn’t go wrong by accident. Some people over there think Tom had something to do with it.” He produced Jay’s letter and gave her thirty seconds to read it.
“Look,” she said. “You’re confusing me.”
“She’s having an autologous bone marrow transplant,” Alex said, “and at the crucial time, her marrow disappeared.”
Patricia Fallon caught her breath. She looked all around as if she’d lost something herself. Her tongue circled her mouth and then she bit her lower lip, wincing suddenly at the pain. Allogeneic transplants were commonly used for childhood leukemias and immune disorders, Alex knew. The ward clerk must know about marrow transplants firsthand.
“That’s terrible,” she said. “But Dr. Dumars… Look, if it’ll help to know who he’s been sleeping with, okay, okay. Her name is Claudia Stevens, all right? You’ll have to ask Dr. Steinkuhler for details. And don’t say I sent you.”
“No. No, I won’t. This Dr. Steinkuhler, how do I find him?”
“Her,” Patricia Fallon corrected him. “Senior resident. I’ll page her. But I didn’t tell you. You just heard the rumor, so you came and asked to see the senior resident. Okay?”
Dr. Steinkuhler turned out to be a very small woman with very short curly brown hair. She wore a long flowered skirt and a short white coat with a stethoscope in the hip pocket. Alex never did find out her first name. He flourished Jay’s letter, unsure whether one doctor’s loosely worded request would get another to snitch on a third. She led him around a different corner to a small office and shut the door. The office had a desk and two chairs and a phone and two travel posters, one a mountain and the other a field of flowers. Probably the office was shared by several staff on duty here. “Sit down, please,” she said, gesturing toward the desk chair. But she remained standing, as if the conversation wouldn’t be going on very long.
“I know of Jay Harrison, of course,” she said with a nod and a respectful air. “I also know
that Tom’s wife is a patient of his. I’ll assume there is a medically valid reason for this question, to do either with research or with patient care. Otherwise somebody of Harrison’s standing wouldn’t ask.” Alex thought that statement might be tongue-in-cheek, but Steinkuhler’s actual tongue rolled right on. She was in a hurry. She told the story without much prompting, and with a certain flair. Alex leaned back in the chair and listened hard.
“I don’t know what Claudia Stevens is really like,” she said, “but she is gorgeous to look at and she wears her breeding and culture on her sleeve. Not that she’s exactly rich. I don’t mean to make Tom out to be a— what’s the word?— a gold digger, whatever else he may be. She’s a concert violinist, and a widow. Her little boy had a serious and sometimes fatal illness, it doesn’t matter what, though now he’s going to be okay. When I opened a locked door I thought it was okay to open, I found her and Tom Dumars out of their sleeves and most everything else. You can imagine I was surprised, but I backed out and closed the door, of course. I might never have brought it up— he’s quite a bit senior to me— if Tom hadn’t approached me the next time he was here on the floor.
“He was all ruffled and tongue-tied and kept saying there really wasn’t any impropriety here, any undue influence, consenting adults, and a lot more clichés along that line. I can’t say I liked it— you may have read all the recent studies about doctor-patient sexual contact, or you may not. She wasn’t a patient, of course, yet in terms of dependence and susceptibility, a lot of the same issues are involved. I told him I thought they ought to cool it until he wasn’t treating the child any longer. If she still saw something in him then, and didn’t mind that he was married, then as far as I was concerned they could screw all they wanted, it didn’t matter to me. He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. Since then he’s refused to talk to me, which I can tell you makes things difficult for everyone whenever he admits a patient here.”
“Yes. I mean I can see that,” Alex said. “When did this happen? Finding them like that?”
“About two months ago. Relations between us have gotten bad enough that I had to explain things confidentially to the nurse manager. Your presence indicates that she felt a need to tell someone else, and so the word has continued to spread. Unless you somehow dug this up on your own?”
Alex didn’t answer that. He didn’t think she really wanted an answer. “Are they still seeing each other, do you know?”
“No. That will have to be your job, won’t it, finding out? She lives on Beacon Hill. It was very convenient, she could walk here to be with her son. He’s a sweet kid, I liked him. In fact, I liked her. That may have been why I was so surprised.”
“Because you didn’t like Tom Dumars, even before.”
“No. Since I’ve spewed all this out I might as well say that too. Too hearty, and I got tired of his hands-on approach with the female staff. I can get you Mrs. Stevens’s address, for Jay Harrison’s confidential medical purposes, that is. She’s somebody people will remember seeing, if you go around asking. Tall and elegant, long blond hair, movie-star type. Who would it be? Faye Dunaway looks. Tom Dumars said I was just a jealous bitch, I was taking it out on him because I’d always dreamed of looking like that.”
She stopped and raised her eyebrows. Alex thought a lot of people might call her pretty but nobody would call her gorgeous. She said, “Well, of course I’ve dreamed of looking like that. Once or twice. Who wouldn’t? Though I bet it gets to be an inconvenience. The way a flashy car impresses the people you want to impress, but it attracts a lot of car thieves too.”
“Probably,” Alex said. “I assume you know Tom’s wife doesn’t provide much competition right now. Do you think he could be serious enough about Claudia to… wish his wife would hurry up and die?”
“I see,” she said, and a trace of a smile flitted across her eyes if not her mouth. Alex found that enjoyment disturbing. Was he supposed to add her to the list of people who wished Tom Dumars was a murderer? Kevin Royce might wish it, assuming the murder could be prevented. Alex knew he had a certain investment in Kevin’s theory himself. That way the kidnap scheme could involve a doctor, as his gut kept telling him, but the doctor didn’t have to be Jay. Except that if Tom Dumars was the kidnapper, and his objective was really murder, then he might already have let the cells thaw and die.
“I did expect you to get around to the missing marrow sooner or later,” Dr. Steinkuhler added by way of explanation of the expression that had passed through her eyes. “You didn’t really think I would tell you all this just on the basis of Jay Harrison’s putative signature on a letter, I hope. You know these things don’t stay secret, I’m sure.”
So the word had begun to spread on the medical grapevine, just as Jay’s bosses had feared. Come grant-getting and fund-raising time, this was sure to have its effect. With an effort Alex pulled himself back from the picture of Linda Dumars’s husband casually tossing those two plastic pouches into the trash. If word had spread, he thought it might be useful to know who was doing the spreading.
“It might be useful to know how they don’t stay secret,” he said.
Steinkuhler hesitated over that one, checking her watch and backing off a step as if she really needed to be somewhere else. She said, “People need to talk about things like this. When they get scared. And this news is terrible and scary, as I’m sure that, whoever you are, you understand.”
“I mean who as well as how,” Alex told her. “I’m an investigator working directly for Jay. You can call him and check, of course.”
“Yes, I assumed that. Well, in my case it was Gordon Kramer, we know each other from school. He told me what’s been happening there, though he swore me to secrecy, of course. Now that I understand your suspicions about Tom, it occurs to me maybe Jay Harrison wanted me alerted for some reason. From what I hear, Gordon is Harrison’s current fair-haired boy. He was in an M.D.-Ph.D. program and did his research in Harrison’s lab. They say he’s going to be his next fellow and all that.” Alex vaguely remembered the doctor in scrubs on the transplant unit that first day, the one who’d asked him, ever so politely, who the hell he was. That would be the same senior resident who was away the rest of this week, the ostensible reason Jay had been too tied up to see him yesterday.
“Look, I’m sure he’s not the only one talking,” Steinkuhler added quickly. She checked her watch and took another step away. This time she put her hand on the doorknob behind her. “Anyway, I’m just mouthing off now about why people gossip. I do have patients to get to still.”
“You didn’t answer my question about Tom Dumars,” Alex pointed out.
“I know.” She sighed, dropping her hand from the knob. She fingered the stethoscope in her pocket, the first time she’d betrayed any nervousness at all. “I have a very hard time believing any doctor did this, including him. Not that a doctor can’t be a kidnapper or a murderer, but like this, by taking someone’s bone marrow? Anyone who’s worked in this area has suffered through patients dying for lack of a match, or because the match came too late. To tell the truth, I hope it’s all some mistake— and believe me, that’s not impossible by any means. Otherwise, if it’s true there’s ransom involved, I guess I’d look for somebody in desperate need of money. But that’s all out of my department.” She reached for the doorknob again, opened the door, and backed out.
25. Deborah’s Key
Dr. Steinkuhler, whatever her first name was, made good on her promise to supply Alex with Tom’s girlfriend’s address. Patricia Fallon handed it to him as he went past the desk. The address was on Joy Street. Alex found his way back to the front entrance of the hospital, turned left on Cambridge Street, and then turned right on Joy. He found the number he wanted halfway up the hill, across from the old African Meeting House, now restored.
Judging by the bells and mailboxes, Claudia Stevens lived on one floor of a narrow old four-story brick building. The small entryway had a scuffed marble floor, painted wooden wainscoting, and p
laster walls with cracks showing through the paint. The back side of Beacon Hill was by tradition the unfashionable side, the high-class side being the front, which looked out over the Common and was a short walk from the Public Garden and the Ritz. At various times the back side had housed free Negroes and working-class whites and bohemians, but those times now were gone. Even in an un-rehabbed building like this one, Alex guessed, a two-bedroom apartment must go for at least twelve hundred a month. He realized he hadn’t asked whether Claudia Stevens had more than one kid, or the age of the one, or who the statuesque violinist’s parents or late husband had been.
He rang the bell but got no answer. His watch said three o’clock. Maybe she was off picking the kid or kids up from school. He had other plans for the coming hours but decided he could afford a few minutes to wait. He loitered against the wall of a Laundromat at the top of her block. He tried focusing on the Holiday Inn sign across Cambridge Street, visible through the brick canyon formed by Joy Street homes. He saw two sets of letters, but just barely, like a TV ghost. When he turned his head the double image vanished, he thought. Still, it was kind of cloudy out. Though the neuro-op doubted this, Alex had observed that the visual misalignment got worse in brighter light.
What I’d like, Alex thought, is to get everybody together in a goddamn room, like an English drawing room, and hear all their answers, all their camera angles, as Barbara Binder said. And then I’d like to show how they don’t form an image that holds up. Did Jay owe Foster a favor, or did Foster hold some kind of grudge? The same question went for Jay and Barbara, and for Henri the old boyfriend as a matter of fact. Jay could be the target of the crime, assuming somebody held Linda Dumars’s life sufficiently cheap. Or he could be the criminal— but why?— or a confederate, maybe unwilling and maybe even unwitting, though it was hard to see how. Or the target could be Linda, or both Jay and Linda could be random victims, and the money might be all the kidnapper cared about. The kidnapper could be sane and businesslike, ready to return the stuff as soon as all the arrangements were made, or the kidnapper could be nuts, as the sperm bank attempt suggested— unless that was a diversion, a red herring after all. Lots of theories, some hunches, but not enough data, as Jay would say. For a start, Alex wanted to know about that letter Barbara said she’d written. To know about that, he needed to know the truth about doctor and secretary.
