by Dick Cluster
When Claudia Stevens didn’t reappear with a child or children in tow, Alex called Deborah from a pay phone inside the Laundromat. He asked her to meet him for coffee again, after work.
“No, I’ve got to pick up Richie from his friend’s house where he went after Little League,” Deborah said. “And my other two are at home with their sitter, and I really have to be there when I said. Monday was an emergency. I know it’s still an emergency, but I’ve got a life to live too. You know what I’m saying, Alex. Richard is away all week. I really just don’t have any slack. And I don’t know anything that can help. Believe me, I wish I did.”
“I know you don’t have any slack,” Alex said. Starting tomorrow he’d have Maria to think about. He couldn’t devote his life entirely to Linda Dumars’s cause whether Jay Harrison was paying for it or not.
Suddenly he knew what might be wrong with Barbarella’s story. “Listen,” he insisted, “how do you get home? Do you drive? Okay, look, just let me ride with you, um, as far as Forest Hills, how about that?”
Deborah told him she didn’t go by Forest Hills, she took Route 1 instead. Alex’s knowledge of commuter routes to the southwestern suburbs was foggy, but he did recall the rotary with the sign about Route 1 south to Providence where it diverged from the Arborway. He also calculated it would take her only about ten minutes extra to drop him where he’d just said. Deborah agreed, if grudgingly. Alex said he’d meet her on the corner of Longwood and Huntington. He said he didn’t want to risk running into Fridley. For that matter, he didn’t want to risk running into Jay.
Deborah showed up as promised, in a Ford Tempo. Alex sat in the shotgun seat as they crawled down Huntington toward the Jamaica Way overpass. In his Saab, Alex thought, he’d be shifting back and forth from first to neutral, easing up on the clutch or down on the gas. With the automatic and a high idle, Deborah didn’t have to do anything but vary the weight of her foot on the brake. Still she kept her eyes ahead of her, apparently bewitched by the cream-colored Nissan Pulsar in front. On the rear end of the Pulsar was a bumper sticker: IS THAT YOUR HEAD, OR DID YOUR NECK THROW UP?
“This Barbara Binder,” Alex said at last. “The one who sent Jay a letter that Jay says he never got. She says she saw you coming out of Jay’s house on a Sunday morning. She says you looked both ways when you came out, as if you’d done something that didn’t really make you happy. Or it made you happy, but you didn’t want your happiness widely known.” He realized that sounded snide, which wasn’t what he’d meant. What he’d meant was to state exactly what Barbarella said she had observed, without coloring.
Deborah took her eyes off the car in front. Instead she looked at Alex the same way, with her eyes level and her mouth closed. Red circles formed on her cheeks, with white centers inside the red. She directed her attention back to the Pulsar and let her Ford glide forward into the two feet that had opened up. Then she turned back to Alex and said, “So? What’s all that supposed to mean?”
“She— that’s Jay’s long-ago girlfriend— thought it meant you spent that Saturday night, and probably others, tangled up with the boss. Therefore she thinks you might have palmed her letter. You might have sent her a brush-off note on your own initiative, pretending the word came down from Jay.”
“That’s ridiculous. I told you I never saw this letter. I’m telling you now I don’t spend any nights with Jay.”
Alex didn’t say anything. Somewhere ahead a light had changed. A car-length space opened in front, and Deborah moved quickly to cut off a Jaguar driven by a man in a suit and tie. The Jaguar man had made a dash from a side street but now he hung there, his bumper an inch from the door beside Alex, pretending he hadn’t just lost a combat. He tapped a nervous finger on the steering wheel, though.
“Probably a doctor,” Alex said. “Accustomed to getting his way. Look, if you and Jay are seeing each other, somebody has to know it. Yvonne Price or one of the other nurses. The unit secretary. Gordon Kramer, maybe. I hear he’s Jay’s protégé.” He didn’t know why he’d said that, except out of instinct. What somebody tells you, try it out on somebody else. See whether the images match.
“Was,” she said. “Being Jay’s protégé is a high-risk thing. Being his lover would be high-risk too.” Alex wasn’t sure what she meant by this. He thought of the feeling he’d gotten from Jay early on, the sense of a sequence of tests you kept having to pass. “He’s the kind of man who goes all starry-eyed romantic and then wonders why it’s not like Hollywood anymore. There’s nothing between me and Jay Harrison outside of work except a little socializing, like I already said.”
She made the yellow light at Tremont Street but got hung up in the intersection when it turned red. A battered old full-size Plymouth coming out of Tremont honked an off-key note as it stopped short. The driver, a young man in a T-shirt, shook an admonishing finger at her. Alex saw this, but Deborah was avoiding eye contact just as the Jaguar driver had avoided it with her. Instead she searched Alex’s face. “Well, do you believe me?” she said.
“About Barbarella’s version, I was having trouble figuring out what you did with the kids. It was easy to see your husband being away at work, flying a client somewhere. But unless your mother was in on the thing, not just in on it but enthusiastic enough to cover for you by taking the kids, and it would have to be your mother, not a friend, because the kids would be bound to say, ‘Daddy, we spent Saturday night at…’ ”
“You don’t believe me,” Deborah said, “but you’ve got an eye for those kind of details. Professionally suspicious, uh-huh. My mother wouldn’t cover. My mother’s of the you-made-your-choice-when-you-got-married school.” She laughed, a fond laugh which softened her face. She hit the steering wheel lightly with her right palm. “ ‘You made your choice, Debbie,’ she’s always telling me. ‘Now learn to live with it.’ She’s said that about everything from which doll to which job to which boy to which man. But this Barbarella, she has a good eye too. For details, I mean.”
When Deborah inched out of the intersection, the Plymouth pulled in behind and gave her rear bumper a nudge. She looked in the mirror but didn’t turn around. When she finally made the left onto the Jamaica Way ramp, the driver pulled around her and cut in front. She said, “What’s his problem?” as if she didn’t know. That didn’t make her a liar, it just meant she knew how the game of driving in Boston was played.
“Jay’s got a long-distance girlfriend, a doctor down in Washington,” she said then. “I don’t see much future in that one, either, but that’s what you’ll find out if you ask around for gossip. Nothing very juicy, believe me. He goes down there sometimes for the weekend, especially if he’s got a business excuse. Once in a while he lends me his place.”
“Nice kind of boss,” Alex said. It did seem in character, though— it made him unconventional, it was a way of sharing the wealth, yet it didn’t cost him any status of the kind he cared about. And what extra loyalty, if any, might it buy?
“Yeah, you could say so. That way I can give the kids a weekend in town, and besides I usually cook something to leave behind for him, and I water his garden for him too. He likes his garden, that’s the only reason he’s got the house instead of an apartment, as near as I can tell. Unless he once expected to, you know, have a family in it and then couldn’t find the right person to have it with.”
Now she was talking faster, keeping pace with the other drivers as the traffic swirled along the crowded parkway notorious for the frequent fender-benders on its twists and turns. Probably she could do this drive in her sleep and had it clocked to the second, since she’d juggled work schedule and family schedule for the last however-many years. They scooted by Jamaica Pond, which meant she’d better keep talking fast if Alex was going to stick to his bargain about getting off at the T station in Forest Hills.
“The time you mean, though, I bet I know what weekend that was. That weekend I left the kids with my mother, and Richard was away, yeah, and one of my old girlfriends and I had a little t
ime on the town. We had kind of a little party there overnight. I stayed last, to finish tidying up. So maybe I, uh, maybe I did look a little guilty. Like, what were his neighbors going to tell him? Not that he’s the kind to care what his neighbors think, or what I do on my own time. If this Barbara really saw what she says, it could be that’s when. What was she doing there, though?”
“Spying, fantasizing, I don’t know what to call it. Acting like somebody out of True Romances, she says. When she saw you come out after this tryst, or so she thought, that helped snap her out of it, she says.”
“Tryst? Aren’t you polite! Me and Jay, huh? Trysting the night away.” She laughed again, relaxing, and passed up the Route 1 turnoff. “This Barbara. She’s not married? She says she’s not married, I mean?”
“No.”
“And Jay and her…”
“Hadn’t been in touch for twenty years, till she saw the article, according to her. And Jay didn’t know where she was, according to him. Do you remember a movie called Ocean’s 11? I don’t know, you might not be as old as me. This guy, Danny Ocean, assembles his old army unit, platoon or something, to steal a lot of money from the casinos in Las Vegas. It was Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, those guys. Sammy Davis, Jr. played the garbageman, of course. They were supposed to get away with the loot in the garbage truck. It all got incinerated by mistake.”
“No,” Deborah said. “No, but maybe I am younger than you. Why?”
“Because Jay asked me was I accusing him of something like that? Him and Foster and Barbara and Dee Sturdevant, all the companions from that cross-country trip. What do you think about that? Is he capable of setting up that kind of scam?”
“Suspicious is one thing. You’re getting into paranoid, I think.”
“Probably. As Jay quoted Foster to me once, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. If Jay lets you use his place, does he let you keep a key maybe? Maybe you keep it at the office, in case he locks himself out?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’d like to borrow it. I won’t disturb anything. I want to make a little ‘surreptitious entry,’ as the FBI would call it. It might help me put my paranoia to rest. Call it practicing conservative detection.” Practicing “conservative medicine,” Wagner and the neuro-op had sent him for a brain scan and had bored a hole to pull fluid out of his spine. It wasn’t any more invasive to take a peek around Jay Harrison’s house.
“It’s a kind of trust,” Deborah McCarthy said, “when somebody gives you their key. Especially when he lends you his place. Especially your boss. A fool and her money are soon parted. Same thing for a fool and her job.”
“This party,” Alex said. “With your old girlfriend. You said Barbara had good eyes, that she read your body language right. So there must have been somebody else there, somebody besides your old friend. Say, your own version of Barbarella? Some sexual phantom out of your past? Or your present, some unexpected one-night stand?”
“That’s none of your business, Alex. And it’s got nothing to do with the missing bone marrow, I swear to God.”
Alex just shrugged, but he knew he was right. He’d finally understood how the gears meshed in one small part of this mechanism, at least. So when Deborah pulled up at the passenger drop-off for the Forest Hills T station, he sat like a bolt long rusted into place. “I need that key,” he said. “And anything you know about his plans for tonight. Tonight would save time, if it’s possible. Otherwise I can go tomorrow morning while he’s at work.”
Deborah drummed her fingers on the wheel. Alex crossed his arms. He wasn’t getting out unless she called a cop.
“Oh, okay,” she said at last. “You want to ride all the way home with me, I guess you can. I’ve got a spare key, yeah. In case there’s some kind of emergency when he’s out of town. You can use it. But I’m doing this for the patient, not because I’m scared of whatever you think you’re holding over me.”
“Good,” Alex said. “Me too.”
26. You Know You Could Be Wrong
Richie— Richard McCarthy, Jr.— admitted to playing shortstop but otherwise met Alex with a blank yet curious stare. When asked about the Sox chances this year, he only shrugged. Yeah, Alex thought, and how would you feel if you knew I just threatened to rain suspicion and discord down on your happy home? Not that he could picture himself approaching the husband with what Barbara Binder had been sure she’d seen. On the whole, he thought Deborah wanted him to eliminate her boss from the list of suspects, and she’d just needed a little something extra to push her into going along. But what exactly had happened, and why she didn’t want it waved in her husband’s face, were mysteries he didn’t need to probe.
Deborah quizzed the kids about homework responsibilities, put potatoes and a premade tuna casserole in the oven, and said she’d be back as soon as she dropped Alex at the train. On the way to the commuter rail station she said, “There’s one other thing that happened, I guess you ought to know. Not that I believe any of this, but you’ll hear it sooner or later. Jay’s access number showed up on some queries about sperm counts, the way it would if he was trying to find out who was putting deposits in the bank.”
“The way it would if he was trying to decide whose to hold for ransom, you mean?”
“In the computer, the patient data system, you can get all kinds of information on who’s been admitted, and why, and what tests were ordered and what the results are. If you know what you’re doing, you could figure out from this what procedures will be done on them, or what kind of specimens might be stored where. You need an access number to get into the system. Every time somebody queries records on a patient, the access number gets recorded too. You see what I mean?”
“Uh-huh. And Agent Fridley put somebody to work following back these electronic trails?”
“It makes sense Jay would have been asking for blood test values, like on Mrs. Dumars and other patients; it doesn’t make sense he’d be asking for sperm counts. But his number doesn’t prove he did the asking, because people borrow each other’s numbers all the time. Doctors lend them to medical students, because the students haven’t got any. Or if your number’s being used for one query, you can’t use it for another right then, so doctors borrow the numbers of other doctors and nurses and everything too. But it’s got that FBI man all up in arms again. I just thought you ought to know about it, that’s all.”
From Norwood to South Station took Alex half an hour in a mostly empty railroad car. From South Station he took the Red Line subway to Charles and, for fifteen dollars, retrieved his Saab from the MGH lot. He followed Storrow Drive out along the river, cut across Allston into Brookline, and followed Deborah’s instructions to Jay’s address up on the big hill between Beacon Street and Commonwealth Ave. The sun had long since set. The curving street was lit by pale, clouded moonlight and diffuse circles under the streetlamps. Two days had gone by since Alex had stepped out of a cab on Dee Sturdevant’s block in the Mission District. He drove slowly past Jay’s house. According to Deborah, Jay wouldn’t be home. He’d told her he had an appointment for dinner and then he’d be coming back to the hospital to wait for the kidnapper to meet the self-imposed deadline. Deborah said she kept Jay’s business calendar but not his personal one, so she didn’t know whom the dinner appointment was with.
Jay’s place was a two-story brick house with a tiny porch, more of an enclosed stoop really, a brick arch topped by a pointed roof. The stoop was a kind of a miniature of the house, which also had a peaked roof on which the peak ran front to back. Charming brick one-family, the ad might say, with yard. Assuming there was a yard in back, with garden, as Deborah had claimed. Assuming she hadn’t sent him to the wrong place with the wrong key.
No one seemed to be home. No car sat in the driveway, and none of the windows were lit. Alex followed the curve of the street for half a block, parked, and walked back armed with the key plus a flashlight, two screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers from the toolbo
x in his trunk. He pushed the illuminated white doorbell that Barbara Binder’s finger had lingered over, she said. He rang again. When he tried the key, it turned. He eased open the wooden door, pushed it shut behind him.
Just in case, he called out, “Jay?” He left the lights off, in case Jay should show up. He used the flashlight to guide himself up the open, carpeted staircase along the right wall of the living room, just where Deborah said it should be. At the top he’d find Jay’s study or office or whatever he might call it. “It’s got a couch I sleep on,” she’d said. “I put the kids in his room, in sleeping bags. It would just seem weird, you know, sleeping in his bed.” The office seemed like a reasonable place to start looking.
Looking for what, Alex knew, was a question with no easy answer, maybe no answer at all. He was here to prove or disprove a negative proposition— that no evidence linked Jay Harrison to any conspiracy to kidnap or appear to kidnap Linda Dumars’s marrow. Conservative detection. So he supposed he was looking for a conspiratorial letter from Paul Foster or Barbarella or Dee. Or he was looking for recent deposit slips, traveler’s checks, certificates of deposit— or a mailbag still stuffed full of cash or full of something else. He didn’t know what he was looking for, except something that gave the lie to anything Jay had told him, or anyone else had said.
