by Dick Cluster
Jay said, “How did you find out those last few things?” He sounded tired. He ought to be tired, he’d been busy. Alex turned away from the bar and stood facing the painted locker, tapping the toe of his sneaker against the bottom of the sheet-metal doorframe that wasn’t really there.
“Following you.” Alex counted taps, one through ten, waiting for Jay to respond to that. When Jay didn’t, he added. “First I broke into your house, before you and Barbara showed up. Then I followed you to your get-together with Tom. You told me you wanted to hire somebody who’d identify with the patient above everybody else, remember? That’s what I’ve done. I hope you can explain to me how nothing I saw tonight has any bearing on where Linda’s marrow is.”
“I didn’t hire you to follow me.” Jay sounded disappointed, like somebody whose real or metaphorical bubble has burst. “I meant I wanted somebody that wouldn’t take any show-offy chances, you know that. To be blunt, I hired you to deliver something and to do certain research, to bring me certain facts. You told me about Barbara, you told me about Tom. I thought I ought to talk to them both. I don’t owe you explanations. When you get back to your desk, your shop, wherever you do your paperwork, you can send me a bill.”
Blew it, blew it, blew it! Alex was shouting at himself inside. Too much pressure, not enough patience, stripped the goddamn threads off the motherfucking bolt. His toe tapped harder, insistently, against the brown paint.
“What about Linda?” he demanded. “What about getting her marrow back?”
“She’s my patient,” Jay said, and now he sounded mad too. “She’s my patient, and I’m taking care of her the way my judgment tells me to. You’ve never even met the woman. Your judgment doesn’t seem very good right now. And maybe your doctor never explained something else to you, Mr. Glauberman. When you have a cancer, it’s a strong sign that you’re mortal. Like the rest of us. You seem to think it makes you into some kind of a god.”
The phone clicked dead. Alex held his toe still. Then he set to kicking the wall as hard as possible, like a pitcher knocked out of the box trying to demolish his locker on the way to the shower, trying to take his failure out on whatever was closest to him. His shoe bounced off the wall but he kept kicking. A dent appeared in the plasterboard. Brown paint chipped off too.
“Hey, you!” the bartender said. “Hey! You!” Alex looked over his shoulder to see her shaking a finger at him as if it were a magic wand that could command better than words. Alex stared at her and stopped kicking, embarrassed. She was good at this. She had to be, because she had to deal with a lot of stupid, angry drunks. The guy drinking at the bar had turned to stare, too, a man with a bandage over one eyebrow, a man maybe the bartender’s age. Look at the weird old guy kicking in the painting, they would both be thinking. Alex started to mumble an apology about being sorry, but the bartender suddenly broke her eyes away from his. Something seemed familiar about her expression. Then it was gone. She wasn’t paying him any more attention. Had there been something in his own eyes, he wondered. Something in them that she didn’t want to see?
“Sorry,” he said. He walked quickly out of the bar, into the motel lobby, and out into the night. Tomorrow, unless the marrow turned up, he’d have to chase after Barbara and Tom and see whether he could drive any wedges between their versions of tonight and Jay’s. Or turn what he’d seen over to Fridley. Right now it was time to give it all a rest and go home.
28. Chaff of the Harvest
“Jesus, Bobby,” Sandra said. She stared with wide eyes, while her dimpled chin dropped. “That was him. That was the guy that delivered the money. I swear it was. What was he doing here? Was it an accident? If it wasn’t an accident, what’s he trying to prove? Making sure I see him like that? What’s going on?”
She was whispering, but sharply. Her s’s came out in a hiss every time. When he didn’t answer, her face firmed up. Now she didn’t look charmed or pliant or even scared. Now she was giving him that hard-bitten don’t-bullshit-me look. He couldn’t find anything to say. Her expression confirmed what he’d feared. She was about to bail out now for sure.
“All this time I kept going over it,” she said. “Thinking what would’ve happened if they caught me this morning. So even if he wasn’t— even if that wasn’t him, I made up my mind already. No deeper, Bobby. No deeper for me.”
She was waiting for him to say something, and while she waited she was turning her head back and forth between him and whoever might be watching.
“How can that be the guy?” he started to say. But she interrupted him.
“I think we have to— you have to… I think it’s time for you to give up.”
Yes, he’d expected this. He’d expected it since he’d found out she screwed up in the sperm bank. He’d managed to talk her into not rushing into anything, into waiting till he could get here in person. He’d longed to stay away, but she was too dangerous to leave alone. So he’d rushed back, even had a car waiting where he was going to need it. Still he shrank from taking the next step. “What do you mean, give up?”
“Let them have the stuff, Bobby. Before she dies. Even if you are a doctor, you don’t know what’s too long.” Her look now conveyed not only determination but skepticism. She still wasn’t sure she believed the doctor part. Maybe because he didn’t match her image of what a doctor was like, maybe because people took orders from doctors, and she didn’t want to take any more orders from him. She said, “You don’t know how long is too long.”
“I know,” he said. “I know how long. Don’t worry. And I can’t believe that was the same guy. That looked like a guy with his own problems. Probably he’s staying here. Can’t you ask them that, at the desk?”
“Only if I want to attract attention. Probably, the thing is, probably in that situation, on the beach, they’d want to use an undercover cop. Not that you warned me about any of that. If he’s a cop, then they’re just waiting for—”
“They wouldn’t wait, would they?” Here at least he had logic on his side.
She shot him another dagger, but then she relented. They wouldn’t wait, that was true. They’d pounce. She took another of those obvious glances around and then she patted his hand on the bar. “Okay, it wasn’t him. And okay, you had a good idea. A great idea. And you didn’t tell me what was going on, with good luck I never knew. Better for both of us, okay. But it didn’t work, Bobby. Now you’ve got to face that.”
And if I don’t, he thought, you’ll face it for me. You figure they’ll let you off on a lesser charge if you turn me in, especially if you can save her life. If you can keep it from being murder. So fine. Let’s play it that way.
“Okay,” he said. He made himself smile, which wasn’t hard. This was something he was good at, charm. Charm and good looks, he should have found a better way to capitalize on those. What if, what if. He was getting really tired of himself, almost as tired as he was getting of her.
“Okay, I know it. But there’s a lot I still haven’t told you, for both our safety, both our sakes. Now listen. There’s one more batch of the marrow that’s buried back on the beach. I wasn’t going to use it because it has some— some technical deficiencies. It’s the— how can I put this? It’s the chaff of the harvest, so to speak. But there ought to be enough of the nucleated cells. Pick me up when you get off work, we’ll drive down and catch the dawn again. We’ll dig it up as soon as it gets light.”
“And you’ll give it back?”
“I’ll give it back, and then I’ll disappear. You won’t have to take any more chances. Nobody will get hurt. I’m sorry I put you through that scare this morning. It seemed like the best thing.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me— Hi, what can I get you?” she said to a fat man in a madras jacket who sat down on the next stool. He sat down on the next stool even though there were lots of empty ones. Was she right? Could they be under observation? They better the hell not be. Probably the fat guy was just jealous. If the barmaid was going to be friendly, she ough
t to be friendly with everybody at once. “Jack and ginger,” the man said. She went and mixed the drink and brought it back.
The man who called himself Bobby Lynch didn’t look at the man in the plaid jacket. He just put two quarters on the bar as if he were leaving a tip. “Thanks for the directions,” he said. It was a poor exit line, but it would have to do. He crossed the street to McDonald’s and called from there, dialing the number she’d given him, which rang the house phone behind the bar.
He said, “I’m getting so jumpy. You’re right, we’ve got to get this over with. I’ll be across the street when you get off work. Like last time, in front of the Star Market?” He wanted to add, and don’t tell anybody you‘re meeting me, but that would be pushing her credulity too far. Anyway, she wouldn’t. She was scared. So far she was still most scared of getting in too deep, even if she might be starting to be scared of him.
When she said okay, she’d pick him up, he was surprised at the will to believe that was unmistakable in her voice. Too bad it wasn’t so simple. That would be nice, to just dig it up and give it back, leave it on the doorstep like a baby. But he couldn’t do that. He wasn’t in the driver’s seat anymore.
DAY THREE
29. A Dead Girl
This time Alex rode up the beach, in a pale green four-by-four with a U.S. Department of the Interior seal on the side. A Cape Cod National Seashore employee was driving. His Smokey the Bear hat went well with his ruddy face and bristly red mustache. The ranger’s name was Frank Corcoran, and he’d taken charge of Alex when Alex stepped out of the helicopter onto the beach parking lot.
The helicopter had been piloted by a wiry guy who’d introduced himself only as “Slim.” Slim, as near as Alex had been able to figure out, was a civilian pilot under contract to the state police, whose copter in turn had been commandeered by the FBI. Like any helicopter pilot Alex’s age, he had presumably acquired his skills over the jungles of Vietnam. Slim claimed to know nothing about why Fridley needed Alex ferried across Massachusetts Bay like this, beyond what Alex already knew. Fridley wanted him to look at “something” on the beach. Alex didn’t know whether “something” meant a footprint or an identifying object or something else. He could imagine that Fridley had put a lot of people to work sifting through the sand. On Frank Corcoran, now, he tried the same question he’d put to Slim: what was worth bringing him all the way here in such a hurry to see?
“A dead girl that a jogger found,” Corcoran said with a shake of his head and hat. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything, but I wouldn’t want anybody to spring that on me.”
It was ten o’clock now, a lot later than it had been the last time Alex had been here on this beach. The sun had risen way up toward its zenith, casting only a short shadow of the truck on pale yellow sand. The whitish cliffs and deep blue waves were breathtaking, but they lacked the dawn’s sense of magic, of things transforming and coming alive. There were no fishermen, but more beachcombers. There were a lot of tire tracks in the sand.
A dead girl, Alex thought. Meaning somebody fully grown, or else the ranger would have said “a dead little girl” instead. Could it be Barbara? He was starting to wish he’d never located her.
“I appreciate that,” he answered. “And the special agent wants to know whether I recognize her?”
But Corcoran only shrugged. “What do I know about it? Did anybody tell me they were going to be paying over any ransom money on my beach?”
The distance that had taken Alex half an hour to walk took less than five minutes to drive. As they approached the place where he’d left the mailbag, he cursed silently because he still saw two posts before the two merged into one. When the Jeep got closer he saw new, smaller posts, red ones, surrounding the area. The red posts had plastic ropes strung between them. There were figures standing about, looking out to sea or turning toward the truck. Corcoran stopped about fifty feet away.
These other men, all of them men, were in suit pants and shirt sleeves. One of them came forward, turning into Jim Fridley. He offered Alex a hand down out of the high-slung truck, but Alex didn’t take it. A steady south wind blew a fine mist of sand up the beach from the direction Alex and Frank Corcoran had come.
Fridley led Alex along a path formed by two rows of the short red posts and plastic streamers. Alex expected to be warned not to disturb anything, but Fridley just said, “Come take a look.” No doubt all the forensic wizardry, the measurements and photos and gathering of samples, was all done by now. Alex took a breath to get ready. Then he was standing over her. Fridley was saying, “Is she the one? Is somebody trying to send us a message here?”
The woman lay curled halfway into a fetal position on her left side. Her face looked pale. Her fringed suede jacket was zipped up almost to where her throat had been cut. Blood stained some of the long leather fringes. The sand below her neck was brown with sunbaked blood. From the neck down, though, she might have been sleeping. She might have been asleep when this happened to her. She could have been curled like this for protection from the wind.
The last time Alex had seen her, this woman had been staring at a guy trying to kick in a wall. Now she was like a dead deer stiffening, no longer moving through her element, but inert and dried up and surrounded by men whose business this was. She was like a deer tied to a rack on top of a hunter’s car. Alex looked away, toward the ocean, then back. He didn’t feel queasy or disoriented, the way he’d felt when he’d watched Jay lift somebody’s encased marrow into the nitrogen mist. That had made him feel how fragile life was. This sight was different. It wasn’t about fragility but about pain and suffering and death. It was awful, but he found himself more steeled to face it. Perhaps because this wasn’t his first corpse.
Still, it took a while for Alex to understand what the FBI agent was asking: not whether he knew the woman, period, but whether she was the one he’d encountered last time he was on this beach. That’s why Fridley had rushed him down here. He wanted to know right away, and perhaps he wanted Alex to see her in this context, not on a slab in the morgue. Alex thought about the shock of recognition in the darkened bar. That had been, if anything, her recognizing him. His mind had been on Jay, Barbarella, Tom Dumars. He hadn’t noticed the resemblance, if there was one. Could he see it now?
If she were standing up, maybe. If she were in a wetsuit instead of the fringed leather and the jeans. If she were wearing a long blond wig. If she were waving her arm enthusiastically. He discovered he was holding his breath.
He let himself breathe. “I don’t know. Probably she’s about the right build. Mostly I remember the way she looked against the dune, the way she moved. I never got this close to her. It might be, it might not.” He looked at Fridley, who was watching him closely, coldly, without anger or expectation that Alex could see. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” he said. “I just don’t know whether it’s the same woman or not.”
“Take your time,” the agent said. “Point out to me where she was when you first saw her, up on the steps. Go through that again. And tell me what she looked like then.”
Alex went through it all again— who did what, and where the bottle landed, and how she dragged the money up the cliff, and where he dug. Only when he pointed out where he’d dug did he realize there was a new hole, maybe a yard or a yard and a half away. He looked down at the corpse again. “Was she digging? Was there a shovel? Did she have any sand under her nails?”
Fridley didn’t answer.
“Did they— do you think whoever was digging, or whoever killed her— do you think they took something out?”
“Like another one of those coolers? I can tell you this, I wish I knew. We’re going to dig the whole area soon.” A walkie-talkie on his belt crackled, interrupting him. He backed out the designated path and spoke into the radio while he looked high up on the dune. Alex saw a figure at the top of the steps. There must be more men up there, searching the bushes and paths. Fridley wiped away the sand the wind had blown against the
back of his neck and jerked his head to signal that Alex should approach.
“I don’t get many corpses,” Fridley said. “Kidnappers have a different profile than killers, generally speaking. They might both act out of vengeance, but kidnappers aren’t out for blood. Excepting terrorists who take hostages. She’s no hostage. If that’s her purse in the car, her name was Sandra Stewart. Her roommate says Stewart never came in last night, though that’s not so uncommon. The roommate says she called Tuesday night to say she was on a junket with a rich new boyfriend. In Las Vegas. Then she came back and wouldn’t talk about it at all. Stewart worked a night shift in a cocktail lounge not far from the Dennison Center. I’m not telling you all this for your curiosity. I want to know, does any of that connect with anything Harrison might have told you, anything you learned about this Foster, anything at all?”
Alex said, “Was it the Howard Johnson lounge? I know Jay Harrison went drinking there last night, with Linda Dumars’s husband. I followed him there. Ask Tom Dumars if somebody sideswiped him on Park Drive afterward. That was me.”
“I thought I told you…” Fridley began, but then he waved off the rest of his speech with a gesture that meant either impatience or disgust. Instead he said, “And?”
“And that’s all, except I called Harrison to ask for some explanations and he told me I wasn’t investigating this for him anymore.”
“So the doctor and I agree about something. Is it out of line, the doc commiserating with the patient’s husband over a drink? Might be, might not. You don’t know.” He turned his head to look at the corpse, or pretend to. “It might have saved a life if you’d told me this last night.”
