by Dick Cluster
That sound got her moving again. She tried to bring her knee up into the man’s crotch. He grunted and whacked her face hard with the back of his hand. She stumbled. Before she could straighten up he was reaching out both hands for her throat. Her mind kept working as his hands came closer. If he’d bothered to hide his face he must not have planned on killing her. So what? She reached behind her, found something solid, and tried to swing it. It was the microscope— too heavy, too awkward, badly balanced. He was on her again before she got her arm halfway up.
“Just stay goddamn still, woman,” he said, and now his hands did close on her throat. Her fingers reached for his eyes. Still squeezing her windpipe, he lowered his head between his arms, so all she could scratch was the back of his neck. Then he butted her collarbone, hard, and through the fog and pain she tried to say, “Okay, I’ll stay still.” Her only hopeful thought was that he’d said “woman” and not “bitch.” He butted once more, and when she went limp he let go of her throat. She landed painfully on the floor, the man standing over her, breathing hard, his head wagging from side to side.
“The closet, get in the closet.” His voice was muffled and unfamiliar. Rumor had it that security had been on the lookout not only for a white woman, the pretend nurse, but also for a black man. This man was white. Should she do what he said or keep fighting? She slid back on the floor, toward the open closet. He stood over her, touching his wound, looking at his fingers, gauging how much blood. She slid back into the closet, scanning the lower shelves for some kind of weapon in case he came in too. The door slammed against her toes.
Everything was dark now. It was too late to find anything. Everything was dark except a slit of light where the door hadn’t closed because of her toes. She pulled her toes back, expecting him to shut her in totally. Nothing happened. She got up on her knees, turned her head sideways, cautiously brought her ear as close as she dared to the slit. She listened. She heard his heavy breathing. That was all.
“Stay in there,” he commanded. “I’ve got your scissors now. I don’t want to have to cut your throat.” Did he really say that? She shrank back, but then put her ear to the crack to listen again. A hiss. A sound she’d know anywhere. He was opening one of the tanks. Then a different kind of hiss, an intake of breath as the cold hit him, as it probably burned his wounded face. So he was leaning over the tank. He’d come to make good on the theft. He wanted specimens, wanted them violently. She felt herself shaking, shivering. He wanted them enough to strangle her or cut her throat. This had to go beyond money, beyond ransoms. It was like men coming after their ex-girlfriends. If I can’t have her, nobody can. Could a man feel that way about semen? About his ex-woman’s new man? If I can’t knock her up, nobody can?
She made herself stop shivering, and then she put her eye to the slit. She needed to know what her attacker was doing, to try and figure out what he was going to do next. She pushed ever so gently, and then she could see his back as he reached into the tank. With his gloved left hand he held the rack up high. His right shoulder dipped. She couldn’t see what he was doing. Then, as he twisted, she could see his right arm bent at the elbow, the forearm resting against the rim of the tank. His elbow was jiggling. What on earth was he doing, rolling imaginary dice? She started to shiver again.
What was he doing? He wasn’t hurrying. Except for the way he was using his left arm to hold up the big rack, he looked like a man leaning against the rail of a dock, fishing with a hand line, jigging for crabs. He began to raise his right forearm, slowly, as if pulling something up. He turned his head in her direction. She shrank back, slid to the far end of the closet. After a moment, his footsteps came her way. His breathing wasn’t as heavy. He didn’t say anything. With relief, she watched the slit of light disappear. He was done with her. She was safe. Slumping onto the floor, she heard scraping sounds. He was pushing something, the desk, against the closet door. After that she didn’t hear anything.
She was safe, but she’d also been just a few minutes too late in her thinking. He’d fished something out from the bottom of her tank, with a hook on some kind of shaft, or maybe with a magnet on a line. It had to be. What else could it be? The stolen bone marrow must have been sitting at the bottom of the long-term semen storage tank all this time. Only now it wasn’t. Now he had it. She waited a minute, till she was sure he must be gone, and then crawled forward and tried to force her way out with this news.
She turned the knob and put her shoulder to the door and pushed. Pushing didn’t seem to do any good. She turned around and put her back to the door, pushing that way, getting more strength out of her legs. It wasn’t any better. She remembered the scraping sound, how long it had taken him to push the desk against the door. There’d been scraping, and then quiet, and then scraping again. He’d needed to push first one side, then the other. The desk had been too heavy for him to push all at once. Still she shoved, with no effect, and then she stopped shoving and began just plain pounding her fists against the door. Maybe someone would hear.
After a while her fists hurt from pounding. She’d have to try pushing again. It was so infuriating that she’d come to the right conclusion just a few minutes— maybe seconds— too late. The specimen must have been there since, when was it, Monday, according to what Edie said. Who could have put it in there? And then she remembered something else.
On Monday a repair technician had come to check the automatic draw devices; they did that from time to time, reasonably enough. She remembered his uniform, a blue uniform, and an ID tag which of course she hadn’t thought to check. She remembered his mustache, his heavy dark-rimmed glasses. She thought now that he’d also worn a cap, some kind of logo cap. Had he been carrying anything, a container? He’d had a toolbox. She hadn’t paid much attention to any of this at the time.
She’d gone to the front room after a while, and she’d still been in the front room when the repairman had left. Now that she thought of it, now that she had to think about it, something mildly strange had happened then. He’d come out that way, through the front, and he’d said everything was set, no problem, or some such parting words. She’d looked up to acknowledge them and noticed one of the guys in the waiting room giving the repairman a very funny look. The patient had stuck his head back in his magazine as soon as he felt her eyes on him. But now she thought about that funny look. It was as if the patient had recognized the repairman but didn’t recognize him, as if he hadn’t been sure whether it was the person he thought or not. Did that explain anything? It didn’t matter now. Mary Forziati pushed, without result, and then went back to pounding on the closet door.
32. Traveling Clothes
Motels and restaurants and woods and ponds and closed-up T-shirt shops flashed by. The 505’s valves sounded worn. Alex went on telling Linda Dumars’s story and the stories that seemed to be linked with hers. Foster’s sudden appearance was like a magic show where the magician promises a rabbit but only produces handkerchiefs and snakes and flowers from his hat. Just when you’ve almost forgotten to watch for it, the bunny comes hopping out of the magician’s mouth. He told Foster what he knew and what he suspected. Foster had promised that he’d give a story in return.
Alex had changed his mind about the phone booth. Gordon Kramer could wait a little while. The thing to do was to go methodically and carefully, as Hans Heidenfelter would advise, not jumble up the small parts or strip the threads from any more bolts he might need. The thing to do was to feel out what surrounded him. Now that it had come down to murder, the wrong move could panic the kidnapper. The wrong move would be even more likely to panic the kidnapper than before.
Or wasn’t that it?, Alex asked himself as he talked. Meredith had once observed that he approached his investigations like a squirrel with a nut, or a boy with a new treasure. He’d pull out some nugget and stare at it from several angles, then hide it away in his pocket again. He knew he had his reasons for this, the same reasons that had him running a one-man repair shop.
“Y
eah, I do remember that trip,” Foster said when Alex was finished. “I remembered a lot about it after Dee called me, and more after you and me got through wolf-talking each other on the telephone.” In telephone he put the accent on the last syllable. The cadence reminded Alex of somebody else, but he didn’t know whom. “I was remembering the scheme to kidnap Kissinger. Was that in that diary? Kind of a party game— what would we want for ransom, what were we making for demands. Get us out of Vietnam. Free the Panthers in jail. Let the Indians have Wyoming. Change the national anthem to ‘Dancin’ in the Street.’ ”
As he talked, Foster watched the road. He gripped the black plastic steering wheel in his big hands. He flexed his fingers, raising all four from the wheel and closing them one at a time, in sequence, like a musician playing a scale. He’d had nice hands, Dee had said in her journal. Bald and bearded in Dee’s picture, he’d stood out more, like a wrestler. Now his pepper-and-salt hair, medium length, went with his wire-rimmed glasses to give him a milder, almost bookish look. He had a day’s stubble on the puckery pores of his cheeks and chin. He had wide cheekbones that rounded out his face, like the Foster in the photograph, though below them now there was slack skin around saggy jowls.
“Not so militaristic, you know? Swinging and swaying and records playing, instead of rockets and bombs and all of that?” He shot Alex a quick glance, so Alex nodded vigorously. Foster had sought him out and picked him up for some reason, he was sure. Now Foster was painting the picture of himself that would go with that reason. Everybody did this, by force of habit, because you couldn’t just expect to be seen all at once and convincingly for the whole person you were. Black men, Alex thought, needed to develop that picture-painting habit more than most.
“Sure,” Alex said. “An invitation across the nation, a chance for folks to meet.” With Jay, this recitation would have gotten him points. With Foster, it might or might not. But Foster had a point. “The Star-Spangled Banner” celebrated a fort, people holed up inside it, siege mentality, is somebody going to take away what we’ve got. The other song was about stepping out and reaching out— and feeling safe among your fellow citizens on the streets.
“Dee helped me get a lawyer after we rattled around coast-to-coast,” Foster said, eyes again on the road or the scenery or the past. “A lawyer to see about my, uh, fugitive status. I don’t know if she told you that.”
“She did. Eventually you sent her a postcard, saying dishonorable but free.”
“Yeah, well, that was just me being careful to give that impression, you know. I never did get discharged, because I never did go back and trust my body to the justice of a military court. Civilian court either, since I had a suspended sentence for an old bullshit charge still hanging over me. I thought it’d be better to get to be somebody else.”
“You got a new identity?” Alex said. He remembered that the new-identity business had held a fascination for both Foster and Jay.
“That’s it. It wasn’t too hard. Nobody was looking for Paul Foster the way they were going after Eldridge Cleaver, and they didn’t even manage to find Eldridge at that time. You might know somebody yourself that went through some of that, that operates under a different name than the one when the teacher called the roll in first grade.”
As a matter of fact, Alex did know somebody like that. “Did you have to start a lot of things over?” he asked Foster. “I tried to find you through the alumni office at Morgan State, but I didn’t have any luck.”
“They wiped me off their list, is that what you ran up against there? Some things I had to do over. When I got around to it I went back and got a new high school diploma, a GED. Sometimes I dabble with college courses, mostly art courses, on the side. For a while I had to be real careful about contact with my folks, because you don’t know who might decide to take an interest. Then too I was into some other shit that, you know, made me want to stay close to the ground. But lately I’m a solid working citizen. And I’ve got a family of my own.”
Foster glanced in the rearview mirror and fell silent. Alex remembered the moody conversationalist of Dee’s journal, alternately reaching out and barring the door. To keep the conversation going he asked a hitchhiker kind of question. He said, “What kind of work do you do?”
“Used to be printing and copying, now I’m into graphics and desktop publishing.” But Foster didn’t seem to want to talk about his work, either, because he lapsed into silence again. “It’s a long way from making revolution,” he said suddenly. “But I tell myself it does something for the community, gives a few young people some training, some employment, you know.”
“Dee said your brother had a printing shop.”
“J.T.’s shop went bust a long time ago. Then he went to work for the government. The way they say about kids, small business is just a phase you pass through. But you see what I’m saying. I’ve got this shop right now. I’ve got my family. None of it’s under Paul Foster, you know what I’m saying? As years went on by, I stopped being careful. Now, say somebody started taking a big interest in Paul Foster all over again. Say some white men in dark suits started in banging on my mama’s door. Say they threatened to come down hard on her neighbors, say they called on everybody that might have a relative on probation or what have you. Sooner or later they’d find out where to find me. I didn’t want any part of this, I told you that right off, but if the FBI was coming looking, I thought it was time to get out the old traveling clothes. I drove up to Boston, I know some folks here. I came knocking on your door bright and early this morning. If I can help you clear this up, it’s good for you, and good for me, and my mama’s neighbors, and that woman lying in the hospital bed.”
Not bad, Alex thought. Not a bad story. A few parts underside and a few parts upside of the American dream. Was it the truth?
“What about the fishing rod?” Alex asked. “When you drove to Boston from wherever, why did you bring a deep-sea fishing rod along?”
“Oh, the fishing rod? When your— is that your wife, the one that told me where to find you?”
“My girlfriend. Woman friend.”
“When she told me the police took you to look at something on that beach, I thought I ought to have some way to look a little bit like I belong. And my friend that I’m staying with, he’s a fishing fiend. Otherwise I would’ve had to run up and down the beach, be a jogger you know, and I don’t know if I’m in shape for that.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. “How come Dee knew where to find you, by the way?”
Foster signaled with his right blinker and slowly, not hurrying, pulled the car off onto the shoulder and stopped. He twisted to face Alex, his torso barely fitting between the seat back and the steering wheel when he turned. He said, “I didn’t come to get interrogated. It’s damn stupid for me to come here at all. That’s what my wife told me, that’s what I told myself all the way up. Now here I am. We can try to figure out who’s been using my old name, or I can go back home and wait for trouble to come to me. The answer to your question is one day I found myself in Oakland and I got an itch to see if I could go locate Dee Sturdevant across the Bay.”
When Alex didn’t say anything, Foster faced forward again and put the car into first. He shifted into second too soon, dropping the r.p.m.s more than he ought to, then did the same thing when he shifted into third.
“I think we ought to stop long enough to call Jay’s secretary,” Alex said, “and ask her a few questions about this Kramer so we can decide what to do next.”
“Yeah, okay.” Foster rubbed his stomach. “I’ll dial and get her on the phone. You talk and I’ll listen. And we’ll get something to eat.”
They stopped before the bridge at a doughnut shop, where Foster bought two for himself, chocolate, and two for Alex, the powdered sugar kind. Alex didn’t know whether this was some new commentary on their partnership or whether Foster just liked chocolate best. He was still thinking about what Foster had said about getting an itch. He thought that maybe one reason they were
together now was that, under pressure, Foster had gotten another one— an itch to take a break from his family and his shop and run around and do crazy shit like this again. Alex understood that kind of itch. He also understood why Foster wanted to place the call: to make sure Alex wasn’t going to call anybody else and announce who had picked him up. Even when you ran around doing crazy dangerous shit, you ought to do it in a cautious way.
“Is this Ms. McCarthy?” Foster asked. “Mr. Glauberman would like to speak to you, hold on.”
“Alex?” Deborah sounded confused. “Who was that? Was that the police? Things are crazy here. Some woman got murdered, on the same beach you took the money to. The police say Jay knows her, or he might know her. They want to know was he at such-and-such a barroom last night? Was he ‘in the habit’ of drinking there?”
“Was he?”
“Huh? Well, not a habit, but I know it’s a convenient place he goes once in a while. I don’t know where he was last night. Except he was here from about one o’clock on. He stayed here all night. Linda had some trouble, something in her lungs, she had to get a transfusion to stop her from bleeding inside. So Jay was here later, everybody testified to that. What about before? Were you— did you go to his house?”
“Yes. And then I followed him to the HoJo’s they’re asking about. He didn’t tell you that? Where is he now?”
“Up on the unit. He wants to stay close to Ms. Dumars, he says.”
“Deborah, listen. I’ll be there in a few hours, I’ll sit down with Jay then, but I need to know something now. About Gordon Kramer.”
