by Dick Cluster
“Oh, what the hell,” Kramer said. “You don’t know what it’s like, to watch yourself keep doing stupider and stupider things. Driving drunk. Choosing that beach to cut her artery on. Tie it in a ribbon, I thought, give them Bobby if they can trace him, Bobby the killer and Bobby the kidnapper too. That leaves Gordon okay, once the marrow turns up, once I get it back, not screwing up like Sandra, and I leave it some convenient place. Only I screwed up and let the other one cut me, mark me like a pile of bad bills. Couldn’t show up at work on Monday like that. And then I went to get stitched— good medicine— that slowed me down disappearing, I thought I had time. And then Foster. Foster, Jesus. But that bastard made a fool out of you too.”
The parts made sense to Alex, most of them, but not the whole. Time was passing, time he knew he didn’t have because the silvery jug kept getting farther and farther away. “Hold the knife, please, Gordon,” he said as gently as he could. “Hold the knife steady, that’s all you have left to do.”
36. Science
Kramer did it. He held the little kitchen knife tightly enough in his bound hands. When the blade finally cut through the phone cord, Alex whirled around and grabbed it and sawed feverishly to free his legs. He left Gordon Kramer there on the living room floor. He had no more use for Jay’s former protégé.
Downstairs the men in the snap-brimmed caps were still talking, and Foster’s Peugeot was gone. Alex ran the two blocks to Harvard Street and dropped a dime into a pay phone. He called Jay’s number, because Foster had said that everything was between him and Jay now. Deborah answered. She said Jay had left.
“He was up on the unit, but now I don’t know where he went. Usually he tells me. He must have been in a hurry. I don’t know.”
“It’s important,” Alex said. “Don’t bullshit me. I know who has the marrow.”
“You know who has it? Who?”
“Foster. Now tell me the truth. Where’s Jay?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure he’ll want to hear about this. Did you tell the police?”
“Not yet. But if I don’t find Jay, I’ll have to. They’ll put out an all-points for Jay, Foster, Jay’s Celica, Foster’s Peugeot. So tell me. Where’s Jay?”
“I wish I knew, Alex. I’ll have him beeped, right away. Can you give me the number where you are?”
“I call you back in about ten minutes, instead.”
“Good. I’ll find him. Soon.”
By the time this conversation was over, Alex was nearly sure that through the past several days Deborah McCarthy had been telling him the truth. Because she was an awful liar. When she lied, she sounded like a recording. She didn’t sound like her.
Luckily Coolidge Corner was still the kind of shopping district where old men and old women got out of cabs. Alex jumped in the one unloading down the block. The Dennison Center, he told the driver, and fast, please. When they got there he told the driver to go on into the parking garage and to cruise slowly up the ramp, because he was looking for somebody’s car. The driver didn’t comment. He negotiated the spiral, the spaces radiating in and out from the spiral like a model of a chromosome, or the way Alex imagined a chromosome to be. At the sixth-floor level, some empty spaces started to show up. Medical science could tell a great deal by looking at chromosomes. Foster’s white Peugeot told Alex what he needed to know.
Deborah sat at her desk, staring at her computer screen, waiting. When she saw Alex her fingers started flying on the keys. She stopped and shook her head.
“I couldn’t find him,” she said. “He won’t answer the page.”
“He went to meet Foster.”
“Did he? Then you know more than I do. Can I have the key to his house back, please? Did you find anything there?”
“Just him and Barbarella. When he agreed to meet Foster, he must have suspected he was taking a chance. You’re the person he would have told where he was going, just in case.”
“Well… that’s true. He said downtown, on the Common. Where there would be a lot of people around. In front of the information booth.”
“No,” Alex said. “And you’re a bad liar. Foster’s here in the building, somewhere. I think he’s trying to cut some kind of deal with Jay.”
“Then let him.” Deborah stuck her chin out. Her brows knitted. She looked like herself again. She stood up and put a hand against his chest. She was more comfortable challenging him with the truth. “What do you care what kind of deal? All that matters is Linda’s cells.”
Alex shook his head again. She was right, but the words didn’t signify anything about what he ought to do. He rubbed his wrist where the indentations from the phone cord lingered on his skin.
Deborah took her eyes from his, shot them to the open hallway door behind him, then back. She let her hand drop but didn’t move from where she stood. Behind her the door to the examining room, which had always been open before, was closed. It would be a safe place, and she could see to it that Jay and Foster weren’t discovered or disturbed. Alex took a small step closer.
“No.” This time she put both hands on his shoulders and tried to push him back. Her touch was springy, elastic. It had a power his t’ai chi teacher would like. “Not unless you’re sure Jay’s involved in it,” she said.
Jay was involved, everybody’s motives seemed to swirl around him, but he didn’t seem to be involved in the way she meant. “They’re in back?” Alex asked.
“No, in there.” She jerked her head toward the wall that separated them from Jay’s office next door.
“Then I won’t disturb them. I’ll just listen, that’s all.”
Deborah thought that over. Close up like this, her eyes were catlike in a way Alex hadn’t noticed; green like Meredith’s, but with black lashes, quick, furred.
“From the beginning, it was Foster?” she demanded. “Did Jay know that?”
“No, it wasn’t Foster. It was Gordon Kramer. But Foster wanted it too. He says he has his own grievance against Jay.”
“That’s no reason for you not to let Jay handle it.”
“Just trust the doctor?” Alex said. “No. I can either listen in or call the police.”
Deborah didn’t argue. She took her hands off his shoulders. She even tried a smile as she got out of the way. “You don’t trust anybody,” she said.
Alex opened the door softly and closed it as softly behind him. Jay’s examining room was like any other: black Naugahyde table, small efficiency sink, antiseptic yellow baked enamel drawers and shelves. His diplomas hung in here, on the otherwise unadorned walls. Alex tiptoed to the black door that connected this room to Jay’s office, Jay’s burrow with the Japanese patterns and the blown-up cells and the baseball stars. He pressed his ear against the door. He could hear Foster’s voice.
“So when Dee quoted me the letter, I said, ‘Goddamn. Jay wrote it himself.’ Because how many people would know, and remember, where and when I picked you up? Only you, and me, and Dee. So you wrote the letter, and why? To set me up. You took the stuff and used me as a decoy. That’s what the facts said to me.”
“No,” Jay said. “Barbara knew too. I guess I told her, and she remembered. Funny the things you remember. Baltimore Beltway, sunny day.”
Foster’s voice came across edgy, accusing, while Jay’s had that forced medical calm. How long had they been talking, and about what else? Alex felt he had come in on the middle of the movie, and he had only the soundtrack, not the screen. He knelt down, pressed his ear tighter, and shut his eyes. He tried to see Foster flexing his fingers, Jay’s hands resting on the desk. In this silence they’d be staring. Foster wouldn’t have the marrow with him, not here. He’d have it stashed someplace only he knew.
“Barbarella,” Foster said at last. “Tell me where does she fit in?”
“She wrote me a letter, no blackmail, just an invitation to get together, after she saw me in People and knew where I was. It was kind of mushy, she says. How fate had thrown us together. How I happened to be standing on that part
icular road I’d told her about, on that particular sunny day. How you and Dee and I happened to stop a thousand miles later for a swim. Only I didn’t get her letter. Somebody must have lifted it from the mail room or the mail cart. They must have used what they learned to make up that other letter, the threatening one, supposedly from you.”
“And you just fell for it.” Foster’s voice rose, incredulous and disgusted. “You started waving my old name all around?”
Alex opened his eyes, stared at the phone, yellow like the shelving, mounted on the wall next to the door. He could pick up the phone, call security, leave it to the SWAT team. But he waited. He wanted to hear Foster out. Something wasn’t clear. Alex felt he had the whole mechanism disassembled, but the parts were out of order because somebody had purposely kicked them across the floor.
“I didn’t start waving it. Not with your name in it. I took some risks to protect you.”
“Protect me? You hired a detective to find me, man. And then you gave my name to the FBI. You didn’t think, what could Foster be into now, or what old trouble could be still hanging over his head…”
“I did think. I rewrote the blackmail letter to keep you out of it. When they found out I’d messed with it, I was trapped, so I had to tell them why. Anyway I knew I didn’t steal the marrow. I didn’t know for sure about you. I still don’t, dammit. What do you mean you know where it is?”
“I mean I know where it is,” Foster added, slowly and flatly, as if speaking to someone who refused to understand a simple fact. “We’re chasing each other round and round the tree, Jay,” he went on more mildly. The mildness allowed Alex to take an easier breath.
“All right, I read the facts wrong,” said Foster. “You didn’t put my name to that note to set me up. But you still took it into your head I wrote it, you see what I’m saying? Twenty years go by, and somebody that once picked you up thumbing— and doesn’t have any dirt on you to peddle— takes it into his head to hit you up for ten thousand bucks? And then he steals something off you, after he warned you he was looking your way? What kind of sense does that make? Or is it because black males are drawn to blackmail, drawn to be doing stupid-ass angry things? And you’re supposed to be a scientist, Dr. Jay.”
It was as if Foster had caught himself about to start yelling and willed his volume back down. Or as if he’d caught himself on the verge of confessing to too much faith in Jay’s good sense and then needed to retreat into disdain. Alex felt the limitations of blindness. He couldn’t tell what Foster wanted. He didn’t know what Foster would do if he didn’t get what he wanted from Jay.
“I didn’t decide you wrote it,” Jay maintained doggedly. “I just didn’t rule that possibility out. Not till last night, when Barbara explained the way I just said. Till then I was thinking maybe you, maybe somebody you told… See, the extortion letter sounded like it was prompted by me being in the magazine. I thought that was a sensible hypothesis. Somebody saw me there and said, ‘Hey, now Jay Harrison is big and important and he’s got bucks.’ ”
“Yeah,” Foster said. “Now you’re talking, because way back in some corner of your mind you kind of thought you deserved to get held up. And see, there’s something else. You were sure it all got started because you got your face in a magazine.”
Jay didn’t answer that. Alex pressed his ear tighter against the black-painted surface. Would Jay’s answer matter? Alex still felt Foster’s hand yanking his hair, Foster’s knee in his back, prying him loose from Linda Dumars’s marrow. He could still picture the way Foster had rubbed his own two hands together, a man celebrating a long task completed well. If Foster was determined to act out Jay’s nightmare, Jay had better have something very convincing to say. Alex closed his fingers around the doorknob and twisted gently. Locked. There wasn’t anything he could do either, except to join the conversation by yelling or banging on the door.
“Uh-huh,” Foster said. “You got brains, Jay, you got some decency, but all the time you think the world turns around you. You were like that then, you’re like that now. Somebody used you that way, Jaybo, somebody that had your number. Nobody long lost that saw your picture. Somebody working here in your hospital that’s got a burr up their ass about you.”
That was right on target. It explained Jay’s mistakes, mistakes Alex himself had swallowed.
“Yeah,” Foster said into Jay’s silence, and Alex thought he heard a soft sound, twice, the sound that brushing hands together might make. “Uh-huh. Glauberman figured this out, figured who that was, your man Gordon Kramer, more than I did. It was Kramer set me up, it wasn’t you. Then he got a shock when the real Paul Foster took him down. But time’s passing, and I need to go. As soon as I can, I’ll call you and tell you where that missing bone marrow is.”
Jay found his voice at last. “Gordon— you confronted him, confronted Gordon? But he’s in— you saw the marrow? Does he have it now?”
“Now? No, not now. I got it from him. I don’t want it, the woman you’re taking care of needs it, but it’s got to be done my way. The way I say. Because the minute her stuff shows up, there’s going to be Feebies coming out of the walls, and you ain’t gonna be the one in charge. It’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of talk. You have to go through that. I don’t. The safest thing for me is to make my ass as hard to find as it was before.”
“You’ve got the marrow?” Jay said. Alex wasn’t sure he’d heard any of the rest. Alex had heard it. He wasn’t sure what to believe. Either Foster was lying, or it was Foster who’d kicked the parts all over the floor.
“It’s where I put it,” said Foster, with an irritated edge. “Somebody’s got to trust somebody. From where I’m standing, the best way is that you’ve got to trust me.”
Alex banged on the door at last. “Deborah?” Jay said.
“No, it’s Houdini.”
The door opened. Alex held up his wrists like an escape artist. Foster was standing halfway between the desk and the door, betraying surprise for the first time since Alex had met him. He was swallowing hard, blinking behind his glasses as if Alex were an apparition he wanted to deny.
“It’s all right,” Alex told him. “I’m a step ahead of you, but back there you were a step ahead of me. Kramer told me a lot more after you left. Seeing you go off with the marrow broke whatever defenses he had. You planned it like that?” Alex heard the hopefulness in his own voice. “I mean, what you said about how you’d been after the marrow all along, about using the torch on me. That was for Kramer’s benefit?”
“Mess with his mind, you mean?” Alex thought he saw faint amusement pass through Foster’s eyes, but then they were steady again. Mess with Kramer’s mind and yours too, partner, that amusement would say. “I thought it might do that. I sure as hell wasn’t about to cut you loose, not then. I thought I might as well get to make the rules for a change.” He looked at Jay, who was still holding onto the doorknob, twisting it back and forth. “I think we’re done talking. Now I need an hour to get out of the way, then I call you and say where it is.”
“Do it,” Alex said. “Give him an hour, Jay.”
“I don’t know,” Jay said.
“Do it,” Alex told him. He turned back to Foster. “You’re sure it’s someplace safe?”
“Safer than it’s been,” Foster said.
“Okay,” Jay agreed. Graciousness flowered on his rounded face. “Thanks for your help,” he said. “It’s— well, it’s nice to see you again.”
“Yeah. Just like old times.” Foster turned around and walked quickly out the door.
Alex watched him go. There was still time to call security, before the Peugeot was out of the garage. But Alex’s marrow told him to take the man at his word. For Linda’s sake, he hoped his marrow knew best.
37. Post Mortem
Six weeks later, Alex walked into the family room of the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at the Dennison Center for Cancer Treatment and Research. The family room, intended for small conferences between staff and rela
tives, was full to overflowing. Nobody wanted to sit down on the couch or the few upholstered chairs. Everybody insisted on standing up. Barbara Binder was there already, as were Mary Forziati and Kevin Royce— now discharged— and Deborah McCarthy and the hospital security chief and five or six unit staff whom Alex didn’t know.
Gordon Kramer wasn’t there and wasn’t coming. His death had made only a small item in the newspaper, even smaller than the sparse story about his arrest. Together they added up to this: a Dennison Center resident, on bail after confessing he’d murdered his girlfriend, had mixed himself a suicide potion that worked. His colleagues said the whole thing came as a complete shock, but they described the murderer-suicide as a troubled young man. His hopes for his medical career had perhaps been beyond his abilities. Perhaps, an unnamed colleague speculated, the same had been true of his hopes in love.
Those words prettied Kramer up, Alex thought. They cheaply diverted attention from the heart of the matter to matters of the heart. Kramer was somebody who couldn’t handle failure, and who hadn’t ever had an open-ended chance to learn what, for himself, might constitute success. He took that problem out on people who were vulnerable. He’d come of age in the eighties. What else could you expect?
If the power of the high gods prevented Kramer’s death from being more of a story, it prevented Linda Dumars from making the news pages at all. The Dennison was everybody’s favorite charity. The advancement of treatment techniques depended on fundraising, on public confidence, on insurers being convinced the new techniques were effective and safe. The medical grapevine knew part of the true story, but the medical grapevine had its own reasons for hanging tough in a situation like this. The rumors would keep Jay Harrison from ever being chief of service or medical director anywhere. But he’d claimed he didn’t want any of that.
One of the staff latched onto Alex, a heavy-set, thin-voiced woman who turned out to be Edie, the cryopreservation specialist from whose tank Linda’s bone marrow had disappeared. Edie told him there was a combination lock now, and the number got changed every week. She said anyone who went in there had to show ID. She said, “I know this must sound like locking the barn door after the horse is gone.”
