Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  I walked over to the phone stands opposite the reception desk and called George DeVries again. When he didn’t answer a second time, I called information and got the number of Dr. Anthony Phillips. His answering service said he was in surgery at Jewish Hospital. I decided to try to catch him before I went back to the Delores. But first I called Bluerock at home, to see if he’d found out anything about Walt Kaplan’s plane trip.

  “No!” he said. “Not a fucking thing!”

  “They must have used aliases,” I said.

  “That’s not too good, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not good.”

  “Look, Bill was talking about his mother all week,” Bluerock said. “Maybe I should call her. Maybe she knows where he is.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” I said.

  “Oh, by the way,” Bluerock said. “Some bitch has been calling you up for the last couple of hours.”

  “Was it Laurel Jones?” I asked, probably because she was on my mind.

  “She was the one in your apartment today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, it wasn’t her. I would have recognized her voice. I don’t know who this one was, and she wouldn’t leave her name or a message. She said she had to talk to you.”

  “Well if she calls again, tell her I’ll be back around six thirty.”

  “You know, I didn’t hire on to be your fucking answering service,” Bluerock said as he hung up.

  28

  I DROVE across Clifton from Deaconess to Jewish. Dr. Anthony Phillips was still in surgery, according to the Emergency Room candy striper I spoke with. When I asked her what kind of surgery, she said, “Cancer, I guess. That’s his specialty.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that.

  I told the girl I was with the DA’s office, showed her my badge, and asked her to tell Dr. Phillips that I would be waiting to talk to him after he finished his operation. She said she’d give him the message.

  I wandered over to the waiting area and sat down across from an enormously fat woman in a striped knit shirt and red rayon slacks. A very thin man, her husband I thought, sat beside her, resting his head in one gaunt hand and saying nothing.

  A little past six, a slender mustached man wearing a blue surgical cap and gown walked up to the reception desk. He said a few words to the candy striper and she pointed in my direction. He came over to me, a weary, skeptical look on his face. Given the nature of the job he had just done, I figured that he probably didn’t have a lot of patience left for strangers.

  “Are you the cop?” he said acidly.

  The fat woman pushed herself up with alacrity, and her husband lowered his hand and leaned forward in his chair.

  “I’m the cop,” I said. “How’d the operation go?”

  “I don’t know,” Phillips said, sitting down on the chair beside mine. “Ask me in five years.”

  “You’re a cancer specialist?”

  He nodded. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “You had a patient I’m interested in. Bill Parks.”

  The surgeon looked at me for a moment. “You know I’m not supposed to talk about my patients. That’s the law.”

  His by-the-book attitude surprised me and ticked me off. “You’re not a psychiatrist,” I said. “Whatever you were treating him for isn’t going to be used in his defense.”

  “Now, how do you know that?” he said.

  “And what does that mean?” I said.

  Phillips looked over at the fat woman, who was watching us with naked curiosity.

  “Let’s go down the hall,” he said, getting to his feet.

  I followed him down a corridor to the surgeon’s lounge—a drywall cubicle furnished with a couple of chairs, a sofa, and a table with a coffee machine on it. Phillips boosted himself to a cup of coffee, then sat down on the sofa.

  “I guess it really doesn’t make a difference if I talk to you about Bill,” he said, stirring the coffee with a forefinger. “He’s a dead man, anyway.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “What hasn’t he got is a better question. Hepatic disorders. An endocrine system that is not of this world. Mammogenesis. Testicular atrophy. Enlargement of the skull and jaw. You name it, he’s got it. Plus, he’s still growing.”

  “What do you mean, he’s still growing?”

  “You know—growing. Getting taller.”

  “He’s twenty-nine years old,” I said. “How could he be getting taller?”

  “Therein lies the problem,” Phillips said. He swallowed the coffee in a gulp, crumpled up the styrofoam cup, and tossed it into a brimming wastebasket in a corner of the room. “The Cougars’ trainer sent Parks to me about six months ago. Bill had been developing tumorous breast tissue, and the trainer knew enough about steroids and growth hormones to realize that they were the culprits.”

  “He was growing breast tissue?” I said.

  Phillips nodded. “What do you know about steroids?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Well, let me explain a few things,” he said. “An anabolic steroid is an artificial form of testosterone. Testosterone stimulates the development of male sexual characteristics like chest hair, large muscles, deep voice. The artificial form is generally given to people who don’t produce sufficient amounts on their own—children who aren’t growing properly or older men who have had prostate surgery or testicular cancer. Unfortunately, it’s also taken by athletes to stimulate muscular growth. And it does do that, undeniably. But it also has some peculiar side effects. For one thing, when you take unnaturally large doses of artificial hormone, the body stops developing hormones of its own. As a result, the testicles may atrophy if the dose is continued over a long period of time. To avoid that problem and other organic complications, athletes ‘stack’ the drugs. That is, they take anabolic steroids in combination with androgenic hormones designed to counteract the side effects of the anabolics. Of course, those androgens also have side effects. They stimulate the development of female sexual characteristics. Males produce small quantities of androgens naturally. But when they are taken in artificially large doses, you start to see the kind of problems that Parks was experiencing—growth of breast tissue, changes in the timber of the voice, loss of sexual potency.”

  “Steroids can affect potency?” I said.

  “Good Lord, yes. The sexual ups and downs that these drugs induce are easily as drastic as the physical changes. The effects range from virilism to impotence—sometimes both. And when the athletes go off the drugs, as they must do to guard against liver damage, there is a period in which the natural hormonal levels are very low, while the body readjusts to producing its own chemicals. During that period depressions, sometimes violent depressions, are commonplace.”

  “Parks was arrested several times for assaulting women. Do you think those assaults might have been induced by the drugs? By frustration over impotence.”

  “It’s entirely possible,” Phillips said. “Or he might have been experiencing a virile reaction and simply gotten carried away. That’s what I meant about this problem constituting a legal defense. This man hasn’t been in complete control of his mind or his body for many years.”

  I asked the obvious question. “Could the drugs have driven him to murder?”

  “They certainly had some bearing,” Phillips said. “I didn’t do a psychological work-up on him. His physical problems were so extensive that they occupied all our time. But there was no question that he was unstable. His reaction to my diagnosis was so violent that I thought I was going to have to call some of you people in to subdue him. Luckily, his girlfriend was with him, and she managed to calm him down.”

  “What was your diagnosis?”

  “Precancerous lesions of the chest. A suspicious spot on the liver. Testicular tumors. I recommended a biopsy on both the liver and the testes. And I also recommended that the girl go to a specialist and have their baby tested immediately. The possibility of chromosomal damage in a ca
se like Parks’s was extremely high. Good Lord, he’d been playing with one of the fundamental fluids of life.”

  “Did he have the biopsy done?”

  Phillips shook his head. “His reaction to my diagnosis was complete denial. To him it was inconceivable that his body could let him down. I suppose it was also impossible for him to accept the fact that he’d brought this trouble on himself.”

  “When did you see him last?” I said.

  “Ten days ago today,” Phillips said. “He agreed to stop taking steroids for a few months. He also talked about taking a few days off from training camp and visiting his mother in Montana. I think he still thought that a little rest and some chicken soup would make the tumors go away, like a cold. I gave him some capsules to take—antidepressants to help him through the drying-out period. And he agreed to come back for some follow-up blood tests in six weeks.”

  “So he hadn’t taken any steroids for several days prior to the murder?”

  “If he kept his word, yes.”

  “And during that time he would have been experiencing a deep depression—possibly a violent one.”

  “The way a man reacts when he kicks any powerful drug,” Phillips said. “He certainly would have been reflecting on his mistakes. From what I’ve heard the girl did go to the obstetrician I recommended, and the baby was severely deformed. Parks was convinced that there would be nothing wrong with the child, just as convinced as he was about the health of his own body. In fact, I think he looked on the baby as a test case—proof that I was an alarmist and that his girlfriend was behaving like a fool.”

  “How did she react to your diagnosis?”

  “She was very frightened and very concerned for Parks and for her unborn child.”

  I got up to go. “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a help.”

  “I hope so,” Phillips said dismally. “In some cases, it’s hard to know.”

  29

  I THOUGHT about Parks all the way back to the Delores. If it was all so sad, I wondered why I felt like laughing. And yet that was exactly what I felt like doing. All he’d wanted was to be the best football player he could be, and he’d ended up murdering C.W. and his child, giving himself cancer, and growing breasts. Everyone that he’d believed in, everyone except for Bluerock, had betrayed him. Even his own body had betrayed him. And at the end, he hadn’t even been able to turn to the girl, to C.W., whom I now thought had really loved him, and who had tried to make up for the way she, too, had betrayed his trust. In his mind, she was part of the problem—she and the child she was carrying—even before Walt told him the ugly truth. Just two more reminders of the impotence and disease that were ravaging his own body.

  He had never been much of a thinker. He’d relied on his instincts, on what his body told him to do. But on those last few nights, even that circuit had sputtered and failed. At the end, there had been no thought at all. Just Bill and those antidepressant pills and the reflection of his body and the dark, hot space in between. Maybe he just sat there waiting for someone to fill that space—another face, another body, someone to blame. Dr. Ashram had told C.W. about the baby on Thursday. I assumed that she’d told Bill the same day. So by Friday, the truth had become undeniable, and this pathetic, put-upon, self-created Frankenstein had had no defense left against it, except the all too ready violence that had been brewing inside him in the heat. The news that C.W. had betrayed him to the police and was going to betray him again in front of the grand jury must have been the spur that had let that violence loose, that had sent it hurtling outward against the symbols of the larger betrayal he had visited on his own body. He hadn’t just killed the child, he’d killed himself—the part of himself in her that was disease and madness incarnate.

  What was left of him after that bloody act wasn’t worth saving. I even knew where to look for him, now. Phillips had told me where he was headed—back home, back to Mom, back out of it all. He wasn’t going to make it back. Perhaps he’d kill himself on Mom’s embroidered rug, a final reproach to the woman he’d obviously never been able to please. Or maybe the diseases themselves would kill him. Most likely, Walt Kaplan would do him that favor. I was sure that was where Walt and Mickey and the hired gun, Habib, were headed—to tuck Bill safely away in some Montana woods, where he would never come back to haunt them in the jury box. Why Walt had decided to go to that extreme, I wasn’t sure. Something had him scared. Maybe it was the murder itself, or the savagery of it. Bill Parks was clearly a madman, and madmen are unpredictable.

  As I pulled into the parking lot behind the Delores, I tried to think of a way to explain it to Bluerock—to explain what a dreadful, farcical mess his friend Parks had made of his life. But the truth was, I didn’t want to explain it, didn’t want to listen to Otto’s inevitable rationalizations, his gripes and protests. I was weary of Bill Parks, and I didn’t want to hear Otto extol the pristine ideals of athleticism again. There was nothing wrong with his ideals. It was the man he was defending who’d gone indefensibly bad.

  I trudged upstairs, unlocked the door, and opened it, to my surprise, not on Bluerock but on Laurel’s friend, Stacey. I must have done a double take, because it took me a good moment to realize that Bluerock was sitting there too.

  “Hello, sport,” Otto said with a disturbing note of solicitude in his voice.

  I glanced at him then took a closer look at Stacey. She was sitting in the desk chair, a straw purse in her lap, her hands on her purse, her head slightly bowed. She was still dressed for vacation in a light summer dress. Only all of the high spirits had gone out of her face. She looked the way Bluerock had sounded—as if someone had died.

  “What are you doing here, Stacey?” I said uneasily. “You’re supposed to be on your way to Hawaii.”

  She raised her head slowly. It was obvious that she’d been crying. Her punky makeup had been scrubbed off, probably because the tears she’d been shedding had made a mess of her face. Her eyes were red and puffy, and there were marks on her cheeks that she’d missed when she was washing up, little black crow’s-feet where the mascara had bled down.

  “Where’s Laurel?” I said.

  Stacey bit her lip. “She’s gone,” she said in a trembling voice, and began to cry. She put her hand over her face and sobbed out loud.

  “Somebody better tell me what’s going on here,” I said nervously.

  “Take it easy, sport,” Bluerock said. “The kid’s had a tough day.”

  “How did she get here?” I asked him.

  “I told her to come over the last time she called. She’s the one who’s been calling you all afternoon. She’d been sitting alone at the airport for about five hours.”

  “Alone?” I said. “What happened to Laurel?”

  Bluerock gave me a grim look. “She says Laurel met three guys at the airport. The meeting had apparently been prearranged. Laurel told Stacey that she was going to go to her house and talk to these guys, and that she’d be back at the airport in an hour. If they missed their flight, they’d catch another, later this afternoon.” He glanced at Stacey, who was still sobbing loudly in her chair. “Laurel never came back.”

  I walked over to the girl and pulled her hands from her face. She gasped as if I’d torn her clothes off.

  “Why’d she go with them?” I said, pressing my face into hers. “She must have given you a reason.”

  “She knew them,” the girl said helplessly. “She said she’d done business with one of them—a great big guy with a beard.”

  “What kind of business?” I said angrily.

  “I don’t know!” Stacey said, staring fearfully into my face. “She was friends with them. She didn’t act scared. She went off on her own. And she never came back.”

  “Christ!” I said furiously. I felt like slapping Stacey’s stupid, frightened face.

  “Take it easy, Harry,” Bluerock said.

  “‘Take it easy,’” I repeated sarcastically.

  “C’mon,” I said, hauling Stacey to her fee
t.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To her house,” I said.

  “I don’t want to go there,” Stacey said, trying to pull away from me. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

  I stared at her for a moment, hearing those words again. The same ones Laurel had used about her friend C.W.

  “Just get the fuck out of here, then,” I said, between my teeth. “Go on. Get out!” I shoved her toward the door.

  She turned back to me from the doorway, her face tearstained and terrified. “Don’t I get to go to Hawaii?” she whined.

  If Bluerock hadn’t jumped to his feet and grabbed me by the arms, I think I would have slugged her. She took a quick look at my face and ran down the hall.

  “C’mon, sport,” Bluerock said. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ve got to call the cops first,” I said with real dread in my heart.

  “I’ll do it,” Bluerock said, picking up the phone. “I won’t give my name. Otherwise it could be a long night.”

  ******

  The Newport cops had responded to the anonymous tip and were camped at Laurel’s apartment by the time Bluerock and I snowed up on the scene. I met one of them, a patrolman, coming down the apartment house stairs to the courtyard. From the ashen look on his face, I could tell that the worst had happened.

  “Somebody must have really hated her,” the cop said, looking sick.

  Bluerock eyed me with concern. “You sure you wanna go up there, sport?” he asked.

  I pushed past the cop and walked up the six flights to Laurel’s apartment. There was a knot of plainclothesmen at the top of the stairs. I recognized one of them, a lieutenant of detectives named Driscoll.

  “Hi ya, Harry,” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I knew the girl,” I said.

  “Yeah?” He gave me a sympathetic look. “Maybe you better not go in there now.”