Blood Test Page 10

  “And this Melendez-Lynch doesn’t want to go the legal route?”

  “He was trying to avoid it. It may end up in court yet.”

  He gave his big head a shake and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll keep my ears open. Anything comes up I’ll let you know.”

  “I’d appreciate it. And thanks for everything, Milo.”

  “It was nothing. Literally.” We shook hands. “Say hello to the entrepreneur when she gets back.”

  “Will do. The best to Rick.”

  I got out of the car. The Matador’s headlights striped the gravel as Milo swung out of the lot. The truncated patter of the radio dispatcher created a punk rock concerto that hung in the air after he was gone.

  I drove north to Sunset, planning to turn off at Beverly Glen and head home. Then I remembered that the house would be empty. Talking to Milo about Robin had opened a few wounds and I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. I realized that Raoul knew nothing about what we’d found at the Sea Breeze, and decided now was as good a time as any to tell him.

  He was hunched over his desk scrawling notations on the draft of a research paper. I knocked lightly on the open door.

  “Alex!” He rose to greet me. “How did it go? Did you convince them?”

  I recounted what we’d found.

  “Oh my God!” He slumped in his chair. “This is unbelievable. Unbelievable.” He exhaled, compressed his jowls with his hands, picked up a pencil and rolled it up and down the surface of the desk.

  “Was there much blood?”

  “One stain about six inches wide.”

  “Not enough for a bleed-out,” he muttered to himself. “No other fluids? No bile, no vomitus?”

  “I didn’t see any. It was hard to tell. The place was a shambles.”

  “A barbaric rite, no doubt. I told you, Alex, they are madmen, those damned Touchers! To steal a child and then to run amok like that! Holism is nothing more than a cover for anarchy and nihilism!”

  He was jumping to conclusions in quantum leaps but I had neither the desire nor the energy to argue with him.

  “The police, what did they do?”

  “The detective who ran the show is a friend of mine. He came down as a favor. There’s an All Points Bulletin out on the family, the sheriff in La Vista has been notified to watch for them. They did a crime scene analysis and filed a report. That’s it. Unless you decide to push it.”

  “Your friend—is he discreet?”

  “Very.”

  “Good. We can’t afford a media side show. Have you ever talked to the press? They are idiots, Alex, and vultures! The blonds from the television stations are the worst. Vapid, with paste-on smiles, always trying to trick you into making outrageous statements. Barely a week goes by that one of them doesn’t attempt to get me to say that the cure for cancer is just around the corner. They want instant information, immediate gratification. Can you imagine what they’ll do with something like this?”

  He’d gone quickly from defeatism to rage and the excess energy propelled him out of his chair. He traversed the length of the office with short nervous steps, pounding his fist into his hand, swerved to avoid the piles of books and manuscripts, walked back to the desk, and cursed in Spanish.

  “Do you think I should go to court, Alex?”

  “It’s a tough question. You need to decide if going public will help the boy. Have you done it before?”

  “Once. Last year we had a little girl who needed transfusions. The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and we had to get an injunction to give her blood. But that was different. The parents weren’t fighting us. Their attitude was, our beliefs don’t allow us to give you permission, but if we’re forced to comply we will. They wanted to save their child, Alex, and were happy when we took the responsibility away from them. That child is alive today and thriving. The Swope boy should be thriving, too, not dying in the back room of some scabrous voodoo den.”

  He thrust his hand into the pocket of his white coat, removed a packet of saltine crackers, tore open the plastic, and nibbled on the crackers until they were consumed. After brushing crumbs out of his mustache he continued.

  “Even in the Witness case the media tried to make a cause célèbre of it, implying that we were coercing the family. One of the stations sent around a moron masquerading as a medical reporter to interview me—probably one of those fellows who wanted to be a doctor but flunked his science courses. He swaggered in with a little tape recorder and addressed me by my first name, Alex! As if we were buddies! I dismissed him and he made the ‘no comment’ sound like concealment of guilt. Fortunately the parents took our advice and refused to talk to them, too. At that point the so-called controversy died a quick death—no carrion, the vultures go elsewhere.”

  The door leading to the lab opened and a young woman clutching a clipboard entered the office. She had light light brown hair cut in a page boy, round eyes that uncannily matched the hair, pinched features, and a petulant mouth. The hand holding the clipboard was pale, and her nails were gnawed to the quick. She wore a lab coat that reached below her knees and crepe-soled flats on her feet.

  She looked through me to Raoul and said, “There’s something you should see. Could be exciting.” The lack of inflection in her voice belied the content of her message.

  Raoul got up. “Is it the new membrane, Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful.” He looked as if he were going to hug her then stopped suddenly, remembering my presence. Clearing his throat, he introduced us: “Alex, meet a fellow Ph.D., Dr. Helen Holroyd.”

  We exchanged the most cursory of pleasantries. She edged closer to Raoul, a proprietary gleam in the beige eyes. He fought, unsuccessfully, to erase the naughty boy look from his face.

  The two of them were trying so hard to look platonic that for the first time all day I felt like smiling. They were sleeping together and it was supposed to be a secret. Without a doubt everyone in the department knew about it.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said.

  “Yes, I understand. Thank you for everything. I may call you to discuss this further. In the meantime, send your bill to my secretary.”

  As I walked out the door they were gazing into each other’s eyes and discussing the wonders of osmotic equilibrium.

  On the way out I stopped in the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee. It was after seven and the dining room was sparsely populated. A tall Mexican man wearing a hair net and blue scrubs ran a dry mop over the floor. A trio of nurses laughed and ate doughnuts. I lidded the coffee and was preparing to leave when movement fluttered in the corner of my eye.

  It was Valcroix and he was waving me over. I walked to his table.

  “Care to join me?”

  “All right.” I put down my cup and took a chair facing him. The remains of a giant salad sat on his tray along with two glasses of water. He used his fork to move a tumbleweed of alfalfa sprouts around the bowl.

  He’d traded his psychedelic sport shirt for a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and had tossed his white coat over the chair next to him. From up close I could see that the long hair was thinning on top. He needed a shave but his beard growth was sparse, spotting only the mustache and chin areas. The drooping face had been worked over by a bad cold; he sniffled, red-nosed and bleary-eyed.

  “Any news on the Swopes?” he asked.

  I was tired of telling the story but he’d been their doctor and deserved to know. I gave him a brief summary.

  He listened with equanimity, no emotion registering in the hooded eyes. When I was finished he coughed and dabbed at his nose with a napkin.

  “For some reason I feel an urge to proclaim my innocence to you,” he said.

  “That’s hardly necessary,” I assured him. I drank some coffee and put it down quickly, having forgotten how awful it was.

  His eyes took on a faraway look and for a moment I thought he was meditating, retreating to an internal world as he’d done during Raoul’s hara
ngue. I found my attention wandering.

  “I know Melendez-Lynch blames me for this. He’s blamed me for everything that’s gone wrong in the department since I began my fellowship. Was he that way when you worked with him?”

  “Let’s just say it took a while to develop a good working relationship.”

  He nodded solemnly, picked some strands from the ball of sprouts and chewed on them.

  “Why do you think they ran away?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “No insights at all?”

  “None. Why should I have, any more than anyone else?”

  “I was under the impression they related well to you.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Raoul.”

  “He wouldn’t recognize relating if it bit him in the ass.”

  “He felt you’d developed especially good rapport with the mother.”

  His hands were scrubbed and pink. They tightened around the salad fork.

  “I was a nurse before I became a doctor,” he said.

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “Nurses are always complaining about their lack of status and money and threatening to quit and go to med school. You’re the first I’ve met who actually did it.”

  “Nurses gripe because their lot in life is shit. But there are insights to be learned at the bottom of the ladder. Like the value of talking to patients and families. I did it as a nurse but now that I’m a doc it makes me a deviate. What’s pathetic is that it’s viewed as sufficiently deviant to be noticed. Rapport? Hell, no. I barely knew them. Sure I spoke to the mother. I was sticking her son every day with needles, puncturing his bone and sucking out marrow. How could I not speak to her?”

  He gazed into the salad bowl.

  “Melendez-Lynch can’t understand that, my wanting to come across as a human being instead of some white-coated technocrat. He didn’t bother to get to know the Swopes but it doesn’t occur to him that his remoteness has anything to do with their—defection. I extended myself, so I’m the goat.” He sniffed, wiped his nose, and drained one of the water glasses. “What’s the use of dissecting it? They’re gone.”

  I remembered Milo’s conjecture about the abandoned car.

  “They may be back,” I said.

  “Be serious, man. They see themselves as having escaped to freedom. No way.”

  “Freedom’s going to sour pretty quickly when the disease gets out of control.”

  “The fact is,” he said, “they hated everything about this place. The noise, the lack of privacy, even the sterility. You worked in Laminar Flow, right?”

  “Three years.”

  “Then you know the kind of food the kids in there get—processed and overcooked and dead.”

  It was true. To a patient without normal immunity a fresh fruit or vegetable is a potential medium for lethal microbes, a glass of milk a breeding pond for lactobacillus. Consequently, everything the kids in the plastic rooms ate was processed to begin with, then heated and sterilized, sometimes to the point where no nutrients remained.

  “We understand the concept,” he said, “but lots of parents have difficulty grasping why this horribly sick kid can have his fill of cola and potato chips and all kinds of junk while carrots are out. It goes against the grain.”

  “I know,” I said, “but most people accept it pretty quickly because their child’s life is at stake. Why not the Swopes?”

  “They’re country folk. They come from a place where the air is clean and people grow their own food. They see the city as a poisonous place. The father used to rail on about how bad the air was. ‘You’re breathing sewage’ he’d tell me every time I saw him. He had a thing for clean air and natural foods. For how healthy it was back home.”

  “Not healthy enough,” I said.

  “No, not healthy enough. How’s that for a frontal assault on a belief system?” He gave a mournful look. “Isn’t there a term in psych for when it all comes tumbling down like that?”

  “Cognitive dissonance.”

  “Whatever. Tell me,” he leaned forward, “what do people do when they’re in that state?”

  “Sometimes change their beliefs, sometimes distort reality to fit those beliefs.”

  He leaned back, ran his hands through his hair and smiled. “Need I say more?”

  I shook my head and tried the coffee again. It had gotten colder, but no better.

  “I keep hearing about the father,” I said. “The mother sounds like his shadow.”

  “Far from it. If anything, she was the tougher of the two. It’s just that she was quiet. She let him run off at the mouth while she stayed with Woody, doing what needed to be done.”

  “Could she have been behind their leaving?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I’m saying is she was a strong woman, not some cardboard cutout.”

  “What about the sister? Beverly said there was no love lost between her and her parents.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. She wasn’t around much, kept to herself when she was.”

  He wiped his nose and stood.

  “I don’t like to gossip,” he said. “I’ve indulged in too much of it already.”

  He snatched up his white coat, flung it over his shoulder, turned his back and left me sitting there. I watched him walk away, lips moving, as if in silent prayer.

  It was after eight by the time I reached Beverly Glen. My house sits atop an old bridle path forgotten by the city. There are no streetlights and the road is serpentine, but I know every twist by heart and drove home by sense of touch. In the mailbox was a love letter from Robin. I got high on it for a while but after the fourth reading, a hazy sense of sadness set in.

  It was too late to feed the koi so I took a hot bath, toweled off, put on my ratty yellow robe, and carried a brandy into the small library off the bedroom. I finished writing a couple of overdue forensic reports then settled in an old chair and went through the stack of books I’d promised myself to read.

  The first volume I grabbed was a collection of Diane Arbus photographs but the unforgiving portraits of dwarfs, derelicts, and other walking wounded made me more depressed. The next couple of choices were no better so I went out on the deck with my guitar, sat looking at the stars, and forced myself to play in a major key.

  10

  THE NEXT morning I went out on the terrace to get the paper and saw it lying there, sluglike and bloated.

  It was a dead rat. A crude noose of hemp had been tied around its neck. Its lifeless eyes were open and clouded, its fur matted and greasy. A pair of disturbingly humanoid forepaws were frozen in supplication. The half-open mouth revealed frontal incisors the color of canned corn.

  Underneath the corpse was a piece of paper. I used the Times to push the rodent away—it resisted, sticking, then slid like a puck to the edge of the terrace.

  It was straight out of an old gangster movie: letters had been cut out of a magazine and pasted up to read:

  HERES TO YOU MONEYCHASER HEADSHRINK

  I’d probably have figured it out anyway, but that made it a cinch.

  Sacrificing the classified section to the task, I wrapped up the rat and carried it down to the garbage. Then I went inside and got on the phone.

  Mal Worthy’s secretary had a secretary and I had to be assertive with both of them to get through to him.

  Before I could speak he said, “I know, I got one, too. What color was yours?”

  “Brownish gray, with a noose around its scrawny little neck.”

  “Count yourself lucky. Mine came decapitated, in a box. I almost lost a damn good mailgirl because of it. She’s still washing her hands. Daschoff’s was ratburger.”

  He was trying to make light of it, but sounded shaken.

  “I knew the guy was a sicko,” he said.

  “How’d he find out where I live?”

  “Your address on your resumé?”

  “Oh shit. What did the
wife get?”

  “Nothing. Does that make sense?”

  “Forget making sense. What can we do about it?”

  “I’ve already begun drafting a restraining order keeping him a thousand yards from any of us. But to be honest, there’s no way to prevent him from defying it. If he gets caught at it, that’s another story, but we don’t want it to get that far, do we?”

  “Not too comforting, Malcolm.”

  “That’s democracy, my friend.” He paused. “This taped?”