Bad to the Bone (27 page)

Moodrow took the stairs two at a time. For the length of one flight, he congratulated himself on his youth and agility. By the time he reached the third floor, however, the sweat was running freely and his heart was pounding in his chest like a speed bag in the hands of a prize fighter. He took the last flight one stair at a time, forming, as he went, an enormous respect for the athletes who participate in a yearly run up the one hundred flights of the Empire State Building.

There were no patients in the toxicology lab, a fact for which Moodrow was infinitely grateful. On the other hand, there were no doctors, either. Just an open area lined with chairs, a locked door and a Plexiglas window which revealed the desk ordinarily occupied by the receptionist. Moodrow tried the door, but he knew it would be locked before he touched the brass knob. He felt the anger rising, as real as the .38 pressed against his waist, but he fought it down, lifting his fist to knock. The door opened before he could finish and a small, fat man carrying an attaché case rushed through. Unfortunately, with Moodrow’s bulk directly in front of him, there was nowhere to go and the resulting collision, though mild enough by Moodrow’s standards, rippled through the man’s body as he bounced several steps backward.

“Who…” the man began.

“Doctor Benari?” Moodrow grinned.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Stanley Moodrow. You were expecting me.” The statement left no room for argument.

“You’re late.”

Moodrow glanced at his watch. “Five minutes.”

“Five minutes is exactly as much time as I
was
prepared to give you.”

“You’re in a hurry?”

“Very observant.”

“Then this is your lucky day, because if you don’t back up and do your fucking job, I’m gonna toss your fat ass through the window and you’ll be in the parking lot before you know it.”

Moodrow folded his arms across his chest, giving the good doctor a moment to think it over. Of course, Benari
knew
that Moodrow was bluffing, but the fact that he, Benari, was five-foot six while Moodrow was six-foot six and both weighed 250 pounds mitigated any desire to call that bluff.

“Make it quick,” he said, backing into the small office behind him and setting down his briefcase.

Moodrow took the notarized request from his back pocket and handed it to Benari. “I just have a few questions. Then I’ll let you go. According to the doctor who treated Connie Alamare, she had a stroke. I guess that’s what the tests revealed. But everything I know about her recent history suggests that she was poisoned. That’s why I’m taking the blood to…”

“You’re wasting your time. We ran a standard tox screen while she was in here.”

“I didn’t know that.” Moodrow felt his heart sink. Another dead end. If he’d known about this earlier…

“Let me make this quick. We tested for all the obvious poisons. Arsenic, curare. Every insecticide, rat poison or herbicide on the market. We tested for a number of industrial poisons as well as drugs that become toxic when combined. We’re satisfied that she was
not
poisoned, either deliberately or accidentally. Now, if you’re asking if we tested for every toxic substance known or unknown to man, I’ll admit we didn’t. There are literally thousands of poisonous industrial chemicals. We didn’t test for all of them. We didn’t test for South Australian seasnake venom, either. Nor the toxin of the African green mamba. Without a recent history to point in some direction, it would take a year to do what you want done. On top of which the cardiologists are sure she had a stroke.”

Moodrow stepped into the room and sat on the edge of the receptionist’s desk. The cops hadn’t mentioned the tests. Maybe they hadn’t known about them. On the other hand, the cardiologist in charge of Flo Alamare’s case must have known all about it, but hadn’t seen fit to communicate the information.

Dr. Benari, encouraged by Moodrow’s apparent confusion, picked up his briefcase and prepared to exit. “Go back into the lab. Tell Mr. Goss who you are and he’ll give you fluids.” He stepped through the door, punched the elevator button, then couldn’t resist a final shot. “What you want to do, Mister Moodrow, is hope she dies. Then you can physically examine her organs and prove your theory, one way or the other.”

Moodrow didn’t bother to respond. He was sorely tempted to leave Flo Alamare’s bodily fluids where they were and go about his business, but he’d pushed hard for this and the lab in Queens had agreed to stay open late so Moodrow could deliver the frozen blood and urine before it spoiled. Sighing, he walked into the back and entered the laboratory.

“Mister Goss?”

The man sitting in a chair behind the counter was no taller than Federico Benari, but he was thin and wiry with a full beard and a halo of thick black hair surrounding a small face. “Misha, please. Call me Misha.” He put down the book he was reading and got to his feet.

“Okay, Misha. My name is Moodrow and Doctor Benari told me to see you about picking up Flo Alamare’s blood samples.”

“They’re in the freezer. I’ll get them.” A moment later, he was back with a half dozen vials of blood and urine which he put in an insulated bag and handed to Moodrow. “You should refrigerate these as soon as possible.”

Moodrow took the small package and prepared to leave. It was well into the evening rush and he was anxious to get to the labs of Toxi-lab, Inc.

“By the way, Moodrow, how’d you like Bo-bo?”

“Bo-bo?”

“Bo-bo Benari. The fattest fuck at Bronx Municipal.”

“He’s not the sweetest guy in the world,” Moodrow answered evenly, “but he seems to know what he’s doing.”

“He doesn’t know shit.” The technician’s face was impassive, but his voice dripped with contempt.

“You talking about this particular case?” Moodrow held up the package.

“Yeah. See, Alamare was a problem and the one thing we don’t like at Bronx Municipal is a problem. These are the plague years in New York. Nobody’s got time for mysteries.”

“You got my attention, Misha. Don’t stop now.”

“Alamare was a puzzle right from the beginning. Pretty white girl in a vacant lot. Needle marks on her arm, but no sign of the infections every junkie gets. Doesn’t add up, right? On the other hand, Bronx Municipal is operating at a hundred and forty percent of capacity with a third less staff than our budget calls for. People don’t want to come here. Doctors, nurses, aides, techs. Most of the AIDS patients in New York are bottled up in municipal hospitals because private hospitals don’t want to treat them. More than half the blood we draw in this hospital is saturated with the virus. You stick yourself with a needle, which happens fairly often, you could get the disease. It’s not very likely, but we’re talking about a condition that’s a hundred-percent fatal. Figure it out for yourself.”

“What you’re saying is that patients at Bronx Municipal don’t get proper medical care.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds, because the staff is very dedicated. That’s why they come here. But what they don’t need is a mystery. Mysteries take all kinds of extra time and time is the scarcest resource in this hospital. So when they got Flo Alamare, they took the easiest way out and called it a stroke.”

“You’re saying it wasn’t a stroke? Are you a doctor?”

Misha Goss blushed and started to protest, but Moodrow interrupted him. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Misha. I just need to know why you’re so sure.”

“I’m not positive that she didn’t have a stroke. What I’m saying is her condition is more consistent with some kind of poisoning. Especially the muscle rigidity. When she came into the hospital, she was stiff as a board and that’s
very
unusual. I’m telling you, Moodrow, if she’d been taken to a private hospital, this would have been handled differently.”

“Benari told me he tested for poison.” Moodrow felt his interest rising again. He wanted to reach out and hug the little technician.

“I ran the tests myself. A standard tox screen. We tested for thirty-five toxic substances. Out of maybe a thousand possibilities. What does it prove?”

“Benari says it would take a year to test for all of them.”

“Benari’s an asshole. I have a test we could do in ten minutes. If it works, we’ll be ninety-five percent sure she was poisoned. I tried to get Benari to okay it, but it’s a little unconventional and he hates my guts.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’ll take a small amount of Alamare’s blood, spin it down in a centrifuge until the serum separates out, then inject the serum into a mouse and see what happens.”

“Why does Benari object to that?”

“Well, for one thing, even if the mouse dies, it’s possible that whatever killed the mouse didn’t hurt Flo Alamare. Very unlikely, but still possible. Also, if the mouse lives, it doesn’t mean that Alamare wasn’t poisoned. Maybe she metabolized the poison before we drew the blood. Maybe the concentration in her blood isn’t great enough to kill the mouse. Maybe the poison never entered her bloodstream. Maybe…”

“All right, I get the picture. Let’s just go ahead and do it. We’ll figure out what happened after we’re finished.”

Fifteen minutes later, they stood in a small room at the rear of the lab. Goss held a tiny, white mouse in his hand and when he injected ten cc’s of clear serum directly into its abdomen, it began to struggle madly, though it made no attempt to bite. Ten seconds later, it was dead, its small body as stiff as if it had been taken from a freezer instead of a cage.

“Jesus,” Moodrow whispered, “that was fast.”

Misha Goss smiled, nodding his agreement. “Right. Now give me your arm and we’ll try it on a human.”

Moodrow jumped away and Goss began to laugh. “Just kidding, bro,” he announced.

“Your wife must get a big kick out of you.” Moodrow, despite his embarrassment, was laughing, too.

“She always enjoyed my sense of humor. Right up until she left for Australia.” He looked down at the mouse for a moment, then back at Moodrow. “There’s one favor you can do for me, Moodrow. When you get to Tox, Inc., don’t mention what happened here. Just give them the fluids. I have a friend over there and I’ll talk to him privately.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is what we did here is unauthorized
and
unscientific,
and
I’m hanging onto my job by my fingernails.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I played a little joke about a month ago and it didn’t go over too good.”

Moodrow leaned back against the wall. “You gonna tell me what you did?”

“It happened one day when Benari was taking a delegation of Japanese doctors through the lab. This was during the day, when we have eight techs working. I was racking urines when they came over to me. You know…”

“What the hell is ‘racking urines’?”

Goss grinned. “When a patient is passing urine that’s cloudy, we sometimes take samples every four hours or so, put them in test tubes in a rack, then watch to see how fast the solids settle to the bottom of the tube. It gives us an idea of whether or not the patient is improving and it doesn’t cost anything. Anyway, I was by the racks when Benari came in with four Japanese doctors. You know how the Japanese are? They bow like penguins. ‘Hai, hai, hai.’ No expression whatsoever. Dead blank. Benari goes through this explanation of how we rack the urines, then finishes by saying, ‘And how’s the patient doing, Mister Goss?’ I take the urine at the end of the rack, uncap it and drink it down. This one looks pretty clear to me,’ I say. Of course, it wasn’t urine in that test tube. It was apple juice and I was making a little joke. Meanwhile, the Japanese don’t even blink. They watch me drink the juice down, then start bowing like crazy. ‘Hai, hai, hai.’ Benari was so pissed off, he transferred me. I’m the only one here at night. They even lock the doors, because some of our patients have been known to roam the corridors looking for controlled substances. Me, I’m a sociable guy. I don’t like being alone.”

“Okay, I don’t have a problem keeping my mouth shut. Meanwhile, let me get this stuff to Queens before it goes bad.” Moodrow gathered up the insulated bag and began to walk toward the door. “There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about, Misha. I wanna know if you think it’s possible that Flo Alamare overdosed on heroin? I know the tests only showed
traces
of heroin, but…”

“Wait, wait. Back up. The test we did on Alamare isn’t specific. All it can do is show the presence of an opiate. It can’t tell us
which
opiate. In a criminal case, you have to determine the exact nature of the substance, but from a medical point of view, the treatment for an overdose of heroin is the same as the treatment for an overdose of any other opiate. Flo Alamare could have been using anything from morphine to Dilaudid.”

“Then why did the doctor say she showed positive for heroin?”

Goss shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t. Sometimes, people hear what they want to hear. Remember, this wasn’t a criminal case. There was no need to be that accurate. They do gas liquid chromatography at Toxilab, Inc. That should pin it down.”

“You wanna hear something funny? All of a sudden I don’t have any doubt about what it was. Now I’m sure. And I’d thank you from the bottom of my heart. If I had a heart.”

F
OUR DAYS LATER, STANLEY
Moodrow made a decision that surprised everyone who knew him. He decided to call for help. Perhaps it was the weather, a series of perfect spring days that stretched out for more than a week. The sun-drenched afternoons had lured normally jaded New Yorkers out of doors and the streets were crowded with joggers and bicycles. The parks had exploded with blossoms. Azaleas, tulips, daffodils, cherry and apple trees, elegant dogwood and opulent magnolias. The new leaves on the trees in Central Park glowed with, energy, matching the intensity of grassy lawns that leaped from dingy yellow to bright green overnight.

Moodrow had found it impossible to stay inside his small apartment, but there was nothing for him to do outside except rework opinions he’d already formed. Even though all the evidence led to the conclusion that Flo Alamare had been poisoned, accidentally or deliberately, and that Billy Williams had been killed as part of a cover-up and that the deaths of three drug users on the Lower East Side were somehow related, there was little he could do about it. He could not, for instance, enter Hanover House and demand to interview Terry Williams. Or obtain a warrant to search the commune for drugs. He was tempted to set up surveillance, but without adequate manpower or the vans, high-power directional microphones, telephone taps and video cameras available to the police, the most likely outcome would be discovery and the removal of evidence.