Extreme Measures (23 page)

He glanced at the motionless body. There was a waiting room full of patients needing his attention, and a member of the search committee camped out in the E.R., probably already blaming him for the chaotic backup. With a shrug he turned his back on Loretta Leone and left the room. For as long as he had been in medicine he had hated this part of the job more than any other.

T
he crystal morning had grown overcast by the time Eric eased the Toyota off the Mystic River Bridge and down to the East Boston waterfront. Several times during their drive from downtown Boston he had checked in the rearview mirror for any car that seemed to be following them. But as far as he could tell, none was.

Although he had never been on the docks, the area was one he knew fairly well. At one time he and Reed Marshall had split a weekly moonlighting shift in the East Boston satellite emergency clinic run by White Memorial. Most of the staff at the clinic was hard-nosed Italian, like East Boston itself, and the spirit in the place was the best of any such facility in which he had ever worked. He smiled at the memory of one battle-hardened night nurse named Falano, who had taken to referring to him and Reed as “Dr. Hot” and “Dr. Cool.”

Cradling the hundred or so remaining posters on her lap, Laura sat quietly in the passenger seat, gazing
out at the panorama of Boston Harbor and the city beyond. After calling Donald Devine and making an appointment to see him that afternoon, they had stayed in her room for more than an hour, talking and holding each other in ways that made her more certain than ever that there was a future for them together. She had expected Eric, as a never-married doctor in a large city, to be experienced and worldly. But in fact, with most of his life spent getting himself educated and then trained, he was in many ways still very young and tentative.

“It’s ironic,” he had said as his shyness and uncertainty were becoming clear to her, “that they take a bunch of twenty-four or twenty-five-year-old kids who have spent most of our lives in school or summer camp, present us with diplomas, and pronounce us M.D.’s, and suddenly we’re supposed to be qualified to help people with the most difficult and deep-seated problems in intimacy and sex. The most frightening moment I think I’ve had in medicine wasn’t from some traffic accident or shooting. It was two months into my internship, when a bank president with a wife and two kids suddenly started unburdening himself to me about discovering he was homosexual.”

In many ways, Laura began to realize, the two of them had led similar lives. Countless people had passed through their worlds, yet both of them remained isolated. White Memorial was no less a haven, no less an escape for Eric than Little Cayman had been for her.

“Whatcha thinking about?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing, everything,” she said. “I keep picturing Scott and me as children, working in the field by the house, or running down to swim in the lake. Only all of a sudden, I realize it’s not Scott I’m with in my mind at all. It’s you.”

“Well, just don’t go in over your head unless
you’re sure it’s with Scott,” he said. “I’m not such a great swimmer.”

“We’ll have to work on that.”

They drove along a high chain-link fence, past a phalanx of huge oil-storage tanks, and parked in a broad dirt lot not far from the main entrance to the dock area. The lot was empty except for several tractor trailers—two of them up on blocks, and all in various stages of rust and disrepair.

“How do you think we should do this?” she asked.

“Well, if that note you got is valid, I think we’re going to have to be a little pushy. Why don’t we just find out where Warehouse Eighteen is and set about making pests of ourselves? At the very least, we can paste these fliers up all over.”

Eric opened the hatch of the Toyota, pulled out a blue woolen watch cap, and put it on.

“This is just so I won’t be too threatening to the longshoremen,” he said.

Warehouse 18 was a huge corrugated-aluminum Quonset hut, surrounded by stacks of shipping containers, pyramids of oil drums, and loading equipment. There were a few men at work around it, and some equipment operating not far away, but in the main, the whole area seemed fairly quiet.

“Why don’t we just wander around for a bit and sort of work up our routine,” he said. “… Laura?”

She had walked away from him and was staring off down the row of freighters, each tethered to a pier.

“Do you see something, or are you just ignoring me?” he asked, approaching her.

“Just thinking about Scott, that’s all,” she said.

Eric stood beside her, his arm just touching hers. Overhead, and as far as they could see, gulls were crisscrossing through the cool morning air, their shrill cries punctuating the background rumble of heavy machinery.

“How old were you when he took over for your parents?” Eric asked.

“Fourteen. The accident was two days after my birthday. Eric, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this. I’m going to find out who he was and exactly what’s happened to him.”

“Well, if he worked here,” Eric said, “sooner or later someone is going to recognize this picture.”

And not ten minutes later, in the shipping office, someone did.

The woman, an attractive if overly made-up blonde, paused in her gum-chewing. “Yeah, I seen him around,” she said in a heavy Boston accent. “His name wasn’t Scott, though. It was Sandy something. And of course he didn’t look quite like he does in that photo. What’s that he’s wearing?”

“A wet suit,” Laura said. “He was scuba-diving.”

“Well, here he wasn’t any scuba diver,” the woman said, tugging at one of her bra straps. “Here he was just a grunt.”

“A grunt?”

“Yeah, a manpower guy. You know, a temp. He started coming here, I don’t know, a few months ago, maybe more. At some point someone must’ve hired him full time, though, cause it seemed he was here every day. Then all of a sudden, poof, he was gone.”

“When?” Eric asked.

“I dunno. January, February maybe.”

Eric and Laura exchanged concerned looks. Both were well aware that Thomas Jordan had died in February.

“Do you remember his last name?” Laura asked.

The woman shook her head. “He bought me coffee once at the truck,” she said. “I hardly even got to talk to him.”

“You would have liked him,” Laura said.

“Hey, wait a minute. Brenda might have something on him in the personnel files.”

She called over to the woman who was typing behind her.

“Take a look at this picture. Isn’t this that guy Sandy who used to work here?”

The other woman, dark-eyed, slim, and perhaps ten years older than the blonde, studied the poster for a moment and then shook her head.

“No way,” she said. “That’s not him at all.”

“You sure?” the blonde asked. “I could have sworn—”

“You asked, I told you. I know exactly who you mean. Sandy North. This guy doesn’t look the least bit like him. Trust me.”

The woman turned and went back to her desk.

“Well, I guess I was wrong,” the blonde said, somewhat nonplussed.

Eric and Laura could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t have been combative. They thanked the woman and left.

“You sure this guy ain’t Sandy North?” the blonde asked after the door had closed.

“Debi,” Brenda said, “I look at their faces; you look at their jeans. Which one of us is right?”

The brunette waited for a few minutes until Debi started typing. Then she picked up the phone and cupped the receiver.

“A guy and girl just left the shipping office,” she whispered. “The woman’s got a stack of posters with Sandy North’s picture on them.…”

“That woman Brenda was lying,” Laura said. “I’m almost certain of it.”

“She did seem a little too forceful.”

“Eric, what would Scott be doing working the docks under
another
false name?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s time you faced the possibility that maybe his life took a downward turn after he left that job in Virginia.”

“But why would he lie to me?”

Eric shrugged.

“Ashamed, I guess. Maybe he was an alcoholic and it just got the better of him.”

“I don’t buy it,” she said. “There’s too much that doesn’t hold together.”

They headed back toward Warehouse 18, pausing now and again to question one of the longshoremen, or to tack up a poster. At the end of half an hour their enthusiasm was gone. Not only did no one recognize Scott’s photo, but many of the men they approached refused even to speak with them. Finally they made their way to the warehouse. The huge metal hangar-like doors of the place were shut. Eric peered through the thick, grimy glass of the smaller entry door. He could make out no movement inside. He twisted the knob and then opened the door a crack, failing to realize that all around the area the work noise had stopped.

“We go in?” he asked.

“If that’s being pushy, we do.”

Eric inched the door open a bit more.

“Are you two nosy or just stupid?”

The two of them whirled.

Three men, two holding steel crate hooks, stood in a semicircle around them, trapping them against the wall. Beyond them, Eric realized, the docks were suddenly deserted.

“We’re … we’re trying to get some information about my brother,” Laura ventured. “We think he might have worked here.”

She offered a poster, but the men didn’t move. The center man of the three, a bull whose head seemed to balloon up from between his shoulders, eyed them for a time.

“Go around to the side of the building,” he ordered. “Walk slow.”

“We’re not looking for any troub—”

“Shut the fuck up and move!” the man snapped.

With the three men maintaining the arc around them, Eric and Laura sidestepped around the corner
of the building and along the wall until they were screened from the rest of the dock by a mountain of oil drums.

“Okay,” the bull said, “that’s far enough. Now, where’s the tape?”

Laura and Eric looked at him blankly.

“What tape?” Eric asked. “We don’t know what you’re—”

Before he could finish, the man stepped forward and hit him brutally in the solar plexus. Eric doubled over and dropped first to his knees and then on his side, gasping for breath. A bitter mix of coffee and bile welled in his throat. His eyes were tearing and he tasted blood from where he had bitten the inside of his lip. The bull pulled him to his feet.

“Just keep your mouth shut,” he said. “We’re talking to her. Now, lady. As you can see, I’m not a very patient person. Your brother killed a friend of mine and maimed another. It’s not going to take much for me to do something similar to this jerk here, or to you.”

Laura could only stare at him in fear and disbelief.

“Now,” he went on, “word has it that you either have a certain videotape or know where it is. You can save us a lot of time, and both of you a lot of pain, if you’ll just tell us where it is.”

“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Laura managed.

“Suit yourself. Artie, break one of his fingers.”

“Wait, please,” Laura cried. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know anything about a tape. Please don’t do this.”