Life's Work (23 page)

"Is he here now?"

"I think so. He may be in the lab. I'll page him for you."

While the girl was paging Dr. Ashram, I went over to a bank of pay phones opposite the reception desk and phoned George DeVries. It wasn't quite five o'clock, and there was an outside chance that he was still sitting at his desk, staring out the window at Mount Adams. I let the phone ring ten times and hung up. When I turned back to the receptionist there was a dark-haired, bespectacled man in a white doctor's tunic standing beside her.

"Are you Dr. Ashram?" I said as I walked over to him.

He nodded. "Yes, I am Dr. Ashram. And what would your name be, sir?"

"Stoner."

"Ah, Mr. Stoner," he said, almost joyfully. "How may I be of help to you?"

Dr. Ashram was a Pakistani gentleman and he spoke English with a merry, singsong lilt. His face was acnescarred and almost as deeply pitted as George DeVries's. His jet-black eyes sparkled as if he'd just heard a joke or told one.

"I'd like to talk to you about one of your patients," I said, showing him the badge.

"This is what Miss Chang has been telling me," he said. "Would you like to come to my office, then?"

"If you wouldn't mind."

"No problem," he said, and smiled a toothy smile, as if in the face of his own insistent courtesy he'd found mine rather funny.

We took an elevator up to the fourth floor. I followed Ashram down a corridor lined with deserted offices on the west wall and with plate glass windows on the east. The windows were in shadows and the fluorescent lights overhead hadn't taken hold yet, so the hall had the dim, crepuscular look of library stacks. When we got to an office door with Ashram's name on it, the doctor dug through a pocket of his loose gabardine trousers and fished out a huge key ring loaded with keys. He found the one he wanted almost immediately, unlocked the door, and waved me through it, flicking on the light as I went in.

His office was neat and modern-looking -a steel secretary's desk and several tall files in the antechamber and a larger wooden desk and a half dozen more files in the main room. Several X-ray viewers were posted on the walls, and one of them had been left on. There was an X ray clipped to it. I glanced at the X ray -it looked like a negative of a summer thunderstorm.

"I never could figure out how you can read those things," I said, sitting on a hobbed leather captain's chair across the desk from Ashram.

"It is an art and a science," he said in his fine, cheerful voice.

Ashram opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Camels.

"It is a terrible vice," he said apologetically, "but one that I cannot seem to rid myself of." He shook a cigarette from the pack and fit it into his mouth as if he were screwing in a light bulb.

"So, what do you wish to know, Mr. Stoner?" he said as he lit the cigarette.

"Carol O'Hara came to you a couple of weeks ago for a series of tests."

"Yes," he said. "She did."

"Why did she need the tests?" I said.

"She had been referred to me by another doctor," Ashram said. "Doctor Anthony Phillips."

"He was her obstetrician?"

Ashram shook his head, scaring away the smoke that was hanging in front of his face. "Not at all," he said. "He was the doctor of her husband. I mean, of course, the doctor of the football player."

"Bill Parks?"

"Yes."

"Why was Parks seeing a doctor?" I asked.

"This you would have to ask Dr. Anthony Phillips," Ashram said. "I believe the man, Parks, had a liver ailment. I'm not sure of the exact diagnosis, but there was concern that the unborn child might have been infected. I was asked to do some tests."

"And the results?"

"My tests showed that the child was mongoloid. There were other complications, as well. Deformities."

"What caused these problems?" I said. "The liver ailment?"

"It is possible, of course, although deformities of such an extent are usually genetic in origin. This is what I told Miss O'Hara."

"When did you give her the diagnosis?"

"On Thursday afternoon of last week."

"Was Parks with her at the time?"

"No."

"And how did she react?"

Ashram shooed the smoke from his eyes. "She was heartbroken, of course, even though she had been expecting the worst. It is always difficult for a mother to face such a calamity, you know. Indeed, she was so distraught that her friend had to help her out of the office."

"I thought you said she was alone?"

"No," Ashram said. "I merely said that her husband that Parks was not with her. She did bring a friend along, a girlfriend."

"Do you remember her friend's name?"

He shook his head. "She was a young blond girl. From Kentucky, I think. I do not recall her name."

Unfortunately, I was very much afraid that I did.
 
 

Of course, there was no way to get in touch with Laurel until she arrived in Hawaii. And she didn't have to be the blond girlfriend who had accompanied C. W. O'Hara to Dr. Ashram's clinic on Thursday. Nevertheless, I was feeling pretty badly used as I rode the elevator back to the hospital lobby. It wasn't as if she hadn't demonstrated that she was untrustworthy. In fact, she'd told me outright that she'd do whatever she had to do to look after her own interests. Moreover, most of the information she'd given me was sound. I'd confirmed it through Bluerock and other sources. It was what she hadn't told me that worried me. And why she hadn't told me. Knowing Laurel, I figured that withholding information had probably turned her a buck. The question was, from whom?

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.
 

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."