M
att and I entered the North Shore Clinic and signed in. We took seats on thinly upholstered chairs, a pattern of greens and blues not found in nature, two of a long line that had been welded together and bolted to the floor, as if an outpatient might be tempted to walk home with a few for her dining room. I tried to keep my breathing shallow, lest I absorb a sickness or an inappropriate medicine, simply by inhaling one of the unpleasant odors that surrounded us. I wished Matt hadn’t chosen to see Dr. Abeles during his shift at the clinic, but I figured he preferred being in Everett, his hometown, a few miles from Revere. I felt almost as uncomfortable in a regular doctor’s office anyway.
The waiting room was full, serving a long list of doctors with different combinations of letters after their names. No one looked especially ill, but I felt sorry for each and every one.
Matt twisted his body and leaned across the shiny metal connector between our chairs. He stroked my hand. “Everything’s going to be fine, Gloria.”
An observer would have assumed I was the patient, not Matt; that I was the one waiting for a needle to be inserted into the wall of my rectum.
“Did you make a list of your symptoms?” I asked Matt, suddenly recalling a piece I’d read on-line. “You know, frequent urination could be caused by a benign prostatic hyperplasia.” I nearly tripped over the words, so much more complicated than phrases like
“nuclear magnetic resonance,” or “the alpha particle tunneling effect.”
Matt smiled. “You’ve been doing research. On-line I suppose.”
I nodded. I’d spent hours searching out information from the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, the National Cancer Institute, and the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide. Any site that seemed reputable. I read comparisons between the side effects of surgery and radiation therapy and tried not to retain the fact that 31,500 men would die of prostate cancer this year.
I’d checked out sites for the latest in hard-science news, objectively, with no hidden agenda. But now, searching the health sites, I had a different approach. I looked for good news only. Unlike other cancers, I read, a man is more likely to die
with
prostate cancer than
of
it. On average, an American male has about a thirty percent risk of having prostate cancer in his lifetime, but only about a three percent risk of dying of the disease.
Whew.
But statistics have never given me long-lasting comfort. In that three percent was someone’s husband, someone’s brother, a teacher, a cop.
“Dr. Abeles is ready for you.”
Matt let go of my hand and answered the call, the high-pitched voice of a woman whose short peachy smock was strewn with lavender smiley faces, a nice complement to the receptionist whose white smock had an arrangement of unidentifiable pastel animals in human clothing. My mind wandered to the possibility of a new market: grown-up designs for hospital workers’ uniforms.
The book I’d brought along was another sign of my shift in interest to the life sciences. I’d picked up a new biography of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin. Not the best choice, since Franklin died of ovarian cancer at thirty-seven, but I’d heard that the book shed light on Franklin’s role in the history-making double-helix model of DNA. The burning question: Did Watson and Crick take advantage of the low status of women at that time
and steal her research? For a few minutes, the ongoing debate between methodology (Franklin) and intuition (Watson) kept my mind off the tiny biopsy gun I’d read about, and which Matt was now facing, with only a local anesthetic between him and severe discomfort.
Matt appeared after about a half hour, about twenty-five pages into the Franklin-Watson controversy. Just in time, since I was becoming upset again, this time at the conditions at Cambridge University in the 1950s—only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Rosalind Franklin’s colleagues went to men-only pubs to brainstorm the direction of the next day’s work.
“All set,” Matt said, doing a good job of smiling. For my benefit, I was sure. “We’ll know in about three days.”
Three days—not long at all. Unless you’re waiting for a medical report.
Dinner at home was interrupted by several phone calls, all asking how Matt’s procedure went. George Berger phoned from the station, plus Rose, Andrea Cabrini—a Charger Street lab technician and my latest attempt at making a friend—and Matt’s sister Jean, who was still in denial that Matt and I lived together.
“Is Matt there?” she always asked immediately when I answered the phone. No “Hi, Gloria,” or any other gesture toward politeness. I’d tried different responses, from “One moment please,” in a detached, telephone-operator-like tone, to “Oh, Jean, it’s me, Gloria. How nice to hear from you.” The latter usually annoyed her.
Matt thought Jean’s aversion to me had nothing to do with me personally, but rather with her devotion to Teresa, his first wife.
“They were like sisters,” he’d tell me after each rebuff.
This, of course, only increased my feeling of inadequacy as potential sister material. I’d thought of buttering up her children, but I knew I’d feel guilty playing on the tension between teenagers and their mother.
Elaine Cody was the last to call, her time zone being three hours behind. Elaine and I had held each other’s hands through many such trials during our thirty-year friendship in Berkeley, and we continued now to be close, if three thousand miles apart.
“If you need me, I’m there …” I heard the snap of her fingers “ … in a minute. I know you have Rose and all your Boston friends.”
We both laughed. Elaine knew that “all my Boston friends,” like all my California friends, could fit into one curtained-off space at the North Shore Clinic. I’d never been very social as an adult, blaming my retreat into graduate work on the death of my fiancé, Al Gravese, right after I finished college. It seemed easier to never again get close enough to anyone you’d miss when they left. Between Elaine’s almost yearly change of significant other, and Rose’s extended family, I was happy enough, and busy enough, with a couple of friends on each coast.
We hung up after Elaine extracted a promise from me that I’d tell her if I needed her to come to Revere.
I looked across the table, past the large bowl of salad, the linguini in reheated clam sauce, and the bottles of mineral water, to where Matt buttered a thick slice of Italian bread, apparently comfortable on the tubular pillow we’d added to his chair. I couldn’t recall making a different decision about letting people into my life, but there he was.
“You look taller,” I said, my first attempt at lightening the mood.
He threw back his shoulders and smiled. “Do you like me taller?”
Not fair to give me that look when he couldn’t follow through.
For the next couple of hours, it seemed nothing could distract me from the image of Matt’s tissue samples on the way to a pathology lab for diagnosis. I hoped the pathologist was more than twenty years old, which was my estimated age of many professionals I’d dealt with recently.
I’d insisted on throwing all the clothes we wore to the clinic into the wash, as if the sign-in pencil-on-a-string, the doorknobs, and the ugly green chairs were all highly contaminated. The late-night sounds of the washing machine soothed me. Swishing soap, clean rinse water pouring into the tub—Matt’s system cleansed by a new miracle drug.
George Berger called a second time, close to midnight. Unlike Jean, Berger always greeted me before asking for his partner. I gave Matt the phone, slipped a notebook and pencil onto Matt’s lap, and hung on his shoulder to read his scribble.
“A DOA?” he said into the mouthpiece.
Nina Martin
, he wrote.
“Where?” he asked.
Rumney
, he wrote. The old Rumney Salt Marsh, former home to mutant insect life and multiple tons of North Shore trash. A few years ago, before the marsh restoration project, a body would never have been noticed amid the discarded shopping carts and refrigerator-size boxes.
“Hmm,” Matt said to Berger. I drummed my fingers on the back of his chair.
“The Galiganis?” he asked. An alert. More drumming.
“Anything else?” he asked.
GSW
, he wrote. Gunshot wounds.
“Evidence?” he asked.
2 BT on vic
, he wrote. Two blood types found on the victim. I was pretty good at Matt’s special combination of police code and his own shorthand.
PI
, he wrote. Principal Investigator? No; wrong context. That was for grant proposals. This must be a Private Investigator, I guessed.
“Whoa,” Matt said.
FDA
, he wrote. The Food and Drug Administration? The people who put the purple stamps on rump roasts?
“Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Berger,” he said.
“Who’s Nina Martin and how is a private investigator from the
FDA connected to the Galiganis?” This from me before the telephone receiver hit the cradle.
Matt made a
slow down
motion. “Martin was a PI; she had two business cards in her wallet, one for the local FDA office, and one for the Galigani Mortuary, plus a list of names and numbers they’re still tracing.”
“Hmm.” This time from me.
I settled back on my chair and folded my hands in my lap. Ready for information.
Only when Matt grimaced as he shifted in his chair did I remember his tender bottom. I also remembered to worry about his test results, but pushed that aside. I got his pillow and patted his bald spot. That would have to do for now.
I spread my palms, waiting. “Not to rush you,” I said.
Matt gave me a silly smile, cleared his throat. It was the
yes, boss
expression he’d recently adopted.
“An engineer from the EPA was with the MTA people out at the marsh. They’re the ones who found her,” Matt said.
First the FDA, now the Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Too many agencies, but it made sense, once I thought about it.
The EPA was needed on the marsh restoration project. An unfinished leg of highway, constructed in the 1960s and called “the expressway to nowhere” for years, had been removed, opening the clogged arteries of the marsh to seawater, and providing the ideal laboratory for wetlands study.
The MTA was connected to Boston’s Big Dig, the multiyear, multibillion-dollar construction of an underground expressway, under the heart of the city, and said to be the largest construction project in US history.
The link: Roadbed gravel from the restoration of Rumney Marsh—I thought I’d read two hundred thousand cubic yards of it—was being recycled to Big Dig sites.
Matt tapped his notebook on his knee. “They found a female Hispanic, early thirties, multiple gunshot wounds. Fingerprints
came back as a PI. Real name Nina Martin, though she had a couple of different IDs on her. Probably dumped there, though it’s hard to tell whether or not the marsh is the crime scene.”
“More than one ID? I didn’t know PIs went undercover.”
“Sure, they do it all the time. Claim to be someone else to get information. They don’t usually go deep, though, except for the brave ones.”
Or the dead ones,
I thought. “What do you make of the Galigani connection?”
Matt frowned. “You won’t like this. She’s from Houston, and MC’s name was written on the back of the Galigani Mortuary card.”
I sat up, on alert, my senses suddenly sharpened. Our Fernwood Avenue home was much farther away from a main street than my mortuary apartment had been; at midnight, the only sounds were from inside the house. A zipper clacked against the drum of our dryer; my computer hard drive hummed, always at the ready; a soft saxophone tune emanated from the speakers in our living room.
The loudest sounds were of links connecting, in my mind. A murdered private detective from Houston. Did Jake send a PI to snoop on MC? I couldn’t entertain the thought that MC herself had done anything wrong, something worth an investigation, not for a nanosecond. But Jake was a different story. Maybe into drugs?
“The FDA investigates drugs, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but not the street kind; that would be DEA. Are you thinking of the ex-boyfriend?”
I nodded. “Or that the people supposedly coming after MC are into drugs.”
“Or the FDA number is completely unrelated. Another case entirely that Martin was working on.”
“Or Wayne Gallen hired the PI to follow MC around.” He was still “at-large” so to speak, in that no one had seen him since he was released from the RPD on Tuesday night. Too confusing right now. “What else do we know?”
Matt skipped over the “we,” having adjusted beautifully to my status as his almost-partner. “Two blood types, one hers. So it’s possible
we’re looking for a wounded killer. Stands to reason, as a PI she would have a firearm and some training in self-defense, and probably got in a shot or two. The word is out at hospitals and clinics.”