Castro Valley was half an hour from the Oakland hills in the daytime but closer to forty-five minutes during the evening rush hour with a light rain slicking the streets. Dr. Leonard Paschelke’s home was hidden in a small grove of young redwoods a hundred feet off the road. His office was in the basement rec room and was a lot like the man himself: large, rumpled, and comfortable. Books lined the walls; a stack of well-thumbed medical journals held down a corner of his desk. The far end of the room was taken up with a cheap stereo system and an old TV set. The battered couch in front of it was half-filled with torn pillows and kids’ toys. Paschelke shooed his two small daughters off the couch and sent them upstairs to keep their mother company in the kitchen. He turned off the TV and waved Artie and Mitch to take a seat, then waddled over to an easy chair and sank into it with a sigh.
“You said you wanted to talk to me about Larry.” He added affectionately: “The son of a bitch in some kind of trouble?” Paschelke peered at them over the top of his thick glasses. “You said you were friends of his, right?”
They hadn’t talked to Paschelke about Shea’s death over the phone, and Artie was now sorry that they
hadn’t; it was going to be much more difficult face-to-face. He and Mitch looked mutely at each other, then Mitch told a simpler story about Shea being mugged and killed in the city and his wife and children having disappeared. He didn’t go into detail about the dogs.
A fat, pale-faced man who nervously polished his glasses and rubbed his nose, Paschelke looked more mournful with every word. When Mitch had finished, he said in a husky voice, “We did our internship together. Good man, good doctor. We kept in touch. Sometimes I’d ask him to come over to East Bay Medical for a consultation.”
“Outside of his wife and kids, you were probably the last one he knew who saw him alive,” Artie said.
Paschelke blew on his lenses and attacked them with a dirty handkerchief for the third time. “Nobody knows where Cathy and the boys are?”
Artie shook his head. “They obviously went someplace, but there was no sign they had packed for it—their suitcases were still in the closet.”
“I don’t know what I can add …” Paschelke paused in midsentence, frowning. “You said Larry was going to give a talk at your meeting?”
Artie edged forward on the broken-down couch.
“Did Larry mention it to you?”
Paschelke looked from one to the other, suddenly cautious. “If he did, I’m not sure I’d remember.”
Artie sank back, disappointed. Dry hole. Or maybe Larry had mentioned the meeting and the subject matter but Paschelke didn’t want to talk about it. If he didn’t, it must have been a hot topic between them. “Larry was a consultant for East Bay?”
“More for me than for East Bay.” Paschelke squinted at Artie, the light from the desk lamp reflecting off his glasses. “You’re not a medical man, are you?”
“TV newswriter,” Artie said. “My job has nothing to do with Larry.”
He could read the suspicion in Paschelke’s face. Reporter,
so be wary. Paschelke turned to Mitch.
“You’re the psychiatrist?” Mitch started to fumble for his wallet and identification, but Paschelke held up a hand. “No, no, I believe you.” He hesitated, then made up his mind to trust them. “I’m on staff at East Bay. They’ve got a twenty-four-hour trauma center and it gets pretty busy on the weekends. I’m usually on call in the ER—the interns call it the Knife and Gurr Club because we get a lot of inner-city homicides. Also, freeways 580, 880, and 238 run close by, and if you get racked up on any of them, the East Bay ER is where they’re going to take you.”
He hoisted himself out of his chair and shuffled over to a small refrigerator in the back of the rec room. “You want a beer? Soda?”
Artie declined with thanks. Mitch asked for a beer and Paschelke returned with two cans of Miller, wiping the frosted tops against his pants.
“We were just trying to follow up on Larry’s last day or two,” Mitch said.
Paschelke popped open his can of beer and took a sip, then looked at Artie with renewed suspicion. “Anything I tell you, I don’t want to see it on the evening news. Larry was the private type, and so am I.”
“I was a friend of Larry’s,” Artie said simply. “That’s why I’m here. You don’t want to tell us anything, you don’t have to.”
Paschelke stared at him a moment longer, then nodded. “Banks … I think Larry mentioned you.” Another sip of beer. “Anyway, three weeks ago last Friday there was a bad accident on 580 about one in the morning. Two high school kids high on beer and methamphetamine were driving an old forty-nine Merc—can you believe that? a classic car—and plowed right into this poor old bastard in his Saturn. The kids went through the windshield and it was slice-and-dice all over the freeway. No seat belts, no air bags, no nothing … . There wasn’t anything we could do but pour them into
buckets and notify their folks. They went straight to the coroner.”
He was silent for a moment, concentrating on his carr of beer.
“The old man in the Saturn was … something else. We did what we could for him but he was pretty badly busted up—died on the table.” He sank back in his chair, his expression suddenly remote as he remembered the scene in the ER.
“You said the old man was ‘something else,’” Mitch prompted, curious.
A snort. “Because he was something else, that’s why. That’s when I called Larry and asked him to come over and have a look-see, confirm what I thought I was seeing.”
Artie was puzzled. “There must have been other doctors present.”
“Always is. But not everybody sees the same thing … or is interested in seeing the same thing. Larry and I had worked together a number of times; we usually saw things the same way.”
There was an edge to Mitch’s voice. “You didn’t call the police? Notify the relatives?”
Paschelke looked pained.
“I guess it’s been a while since you did a rotation in an ER, Doctor. The police are usually first on the scene—they follow the ambulance crews to the hospital. They’re the ones who go through the victim’s pockets and the car, find the ID, and call the next of kin. They were right there with this one. I made my report and they went away. Nobody they could notify in this case. The car wasn’t his. And he had no ID.”
“No place of employment?” Artie asked, surprised.
“I told you. No ID, no nothing. The police went through what was left of his car with a fine-tooth comb. All they got was a name on a cleaner’s tag on the inside of his coat. William Talbot. Just a name and a garment number, nothing more—no address or city for the
cleaner, nothing. Only a tag the wearer had forgotten to remove. Not even sure that was his real name—what the hell, he could have borrowed the coat, I suppose. The police checked out the car. A rental but the name on the rental agreement didn’t check out either. Perhaps his prints will, I don’t know. The police will probably just log him in their files and hope someone reports him missing. Maybe somebody will, but I doubt it. Had to be a reason why there was no ID anywhere in the car.”
Artie forgot about his long trip back to the city.
Talbot was the name on one of Larry’s files.
“Why did you call in Larry?”
Paschelke crumpled the empty beer can in his fist. “Specifically? Condition of the body. Facially, Talbot looked like he was in his early sixties. Only thing was, his bones weren’t old. We tried to set a few of them while he was on the table—I told you he was pretty broken up. A lot of compound fractures where the long bones protruded through the flesh.” He shook his head, remembering. “A real mess.”
“I don’t understand about the bones,” Artie said, frowning.
Paschelke leaned forward to explain, his expression almost professorial.
“Look, when you grow old, your bones get brittle, they lose calcium. If you exercise a lot, the deterioration is slower, but it’s still there. What you can’t change are the pads of cartilage at the ends of the bones that begin to thin out as you age. You’re not as flexible anymore; you’ve got less connective tissue, less cushioning. The shafts of Talbot’s long bones were thick with heavy ridges for the attachment of what were exceptionally powerful muscles. If I had to go by the bones, I would have said the man was a naturally very strong thirty-, thirty-five-year-old. One thing for sure: He was either a young man who’d been through a helluva
lot or he was one damn healthy old fart. That’s when I called up Larry and asked him to come over.”
Mitch looked at him sharply. “Larry wasn’t a specialist in orthopedics.”
“That’s not why I called him. Larry and I had worked together before; we were interested in the same things, medically speaking. In this case, the limits of human variability. Me, because as a surgeon I’m naturally curious. Larry, because he specialized in the circulatory system and, believe me, the anatomical variations can be enormous. Human variability is something all doctors are interested in, have to be interested in. It’s a good part of what makes horse races in medicine. How much a person can differ physically in heart size, brain size, weight, height—that sort of thing—and still be within normal bounds. Strip down a pygmy and a tall Swede, have them stand side by side, and you’d be hard pressed to say they were of the same species.”
He got up and waddled over to the fridge for another can of beer. When he came back, Mitch said, “So Larry came over. Then what?”
Paschelke looked uncomfortable. “The man was dead. He had no ID, no known relatives. You can’t hold them in the morgue forever. If the body isn’t claimed, it’s turned over to the coroner and cremated or donated to a medical school. Larry came and took a look and we got curious. There was nobody to notify, no way we could hurt the man no matter what we did. So as the physician of record, I decided to do an autopsy.”
Mitch raised his eyebrows. “And what did you find out?”
Paschelke held up his hand and started listing the findings on his fingers. “The arteries showed no signs whatever of atherosclerosis—they were what cardiologists call ‘pipes.’ Even when you’re young, your arteries usually show some fat deposits. The heart was oversize, beyond what I’d call normal limits. I mean the entire
heart, not just the left ventricle, which might be expected if the man had valve trouble or was suffering from heart failure. The arteries feeding the heart were very large and, as I said, very healthy. No way in the world he would ever have had a heart attack.”
“What about the lungs?”
“Clean, much too clean even for those living in the country these days.” The basement was cool but Paschelke had started to sweat. “The body didn’t look—normal. To either of us. Larry took measurements, a lot of them, and inspected the other organs. No signs of deterioration in any of them—I’m talking about normal deterioration with age. If the man hadn’t died, our guess was that he would have lived a lot longer than a healthy hundred.”
He sank back in his chair, rolling the cold can of beer between his sweaty palms.
“And there was the accident itself. The kids were going the wrong way on a ramp. It should have been a head-on, both cars completely demolished. It didn’t happen that way. Talbot reacted pretty fast—far faster than he should have been able to. According to the police, he almost made it, twisting the steering wheel to swerve out of the way. The kids clipped his Saturn at the rear and it rolled down an embankment. That’s what did the damage, both to the car and the driver. Seat belt didn’t help and, since the car was rolling sideways, neither did the air bag.”
He lapsed into silence, concentrating on his can of beer.
“You think Larry was going to talk about this?” Artie asked. It was pretty morbid; he couldn’t imagine Larry picking it as a topic.
“I told you Larry took measurements.” Once again, Paschelke sounded uncertain of himself. “A lot of them. In anthropology, they call it cladistics, the science of measurements to determine what species a creature belongs to. The pygmy and our Swedish
friend might not look much alike, but when you measure the shape of the skull and the way it sits on the spinal column, the teeth and the shape of the long bones and all of that, it’s obvious they’re members of the same species.” He paused, remembering. “Larry got pretty excited.”
“Why?” Artie asked, puzzled.
Paschelke looked embarrassed.
“He didn’t think William Talbot was human.”
“Jesus Christ, little green men,” Mitch muttered.
Paschelke sat up in his chair, suddenly very formal. “I didn’t say anything like that, Doctor. The man was genus Homo, there was no argument about that. But Larry didn’t think he was sapiens. From what he told me about your meetings, I’d say yes, that’s what he was going to talk about.”
It was suddenly so quiet in the basement that Artie could hear the wind in the redwoods outside.
“What did you think?”
Paschelke looked uneasy. “I can’t say as I came to any conclusions. The body certainly pushed the limits of human variability, but after you see a lot of bodies, you get reluctant to set limits. But I couldn’t disagree with Larry on any of his findings. And the man’s physical strength was certainly beyond the norm.”
Mitch snorted and stood up, ready to leave. Artie pushed himself off the couch, thinking once again about the long trip home. He slipped into his coat and turned to say good-bye.
“What do you mean, his physical strength was beyond the norm? How could you tell?”
Paschelke shrugged. “Just that. Beyond the norm. William Talbot twisted the steering wheel to swerve out of the way of the Merc. He still had it in his hands when the police pulled him out.” He looked up at them. “He twisted the damn wheel right off the steering column.”
“Superman,” Mitch sneered.
Paschelke was insulted.
“I didn’t say that, either. Who knows what somebody can do in extremis? I know a man who once lifted a car off a friend pinned underneath … . Oh, I thought Talbot was human enough. At the high end of the bell curve, obviously, but human. It was Larry who thought he was … different.”
“He could have taken a DNA sample,” Mitch said coldly. “Satisfied his curiosity easily enough.”
“He did, Dr. Levin,” Paschelke said, just as cold. “Five milliliters of blood and a small tissue sample from the kidneys. But I doubt that he had time to have the tests performed before his … death.”
It was dark and the drizzle had changed to a cold rain. Mitch turned up the heater and slowed the car, searching for the turnoff to the freeway.
“Did you believe all that crap?”
Artie stirred, half asleep.
“I’m no doctor, Mitch.” After a moment’s thought: “Maybe. If everything he said was true, it’s the sort of thing that would’ve gotten Larry’s water hot. I can see him going off the deep end about it.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Connection to what?”
“Between the man they autopsied and Larry getting killed in the Tenderloin.”
Artie blinked the sleep from his eyes.
“That’s some stretch.” He suddenly wasn’t sure. “Larry did the autopsy and wrote up his notes. The next night he’s killed in the Tenderloin and his family disappears and his home is ransacked—carefully.” He frowned. “I don’t know. Because events happen in sequence doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a connection. Paschelke was with him. He knew as much as Larry did and he’s still alive.”
The roadside sign said another twenty miles to San Francisco.
“Larry believed the guy was something else, and Paschelke didn’t. That might make a difference.”
Artie was wide awake now. Despite the heater, it suddenly felt colder in the car.
“He didn’t believe it until we stopped by and told him about Larry being killed. Maybe he’s rethinking his position. There’s a chance we didn’t do him any favors asking him about it.”
He thought about it a moment longer.
“Imagine there is a connection. Say somebody knew the old man was … different … and didn’t want anybody else to know and went to extraordinary lengths to shut up the one man who did know and those he might have mentioned it to. But first he would have had to know that the driver was in an accident. Then he would have had to know that Larry had done the autopsy and made notes. After that, presumably, he followed Larry into the city, somehow sicced the dogs on him before he could talk to us at the meeting, and then went over to Oakland to kill the family or confiscate all the research—or erase it—or maybe both. Not to mention going through the fridge looking for little test tubes of DNA samples. That’s a lot for one man to do in one night.”
“Maybe he had help.”
“Sure, Mitch, maybe it was all a secret experiment of some sort. Larry found out and so the government had to get rid of him. They sure chose a strange way of doing it.”
“Larry’s dead, Artie. Don’t make jokes about it.”
Artie felt irritated.
“What difference does it make if Talbot was … unusual? Who the hell cares? So the cops called Cathy and she freaked, grabbed the kids, and went to a friend’s house or maybe a relative’s. What would you expect her to do? At the very least she’d be looking for comfort and somebody to help handle the kids. What’s so surprising that the diskette was erased and the hard
drive was fucked up? The office was probably forbidden to the kids, which meant it was a huge attraction for them. So they played with the computer when nobody was around and they screwed it up. They wouldn’t have been the first kids to do that.”
“You’re trying too hard,” Mitch said quietly. And after a few miles more: “I guess I just can’t believe Larry’s dead. I don’t want to believe that was him on the table.” He changed the subject. “What about the diskette you found in his lab coat?”
Artie had forgotten about it. “You saw me?”
“‘The Shadow knows’—there was a mirror by the side door so Cathy could see who was coming.”
“I’ll give the diskette to the intern down at work to print out. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s Larry’s notes—we’ll find out. We ought to think about services for Larry. His parents are dead, but I know he had a brother or a cousin back East. And we should contact Cathy’s relatives … .”
“The ones she went to visit last night without even packing?” Mitch shook his head. “Sorry, Artie, promise.”
Artie wasn’t sleepy anymore and was sorry that he wasn’t. In his mind’s eye he kept seeing Larry crouched in the packing crate, trying to fight off three feral dogs.
“Paschelke was something else—to coin a phrase,” Mitch mused.
Artie didn’t answer. He had closed his eyes, but much as he wanted to, he couldn’t doze off.
“‘I’m a victim of soicumstance,’” Levin suddenly said, chuckling.
Artie opened one eye.
“Too easy, Mitch. That’s Curly.”
Artie picked up his car in the KXAM lot; he didn’t bother checking to see if Connie was working late. He’d see her in the morning and that would be too soon.
It was a little after ten when he got home. Mark had fallen asleep on the couch, a Friends rerun on the TV set. Artie didn’t wake him but went to the kitchen and ate half a bowl of cereal, then dumped the rest in the sink and walked out on the back porch. The rain had let up and it didn’t feel quite so cold.
He leaned his elbows on the railing and stared out over the city. They were on a hill, the porch three stories above Noe Street. It was a great view, one of the things that had decided him and Susan on buying the house. They had bought it in the early eighties and gotten it cheap. It was worth a lot more now—retirement money when the time came.
On the street below, a few young men were slogging through the drizzle to the bars around Castro and Market. Lonely people, he thought, everybody by themselves, almost nobody walking in pairs. They’d sit in a bar, get loaded, and pick up somebody at closing time so they wouldn’t have to spend the night alone.
He stared more intently at the sidewalk. Somebody was watching him from the street below, he thought, annoyed. Then the annoyance slipped easily from his mind and he went back to staring out over the city. It was one lousy time for Susan to go up north. Nobody should be alone on the holidays; nobody should have to be alone anytime. Too many people looked forward to going to work simply because they were surrounded by people they knew, then went home to TV dinners and their one reliable friend, the Tube.
To a part of Artie, it suddenly seemed like the air was alive with electricity. There were little crosscurrents of wind and whispers in the night. But most of him ignored the wind and the whispers and the tentative plucking at his mind, the twinges in the air around him.
Then a murmur in his mind, a bubble of thought.
that’s right … one fucking, depressing life …
A part of Artie was suddenly frantic.
There was a flutter of wings a few feet above him, and he looked up to watch a gull wheeling by in the rainy night. If you had to settle for living, that would be the life he’d settle for. Just flap his wings and fly.
Only a faint sigh this time, a subtle urging.
go ahead … try it …
He wasn’t aware of climbing to the top of the railing that circled the porch and teetering on the edge, his arms outstretched. One step, he thought. One step off the railing to catch a rising air current and then he’d soar over the city like the gull.
“Dad!”
Somebody grabbed him around the waist and the next thing he.knew he was lying on the redwood deck of the porch, his face bruised and bleeding from smashing into the wooden planking. Mark was holding him, his T-shirt clinging limply to his chest, his hair plastered over his face from the rain. He must have lunged for Artie from his wheelchair, which was still in the doorway.
For a long moment Artie couldn’t even think. It was raining and he was wet and cold, though there seemed to be less electricity in the air. Just the wind and the rustle of the leaves and, somewhere in the night around him, a vague sense of surprise and disappointment.
“What? What the hell—”
“Goddamm it, Artie, you were standing on the railing! You were going to jump!”
Artie twisted around to stare at the railing. When had he made up his mind to go over? Or what had made it up for him?
He shivered. Larry had died because he’d found out something he shouldn’t have.
Now he knew part of what Larry had known and if it hadn’t been for Mark, he’d be dead too.
Which didn’t make any sense at all, because he didn’t know enough about the dead driver of the Saturn to believe or disbelieve—
Anything.