Blood Shot

36

I retrieved my car and headed back to Lotty’s. All I’d really gotten from seeing Jurshak was information that he’d been working some kind of fraud with the Xerxes insurance. And something major, based on his expression. But I didn’t know what it was. And I needed to find out quickly, before all the people who were mad at me converged once and for all and sent me to my permanent rest. The urgency tightened my stomach and congealed my brain.

Rush-hour traffic was already thickening the main streets downtown. The menace in Humboldt’s voice this morning lingered in my ears. I drove cautiously through the February twilight, trying to make sure no one was tailing me. I drove all the way up to Montrose and exited at the park, doubling around twice before figuring I was in the clear and heading back to Lotty’s.

It didn’t surprise me that I got there before she did-to accommodate working mothers Lotty keeps the clinic open until six most evenings. I went out for some food-the least I could do in thanks for her hospitality was to have dinner ready. I started again on the chicken with garlic and olives I’d been trying to make the night before my attack, hoping that if I kept the front of my mind occupied, the back would begin to sprout ideas. This time I prepared the whole dish without interruption and set it to simmer over a low flame.

By then it was close to seven-thirty and Lotty still hadn’t returned. I began to get worried, wondering whether I should check the clinic or with Max. A late emergency might have detained her, either at the clinic or hospital. But she’d also be an easy target for anyone bent on getting revenge on me.

At eight-thirty, when I’d tried both clinic and hospital without results, I headed out to search for her. Her car pulled up in front of the building just as I was locking the lobby door.

“Lotty! I was getting worried,” I cried, dashing over to meet her.

She followed me back into the building, her pace lagging, most unlike her usual brisk trot. “Were you, my dear?” she asked tiredly. “I should have remembered how nervous you’ve been the last few days. It’s not like you to be in such a fret over a few hours.”

She was right. Another sign that I had moved beyond any semblance of rationality in dealing with the issues at hand. She moved slowly into her apartment, taking off her coat with careful movements and stowing it methodically inside a carved walnut wardrobe standing in the hallway. I led her to an armchair in her sitting room. She let me pour her a small brandy-the only alcohol she drinks, and then only when under severe strain.

“Thank you, my dear. That’s most helpful.” She slipped her shoes off; I found her slippers laid neatly next to her bed and brought them out for her.

“I spent the last two hours with Dr. Christophersen. She’s the nephrologist I mentioned showing your chemical company notebooks to.”

She finished the brandy but shook her head when I offered her the bottle. “I suspected something when I looked at the records, but I wanted a specialist to do a thorough interpretation.” She opened her briefcase and pulled out a few pages of photocopies. “I left the notebooks locked in Max’s safe at Beth Israel. They are too-too frightening to be floating around the city streets where anyone could lay hands on them. This is a summary of Ann’s-Dr. Christophersen’s-notes. She says she can do a thorough analysis if it’s needed.”

I took the pages from her and looked at Dr. Christophersen’s square, tiny writing. She was citing the blood work reported in the pages of Chigwell’s notebooks, using Louisa Djiak’s and Steve Ferraro’s records as an example. The blood chemistry details made no sense to me, but the summary at the bottom of the page was in plain English and appallingly clear:

These records show blood history for Ms. Louisa Djiak (white unmarried female, one parturition) from 1963 to 1982, the last year for which data were taken; and for Mr. Steve Ferraro (white unmarried male) from 1957 to 1982. Records also exist for approximately five hundred other employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant covering the period 1955 to 1982. These records show changes in the values of creatine, blood urea nitrogen, bilirubin, hematocrit, and hemoglobin, and white blood count consistent with the development of renal, liver, and bone marrow dysfunction. Conversation with Dr. Daniel Peters, Ms. Djiak’s attending physician, confirm that the patient first came to him in 1984, only at her daughter’s insistence. At that time he diagnosed chronic renal failure, which has now progressed to an acute stage. Other complications kept Ms. Djiak from being a good candidate for transplant.

The blood work indicates that noticeable renal damage occurred as early as 1967 (CR = 1.9; BUN = 28) and severe damage by 1969 (CR = 2.4; BUN = 30). The patient herself began experiencing typical diffuse symptoms -itching, fatigue, headaches-around 1979 but thought perhaps she was experiencing “change of life” and did not deem it necessary to consult a physician.

The report went on to give a similar summary of Steve Ferraro, ending with his death from aplastic anemia in 1983. The rest of the precise script detailed the toxic properties of Xerxine, and showed that the changes in blood chemistry were consistent with exposure to Xerxine. I read the document through twice before putting it down to stare, appalled, at Lotty.

“Dr. Christophersen did a lot of work, calling Louisa’s and Steve Ferraro’s doctors and doing all that checking,” was the only comment I could get out at first.

“She was horrified-most horrified-at what she was seeing, I gave her the names of two patients I knew could be checked on and she did the follow-up this afternoon. At least in the case of your friend and Mr. Ferraro, it seems abundantly clear that they had no idea what was happening to them,”

I nodded. “It makes a hideous kind of sense. Louisa starts having vague symptoms that she thinks are menopause-at thirty-four?-but then she never had any sex education to speak of, maybe it’s not so incredible. Anyway, she wouldn’t blab it around the plant. A lot of them come from the kind of background she did-where anything having to do with private body functions was shameful and never to be discussed.”

“But, Victoria,” Lotty burst out, “what is the sense of all this? Who besides a Mengele is so cold, so calculating in keeping these kinds of records, and saying nothing, not one word, to the people involved?”

I rubbed my head. The spot where I’d been hit was pretty well healed, but now that my brain was so stressed out, the injury was throbbing in a dull way, the pounding drum in the jungle of my mind.

“I don’t know.” Lotty’s enervated state had infected me. “I can see why they don’t want any of it coming out now.”

Lotty shook her head impatiently. “Not so I. Explain, Victoria.”

“Damages. Pankowski and Ferraro sued for indemnity payments they believed were rightfully theirs-they tried to build a case saying their illnesses were the result of exposure to Xerxine. Humboldt defended himself successfully. According to the lawyer who handled their suit, the company had two workable defenses-the first was that these guys both smoked and drank heavily, so no one could prove that Xerxine had poisoned them. And the second, which seemed to do the trick, was that their exposure had taken place before Xerxine’s toxicity was known. So that…”

My voice trailed off. The problem with Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest became staggeringly clear to me. He was helping Humboldt hide the high mortality and illness rates at Xerxes to get favorable rate consideration from the insurance carrier. I could imagine a couple of different ways they could work it, but the likeliest seemed to be that they’d buy a better package from Mariners Rest than they offered the employees. Employees would be told that they didn’t have coverage for certain tests or certain amounts of hospital stay. Then when the bills came in they’d go through the fiduciary and he’d fix them before sending them to the insurance company. I thought about it from several different angles and it still looked good. I got up and headed for the phone extension in the kitchen.

“So that what, Vic?” Lotty called impatiently behind me. “What are you doing?”

Turning off the chicken for starters: I’d forgotten the dinner I’d left simmering happily on the back of the stove. The olives were little charred lumps while the chicken seemed to have welded itself to the bottom of the pan. Definitely not the most successful recipe in my repertoire. I tried scraping the mess into the garbage can.

“Oh, never mind the dinner,” Lotty said irritably. “Just put it in the sink and tell me the rest of your thinking. The company argued that they couldn’t be responsible for the illness of anyone who worked for them if it took place before 1975 when Xerxine’s toxicity was established by Ciba-Geigy. Is that it?”

“Yeah, except I didn’t know about Ciba-Geigy or that 1975 was the critical year. And my bet is that they claimed to have lowered their ppm of Xerxine to whatever the decreed standard was, and that that’s what their reports to Washington show. The ones that Jurshak sent out for Humboldt. But that the analysis SCRAP did at the plant shows much higher levels. I need to call Caroline Djiak and find out.”

“But, Vic,” Lotty said, absently scraping charred chicken from the skillet, “you still don’t explain why they wouldn’t tell their workers their bodies were being damaged. If the standard wasn’t set until 1975, what difference did it make before then?”

“Insurance,” I said shortly, trying to find Louisa’s number in the directory. She wasn’t listed. Snarling, I went back to the spare room to dig my address book out of my suitcase.

I returned to the kitchen and started dialing. “The only person who might tell us definitely is Dr. Chigwell, and he’s missing right now. I’m not sure I could make him talk even if I could find him-Humboldt scares him much more than I do.”

Caroline answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Vic. Hi. I was just putting Ma to bed. Can you hold? Or should I call back?”

I told her I’d wait. “But you see,” I added to Lotty, “those notebooks mean bankruptcy now. Not for the whole company necessarily, but certainly for the Xerxes operation. A good lawyer gets hold of that stuff, contacts the employees or their families, and really goes to town. They’ve got all those Manville settlements to use by way of precedent.”

No wonder Humboldt had been desperate enough to seek me out personally. His little empire was being threatened by the Turks. Frederick Manheim had been right-it must have seemed incredible to all of them that a detective could start nosing around Pankowski and Ferraro and not be looking for evidence of the blood work.

Why had Chigwell tried to kill himself? Overcome by remorse? Or did someone threaten him with a fate worse than death if he told Murray or me anything? The people he’d pranced off to on Friday might well have killed him by now if they thought he was going to crack on them.

I didn’t think I’d ever find out exactly what happened. Nor did I see a way of bringing Nancy’s death back to the great shark. The only hope would be if the two thugs Bobby had in custody spilled their guts and somehow managed to implicate Humboldt. But I didn’t pin much hope on that. Even if they did talk, someone like Humboldt knew too many ways of insulating himself from the direct consequences of his actions. Just like Henry II. I shivered.

When Caroline came back on the line I asked her if Louisa had a brochure describing her Xerxes benefits.

“Christ, Vic, I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “What difference does it make?”

“A lot,” I answered shortly. “It could explain why Nancy was killed and a whole lot of other unpleasant stuff.”

Caroline gave an exaggerated sigh. She said she’d ask Louisa, and put the phone down.

Nancy would have known about Xerxes’s real loss experience because she was monitoring that as SCRAP’S environment and health director. So when she’d seen the letter to Mariners Rest and found the company’s rate structure, she’d seen at once that Jurshak was handling some kind of fiddle for them. But who had taken her files out of her office at SCRAP? Or maybe she’d had them on her, preparing for a confrontation with Jurshak, and he’d seen they were found and destroyed. But she’d left the other stuff in her car and he hadn’t looked there.

When Caroline came back on the line she told me that Louisa thought she’d brought a flyer home with her but it would be buried in her papers. Did I want to wait while she looked? I asked her just to find it and leave it out for me to pick up in the morning. She began a barrage of questions. I couldn’t deal with the insistent pressure in her voice.

“Give my love to Louisa,” I interrupted tiredly, and hung up on her indignant squawks.

Lotty and I went out for a sober supper at the Dortmunder. Both of us felt too overwhelmed by the enormity revealed by the Chigwell notebooks to have much appetite, or to want to talk.

When we got home I checked in with Mr. Contreras. Young Arthur had taken off. The old man had locked front and back doors when he took Peppy out for her evening walk, but Art had opened a window and jumped out. Mr. Contreras was miserable-he felt he’d let me down the one time I’d actively sought his help.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said earnestly. “You couldn’t possibly watch him twenty-four hours a day. He came to us for protection-if he doesn’t want it, it’s his neck, after all. You and I can’t spend our lives looking around for scissors if he wants to keep sticking his head into nooses.”

That cheered him slightly. Although he apologized several times more, he was able to talk about something else-like how lonely Peppy was with me away.

“Yeah, I miss both of you,” I said. “Even your hot breath down my neck when I want to be alone.”

He laughed delightedly at that and hung up much happier than I was. Although I really didn’t give a damn what happened to young Art, I wasn’t sure how much he’d learned of what I was figuring out. I didn’t relish the thought of his taking any of it back to his father.

My answering service told me Murray had been trying to reach me. I tracked him down and told him nothing had jelled yet. He didn’t really believe me, but he didn’t have any way to prove I was wrong.