A Case of Need: A Novel (16 page)

Finally, I shifted the conversation to Karen.

“What, you, too?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re the second one today. Foggy was here earlier.”

“Foggy?”

The old man. That’s what she used to call him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It was her name for him, that’s all. She had lots of names for him.”

“You talked with him?”

Zenner said carefully, “He came to see me.”

“And?”

Zenner shrugged. “I told him to go away.”

“Why is that?”

We came to Massachusetts Avenue. The traffic was heavy. “Because,” he said, “I didn’t want to get involved.”

“But you already are involved.”

“Like hell I am.” He started across the street, deftly maneuvering among the cars.

I said, “Do you know what happened to her?”

“Listen,” he said, “I know more about it than anybody. Even her parents. Anybody.”

“But you don’t want to get involved.”

“That’s the picture.”

I said, “This is very serious. A man has been charged with murdering her. You have to tell me what you know.”

“Look,” he said. “She was a nice girl, but she had problems. We had problems together. For a while it was O.K., and then the problems got too big, and it was over. That’s all. Now get off my back.”

I shrugged. “During the trial,” I said, “the defense will call you. They can make you testify under oath.”

“I’m not testifying in any trial.”

“You won’t have a choice,” I said. “Unless, perhaps, there never is a trial.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning we’d better have a talk.”

Two blocks down Massachusetts Avenue toward Central Square was a dirty little tavern with an out-of-focus color TV over the bar. We ordered two beers and watched the weather report while we waited. The forecaster was a cheerful little pudgy fellow who smiled as he predicted rain tomorrow, and the next day.

Zenner said, “What’s your interest in all this?”

“I think Lee is innocent.”

He laughed. “You’re the only one who does.”

The beers came. I paid. He sipped his and licked the foam off his lips.

“O.K.,” he said, settling back in the booth. “I’ll tell you how it was. I met her at a party last spring, around April. We got along well, right off. It seemed just great. I didn’t know anything about her when I met her, she was just a good-looking girl. I knew she was young. I didn’t know how young until the next morning when I practically flipped. I mean, Christ, sixteen … But I liked her. She wasn’t cheap.”

He drank half the glass in a single gulp.

“So, we started seeing each other. And little by little, I found out about her. She had a way of explaining things in bits and snatches. It was very tantalizing, like the old movie serials. Come back next Saturday for the next installment, that kind of thing. She was good at it.”

“When did you stop seeing her?”

“June, early June. She was graduating from Concord, and I said I’d come out to see the graduation. She didn’t want that. I said why. And then the whole thing came out about her parents and how I wouldn’t get along. You see,” he said, “my name was Zemnick before, and I grew up in Brooklyn. It’s that way. She made her point, and I kissed her off. I was really pissed at the time. Now, I don’t care anymore.”

“You never saw her again?”

“Once. It must have been late July. I had a construction job on the Cape, a real soft one, and a lot of my friends were out there. I’d heard some things about her, things I hadn’t heard when I was dating her. And how she collects jocks. About her problems with her parents and how she hated her old man. Things began to make sense when they hadn’t made sense before. And I heard that she’d had an abortion and was telling people it was my kid.”

He finished his beer and motioned to the bartender. I had another with him.

“One day I run into her out by Scusset. She’s in a gas station getting her car filled and I happen to pull in. So we have a little talk. I ask her if it was true about the abortion, and she says yes. I ask her if it was my kid, and she says in a real steady voice that she doesn’t know who the father is. So I tell her to go to hell and walk off. Then she comes running up and says she’s sorry, can’t we be friends again and see each other. I say no we can’t. So she starts to cry. Well, hell, that’s awful to have a girl crying in a gas station. So I said I’d take her out that night.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. It was terrible. Alan, do this; Alan, do that; faster, Alan, now slower. Alan, you sweat so much. She never shut up.”

“Was she living on the Cape last summer?”

“She said she was. Working in an art gallery or something. But I heard she spent most of her time in Beacon Hill. She had some crazy friends.”

“What friends?”

“I don’t know. Friends.”

“Did you ever meet any of them?”

“Only one. At a party one time on the Cape. Somebody introduced me to a girl named Angela who was supposed to be a friend of Karen’s. Angela Harley or Hardy, something like that. Damned good-looking girl, but strange.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just strange. Far out. When I met her, she was high on something. She kept saying strange things like ‘The nose of God has the power of sour.’ You couldn’t talk to her; she was out of it. Too bad, she was damned good-looking.”

“Did you ever meet her parents?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Once. Quite a pair. Old stiff upper lip and warm lower lips. No wonder she hated them.”

“How do you know she hated them?”

“What do you think she talked about? Her parents. Hour after hour. She hated Foggy. She sometimes called him Good Old Dad, because of the initials. She had names for her stepmother, too, but you wouldn’t believe them. The funny thing is, though, that she was very close to her mother. Her real mother. She died when Karen was about fourteen or fifteen. I think that was when it all started.”

“What started?”

“The wild stuff. All the drugs and the action. She wanted people to think she was wild. She wanted to be shocking. As if she had to prove it. She was very big on drugs and always took them in public. Some people said she was addicted to amphetamines, but I don’t know if that was true. A lot of people on the Cape had been stung by her, and there were lots of nasty stories. They used to say that Karen Randall would go up on anything, and down on everything.” He grimaced slightly as he said it.

“You liked her,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “as long as I could.”

“That time on the Cape, was it the last time you saw her?”

“Yeah.”

The next beer came. He looked at his glass and twisted it around in his hands for a few seconds.

“No,” he said, “that’s not true.”

“You saw her again?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“When?”

“Sunday,” he said, “last Sunday.”

“I
T WAS ALMOST LUNCHTIME
,” Zenner said. “I was hung over from a party after the game. Really hung. Too hung. I was worried about looking good at practice Monday, because I had missed a few plays on Saturday. The same play: an end sweep. I wasn’t pulling fast enough, it kept happening. So I was a little worried.

“Anyway, I was in my room trying to get dressed for lunch. Tying my tie. I had to do it three times, because I kept getting it crooked. I was really hung. And I had a bad headache; and in she walks, right into the room, just like I was expecting her.”

“Were you?”

“I never wanted to see anyone less in my life. I had finally gotten over her, you know, worked it all out of my system. Then she shows up again, looking better than ever. A little heavy, but still good. My roommates had all gone to lunch, so I was the only one there. She asked me if I would take her to lunch.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to see her. She was like the plague, she infected you. I didn’t want her around. So I asked her to please leave, but she didn’t. She sat down and lit a cigarette and said she knew it was all over with us, but she needed somebody to talk to. Well, I’d heard that one before, and I wasn’t having any. But she wouldn’t leave. She sat there on the couch and wouldn’t leave. She said I was the only person she could talk to.

“So finally I just gave up. I sat down and said, ‘O.K., talk.’ And I kept telling myself that I was a fool and that I’d regret it, just the way I regretted the last time. There are some people you just can’t be around.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Her. That was all she ever talked about. Herself, her parents, her brother—”

“Was she close to her brother?”

“In a way. But he’s kind of straight arrow, like Foggy. Fired for the medical bit. So Karen never told him a lot of things. Like the drugs and stuff. She just never mentioned it to him.”

“Go on.”

“So I sat there and listened to her talk. She talked about school for a while, and then about some mystical thing she was starting where you meditated twice a day for half an hour. It was supposed to be like washing out your mind, or dipping a cloth in ink, or something. She had just started it but she thought it was great.”

“How did she act during this time?”

“Nervous,” Zenner said. “She smoked a pack just while she sat there, and she kept fiddling with her hands. She had a Concord Academy ring. She kept pulling it off, and putting it on, and twisting it. The whole damned time.”

“Did she say why she had come down from Smith for the weekend?”

“I asked her,” Zenner said. “And she told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That she was going to have an abortion.”

I sat back and lit a cigarette. “What was your reaction?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t believe her.” He glanced quickly at me, then sipped the beer. “I didn’t believe anything about her anymore. That was the trouble. I was just turned off, I wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t let myself, because she still … had an effect on me.”

“Was she aware of that?”

“She was aware of everything,” he said. “She didn’t miss anything. She was like a cat; she worked by her instincts and they were always right. She could walk into a room and just look around, and she immediately knew everything about everyone. She had this sense for emotions.”

“Did you talk to her about the abortion?”

“No. Because I didn’t believe her. I just let it drop. Only she came back to it, about an hour later. She said she was scared, that she wanted to be with me. She kept saying she was scared.”

“Did you believe that?”

“I didn’t know what to believe. No. No, I didn’t believe her.” He finished his beer in a gulp and put the mug down. “But look,” he said, “what the hell was I supposed to do? She was nuts, that girl. Everybody knew it and it was true. She had this thing with her parents and with everybody else, and it pushed her over the brink. She was crazy.”

“How long did you talk with her?”

“About an hour and a half. Then I said I had to eat lunch and study and that she’d better go. So she left.”

“You don’t know where she was going?”

“No. I asked her, and she just laughed. She said she never knew where she was going.”

I
T WAS LATE IN THE DAY
when I left Zenner, but I called Peter Randall’s office anyway. He wasn’t there. I said it was urgent so his nurse suggested I try his lab. He often worked late in his lab on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

I didn’t call. I went right over.

Peter Randall was the only member of the Randall family I had ever met before. I’d run into him once or twice at medical parties. It was impossible to miss him—first, because he was so physically outstanding, and second because he liked parties and attended every one he heard about.

He was a titanic fat man, jowled and jovial, with a hearty laugh and a flushed face. He smoked continuously, drank exorbitantly, talked amusingly, and was in general the treasure of every hostess. Peter could make a party. He could revive one instantly. Betty Gayle, whose husband was chief of medicine at the Lincoln, had once said, “Isn’t he a marvelous social animal?” She was always saying things like that, but for once she was right. Peter Randall was a social animal—gregarious, extroverted, relaxed, good-humored. His wit and his manner gave him a remarkable land of freedom.

For instance, Peter could successfully tell the most foul and revolting dirty joke, and you would laugh. Inside, you would be thinking, “That’s a pretty dirty joke,” but you would be laughing, spite yourself, and all the wives would be laughing, too. He could also flirt with your wife, spill his drink, insult the hostess, complain, or do anything else. You never minded, never frowned.

I wondered what he would have to say about Karen.

H
IS LAB WAS ON THE FIFTH FLOOR
of the biochem wing of the medical school. I walked down the corridor, smelling the smell of laboratories—a combination of acetone, Bunsen burners, pipette soap, and reagents. A clean, sharp smell. His office was small. A girl behind the desk was typing a letter, wearing a white lab coat. She was strikingly attractive, but I suppose I should have expected that.

“Yes? May I help you?” She had a slight accent.

“I’m looking for Dr. Randall.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I called earlier, but he may not have gotten my message.”

She looked at me and sized me up for a clinician. There was that slightly supercilious look in her eyes that all researchers get when they are around clinicians. Clinicians don’t use their minds, you see. They fool with dirty, unscientific things like patients. A researcher, on the other hand, inhabits a world of pure, satisfying intellectualism.

“Come with me,” she said. She got up and walked down the hall. She wore wooden shoes without heels—that explained her accent. Following behind her, I watched her bottom and wished she was not wearing a lab coat.

“He’s about to start a new incubation run,” she said over her shoulder. “He’ll be very busy.”

“I can wait.”

We entered the lab. It was bare, at a corner of the wing, looking down over the parking lot. So late in the day, most of the cars were gone.