A Case of Need: A Novel (17 page)

Randall was bent over a white rat. As the girl came in, he said, “Ah, Brigit. You’re just in time.” Then he saw me. “Well now, what have we here?”

“My name is Berry,” I said. “I—”

“Of course, of course. I remember you well.” He dropped the rat and shook hands with me. The rat scampered across the table but stopped at the edge, looking down at the floor and sniffing.

“John, isn’t it?” Randall said. “Yes, we’ve met several times.” He picked up the rat again and chuckled. “In fact, my brother just called me about you. You’ve got him quite ruffled—a snot-nosed snoop, I believe his words were.”

He seemed to find this very amusing. He laughed again and said, “It’s what you get for pestering his dearly beloved. Apparently you upset her.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Peter said cheerfully. He turned to Brigit and said, “Call the others, will you? We have to get this thing going.”

Brigit wrinkled her nose, and Peter winked at her. When she was gone, he said, “Adorable creature, Brigit. She keeps me in shape.”

“In shape?”

“Indeed,” he said, patting his stomach. “One of the great pitfalls to modern, easy living is weak eye muscles. Television’s to blame; we sit there and don’t exercise our eyes. The result is flabby eyes, a terrible tragedy. But Brigit prevents all that. Preventive medicine of the finest sort.” He sighed happily. “But what can I do for you? I can’t imagine why you’d want to see me. Brigit, yes, but not me.”

I said, “You were Karen’s physician.”

“So I was, so I was.”

He took the rat and placed it in a small cage. Then he looked among a row of larger cages for another.

“Those damned girls. I keep telling them dye is cheap, but they never put enough on. There!” His hand darted in and brought out a second rat. “We’re taking all the ones with dye on the tail,” he explained. He held the rat so I could see the spot of purple color. “They were injected with parathyroid hormone yesterday morning. Now,” he said, “I regret to say they are going to meet their Maker. Know anything about killing rats?”

“A little.”

“You wouldn’t care to dispatch them for me, would you? I hate to sacrifice them.”

“No, thanks.”

He sighed. “I thought so. Now, about Karen: yes, I was her physician. What can I tell you?”

He seemed apparently friendly and open.

“Did you treat her in the middle of the summer for an accident?”

“An accident? No.”

The girls came in. There were three, including Brigit. They were all attractive, and whether by chance or design, one was blonde, one brunette, and one redhead. They stood in a line in front of him, and Peter smiled benignly at each of them, as if he were about to bestow presents.

“We have six tonight,” he said, “and then we can all go home. Is the dissecting equipment set out?”

“Yes,” Brigit said. She pointed to a long table with three chairs. In front of each chair was a cork pad, some pins, a pair of forceps, a scalpel, and an ice bath.

“What about the agitation bath? All ready?”

“Yes,” said another girl.

“Good,” Peter said. “Then let’s get started.”

The girls took their places at the table. Randall looked at me and said, “I guess I’ll have to go through with it. I really hate this. Someday I’ll get so worried about the little beasts’ last moments that I’ll chop off my fingers as well as their heads.”

“What do you use?”

“Well, that’s a long story.” He grinned. “You see before you the squeamish connoisseur of rat-dispatching. I have tried everything—chloroform, neck breaking, squeezing. Even a little guillotine that the British are so fond of. I have a friend in London who sent me one—he swears by it—but it was always getting clogged with fur. So,” he said, picking up one rat and examining it thoughtfully, “I went back to basics. I use a meat cleaver.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh, I know it sounds bad. It looks bad, too, but it’s the best way. You see, we have to get the dissection done quickly. The experimental design demands that.”

He took the rat over to the sink. A heavy butcher’s block was there, by the rim of the basin. He set the rat on the block and put a wax bag in the sink. Then he went over to the cabinet and brought out a meat cleaver, a heavy, stubby thing with a solid wooden handle.

“They sell these things,” he said, “in the chemical supply houses. But they’re too delicate and they never stay sharp. I bought this one secondhand from a butcher. It’s superb.”

He sharpened the edge on a stone briefly, then tested it on a piece of paper. It cut through cleanly.

The telephone rang at that moment, and Brigit jumped up to answer it. The other girls relaxed, obviously glad for a delay. Peter also seemed relieved.

Brigit spoke for a moment, then said, “It’s the rental agency. They are going to deliver the car.”

“Good,” Peter said. “Tell them to leave it in the parking lot and leave the keys over the sun visor.”

While Brigit was relaying the instructions, Peter said to me, “Damned nuisance. My car’s been stolen.”

“Stolen?”

“Yes. Quite annoying. It happened yesterday.”

“What kind of a car was it?”

“A little Mercedes sedan. Battered, but I was fond of it. If I had my way,” he said with a grin, “I’d see the thieves arrested for kidnapping, not car theft. I was very fond of that car.”

“Have you reported it to the police?”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “For whatever it’s worth.”

Brigit hung up and returned to her seat. Peter sighed, picked up the cleaver, and said, “Well, better get on with it.”

He held the rat by the tail. The rat tried to pull away, spread-eagling its body on the block. In a swift motion, Peter lifted the cleaver over his head and brought it down. There was a loud
thump!
as the blade struck the block. The girls stared away. I looked back and saw Peter holding the wriggling decapitated body over the sink. The blood drained out for a few moments. Then he carried it over to Brigit and placed it on the cork pad.

“Number one,” he said briskly. He returned to the block, pushed the head into the paper bag, and selected a second rat.

I watched Brigit work. With swift, practiced moves she pinned the body on its back to the cork. Then she cut into the legs, clearing away the flesh and muscle around the bones. Next she clipped the bones free of the body and dropped them into the ice bath.

“A minor triumph,” Peter said, preparing the next rat on the block. “In this lab, we perfected the first
in vitro
bone cultures. We are able to keep isolated bone tissue alive for as long as three days. The real problem is getting the bone out of the animal and into the bath before the cells die. We’ve got it down to a fine art now.”

“What exactly is your field?”

“Calcium metabolism, particularly as it relates to parathyroid hormone and thyrocalcitonin. I want to know how those hormones work to release calcium from bone.”

Parathyroid hormone was a little-understood substance secreted by four small glands attached to the thyroid. Nobody knew much about it, except that the parathyroids seemed to control calcium levels in the blood, and that these levels were strictly regulated—much more so than, say, blood sugar or free fatty acid. Blood calcium was necessary for normal nerve transmission and normal muscle contraction, and it was theorized that calcium was shunted to and from the bone, as occasion demanded. If you had too much calcium in your blood, you deposited it in bone. If you had too little, you drew it out of bone. But nobody knew quite how this was accomplished.

“The time course is crucial,” Peter continued. “I once performed an interesting experiment. I took a dog and put in an arterial bypass. I was able to take his blood, treat it with chemicals to remove all calcium, and put it back again. I ran this thing for hours, taking out literally pounds of calcium. Yet the blood levels remained normal, readjusting instantly. That dog was draining large quantities of calcium out of his bone and into his blood at a very rapid rate.”

The cleaver swung down again with a heavy sound. The rat wriggled and was still. It was given to the second girl.

“I got interested in all this,” Peter said. “The whole problem of calcium storage and release. It’s fine to say you can put your calcium into bone, or take it out; but bone is a crystal, it’s hard and rigidly structured. We can apparently build it up or tear it down in fractions of a second. I wanted to know how.”

He reached into a cage and produced another rat with a purple tail.

“So I decided to set up an
in vitro
system to study bone. Nobody thought I could do it. Bone metabolism was too slow, they said. Impossible to measure. But I succeeded, several hundred rats later.” He sighed. “If the rats ever take over the world, I’ll be tried for my war crimes.”

He positioned the rat on the block.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to find a girl to do this work for me. I kept looking for a cold-blooded German girl, or a sadist of some sort. Never found one. All of those”—he nodded to the three at the table—“came to work only after I agreed that they would never have to kill the animals.”

“How long have you been doing this work?”

“Seven years now. I started very slowly, half a day a week. Then it got to be every Tuesday. Pretty soon it was Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then it was all weekend as well. I’ve cut down my practice as much as I can. This work is really addicting.”

“You like it?”

“I adore it. It’s a game, a big wonderful game. A puzzle where nobody knows the answer. If you’re not careful, though, you can become obsessed with the answer. Some people in the biochem department work longer hours than any practicing doctor. They drive themselves. But I won’t let that happen to me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because whenever I feel the symptoms coming on—the urge to work round the clock, to keep going until midnight, or to come in at five in the morning—I say to myself, it’s just a game. I repeat that over and over. And it works: I settle down.”

The cleaver finished the third rat.

“Ah,” Peter said, “halfway there.” He scratched his stomach reflectively. “But enough about me. What about you?”

“I’m just interested in Karen.”

“Ummm. And you wanted to know about an accident? There was none, that I recall.”

“Why were skull films taken last summer?”

“Oh
that.
” He stroked the fourth victim soothingly and set it on the block. “That was typical Karen.”

“What do you mean?”

“She came into my office and said, ‘I’m going blind.’ She was very concerned, in her own breathless way. You know how sixteen-year-old girls can be: she was losing her vision, and her tennis game was suffering. She wanted me to do something. So I drew some blood and ordered a few tests. Drawing blood always impresses them. And I checked her blood pressure and listened to her and generally gave the impression I was being very thorough.”

“And you ordered skull films.”

“Yes. That was part of the cure.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Karen’s problems were purely psychosomatic,” he said. “She’s like ninety percent of the women I see. Some little thing goes wrong—like your tennis game—and bang! you have a medical problem. You go to see your doctor. He can find nothing physically wrong with you. But does this satisfy you? No: on to another doctor, and still another, until you find one who will pat your hand and say, ‘Yes, you’re a very sick woman.’” He laughed.

“So you ordered all these tests as a diversion?”

“Largely,” he said. “Not entirely. I believe in caution, and when one hears a complaint as serious as vision loss, one must investigate. I checked her fundi. Normal. I did a visual fields. Normal, but she said it came and went. So I took a blood sample and ordered tests of thyroid function and hormone levels. Normal. And the skull films. They were normal, too, or have you already seen them?”

“I saw them,” I said. I lit a cigarette as the next rat died. “But I’m still not sure why—”

“Well, put it together. She’s young, but it’s still possible—vision and headache, slight weight gain, lethargy. That could be pan hypopituitarism with optic nerve involvement.”

“You mean a pituitary tumor?”

“It’s possible, just possible. I figured the tests would show if she was pan hypopit. The skull films might show something if she was really badly off. But everything came back negative. It was all in her mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“The labs might have made a mistake.”

“That’s true. I would have run a second test, just to be sure.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because she never came back,” Peter said. “That’s the key to it all. One day she comes in near hysteria because she’s going blind. I say come back in a week, and my nurse makes the appointment. A week later, no show. She’s out playing tennis, having a fine time. It was all in her mind.”

“Was she menstruating when you saw her?”

“She said her periods were normal,” he said. “Of course, if she were four months’ pregnant at the time of her death, she would just have conceived when I saw her.”

“But she never came back to you?”

“No. She was rather scatterbrained, actually.” He killed the last rat. All the girls were now busily working. Peter collected the carcasses and put them into the paper bag, then dropped the bag into a wastebasket. “Ah,” he said, “at last.” He washed his hands vigorously.

“Well,” I said, “thanks for your time.”

“Not at all.” He dried his hands on a paper towel, then stopped. “I suppose I ought to make some sort of official statement,” he said, “since I’m the uncle and so forth.”

I waited.

“J. D. would never speak to me again if he knew I’d had this conversation with you. Try to keep that in mind if you talk to anybody else.”

“O.K.,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Peter said, “and I don’t want to know. You’ve always struck me as pretty level and sensible, and I assume you’re not wasting your time.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t see what he was leading up to, but I knew he was leading up to something.

“My brother, at this moment, is neither level nor sensible. He’s paranoid; you can’t get anything out of him. But I understand that you were present at the autopsy.”