False Conception Read online

  DON’T MISS STEPHEN GREENLEAF’S FLESH WOUNDS

  A John Marshall Tanner Mystery

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A first-class noir series….funny, pointed…always perceptive, and…incisively etched.”

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  Acclaim for Stephen Greenleaf’s FALSE CONCEPTION

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Mr. Greenleaf writes like a literary guerrilla … lulling his readers by laying out the messy moral questions with clarity and intelligence.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Greenleaf is a pro, so the rapidly unfolding events make for an engrossing read, but more importantly, the book is as fine an exploration of the perils of genetic narcissism as you’re going to find.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “Greenleaf’s portrayal of the wealthy Colbert family’s misguided efforts to insulate itself from the consequences of prior mistakes is unerring. He is a master of the succinct but revealing descriptive phrase.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “A fascinating journey down a dark and twisty lane, deep into shadowy cold family secrets, down a path littered with bitter business rivalries and illfated love affairs.”

  More Praise for the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “His dialogue rings with smart authority and reverberates in the memory long after the reader has closed the book.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The problem with author Stephen Greenleaf is that he doesn’t write often enough…. Marsh Tanner is a unique, lonely, and appealing protagonist”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “John Marshall Tanner is the long-sought heir of Sam Spade, Marlowe, and Archer.”

  —Library Journal

  “Tough, meaty prose, sly twists in plot, and immediacy of action.”

  —Booklist

  “The Tanner series continues to be among the most emotionally and intellectually challenging in the genre. Outstanding.”

  —Mystery News

  “A logical and suspenseful tale that makes for an engrossing read. Mr. Greenleaf always gives his reader a full-blown and well-realized story.”

  —Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winning author of the Gideon Oliver series

  “Stephen Greenleaf is terrific: a writer whose prose is not only crisp but literate and thoughtful as well. Even the scuzziest inhabitants of the meanest streets are set down on paper with wit, grace, and humanity … a wonderful read.”

  Books by Stephen Greenleaf

  Flesh Wounds*

  False Conception*

  Southern Cross

  Blood Type

  Book Case

  Impact

  Toll Call

  Beyond Blame

  The Ditto List

  Fatal Obsession

  State’s Evidence

  Death Bed

  Grave Error

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  For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc., 200 Old Tappan Road, Old Tappan, NJ 07675.

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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  Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Greenleaf

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Otto Penzler Books, c/o Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-00794-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-00794-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-10638-9

  First Pocket Books printing March 1997

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  Cover design by Steven Ferlauto

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To Caroline and Gerhard

  FALSE CONCEPTION

  CHAPTER 1

  What do you know about surrogate motherhood?” he asked, his lush black brows raised in elaborate innocence, as if the question were as offhand as a query about oat bran or Coxey’s Army.

  “What kind of motherhood?”

  “Surrogate. You know, a woman having a baby for someone else.”

  I thought about it and shrugged. “Mary Beth Whitehead. Baby M. Plus news reports of a couple of California superior court cases that have upheld the concept. That’s about it.”

  “That’s all I knew, too, until a month ago.” Russell Jorgensen clambered out of his high-tech high-backed chair and began to pace the room, his shoes scraping the polished parquet like wire brushes sweeping soulfully across a snare.

  We were sitting in Russell’s law office, on the northeast corner of the twenty-ninth floor of Embarcadero Four, with nothing but a sheet of lightly tinted safety glass between us and a view to the ends of the earth, or at least to the Sierras and the Trinity Alps. Cars streaked across the bridges, ships steamed across the bay, a string of cirrus clouds slipped through the sky like chiffon salmon swimming up an azure stream to spawn in the place of their birth. At one point in my life, having an office with a perspective like this one had been among the loftiest of my dreams. Now all my dreams are down to earth, which must mean they aren’t dreams at all.

  Worrying the silken ends of his gaudy necktie, scratching the tip of his raptor’s beak, Russell was far less tranquil than the vision outside his windows. I’d known him for twenty years. He was a big man, with a big brain and a big heart and a big reputation for both courtroom theatrics and a social conscience, a combination not all that common in the world of highpriced lawyering, which I suppose was why I liked him. Like most lawyers, his ego and his temper staged a riot from time to time, and left casualties in their wake, but lately he’d seemed to mellow—I’d heard he had fallen in love, which must have also meant that he’d finally recovered from the death of his wife.

  I’d worked for Russell a dozen times over the years—mostly tying up loose ends during the week before one of his trials when he was too frantic to handle minutiae himself—but this time he looked in need of more substantial assistance. “I never should have let this goddamned thing get so far along,” Russell scolded himself. “I should have put a stop to it a month ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  When he shrugged, his shoulders bulged like a bison’s. “Stuart Colbert’s an important client, and even a bit of a friend. Despite all the money he’s got, and the swarms of women who hover over him down at the store, he’s kind of a pathetic character, what with his old man looking over his shoulder for the slightest slip and his sister being so imposing. And besides, it isn’t like they’re trying to commit a felony—they just want a fucking baby.” He looked at me with the swollen defiance he usually reserved for a hostile witness. “What’s w
rong with that?”

  “Nothing,” I said amiably. “Theoretically.”

  My demeanor didn’t pacify him. “Right. And even the surrogate business. I mean hell, it’s not that big a deal—it’s been around since biblical times, for Christ’s sake. Abraham sired a son by his wife’s maid, didn’t he? When Sarah couldn’t have children? Hagar was her name, I think. The maid. Am I right?”

  “Beats me, Russell. But I’ll check it out with Reverend Schuller if you want me to.”

  He ignored my offer. “There’s been one surrogacy bill or another bouncing around the state legislature since 1982. I mean, this isn’t witchcraft we’re talking about, or even genetic engineering. It’s not like they’re some sort of satanists.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, then laughed.

  My chortle brought Russell up short and his skin baked even browner. “What’s so funny?”

  “You are. You’re ranting and raving about this surrogate stuff, and looking to me for what sounds like moral support, and I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” I stopped grinning. “Except I’m getting the impression that you’re afraid you screwed up.”

  Russell swore once more and looked past me toward the door, as if he was afraid someone would come through it and catch him at something. “I did screw up,” he said quietly, running a hand through the hair that swept across his temples in a long black wave that was streaked with slats of gray. “It’ll probably work out in the end and I’ll skate by and so will the Colberts, but if not …” He tried for a smile but it twisted into a wince. “Disbarment isn’t the worst fate in the world, is it? I mean, you ought to know, right?”

  I felt myself color as I was tipped toward a past I had worked long and hard to forget. “I wasn’t disbarred,” I countered. “I was suspended. And you’re right; it isn’t the worst fate in the world.” I decided not to tell him that it came close enough to cast a shadow.

  I waited until he was paying more attention to me than to his doomsday projection. “Here’s an idea—why don’t you start at the beginning? When you’re finished, maybe I can let you know if I can help you out.”

  Russell took one last look out the window, toward the jut of Mount Tam and the sling of the Golden Gate, then sat back down at his desk as gingerly as if he were taking a seat in a lawn chair. “This is totally work-product, Marsh,” he admonished as prologue. “Privileged inside and out. No one hears about this stuff. Ever. Not from either one of us.”

  “Check.”

  “Okay. The client is Stuart Colbert.”

  “This is the Stuart Colbert we’re talking about?”

  Russell nodded. “Our firm represents the Colbert stores, Stuart’s and his sister’s both, and has since the old man founded the business after the war. We handled Stuart’s prénuptial agreement and his divorce, wrote his will, and drafted the details of the compensation arrangement when he took over half the business. Bottom line is, Stuart Colbert writes this firm a pretty big check every year.”

  “Which means you cut him some slack.”

  Russell seemed relieved at what he assumed was an endorsement. “It’s only natural, right, Marsh?”

  “Right, Russell.”

  Luckily, he didn’t test for sarcasm. “But Stuart’s not the problem, actually. Mainly I let this thing get too far along because of Millicent.”

  “Who is?”

  “Stuart’s wife. Spouse number two. A great kid, will make a great mother, which is what she wants to be in the worst way. Problem is, she can’t have children. Had an ectopic pregnancy some years back—some kind of infection had clogged up her tubes. Apparently the sepsis was so widespread that by the time they went in to take a look, they had to cut out most of the reproductive machinery to save her life—uterus, tubes, everything but the ovaries.”

  “Tough deal.”

  Russell nodded. “Especially when you’re Millicent’s age and think having a kid is crucial to fulfilling your role as a woman or whatever. She was crushed by this, believe me.”

  “So you cooked up an option for her.”

  Russell shook his head. “Not me, Marsh; I didn’t come on the scene till the wheels were already rolling. By the time I got into it, all they needed was a contract.”

  “For what?”

  “An agreement between them and the surrogate, A contract for a woman to carry their baby to term, then hand it over to the Colberts and exit their lives ever after.”

  Russell put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. On the wall behind him, a smear of graphic art made light of his predicament without knowing what it was. Beyond the windows, a 747 took another load of haoles to Hawaii. Over in Oakland, something was on fire. Something’s always on fire in Oakland.

  “Frankly,” Russell was explaining softly, “the reason I didn’t get involved with the surrogate thing more intimately was because I thought the legislature would take care of the situation for me. Which it did, temporarily.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The pols passed an Alternative Reproduction Act in Sacramento last year. Regulated this surrogate stuff up one side and down the other—insurance arrangements, psychological testing, payment terms, health exams, the whole works. I figured the law would tell the Colberts what they could and couldn’t do, and I’d just incorporate the statutory requirements in the contract and that would take care of it; I just had to follow the code.”

  “What happened?”

  “The governor fucking vetoed the thing.”

  “Why?”

  “The veto message claimed that since the moral and psychological dimensions of surrogacy aren’t clear at this point, the courts should deal with it on a case-by-case basis, the way they have in the past. But from what I hear, a big reason for the veto was the religious stuff—interfering with God’s plan and all that. Some outfit called the Committee for Moral Concerns was lobbying pretty hard against the thing. They’re worried about a domino effect—if they let people change the reproductive rules at all, the next thing you know the state will be promoting abortion and even genetic engineering. But it was also a chance for the gov to make points with the feminists, since some of them don’t like surrogacy, either.”

  “Seems like they’d come out the other way on the issue.”

  “Some do, but lots of them see it as just one more instance of exploitation of poor women for the benefit of wealthy men. Although why they feel that a woman is capable of choosing whether to have an abortion but not whether she wants to be a surrogate mother is beyond me.”

  “Consistency and evangelism seldom occupy the same space.”

  “Yeah, well, the philosophical bullshit is all well and good, except it leaves me high and dry with two people who’ve lined up a woman who says she’s willing to get pregnant with their kid, and I’m not sure what I can do about it. Except to have the contract track the proposed legislation as closely as possible, in case another bill goes through while the Colberts’ child is getting born.”

  I thought about what he’d said, then held up my hand to reverse his direction. “Back up a minute, Russell. How does this surrogacy thing work, exactly?”

  As though there was some spirit out there to advise him, Russell swiveled toward the window and looked out. “To make a baby, you need a sperm and an ovum. One fertilizes the other and presto, you get conception. Nine months later, you get a kid. Birds and bees and all that—propagation of the frigging species.”

  “I think they covered that in the Army, Russell. I seem to remember a training film.”

  He twirled back toward me. “Then let me bring you up to date. With the new methods of reproduction they’ve developed in the past decade—artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and the like—a baby can have six different parents on the day of its birth: the donors of the sperm and the egg, the mother who carries the fetus during gestation and her husband if she has one, and the man and woman who will nurture the child after it’s born
.”

  “Sounds like it could get complicated.”

  “Sure it can. Mary Beth Whitehead refused to give up the child to the contracting parents; another surrogate aborted the child without warning; another gave birth to twins and there was a lawsuit over what to do with the extra one. All kinds of problems can crop up.”

  “So what are the problems in your case?”

  Russell rubbed his nose. “First some background. There are two basic situations. In the first, the sperm of the contracting father is artificially inseminated into the surrogate. It fertilizes her egg, and she carries the baby to term, then yields the child to the couple who hired her and they all live happily ever after.”

  “Theoretically,” I said again.

  “Right. Theoretically. Most states that accept surrogacy don’t even require an adoption procedure—the surrogate’s rights in the child terminate at birth. But the process varies from state to state, and several states ban surrogacy entirely. In California, at least at this point, the surrogate isn’t considered the mother in the legal sense at any time, even in cases like the one I mentioned, where her own egg has been fertilized so she’s both the biological and birth mother. The courts generally hold the surrogate’s rights end at birth unless there are weird circumstances, such as the future nurturing mother dies during pregnancy or there’s some kind of fraud involved in connection with the contract. But like I said, that’s one type of case. With the Colberts, there are variations.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one thing, Stuart Colbert had a vasectomy after his first marriage ended, so he can’t conceive by normal means. Luckily, it’s not a major problem.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even before he got married, Stuart had some sperm put in cryopreservation storage at a sperm bank over in Berkeley.”

  “Why do that before he got married?”

  “Because his daddy told him to after he found out that the average sperm count of the American male has fallen 50 percent in the last fifty years. The old man got worried about his legacy, so he did some checking. The medical people told Stuart that if he and his wife ever had problems conceiving, the lab guys could intensify his potency by whipping up an industrial-strength solution of some sort, a double shot of spermatozoa, as it were. And they can do that, as it turns out, although nowadays, if a man can produce even one sperm, they can inject that into the egg directly, so whole vials of the stuff aren’t going to be needed anymore. The point is, the sperm that’s going to make this kid isn’t fresh from the tap—it’s out of a jar in the sperm bank.”