Blood Type Read online

  The remaining nooks and crannies were stuffed with Tom’s regular diet of brain food—pamphlets and brochures and news clippings and hearing transcripts on a variety of arcane subjects that had been of interest to him at some time or another. I made my way through the entire collection, extracting a couple of items for myself along the way, finding references to everything but his brother. Eventually I reached the volumes closest to the bed, which suggested they were Tom’s most recent source of reference.

  The materials were on mental health, primarily: dozens of volumes, from the pioneering works of Freud and Jung to more recent formulations of Laing and Miller, of such a wide array I couldn’t decide whether Tom was trying to cure his brother or himself. The Merck Manual was among them, as was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association, third edition. The focus of the majority of the monographs was schizophrenia: journals outlining recently discovered genetic and biological indicators, clippings on the component of the mentally ill among the homeless on the streets, case histories of families who had endured the torment of the disease for years.

  There were materials on other maladies as well, chiefly ailments common to the street and thus to Tom’s profession—articles on treatment and prevention approaches to alcoholism; Randy Shilts’s book on AIDS and a collection of issues of the AIDS Treatment News; a variety of works on drug abuse and methods of rehabilitation from addiction. Tom Crandall had clearly taken his work seriously; I wondered if many physicians in the city were as well informed.

  I leafed through all the volumes and through the desk as well, looking for an address book or correspondence or anything else that might be a connection to Nicky Crandall. Along the way I learned that Tom had been a fan of Diane Arbus, that he must have known everything there was to know about the Peloponnesian War, that he had actually read and made marginal annotations in the works of Wittgenstein, that he laughed at Gary Larson. But I learned not a whit of Nick.

  I was close to the end of my search when I came across a large manila envelope, unsealed but bound with a rubber band, stuffed in the back of a drawer. It was full of clippings, from publications ranging from the Berkeley Barb to Punch to Foreign Affairs, on subjects ranging from sexual practices to world government to the virtues of the primal scream. All of them dated from more than a decade ago, which made them Tom Crandall’s version of billets-doux, I was certain, from back when the fire was hot and Clarissa was glad to be its fuel and Tom was expanding her consciousness.

  I put the clippings back in the envelope and the envelope in my coat pocket and looked through the rest of the accumulation, but the only thing I found that could conceivably be a lead was a note—handwritten in pencil, undated, signed by someone named Jan: Scanlon’s. Tonight. Please. Scanlon’s was a bar in the Tenderloin, a derelict hangout the last time I’d been there, which was the last time I ever wanted to set foot in the place. I pocketed the note as well.

  I was about to close out my task when something caught my eye. It was a bookmark or so I thought, barely visible at the top of the second volume of the DSM. When I opened it, what fell out was a snapshot, out of focus and underexposed, of a thin, abstracted young man whose eyes burned so brightly and mouth curved so dismissively it could only have been Nicky. He was unquestionably wayward and alarmingly awry—shirt torn, pants soiled, face scratched and bruised—but behind the surface carnage something compelling still burned brightly: an energy, an earnestness, an inquiring and urgent aspect that bespoke of life and love. In overall impact, the picture seemed to portray less a pathetic state of being than a continuing plea for help.

  I stuck the snapshot in my pocket as well and went back to the living room. Clarissa was waiting for me, changed into a dark blue suit, white blouse with big blue polka dots, and heels to match the suit. She looked smart and sharp and formidable. I wondered if it was part of their problem that Tom had never looked any of those things.

  The tape deck was spinning, and a sprightly jingle was dancing out of the speakers. I thought I’d heard it before, and when the refrain kicked in, I knew I had—the catchy tune promoted the array of bargains currently available at the grocery chain I patronized when it had a sale on soup.

  I listened a while longer, then looked at Clarissa. “Is that you?”

  She nodded. “It’s a little deflating, but it pays a lot of bills. Funeral expenses included.” Her look intensified. “Richard arranged the session for me.”

  “So he’s your manager as well.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I imagine he can open a lot of doors.”

  “Any door I want. And the nice thing is, those are the only ones he opens.”

  I decided I’d heard enough about the spotless Mr. Sands. To redress the balance, I reached in my pocket for the envelope and held it out. “I thought you might want these.”

  She took it from me and looked inside. When she saw the clippings, she moaned. “God. I didn’t need these at this particular moment.”

  “Sorry.”

  She blushed. “I didn’t mean it that way. I do want them. Of course I do. They’re the most … sincere thing anyone ever did for me.” She sighed and shook her head. “God, I loved him. Not at the end, not after he let himself sink into all that despair and tried to drag me in with him. But what he was before. The day we met, Tom Crandall was the most electric man alive. He had more ideas in an hour than the other men in my life had in a year, and all I wanted was to be what he wanted me to be. Then a decade went by, and all he wanted me to be was miserable. So I decided to reclaim my life.”

  I let the complicated eulogy eddy through the apartment, which absorbed it so quickly it seemed starved for the sentiment. “Why did he lose that excitement, do you think?” I asked when the echo had died away. “What made him change?”

  She shook her head slowly, suggesting the effort she’d made to answer the question long before I’d asked it. “I don’t know. Most people thought it was the war, but that wasn’t it. He’d gotten over those times when I met him, had come to terms with what he’d done. Then all of a sudden he seemed to decide that everything around him was crumbling. The world. America. The city. Me. We were a disappointment to him, all of us, an entire universe drowning in materialism and immorality and self-absorption and all the other things Tom saw as mortal sins. But I didn’t want to drown. I didn’t want Tom to, either, but since he wasn’t doing anything to save himself, I went looking for a life raft.”

  “Enter Mr. Sands.”

  Her anger flashed. “What was I supposed to do, go down with the ship? I was only the first mate, not the captain.”

  Clarissa walked across the room and banged on the piano. The chord was dissonant and disturbing, but her version of events seemed close to what I had observed myself, so I didn’t try to talk her into a different one.

  “What about it?” she demanded finally. “Did you have any luck tracking Nicky?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “Do you know a girl named Jan, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “I think she may be Nicky’s girlfriend.”

  “Then I wouldn’t know anything about her. Tom wouldn’t talk to me about Nicky. It was like I wasn’t pure enough to know about him.”

  “I don’t think that was it,” I said. “I think Nicky was Tom’s Achilles’ heel. I think Tom felt responsible for what his brother had become, for some reason. I think that explains Tom’s determination to help him. I think his failure in that regard may even explain Tom’s emotional decline.”

  “That’s crediting Nicky with a lot of damage,” she said without much interest. “Have you talked to him about your theory?”

  I looked at her closely. “I think it’s possible he’s dead.”

  There was no reaction other than ambivalence. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I thought maybe Tom had said something.”

  “Not to me.” She looked at me long enough to make me uneasy. “I don’t expec
t you to understand what went on between me and my husband; I’m not sure I understand it myself. But I don’t want to be a problem for you, Mr. Tanner. As I said, it isn’t easy for me to think that the man I loved was so miserable he decided to kill himself. I’d be very pleased if you proved it wasn’t true.”

  The irony of having Deirdre Sands as my client while being of aid and comfort to her husband’s mistress was almost too juicy to resist disclosing at this point. But this was one of those cases where I knew so little myself I wasn’t inclined to tell anything to anyone.

  “I don’t think he committed suicide,” I said instead. “I think he was murdered.”

  I expected to shock her, but she accepted the alternative without flinching. “Why?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I think it had something to do with Nicky. And maybe to do with Healthways, too.”

  “Healthways? Why Healthways?”

  “I don’t know that, either. It just keeps hovering. Like a vulture.”

  “Richard’s chief aide works for Healthways,” Clarissa said absently. “I think he’s the president, in fact.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lex Chadwick.”

  She led me to the door. When I asked her more about Chadwick, she described the person I’d seen that morning when I was talking with Dr. Marlin, the man with the Mercedes who was arguing with the street kid in the parking lot.

  TWENTY

  When I got back to my building, there was another car blocking the alley: a limousine this time, bigger than the Cadillac, pearl gray in color. The license plate read RS-1.

  When I got to the office, I expected to find the great RS himself, but the man planted like a pine tree in the center of the waiting room was the burly corporate type who’d picked up Clarissa Crandall at the Velvet Room and deposited her beneath the awning at the Sandstone Club, the guy Clarissa had just claimed was the chief mucky-muck at Healthways. His suit still came in three pieces, but today they were a flawless flannel in a banker’s gray, dyed to match the car. His attitude was a match as well—imperious, impatient, and domineering: from his close-cropped hair to his thick lips to the thrust of his chest, Lex Chadwick had all the earmarks of a bully.

  “How may I be of service?” I said when he moved aside enough for me to share the room.

  “Richard Sands wants to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Where?”

  “At his club.” Chadwick looked at his watch, which seemed to have been fashioned from a gold coin. “He would like you there by five—he has a charity event at seven.”

  “You mean charity as in tax-deductible? Or charity as in social climbing?”

  He dismissed the quip as beneath his dignity. Or maybe he didn’t get it. “I mean what I say. So does Mr. Sands.” Our eyes met; Chadwick had used his as a weapon before.

  “What does he want me for?” I asked.

  The question seemed to disappoint him. “You know who he is, right?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Then what difference does it make?”

  I bowed to his logic. The prospect of meeting Richard Sands made me recall my conversation with Tom at Guido’s. “I guess Mr. Moore should have turned the tables.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Only a movie.”

  “How is that of interest to Mr. Sands?” Chadwick puzzled over it the way dogs puzzle over sleight of hand.

  I pointed toward the private office. “Other than the painting in there, few things in my life are of interest to anyone. Except my curiosity, of course, which I suppose is why you’re here. What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Why?”

  “My mother told me never to get in a limo with strangers.”

  He started to debate the point, then didn’t; lots of people had that reaction to my mother’s principles. “Chadwick,” he said.

  “You seem a tad … rough-hewn for a corporate president, Mr. Chadwick.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he glanced around the office as though he suspected someone had squealed on him. “My position is not relevant,” he said.

  “I beg to differ; I’m beginning to think Healthways is very relevant.”

  “How?”

  “Well, one thing that’s of interest is what you were doing at the clinic in the Tenderloin this morning, talking with a kid who looked like Sid Vicious.”

  Chadwick found no humor in the image; I doubt he found humor in anything but bankruptcy. “I’ve never been at that clinic or any other clinic; I have a highly paid inspection team to monitor the field operations and a roomful of numbers crunchers to keep track of the bottom line.”

  “What’s left for you?”

  “Motivation,” Chadwick said heavily, and flashed a sadist’s smile.

  It would have been easy to underestimate Chadwick—he looked and acted a little like the late Aldo Ray—but given his relationship with Sands, I sensed it would be a mistake. “Shall we go,” he urged with mounting irritation, “or should I tell Mr. Sands you declined his invitation?”

  I bowed. “After you, Lex.” When I paused to lock the door, the expression on his face said, “Why bother?”

  When I was comfortable in the cushy leathers of the limo, a bar popped open in front of me, and an array of liquid refreshment was at my disposal. I chose a Heineken, pried off the top with a pearl-handled church key, and got ready to enjoy the ride. It was the second time in a year that a limo had been sent to fetch me. Either I was moving up in the world or limos didn’t carry the message they used to.

  We couldn’t have navigated the traffic more smoothly if there’d been flags on the fenders and T-men clinging to the sides. Along the way, we attracted a host of admiring stares and more than a few denunciations. I was ambivalent about the situation myself.

  We made it to the club with time to spare. By daylight, the place was even more impressive than when my bleary eyes had first observed it—the brickwork more intricate, the brass appointments more brilliant, the red awning more arrogant, the contrast with the rest of Cleveland Street more stark.

  As he ushered me inside, Chadwick grew almost garrulous. “Bet you never thought you’d get this far the other night.”

  “Au contraire. I’m a democrat; I believe that someday, somehow, all doors will be open to me.”

  “Some doors don’t open unless you have the balls to break them down.” Chadwick’s riposte disproved the adage that wealth and refinement go hand in hand. I think only the British still believe it.

  Once inside, Chadwick led the way toward the door at the end of a hallway that was lined with metallic wallpaper reminiscent of hammered dimes and carpeted with something that could have passed for calfskin. Without a visible assist, the door opened onto an office that looked to be designed and furnished out of Industrial Light and Magic—smoked skylights, copper-sheeted walls, chrome-and-flagstone desk, slate floor, leather chairs, onyx tables. It was the kind of room every man envisions creating for himself the day his ship comes in, at least the men who grew to manhood in the last half of this century and whose ship is owned in syndication and financed with high-yield bonds.

  I absorbed the high-tech scene until my fascination was drawn to another source. Although a fire was blazing in a stainless-steel hearth and a neon chandelier was contributing some candlepower as well, the eyes of my host were the most incandescent items in the room.

  Richard Sands was seated in one of the architectonic chairs that flanked the fire, telephone to his ear, stock tape winding across a screen at his flank, fax machine oozing a message in the background. “Sell when the market opens,” he told the bright red telephone gruffly, his eyes still roaming over me. “The entire position. We can buy it back in a week at eleven—the earnings are going to be very disappointing. And that, Mr. Leamington, is a lock.”

  Sands didn’t want or wait for an answer. After putting the phone in his pocket, he smiled the smile of a man with a big bet on a
sure thing: the man who’d fixed the fight.

  “Mr. Tanner.”

  “Mr. Sands.”

  “I’m delighted you could join me.”

  “It was kind of you to send your carriage.”

  He blinked the gray-tipped lids that matched the gray-tipped hair that lay neatly against his temples. His money had bought enough self-assurance to make him handsome, and his grooming was fit for a thoroughbred. But as with great horses, the measure of quality lay below the surface sleekness, somewhere near the heart.

  “Drink?”

  “Scotch.”

  “Laphroaig okay?”

  “Fine.”

  Sands nodded and Chadwick disappeared, which gave me time to examine the man. He was smaller than I expected, and younger-looking. When I compared him to his news photos, I found the latter lacking with respect to the force of his presence and the power in his jaw. Sands was tan, lean, rich, confident—what most people in this day and age aspire to be. It was only when he sent Chadwick off to fetch the booze that I noticed his hand was shaking. Which reminded me that what most people covet these days comes at a high price.

  I looked around the room a second time and didn’t bother to hide my admiration. “So what is this joint, exactly?”

  Sands raised a brow. “The club? A hideaway for my staff. My top people need a place where they can let their hair down without fear of being compromised. We have a competent kitchen and bar, workout room, Jacuzzi, and the library.” He glanced at the wall. “You might be surprised at what’s behind those leather spines: I’ve been told my collection of erotica is without peer in the Bay Area.”

  When he looked at me, I told him I’d take his word for it. He seemed let down that my interest wasn’t more tumescent.

  “Upstairs we have the rumpus room,” he went on. “There’s only one key, available by reservation. You can do anything from watch art films to play badminton to mount an orgy up there, and no one’s the wiser unless you brag about it.” He assessed his environment the way I had. “A profitable investment, on the whole; some of our most productive strategies have been concocted here.” His look turned naughty, which on Sands was more than a little scary. “Someone ought to do a study on the relationship between money and sex,” he mused quietly.