Blood Type Read online

  “If I was going to do something weird, I’d have already done it, don’t you think?”

  She still hesitated. “I never know what I think anymore,” she said finally, her energies on the wane. “It must be my medication.” Hostage to confusion, she backed away and let me wander.

  Like the door, the apartment showed evidence of effort. The surfaces were neat, the dishes cleaned, the furniture cheap and battered but tastefully arranged and skillfully mended. The only overt sign of mental illness was a drawing on the wall, a contorted rendering of a woman who looked in the grip of monstrous agony.

  When she saw me looking at it, Jan commented as though I’d been admiring a candy dish. “Nick did that. It’s me when my medication runs out, he says. Helps keep me straight.”

  “Nice,” I said, and in an in terrorem sense it was.

  I walked to the bookcase. In it were several New Age tracts I guessed belonged to Jan, some popular novels, and, more important, several of the same medical texts I’d found in Tom’s room, primarily the tomes on schizophrenia and the various street diseases. I began to wonder who was teaching whom.

  On top of the bookcase were several plastic bottles filled with some kind of liquid. I gestured toward them and asked Jan what they were.

  “Nicky saves his piss,” she said without affect. “That box over there has fingernail clippings. There’s a bag of hair in the closet and even creepier stuff in the fridge. He was saving his shit till I made him throw it out.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  “Nick says it’s evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Of how they’re trying to poison him, I guess. Nick’s hard to follow, sometimes.”

  “How long have people been trying to kill him?”

  She shrugged. “Ever since we got to town, it seems like.”

  “But you don’t know who they are?”

  Jan shook her head. “Not for sure.”

  Our smiles were carefully circumscribed. Jan asked if I wanted some tea, but the look on her face made me think she had doubts she could come up with any. When I declined the offer, she gestured toward the studio couch along the wall, which was made up for day use but must have served as their bed come nightfall.

  After I was seated, Jan sank to the floor across from me, curled her legs beneath her, and looked at me with eyes that expected bad news. “Are you sure Nick isn’t in some kind of trouble? They bust him a lot, you know—disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct. Especially when he’s hearing his voices.” She looked at me with sudden anger. “Especially when the voice is his brother’s.”

  “I don’t know if Nicky’s in trouble or not,” I admitted. “But if he is, it’s worse than disorderly conduct.”

  Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Tom Crandall is dead.”

  She froze, then groaned, then hugged herself. “That’s not … possible.”

  “They found the body less than two blocks from here. He was killed some time Thursday night.”

  “God. Nick will …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.” She glanced at her wrists, suggesting one of the possibilities.

  “Was Nicky home that night?”

  She thought about it, then nodded. “We watched the new Star Trek. He gets signals from the bald guy, too.” She was as matter-of-fact as if she were reporting a ride on the bus.

  “Did he go out at all that night?”

  She shook her head. “But I did. Nick sent me to the store for beer, and I got hassled by some street guy on the way back and had to ditch him, so it took a while. By the time I got home, Nick was upset, so we went down to Market Street. Nick likes Market Street.”

  Which made Nicky unique to the city. Which also left him without an alibi. “What upset him, do you know?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Nick gets upset. It’s what he does.”

  “What did Nicky and Tom talk about when they got together?”

  “I don’t pay attention, to tell you the truth. Nicky likes me to keep quiet when Tom’s around, so I read or sew or something and stay out of the way. They talk about the old days a lot, I think.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Not really. Jesus.” Her voice rose, and her eyes grew desperate again. “Why didn’t someone tell us? He’s his brother, for God’s sake. Was there a funeral and everything?”

  I nodded.

  “And they didn’t even tell him,” she repeated.

  “Maybe they tried. Do you have a phone?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s probably the problem. But it made the papers. I’m surprised someone didn’t see it and tell Nick about it.”

  “Not many people down here use the papers for anything but a mattress.” Jan’s back suddenly straightened. “Maybe that is what happened. Maybe someone told him, and that’s why he took off.”

  “What did he say when he left?”

  “Just that there was something he had to do. But there’s always something he has to do. Usually something crazy.” Her grin was slightly crooked.

  “How did Nicky feel about his brother?”

  “He thought Tom was the second Son of God.”

  “Seriously?”

  Jan looked at me. “Well, yeah. It’s what he thought. I know it sounds goofy, but he really did.”

  “So they had a good relationship? They didn’t fight?”

  “They fought all the time. Nick kept trying to explain things to Tom, about the Other Side and all, and Tom kept not believing him. It made Nick mad. Not mad—frustrated.”

  “What kind of things couldn’t Tom understand?”

  Her look became inscrutable. “Why Charles Kuralt wants Nick to eat nothing but frozen food. Why Bart Simpson wants in my pants. Why the Other Side wants Nick’s blood. Why Nick’s father is being held for ransom in Turlock.”

  “I thought his father was dead.”

  “He is.” She hesitated with uncertainty. “I think.”

  I sighed. “Medication doesn’t help all this?”

  “The clozapine? Sometimes. When he takes it. The problem is, Nick likes his voices. He likes having secret talks with Peter Jennings. He likes getting signs from Sylvester Stallone. There were seven separate signals for Nick in Rambo II alone.” She paused to right herself. “Or so he says.”

  “It’s none of my business, but why have you stayed with him so long?”

  Her voice lost it’s neutral drone and became more musical. “Because he needs me and I need him.” She saw my look. “He’s never done anything bad to me, mister. He’s never hit me, or cursed me, or made me feel bad about myself. And that’s more than I can say about any so-called sane man I ever knew—my daddy included.”

  “How do you think he’ll react if I’m the one who tells him his brother is dead?”

  “I don’t know, but it will be hard for him. Tom was, like, his whole life, in a way. We’ve been all over the country, but we always come back to Tom. I think in a way Nick was Tom’s life, too,” she added stubbornly, as if to prove that at least in one sense the brothers were in parity.

  “I still don’t know exactly what went on between them,” I said. “Why they were so at odds.”

  “Part of it had to do with a girl, I think. And it had to do with Dr. Marlin, too.” She looked around the room, as if to confirm that Nicky wasn’t there. “I’d better find him. If he hears about Tom and I’m not there, he might do something awful.”

  I remembered my adventure at the grave. “Did Nicky have any of his brother’s war souvenirs? His Silver Star, for example?”

  Jan nodded. “He wears it all the time. He has this hat he puts it on.”

  “Then he already knows what happened to his brother.”

  She frowned. “How could he?”

  “I don’t know, but he does.”

  “Jesus,” she said simply, then looked at me in fear. “He
may never come back. He may …”

  “There’s no use speculating,” I said to quell her panic. “Just sit tight till you hear from me. I’m going to keep looking. How can I reach you if I need to?”

  “Scanlon’s. It’s a bar on Mason. The bartender’s name is Gary—he’ll take a message.”

  I gave Jan my card and asked her to call me if Nicky showed up. From the dubious way she looked at it, she expected to have more important things to do than worry about me.

  “One more thing,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Is Nicky sick? Physically sick, not just mentally?”

  When she met my eyes, it was with fully charged versions of her own. “Nick thinks he’s dying. I don’t know why, or if he really is, but that’s what he thinks. What I don’t get is, if Nick is so sick, why wouldn’t Dr. Marlin do something about it?”

  “Maybe he is. Maybe that’s why he sends the Healthways guys around, to make sure the treatment is working.”

  Jan made a face and touched the dangling button on her blouse, to remind me of just how helpful Healthways had been. My apologia for Dr. Marlin was halfhearted in any event. The only thing I knew for sure about the doctor was that he’d lied to me about not being in touch with Nicky Crandall. Most likely he’d also been lying when he denied knowing Tom was dead, a fact Nicky had known as well. One question was, who had told whom about Tom’s death? Another was, how had that person learned about it in the first place?

  I didn’t think Jan could answer either question, so I asked her another. “Do you know whether Tom ever had Nick tested for any kind of medical problem?”

  She thought about it. “He may have. They were talking about some kind of blot test or something one time.”

  “Inkblot?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember for sure.”

  “That’s a psychological evaluation.”

  Jan shrugged. “Whatever. I wasn’t paying attention. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to keep up.”

  “What else does Nick say about it?”

  “The sickness? He says the Other Side is doing it. He says it’s a plot to destroy him. He says they made him sick on purpose.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Tenderloin branch of the John C. Fremont Memorial Blood Bank was a nondescript storefront near the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth Street, across from the Tenderloin Self-Help Center. The windows were covered with computer paper so no one could see inside, the hand-lettering on the sign taped to the reinforced steel door read DONATIONS ONLY—NO FEES PAID, and the banner overhead read FREMONT MEMORIAL. I entered with trepidation.

  The woman at the reception desk was dour and defensive despite her snow-white uniform and the tag above a breast that identified her as Ms. Glad. The look on her face when I approached was closed and wary and perhaps a trifle terrified. Given the neighborhood, I found the reaction reasonable.

  At her back was a single large room divided into half a dozen cubicles by a series of freestanding dividers draped with white muslin. The cubicle I could see into contained a chair and a cot and a blood-pressure cuff hanging from a coat rack like a roasted chicken in a Chinese grocery. The place looked efficient and antiseptic though certainly not plush, but for most of the clientele of the Tenderloin branch, this was doubtlessly the most elegant establishment they’d been invited to in years.

  While I waited for Ms. Glad to look up from what she was doing, I imagined a roomful of donors, arms pierced with needles, tubes leading to plastic bags being inexorably engorged with red while a roomful of hearts were pumping to meet the increased capacity of the circulatory system they served. For some reason, it wasn’t a comforting picture.

  Ms. Glad said something I didn’t catch. I didn’t catch it because I was wrestling with a memory of the last time I’d given blood, which was when I was in basic training at Fort Lewis a quarter-century ago.

  They’d promised a morning off for anyone who donated, which seemed a genuinely good deal as opposed to the Hobson’s choice that most training-camp propositions amounted to. So I’d signed up. And been trucked to the post hospital. And patiently waited my turn—the longer the wait, the more time away from training. Finally they called my name, directed me to a cot, told me to lie down and roll up the sleeve of my fatigues. Antiseptic applied, then a rubber tourniquet, then a slight prick at the inner elbow followed by instructions to open and close my hand to keep things moving.

  No problem, except that it took forever. The technician—not a doctor or nurse, just an enlisted man like me—kept checking back and telling me to make fists faster while muttering snide asides about my blood pressure. The contributors at my flanks came and went their sanguine way, not once but thrice, as my heart and my fist still slaved away, my quota not yet reached. I started to sweat, to feel pain in my arm, to want the hell out of there, morning off or no.

  Finally what appeared to be a real live doctor came over, looked at my arm, looked at the bag I was laboring to fill, told the technician he’d missed most of the vein, and ordered him to shut me down. Which he did, to my relief and his embarrassment. After freeing my arm, he rolled up his tubes, put a patch on the hole in my flesh, and bent to unhook my still-unfilled receptacle from the apparatus from which it dangled. Newly brave and smugly superior now that the fault was not my own, I sat up and watched him work, just in time to see him spill it.

  Three-quarters of a pint of blood, my blood, washed across the floor like so much crimson wax, to my dismay and to a chorus of cries and curses from the people in its path. The last thing I remembered, before I fell to the floor like a stone, was the color and consistency of the horribly lovely fluid that bathed the technician’s hands as he tried to catch the bag and flubbed it: E-4, in baseball parlance, too.

  I woke to the prick of smelling salts and the chill of a cold sweat. The doctor asked me how I was, and I told him I was fine, which I was, oddly refreshed by my swoon. But as I got off the table and headed for the door, the eyes of my fellow trainees avoided me as assiduously as I’ve avoided giving blood from that day to this.

  “Have you contributed with Fremont before?” Ms. Glad asked once more.

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll need you to fill out this form.” She thrust a paper at me. “This will also inform you what testing will be done on the blood you donate.” Her look intensified. “Please be advised that the declarations are made under penalty of perjury, and failure to answer truthfully may result in criminal and/or civil penalties.”

  I looked at her. “You mean because of AIDS and stuff.”

  “Among other things.”

  “I don’t have AIDS.”

  “That’s fortunate—it’s a felony for a person who knows he is so afflicted to donate blood. But AIDS is not our only concern.”

  “I fill out the form, then what?” I asked, still unclear what I expected to learn during this adventure or the price I was willing to pay for it.

  Ms. Glad was beginning to be worthy of her name. “Return the form to me. If you meet the screening standards, one of our trained technicians will assist you in making your donation.”

  “You said ‘technician.’”

  “Yes.”

  “And ‘donation.’”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m supposed to get paid for this. Donation doesn’t sound like getting paid.”

  Ms. Glad was irritated with me. “Apparently you didn’t read the sign. Fremont Memorial does not compensate its donors.”

  “Why not?”

  “Health and Safety Code Section One Six Two Six makes it unlawful to use blood obtained from a paid donor in any transfusion undertaken in this state. If you are in need of compensation, the plasmapheresis center will pay if you pass their screening. I believe the rate is twelve dollars per unit.”

  “How come they can pay and you can’t?”

  “Because plasma is different from whole blood—the collection process is more lengthy; the demand for plasma derivative
s can’t be met by voluntary services like ours; plus plasma derivatives can be heat-treated in ways that whole blood cannot, to further reduce the risk of contamination.”

  “Why would anyone give blood to you for free when they could sell it to this plasma place for twelve bucks?”

  Her smile turned beatific. “The benefit our donors confer on their fellow San Franciscans, in terms of insuring an adequate supply of whole blood for our citizens who find themselves in need, far outweighs the more materialistic rewards at the plasma center.”

  It sounded weak to me, especially given the financial state of the donors most likely to patronize the Tenderloin branch. When I started to ask another question, she pointed at the form. “If you will complete the paperwork first, I’m sure I can answer your inquiries more precisely.”

  She gestured toward a table in the corner. A man was already sitting there, unkempt and unwashed, laboring over his form as though he were deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. I joined him without disturbing his concentration and set about filling out my own. Downwind from my compatriot, I held my breath and did my duty.

  Personal history—unremarkable. Medical history—routine, although there was no box for gunshot wounds. Sexual preference—weekly. Drug abuse—caffeine, alcohol, refined sugar. Risk groups—bachelorhood. Current medical condition—breathing without assistance. Are you a male who has had sex with another male EVEN ONCE since 1977? Have you engaged in sex for money or drugs since 1977 or had sex within the last twelve months with someone who has, EVEN ONCE? Gee, I don’t remember.

  When I’d finished, I looked across the table. My companion was still locked onto his task, frowning at the vocabulary and the print size, clutching his pencil like an ice pick as he checked off boxes left and right, which made his past at least as disheveled as his present.

  When I returned to Ms. Glad, I must have looked dubious. “Did you have trouble with any of the questions?” she asked, implying that only an idiot would answer in the affirmative. “A good rule is, when in doubt, just say ‘no.’”

  “Okay … ‘no.’”

  “I meant on the form.”