Blood Type Read online

  The driver shrugged; the door closed; the bus trudged off to Oakland, and Ellen Simmons took my hand. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s already better than the bank.”

  I helped Ellen into the backseat and made brief introductions. Both she and Heskett seemed to regard them as a cut above pro forma.

  When we were under way, I launched my spiel. “I’m going to begin at the end. When I’m finished, Ellen can tell you the beginning.”

  “It usually works better the other way around,” Heskett objected.

  I ignored him.

  “It ends with Richard Sands. More precisely with his holding company—the Sandstone Corporation. Sandstone has been breaking down under its debt load, along with a lot of other highfliers of the eighties.” Heskett started to interrupt. “I can give you sources for this,” I said. “Check with me when you’re ready to write it up.”

  “If Richard Sands is involved, I’d better check with you before I write it.”

  “We do it my way or not at all.”

  “Like I said,” Heskett grumbled, “I’ll check with you later.”

  Ellen’s laugh seemed more elaborate than the amendment warranted.

  “When the company began to fall apart,” I went on, “someone came up with a scheme to save it. That someone was Lex Chadwick, president of Healthways Corporation, one of Sandstone’s subsidiaries. What Sandstone needed was a ton of cash to service its debt, otherwise it was going to have to auction off its assets and file for reorganization under the Bankruptcy Act. What Chadwick learned was that the pharmaceutical division of Healthways had a hot new product in the pipeline, a substance so revolutionary that in the right market conditions it could generate the cash flow necessary to put Sandstone on solid footing.”

  “What was it?” Heskett asked.

  “At first, I thought they’d come up with an AIDS vaccine and were using the Healthways clinics to test it on humans without authorization from the FDA.”

  “Jesus,” Heskett blurted. “Is that true?”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t quite it.”

  “What was it?”

  “What Healthways had come up with was synthetic blood. I don’t know the science behind it—apparently it involves a mixture of something called perfluorochemicals, along with a detergent and some kind of molecules from egg yolk. Because of the way it’s engineered, synthetic blood can perform the primary function of real blood, which is to oxygenate the body, while freeing transfusion recipients from the rejection problems of real blood and from transfusion disease problems as well. The point is, Healthways may have developed the first blood substitute that really works.”

  “I know blood is big business,” Heskett said with more than a little paternalism, “but I have to tell you, I don’t see this as a story unless and until Sandstone is ready to go public with the stuff. Maybe a science-page spot, though; I can put you in touch with our guy on that beat.”

  “Why don’t you wait till you hear the whole thing?”

  Heskett shrugged. “I seem to be a captive audience.” He looked at the woman in the backseat. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  When Heskett’s eyes were on the road, Ellen grinned at me in the rearview mirror. I hurried to wrap it up.

  “Even though Healthways had a breakthrough, they also had a problem. Sandstone couldn’t wait for them to put the blood substitute through the FDA testing protocols and approval process—that could take years, and Sandstone needed income now. Chadwick decided the way to get it was to create such a massive demand for the product that the normal testing procedures would be waived even if it was discovered that Healthways had failed to follow them.”

  “Where was this demand supposed to come from?”

  “From the people who normally need blood—hospitals and their patients. That demand is substantial normally, but in a few weeks the need may be far greater than anyone estimated—if the War in the Gulf turns into a quagmire, demand for blood will skyrocket. If the Healthways synthetic is any good, they can name their price.”

  “But why would people need synthetic blood? Why not use the real stuff?”

  I paused for effect. “Because Healthways is sabotaging the blood supply. Not all of it, just enough to start such a panic in Bay Area blood circles that hospitals will embrace any alternative to the local supply in order to meet demand, even an unproved synthetic.”

  Heskett’s head jerked left. “How do you mean, ‘sabotage’?”

  I took a deep breath. The adrenaline of the evening had evaporated—fatigue fell over me like snow. “As you know, donated blood—whether at a blood bank or the Red Cross—is tested for contaminants, including the AIDS virus. But there’s a problem—the AIDS test doesn’t react to the virus but to the antibodies the body produces to fight the virus. Between the time the virus is contracted and the time antibodies form, there’s a gap—several weeks for sure, maybe as long as several months. What Healthways did was send the Fremont Memorial Blood Bank a select number of donors who had the virus but not the antibodies, people with HIV who would pass the screening tests and compromise the Bay Area blood supply by slipping infected units into the inventory.”

  “They did this on purpose?” Ellen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That Sands person?”

  “It was his company that did it, but I don’t think he knew what was going on,” I said. Then the events of the evening took a new shape in my mind and I decided to amplify my answer. “Either that or he and I just had a game of chicken and I lost. But whatever Sands might have known himself, his people certainly knew about it, which to me is the same thing.”

  Ellen’s voice was hollow. “Did that woman know?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “So what happened after the bank got the bad blood?” Heskett demanded, his notebook in his lap.

  “Sandstone leaked word that the Fremont inventories were compromised. The FDA decided to investigate; their report is due any day. When it comes out, all the local blood banks may have to discard their inventories to make sure they don’t have the same problem. When the public gets wind of the situation, no one within fifty miles of San Francisco will accept blood from a source that isn’t certifiably safe. When Healthways pops up with a substitute, they’ll be welcomed with open arms.”

  “What’s to keep this from becoming a national crisis?”

  “What I hope is that Healthways knows whose blood was bad, and that those units can be traced into the inventory and extracted.”

  “But some may have been used already.”

  “Possibly. But those people should be able to be identified. With luck, the panic will be localized and short-lived.”

  “You hope,” Heskett repeated, then considered what he’d learned. “How did Healthways know the people they lined up to give blood really had HIV?”

  “That’s not the question.”

  “What is the question?”

  “The question is, how did they know the donors had the virus but not the antibodies?”

  “Well? How did they?”

  I looked at him. “This is where it gets evil.”

  “I thought it might.”

  I honked at an errant driver.

  “Healthways knew the blood donors had the virus but not the antibodies because Healthways gave the donors the virus in the first place. Massive doses of HIV, injected into destitute patients who visited Healthways clinics for other purposes and got an injection that would supposedly make them well but in reality flooded their system with the virus. A few weeks later, when the virus was rampant but the antibodies hadn’t had time to form, these same people were rounded up by a kid named Dracula and paid to go to Fremont Memorial and donate blood. The recruits would pass the screening procedures, of course, since they weren’t in the risk groups—they had been given the virus deliberately. I should emphasize that the donors weren’t collaborators, they were victims—they had no idea they’d been turned into HIV carriers and no idea
they were being used to destroy a vital part of the healthcare system. Fremont was a victim, too.”

  “That’s fucking diabolical,” Heskett mumbled.

  “Is it starting to look like a story yet?”

  Heskett swore. “You can prove all this?”

  “I expect Sands to lay it out by the end of the day. If he doesn’t, I can tell you how to flesh it out yourself.”

  Ellen’s voice was ethereal in the rear seat. “I don’t understand what this has to do with Tom.”

  I found her in the mirror. “Tom was killed because he uncovered the scheme I just mentioned.”

  “Killed by whom?”

  “A couple of Healthways paramedics.”

  “How did he learn about it?”

  “Nicky was one of the guinea pigs. Tom figured out what was going on because despite the lunacy of his ramblings, Nicky knew what had been done to him and was telling Tom about it in his own warped way. When Tom put it together and started asking questions, he was killed to shut him up.”

  I explained to Heskett. “Tom Crandall’s brother was one of the people injected with HIV. The guy who did it was a Healthways psychiatrist named Marlin. Nicky wasn’t chosen at random like the others—Marlin wanted to get rid of him because of what had gone on in the old days out here in the valley, back when Marlin ran a psychiatric clinic and Nicky was one of his patients.”

  “Is Nicky still alive?” Ellen asked.

  I nodded. “I saw him yesterday.”

  “But he has AIDS.”

  “He has the virus. He didn’t seem symptomatic, but I’m not a doctor.”

  “If you have the virus, doesn’t it mean you’re going to die?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully, then thought of people I’d known and stories I’d heard, of Acyclovir and Iscador, of ddI and ddC, of T-helpers and PZ4. “A lot of people hope it doesn’t, and they go through hell trying to fight it off. Some people have lived with the virus for years. Tough years, but years.”

  “Nicky has a girlfriend, doesn’t he?”

  I nodded. “Her name is Jan.”

  “Then she has the virus, too.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Does she know it?”

  “Not yet.”

  I pulled to a stop in front of a coffee shop. “Ellen can give you the first chapter,” I said to Heskett, then got out of the car and waited for him and Ellen to join me.

  Ellen grasped my hand. “You’re not staying?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got to see some people.”

  “Jan.”

  “And my client. Tom’s wife doesn’t know the whole story yet, either. She isn’t a bad woman, by the way. She and Tom just messed up their marriage. It happens sometimes, even to people who love each other.”

  “Hey,” Heskett said in what sounded like distress. “I don’t have a car. How am I going to get out of here?”

  I kissed the back of Ellen’s hand. “When it’s time to go, you’ll find a way. Right, Ms. Simmons?”

  Her smile made mincemeat of the sun. “Absolutely, Mr. Tanner.”

  Then I drove back across the bridge.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries

  ONE

  Maybe it was because it was one of those foggy San Francisco summer days that suggest the sun will forever shun us. Or maybe it was because I’d earned less than a thousand dollars the previous month and my banker had giggled like a geisha when I hinted I might need a loan to tide me over the rest of the recession. Or maybe it was because my banker was thirty-six and gorgeous, I was forty-eight and overweight, and she didn’t even bother to blush when I flirted with her. Whatever the reason, I rejected the idea from the moment I learned of it.

  After the mail deposited the first of what would become a dozen increasingly brash and artlessly imploring announcements on my desk, my primary reaction was dismay—that so much time had passed; that such a dread and distant milestone was suddenly upon me; that I had actually become one of those persons I’d formerly regarded, from within the brassy shell of youth, as comically obsolete and borderline pathetic; that I had truly toppled, suddenly and definitively, onto the dismal side of middle age. As with most idylls of introspection, the more I thought about it, the worse it got.

  A more reasoned response, formulated that evening during a silent soliloquy at Guido’s, was to shun the event on more exalted grounds: that the underlying sentiment was immature, reactionary, and possibly injurious in some gerontologic aspect; that at my age the only worthy focus was prospective—nostalgia was a crutch for the developmentally arrested or professionally unaccomplished, and I of course was neither; that memory was too perverse to mess with—the good times hadn’t been that good, and the bad ones had been worse. All of which was reason enough to let bygones stay long gone and the dead stay deeply buried.

  But philosophizing only maps your options; at some point you have to act, and then it’s pretty much a dice roll. In this case, the fact that seemed determinative was that in my current fiscal state I couldn’t afford to make the trip even if I wanted to. So I checked the box marked “Do Not Plan to Attend,” and refrained from supplying biographical data beyond my name, address, and, after an interesting internal debate and a review of appropriate euphemisms, my current occupation. When I turned away an unctuous emissary, who materialized in my office to dun me for an absurdly monumental contribution to the development fund with far less tact than his mission warranted, I figured the issue was closed.

  Yet somehow, six months after my last best pledge of noninvolvement, here I was, two thousand miles from home, lolling in line in an inadequately lit gymnasium on the campus of a diminutive liberal-arts college in the heart of the Upper Midwest, waiting to receive my name tag and T-shirt and schedule of weekend activities, poised to dive headlong into the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of my graduation from that selfsame institution. If I had to pick a reason for my change of heart, I’d say part of it had to do with wondering how a bunch of doctors and lawyers and insurance executives would react when confronted by a real live private eye.

  But a more essential impulse had to do with age. Fifty loomed before me like the Matterhorn; I would need a boost to get beyond it. If I could recharge my psychological batteries, replenish my store of hope, find further reason to keep doing what I did, then the reunion would serve its purpose. But I wasn’t optimistic.

  As the registration line shortened imperceptibly, my heart was as aflutter as if someone held a gun on me, my nerves as frayed as if drunken revelations and compulsive camaraderie lay behind me instead of dead ahead. My eyes were as skittish as sparrows—I didn’t want to seem aloof, but I didn’t want to come face-to-face with someone I didn’t recognize but should have, either. The stance I finally seized upon was to pretend I didn’t know what the commotion was about; I was just there to read the meter. That bit of burlesque only got me through the next three minutes.

  Such real and imagined dilemmas were tumbling through my mind like socks in a dryer when a hand landed on my shoulder with the subtlety of a sack of cement. “Tanner, you asshole. How come you never answered my letter?”

  “The one I got back in ’72? That said you’d be in San Francisco for a day and wanted to get together? The one that came a week after you were supposed to arrive? Because you didn’t include a return address, you moron.”

  I had finished most of my declamation before I turned to greet the object of the exercise, to wit: Gilbert Huxley Hayward, one of my best friends in those years, at once the most endearing and maddening man I’ve ever known.

  Although I was prepared to greet him warmly, when he was fully focused in my bifocals, I was afraid I’d been mistaken. The white hair, the bloated body, the jowls overgrown with Santa’s beard, all suggested my radar had misfired.

  “Gil?”

  His smile was as big as his belly, which he patted like a pumpkin at the point where his belt was eclipsed by his bulge. “A
t your service.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  To his credit, his ego was still intact and his laugh was unrestrained. “The same thing that happened to you, douche bag. I guess you don’t have mirrors in your house, so you didn’t notice you look more like Tom Foley than Tom Cruise these days. I hate like hell to be the one to break the news.”

  I laughed to cover my boorishness. “Good to see you, Gil.”

  “Yeah. Been a long time and all that shit. Assume the appropriate clichés have been exhausted.” He looked around the gym with more revulsion than reverence. “Remember when I passed out behind the wrestling mats and got locked in all night, and Dean Antley called the cops ’cause he thought I’d been abducted?”

  “Remember when you put Man Tan in my shaving lotion and I thought I had the pox?”

  “Remember filling Janson’s shoes with glue?”

  “Remember the detergent in the pool?”

  “Remember Susan Willoughby’s tits?”

  I remembered all of that and more, and Gil did, too, and we took a moment to take pleasure in the exercise. The swelling in my chest surprised me.

  “So what keeps you busy these days?” I asked when the memories dimmed.

  “Same as always—getting rich and getting laid. Not that tough to do either in New Jersey.”

  I detoured around his sex life. “What are you doing for a living?”

  He disdained an answer more elaborate than a shrug. “Whatever.”

  “Bring the wife and kids?”

  Gil shook his head. “Claimed they’d never heard anything about the joint that made them want to see it, plus the youngest had tickets to Kris Kross. Whatever that is.” He looked at me more closely, as though he’d heard a nasty rumor but couldn’t quite remember what it was. “How about you? Got family milling around somewhere?”