Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (11 page)

I said I would, but I intended to steer our path toward the research area as soon as I could. I was not here to see the sick people. I was here to see where Keith Bunsen conducted his diabetes study and to assess my chances of discovering whether Bram Fitzwaring was one of his test subjects. I had asked Keith twice and both times he said he didn’t know. Maybe, I thought, I’d have more luck with one of his assistants, but I knew it would take finesse and a bit of trickery on my part. After fifteen minutes walking up and down the hall where Lindsey worked, glimpsing pulmonary patients in beds left and right, “Oxygen in Use” signs on many of the doors, I asked about research. Lindsey looked disappointed. About halfway down the hall, a little clutch of hospital personnel—I couldn’t tell if they were nurses or what—stood eyeing us, none too subtly.

“Are these your co-workers?” I nodded and smiled in their direction.

“Would you mind meeting them?”

“I’d like to.” I toyed with excuses to cut this meeting short while Lindsey introduced me as her mother’s best friend from America, and they responded with polite questions about what I was doing here. “I’m attending a conference at the university but if you’re asking why I’m here at your hospital, it’s because a professor at St. Ormond’s has told me about some fascinating work on diabetes that’s being done here. I’m diabetic so, of course, the research interests me. I’m hoping Dr.”—I couldn’t remember Lindsey’s married name and had no idea if she had returned to using her maiden name or not—“that is, Lindsey, will show me where the labs are.”

Lindsey looked a bit surprised and stared at her feet for a second as if revising her tour plans. “We’d better be going then,” she said. “The research wing is a right long hike from here.” She led me back to the first floor by elevator, then along a glassed-in corridor, around several personnel stations, and through a number of automatic doors. “This is it,” she said.

We stood in a brightly lit hall with a gleaming white floor. The rooms on either side were clear glass from waist height to ceiling so I could see into the labs. I love labs. There’s something about flasks with brightly colored liquids and rows of test tubes and stainless steel panels and dials with red needles that I find exciting. Neat. Orderly. Precise. But the lab on my right wasn’t quite so neat. The beakers closest to the window were filled with something that looked more like pond scum and spoiled milk. A clipboard hanging from a string held a chart scribbled with several colors of ink.

“On the right, we have our genetic research and diabetes research.”

I stepped closer to the glass and saw a couple of workers in white lab coats, but they were women. No Keith Bunsen anywhere in sight. While I peered in, studying as much of the room as I could, I noticed Lindsey eyeing the lab on the other side of the hall.

She touched my arm. “On this side we have neurology and nervous tissue studies.”

“Can we go in?”

“Not without clearance.” She looked through the sheet of glass fronting the neurology lab and waved, then pointed to herself and me. “We just got clearance.”

I followed her into a room that smelled of ozone, like the aftermath of an electrical storm. A wall of stacked cages ranged along one wall contained inverted water bottles and mice, one on its back legs with its little front feet hooked over the wire of its cage. They were curious, I supposed, to find out who the visitors were. Lindsey introduced me to a rather short but handsome man who reminded me of Hugh Grant, with a shock of thick hair expertly cut to look messy.

“St. Giles Bell,” Lindsey told me.

We shook hands. He had a charming smile.
What do you call a man when his first name is St. Giles?
Did he have a nickname? I said, “Nice to meet you, Dr. Bell.”

We exchanged small talk for a minute while Lindsey shuffled her feet and played with her ponytail. This was her new boyfriend, I felt certain. When I got a second chance to look around the room, I spotted a large shallow pan full of oysters in a thin brownish liquid. Oysters? I had to ask.

“My work on nervous disorders involves sodium channel blockers,” said St. Giles Bell, “and the best one I’ve found is called saxitoxin. It’s produced by certain marine algae and concentrated in the tissues of filter-feeding animals, like oysters. That’s the reason for the oysters. They are happily gorging themselves on a certain kind of algae that I have procured for them at great risk to my own well-being.”

“He means snorkeling in the North Sea,” Lindsey said, rolling her eyes.

“Well, hey. That water is cold. I could have suffered cardiac arrest.” He pressed his hand against his chest.

I found his self-effacing manner charming. The look on Lindsey’s face said she did, too. I said, “A toxin, did you say?”

“Right, and an extremely potent one. In fact, it’s a Schedule One Chemical Warfare Agent.”

I didn’t need to ask what that meant. What I didn’t get was how it could possibly help cure diseases. I started to ask, but Lindsey and St. Giles Bell had moved away from me and put their heads together, his hand cupping her white-coated elbow. I slipped out into the hall and across to the window of the genetics and diabetes lab. I could see that it wasn’t a single room, but a series of spaces that communicated with one another and were connected to the hall at intervals by white-painted doors.

I spotted Keith Bunsen. Damn! There went any chance I may have had to talk with one of his assistants without his knowledge. He had just walked through from an unseen adjoining room and was carrying a clipboard. Like everyone else, he was wearing a white lab coat. I waved, but he didn’t see me.
No need to pretend I’m not here.
I watched while he conferred with a young woman seated in front of a microscope. He seemed to be giving her instructions. When he straightened his tall, bony frame and turned my way, I waved again. This time he saw me and loped to the door.

“Dotsy, w-w-what are you doing here?”

I pointed to the neurology lab across the hall and explained, but omitted mentioning that the real reason I was here was to locate his lab. I made it sound as if my friend Lettie had been anxious for me to see where her daughter, the doctor, worked. Keith invited me in. This lab was full of chemistry apparatus, and the walls were papered with charts: Flow sheets, chemical equations, and a key-shaped diagram I recognized as the Krebs cycle. I’d seen plenty of these while waiting for blood to be drawn.

Keith took me around a partition to a small room where a young woman sat at a wall of filing cabinets. Two built-in desks, both with laptops centered above the kneeholes and printouts scattered about, stood on the opposite wall. “This is where we keep the data. We try to keep the paperwork apart from the stuff that can possibly explode.”

I laughed. Suddenly, the direct approach didn’t seem unreasonable. “By the way, have you found out whether Bram Fitzwaring was part of your study?”

Both workers sat up straight and I got the feeling I’d said something I shouldn’t. Uh-oh. Double-blind study. Keith isn’t supposed to know who is in which group. For a minute, I was afraid I’d ruined his project.

But Keith relieved my mind with, “I have, actually. In light of the fact that he’s no longer participating, I asked Katie to check for me.” The worker I assumed was Katie looked up from her work and nodded. “Fitzwaring was a part of our study, but he was in the control group.”

“So he didn’t get the real medicine, right? He was getting a placebo,” I said.

“Right. And I thank God he wasn’t in the test group. If we lose one more person in that group, we’ll have to battle with the old chi-square monster.” I must have had a horrified look on my face, because he quickly added, “I don’t mean I’m not sorry he died. I o-o-only meant it’s a matter of numbers. My test group is doing very well medically. It’s just that they keep getting hit by trucks.”

“Pardon?”

Keith ran a finger under his collar and his Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. “Not literally, of course, but one member of the group has moved to Scotland, one dropped out due to unrelated medical problems, things like that.”

After following me out into the hall, Keith closed the door behind himself. I felt as if I was being ushered out. “This phase of the study should be completed in less than a year,” he said. “After that, if all looks good, we’ll do a broader study. Would you like to be a part of it?”

“Would I be in the test group or the control group?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“How would I handle the evaluations? I couldn’t come here once a month.”

“In the next stage, the consultations could be done with your local doctor.”

“I see.”

“We’ll stay in touch after you fly back across the pond, eh?”

I wondered if Keith would put up with all the questions I’d ask before I joined a clinical trial. I turned and found Lindsey standing behind me.

She didn’t ask me what Keith and I had been talking about, but looked at her watch and said, “I need to be back upstairs in twenty-five minutes. We’ve run over into my lunch break, I’m afraid. Would you like to come to the cafeteria with me?”

I said I would.

In the cafeteria line Lindsey chose a ready-made salad and I did likewise. After we found a table and settled in, I poured blue cheese dressing all over my salad and noticed that Lindsey had added no dressing at all. I had a large roll and butter. She had one little cellophane pack of crackers.

“I see how you stay so nice and slim,” I said.

“Mom’s always on my back to eat more.” She pushed lettuce around with her fork but didn’t actually pick up a forkful. “You know how she is.”

“She’s doing you a huge favor this summer, coming over here.”

“That she is.” Lindsey’s tone told me she’d taken my comment as criticism.

“But she loves the time she has with her grandchildren. To her, it’s not a job. She enjoys it.” I wasn’t making things any better, so I tried to think of another topic.

Lindsey’s husband, according to Lettie, was a jerk. He was a very successful corporate lawyer in Northern Virginia and until they split, they’d lived in a multimillion-dollar home in Alexandria. Lindsey had married him for his reputation, his well-toned body, and his bank balance rather than for any personal qualities—like empathy or flexibility. Lettie and I had talked about it a lot and in Lettie’s opinion, it all started when she and Ollie insisted Lindsey go to a private high school rather than the public school she’d attended in grades K through eight. Until then, Lindsey had never thought about social class one way or the other.

The Osgoods had plenty of money, but they were still an ordinary middle-class family. Ollie, Lettie’s husband and Lindsey’s father, had succeeded wildly in the construction business but took his beer and football with him as they “moved on up.” He was the sort of guy whose motto was “Git ’er done.” Lettie and Ollie both thought the public school was exposing their daughter to the seamy side of life too early so they enrolled her in the exclusive private school where she encountered snobbery for the first time in her life and, rather than rebel against it, internalized it. Longing for acceptance, she tried to change herself to be like them. Whenever Ollie picked her up in his old cement-spattered truck, Lindsey ducked into the footwell until they drove out the school gate. She tossed Lettie’s artificial flower arrangements into the trash because,
“Nobody
uses fake flowers. It just proves you have
no class
!” Lettie laughed when she told me this, but I think it really hurt her.

Lindsey went off to college after that, and then med school, but the damage was already done. Lettie and I talked about how children never get over their first steps out of the nest and into the big world—the teen world of sex and competition and alliances and self-doubt. When even the bullies are afraid. Lindsey stayed in contact with her high school crowd as they progressed through their various prestigious universities. There she found Taylor Scoggin, a man who turned the old crowd green with envy.

They had two beautiful children, and their careers flourished while Taylor chipped away at Lindsey’s self-esteem. Slowly, she accepted the fact that to Taylor she was nothing more than an educated arm piece, and that was too bad, because that’s also why she’d chosen him. At least that was my take on it. After ten years of marriage, one day she asked him if he knew the name of her childhood dog. The instrument she played in the high school band. Her favorite color. He went O for three. Taylor got into cocaine, which he considered nothing more than a necessary part of his alleged high-pressure job, and then he became abusive. Lindsey packed up the children and moved out.

I changed the subject. “Did your mom tell you about the man on our staircase who died yesterday?”

“Yes. What happened to him?”

“They’re saying it was hypoglycemia but I’m not so sure. He was diabetic like me, but the timing is wrong, I think. By the way. Where do they do autopsies?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Will they do an autopsy on him?”

“Was anyone with him when he died?”

“No.”

“It was an unattended death. They should do one.”

“At the police station, do you think?”

“Why there? Are the police involved?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then I suppose it would be done in a hospital morgue.”

“You mean here.”

“This is the largest hospital around here, but I really don’t know. Why?” Lindsey picked at her salad. She looked up, grinning at me. “You want to sit in on it?”

“No. I was just wondering. I’d like to know what they find.”

“Good luck with that. They probably won’t share their findings with the general public, and, to a medical examiner, that’s all you are. General public.”

On the cab ride back to the center of town, I sat on the right side of the back seat so I could elevate my left ankle by resting it on the seat. In spite of the ice I’d applied last night, it was still swollen and not the right color. The scenery between the hospital and the center of town was mainly residential, the homes mainly the type the English called “semi-detached,” with two residences built to look like one house, each having its own small but carefully tended yard in front.