Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (71 page)

“That’s a long time to wait—a long time to
hope.
”

“I have a rare compatibility problem, Leo. There’s very little chance a kidney will ever turn up for me.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I was diagnosed with chronic kidney failure; when my kidney function fell below 10 percent, it became end-stage renal disease. Dialysis can buy you some time, but a transplant is the only cure.” She turned to the window. “The word among doctors is that kidney failure is a pretty good way to go. Your blood becomes more and more polluted, and you just sort of run down like a battery. My battery is pretty low.”

“Are there no family members who can help?”

“I have one sister; she’s not a match.”

Leo put his arm around her, pulled her close, and kissed her hair. “I can see why things are complicated.”

“I think Nick suspects anyway.”

“Nick knows you’re ill. When he was at your apartment the other night, he looked through your medicine cabinet and found your medications.”

Riley straightened. “He had no right!”

“Breaking and entering, hacking into patient databases—the question of ‘rights’ here is a little slippery, don’t you think? The point is, Riley, when I hand Nick this list, he’s going to see your name on it. He’s going to know the full extent of your illness. He’s going to
know,
Riley. Is that what you want?”

“What choice do I have?”

Leo opened the folder and took out several sheets of paper. “As a friend—as someone who
loves
you—I’m offering to remove your name from this list.”

Riley stared at him. “Would you be willing to do that?”

“I might—but first you have to answer some questions for me: Why are you involved in all this, Riley McKay? What’s your true motivation? And what does this have to do with your own need for a kidney transplant?”

Riley took a minute to collect her thoughts. “When Lassiter refused to release that man’s organs for transplant, I thought, ‘Those could have been
my
kidneys!’ And even if they weren’t, they could have saved
someone’s
life. People die on the waiting list every day, Leo. Someday soon, I will. I had to know why Lassiter would do that. It just triggered something inside me; I didn’t know where all this would lead.” She looked into his eyes. “Do you believe me?”

“Without question,” he nodded. “Nick lives in a world of the mind—but I happen to know hearts. If you were lying to me, I would have known it before you finished your first sentence. Now, about this list—what do you want me to do?”

“What do you think I should do?”

“If Nick knows you’re dying, he’ll either throw himself at you or run away. Either way, it could no longer be an ordinary relationship—and that’s what I want for him most. The time may come when you have to tell him yourself, Riley, but I want you to have the freedom to make that choice.”

Leo tore the top sheet of paper in half and put it back in the folder.

She kissed him on the cheek again. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

They looked out the back window; the car was approaching the end of the steel track. Their piece of the jigsaw puzzle was about to slide into place, completing the picture of the upper station with its white beveled siding and twin towers with violet caps. Riley began to turn toward the door as the car came to its final stop—but Leo held on to her hand until she turned back to him again.

“I don’t know if you’ll be the cure for Nick,” he said, “but I hope you won’t contribute to his disease.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“You know, Riley, it isn’t enough for you to be Nick’s cure—he has to cure something in you as well.”

“Oh, Leo—I don’t know if that’s possible.”

Leo kissed the back of her hand. “You never know,” he said. “Love heals all kinds of wounds.”

Make a right on 19,” Riley said, studying the MapQuest directions.

Nick pushed harder on the gas as they started up a long hill; the engine made a whining sound, coughing and wheezing like an old man climbing stairs. Each time one of the four cylinders missed, another puff of blue smoke belched out behind them, punctuating the still morning air.

“Nick, I’ve heard model airplanes that sound better than this.”

“That’s because they cost more. I got a deal on this.”

“Somebody got a deal. How old is this thing?”

“Car talk bores me. Which way at this intersection?”

“Left.” Riley sipped her Starbucks and glanced at her watch:
five-thirty.
She was giving up her every-other-weekend-off for
this
? Her only consolation was that Nick had no way of flipping the car over and dumping her onto the roadway—but looking at the shuddering car around her, she wasn’t entirely sure. She picked up a half-eaten croissant from her lap, nibbled at it, then wadded it up in her napkin and turned to Nick. “What do I do with this?”

“There’s a place for trash in the backseat.”

She turned and looked. The backseat and floor were piled high with faded textbooks, drab-looking journals, and glutted three-ring binders spewing disheveled papers. There were two knapsacks, wadded-up articles of multicolored clothing, and a strange assortment of lidded plastic and foam containers.

She looked back at Nick. He took the napkin from her hand and tossed it over his shoulder. It bounced off something that looked like a butterfly net and came to rest under the rear window.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a slob?” she said.

“Only rude people.”

Riley folded her arms tightly and settled back in her seat, trying
her best not to touch anything around her. “You sure know how to treat a girl,” she grumbled.

“Stop complaining. Aren’t I taking you to Upper St. Clair? It’s the classiest neighborhood in all of Pittsburgh.”

Riley looked out her window. Through breaks in the tall hedges she began to catch passing glimpses of sprawling private estates with manicured shrubbery, sculptured fountains, and winding driveways paved in sulfur-gray Pennsylvania flagstone.

“Look at this place,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re not from around here?”

“Hardly. I grew up about forty miles south of here—a little coalmining town called Mencken. My father was a coal miner from the time he was old enough to go to work until the day he died.”

“What did he die of?”

Riley shrugged. “A coal mine is a toxic place—so are the towns that grow up around them. There’s coal dust, fly ash, cadmium, iron oxides—take your pick. My father just began to waste away one day. A month later he was dead. The cause of death was never determined. I think that’s one of the reasons I went into pathology: it’s nice to know why someone you love died.”

“Mencken—why does that sound familiar?”

“Probably our underground coal-mine fire; it’s been burning for forty years now.”

“Forty years?”

“There are places where the coal vein comes right up to the surface. The miners’ families used to go there to gather our own coal to use in our furnaces. People dumped their trash there too, and years ago someone got the bright idea to burn it. That set fire to the coal seam, and the fire’s been smoldering underground ever since.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“There are underground coal-mine fires all over Pennsylvania—five in Allegheny County alone. Of course, what makes Mencken so special is that we’ve got a bony pile fire too.”

“A what?”

Riley looked at him. “You’re from Pittsburgh, and you’ve never heard of a bony pile?”

“My family was in steel,” he said. “The Carnegies and the Polchaks.”

“A coal mine produces a lot of scrap—shale, coal tailings, old timbers, stuff like that. In the old days, when the miners came out of the shaft, they just dumped it all beside the mouth of the mine. Over the years those piles grew to enormous sizes. The Mencken bony pile is two hundred feet high and half a mile long; it went right past our back door. The problem is, those piles contain a lot of low-grade coal, and sometimes they catch fire just like the mines do. Our bony pile has been burning for years now.”

“Like a giant pile of charcoal briquettes?”

“Only it burns from the inside out. To look at it, you wouldn’t even know it’s on fire. I used to play on it all the time as a little girl.”

“You used to
play
on it? Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

“It is if you don’t know where you’re going. A man from the Department of Environmental Protection came out once. He climbed halfway up the bony pile and stuck a temperature probe into the ground by his feet. A foot and a half below the surface it was eight hundred degrees. He came down off that pile
fast.
”

“And you used to
play
on it?”

“Like I said, you just have to know where you’re going. Every winter, when it snowed, the bony pile looked like a ski area. The snow would melt off all the hot spots, and stick to all the cold ones. It made a sort of map; it told us where it was safe to walk.”

“And you just hoped it stayed that way until the following winter.”

“I’m a coal miner’s daughter. We didn’t have it soft like you steel tycoons.”

“So the mine is on fire, and the bony pile is on fire. That’s got to be a little hard on property values.”

“My sister and I still own the house, if that’s what you mean. How could we sell it? Mencken is a ghost town. The basements collect carbon monoxide, smoke seeps out of cracks in the ground, and after it rains the bony pile steams like a giant compost mound. It’s not exactly Upper St. Clair.”

“So you and your sister are blue collar girls. Somehow I thought the blue was in your veins.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re a doctor. I don’t imagine many Mencken High graduates went on to medical school.”

“Sarah and I both went into medicine. We thought it’s what our father would have wanted.”

Nick looked at her. “Your father would have been very proud of you.”

She met his eyes. “What about your father? Was he proud of you?”

Nick turned away. “Boyce Street. What do we do here?”

“This is it. Make a right—it should be just a couple of houses down.”

They passed a series of tall brick posts capped in limestone finials the shape of chess pawns. The posts were connected by sections of intricate wrought-iron fence; in the center of each was a flowering fleur-de-lis. After the sixth post there was a wide, arching gate that spanned an immaculate crushed-stone driveway. Nick pulled to the center of the gate and stopped the car. At the end of the long driveway, visible between a colonnade of stately elms and poplars, was the seemingly endless English Tudor estate of Mr. Miles Vandenborre.

“Five million at least,” Nick whistled.

“Nick—don’t stop here!”

“Why not?”

“Look at that place—and look at this car.”

“OK …”

“Do I have to spell it out for you? Their garbage is worth more than this car!”

“I hope so,” Nick said. “That’s the whole idea.” He stepped out of the car and lifted the trunk with a rusty groan. To the right of the gate, two thirty-gallon garbage cans stood sentry, surrounded by a series of smaller white plastic bags neatly twist-tied at the tops. He flipped the lid off each can, pulled out the black cinch-top bags, and carried them to his trunk. He rounded up the white bags in a single armload, and in less than two minutes they were under way again.

Nick glanced over at Riley, who was slumping even lower in her seat. “Now you know why I wanted to bring
my
car—the right tool for the right job.”

“Just drive,” she said, cupping her right hand over her eyes.

“Your first time Dumpster diving? I guess you’ve never been a teacher.”

“What are we going to do with all this stuff?”

“We’re taking it to Leo’s. Mr. Vandenborre is a rich man in need of a kidney transplant, but for some reason he removed himself from the waiting list—yet he’s still alive. I want to know why.”

“And you think his trash is going to tell us.”

Nick glanced at the backseat. “You can tell a lot about a person by his trash—don’t you think?”

They parallel parked in front of Forest Hills Apartments. Riley took the two black bags; Nick gathered the assortment of white bags and closed the trunk behind him. They disappeared through a stone archway and up a flight of stairs.

Across the street, Cruz Santangelo set his binoculars on the dashboard, took a pen from his coat pocket, and jotted down the address.