I was on my way to a meeting with Rita. Jenny had wanted me to stay another day with her in Palo Alto, but Rita and I had to prep for the Kumar shoot, which began on Monday.
Last night, after LifeScience, Jenny and I had ended up at a pizza joint for dinner. She could barely stand the thought of food, much less cooking, and just picked at her slice. She couldn’t stop imagining Sheila’s last minutes. I didn’t want to tell her the details of what I’d learned about anaphylaxis.
Sheila probably first felt it as a tingle in her teeth, an itch on the roof of her mouth. Not suspecting food caused it, she might have blamed it on the cat. As the antigen was absorbed into her stomach, Sheila’s immune system would have misidentified it as a threat. Mast cells were dispatched from various locations in her body, in search of the antigen. Histamine exploded like grenades out of the mast cells as they degranulated. Her stomach cramped. Capillaries enlarged and filled with fluid, which leaked into other tissues. Her gut, throat, hands, and feet swelled. Her skin started to feel hot and prickly. Welts spread over it. Her blood pressure dropped and she became dizzy from the onset of hypotensive shock. By now she must have known what was happening. A sense of doom overcame her. She tried the adrenaline injection in the bathroom, or maybe in her car. It should have relieved the other dangerous effect of the histamine, which was to cause her muscles to constrict, especially muscles in her bronchial tubes. But the solution was spoiled. Slowly her breathing apparatus closed up. She fought for oxygen. It could get neither in nor out. She suffocated with two hyperinflated lungs, like balloons full of air.
I got off 280 at San Jose Avenue and went straight to Rita’s. She lived in a backyard bungalow, built around 1910, in the Mission. She’d bought it in the early nineties, when prices were low. Low for San Francisco, that is: at the time, her down payment seemed a small fortune. Rita had been smart in all the ways I hadn’t. She’d stuck with filmmaking. A steady income from industrials had allowed her to make one independent documentary and begin research for a second.
Rita arched her brows as soon as I entered the house. The living room was an obstacle course of film gear. I left my camera there and we went into the kitchen, a large room with windows on two walls. A breakfast table sat in the middle. A couch was in the corner. I dropped into it and Rita stuck a cup of coffee in my hand.
“Two nights in a row with Jenny,” Rita said. “I smell a matrimonial mishap.” Her bright, throaty voice undercut itself with a low current of irony.
I frowned. “I haven’t told you the reason yet.”
I related the whole Sheila story. Rita’s expression sobered. “I can see why Jenny’s upset,” she said. “But I don’t see why she feels responsible. She took all the right precautions.”
“The doctor was sure it was something Sheila ate. The reaction comes on pretty fast. Where else would the toxin have come from but dinner?”
“Something in her car?”
I shook my head. “Sheila was careful.”
Rita gave a sympathetic shrug. “Just one of those terrible, inexplicable things, I guess. You may never know the real cause.”
I looked at her without answering. She was nearly my height, with light sandstone hair that fell to her shoulders in waves. Her round face and fine features reminded me of a Botticelli painting. We had been a couple for two years, but that seemed ages ago, before the Internet bubble swelled big enough to separate us. While I got sucked into it, she stuck with film. We’d been a good team. I could shoot and she could direct, or vice-versa. On the kind of films I shot now — documentaries, industrials, independent narrative, most with small crews — half the directors didn’t know how to compose a frame. Rita knew cinematography. We agreed about the process, and I didn’t have to put up a fight to make the picture look good.
We sipped coffee for a minute and stared out the window. Her little house was set back from the street. A neighbor was hanging laundry on the line that stretched from her porch to Rita’s roof.
Rita got up and tossed a script into my lap. She’d written it with someone from Kumar’s marketing department. The first shoot would last five days, all next week. We began to plot out each day’s work, each setup, each piece of gear. This afternoon I’d go and rent the specialized equipment we’d need.
It was a bioinformatics industrial, meant to show off the company’s tech to the stockholders. There’d be lots of shots of computer screens. Not much challenge, except to use Clearscan to make sure no bars went rolling up the screen. We also came up with ideas for showing some of the micro world that underlay all that computation. That would be more interesting to shoot.
“We can get inside with the snorkel lens we used on our last microchip job,” I said. “Put a one-and-a-half-inch probe lens on it, use a ninety-degree rotating periscope to get different angles on the circuitry. They don’t want to use film, do they?”
“No, HD. Everyone’s on a budget these days.”
“I did some establishing shots of the building on Wednesday.” That reminded me of the parking lot. “Hey, Gregory hasn’t bothered you again, has he?”
Rita rolled her eyes. “Only six times yesterday. He doesn’t leave messages, but I see his number on caller ID.”
“I told him to lay off. You want to see what he looks like? I’ve got the tape in my camera bag. You’re not going to believe this guy.”
“Not necessary. I won’t be working with him.”
“I got footage of Sheila, too. She was in the same parking lot. The camera spooked her. I wonder what she was up to.”
“You said she worked in biotech. People in the industry know each other, right? Maybe her company was doing business with Kumar.”
“Why would she hide, though? There are so many weird things going on. The missing hard drive. Mr. Alpha Male at LifeScience. Why did he want Sheila’s journal? And Fay, stealing it in the first place.”
Rita tsked. “Those are the kind of friends Jenny has.”
“Come on now, you can blame Jenny for a lot of things, but not what happened to Sheila.”
“Well, what’s in Sheila’s diary?”
“I don’t know yet. I opened it last night, but…” It had been bad enough to see Sheila laid out in the morgue; I hadn’t been ready to see her heart laid bare. The journal had gone into my glove compartment this morning. “I’ll read it tonight. See what’s in there about her allergies. LifeScience. Fay.”
Rita’s green eyes held me for several long seconds. They were aloof, like an oracle. “Why are you getting so caught up in this?”
“You know me, Rita. I like to get to the bottom of things.”
She gave me a scolding smile. “The curious cat. Always chasing after things he can’t quite catch. Pretty soon one of those things will jump up and bite you.”
“I bite back, don’t forget.”
“Yes. One of the few men whose bite is worse than his bark.” She smiled.
“Thanks for the upgrade to dog status. But look, I was dragged into this. I’m the one who identified the body. Jenny may get blamed for her death. And Sheila was — I don’t know, something just clicked. You don’t often meet people like her. You would have liked her, Rita.”
“I’m sorry, Bill. I’m sorry she died.”
“The guy at LifeScience was such a prick about it. He’s covering something, I’m sure. It pisses me off, you know? The things people get away with.”