“I’m asking you.”
“I’d have to section the brain and put it under a microscope. They must have done that at the hospital. Go back and ask if they ran a brain section p.m.”
“This lady was a socialite, they don’t autopsy socialites.”
“This socialite they should’ve. Either the infection moved incredibly fast or the initial diagnosis was way off. They’re all over the map, treating morphine withdrawal, hepatitis, heart fibrillation, epilepsy, and meantime something very hungry is having a picnic on her brain.”
He closed the folder and pursed his lips thoughtfully, the pencil in his hand tapping the desk edge.
“Assuming these doctors aren’t jerks, something that began as a blood disorder crossed to the brain. And the blood-brain barrier is not easy to penetrate. You have to be the size of maybe two electrons to get through. But without the blood sheets, there’s no point even guessing.”
“Any chance of unnatural causes?”
“These are infections, not bullets.”
“Could someone who knew medicine have infected her?”
“Not even Josef Mengele. This kind of disaster is like a five-plane midair collision. You can’t plan it, you can’t control it. You trying to make a case?”
“Just wondering.”
“If she was sharing needles, there could have been contributing negligence. But that’s luck of the draw, not murder.”
“I don’t think she was sharing. Too classy for that.”
“Get me her blood charts. There’s definitely grounds for curiosity.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Lieutenant.”
Dr. William Tiffany rose from his desk and stretched out his arm, offering a handshake. He was the same stout, Nautilus-pumped man Cardozo remembered from Ash’s sick room, dressed in a well-cut dark suit and striped tie.
It was a roomy corner office, with a black leather couch and two comfortable matching chairs. Cardozo chose the chair nearer the window.
Dr. Tiffany closed a folder and took the other chair.
Between the doctor and the detective was a table of woven bamboo, painted a ripe peach and heaped with magazines—Town and Country, Yachting, Vanity Fair, the French edition of Réalités.
Dr. Tiffany smiled, exuding the confidence of a man who dealt every day with the lives and deaths of people with very deep pockets. “You said on the phone you were a friend of Lady Ash Canfield.”
“Yes, I was.”
“That makes two of us. Terrible loss. And you’re a friend of Dina Alstetter as well?”
“She asked me to speak with you.”
“Yes? Concerning—?”
“Lady Canfield’s medical records. My coroner says they’re not complete. There are no blood analyses.”
Dr. Tiffany’s eyes were intelligent, shrewd. “Lady Canfield’s husband has the right to keep them confidential.”
“Mrs. Alstetter says Lady Canfield was going to divorce her husband. As next of kin, she’d like to know what killed her sister.”
“Congestive heart failure.”
“My coroner says something got across the blood-brain barrier. He says you’re protecting yourself. Mrs. Alstetter wants to know your side of things before she takes legal steps.”
The doctor looked toward Cardozo with that built-in coolness of his profession. “Nothing could have saved Lady Canfield. Lieutenant, have you heard the term HIV?”
“It causes AIDS. Is that what Lady Canfield had?”
Dr. Tiffany leaned back in his chair.
“AIDS manifested in Zaire twelve years ago,” he said. “Cuban troops brought AIDS to this hemisphere and to Central America. American mercenaries and military advisers brought AIDS from Central America to New York, where it entered the gay community and the heterosexual swinging community. Because gays are a small population, living in three or four ghettos across the country, the number of repeat exposures was enormous, and the disease followed a spectacular, fulminating course. What people are just beginning to grasp is that AIDS may have spread just as rapidly among heterosexuals. Because it’s had the entire American population to fan out through, repeat heterosexual exposures have been far lower than among gays. On the other hand, total exposures have been enormously higher, given that heterosexuals outnumber gays ten to one. We do know that one repeatedly exposed heterosexual group, non-IV-using female prostitutes, is showing double the rate of infection that male homosexuals in New York City did four years ago. If you extrapolate from that statistic, we have a holocaust down the road.”
Dr. Tiffany shook his head and paused and sat there just looking at Cardozo.
Cardozo sat there looking back.
“Are you Catholic or Fundamentalist or born again?” Dr. Tiffany asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t want to offend you.”
“You couldn’t even begin.”
“With the virus as widespread as it is, and the Catholic hierarchy and the Falwellians dead set against educating the public, the caseload is doubling every six months. Over a tenth of the population has been exposed, and possibly a third of those exposed will die within seven years. How does that grab you, Lieutenant?”
“Doctor,” Cardozo said, “you don’t need to shout. Put me on the mailing list. I’ll contribute. Could you just tell me if you tested Ash Canfield’s blood?”
Dr. Tiffany rose and walked to his files. “Would you mind coming over here, Lieutenant?”
Dr. Tiffany pulled a gold keychain from his pocket and unlocked one of the file drawers. The drawer slid out smoothly on noiseless rollers.
“There’s a lot of agony going on out there, Lieutenant. Not just the kind you police deal with. These are the records of tens of thousands of blood tests, X rays, CAT scans, examinations by dozens of our doctors. They go back five years.”
Cardozo stared at the alphabetized folders, aware that something alien and menacing was passing under his eyes.
“The men and women in these files have suffered physical degradation you could not begin to imagine. Over half of them are dead. And the others don’t have long.”
Cardozo ran his eye from the back of the drawer forward to the C’s and then along the names. CLEMENS, CANNING, CANFIELD.
“In these drawers you’ll find the ex-wife of the head of the largest communications conglomerate in the country. A nun. Top fashion designers. Children. Infants. Grandfathers. Firemen. Pro football players. Some of your own coworkers. Some of mine. Famous actors. Actors who were never famous and never will be. Soldiers—men who survived Vietnam. Help yourself.”
Cardozo drew out the folder marked CANFIELD, ASH, and stared at the photograph of Ash Canfield at nearly full body-weight, at the sheets of computer-generated graphs and printout.
“I don’t understand these graphs,” he said.
“Lady Ash Canfield had no T-cells and her blood tested positive for HIV antibodies.”
Cardozo dropped the file back into place. An awareness was pressing at the margin of his consciousness. Something to do with the drawer, a deep drawer, the letters running back through the early H’s. He saw that the last name was Hatfield.
“What about this one?” he drew the folder out. The photo showed a wholesome-looking man in his mid-thirties, HATFIELD, BRIAN. “Dead or alive?”
“Brian was one of mine,” Dr. Tiffany said. “He died last summer.”
Cardozo drew out the neighboring folder, HALLEY, JOHN. His stomach tightened as though a fist had slammed him. The face in the photograph was Jodie Downs’s.
“Tell me about this patient,” Cardozo said. “John Halley.”
“John was one of my outpatients. He had ARC—AIDS-related complex. He dropped out of the program a little over five months ago.
“Is ARC infectious?”
“We don’t know. Some people seem to be able to transmit the virus without coming down with AIDS themselves. I’d have to answer that one with a guarded yes.”
“What’s the incubation period?”
“There’s a lot of misinformation in the press on that. We don’t know what triggers the virus once it’s in the blood. There could be cofactors we’re completely unaware of. So far as we know, the disease can manifest anytime between exposure and death. So I’d put what you call the incubation period at anywhere from an hour to forty years.”