Silent Partner

“Not yet. If you’re right about Lanier going home to have her baby, hometown would be the perfect place- assuming she never read Thomas Wolfe. How about you give a call down there and see what you come up with? Start with the Chamber of Commerce and find out the names of any hospitals doing business back in ’53. If you’re lucky and they hold on to records, a little lying will pry it out of them- say you’re some kind of bureaucrat. They’ll do anything to get rid of you. If nothing pans out, check out the county registrar.”

“Call Helen; call Port Wallace. Any more assignments, sir?”

“Hey, you want to play sleuth, develop a taste for the tedious stuff.”

“The safe stuff?”

He scowled. “Damn right, Alex. Think back to what the Kruses and the Escobar girl looked like. And how fast the Fontaines lit out for Coconut Country. If you’re right about a tenth of this, we’re dealing with people with very long arms.”

He made a circle with thumb and forefinger, released the finger as if flicking away a speck of dust. “Poof. Life is fragile- something I got from Freshman Philosophy. Stay inside; keep your doors locked. Don’t take candy from strangers.”

He rinsed out his bowl, put it in the drainer. Saluted and began to leave.

“Where are you off to?”

“Got something I have to follow up on.”

“The something that kept you from calling Port Wallace? Stalking the wild Trapp?”

He glowered at me.

I said, “Rick assured me you’re going to get him.”

“Rick should stick to cutting up people for fun and profit. Yeah, I’m gu

“How underage?”

“Teenage jailbait. When he was back in Hollywood Division he was heavily into the Police Scouts- earned himself a departmental commendation for public service beyond the call of blah blah. Part of that service was providing personal guidance to some of the more comely young lady scouts.”

“How’d you find this out?”

“Classic source: disgruntled former employee. Female officer, Hispanic, couple of years behind me in the academy. She used to work the Hollywood Evidence Room, took leave to have a baby. After she returned, Trapp made her life so miserable, she opted for stress disability and quit. Few years ago I ran into her downtown, day of her final hearing. Racking my brains for a hook into Trapp made me remember. She really hated him. I looked her up and paid her a visit. She’s married to an accountant, got a fat little kid, nice split level in Simi Valley. But even after all these years, talking about Trapp made her eyes bulge. He used to grope her, make racist comments- how Mexican girls lost their virginity before their baby teeth, what brown-nose really means- all of it delivered in a Tio Taco accent.”

“Why didn’t she report it when it was happening?”

“Why didn’t all those kids at Casa de los Niños tell anyone what was happening to them? Fear. Intimidation. Back then the city didn’t believe in sexual harassment. Filing a complaint would have meant exposing her entire sexual history to Internal Affairs and the press, and she’d been known to party. These days her consciousness is raised. She realizes how badly she got screwed and is sitting on a lot of rage. But she hasn’t talked about it to anyone- certainly not hubby. After she spilled her guts, she made me swear I wouldn’t drag her into anything, so I’ve got knowledge that I can’t use. But if I can find corroboration, the bastard’s good as gone.”

He walked to the door. “And that, my friend, is where I’m choosing to focus my extracurricular attention.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah. I’ll work it from my end; maybe it’ll all co

“You too, Sturgis. Yours ain’t scorchproof.”

I got Helen Leidecker’s number from San Bernardino information. No answer. Frustrated but relieved- I hadn’t relished testing her integrity- I found a U.S. atlas and located Port Wallace, Texas, in the southernmost part of the state, just west of Laredo. A faint black speck on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.

I called the operator for the South Texas area code, dialed 512 information, and asked for the Port Wallace Chamber of Commerce.

“One second, sir,” came the drawled reply, followed by clicks and several computer squeaks. “No such listing, sir.”

“Are there any government offices listed in Port Wallace?”

“I’ll check, sir.” Click. “A United States Post Office, sir.”

“I’ll take that.”

“Hold for that number, sir.”

I called the post office. No answer there either. Checked my watch. Eight A.M. here, two hours later there. Maybe they believed in the leisurely life.

I called again. Nothing. So much for my assignments. But there was still plenty to do.

The research library had a single listing for Neurath, Donald. A 1951 book on fertility published by a university press and housed, across campus, in the biomedical library. The date and subject matter fit, but it was hard to reconcile an abortionist with the author of something that scholarly. Nevertheless, I made the trek to BioMed, consulted the Index Medicus, and found two other articles on fertility, authored in 1951 and 1952 by a Donald Neurath with a Los Angeles address. The L.A. County Medical Association Directory features photos of members. I found the one from 1950 and flipped to the N’s.

His face jumped out at me, slicked hair, pencil-line mustache, and lemon-sucking expression, as if life had treated him poorly. Or maybe it was living too close to the edge.

His office was on Wilshire, just where Crotty had put it. A member of AMA, education at a first-rate medical school, excellent internship and residency, an academic appointment at the school that loosely employed me.

The two faces of Dr. N.

Another split identity.

I hurried to the BioMed stacks, found his book and the two articles. The former was an edited compendium of current fertility research. Eight chapters by other doctors, the last one by Neurath.

His research involved the treatment of infertility with injections of sex hormones to stimulate ovulation- revolutionary stuff during a period in which human fertility remained a medical mystery. Neurath emphasized this, listed previous treatments as slapshot and generally unsuccessful: endometrial biopsies, surgical enlargement of the pelvic veins, implantation of radioactive metal in the uterus, even long-term psychoanalysis combined with tranquilizers to overcome “ovulation-blocking anxiety stemming from hostile mother-daughter identification.”

Though researchers had begun to make a co

Neurath had taken it a step further, injecting half a dozen barren women with hormones obtained from the ovaries and pituitaries of female cadavers. Combining the injections with a regimen of temperature-taking and blood tests in order to get a precise fix on the time of ovulation. After several months of repeated treatments, three of the women became pregnant. Two suffered miscarriages, but one carried a healthy baby to term.

While stressing that his findings were preliminary and needed to be replicated by controlled studies, Neurath suggested that hormonal manipulation promised hope for childless couples and should be attempted on a large scale.

The 1951 article was a shorter version of the book chapter. The one from ’52 was a letter to the editor, responding to the ’51 article, by a group of doctors who complained that Neurath’s treating of humans was premature, based on flimsy data, and his findings were tainted by poor research design. Medical science, the letter emphasized, knew little about the effects of gonadotropic hormones on general health. In addition to not helping his patients, Neurath might very well be endangering them.