Blood Count Read online

“Because Alex could use your expertise. You know how to hunt down people and that sort of quasi-criminal stuff. He’ll be glad of your advice.”

  “Alex seemed pretty steely and independent tonight.”

  “That might’ve just been bravado,” Annie said. She was stroking my stomach counter-clockwise. “When he gets down to the real business of trying to locate the man he says he’s going to kill, that’s the time he’ll need some trained help.”

  “And that’s when I make my move?” I said. “Offer Alex the benefit of my wisdom?”

  “Exactly,” Annie said.

  The rotations with her hand dropped lower on my stomach.

  “Hey,” Annie said, “what’s this we have down here?”

  “Tumescence.”

  “If we’re going to make love,” Annie said, “there’re two matters to take care of first.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Number one, finish talking about the plan to keep Alex out of trouble.”

  “We’re finished,” I said. “The order of action is, I offer my services to Alex, and in the process, I winkle some hints out of him about where he’s going to search for the alleged guilty party, the guy who infected Ian with AIDS, and I get to this party first and tell him to move out of town pronto.”

  “Why are you speaking so quickly?”

  “Shows you what a fast study I am.”

  “Well, yes, that’s the plan I have in mind,” Annie said. “But there has to be more detail.”

  “Let me talk to Alex, and later on we’ll regroup for the detail.”

  Annie hesitated. “I guess so,” she said.

  “What’s the other matter we have to take care of before we make love?”

  “On this one, buster, you’re on your own.”

  “I am?”

  “Get into the bathroom and gargle some mouthwash.”

  Chapter Three

  Next morning, Saturday, after Annie left, I volunteered to help Alex walk the dog.

  “That’s sweet of you, Crang,” Alex said.

  The dog is an Irish Setter and getting long in the tooth. Alex and Ian had named him Genet. He wags his tail a lot and barks only with extreme provocation.

  “Through the park and down to Queen,” Alex said. “It’s the usual route.”

  “Don’t change on my account.”

  “In honour of the occasion, you can be point man.”

  Alex handed me Genet’s leash. He carried a pooper scooper and a small brown paper bag. The three of us crossed Beverley Street and walked into the park. It had plenty of trees in orderly rows and a scattering of heavy green picnic tables.

  “How’s the pooch bearing up under Ian’s absence?” I asked.

  “He whines at eating time. Only natural, I guess. Ian was the one who opened his little tins and things. And he goes around looking rather puzzled.”

  “I took that for his permanent expression.”

  “Now that you mention it.…”

  Genet was a leisurely walker. No yanking on the leash, no sudden leaps and bounds. He halted now and then to sniff trees and discarded Big Mac boxes, and he squatted to do some business on the grass. Alex went to work with the pooper scooper and the brown paper bag.

  “I loathe this part,” he said.

  “Because Ian handled the walking detail.”

  Alex held the pooper scooper and brown bag at arm’s length. “Speaking of which,” he said, “this is the first time I remember you on one of these doggy excursions.”

  “How come I hear suspicion in your voice?”

  “Annie put you up to it, didn’t she?”

  “Up to what?” Playing dumb was all the technique I could muster.

  “To talking me out of my intentions.”

  “Sort of.”

  Near one of the picnic tables, an elderly Asian gent and a middle-aged white lady wearing what might have been jammies were going through a sequence of slowmo tai chi moves. Step up, deflect, parry.

  “I don’t want you involved,” Alex said. “Not just you. I don’t want anyone involved apart from myself.”

  “Annie thinks I have talent in the field.”

  “No doubt you do. But I’m doing splendidly for a novice.”

  “You don’t have the guy’s name.”

  Alex stopped and looked at me. “Ah, but I know the place.”

  “So you were saying last night.”

  “And I’ve narrowed the field.”

  “Of what? Suspects?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Since last night you’ve done this?” I said.

  Alex had what might pass for a sly expression. “I have my contacts, Crang, and I’ll say no more, so don’t press me, please.”

  The three of us walked out of the park’s south entrance. We kept going to Queen Street and turned west. Alex stuffed the brown bag into a city litter bin.

  “A stop at Pages if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  Alex took Genet’s leash and wound it around the last rung of a bicycle stand on the sidewalk. Pages is a bookstore with a nice range of magazines and a small specialty in books about jazz. I bought Mel Tormé’s autobiography in paperback. Alex loaded up on magazines. Mother Jones. Forbes. This Magazine. New Republic.

  “Magazine-wise,” I said, “you just defined eclectic.”

  “All they ever have on the plane is last week’s Time,” Alex said. We were back on the street.

  “You going away?”

  “After lunch,” Alex said. “Bound to be strange down there without Ian.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Alex and Ian had a cottage in Key West a couple of blocks from the old Hemingway house. “How long do you figure you’ll be gone?”

  “Whatever it takes to think and plot. A few days.” Alex shifted the parcel of magazines under his arm. “Feel like some caffeine?”

  “What about Genet?”

  “Don’t fret about him. He adores the passing parade.”

  Genet was resting his rear end on the sidewalk. His head swung back and forth to take in the street action.

  Alex and I went into the café next door to Pages. I nabbed a window table. Alex lined up at the counter and brought back two cappuccinos. I waited for mine to cool. Alex stirred his in an abstracted way.

  I tried a little prompting. “Anything more you want to get off your chest?” I asked Alex.

  “Perhaps something in the nature of enlightenment.”

  “Swell. I could stand some of that.”

  “Gaëtan Dugas,” Alex said. “Does that name signify anything to you?”

  “Who is he? One of your new suspects?”

  “Gaëtan Dugas’s story is about AIDS.” Alex had a schoolmarm air. “About AIDS but very early on, 1980, in that general period. You see, the first people doctors spotted with this new awful virus, what turned out to be AIDS, dozens of them seemed to have one thing in common. Amazing bit of research when one dwells on it, but some medical detectives worked out that these earliest victims had all had sex with one man. Or that they’d had sex with someone else who had sex with this man.”

  “What’s-his-name Dugas?”

  “Gaëtan Dugas. The Typhoid Marvin of AIDS.”

  “He spread it? Single-handedly spread it?”

  “Damn near.” Alex kept nodding. “What Dugas had specifically was Kaposi’s sarcoma —”

  “Right,” I interrupted. “Same disease Rock Hudson died of. Or maybe not died of, but he caught it.”

  “Oh, Crang, you straights are so predictable. Mention AIDS and Rock Hudson can’t be far behind.”

  “But I’m right about Rock and Kaposi’s sarcoma?”

  “Yes, yes. But more key to my sad little tale is that Gaëtan Dugas was afflicted, too. The Kaposi’s sarcoma was the si
gnal he had it. AIDS. It meant his whole immune system was shutting down. It meant he was going to die.”

  “When did he die?” I asked.

  “Almost four years after he was diagnosed.”

  “Huh,” I said, “the guy seems to have lived a long time with the disease.”

  “Much longer than Ian, you mean?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Ian, dear God, he got one of the quicker brands. Isn’t that just dandy, different kinds of AIDS, slower and faster? Ian had PCP. Pneumocystis pneumonia. It can kill in a few months. Weeks even.”

  “That name comes trippingly off your tongue.”

  “Practice, Crang. I’ve repeated the damned words often enough in the past four months.”

  Alex made an impatient gesture with his hand. “But this is getting ahead of things,” he said. “Just please, Crang, drink your cappuccino and listen and absorb.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Now I’ll tell you what Dugas looked like. He was drop-dead gorgeous. Debonair, you know, vibrant, sensual. It was no wonder everybody wanted him.”

  “Pardon me, Alex, am I interpreting you correctly if I say it sounds like you personally knew Dugas?”

  “Not knew. Met. At a Sunday brunch one time, and my lands, he was a catch.”

  “Too bad for the guys who caught him.”

  “He’s supposed to have had twenty-five hundred lovers in his short life, or some such astronomical number.”

  “Couldn’t have left much time for hobbies. Stamp collecting and whatnot.”

  “Indeed,” Alex said. “As I told you a minute ago, some doctors tracked down Dugas, immunologists, epidemiologists, scientific people. Patient Zero, they called Dugas, and I’ve heard they warned him to stop having sex, ordered him. But he kept right on almost to the very day he died. The very month, at any rate.”

  “Lordy.”

  “Some people say he got downright callous,” Alex said. “They say he’d have sex with some poor soul in a bathhouse, and afterward, after the poor soul had his brains fucked out, Dugas would turn up the lights and point out his Kaposi’s sarcoma spots. ‘I’ve got gay cancer,’ he’d say. ‘I’m going to die and so are you.’”

  “Alex, that isn’t callous. We’re talking serious evil.”

  “And wouldn’t you know it, he was one of ours.”

  “Not of mine.”

  “Canadian. He was a nice French-Canadian boy from Quebec. Better, he worked for Air Canada. A flight attendant. That’s how he got around so much. San Francisco, New York, Florida, coast-to-coast. He had hundreds of lovers in every town you could book an Air Canada flight to.”

  “Infection in the jet age.”

  “There’s even a case to be made that dear Gaëtan was the initial carrier, the son of a bitch who brought AIDS to North America.”

  “From where?”

  “Paris. The route is supposed to be from some place in central Africa to Paris and from there to us lucky folks over here.”

  “Possibly via Gaëtan Dugas?”

  “Stunning what a job at Air Canada can do for a lad,” Alex said in his most brittle tone. “Anyhow, you get the picture.”

  “I get the picture, and something else, I have this terrible feeling I get the punch line, too.”

  “Punch line?”

  “Where you’re going with the Gaëtan Dugas story.”

  “Someone,” Alex said, “should have shot Dugas at the very beginning.”

  “That’s the punch line I had the terrible feeling you were going to deliver.”

  “Think of the lives that would have been saved.”

  “And next thing, you’re drawing an analogy between Dugas and the person who infected Ian.”

  “Don’t debate numbers with me, Crang,” Alex said. “Dugas might have been responsible for dozens of deaths, maybe hundreds. The bastard who killed Ian killed only Ian, as far as we know. But death is death, and a murderer is a murderer, never mind the quantity.”

  “Alex, come on, all this talk, the only thing’s likely to happen is you’ll screw up your own life.”

  Alex’s face did funny things, as if it might crack into pieces.

  “Ian is dead,” he said, his voice sounding rusty. “Can you honestly imagine I have anything else to lose at my age that I care about?”

  “Well, sure. Your career, friends, lots of things, little things, the Bobby Short tapes you listen to on Sunday mornings.”

  Alex lifted his bundle of magazines off the café table. He didn’t say anything, but his body language announced that the discussion had ended.

  At the counter, I bought an almond cookie and fed part of it to Genet out on the street.

  “That’s for your remarkable display of patience, sport,” I said.

  “Crang,” Alex said, smiling a little, trying it out, “I think you like the beastie.”

  “He’s no Wonder Dog, Rin Tin Tin, or One Hundred and One Dalmatians, that calibre, but Genet’s got his fine points.”

  “Perhaps you’d care to keep him company while I’m gone.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “He’s booked into a doggy haven out near the airport, which isn’t his favourite resort judging by past performances. But I can cancel the reservation.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Feed him and trot him through the park a couple times? That’s it?”

  “An outing in the morning and another after his din-dins.”

  We started up Beverley Street.

  “One question,” I said to Alex. “One question about your intentions and state of mind and everything, just the one and I’ll lay off.”

  “I doubt you will. Or Annie, for that matter. But go ahead, ask away.”

  “How can you be so sure you haven’t got AIDS yourself? The impression I got last night, you haven’t asked a doctor to run tests. So how do you know?”

  Alex pulled to a halt on the sidewalk. I stopped, too. Genet, trotting out front, stayed on the move. The leash jerked me forward. I did a Stan Laurel stumble, righted myself, and reined in Genet.

  “Because,” Alex said, mostly in words of one syllable each, “Ian and I had no sex for the last eighteen months or more.”

  “Uh. I have to say that to an outsider like me, the two of you seemed as chummy as ever.”

  “Of course we were.” Alex sounded cross. “We were absolutely committed to one another. It’s simply … well, I am sixty-four and I suppose, age and one thing or another, I got the sexual blahs. Didn’t care about it. Didn’t think about it. And so, consequently, Ian and I never got around to having it.”

  “Uh-huh, sure, but how did that sit with Ian?”

  “He understood.” Alex gave a look that dared me to question his answer.

  “Right.”

  “Oh, Ian made little jokes sometimes about madam and her bedtime migraines. But as you observed, we stayed as close as we’d always been.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Closer.”

  “Sure.”

  “Ian understood,” Alex said. “We shared the same bed, as usual. We just didn’t romp in it.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  We resumed the walk up Beverley. Neither of us spoke another word until we reached the sidewalk in front of the house.

  “Ian understood,” Alex said. He was facing me. “That’s what I always assumed. In fact, it was beyond assumption. Sex went out of my head. I never dwelt on it, and I assumed — this is rather in retrospect, looking back now — Ian understood.”

  I nodded my head.

  “But —” Alex’s voice might have been close to breaking. “— But one time, I realize, he mustn’t have understood and it cost him his life.”

  We went into the house.

  Chapter Four

  Genet was my excuse for s
tepping into Alex’s quarters. I was supposed to feed the mutt. I had no excuse for what else I intended to do. I intended to conduct a search of the premises.

  There was a tin half full of dog food in the refrigerator. I peeled off the Saran wrap covering the top and scooped the meat into Genet’s bowl.

  “Yuck, this stuff smells terrible,” I said to the dog.

  Genet sniffed the bowl and turned his head up to me.

  “You think it stinks, too?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Or maybe it’s the hour? Too early for dinner?”

  It was four thirty, Saturday afternoon.

  “See, Genet, I’m a tad keen to get on with the search.…”

  What was I doing? Explaining to a dog!

  Genet blinked his rheumy eyes and focused on the bowl’s contents.

  “Think of it as high tea,” I said to the top of his head.

  On the refrigerator door, a pair of silver magnets pinned a New Yorker cartoon done by the guy who draws in dots. It showed a doctor examining a patient’s arm and saying, “Well, Bob, it looks like a paper cut, but just to make sure, let’s do lots of tests.” Two more silver magnets held up a list of things to do: “Cancel Globe till May 19”; “Join Winston Churchill Tennis Club”; and “Book window washer.” The list was in Alex’s handwriting. None of the items said: “Advise Crang where to find Ian’s killer.”

  I walked down the hall to the living room at the front of the house. Behind me, Genet slurped his protein. I sat at the elegant little Biedermeier desk and looked at the small oil painting over it, an Albert Franck of a downtown Toronto backyard. It didn’t tell me anything except that it was a clear, evocative, tough-minded piece of art. Genet padded into the room and fixed a gaze on me.

  “Don’t even mention it.” My voice was on the loud side. “I shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s for a good cause, okay?”

  Genet whimpered.

  Alex kept orderly desk drawers. Receipts clipped together — Bell Canada, Imperial Oil, Visa, the University Club. There was a file marked “Income Tax” and another labelled “Ian’s Estate.” A bundle of fat documents with many official seals had to do with the ownership of the Key West cottage. I fingered through every scrap of paper and found nothing that revealed where Alex might have gone digging for the guy who gave Ian the disease.