Cause of Death (26 page)

"You ever heard of Fiesta Ware?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, there was something in the glaze of this particular line that I come to find out will set a Geiger counter off."

" It doesn't take much radioactivity to set a Geiger counter off." I made that point again.

"Well, there'd been stories written about the stuff, which had been taken off the market," he went on. "Doris wouldn't listen. She thought I was overreacting."

"And you probably were."

"Look, people are phobic of all kinds of things. Me, it's radiation. You know how much I hate even being in the X-ray room with you, and when I turn on the microwave, I leave the kitchen. So I packed up all the dishes and dumped them without telling her where."

He got quiet and wiped his face again. He cleared his throat several times.

Then he said, "A month later she left."

"Listen," I softened my voice, "I wouldn't want to eat off those dishes, either. Even though I know better. I understand fear, and fear isn't always rationales'

"Yeah, Doc, well maybe in my case it is." He opened his window a crack. "I'm afraid of dying. Every morning I get up and think about it, if you want to know. Every day I think I'm going to stroke out or be told I got cancer. I dread going to bed because I'm afraid I'll die in my sleep."

He paused, and it was with great difficulty that he added, "That's the real reason Molly stopped seeing me, if you want to know."

"That wasn't a very kind reason." What he just said hurt me.

"Well--he got more uncomfortable--she's a lot younger than me. And part of the way I feel these days is I don't want to do anything that might exert myself."

"Then you're afraid of having sex."

"Shit," he said, "why don't you just wave it like a flag."

"Marino, I'm a doctor. All I want to do is help, if I can."

"Molly said I made her feel rejected," he went on.

"And you probably did. How long have you had this problem?"

"I don't know, Thanksgiving."

"Did something happen?"

He hesitated again. "Well, you know I've been off my medicine."

"Which medication? Your adrenergic blocker or the finasteride? And no, I didn't know."

"Both."

"Now why would you do anything that foolish?"

"Because when I'm on it nothing works right," he blurted out. "I quit taking it when I started dating Molly.

Then I started again around Thanksgiving after I had a checkup and my blood pressure was really up there and my prostate was getting bad again. It scared me."

"No woman is worth dying for," I said. "And what this is all about is depression, which you're a perfect candidate for, by the way."

"Yeah, it's depressing when you can't do it. You don't understand."

"Of course, I understand. It's depressing when your body fails you, when you get older and have other stressors in your life like change. And you've had a lot of change in the past few years."

"No, what's depressing,' I he said, and his voice was getting louder, "is when you can't get it up. And then sometimes you get it up and it won't go down. And you can't pee when you feel like you got to go, and other times you go when you don't feel like it. And then there's the whole problem of not being in the mood when you got a girlfriend almost young enough to be your daughter." He was glaring at me, veins standing out in his neck. "Yeah, I'm depressed. You're fucking right I am!"

"Please don't be angry with me."

He looked away, breathing hard. -1 want you to make appointments with your cardiologist and your urologist," I said.

"Uh-uh. No way." He shook his head. "This damn new health-care plan I'm on has me assigned to a woman urologist. I can't go in there and tell a woman all this shit."

"Why not? You just told me."

He fell silent, staring out the window. He looked in the side mirror and said, "By the way, some drone in a gold Lexus has been behind us since Richmond."

I looked in the rearview mirror. The car was a newer model and the person driving was talking on the phone.

"Do you think we're being followed?" I asked.

"Hell if I know, but I wouldn't want to pay his damn phone bill."

We were close to Charlottesville, and the gentle landscape we had left had rounded into western hills that were winter-gray between evergreens. The air was colder and there was more snow, although the interstate was dry. I asked Marino if we could turn the scanner off because I was tired of hearing police chatter, and I took 29 North toward the University of Virginia.

For a while, the scenery was sheer rocky faces interspersed with trees spreading from woods to roadsides. Then we reached the outer limits of the campus, and blocks were crowded with places for pizzas and subs, convenience stores and filling stations. The university was still on Christmas break, but my niece was not the only person in the world to ignore that fact. At Scott Stadium, I turned on Maury Avenue, where students perched on benches and rode by on bikes, wearing backpacks or holding satchels that seemed full of work. There were plenty of cars.

"You ever been to a game here?" Marino had perked up.

"I can't say that I have."

"Now that ought to be against the law. You have a niece going here and you never once saw the Hoos? What'd you do when you came to town? I mean, what did you and Lucy do?"

In fact, we had done very little. Our time together generally was spent taking long walks on the campus or talking inside her room on the Lawn. Of course we had many dinners at restaurants like The Ivy and Boar's Head, and I had met her professors and even gone to class. But I did not see friends, what few of them she had. They, like the places where she met them, were not something shared with me.

I realized Marino was still talking.

"I'll never forget when I saw him play," he was saying.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Can you imagine being seven feet tall? You know he lives in Richmond now."

"Let's see." I studied buildings we were passing. "We want the School of Engineering, which starts right here. But we need Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering."

I slowed down as a brick building with white trim came in sight, and then I saw the sign. Parking was not hard to find, but Dr. Alfred Matthews was. He had promised to meet me in his office at eleven-thirty but apparently had forgotten.

"Then where the hell is he?" asked Marino, who was still worried about what was in his trunk.

"The reactor facility." I got back in the car.

"Oh great."

It was really called the High Energy Physics Lab and was on top of a mountain that was also shared by an observatory. The university's nuclear reactor was a large silo made of brick. It was surrounded by woods that were fenced in, and Marino was acting phobic again.

"Come on. You'll find this interesting." I opened my door.

"I got no interest in this at all."

"Okay. Then you stay here and I'll go in."

"You won't get an argument out of me," he replied.

I retrieved the sample from the trunk, and at the facility's IL

main entrance, I rang a bell and someone released a lock.

Inside was a small lobby where I told a young man behind glass that I was looking for Dr. Matthews. A list was checked and I was informed that the head of the physics department, whom I knew only in a limited way, was this moment by the reactor's pool. The young man then picked up an in-house phone while sliding out a visitor's pass and a detector for radiation. I clipped them to my jacket, and he left his station to escort me through a heavy steel door beneath a red light sign that indicated the reactor was on.

The room was windowless with high tile walls, and every object I saw was marked with a bright yellow radioactive tag. At one end of the lighted pool, Cerenkov radiation caused the water to glow a fantastic blue as unstable atoms spontaneously disintegrated in the fuel assembly twenty feet down. Dr. Matthews was conferring with a student who, I gathered as I heard them talk, was using cobalt instead of an autoclave to sterilize micropipettes used for in vitro fertilization.

"I thought you were coming tomorrow," the nuclear physicist said to me, a distressed expression on his face.

"No, it was today. But thank you for seeing me at all. I have the sample with me." I held up the envelope.

"Okay, George," he said to the young man. "Will you be all right?"

"Yes, sir. Thanks."

"Come on," Matthews said to me. "We'll take it down there now and get started. Do you know how much you've got here?"

"I don't know exactly."

"If we've got enough, we can do it while you wait."

Beyond a heavy door, we turned left and paused at a tall box that monitored the radiation of our hands and feet. We passed with bright green colors and went on to stairs that led to the neutron radiography lab, which was in a basement of machine shops and forklifts, and big black barrels containing low-level nuclear waste waiting to be shipped.

There was emergency equipment at almost every turn, and a control room locked inside a cage. Most remote to all of this was the low background counting room. Built of thick windowless concrete, it was stocked with fifty-gallon canisters of liquid nitrogen, and germanium detectors and amplifiers and bricks made of lead.

The process for identifying my sample was surprisingly simple. Matthews, wearing no special protection other than lab coat and -loves, placed the piece of sticky tape into a tube, which he then set inside a two-foot-long aluminum container containing the germanium crystal. Finally, he stacked lead bricks on every side to shield the sample from background radiation.

Activating the process required a simple computer command, and a counter on the canister began measuring radioactivity so it could tell us which isotope we had. This was all rather strange to see, for I was accustomed to arcane instruments like scanning electron microscopes and gas chromatographs. This detector, on the other hand, was a rather formless house of lead cooled by liquid nitrogen and did not seem capable of intelligent thought.

"Now, if you'll just sign this evidence receipt," I said, "I'll be on my way."

"It could take an hour or two. It's hard to say," he answered.

He signed the form and I gave him a copy.

"I'll stop by after I check on Lucy."

"Come on, I'll escort you up to make sure you don't set anything off. How is she?" he asked as we passed detectors without a complaint. "Did she ever go on to MIT?"

"She did do an internship there last fall," I said. "In robotics. You know, she's back here. For at least a month."

"I didn't know. That's wonderful. Studying what?"

"Virtual reality, I think she said."

Matthews looked perplexed for a moment. "Didn't she take that when she was here?"

"I expect this is more advanced."

"I expect it would have to be." He smiled. "I wish I had at least one of her in every class."

Lucy had probably been the only non-physics major at UVA to take a course in nuclear design for fun. I walked outside, and Marino was leaning against the car, smoking "So what now?" He said, and he still looked glum.

." thought I'd surprise my niece and take her to lunch.

You're more than welcome to join us."

"I'm going to drop by the Exxon station down the street and use the pay phone," he said. "I got some calls to make."

HE DROVE ME TO THE ROTUNDA, BRILLIANT WHITE IN sunlight and my favorite building Thomas Jefferson had designed. I followed old brick colonnaded walkways beneath ancient trees, where Federal pavilions formed two rows of privileged housing known as the Lawn.

Living here was an award for academic achievement, yet it might have been considered a dubious honor by some.

Showers and toilets were located in another building in back, the sparsely furnished rooms not necessarily intended for comfort. Yet I had never heard Lucy complain, for she had truly loved her life at UVA.

She was staying on the West Lawn in Pavilion III, with its Corinthian capitals of Carrara marble that had been carved in Italy. Wooden shutters outside room I I were drawn, the morning paper still on the mat, and I wondered, perplexed, if she had not gotten up yet. I rapped on the door several times and heard someone stirring.

"Who is it?" my niece's voice called out.

"It's me," I said.

There was a pause, then a surprised, "Aunt Kay?"

"Are you going to open the door?" My good mood was fading fast for she did not sound pleased.

"Uh, hold on a minute. I'm coming."

The door unlocked and opened.

"Hi," she said as she let me in.

"I hope I didn't wake you up." I handed her the newspaper.

"Oh, T. C. gets that," she said, referring to the friend who really belonged to this room. "She forgot to cancel it before she left for Germany. I never get around to reading it."