Phoenix Heart (28 page)

I had a sudden urge to stop Andrew, tell him, look, you
know? I’ve reconsidered. You were right. I don’t think I want to do this. I’d
just as soon go back to the old Pacific Crest Hotel, crawl under the covers,
have a good night’s sleep and jump on the old tour bus tomorrow and see
Fisherman’s Wharf and Coit Tower and all those other mundane things. So, gee,
it’s been great and so long for now.

Instead, I followed Andrew quietly to the door.

“Tape,” he whispered. I fished a roll of masking tape out of
my purse. He quickly striped some across the bottom corner of the glass panel,
then he handed me the tape and took the hammer. He drove it against the taped
glass until I heard it crack. He tapped several more times, then pushed the
taped shards of glass inward, reached carefully through, and turned the bolt on
the inside of the door.

“Would you look at that,” he whispered. “It worked.”

We stepped through the door quickly and Andrew shut it
behind us soundlessly. The layout of Harrison’s lab in many ways matched Andrew’s,
and I wondered if subconsciously he’d patterned it after his one-time mentor. We’d
walked into the main lab, with the same center island lab counter with crawl
spaces and storage drawers beneath it. More workbenches lined the walls. Two
doors opened off the right side of the room, one door off the center, back
wall. On either side of this door, fume hoods stood, low light from within
reflecting off glassware and flasks of chemicals inside and sending watery
light out into the room.

There were half a dozen places along both the island counter
and the side counters where grad students had pushed paraphernalia aside to
clear a work space. Each had its own personal stock of tools and glassware and
a stool placed in front. Andrew walked around the end of the island and started
down the other side. He stopped about halfway down at one of the work spaces,
reached up and ran his hand lightly along the edge of the bookshelf over the
bench.

“I spent four years here,” he whispered. “This was my bench.”

I looked over my shoulder at the front door. “Andrew?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Not the best time for a stroll
down Memory Lane.”

He walked toward the door in the back wall. J.P. Harrison
was again written on the door, this time etched on a brass plaque mounted below
the inset glass. Below the brass plaque was a smaller, discreet sign with one
word: Private.

“Not for long, buddy boy.” This time he didn’t bother with
the tape. He swung the hammer and smashed the inset glass.

I flinched, and looked back at the front door, but there
were no cries of alarm, no thundering footsteps coming up the hallway. “You
want to warn me when you’re going to do something like that?” I asked.

“Sorry.”

I pressed a hand over my heart. “You’ll be sorrier when you
have to call the paramedics to come haul away my poor lifeless body.”

Andrew didn’t smile, just reached through, turned the inside
knob and pulled the door open. The office was much larger than any that I’d
seen at the University back home, and much neater. It had been formed by
walling off the entire back end of the main lab room. The wall opposite was
entirely of glass and provided a spectacular view of the lights of San
Francisco.

Andrew crunched across the broken glass and closed the
blinds over that view. “Mel, shut the door, will you?”

“What for? You smashed the glass.”

“There’s a shade. Pull it down.”

He switched on the desk lamp. The office wasn’t just neat,
it looked like it had been put in order using a level and a carpenter’s square.
Everything was perfectly in place. The bookshelves were clean and tidy with
each book upright and--I squinted up at them--in alphabetical order. Filing
cabinets stood on each side of the desk and along one wall; all the doors were
neatly closed and had nothing, not even a speck of dust, on top. A pristine
blotter lay on the immaculate desk, carefully squared below a well-polished
marble and gold pen and pencil set. No family photos sat on the polished oak,
no open journals lay face down. No reprints slid off piles stacked on chairs. No
photos from presentations overflowed boxes. There were, however, dozens of
framed photographs on the walls. I stepped over to see them more closely. The
first was of J.P. Harrison standing next to a well-known state senator, the
next, J.P. with his arm around one of the lead characters of a television
series that was filmed in San Francisco, below that J.P. at what looked like a
gallery opening surrounded by people whose faces I recognized but whose names I
either never knew or had forgotten. Above the desk were more recent photos,
some I recognized from newspapers and magazines, all of them posed shots with
more famous celebrities than those on the side walls.

Andrew also looked at the photos. “I used to think that was
J.P.’s one fault, his one vice,” he said slowly. “Needing to see his picture splashed
across magazines and web pages.”

Oh Pot? Kettle wants a word
with you.

Andrew looked at my face. “Hey, I never liked having my
picture printed everywhere.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“It was just because I was dating Caren.”

“Right.”

“Caren’s a very nice girl. Lots of fun.”

“Okay.”

“Whatever,” he said. “I never asked to be in those
magazines.”

I shrugged, but I was also trying to keep my own sudden moment
of revelation from showing. He wouldn’t have been in those magazines if people
like me didn’t buy them.

It was at that moment, the two of us standing in the light
cast by the desk lamp, when the star shine blinked out. Here in front of me was
not Dr. Andrew Richards, tuxedo-clad man about town, wounded hero, adventurer,
and sex symbol. Instead, there was a man in a too-big brown flannel shirt,
smudges on his face from the amateur disguise I’d tried to apply, lines of
weariness and stress around his eyes.

And it was at that moment that I realized that I loved him.
It wasn’t just heat. It wasn’t just hero worship. I saw the man and I loved
that man and I thought my heart would simply stop beating from the knowledge
that he was to marry someone else.

“What?” Andrew asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Where do we start looking?”

“Well, as I expected, no computer. He would have taken his
laptop with him. Hell, there’d be no way to figure out his password, anyway. I’ll
go through the filing cabinets and look for the lab journals. It’ll be faster
if I do it. You don’t know what to look for.”

“Fine.”

He pulled open the first file drawer and started flipping
quickly through the folders. “Why didn’t I see it sooner?” he muttered.

“What, J.P.?”

“Yeah. Why didn’t I see the way he played the game, never
doing work himself, never suggesting anything new, always using his students’
work to make himself look good?”

His hands paused on the files. “No, that’s wrong.” He looked
over at me and then away, as if he were embarrassed. “He’s not always been that
way,” he said. “In his early years he produced some exceptional work. It’s possible
some of his success was luck, but not all of it.”

“Andrew, he was and is bright. You have no reason to be
ashamed because you didn’t see him for what he was.”

“But why didn’t I see the signs? He would always listen when
I talked to him, but never suggest anything. He always managed to make it to LA
when there was some celebrity fundraiser, but never when it was a seminar. Jesus,
I’ve been such a jerk.”

“Look, you obviously aren’t the only one he’s fooled. Look
at this place. Look at these photos. He’s got just about everybody who’s
anybody fooled. Don’t feel bad because you wanted to believe in him.”

Andrew smiled at me. “You do know what to say to make me
feel better.”

I shrugged and sat down in a chair by the door. “Now that
you’re feeling better, can we get on with this? I really am enjoying myself,
but too much of a good thing, you know.”

“Right.” Andrew turned back to the files and began flipping
through them again, going from one drawer to the next, quickly, surely. I sat
back against the straight chair, waiting and watching, and trying to think how
to take in this new awareness of how I felt about this man, and how to live
with it in the days, weeks, and years ahead. It was in the third drawer down in
the second cabinet that he hit pay dirt. He grinned at me and pulled out a
series of thick black and grey notebooks, all neatly numbered and labeled. He
dumped them on the desk, then pulled the lamp over and placed it back on the
desk. He took off his jacket, dropped it over the back of the desk chair and
sat down. I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder. The first dozen
books each had, neatly lettered on the front label, the name Andrew Richards.

He ran his hand over the stack, and patted it almost
lovingly. “All my grad work is in these books. I started my work on the
mechanisms for the control of development here.” He paused, and shook his head
and looked up at me. “I know now that he was a good con artist, but Jesus, I
was so naive. I’d be working on something and get stuck and go to J.P. and he’d
say in that rumbling voice, ‘Go look it up, boy. You ain’t going to learn
anything by asking me.’ He’d always have this look in his eye, this knowing
little twinkle like he knew the secret, but for your own good he wasn’t going
to part with it. I’d bust my tail, work on it for days, and then when I’d come
back with the answer he’d nod knowingly and say, ‘I knew you could do it kid’
and I’d act like a puppy that’s just been told good dog.” He leaned an elbow on
the desk, rested his forehead in his hand and stared down at the notebooks. “I
really cared what he thought. It mattered to me. He mattered to me.”

My hand reached out to give comfort, but it stopped before
it touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry Andrew.”

“Me too.” He shoved his old notebooks aside and dropped his
baseball cap on top, then grabbed the newer books. He opened the first of them
and started quickly scanning them. “This is going to take a while. You might as
well get comfortable.”

“Okay.” I went back to the chair by the door and watched Andrew
flipping quickly through the books, reading the pages in the small circle of
light cast by the small green glass lamp. For all the coldness of the too neat
little room, the light shining on the light brown flannel shirt was warm. It
had pleased me when I’d found that shirt, because I knew the color was going to
look good on him. I’d enjoyed the feeling of choosing among the stack of
shirts, finding the right size and it had pleased me to take it to the register
and pay for it, even though it had taken the last few dollars I had.

I sat up straight in the chair.
Stop it. Just cut it out.
Andrew turned a page, tilting his head to the side to study the words
written there. The shirt suited him. The flannel stretched across his shoulders
and back, not too tightly, but snugly enough so I could see the muscles of his
back shift as he reached to turn another page. I shook my head fiercely and
stared down at my hands clenched in my lap.

He is not the man in your life.
He is the man in Caren Granzella’s life. He is your friend. That’s it. That’s
all. Finis.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. Perfect.” He looked over at me
and grinned. “Got him. Hey, what’s wrong?”

I smiled quickly and jumped from the chair. “Nothing. You
really found something?”

“Yeah. Oh, there’s a lot of little stuff, but this one’s
sure fire. Look here.” He pointed to a list of chemicals. “This is a run of a
purification of a protein, one of the first steps in the process that will
eventually lead to getting the gene. This list is all the solutions that they
are making up for the experiment, preparing them all in advance. See this one?”
He pointed to one about halfway down the list.

“Dithiothreitol?”

“Yes. It’s absolutely critical to the process. If you don’t
have it at the right concentration at the right time, the protein you’re trying
to purify will be chewed up by enzymes and you end up with nothing. See here? This
says to make it up in 70% ethyl alcohol and store it at 10 degrees.”

“So?”

“So, they’re making it up three days before they need it. Dithiothreitol
deteriorates very rapidly. If you don’t use it within four hours of the time
you make it up, you might as well be pouring Kool-Aid into your experiment. In
fact, Kool-Aid might do better.”

We grinned at each other. “Andrew, that’s it!”

“It’s a start, anyway. Now, to get copies.” His smile faded.
“I still don’t like the idea of you going alone.”

“You can’t be running up and down stairs.”

“I know. So, are you sure you can find the copy machine all
right?”

“Left out the door, end of hall, down the stairs, come out
the door, turn right, I’ll see the Bio department office, the copy machine is
in an alcove just beyond the office door. If I see the Computer and Equipment
room I’ve gone too far.”

He still looked worried. “I really don’t like this.”

“Not much we can do about that. If either of us had our
phone, we could take pictures, but we don’t. Come on, hand over the book. I’ll
be back in a minute.”

He marked the page and handed the lab book to me. “Just be
sure you are,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I tucked the book under my arm and headed for
the door.

“Melanie?”

I turned back. He was looking at me, all trace of humor
gone. “If you see anyone, or anything the least bit out of the ordinary, you
get out of here. Promise?”

“Well...”

“Mel, that was the deal.”

“Okay.” I turned to go.

“Mel?”

“Yes?”

He reached out to take my hand.

I shook my head. “You need to stop that. You need to stop.”

“Sorry… again. I… Sorry.”

I turned and put my hand on the doorknob. “Light please,” I
said.