G Is for Gumshoe

this long, garbled tale that I'm almost sure now had the truth embedded in it someplace. I'll tell you one thing. I'm not interested in driving back down to the desert to investigate. Forget that."
    "Be pointless anyway after all these years."
    "That's what Clyde says. What's the deal on Rochelle Messinger?"
    Dietz pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. "I got her number in North Hollywood. Dolan didn't want to give it to me, but I finally talked him into it. He says if we get a line on the guy, we're to stay strictly the hell away."
    "Of course," I said. "What now?"
    He looked over at me with his lopsided smile. "How about a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
    I laughed. "Done."
    We got back to the apartment at one o'clock, fully carbed up, our fat tanks on overload. I could feel my arteries hardening, plaques piling up in my veins like a logjam in a river, blood pressure going up from all the sodium.
    Dietz tried calling Rochelle Messinger. When he got no answer after fifteen rings, he turned the phone over to me. I was aching for a nap, but I thought I'd better find out if Dr. Palchak had seen the slides yet. I didn't like the idea of cruising the neighborhood around the nursing home, bumping all those doors again. With luck, I wouldn't have to.
    I put a call through to the pathology department at St. Terry's and had Laura Palchak paged. I had Irene's cardboard box on my lap, using it as an armrest. For ten cents, I would have put my head down and gone to sleep right there. Sometimes I long for the simplicity of kindergarten, which is where I learned to nap on command.
    She picked up the phone on her end.
    "Hi, Laura. Kinsey Millhone," I said. "I was wondering if you'd had a chance to examine the tissue slides."
    "You bet," she said. There was a grim satisfaction in her voice.
    "I take it your hunch turned out to be right on the money."
    "Sure did. This is one I've never run across myself, but I remembered an abstract on the subject from a few years back. The hospital librarian tracked down the journal, which is on my desk somewhere. Hang on."
    "What subject?"
    "I'm getting to that. This is an article on 'Human stress cardiomyopathy' written by a couple of doctors in Ohio. Here we go. Catch this," she said. "Mrs. Grey suffered a characteristic damage to her heart-a cell death called myofibrillar degeneration brought on by fear-generated stress."
    "Can you translate?"
    "Sure, it's simple. When the body gets flooded with intolerable levels of adrenaline, heart cells are killed. The pockets of dead cells interfere with the normal electrical network that regulates the heart. When the nerve fibers are disrupted, the heart starts beating erratically and, in this case, that led to cardiac failure."
    "Okay," I said cautiously. I had the feeling there was more. "So what's the punch line here?"
    "This little old lady was quite literally scared to death."
    "What?"
    "It's just what it sounds like. Whatever happened to her in those hours she was gone, she was so badly frightened it killed her."
    "Are you talking about her being lost or something more than that?"
    "I suspect something more. The theory is that, under certain circumstances, the cumulative burden of psychological stress and pain can generate lethal charges in cardiac tissue."
    "Like what?"
    "Well, take a little kid. Her father beats her with a belt, ties her up, and leaves her bound in a vacant room overnight. Next morning, she's dead. The actual physical injuries aren't sufficient to cause death. I'm not talking about the stress levels most of us experience in the ordinary course of events. Without getting graphic about it, it's analogous to certain animal experiments relating focal myocardial necrosis to stress."
    "You're telling me this is a homicide."
    "In essence, yes. I don't think Dolan would consider it such, but that's my guess."
    I sat for a moment while the information sank in. "I don't like this."
    "I didn't think you would," she replied. "In the meantime, if you haven't figured out yet where she was, you might want to try again."
    "Yes." I felt a heaviness in my chest, some ancient dread activated by the proximity to murder. I'd done my job efficiently. I'd tracked the woman down. I'd helped facilitate the plan to move her to Santa Teresa, despite her fears, despite her pleadings. Now she was dead. Was I inadvertently responsible for that, too?
    After I hung up, I sat there so long I found Dietz staring at me with puzzlement. I was picking at the