The Color of Wounds Page 2

  They picked up their rental car, a Chevy Lumina, and headed north out of Houston on Route 59 toward Dempsey, home of Burman A&M University’s main campus. It was fifty miles ahead nestled between Dempsey Lake and the Trinity River. Prime East Texas real estate.

  After they were beyond Houston’s sprawl, the driving was easy. He drove, and for the first half of the trip, he let Loren doze in the passenger seat. He had hoped to use the drive time for her to bring him up to speed on the case, but she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open. Finally, when they thumped over a section of road under construction, she stirred, and he seized his opportunity.

  “So tell me more about why you dragged me all the way down to Texas.”

  “Nah,” she said, which surprised him. “We’re almost there. We’re going to meet a guy named Byron Losiewicz. He’s the whistleblower. I’ll let him tell you all about it.” She leaned her head back and was instantly asleep again.

  “Loren, wake up,” Kent said, without much attempt to be gentle. “We’re here. I need you to give me directions.”

  Loren pulled herself upright, swallowed hard, and ran her fingers through her hair. “Where are we?”

  “We just passed a sign for the Burman A&M exit. Two miles.”

  “Okay, take it.” She began rummaging through her purse. “I’ve got a Triple A Trip Tik and a campus map somewhere. Here. Got it.” She studied the map. “You’ll be on Stetson Parkway, which is also University Place. When you get to Derringer Street, go left around the circle in front of the big administration building and then right on Armadillo. Losiewicz said from there you can look straight ahead a couple blocks at a tall glass building. Supposedly the student union is next to that. He’ll be at the information desk.”

  Loren repeated each step while Kent squinted at road signs and jockeyed the Lumina through traffic. He began noticing similarities to their alma mater, Cornell. Both schools were massive, offering education in virtually any field. Both had sprawling campuses surrounded by huge tracts of land devoted to agricultural research. The main difference was Burman lay on terrain that was pool table flat. Cornell was on hillsides and divided by deep gorges.

  “Aha, there you have it!” Kent said with obvious satisfaction, and loud enough to startle Loren.

  “Have what?”

  “That historical marker back there. Burman was founded in 1871.”

  “So?”

  “So, Cornell was founded in 1865.”

  “So?”

  “That makes Cornell older — and, therefore, more venerable.”

  “Okay, Mister School Spirit, there’s Armadillo Street. Take a right.”

  Ahead was Russell Tower and a few minutes later they entered Perot Student Union. They crossed a room that was the size of a barn with a high ceiling and bright florescent lighting. There were students lounging on heavy furniture, swaggering around pool tables, and burning off energy pounding ping-pong balls back and forth. High on one wall was a blurry black and white photograph mural depicting A&M football circa 1950.

  At the information desk, they waited for a group of kids to return their paddles to a freckle-faced young man with broad shoulders and short hair. When Kent asked him if a Byron Losiewicz had come in, the youth informed Kent in a polite drawl that no one with that name had come to the desk since his shift started four hours ago.

  Loren found a couple of Pepsis and secured them a place in a grouping of chairs near large windows overlooking a grassy quad.

  “Guess we’ll have to wait,” she said, and resigned herself to watching young Texans crisscross on their way to and from class.

  “This would be a good time to tell me about the case,” Kent suggested for a second time.

  “I told you, Losiewicz will do that.”

  Kent followed Loren’s lead and studied the quad.

  A few minutes later, Kent sensed a person close by and saw Loren’s eyes rise to greet someone behind him. He turned and saw a short, blocky man in his sixties, shiny bald with a fringe of curly salt and pepper hair and a thick black mustache.

  “My name is Byron Losiewicz,” the man said in a soft, respectful tone. He had an Eastern European accent.

  He addressed Kent, the male, but his dark eyes flipped nervously to Loren, since he knew his meeting was to be with a woman.

  Loren extended a hand and eased his quandary. “I’m Loren Summer, the one you spoke to on the telephone. This is Dr. Kent Stephenson.”

  “Yes. I remember your voice,” Losiewicz said, as they shook hands. “I’m sorry I’m late. They haven’t got anybody for Jimmy yet, so it takes me longer to get everything done.”

  “Not a problem,” Loren said. “Sit down. We’re anxious to hear what you have to say.”

  Losiewicz glanced around apparently making sure there was no one close enough to overhear, then perched himself on the edge of a chair facing Kent and Loren. He calmed himself with a deep breath and plunged into his story.

  “My job is janitor at the medical school. I like my job. I like the university. It has been very good to me. I work for them for thirty-five years. I never make no trouble. I just do my job. My wife, she work for the university, too, and she don’t make trouble either.”

  He scowled and shook his head in frustration. “I was gonna retire last year, but my wife say ‘one more year you going to work. Then you will be sixty-five and have a good pension. Then you can take Albert and Robert fishing every day.’ They are my grandsons. We like fishing.”

  “Me too,” Kent said.

  “Then this thing happened.” Losiewicz turned a pleading look to Loren, who was leaning back letting Kent manage the interview. “They fired Jimmy. It was not right.”

  “Who is Jimmy?” Kent asked.

  “He is a janitor, too, at the medical school. Like me. But mostly he is my friend. He came there four years after me.”

  Kent nodded. “So he’s been there a long time, too.”

  “Yes. And he never make no trouble.”

  “But he got fired?”

  “Yes. I told him what the professors do with the animals was not his business. A few more years and he could retire, too. Then he could bring his grandsons and fish with Albert and Robert and me. I begged him. He should ignore the suffering. I don’t like it. Nobody likes it, but it is not worth getting fired, I told him. But Jimmy, he likes animals. And he is stubborn.”

  Losiewicz folded his face into a deep frown and puffed out his chest in a mocking imitation of his friend. “‘I been a black man in the south my whole life,’ he said to me. ‘I know what it’s like to be suffering and have nobody do nothing. I know what them animals is feeling. If I go to the right people, nothing bad is gonna happen to me.’”

  “The right people?” Kent asked.

  “Jimmy, he made an appointment with Dean Slater.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s the dean of the medical school.”

  “The right person.”

  “Yes, Sir. Raymond T. Slater. Jimmy was very proud. A black janitor got an appointment to meet with the dean.”

  Kent and Loren both chuckled at Losiewicz’s delivery.

  “The next morning, after our shift, Jimmy went to tell his story to the dean.” A baffled look crossed Losiewicz’s face. “And that night, poof, he didn’t come to work.” He snapped his fingers without making a sound.

  Kent and Loren glanced at each other, both knowing what was coming next.

  “Jimmy never missed work. Never.” Losiewicz’s tone was as if he was speaking of his brother. “So I called him up. ‘You sick?’ ‘Naw. I got fired.’”

  “‘Fired!’ I say. ‘Yep’, he says. So he tells me how he went to his appointment with the dean like he was supposed to, but besides the dean there was the professor who runs the Torture Lab. That’s what we called it. The Torture Lab.”

  “What
is his name?” Kent asked.

  As if he was vomiting, Losiewicz said, “Bentley. Professor E. Randolph Bentley.” He sighed deeply and continued. “Him being there made Jimmy nervous, but by then he was so mad there was no stopping. He just lit into the both of them about how it was not right to do those things to God’s living creatures. Jimmy is pretty religious. And he was coming to them man to man and asking them to stop it. Next thing you know they turn the table on him and start saying they had a lot of complaints lately about his work, and his attitude is bad and all that and,” Losiewicz threw both hands in the air, “they fired him. Flat out.”

  “Did he appeal it?”

  Losiewicz gave Kent a skeptical look. “Jimmy is a black man in Texas. He knows about what an appeal will get you.”

  “Yeah. I get that,” Kent said. “So what was it that you and Jimmy saw?”

  Losiewicz’s eyes narrowed. “I told you. It was the Torture Lab,” as if that explained all.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Yeah, I can,” Losiewicz said, his anger was starting to bubble over. “When we went in there at night to clean, there was monkeys strapped in racks and spinning around with puke all over the front of them. There was pigeons pecking crazy-like at themselves in a mirror so bad their beaks were dripping blood. I remember a cat curled up in the back of a cage chewing off its own leg…”

  Kent stopped him with a raised palm. “We get the picture.”

  Losiewicz shook his head. “Not really, you don’t. It’s worse than any picture you can think.”

  The old man let that thought sink in for a moment then said, “What I want to know is, can you do anything about it? Am I going to get fired, too, like Jimmy, for coming to you?”

  “If what you are telling us is true, you won’t lose your job, Mr. Losiewicz,” Kent said. “And if there are animals in those labs that are being treated half as bad as you say, we’ll do something about it. That I promise you.”

  “It’s all true. Believe me, if you go and look, what you’ll see is worse than I told you. Seems to me some of those big shots need to learn respect for people—and animal.”

  CHAPTER 3

  For the better part of an hour after hearing Byron Losiewicz’s story, Kent and Loren remained by the windows of the Burman A&M student union. Outside the sky had darkened and a misty rain was falling. Young men and women were walking with determined strides, dodging puddles, holding books and backpacks over their heads, and bracing against the Texas wind.

  Finally Kent said, “Can we get something to eat yet, Boss?”

  “Yeah. If I can find my appetite after what we heard.”

  Kent returned to the information desk and asked the young man if he could suggest a good place off campus to eat, he did, and in no time they were back in the car.

  They drove back to Dempsey and easily found the restaurant the desk boy had recommended. Kent was pleasantly surprised by the young man’s good taste as they entered the quiet ambiance of the Garden Park Grill.

  When they were seated, Loren withdrew a gold cigarette case from her purse, and tapped it with a fingernail—giving Kent a split second to provide a lighter. She put the cigarette to her lips, hesitated just long enough to see that Kent had muffed his chance, and lit it herself.

  “You remind me of your namesake,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Lauren Bacall.”

  She exhaled a long breath of smoke toward the ceiling. “It’s spelled differently.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right.”

  “If you were Humphrey Bogart, you’d have had a lighter ready.”

  “I’ll work on that.”

  A tiny Hispanic man wearing an immaculate white shirt appeared at their table and introduced himself as Wilfredo. He spoke pleasantly as he poured two glasses of ice water, passed each of them a menu, and then musically recited the day’s specials.

  “I’ll have some kind of a green salad. Do you have spinach?” Loren asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Good. I’ll have a small spinach salad with Roquefort. Do you have Roquefort?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Anything to drink?”

  “Scotch and water.”

  The waiter turned to Kent, pad and pencil poised.

  “I’ll just have a BLT and an iced tea.”

  The waiter nodded and vanished.

  Loren twisted the butt of her cigarette into an ashtray. “You know, Kent. You always were my Humphrey Bogart.”

  They had met as undergrad biology majors at Cornell, both hoping to get into the veterinary school. Everything was done by alphabetical order, so class after class, they turned up as lab partners—Stephenson and Summer.

  She was beautiful, intelligent, and cosmopolitan. He was quiet and bucolic. Yet they had developed a fast friendship.

  Kent remembered the night they celebrated their admission to vet school. All the applicants knew the day notifications would be mailed out. And all that week, checking the mail was excruciating. Even now the thought of it made him squirm. He remembered stepping into the foyer of his residence and wanting to avoid his mailbox, but not being able to keep his eyes from looking in its tiny window. And there it was, a letter from the Admissions Office, New York State College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University. His knees got weak.

  For a long time he let it lie on his bed unopened, watching it as if it were a wild animal. Finally, he stretched out on the bed, held the letter to his chest for a second, took a deep breath, and opened it.

  Mercifully, the director of admissions had put the important words in the first sentence: We congratulate you on your acceptance to the New York State College of Veterinary Medicine Class of 1976.

  He could hardly breathe. He lay there motionless feeling none of the jubilation he had long dreamed he expected. There was only numbness, swirling mental cloudiness. But his next thought—he remembered clearly, because it had surprised him even then—was, I’ve got to call Loren. By rights, he should have wanted to give the good news to Mary, his fiancé, but strangely, he felt a need to tell Loren before anyone else.

  Then he thought, what if she had been rejected? It would be cruel to gloat if she had not been as lucky. He was wrestling with his dilemma when the phone rang. It was Loren. She had been accepted too, and, true to her nature, had not hesitated to call him. “I knew if I made it, you made it,” she had said.

  That night they had celebrated their accomplishment, and their sense of security in the future, like they had never known before. It was the first time they had slept together.

  Kent leaned back while Wilfredo poured his iced tea and disappeared again.

  “I’ve never felt like Humphrey Bogart when I’m around you,” he said. “I always felt like a clod-kicking farm boy.”

  “You were! And I liked it. The thing is, you had a way of finding the high road. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “You made me, and everyone else around you, do the right thing without coming off like some holier-than-thou asshole. That’s the way Bogart’s characters did it.”

  Kent sipped his tea. “The right thing, uh-huh. Engaged to Mary and sex with you.”

  “I’m not talking about that. It’s hard to explain,” Loren said. “You have a way of making people feel better about themselves.”

  “Because I set the bar low for myself.”

  He looked over at her and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have joked.”

  She downed her Scotch, offered no explanation, then dismissed the matter with the wave of her hand. The silence that followed held until she picked up her knife and fork and began sawing at her salad.

  When she spoke again, her tone was business-like. “My boss at NIH is Doug Huddleston. The news of what is going on at Burman A&M came across his
desk. When he called me in for a briefing, he told me, right then and there, this one is going to be big, and political, and nasty. He said since I am head of Compliance Oversight, he wanted me on it from the beginning. No underlings. Not that I had much choice, of course, so I told him I’d take it. But,” she rolled her eyes, “given that the case could cause a political frenzy, I insisted that I have the freedom to recruit help from the private sector—respected people—to give us some credibility.”

  Kent bobbed the ice in his tea with his fingertip and said nothing.

  “He couldn’t refuse me. He knew that. So, ‘voila.’”. She pointed at him with her knife. “Here you are. I can’t think of anybody I trust more, or who can settle this thing with fewer casualties.”

  She went on to remind Kent that the Office of Compliance Oversight (OCO) was a limb of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was a limb of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was attached to the tree trunk known as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Health and Human Services had a cabinet position in the White House, which ultimately made the president of the United States the root system of the whole gnarly, blighted, bureaucratic tree.

  OCO’s responsibility was to see that all public and private institutions that receive federal funding abide by the Health Research Extension (HRE) Act. In a nutshell, it specified how research animals must be treated, as well as what types of experiments could and could not be conducted using them.

  And, if what Losiewicz said was true, Burman A&M’s medical school had gone way, way outside the bounds of the HRE Act.

  Kent was smart enough to know that Loren was a tiny leaf way out on the tip of a limb of the tree, and when the political winds began whipping the branches, the tree would start dropping its leaves to keep from being blown over.

  Kent wiped mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. “I thank you for the sterling recommendation, and I’m honored that you thought of me, but before we go any further, let me remind you that I agreed to come down here only to take a look at the problem. That is all.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “My gut says Losiewicz is telling the truth,” Kent said.