“So you wrote her a letter.” Ruth set a plate of Oreos down in the middle of the table along with a handful of spoons.
“I wrote her a letter.” Daddy sat down and Ruth nudged a mug of coffee in his direction, which he ignored. “In the letter I refuted her accusations one by one and ordered her to get away from that therapist. I insisted that she find a doctor who could help her. A real doctor. An M.D.”
Connie looked from Daddy to Dennis, her nose wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand. What’s so incriminating about that?”
“Tell her, Captain.”
My father lowered his eyes and studied his thumbnails. “I may have made a few threats.”
For some reason, Dennis turned to me. “Your father wrote Georgina that if she didn’t consult a real doctor soon, he would disown her.”
“That’s it?” I was incredulous.
“And something about making the therapist see reason.”
“Oh, Lord!” My mother began to massage her temples, a sure sign that a migraine was on the way.
“So, what were they looking for here?” I asked.
“Turner didn’t say. But I know they came away empty-handed.”
I realized Ruth had been holding her breath when she puffed air out through her lips. “Whew!”
But Dennis wasn’t finished. “Now, this is what concerns me. They found your fingerprints, Captain, on the glass door leading to the balcony from the therapist’s office.”
Daddy’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m not denying the possibility of that. I must have left them there during that god-awful session with Georgina.”
“That could well be, except the Sturgeses’ housekeeper claims that she carefully cleaned the glass, inside and out, on the day before the murder.”
Daddy frowned. “Maybe that housekeeper’s not as thorough as she thinks.”
“Turner says that Georgina told him you never went near the balcony that day.”
“She’s very much mistaken, then.” Daddy shook his head. “That office was stifling. I needed some air.”
Dennis waved a hand. “The word of the housekeeper in itself is not going to cut much ice with the detectives, so if that’s all they’ve got …” He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “But I wouldn’t risk it. To tell you the truth, sir, I think you need a lawyer.”
“Wait a minute!” I croaked. “We know when Dr. Sturges died. The police were asking everyone what they were doing between the hours of noon and three on Friday.” I swiveled to face my father. “You told them what you were doing then, didn’t you, Daddy? If you were here in Annapolis, you can’t have been murdering people up in Baltimore!”
Daddy shrugged. “I was at Home Depot buying stuff for the house.”
“So you have credit card receipts!”
“I paid cash.”
“But you still would have receipts,” I reasoned.
“Hannah, I can’t find them. I’m sure they went out with the trash on Saturday.”
Mother, who had begun sobbing quietly, got up and left the room. I heard the door to the bathroom firmly close and the unmistakable sound of running water.
Connie spoke for the first time in a long while. “Dennis, even if he doesn’t have a rock-solid alibi, surely the police don’t really believe that Captain Alexander killed that woman! He’s a solid citizen. A war hero. When I think about all he went through in Vietnam …”
Using his fingers like a comb, Dennis smoothed his pale hair back from his forehead. “Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still considered a suspect.”
Daddy pounded the flat of his hand on the table so hard that the spoons jounced and clattered. “I’ll clear it up right now! I wrote that letter to Georgina and I meant every word I said. I wanted to kill that damn therapist. I could have strangled her with my bare hands for what she’s done to my little girl. Wanted to, notice, but didn’t. After that session I drove home, wrote the letter, and cooled off. End of story.”
Daddy’s face turned scarlet; crooked, purple veins pulsed in his forehead. I had never seen him so angry.
Dennis must have decided Daddy wouldn’t bite, because he stood up and faced him, practically nose to nose. “Captain Alexander, we’ve just met, so I’m going on gut feeling here, but I believe you. Now, we’ll just have to hope you come up with a more solid alibi, or that somebody else pops up on Homicide’s radar screen, because right now, sir, you are what’s behind door number one.”
“Dennis, isn’t there anything you can do?” Connie spoke softly, her voice pleading.
Dennis shook his head. “Out of my jurisdiction. And Turner has already stuck his neck out for me on this.”
“Somebody’s got to do something!” Ruth moaned.
Since she was flying to Bali come hell or high water on Thursday, I figured it wouldn’t be Ruth doing the something that needed doing. I surveyed the glum faces clustered around me. Maybe Dennis’s hands were tied, but not mine. First thing in the morning, if Georgina still refused to talk to me about Diane Sturges, I’d start trying to track down the owners of some of the other names in the doctor’s appointment book.
chapter
9
Georgina wasn’t taking any calls. Scott, teetering on the edge of rudeness, made this abundantly plain when I telephoned the following day. So, with Paul drowning in beginning-of-semester tasks and Ruth resolutely Bali-bound, I prevailed upon Connie to help me locate the patients on Diane Sturges’s list. Connie had to prepare a shipment of her painted gourd figures for an art gallery in New York, but she had hired Dennis’s twenty-something daughter, Maggie, to help out. Usually Connie strong-armed me to manage the packing, so I was relieved to learn that she had made other arrangements. It was also encouraging to hear that Maggie was feeling up to it. It had been over a year since her mother’s death, but Maggie was still grieving and not yet comfortable with the undeniable romance between her father and Paul’s sister. Perhaps this was the first sign of a thaw. Connie promised to get Maggie started and see how it went.
After breakfast, I kissed Paul good-bye and stood on the front stoop watching him walk up Prince George Street until he turned the corner on Maryland Avenue on his way to class. I poured myself a second cup of coffee and carried it down to our basement office. I retrieved the pages Georgina had taken from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book from the filing cabinet where I had hidden them and spread them out, in chronological order, on the worktable. It was the first time I had given them more than a cursory glance.
The pages covered approximately three weeks in Diane Sturges’s busy practice. Sunday and Monday appeared to be her days off, but between ten and five on all other days she had appointments scheduled back to back, six per day and sometimes seven, with no break for lunch. Fridays she knocked off early. Georgina’s appointment at three was Dr. Sturges’s last scheduled session on that day.
I flipped backward and confirmed that Georgina also visited the doctor on Tuesdays at eleven. On the Tuesday immediately before the murder, Georgina’s name was duly listed and there was an additional notation—G. Alexander. Tuesday. Poor Daddy. He hardly had time to unpack his suitcase before Georgina managed to drag him into her private hell.
Most of the patients, like Georgina, visited the doctor twice a week. A handful made single visits and two lucky individuals bared their souls to the doctor each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. I wondered what Sturges charged them. One hundred? Two hundred a session? I did some mental arithmetic. With thirty sessions per week, that was a healthy chunk of change.
I decided that anybody needing therapy three times a week was probably too screwed up to be of much help and moved on to consider the others. B. Smith. Hah! No way I could find a Smith in the phone book. Gini. Could have been anyone—a patient or an appointment with her manicurist. J. Riggins. Maybe. A. Jacobs. Good bet. F. Wandowsky. Even better. Once I had a list of possible candidates, I drove to the public library on West Street, parked, and hea
ded straight for the shelves of telephone directories. Believe it or not, there were four people named A. Jacobs in the Baltimore metropolitan area, but there was only one F. Wandowsky. I jotted down that telephone number and those of a few other likely individuals, knowing it was just the tip of the iceberg. Most telephones were still listed in the husband’s name, so there could have been any number of A. Jacobs married to those John, Henry, and Thomas Jacobs listed in the directory. Back home, I tried another resource. I logged on to the Internet and clicked over to the white pages on the Lycos search engine. J. Riggins might be the J. S. Riggins living on North Charles Street. The A. Jacobs was definitely Andrea, I decided, because her address on Cold Spring Lane was just off Roland.
Exhilarated, I picked up the phone, then dropped it back in its cradle. What the hell was I going to say? Doctors’ records are supposed to be confidential. I puzzled over that while I went for another cup of coffee, hoping the extra caffeine would jump-start my brain.
Wait a minute! If the police had already contacted all of the doctor’s patients as they claimed, I could pretend to be Officer Williams, simply following up on something. But then I thought better of it. The last thing my mother needed was for another of her daughters to get arrested, this time for impersonating a police officer. If I impersonated anybody, it couldn’t be Officer Williams. I’d be a departmental secretary or something.
I tapped in the first number.
“Ms. Wandowsky?”
“Ain’t no Ms. Wandowsky here.”
“Ms. F. Wandowsky?”
“Name’s Frank. Whatcha selling?” The voice screamed tattooed arms, beer belly, and a round-the-clock five-o’-clock shadow.
“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I have the wrong number.”
I hung up, then thought, You dope! Just because F. Wandowsky was a man didn’t mean he wasn’t a patient of Dr. Sturges’s. But the man didn’t sound very forthcoming—probably resented my interruption of his daytime television viewing—so I went to the next name on my list. Andrea Jacobs wasn’t able to come to the phone just now, but if I would leave my name and number, and day and time that I called, she would get right back to me. I hung up before the beep.
J. S. Riggins answered in a voice heavy with sleep. It wasn’t so much a “hello” as a “hmmph.”
“Ms. Riggins?”
“Yes? What time is it?” She sounded as if she had a mouth full of peanut butter crackers.
“I’m sorry if I woke you, Ms. Riggins. This is Betty Smith calling from the Baltimore City Police Department. I’m working with Officer Williams, following up with Dr. Sturges’s patients on something from the other day.”
“I already told you people all I know. Can I go back to sleep now? Christ! I work nights.”
Bingo! My heart did a flip-flop in my chest. “This will only take a minute,” I said.
I took her grunt for a yes.
“Who referred you to the doctor, Ms. Riggins?”
“Nobody did. I saw a notice on the bulletin board at Fresh Fields about a self-help group that meets on Wednesday nights at a local church. I’d been having trouble losing weight, so I thought I’d give All Hallows a try.”
“All Hallows?” I squeaked. That was Georgina’s church! I coughed, hoping to cover up my squeak. I didn’t imagine that squeaking was a sought-after trait in selecting an employee for the Baltimore City Police Department. I doubted that Officer Williams’s voice ever got squeaky.
“Diane Sturges was in the group?”
“Hell, no. She was facilitating it.”
“So, how did you get to be her private patient?”
“Diane was helping me see that in order to be cured of what was troubling me, I’d have to come to grips with some things that happened in my past. She convinced me that one-on-one therapy would be beneficial.”
Where had I heard that before? She and Georgina were certainly singing out of the same hymnbook. “So,” I persisted. “Some of her patients knew each other?”
“Of course we knew each other. After working in that group, we knew each other inside and out.”
“How many of her private patients were also in the All Hallows group?”
“Four or five, maybe. I can’t say for sure. They came and went.”
“Do you mind telling me who they were?”
When she didn’t answer right away, I thought for a minute she might have dozed off.
“Ms. Riggins?”
“Look, you’ve got all the names in front of you. Ask them yourself!”
I had almost forgotten I was supposed to be working for the police, so I scrambled to salvage the situation. “Just one more question, Ms. Riggins, then I’ll let you get back to sleep. Based on what you know about these other women, do you think any of them had a reason to kill Dr. Sturges?”
Ms. Riggins sputtered into the receiver. “Hardly. She was getting us through some pretty tough stuff.” She paused for a moment. “One of the husbands might have done it, I suppose. A father, maybe. Or a Catholic priest or two.”
I chuckled and was instantly sorry.
“You may well laugh, Ms., uh, Smith, was it? But I’m perfectly serious about the priests.”
I was dying to ask if she knew my sister. Since the group met at the church where Georgina played the organ, it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. But I had already come dangerously close to blowing my cover, so I didn’t want to risk it. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Riggins. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
She grunted and hung up without saying good-bye, and I never did learn what the J stood for.
I sipped my coffee, now cold, sat back, and considered the other names I had jotted down. I was about to dial someone named C. Cameron when I noticed that the caller ID box attached to the phone was flashing red and the digital display said “Message Waiting.” I punched the review button and learned I had two calls—one from Connie and another from an unknown number that had come in at 10:02. I dialed the answering machine and checked my messages. Regretfully, Connie wasn’t coming. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving Dennis’s daughter alone, especially when their relationship was so fragile. Well, nuts! The unknown number was my plastic surgeon’s receptionist, reminding me that I had a consultation for my breast reconstruction the following day. In all the confusion, I had completely forgotten about the appointment. They were expecting me to appear with all the necessary papers signed, and I was still being wishy-washy about it. What frightened me the most was the anaesthesia. At night, lying in bed listening to the click-click-click of the portable alarm clock, I’d worked myself up into a cold panic. They give you something to shut down your lungs, I’d read somewhere, then they hook you to a machine that breathes for you. I wasn’t sure I had that much trust in machines.
Our office has a single window, a narrow rectangle, high up and splattered with mud through which the rays of the late-morning sun were just able to penetrate. Dust motes danced in a shaft of light that caught a photograph on top of the filing cabinet in its spotlight. I picked up the photo and blew a layer of dust from the glass. The picture had been taken five years before and showed Connie and me lounging on the bow of Sea Song, holding beers and toothily grinning. Connie wore a red striped bathing suit and I was squeezed into a chrome yellow bikini that Paul used to say made him break out in a sweat. Lord, I had good legs then! Nice boobs, too, swelling out over the top of the bikini. Paul had insisted that the decision about reconstruction was up to me, but how could he not prefer a less lopsided wife? If I had been teetering on the status quo side, seeing that picture again tipped the balance.
Before I completed the forms the doctor expected me to bring, I finished my detective work by writing all the names from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book down on a yellow tablet, in columns. Beside A. Jacobs I wrote Andrea, then penciled in a big question mark. Next to J. S. Riggins I drew a check mark and wrote in the wide column to the far right: Husbands? Fathers? Priests? As I did this, I wondered if I was wasting my time, but as the li
st took shape, I felt good about it. At least I was doing something.
I smiled to myself. The police must be at their wits’ end. Every one of these people could be telling stories that would make the hair of even Baltimore’s Finest who had probably heard everything stand on end. Based on what Ms. Riggins had told me, they could have dozens of suspects by now, all of them hiding secrets ugly enough to kill for. I slipped the tablet into my purse and zipped it up securely. But no matter how you cut it, it was my father’s fingerprints that had turned up on Dr. Sturges’s plate-glass window, not some suburban housewife’s funny uncle.
I was agonizing over this when the telephone rang. Even before I checked the caller ID, I knew who it was. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened; it must have been telepathy.
“Hannah?”
“Hi, Daddy.” His voice sounded as if it were coming to me from inside a barrel at the bottom of the bay. “Where are you?”
“I took the telephone into the closet. I didn’t want your mother to hear.”
Tears stung my eyes. “Oh, Daddy.”
“Your mother’s not coping very well. She sat up in bed all night, hardly sleeping, propped up on pillows. She didn’t even get out of bed this morning.”
“That’s not good.”
“She says she believes I’m innocent, but then she gets this look in her eyes like the woman I know and love has gone away somewhere. I feel like I’m losing her, Hannah.”
“She’s started smoking again, too,” I said, feeling like a snitch.
“I know. What worries me is that she doesn’t even bother to hide it.”
“I don’t know what to say, Daddy.”
“Help me, Hannah! If it were up to me, I’d be out beating the bushes to find the real killer. As it is, I can’t leave your mother in her present condition.” He paused to take a deep, steadying breath. “I don’t know what she’ll do if I’m actually arrested for killing that woman.”
Even though I had no clue about it one way or the other, I tried to reassure him. “I don’t think that arrest is likely, Daddy. The evidence against you is very slim.”
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