by Leslie Glass
“It wasn’t a bad face.” April shrugged. “You undercover or something?”
Jason smiled. “Maybe.”
April picked up on the smile. Things were going better for him. Maybe he had a new girlfriend or his wife was back. “And the clocks. What happened to them?”
Jason swung around to check the bookcase. “Nothing. You’re exactly on time.”
“Why aren’t they making a racket?” April pointed to the brass bull with the clock on his back. The minute hand jumped to five past.
“Oh, only the ones at home chime.”
“Ah, silent clocks for patients.” She fell silent herself, didn’t want to ask about Emma, wasn’t sure whether she should sit down. “Sorry I had to cancel out on you twice. You know how it is when something comes up. You had some questions for me?”
“Yes, thanks for coming. You want to sit down, go out for a coffee, or stand there?”
She was starved. “How much time do you have?”
“I have to be back at four-fifteen. I get the feeling you’re hungry.”
“I am,” she admitted. The last thing she had had was scrambled egg fried rice at six, forced on her by her mother as she tried to sneak out of the house without engaging in another conversation about duty and marriage. It was the same breakfast her mother had served when she was a kid. And the same conversation they’d been having for the last nine years. Only now, thanks to Mike’s turning up on Saturday and Alice Chen’s intelligence on what had happened that afternoon, Skinny Dragon Mother had something new to obsess about. Finally getting a marriage but to the wrong kind of guy.
“It’s been a long day.” She didn’t mention her morning with Nicole Amendonde, the rape victim in ER.
Twelve minutes later they were sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway. From where they sat they could see Zabar’s, the site where Dr. Lobrinsky had so very recently lost his much-loved, canary-yellow ride. April didn’t mention that, either.
“So fill me in,” Jason said when she had put away half of her BLT and was working on a huge side of fries.
“I just got another unnatural from your shop. What’s going on there? You got people dropping dead left and right.”
“An inpatient? You going to eat all those?”
“Uh-uh.” April pushed the fries in his direction. “I’ve had it.”
“I’m not supposed to …” he muttered vaguely, tucking into them.
April dabbed her lips delicately with the paper napkin. “No, it’s not a patient, actually. It’s a doctor. Maybe you know him, guy named Dickey.”
Jason’s handful of french fries stopped halfway to his mouth. “Harold Dickey, an unnatural?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“An unnatural, are you sure?”
“Well, the guy supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack, but it turns out he was full of Amitrip-ti-something.”
“Amitriptyline?” Jason frowned and shook his head as the waiter offered him the last inch of muddy coffee in the pot.
“Yeah, what is it?”
Jason raked his beard unhappily. “It’s a tricyclic.”
April looked blank. “What would someone take it for?”
“It’s an antidepressant. It’s given for depressive neurosis, manic depression. Anxiety. You might know it by its trade name. Elavil.”
April nodded. “What would Dickey have been taking it for?”
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware that he was depressed.” Jason raised his eyebrow, thinking it over. It was no secret that Harold liked his scotch. Maybe he’d slipped from social drinking to alcoholism, had gone on the wagon, and was taking Elavil to relieve withdrawal depression. Maybe he was self-medicating. A lot of doctors did that.
“What’s the thought?” April asked.
Jason grimaced. “Nothing. It’s complicated, that’s all. Why are the police involved?”
“Yes, it is complicated. More than you might be aware of. Dickey’s name and number were found beside the body of Raymond Cowles.”
“What?”
April nodded. “I interviewed Dickey last week, and he said he didn’t know Cowles and certainly hadn’t spoken to him the night he died.”
“That’s …”Jason shook his head. “So what happened to Dickey? How did you get involved?”
“It’s a little mysterious. Usually in cases like this, the ER doctors will sign off on the spot. Or the attending will sign the certificate. Dickey was sixty-eight, had a heart attack. It should have been straightforward enough. Buuut—I guess somebody didn’t like the way it looked and didn’t want trouble later. All I know is someone called the Medical Examiner, the office took the case, and the path found something.” She watched Jason move in on the fries again, then said, “You know, the Cowles case looked like a clear-cut suicide, too. It turned out to be, but still, we have to check it out.”
“Tell me about it.” Jason licked a finger, then another one.
April wrinkled her nose. “Anybody ever teach you what napkins are for?”
“Nope.” He finished licking his fingers and pushed the plate away. “So, what’s the story on Cowles?” he asked, finally getting to his reason for wanting a meeting.
“What’s your interest?”
Jason sighed. “I got sucked into reviewing the case as a consultant. There might be a lawsuit.”
“From what I’ve seen of the widow, there will certainly be a lawsuit.” April watched Jason catch sight of his image in the mirror behind the booth and look surprised, then refocus on the subject.
“On what grounds?” he asked.
“She was married to him for almost fifteen years, didn’t know the guy was gay. Her story is they were the perfect couple. Then suddenly her husband needs space. Out of the blue he takes another apartment and returns to his former shrink, Dr. Treadwell. The doctor sees him a few times, prescribes tranquilizers. He uses them to kill himself. The widow thinks the shrink made him believe he was gay when he was in a vulnerable state. Then because it was against everything he believed, he freaks out and kills himself. Whatever the truth was, the medication she prescribed helped to kill him.”
“Anything else?”
“The autopsy showed Cowles had a lot of perianal scarring and signs of long-term infection. The pathologist said it wasn’t a new thing with him. He’d been into it for a long time.”
“Probably all his adult life,” Jason murmured.
“Another thing. Cowles was with someone just before he died. His lover was a lawyer from the insurance company where he worked. The night he died they cooked dinner together, had sex. The lover said Cowles was in a great mood. They were in love and planned to move in together. The lover went home to his own apartment about nine.”
“When did Cowles die?”
“Not likely to have been before ten. Three trick-or-treaters rang his doorbell at nine-thirty. They said he complimented them on their costumes.”
“So something happened after that. Any idea what?”
“Well, he placed a call to Dr. Treadwell at nine-thirty-eight. The phone company logged the time at six minutes.”
“What?” Jason said, shocked again. “What did Dr. Treadwell have to say about that?”
“I didn’t call her on it, Jason. It wasn’t relevant to our investigation. We were looking for a homicide.”
“It would be relevant to malpractice, though.”
“Yeah, I guess in civil suits, sticks and stones can break your bones and words can also harm you.” April glanced up at the clock over the counter. It read 4:02.
“Yeah, and sometimes words can even kill you.” Jason raised his hand for the check.
“I’ll take it,” April said.
Jason shook his head. “Next time … So, there was a six-minute conversation between Dr. Treadwell’s phone and Raymond Cowles’s phone. And Cowles committed suicide almost immediately thereafter.” Even if it could never be proved that Clara talked to Cowles, it was very nasty news. Jason rubbed his cheek.
“That’s about the size of it.” April reached for the check, but Jason got it first.
“I said next time.”
“Thanks.” April gathered up her jacket and bag. “What about this Dickey? You know of any reason he had to kill himself?”
Jason scratched his cheek. That morning he’d had a call from the head of the medical school asking him to take over Dickey’s classes until they found a replacement. Oh, and by the way, was he interested in the job? Now Dickey turned out to be an unnatural. Had words harmed him, too?
Deeply disturbed, Jason took a deep breath and exhaled. “No, I wouldn’t have said Harold Dickey was the type to commit suicide. Could it have been an accident?”
“That was my next question.”
“People make fatal mistakes all the time. I know older heart patients who forget they’ve taken their medication and take it again. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does.” He counted out the bills and left them on the table with the check.
“I’ll probably need your help with this hospital stuff,” April said, out on the street, vaguely annoyed that he wouldn’t let her pay and didn’t even look like himself anymore.
“So will I,” he said, smiling grimly. “Let’s keep in touch.”
thirty-eight
Clara Treadwell did not get up or say hello when April came into her office. She merely pointed to the tufted leather tub chair in front of her desk.
“Please sit down, Officer.”
“Detective Woo,” April corrected her.
“Yes, I remember. But there were two of you. Where’s your partner?” The woman seemed annoyed that there was only one of them now. She also seemed much older than she had a week ago. Her skin had a dry and grayish cast under the tan, and the puffiness around her eyes made her look as if she’d been worrying a lot and not sleeping much.
“He’s on another case.” April did not bother to tell the doctor that precinct detectives sometimes worked together but did not have partners. She sat gingerly on the shiny tufts, which were so hard, they must have been designed to discourage visitors from staying too long.
On the Upper West Side she had worked on cases involving all kinds of women—homeless, hookers, students, housewives, store owners, and businesswomen. It was the people April considered rich who fascinated and intimidated her the most. Until she’d come uptown she’d never seen this kind of people up close before, the kind who looked like they walked out of TV shows and magazines. They lived in luxurious apartments with doormen and porters, who took out the garbage and hosed down the sidewalks every morning. They kept their cars in garages that cost what a one-bedroom apartment cost outside of Manhattan. They ate in restaurants with white tablecloths and worked in stores and offices that were attractive and clean and comfortable—unlike New York City precinct stations or anything April had ever encountered in Chinatown.
But privilege gave rich women more than luxury. April had noted the extra piece in their design over and over, wanted it and knew how hard it would be to achieve. No promotion would give it to her, and no amount of money could buy it. The posture of Clara Treadwell’s body, the arch of her eyebrows, the set of her mouth as she sat at her desk exhausted but undaunted—her hands easy among expensive blotter, appointment book, and pen set—everything about her stated her confidence in herself, her certainty that she was right and could get that lightness across, her ability to intimidate without saying a word. Her lack of fear. April believed you had to be born with that lack of fear, educated to it, and Caucasian to carry it off.
“You’re here to report your conclusions on the Raymond Cowles case,” Dr. Treadwell said imperiously.
“I’m here on another matter, but I’d be glad to fill you in on that investigation if you’d like.”
Clara nodded.
April quickly told her what they had discovered about Raymond Cowles’s last night and what the forensic evidence had indicated about the manner and time of his death. Clara’s face tightened as April described the dinner and sex with his lover. Otherwise she betrayed no emotion.
“Except for his phone call to you, there seems to be no mystery about it,” April concluded.
The weariness and age dropped away from the hospital director’s face as indignation animated it. “What makes you think I had a conversation with Ray that night?”
“We hit the redial button on his phone, Dr. Treadwell. Your number was the last one he called.”
“That doesn’t mean he reached me,” Clara said angrily. “If he called the number, he must have gotten my answering machine and hung up.”
No, that was not possible. The phone company had logged the call in at over six minutes. Clara’s answering machine took messages of only two minutes in length. April knew that because the machine itself had given her the information when she called the number. Cowles and Treadwell had talked, but April decided to let it go. If Dr. Treadwell bore some responsibility for Cowles’s mental state at the time he took his life, some other court would have to determine it.
“It’s a mystery,” April murmured.
“I’m a doctor. Do you think I would have hung up on him if I had known he was on the edge?” Clara persisted.
“You spoke to him,” April said softly.
“No, of course I didn’t. I’m saying it wouldn’t have happened if we had spoken.”
April’s mouth went dry exactly the same way it had when she followed Mike to the door of Raymond’s room and saw by his stance that Cowles was in there and he was dead. Clara had most certainly talked to him. The admission was there in her denial. It didn’t change anything, though. Only that April could no longer believe any statement she made.
“Well.” April backed off on Raymond. “I’m here to ask you a few questions about Dr. Harold Dickey. You were with him when he collapsed, I understand.”
“Yes.” Clara’s eyes flared. “Has this become a police matter, too?”
April was surprised. “Haven’t you been briefed on it yet?”
Clara shook her head, wary now. “What’s going on?”
“The death file isn’t complete yet, but the preliminary findings show no signs of heart disease or natural—”
“Then what killed him?” she demanded impatiently.
“According to the tox reports, he had very high levels of alcohol and Amitrip … ah, Elavil.”
“Jesus.” Clara’s brow furrowed. “Amitriptyline? Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But he’d been drinking. He knew better than—” Clara Treadwell froze.
April pulled out her notepad. “Do you know of any reason he might have wanted to commit suicide?”
The doctor stared at April, clearly stunned. “Give me a minute, will you. This is …”
Pressed rigidly against the unyielding chair, April’s back began to ache. She wanted to get up and walk around.
Clara pulled herself together. She could do it faster than anyone April had ever seen. In less than sixty seconds the imperiousness was back. “Detective, I’ll have to talk to you some other time. I need to organize my thoughts about this.”
“I won’t take long,” April said evenly. She didn’t want Clara Treadwell organizing her thoughts. She wasn’t getting a cozy feeling about this woman, who was already implicated in one death. This was her second death in little more than a week. April wanted to know what happened to Harold Dickey. It was her job to find out, and find out she would—no matter who the woman was or how intimidating she could be.
“I don’t care how long it will take. I cannot do it now.”
Clara stood up. April did not.
“I’d rather talk to you before you think about it, Doctor. It’s an unnatural, that’s all. We just have to establish whether it was an accident or Dr. Dickey took too much medicine on purpose.”
“How can I know that?” Clara clenched her fists.
“You were there.”
“Yes,” Clara said, calmer now. “Harold asked m
e to come there. He was already ill when I arrived. At first I thought he was drunk.” She shook her head. “Then I realized it was something more than that.”
“What made you think so?”
“He was agitated, paranoid, raving, hallucinating. He was having a psychotic episode.” She looked puzzled. “But I—”
“Did he ask for help?”
“He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know. He would have told me.” She shook her head again.
“When did you call for help?”
“He collapsed and had a seizure almost immediately. I was only there for a minute, maybe two minutes, before it happened. You can ask the guards. They saw me come in and they responded when the code was called.”
“The code?”
“There’s a code for medical emergency.”
“When did you arrange to meet?”
“We didn’t. He just asked me and I—” She froze again.
Another nerve. “When?”
Clara closed her eyes. “I don’t remember. I just know he didn’t take anything while I was there, and he was already very ill. If I’d gotten there five minutes later, he would have died alone.” She fell silent.
“Was he depressed when you talked to him?”
“Not at that exact moment, no.”
“Had he been depressed recently?”
“Well … yes. There was the Cowles suicide. He was upset about that.”
“Oh? Did he know Raymond Cowles well?” April asked.
“Of course he did, he was the supervisor on Cowles’s analysis. He directed every aspect of the case.” Clara pursed her lips. “But I’m sure he told you that when you spoke with him.”
Uh-uh. Dickey had told her he hadn’t known Cowles.
“Dr. Dickey told me you found his number by Cowles’s body. Maybe Dr. Dickey spoke to him,” Clara speculated.
“Maybe.” April nodded, wondering if the two deaths were connected or not. “Well, thank you for talking to me. I’ll need to see his office. Has anyone been in it since—”
Again the eyes flared. “No. I locked it immediately. No one’s been in that room or touched a thing.”
“Good. I’ll also need a list of his patients, people he worked with—colleagues, nurses—his relatives.” April got up. Her back throbbed, and she had to pee.