Judgement Day

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Miriam!” His hands broke free.

  Desperate now, Kevin took hold of the man’s hair and pulled the strands back, nearly tearing them from their roots. Finally, the man lifted himself off Miriam’s body and began a slow and deliberate turn. Kevin released his grip and poised himself to drive his fist into the man’s face. But when the man turned completely, Kevin opened his fist and pressed both hands against his own head.

  “No!” he screamed. “What . . .”

  He was looking at himself. And the shock of it sent him reeling back into darkness.

  10

  No!” Kevin screamed. He sat up in the darkness.

  “Kevin?” Miriam leaned over to turn on the night lamp on the end table. As soon as the bedroom was light, Kevin spun around, a mixture of fear and confusion in his face.

  “What? Where . . .” He glared down at Miriam, who had fallen back to the pillow and stared up at him in astonishment. “Miriam . . . I . . . how did I get into bed? Where is . . .” He spun around, searching the room for signs of . . . of whom? Himself?

  Miriam shook her head and drew herself into a sitting position.

  “Where is who?”

  He stared at her. She looked genuinely confused.

  “How did I get into bed?” he muttered.

  “Kevin Taylor, don’t you remember anything?”

  “I . . .” He took a deep breath and then pressed his palms against his eyes. “The last thing I remember, I was in the study and I awoke to find everyone gone, so I came down here and . . .”

  “You didn’t come down here. You were brought down here.”

  “I was?”

  “The boys found you drunk and babbling on the floor in Mr. Milton’s study. One of the secretaries told them what had happened to you. They got you out and brought you down here discreetly. Paul Scholefield came up to me after I played another piece on the piano and told me where you were. He said you were out like a light, so I didn’t come right down. I stayed until people started to leave. Then I said good night to Mr. Milton and came down myself. Not long after I got into bed, you woke up and we . . .”

  “What?”

  “Some lover. I thought you were wonderful, I thought it was one of the best times, and all the time you were so drunk you didn’t know what you were doing? You don’t remember any of it?”

  “We made love?” He considered what she was saying and what he had thought. “Then it was just a dream.” He laughed a laugh of relief. “It was just a dream,” he repeated.

  “What was just a dream?”

  “Nothing. I . . . oh, Miriam, I’m sorry. I guess I just didn’t realize how much I had drunk. I missed the rest of the party?”

  “It’s all right. Nobody really noticed. As I said, the boys handled it well.”

  “And Mr. Milton?”

  “No problem. He really likes you. I had a wonderful time, especially afterward, whether you remember it or not. Maybe you should get drunk more often,” she added.

  He thought for a moment. Not to be able to remember making love?

  “I was good?”

  “All I can say is you touched me where I had never been touched before. It was like you . . .”

  “What?” He saw her redden with the thought. “Come on, tell me.”

  “Like you grew larger and larger in me until I was filled with you. If we didn’t make the baby tonight, I don’t know when we will.” She leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips. “I’m sorry if I got a little wild,” she whispered. The blanket fell away from her breasts.

  “Wild?”

  “And dug my fingernails in too deeply. I know I scratched you, but that’s the price you pay for getting so passionate.” She kissed him again, working her tongue into his mouth, nearly gagging him. “I’ll never forget it,” she whispered after the kiss. “Even if you already have.”

  “Well, I . . . I’ve never been so drunk that I forgot where I was and what I had done, much less forgot making love. Sorry. But I’ll make it up to you.”

  “You’d better,” she whispered. Then she lay back. She smiled up at him, and images of what he remembered from his dream returned. He shook his head to drive them away.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, just a little dizzy. I think I’d better go splash some cold water on my face. Wow, what a night.” He slipped off the bed to go into the bathroom. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw that his eyes were somewhat bloodshot. He splashed some cold water on his face and then took a leak. Before he left the bathroom, he turned around and looked at his naked buttocks in the mirror. There wasn’t a mark on them.

  Scratched me? He shrugged. She probably got so excited, she thought she scratched me. Oh well, thank God what I saw was just a nightmare. Too bad I didn’t enjoy the sex, though. From the way she described it, he thought, / must have been wonderful.

  Kevin laughed to himself and went back to bed. Miriam embraced him, and they made love, but when it was over, she looked disappointed.

  “What’s wrong? Wasn’t I as good as before?”

  “You’re probably tired,” she said. “It was good,” she added when his look of disappointment came, “but it wasn’t like before. I’m sure it will be again.”

  “Well, I’m not going to get drunk like that again. You can bet your ass on that.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “When did you leave the party and go into the den?”

  “You were playing the piano . . . beautifully. I never heard you play like that, Miriam. And that piece. When did you learn a new piece?”

  “It wasn’t a new piece, Kevin. I’ve played it often.”

  “You have? Funny, I can’t remember that, either,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Maybe the champagne burned out some of your memory,” she said sarcastically.

  “I’m sorry. I just . . . I guess I’ll just go to sleep.”

  “Good idea, Kev.” She turned over.

  He lay back and thought about it. How can something as dramatic and as involving as making love passionately be beyond recall? It didn’t make sense.

  Nor did my nightmare, he thought. For now, the two seemed to cancel each other out. He closed his eyes, and in moments he was asleep.

  In the morning both Ted and Dave called to ask how he was. Paul actually came around to see him.

  “I guess I should thank you guys,” Kevin said, “but I can’t remember a damn thing about it.”

  “Well, you were really more asleep than awake when we brought you down . . . carried you down, I should say.” He winked at Miriam. “You played beautifully, Miriam.”

  “Thank you,” she said and gave Kevin a look of self-satisfaction that made his eyebrows rise.

  The rest of the weekend proved to be wonderful. Dave and Ted, Norma and Jean, and he and Miriam went to a Broadway matinee on Saturday. They had highly sought-after front-row tickets provided for them through a connection Mr. Milton had with the theater. Paul begged out, telling them he wanted to take Helen back to their doctor. He said he would try to join them for dinner afterward, but he never showed. Later he told them Helen wasn’t up to going anywhere and he didn’t want to leave her alone.

  On Sunday, they all went up to the penthouse to watch the football game. Paul joined them, but Helen remained in their apartment, resting. He said she had been placed on newer, stronger medication.

  “I had to hire a nurse to stay with her,” he told them. “Lucky for me, the nurse Richard Jaffee had was available, Mrs. Longchamp, so if you see her around, you’ll know why. If there’s no improvement soon,” he told everyone, “I’ll have to put her in the sanitarium.”

  “You’ll do what’s best for her, Paul,” Mr. Milton told him and then took him aside to talk with him. Norma and Jean brought out some hot buttered popcorn they had prepared in Mr. Milton’s kitchen, and everyone’s attention returned to the game.

  The following week at the firm was very busy. Paul’s case came to trial, and Dave and Ted pi
cked up new clients. Dave was defending a doctor’s son who had been allegedly pilfering drugs from his father and peddling them at college. Ted was handling a routine breaking and entering; the burglar was someone he had defended once before and gotten acquitted. He said his best hope was to get a deal, and sure enough, before the week was out, he had negotiated a settlement providing for less than a quarter of what the client would have been sentenced to had the case gone to trial.

  Paul’s case went according to plan, too. The district attorney’s decision to prove that Philip Galan was guilty of murdering his little brother proved to be a mistake in strategy. Despite Philip’s lack of remorse, Paul was able to get expert psychiatrists to testify that Philip had a history of impulsive behavior and was an emotionally disturbed youngster. Just as Paul intended, he was able to show how the parents were more guilty in many ways. The trial resulted in Philip being remanded to psychiatric care.

  On Thursday, Kevin had his meeting with Beverly Morgan, Maxine Rothberg’s nurse. She had left the hotel after Maxine’s death and was living with a sister in Middletown, New York, a small city approximately an hour and a half from Manhattan. Kevin made arrangements for Charon to drive him upstate.

  Beverly Morgan’s sister owned a small, Cape Cod-style house on a side street. It was a low-income neighborhood; the street was narrow, the houses old and run-down, their small porch fronts sagging, their sidewalks chipped and cracked and pitted. It had snowed much more frequently and more heavily in the upstate New York area, so the narrow street was cramped by the slush and the residue of the last storm. Kevin found it a depressing area, everything dull, faded, worn.

  Beverly Morgan was home alone. The stocky fifty-eight-year-old black woman had a head of dull black hair with snowy white strands streaked through the center. Her hair had been cut unevenly, probably by her sister, Kevin thought, or some nonprofessional.

  She gazed out at him with large black eyes, the whites bright, her look fearful, distrusting. She wore a kelly green sweater over a light green one-piece dress that looked like a nurse’s uniform that had been dyed. Before she greeted him, she glanced quickly at the limo. Charon stood by the driver’s side looking back at her.

  “You’re the lawyer?” she asked, still looking Charon’s way.

  “Yes, ma’am. Kevin Taylor.”

  She nodded and stepped back to let him enter, pausing to look once more at Charon before closing the door. The small entryway was covered with a narrow throw rug, stained and faded. There was a dark pine coat- and hatrack on the right and a square two-foot mirror in a matching pine frame on the wall beside it.

  “You can put your coat there,” Beverly said and nodded at the rack.

  “Thank you.” Kevin slipped out of his suede and wool topcoat and hung it quickly. There was a delicious aroma throughout the house, the scent of chicken being fried. It made his mouth water. “Something smells good.”

  “Um,” she said and turned to lead him into the living room, a small room overly heated by a coal stove. Kevin loosened his tie and looked about. The furniture was of discount department store quality, the cushions on the couch showing their wear. The one attractive piece was a vintage dark pine grandfather clock, its face reporting accurate time.

  “Beautiful clock,” he remarked.

  “Was my father’s. Held on to it no matter how bad times got. Sit down. You want some tea?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  “Well, let’s get to it. I had some experience with lawyers before,” she said, dropping herself into a light brown easy chair across from the couch. It seemed to close itself snugly around her. She crossed her legs and smirked.

  “Well, this is quite an important case.”

  “Rich people’s cases always are.”

  Kevin tried to smile. He saw a bottle of bourbon on the bottom bookshelf with a tumbler beside it. The glass had some whiskey in it. He opened his briefcase and took out a long notepad. Then he sat back.

  “What can you tell me about the way Mrs. Rothberg died?”

  “Same as I told the district attorney,” she began with mechanical swiftness. “I came into the room and found her sprawled out on the bed. I thought she had had a heart attack at first. I called the doctor right away, tried CPR, and called the hotel to have Mr. Rothberg paged.”

  “When was the last time you had seen her conscious?”

  “Right after dinner. I sat with her for a while, and then she said she was tired, but she wanted me to leave the television set on. So I went to my own room to watch television. When I came back, she was dead.”

  “And you had given her the usual dosage of insulin that day?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now are you confident that you gave her the correct amount?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said firmly.

  “I see.” Kevin pretended to write some notes. He did write “Appears defensive,” but he realized anyone in her position had a right to be.

  “Let me get right to it, Beverly. Is it all right if I call you Beverly?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “Yes. Let me get to the heart of the thing so I don’t waste any of your time.” She nodded, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Do you know anything that would incriminate Mr. Rothberg? Did you see him go into his wife’s bedroom after you had left, for instance?”

  “No. I went right to my room. I told you.”

  “Uh-huh. You know about the supply of insulin that was found in Mr. Rothberg’s room. Do you have any explanation for why it was there?”

  She shook her head.

  “Beverly, you must know that Mr. Rothberg was seeing someone on the side.”

  “Sure do.”

  “Did Mrs. Rothberg know it, too?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She ever talk to you about it?”

  “No. She was a lady, right to the end.”

  “Then how did you know she knew?” he asked quickly, falling into his cross-examination tone of voice and demeanor.

  “She had to know. Other people came to see her.”

  “Then you overheard someone tell her, talk to her about it?”

  She hesitated.

  “Not that you were spying, but I’m sure while you were working nearby . . .”

  “Yeah, I heard some talk sometimes.”

  “I see. Did you happen, by accident, of course, to ever overhear an exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Rothberg concerning this matter?”

  “You mean, did they have an argument about it? Not that I heard, no, but I came into her room many a time just after he had left and found her looking upset.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kevin sat for a moment staring at her. “Mrs. Rothberg was quite depressed then, you would say?”

  “Well she didn’t have a helluva lot to be happy about. She was an invalid and her husband was screwin’ around. But even though she had a rough time of it, she managed to be in good spirits most of the time. She was quite a woman. I thought she was a real lady, understand?” she repeated with emphasis.

  “Yes, I do.” He sat back, taking a relaxed posture. “You’ve had a pretty rough time of it yourself, haven’t you, Beverly?” he asked in his most sympathetic tone of voice.

  “Rough time?”

  “With your own life, your own family.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Kevin shifted his eyes obviously and clearly toward the bottle of bourbon. “You do some drinking, Beverly?” She straightened up quickly. “Even at the hotel?”

  “I have a drink once in a while. Helps me get through the day.”

  “More than once in a while, perhaps? People know about that, too, Beverly,” he said quickly, sitting forward.

  “I never got so I couldn’t do my job, Mr. Taylor.”

  “As a nurse, you know that people who drink often don’t face up to how much they drink or how it affects them.”

  “I’m no alcoholic. It ain’t goin’ to do you any good to try to say I am and that I accidentally killed Mrs. Rothberg.”


  “I read Mr. and Mrs. Rothberg’s doctor’s reports. He had some critical things to say about you, Beverly.”

  “He never liked me. He was Mr. Rothberg’s doctor,” she added. “He wasn’t the doctor Mrs. Rothberg’s mother had.”

  “You were in charge of giving Mrs. Rothberg her insulin, you drank, the doctor knew it and wasn’t pleased,” Kevin said, ignoring her implications.

  “I didn’t accidentally kill Mrs. Rothberg.”

  “I see. Mr. Rothberg tells me he and his wife did have an argument about his affair and that she threatened to commit suicide and make it look as if he had killed her. He thinks that’s why the insulin was placed in his closet. There is a strong suggestion that the fatal dosage came from that supply. Do you think you can search your memory for any possible recollection of how that insulin got into Mr. Rothberg’s closet?”

  She stared at him.

  “Did you put it there?”

  “No.”

  “Your fingerprints were found on it.”

  “So? My fingerprints are on everything in Mrs. Rothberg’s room. Look, why the hell would I put it in there?” she asked, her voice rising in pitch.

  “Maybe Mrs. Rothberg asked you to do so.”

  “She didn’t and I didn’t.”

  “Did you see her wheel herself into Mr. Rothberg’s room?”

  “When?”

  “Ever?”

  “Maybe . . . yes, I guess.”

  “With the box of insulin in her lap, perhaps?”

  “No, never. And if she did, why ain’t her fingerprints on the box?”

  “She could have worn plastic gloves.”

  “Oh, what a load a garbage. Mr. Rothberg coulda worn plastic gloves, too!”

  He smiled to himself. She wasn’t dumb. She imbibed and might have been less efficient than the doctor would have liked, he thought, but she wasn’t stupid. He decided to try another tact.

  “You liked Mrs. Rothberg, didn’t you, Beverly?”