by Jill Kelly
“That’s okay, Gracie. I know you weren’t expecting me.”
“Well, I did think you might come around, especially when I wasn’t at the Maverick on Tuesday.”
“I was out of town.” He paused, hoping the right words would come. He could see her waiting for information. “Look, Gracie, there’s no easy way to say what I’ve got to say.”
A flash of pain crossed her face, then resignation. “I’ve heard this one, before, Al. You’ve met somebody else.”
“Yes, and the thing is, I’ve married her.”
“You what? I don’t get it. Is this a joke?”
“No, Gracie, it’s no joke. We went to Flagstaff and got married last Sunday.”
“We who?”
“You don’t know her. She’s not from around here.”
“Where is she from?”
“I don’t know.” Al realized how stupid that sounded and that it hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that he didn’t know where Ellie had come from.
Gracie looked at him for a long moment. “How long have you known her?”
“A week or so. I met her at the Maverick last Tuesday.”
“Our night. Let me get this straight. You met another woman on our night at the Maverick and you married her. And you don’t know where she’s from.”
“Yup,” he nodded, “that about sums it up.”
“What’s her name, this woman who’s bewitched you?” He could hear the jealousy choking her voice and it surprised him.
“Ellie.”
“And I suppose she’s twenty and got legs up to her ass and long blonde hair and she thinks you’re a big, strong cowboy sugar daddy who’s going to take care of her.”
“You watch too many TV movies, Gracie. Ellie’s my age and she looks it. I need a companion, Gracie. I need to share my life again.”
“And it was never going to be me, was it?” There was a bitter set to her mouth that reminded him of Annie. He hated to have put it there.
“No,” he said finally and paused, wondering how much he should say. “Annie was always going to be …”
“Fuck you, Al,” she said. “No wonder Annie left you. Now get out of my house.” And she turned up the TV so loud it hurt his ears. He could hear Oprah’s voice all the way to his truck.
19
Ellie planned to go back to work the first Monday after Gettysburg but Sandy talked her out of it. “You need more time, honey. You need to rest. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. No one will fault for you taking another week or two. Maybe you should even consider taking a leave this semester.”
And so she’d agreed to stay home and rest. Not that home was all that restful. The first Saturday morning, she woke to find the morass of the media at her door, microphones and cameras and reporters. They rang the bell incessantly until her landlord, Duncan, a hometown boy who lived downstairs, called his uncle, who called the chief of police. Warned about trespassing on private property, the reporters retreated to the street. Duncan called again and they were all cited for holding a parade without a permit. Soon, only the diehards were left, sequestered in their cars.
Things quieted down then. She didn’t go out. She stopped answering the phone, stayed off email. Some of her faculty friends called to see how she was doing, but Ellie didn’t know what to tell them. She didn’t want to describe anything. She didn’t want to talk about it. It was easier to just see Sandy, who brought her groceries and Thai take-out. It was Sandy who called Ellie’s doctor, made her an appointment for early in the week, got the name of a rape counselor. It was Sandy who fended off reporters with ease, protecting her friend.
Saturday was hard. Ellie didn’t want to be alone with her feelings, so she and Sandy played Quiddler and Canasta, watched old movies, exercised to an old Jane Fonda tape—anything to not think and not talk. Sandy stayed while she napped, ran her a hot bath in the late afternoon. At seven, she took two more Valium and sent Sandy home and went to bed.
Sunday morning, she found she didn’t have the energy to get up. She fed the cats and went back to bed. The cats were happy to follow her into the bedroom. She dozed and dreamed and slept some more. She woke thirsty from the drugs but with little appetite. When Sandy showed up, she was asleep on the couch. Sandy made tomato soup but Ellie let the bowl grow cold on the coffee table.
She slept through the next five days. She slept through her doctor’s appointment but got the woman to agree to refill the Valium. Sandy, who worked at the college library, came by on her way home to fix supper. But most of the nights, Ellie lied and said she’d had a late lunch and not to bother fixing anything.
Late Friday afternoon, her cell phone rang. Only a few people had that number: Joel, Sandy, her sister, her best friend in Virginia. But it was none of those. It was Detective Hansen.
“Did I wake you?” His voice was already familiar and somehow comforting, and she found it odd that she felt that way.
“No, yes. I’ve done nothing but sleep all week. I think I must be depressed.” She heard a low chuckle from the other end.
“I would think you have a right to be,” he said. “How are you doing, other than sleeping?”
“I don’t know. I just get through the days. I’m looking forward to going back to work next week.”
“Isn’t that a little soon?” She heard the concern in his voice and it made her feel somehow safer though she knew that was silly. He was two hundred miles away.
“You sound like Sandy,” she said. “I need to work. I need to get back into my life. I can’t watch any more game shows or soap operas. I’m not cut out to be idle.”
“Well, don’t rush it. You’ve been through a lot.”
He paused and she waited.
“I don’t have a lot to report,” he said. “We’ve eliminated all the possible suspects that we came across. We’re pretty well convinced that it wasn’t someone you knew.”
“Like who?”
“Some of Dr. Richardson’s colleagues, men he knew socially.”
“Arlen.” She didn’t know why that occurred to her.
“Yes, we looked at Mr. Gerstead, but his DNA was not a match.”
“You tested his DNA?”
“Ellie, Dr. McKay, we’re very thorough at what we do.”
“Arlen? You suspected Arlen? He’s my friend. He’s married to my best friend. He’s …”
“Not that kind of guy?”
“Touché,” she said. “What do I know about men and what they’re capable of?” She could hear the bitterness in her own voice.
“Whoa,” he said. “We looked at every man we could think of. We have nothing that puts Mr. Gerstead in that room with you and Joel, nothing at all. We have no evidence that you should feel uncomfortable with him.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“We don’t suspect him.” Hansen’s voice sounded weary and patient. She remembered his tired smile. He went on. “We’re looking in other directions.”
She felt a deep sinking in her gut. “You’re not going to find him, are you? The man who did this. He’s going to be out there in my world.”
“I’m not going to stop looking, Ellie. That’s all I can say.”
“Yeah, I got it. Okay, I’m going to hang up now. Thank you for calling.” The coldness in her voice spread through her body. She went upstairs and got into bed and turned the heating pad on as high as it would go.
20
After Hansen hung up, he sat in his car outside Ellie’s apartment for a while. He wanted to go up and knock on her door, convince her he was doing all he could. But it wasn’t really true. Once the coroner ruled that Joel Richardson had taken his own life, the case faded quickly from priority in the Gettysburg Borough Police Department workload, there were plenty of other cases to handle. And Ellie McKay wasn’t a resident or a local taxpayer. She was a tourist who’d brought her own bad fortune to town with her. After the initial gossip and titillation, the locals, including the police chief, saw it as a Pitts
burgh matter. Hansen argued that the second man could have been a local, and the chief gave them permission to spend a bit more time looking into it, but he clearly didn’t see it as critical.
He had heard twice that week from Arlen Gerstead, who said he was calling for Ellie, wanting to know if there was any news. The first time, his DNA results had just come back and Hansen wondered if Arlen were gloating, rubbing Hansen’s nose in it that he wasn’t a suspect any longer. Capriano had pegged Gerstead as a prima donna witness: someone enamored of crime and delighted to be involved. But something deeper nagged at Hansen about Arlen, something for which there was no evidence whatsoever. Maybe he just didn’t like the man, didn’t like someone who’d want to be friends with Joel Richardson.
To both phone calls, Hansen had said no, no news. That was half true. They still had no clue as to the identity of the second man, but over the two weeks, they had learned a lot about Joel Richardson.
The Vietnam story was true. He had served two tours of duty, first as a medic, then as a surgeon. He’d been twice decorated although a doctor in DC named Kirchner, who had worked with Richardson in a field hospital, said he wasn’t convinced that he’d deserved the medals. “But then, I didn’t like him much,” Kirchner had told Hansen over the phone. “He often worked drunk or hungover, and he had a temper and took it out on the nurses. But he was a wizard with the knife, I’ll say that for him. He saved a lot of lives—and limbs—and didn’t lose too many. In the off-time, he liked to cruise the bars and the prostitutes. He even married one, I heard. That wasn’t my scene. I had a wife and kids here in the States and all I wanted to do was survive and come home.” He paused and then gave a deep sigh. “He’s dead, you say? Was it a suicide?”
“At this point, we don’t know.”
“Hmmm. That war did strange things to a lot of us. Were you old enough to serve back then?”
“I volunteered when I turned eighteen,” said Hansen, “but the war ended while I was in basic.”
“Just as well,” Kirchner said. “Just as well.”
Richardson’s Pittsburgh General colleagues said much the same thing when Hansen showed up there toward the end of the second week. Excellent skills, undaunted by the most impossible cases, a great track record but tough to work with. The nurses weren’t interested in being on shift with him, as he made things difficult for them.
“How so?” Hansen had asked one ER nurse practitioner.
She ran her fingers through her short gray hair. “Nothing specific, really. Just an attitude of impatience and intolerance. He wanted everything at warp speed—instruments, test results, answers. On a busy night, and there aren’t many that aren’t busy in the ER, it’s chaotic enough here without a doctor cursing the technicians.”
“Anything odd about his personal life?” said Hansen. “I know sometimes doctors and nurses …”
She laughed. “Around here we called him Flash. All style, no substance. He looked good but there was nothing really there.”
“Anyone who tried him out?”
“You might ask Janey Colson. She dated him a bit when he first came to the hospital.”
But Janey had little to say when Hansen tracked her down. “We went out a few times. He was good-looking, a sharp dresser. Took me to a few nice restaurants. But I was looking for a husband and there was something missing.”
“Missing between you?”
“Yes, but more missing in him. To be honest, the sex wasn’t all that great. He had, well, technique, he knew everything to do, but he wasn’t really there with me. I wanted a man who was present, not off in his head carving up a spleen.”
“Did he ever suggest anything kinky?”
“No,” she said. Then she frowned and looked at him.
“What?” said Hansen. “Anything will help.”
“Well, one time I saw some books in his bedroom. The Story of O and a collection by the Marquis de Sade. I knew what they were about—I’ve been around a little. But he never suggested we do anything out of the ordinary and I’d forgotten about them.”
“He ever suggest a threesome?”
“No,” she said, then she paused. “Well, there was this one time. A friend of his met us for breakfast after work. The guy seemed kind of nervous but decent enough. After we ate, Joel invited us both back to his apartment. We played music and drank until dawn and the men smoked a joint and talked about motorcycles and accidents they’d had. It wasn’t all that fascinating to me, and I kept waiting for Jerry to go home so Joel and I could go to bed.”
“That was his name? Jerry?”
“Yeah. I remember wondering if he was a J Jerry or a G Gerry. Funny what the mind gets up to when you’re bored.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing really. There was an odd kind of tension in the room as the morning came on, and I suddenly didn’t feel too comfortable. So I went to the bathroom, got my coat, and went in to say goodbye. Joel didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, gave me a peck on the lips and didn’t even walk me to the door, but Jerry looked disappointed, like he was expecting something to happen. Later, after I broke it off with Joel, I saw Jerry a couple of times at the hospital waiting for Joel and we chatted. I thought he might ask me out, but he didn’t and I met my husband and that was that.”
Hansen spent a couple more hours talking to Richardson’s neighbors, other ER doctors, guys at his gym. Nothing turned up. He checked in with Capriano, who shared what he had.
Capriano had handled Richardson’s electronic and financial records. The dead man had no landline and his cell phone and rarely used pager records led them nowhere. There were calls to the answering service and the hospital, quite a few to Ellie and three or four to the Gersteads over the months Ellie and Joel had seen each other. There were calls to a lot of take-out restaurants in Joel’s Pittsburgh neighborhood. He saw a dentist and a chiropractor. The detectives got excited when they found the number of a Monroeville massage therapist, but it turned out that Joel had twice bought Ellie a massage gift certificate. He had never been in the place himself. And none of the numbers he called belonged to a Jerry or a Gerry or a Jerome or a Gerald.
Richardson had money. He made a great deal, had paid for his condo and his Lexus outright, owned expensive art. He had an American Express card, which he seemed to use only for travel and the occasional phone or email purchase. He withdrew $1,000 nearly every Friday—weekend cash spending, they assumed, but on what?
Capriano traced his clothes to several clothing importers online, one in Italy, one in Hong Kong, and other labels revealed a tailor in Squirrel Hill, who was most distressed to hear that such a good customer was no more. But there was nothing suspicious, or rather nothing that led anywhere.
That was the problem: Nothing led anywhere. There was no trace of the second man. Capriano and Hansen both knew that there’s always a trace, that something would turn up but it was impossible to predict when. The Pittsburgh police put it in pending and Hansen headed home.
Hansen was more than reluctant to let the case go. What had happened to Ellie in that hotel room filled him with shame and anger. First, he was a career cop and a true believer. Protect and serve was what he lived by. While he wasn’t always so sure about misdemeanor drug busts, he didn’t like to see any creep get away with a heinous crime. And this was a heinous crime. They all agreed that Richardson had been in on it, probably arranged it, probably paid for it. If he had abused her himself and then killed himself from the shame of his sickness, well, that would have been terrible but it would have satisfied the right order of things in Hansen’s world. But Richardson hadn’t done it. He’d let it happen, had it done, wanted it done. And he’d most likely watched. In his jacket pocket, the forensics team had found two matching linen handkerchiefs, each full of semen. They couldn’t pinpoint the time of ejaculation but could tell that the emissions had happened several hours apart. Hansen prided himself on knowing a fair amount about human nature, but this was one sick guy.
The night had descended and it was hours back to Gettysburg. Hansen thought one more time of knocking on Ellie’s door, but he knew his motives weren’t entirely professional. He started the motor and with one more look up at her windows, he drove away.
21
Ellie wasn’t sure how she was going to make herself a life in Farmington, not in town or eventually on the ranch. She had never seen herself as living for her work but teaching had been fun, at least at first, and it had always given her life structure. So she met with the dean at San Juan College and although the man was clearly impressed with her credentials, there were no openings. There was, he said, a community education program if she wanted to offer French conversation for no credit. Ellie told him she’d think about it. As she drove away from the treeless campus, so different from the full-leafed splendor of gothic Greensburg, she realized that Joel was still calling the shots, pushing her into a retirement she did not want.
She wasn’t drinking. After breakfast with Al that first morning, she’d poured out the bourbon. She’d had several hard days of craving but that had eased with sleep and good food and long, long walks. She went to a couple of AA meetings but it didn’t seem to help much to be with strangers. She could hear her sponsor’s voice urging her to return but she didn’t go back.
She also didn’t know what to do with Al. She and Joel had seen each other once or twice a week, sometimes once or twice a month. That had been plenty. But being a wife was going to mean something quite different. For one thing, Al expected her to make decisions about redoing the house, expected her to want a say in wall colors and rug patterns and crockery. And he wanted to see her every day.