The Chairmen

by Robert I. Katz

  Christina Pirelli stared at the picture on her desk. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “Maybe.”

  The picture was that of Roy Cullen, MD, a recently graduated orthopedist who had joined the faculty at Easton approximately six months before Christina Pirelli had arrived at Staunton. Jennie Suarez frowned down at the picture. “I didn’t know he was in New York.”

  “What was it you said about Winston-Salem?” Kurtz said. “Boring? Apparently, you’re not the only ones who left Winston-Salem for the big apple.”

  “What’s he like?” O’Brien asked.

  Jenny Suarez frowned. “Serious,” she said. “Not my type.”

  “So why did you go out with him?”

  “He’s got a lot of nice muscles.” She grinned. “I liked his looks. It took me only a couple of dates to figure out that he had no sense of humor.”

  “And how did he take it when you called it off.”

  “Not well,” she shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? It was a mistake.”

  Kurtz looked at O’Brien, who kept his face impassive, then at Christina Pirelli, who was frowning down at the picture sitting on the desk. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Why would this guy be stalking me?”

  “Because he’s a lunatic?” Kurtz said.

  “It’s a good question, though,” O’Brien said. “What did Dr. Pirelli have to do with his breakup, or anything else, for that matter?” He glanced at Christina, who was looking bewildered.

  “He does look like the guy who was chasing me,” she said doubtfully.

  “Call Harry Moran,” Kurtz said. “See about some surveillance.”

  O’Brien looked skeptical but picked up the phone. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Let’s see about some surveillance.”

  O’Brien’s skepticism proved well founded. Moran heard him out and then said, “So let me get this straight: a girl breaks up with a guy, six months later a campaign of intimidation begins at Staunton and you decide, with no obvious motive and no evidence whatsoever, that this is the guy who’s responsible. And you want me to assign a couple of policemen who have actual jobs to follow him around.”

  “It sounds bad when you put it like that,” O’Brien said.

  “Right,” Moran said. “Call me back when you’ve got something real.” He hung up.

  “Well,” Kurtz said. “We’ll just have to do it ourselves.”

  Kurtz had read about stakeouts. He knew what to expect and he wasn’t looking forward to it. Stakeouts were tedious, frustrating and boring. You sat there with nothing to do except wait. If you were lucky, it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t raining, and nobody noticed you, but you still had to pay attention. Even if you were sitting in a car parked on the street, your eyes fixed on the guy’s apartment, you couldn’t do anything else but sit there and watch because the subject might choose that exact moment to walk out his door and vanish.

  Luckily (or not, considering the circumstances), Kurtz didn’t have to do any surveillance because it turned out that Roy Cullen had left a week before on a two-week vacation to Aruba with his latest girlfriend, a nurse in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. He had been in New York when Christina Pirelli had first been stalked in the park but was safely out of the country during the latest incident.

  “Win some. Lose some,” Patrick O’Brien said.

  “Yeah,” Kurtz said. “I know how that works, except that so far, we haven’t won any.”

  Patrick shrugged.

  Kurtz grinned at him. “I have another idea.”

  Patrick sighed. “Of course, you do.”

  Chapter 21

  Color copies of forty-two letters were spread out on the table, loosely arranged by date of receipt. Most of them contained vague threats and promises of formless revenge. All of them except the first two, which were in pencil and as accurate as Christina Pirelli could remember, were written in crayon. Seen like this, all forty-two together, they seemed sinister but vaguely absurd. He had looked at them at least a dozen times.

  “What do you think?” Kurtz asked.

  Dina Werth was Bill Werth’s wife, an Associate Professor of English Literature at City College of New York. She was an attractive, slightly overweight woman, with long brown hair and an olive complexion. She looked up, a frown on her face. “You were right,” she said. “This one is from Medea.”

  “Medea…” Kurtz said.

  Dina smiled. “Medea is a play by Euripides, one of the few ancient Greek plays to survive into modern times. Medea has been betrayed by her husband, Jason. In revenge, she murders their two children and then takes their bodies away to be buried in secret. It’s fate. You’re going to die a miserable coward’s death, just as you deserve. That’s not an exact quote, of course. It’s paraphrased, but then, there are a lot of translations and they all differ slightly. She rose from her seat and went over to a bookcase, hesitated, then grabbed a thick book with a leather cover. She opened it and read:

  I take my children's bodies with me that I may bury them in Hera’s precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil fate. You will die a miserable coward's death as you deserve, struck on your head by a piece of the wreck of the Argo.”

  “The Argo…”

  “The Argo was Jason’s ship. You know, Jason and the Argonauts? Jason sailed to Colchis with Hercules and the Argonauts and stole the Golden Fleece.”

  “There are forty-two letters,” Kurtz said. “That seems pretty tenuous.”

  “It’s not the only one. She searched through the pile, held up a note and read: “‘Wounds heal slowly, by degrees. I’ll be coming for you. Soon.’” She waved the letter at Kurtz. “This is the first one, correct?”

  “So far as she can remember. She didn’t start saving them until the third,” Kurtz said.

  Dina gave a crisp nod, went back to the bookcase, scanned the top shelf and picked out two leather bound volumes. She opened one of them, flipped through, found the page she wanted and held the book out to Kurtz. “Here,” she said. “Take a look.”

  “How poor are they that have not patience!” Kurtz quoted. “What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” He looked at Dina.

  “Othello,” she said. “It’s not one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, but it’s not obscure, either.”

  Kurtz sat back in his chair. “Any more?”

  “Yeah,” Dina said. She grimaced and read another of the notes out loud. “How shall my hatred be shown? Simple. Only your blood will satisfy me.” She shook her head. “Sort of an asshole, isn’t he?”

  “Pretty much,” Kurtz agreed. “So that’s a quote?”

  “Yep. This one is a little more obscure.” She picked up the second book, opened it and held the page out to Kurtz.

  He squinted down at it. “’But say, Reuenge,—for thou must helpe or none,—Against the rest how shall my hate be showne?’ Kurtz frowned. “I don’t even know how to pronounce it.”

  “It’s from The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, written around 1585. It was one of the first revenge plays in Elizabethan theater. Supposedly, it was a major influence on Hamlet.”

  “Who would know this, today?”

  Dina shrugged. “An English scholar, maybe a theater buff. Nobody else, that’s for sure.”

  “A theater buff,” Kurtz said, and he smiled. “After all this time, a real life clue…Thanks,” he said.

  Elizabeth Reisman, Christina Pirelli’s sister, sat stiffly on the couch in her own living room. She was back home in North Carolina but she and Christina both had Skype on their computers. Kurtz and Lydia Cho sat on a brown, leather couch in Christina’s apartment. Christina sat next to them in an easy chair.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Elizabeth Reisman said. “You think that somebody resents Christina for something having to do with one of us, and that it somehow revolves around the theater.” She looked at Lydia Cho and raised an eyebrow. Lydia shrugged.

  Elizabeth Reisman looked like Christina, a little younger, a little thinner, but th
e same dark curls and pale complexion. Christina, sitting in front of her own computer screen and nursing a glass of Chardonnay, looked equally skeptical.

  “Yeah,” Kurtz said.

  “That doesn’t seem likely,” Elizabeth said.

  “It might not have anything to do with the theater, not directly, at least, but both of you, I’ve been told, like the theater, and this guy, whoever is doing it, obviously knows at least a little about the theater.”

  “Huh,” Elizabeth said.

  “Have either of you ever seen The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd?”

  “Never heard of it,” Elizabeth said.

  “How about Othello?”

  “Okay. I’ve heard of Othello.”

  “You’ve never seen it?” Kurtz said.

  “I read it in high school. I’ve never seen it performed.”

  “Medea, by Euripides?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Heard of it. Never read it. Never seen it.”

  Lydia Cho, who had been listening to this interchange with a grim look on her face, leaned back in the couch, took a deep breath and turned to Christina. “You got anything to drink?” she asked.

  Christina looked at her. “You mean like alcohol?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lydia said. “I mean like alcohol.”

  Silently, Christina rose to her feet, disappeared into another room and came back with a bottle of Bourbon. She poured a generous helping into a crystal glass, glanced at Lydia’s pale face, frowned and added a little more.

  “Thanks.” Lydia drank half of it in one swallow.

  “You’ve thought of something,” Kurtz said.

  Lydia sighed, then nodded, her lips set in a tight line. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve thought of something.”

  “Othello, The Spanish Tragedy and Medea are all about revenge,” Kurtz said. “This is not likely to be a coincidence.”

  Harry Moran shrugged. Lew Barent sat next to him, eating a burger and quietly listening. Barent had a small smile on his face. Kurtz, who had come to know him well, thought that Barent was enjoying being a spectator on what, to him, was a minor sort of case. “Revenge for what?” Moran said. “If Lydia Cho is correct, the interaction was superficial. They went out on a few dates. They weren’t physically involved. They drifted apart. How, exactly, is Christina Pirelli supposed to have harmed the guy?”

  “By existing?”

  Moran, Barent, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien were sitting in a booth at the Subway Inn, a homey sort of bar on the Upper East Side. Moran and Barent were officially off duty and they were all sipping beer.

  Patrick O’Brien picked a pretzel out of a bowl on the table and chewed on it. “Iago, if I remember correctly, also did not have any obvious motive when he hatched his plot against Othello, his supposed friend and superior officer. Since Iago lacked a definite motive, it’s generally assumed that Shakespeare meant Iago to be taken as the personification of pure evil.”

  Kurtz and Moran stared at him. Barent cocked his head to the side, smiled and poured himself another beer. Patrick O’Brien gave a modest shrug.

  “Well,” Moran finally said, “most criminals do have a motive, even if it’s simple jealousy for somebody who has a better life than they have.”

  “According to Lydia Cho,” Patrick went on, “she went out with this guy a few times while she was in Medical School. He was attentive, too much so, actually. He started to talk about a future on their third date. Around this time, Lydia decided to drop the MD part of her degree and go on with the PhD. She preferred research to taking care of patients. The guy was angry. Apparently, one of his fantasies about the future involved a wife who made a lot of money, so he dumped her. This didn’t bother Lydia Cho since she thought he was sort of a jerk, anyway. And that’s that.”

  “So where do Othello and Greek tragedy come in?” Patrick asked.

  “Lydia went to a number of plays with him, at least three or four. He expressed enthusiasm for the art form.”

  “It sounds like he expressed enthusiasm for everything to do with her, before she decided to stop pursuing her MD.”

  “So why blame Christina?” Moran asked.

  “Apparently, according to the guy’s fevered brain, Christina is the one who convinced Lydia to give up the idea of becoming a well-paid doctor and go into research, instead. Lydia and Christina both confirm that she was supportive of the decision. She didn’t talk her into it, but the guy was convinced that she had.”

  “Well,” Kurtz said, “that is not exactly that.” He grinned. “I put a Google search on the guy before coming here.” He took a sip of his beer and smacked his lips. “He’s dead.

  Moran and O’Brien stared at him. Barent shrugged. “About five years after his breakup with Lydia Cho, he drove his car off a bridge in Stockton, Colorado, where he was working as a bus boy in a local restaurant. The autopsy revealed high levels of both alcohol and cocaine in his blood. It might have been an accident but there was speculation as to suicide. Friends and co-workers claim he was depressed.”

  “Then why are we here?” Moran asked.

  Kurtz put his beer down on the table and raised an eyebrow. “He has a brother. The brother works at Staunton.”

  “Really?”

  “His name is James McDonald. He’s a pharmacy technician. His work takes him all over the hospital, which is certainly convenient. He also moonlights once a week at Easton.”

  Moran ate a pretzel and grudgingly nodded. “You have a theory, and it makes a little sense, but it’s not evidence.” He frowned. “Tell me about the brother. The dead guy.”

  “Joseph McDonald. He was in a Masters program in Sociology when he met Lydia Cho. Good looking, charming and obsessive. He had a lot of student debts and no job prospects beyond the dim hope of teaching high school, which he did for awhile, until he got fired for having an affair with one of his students. He went on welfare, worked for every left wing cause imaginable and chose Colorado as a place to live because he liked the outdoor lifestyle. He drove a car off a bridge and nobody mourned him, except his little brother, who was apparently the only person alive dumb enough to buy his line of bullshit.”

  “It’s not evidence,” Moran said again.

  “No, it’s not,” Kurtz agreed. “Is it enough to put a guy on him, at least for a couple of days?”

  Moran sipped his beer, while he considered the question. Finally, he looked over at Barent and nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I think we can do that.”

  Chapter 22

  The campaign of intimidation continued. During the next week, three more letters were received by nurses on the OB floor, two harassing phone calls were reported and a package containing a dead sparrow was delivered to Christina Pirelli.

  “Low level stuff,” Kurtz said.

  “I doubt the sparrow would agree,” Patrick O’Brien said.

  Kurtz shook his head. “Keeping the pressure up.”

  It was worth a shot but it wasn’t worth overtime. A rotating team of NYPD detectives was assigned to put James McDonald under surveillance. It was noted that he left his apartment each morning at approximately 7:30 AM and arrived at work by 8:00. Twice during the week, he went to a local pizzeria during his lunch hour, before returning to the hospital. He got off work at 4:30 PM, took the subway home and, on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, did not go out again. On Tuesday, he walked to a nearby Barnes and Noble, where he stayed for approximately forty minutes before picking up dinner at a neighborhood Indian place. On Friday, he had dinner with some friends at a local hamburger joint. He arrived home by 10:00 PM and was not seen to exit his building for the rest of the night. On Saturday, he went out shopping, strolled through the Museum of Modern Art and took in a movie by himself. On Sunday, he went running in Central Park. Nothing he did seemed unusual, out of place or suspicious.

  Meanwhile, the letters and phone calls continued.

  “I don’t know,” Moran said.

  “It could have been set up weeks in advance. We know he
’s been using intermediaries.” Kurtz grimaced. “Whoever he is.”

  “My point exactly,” Moran said.

  They continued the surveillance for three more days before Moran called it quits. “Either there’s nothing to discover or he’s covered his tracks. Either way, this isn’t working.”

  “Right,” Kurtz said, and glumly nodded.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “Huh?” Kurtz looked up at Lenore, then back down to the book lying in his lap. The book had been opened to the same page for nearly twenty minutes. “I’m trying not to take this personally,” he said, “but it’s not easy. This son of a bitch is calmly going about his business, ruining people’s lives, smirking, and playing us for fools.”

  “You don’t know that he’s smirking. That’s an assumption.”

  “Hah! I bet you he’s smirking right now. He’s probably sipping a glass of wine and congratulating himself on being smarter than we are.”

  Lenore raised an eyebrow, sipped her wine and said, “What are you going to do about it?”

  Kurtz drew a slow, deep breath and grimly smiled. “Well, that is the question, now isn’t it?” Unfortunately for Kurtz’ peace of mind, he had no idea what he was going to do about it. “I’m considering my options,” he said.

  Chapter 23

  “He’s twenty-seven years old,” Patrick O’Brien said. “He has an above average IQ and he got decent but not spectacular grades. His letters of recommendation were okay but nothing special.”

  “An underachiever,” Kurtz said.

  “Apparently.”

  “How come?”

  Patrick shrugged. “Other things on his mind? The letters don’t say exactly, but if you read between the lines, he seems to have spent a lot of time by himself. He was into video games, long distance running and wilderness camping. Also, saving the environment.”