ER - A Murder Too Personal

by Gerald J. Davis

  “Neither,” I said. “No one was hurt and there was no damage, if you don’t count the stained sheets.”

  She reddened. The flush was apparent through her translucent skin. “Oh, don’t be concerned about that. I’ll have them cleaned and the bed made like new before they get back.”

  I had the feeling she’d done this before. We carried our drinks down an endless corridor and went down two steps into a sunken living room. The house was done in a slick modern style that suited Chisolm. There were huge abstract paintings on all the walls. Each room had its own fireplace and they were so clean it was apparent they had never been used.

  We lingered another half-hour over the drinks. Our conversation was the talk of two solitary souls who knew the words would be the last between them.

  When I stood up, she got to her feet and went down the hallway back to the bedroom to get dressed. After she was gone, I had a chance to scope out the alarm system and the window locks. I left one of the living room windows open a crack.

  She must have sensed something because she was back faster than a thoroughbred out of the gate.

  “Ready, dahling?” she said, and she held the ah just a split-second longer than necessary.

  I nodded. As we stood in the entranceway, she flicked on the alarm and checked to see that the red dot was lit.

  “We have forty-five seconds to get out,” she said with a wistful grin.

  I grabbed her. “Just enough time for a goodbye kiss.”

  Her lips were soft. And, as I turned her around, I shut off the alarm. It was a long and deep kiss. When it was time, I turned her again and led her out the door.

  ***

  Before an hour had passed I was back inside the house. It was one of those contemporary colonials that was neither contemporary nor colonial, just a bastardized edition of some architect’s vision. Like Chisolm, the house was ostentatious. It stood on the crest of a small hill in the center of four acres of neatly-tended grounds. What percent he owned and what percent the bank owned was a question to speculate on.

  I had all the time I needed to inspect the house. There was nothing unusual in the standard hiding places. He had a safe in his office that was easy to locate. It was behind a false front of the Harvard Classics and, knowing Chisolm the way I thought I did, there was only one reason for him to have the Harvard Classics in his home—as a false front for a safe.

  I didn’t even try to crack it.

  The house was large—too large for just two people. I went through every room. The interior was expensively detailed, with hand-carved moldings and plaster walls. You could see that these were people who entertained a lot, and extravagantly. The house seemed designed for that. One room served as a photo gallery and there I got a lot of views of Mrs. Chisolm. She looked a few years older than her husband, not unattractive, with a patrician solidness about her. I might have recognized her face from some society photos I’d seen in the Times. She had a square jaw and a clear intelligence in the eyes—or was it just arrogance?

  I’d have to find out more about this babe. The green-eyed monster was a nasty son of a bitch. If she didn’t know her husband had broken up with my wife…

  It took me three hours to search the entire house. The only thing of interest was in Chisolm’s office. It was in his rolltop desk, in one of those secret compartments that look like woodwork until you pull it just the right way. Next to a checkbook was a glassine envelope with a couple of grams of coke.

  It didn’t prove much, but it tied in with the blow in Alicia’s apartment. So Chisolm was a cokehead. And he’d probably introduced Alicia into its pleasurable byways. Another stop on the highway to perdition. What the hell had Alicia become? A metaphysical, psychological, feminist cokehead. My innocent bride, who wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette, who despised Freud, and who believed that fellatio was wrong.

  I flipped through the checkbook. Nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you believe that surviving on your overdrafts was unusual. Considering all the people I knew who were living beyond their means on their lines of credit or home equity loans, I guess it wasn’t anything special.

  I put the coke and the checkbook back where I found them and headed home.

  Now all I had to do was to check out Mrs. Chisolm’s temperament and find out if she was capable of shortening a person’s life expectancy.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “Why didn’t you tell me your little shrink played non-Freudian games?”

  “Ha,” Rachel said. “If you only began to know what that squirt was capable of.”

  “Then why do you go to him?”

  “Because like he amuses me.” She put her hands on her hips. “He’s transparent and he’s also a real sicko. He tries to do every female patient…and I would say his batting average is pretty good.”

  “And they go to bed with him?” I kept the distaste out of my voice.

  She laughed. “If you call that sofa a bed.” She inclined her head toward me. “You know about transference?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, he’s like the master of transference. All his women love him. And he loves them back in every hole. Sometimes he even cures some of them.”

  We walked along the path around the lake and came to Bethesda fountain. Central Park was almost empty this early on a Thursday morning. It wasn’t eight yet but the day was going to be the first hot one of the spring. I’d traded in my suit for a navy Lacoste shirt and khaki pants.

  I turned to look at her face with its delicate features. Almost perfection, except for the glint in her eye. What the hell was it? Wild, devious, cunning? Damned if I knew.

  “Why are you seeing Pasternack?”

  A broad grin spread across her face. “You know better than to ask a patient a question like that. A person in analysis should never say why she’s going to a shrink.” She seemed delighted with the question. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”

  She locked arms with me. “It was my condition,” she whispered in my ear, even though there was no one within thirty meters of us. “I have like a disorder called vaginismus. Do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a condition that makes intercourse extremely painful.” She screwed up her face in a rough approximation of pain. “He was trying to find out if it was organic or psychosomatic.”

  “And what did he find out?”

  She looked out over the lake at a young couple rowing a boat. The boy was having trouble maneuvering the boat back into the dock. He finally guided the boat in and the girl stepped over the seat and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. She was wearing a light summer dress that flowed with her movements. Shot in soft-focus, it could have been a thirty-second spot for a douche or a condom.

  Rachel turned away from this touching vignette and said, “He wasn’t sure. He said it might have been caused…by Daddy. In like a roundabout way, of course.”

  I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “All right. Then tell me why Pasternack is such a sicko.”

  She clearly didn’t mind talking about that. “He’s very good with his fingers and his tongue. But that’s all he uses, you know. I’ve heard he like only gets off by himself. I think he wants to show power over his female patients.”

  “A real Rasputin, this charmer. Tell me something. Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

  She chewed on that adorable lower lip. “If you’re a doctor, you think you’re like a god. You’re infallible, you know. You can do no wrong. It’s a given. Do you think a shrink measures himself by human standards? My little sicko has probably done more than most.” She giggled suddenly. “More than me, even.”

  I grunted. “You haven’t done half of what you claim.”

  “More than half,” she said with another giggle. “Maybe even more than twice.”

  ***

  I sat in my office that afternoon, shoes o
ff, feet on the desk, drinking black coffee out of a paper cup and thinking about Alicia. The coffee was hot. That was about all I could say for it.

  What were her final moments like? Did she think of me in those last measured seconds? That poor sweet bitch.

  Jesus. I just wanted to rip the heart out of the bastard that killed her.

  I had no shortage of real good possibilities. Stallings, her boss. Why did he fire her? Did she have something on him? Maybe he was banging her. Was I paranoid, or was the girl who was a virgin when she married me turning into the whore of Babylon? Chisolm. Cocaine and the end of a love affair. Mrs. Chisolm, angry beyond belief at her husband’s latest infidelity. Wheelock, because she wouldn’t go out with him or revenge because she dumped him? Pasternack. A twisted shrink. Was he twisted enough to kill? Garbarini, a harmless superannuated love child or a stern Zen master punishing a wayward disciple? Even Rachel. She wasn’t a killer, but there was something about her that didn’t sit right. Something I couldn’t figure out. It was that uncertainty….

  Where the hell to begin to begin? I was starting to descend into one of those black butt-kicking moods because there was no shortage of possible murderers and no feel for how to proceed from here. Then the fax rang and rolled out its message.

  I eased my feet off the desk and stood watching. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The typeface was Courier 12 point. Could have come from any computer in the free world. The words were not very polite. “Stay out of this you fucking bastard or you’ll be dead”

  Short and sweet. Only three more words than he needed to make his point. Maybe he added them for emphasis.

  Stay out of what? I was working on half a dozen cases. Which one was he referring to?

  I checked the sending number on the header and called it, but all I got was a fax tone on the other end. I sent a fax asking where they were located but all I kept getting was a disconnect message. Five minutes later, the fax got through. The return fax took another couple of minutes.

  The fax said the place was on Forty-second between Sixth and Seventh, in what you would not call the fanciest precinct in town. It was four blocks from my office. I grabbed my jacket and got down there as fast as I could. It was one of those public fax-sending storefronts with Xerox machines and post office boxes, squeezed between a smoke shop and a porno hangout. The fat slob behind the counter took a spit-soaked cigar out of his mouth long enough to tell me, “I don’t remember nothing about nobody. We get hundreds of people in here every day.” When I put a twenty on the counter, he just shrugged and looked out the door at a sleazebag who was trying to come in. “Get the fuck out of here,” he yelled, “or I’ll bust your fucking skull.”

  I picked up the twenty. That was the way I felt too.

  I was in one of the foulest moods I’d ever been in. Black as pitch. For the next couple of hours I wandered around the city trying to sort it out.

  Every block was so familiar. I walked around the East side until it became too sterile. Then I took the Seventy-ninth street transverse through the park and walked around the West side, sensing rather than seeing the menace. This was a third-world city next to the opulence of the East side, separated by the green wilderness. A jumbled whorehouse of all nations next to the ordered world on the other side of the park.

  All the walking and musing did nothing to ease my disposition. I walked through the night. Tomorrow, I’d start looking for Wheelock. I hoped it would be him. That would be a nice symmetry. I wouldn’t treat him too kindly.

  CHAPTER XIX

  You could call them boiler rooms or bucket shops, but they were usually located in storefronts or first-floor offices in rundown buildings in old industrial neighborhoods. They had names like Second Jersey or First Interstate or First International or various combinations and permutations of names like Morgan, Whitney, Rothschild, Fiske. The only thing they had in common was that their names ended in Securities.

  This one was located in Hoboken, but it could just have well been in Miami or Denver. They never stayed put in one location too long. Just long enough for the complaints to pile up in the state attorney general’s office or the SEC or the NASD. Then, just before the investigators swooped down, they moved operations to a less inhospitable site and took a new name.

  All they needed was a switchboard for the phones and some desks. Sometimes they didn’t even need the desks. The young turks who worked these shops were college dropouts. One or two years of college and a burning desire for quick and easy bucks were all that was required. That and a slick phone manner. They’d call across the country, say they were calling from Wall Street, and play to the greed that drives the blue collar and pink collar and the retired and the widowed. The story was invariably the same. There was a gold mine, or a Russian default, or platinum options, or a new Internet company, as long as it had .com as a suffix. There was a new process, or a crisis impending. There was always a scheme—and if you waited too long you would miss out. The company would go public, the process would become common knowledge, the crisis would erupt. Now was the time to get in—before the masses, while you had early knowledge.

  It had taken me more than an hour to get there because the upper level of the George Washington bridge had been closed and I had to go five miles an hour in a vehicle designed to burn rubber at a hundred and fifty.

  The Palisades were partly shrouded by the early morning haze. The view of the Hudson was still magnificent, but not enough to compensate for the slow crawl. As I sat stalled on the bridge, I watched the drivers around me picking their noses or smoothing their hair, tapping on the steering wheel to the rhythm of an unheard backbeat.

  I finally made it across to Jersey and drove along the local commercial streets, looking out for the building number. It was a storefront and there appeared to be a lot of activity inside the front window. A bunch of old men in working class clothing stood outside the door in a conspiratorial huddle, surveying the operation. There were signs hanging in the window promising 8% to 10% returns tax-free with no risk, guaranteed without fail.

  I parked on a side street in front of a row of neat two-family houses that spoke of solid values. No problem leaving the car there. There was always an Italian grandma watching out of the upper floor window and wired right into the local precinct.

  The girl at the desk looked surprised to see me, as if anyone half-alive ever wandered into the place. She was a luscious specimen of eighteen or nineteen with teased big blond hair and black nail polish, probably local, looking to get a job across the river on Wall Street. She must have assumed I was an investigator from the NASD, because she got up from behind her desk and came around to meet me.

  I told her I wanted to see the boss and she returned with a fat, sweaty guy in tow. By now all the young studs had lowered their voices or cupped their hands over the mouthpieces, and were staring at me surreptitiously. One flash of my badge was all I gave him. That was enough. I caught his sigh of relief as he pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his back pocket.

  “I’m looking for one Steve Wheelock,” I said to him.

  “Oh, yeah. Wheelock…Steve…” He passed the handkerchief over his brow. He was a tall, greasy guy, balding, with a bad shave and a protruding lower lip. He wore a poly shirt that still had yesterday’s dinner on it and a six-pack tie with those stripes that shaded from dark to light. The shirt was open at the neck and the knot of his tie was a third of the way down from his throat to his beer belly.

  “Wheelock worked here for a couple of years. He was a good broker. Put in his hours, made his calls, met his quotas, one of the best. Left here, let’s see,” he said as he rubbed his stubbly chin, “last April or May. Booze trouble, broad trouble, you know.” He winked at me with a jaundiced eye.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Which broad?”

  He wiped the back of his neck with the handkerchief. “He was a real cunt man, you know. Banged everything in sight. Some broad came into the office, not this one, the old office, when we were upstairs and she was wa
ving a gun and said she was going to blow his balls off and everything.”

  He seemed to think this was very funny because he started to guffaw and then it turned into a half laughing- half coughing spasm that I thought was going to end up in a heart attack, but he finally caught himself and wadded the handkerchief over his mouth and hawked into it.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Anyway, this broad must’ve scared the shit out of him because he didn’t come back no more. I heard he started drinking even more than before. He had us send his commission checks to …let me see…some place in Connecticut.”

  I had a good idea why this turkey was being so helpful. He had no beef with me. He thought I was a cop and he wanted to keep me happy and get me the hell out of there. As long as I wasn’t investigating securities fraud, he would have told me which way his wife liked to take it. Hell, he would’ve offered me his wife.

  “Who was the woman with the gun?”

  He hesitated and rolled his eyes up.

  “No idea. His girlfriend, maybe. A good-looking broad, though. Tall and thin, with long blond hair. Think her name was Barbara…something. I can find out for you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Do that for me.”

  He yelled out across the room. “Elliot, come over here, willya.” A guy in his mid-twenties hung up his phone and threaded his way between the desks. He was wearing a neatly-pressed blue shirt with a white collar and red suspenders. The shirt was buttoned at the neck and he wasn’t wearing a tie. He looked like one of those Iranian diplomats on TV. He had closely cropped curly hair and no sideburns.

  When Elliot got to us, Greasy threw an arm around his shoulder. “Elliot, my man. This gentleman is official.” He winked at Elliot. “He’s looking for Wheelock. You remember that broad that came in waving a piece around the old office? What was her name?”