Just Take My Heart

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Her plan didn't work. Only this time she called out Natalie's name as she woke. For the rest of the night, Alice was awake thinking of her lost daughter, musing over the memory that Natalie had been born three weeks early, arriving on her thirtieth birthday. Of course, after a marriage that had been, to her sorrow, childless for eight years, that had made Natalie a true gift from heaven.

  Then Alice thought about the evening a few weeks ago when her sisters had insisted on taking her to dinner for her seventieth birthday and toasted her at the table. They were afraid to mention Nata?lie's name but I insisted we toast her, too, Alice remembered. We even managed to joke about it. “Trust me, Natalie wouldn't have al?lowed a fortieth birthday party,” she'd said. “Remember, she always told us that in show business it's a good idea to be eternally young.”

  She is eternally young, Alice thought, sighing, as she got up from the easy chair at seven a.m. and reached down to pull on her slippers. Her arthritic knees were always worse in the morning. Wincing as she got to her feet, she walked across the living room of her small apartment on West Sixty-fifth Street, closed the windows, and pulled up the shades. As always, the sight of the Hudson River in Manhattan lifted her spirits.

  Natalie had inherited her love of the water. That was why she had so often driven up to Cape Cod, even for just a few days.

  Alice tightened the sash on her soft cotton bathrobe. She loved fresh air, but it had become colder during the night and now the living room was chilly. She adjusted the thermostat upward, went into the galley kitchen, and reached for the coffeepot. It had been set to go on at 6:55. The coffee had brewed and her cup was on the sideboard next to it.

  She knew she should eat at least a slice of toast, but she simply didn't want it. What would the prosecutor ask her? she wondered as she carried the cup into the dinette and sat at the table in the chair that gave the best view of the river. And what can I add to what I already told the detectives more than two years ago? That Gregg wanted a reconciliation and that I urged my daughter to go back to him?

  That I loved Gregg?

  That I now despise him?

  That I will never understand how he could have done this to her?

  For the interview, Alice decided to wear a black pants suit with a white blouse. Her sister had bought it for her to wear to Natalie's funeral. In these two years, she had lost a little weight and knew the suit hung loosely on her. But what difference does that make? she asked herself. She had stopped touching up her hair and now it was pure white, with a natural wave that saved her many trips to the beauty salon. The weight loss had caused the wrinkles on her face to deepen, and she had no energy to keep up with facials, as Natalie had always reminded her to do.

  The meeting was scheduled for ten o'clock. At eight, Alice went downstairs, walked a block past Lincoln Center, went into the subway, and took the train that stopped at the Port Authority Bus Termi?nal. On the brief ride, she found herself thinking about the house in Closter. A real estate agent had urged her not to try to sell it while the newspapers were writing daily about Natalie. “Wait a while,” he'd suggested. “Then paint the whole interior white. That will give it a nice clean and fresh feeling. Then we'll put it on the market.”

  Alice knew the man hadn't meant to be rude or insensitive. It was just that the idea of somehow whitewashing Natalie's death hurt so much. When his exclusive on the listing of the house ended, she did not renew it.

  When she got to the Port Authority, it was, as usual, teeming with people rushing in and out of the building, hurrying to and from platforms to catch their buses or to flag down a cab. For Alice, like every?where she went, it was a reminder. She could see herself rushing Natalie through here after school for television commercial audi?tions as early as when she was still in kindergarten.

  Even then, people stopped to look at her, Alice thought, as she waited on line to buy a round-trip ticket to and from Hackensack, New Jersey, where the courthouse was located. When all the other kids had long hair Natalie had the pageboy cut and bangs. She was a beautiful child and she stood out.

  But it was more than that. She had Stardust clinging to her.

  After all these years, it would have felt natural to go to Gate 210 where the bus to Closter was located, but Alice, her feet leaden now, went to Gate 232 and waited for the bus to Hackensack.

  An hour later she was walking up the steps of the Bergen County Courthouse and, as she placed her bag on the electronic security monitor, timidly inquired as to the location of the elevator that would take her to the second-floor prosecutor's office.

  Just Take My Heart

  8

  As Alice Mills was getting off the bus down the block from the courthouse, Emily was reviewing her notes for the interview with Bill}' Tryon and Jake Rosen, the two homicide detectives who had worked on the Natalie Raines case from its inception. They had been among the prosecutor's team which responded to the call from the Closter police after they had arrived at Natalie's home and found her body.

  Tryon and Rosen had settled in chairs opposite her desk. As usual, when Emily looked at them, she couldn't help but feel the stark con?trast in her reaction to the two men. Jake Rosen, age thirty-one, six feet tall, with a trim body, close-cropped blond hair, and an intelli?gent demeanor, was a smart, diligent investigator. She had worked with him several years before, when they both had been assigned to the juvenile division, and they had gotten along well. Unlike a cou?ple of his colleagues, including Billy Tryon, he had never seemed to resent having a woman as his supervisor.

  Tryon, however, had been cut from a different cloth. Emily and other women in the office had always felt his thinly veiled hostility. They all resented the fact that because he was Prosecutor Ted Wesley's cousin, no complaints, however justified, had ever been filed against him.

  He was a good investigator, Emily didn't dispute that. But it was

  common knowledge that in the methods that he sometimes used to obtain convictions, he walked the line. There had been numerous accusations over the years by defendants who angrily denied that they had made the incriminating verbal statements he described in his sworn testimony at trials. While she understood that all detectives receive that kind of complaint at some point, there was no doubt that Tryon had much more than his share of them.

  He was also the detective who had been the first to respond to Easton's request to talk to someone from the prosecutor's office after his arrest for the burglary.

  Emily hoped the distaste she felt for Tryon did not show in her expression as she looked at him, slouched in his chair. With his weather-beaten face, shaggy haircut, and eyes perpetually half closed, he looked older than his fifty-two years. Divorced, and known to consider himself a ladies' man, she knew that some women out?side the office found him appealing. Her distaste was magnified when she heard that he was telling people she wasn't tough enough to try this case. But after studying the file she had to admit that he and Rosen had done a thorough job of investigating the crime scene and of interviewing the witnesses.

  She did not waste time on pleasantries. She opened the manila folder on top of the file on her desk. “Natalie Raines's mother will be here in a little while,” she said crisply. “I've been going over your reports and her initial statement to you the night Natalie died and her written statement a few days later.”

  She looked up at the two of them. “From what I see here, the mother's first reaction was that she absolutely refused to believe that Gregg Aldrich could have anything to do with this.”

  “That's right,” Rosen confirmed quietly. “Mrs. Mills said she loved Gregg like a son and had begged Natalie to go back to him. She thought Natalie worked much too hard and wanted to see her give more time to her personal life.”

  “You'd think she'd want to kill him,” Tryon said sarcastically. “Instead she's all worried and upset about him and his kid.”

  “I think she understood Aldrich's frustration,” Rosen said, turn?ing to Emily. “The friends we interviewed all agree
d that Natalie was a workaholic. The irony of it is that what drove him to murder could make the jurors feel sorry for him. Even his own mother-in-law felt sorry for him. She didn't even believe he did it.”

  “When was the last time either one of you spoke to her?” Emily asked.

  “We called her just before Easton's statement hit the papers. We didn't want her to read about it. She was really shocked. Before that, she called a few times to see if anything had developed in the investigation,” Rosen said.

  “The old lady wanted someone to talk to,” Tryon interjected, his voice indifferent, “so we talked to her.”

  “How nice of you,” Emily snapped. “I see in her statement that Mrs. Mills talked about Natalie's roommate, Jamie Evans, being murdered in Central Park fifteen years before Natalie died. You asked her if she thought there could be any connection to this?”

  “She said that would be impossible,” Tryon replied. “She told us Natalie never met the roommate's boyfriend. She did know that he was married and supposedly getting a divorce. Natalie had urged her roommate to break it off because she knew he was conning her. Nat?alie said she did see his picture once, and when it was missing from the roommate's wallet after the murder, she thought there could be a connection, but the detectives on the case didn't buy it. There had been a series of muggings in the park about that time. Jamie Evans's wallet was on the ground with her credit cards and money gone, and her watch and earrings were missing, too. The cops believe she re?sisted the robbery and ended up dead. Anyway, they never did figure out who the boyfriend was, but the bottom line is they thought it was a robbery gone bad.”

  The phone rang. Emily picked it up. “Emily, Mrs. Mills is here,” the receptionist said.

  “Okay. We'll be right there.”

  Rosen stood up. “Why don't I get her, Emily?”

  Tryon did not move.

  Emily looked at him. “We'll need another chair,” she said. “Would you mind pulling one in?”

  Tryon ambled to his feet. “Do you really need both of us here for this? I'm finishing my report on the Gannon case. I don't think Momma is going to come up with any surprises.”

  “Her name is Mrs. Alice Mills.” Emily made no effort to hide her irritation. “I would appreciate it if you would be a little more sensitive.”

  “Lighten up, Emily. I don't need any instructions.” He looked her in the eye. “And keep in mind I was working on cases in this of?fice when you were in the third grade.”

  As Tryon left, Rosen walked in with Alice Mills. In a quick moment, Emily observed the sorrow etched in the older woman's face, the slight tremor in her neck, the fact that the suit she was wearing seemed too big for her. Still standing, Emily introduced herself, ex?pressed her condolences, and invited her to sit down. When she sat back in her own chair, Emily explained to Natalie Raines's mother that she would be handling the trial and would do her best to con?vict Gregg Aldrich and obtain justice for Natalie.

  “And please call me Emily,” she concluded.

  “Thank you,” Alice Mills said softly. “I must tell you that the people from your office have been very kind. I only wish they could bring my daughter back.”

  An image of Mark saying good-bye to her that last time flashed through Emily's mind. “I wish I could bring her back,” Emily re?plied, hoping that the catch in her throat was not apparent.

  For the next hour, her voice conversational, her manner unhur?ried, Emily reviewed the statements that Mills had given two years before. To her dismay, it soon became clear that Natalie's mother still was torn about whether Gregg Aldrich could have committed the crime. “When they told me about Easton, I was stunned and devastated, but at least it was a relief to know the truth. But the more I read about this fellow Easton, the more I wonder.”

  If the jury thinks like that, I'm cooked, Emily thought, and moved on to the next area she wanted to discuss. “Mrs. Mills, Natalie's roommate, Jamie Evans, was killed in Central Park many years ago. I understand that Natalie thought that the mystery guy she was see?ing might be responsible?”

  “Jamie and Natalie both gone,” Alice Mills said, shaking her head as she tried to blink back tears. “And both murdered . . . Who could possibly have imagined such unspeakable tragedy?” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and then continued. “Natalie was wrong,” she said. “She saw that man's picture in Jamie's wallet once, but that was at least a month before Jamie was killed. For all Natalie knew, Jamie might have thrown it out herself. I think Natalie's reac?tion was like what I feel right now. She and Jamie were so close. She needed to blame someone, to punish someone for her death.”

  “As you want to punish Gregg Aldrich?” Emily asked.

  “I want to punish her murderer, whoever he is.”

  Emily averted her eyes from the naked pain on the other woman's face. This was the part of her job that she dreaded. She realized that the empathy she felt when she saw the anguish of a victim's fam?ily was what drove her to present the best possible case in court. But today, for some reason, more than ever before, the grief she was wit?nessing touched her to her very soul. She knew it was useless to try to assuage this mother's grief with words.

  But I can help her by proving not only to a jury but to her that

  Gregg Aldrich was responsible for Natalie's death and deserves the harshest sentence the judge can give him —life in prison without parole.

  Then she did something she had not expected to do. As Alice Mills got up to leave, Emily stood up, hurried around her desk, and put her arms around the heartbroken mother.

  Just Take My Heart

  9

  Michael Gordon's desk in his office on the thirtieth floor of Rockefeller Center was heaped with newspapers from all over the country', a usual sight in the morning. Before the end of the day, he would have scanned all of them looking for interesting crimes to cover on his nightly program, Courtside, on channel 8.

  A former defense attorney, Michael's life had changed dramatically at age thirty-four, when he had been invited to be on that same program, one of a panel of experts analyzing ongoing criminal trials in Manhattan. His perceptive comments, quick wit, and black Irish good looks had ensured his frequent invitations to be a guest on the show. Then when the longtime host retired, he was asked to take over, and now, two years later, it was one of the most popular pro?grams in the country.

  A native of Manhattan, Mike lived in an apartment on Central Park West. Though a sought-after bachelor, and despite the many invitations that were showered on him, he spent many nights quietly at home working on the book he had contracted to write, an analysis of great crimes of the twentieth century. He planned to open it with Harry Thaw's killing of the architect Stanford White in 1906 and end with the first O. J. Simpson trial in 1995.

  It was a project that fascinated him. He had come to believe that most domestic crimes were rooted in jealousy. Thaw was jealous that

  White had been intimate with his wife when she was a very young woman. Simpson was jealous that his wife was being seen with someone else.

  What about Gregg Aldrich, a man he had admired and liked? Michael had been a close friend of both Gregg and Natalie even before they were married. He had spoken eloquently at Natalie's memorial service and had frequently invited Gregg and his daughter, Katie, to his skiing lodge in Vermont on weekends during the two winters since Natalie's death.

  I always believed that the cops rushed to judgment by publicly referring to Gregg as “a person of interest,” Michael thought, as he absentmindedly glanced at and pushed aside the newspapers on his desk. What do I believe now? I just don't know.

  Gregg had called the same day he was indicted. “Mike, I assume you'll be covering the trial on your program?”

  “Yes.”

  “I'm going to make it easy for you. I'm not going to ask you if you believe Easton's story. But I think it best if we avoid each other until after the trial.”

  “I think you're right, Gregg.” An uncomfortable silence settled between the
m.

  They had not seen each other much in these past six months. Occasionally they'd been in the theatre or at a cocktail party and had only nodded in passing. Now the trial was scheduled to start on September 15th, next Monday. Mike knew he would cover it the usual way, highlights of the day's testimony every evening, followed by discussion with his panel of legal experts. It was a real break that the judge was allowing cameras inside the courtroom. Clips of the actual proceedings made for good viewing.

  Knowing Gregg, he was sure that on the surface he would be composed no matter what accusations the prosecutor threw at him. But Gregg's emotions ran deep. At the memorial service he had been composed. Later that evening in his apartment, with only Nat?alie's mother and Katie and Mike present, he had suddenly started sobbing inconsolably, then, embarrassed, had rushed from the room.

  There was no question he had been crazy about Natalie. But had that outburst been pure grief, or had it been remorse? Or was it terror at the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison? Mike wasn't sure anymore. For some reason the image of Scott Peterson tacking up posters with pictures of his missing wife when he had in fact murdered her and tossed her body in the Pacific Ocean surfaced whenever he thought of the evening that Gregg had broken down.

  “Mike.”

  His secretary was on the intercom. Startled out of his reverie, Michael said, “Oh, uh, yes, Liz.”

  “Katie Aldrich is here. She'd like to see you.” “Katie! Of course. Send her in.”

  Mike rushed to get up and around his desk. As the door opened, he greeted the slender, golden-haired fourteen-year-old with open arms. “Katie, I've missed you.” He could feel her trembling as he embraced her.