Dante's Wood

by Lynne Raimondo

  “With a distinctive name like that it shouldn’t take long to find her in our records. Give me a minute to look and I’ll be right back.”

  I waited anxiously, at once thrilled that my subterfuge seemed to be working and fearful that Tanya would yet catch me in a fraud. A fluorescent light overhead sputtered, counting off the seconds like sand in an hour glass. When enough had fallen to fill Jones Beach, Tanya returned.

  “Found it!” she declared in triumph. “It’s one of our signature pieces. We don’t have it in stock, but I can have it ordered for you. And guess what? A copy of the original appraisal was there too, so you can submit an insurance claim.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “My wife might find out.”

  “We can send it directly to the insurer, if you prefer. You should, you know, Mr. Dickerson. An expensive piece like that . . .”

  I was momentarily stunned, not sure my hearing hadn’t gone the way of my sight. “What did you just say?”

  “Mr. Dickerson. That is your name, isn’t it? Nathanial Dickerson is what we have in our records. They say you purchased a diamond pendant necklace valued at $4,500 for a Ms. Shannon Sparrow on June 16 of last year. You paid for it with cash, just like you said. Is there something wrong? You look ill all of a sudden.”

  Later, I wasn’t sure how I got out of there without giving myself away. My hands were shaking like an old drunk and I could barely control them long enough to put down a cash deposit on the necklace and sign the order form. It would be waiting for me at the store in a week’s time. “Call ahead, just to be sure it’s come in,” Tanya warbled as she escorted me to the door. “I hope it turns out all right. I would never have said this before, but your wife is a very fortunate woman.” I muttered a weak thank you and stumbled out into the daylight. Somehow I managed to get back to my place without being flattened by someone’s Ford Explorer, my thoughts racing ahead of me like wildfire.

  Nate? Nate was Shannon’s lover? It seemed fantastic and yet it fit, starting with Judith’s suspicion that Shannon was molesting her son. Judith’s instincts had been good. Shannon was sexually involved with a male family member—Judith just hadn’t latched onto the right one. And it explained the DNA results, too. I remembered suddenly what Josh had said about Charlie having an identical twin. I had been so focused on the fact that only one in ten thousand men could have fathered Shannon’s child I had overlooked the obvious. As father and son, Nate and Charlie’s genetic profiles would resemble one another closely. Even if the testing lab had been alerted to look for such a match, the statistical nature of the analysis might have precluded saying with certainty which of the two it was. And the affair with Shannon left no doubt in my mind. I hadn’t been wrong about Charlie and Shannon after all.

  But with my relief at not having screwed up came another, ugly, realization. Nate had stood by while Charlie was accused of murder and withheld information that almost certainly would have exonerated his son. As a doctor, Nate must have known what the DNA results really meant. Yet he had remained silent, and even gone so far as to sue me for a faulty diagnosis. What kind of man would send his child—any child for that matter—to prison to cover up an adulterous affair? Did Nate care so little for Charlie that he would allow the boy’s life to be destroyed simply to avoid a confrontation with Judith? The idea sickened me, and all the more so because it recalled all my own lies to Annie and their fatal consequences for Jack.

  Unless . . . unless there was more to it than just concealing an extramarital fling. As O’Leary had reminded me, it was textbook knowledge that most violent deaths are caused by a person close to the victim. It was the reason I had been so fixated on finding out the identity of Shannon’s lover. I thought back again to my lunch with O’Leary, my speculation then that the killer had been someone with a medical background. Nate was a surgeon. He would have known how to silence Shannon quickly, before she had a chance to cry out. He also would have heard about the Surgeon murders, which were all over the news. He was clever enough to have planned Shannon’s death so it would look like another in the same string of killings.

  What he couldn’t have anticipated was Charlie stumbling onto Shannon after he had left her for dead. I imagined the dilemma this must have created for Nate—his life or the life of his son. Perhaps he had been able to rationalize putting his own interests first because in his innermost reaches he was ashamed of Charlie. During our first interview, Judith said Nate never spent any time with the boy and Nate went out of his way to emphasize Charlie’s limited intellect. I’d thought it was just an overreaction to Judith’s fanatical boosterism, but it might have been a sign of deeply conflicted feelings about Charlie. Nate’s anger toward me after the hearing also fit the pattern of a man unable to square his conscience with his conduct. He was projecting his guilt onto me, finding a scapegoat for the hideous injustice he was inflicting on his own child.

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I had a theory, more plausible than any I had come up with before. Now I just needed to prove it.

  I spent the rest of the day on my desktop computer. My excitement had proved inspiring and I thought I had another way of connecting Shannon to Nate. Virtually every state requires doctors, as well as lawyers and accountants, to complete a certain number of continuing professional education hours each year. It’s a win-win for everyone—except the Treasury Department. Lawmakers appear virtuous by holding licensees to strict standards, the CPE programs get rich selling them to a captive audience, and the participants can deduct the tuition as a business expense when it comes time to pay their taxes. To further lessen the pain, CPE is usually offered at luxury resorts so that the attendees can unwind on the ski slopes or lounge by a pool after dozing through an hour or so of lectures in the morning. Annie had accompanied me on many such excursions, and I was betting that Nate, a frequent speaker on the CPE circuit, had used them as a means of treating Shannon to expensive trips courtesy of his employers.

  It took a few hours of searching and listening, but by late afternoon I had compiled a list of Nate’s appearances at such seminars during the preceding year. I understood Judith’s complaint that he was always away. Given Nate’s travel schedule I was surprised he found room to operate, let alone spend time with his family. Altogether, he had taken twenty-two trips in the previous twelve months. A few were short hops to places like Detroit or Indianapolis. But the majority were weeklong stays in resort areas with a healthy ratio of golf course to regular acreage. When I finished, the beginning of my list looked like this:

  January 12 to 26 Ritz Carlton, Palm Beach

  February 6 to 12 Mandarin Oriental, Honolulu

  March 12 to 14 Biltmore Hotel, Phoenix

  April 23 to 28 Grand Hyatt, San Francisco

  May 9 to 11 The Westin, Miami

  And so on, for a total of two dozen hotel stays in all.

  It was a start, but now I needed to prove Nate had taken Shannon with him. I got nowhere with phone calls to the first three hotels on my list—they didn’t give out information about guest stays, not even to someone claiming to be the guest’s husband. Hotel number four required the guest’s credit card and Social Security number before they would check. The clerk at hotel number five put me on hold until the Muzak—a salsa-inspired rendition of the “1812 Overture”—finally drove me off the line. On my sixth try I got lucky. A sympathetic clerk bought my story that Shannon was taking me to the cleaners in a divorce settlement and agreed to see whether she’d stayed there in March, but there was no record of her having registered under her own name. Ditto with the seventh and eighth calls. I was beginning to feel despondent again until I hit on another idea, one more likely to succeed with an official-looking caller id. It was a quarter to five, so I paged Yelena on her cell.

  “What’s going on with you?” she asked me when she rang back, already on the way home, judging from the highway noise I could hear in the background.

  “The straight jacket’s a little tight,
but I’m beginning to see some advantages to padded surfaces.”

  “Dr. Frain has started a pool on whether you’ll be coming back.”

  “That was thoughtful of him. Which side are you in on?”

  “It wouldn’t be polite to say. What do you want now?”

  I outlined what I needed her to do in the morning.

  “Is that legal?” Yelena asked when I was through giving her the script.

  “Since when has that ever bothered you?”

  “They’re sending my cousin back to Murmansk on Tuesday. It’s warmer here.”

  I sighed. “How does two days off next month sound? I’ll tell everyone you came down with a case of shingles.”

  “Make it a week, and I’ll think about it.”

  Good ol’ Yelena, always upping the ante.

  “That’s too bad. I heard Dr. Brennan say he’ll be looking for a new assistant when Brenda retires next month. He mentioned you for the job if I can’t come back.” Sep was an unapologetic secretarial slave-driver; it was widely believed that Brenda had made it to retirement only by faking advancing deafness.

  “Twist my arm, why don’t you?” Yelena said.

  I told Yelena I would e-mail her a list of telephone numbers. Before she rang off, I also secured her promise to call the hospital garage to find out whether Nate Dickerson drove a white Jaguar to work.

  By the time I’d finished the e-mail to Yelena it was close to 5:30 and a long evening with nothing to do loomed ahead of me. On impulse, I called Alice and asked if she’d like to come over.

  “I meant it when I said I’m no cook, but we could order in. And I need to talk to someone about what I found out today,” I told her.

  “What is it? You sound almost . . . breathless.”

  “I don’t want to tell you over the phone. It’ll take too long to explain.”

  “I’ll be there,” Alice said.

  I spent an hour or so making my apartment less of a minefield for the low of vision. Then I called Hallie Sanchez.

  “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I heard about the complaint Nate Dickerson filed against you. I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. He acted rashly, against my advice. It doesn’t help Charlie’s case and it’s just plain wrong. That’s off the record, of course.”

  Of course. But I couldn’t blame Hallie. She had a client to represent—a client whose father might be the real murderer. I couldn’t tell her what I knew; it would put her in an awkward position. But I could try to buy some more time for Charlie.

  “How is he?” I asked, not especially keen to know the answer.

  “He’s . . . well, he’s still very quiet, not talking about what happened. But he’s in the prison hospital and I arranged for visits by a private psychiatrist.” She gave the name of a doctor I knew, a woman reputed to be excellent, and my fears eased somewhat. “She says we need to take it slowly.”

  “Has a trial date been set?”

  “Not yet, but there may not be one.”

  “Hallie,” I said. “Please tell me you haven’t agreed to a deal. Not that quickly.” It hadn’t even been a week since the preliminary hearing.

  “Not yet. But Di Marco called, asking for a meeting next week. I’ll listen to what he has to say. I’ll have no choice. And it may be the best thing for Charlie. The judge denied our motion to suppress the confession, as I knew she would after the DNA evidence came in.”

  DNA evidence that only I knew might be flawed. I again fought off a desire to tell her. I had to go slowly if I was going to prove it was Nate, not his son, who had killed Shannon.

  Hallie was saying, “With the charge reduced to manslaughter, and given Charlie’s special circumstances, we may be able to get a sentence that would allow him to serve his time in a minimum-security prison.”

  “How much time?”

  “I don’t think they’ll agree to anything less than ten to fifteen. That’s too long, I know, but his life wouldn’t be over. He’d get out when he was in his thirties, maybe sooner.”

  “You can’t agree to that.”

  “I won’t like it, but my job is to obtain the best possible result for him. His parents, Nate especially, want this over with. Nate said prison might even be good for Charlie, teach him a job he could do. He was only joking, of course. He’s still very upset about what’s happened and wants to do what’s best for the boy. It’s plain he loves his son very much.”

  I had to swallow hard to keep the bile down my throat.

  “Hallie,” I said. “I know what I have to say carries zero weight, but please don’t rush into anything. There can’t be that much urgency and . . . I’ve found out some things that may change your mind.”

  “What things?” Hallie said sharply.

  “I can’t tell you just yet.”

  “Playing detective now, huh? Come on, Mark, listen to yourself. Who do you think you are? This isn’t a parlor game for amateurs. This is the real world, where people get sent to death row for crimes they didn’t commit. If the best I can do is spare Charlie a life sentence, I’ll do it. You’re only a psychiatrist. What makes you think you can keep Charlie from going to prison if I can’t?”

  Her words echoed my own doubts and put me on the defensive.

  “I’m trying,” I said heatedly, “which is more than I can say for you.”

  “Trying to prove something to yourself, is what I think. Charlie’s well-being has nothing to do with it.”

  It was too much for me to hear and I lashed back.

  “Why don’t you just say it,” I said, becoming shrill. “You think Charlie’s life is worthless, or close to it. One day he’ll end up in an institution anyway, so what difference does it make if it’s one with bars on the windows? If he were a teenage boy of normal intelligence, a kid with a bright future ahead of him, you’d be fighting tooth and nail for him. You’re giving up because he’s retarded. You probably even think he did it.”

  Hallie spit back, “That’s a contemptible thing to say.”

  “Is it? A year or two ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but my own experience has opened my eyes to the way people like Charlie . . . the way we’re looked upon. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be shipped off to another planet so nobody would have to rub shoulders with us? You’re just like all the rest.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Give me a reason to think I’m wrong.”

  “All right. I wasn’t going to mention it because I thought it was irrelevant but now that you’ve accused me of being some kind of Hitler Youth you might as well know.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You once befriended a little crippled kid at school.”

  “You can be a real asshole, you know that? No, it’s my brother. He has ROP.”

  Retinopathy of prematurity—like Stevie Wonder. That jarred me. I thought back to that day in the Double L when Jesus wanted to introduce me to his cousin. Hallie couldn’t be . . . ?

  Hallie continued, “We were always taught to treat him just like anyone else. He’s a computer engineer now, with a great wife and three kids. It wouldn’t even occur to me that his life isn’t worth living. In fact, in many ways I envy him. I’ve always wanted a marriage like his. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything he can’t do. And not just because he’s my brother. I gave you a chance, didn’t I? Now maybe I think I shouldn’t have. I don’t need you to remind me that I failed Charlie at that hearing—or that I might be failing him again if I cop a plea.”

  Tears were pooling in her voice and I instantly regretted my stupid outburst.

  “Excuse me a minute,” Hallie said abruptly.

  I felt like a genuine heel.

  When she returned to the line I said, “Don’t worry. It’s off now.”

  “What’s off?” Hallie said through a tissue.

  “That gigantic chip on my shoulder. I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean what I said—about you not trying hard enough. It’s just this whole s
ituation . . . it cuts too close to home.” This had to qualify as the understatement of the century. Hallie blew her nose. “Just do one thing for me—hold off making a deal with Di Marco right away. There are things you don’t know, things I can’t tell you about yet, but if I’m right they change everything.”

  “When will you be able to tell me this big secret?” Hallie asked, still not fully recovered.

  “I don’t know. Soon, I hope. If it turns out to be nothing, I’ll support you in whatever you think is best for Charlie.”

  “Well that’s certainly a comfort.”

  “At least you’re back to being snotty with me.”

  Hallie said, “I wish . . . well let’s just say that when this is all over I’d like us to be friends.”

  “Me too,” I admitted.

  After I rang off I wondered about this sudden influx of women into my life. I hadn’t realized it before, but I was attracted to Hallie. Not in the same way I was attracted to Alice, but I liked the way Hallie was always so direct with me, questioning my motives. Alice challenged me too, but in a different way. I’d always found pure intentions hard to swallow. It threatened my jaundiced view of the world to think that Alice might be the real thing, that rare sort of person who really did care deeply about other people and wanted to improve their lives. I felt drawn to her selflessness, but it also made me uneasy. Could two so fundamentally different people find contentment with one another for very long?

  Alice arrived at seven, with a bottle of Bordeaux and a roast chicken from Fox & Obel. While the food warmed up in the oven we went out to my terrace, where we sat sipping the wine in the gentle evening breeze. Not far away, traffic thrummed on the Drive and a merchant ship chugged slowly up the river, accompanied by a flock of chattering gulls.

  “That’s awful,” she chastised after I’d described the incident in the Tiffany store.

  “All right, so I’m not much of an actor.”

  “No. I meant something different. You played the clown, used blindness as a club to beat those people with.”