“Do you stay here with him?” I said.
“You mean do I live with him?” She smiled. “Heavens, no. I’m his employee, not his …” She waved her hand. “The doctor is very sensitive about scandal. In this town, if my car stayed in the driveway all night, it would be all over town by sunup the next morning.”
“But you take care of him,” I said.
She shrugged. “I’m a nurse. It’s taken him awhile to acknowledge he needs taking care of. MS is an insidious disease.”
“What’s his prognosis?”
She looked away and shook her head. Then she said, “Come on. This way.”
I followed her through the living room and dining room to a screened porch on the back of the house. It looked out over a small lawn bordered by flower gardens, with deep woods beyond. A sprinkler was going tick-tick-tick, and the water dripping off the plants glittered in the morning sunlight.
Winston St. Croix was sitting in an easy chair with his feet up on a hassock. He was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt and a red bowtie. His wheelchair was parked in the corner.
A TV against the wall across from him showed several people sitting around a table. They seemed to be discussing the stock market.
When he saw me, the doctor smiled and waved me to the chair beside him. “Ah, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “You made it. Good.” He clicked the television off with a remote, then held out his hand to me.
I went over and shook it. His grip was feeble. “How are you this morning, Doctor?” I said.
He smiled. “My health. I can’t think of a more boring topic.” Then he frowned at me. “You’ve got a nasty contusion there. Bump into something?”
I nodded. “Clumsiness.”
“You should put some ice on it.” He looked over at Claudia Wells, who was standing in the doorway. “Bring us some coffee, my dear, would you please? And an icebag for Mr. Coyne.”
She arched her eyebrows at me, and I nodded. “Black, please.”
She left the room.
The doctor watched her go, then turned his head to me. “Remarkable woman,” he said. “She should’ve been having babies years ago.”
“She seems quite devoted,” I said.
“Oh, indeed. Altogether too devoted. I keep telling her. Take a cruise. Meet men. Get married. Have children. Claudia loves children. She shouldn’t be hanging around with an old invalid like me.” He spread his hands. “She won’t listen to me. Women. They just won’t listen, will they?”
I thought of Evie and smiled. “The interesting ones don’t seem to.”
He reached over and touched my arm. “You heard about Dr. Romano?”
I nodded.
“You met him yesterday, am I right? In my office?”
“Yes.”
“Terrible thing. The police were here earlier. Asked me all sorts of questions. As if I knew the poor man. I only met him yesterday. He was interested in buying my practice, you know.”
I nodded.
“Seemed like a fine doctor,” he said. “Unusual, these days, a young doctor who actually wants to help people. Most of them seem more interested in organs than people, if you know what I mean.”
Claudia came back with a carafe of coffee and two mugs. She put them on the table between the doctor and me, poured each mug full, and handed one to the doctor. I took the other one. Then she handed me an icebag. I thanked her and pressed it against my cheek.
St. Croix held his mug in both hands. “Thank you, my dear,” he said to Claudia. “Now, Mr. Coyne and I want to talk.”
She shrugged. “I’ll be in the living room if you need me.”
After Claudia left, I put the icebag on the table beside me and took a sip of my coffee. The doctor set his mug on the table, laid his head back, and closed his eyes. “I try not to let her know how I’m feeling. She worries too much.” He sighed, opened his eyes, and looked at me. “So where were we yesterday, Mr. Coyne, when we were so rudely interrupted?”
“We were talking about Evie Banyon.”
“Ah, yes. And you were telling me she had disappeared. Something to do with Larry Scott’s unfortunate death.”
“The police think she killed him.”
“And you want to find the real culprit, is that it?”
I shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “Evie Banyon wouldn’t kill anybody. That’s silly.”
“I agree. But now they think she might’ve killed Dr. Romano, too.”
“Why on earth would she do that?”
“She wouldn’t,” I said. “Do you know of any connection between Evie and Dr. Romano?”
“That Detective Vanderweigh was asking me the same questions just before you got here,” he said. “He was giving me way more credit than I deserve. I don’t know much about Evie, and I know even less about Dr. Romano. Evie honored me by letting me take her to dinner a few times. But that was several years ago. Dr. Romano came up from New Jersey to talk to me about buying my medical practice. I never saw him before yesterday. As delightful as Evie Banyon is, she is an unusually private person. I hardly feel that I know her. And I didn’t know Dr. Romano at all.” He blew out a breath. “I liked him, though. He reminded me of myself, oh, thirty years ago. Enthusiastic, idealistic, full of energy and ideas.”
“Do you know of any connection between Romano and Larry Scott?”
Dr. St. Croix ran his fingers through his thinning white hair and stared out through the screen. “Just me, I guess.”
“You?”
He shrugged. “Larry Scott was my patient, of course. Twenty years ago, when he was a child. Every child in Cortland was my patient back then. Oh, we were busy in those days, Claudia and I. Seven days a week, Mr. Coyne. Now they’ve got that new medical center. There’s a pediatric group there, and some of the newer folks in town prefer to take their children there. We’re still plenty busy, though. I’d love to just keep working, but …” He waved his hand.
I sipped my coffee and said nothing.
“I announced my retirement three months ago,” he said after a minute. “There was a nice story in the local paper, and the Providence Journal and the Globe both picked it up. ‘Old-time pediatrician who was actually still making house calls retires.’ ‘End of an era.’ That sort of thing. They ran a picture of me from several years ago. You wouldn’t recognize me, Mr. Coyne. I used to be a good-looking man, believe it or not.”
“I believe it,” I said automatically. “So is there a lot of interest in your practice?”
“I’ve had some feelers,” he said. “But Dr. Romano was the first one who actually came to talk business with me. He seemed quite serious about it. He was going to come by today to go over my records with me. He was most insistent on seeing my records.” He lifted his hand, then let it fall into his lap. “Well, I don’t blame him for that, of course. We did have to decide what he would pay me.”
“He was prepared to follow through with it?”
“Oh, yes. It was just a matter of arriving at a mutually agreeable arrangement.”
“What about Claudia?”
“He said he hoped she’d stay on, work with him. I told her that after he left yesterday. She was pleased.” He shook his head. “Well, that won’t happen, of course. Not now.”
“Could Evie have known Dr. Romano through her job at the medical center?” I said.
“I suppose it’s possible.” He frowned at me. “You’re not thinking … ?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Evie wouldn’t harm anybody.”
“She was very kind to me,” he said softly. “You know, Mr. Coyne, when I graduated from medical school, I took an oath. The first principle was, never do harm to anyone. They attribute the oath to Hippocrates, although there’s some doubt whether Hippocrates actually created it. Anyway, when you think about it, it’s a good way to live your life, whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or an insurance salesman. You want to do some good while you’re at it, too, of course. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, just doing no h
arm. I think that’s how Evie tries to live her life. She’s a good-hearted girl who wants to do no harm, and she doesn’t understand anyone who is willing to harm somebody else.”
“Like Larry Scott,” I said.
He shrugged. “Larry Scott seemed bent on doing Evie harm, all right. He made her life miserable. She stopped allowing me to squire her about because he was doing her considerable harm, and she feared he’d do me harm.”
“Did Scott ever threaten you?”
“Not to my face,” he said. “But Evie believed that he intended to harm me.”
“If she kept seeing you,” I said.
He nodded. “She thought we should stop having our dinners together. I agreed with her. I hoped that if she stopped seeing me, Larry would leave her alone. He was an unpredictable and dangerous young man.”
“But he never did you any actual harm.”
He smiled. “There was no reason why he should. Evie and I were friends. That’s all.”
“Yesterday you told me that you wished it was more.”
“Oh, sure. Who wouldn’t? But I knew better. I may be a decrepit old man, Mr. Coyne. But I am a realist.”
“Doctor,” I said, “when Evie and I—”
“It’s Win,” he said. “Please. If you insist on calling me ‘Doctor,’ I shall be obliged to call you ‘Esquire.’”
I smiled. “Win it is, then,” I said. “Anyway, when Evie and I were vacationing on Cape Cod a week ago, Larry Scott followed us and confronted us in a restaurant.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard all about that. Several highly imaginative versions of that story have circulated through this town, many of which involve Evie stabbing him with a kitchen knife.”
“At one point,” I said, “Scott mentioned you.”
“Me?”
“He said to Evie, ‘I know about your saint,’ or words to that effect. I assume he was referring to you.”
“‘Your saint.’ That’s flattering. I’m hardly a saint, and I don’t think Evie ever thought of me as saintly.” He smiled. “I’m sure she was fully aware of the devilish thoughts she inspired in me.”
“I was thinking of your name.”
He looked at me. “Oh, well, sure. Maybe. I didn’t think of that.”
“So if he was referring to you,” I said, “what could he have known about you that he wanted to tell Evie?”
“How in the world would I know what was in that poor, obsessed boy’s head?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d have an idea.”
St. Croix shook his head sadly. “Larry Scott wanted Evie and she didn’t want him. It’s a simple as that. She went out with me a few times, and he was blind jealous. He thought I was his competition. He made her life so miserable that he finally drove her out of town. I guess he thought if slandering me would win her back, he’d do it.”
“But there was nothing he might have known—about you, I mean—that would have caused him to follow Evie to the Cape to tell her?”
He smiled at me. “You’re cross-examining me, you know.”
“I apologize,” I said.
“What difference would it make, anyway?” he said. He tapped his legs. “I certainly didn’t kill Larry Scott.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“Or Dr. Romano, either.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m not sure that Detective Vanderweigh is convinced,” he said.
“Detective Vanderweigh suspects everybody,” I said. “Even me.”
Dr. St. Croix closed his eyes for a minute. “Multiple sclerosis is a terrible disease,” he said quietly. “It cripples your body, but as far as I’m concerned, what’s worse, it begins to eat away at your sanity. Depression, of course. But I’ve found that in the past several months I’ve also become increasingly short-tempered and distrustful. I have to monitor myself constantly against paranoia. I’ve yelled at poor, loyal Claudia, of all people, more than once. And now, I’m sitting here looking at these useless legs and these pitiful trembling hands, and I’m telling myself to stop thinking what I’m thinking, that I have no reason to distrust you.” He blinked at me. “Do I?”
“No,” I said. “No reason to distrust me at all.”
“And I’m wondering if I should’ve distrusted Dr. Romano a bit more.”
“Did you distrust him?”
“Yes, of course. As I said, nowadays I tend to distrust everybody. I admired his enthusiasm, his idealism. But at the same time, I couldn’t quite believe that some bright, eager young doctor from New Jersey would really be interested in taking over this dead-end little small-town pediatric practice. You see? It’s sick and reprehensible to have a part of your brain thinking the worst of people. I never used to be that way.”
“Some people are always that way,” I said.
“Never do harm to anyone,” he said. “That starts with thinking well of people, giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
“Well,” I said, “Larry Scott—”
At that moment, Claudia Wells came into the room. She pointed at her wristwatch. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, “but it’s time for your meds, Doctor.”
“Leave us alone, woman,” said St. Croix. “Brady and I are talking.”
Claudia looked at me and rolled her eyes. “He’s the world’s most difficult patient.” She turned to him. “I’m going to give you your shot, and I don’t want any back talk.”
I stood up. “I should get going anyway.”
“Please stay,” said St. Croix.
“No,” said Claudia, “Mr. Coyne is right. He should leave now. He can come back.”
“I told you,” said the doctor to me, “she’s a monster. She can’t wait to haul down my pants and stick a needle into my bottom. You will come back?”
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in town,” I said. “But if I get a chance, sure, I’ll come back.” I bent to St. Croix and held out my hand. “I’ve enjoyed talking with you.”
He took my hand and held onto it. “Me too,” he said. He glanced at Claudia. “It’s good to talk to a man for a change.”
I smiled and turned to leave. Claudia started to follow me. “I can find my way out,” I said.
She nodded. “Do come back,” she said softly. “He likes you.”
“I like him, too.”
I paused on the front steps to light a cigarette. As I started down the fieldstone pathway to the parking area beside the house, Valerie Kershaw pushed herself away from her cruiser and headed toward me.
She met me at my car. “You’ve got to follow me, Mr. Coyne.”
“I thought you were supposed to follow me.”
She shrugged. “We changed the rules.”
“Why?”
“Detective Vanderweigh needs to talk with you.”
THIRTEEN
I followed Valerie Kershaw’s cruiser back into town. She pulled up in front of a cluster of new-looking, rectangular brick buildings. Town hall, library, police station, public works, firehouse, all lined up next to each together, directly across the village green from Charlotte Matley’s office.
I parked my car, got out, and waited for Valerie to come over.
“You want to cuff me, bring me in?” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Come on. This way.”
She led me into the police station, past the front desk where a woman in civilian clothes said hello to her, and down a short corridor. She stopped at a door, peeked in through the glass, then opened it and held it for me.
I stepped in. Detective Vanderweigh and his partner, a young, blond guy—I’d met him in Brewster, but I couldn’t recall his name—were sitting beside each other in leather chairs at a long oak conference table. They appeared to be studying the documents that were stacked in front of them.
Vanderweigh looked up over the tops of his reading glasses, smiled quickly, put the palms of both his hands on the tabletop, and pushed himself halfway into a standing position. “Mr
. Coyne,” he said. “Have a seat, please. Thanks for joining us.”
I took a chair across the table from the two of them. “I wasn’t given much choice,” I said.
“What happened to your face?”
“Bumped into a door.”
Vanderweigh shrugged. “You remember Sergeant Lipton.”
I nodded at the other man. “Sure. You never forget your interrogator.”
Lipton reached his hand across the table, and I shook it.
I looked around the room. The two big windows overlooking the village green had no wire mesh over them. The walls were paneled in knotty pine. There were two television sets with VCR hookups on one table, a coffee machine and a microwave oven on another, and a computer and a fax machine and two telephones on a desk. The chairs were comfortable, and there were no cigarette scars on the tabletop. “Not bad,” I said, “for an inquisition room.”
“This is a conference room,” said Vanderweigh. “We want to confer with you.”
“Does this mean I’m no longer a suspect?”
He smiled. “If you like.” He cleared his throat. “Does the name Owen Ransom mean anything to you?”
I thought for a minute, then shook my head. “No.”
“Ever been to Carlisle, Pennsylvania?”
“Actually,” I said, “I have. There are some good trout streams in that part of Pennsylvania. Who’s Owen Ransom?”
“‘Who was Owen Ransom,’” said Vanderweigh. “He’s deceased.”
I looked from Vanderweigh to Lipton. “You gentlemen being homicide detectives and all, I would surmise that this Owen Ransom did not die of natural causes.”
“No,” said Vanderweigh. “He got his throat cut.”
“In an automobile behind a motel, by any chance? Sometime recently?”
He nodded.
“So Dr. Paul Romano’s real name was Owen Ransom.”
“Owen Ransom was not a doctor,” he said. “Owen Ransom was a clerk at a hardware store.”
“In Carlisle, Pennsylvania?”
“Yes,” said Vanderweigh.
“Being well-trained detectives,” I said, “you checked his wallet, looked at his driver’s license and credit cards and other personal effects.”
Vanderweigh nodded. “Sure. First thing we do with a homicide victim. Try to identify him.”
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