VC04 - Jury Double

by Edward Stewart

  “Or if you’re in the mood for something minimalist …” The clerk brought out a jeweler’s tray of what seemed to be shower caps for elves. “These require an acetyline adhesive, which we sell.” A tall man with a wedge-shape face, he wore a tricolor ponytail and granny glasses with tinted rose lenses. “The adhesive comes in cinnamon, lemon, and hot ginger.” He winked. “I wouldn’t recommend hot ginger for beginners.”

  The woman turned to stare at a shelf of polka-dot dental dams. “Do you ship to Australia?”

  “We ship anywhere in the world. Why don’t you take a moment and think about it?” The clerk turned his tanned face toward Cardozo. “Yes, sir?”

  “I have a package for Juliana. I phoned.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m Henk.” The clerk glided to the end of the counter. He lowered his voice. “Are you sure Juliana is expecting this?”

  “She certainly is.” Cardozo slid the package across the countertop. “Urgent.”

  Henk looked at his Mickey Mouse watch. “I’ll see she gets it within the hour.”

  “Tall guy with granny glasses,” Cardozo said, “and a red-white-and-blue ponytail. Said he’d deliver it within an hour.”

  Anne glanced at her watch. It was seven-fifteen and the evening light had faded on the windows of Bleecker Street’s boutiques.

  The waitress brought their cappuccinos.

  “Have you got a phone?” Cardozo asked.

  “There’s one in back.”

  “Excuse me.” He pushed himself up from the table. “Have to check my messages.”

  Anne ripped open a packet of sugar and stirred it into her coffee.

  “No granny glasses …” Mark’s head tipped up and nodded. “But that’s got to be him.”

  Anne glanced out the window. Across the street, a tall man with a red-white-and-blue ponytail and a grim face was stepping out of the doorway of Condom Nation. He wore jeans with prefab rips and a maroon Annie Get Your Gun national tour T-shirt, and he was carrying the wrapped package of rug cleaner tucked under his left arm.

  Anne felt cheated. After a week of courthouse and hotel coffee, she had been looking forward to her cappuccino. “You said an hour.”

  “Lieutenant Cardozo said an hour.”

  The man looked west through traffic stalled along Bleecker. He grimaced and began walking briskly east.

  Anne gulped a mouthful of coffee and grabbed her purse. “I’m going to follow him. You wait for Cardozo. I’ll contact you at your place.” She was up in a single bound, hurrying onto the sidewalk.

  The ponytail was already half a block ahead of her, bobbing above a sea of pedestrians. It turned left on 10th Street.

  She reached Seventh Avenue just in time to see it duck into a taxicab.

  Anne’s hand went up. “Taxi!”

  It was one minute after seven-thirty when Anne’s taxi braked to a stop on East 59th Street, under the grimy shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. She caught a glimpse of the ponytail bobbing into the service entrance of a restaurant called Hot Sushi. She thrust a twenty at the driver and didn’t wait for change.

  A sumo wrestler in a chef’s hat stopped her at the door. She pointed beyond him at the ponytail cantering past a row of steaming vats and woks. “I’m with him.”

  He let her pass.

  The kitchen was drenched in smells of ginger and garlic and curry. Juliana stood with a stack of bowls at the salad bar, frowning at a four-ounce container of I Love My Carpet potpourri-scented rug cleaner.

  “That’s a present from me,” Anne said.

  Juliana’s eyes came around, startled. “I don’t get it.”

  Anne opened her purse and took out the note from the refrigerator. “What does this message mean?”

  Juliana slipped on a pair of glasses. “It means exactly what it says. I was working for Catch Talbot.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “That doesn’t concern you.”

  “You’re working without a green card. I could phone Immigration.”

  Juliana motioned Anne to follow her into a murky storage room. She closed the door. “Catch phoned last week and asked to meet in a coffee shop. He offered me three thousand dollars to leave Kyra and bring Toby to him after school last Friday. But Kyra fired me and told the school I wasn’t to pick Toby up, so Catch had to pick him up himself.”

  “And how did Catch manage that?”

  “I have no idea. But when I phoned, he asked me to act as a transitional nanny until he got Toby out of the country.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  Juliana described him. Ultra crew-cut hair. Stocky build. Brown eyes.

  “That wasn’t Toby’s father. Catch has blue eyes.”

  “How was I supposed to know? I’d never met him before. Kyra never had photos of him. Besides, he showed me plenty of I.D.—with photos.”

  “But you knew Kyra had custody.”

  “No one’s ever shown me any custody papers. And you may not be aware of it, but Kyra’s a pretty casual mother. I told Catch if it meant a decent home for Toby—I’d be glad to help. But I wouldn’t do anything illegal. Catch said it was only going to be for four days. Till the passports came.”

  “He was planning to take Toby out of the country?”

  “Look, I love that kid like my own little brother, but I can’t get mixed up in this.”

  “But you are mixed up in it, Juliana.”

  “All he told me was—plans had changed—he wouldn’t be needing me. He gave me a hundred dollars and that was that.”

  “Back up a moment. When did you last see Toby?”

  Juliana screwed up her face, remembering. “Sunday. He was getting antsy. He was tired of reading and tired of his games; and he and his dad weren’t getting along.”

  “Don’t call that man his dad. He isn’t.”

  Juliana shrugged. “Toby was playing with his modem—he was calling your computer. But Catch said they had to go to the supermarket. Four hours later Catch came back in a taxi, alone.”

  “Did he say where Toby was?”

  “He wasn’t making sense. He seemed disoriented—he was saying stupid stuff.”

  “Stupid stuff like what?”

  “He said Toby talked back to him and he had to hand him over to the authorities.”

  “What authorities?”

  “I don’t know.” Juliana began crying. “Catch was screaming and there was blood on his clothes. He asked me to phone a doctor to come pick him up.”

  “What doctor?”

  “He had a name like a bottle of gin.” She sniffled and blotted her eyes with the back of her hand. “Gordon something.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was driving a terrific Porsche 928. The license plate spelled Bullion.”

  “Where’s Catch now?”

  “I don’t know. He never contacted me. After two days I said to hell with this.”

  “So you just left a note on the refrigerator and walked away from it?”

  “I’m not a legal resident. I can’t save the world.”

  There was a knock on the door. A man with an angry face peered in. “Juliana—table eighteen.”

  “Excuse me. I have a living to earn.”

  FORTY-THREE

  8:30 P.M.

  THEY MET AT A quiet little Szechuan restaurant on Third Avenue.

  “A doctor came in a Porsche and picked him up.” Anne sipped at a bowl of clear vegetable broth. She had butterflies in her stomach and she knew she couldn’t keep down anything heavier. “The doctor’s name sounded like a bottle of gin.”

  “Gilbey’s?” Mark suggested.

  “Or Gordon’s?” Cardozo said.

  “Gordon. That was it.”

  Cardozo’s chopsticks, clasping a ginger scallop, stopped in midair. “Gordon Gibbs?”

  “Juliana didn’t remember the last name.”

  “Gibbs does sound kind of like Gilbey’s,” Mark said. “Who is he?”

  “Runs a clinic,” Cardozo said.
“He’s a specialist in spleen viruses. And chairman of a self-help group for divorced fathers. Thursday the nineteenth, while Catch Talbot was in Seattle, he had dinner in the Oak Room with a man calling himself Catch Talbot. The man claimed to need moral support in a custody battle with his ex-wife.”

  Mark spooned pork fried rice onto his cashew chicken. “You know what amazes me? How come the false Catch knows so damned much about the real Catch?”

  “He could have got hold of the voir dire. Kyra gave the court a pretty complete rundown of her life and problems.”

  “Dotson Elihu mentioned something strange in court,” Anne recalled. “He said the feds were hiding Mickey Williams in a clinic.”

  Cardozo glanced at her. “Which clinic?”

  “DiAngeli objected before he could say.”

  “Gibbs runs a clinic.”

  “Hold it.” Mark raised a hand. “If Gibbs is hiding a man who’s killed three people, he’s not going to talk to the police—not voluntarily.”

  “How do you figure three?” Anne said. “Kyra and the policewoman and who else?”

  “Toby.”

  “No one’s found his body,” she stated flatly.

  “But according to Juliana—”

  She cut him off. “According to Juliana there was blood on a man’s clothing. Period. We don’t even know if the blood was Toby’s. And we know Toby escaped from the Scottsboro station house.”

  “And no one’s seen him since.”

  Anger flared in her. “Toby is alive.”

  “Okay. He’s alive and Dr. Gibbs is going to hand over the fake Catch and the fake Catch is going to hand over Toby.” Mark reached into his jacket and pulled out his cellular phone. “Be my guest.”

  “Mark has a point,” Cardozo said. “Gibbs isn’t going to want to talk to the police.”

  “Then he’ll talk to me.” Anne grabbed the phone and tapped in the code for directory assistance. “Do you have a number listed for a Dr. Gordon Gibbs?”

  “We show a Gordon Gibbs, M.D., on East Sixty-second.”

  She glanced at her watch. It was almost nine o’clock—well past any Manhattan M.D.’s office hours—but most doctors were in touch with their answering services in case of emergency. She pressed disconnect and tapped Gibbs’s number into the keypad. She waited through eight interminably sluggish rings.

  “Doctor’s office.” The voice was female and curt.

  “Dr. Gibbs, please.”

  “The doctor’s office hours are Tuesday and Thursday, ten to four.”

  “This is an emergency.”

  “Your name and number, please?”

  “Anne Bingham.” She read the number off the headset.

  “Are you a patient?”

  “The doctor treats my family. Tell him I’m Toby Talbot’s aunt.”

  Eight minutes later the phone rang.

  “Ms. Bingham?” The voice was male and jocular and ever so slightly harried. “Gordon Gibbs. What’s the emergency?”

  “The emergency is my eleven-year-old nephew, Toby Talbot.”

  No reaction.

  “Doctor, I want to find my nephew and I believe you can help me.”

  “How did you get my name?”

  “From Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo of the New York City police.”

  “You said Toby Talbot?”

  “Toby. As in Catch Talbot. As in Mickey Williams.”

  “I’m on my cellular phone and this is a rotten connection. Could you meet me in my office in fifteen minutes?”

  Even at nine-thirty in the evening, dozens of people hurried through the marbled lobby of the granite building on 62nd Street and Second Avenue. Footsteps clattered across black and white checkerboard tile.

  The night guard at the security desk stopped them and Anne explained that Dr. Gordon Gibbs was expecting them.

  “Third floor.” He motioned toward the first bank of elevators.

  The directory on the third floor pointed them left, down a long gray corridor. A tall, full-faced man with a neatly trimmed white beard stood in the doorway of a consulting room. He was wearing yellow jogging shoes and green nylon warm-ups and a Crain’s Business News sweatshirt. “Ms. Bingham?”

  “Dr. Gibbs?” She introduced Mark. “My lawyer.” And Cardozo. “And Lieutenant Vince Cardozo of the New York police.”

  “I keep running into you, Lieutenant.” Dr. Gibbs held out a hand. “Won’t you please come in.”

  Gibbs was one of those New York professionals who had it all—the leather-and-mahogany office, the signed Jasper Johns lithos, the Harvard Med and Johns Hopkins diplomas on the wall.

  They sat in brass-studded armchairs.

  “We should get a few things straight.” Gibbs had a voice that went fluty under pressure, like an adolescent’s. It clashed with his heavy build and beard. “I specialize in viral diseases of the spleen. I’m chiefly a researcher. I don’t discuss my patients, but I can tell you without violating medical ethics that I have never had any patients by the name of Catch Talbot or Mickey Williams. In fact, my patients are all women.” He smiled a friendly smile, sorry to disappoint. But his fingertips were jittering on the armrest like strung-out junkies. “I’ve heard the name Toby Talbot, but contrary to your beliefs, I have no idea where he is.”

  Cardozo wasn’t buying the smile. Or anything else. “Where did you hear Toby Talbot’s name?”

  “I’ve told you all this before.”

  “My friends haven’t heard.”

  “I’m president of the New York chapter of P-Wok—Pops Without Kids. When Catch—when Mr. Talbot came to town he gave me a call. We had dinner. He believed his ex-wife had a scheme to seize sole custody at the next hearing. He was furious with her.”

  “Furious enough to want to harm her?”

  “There’s no way I can make that judgment.”

  “Tell me, Doctor. What sort of assistance were you giving the man you call Catch Talbot?”

  “I’ve given him no assistance.” Gibbs’s eyes, glaring above his half-moon glasses, met Cardozo’s unwaveringly. As though the ability to stare a cop in the face was proof of candor.

  “In case your friend hasn’t told you yet—he’s using the real Catch Talbot’s name and credit cards. Felony if he’s charged over five thousand. He’s murdered one of my policewomen. Felony. He’s murdered the real Catch Talbot’s ex-wife. Felony. And he’s kidnapped Toby Talbot. Felony.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it. But he’s not my patient, so how does any of that involve me?”

  “He’s been using you to divert suspicion to the real Catch Talbot. Which means, like it or not, you’re very much involved.”

  “As an accessory,” Mark Wells said. “And since you say he’s not a patient, I’d be very surprised if the law would consider medical ethics a defense.”

  “In that case …” The doctor stood up. “I have a right to speak to a lawyer.”

  “You’re speaking to one.” Mark Wells smiled. “Me.”

  “Now, look here—either you people leave my office right now, or I call my lawyer.”

  “I’d like to speak to your lawyer,” Cardozo said.

  Behind Gibbs, a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, unhurriedly.

  Gibbs crumpled back into the chair. “Look—can’t we straighten this out amicably? Can’t you people see I know nothing about this man or his crimes?”

  “Then why did you return my call?” Anne said. “And agree to meet me?”

  “I was only trying to be helpful to a lady who sounded confused and distressed.”

  “Try a little harder,” Cardozo suggested, “and you might wind up helping yourself.”

  “All right.” Gibbs exhaled a surrendering sigh. “Here’s the situation. Four or five days after our dinner … Mr. Talbot was having emotional trouble. He contacted me.”

  “And?”

  Gibbs studied Cardozo with calibrating eyes. “I came to realize he had obsessive resentments—but I swear I had no idea he was capable of acting o
n them violently.”

  “It’s a crime,” Cardozo reminded the doctor, “to withhold information in a murder investigation.”

  “Can’t you grasp the fact that I have no information? Catch—or whatever his name is—never confided in me. He’s not my patient.” Gibbs’s eyes dropped. “He’s being treated by Dr. Lederer.”

  “And who’s Dr. Lederer?”

  It was a long moment before Gibbs answered. “Hillary Lederer, one of our best psychiatrists. He and Catch had a few consultations. I arranged for Catch to move into one of the spare rooms upstairs. I had no idea he was even suspected of a felony. I had no intention of abetting any crime.”

  “And is he upstairs now?” Cardozo asked.

  “There’s one way to find out.” Gibbs reached across the desk for the phone.

  “Let’s save the phone call,” Cardozo suggested, “and surprise him.”

  Dr. Gordon Gibbs rapped on the gray door at the end of the seventh-story corridor. “Catch—are you there?”

  No one answered. He rapped louder.

  And still no answer.

  “Why don’t you just let us in?” Cardozo suggested.

  “Look, I want to be helpful, but I’m not sure I have the right.”

  “Under New York State law,” Mark Wells assured him, “you have the right.”

  Gibbs searched his key chain. “I’m not sure I have the passkey.”

  Cardozo pointed to the Medeco skeleton key. “That one should do the trick.”

  With fumbling hands, Gibbs tried the key. It turned. The door opened on darkness. A faint scent of soap drifted out.

  “Catch? It’s just me—Gordon Gibbs.” He flicked the electric switch. Light came up on a comfortable room with mocha walls and bleached-pine furniture. And no occupant.

  Cardozo’s eye inventoried: two walls of bookshelves. A daybed with leather bolsters. A 1950s Danish-modern desk with a phone and answering machine. A five-spring cable exerciser lay across the back of a chair; two twenty-four-pound dumbbells sat on the floor.

  “Mr. Talbot seems to travel with a small gym.”

  “He says he enjoys working out,” Gibbs said.

  Cardozo crossed to the closet. Empty. The bathroom. A toothbrush and a Trac-II razor sitting in a Hilton Hotel tumbler.