If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  For a moment, Lucas Ash reached for her right hand and held it.

  “Ready for the new one?” he asked her.

  Her eyes were wet.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Chapter Forty

  Tuesday, January 26th

  “Do you understand that you have the right to remain silent?” Joe asked Schwartz, with no one else except Ferguson to hear. “Do you understand that anything you say can and may be used against you in court or other proceedings? Do you understand that . . .?”

  Joe knew that in the past eighteen hours he had done much more than break rules. He had violated a man’s rights, he had exhorted others to break the law, he had put one civilian in physical danger, had placed the future of a fine physician and a first-rate clinic at serious risk, and he had told more lies than he had in his entire life. He had done it for his sister and the others like her. He had done it because he could not endure the spectre of Schwartz walking free. He had done it because – once the whole roller-coaster ride had begun gathering momentum – he had seen no viable alternative. He had done it, some might say, for the greater good. None of that made it right.

  Yet he continued a while longer. He read Schwartz his rights right there and then in the whitewashed laboratory at the Howe Clinic, while he knew – while he damn well knew – that the man was too demented, too sedated, to comprehend what he was being told. And all the time Sean Ferguson, brimful with vengeance for his beloved Marie, went on playing Kaminsky, holding the little pacemaker like some miniaturized Damoclean A-bomb; and Joe knew that Ferguson would do anything he had to, lie through his teeth, even perjure himself in court – not to help a cop with his job on the line, but because Schwartz or Siegfried or whoever the hell good-old-Fred had turned out to be, had murdered his wife, which was why Lieutenant Joe Duval knew he could go on violating this man’s rights all the way to Jackson’s 8 a.m. deadline if necessary, and at least no one would ever get to hear about it from the lips of this particular witness.

  The sedation and the lingering effects of the beta-blockers and temperature extremes meant that Schwartz was slow getting started, but he had already identified one of the documents he’d buried with the Gila monsters as the true record of his labours, and Joe already knew that the whole idea of the conductive glue hair-trigger detonation had been an elaborate fiction, and he had a pretty shrewd idea that though the confession had begun slowly, once Schwartz got going, nothing much would stop him. Many murderers talked when they thought it was all over – some just gave up the game and went to sleep, but many talked, often so goddamned relieved that they forgot all about attorneys and their rights. Some killers, though, simply relished the spilling of their guts as the continuing fulfilment of their great, dark, ongoing ego trip, and Joe was as confident as he could be that Schwartz would be one of these, spurred on by the terrors of Kaminsky and his little metal box.

  At five minutes before eight, with Lally safely tucked up in bed and Al Hagen and Howard Leary already helping the police and FBI in the final tracking down of Schwartz’s victims, Joe interrupted the session to call Jackson. Within a half hour, Cohen was sitting in on the confession, back in Schwartz’s second-floor room, and they were rolling tape, and everything was starting to spruce up nicely and Joe dared to believe that – even if Lieutenant Joseph Duval was down for the count – at least there was reason to hope that the case against Frederick Schwartz was back on track.

  “I began,” Schwartz told his two-man audience, “last August. One weekend, that was all it took for me to work it out, though I guess, one way or another, I’d been working it out most of my life.”

  There was still a tremor in his hands, but his voice was less slurred now, and though he paused for a moment, neither Joe nor Cohen said a word. They both knew it was coming, all coming now, they could feel it, they could always feel it in the air when a confession was working its way up and out of the dark and messy recesses of a long-term killer.

  “The real work was child’s play for me,” Schwartz went on. “I started in the last week of September. Six pacemakers, twice a week, for eight weeks, four of them dummies, two of them the real thing. I could easily have done more – I could have killed hundreds, more if I’d chosen to. But I didn’t need more. I’m not a violent man by nature. That was enough to punish them all.”

  “Who were you punishing?” Joe asked.

  “You know who.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “The doctors. The ones who lied. The ones who laughed.” The hazel eyes were so hard to read now, blank, almost blind with memory. “And him most of all. That was what I wanted most, to finish him.”

  “Who, most of all?” Joe asked, softly.

  “Hagen, of course.” He said the name the German way, Hahgen, the way he’d said it hours back when Al Hagen had come to see him, and Cohen looked up, surprised.

  “Can you tell us his full name?” Joe said, for the sake of the tape.

  “Albrecht Hagen.” Schwartz’s lips turned up a little at the corners. “He wanted to kill me, you know.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It was written. Mother told me.” Schwartz gave a tiny shrug. “Hagen kills Siegfried, everyone knows that.”

  “Who’s Siegfried?” Cohen asked, still confused.

  Schwartz turned to face the older detective, and the disdain was clear in his expression and in his voice.

  “I am Siegfried,” he said.

  Joe closed his eyes for an instant, letting relief wash over him. The crazier the better, he thought. On the tape, another cop listening. Which ever way he tried to squirm later, whatever he told his attorney, Frederick Schwartz would not now walk, would not go free.

  Lally was safe, and the others out there had a chance. For Joe, right now, that was more than enough.

  Twelve hours later, Chris Webber felt torn apart all over again, between relief, anger and frustration. He was gladder than he’d ever imagined it was possible to be that Lally had been safely brought through her nightmare, and that her brother had nailed Schwartz. But if he had allowed himself to fantasize at all about what might happen next between himself and the woman with whom he knew, without a shadow of doubt, he was deeply in love, he certainly had not envisaged that almost the first thing he would have to do was to leave her side and go back home to Stockbridge.

  “What’s happened?” Lally asked, when he came to tell her. It was nine-thirty in the evening, and she’d been sleeping for most of the day. After her surgery, John Morrissey had admitted Chris to the clinic as a patient so that he could fully recover from his own ordeal and be monitored for any after-effects, and he had been resting too, until a while ago.

  “I called Katy,” he said. “Seems Andrea checked herself out of her clinic.”

  “Oh,” Lally said, softly. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.” Chris shook his head. “She’s wrecked our house, Lally. She’s out of control, and that’s why I have to go back.”

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  The room was very quiet. Hugo, on the verge of collapse when the crisis had passed, had gone back to Joe’s house, and Joe, this evening, was still heavily embroiled in police business. Schwartz was still in the clinic, under guard, where he would remain until morning. Lucas Ash had said he wanted Lally to have as few visitors as possible until next day; but knowing now that he would have to check out early in the morning to catch the first flight back to Albany, Chris had crept out of his own room, across the corridor from Lally’s, and come to see her.

  She looked so lovely, those soft grey eyes so tired and still vulnerable, yet so luminous with relief and the joy of being alive. She wore a white man’s shirt instead of a nightdress, and her hair, freshly washed by one of the nurses, hung loose over her shoulders. No make-up, not even a hint of lipstick, but Chris knew he’d never seen a lovelier woman.

  “When are you going to tell me?” she asked him.

  “Tell you what?”

>   “Where you were, all that time. What you were doing. What really happened to your hand.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Chris said. “Because of Joe.”

  “I know. Joe told me not to ask you.”

  “There’s not much to tell, anyway.”

  “I know that you were helping Joe. Helping me.”

  “I didn’t do much.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Lally paused. “I was scared.”

  “I know you were.”

  “Not just for myself – ” She smiled ruefully. “I was terrified for myself. But I was scared for you, too. When you didn’t come back after I checked in here – ”

  “I wanted to be here,” Chris said.

  “That wasn’t a reproach,” Lally said swiftly. “It’s just that I had this awful feeling something had happened to you.” Tentatively, gently, she reached out and touched his bandaged hand. “I guess it was just this.”

  “I guess.”

  They fell silent. With the corridor still devoid of other patients, and in the late evening stillness, the hush in the room was almost too complete. If she was home at the end of a day, Lally thought, if she sat in her sitting room all alone – no Hugo, no TV, no music, with even Nijinsky prowling outside – it was still never totally silent. There was the ticking of the French carriage clock she’d inherited from her parents, there was the occasional creak, the comfortable voice of a good old house, and there were the night birds and the wind in the trees and the cars on Lenox Road, and the reminders of neighbours and friends, doors banging, dogs barking, voices, laughing or arguing or just living.

  “It’s too quiet here,” she said to Chris.

  “I know.”

  “I can’t wait to get home.”

  Chris said nothing.

  “Oh, Chris, I’m sorry.” Lally touched his hand again, careful not to grasp it properly in case she hurt his wound or overstepped some unspoken boundary. “I didn’t think.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does. You must be so worried about Andrea and Katy.” She winced a little.

  “Are you in pain?” Chris asked, quickly, anxiously.

  “No, not at all – Lucas gave me something.” She paused. “I was just thinking that this is really my fault.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “If you’d stayed home, if you hadn’t come chasing after me and saving my life, you’d have been there for Andrea when she needed you.”

  “That makes it my fault, not yours.”

  “You thought she was safe,” Lally said. “You thought she was being looked after.”

  “There you are then,” Chris said. “No one’s fault.”

  Lally thought about Andrea Webber, about her violence and vulnerability and misery, and guilt flooded through her. “I should have insisted you went back as soon as you got me here,” she said. “It was selfish of me to want you with me.”

  “Did you want me with you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Lally hesitated. “More than anything.”

  “Thank God for that,” Chris said, softly.

  They were silent again.

  “You know it’s over,” he said, after a while. “My marriage is over.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Lally said. “Not now.”

  “I’ve been sure of it for a long time. I told you that the night Katy stayed with you, when you made me supper and let me talk. I needed that more than anything, and you just sat there and let me.”

  “Anyone would have done the same.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Chris said. “And no one else would have come to check up on Katy the way you did.”

  “Sticking my nose in.”

  “You did it because you cared.”

  “I’m Katy’s teacher. How could I not care?”

  “Another teacher would have handled it differently, probably filed an official report.” Chris paused. “You thought I was abusing Katy, didn’t you?”

  “No. Not really.” Lally tried to remember exactly what she had thought. She was so tired still, it was hard work just thinking. “I knew it had to be a possibility, but I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it was Andrea, either. You both seemed such – ” She broke off.

  “Such good parents,” Chris said wryly.

  “You are,” Lally said quickly. “And you said yourself that Andrea loves Katy more than anything – she’s sick, she can’t help herself. Which is why you have to fly home in the morning, and you don’t have to worry about me any more. I’m okay now.” She smiled into his eyes. “Thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to a lot of people.” Very gently, Chris took her right hand with his good left one. “They all seem to love you so much.”

  “I know. I’m very lucky.”

  “Hugo, especially.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there – ?” Chris’s face coloured a fraction. “Is there something special between you and Hugo?”

  “Yes,” Lally answered, and watched his eyes darken. “We’re best friends.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It is for me.”

  “Poor Hugo,” Chris said.

  Lally smiled again. “He was very suspicious of you, you know.”

  “Was?”

  “He can’t hate you now, after what you did. I think that irks him a little.”

  “I think your brother feels the same way.”

  “I expect so.”

  “All these people, wanting to protect you, loving you.” Chris still held onto her hand. “It’s because you’re so special.”

  “I’m nothing special,” Lally said.

  “Oh, yes. You are.”

  “Thank you.”

  She closed her eyes for a minute, and when she opened them again, Chris was looking at her so intently and with such naked love that she had the greatest urge to move into his arms, to hold him and let him hold her. But Andrea was still there between them, as forcefully as if she were physically there, in the room, and so Lally just lay still and said nothing and did nothing.

  “I have to let you sleep now,” Chris said, gently. “Dr Ash would shoot me if he knew I were keeping you up.”

  “You should rest, too,” she said, looking at his injured hand.

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you were fine, Dr Morrissey wouldn’t have kept you here.”

  “That was just because he knew I wanted to be near you.”

  They were still again for a moment.

  “Did you see him?” she asked, quietly.

  “Schwartz, you mean?”

  Lally nodded.

  “Kind of,” Chris said.

  “I met with him, you know.”

  “Joe told me.”

  “He was so cold,” Lally said. “I suppose I thought it would make a difference to him, seeing me – I don’t know why I thought that – I guess it was very naive of me.” She paused, thinking, remembering. “I thought, he’s still just a man, a human being – he’s only done this because of what happened to his mother, whom he loved.” She shook her head. “I thought that if he was capable of that kind of love, I might be able to touch him.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  “No.” She was clear on that. “Not a bit.”

  “Your brother says he’s insane.”

  “But so clever, too. Able to do all that, and to fool everyone – people who worked with him every day, who’d known him for years.”

  “You always hear that, don’t you?” Chris said. “When they arrest serial killers, the neighbours always say he seemed so normal, so ordinary, a bit of a loner, but nothing special.”

  Lally took a deep breath and let it out slowly, gently. Her heart beat easily, healthily, powered by its new, safe, regular pacemaker. She knew the routine now. Another couple of days here in the clinic, then a check-up, back in Massachusetts, with Bobby Goldstein taking care of the fine tuning. And then back to normal, the way Lucas Ash had told her the first time.

&nb
sp; “I’m going to be okay now,” she said to Chris.

  “I know,” he said, quietly. “It’s all over.”

  “For me, anyway.”

  “You mustn’t think about the others.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Not now, anyway. Now you have to concentrate on getting strong, on getting over it.”

  “I feel pretty good, considering,” Lally said.

  “You look wonderful,” he told her.

  “Do I?”

  He nodded slowly. “You’re very beautiful.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m tall and skinny and my nose is too long.”

  “Your nose is perfect,” Chris said. “Trust me, I’m an artist.”

  She smiled again.

  “Will you say goodbye before you go in the morning?”

  “It’ll be very early.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “And it won’t be goodbye,” Chris said.

  “Of course it won’t,” Lally said, lightly. “We’ll see each other, whatever happens. I’ll be teaching again in a few weeks and – ”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.”

  An image of Andrea Webber floated, unbidden, into Lally’s mind.

  “I’d better get some sleep now,” she said and, very gently, she took her hand out of his. “You, too.”

  Reluctantly, Chris stood up. His head still swam with fatigue and his hand still throbbed.

  “I’ll be just across the corridor if you need me,” he told her.

  “I won’t need anything,” she said.

  “All the same, I’ll be there.”

  “Stop worrying about me, Chris.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Wednesday, January 27th

  At a quarter past three in the morning, Schwartz was awake. They had allowed him to rest for quite a long while, and now he was feeling better. He was able to breathe more easily, was perspiring less. He was growing stronger.

  The night staff checked on him hourly. The last nurse had come in at a quarter to three. Pulse, temperature, blood pressure. A tweak to the drip feed still attached to his left arm. The EKG monitor had been removed during the afternoon. He did not miss it.