by G. H. Ephron
We pulled onto the rolling hospital campus and I showed Annie where to park. “This place always reminds me of a country club,” she commented as we hurried up the hill to the unit.
Kwan was on the phone at the nurses’ station. “I’ll call you back,” he said, “keep looking.” He hung up and turned to me. His face was tense. Uncharacteristically, his tie was loosened at the neck. “That was hospital security. They’re searching the grounds. Nothing yet. But there are so many nooks and crannies in this place, it could take awhile.”
“They’ve alerted the police?” I asked. Kwan nodded.
Gloria came rushing in from the hall. “I checked her room. Her clothes are still there. Her toothbrush. As far as I can tell, everything except her purse and what she was wearing.”
“How long has she been gone?” I asked.
Gloria answered, “She was here when the nurse passed out meds at three. Then didn’t show up for dinner.”
Dinner on the unit was at 5:30 P.M. It was already after six. A lot could happen in three hours.
“This morning she seemed jumpy,” I said. “I asked her why she wasn’t participating in any of the morning activities. Then I got distracted.” Gloria put her hands on her hips and eyed me. “I know, I know. I should have been paying attention. But there was an awful lot going on around here.”
Gloria rubbed her forehead and sighed. “At least you talked to her. I didn’t even notice what she was up to. All I know is Maria ate lunch and went back to her room. If I’d been doing my job, this never would have happened.”
“Often you can tell a lot about someone’s state of mind, where they thought they were going, by what they take with them and what they leave behind,” Annie offered. The three of us looked over at her. I started to say something and then stopped myself. It’s not ethical to talk about a patient in front of an outsider. On the other hand, Annie was a trained investigator.
I quickly introduced Annie to Kwan and Gloria. “Annie is a private investigator,” I explained. “I’m working with her on a case.”
“I know sharing information about a patient probably makes you all uncomfortable,” Annie said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. Maybe I can help.” Annie took the silence as permission to continue. “Someone who’s just looking for a hole to crawl into and die probably isn’t going to bother to take her purse along. On the other hand …”
The phone at the desk rang and Kwan picked it up.
“Why don’t you check out her room,” Gloria suggested. “You might notice something I missed. I’m going upstairs to check the rest of the building one more time. Maybe she’s taking a nap in someone’s office.”
Annie and I went down to Maria Whitson’s room. Her bed was made but rumpled, as if she’d been sitting on it. Her mother’s photograph album lay open on the bed. I looked in the closet. Her clothes were there, neatly folded or hung. The morning paper was on the bathroom floor. I picked it up. There was a story on the front page about the Jackson trial — “Assault Victim’s Memory to Be Questioned.”
“This is your patient?” Annie asked. She’d picked up the open photograph album.
I glanced at the wedding picture. “That’s her,” I said and crouched down to peer under the bed.
“Peter, look closely and tell me what you see.”
I looked at the page Annie held open. Slim and radiant, her hair done up elaborately with tendrils curling about her face, Maria Whitson beamed on the arm of a dark, handsome, muscular young man, a young man she had since ousted from her life. “Holy shit,” I whispered, staring at the familiar face, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The handsome young man who stood beside Maria, uncomfortable in his rented tux, was Sylvia Jackson’s guardian angel, Angelo di Benedetti.
“Isn’t Angelo’s alibi his ex-wife?” Annie asked.
I nodded.
“And Angelo is Tony’s nephew by ex-marriage, right?”
I nodded again.
“Then that makes your patient—”
“—Tony Ruggiero’s niece. Sylvia’s Tony and Maria’s Uncle Nino are the same person.” I said the words slowly, running them through my brain like a blind person feeling an unfamiliar feature in a familiar face.
“Wait a minute,” Annie said. “Let me get this straight. You’re treating a patient who’s related to our murder victim?”
“But I had no idea …”
“Of course you had no idea. You would have disqualified yourself from the start. Once Sherman gets wind of this, he could file for a mistrial.”
I tried to digest what was happening. As Annie had instantly realized, the connection meant I had a conflict of interest. My opinions were tainted. But there was more to it than that. Pieces of information were flying around in my head and I was struggling to connect the dots.
Some pieces of paper that must have been tucked into the photograph album fluttered to the floor. I reached down and picked them up. “Would you look at this,” I murmured. There was the newspaper clipping from two months earlier: “Jackson Case to Hear Memory Expert.” Also, a Xerox of the feature article that had been written about me, whole sections of text highlighted in yellow. And finally, a copy of a newspaper clipping — I winced at the words, “Slasher Kills Cambridge Artist.”
Annie said, “It’s almost as if she wanted you to find these.” It was what I’d been thinking, too.
“I wonder …” I started, and picked up the phone and dialed the hospital operator. “Can you connect me with Dr. Baldridge?” I waited. When I got Baldridge’s answering service, I said, “I need to talk to him. Right now.”
“He’s in group,” the drone on the other end of the line told me.
“This is urgent. I know there’s an emergency code. Please, use it.”
“I’m sorry. I have strict instructions …”
“If I don’t hear back from him in ten minutes, I’m going to come over there and interrupt the group myself. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
Dr. Baldridge called back two minutes later. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.
“Why did you refer Maria Whitson to the Neuropsych Unit?”
“You interrupt me, get me out of group to ask me—”
“Believe me, it’s a matter of great urgency.”
“Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”
“Maria Whitson has disappeared. It’s very important that I understand exactly the circumstances surrounding her admission.”
“Disappeared? Can’t you people …” Baldridge sputtered. “Let’s see, Maria Whitson”—I had the distinct impression he was trying to recall who she was. “I referred her to you because I knew you’d be able to …”
“You referred her on your own? It was your idea?”
There was silence. “She did mention that she’d read about you.”
“So she asked you to refer her to me, specifically?”
“Well, with you being an expert on head trauma and all, I concurred.” There was a pause. “It was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? I wasn’t able to treat her any further. Well, of course, I might have done so anyway, given the problems she was having, and of course …” He blustered on. I hung up and swore under my breath.
“What was that all about?” Annie asked.
“Would have been pretty amazing, I take on a murder case and a week later, the niece of the murdered victim shows up on the unit.” I stared at the phone. “It was no coincidence. It was engineered.”
I was still staring at the phone when it rang. Annie and I looked at each other. I picked it up. “Hello?”
It was Kwan, calling from down the hall. “One of the security guards saw a blond woman out jogging on the grounds this afternoon. It was still light. Then, he noticed her again later, outside the gate talking to someone in a car. He had the impression they were having a vigorous discussion. Maybe an argument. They went at it for a few minutes. Then she got into the car and it took off. Says he can show us the tire tracks. I guess
the guy was in a hurry.”
“Did he get a plate number? Make of car? Description of the driver?” I sounded like my friend, Sergeant MacRae.
“No plate number. Couldn’t see the man she was talking to.”
“But he had the impression that it was a man?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I hung up the phone and told Annie. “Did he think she went voluntarily?” Annie asked.
“Well, he didn’t get out and force her into the car.”
A high-pitched ring sounded. It wasn’t coming from Maria’s bedside phone. The sound came again. The orange plastic pitcher alongside the regular phone was ringing. I opened the top. The sound came again, louder. I lifted a cell phone from its hiding place, flipped it opened, turned it on, and held it to my ear.
“Hello?” I said.
There was no sound. Then a click.
“Anybody there?” Annie asked.
I shook my head. I wondered, once again, why Maria Whitson felt she needed to keep this phone hidden. Then, I remembered something from walk rounds, the first day we admitted her. When I started to pour her a cup of water from this pitcher, she became agitated. Was the cell phone hidden here from day one? It was a disturbing thought. Which led to another disturbing thought. Had she been tormenting my mother with middle-of-the-night phone calls intended to disrupt my sleep, calls that she didn’t want showing up in the hospital phone records?
I pressed the redial button and waited. There were seven beeps in quick succession. As I’d expected, a local call. The phone rang once. Twice. Still no answer. Three rings. I waited. Four rings. I kept expecting to hear my mother’s voice at the other end. Instead, the phone rang again. And again. Still no one picked up, not even an answering machine. I was about to give up after the seventh ring when there was a click, a pause, the sound of someone exhaling, and a familiar, breathy voice, “ … Hello?”
I started to say something when I heard a man’s voice yelling in the background. I couldn’t make out the words. Then the phone went dead. I pressed redial again. Seven beeps. And a rapid busy signal.
32
“SYLVIA JACKSON?” Annie gasped when I told her who I thought had picked up the phone. “Why would your patient be calling her?”
“Maybe she wasn’t calling Syl. Maybe she was calling someone else, someone she knew would be at Syl’s house.”
“Maybe Angelo,” Annie said. “She was his ex-wife. His alibi.”
I remembered the first time I’d met Angelo, how his powerful hands had circled Syl’s neck. In my memory now, the gesture seemed menacing. This was the same man Maria said became enraged when the unexpected happened.
My mind was churning. I checked my watch, barely noticing the position of the minute and hour hands, acutely aware of the second hand sweeping across the dial. If I was lucky, it wasn’t too late to prevent whatever terrible thing I knew in my gut was about to happen. Sitting still and waiting, mindlessly following doctor-patient etiquette, wasn’t an option. This time, I wasn’t going to be too late.
“Do you know where Sylvia Jackson lives? I think we should get over there. She could be in danger. And so could my patient.”
Annie pulled out her appointment book, turned to the back, and read off an address. I hurried out of the room and down the hall with Annie close behind. “Maybe we should call the police,” she said.
“And tell them what? To come protect me while I go snooping around at a private home?”
We hurried out past Kwan. He was on the phone, looking harried. He raised his eyebrows in a question. “I think I know where she might be,” I told him. Before Kwan could reply, Annie and I were gone.
Annie drove while I struggled to see a map in the beam of her little penlight. After a few wrong turns, we found Syl’s house on a side street behind Mount Auburn Cemetery in a mazelike neighborhood of one-ways and dead ends.
As we approached, Annie turned off the ignition and the headlights and rolled to a stop just beyond the house. From the car, I could see a white colonial-style house with an attached garage. Tall bushes shrouded a shadowy front porch. Only a sliver of light between drawn drapes suggested anyone was home.
Someone had made an effort to dress up the house for Halloween. On the small lawn, dried cornstalks were teepeed around a lamppost. A pumpkin grinned from the top of a wheelchair ramp. Opposite the pumpkin was a little barrel of chrysanthemums. Beside the front door, barely visible in the shadow, a scarecrow dummy wearing a cowboy hat was slumped in a chair. I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath.
“Okay, we’re here,” Annie said. “Now what?”
This time, I wasn’t going to do nothing. “Let’s just check things out quietly first.”
Annie got out and eased the car door shut. I did the same.
We moved cautiously, up the side of the house, crouching as we passed under the dark windows. I was conscious of every sound — my own breathing, traffic whooshing up and down the adjacent streets, the far-off pulsing wail of a siren. At every step, the sound of leaves crunching underfoot seemed thunderous.
Annie disappeared around the rear of the house. I glanced back toward the street. The lights of passing cars briefly illuminated the Jeep.
“Peter,” came Annie’s urgent whisper as she reappeared around the corner. “Come look!”
In the corner of the yard, lit by the dim glow from what I guessed was a curtained kitchen window and looking like the ghost of a small beached whale, sat a small boat. I raised an edge of the tarp that covered it. Just a stinkpot, like every other stinkpot that plagues the river. I lifted a dark hooded sweatshirt from under the wooden seat. I dropped it back into the boat and sniffed my hand—it smelled of mildewed eau de Charles River.
A nearby branch snapped and we both hunkered down beside the boat. A cat darted out from behind some bushes. In the darkness, all I could see were little white paws mincing toward me and the white tip of a tail held aloft. It sauntered up and rubbed its back against my leg.
“Shoo,” I whispered, gently pushing the cat away. It skittered off and disappeared. “Let’s check out the garage.”
We crept around the back of the yard, staying as deep in shadow as we could. We approached the back of the garage and I peered in through a window. “Can’t see a blessed thing,” I whispered.
Annie shined the penlight through the glass. We couldn’t make out much, but there was definitely a car parked inside, and it was definitely red.
“Let’s go around front,” I said. “I think there’s a door.”
It wasn’t possible to go around the far side of the garage without making a racket, crashing through the branches that grew close to it. So we crept back around the house, skirting the yard, and returned to the front.
The scarecrow dummy still sat, nonchalant in the aluminum chair on the porch. Scarecrow dummies used to terrify me when I was a kid. I’d skip the trick-or-treats at any house where one sat guard. This one slouched spinelessly, one leg pointing forward and the other one doubled over, angled back awkwardly, as if he might at any moment lurch to his feet and stagger off down the driveway in search of the black cat. Stuffed garden gloves sewn to the sleeves of a torn plaid shirt rested on threadbare jeans. Close up, I could see the childlike drawing of a jacko’-lantern face on his pillowcase head. I couldn’t help thinking of the pillowcase that covered Tony Ruggiero’s head while he was beaten and shot.
There was an ordinary door alongside the garage’s overhead door. I twisted the knob gently. I pushed. The door gave about half an inch and then stuck. I pushed harder and felt the pile of objects pressed up against it inch back, just enough so that we could squeeze through.
It was pitch black inside. Annie switched on the penlight. Behind the door were stacks of boxes, one overflowing with old clothes, another exploding with miscellaneous plumbing innards. One bay of the garage was empty. In the other was the red Firebird we’d seen through the back window. Annie ran the light along one side. It was covered with s
cratches, as if someone had driven it heedlessly through underbrush. We squeezed around behind the car and Annie sidled up the far side, toward the front. She ran the light along the front fender. “Do you see what I see?” she asked, indicating a dent and a streak of dark green paint.
I started to answer when Annie put her finger to her lips and doused the light.
The door to the house on the opposite side of the garage opened. I crouched. Footsteps were barely audible, rubber soles crossing the garage’s empty bay. As my eyes got accustomed to the dark, I began to make out a pale round shape, floating, suspended in the shadows at about head height.
There was a click and the room sprang to light. I blinked away the brightness. “Well, if it isn’t the expert witness,” a voice sneered.
Angelo di Benedetti stood facing me. He wore a black turtleneck and baggy black pants, rolled at the ankle above combat boots. His handsome face was hard and a vein pulsed in his forehead. He had his hands in his pockets. I wondered where Annie was, but I didn’t dare look at the spot where I knew she’d been not more than ten seconds earlier. Another instinct told me not to move suddenly.
Angelo’s eyes were cold and disdainful. “So nice of you to join us.”
Through the open door behind him, I could make out a figure sitting slumped over a kitchen table. It was Sylvia Jackson. She sat in her wheelchair, her back bowed, her chin resting on her chest. Just like the scarecrow dummy. Two half-filled wineglasses were on the table. Where was Maria? Was she here, too, drugged and comatose in one of the bedrooms?
“Why don’t you come inside where we can be more comfortable,” he said, drawing out the last word so it took on sinister overtones.
He stood aside and I walked past him into the house. I went over to Syl, trying to move deliberately and not betray the panic I felt. I touched her shoulder. No reaction. I pressed two fingers to the side of her neck. The skin was cool, pulse faint. I shook her gently. Her body listed to one side. She was unconscious. Not dead. Not yet.
“She needs a doctor,” I said, keeping my voice even.
“Isn’t that what you are? A doctor?”