The First Wife

by Diana Diamond

  Damn! She poked at all the other buttons on the handset, hit one that turned on the light over her head. Now she found the call button and squeezed it. Just to make sure, she screamed again.

  She heard footsteps. A young nurse, scarcely out of her teens, rushed in, stringing together French words as she rushed to the bed. She took Jane’s legs and began to wrestle her back into the bed.

  “Get her!” Jane ordered. “Don’t let her get away!”

  The nurse shouted back angrily, nearly throwing herself across her patient. And then another nurse, this one a man, ran into the room. He came around the bed, took Jane’s shoulders in a strong grip, and forced her back onto the pillow.

  “She tried to kill me. Go after her!” Jane broke away from the man and fell across the young nurse. Together, they wrestled her back into bed. Still another nurse rushed in. While the first two held her, the new arrival prepared a hypodermic.

  “Don’t kill me … please don’t kill me!”

  The new needle slipped easily into her arm. Jane continued to struggle for another few seconds, but then dropped off into a black state of unconsciousness.

  When she came to abruptly, after what seemed like seconds, the sun was pouring in through the window. William Andrews was standing beside her, flanked by two men in business suits. Her doctors and nurses were in an uneven line across her open doorway.

  She explained to her husband and the two men, who turned out to be hospital administrators, exactly what had happened the night before. She had awakened to find a nurse, or a woman dressed as a nurse, in her room. The woman had tried to inject her, and Jane had fought her off. Then the woman had rushed from the room. Jane looked to the medical staff. “You must have passed her in the corridor. She ran out just a few seconds before you came in.” They listened as the administrator translated and then answered with shrugs and grunts. He announced that no one had seen this mysterious woman.

  “Did you recognize her?” the other administrator asked. “Have you ever seen her before?”

  Jane started to answer, but then cut herself off. “No,” she finally decided. “I don’t think so.” She wasn’t about to discuss with a room full of strangers the circumstances under which she had first seen Selina Royce. Nor was she exactly sure how she would explain the encounter to her husband when they were alone. She looked to Andrews, who seemed to have no doubt that she was telling the truth.

  “Were you injected?” a doctor asked.

  “Yes, here on the shoulder. Look! There’s a bruise.”

  The medical staff exchanged glances. Then the nurse who had arrived with the second hypodermic said something to the administrators. They exchanged a few words in French, nodding in agreement. One of them told Andrews, “Your wife was struggling last night when the nurse was trying to give her a sedative. She says she might have bruised the patient. The conditions for giving a shot weren’t ideal.”

  “Dammit!” Jane snapped. “The woman stuck me, half a minute before your nurse did. This is where the woman left her needle.” She pointed to a bruise on her shoulder.

  “Left the needle?” The administrator almost smiled.

  His colleague asked, “Left the needle in your arm?”

  “Yes, hanging out of my shoulder! I pulled it out and threw it across the room. Over there!” Jane pointed in the direction where the hypodermic had disappeared into the darkness.

  “Over here,” one of the administrators said as he turned and began examining the floor. The other directed a question to the medical staff. Once again, the answer came in nods and grunts. “I don’t see anything,” the administrator said from across the room.

  “The staff didn’t find anything,” the other one announced.

  Andrews flashed anger. “My wife says that there was a woman in here last night who tried to inject her. Why don’t you take that as a fact and start from there.”

  One of the men cleared his throat in preparation for introducing a delicate subject. “Perhaps she had a terrible dream. The recent stress, her medicines, and the … inevitable indignities of medical care … might well have planted the suggestion of an assault. Then, while drowsy from sedatives—”

  “You think I imagined all this? That I imagined these bruises and needle marks, and tried to run after a woman who wasn’t even there?”

  “I’m only suggesting—”

  She cut him off. “Bill, can you take me out of here today? Right now?”

  He looked at the hospital staff, hoping for an answer. “I’m not sure. Would it be all right…”

  “I don’t want their medical opinion,” Jane snapped. “I want to get out of this place before I get as crazy as they think I am.”

  Bill glanced at the administrators. “I suppose so,” he considered. They both nodded in agreement. The sooner the better, they seemed to be telling him.

  They were in the jet’s private quarters, 32,000 feet over the Atlantic. Jane was sitting up in bed, resting against pillows. Bill was in a chair, leaning in to be close to her. She was going back over her harrowing moments in the hospital, reporting every detail of the nurse’s attack. Except the one fact that could easily have confirmed her story—the name of the woman who had attacked her.

  “There was a needle!” Jane snapped angrily.

  Bill took her hand. “I believe you. All I’m saying is that the last thing the hospital wants to admit is that outsiders, dressed as nurses, can get at their patients. They picked up the needle before they called the meeting in your room. And those guys in the suits probably ordered their doctors to act as dumb as they looked.”

  He had passed on any number of opportunities to tell her about Selina. “I know what this is all about. There’s a woman here in Paris that I’m very close to. She hates the idea that I’ve fallen in love with someone else.” Instead, he had avoided the issue, confident that his secret was still safe. In the hospital he had been locked in discussions with the administrators while she was dressed, discharged, and wheeled down to the waiting limo. In the car he had counseled her to rest and not trouble herself with her two near-fatal episodes. “That’s all behind us,” he said. Then on the plane he had sent her into his cabin to rest.

  But Jane couldn’t rest. She wanted to talk. She needed to get to the bottom of what she regarded as a string of attempts to murder her. Her husband, she knew, had the answers she was seeking. But he wasn’t forthcoming. He valued his secret more than he did his marriage.

  “Bill, who could it have been? There must be someone in Paris who hates me for being your wife. An old business rival? A woman you jilted?”

  He pretended to be searching his memory. “It’s possible, I suppose. But there’s no one I can think of. And besides, how could someone in Paris have tried to drown you in the swimming pool?”

  She was on the verge of confronting him with the facts. “Bill, I know about Selina Royce,” she could say, perhaps squeezing his hand to signal that she still loved him. “I know you’ve been paying her every month, and I know that you visited her the day I saw you near the opera house. Is it possible that she’s the one who wants me dead?” That would give him the chance to unfold the truth at his own pace. He could explain who she was and why he was obligated to her. The only thing she feared was that he would end up saying that he was still hopelessly in love with the woman.

  Or she could hit much harder. “I got a glimpse of the woman with the needle. It was the same woman you visited on Boulevard Hauss-mann, the one you’ve been sending money.” That would give him only one avenue of escape—to deny that there was any such woman. Then she would know that her marriage was over.

  Did all women try to avoid the truth about their husbands and lovers? Did kept mistresses really believe that the man was going to leave his wife, and did wives really believe that the smell of perfume must have come from someone on the elevator? Were they all lying to themselves, trying to pretend that their dream world really did exist? The simple truth was that her husband had bought a company jus
t to acquire rights to Selina Royce, that he had saved her from prosecution when she murdered his wife, and that he had kept her all these years, even while taking a new wife. So why was she denying it and putting her life at risk?

  “Try to rest,” Bill said again. “We’ll talk about this when we have more information from the police, and when you have your strength back.” He eased out of the cabin and shut the door quietly.

  I have my strength back, Jane thought. And I don’t need any more evidence from the police. All I need is for you to tell me the truth.

  A car met them at the airport and delivered them to the apartment. Bill settled her in the living room with its wide-screen view of Central Park and instructed Mrs. McCarty to look in on her. Then he was gone to his office, where a week’s worth of work awaited. She sat by herself, listening to the workmen finishing the renovations in the new master suite. The decor was inviting, a visible blend of masculine appliances and feminine touches, exactly what she had hoped to achieve. The closet had matching his-and-her sides, and the new bathroom was both practical and sensuous. All that was missing was the husband she hoped to share it with.

  She browsed through magazines, turning the pages impatiently and then tossing them aside. When she looked up, she noticed the open library on the bedroom level and went to find a book, something she should have read but had never gotten around to. None of the titles appealed to her. She went down to the breakfast room and began sorting through a week’s worth of mail.

  Everything was for William Andrews. Circulars, flyers, letters from law firms, and two notices from the building association. Then there were a few items forwarded from her office. One of the letters was in lopsided print, apparently from a child. She was surprised that it was from Sam Simon, the computer guru from the newspaper.

  The letter, written in sloping lines, indicated a sloppiness that seemed to go hand in hand with Sam’s intuitive genius. He took the long way round in explaining how she could get into Kay’s personal records.

  She climbed the stairs and went into the office. Kay’s computer was off to one corner, shut down with the keyboard drawer closed, exactly as she had left it when she searched for Kay’s favorite caterers. She booted it up and went to the listing of Kay’s documents and looked at them one at a time until she found one that required a password. She took Sam Simon’s letter and followed the steps he had outlined. A second later she was inside a folder labeled PRIVATE

  CORRESPONDENCE.

  Jane was excited when she began, but she quickly settled into boredom. The letters were routine, dwelling on mundane subjects— complaints to her dressmaker, notes to a symphony orchestra committee about an approaching fund-raiser, excuses declining invitations. She began to pity Kay for the excruciatingly dull life that hid behind her public glamour.

  She broke from her snooping to have lunch in the breakfast room, unsure whether she would bother going back to Kay Parker’s trivia. But, she conceded, there might still be something among the collection of congratulations, thank-you notes, acceptances, rejections with regrets. She had been browsing for another half an hour when one of the headings caught her eye: ARNOLD GRAFF INVESTIGATIONS. She opened the file and found a formal letter authorizing “services as discussed” and agreeing to a rate of six hundred dollars an hour plus expenses. If Arnold Graff was what he seemed to be, then he must have a very wealthy clientele. At six hundred dollars an hour, he had to be the very soul of discretion.

  She looked at titles of other folders that were locked behind Kay Parker’s password and found GRAFF DETECTIVES. She was right. Kay had been dealing with a private detective. She opened up individual files, dated in the months and days immediately before Kay’s murder. Each was a report, sent computer to computer so there would be no paper trail between Kay and her investigator. Each detailed the visible elements of William Andrews’s life with “the woman in question.”

  “They got into a limousine together and were driven to an airport, where they boarded the company plane along with other company executives,” one report stated. “They were together in the Andrews Global Network conference room for approximately two hours after other meeting attendees had departed,” another read. Graff reported that Mr. Andrews had visited her town house at 7:20 P.M. and did not leave until after midnight. Kay had added a memo to that entry, noting that W.A. claimed to be at a critical meeting at a major network’s headquarters.

  Graff Investigations was meticulous in documenting every minute that it billed and every expense that it incurred—even quarters plugged into parking meters while its operative waited outside the woman’s apartment. It had documented that Andrews was spending an inordinate amount of time with his new anchor from San Antonio and that she seemed to be included in his entourage for every trip out of town.

  But Graff detectives didn’t peek through bedroom windows or hide in hotel-room closets. The detectives’ reports stopped at the front door or the office door or the moment the plane took off. On one of Andrews’s California trips, Graff had hired an associate to “acquire W.A. when his plane parked at the executive terminal and log his subsequent activities.” The report followed a limo to a downtown hotel, where W.A. and the woman associate checked in to adjoining rooms. It noted that two breakfasts were delivered to W.A.’s room the next morning. But there was no suggestion that the two had bedded down together, no innuendo, and certainly no photographs.

  Jane read several more of the reports, which built a mountain of evidence that William Andrews was cheating on Kay Parker. More disturbing was that Kay was on to him and was building a court case that would take him to the cleaners. It seemed to Jane that Bill and his mistress had every reason to wish for some terrible accident to befall Kay. So there was a compelling motive to go along with the opportunity presented when Andrews and Kay Parker were alone in their mountain chalet. She had no choice but to conclude that her husband was a murderer. And the fact that he had killed once before moved him up on the list of candidates who might be responsible for her recent spate of “accidents.”

  She signed off and closed the computer. Then she went downstairs to the living room and watched the sun setting over the towers on the West Side. Bill would be home soon, and they would share a quiet supper, probably in front of the window. She would be sure not to ask any more questions about her near-death encounters, nor would she confront him with the name of Selina Royce. She had a foreboding sense of danger.

  He left early in the morning, mentioning that he would probably fly up to Ottawa that night for a meeting the next morning with Canadian government officials. As soon as he was gone, she dressed and headed for the elevator.

  “Where are you going?” It was Mrs. McCarty right at her heels. “Mr. Andrews asked me to stay close to you. What will I tell him when he calls?”

  “That I’ve gone for a walk in the park,” Jane answered as the elevator door closed.

  She was headed down to the park, or at least the park side of Fifth Avenue, but not to take a walk. She needed to make a phone call, and she couldn’t risk anyone’s listening in. She dialed Roscoe Taylor’s number on her cell phone, got his mailbox, and asked him to call back. Then she found a bench just inside the park wall. A few minutes later her phone beeped.

  They exchanged pleasantries but didn’t get specific about either his new job or her trip to Paris. His decision to join the Andrews “team” had created an awkwardness between them. But finally she pushed the issue. “Roscoe, I need your help. I have to find out if Selina Royce was at the business meeting in the Adirondacks. I’m beginning to think that she was there with Andrews and that Kay Parker walked in on them.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “What happened is that I was nearly killed in Paris. Twice, as a matter of fact, and one of the times it was Selina who tried to kill me.” She heard him suck in air and then reply, “Jesus.”

  Jane told him everything, from their arrival in Paris to the flight home. She recounted how she visited the addre
ss he had given her for Selina Royce and spent half the day waiting outside. “About one in the afternoon—maybe a bit later—Andrews showed up. He went into the building and stayed until almost three.” She told him how she waited, spotted a woman who fit Selina’s description come out of the building, and then followed her. “She looked right at me in the bank. At first I thought it was just two strangers making eye contact. But she must have recognized me, maybe from pictures in the paper.”

  She told him how her husband had denied ever being there and about the incident in the spa. “No one seemed particularly interested in how the door got locked,” she said. “It was as if it was ‘just one of those things’ that no one can explain.” Then she went into the incident at the hospital and the official denial that anyone had gone into her room with a hypodermic needle. “They called it a dream, probably induced by stress and medicine.”

  All through her narration, Roscoe had remained deathly quiet. He made no comments and asked no questions. She continued with the events since she had returned home. In particular, she went into the detective reports she had found in Kay Parker’s computer. “There was an affair,” she said, “and Kay knew about it. She had it documented by date, time, and place. It seemed as if she was building an airtight case against her husband.”

  There was a lengthy silence, finally broken by Roscoe, who said in a very soft voice, “You know what you’re saying.”

  Another pause before Jane answered, “That Bill had a motive to kill his wife.”

  “Have you thought of the implications? Do you have any idea of the consequences of William Andrews being found guilty of murder?”

  Jane weighed the question. “That he might well do it again …”

  He was suddenly angry. “Jane, for Christ’s sake, stop thinking of him as your husband. William Andrews is the single biggest figure in world communications. News, entertainment, business networks, everything. He has an empire bulging at the seams with kingdoms he’s conquered. There are hundreds of entrepreneurs who’d love to break free, and he has billions of dollars in investment capital counting on him to hold the whole thing together. Do you have any idea what you’re up against?”