Mirror Image

by Dennis Palumbo

  “Thank you, Stevens,” Wingfield said, staring at his own reflection in the glass. The steward looked up. “I’ll be the only one drinking.”

  The steward replaced the bottle in its standing ice bucket and padded out of the room.

  After the door closed behind him, Wingfield turned and gave me that small, tight smile. Another tailored Italian suit, black silk shirt, and tie. Hands in his pockets.

  “Time is short, Dr. Rinaldi. For all of us. So say your piece and let’s bring things to an end, okay?”

  As before, his voice smooth, amiable. Eyes veiled with a milk-white film.

  “It’s over.” I feigned a bravado I didn’t feel. “The cops are on their way. The Feds. Hell, with any luck, CNN.”

  “Yes, I know.” Wingfield was unperturbed. “Though not quickly, I assure you. One of my friends in Justice is slowing things down as best he can.”

  “I’m not surprised.” And I wasn’t.

  “Before they get here, with their lawyers and their warrants, I’ll be long gone. And you’ll be dead.”

  Wingfield glanced past me at his head of security.

  “Stand over by the doorway, will you, Carl? If that gun goes off in your hand, you’re liable to spray the whole damn room.”

  I heard Trask snort behind me, then felt the pressure of the gun ease off my spine. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the big security man lumber over to the door.

  Wingfield sighed, and swiveled back to me. “I had so wanted to see you destroyed, Doctor. To deliver the public humiliation and ruin you deserve. Your death would have come eventually, of course, when it suited me. But now it looks like that’ll have to happen sooner rather than later. Though Carl promises me it will be a long, agonizing process. Right, Carl?”

  “You got my word on that, sir.”

  “And the photos?”

  “I’ll Fed Ex ’em to you. Pre- and post-mortem. You won’t be disappointed.”

  Standing next to me, Bert Garman looked kind of queasy. I jerked my thumb toward him.

  “You mind if he sits down?” I said to Wingfield. “He’s not as used to this kind of thing as I’m getting to be.”

  Wingfield motioned to a chair. Garman collapsed into it, taking what was probably his first breath since we’d driven up to the guard shack.

  Just then, a phone on the table near Wingfield rang. He picked it up, listened a moment, and hung up.

  He walked toward me. “That was my pilot. Seems we have clearance to depart. He’s rolling our jet out of the hangar as we speak.”

  “Where are you headed?” I asked.

  “Does it really matter, especially to you?”

  “I’m a therapist. I like closure.”

  Wingfield gave a short laugh. “You know, Doctor, in a way I’m glad you were foolish enough to come here. I can console myself that I was able to look you in the eye one last time before you died.”

  “Too bad you can’t say that about James Stickey.”

  “Who?”

  “Stickey. The guy who broke into Kevin’s apartment to rob him. The guy you had killed in prison.”

  “Oh, yes. The piece of ghetto trash who dared assault a member of my family.” He shrugged. “That was nothing. Just a loose end. In memory of my late son.”

  “Who you had killed,” Bert Garman gasped. They were the first words he’d spoken in ten minutes.

  Garman’s face blanched to a whiteness matching that of his eyes. Sweat beaded his hairline.

  “Dr. Garman.” Wingfield turned to him. “I recognize you from Peter Clarkson’s description. He said you were a fool, though I’ve always thought otherwise. Not after the fine job you’ve done with Ten Oaks. I’ve seen the numbers. Very impressive. I was happy to acquire it.”

  He stood over Garman, who shrank back in his chair. Wingfield lifted his hands out of his pockets and put them firmly on Garman’s shoulders.

  “But for a man of your clinical experience, your grasp of my character is pathetic. I loved my children, both of them. In ways you could never possibly imagine. We shared intimacies beyond your feeble dreams. I could no more kill Kevin than kill myself.”

  Wingfield straightened then, tapping the tips of his fingers together as though in deep reflection.

  “So maybe poor Peter was right, and you are a fool. Doesn’t really matter. I was going to keep you on as clinical director, but I suspect UniHealth is about to undergo a drastic restructuring. The government will freeze everything during the inevitable investigations to come. So, frankly, I’m not going to need you around.”

  He smiled over at Trask. “You mind taking care of Dr. Garman here, along with Rinaldi?”

  “No!!” Garman tried to wriggle out of his seat, but Wingfield shoved him down with surprising strength.

  Leaning against the door, Trask nodded soberly. “No problem, Mr. Wingfield.”

  As Wingfield gave Garman’s shoulder an almost paternal pat, I scanned the room, figuring the odds.

  On the one hand, I had nothing to lose. On the other, I didn’t see a move. Trask and his gun were a dozen feet away from where I stood. And though I assumed Wingfield wasn’t armed, I had to take the possibility into account.

  My brow was wet with sweat, my breathing shallow. I tried to think. Focus.

  Miles Wingfield sniffed noisily. “Okay, Carl. Time, as they say, is money.”

  I saw that same shift in his body language, the thing I’d sensed before at the Burgoyne. His transaction with Garman and me was over. Old business.

  Meanwhile, Trask was motioning to Garman and me with the Uzi. “Okay, assholes. Move.”

  My mind raced as we walked slowly toward the door. Maybe outside, in the stairwell. He’d skipped the elevator bringing us here to the top floor, so probably he’d do the same going down. Maybe I had a shot at something there.

  I heard Bert Garman’s quiet, almost resigned breathing beside me as we reached the door. Mentally drifting, going away somewhere in his head. Dissociating…

  Already dead. Already gone.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Trask tapped my shoulder blade with the gun. “C’mon, open the goddam door.”

  I took a breath and reached for the door handle.

  Suddenly, the handle turned itself.

  Trask sputtered. “What th—?”

  The door flung open. I turned fast, my shoulders pushing Trask’s gun hand aside. He staggered back as I pivoted and grabbed the gun barrel.

  Everything happened at once. I grappled with Trask for the Uzi, our bodies slamming against the near wall. Suddenly the gun went off, shooting a stream of bullets across the room. Bert hit the floor, hands over his head.

  Shots pierced the huge windows, the shattered glass exploding into glittering shards. Wingfield crouched behind the table, unharmed. Trask and I still wrestled for the gun, his face a mask of rage. Then—

  “Danny?…”

  Casey’s voice. Shrill, panicked. How? Where?

  Trask drove me back against the wall again, knocking the wind out of me. The room tilted…

  Had I even heard Casey’s voice?

  Or was it her voice screaming in my mind as I struggled furiously with Trask, the lethal gun caught between us. I pulled his fingers from the trigger, but now he used the gun as a club, ramming its barrel into my side.

  We careened through the opened door onto the floor of the narrow hall, arms locked, gasping, straining, cursing.

  Then, a shadow of movement. Someone running out of the lounge. Legs moving past us. Bert Garman, heading down the hall, toward the stairs.

  Trask buried his elbow in my throat, bearing down with all his weight, eyes glazed with murderous fury. The will to fight began draining from me.

  A sound I didn’t recognize boiled up from my throat. I reared and butted his head with my own. He reeled back, sputtering. I managed to lock my hands around the gun and swung with all my might at his face.

  Blood spurted in a wide gush as he howled in agony. His nose was spl
it, cheeks caved in like craters. His eyes rolled up. Then he fell backwards, and stopped moving.

  Gasping, spitting blood, I scrambled to my feet. Disoriented. Maybe in shock. I almost fell against the wall, but righted myself at the sounds of a fight coming from inside the lounge.

  Voices. Screams.

  I scooped up the gun and veered back through the door.

  Casey and Wingfield struggled beside a shattered window, rain sheeting through its gaping hole.

  He held a heavy bronze paperweight in his hands, and she was fighting him for control of it. An ugly red gash smeared her forehead.

  “Casey!”

  Her eyes blazing, Casey slammed Wingfield against the jagged glass shards, forcing him back onto its sharp teeth. He yelled, writhing in pain, and dropped the bronze to strike with his hands. Blood ran in thin rivulets from his neck and shoulders.

  I ran towards them, gun raised. Wingfield snarled, slapping at Casey, snatching her hair, trying to keep his balance. With a fierce cry, Casey planted her feet and shoved him with all her strength.

  Wingfield toppled back through the yawning opening in the glass, legs kicking at empty air.

  And then he was gone.

  His screams were a torrent of rage thrown up against the night. I got to the shattered window just in time to see him hit the rain-slicked pavement below with a sickening thud. His twisted body lay sprawled on the tarmac, pummeled by the storm.

  Just as Richie Ellner’s had lain broken against the rubble outside an abandoned factory a week before. From another fall. From another window.

  The sputtering whine of twin engines drew my eyes away from the body below and toward the SkyLark jet taxiing out of the adjacent hangar.

  At the same time, the phone rang behind me on the table. I didn’t bother to pick up.

  Miles Wingfield was going to miss his flight.

  Casey came to stand beside me, her body trembling. I put my arm around her shoulders as she forced herself to peer out the window, rain pelting her face. She stared down at the pavement for a long time.

  I spoke to her profile.

  “Even after all he’s done, it’s still hard to see him dead. Isn’t it?…Karen.”

  Chapter Sixty-five

  “Bert probably went to call the police,” I said, as Karen Wingfield and I slumped on the floor, backs against a broad wood cabinet. “So we don’t have much time.”

  She merely sat there staring out at the storm. I dabbed the gash on her forehead with my handkerchief.

  She found her voice. Soft. Tentative.

  “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Not for sure. Until I spoke with Ed Hingis about the night Kevin was brought in. Hingis questioned him in the Box, but he told me you stayed outside, watching through the one-way. Yet Sinclair said you never did that. You liked to be inside, with the witness, the suspect. It occurred to me that you didn’t go in the Box because you were afraid your brother would recognize you. Yet you were worried enough about his condition that you called Angie Villanova, asked that she refer Kevin to me.”

  Drops of rain pushed by the wind dotted her cheeks, her lashes. Her beauty hurt my heart.

  “The name Casey,” I went on, as though it mattered anymore. “It’s from Karen Carlyle Wingfield. Your mother’s maiden name is your middle name. So you used the first letters of each. Plus, like most people who assume a new identity, you picked a last name with the same first letter as your own. W, for Walters. Makes it easier to remember.”

  Though our shoulders were touching, sitting next to each other, I could feel us growing apart, moment by moment. A space, widening.

  “Then I remembered Paula Stark. That robbery suspect you said you had to release for lack of evidence. You had gotten her to call the police from Arizona, claiming to be you. You gave her a script. All the things to say. No wonder she sounded drunk on the phone. She’d had to screw up her courage to get through the performance.”

  I took a breath. “That’s why when she broke down at one point, and said she couldn’t do it, you seemed so alarmed in Sinclair’s office. I watched your face. I thought it was concern for Karen’s plight. Instead, it was fear that Paula was going to blow it.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was listening. Gazing out at the violent night.

  “By pretending to be Karen Wingfield, Paula spoke for you. At last, the truth about your father’s incest could be revealed. To the cops. To the world.”

  I stared at her until she looked back. Her eyes were empty.

  “When did you decide to use Paula Stark? After Kevin was murdered?”

  She took the handkerchief from me and began wiping the blood from her forehead.

  “I ran away from Banford soon after my father left. I hated my foster parents, how they treated me. The poor, troubled Wingfield girl. Total slut. Did it with her own brother. Ruined her father’s life. So I ran…and kept running. Changed my name, my look.”

  “Kevin told me he’d heard you’d gotten married.”

  “Lasted a couple years. A ranch kid out west. I got pregnant and he freaked. Times were hard. Believe me, it took everything I had to turn that detective away when he found me. Holding out my father’s offer of reconciliation, and all that money. But I didn’t want any part of my father. Or his money.”

  “Did you have the child? As Paula said on the phone?”

  She smiled. “No. That was more Paula’s life. I wove some of her personal story into mine to throw up a smoke-screen. Besides, I figured the more similar to her own life, the easier time she’d have telling it.”

  She fell silent.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Karen,” I said at last. “What about your child?”

  “Like I said, my so-called husband freaked. Then he left. I didn’t have anywhere to turn. So I got an abortion. Some quack in Taos, New Mexico.”

  She rubbed her face with her hands. “I was young. Broke. It was the only thing I could do. But I guess he botched it. They tell me I’ll never be able to have children. Probably just as well. With my genes.”

  I shifted on the floor next to her, reached out to touch her. She stopped me.

  “Don’t, Danny. Please.”

  She leaned back, closed her eyes. “But it turned out I was smart. And God knows I have the gift for attracting men. So I picked out a rich one in Denver and got him to send me to college. I graduated cum laude and applied to law school. But he didn’t want a lawyer, he wanted a blonde babe to drink wine spritzers with and impress his old-fart married friends. So we split and I came east again.”

  “Were you ever in touch with Kevin?”

  “No. I’d heard from some distant relative about his being in and out of mental hospitals. After I started practicing law here, I put out some feelers. But of course I had people looking for a Kevin Wingfield. I didn’t know he’d changed his name, too. So I never found him.”

  I said nothing, watched as tears began to slide from her closed lids.

  “Eventually, I made enough of a name for myself to land a job in the DA’s office. I won’t pretend I’m not ambitious, Danny. And I like getting the bad guys.”

  “I can imagine why.” I paused. “Then came the night they brought Kevin in, after he’d been assaulted…”

  Karen pushed back the tears in her eyes with her palms. As a child does. As Kevin did.

  “I happened to be working that night, so I went down to the Box to join the interview. Then, when I looked through the glass and saw who it was…It’s funny, after all those years, but I recognized him immediately. My baby brother Kev.”

  “But that’s what I don’t understand. Why didn’t you go inside? Let him know who you were?”

  “I don’t know, Danny. I just…couldn’t. After all that time, wondering about him, trying to find him. But suddenly I was so ashamed. I realized he must have been, too. He’d changed his name, like I had. We’d each chosen to go on with our separate lives. What right did I have to screw with that?”


  Her eyes found mine. “Besides, what if seeing me again did something bad to him? I mean, psychologically. Kevin seemed so fragile…like he was barely keeping it together as it was. So I didn’t go inside. Didn’t let him see me. But I was so worried about him, I called Angie Villanova.”

  She sighed. “I felt so much better when I knew he was in treatment with you. I thought it would buy me some time to figure out what to do. Whether to tell him about me.”

  Her voice caught. “And then he was murdered. My little Kev…poor baby…poor baby…”

  She broke into wrenching sobs, and I cradled her in my arms. Kissed her wet cheeks, the side of her neck.

  “I understand now,” I said quietly. “When Wingfield came forward after Kevin’s death…the grieving father, throwing his weight around with the cops…”

  Her face craned up, flushed with anger.

  “Yes!…That’s when I decided to take him down. I owed it to Kevin to expose our father’s crimes. But I didn’t want to come forward myself. All that publicity. The loss of the life I’d built for myself. I couldn’t give him that, too.”

  “So that night I first met you, when you complained to Polk about their case against Paula Stark…”

  She nodded. “I’d already decided to use her. Polk was right. We did have enough to charge her. But I spoke with Paula in private and…well…committed a felony.”

  “You offered to let her walk, in exchange for leaving the state and making the calls to the DA’s office, pretending she was someone named Karen Wingfield.”

  “Paula’s not stupid. She knew ten minutes into my pitch that I was Karen Wingfield. But she didn’t care. She treated me as though we were sisters-in-arms, fucked by men and the system and life. Don’t get me wrong, she was happy to skate on armed robbery. But she was almost as happy to help bring down my sick bastard of a father.”

  “Where is she now? Do you know?”

  “That part’s the truth. She’s somewhere in Europe. I arranged for the flight myself. With no outstanding warrants, Paula Stark and her son can go anywhere they want. She told me her plan was to marry a Count.”