I took another file card from the top left drawer and wrote down Bechman’s name and address again and under that a few questions that had come to mind. Did the doctor have a pied-à-terre in the city? Did the doctor stay over in the city during the week? Did the doctor have a girlfriend, preferably, I thought, an irate one? Where had Marsha Bechman been at the time of her husband’s murder?
I wondered if Bechman had one of those shared offices, two or three doctors together to keep the expenses down, almost a necessity nowadays what with people suing over every little mistake doctors made and malpractice insurance being so high. In fact, I suspected that for someone injecting Botox into the faces of children, the insurance would be even stiffer than usual.
I stopped writing and checked the time. It was too late for a doctor’s office to be open and too early for Dashiell’s last walk, but I had the sudden yen to walk over to Washington Square Park and see how many names were on the doctor’s bell. As soon as I stood up, Dash did, too. He was always willing to drop whatever it was he was doing, in this case taking a nap, in order to accompany me on a walk of any length, one of the many things I liked about dogs in general and Dashiell in particular.
I grabbed my cell phone, my keys, a twenty-dollar bill and Dashiell’s leash, checking the pockets of my jeans for pickup bags and finding three. We headed out the door and turned right, walking a couple of blocks to West Fourth Street and then taking that toward the park, skirting it when we got there, then looking for Dr. Bechman’s address. The town house his office occupied was about a third of the way up the block, a stately building with views that at one time were more elegant than they are today, unless there were drug dealers and the homeless in the park then, too. Even so, the doctor was in a classy spot, not far from the newly renovated Washington Square Arch and just around the corner from Fifth Avenue.
I didn’t need to open the low gate that led to the two steps down to the doctor’s office. I could read the three brass plaques from where I stood on the sidewalk. Dr. Bechman was, according to the plaque with his name on it, a plaque that was still there a week and a half after his death, a pediatric neurologist, something I didn’t know existed before that moment. Dr. Hyram Willet, who had the top plaque, was an oncologist and Dr. Laura Edelstein, a pediatrician. My guess was that Dr. Willet worked only with children, too, because there was no way an adult with a diagnosis of cancer would sit in a waiting room full of screaming kids.
The fact that Bechman had been part of a shared practice was good news. It meant the office was still open for business, that the receptionist still had a job and I had a chance of wheedling some information out of her. What I wanted, of course, was a complete patient list as well as any personal gossip about the late Dr. Bechman I could get. At the very least, I wanted someone else’s take on Madison Spector. Since she herself wasn’t talking, and since I believed her father was holding things back in order to protect his daughter, something I couldn’t really fault him for, I had to find people who were willing to speak openly about Madison. I needed to know more about her.
I looked at the card I’d taken off the bulletin board and pocketed, and dialed Dr. Bechman’s number. Standing in front of the doctor’s office, I listened to the recording tell me what hours the office was open and when Dr. Bechman was, or in this case used to be, available: Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to five and Fridays from one to four.
I took the stairs, a wide, long stoop up to the front door, which led to the parlor floor of the town house, just as they did in the smaller version I took care of on West Tenth Street. I had a penlight in my pocket but found I didn’t need it. The light hanging over the doorway, brass and etched glass, lit the name on the bell. There was just one. Apparently Dr. Willet lived in the rest of the town house and Drs. Bechman and Edelstein commuted. I made a note to check under Bechman again in the phone book to see if there was a residential listing as well.
Standing at the top of the stairs I reminded myself that whatever Dr. Bechman had done, with or without Botox, it was unlikely he deserved his early demise. I had to be sure that in my zeal to get Madison off the hook, inspired not by my belief in her innocence but by the fact that the likelihood of finding her mother was so slim, I did not fall into the trap of blaming the victim. I didn’t plan to do anything with whatever I discovered unless I was sure it impacted on the case. I was just, for the moment, doing what my job had taught me to do, following every thread, no matter where it went, because you never knew what it could reveal.
I dialed Leon’s number next. He answered on the first ring.
“Are you planning to be with Madison every second of the time until this case is resolved one way or another?”
“Rachel?”
“Sorry. I should remember to say hello first.”
I expected Leon to laugh at that but he didn’t. I doubted he’d had much to laugh about for a very long time.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. Then he whispered, “Do you think it’s odd that I don’t want her on her own now, Rachel? After all…” His voice trailed off, but I didn’t need Leon to finish his last sentence.
“No, it’s not odd.”
“I don’t understand. What is it you want?”
“I was thinking I’d like to spend some time with Madison, just the two of us. Would that be possible?”
There was silence on the phone while Leon processed my request.
“Why? She’s not going to tell you anything,” he whispered. “She’s not going to talk to you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I looked at my watch wondering if Madison was still up and if that was why he was whispering.
“Even if you had a court order saying that you had to keep her with you, you’d probably still be able to occasionally hire a responsible person to take care of her when you weren’t able to.”
“There is no court order. She hasn’t been arrested.”
I ignored his comment. “Hire me,” I said. “I’m responsible and my rates can’t be beat.”
Silence.
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t use a break, Leon? I’m offering you a break.”
“What’s this all about?”
“You’re going to have to trust me on this, Leon,” I told him. Then the silence was coming from my end. “I’m not sure what it’s all about but I think that in order to do the job you hired me to do…” Stopping in mid-sentence, sounding more like Leon than myself. “Here’s what I’m doing, Leon. I’m exploring every possible connection to Sally in the hope that someone or something will eventually lead me to her. That’s all I can do after all these years and that’s what spending time with Madison is all about.”
“But Madison…” He stopped. I figured I knew what he was going to tell me but I didn’t say so. “She won’t talk to you, Rachel. And even if she did, she was only seven when Sally left. I don’t know how much she remembers or if any of it would be useful to you. And she’s difficult. You won’t find it easy being with her. You can see that already, can’t you?”
“I don’t have a lot of options, Leon.”
I heard him blowing his nose. Then coughing. “Okay,” he said. “You do what you feel is best. I’ll explain it to Madison.”
“No, don’t do that,” I said much too quickly.
“Don’t explain it?”
“What would you say?”
“I’d say that…” He stopped, unable to answer my question. “What would I say?”
“Does Madison understand the arrangement and the reason for it?”
“I believe so.”
“So she knows you’re not willing to leave her alone right now?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, then tell her that you have to do something on Saturday morning and you can’t take her with you. Tell her that I’m going to stay with her.” There was another silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t even hear Leon breathing. “Leon?”
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh, yes or oh, no?”
“Oh, yes. I was nodding. I forgot you couldn’t see me.”
“I’ll be there at ten,” I told him. “Day after tomorrow.”
“I’m working on the papers for you.”
“Good. When will I be able to get them?”
“Tomorrow night, after eight. Madison goes to sleep at eight.”
“I’ll be there,” I told him.
“Just ring the bell. I’ll bring them down.”
This time I was the one who nodded, but not until after Leon was off the line. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten that Leon couldn’t see me. I was nodding to myself, agreeing with my plan to try to get to know Madison. As I walked home, that’s all I could think about, wondering how I might connect somehow with this unreachable person, wondering when I did, if I did, what her response would be, wondering if she had, indeed, killed Dr. Bechman in a fit of rage, as the authorities presumed.
When I got home, Dashiell and I stayed outside for a while. I thought I’d sit on the steps, look up through the branches of the oak tree in the center of the garden and watch the stars. But it was cloudy and there wasn’t much to see, the sky an inky black with just the occasional wisp of silver-gray cloud visible beyond the tree. Dashiell sat next to me, on the top step, waiting to see if I might toss a ball or order a pizza, or perhaps just waiting with no other purpose in mind. I thought we’d stay out for a while and then go in and go to bed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Madison.
What if Sally were still alive? What if I were able to find her? What if I could convince her to come back and try to help the daughter she’d abandoned five years earlier? And suppose she did that, suppose she agreed and suppose, as Leon wished, seeing her mother, Madison began to talk again? And suppose when she did, she said she had killed Dr. Bechman, that she was guilty as charged? Or rather as not yet charged.
I worried at first that even if Madison did speak up, no one would believe her. But that would only be the case if she claimed she hadn’t killed Dr. Bechman. I was pretty sure that if she confessed to the crime, everyone would think she was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even her own father.
Was that why I was so concerned about this angry, uncommunicative little girl, because in the end she might have no one else on her side? I hadn’t even been hired to solve the crime she’d been thought to have committed. I’d only been hired to try to find Sally.
Sally.
Had she planned to disappear, wouldn’t she have left when Leon was out working and Madison was in school? She could have taken some things then, some clothes, some money. She could have left a note.
But that’s not what had happened. She’d gone out to walk Roy. And then what? Had someone snatched her off the street? Had her body floated to the surface somewhere like the one that had turned up near LaGuardia Airport? Was Sally dead and gone, buried in potter’s field or in some woods in New Jersey, her bones, perhaps, dug up and carried away by animals, one or two at a time?
Or was it something else entirely, a lover, say, closer to her own age, someone she’d met quite by accident at the supermarket or in the drugstore, someone she’d been seeing and couldn’t find a way to tell Leon about?
Or had she just wanted some air? And once outside, once she’d started putting distance between herself and the life she’d been living, she found she couldn’t go back. Who hasn’t imagined that scenario, I thought, walking out of the house one night, letting the door close behind you, never going back. You wouldn’t necessarily know where you were headed. That wasn’t the point. You’d only know where you had been, and that it was a place you didn’t want to be, a place you couldn’t be, not ever again.
CHAPTER 5
After a swim at the Y, I stopped at home to drop off my wet swimsuit, make a couple of phone calls and pick up Dashiell, heading back where we’d been the night before, to Dr. Bechman’s office. It seemed that Dr. Bechman wasn’t the only one who didn’t have hours on Friday morning. According to the two recordings I’d just listened to, the entire office would be closed Friday morning. Dr. Willet’s recording said that in case of an emergency, he could be reached at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His pager number was repeated twice. Dr. Edelstein had hours from one to four on Fridays, the same as the late Dr. Bechman. It was still early and no one answered the bell. I crossed the street and leaned against the park fence to wait.
An hour earlier, floating in the pool after doing laps, letting my mind wander along with my body, I thought not about Madison Spector or her missing mother. I thought about my sister Lillian, on the day her son was born. My brother-in-law, Ted, had called to give me the news and I’d gone straight to the hospital to see the newborn Zachery, his tiny dimpled hands in fists he held to his face, like a boxer protecting a glass chin. The moment I picked him up, I felt a lurching in my chest, something opening to embrace him, to make room for this small being in my heart. It was difficult to take my eyes off him, but when I did, I saw my sister watching him, too, the expression on her face one I’d never seen before.
“It’s as if the whole world was in black and white,” she whispered, “and now, all at once, it’s in color.”
I was sitting on the edge of her bed, the baby’s head against one arm, his almost weightless body on my lap, watching his lips work, practicing for his first big meal.
“I saw him being born,” she said. “And the strangest thing happened.” My sister pale, her hair still damp against her brow, her hand on my arm, the backs of her long fingers against the baby’s head. “It was as if I was finally ready to start my life. No one ever told me,” she said, taking her hand away, reaching for the cup of water on her nightstand. “No one ever said I would feel like this.”
Waiting for someone to show up and open the office, I wondered how Sally had felt when Madison was born, if she, too, felt that her life was about to begin. Or did she feel it had just ended? Instead of the brightness my sister had experienced, my sister who always felt she’d been born to be a mother, did Sally feel the world closing in? From that moment on, everything she wanted to do would have to be preceded by an answer to the question “What about the baby?” Had the tiny person she held in her arms represented not the freedom to be herself, the way it had for my sister, but a kind of prison, a taking away of everything she’d ever wanted?
Turning the corner from MacDougal Street, a woman caught my eye. Was it the brisk, no-nonsense walk, the fact that she was heading for the place I was watching, or was it something else, some hard-to-pin-down quality that said receptionist? Did she somehow appear to be the person whose voice was on all three recordings? Or was it the white uniform, white stockings and white shoes? I wondered if she really was a nurse or if she just played one on the bus coming to work and, perhaps, in the office, doling out sage advice and urgent warnings along with the little white card with the next appointment on it.
I crossed the street and met her at the gate that led to the garden floor of the town house. When her eyebrows rose, I realized I hadn’t planned what I was going to say. I wasn’t related to Madison. I hadn’t even been hired to do the work I was attempting to do. I had no right to ask anything. Could I tell her I had some questions to ask her because I was just curious? When I didn’t speak, she reached for the latch to open the gate, but her manners and her training took over and she didn’t continue on inside.
“Yes?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, trying to gather my thoughts. Since lying when I was on the job was one of my specialties, in fact, lying for a living was as good a definition of undercover work as I’d ever heard, I was surprised to find myself tongue-tied. I knew what I wanted, but for once in my life, not how to try to get it. “It’s about Madison Spector,” I finally said. “I’ve been hired to find her mother.”
She didn’t say anything but she was shaking her head, holding her hand out the way you might hold a cross out to ward off a vampire. She looked startled, almost afraid, then angry, her fac
e a slide show of emotions.
“I was the one who found him,” she said. She shook her head again. “Whatever it is you want, I’m not the person to ask.”
“I’m only trying to understand a child who doesn’t talk,” I said. “Her father thinks that if I can find her mother, Madison might be willing to speak again, might be able to tell us what happened.”
“Oh, we know what happened.”
“Do you?”
“I guess you’re new on the scene,” she nearly spat out at me. “I guess you haven’t spent much time with her.” She cocked her head and waited for my reply.
“That’s correct,” I told her.
“Do you think this is the first time she’s acted up?” Shaking her head, frowning. “Well, it’s not. Only this time—”
“Was there yelling?” I asked.
“Yelling? She doesn’t make a sound.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s just one of her many ways of manipulating the people who are forced to deal with her.”
“So there was no yelling?”
“Well, Dr. Bechman would never have yelled at a child. At anyone. So the answer to your question is no, there was no yelling.”
The little tag pinned to her chest uniform said “L. Peach.”
“So you didn’t hear anything, Ms. Peach, anything at all?”
She inhaled sharply through her nose but said nothing, a woman in her sixties, neat in her white uniform, hair pulled tightly back off her full face. Her cheeks were doughy and she was wearing too much makeup. Behind her bifocals I could see she was fuming. A second later, I thought she was about to cry.
“She was the last person here. She, she…”
I just waited, Dashiell sitting close to my leg.
“I heard him before I left for the day. I heard him saying what he’d said before, what he’d told Mr. Spector when he came in with her right after it happened,” pointing to her eyelid, “that the effects of the Botox were temporary, that that’s why she was supposed to come in every three months for shots, because it wasn’t permanent. Anyway, this shot was supposed to be for her other eye. He did one at a time. He was very conservative in his treatment of…”
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