“I understand you were at the medical practice around the corner when Celia Abele worked there.”
She stepped back. “What is this about?”
“And that you are JoAnn’s pediatrician, but you see her at your other office, at the hospital. Is that correct?”
“Who are you? What is it you…?”
“You heard about Celia, of course.”
Dr. Edelstein blinked. I didn’t wait for more.
“Charles doesn’t think that Celia committed suicide, Doctor, and neither do I. I think her death is connected to the death of Eric Bechman.”
“Of course it is.”
I shook my head. “Not in the way you think. It wasn’t grief that killed Celia.”
I watched the information play across her face, waited as she took another step back, another step away from me.
“If you could only give me ten minutes to explain.”
“Who are you? What is your connection to Celia and Eric?”
“My name is Rachel Alexander,” I told her. “I’m a private investigator, hired by Leon Spector, whose daughter, Madison—”
She began to shake her head. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t help you with this.”
“Madison didn’t kill Dr. Bechman. If we can sit down somewhere, I can explain. I can show you—”
“I have to get home. I’m expected…” Making a point of checking her watch.
“Do you have children, Dr. Edelstein?” Knowing she did, a girl of six. Ellie. When I saw the look on Dr. Edelstein’s face, I lifted one hand. “I’m not here to threaten you, Doctor. Far from it. It’s just that since you have a child, too, a daughter, you must understand how Charles Abele feels, how Leon Spector feels.”
“Of course I understand. What does that have to do with anything?”
“I have good reason to believe that Madison didn’t murder her doctor. And she surely didn’t murder Celia. If I’m right, and let’s assume for the moment that I am, someone else did. Someone else killed them both.”
She had finally stopped walking. She was standing there, holding her jacket tight around her body, just staring at me, wondering what the hell was happening to her orderly life. Well, who hadn’t ever worried about that? No one I knew. And wasn’t that the point I was trying to make, that Leon’s and Charles’s lives had been torn to shreds, not just once either. If she was going to help me, she’d have to understand that, no matter what it took.
“Who?” she said.
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I need your help.”
“You said you could show me something,” she said. “Show me what?”
I had Madison’s drawing in my jacket pocket, the copy of her medical records as well. I took the drawing out first, unfolding it, handing it to Dr. Edelstein. “This is a copy of the drawing that was found on Dr. Bechman’s desk a few hours after he was murdered.”
She began to shake her head.
“I know it looks different. As you know, Madison doesn’t speak. She stopped speaking shortly after her mother disappeared. I was hired to find her mother—and I did.”
Dr. Edelstein’s mouth opened, but I held up my hand before she had the chance to speak.
“Mr. Spector thought if I could find his missing wife and bring her home, that if she had her mother back, Madison would speak again, that she would tell us whether or not she had committed this terrible crime. But her mother won’t come back.” I shook my head. “Wishes won’t change that. She won’t.”
Try as I did to stop it, I felt my eyes getting wet. I felt a tear fall.
“I’ve been trying, with Dashiell’s help,” looking down at him, then back at her, streams of people passing us going both ways, the world leaving work and going home for the evening, “I’ve been trying to get through to her, to Madison, to connect with her, to show her that she could trust me, and I think I did, somewhat, because she was willing, just today, to tell me what this drawing meant by finishing it.”
Dr. Edelstein looked down at the drawing in her hand, then back up at me.
“You saw the original, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So you can see the difference.”
“Yes, I can, but what does it mean?”
“The drawing wasn’t a threat. Madison was telling Dr. Bechman that the effects of the Botox had broken her heart. He must have understood. He must have stopped her before she finished it, to tell her that, to say she didn’t have to have the second injection.”
“What is it you want from me, Ms. Alexander?”
“If whoever murdered Dr. Bechman also murdered Celia, the likelihood is that Celia was killed because she knew something, something someone didn’t want me to find out.” There were benches in the entranceway of Two Fifth Avenue, low bushes behind them, a place to wait for a friend who was coming down. “Can we sit a moment?” I asked her. “There’s something else I’d like to show you.”
Dr. Edelstein hesitated, then walked to the closest bench and sat. I sat near her, turning so that I could face her, pulling the copy of Madison’s records out of my jacket pocket.
“I asked Mr. Spector to obtain a copy of Madison’s medical records for me, something I could show her mother if I located her.”
“Even with that…?”
“She wouldn’t look at them. But I’m hoping you will.”
“She wouldn’t look at them? At her own daughter’s—”
“That’s done and gone, Doctor. There’s no use discussing it because all the talk in the world is not going to make Sally come back,” picturing her cabin, empty now, perhaps Roy’s water bowl forgotten in the corner, a single shoe lying on its side in the closet.
She reached for the papers. “Of course I’m aware of her condition because of the—”
“It’s not the diagnosis I want you to see. It’s the form in which the notes are written.”
“The form? You mean you can’t read his handwriting?”
“No. It’s not that. It’s the spaces.” I handed her the sheets. “As if something had been removed, whited out, and then the copy recopied.”
“You mean a problem with the copying machine, part of the records missing?”
“Yes and no. I believe parts of the records are missing, but I don’t think it’s a problem with the copying machine.”
“And what is it you think I can do for you, Ms. Alexander? Surely you don’t think I can give a private investigator access to the medical records of one of the children who come to our practice.” Stopping, shaking her head, one hand on her shoulder bag as if she suddenly thought I was planning to snatch it, that that’s what this was all about.
“I’m aware that you can’t do that. It would be against the law. But you could look at them, couldn’t you? You could see if they’ve been altered.”
Laura Edelstein held my eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Then she reached for the envelope with Madison’s records in it, pulling the sheets out, opening them on her lap and beginning to read.
When she’d finished reading Madison’s records, she folded them and put them back in the envelope. “If you’ll just give me a moment to call home, we can go back to the office.” Her face grim.
“No, we can’t. I’m afraid that’s not a good idea. The office—someone might be watching the office. I don’t want to put you in danger.”
“Then what do you have in mind?”
“Is there any way you can look at them tomorrow, by going in early or by somehow getting Ms. Peach out of the way?”
“Are you saying Louise Peach has something to do with Dr. Bechman’s murder?”
“All I know is that Ms. Peach gave the records you have in your hand to Madison’s father when he asked for a complete copy of her medical history with Dr. Bechman. Perhaps I’m wrong, Doctor. Perhaps they’re accurate. But if they aren’t…”
She shook her head. “I’m in the hospital before office hours, so I can’t get there early. But I can get rid of Louis
e. I can send her out to fill a prescription for me. She won’t be happy, but she’ll go.”
“Would that be an unusual thing to do, sending her out on an errand?”
“No, not really.”
“And wouldn’t you have the medication you need in the office? I thought doctors get free samples of everything.”
“I’ll be sure to come up with something we don’t have on hand. I’m sure I can figure that out. Meanwhile, can I hold on to this?” Holding up the envelope I’d given her.
“Of course.” I took out a business card and added my cell phone number. “You’ll call me as soon as you know?”
“I will.”
“Doctor, can you make a private call from the office, one no one else can listen in on?”
She stood but she didn’t walk away. “I can,” she said. “I can use my cell phone.” Serious as a bad diagnosis, something you never want to hear, even for your worst enemy. “What if the files are identical? What if Louise Xeroxed what was in the file, as it was in the file, then what?”
I shook my head. “I tracked down Celia. I was hoping for another view of Madison. I was hoping for something more sympathetic, which is what I got. But I also got more than I’d bargained for. I got this cock-and-bull story of how Dr. Bechman was supporting his second family. You do know…”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I didn’t think what they did was right, but—”
“Not the point, Doctor. We all judge, but that’s not the issue here. And all beside the point now. The issue is that he needed enough money to take care of Celia and JoAnn without it showing up on his taxes, forms his wife would be signing, too. Even if she’s one of those unconscious women who has no idea what’s going on financially in her own family, just having that information available in black and white was a poor idea. For example, had they ever split up, had a lawyer ever gotten hold of his tax forms,” shaking my head, “that wasn’t a trail he wanted to leave. If his wife did find out, he’d be finished in every way you can think of.”
Dr. Edelstein sat down again.
“Celia said that Eric has this gig with an advertising company where he ran focus groups for them to determine things in advance about new drugs before they went on the market, what kind of wording would make people feel most confident, what color the pills should be, that kind of stuff. She said they paid him off the books, that they paid him in cash.”
I could see by the expression on her face that she didn’t buy the story either.
“Unlikely,” I said. “That’s what I thought, too. Oh, I’m sure the drug companies hire advertising firms and I’m sure those firms run focus groups and do everything they can to sell us, the public, on their new products, even in those circumstances where the need for such a product didn’t previously exist. They’re very good at that and the American public is endlessly gullible. But to pay enough money to support a family and do that off the books?” I shook my head. “That I can’t imagine. And even if I could, Doctor, just the same way when you hear a few symptoms, you can list the rest of them, just the same way the traffic cop shakes his head when you tell him you were only speeding because you were going downhill, that’s the way I can tell when someone’s spinning out a story, making it up as they go along. The voice goes up in register, ever so slightly, but I can hear it. Eye contact diminishes. And most people talk faster, even louder, once they’re on a roll, particularly if they think you’re buying what they’re selling.”
“Is that why you think she was killed, because she knew the truth and she might tell it one day?”
I nodded.
“And you think the truth, whatever Eric was doing to raise the money he needed, you think that is connected to what may have been removed from Madison’s records?”
“I do, Doctor.”
“Some kind of insurance fraud?”
“I can’t answer your question until you call me tomorrow.”
She stood. Again she didn’t leave. I stood, too, and reached for her free hand.
“Please be careful, Doctor. Someone was willing to let a child take the fall for stabbing her doctor in the heart. Someone killed a second time to keep a secret.”
“Then you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“The needle used to inject Botox into the muscles just beneath the surface of the skin is barely an inch long.”
“So it couldn’t reach the heart?”
“There’s more than one way to reach the heart, Ms. Alexander.”
“I read that Botox could prove fatal if it paralyzed the respiratory muscles. Is that what happened?”
She shook her head. “He died too quickly for it to have been any sort of paralysis from the Botox.”
“Anaphylactic shock?”
She nodded. “His body shut down in a matter of seconds.”
“Did he know about the allergy?”
“I have no reason to think he did.”
“But then whoever killed him couldn’t have known either.”
“We can assume that.”
“Which means his death was an accident?”
“Of sorts,” she said. She took the copy of Madison’s medical records and slipped them into the outside pocket of her purse, handing me the finished drawing, a heart broken in two.
“But Celia’s death wasn’t,” I said. “And it wasn’t suicide. It was murder.” I folded Madison’s drawing and put it into my pocket. “We may never know what was in the heart of the killer the first time, Doctor. We may never know his or her intent. It might have been, as the police suggest, something that happened in the heat of the moment, a mindless explosion of rage that left Bechman dead for a reason no one could have guessed. But what happened to Celia was another story. That death was clearly premeditated, coldly planned and heartlessly executed.”
“And it left that poor little girl without a mother,” she said. “Things like that shouldn’t happen, not ever.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, thinking about two little girls, not one. “I’ll wait for your call.”
She reached out and touched my arm, then turned away and headed home.
I avoided the park on the way home. I was mostly thinking about what Dr. Edelstein was going to find. It was hard to think about anything else. But something else was trying to get my attention, something I had seen that had invaded my subconscious. Walking along the dark side streets of the Village, I tried to play it out of hiding, the way you would tease a cat out from under the bed with a feather on the end of a string. But whatever it was, it stayed beyond reach, safely hidden in the dark.
CHAPTER 31
There was no use waiting around the house all morning for a call that wouldn’t come until afternoon. I took Dashiell for a long walk, then headed for the Y to swim. Would I ever stop thinking of Madison’s room when I was swimming, of the way Sally had painted the walls in the hope that the underwater scene would calm her daughter, as if that were all it took, all the kid needed? She did it for Madison, that’s what I’d been told. Perhaps that wasn’t so. Perhaps she’d painted her daughter’s room that way in an effort to stay, as a way of trying to bring the world she needed to the place where she was. And then like a siren, all that blue called to her, pulling her away from Madison and Leon, drawing her to a more comfortable place, a world of fish and coral and rocks, a world without people, like the one on her daughter’s walls.
My head in the water, my arms reaching out in front of me, then driving the water back, I was in that world, too. No matter that there was someone swimming laps in the next lane, that in other parts of the Y people were walking on treadmills, riding stationary bicycles, doing yoga, step aerobics, ballet. All I could see was the pale blue of the pool’s water as if I were alone in the world.
Was that what Sally was after? Was that what she had achieved? No emotional attachments, a job where strangers came and went, no one staying long enough to make things personal. And when she wasn’t working, a world away, apart, a c
ool, quiet place where she never had to tell a needy child to be quiet, a lonely husband that she had to study, where she never had to tell her family that she didn’t love them, at least not enough, that she never had and never would.
Where had she gone? I wondered. Someplace else where she could slip under the radar, work off the books, spend her time reading and swimming. I thought of the dog, Roy, waiting on the shore, a demanding breed, but nothing compared to the demands of family, nothing compared to the demands Madison must have made on her. Sally could meet Roy’s demands, a walk in the morning, a swim in the afternoon, a game of fetch when the air cooled down at night. Perhaps he slept on the foot of the bed, too, and that might have been all she needed, all she wanted, all she could handle.
Floating on my back at the end of my time in the pool, I thought about the people Dashiell and I did pet therapy with. Some of them had come not to trust another human. But they trusted Dashiell. They trusted a dog’s nonjudgmental attitude. They felt safe with him. And for some, that safety allowed them, over time, rapport with the person who had brought the dog. Sally had stopped, it seemed with Roy, Roy who would never ask a question that would tear her to shreds, Roy who would never ask for more than she could give.
I picked up lunch on the way home. Then, sitting at my desk, sharing my sushi with Dashiell, I began to go over all my notes again, knowing that sometimes what you were looking for ended up being right under your nose all along.
I had started a time line for Sally’s disappearance, at least for the one when Paul spirited her away from the meat market in his truck. I put that in a folder. It was no longer the point. I put the notes from the meeting with Jim there as well, and the printouts of the other letters I’d gotten by posting Sally’s name on Classmates.com.
I had notes from speaking to neighbors in Leon and Madison’s building, Nancy Goodman and Ted Fowler. I hadn’t made notes after talking to Nina. I didn’t think anything she had to say would help me help Madison. I put all those notes away, too.
That’s when I noticed the contact sheets Leon had given me, pictures of Dashiell from the time I was away. I checked the time. I wouldn’t hear from Dr. Edelstein for at least another hour, probably much longer, so I took out my loupe and started to look at pictures of Dash, Dash at the waterfront, Dash at the dog run, Dash with Madison. I guess Madison was learning how to use his camera, too, because there were even shots of Dash with Leon. I thought by now the whole world had gone digital, but not Leon. Leon was out of step. He probably always was. Leon and Sally. What a pair.
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