She continued, “Doctor, you saw Vangie at about eight o’clock that night. Isn’t that true?”
He nodded. “I saw her at precisely eight o’clock.”
“How long did she stay?”
“About forty minutes. She phoned Monday afternoon and asked for an appointment. I usually work until eight on Monday night and was completely booked. I told her so and suggested she come in Tuesday morning.”
“How did she respond?”
“She began to cry over the phone. She acted quite distressed, and of course, I told her to come in, that I could see her at eight.”
“Why was she so distressed, Doctor?”
He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. “She had quarreled with her husband. She was convinced he did not love her or want the baby. Physically, the strain of the pregnancy was beginning to tell on her. She was quite immature, really—an only child who had been inordinately spoiled and fussed over. The physical discomfort was appalling to her, and the prospect of the birth had suddenly become frightening.”
Unconsciously, his eyes shifted to the chair at the right of his desk. She had sat in it Monday evening, that long caftan folding around her. Much as she had claimed to want a baby, Vangie had hated maternity clothes, hated losing her figure. In the last month she’d tried to conceal her outsized body and swollen leg by wearing floor-length dresses. It was a miracle she hadn’t tripped and fallen the way they flapped around her feet.
Katie stared at him curiously. This man was nervous. What advice had he given Vangie that had sent her rushing home to kill herself? Or had sent her to a killer if Richard’s hunch was right? The quarrel Chris Lewis had not admitted that he and Vangie had quarreled.
Leaning forward quickly, Katie asked, “Doctor, I realize that you want to protect the confidentiality of Mrs. Lewis’ discussions with you, but this is an official matter. We do need to know whatever you can tell us about the quarrel Vangie Lewis had with her husband.”
It seemed to him that Katie’s voice came from far off. He was seeing Vangie’s eyes terrified and staring at him. With a fierce effort he cleared his thoughts and looked directly at Katie. “Mrs. Lewis told me that she believed her husband was in love with someone else; that she’d accused him of that. She told me she had warned him that when she found out who the woman was she’d make her life hell. She was angry, agitated, bitter and frightened.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I promised her that before and during the birth she would be given everything necessary to make her comfortable. I told her that we hoped she would have the baby she’d always wanted and that it might be the instrument to give her marriage more time.”
“How did she react to that?”
“She began to calm down. But then I felt it necessary to warn her that after the baby was born, if her marriage relationship did not improve, she should consider the possibility of terminating it.”
“And then?”
“She became furious. She swore that she would never let her husband leave her, that I was like everyone else, on his side. She got up and grabbed her coat.”
“What did you do, Doctor?”
“It was clearly time for me to do nothing. I told her to go home, get a good night’s sleep and to call me in the morning. I realized it was far too early for her to deal with the seemingly irrevocable fact that Captain Lewis wanted a divorce.”
“And she left?”
“Yes. Her car was parked in the rear parking area. Occasionally she’d ask if she could use my private entrance in order to go out the back way. Monday night she didn’t ask. She simply walked out through that door.”
“And you never heard from her again?”
“No.”
“I see.” Katie got up and walked over to the paneled wall with the pictures. She wanted to keep Dr. Fukhito talking. He was holding something back. He was nervous.
“I was a patient here myself Monday night, Doctor,” she said. “I had a minor automobile accident and was brought here.”
“I’m glad it was minor.”
“Yes.” Katie stood in front of one of the pictures. A Small Road at Yabu Koji Atagoshita. “That’s lovely,” she said. “It’s from the Hundred Views of Yedo series, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You’re very knowledgeable about Japanese art.”
“Not really. My husband was the expert and taught me a little about it, and I have other reproductions from the series, but this one is beautiful. Interesting, isn’t it, the concept of one hundred views of the same place?”
He became watchful. Katie’s back was to him and she did not see that he pressed his lips into a rigid line.
Katie turned around. “Doctor, I was brought in here around ten o’clock Monday night. Can you tell me, is there any chance that Vangie Lewis did not leave at eight o’clock; that she was still around the hospital; that at ten o’clock, when I was brought in, semiconscious, I might have seen her?”
Dr. Fukhito stared at Katie, feeling clammy wet fear crawl across his skin. He forced himself to smile. “I don’t see how,” he said. But Katie noticed that his knuckles were clenched and white, as if he were forcing himself to sit in his chair, not to run away, and something—was it fury or fear?—flashed in his eyes.
♦20♦
At five o’clock Gertrude Fitzgerald turned the phone over to the answering service and locked the reception desk. Nervously she phoned Edna’s number. Again there was no answer. There was no doubt. Edna had been drinking more and more lately. But she was such a cheerful, good person. Really loved everybody. Gertrude and Edna often had lunch together, usually in the hospital cafeteria. Sometimes Edna would say, “Let’s go out and get something decent.” That meant she wanted to go to the pub near the hospital where she could get a Manhattan. Those days Gertrude always tried to make her keep it down to one drink. She’d kid her along. “You can have a couple tonight, honey,” she’d say.
Gertrude understood Edna’s need to drink. She didn’t drink herself, but she understood that hollow, burning feeling when all you do is go to work every day and then go home and stare at four walls. She and Edna laughed sometimes about all the articles that told you to take up yoga or tennis or join a bird-watching club or take a course. And Edna would say, “I couldn’t get these fat legs in the cross-leg position; there’s no way I’ll ever touch the ground without bending my knees; I’m allergic to birds and at the end of the day I’m too tired to worry about the history of ancient Greece. I just wish that somewhere along the way I’d meet a nice guy who wanted to come home to me at night, and buh-lieve me, I wouldn’t care if he snored.”
Gertrude was a widow of seven years, but at least she had the children and grandchildren; people who cared about her, called her up, sometimes borrowed a few hundred bucks; people who needed her. She had her own lonely times, God knew, but it wasn’t the same as it was for Edna. She’d lived. She was sixty-two years old, in good health, and she had something to look back on.
She could swear Dr. Highley had known she was lying when she said Edna had called in sick. But Edna had admitted that Dr. Highley had warned her about the drinking. And Edna needed the job. Those old parents of hers had cost her a mint before they died. Not that Edna ever complained. Sad thing was, she wished they were still around; she missed them.
Suppose Edna hadn’t been drinking? Suppose she was sick or something? The thought made Gertrude catch her breath sharply. No two ways about it. She’d have to check up on Edna. She’d drive over to her house right now. If she was drinking, she’d make her stop and sober her up. If she was sick, she’d take care of her.
Her mind settled, Gertrude got up from the desk briskly. Something else. That Mrs. DeMaio from the Prosecutor’s office. She’d been very nice, but you could tell she’d been anxious to talk to Edna. She’d probably phone Edna tomorrow. What could she want of her? Whatever would Edna be able to tell her about Mrs. Lewis?
It was an intriguing problem, one that kept Gertrude occupied a
s she drove the six miles to Edna’s apartment. But she was still unable to come up with an answer by the time she drove into the visitors’ parking area behind Edna’s apartment and walked around to the front door.
The lights were on. Even though the shiny, self-lined drapery was drawn, Gertrude could tell that there were lights coming from the living room and dinette. As she neared the door, she heard the faint sound of voices. The television set, of course.
A momentary irritation flashed through her. She might just get really annoyed if Edna was sitting all nice and comfortable in her recliner and hadn’t even bothered to answer the phone. She, Gertrude, had covered her work for her, covered her absence and now driven miles out of her way to make sure she wasn’t in need.
Gertrude rang the bell. It pealed in a clanging double chime. She waited. Even though she listened hard, there was no sound of hurrying feet approaching the door, or a familiar voice calling, “Right with you.” Maybe Edna was rinsing her mouth with Scope. She was always afraid that one of the doctors might drop in with emergency work to do. That had happened a few times on days Edna was out. That was how Dr. Highley had first noticed Edna’s problem.
But there was no reassuring sound of voice or footsteps. Gertrude shivered as she firmly pushed the bell again. Maybe Edna was sleeping it off. It was so terribly cold. She wanted to get home herself.
By the time she’d rung the bell four times, the annoyance had passed and Gertrude was thoroughly alarmed. There was no use fooling around; something was wrong and she had to get into the apartment. The superintendent, Mr. Krupshak, lived directly across the court. Hurrying over, Gertrude told her story. The super was eating dinner and looked annoyed, but his wife, Gana, reached for the wide key ring on a nail over the sink. “I’ll go with you,” she said.
The two women hurried across the courtyard together. “Edna’s a real friend,” Gana Krupshak volunteered. “Sometimes in the evening I pop in on her and we visit and have a drink together. My husband doesn’t approve of liquor, even wine. Just last night I stopped over at about eight. I had a Manhattan with her, and she told me that one of her favorite patients had killed herself. Well, here we are.”
The women were on the small porch leading to Edna’s apartment. The superintendent’s wife fumbled with the keys. “It’s this one,” she murmured. She inserted the key into the lock, twisted it. “This lock has a funny little thing—you have to kind of jiggle it.”
The lock turned and she pushed open the door as she spoke.
The two women saw Edna at exactly the same moment: lying on the floor, her legs crumpled under her, her blue robe open, revealing a flannel nightgown, her graying hair plastered around her face, her eyes staring, crusted blood making a crimson crown on the top of her head.
“No. No.” Gertrude felt her voice rise, high, shrill, an entity she could not control. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
In a dazed voice Gana Krupshak said, “It’s just last night I was sitting here with her. And”—the woman’s voice broke—“she was pretty under the weather—you know what I mean, the way Edna could get—and she was talking about a patient who killed herself. And then she phoned that patient’s husband.” Gana began to sob—noisy, racking sounds. “And now poor Edna is dead too!”
♦21♦
Chris Lewis stood next to Vangie’s parents to the right of the coffin, numbly acknowledging the sympathetic utterances of friends. When he’d phoned them about her death, they had agreed that they would view her body privately, have a memorial service tomorrow morning followed by a private interment.
Instead, when he’d arrived in Minneapolis this afternoon, he found that they had arranged for public viewing tonight and that after the chapel service tomorrow morning a cortege would follow Vangie’s body to the cemetery.
“So many friends will want to say good-bye to our little girl. To think that two days ago she was alive, and now she’s gone,” her mother sobbed.
Was it only Wednesday? It seemed to Chris that weeks had passed since he’d walked into that nightmare scene in the bedroom yesterday morning. Yesterday morning.
“Doesn’t our baby look lovely?” her mother was asking the visitor who had just approached the coffin.
Our little girl. Our baby. If only you had let her grow up, Chris thought, it might all have been so different. Their hostility to him was controlled, but lurked below the surface ready to spring out. “A happy girl does not take her own life,” her mother had said accusingly.
They looked old and tired and shattered with grief—plain, hardworking people who had denied themselves everything to surround their unexpectedly beautiful child with luxury, who had brought her up to believe her wish was law.
Would it be easier for them when the truth was revealed that someone had taken Vangie’s life? Or did he owe it to them to say nothing, to keep that final horror from them? Her mother was already trying to find comfort, to frame a version she could live with: “Chris was on a trip and we’re so far away, and my baby was feeling so sick and she took a sip of something and went to sleep.”
Oh, God, Chris thought, how people twist truth, twist life. He wanted to talk to Joan. She’d been so upset when she heard about Vangie that she’d hardly been able to talk. “Did she know about us?” He’d finally had to admit to her that Vangie suspected that he was interested in someone else.
Joan would be back from Florida Friday evening. He was going to return to New Jersey tomorrow afternoon right after the funeral. He would say nothing to the police until he’d had a chance to talk to Joan, to warn her that she might be dragged into this. The police would be looking for a motive for him to kill Vangie. In their eyes, Joan would be the motive.
Should he leave well enough alone? Did he have the right to drag Joan into this, to unearth something that would hurt Vangie’s parents even more?
Had there been someone else in Vangie’s life? Chris glanced over at the coffin, at Vangie’s now-peaceful face, the quietly folded hands. He and Vangie had scarcely lived as man and wife in the past few years. They’d lain side by side like two strangers; he emotionally drained from the endless quarreling, she wanting to be cajoled, babied. He’d even suggested separate rooms, but she’d become hysterical.
She became pregnant two months after they moved to New Jersey. When he’d agreed to one more final try at the marriage, he had made a genuine effort to make it work. But the summer had been miserable. By August he and Vangie had barely been speaking. Only once, around the middle of the month, had they slept together. He had thought it an irony of fate that after ten years she had become pregnant just as he met someone else.
A suspicion that Chris realized had been sitting somewhere in his subconscious sprang full-blown to life. Was it possible that Vangie had become involved with another man, a man who did not want to take responsibility for her and a baby? Had she confronted that other man? Vangie had threatened that if she knew whom Chris was seeing, she’d make her wish she were dead. Suppose she had been having some kind of affair with a married man. Suppose she’d hurled hysterical threats at him?
Chris realized that he had been shaking hands, murmuring thanks, looking into familiar faces and not really seeing them: neighbors from the condominium where he and Vangie had lived before the move to New Jersey; airline friends; friends of Vangie’s parents. His own parents were retired in North Carolina. Neither was well. He had told them not to make the trip to Minneapolis in the bitterly cold weather.
“I’m very sorry.” The man who was clasping his hand was in his mid-sixties. He was a slightly built man, but sturdily attractive, with winter-gray hair and bushy brows over keen, penetrating eyes. “I’m Dr. Salem,” he said, “Emmet Salem. I delivered Vangie and was her first gynecologist. She was one of the prettiest things I ever brought into this world, and she never changed. I only wish I hadn’t been away when she phoned my office Monday.”
Chris stared at him. “Vangie phoned you Monday?”
“Yes. My nurse said she
was quite upset. Wanted to see me immediately. I was teaching a seminar in Detroit, but the nurse made an appointment with me for her for today. She was planning to fly out yesterday, from what I understand. Maybe I could have helped her.”
Why had Vangie called this man? Why? It seemed to Chris that it was impossible to think. What would make her go back to a doctor she hadn’t seen in years? She wasn’t well, but if she wanted a consultation, why a doctor thirteen hundred miles away?
“Had Vangie been ill?” Dr. Salem was looking at him curiously, waiting for an answer.
“No, not ill,” Chris said. “As you probably know, she was expecting a baby. It was a difficult pregnancy from the beginning.”
“Vangie was what?” The doctor’s voice rose. He stared at Chris in astonishment.
“I know. She had just about given up hope. But in New Jersey she started the Westlake Maternity Concept. You may have heard of it, or of Dr. Highley—Dr. Edgar Highley.”
“Captain Lewis, may I speak with you?” The funeral director had a hand under his arm, was propelling him toward the private office across the foyer from the viewing room.
“Excuse me,” Chris said to the doctor. Nonplussed by the director’s agitation, he allowed himself to be guided into the office.
The funeral director closed the door and looked at Chris. “I’ve just received a call from the Prosecutor’s office in Valley County, New Jersey,” he said. “Written confirmation is on the way. We are forbidden to inter your wife’s body. Your wife’s body is to be flown back to the Medical Examiner’s office in Valley County immediately after the service tomorrow.”
They know it wasn’t a suicide, Chris thought. They already know that. There was nothing he could do to hide it. Once he had a chance to talk to Joan Friday night, he’d tell the Prosecutor’s office everything he knew or suspected.
Without answering the funeral director, he turned and left the office. He wanted to speak to Dr. Salem, find out what Vangie had said to the nurse on the phone.