“And he plays golf with you,” Molly interjected.
Bill nodded. “That too.” He picked up a stalk of celery and nibbled on it. “A word of advice. If Katie doesn’t want to tell Richard about this operation, don’t fill him in. That’s not fair to her. If he’s persistent in being concerned about her, it has to make some sort of statement to her. You’ve gotten them together. Now—”
“Now bug off,” Molly sighed.
“Something like that. And tomorrow night when Katie goes into the hospital, you and I are going to the Met. I got tickets for Otello months ago and I don’t plan to change them. You be there when she comes out of the recovery room Saturday morning, but it won’t hurt her any to wish she had someone with her. Friday evening maybe she’ll do a little thinking.”
“Go into the hospital by herself?” Molly protested.
“By herself,” Bill said firmly. “She’s a big girl.”
The telephone rang. “Pray it isn’t the school nurse saying one of the kids started with the virus again,” Molly muttered. Her “Hello” was guarded. Then her tone became concerned. “Liz, hi. Now, don’t tell me you’re going to cancel on me tonight.”
She listened. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, bring her along. You have the folding carriage . . . . Sure, we’ll put her up in our room and she’ll be fine . . . . Of course I don’t mind. So if she wakes up we’ll bring her down and let her join the party. It’ll be like old times around here . . . . Great. See you at seven. Bye.”
She hung up. “Liz Berkeley’s regular baby-sitter had to cancel and she’s afraid to leave her with someone she doesn’t know, so she’s bringing the baby along.”
“Fine.” Bill looked at the kitchen clock. “I’d better get out of here. It’s getting late.” He kissed Molly’s cheek. “Will you quit worrying about your little sister?”
Molly bit her lip. “I can’t. I’ve got this creepy feeling about Katie, like something might happen to her.”
♦34♦
When Richard returned to his office, he stood for a long time staring out the window. His view was somewhat more appealing than the one from Scott’s office. Besides the northeast corner of the county jail, a distinct section of the pocket-sized park in front of the courthouse was visible to him. Only half aware of what he was seeing, he watched as a flurry of sleet-weighted snow pelted the already-slick frozen grass.
Wonderful weather, he thought. He glanced up at the sky. Heavy snow clouds were forming. Vangie Lewis’ body was being flown into Newark from Minneapolis on a two-thirty flight. It would be picked up at seven and brought to the morgue. Tomorrow morning he’d re-examine it. Not that he expected to find anything more than he already knew. There were absolutely no bruise marks on it. He was sure of that. But there was something about her left foot or leg that he had noticed and dismissed as irrelevant.
He pushed that thought aside. It was useless to speculate until he could re-examine the body. Vangie had obviously been highly emotional. Could she have been induced to suicide by Fukhito? If Vangie was carrying Fukhito’s child, he must have been panicked. He’d be finished as a doctor if he were found to be involved with a patient again.
But Chris Lewis had a girlfriend—a good reason for wanting his wife out of the way. Suppose he had learned of the affair? Apparently even Vangie’s parents hadn’t known she was planning to come home to Minneapolis. Was it possible Vangie hoped to be delivered of the baby by the Minnesota obstetrician and keep quiet about it? Maybe she’d say she’d lost it. If she wanted to preserve her marriage, she might have been driven to that. Or if she realized a divorce was inevitable, the absolute proof of her infidelity might have weighed in the settlement.
None of it rang true.
Sighing, Richard reached over, snapped on the intercom and asked Marge to come in. She had been at lunch when he returned from Scott’s office and he had not collected his messages.
She hurried in with a sheaf of slips in her hand. “None of these are too important,” she informed him. “Oh, yes, there was one right after you went to Mr. Myerson’s office. A Dr. Salem. He didn’t ask for you by name; he wanted the Medical Examiner. Then he asked if we had performed the autopsy on Vangie Lewis. I said you were the M. E. and that you’d performed it personally. He was catching a plane from Minneapolis, but asked if you’d call him at the Essex House in New York around five o’clock. He sounded anxious to talk to you.”
Richard pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “I’m anxious to talk to him,” he said.
“Oh, and I got the statistics on the Westlake obstetrical patients,” Marge said. “In the eight years of the Westlake Maternity Concept, sixteen patients have died either in childbirth or of toxic pregnancies.”
“Sixteen?”
“Sixteen,” Marge repeated with emphasis. “However, the practice is huge. Dr. Highley is considered an excellent doctor. Some of the babies he’s brought to term are near miracles, and the women who died had all been warned by other doctors that they were high pregnancy risks.”
“I’ll want to study all the fatalities,” Richard said. “But if we ask Scott to subpoena the files from the hospital, we’ll alert them, and I don’t want to do that yet. Have you got anything else?”
“Maybe. In these eight years two people filed malpractice suits against Dr. Highley. Both suits were dismissed. And a cousin of his wife’s came in and claimed that he didn’t believe she’d died of a heart attack. The Prosecutor’s office contacted her personal physician and he said the cousin was crazy. The cousin had been the sole heir before Winifred Westlake married Dr. Highley, so that may be why he wanted to start trouble.”
“Who was Winifred Westlake’s personal physician?”
“Dr. Alan Levine.”
“He’s a top internist,” Richard said. “I’ll have a talk with him.”
“How about the people who filed the malpractice suits? Do you want to know who they are?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I figured that. Here.”
Richard looked down at the two names on the sheet of paper Marge handed him. Anthony Caldwell, Old Country Lane, Peapack, N. J., and Anna Horan, 415 Walnut Street, Ridgefield Park, N. J.
“You do nice work, Marge,” he said.
She nodded. “I know.” Her tone was satisfied.
“Scott is in court by now. Will you leave word for him to call me when he gets back to his office? Oh, and tell the lab I want Vangie Lewis’ clothes available to put on her first thing tomorrow morning. All tests have to be finished on the clothing by this afternoon.”
Marge left, and Richard turned to the work on his desk.
It was after four before Scott returned the call. He listened to Richard’s decision to interview the complainants against Dr. Highley and was clearly not impressed. “Look, today there isn’t any doctor, no matter who he is, who isn’t hit by malpractice suits. If Dr. Schweitzer were still alive, so help me, he’d be defending himself against them in the jungle. But go ahead on your own if you want to. We’ll subpoena the hospital records when you’re ready for them. I am concerned about the high number of obstetrical deaths of mothers, but even that may be explainable. He does deal in high-risk pregnancies.”
Scott’s voice deepened. “What I’m most interested in is what this Dr. Salem has to say. You talk with him and get back to me and then I’ll get in on the act. Between you and me, Richard, I think we’re going to pull a tight-enough circumstantial case around Captain Chris Lewis that we may force him to come clean. We know that his movements are unaccounted for on Monday night, when his wife died. We know Edna Burns called him Tuesday night. We now know that the funeral director left him before nine on Tuesday night. After that he was alone and could easily have gone out. Suppose he did go down and see her? He’s handy. Charley tells me he’s got sophisticated tools in his garage. Edna was almost blind drunk when she called him. The neighbor told us that. Suppose he drove there, slipped the lock, got into the apartment and shoved that poor dame before she k
new what hit her? Frankly, that’s the way my gut sees it, and we’ll have him here tonight to tell us all about it.”
“You may be right,” Richard said. “But I’m still going to check these people out.”
He caught Dr. Alan Levine just as he was leaving his office. “Buy you a drink,” Richard suggested. “I’ll only take fifteen minutes.”
They agreed to meet at the Parkwood Country Club. A midway point for both of them, it had the virtue of being quiet on weekdays. They’d be able to talk in the bar without worry about being overheard or having people drop over to say hello.
Alan Levine was a Jimmy Stewart-at-fifty-five look-alike—a fact that endeared him to his older patients. They enjoyed the easy cordiality of professionals who respected each other, enjoyed a drink together if their paths crossed, waved to each other on the golf links.
Richard came directly to the point. “For various reasons we’re interested in Westlake Hospital. Winifred Westlake was your patient. Her cousin tried to insinuate that she did not die of a heart attack. What can you tell me about it?”
Alan Levine looked directly at Richard, sipped his martini, glanced out the picture window at the snow-covered fairway and pursed his lips. “I have to answer that question on a couple of levels,” he said slowly. “First: Yes, Winifred was my patient. For years she’d had a near-ulcer. Specifically, she had all the classic symptoms of a duodenal ulcer, but it never showed up on X-ray. When she’d periodically experience pain, I’d have the usual X-rays done, get negative results, prescribe an ulcer diet, and she experienced relief almost immediately. No great problem.
“Then the year before she met and married Highley she had a severe attack of gastroenteritis which actually altered her cardiogram. I put her in the hospital for a suspected heart attack. But after two days in the hospital the cardiogram was well within the normal range.”
“So there might or might not have been a problem with her heart?” Richard asked.
“I didn’t think there was. It never showed up in the standard tests. But her mother died of a heart attack at fifty-eight. And Winifred was nearly fifty-two when she died. She was older than Highley by some ten years, you know. Several years after her marriage she began to come to me more frequently, constantly complaining of chest pains. The tests produced nothing significant. I told her to watch her diet.”
“And then she had a fatal attack?” Richard asked.
The other doctor nodded. “One evening, during dinner, she had a seizure. Edgar Highley phoned his service immediately. Gave them my number, the hospital’s number, told them to call the police. From what I was told, Winifred keeled over at the dining-room table.”
“You were there when she died?” Richard queried.
“Yes. Highley was still trying to revive her. But it was hopeless. She died a few minutes after I arrived.”
“And you’re satisfied it was heart failure?” Richard asked.
Again there was the hint of hesitation. “She’d been having chest pains over a period of years. Not all heart trouble shows up on cardiograms. In the couple of years before she died she was suffering periodically from high blood pressure. There’s no question that heart trouble tends to run in families. Yes. I was satisfied at the time.”
“At the time.” Richard underscored the words.
“I suppose the cousin’s absolute conviction that something was wrong about her death has troubled me these three years. I practically threw him out of my office when he came in and as much as accused me of falsifying records. Figured he was a disgruntled relative who hated the guy who took his place in the will. But Glenn Nickerson is a good man. He’s coach at Parkwood High, and my kids go there now. They’re all crazy about him. He’s a family man, active in his church, on the town council; certainly not the kind of man who would go off half-cocked at being disinherited. And certainly he must have known that Winifred would leave her estate to her husband. She was crazy about Highley. Why, I never could see. He’s a cold fish if ever I met one.”
“I gather you don’t like him.”
Alan Levine finished his drink. “I don’t like him at all. And have you caught the article about him in Newsmaker? Just came out today. Makes a little tin god of him. He’ll be even more insufferable, I suppose. But I’ve got to hand it to him. He’s an excellent doctor.”
“Excellent enough to have chemically induced a heart attack in his wife?”
Dr. Levine looked directly at Richard. “Frankly, I’ve often wished I’d insisted on an autopsy.”
Richard signaled for the check. “You’ve been a great help, Alan.”
The other man shrugged. “I don’t see how. What possible use is any of this to you?”
“For the present, it gives me insight when I talk to some people. After that, who knows?”
They parted at the entrance to the bar. Richard fished in his pocket for change, went over to the public telephone and phoned the Essex House Hotel in New York. “Dr. Emmet Salem, please.”
There was the jabbing sound of a hotel phone ringing. Three, four, five, six times. The operator broke in. “I’m sorry, but there’s no answer there.”
“Are you sure Dr. Salem has checked in?” Richard asked.
“Yes, sir, I am. He called specifically to say that he was expecting an important phone call and he wanted to be sure to get it. That was only twenty minutes ago. But I guess he changed his mind or something. Because we are definitely ringing his room and there’s no answer.”
♦35♦
When she left Scott’s office, Katie called in Rita Castile and together they went over the material Katie would need for upcoming trials. “That armed robbery on the twenty-eighth,” Katie said, “where the defendant had his hair cut the morning after the crime. We’ll need the barber to testify. It’s no wonder the witnesses couldn’t make a positive identification. Even though we made him wear a wig in the lineup, he didn’t look the same.”
“Got it.” Rita jotted down the barber’s address. “It’s too bad you can’t let the jury know that Benton has a long juvenile record.”
“That’s the law,” Katie sighed. “I sure hope that someday it stops bending backward to protect criminals. That’s about all I have for you now, but I won’t be coming in over the weekend, so next week will really be a mess. Be prepared.”
“You won’t be coming in?” Rita raised her eyebrows. “Well, it’s about time. You haven’t given yourself a full weekend off in a couple of months. I hope you’re planning to go someplace and have fun.”
Katie grinned. “I don’t know how much fun it will be. Oh, Rita, I have a hunch that Maureen is upset about something today. Without being nosy, is there anything wrong that you know about? Is she still down about the breakup with her fiancé?”
Rita shook her head. “No, not at all. That was just kid stuff, and she knew it. The usual going-steady-from-the-time-they-were-fifteen, an engagement ring the night of the prom. They both realized by last summer that they weren’t ready to get married. He’s in college now, so that’s no problem.”
“Then why is she so unhappy?” Katie asked.
“Regret,” Rita said simply. “Just about the time they broke up she realized she was pregnant and had an abortion. She’s weighted down with guilt about it. She told me that she keeps dreaming about the baby, that she hears a baby crying and is trying to find it. Said she’d do anything to have had the baby, even though she would have given it out for adoption.”
Katie remembered how much she had hoped to conceive John’s child, how furious she’d been when after his death someone commented that she was lucky not to be stuck with a baby. “Life is so crazy,” she said. “The wrong people get pregnant, and then it’s so easy to make a mistake you have to live with for the rest of your life. But that does explain it. Thanks for telling me. I was afraid I’d said something to hurt her.”
“You didn’t,” Rita said. She gathered up the files Katie had assigned her. “All right. I’ll serve these subpoenas and h
unt for the barber.”
After Rita left, Katie leaned back in her chair. She wanted to talk again with Gertrude Fitzgerald and Gana Krupshak. Mrs. Fitzgerald and Edna had been good friends; they’d often lunched together. Mrs. Krupshak had frequently dropped into Edna’s apartment at night. Maybe Edna had said something to one of them about Dr. Fukhito and Vangie Lewis. It was worth a try.
She called Westlake Hospital and was told that Mrs. Fitzgerald was home ill; requested and got her home phone number. When the woman answered she was obviously still distraught. Her voice was weak and shaking. “I have one of my migraines, Mrs. DeMaio,” she said, “and no wonder. Every time I think of how Edna looked, poor dear . . .”
“I was going to suggest that we get together either here or at your home,” Katie said. “But I’ll be in court all day tomorrow, so I guess it will have to wait until Monday. There’s just one thing I would like to ask you, Mrs. Fitzgerald. Did Edna ever call either of the doctors she worked for ‘Prince Charming’?”
“Prince Charming?” Gertrude Fitzgerald’s voice was astonished. “Prince Charming? My goodness. Dr. Highley or Dr. Fukhito? Why would anyone call either of them Prince Charming? My heavens, no.”
“All right. It was just a thought.” Katie said goodbye and dialed Mrs. Krupshak. The superintendent answered. His wife was out, he explained. She’d be back around five.
Katie glanced at the clock. It was four thirty. “Do you think she’d mind if on my way home I stopped to talk to her for a few minutes? I promise I won’t be long.”
“Suit yourself,” the man answered shortly, then added, “What’s going on with the Burns apartment? How long before it gets cleared out?”
“That apartment is not to be entered or touched until this office releases it,” Katie said sharply. She hung up, packed some files in her briefcase and got her coat. She’d have just enough time to talk to Mrs. Krupshak, then go home and change. She wouldn’t stay late at Molly’s tonight. She wanted one decent night’s sleep before the operation. She knew she wouldn’t sleep well in the hospital.