Susan understands a lot more than Dee likes to believe, Emily told herself. At the time of Charley’s and my breakup, Dee was in California with Jack, busy and happy. First, Susan had had to get over Jack’s betrayal, and then she was there, giving support to me. Plus, Charley didn’t have time for her once Binky came into the picture, which must have hurt, since she always had been a Daddy’s girl.
“Are we off in a dream world?” a teasing voice asked.
“Nan!” Emily jumped up and hugged her friend, as they exchanged brief air kisses. “Yes, I guess I am.” She looked with fondness at Nan. “You look great.”
It was true. At sixty, Nan, a slender brunette with a fine-boned face and body, was still a beautiful woman.
“And so do you,” Nan said emphatically. “Let’s face it, Em. We’re hanging in there.”
“Fighting the good fight,” Emily agreed. “A tuck here, a nip there. Age gracefully, but not too fast.”
“So, have you missed me?” Nan asked. She had been in Florida with her ailing mother for over a month, having returned only the week before.
“You know I have. There were a few bumpy days there,” Emily confided.
They decided to forget the calorie counting today. A glass of chardonnay and a club sandwich sounded just the thing to both of them.
The wine arrived, and serious gossip began.
Emily told her friend how blue she had been on Sunday. “What really got me was that the Trophy threw that party on our fortieth anniversary—and Charley let her do it.”
“You know it was deliberate,” Nan said. “It’s so typically Binky. I have to confess to you that even I was at the party for a little while. I didn’t see Susan, though. Apparently she had already left. I guess she just made a token appearance.”
There was something in Nan’s voice that reflected concern. Emily did not have to wait to find out what it was.
“Em, in the long run, it probably won’t matter, but Binky can’t stand Susan. She knows that it was Susan who talked Charles into taking a vacation alone so he could think things through quietly right after he told you he wanted to break up. That Binky got her man anyway doesn’t seem to matter. She’ll still never forgive her.”
Emily nodded.
“She does, however, seem to like Dee. So, Binky invited Alex Wright to the party so the two of them could meet. Only Dee wasn’t there when he arrived, so he ended up having a long chat with Susan, and from what I hear, he was pretty much taken with her. That certainly wasn’t part of Binky’s master plan.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if by any chance Susan does hear from Alex, and a relationship does begin to develop between them, she should be aware that Binky will do her best to sabotage it. Binky loves to pit people against each other. She’s a manipulator par excellence.”
“By pitting people against each other, you mean Susan and Dee?”
“Yes, I do. For Binky to be so furious, Alex Wright must have been pretty emphatic about how attractive he found Susan. Because, believe me, she was furious. Of course, I don’t know Alex well at all. I gather he’s not a party kind of guy, but I do know that the Wright Family Foundation—which he runs—has done immeasurable good, and while some guys with vast amounts of family money turn into playboys, he’s apparently serious about what’s important. In fact, he’s just the kind of guy I wish Susan would get involved with—since I couldn’t foster a match between her and Bobby.”
Bobby was Nan’s oldest son. He and Susan had been friends since childhood but never had been romantic about each other. Bobby was married now, but Nan still joked about the fact that she and Em had lost their chance to have joint grandchildren.
“I wish both Susan and Dee would meet someone they could be happy with,” Emily said, uncomfortable in the knowledge that, even without prodding from Binky, Dee would willingly go after Alex Wright if she became interested in him.
She was aware also that Nan had subtly but quite deliberately made that point. Her message was that Susan should be made aware of Binky’s scheming, and that Dee should be told to leave Alex Wright alone.
“And now for a piece of gossip you’ll really be interested in,” Nan said, bending closer to her friend and glancing around to be sure the waiter was not near the table. “Charley and Dan played golf together yesterday. Charley is thinking of retiring! Apparently the board of Bannister Foods wants a younger chairman-CEO and has been making overtures about offering him a golden parachute. Charley told Dan that he’d rather leave gracefully than be forced out. But there’s just one problem: When he broached the subject to Binky, she had a fit. He told Dan that she said that living with a retired husband was like having a piano in the kitchen. Which to my mind translates to ‘useless and in the way.”’
Nan paused and leaned back. Then, arching her eyebrows for effect, she continued: “Do you think there could be trouble in paradise?”
48
Before leaving the studio, Susan phoned her office. She knew there was a strong possibility that her one o’clock appointment might have canceled. The patient, Linda, a forty-year-old copywriter whose pet, a golden retriever, had just been put down, was trying to work her way out of depression and bereavement. They’d had only two sessions, but already Susan was sure that the basic source of Linda’s trouble was not the honest grief over the loss of a beloved pet, but the recent, sudden death of the adoptive mother from whom Linda had been estranged.
Her hunch that Linda would cancel proved correct. “She says she’s really sorry, but that an important meeting came up at work,” Janet explained.
Maybe yes, maybe no, Susan thought, making a mental note to call Linda later. “Any other messages?” she asked.
“Just one. Mrs. Clausen wants you to call her anytime after three. Oh, and you’ve got a gorgeous bouquet of flowers sitting on your desk.”
“Flowers! Who sent them?”
“The card is sealed, so of course I didn’t open it,” Janet replied smugly. “I’m sure the note must be personal.”
“Open it now, please, and read it to me.” Susan raised her eyes to heaven. Janet was an excellent secretary in so many ways, but her need to editorialize was a source of constant exasperation.
Janet was back a moment later. “I knew it was personal, Doctor.” She began to read: “ ‘Thanks for a great evening. Looking forward to Saturday.’ It’s signed ‘Alex”’
Susan felt a sudden lifting of her spirits. “Nice of him,” she said, careful to keep her tone noncommittal. “Janet, since I don’t have anything on my schedule until two o’clock, I think I’ll run an errand.”
Less than a minute later, Susan was outside, hailing a taxi. She had decided that the next thing she had to do was to talk to whoever on the police force was in charge of the investigation of Carolyn Wells’s accident. Now that she was certain that it was Carolyn who called the show on Monday and identified herself as Karen, she had to find out if the police had given any credence to the version of the incident that elderly woman had given them—that Carolyn Wells had been pushed in front of the van.
The article she had read in the Times this morning had reported that the investigations into both Carolyn’s accident and Hilda Johnson’s murder were being handled by the 19th Precinct.
Clearly that was the place to start looking for answers.
Despite Oliver Baker’s resolute eyewitness account that Carolyn Wells had lost her balance and fallen, Police Captain Tom Shea was still not satisfied. Given Hilda Johnson’s perhaps too-public proclamation that she had seen someone push Wells, he was having trouble accepting the elderly woman’s death as a mere coincidence, and the result of a random killing. It all came back to several basic questions: How did the perp get into the building in the first place? Then, how did he get into Hilda’s apartment? And finally, why her apartment, and why only her apartment?
In the hours since her body had been discovered, a team of detectives had spoken to every single tenant in the building.
With only four apartments to the floor and only twelve floors, that hadn’t been too much of a task.
Most of the tenants were like Hilda—elderly, longtime residents. They were all adamant that they hadn’t buzzed in a deliveryman or anyone else late Monday evening. Those who had been in and out of the building during the time in question swore they had neither seen a stranger loitering nearby nor allowed anyone to come in when they used their keys to enter the lobby.
Hilda Johnson must have let someone into the building herself, and then into her apartment, Shea concluded. So it had to be someone she believed she could trust. From what he knew of Hilda—and since he had been at this precinct he had come to know her fairly well—he had trouble imagining who that person might have been. Why wasn’t I on duty Monday afternoon? he asked himself again, fuming at fate. It had been his day off, and he and Joan, his wife, had driven to Fairfield College in Connecticut, where their daughter was a freshman. It was only when he watched the eleven o’clock news that night that Tom learned about the accident and saw Hilda interviewed.
If only I had called her then, was the thought that nagged him. If I hadn’t gotten an answer I’d have suspected trouble right away, and if I had talked to her, I might have gotten a description of the person she thought had shoved Carolyn Wells in front of the van.
It was only a quarter of one now, but Tom could feel weariness in his whole body—the kind caused by angry self-recrimination. He was sure Hilda’s death could have been avoided, and now he was back to square one on solving not just her murder, but what could well be another attempted murder. He had been a cop for twenty-seven years, since he was twenty-one; he could think of nothing in all that time that depressed him more than this.
His phone rang, interrupting his mental self-flagellation. It was the desk sergeant, telling him that a Dr. Susan Chandler wanted to talk to him about Carolyn Wells’s accident on Park Avenue.
Hoping she might be another eyewitness to the incident, Shea quickly responded, “Send her in.” A few moments later, he and Susan were studying each other with cautious interest.
Susan immediately liked the man sitting across the desk from her—his lean, clean-cut face; the alert, intelligent expression in his dark brown eyes; the long, sensitive fingers that were silently tapping the desk.
Sensing that this was not the kind of police officer who wasted time, she got right to the point. “Captain, I have to be back in my office at two. You know how traffic can be in New York; since it took me forty minutes to get up here from Broadway and Forty-first, I’ll make this brief.”
She quickly summarized her background and even felt a fleeting amusement that the faint disapproval on Shea’s face when she said she was a psychologist was replaced by a look of camaraderie when she told him that for two years she had been an assistant district attorney.
“My interest in Carolyn Wells is that I am certain it was she who called in to my radio program Monday morning with potentially valuable information about Regina Clausen, a woman who has been missing for several years. During the call, Wells made an appointment to come in and see me. She failed to keep the appointment, however; then later, according to one witness, she may have been pushed in front of a van on Park Avenue. I need to find out if there is any connection between her—for now, let’s call it an accident—and the call she made to me.”
Shea leaned forward as a look of deep interest filled his face. Oliver Baker had said that the block printing on the manila envelope Carolyn Wells had been carrying was large, and that he was pretty sure he had glimpsed the word “Dr.” on the first line of the address. Maybe Dr. Susan Chandler was putting him on the track to something, perhaps even a connection between Hilda Johnson’s insistence that Carolyn Wells had been pushed and Hilda’s own murderer.
“Have you received a manila envelope that could have been from her in the mail?” Shea asked.
“Not as of yesterday. The mail wasn’t in when I left my office this morning. Why?”
“Because both Hilda Johnson and one other witness saw Carolyn Wells carrying a manila envelope, and the second witness thought it was addressed to Dr. Something. Did you expect her to send anything to you?”
“No, but then she might have decided to mail in the picture and ring she promised to give me. Let me play the tape of her call for you.”
When it was finished, Susan looked across the desk and noted the intensity of Captain Shea’s expression.
“You’re sure that woman is Carolyn Wells?” he demanded.
“I’m absolutely positive,” she replied.
“You’re a psychologist, Dr. Chandler. Would you agree that that woman is afraid of her husband?”
“I would say that she is nervous about his reaction to what she told me.”
Captain Shea picked up the phone and barked out an order. “See if we have any record of a complaint against a Justin Wells. Probably something domestic. About two years ago.”
“Dr. Chandler,” he said, “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you came in. If I get the report I expect—”
He was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. He picked up the receiver, listened, and then nodded.
He hung up and looked at Susan. “It’s what I thought. I knew that what you told me rang a bell. Dr. Chandler, two years ago Carolyn Wells swore out a complaint against Justin Wells, which she later withdrew. In the complaint she contended that, in a jealous rage, her husband had threatened to kill her. Would you know if Wells had learned of that call she made to your program?”
Susan knew she had no choice but to tell the exact truth. “He not only learned of it, he phoned on Monday afternoon, requesting a copy of the tape; then, when I called him about it last night, he denied any knowledge of the request. I tried to deliver the tape to his office this morning, and he refused to see me.”
“Dr. Chandler, I can’t thank you enough for this information. I must ask you to leave this tape with me.”
Susan stood up. “Of course. I have the master tape at the studio. But Captain Shea, what I really wanted to ask you to follow up was the possibility that there was a connection between the man Carolyn Wells met on the ship and Regina Clausen’s disappearance. There was a turquoise ring with the inscription ‘You belong to me’ in Regina Clausen’s belongings.” She was about to tell him about the calls from Tiffany, and her report that someone in Greenwich Village sold and perhaps even made rings just like that, when Shea interrupted.
“Dr. Chandler, it’s a matter of record that Justin Wells was—and probably is—fiercely jealous of his wife. The tape shows she’s afraid of him. My guess is that she didn’t tell her husband anything about her relationship with the guy she met on the ship. I think when Wells heard about that program, he went nuts. I want to talk to him. I want to know where he was between four and four-thirty Monday afternoon. I want to know who told him about the call to your program, and how much that person told him.”
Susan knew that everything Captain Shea said made sense. She glanced at her watch; she had to get back to her office. But something still wasn’t right. Every instinct in her body told her that even if Justin Wells, in a fit of jealous rage, did push his wife in front of that van, there still might be a connection between the man Carolyn had met on the trip and Regina Clausen’s disappearance.
As she left the police station, she decided there was one link she would follow up herself: She would track down Tiffany, whose phone number she had and who worked at The Grotto, “the best Italian restaurant in Yonkers.”
49
Jim Curley had been sure something was up when he picked up his boss at noon at the Wright Family Foundation and was told to stop by Irene Hayes Wadley & Smythe, an elegant Rockefeller Center florist. Once there, instead of sending Jim inside, Wright had had him wait while he got out of the car himself and went inside the shop, carrying a box under his arm. He returned fifteen minutes later, trailed by a florist who carried a lavish bouquet in a large vase.
The vase was w
edged in a carton to give it stability, and Wright instructed the florist to put it on the floor of the backseat, where he could be sure it wouldn’t tip over.
With a smile, the florist thanked Wright, then closed the door. Wright, his voice buoyant, had said, “Next stop SoHo,” then gave Jim an unfamiliar address. Noting the perplexed look on the driver’s face, he had added, “Before you die of curiosity, we’re going to Dr. Susan Chandler’s office. Or at least, you’re going there to deliver these flowers. I’ll wait in the car.”
Over the years, Jim had delivered flowers to many attractive women for his boss, but he never before had known Alex Wright to personally select them.
With the informality that came with long years of service, Jim had said, “Mr. Alex, if I may say so, I liked Dr. Chandler. She’s a nice woman and really attractive. I found there was something warm and natural about her, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Jim,” Alex Wright had responded, “and I agree.”
Jim had pulled the car into an illegal parking spot on Houston Street, sprinted around the corner to the office building, caught an elevator just as the door was closing, and on reaching the top floor, hurried down the corridor to the office that displayed the discreet sign, DR. SUSAN CHANDLER. There he had deposited the flowers with the receptionist, refused the proffered tip, and rushed back to the car.
Once again he took advantage of his long-established loyalty to ask a question: “Mr. Alex, isn’t that the vase that was on the table in the foyer, the Waterford your mother brought back from Ireland?”
“You’ve got a good eye, Jim. The other night when I escorted Dr. Chandler to her door, I could see that she had a vase very similar to that one, only smaller. I thought it could use a companion piece. Now you’d better step on it. I’m already late for lunch at the Plaza.”