Capitol Reflections (5 page)
“You wanted all this on the q.t., right?”
“Yeah,” Gwen replied, feeling horribly fatigued. She knew it wasn’t because of her lack of sleep. “Send it to my attention and add ‘eyes only.’ You kept all this out of your office’s files, right?”
“I’m afraid that’s not so easy to do, at least not completely. I can’t pretend the body wasn’t here, but I entered your friend’s name, time of death, and a few other rudimentary details into the database, and then cross-referenced the computer’s basic autopsy template, which would usually list chapter and verse for the whole procedure, with a Jane Doe brought in last week. The file shouldn’t raise any eyebrows, but if anyone gets curious—highly doubtful—it’ll look like nothing more than a computer glitch. As for any paperwork, I’ve accidentally on purpose sent the hard copy to Syracuse. Just another minor screw up. Happens all the time in the city that never sleeps. Even dedicated public servants like
moi
get a little careless while pulling an all-nighter.”
moi
get a little careless while pulling an all-nighter.”
“Thanks, Dave. I owe you.”
“You could always make the IRS lose my Social Security number.”
Gwen smiled. First real one of the day. “Dream on. I don’t mess with the revenuers.”
Gwen stood, shook hands with Dardenoff, and left the lounge. On the way out, she stopped at the ladies’ room. She stared at herself in the mirror. She looked dreadful. Did Dave notice? Did Dave ever notice the “little things” about the living? The thought of Dave, and what Dave had spent several hours doing last night, brought the immediacy of Marci’s loss back to the forefront. Caring little about her appearance or where she was, Gwen bowed her head and cried.
6
Why did it always rain at funerals? The downpour at a gravesite while mourners held black umbrellas had become a Hollywood stereotype, and yet the stereotype held true for the funeral of Marci Elizabeth Newman. Family and friends, together with at least fifty lawyers and DS&W colleagues, gathered at the cemetery as a rabbi recited words few could hear. Rain slapped their umbrellas and the tarp over Marci’s grave. Black-clad figures huddled for shelter under shared umbrellas. Marci’s casket was protected by a flimsy green canopy. The Jewish funeral customs observed only enhanced the stark reality—a plain pine box, no flowers, an unadorned mound of earth, and shovels wielded by the mourners themselves. Nothing to prettify death or avoid its finality.
When the service concluded, Gwen felt numb. Nothing she’d done or considered since Marci’s death had helped to make any sense of it. She stared at the somber crowd making its way across soggy grass to limousines and town cars. Determined to be the last to leave, she even asked Jack for a moment alone.
“Good-bye, Marci,” she said. “I wish we could have seen
Ondine
one last time.” She brushed away a single tear from her cheek and knew the good-bye wasn’t near enough. “I’ll always love you.”
Ondine
one last time.” She brushed away a single tear from her cheek and knew the good-bye wasn’t near enough. “I’ll always love you.”
She turned and walked into the rain.
Back at the Newman home, a three-story red brick mansion on Long Island, Gwen mingled with Marci’s extended family—cousins, aunts, and uncles she’d known from the days when she and Marci could get themselves into some healthy mischief—as well as a good many lawyers who had decided to take the afternoon off and imbibe some of the Newmans’ excellent scotch. Gwen forced herself to smile, nod, and make small talk, all the while repeating in her mind what had become a mantra since she and Jack had been ushered to the quiet room at Bellevue immediately after Marci’s death: This shouldn’t have happened.
The one person with whom she was genuinely interested in speaking was Susan Parks, Marci’s paralegal. Parks was middleaged—maybe late forties—and had been responsible, to a large extent, for creating order out of the maelstrom of activity that was Marci’s professional life. Gwen knew—because Marci bragged about her endlessly—that Susan herself had frequently put in overtime to find the legal precedents necessary to keep Marci up to speed on the dozens of cases she juggled. No one else saw Marci as regularly as Susan Parks did.
“Had Marci been feeling okay during the last week?” Gwen asked the paralegal as they stood by themselves in a small room toward the back of the house.
“If she was feeling bad,” Parks answered solemnly, “I didn’t pick up on it. She was her usual energetic self to the very end. I expected to see her stride into her office from the courthouse, ready for another ten rounds.”
“Was her color good?” Gwen felt as if she were back in family practice, questioning an attending ER physician about a recently admitted patient.
Parks knit her eyebrows. “Color? Uh … yeah. It was fine.”
“What was she working on? Anything unusual?”
“I could get in real trouble talking about her cases, Dr. Maulder. I mean, well, I want to help, but … ” Parks paused, looking out the window at a side garden as rain pelted the panes of glass. Then she seemed to make a decision. “She was helping a Vietnamese woman, one of her
pro bono
cases, the afternoon she collapsed. I guess there’s no harm in mentioning something that didn’t fall directly under her work for the firm.”
pro bono
cases, the afternoon she collapsed. I guess there’s no harm in mentioning something that didn’t fall directly under her work for the firm.”
Gwen nodded appreciatively. “I know these questions are difficult, and may even seem a bit odd, but as a doctor and Marci’s friend, I’m curious. I know she worked hard, but she had youth on her side, and … ” Now it was Gwen’s turn to pause and consider the dreary afternoon for a few moments lest her voice break. “Did you know that Marci smoked?” she continued.
“You know, it’s funny you mention that. I never saw her actually holding a cigarette—not ever. But lately she left the building every morning at exactly nine-thirty and eleven, which is when all the smokers head for the sidewalk to light up. There’s no smoking in the building—you know, the Mayor made that decision—so most smokers hit the pavement for their breaks. Workers in the building call them “the elevator people” since they’re always riding up and down for a nicotine fix. You think smoking had something to do with—” Parks stopped abruptly, clearly not wanting to finish the sentence with the words “her death.”
“No, not really. It’s just that somebody told me she’d started again recently, and it caught me off guard.”
A moment later, Lawrence and Jennifer Newman, both in their late sixties, entered the room and hugged Gwen warmly. Parks excused herself after politely expressing condolences to Marci’s parents.
“You’re a godsend, Gwen,” said Mrs. Newman. “Having Marci’s best friend at the hospital when it really counted means more than Lawrence and I can express in words.”
“Please.” Mr. Newman motioned toward a wingback chair in the small sitting room. “If anyone can make sense of this, you can. What happened?”
Lawrence and Jennifer Newman, sitting on a sofa opposite Gwen, puzzled countenances on their faces, sat waiting for the most important revelation of their lives. They said nothing more as they waited for Gwen to speak.
“As far as I can tell,” Gwen began, looking from the oriental carpet to the faces of her friend’s parents, “Marci suffered a seizure for reasons nobody has figured out. Usually a seizure in a young person is pretty benign and either doesn’t recur or can be controlled with medicine. Fatal seizures are incredibly rare, but unfortunately, Marci was the one-in-a-thousand exception to the rule. I’m sure you know that she put herself under a great deal of stress at work. It turns out that she also had a slight defect in her heart valve. We still don’t know why everything went wrong all at once. We may never know.”
Gwen was not willing to let her private doubts compound the grief for Marci’s parents.
“Is this what the autopsy revealed?” Marci’s father asked, leaning forward slightly. “Heart trouble?”
“I’m afraid the medical examiner found nothing conclusive either way. There was a little bit of floppiness to one of her heart valves—what we call valve prolapse—but that’s seen in many young, thin women. It almost never causes problems, but this might have been one of those ‘almost never’ cases. There was naturally some damage to the heart muscle given cardiovascular collapse, but that unfortunately would mask any other preexisting damage.”
This was actually untrue in a majority of cases. For someone with Dardenoff ’s skill, a tissue sample could speak volumes about the body’s cardiac history, but Gwen didn’t know what else to tell Lawrence and Jennifer Newman. She certainly wasn’t going to confide that she suspected something was very wrong with the entire scenario of Marci’s collapse at city court. People don’t die of seizures unless there are drugs involved—and she knew there weren’t.
Why, then, did Marci’s seizure act like it was drug-induced? There was more to this story.
“I was wondering,” Gwen said, breaking an awkward silence, “if I could go to Marci’s apartment and look for a keepsake. I’d like to have one or two things from our college days. I would naturally ask your permission for anything I chose.”
“Of course,” said Jennifer as her husband put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “Marci would certainly want you to have something special. We’ll give you a key to her apartment before you leave today.”
“Thanks. It means a lot to me.”
Finding memorabilia was not exactly what Gwen had in mind, though she was sure the apartment would bring back a flood of memories and Gwen would love to have a token of those memories. However, her primary motivation was to search the apartment for something that would help explain the tragedy. She’d been Marci’s friend, but she was also Dr. Gwen Maulder, and any epidemiologist worth her salt was part detective. She would go through with a fine-toothed comb.
If something were even slightly amiss in Marci Newman’s apartment, Gwen Maulder would find it.
7
Mark Stern read the
New York Times
religiously every day. Without the success of his column in the
Times
and the books it had spawned, he wouldn’t be writing his
Journal
column today, complete with stipple portraits by artist Noli Novak. After all was said and done, he enjoyed keeping his fingers on the pulse of New York City, from Broadway to the bag ladies and schizophrenics who slept behind dumpsters. Gotham provided the perfect microcosm for Stern to practice his mojo, part journalistic, part metaphysical.
New York Times
religiously every day. Without the success of his column in the
Times
and the books it had spawned, he wouldn’t be writing his
Journal
column today, complete with stipple portraits by artist Noli Novak. After all was said and done, he enjoyed keeping his fingers on the pulse of New York City, from Broadway to the bag ladies and schizophrenics who slept behind dumpsters. Gotham provided the perfect microcosm for Stern to practice his mojo, part journalistic, part metaphysical.
He paged through the Metro section first every day since the real stories were there—stories that took place on crowded streets with millions of pedestrians going everywhere and nowhere. On page three, he read “Subway Traffic Halted—Woman Proclaims End of World.” That was right up his alley. He had always thought that crazy people could teach everyone else a thing or two. Wasn’t the normal response to an absurd world to go a little wacko? Of course it was. And who knew? Maybe this woman was on to something. Elijah and Jeremiah must have seemed pretty far out in their day. Stern often wondered how one could distinguish prophecy from lunacy.
The brief half-column story explained that a Brooklyn woman started to scream, alarming a carload of commuters at 8:07 a.m. the previous morning. Two men finally managed to restrain her before the train pulled into the next station where the Transit Authority Police waited to remove the maniacal “prophet.” She wailed that Jesus was coming back any day now. She’d seen the Great Beast from Revelation, seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, seen the great Harlot corrupting the powerful leaders of the world. With a bloodstream full of righteous adrenaline, she had attacked a woman, shaking her hard enough to cause a mild concussion when the woman’s skull bounced off the thick glass window of the subway car.
Stern turned next to the obituary section, a morbid habit he’d developed since turning forty. With a slight grin, he’d dismissed the black balloons he’d received from friends along with birthday cards declaring that his life was over, but the stark truth was that Mark Stern, kid in residence at the
Wall Street Journal
, did not like the idea of growing older. He had way too much to do with his life—there were the tamarin and the spider monkey, the rainforest trip he still hadn’t made, the dozens of bands he hadn’t seen live yet, and maybe even the so-far-elusive woman to share his soul with.
Wall Street Journal
, did not like the idea of growing older. He had way too much to do with his life—there were the tamarin and the spider monkey, the rainforest trip he still hadn’t made, the dozens of bands he hadn’t seen live yet, and maybe even the so-far-elusive woman to share his soul with.
There. Page five, column four. The brief obit caught his attention immediately. Marci Newman, prominent lawyer and daughter of Lawrence and Jennifer Newman, had collapsed in city court two days earlier and died at Bellevue. He remembered Marci vividly as Gwen McBean’s roommate. Something that reminded him of Gwen just moments after thinking about “soulmates” had to have some cosmic significance. Gwen was the flame Mark had never quite given up on, even after her marriage to Jack Maulder. She must be hurting badly right now. He remembered how close Gwen and Marci had remained even while they pursued stellar careers.
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