A Circle of Wives (6 page)

This reporter, she hits me with the facts. So smoothly! No hint of judgment or shock in her voice. She fools me, she makes it sound like no big deal.

“And you had no idea about your husband’s other wives?” she asks, and her voice is so . . .
understanding
. . . that I lose my head. The booze coupled with the confusion. I spew words, many words, before hanging up the phone and collapsing.

7
San Francisco Chronicle

Deceased Stanford Doctor
Had Three Wives

May 15, 2013

PALO ALTO, CA—Dr. John Taylor was a prominent plastic surgeon, an associate clinical professor at Stanford, and director of the Taylor Institute, a thriving private clinic that specialized in facial reconstructions. It wasn’t until Taylor passed away last week, at age 62, of a presumed heart attack, that he was discovered to have had three concurrent wives in different households in Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and Los Angeles.

“My world has just fallen apart,” said MJ Taylor (née Johnston) of Los Gatos, who hadn’t known that her husband was married with three children. In fact, he had never divorced his wife Deborah Taylor (55) of Palo Alto. MJ Taylor (49) had married Dr. John Taylor in a quiet ceremony on the beach in Santa Cruz five years ago. At that point, Dr. John Taylor had been married to Deborah Taylor for nearly thirty years. Then, six months ago, Dr. Taylor married again, this time to fellow physician Helen Richter (36) who lives and works in Los Angeles, where Dr. Taylor was a visiting professor at the UCLA medical school. Dr. Richter kept her own surname after the ceremony. MJ Taylor, a financial analyst at WebSys Corp., in Santa Clara, also claimed to have no knowledge of this later marriage. “Until the funeral reception, I had no idea. Not a clue,” she said, adding, “She
does
seem like a nice woman.”

Dr. Helen Richter and Deborah Taylor were unavailable for comment.

In the United States, the Model Penal Code (section 230.1) defines bigamy as a misdemeanor. In the state of California, if a married person marries an unmarried person the penalty is a one-year prison term or a ten-thousand-dollar fine. If an unmarried person knowingly marries another person’s husband or wife, then the penalty is five thousand dollars or a one-year prison term. Samantha Adams, a detective with the Palo Alto Police Department said the state was unlikely to pursue charges against MJ Taylor or Dr. Richter, as they appeared ignorant of Taylor’s original marriage.

8
Samantha

“
SO YOU
’
VE CAUGHT A LIVE
ONE
.” That’s my boss, Chief Elliot, although everyone calls her Susan. Officers visiting our station house from other cities are appalled at the informality. But despite the fact that we’re on a first-name basis, she doesn’t stand for nonsense. A tall woman in her midfifties, she’s been running the Palo Alto police department for almost twenty years. She was the one to tap my shoulder and ask if I wanted to take the detective exam, the one who put the idea into my head. I wouldn’t exactly call her a mentor, although others in the department hint that I’m a favorite. She’s a remote sort of person, not overly warm, and despite the first-name thing, not terribly approachable. Once I bought her a Diet Coke from the machine, having noticed that she swills them down in a constant flow all day. The look I got still sends chills through me. But I’ve witnessed her in action enough to note that she has vast excesses of patience and, I’ve always thought, wisdom. She has a nickname that people are careful to use only out of her hearing,
Suicide Suzie,
due to a famous incident where she talked a guy down from jumping off the Sand Hill 280 overpass. The mayor gave her a plaque
for an act of valor
that someone had to rescue from the garbage can after the award ceremony. To Susan’s chagrin, it now hangs above the entrance to the station house. I have enormous respect for her. She doesn’t seek glory for its own sake, but values a job well done.

Susan sits at her desk, fiddling with a pen, then leans back in her chair. She is large, with massive shoulders and a double chin, the type of woman that unenlightened persons probably wouldn’t take seriously, given her size and indifference to fashion. Strangers might mock her for her weight, might see it as evidence of laziness or lack of control. Yet I’ve never known anyone so disciplined. No matter how early you get to the station, Susan is already there. The station house is a spotless engine of efficiency. She computerized all the records a full decade before other police departments in the state. Of course, a lot of that has to do with Palo Alto money. But also Susan’s vision. She’s married to the head of Palo Alto’s firefighting division, himself no Skinny Minnie. People like to joke that one of the reasons Palo Alto is such a placid community is that the two of them hate having their dinner interrupted.

“I’m mostly talking to myself here,” she says. “I’m wondering if this case shouldn’t go to a more seasoned officer. Someone used to handling those ghouls in the media. After that
Chronicle
nastiness, the media is calling for an official statement. You’d have to write one today and present it tonight or tomorrow morning. You up for that? Or do you want me to pass it on to Grady.” Grady being our only big-city cop, having retired from the Detroit police force before moving west and signing on in Palo Alto as a detective at the ripe old age of fifty.
Easy money
, he calls it. You can see him trying to stifle a smile when anyone complains about having a bad day. I Googled him once, way back. He was put on administrative leave twice in Detroit for having killed while on duty. The words
excessive use of force
were used throughout the various newspaper reports. Scary stuff. I tend to tiptoe around Grady.

Part of me wants to say,
sure, why not
,
throw it to Grady,
and let this case go. That’s the quitter in me. Though I’m also kind of hooked.

“I can handle that,” I say. I try to exude the air of someone competent, yet not foolishly overconfident. Mostly this involves standing up to my 5'4" height and brushing my bangs out of my face.

“But we know nothing yet,” I say. “Jake sent the body to the pathologist for an autopsy, and he said we won’t have the results for days.”

“Then tell them that. Keep it short and sweet,” Susan says.

“Do I mention the bruising? The needle puncture?”

“Absolutely not,” says Susan. “You speculate about nothing. They’ll press you to say more. They’ll try to get you to say this is murder, whatever. Just stick to the facts, Sam.”

The facts, I think, not unhappily, are doozies. Although I’m not unmindful of the fact that a man is dead—a man with responsibilities and a family who is grieving—I’m excited to be doing something other than processing theft reports that will come to nothing or investigating break-ins fumbled by pot-smoking sixteen-year-olds. They’re not the cleverest criminal minds. The last one I’d been assigned to, the perp had two of his friends on bicycles acting as lookouts. A couple of kids riding in perpetual circles in front of the target’s home naturally aroused the attention of the neighbors. When we arrived, the perp was trying to get away on his bike with a MacBook in his backpack and two iPhones in his pocket, but not before he’d paused to make a phone call from one of his ill-gotten phones. Like I said, not the brightest criminals in the world.

“I’d like you to stay on the case,” says Susan, with an air of having made up her mind, “For now, you’re our homicide department, Sam. Use Grady or Mollie as backup. I want daily briefings.”

“Oh, and Sam,” she calls after me, as I’m walking away, “Find out who tipped the newspaper off about the three marriages. Talk about a shocker! It must have been one of the wives. I’d like to know which one thought it would be advantageous for us to know about the bigamy—I mean, multiple marriages.”

“The
trigamy
,” I quip, and get a smile out of Susan. It makes my day.

9
Excerpt from Transcript

Police interview with
MJ Taylor, May 18, 2013

[Preliminary introductions, explanations of processes and procedures]

Samantha Adams:
When did you realize your husband had two other . . . relationships?

MJ Taylor:
Not until I read the news of his death. And actually, I only found out about his first wife from the paper. The other wife I learned about at the funeral reception. No one accepts that, though. No one can believe I didn’t suspect something, anything.

Samantha Adams:
Well, didn’t you?

MJ Taylor:
Not at all.

Samantha Adams:
How could that be?

MJ Taylor:
I have to tell you, John simply inspired confidence. That large, imposing physique. His soothing authoritative voice. And don’t forget I was in love. I felt like a bride even after five years of marriage. I had no idea I was married to a Bluebeard. And unlike Bluebeard’s bride, when he told me there were places I couldn’t go, questions I couldn’t ask, I obeyed. Unlike her, I absolutely obeyed.

Samantha Adams:
Do you think others suspected? His secretary? His colleagues?

MJ Taylor:
I never called his office; he forbid me to, said it would disrupt his work. I was only allowed to contact him via email, or through his cell phone. I didn’t call the hotels he stayed at when he was out of town, I never showed up unannounced at any of his award dinners honoring him, any of the celebrations of his professional success. He wanted to keep his professional and personal lives separate, he told me, and I obeyed.

Samantha Adams:
Didn’t any of this strike you as strange?

MJ Taylor:
Not at the time. Or rather, John
was
strange. It was one of his charms, his eccentricity. He danced naked in the garden after dark. He kept caramel candies in his bedside table, popped them in his mouth during his frequent awakenings in the night, sucked them until he fell back asleep. Like a two-year-old, he suffered from night terrors, needed sweets as pacifiers.

And I was—am—a little strange myself. The hippy accountant. Fish out of water almost everywhere. Except when I’m with my brother, of course. I’m nothing if not a good big sister. But other than that, an oddball. Until John. I was truly known to him. Do you understand what I mean by that? That was John’s particular magic. My friends said this, too, you felt he saw you, really
saw
you. Such a man was worth waiting for. Even worth compromising for.

Samantha Adams:
Well, how
did
you meet John Taylor? You seem to come from such very different worlds.

MJ Taylor:
We met cute, as they say. Six years ago. I had just been laid off in one of those Silicon Valley purges that seem to happen every ten years or so.
Downsizing.
Or, as our CEO said when he made the announcement,
rightsizing.
Meaning me, and about forty thousand other people, were wrong. I went out for drinks with my fellow superfluous humans. Unusual, for me, I’m not a drinker. Neither was John, it was something we had in common. That’s what makes our first encounter in a bar so odd. That day I had a beer. And another. And another. One by one my fellow ex-employees left, and eventually I looked around and realized I didn’t know anyone. Surrounded by strangers! I’d drunk enough to become cranky, but I signaled the bartender, and ordered a real drink, in a real drinker’s glass. That’s how I ordered it, “Give me the drink that comes in that glass.” And I pointed. When it came, I gagged, it was so strong, so bitter. And I hate olives. I sent it back. I rejected it as inferior, as I had been rejected that morning.
Rightsizing.
Rightdrinking. My voice was too loud, and heads turned. Who expects to see an aging hippy, complete with long flowered skirt and beads, at a watering hole for software project managers and semiconductor sales reps? I was surrounded by young men (all young, young,
young
) in identical uniforms, khaki pants and blue button-down shirts. Very few women, very few of anyone over the age of thirty. The guy sitting next to me at the bar was the exception.

This man—I guessed his age as midfifties—he reached out across the bar to my rejected drink, picked it up, and took a sip. He made a face. “This is clearly unacceptable,” he said, and smiled at me (an understanding smile). “Wait. Just you see,” he said. “I’ll make you the perfect drink.” He somehow commanded from the bartender the vodka bottle, a handful of lime wedges, a can of cranberry juice, packets of sugar. How did he manage that? He had that way about him. He was clearly used to being in charge, he didn’t even need to raise his voice. If anything, it was the reverse, he was so soft-spoken that you had to lean forward,
you
had to go to
him
. And you did so willingly.