A Circle of Wives (8 page)

Deborah Taylor:
It was the only way.

Samantha Adams:
Can you explain that, please?

Deborah Taylor:
John started his . . . wandering . . . precisely eight years ago. Cynthia, our youngest daughter, had just left for her freshman year at Berkeley. There we were, John and I, alone together in the house for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. Our days consisted primarily of long silences punctuated by bursts of temper. It made clear what both of us had suspected. The marriage was dead.

Shortly after, John took up with a nurse at the hospital. He tried to do it surreptitiously. As if I couldn’t tell from Day One. I confronted him. We discussed it, openly. We didn’t argue about it. But I was adamant. He could see his nurse. Have his sordid little affair. But no divorce. Never would I agree. If he tried I would fight it, take everything he had, would do my best to ensure the children never spoke to him again. I don’t think I’d have had much luck making that latter threat come true. The children—well, at least Cynthia and Evan—worship John. Charles is more difficult to read.

It was the threat of taking away the children’s affections, rather than the money, that got to John. He felt his own betrayal of me more than I did, couldn’t believe that others wouldn’t judge him as harshly as he was judging himself. John didn’t have much confidence in his ability to command affection from people. Ironic, when he was one of the most beloved of men. Truly. Ask around at his clinic. He had warmth, a vulnerability even, that was tremendously endearing if you were susceptible in that way. I wasn’t. Not anymore, at least.

I monitored the situation with the nurse. As I suspected, it soon turned serious. John would never be satisfied with a casual affair. He would always need more. I put an end to it. I don’t want to go into the details now. Suffice it to say I scared her off. My tactics may have been heavy-handed, but they worked. John was in despair. “I must have love,” he said. “If you won’t love me, I need to find someone who will.”

I didn’t mind him having cheap flings. “You may indulge yourself if you like,” I told him. “But nothing that threatens our marriage, nothing that prevents you from coming home every night to me.” But he didn’t want fleeting affairs. He wanted the real thing. And I wanted to continue being Mrs. John Taylor. Younger women may mock me, may think me lacking in character, or ambition, or dignity—I know my daughter would—but that’s the way I was raised.

We were at an impasse.

This lasted for a year. To say we were both unhappy would be an understatement. I had always run a harmonious household, needed things to be regulated, to run smoothly. And they weren’t anymore. John was drinking, he was depressed, we were having real fights for the first time.

Late one night after a particularly bad fight we worked out a deal. He could have a serious relationship. He could seek love. He could even get married again, if he found someone he loved who loved him back. But whoever she was, she was not to know about me. She was not to have entrée into his public, professional life—he had to choose an outsider to our world.
I
was Mrs. John Taylor. And he had to be home by 5:30 every morning, to shower, dress, and eat breakfast in our house before going to work, before making his rounds. His car would be parked in our driveway as our neighbors roused themselves and left for work. How he managed that was his business.

It took him a year before all the variables lined up right for him. He met that MJ creature in some Silicon Valley bar, and courted her. With my permission. Eventually they had some hippy wedding, but legitimate as far as she knew. I continued to organize his life. I controlled the household, paid the bills, and kept his calendar. I kept him straight. I even booked his flights down to LA when he found someone there, too.

Samantha Adams:
So you were an accomplice to a crime. Bigamy. Or whatever it is when three wives are involved. Didn’t that bother you?

Deborah Taylor:
Why, are you going to charge me?

Samantha Adams:
[Silence]

Deborah Taylor:
I thought not. Well, to get back to your question, why would bigamy bother me? If anything, it made me feel safer. The bigger the deception on his part, the more inexcusable his crimes against these other women—and, not incidentally, the law of the land—the less chance he would be able to come clean and make an honest man of himself. He would most definitely be hoist with his own petard if he tried. I had rigged the situation admirably. It would have worked. Even after he died, under normal circumstances I would have been able to negotiate deals with MJ and Helen to keep everything quiet. I would be John Taylor’s widow, just as I had been his wife. And in return I would make sure they didn’t suffer financially.

It was perfect until you prevented me from burying my husband. By the way, if anyone finds out that coffin was empty, I’ll be the laughingstock of the town.

Samantha Adams:
We told you that we needed to do an autopsy. You needn’t have scheduled the funeral quite so quickly.

Deborah Taylor:
People would have wondered why the funeral was delayed. I couldn’t risk that. I needed John safely buried.

Samantha Adams:
As it turned out, someone let the cat out of the bag anyway.

Deborah Taylor:
Yes, that was unfortunate.

Samantha Adams:
Was it you who tipped off the reporter?

Deborah Taylor:
Why on earth would I do such a thing? My goal was that no one ever discover the truth. Now my own children are furious at me. They’re not stupid. They know John. They know me. They figure I must have known about the deception, even suspect that I masterminded it.

Samantha Adams:
Who else possessed this information other than the three wives?

Deborah Taylor:
No one. I’m sure John would never have confided in another soul. By the way, you’ve not yet told me why you sent the body for an autopsy. Isn’t that done only when there’s a suspicious death?

Samantha Adams:
Not necessarily. It’s performed when the cause of a sudden death is unclear.

Deborah Taylor:
What was unclear about my husband’s death? From what I gather, the medical examiner believes it to be a heart attack.

Samantha Adams:
Perhaps. We’ll have to wait on the results of the autopsy.

Deborah Taylor:
All right, but patience isn’t one of my virtues.

12
Samantha

IT TAKES TEN LONG DAYS
for the toxicology report on John Taylor to come back. It is inconclusive. According to the pathologist, the levels of potassium in his body were high, but then they would be after a heart attack. Nothing else—not a trace of any substance that would explain his death. Jake says the results of the forensic autopsy are also inconclusive, but that he believes enough questions have been raised by the evidence for a verdict of wrongful death to be issued by the coroner at the inquest.

Jake is sitting at his desk with the Taylor reports in front of him, frowning. As precise and neat as Jake is in person, his office is the opposite. Files strewn over the desk and floor, articles cut from
Forensic Magazine
and
Academic Forensic Pathology
taped to the walls, a whiteboard with indecipherable scribbles on it, and a decent rendering of a cartoon rodent sniffing suspiciously at a half-erased line drawing of a cadaver.

“The high levels of potassium by themselves would mean nothing,” Jake says without lifting his head. “But when you put them together with the needle puncture and the bruises, that’s when the jury at the inquest will get interested.”

“So what actually killed him? Was it the head injury when he hit the desk?” I clear some papers off a chair and sit down, take out my notebook.

Jake shakes his head. “No. The pathologist believes heart attack. The blow on his head was a nasty one, and could have knocked him out. But it wasn’t what killed him. He was alive when he hit his head. He died some time after that.”

“I thought you said the coroner would probably issue a wrongful death verdict,” I say. “I’m confused.”

“Heart attack it officially is.” He pauses, then picks up one of the papers from his desk. “But there was the hyperkalemia,” he says. “Serum potassium levels, when normal, are between 3.5 and 5.0. The victim’s were 10. Now that can happen with a heart attack. Or the high potassium caused the cardiac dysrhythmia. It could go either way.”

“What’s that—hyperkalemia?”

“Excess potassium.”

“So the pathologist thinks . . . what, exactly?”

“That our good doctor suffered a heart attack. That he banged his head on the corner of the dresser going down, but that what ultimately killed him was the heart attack.”

I shake my head. I feel like I’m being run around in circles.

“Yet you believe the inquest will be wrongful death?”

“Yes,” says Jake, a little impatiently. “Remember the bruises? The needle mark? Here . . .” and he pulls out of the file some photographs. This time I see what he was talking about that day in the Westin. The puncture. Very distinct.

“High amounts of potassium in the system can actually cause cardiac dysrhythmia as well as being a side effect of it. My guess is that the coroner will want a full investigation.”

I nod. “So you’re saying he could have been injected with potassium? And that the high levels in his body may have caused the heart attack. Not the reverse.”

“Maybe. Why not. Could have, perhaps, who knows?” says Jake, shrugging. “That’s what the inquest will try to determine.”

I pick up copies of the paperwork he printed out for me and start reading.

Most of the language is unintelligible.
Myocardial infarction. Rigor mortis, livor mortis, skin slippage, malodor
.
I grasp on to phrases I can understand.
Forehead trauma. Contusions on arms and neck. Wrongful death not ruled out.

“What about fingerprints in the room?” he asks.

Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Nothing. Not even the usual partials you’d expect from a hotel room.”

“How about other evidence?” asks Jake. “Did he have anything on his person that was unusual? Anything in the room that was out of place?”

“In his pockets were his cell phone and wallet. Most of his clothes were still folded in the suitcase. Interestingly enough, they were all brand new—still had tags on them. What he was wearing also seemed new—hardly worn. There was a pair of pajamas still in the packaging on the bed, and a new toothbrush and fresh tube of toothpaste in the bathroom. Otherwise, the room was as clean as a whistle.”

“Which of course is suspect. You’d expect fingerprints all over the place—his, previous guests’, and the staff’s.” Jake pauses. “Anything
not
there that you’d expect to be?” he asks.

This stops me short. I hadn’t considered it that way.

“Let me think,” I say.

“Razor?”

“Oh. Yes, of course. There was a new razor and an unopened package of blades in his suitcase.”

“Comb? Brush?”

“Just a comb, in the bathroom.”

“Car keys? I assume he drove to the Westin?”

“Yes. His keys were on the dresser,” I say.

“How about his house keys? Were they on the same ring?”

I have to stop to think about that one. “It was a big bunch of keys,” I say finally. “But wouldn’t that bust him? He wouldn’t have keys to all three of his houses on the same key ring. Or would he?”

“He probably had other keys as well—keys to his clinic, keys to various rooms at the clinic, keys to his office on campus . . . having one or two others probably wouldn’t make much difference unless someone was looking for trouble,” says Jake.

Something nags at me while he talks on. What else would I possess if I’d checked into a hotel room? Clothes, check. Toiletries, check. Wallet, cell phone, and keys, check. But there should be something else . . .

“What about the room key?” I ask.

“What?” asks Jake.

“I don’t recall seeing a room key in the evidence bags. I’ll have to double-check of course. It’s not that I was looking for it.”

“It’s probably there,” says Jake. “He had his key to get into the room. It was probably such an obvious thing that you didn’t register it.”

“But it doesn’t hurt to check,” I say.

“It never hurts to be thorough,” Jake agrees as I take my leave.

13
MJ

OF COURSE I REGRETTED SPEAKING
to that reporter the minute I hung up the phone. But something puzzled me. I didn’t blab
that
much, drunk as I was. And that reporter definitely had information I didn’t give her.