Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (17 page)

“No, I wasn’t privy to that information.” Ian unbuttoned the gorgeous alpaca coat and removed his gloves. “The building needs to improve its security.”IT

Claudia darted a quick look at him, but he was looking straight ahead and she couldn’t tell whether he was being serious. She said, “She was attacked, hit over the head. I wonder whether it had anything to do with the reason Grusha brought me to New York.”IT

Ian inclined his head toward the cabbie, who had left the partition separating them partway open. “Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss this just now. How about this evening? Dinner?”

“Oh, I don’t—” She was thinking about the fact that he hadn’t asked whether Dr. Pollard was okay. It seemed an interesting omission.

“Don’t you like me, Claudia?”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the second time I’ve asked you out and both times, your first instinct has been to refuse me.”

“I told you, I’m—I’m seeing someone.”

“Do you find me repulsive?”

“Of course not. In fact, you’re quite attractive, but—”

“Then have dinner with me. Just dinner. I’ll pick you up at your hotel. I have my car garaged in the city. We’ll take a run up the Hudson.”

“If you have a car here, why are you taking a cab?”

He gave her the odd smile that seemed to stop just short of a sneer. “I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to see you.”

Jessica McAllister’s file was thick with Dr. Pollard’s handwritten notes. The psychologist wrote in a flowery hand that matched her appearance: a trifle overblown.

A good therapist needs objectivity
, Claudia thought, viewing a page crowded with hard-to-read handwriting. That kind of dense spatial arrangement indicated difficulty in stepping back and maintaining professional distance. Many of the o’s and a’s were open at the top, the loops right-slanted: talkative, emotional, quick to become overinvolved.

Was that what had happened during therapy sessions with Ian McAllister’s daughter? Had Pollard become emotionally overinvolved with Jessica?

Once Claudia had familiarized herself with the flow of Donna Pollard’s handwriting, reading it was a little easier. But the picture of Jessica McAllister that began to emerge set her teeth on edge.

On the intake form, Pollard had written that Jessica had joined Elite Introductions at the behest of her father. Despite Grusha’s insistence that, having turned eighteen a couple of months earlier, the young woman didn’t have enough life experience to date the kind of men who joined the club, she had allowed herself to be persuaded. Claudia was cynical enough to think that payment of a hefty fee might have had some influence on Grusha Olinetsky’s acceptance of the young woman as a member.

Dr. Pollard and Jessica had immediately hit it off at the initial psychological screening appointment. Pollard learned that the girl’s mother had deserted her husband and child when Jessica was just four years old and had never contacted them again.

Jessica, or Jessie, as Pollard tended to refer to her, seemed to be looking for a surrogate mother, and the psychologist was drawn to her. Although most Elite Introductions members saw Pollard only once in the screening process, she and the girl had decided between them that Jessie should enter therapy. As an adult, she did not need her father’s permission, nor did she have to inform him of her activities. Pollard decided to see her pro bono, so there would be no audit trail that her father could follow.

Still, she had made clinical notes, from which it became apparent that the process of transference had been completed early on—the client had literally transferred her feelings from her mother to the therapist. The unfortunate truth was, it also appeared from the notes that countertransference—the feelings of the therapist becoming inappropriately intertwined with the client’s, and possibly interfering with therapy—had occurred.

Claudia stopped reading for a moment and thought of her own relationship with Annabelle Giordano. She couldn’t fault Pollard for caring about Jessie McAllister. Lord knew it was easy to become involved with a vulnerable girl who needed a confidant. But although she had degrees in psychology, Claudia had chosen
not
to become a therapist because she knew that she would be unable to maintain the needed level of detachment to be helpful to clients.

When she’d hit thirty it seemed the right time to look back and examine her life. In her self-exploration, she’d recognized that something was amiss, so she’d found a therapist for herself.

In the first session, she had begun to get an inkling that her inability to trust had interfered with intimate relationships and contributed to the failure of her marriage. Yet confronting the demons of the past had been too painful for her. She’d dropped out after only a couple of visits. Now, ten years later, she was struggling to deal with the issues on her own, but she found that she didn’t want to look back and deal with the pain of the past.

She’d discovered that Jovanic had trouble trusting, too. But over the months they’d been together, they had both started to learn how to lower their barriers, little by little. At least, they had until Alex began to show up without warning, phoning him at all hours. Jovanic insisted it was strictly business, but Claudia’s intuition was zinging, and she didn’t like what it was telling her. And as she had withdrawn, so had Jovanic.

What a pair we are
, she thought as she came back around to the problem of Jessica McAllister. No time for her own problems when there was work to be done. There was something to be said for filling her time with work.

“Feels uncomfortable with F,” Pollard had written in notes dated half a year earlier. The next few lines pointed to “F” as referencing Jessie’s father, Ian McAllister.

Later, Pollard wrote, “F jealous of J’s boyfriends. Drives them away with superior attitude and controlling behavior.”

Claudia read on and learned that Ian had requested that Grusha find Jessie a match with an older man. The notes said that he had judged every introduction she made as unworthy of his daughter. Not wealthy enough. Not powerful enough.

Jessie confided to her therapist that she believed no man would ever attain her father’s standards. And, understandably, she didn’t want a “made match” anyway.

It struck Claudia that Ryan Turner might have filled the bill on all counts, except, perhaps the requirement for an “older” man. Ryan had been a twenty-seven-year-old second-year resident, at the outer reaches of a reasonable age for eighteen-year-old Jessie. He was a medical man. He came from a wealthy family. He was drop-dead gorgeous. And his career choice gave him the potential for achieving status and power.

The notes indicated that Jessie had dated Ryan twice and was infatuated with him, but her father had denigrated Ryan’s choice of plastic surgery as a specialty and put the kibosh on the relationship before it had a chance to blossom.

After her father nixed her short-lived romantic attachment to Ryan, Jessie had gone on a couple of dates with “AC,” whom Claudia deduced must be Avram Cohen.

“Says she’s afraid of him,” Pollard had written.

Jessie had been introduced to Marcus Bernard, but indicated that she thought he was way too old and he turned her off. Late thirties would be ancient to a girl of eighteen. Still, at her father’s insistence, she had seen him several times before digging in her heels—with Donna Pollard’s secret encouragement—and refusing to see him again.

Flipping through the pages, Claudia came upon a handwritten note from Jessica herself.

As Claudia read the words and looked at the handwriting, she felt an aching sadness for the young woman. Why hadn’t she broken away from her father after she’d reached her majority?

Jessica’s handwriting held the answer: the “good girl” syndrome. The need for her father’s affection and approval was plain in the round letter forms and crowded words, not so different from Dr. Pollard’s own. Jessica had missed the nurturing of a mother and Ian had not been equipped to give her what she needed in terms of emotional support. The lack of a comma between
Love
and
Jessie
made the words into a plea.

Many letters thrust up against each other, a feature of people who were unsure of their boundaries and had no real sense of their own space or power. Claudia’s mind flipped over to Annabelle, who had once attempted to kill herself. Thank god she had been rescued in time.

But Jessica had managed to complete the act. Judging by this handwriting, it would not be surprising to learn that her actions were, in reality, a plea for help, rather than a sincere desire to end her life. When she slit her wrists, had she intended for someone to find her before it was too late?

Or was there a possibility that Jessie hadn’t acted alone in her suicide?

Claudia turned to the next page of Dr. Pollard’s notes. In a frantic act of rebellion, Jessica reported to her therapist that she had been sneaking out to rave parties when she knew that her father would not find out. Pollard’s notes described dangerous drug use and indiscriminate sex. Unprotected sex.

An AIDS test, positive for the HIV virus. Claudia read on, her heart sinking lower with each line.

Pollard wrote that she had tried to talk Jessie out of making this revelation to her father. Her concern was that McAllister, having lost the object of his sociopathic /narcissistic rage—his daughter—would need to deflect it onto someone else.

A month passed between that note and the last one in the file, which indicated that Pollard didn’t know whether Jessie had confronted her father or not. Nor did it matter further. The girl had ended her life.

Claudia turned the last page and sat there for a while, just looking at the bundle of papers. What did it all mean in terms of Grusha Olinetsky and Elite Introductions, if anything?

There was a reason why Donna Pollard had directed her to this file, and it wasn’t just because Claudia had asked about McAllister’s daughter. The manifest answer was that Pollard suspected Ian McAllister of being Grusha’s saboteur. But what did that have to do with his daughter?

McAllister signed Jessie up with Elite Introductions.

He was dissatisfied with the men she met: Avram Cohen, Marcus Bernard, Ryan Turner.

Jessie slept around with random guys who would never have been accepted into Elite Introductions.

She injected drugs.

She contracted AIDS.

Then came the questions: Did Jessie tell her father that she had the disease? If she did tell him, how had he reacted?

Chapter 16

Zebediah Gold answered the phone as he often did, in a rather brusque way that made Claudia wonder what she was interrupting and whether she should just hang up. But when he heard it was she, asking him for a few minutes of his time, his voice brightened.

“Sweetheart! I always have time for you; you know that. What shall we talk about? You and me on a desert island with a pitcher of martinis and—”

She interrupted. “If you don’t mind, let’s talk about OCPD and narcissistic rage.”

“I like my idea better. Yours has made my brain go flaccid. Exactly whose obsessive compulsive personality and rage has you concerned?”

Zebediah was a semiretired criminal psychologist and her long-ago lover. She could always count on him to make himself available when she had a knotty problem to gnaw on.

Claudia summarized her meeting with Ian McAllister and told Zebediah what she’d learned about Jessica McAllister ’s suicide from Dr. Pollard’s clinical notes.

Zebediah listened quietly as she spoke. When she was finished, he said, “She slit her wrists?”

“That’s what Dr. Pollard said. She took pills, too.”

“Cutting oneself is supposed to be one of the most painful ways to end it all.”

“That’s what Annabelle told me. When she tried it, she cut herself with a broken bottle. She told me that her hands started shaking so badly she couldn’t control them. They cramped up like claws. It sounded excruciating.”IT

“God, she’s lucky someone came along and found her in time.”

“Unlike poor Jessica, who bled out in the bathtub.”

“And you think her father might have had something to do with it?”

Claudia faltered, having second thoughts as she faced the enormity of what she was suggesting. “What do you think, Zeb? With the level of controlling behavior Donna Pollard described in her notes, do you think it’s possible that he could have killed her and made it look like suicide?”

“The ultimate control,” Zebediah mused. “The power over life and death.”

“He would have to be crazy, wouldn’t he, to do something like that?”