ER - A Murder Too Personal (10 page)

Tanner nodded. “Maybe. Let me make some
calls. You never know. He might turn up under some rock.”

Justine rolled over on her side and gave me
one of those sleepy, satisfied smiles. The pink satin sheet had
fallen away and exposed her tired left breast.

I smiled back at her. She wasn’t bad-looking
for her age. You could see she’d once been able to turn heads on
the street but time and some of life’s little disappointments had
etched their passage on her face.

She ran the tips of her fingers over my face
and lips. Long ruby-red nails, beautifully manicured. The final
chords of a Mozart concerto echoed through the house. It was a long
piece with violas and woodwinds. I used to know which one, but now
I forget.

I leaned over and nuzzled her neck. Her
perfume smelled good, but it wasn’t Shalimar. She put her arms
around me and pulled me to her. The motion was feminine, eternal,
giving.

I hadn’t meant it to turn out this way when I
called her at Chisolm’s office. I was trying to find whatever I
could without being too obvious, but soon we were sliding down that
slippery slope. Now I was flat on my back in Chisolm’s bed with his
secretary and his house was wide open to me. Chisolm and his wife
were out of town for the weekend and Justine just sort of hinted
that her mother wouldn’t take it too kindly if she brought a man
home to spend the night. My place, of course, was being painted, as
it always is when such a need arises.

She climbed out of bed with a sigh and padded
off to the bathroom. Her buttocks were a little too full and her
thighs were cratered with what was popularly called cellulite, but
you could see she worked out regularly. She was limber and in
reasonably good shape. I guessed she was in her mid-forties.

She blew me a kiss as she closed the bathroom
door. I lay back in the bed. It was a custom-made job, as big as a
Civil War battlefield. I wondered if Chisolm kept a box score of
his sexual encounters with his wife—or if he even had sex with
her.

The ceiling was lavender, just like the
walls. The room looked like some kind of training ground for the
Sex Olympics. Mirrors, exercise equipment, bidet, the works. At the
foot of the bed was some kind of a roll bar whose use I couldn’t
figure out.

I tossed back the sheets and got dressed. By
the time she came out of the bathroom I was standing by the window
with my jacket and tie on and a really strong craving for a
cigarette. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. She was
wearing a white satin robe that had a fluffy collar and cuffs like
the heroines used to wear in those films noir of the forties. Mrs.
Chisolm’s maybe?

“I guess I should get dressed too,” she said
as she brushed her hair back with long slow strokes.

“Tempus fugit,” I said.

“I know, I know,” she nodded. “We’ve stayed
longer than we should have.” She finished the last slow strokes and
said, “Do you think we could have one more drink?”

I spread my hands. “Sure, if you make it as
good as the last one.”

She giggled like a teenager. Some women never
lose that quality. She snapped off a sharp military salute. “Yes,
sir. An extra dry martini coming right up.” Without makeup her skin
looked drier and sallower, the way Irish girls look as they
age.

The martini was better than the first one, or
was it just that booze tastes better after the act?

As she sipped her drink, her eyes questioned
me. “Was it wrong to do it or was it just wrong to do it here?”

“Neither,” I said. “No one was hurt and there
was no damage, if you don’t count the stained sheets.”

She reddened. The flush was apparent through
her translucent skin. “Oh, don’t be concerned about that. I’ll have
them cleaned and the bed made like new before they get back.”

I had the feeling she’d done this before. We
carried our drinks down an endless corridor and went down two steps
into a sunken living room. The house was done in a slick modern
style that suited Chisolm. There were huge abstract paintings on
all the walls. Each room had its own fireplace and they were so
clean it was apparent they had never been used.

We lingered another half-hour over the
drinks. Our conversation was the talk of two solitary souls who
knew the words would be the last between them.

When I stood up, she got to her feet and went
down the hallway back to the bedroom to get dressed. After she was
gone, I had a chance to scope out the alarm system and the window
locks. I left one of the living room windows open a crack.

She must have sensed something because she
was back faster than a thoroughbred out of the gate.

“Ready, dahling?” she said, and she held the
ah just a split-second longer than necessary.

I nodded. As we stood in the entranceway, she
flicked on the alarm and checked to see that the red dot was
lit.

“We have forty-five seconds to get out,” she
said with a wistful grin.

I grabbed her. “Just enough time for a
goodbye kiss.”

Her lips were soft. And, as I turned her
around, I shut off the alarm. It was a long and deep kiss. When it
was time, I turned her again and led her out the door.

***

Before an hour had passed I was back inside
the house. It was one of those contemporary colonials that was
neither contemporary nor colonial, just a bastardized edition of
some architect’s vision. Like Chisolm, the house was ostentatious.
It stood on the crest of a small hill in the center of four acres
of neatly-tended grounds. What percent he owned and what percent
the bank owned was a question to speculate on.

I had all the time I needed to inspect the
house. There was nothing unusual in the standard hiding places. He
had a safe in his office that was easy to locate. It was behind a
false front of the Harvard Classics and, knowing Chisolm the way I
thought I did, there was only one reason for him to have the
Harvard Classics in his home—as a false front for a safe.

I didn’t even try to crack it.

The house was large—too large for just two
people. I went through every room. The interior was expensively
detailed, with hand-carved moldings and plaster walls. You could
see that these were people who entertained a lot, and
extravagantly. The house seemed designed for that. One room served
as a photo gallery and there I got a lot of views of Mrs. Chisolm.
She looked a few years older than her husband, not unattractive,
with a patrician solidness about her. I might have recognized her
face from some society photos I’d seen in the Times. She had a
square jaw and a clear intelligence in the eyes—or was it just
arrogance?

I’d have to find out more about this babe.
The green-eyed monster was a nasty son of a bitch. If she didn’t
know her husband had broken up with my wife…

It took me three hours to search the entire
house. The only thing of interest was in Chisolm’s office. It was
in his rolltop desk, in one of those secret compartments that look
like woodwork until you pull it just the right way. Next to a
checkbook was a glassine envelope with a couple of grams of
coke.

It didn’t prove much, but it tied in with the
blow in Alicia’s apartment. So Chisolm was a cokehead. And he’d
probably introduced Alicia into its pleasurable byways. Another
stop on the highway to perdition. What the hell had Alicia become?
A metaphysical, psychological, feminist cokehead. My innocent
bride, who wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette, who despised Freud, and
who believed that fellatio was wrong.

I flipped through the checkbook. Nothing out
of the ordinary. Unless you believe that surviving on your
overdrafts was unusual. Considering all the people I knew who were
living beyond their means on their lines of credit or home equity
loans, I guess it wasn’t anything special.

I put the coke and the checkbook back where I
found them and headed home.

Now all I had to do was to check out Mrs.
Chisolm’s temperament and find out if she was capable of shortening
a person’s life expectancy.

“Why didn’t you tell me your little shrink
played non-Freudian games?”

“Ha,” Rachel said. “If you only began to know
what that squirt was capable of.”

“Then why do you go to him?”

“Because like he amuses me.” She put her
hands on her hips. “He’s transparent and he’s also a real sicko. He
tries to do every female patient…and I would say his batting
average is pretty good.”

“And they go to bed with him?” I kept the
distaste out of my voice.

She laughed. “If you call that sofa a bed.”
She inclined her head toward me. “You know about transference?”

“Sure.”

“Well, he’s like the master of transference.
All his women love him. And he loves them back in every hole.
Sometimes he even cures some of them.”

We walked along the path around the lake and
came to Bethesda fountain. Central Park was almost empty this early
on a Thursday morning. It wasn’t eight yet but the day was going to
be the first hot one of the spring. I’d traded in my suit for a
navy Lacoste shirt and khaki pants.

I turned to look at her face with its
delicate features. Almost perfection, except for the glint in her
eye. What the hell was it? Wild, devious, cunning? Damned if I
knew.

“Why are you seeing Pasternack?”

A broad grin spread across her face. “You
know better than to ask a patient a question like that. A person in
analysis should never say why she’s going to a shrink.” She seemed
delighted with the question. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”

She locked arms with me. “It was my
condition,” she whispered in my ear, even though there was no one
within thirty meters of us. “I have like a disorder called
vaginismus. Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a condition that makes intercourse
extremely painful.” She screwed up her face in a rough
approximation of pain. “He was trying to find out if it was organic
or psychosomatic.”

“And what did he find out?”

She looked out over the lake at a young
couple rowing a boat. The boy was having trouble maneuvering the
boat back into the dock. He finally guided the boat in and the girl
stepped over the seat and put her arms around his neck and kissed
him. She was wearing a light summer dress that flowed with her
movements. Shot in soft-focus, it could have been a thirty-second
spot for a douche or a condom.

Rachel turned away from this touching
vignette and said, “He wasn’t sure. He said it might have been
caused…by Daddy. In like a roundabout way, of course.”

I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

She shook her head abruptly. “I don’t want to
talk about that.”

“All right. Then tell me why Pasternack is
such a sicko.”

She clearly didn’t mind talking about that.
“He’s very good with his fingers and his tongue. But that’s all he
uses, you know. I’ve heard he like only gets off by himself. I
think he wants to show power over his female patients.”

“A real Rasputin, this charmer. Tell me
something. Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

She chewed on that adorable lower lip. “If
you’re a doctor, you think you’re like a god. You’re infallible,
you know. You can do no wrong. It’s a given. Do you think a shrink
measures himself by human standards? My little sicko has probably
done more than most.” She giggled suddenly. “More than me,
even.”

I grunted. “You haven’t done half of what you
claim.”

“More than half,” she said with another
giggle. “Maybe even more than twice.”

***

I sat in my office that afternoon, shoes off,
feet on the desk, drinking black coffee out of a paper cup and
thinking about Alicia. The coffee was hot. That was about all I
could say for it.

What were her final moments like? Did she
think of me in those last measured seconds? That poor sweet
bitch.

Jesus. I just wanted to rip the heart out of
the bastard that killed her.

I had no shortage of real good possibilities.
Stallings, her boss. Why did he fire her? Did she have something on
him? Maybe he was banging her. Was I paranoid, or was the girl who
was a virgin when she married me turning into the whore of Babylon?
Chisolm. Cocaine and the end of a love affair. Mrs. Chisolm, angry
beyond belief at her husband’s latest infidelity. Wheelock, because
she wouldn’t go out with him or revenge because she dumped him?
Pasternack. A twisted shrink. Was he twisted enough to kill?
Garbarini, a harmless superannuated love child or a stern Zen
master punishing a wayward disciple? Even Rachel. She wasn’t a
killer, but there was something about her that didn’t sit right.
Something I couldn’t figure out. It was that uncertainty….

Where the hell to begin to begin? I was
starting to descend into one of those black butt-kicking moods
because there was no shortage of possible murderers and no feel for
how to proceed from here. Then the fax rang and rolled out its
message.

I eased my feet off the desk and stood
watching. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The typeface was Courier
12 point. Could have come from any computer in the free world. The
words were not very polite. “Stay out of this you fucking bastard
or you’ll be dead”

Short and sweet. Only three more words than
he needed to make his point. Maybe he added them for emphasis.

Stay out of what? I was working on half a
dozen cases. Which one was he referring to?

I checked the sending number on the header
and called it, but all I got was a fax tone on the other end. I
sent a fax asking where they were located but all I kept getting
was a disconnect message. Five minutes later, the fax got through.
The return fax took another couple of minutes.