ER - A Murder Too Personal (15 page)

I opened it slowly and saw Rachel’s form on
the bed in the dim light from the hallway. Her nightgown was way up
around her chest. She wasn’t wearing anything else. One arm was
flung up on the pillow and the other hung over the side. The shaft
of light behind me slanted across her face.

She didn’t move. The only way I could tell
she was alive was the slow rise and fall of her belly.

Then she opened one eye and smiled. “Hello,
long-lost stranger,” she whispered.

“What happened to Pasternak?”

She shook her head in slow motion from side
to side. As she did it, her face disappeared into darkness and then
came back into the light. It was like watching an old time
silhouette lantern show.

“I don’t know,” she moaned. Then she said it
again.

“You said he was dead.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”

“How did he die?”

“He’s dead, you know, and he left me stranded
without a shrink.”

I could think of worse things. Like running
out of cold beer on a hot summer day. I stepped over to the bed and
shook her shoulders. “What the hell did you take?” There was no
smell of alcohol on her breath.

She didn’t answer. I slapped her a couple of
times.

She blinked and tried to sit up but she
didn’t make it. Then she mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I
sat on the edge of the bed and propped her up against the
headboard. Her nightgown fell to her waist.

“What did you take?”

She opened her eyes and gave me a glassy
stare. “Some pills…I think…”

“What kind?”

She tried to think, then gave up and shook
her head. “Just some pills…” She giggled. “Am I a bad girl?”

“No, you’re wonderful. You’re a great
girl.”

She put her hand up and touched my cheek.
“You’re a dear. You’re tough and you’re sweet.”

“How did Pasternak die?”

She gave me that glassy look again. Her
thoughts were struggling to come back from that place where they’d
gone. I ran my hand through her straggly hair.

“Talk to me, baby. Tell me what happened to
him.”

With a visible effort, she managed to break
through. “He killed himself. He’s dead. And now like I don’t have a
shrink.”

I tried to comfort her. I held her in my arms
as she rocked back and forth. “Don’t worry. It’s all right. You’ll
find another shrink.”

Then, without warning, she burst out
laughing. “Yes, but what about tonight?” She laughed so hard, tears
started down her cheeks. She was laughing and crying at the same
time and she kept on like that for a couple of minutes. Then she
calmed down. She took some deep breaths.

“My little doc is gone,” she said in the
sing-song voice of a little girl. “My little doc is gone.” I
cradled her as her breathing became deeper and deeper. My eyes had
become accustomed to the dark and I could make out the prescription
vial on the night stand and the glass of water next to it.

Then she started to surface. She looked up at
me and whispered, “I want to swallow you and I want to swallow your
juice.” She reached down and started to caress my crotch.

“You’re in no condition to swallow anything,”
I said.

She stopped moving her hand but left it where
it was.

“How did he die?” I said.

She was back now. She would be all right.
“How does a shrink die? He overdosed on pills. A lot of pills. He
left a note, you know, saying it was because he loved her.”

“Who?”

Her smile was nasty. “You’re the detective.
Let’s play a guessing game.”

“Alicia?”

“Give the man in the balcony a silver dollar,
my daddy used to say.”

That threw me for a loop. “Why the hell…”

She interrupted me. “You’re a big boy. You’ve
heard of transference.”

“Yeah, but transference works the other
way.”

Her grin became even nastier. “Usually it
does. But in this case…” She left the sentence unfinished.

I rubbed the stubble on my jaw and tried to
put the pieces together. A heartsick shrink checked out with an OD.
And I had a broad in my arms with a bad case of psychoanalytic
withdrawal. All this wasn’t making my job any easier.

All of a sudden I felt really tired. Too
tired to make it back to my place. The way you feel when you know
your reserve tank is empty and the nearest gas station is over the
county line.

I pulled off my tuxedo jacket with some
difficulty, favoring my bad arm. Then I loosened my tie and kicked
off my shoes.

“Shove over, buttercup,” I said. “I’m going
to sleep.”

“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Politeness,”
was the last thing I heard before my head hit the rack.

The next morning at ten, I ducked into
Stalling’s office and slammed the door shut behind me. He was
surprised to see me. I was surprised by the fact that I was lucky
enough to stop by while his secretary was down the hall at the
coffee wagon discussing the latest Serbo-Croatian foreign policy
initiative.

As he looked up from the research report he
was reading, I could see that flash of fear in his eyes. So he
remembered our last cordial encounter and the cold feel of a hard
polymer gun against his cheek.

He reached for the phone on a little table
next to him.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

He pulled his hand back.

“Why did you fire Alicia?” I walked behind
where he was sitting on a sofa next to a floor-to-ceiling window
that looked out over the harbor and the Statue of Liberty.

Stallings had one of those modern offices
that had dispensed with the desk, that archaic symbol of work. He
was slouched down on an overstuffed leather couch with a pile of
reports on the floor next to his highly-polished shoes. He’d
shrugged off his Brooks Brothers suspenders with the little ducks
and was sipping herb tea from a china cup. He was wearing the kind
of shirt with a white collar and blue body, French cuffs and little
gold button cuff links. His slicked-back hair was so shiny the
ceiling light reflected off it.

Just as I stepped next to him, he made a
sudden jerky movement and dropped his teacup onto the rug. It
didn’t break, but the tea slowly spread out in a darkening stain on
what was probably a very expensive oriental.

He stood and turned around to look at me. The
expression on his face was a strange mixture of fright and
annoyance.

“Sit down,” I said. I shoved him back onto
the couch.

He did. His undertaker’s style had deserted
him. He was no longer the old smoothie. You could see he wanted me
six feet under.

“Why did you fire Alicia?” I said.

He looked at me like I’d said, “Why did you
kill Alicia?”

The words came out of his mouth in a stammer.
“I…I didn’t…”

“Don’t hand me that, Stallings.” I grabbed
his shoulder from behind. “Did it have something to do with
Jergens?”

His eyebrows went up about six inches.
“How…?”

“I find things out. Things you don’t want
other people to know. I know what color your skivvies are.”

He slumped even more in the sofa. “I have
nothing to say to you,” he tried. “Talk to my lawyer.”

I squeezed his shoulder so hard he winced.
“This isn’t due process, Stallings. You can’t take the Fifth with
me. But I have a hunch the SEC would like to hear about it. I’m
sure you’d welcome an investigation of Jergens’ stock offering. You
know how these Boy Scouts are when they start to poke around.”

“Oh, God, no.” His frame slumped even
more.

While he debated whether to betray a valued
client and lose a stream of future income, I surveyed the view from
the fortieth floor. He had the corner office with tinted windows on
two walls. From where I stood, you could see all the way down the
East coast to Key West. The Statue of Liberty looked insignificant
way down in the harbor, like one of those souvenir shop models. You
wanted to reach out and pick it up and shake it and let the snow
settle on its base.

“What about Jergens? Was he the reason you
fired Alicia?”

The answer was barely audible. “Yes.”

I had to prod him. “What happened?”

Stallings practically had tears in his eyes,
like I’d just punched the last hole in his meal ticket. “Jergens
was going to float a new stock issue in the third quarter and we
were to be the lead underwriter. The real estate market has been
strong, as you know, and Jergens was one of the strongest
operators. It would have taken the slightest hint of scandal to
derail the offering and our underwriting fees with it. I couldn’t
afford to take a chance. The future of the firm literally depended
on it.”

“Why?”

“We’ve lost some large underwriting clients
recently and our reputation was starting to suffer. If we’d lost
this deal, people on the street would have started questioning our
ability to do deals.”

“What did Alicia do?”

Stallings permitted himself a small smile and
then looked up at me to see how I’d take it. “She was a clever
woman, your wife. I don’t know what caused her to suspect anything,
but she actually went down and inspected a bunch of properties in
person. She started at the top floor in each building and went
through every one, knocking on doors to determine occupancy rates.
She talked to maintenance workers and cleaning ladies. What she
found out was that Jergens’ financials were not strictly
cricket.”

I had to hand it to Alicia. That sounded like
something she would have done in the old days, before her new age,
Mother Earth self. “Nice detective work, for an amateur.”

Stallings nodded vigorously, as if he wanted
to get on my good side. Little did he know I’d lost my good side a
long time ago, somewhere in that perfect purgatory that was called
the Au Shau valley.

“That’s when you canned her?”

“Well, no,” he said. “It was a little more
complicated than that. She evidently went directly to Jergens and
told him of her findings. I don’t know to what end. He threatened
her and told her to bury the information. Then he set up a meeting
with me at an out-of-the-way restaurant and told me to fire
her.”

“So you did?”

Stallings nodded. “Yes. But then an odd thing
happened.” He narrowed his eyes. “He called me back a couple of
weeks later and told me to re-hire her.”

“Why did he do that?”

Stallings leaned toward me. “That’s the
strange thing. I don’t know why. But she came back to work as if
nothing had happened.”

“What about the report?”

“It was never published. It just disappeared
off the face of the earth.”

I took this all in. “What did Jergens
threaten her with?”

“He swore to destroy her career. I believe he
even threatened her with physical violence. When she came back to
the office after meeting him, she looked scared to death.” He
stopped and caught himself. “I suppose that’s a poor choice of
words.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” I said.
“No one’s going to flunk you for insensitivity.”

Her starched white dress made an audible
rustle as she rose to get me the file. In a single motion, she
reached down and smoothed out the wrinkles on the front of the
material where her legs had been.

“I really shouldn’t do this,” Pasternak’s
nurse said in a tone that meant she really wanted to do it. “But
since he’s dead and she’s dead, I don’t see how it can hurt
anyone.”

A sob story always worked on a babe like
this. Nurses were sweet, they were caring, that’s why they went
into the healing professions. I’d told her how grief-stricken I was
by Alicia’s death and how I thought Pasternak’s suicide might have
tied into it and how I wanted to make sense out of the whole tragic
business. She bought into it. But only up to a point.

“I can’t let you take the file out of the
office, but I’ll let you read it here,” she told me with a tone of
concern. She confirmed that the police had taken Alicia’s file.
That was why I couldn’t locate it when I made the unsolicited house
call to Pasternak’s office on that midnight dreary.

She led me into a cramped waiting room with a
soundproof double door that was a shade more comfortable than
Pasternak’s office had been. She turned and gave me a pleasant
little nurse’s smile. Her accent was somewhere between Staten
Island and Brooklyn, and her face was round and flat in a Balkan
kind of way. “Take as much time as you need,” she said in a voice
that came from years of practice in the art of comfort and
solicitation. “I have a lot of paperwork to do before the office is
closed down.”

She laid Alicia’s file down carefully on a
coffee table covered with editions of Architectural Digest, Vogue,
The New Yorker and other magazines that reflected the supposed
browsing habits of the ideal clientele Pasternak wished for but
didn’t have.

“Before you go, I’d like to ask you a few
questions,” I said.

She looked surprised, but quickly said,
“Sure, Mr. Rogan, whatever I can answer.”

“Thanks. Why don’t you sit down.”

She sat facing me in a prim and proper way
with her knees pressed together and her feet in their sensible
white shoes flat on the floor.

“I just want to understand why my wife is
dead and why Dr. Pasternak is dead.” I tried to look earnest. “Will
you help me.”

“I’d be glad to, if I can, but I don’t know
very much about your wife. She came once a week, but she broke her
appointments a lot. Doctor used to get very upset about that—more
than with most of the other patients, you know.”

“Why do you think that was?”

She shrugged brightly. “I don’t have the
faintest idea. Maybe Doctor liked the sessions with her more than
the others.” She furrowed her brow. “Doctor did tell me once that
her sessions were…what was the word he used… fascinating.”