ER - A Murder Too Personal (16 page)

She leaned forward and spoke softly, almost
reluctantly. “You know, Mr. Rogan, it’s like this. Most of Doctor’s
patients were older you know, elderly, and they were, you know, not
very interesting. They were…he called them ‘run of the mill.’ They
were, in other words, boring, you know. Doctor said they had body
odor and they … they had flatulence, you know?”

“Yeah, I know what that is.”

“Well, he did have a few young ladies as
patients and he seemed to appreciate those sessions more. He used
to tell me that was the way psychiatry should be, you know.”

“Do you think Dr. Pasternak had a physical
relationship with any of his patients?”

She drew back and her face went white. “Oh,
no, never, not ever. That’s against all the rules, the ethics, you
know. Doctor would never do that, never.”

“I see, I see,” I said reassuringly. I didn’t
want her clamping up on me. “How did you find out he committed
suicide?”

“Why, I discovered his body.” She seemed
almost pleased with herself. “Doctor lived alone, you know, and I
usually come to work at nine. Only that morning he didn’t let me
in. I thought that was strange, you know. I had a key he gave me so
I could do work when he wasn’t home, you know, so I opened the door
and went in. I thought he just wasn’t home.”

I watched her mouth move as she told her
story. Some people just love to talk. All they need is time to
spare, an excuse and a listener.

“Well, anyway, I started to do my billing and
then I caught up on a lot of overdue paperwork, you know. I guess
I’d been working for a couple of hours and I was getting thirsty
and hungry and my ears were starting to hurt from the headset, so I
went to the kitchen to make myself a snack and get a soda and then
I went to the bathroom. Only the bathroom door wouldn’t open. So
anyway, I pushed hard and it opened a little and then I pushed a
little more, you know, and I could feel something was holding the
door shut, so I pushed more and I saw his foot. You couldn’t
imagine how surprised I was, you know.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I said, by way
of encouragement.

“Well, anyway, I’m a nurse, you know.”

“I kind of suspected that.”

She nodded. “So I tried to resuscitate him,
you know, but I could tell it wasn’t any good. He’d been dead for
hours. So I just sat down and thought. I didn’t go into shock or
anything, you know. I’m a professional,” she said, holding her head
erect. “So anyway, after that, I walked through the whole house to
see what I could make of it.”

She moved closer to me and whispered, “I even
went up to the top floor, where I never went before, because he
said I was forbidden to go up there. And that’s where I found
it.”

“What?”

“The suicide note,” she explained.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, it was on the night table by his
bed.”

“And what did it say?”

She held out her hands in front of her with
the palms facing me. “The police told me not to say anything, you
know.”

I was as smooth as warm butter. “Yes, I can
imagine. But you can tell me because I was her husband,” I said in
the most masterful non-sequitur I had ever used.

She eyed me suspiciously. “Well, I guess it’s
all right. The note went something like ‘Because I loved her and
now she’s gone.’ “

I nodded. “What do you think he was referring
to?”

“I don’t know…I really can’t imagine.” She
looked genuinely puzzled.

“What else did you see?”

“Well, there was an empty prescription bottle
on the table next to the note. The police took that too. I’m not
sure, but I think it was Prozac.”

“Anything else?”

She thought for a minute or two, then said,
“Nothing else really, you know.”

I could see that was all she had, so I
thanked her and told her I’d read Alicia’s file for a while.

I stayed in that little room for almost an
hour, just getting up once for a cup of coffee. She didn’t have any
real coffee, so she made me a cup of what she said was
hazelnut-flavored instant decaf, but what I took to be
coffee-flavored dishwater.

The file was a bitch. Pasternak’s handwriting
was tough to decipher. I tried to make some sense out of the
technical terms, shorthand notations and abbreviations. But the
part that set me back a couple of squares was a beauty. That was
the series of entries that described the sexual relationship
between Alicia and Rachel.

It was like Dr. Pasternak’s own private
window into a subterranean life. It appeared that both Rachel and
Alicia confided their unembarrassed thoughts and actions to
Pasternak, so he had a front row seat from both angles to their
labial activity of huffing and puffing and sweating.

I had no reason to suspect they were
screwing, or whatever it was called when lesbians did it to each
other. Rachel might have had some minor justification, with her
vaginismus. But Alicia…? She never showed any inclination toward
women. On the contrary, she always told me it made her want to
heave. And now…I could just visualize all those fingers and tongues
busy at their lubricious work.

All this non-traditional sexuality was
starting to make me doubt the eternal verities. Whatever happened
to the good old male-female in-out? Seemed like it was on its way
to becoming a niche product in the medicine chest.

I’d seen enough. Alicia’s file described a
complete stranger. I was about to toss the file back onto the table
when I saw another page that had been folded over and tucked into a
flap in the cover.

That page surprised the hell out of me.

It described in excruciating detail how
Alicia had been brutally raped and beaten several years earlier.
How she’d been taken to the hospital in a semi-coma and had
remained there for almost a week. How all identification had been
removed from her so she was admitted as Jane Doe until the police
could put a name to her. And how she’d told no one about the
incident. Absolutely no one, except her shrink, for fear of the
humiliation.

And who was the lowlife rapist? His name was
Wheelock.

I put the file down, took another swallow of
dishwater and leaned back in my chair. There was a deep dull ache
in my chest. I tried to imagine the torment my girl had gone
through. I wished I could have been there to comfort her. But she
never told me.

The rape and beating was a new insight but I
didn’t know what it was worth. Could that have caused the change in
her personality? Oh, the intricate clockwork that we call the human
psyche. Who could ever plumb its depths or make any sense of
it?

“Find Wheelock for me,” I told Tanner. “The
son of a bitch has gone to ground and I can’t locate him.”

He squinted and ran his fingers through his
thinning crew cut. “Sure thing, old buddy. Maybe one of his old
sailing mates has a line on him. How close did you get?”

“Tracked him down to a rented room in
Greenwich. After that he just disappeared. Couldn’t scare up a
trace of him.”

Tanner finished off his beer with a flourish
and lit up a large foul-smelling cigar. We were in the cocktail
lounge of the Hyatt on Forty-second street in the middle of a sea
of marble and polished chrome and glass. As the smoke wafted over
to the next table a middle-aged woman with wire-rimmed glasses and
a sour expression wrinkled up her nose in distaste.

“Let us absent ourselves from this place,” I
said. “I need a long walk.”

I tossed a ten on the table and headed
through the lobby in the direction of Grand Central. Tanner grabbed
his briefcase and hustled to catch up with me. Before we were
halfway out of the hotel, our cocktail waitress came running, her
rubber-soled shoes making squeaking sounds on the polished marble,
and caught up with us.

I turned to face her. “What’s on your mind,
honeybunch?”

She struggled to catch her breath. “It’s not
enough,” she wheezed.

“What? We just had a couple of beers,” I
said. “The rest is your tip.”

“I know,” she said between deep gasps.

“So?”

“Sir, the beers are five-fifty each,” she
said.

Tanner and I exchanged disbelieving
glances.

“Barley, malt, hops, yeast. A little
fermentation. A percentage for advertising, overhead and profit,”
he said with a big grin.

I shrugged and handed the girl another ten.
“Does this redeem us?”

“More than enough to reserve you a place in
the heavenly choir.” She put her hand on my arm. “Come back
anytime, gentlemen.”

“Sure,” I said. “Next time I hit the
trifecta.”

We left the Hyatt, walked through Grand
Central, went up the escalator, through 200 Park and the Helmsley
Building and exited onto Park Avenue.

It was lunchtime and all the office workers
were out for a stroll. The day was clear and warm and sunny. Tanner
and I walked for a few blocks without talking. The only thing
fouling the air was his cigar.

“Jesus, will you put out that damn thing. It
smells like a cathouse the morning after payday.”

“Sorry, old buddy,” he said as he poked me in
the ribs. “Didn’t know your nose was so sensitive. You used to like
the smell of WP.”

“Yeah, but that was a different time.”

His remark brought back the memory of a green
lieutenant carrying a badly-wounded captain on his back from one of
the hilltops guarding Khe Sanh through triple rows of wire and
elephant grass to a medevac landing zone and waiting with him for
the choppers to arrive while rocket-propelled grenades and mortars
fell all around them. He was the kid. I was the captain. I owed
him.

We walked to Fifty-ninth without a word. Old
friends can do that. Wordsworth once spent an entire evening at
Coleridge’s house without either man speaking. When he left, he
thanked his friend for a pleasant time.

The secretaries in their summer dresses sat
with their boyfriends in front of the office buildings eating
salads and drinking Evian. The people strolling by studied the
people sitting down who, in turn, studied them.

“Dave,” I said finally, “Did you know that
Alicia’d been raped?”

“Hell, no.”

“Raped and had the shit kicked out of her.
Spent a week in the hospital.”

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Who did it?”

“Wheelock.”

He let out a long slow whistle. “When did it
happen?”

“A couple of years ago. Nobody knows about
it.”

“How did you find out?” he said.

“From a dead psychiatrist.”

He nodded.

I looked at him. His eyes had tears in
them.

“Find the bastard for me,” I said. “I want to
exchange a few words with him.”

***

“Tell Mr. Jergens my name is Rogan.”

“Just a moment please.”

The secretary came back on the line. “Mr.
Jergens says he doesn’t know you, Mr. Rogan.”

“That’s correct. Tell him it’s about Alicia
Rogan.”

She clicked off and came back a minute later.
“He says he doesn’t know of any Alicia Rogan.”

“She was a stock analyst working for
Stallings. He might have known her by the name of Alicia
Farrell.”

She clicked off and on again. I could picture
her by the tone of her voice. Pinched nose, thin lips, hair tied
back in a bun. “Mr. Jergens still doesn’t recall anyone by that
name.”

“All right, then tell him it’s about his
phony house of cards.”

She was back in a flash. “Mr. Jergens says he
doesn’t know anything about a house of cards and he asked me to bid
you a very good day, Mr. Rogan.”

And then she was gone.

Rachel opened the door to her apartment. She
was holding an enormous drink in her little hand.

“Is that scotch?” I asked.

Her lips curled up in an approximation of a
smile. “It might be. Care for a sip?” She held the glass up to me
and offered me a taste.

I took the glass and tried some. It was
scotch all right, and it was good.

“You made a sale. I’ll take four
fingers.”

She led me into that enormous living room and
sat me down on that enormous couch.

“I thought you’d like it. It’s as expensive
as scotch gets.” She reached over to the cocktail table and poured
me a glass-full from a decanter.

I took a couple of long, slow sips and
thought about all the joys I’d been missing. Cheap scotch dulls the
taste buds. Or was it just the passing of the years?

She put the decanter back on the table and
glanced sideways at me with a hint of impatience. “Well, tell me.
What did you find out?”

I hesitated. “Did you know that Alicia had
been raped and badly beaten?”

She took a deep breath and shook her head
slowly. “No, I didn’t know,” she said softly. “I thought we were
friends. You should be able to tell your friend about something
like that, you know. She never told me…”

She took a big drink of her scotch. Then she
took another big drink. There was pain in her eyes. She looked down
and closed her eyes so I couldn’t see the hurt. She didn’t say
anything for a long time.

Then she looked up at me and said, “What else
did you find out?”

“It’s not pleasant,” I said.

“I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

“You sure can.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What do you
mean?”

“You were a lot closer to Alicia than you
told me.”

It didn’t register at first. Then her eyes
lit up as she got the picture.

“Tell me if you’re referring to what I’m
thinking,” she said coolly.

There wasn’t any use pussyfooting around the
subject, so to speak. I let her have it as plainly as I could. “You
fucked Alicia.”

A nasty smirk played on her lips. “I didn’t
fuck Alicia.”

I smiled too. “That’s technically correct.
But you did have sexual congress with her.”