The Prettiest Feathers (17 page)

After running that through the department’s fax, I folded the originals and tucked them into my briefcase. Then I drove to the hospital to find out if Robert’s meeting with Chadwick had produced anything worthwhile.

They had put him on the third floor, right next to the elevators. At least that’s where his room was; Robert was nowhere in sight.

A nurse, passing by the open doorway, glanced into the room, saw me staring at Robert’s empty bed, and said, “He’s down in radiology. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

I looked at my watch. It was well past suppertime and I hadn’t yet had breakfast or lunch. “Yes,” I said. “I’d appreciate that.”

The nurse returned and said, “There seems to be a problem.”

“Robert?” I asked.

“Don’t be alarmed. He hasn’t taken a turn for the worse, or anything. At least not as far as I know.”

“What do you mean?”

The woman was obviously upset. “We seem to have lost Detective Sinclair,” she said. “The orderly took him down for a CAT scan, but they weren’t ready for him. So Detective Sinclair was left in his wheelchair, in the hallway. But when the technician came out to get him, the chair was there—and, well—”

“Never mind,” I said. “I get the picture.”

If I knew Robert, he was off chasing a lead. This wasn’t exactly the way partners are supposed to work a case—each guessing what the other is up to. But that’s what you get when you choose to work with a guy who’s been ordered off the case, and is a suspect himself.

“What was he wearing?” I asked, trying to figure what the odds were that he had left the hospital.

“We got him some surgical scrubs. He said he wasn’t putting on a dress for anybody, not even the surgeon general.”

That was Robert all right.

“Is he going to be in trouble out there?” I asked. “In his condition, is it safe for him to be out there alone?”

“We don’t know yet how extensive his injuries are.”

“What was the CAT scan supposed to show?”

“Whether or not he has a subdural hematoma.”

For the first time, fear set in. “What can that do to a person?” I asked.

“He could lose his memory. Pass out. Even die,” she said. “Or he could be fine. He may just have a bump on the head.”

I was still trying to decide if I should put out an all-points bulletin on him when the phone rang.

“Robert Sinclair’s room,” I said.

I heard a familiar voice, “I thought you might be there.”

It was Robert.

“Where are you?”

“J. C. Penney’s,” he said.

“What?”

“The department store. I had to get rid of these green pajamas. They’re having a sale.”

“Robert—” I started.

“Jeans for twenty bucks. Nine bucks for a flannel shirt. I can fully outfit myself for less than a c-note.”

“Your car was totaled. How’d you get out there?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I wish you’d stop doing that stuff.”

“It was just a cruiser, not some civilian’s wheels,” he said. “Found it parked outside the emergency room door with the engine running, like it was waiting for me.”

“I’ve got a question for you, partner,” I said. “How come you were watching Sarah’s house?”

“She had a book that once belonged to Maxine Harris. Remember her? I think I told you about this.”

“Yeah. Throat slashed. Found propped up against a
tombstone in a cemetery. A guy from the DA’s office just mentioned the case. Why would Sarah have a book that belonged to her?”

“It’s a long story. The point is, Sarah had the book, and I was waiting for her to come home so I could get it from her.”

I heard him pop the top on a beer can.

“Do you know you may be walking around with a subdural hematoma?” I asked.

“Lane, give me a break. I hate hospitals. Besides, there’s stuff I’ve gotta do. You put me on to Chadwick, and I want to follow it up. I feel all right. I really do.”

I heard a woman’s voice in the background. She was telling Robert that he couldn’t drink in there.

“Look, I’m getting hassled. Chadwick’s place is a crater. It blew up on Monday. Chadwick may or may not be dead. I ran into this old guy up there, a neighbor. He told me the good doctor went to Harvard. I need to check it out. I’ve got a gut feeling about this guy and I want to stay on top of it.”

“Robert, don’t hang up. Don’t go anywhere. A nurse told me you could die if you have one of those things in your head.”

“I promise you, Lane, I’m not gonna die,” he said. “But I’ve gotta run. I’ve got just enough time to catch the shuttle to Boston. Maybe if I dig around up there in person, I can turn something up. I don’t feel like playing phone tag with a bunch of bureaucrats. If you get anything on Chadwick, leave a message with airport security in Boston. I’ll check in when I arrive.”

Before he hung up, I heard that same woman in the background, and this time she wasn’t complaining about the beer. She was saying, “Hey, mister, are you okay?”

It was 11:00
P.M.
when I pulled up in front of Wallingford Antiques. The shop was a small storefront with a blue awning spanning its width. I could see lamps burning
inside—their leaded shades giving the showroom a warm yellow glow.

Before I had a chance to ring the bell, an elderly, balding man moved the door curtain aside and peeked out at me. A smile was all it took to get him to open up.

“You’re the lady who called about our ad,” he said.

Wallingford’s sister—a woman with white hair but a young face—was busy wrapping a cut-glass punch bowl in tissue paper. She looked at me with wet eyes, then looked away without speaking. Her husband extended his freckled hand, telling me his name, Brian, and inviting me to explore the shop.

“I’m sorry about your brother-in-law,” I told him. “It must have been very sudden.”

“His heart had been bad for years,” Brian whispered.

So it was a natural death.

Brian wanted to know how long I had been an antiques dealer.

“Actually, I’m not,” I said.

His left eyebrow lifted slightly. “Oh?”

I had no idea what I was going to find when I got to Landgrove, but there seemed to be no reason to continue the deceit. “I apologize for misleading you,” I said.

I showed them my shield. “I’m a detective, and I’m investigating a homicide. One of Mr. Wallingford’s business cards was found in the possession of the victim.”

Brian glanced over at his wife. “Oh, dear,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth.

“Did your brother keep a record of his customers?”

“My name’s Grace,” she said. “There’s a card file.”

“It’s pretty straightforward,” Brian added, walking behind the counter and pulling open a wooden drawer filled with frayed three-by-five cards.

“Would you check it for a John Wolf?” I asked.

“How was this person killed?” Grace asked.

“Stabbed to death, ma’am.”

“How horrible.”

“There’s no one here with that name,” Brian said.

“What about Alan Carver or Alan Chadwick?”

He fingered his way through the cards. “Neither one.”

“Sarah Sinclair?”

Brian was at the back of the drawer again, already shaking his head, when his wife said, “Wasn’t that the name of the man who was here this morning? Or was that St. Clair?”

“What did he want?”

“He was looking for a feather tree,” Grace said. “My brother used to get them in from time to time. They’re made of goosefeathers, or maybe chicken feathers. They were very popular in the early nineteen hundreds. The newest ones would date to the nineteen thirties.”

“The door wasn’t locked,” Brian added. “He thought we were open for business. There was one tree here, and this man offered seventy-five dollars for it. So we sold it to him.”

I asked him to describe the guy.

It wasn’t Robert.

I
caught the last shuttle out of La Guardia. I hate flying almost as much as I hate funerals. But when I have to fly into Boston’s Logan Airport, I hate it even
more
than funerals. It’s the seawall. The 727 seems like it’s just barely skimming over the top, and knowing that some planes have landed short of the runway and disintegrated against the wall makes it all a crap shoot as far as I’m concerned.

I checked in with airport security as soon as I arrived. Lane had faxed what little she had on Alan Chadwick—just his DOB and SS number—but it was enough for what I had in mind.

I picked up a rental car and headed out through the Sumner Tunnel. I found a cheap motel on Massachusetts Avenue, crashed there for the night, then started out fresh in the morning.

People who complain about driving in New York have never driven in Boston… New York is a grid. It’s consistent. Stay with the flow of the traffic and you’ll get where you’re going. Boston is laid out like one of those mazes in a kid’s
magazine. Everything dead-ends somewhere and you have to start over.

After one street that went nowhere and a couple of one-ways that weren’t headed in the same direction I was, I found the Harvard Medical School. The alumni office was just like anything else that wears the Veritas seal—brick, old wood polished to a sheen, leather chairs.

A secretary named Shirley Bright was sympathetic to my problem. I was an out-of-town cop with a dead alumnus of theirs on my hands and no way of contacting any of his family. She wondered why I hadn’t just called, why I came in person—and I said the usual: “It’s a sensitive matter.”

Shirley said she understood. I told her Chadwick’s name and gave her his date of birth from the material Lane had sent. Shirley began tapping away at her computer.

“I’m afraid we don’t have anything terribly recent,” she said. “When he left here he went over to Boston City for a residency in pathology. The last entry says he stayed on as a staff pathologist. That was in nineteen eighty-three. There isn’t anything here about family.”

Shirley directed me to Boston City Hospital, and said she’d call ahead to let the personnel department know that I was on my way. I thanked her and left.

For starters, Boston City’s personnel office was in the catacombs of an ancient building on Columbus Avenue—and it didn’t say Personnel on the door; it said Human Resources. Sign of the times. The elevated train rumbled by outside, contributing its share to the constant din.

My secretary this time was named Wanda. That’s all her tag said. “This will take time,” Wanda told me. “Those old records haven’t been put in the computer.”

Wanda sighed a lot. I offered to help her search for the information, but she said it wasn’t allowed. Authorized personnel only. And she kept having to take phone calls as she plowed through dusty boxes of file folders.

Sometimes when she sighed, Wanda said, “That’s such a long time ago.”

“What were you doing in nineteen eighty-three?” I asked her, just trying to make conversation.

She thought for a long moment, then said, “I don’t want to tell you that. I don’t have to, do I?”

I assured her she didn’t. Wanda had lost her place, and I had learned not to interrupt.

After I’d spent about an hour and a half skimming through old
Time
magazines, Wanda picked up her phone and punched a few buttons.

“Is he in?” she asked—then, after a pause, said, “No, I don’t need to talk to him. I just wondered if he’s in.”

When she hung up, she turned to me and said, “Dr. Chadwick didn’t die.”

“What?”

“You said he died.”

“That’s right. There was an explosion. We need to contact next of kin.”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Who’s upstairs?”

She sighed. “Dr. Chadwick. He’s in pathology, where he’s always been. He didn’t even move or anything.”

Wanda tolerated my ignorance and directed me to pathology.

Alan Chadwick was a tall, paunchy man with tufts of prematurely white hair that seemed to be glued, at random, to parts of his head. He wore a permanently dour expression, looking out at the world over half glasses. He had large, gnarled hands that appeared to be arthritic.

“As you can see, Detective,” he said, “I’m not dead.”

I decided to begin at the beginning. “For the past six years or so there’s been a man with your name, Dr. Alan Chadwick, with your date of birth and educational credentials—right down to the residency here—employed as a county medical examiner in southwestern Connecticut. Several days ago there was an explosion at his home. We think he may have been killed in that explosion.”

“An imposter,” the doctor said.

“I see that now,” I said. “And there’s another part to this. At least two women—probably more—have been murdered in the last few months. One of them was my ex-wife. Just before her death she had begun dating someone new. The night she was killed, she’d been having drinks with somebody—maybe the new boyfriend. His fingerprints were all over her apartment. When we ran them, Dr. Alan Chad-wick’s name popped up.”

“A very clever and homicidal imposter.”

“That’s what I think. Can you tell me how he could have become you?”

Lane had faxed me a copy of Chadwick’s diploma. I pushed it across the desk at him. For this, he looked through his glasses.

“That is my diploma,” Chadwick said.