Let Me Call You Sweetheart

16 Wednesday, October 25th

It was clear that Frank Green was irritated. The smile that he flashed so readily to show off his newly whitened teeth was nowhere in evidence as he looked across his desk at Kerry.

I suppose it’s the reaction I expected, she thought. I should have known that, of all people, Frank wouldn’t want to hear anyone questioning the case that made him, and especially not now, with talk of his candidacy for governor so prevalent.

After reading the newspaper file on the Sweetheart Murder Case, Kerry had gone to bed trying to decide what she should do regarding Dr. Smith. Should she confront him, ask him point-blank about his daughter, ask him why he was re-creating her in the faces of other women?

The odds were that he would throw her out of the office and deny everything. Skip Reardon had accused the doctor of lying when he gave testimony about his daughter. If he had lied, Smith certainly wouldn’t admit it to Kerry now, all these years later. And even if he had lied, the biggest question of them all was, why?

By the time Kerry had finally fallen asleep, she had decided that the best place to start asking questions was with Frank Green, since he had tried the case. Now that she had filled Green in on the reason she was inquiring about the Reardon case, it was obvious that her question, “Do you think there is any possibility Dr. Smith was lying when he testified against Skip Reardon?” was not going to result in a helpful or even friendly response.

“Kerry,” Green said, “Skip Reardon killed his wife. He knew she was playing around. The very day he killed her, he had called in his accountant to find out how much a divorce would cost him, and he went bananas when he was told that it would involve big bucks. He was a wealthy man, and Suzanne had given up a lucrative modeling career to become a full-time wife. He would have to pay through the nose. So questioning Dr. Smith’s veracity at this point seems a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.”

“But there’s something wrong with Dr. Smith,” Kerry said slowly. “Frank, I’m not trying to make trouble, and no one more than I wants to see a murderer behind bars, but I swear to you that Smith is more than a grief-stricken father. He seems almost to be demented. You should have seen his expression when he lectured Robin and me about the necessity to preserve beauty, and how some people are given it freely and others have to attain it.”

Green looked at his watch. “Kerry, you just finished a big case. You’re about to take on another one. You’ve got a judgeship pending. It’s too bad Robin was treated by Suzanne Reardon’s father. If anything, he wasn’t an ideal witness on the stand. There wasn’t a drop of emotion in him when he talked about his daughter. In fact, he was so cold, so cut-and-dry that I was thankful that the jury even believed his testimony. Do yourself a favor and forget it.”

It was clear the meeting was over. As Kerry stood up, she said, “What I am doing is having Dr. Smith’s handiwork on Robin checked by another plastic surgeon, one that Jonathan found for me.”

When she was back in her office, Kerry asked her secretary to hold the phone calls and sat for a long time gazing into space. She could understand Frank Green’s alarm at the thought of her raising questions about his star witness in the Sweetheart Murder Case. Any suggestion that there might have been a miscarriage of justice certainly would result in negative publicity and no doubt would tarnish Frank’s image as a potential governor.

Dr. Smith is probably an obsessively grieving father who is able to use his great skill to re-create his daughter, she told herself, and Skip Reardon is probably one of the countless murderers who say, “I didn’t do it.”

Even so, she knew that she couldn’t let it rest at that. On Saturday, when she took Robin to visit the plastic surgeon Jonathan had recommended, she would ask him how many surgeons in his field would even consider giving a number of women the same face.