Likely To Die

24

SAVED YOU SOME QUAIL’S EGGS IN haddock-and-cheese sauce. The Commander says it’s not to be missed.“

“I’ll pass.”

“Steak-and-kidney pie?”

“The waiter’s bringing me some grilled sole. Dover.” We all took a break from the case as Dogen and Creavey lectured us on the local sights and Cliveden myths. After tea was served, I tried to get Mike out of earshot of Geoffrey to explain my call to Mercer. He was holding one of the Cliveden luncheon menus, passing it to me and telling me to put it in my folder to take back to the States.

“Did you see this? Can you believe they serve a dessert called ‘spotted dick’? I gotta take one of those back for Mercer and the guys in Sex Crimes.”

“I’m really proud of how well you’re maturing-something kept you from sharing that thought, as they say, with Dr. Dogen.”

I told Mike that I’d asked Mercer to check on DuPre’s credentials and reminded him that the neurologist had been one of the doctors checking on Maureen while she was at Mid-Manhattan.

Geoffrey Dogen and I walked the short distance back to our workroom and resumed our places around the table while Chapman and Creavey went to the men’s room. I had resisted the urge, in Mike’s presence, to ask Dogen whether he remembered the circumstance of Carla Renaud’s death in a London operating room a couple of years ago. But as we were alone, I quietly asked the question that had been gnawing at me.

“Indeed. Gemma was devastated by the event, of course. The procedure was a new one that had been developed in our program by James Binchy, one of our finest surgeons. Quite a radical operation, and a very long one-six, seven hours. That’s why Binchy invited Gemma over to assist him. Unfortunately she became a bit too involved, personally, with the family. Wanted very much for the experiment to succeed-for the girl’s sake and for the larger picture.

“Gemma hadn’t lost very many patients on the table. Took this rather hard. Had to break it to the husband herself. He was wild with grief.”

“Wild-atGemma?”

“Mad at the world. One of those ‘she had everything to live for so why did you let her die’ tirades. Truth is, of course, that Carla Renaud couldn’t have lived more than another month without an attempt at the surgery. Binchy wasn’t trying this out for sport, Miss Cooper. It was the only hope for the Renaud girl and it didn’t work. How does this fit into your questioning?”

Mike was standing in the doorway and answered for me. “Like I said, Doc, we’re looking at every angle. Last December, right before Christmas, an ex-con found his way into a cancer clinic at New York Hospital and slashed the face of a doctor who had treated the guy’s child five years earlier. The teenager had died of leukemia, despite everybody’s best efforts, and the father just never came to grips with it.

“Agatha Christie here is considering whether Renaud’s widower might have harbored this same kind of vengeance for Gemma.”

Dogen’s face puckered and grimaced as he tried to call up old conversations about the matter. “Well, I remember the husband-he was a barrister, wasn’t he?-I know there was talk of lawsuits against Binchy and Gemma and so on. But I’m quite sure nothing came of it. Poor lad was disconsolate at his wife’s death. Had at least expected she’d survive the surgery and die in his arms. But it seems to me he was reasoned with in the end and I’m not aware Gemma ever heard from him again. Not that I’d have any reason to know that for sure.”

“You want to get back to business, Blondie, or you think maybe Dr. Dogen can help you with your horoscope, too?”

Mike and I split up the pile of hundreds of DD5s and began to go through them in detail, picking out points about which to question our cooperative witness. Creavey sat at the far end of the table, sorting through a duplicate pile of police reports, using his own skills and methods to try to reconstruct a version of the investigation.

When we reached the autopsy report, Mike passed the several-page document over to Dogen. “There’s no reason to hold back these details from you, Doc. It’s pretty tough stuff but at least the medical terms will make sense to you. Why don’t you read it and then we can answer any questions you have.”

The mild-mannered physician started at the top with the paragraph describing the deceased’s physical appearance and dimensions. Before he had gotten very far, he stood up and walked to a corner of the room, slumping himself into a chair and running his hand back and forth over his mouth as he tried to absorb the information about the number of stab wounds and the frenzy of the attack.

We sat silently for almost five minutes, then Mike tapped my arm and pointed to the door. As we left the room together, Creavey followed along with us. For a quarter of an hour, the three of us walked around the pool, taking in the brisk spring air while we left Geoffrey Dogen with the haunting pathologist’s portrait of his friend, his former wife. It was obvious he had been crying when we rejoined him and he blew his nose before speaking to us.

“Well, I knew Gemma was a fighter. Looks like your man didn’t expect her to be, did he?”

I let Mike take the lead. “My partner thinks that’s one of the reasons to assume she knew her killer. Someone who’d be aware she might be alone in her office in the middle of the night and that she wouldn’t freak out to see him come in. Maybe it started as a conversation, something he thought he could reason with her about. But he was obviously prepared for the assault if he didn’t get his way.”

“And then she was bound and gagged?”

“That’s what the ME suggested. But almost any one of those stab wounds would have disabled her. If the first thing he did was that blow to the middle of her back, he could have tied her after that and then continued the assault.”

“But certainly there would have been screams-”

“And no one to hear them. It’d be easier to raise some of the dead in the morgue than anyone on that hallway at 2A.M. once it was cleared of all its other occupants. Even if Gemma had gotten out one shriek before she was gagged, another thrust of the knife would have silenced her.”

“What do you make of the attempt to sexually assault her in this-well, condition? The man would have to be insane, don’t you think?”

“I think that’s exactly what he’d want us to think. If you’ve ever seen Mid-Manhattan, you’d know it’s full of lunatics-I mean, the resident population. More than likely, the killer tried to stage this to look like an attempt to rape Gemma just to throw us off course.”

Mike loaded a pack of slides into the viewer. “These are some photographs of the crime scene, Doc. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gemma’s office but I’d like you to have a look.”

“I’ve been there several times. Even have a few photos of it. Gemma sent them-‘Me in my natural habitat,’ as she labeled them.”

Mike pressed the button that rotated the slides around the carousel and the images from the first run flashed onto the wall-sized screen. Dogen’s head was still as he focused on the shots, many of them repeats of different angles of the dark bloodstains soaked into the carpet.

Interspersed with those were photographs of Gemma’s desk and chair, then of the rows of bookshelves that stood above her file cabinets and drawers full of X-ray film.

“ ‘Ere you go,” Creavey said, breaking the silence by pointing at a large object on Gemma’s desk, sitting like a paperweight atop an inch of documents. “ Tower Bridge, Doc. Front and center.”

“I bought her that from a stall in a market on the Portobello Road. Shape of the bridge, so she loved it. If you take us back a slide or two, Chapman, I can point out people in some of those photographs she’s got on the bookshelf. Took a few of them myself.”

Mike clicked the loader and reversed direction. Dogen called out names as he recognized snapshots, many of them taken in London years ago judging from the styles of the clothing. It was clearly an exercise that meant more to Dogen than it did to our investigation, but in light of the emotional toll on him, Chapman seemed happy to indulge the gentle man.

“Whoops. Hold it there, will you?” Dogen rose to his feet and squinted as he walked closer to the screen. “You probably know this-I can see you’ve been very thorough in your work. You’re aware that her chain is missing from the bookshelf?”

Chapman and I exchanged puzzled glances. “What chain? What are you talking about?”

“Another of her Tower Bridge obsessions. You see this hook on the end of the metal support?” There were pairs of slender steel arms that held the lengths of bookshelves along one entire wall of Gemma’s office. Dogen was standing beside the screen pointing at the curved end of the brace that protruded directly next to the side of her large office desk.

“This is where Gemma hung her spare set of keys. The round hook fitted over the point of the arm and that way the two essential keys she needed-her office and her home-were always ready for her to grab in case she didn’t want to carry an entire handbag around with her. You know what I mean,” Dogen said, looking over at me.

I nodded, similarly having a spare set that I used when I jogged or walked Zac and didn’t want to deal with the bulk of a pocketbook. Police had found Gemma’s tote bag in her drawer-untouched-and from it recovered the set of keys that Mercer and I had used to enter her apartment.

“Are you saying you’ve seen a set of keys up there from time to time when you visited?”

“I mean, shealways kept them there, detective. It had become a joke. Not very funny now. But she called her office Traitor’s Gate, after the part of the Tower where prisoners were received to go to their deaths. It’s where they got their last look at the world on their way to the block. Ironic now but she had come to view herself as an outsider at Minuit.

“So those were her keys to freedom, Gemma used to say. They always dangled from that spot so she could reach up and grab them and be off anytime she wanted. Go for a run, walk to her apartment, get away from the people she didn’t like. I assure you-look at any photograph of this room before Gemma’s death and you’ll see that Tower Bridge key chain hanging from this very point.” Dogen was at his most emphatic pitch now, driving his finger against the enlarged tip of the bookshelf, which wavered as the screen hit the wall behind it.

Neither Mike nor I seemed to know what significance to attach to Geoffrey’s news. We let him calm down and finished reviewing the slides as I realized it was almost five o’clock in the afternoon. When he stepped out to use the telephone, Mike shrugged his shoulders and asked what I thought.

“Hard to tell. I can’t imagine anyone except the cleaning staff who might actually know how recently such a key chain was in the office. But I guess we better put it on the list to ask everyone when we go at it again next week.”

“Yeah, but what’s the point? Nobody broke into her office just to steal the key to that very same office, right? That’s kind of stupid. And it didn’t appear that anything had been taken from her apartment, either.”

“Maybe the killer kept it as a trophy or something,”

“I’m telling you to lighten up on those murder mysteries, Coop. You’re reading too many of these serial killer things and buying into all that FBI bullshit. Are we done with Dogen, d’you think?” He opened the door to look for the doctor.

Creavey, Chapman, and I walked Geoffrey Dogen out to the car park in front of the Great Hall. “Did you and Gemma ever talk about her social life, the men she dated?”

“No, no. Not the kind of thing she’d bring up with me.”

“I assume you’ve heard the name William Dietrich, I mean, because of his position at Minuit.”

“Know him for two reasons, actually.” Dogen frowned. “I knew about his professional tiffs with Gemma and I’d heard bits and bobs about their relationship from other colleagues who disapproved. Something about his financial problems and a motor car that he wanted desperately. Gemma was always a soft touch for a friend who needed money. Material things meant very little to her. The girl came from nothing, made a lot of money, and was happy to give it away. Don’t know any more than that but I must say I wasn’t inclined to like this Dietrich fellow.”

We were struggling to make small talk by this time and Mike asked the doctor what Gemma had done for amusement or fun.

“Fun?” Dogen responded as though the word needed interpretation for him. “Not exactly the first thing that comes to mind about her. I mean, she enjoyed her friends, and she liked a good movie or a great read, but Gemma was quite intense about all her pursuits.”

“Well, did she ever talk about American baseball or similar events that she went to for diversion? Mets, Yankees, Knicks-?”

“Never heard her say the word baseball. Can’t imagine she went to any games of that sort. She hated team sports.”

Mike’s questions reminded me of the folder I had seen in her apartment when Mercer and I had visited there more than a week ago with the file tab labeledMET GAMES.

Dogen rambled on. “Gemma loved nature. Put her in a canoe or climbing a mountain or running for miles at a clip and she was content, but I’ve never known her to be interested in any kind of team activity, really. And your American baseball? Much too slow a game for her to sit through. No patience for that kind of nonsense at all.”

I’d have to make a note to check out the file folder and see what it had contained. Or decide whether this meeting had been a complete waste of time because Geoffrey Dogen simply didn’t know his ex all that well after the many years of separation.

Mike and I entered the reception area, having said good-bye to Dogen and the Commander. A bellman handed me the piece of paper and told me its message. I was to call Mr. Mercer back at Sarah Brenner’s office. Good news, the note read, and bad news.

Mike followed me up the stairs to our room. I dropped the case folder on the desk and asked the operator to place the call to my office.

Sarah’s secretary answered and put me through. “I’ll give you the good news first. They’ve had a break in the stabbing of the doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian. A snitch led them to a suspect last night and the squad’s got someone in custody right now. Tell Mike he was right. The guy saw the M.D. plates and flattened the tire himself, figuring he could at least steal drugs or a prescription pad from the victim. Then the doctor turned out to be a woman, so he tried to rape her, too. But this perp’s an uptown guy. Nothing at all to link him to Mid-Manhattan. Unfortunately, his victim is still likely to go out of the picture.

“And Maureen gets a message to me, via the Commissioner, once a day. Everything’s fine, so try and take it easy ‘til you get back home. Here’s Mercer with the bad news.”

I could hear him humming in the background, doing the intro like he was one of the Platters, before his deep bass voice broke into song as he took the receiver from Sarah. “Oh-oh, yes, he’s the great pre-e-tender-”

“Dammit. Will the real John DuPre stand up, please? What’s the story, Mercer?”

“Keep in mind the Tulane Medical School offices didn’t open until ten o’clock-that’s not much more than an hour ago. Just got a call back from them. The only John DuPre who holds a diploma from their distinguished institution graduated with honors in, let me see, the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty-three. Nineteen thirty-three-that’s a wee bit before our boy was born, I would say. And I have to agree that my money’s with you on the idea that no self-respecting brother is walking around with the name Jefferson Davis anywhere in his pedigree.

“Now, when are you bringing m’man home to me?”

“We’re done. We’re on that noon flight tomorrow.”

“I’ll be picking you up at Kennedy so we can compare notes then. Right now Sarah’s typing me up a search warrant for DuPre’s office.

“I’m not gonna call over there first ‘cause I don’t want to alert any of his staff. But I’ll just show up and go back in to the receptionist saying I’ve got some more questions I forgot to ask about Gemma Dogen. Meanwhile, Sarah’s looking at the statutes on practicing medicine without a license. The warrant should cover all those diplomas on his wall, some of the patient records, and his appointment book. I’m thinking maybe we’ll catch a break and find something that connects him to the deadly candy or the attempt on Mo the other night.”

“Fingers crossed. Keep us posted.”

“Let me talk to Chapman. Can’t wait to tell him how much I miss him.”