Loving Time

thirty-seven

At precisely three P.M. April hesitated by the two open doors to Jason Frank’s inner office. She could see Jason sitting at his desk with his back to her. In spite of the number of clocks she knew were in there, none of them happened to be chiming the hour. She wondered if she was early.

He punched a button on his laptop and swiveled around. “Hey, April, you made it.”

“Oh, my.” She tried to keep a straight face. His new beard wasn’t exactly the same length all over his face and wasn’t the same color as his head hair. The beard and mustache were grizzled, made him look older than his thirty-nine years and blunted the good looks April had always admired.

“Smartest detective in New York. How are you?” Piercing through the ragged edges, though, Jason’s dark eyes were as sharp and knowing as ever. He looked the detective over with obvious pleasure.

April was wearing black wool pants, ankle-high black boots, a red turtleneck sweater, and a black pea jacket Her short layered haircut was a little longer and fuller now. She carried the same heavy shoulder bag with an extra gun, the handcuffs, and the Mace in it. She was the only woman Jason knew who carried around such things and never forgot what they were there for … the way he never forgot he was a doctor. The last time he saw April her lipstick was pink. Now it was fire-engine red, apparently to match the sweater. She looked good.

She looked even better when she smiled. “I’m tired, Doc. How about you?”

He nodded, raising his shoulders equivocally, shook the hand that could shoot a gun, let it go reluctantly. “It’s a chronic condition.”

“So?” she murmured. “What’s with the beard? Are you Dr. Freud now?”

“Don’t you like it? I’m taking a survey.”

“It wasn’t a bad face.” April shrugged. “You undercover or something?”

Jason smiled. “Maybe.”

April picked up on the smile. Things were going better for him. Maybe he had a new girlfriend or his wife was back. “And the clocks. What happened to them?”

Jason swung around to check the bookcase. “Nothing. You’re exactly on time.”

“Why aren’t they making a racket?” April pointed to the brass bull with the clock on his back. The minute hand jumped to five past.

“Oh, only the ones at home chime.”

“Ah, silent clocks for patients.” She fell silent herself, didn’t want to ask about Emma, wasn’t sure whether she should sit down. “Sorry I had to cancel out on you twice. You know how it is when something comes up. You had some questions for me?”

“Yes, thanks for coming. You want to sit down, go out for a coffee, or stand there?”

She was starved. “How much time do you have?”

“I have to be back at four-fifteen. I get the feeling you’re hungry.”

“I am,” she admitted. The last thing she had had was scrambled egg fried rice at six, forced on her by her mother as she tried to sneak out of the house without engaging in another conversation about duty and marriage. It was the same breakfast her mother had served when she was a kid. And the same conversation they’d been having for the last nine years. Only now, thanks to Mike’s turning up on Saturday and Alice Chen’s intelligence on what had happened that afternoon, Skinny Dragon Mother had something new to obsess about. Finally getting a marriage but to the wrong kind of guy.

“It’s been a long day.” She didn’t mention her morning with Nicole Amendonde, the rape victim in ER.

Twelve minutes later they were sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway. From where they sat they could see Zabar’s, the site where Dr. Lobrinsky had so very recently lost his much-loved, canary-yellow ride. April didn’t mention that, either.

“So fill me in,” Jason said when she had put away half of her BLT and was working on a huge side of fries.

“I just got another unnatural from your shop. What’s going on there? You got people dropping dead left and right.”

“An inpatient? You going to eat all those?”

“Uh-uh.” April pushed the fries in his direction. “I’ve had it.”

“I’m not supposed to …” he muttered vaguely, tucking into them.

April dabbed her lips delicately with the paper napkin. “No, it’s not a patient, actually. It’s a doctor. Maybe you know him, guy named Dickey.”

Jason’s handful of french fries stopped halfway to his mouth. “Harold Dickey, an unnatural?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“An unnatural, are you sure?”

“Well, the guy supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack, but it turns out he was full of Amitrip-ti-something.”

“Amitriptyline?” Jason frowned and shook his head as the waiter offered him the last inch of muddy coffee in the pot.

“Yeah, what is it?”

Jason raked his beard unhappily. “It’s a tricyclic.”

April looked blank. “What would someone take it for?”

“It’s an antidepressant. It’s given for depressive neurosis, manic depression. Anxiety. You might know it by its trade name. Elavil.”

April nodded. “What would Dickey have been taking it for?”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware that he was depressed.” Jason raised his eyebrow, thinking it over. It was no secret that Harold liked his scotch. Maybe he’d slipped from social drinking to alcoholism, had gone on the wagon, and was taking Elavil to relieve withdrawal depression. Maybe he was self-medicating. A lot of doctors did that.

“What’s the thought?” April asked.

Jason grimaced. “Nothing. It’s complicated, that’s all. Why are the police involved?”

“Yes, it is complicated. More than you might be aware of. Dickey’s name and number were found beside the body of Raymond Cowles.”

“What?”

April nodded. “I interviewed Dickey last week, and he said he didn’t know Cowles and certainly hadn’t spoken to him the night he died.”

“That’s …”Jason shook his head. “So what happened to Dickey? How did you get involved?”

“It’s a little mysterious. Usually in cases like this, the ER doctors will sign off on the spot. Or the attending will sign the certificate. Dickey was sixty-eight, had a heart attack. It should have been straightforward enough. Buuut—I guess somebody didn’t like the way it looked and didn’t want trouble later. All I know is someone called the Medical Examiner, the office took the case, and the path found something.” She watched Jason move in on the fries again, then said, “You know, the Cowles case looked like a clear-cut suicide, too. It turned out to be, but still, we have to check it out.”

“Tell me about it.” Jason licked a finger, then another one.

April wrinkled her nose. “Anybody ever teach you what napkins are for?”

“Nope.” He finished licking his fingers and pushed the plate away. “So, what’s the story on Cowles?” he asked, finally getting to his reason for wanting a meeting.

“What’s your interest?”

Jason sighed. “I got sucked into reviewing the case as a consultant. There might be a lawsuit.”

“From what I’ve seen of the widow, there will certainly be a lawsuit.” April watched Jason catch sight of his image in the mirror behind the booth and look surprised, then refocus on the subject.

“On what grounds?” he asked.

“She was married to him for almost fifteen years, didn’t know the guy was gay. Her story is they were the perfect couple. Then suddenly her husband needs space. Out of the blue he takes another apartment and returns to his former shrink, Dr. Treadwell. The doctor sees him a few times, prescribes tranquilizers. He uses them to kill himself. The widow thinks the shrink made him believe he was gay when he was in a vulnerable state. Then because it was against everything he believed, he freaks out and kills himself. Whatever the truth was, the medication she prescribed helped to kill him.”

“Anything else?”

“The autopsy showed Cowles had a lot of perianal scarring and signs of long-term infection. The pathologist said it wasn’t a new thing with him. He’d been into it for a long time.”

“Probably all his adult life,” Jason murmured.

“Another thing. Cowles was with someone just before he died. His lover was a lawyer from the insurance company where he worked. The night he died they cooked dinner together, had sex. The lover said Cowles was in a great mood. They were in love and planned to move in together. The lover went home to his own apartment about nine.”

“When did Cowles die?”

“Not likely to have been before ten. Three trick-or-treaters rang his doorbell at nine-thirty. They said he complimented them on their costumes.”

“So something happened after that. Any idea what?”

“Well, he placed a call to Dr. Treadwell at nine-thirty-eight. The phone company logged the time at six minutes.”

“What?” Jason said, shocked again. “What did Dr. Treadwell have to say about that?”

“I didn’t call her on it, Jason. It wasn’t relevant to our investigation. We were looking for a homicide.”

“It would be relevant to malpractice, though.”

“Yeah, I guess in civil suits, sticks and stones can break your bones and words can also harm you.” April glanced up at the clock over the counter. It read 4:02.

“Yeah, and sometimes words can even kill you.” Jason raised his hand for the check.

“I’ll take it,” April said.

Jason shook his head. “Next time … So, there was a six-minute conversation between Dr. Treadwell’s phone and Raymond Cowles’s phone. And Cowles committed suicide almost immediately thereafter.” Even if it could never be proved that Clara talked to Cowles, it was very nasty news. Jason rubbed his cheek.

“That’s about the size of it.” April reached for the check, but Jason got it first.

“I said next time.”

“Thanks.” April gathered up her jacket and bag. “What about this Dickey? You know of any reason he had to kill himself?”

Jason scratched his cheek. That morning he’d had a call from the head of the medical school asking him to take over Dickey’s classes until they found a replacement. Oh, and by the way, was he interested in the job? Now Dickey turned out to be an unnatural. Had words harmed him, too?

Deeply disturbed, Jason took a deep breath and exhaled. “No, I wouldn’t have said Harold Dickey was the type to commit suicide. Could it have been an accident?”

“That was my next question.”

“People make fatal mistakes all the time. I know older heart patients who forget they’ve taken their medication and take it again. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does.” He counted out the bills and left them on the table with the check.

“I’ll probably need your help with this hospital stuff,” April said, out on the street, vaguely annoyed that he wouldn’t let her pay and didn’t even look like himself anymore.

“So will I,” he said, smiling grimly. “Let’s keep in touch.”