Mortal Remains

Chapter 6

Saturday, November 17, 2:30 P.M.

Metropolis Club, New York City

Feeling gloomy and foolish, Mark was back at the bar picking up his second glass of white wine. He was gloomy because of the event itself – a memorial service for a woman who’d died twenty-seven years ago. The tributes by high school, college, and medical school classmates had seemed thin and hollow to him. No one captured Kelly’s real warmth and sense of mischief. Rather, they’d remembered her as some kind of hardworking, self-sacrificing tin saint. And Samantha McShane. The woman made a complete ass of herself, droning endlessly how she suffered over the loss of her beloved daughter. Her lengthy, self-aggrandizing remarks made him sick. By contrast, Chaz’s tribute to his wife came across as surprisingly dignified and tender.

He sauntered to the far corner of the impressive mahogany-paneled room, took a healthy swig of wine, and looked over the small crowd. Oh, yeah, he felt foolish all right. How in heaven’s name had he convinced himself that he was going to find leads by talking to the people who came to this service?

A prick named Tommy Leannis, a plastic surgeon who’d been a resident with Kelly, had blown him off, seeming afraid that the Bradens wouldn’t approve of his talking with the coroner. Another med school friend of Kelly’s, Melanie Collins, made him feel uneasy with her not-so-subtle sexual come-on. She was at least fifteen, maybe twenty years older than he, and a good-looking old gal, but her assertiveness was a turnoff. She helped in one thing she told him, though. She’d said that “a person could hide everything but two conditions – being drunk and being in love” – and that Kelly definitely had been in love at the time she’d disappeared. In love… the man in the taxi. Damn, he had to find that guy.

Braden Senior had been smarmy as ever when they’d exchanged a few words, and Chaz seemed even more nervous than he had been in Dan’s office. Mark got nowhere fast with either of them. Time to toss back the rest of his wine and leave, he decided, when he spotted a tall, slim man with a very attractive blond woman on his arm, one of the few couples he hadn’t yet approached. He put down his glass, went over, and introduced himself.

“Ah, Dr. Roper, the coroner on the case,” Earl said. “I’m Dr. Garnet, but call me Earl. This is my wife, Dr. Janet Graceton.”

They all shook hands

“So tell us,” Earl continued, “what’s your connection to Kelly, other than having had the investigation dumped in your lap?”

The comment took Mark by surprise. “How did you know it was a dump? You’re not connected with NYPD are you?”

Earl laughed. “No, I’m in ER at St. Paul’s Hospital in Buffalo, though some of my staff probably think of me as a cop.”

“And I deliver babies,” added Janet, her smile bright. “We’re definitely not with the police.”

“But bureaucracy’s bureaucracy,” Earl continued, “and I’ve had a lifetime of stuff shuffled my way. As soon as I saw the article in the Herald, I figured they were sloughing the whole thing onto you.”

“I’ll say they did. Though I would have done whatever was necessary anyway, to bring Kelly justice. She was a very special lady.”

“You knew her?” Earl asked.

“Only as a kid.”

“Really. What do you remember of her?”

“Like I told everyone here, I remember the important stuff for a seven-year-old boy. She could ride a bike like the wind, had a jackknife dive to die for, and when it came to cannonballs, no one on the dock was safe.”

Earl laughed again, even though his eyes remained sad. Mark found him more sincere than those who’d gushed over Kelly at the service. He immediately liked Earl Garnet.

“What else?” Earl asked.

And Mark had figured he’d be the one asking the questions. “Well, I guess what I recall most was how much fun she was. She always made me feel great.”

“She sometimes mentioned a Dr. Roper. Was he your father?”

“Yes.”

“She spoke very highly of him. Said he was the one who gave her enough confidence to apply to med school.”

“I know she sure liked talking with him. They’d spend hours together in his study. He actually was her doctor for a while. I found his old file on her in our basement.”

“It must be especially sad for him, knowing someone murdered his protégée.”

“At least he was spared that. He died nearly a couple of months after she disappeared.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It was all such a long time ago.”

“Yet her disappearance must have been painful for him and for you. Did he ever talk about it?”

Boy, this guy likes to probe, Mark thought, also realizing that he didn’t mind. Earl seemed genuinely interested. He could tell by his eyes. They never wavered from him. “Actually, I didn’t know she had vanished. My father told me only that she’d gone away, and I had no idea I’d lost her until much later. As a result I haven’t any traumatic last-time-I-saw-Kelly stuff to cloud my memories of her.” He found himself smiling. “So all of them are pretty happy. My favorite even now is of us spending hours on the dock, swimming and joking together. She especially liked watching the clouds and making crazy interpretations out of the shapes.”

Earl’s face suddenly grew animated. “Ah, yes, Kelly and her cloud game. It was fun-”

“You played it with her?”

“Yes-” He seemed to stop himself, his expression growing serious again. “It must be hard for you, investigating who killed her, yet having been so close.” Oddly, he sounded guarded now.

Shit, surely this man wasn’t going to suddenly bottle up the way Leannis did. Then he noticed how still Janet Graceton had gotten and the sideways look of astonishment she gave her husband.

The moment hung there, the seconds elongated.

He didn’t figure it out.

It simply popped into his head.

Intuition, insight, instinct – whatever, he just knew. This guy had loved Kelly. He must have been the one!

As he cast about for what to say next, a dark shape moving across the other side of the room drifted into his field of vision. He turned to see Samantha McShane glide toward Chaz Braden, a half-finished drink in her hand.

“Murderer,” she said, her voice low, yet the guttural sounds traveled throughout the room.

Chaz froze, his own drink halfway to his lips.

“You killed her! I know you did. I’ve known it for twenty-seven years.” Samantha’s anger brimmed into tears, a few of which coursed down her cheeks, leaving faint tracks in her makeup.

Chaz went white.

Walter came running up and tried to take her by the elbow. “Samantha, for the love of God!”

She shoved her husband’s hand away and looked at him, her stare fierce, her tears stopping as quickly as they’d come. “This man murdered our Kelly, I know he did. And he has to be brought to justice. He has to!”

As Samantha verged on the edge of hysterics, Mark realized just how unsteady, even volatile her emotions were.

While everyone nearby remained too shocked to move, her husband managed to slip an arm around her shoulders, whisper into her ear, and begin to walk her to the exit.

Suddenly Braden Senior was at his son’s side.

“Unfortunate dear,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “Overwrought, understandably.” Once Walter McShane had led his wife out of earshot, Charles turned to the rest of the group, and added, “It’s tragic, but the woman’s sadly unstable. Of course she’s distraught, but has always been far too emotionally charged and changeable. Bad for Kelly, bad for the marriage. Sorry for the disruption, but I’m sure I can count on your understanding.”

The sheer unflappability of the man took Mark’s breath away, until he noticed Braden’s right fist was clenched so tightly that the knuckles were white.

Chaz eyed the remnants of his drink and placed it untouched back on the bar. The color still hadn’t returned to his face. But when he saw Mark looking at him, he responded with an angry glare.

The embarrassed silence slowly dissolved as people resumed their conversations in small groups.

Mark turned to resume his own conversation with Earl and Janet, but saw them headed for the door.

On impulse he followed at a discreet distance, not at all sure what he would do.

“So tell me about Kelly,” Janet said, settling back in her chair.

Earl paused with his fork halfway to his mouth.

He and Janet sat across from each other at a table by one of the big windows in the main dining room of the Plaza Hotel. It offered a view of Central Park across Fifty-ninth Street, but he’d barely noticed. He also found the food tasteless – most of his dinner remained on his plate – and Janet was uncharacteristically quiet. Despite sensing his act about Kelly grow rapidly transparent, like a con artist hooked on his own lie, he continued the sham. “What everybody said about her gave a pretty good picture.” His breezy tone sounded false to his own ear.

Janet’s glacial blue eyes held steady on him. Finally, she reached across the table, touched his hand, and interlaced her fingers with his. “It’s time you told me what’s up here.”

He felt sheepish. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you right out – didn’t want to worry you was the main reason. I’d hoped the story would go away. The NYPD obviously weren’t interested, and after a few days of holding my breath, nobody from Hampton Junction came knocking on my door either. But now, by keeping quiet, I’ve made such a big thing out of something that happened so long ago-”

She raised the fingers of her free hand to his lips and silenced him. “Earl, what’s the deal? Were you two lovers?”

He sat there, feeling caught, his quiet serving as an admission of… of what? Not guilt. He felt more regret and sadness than shame. “How did you know?”

She shook her head, obviously incredulous that he had to ask. “I could understand it being a shock – all these years you believed she’d escaped, and now you find out she had been murdered. But your needing me to be with you at the funeral, your being in a daze for the last week, then your letting slip about Kelly’s cloud game-”

“I’m sorry-”

A waiter arrived to clear away their plates, and Earl welcomed the hiatus in his apology, then had no idea what to add when he left.

“She was married,” Janet said after a few seconds, almost to herself.

“I know, but as I told you before, there were problems, big ones.”

She shook her head and gave him a smile as if he were an errant medical student. “And you got involved with a woman old enough to know better. What’d she say? ‘Mister, my husband doesn’t understand me’?”

“It wasn’t like that. In fact she hardly ever talked about her husband’s problems.”

“Then how was it? My God, Earl, I mean I knew I wasn’t the first in your life, and you weren’t my first, but I sure never messed with married men. Considered them tainted meat.”

Earl winced at Janet’s characteristic candor. Yet she didn’t seem to be upset so much as pensive. “What can I say, Janet? Over the first few years of med school Kelly and I spent a lot of time talking together. She told me the trouble she was in, and I was young and stupid. I guess I got caught up in rescue fantasies.”

“You guess?”

Nothing, not even a lifetime of medical experience, had ever enabled Earl to unravel the mysterious power Janet possessed to make him explain himself. He knew only that once she got him started, he found it hard to stop.

“Okay, so I was an idiot. But I don’t regret trying to help her. As Chaz became increasingly abusive and controlling. I honestly thought she and I were good for each other, that we’d get her out of her mess, then see about us. Besides, you weren’t anywhere in sight to ‘save me from myself,’ as you so often put it, for about another fifteen years.”

“Hey!” she said softly. “Of course you tried to help her. You’re a compassionate, caring man. It’s one of the many things I love in you.”

“I mean, it’s not like I’ve been nursing a flame for her all these years.”

“I know.”

“Hell, I haven’t even thought about her in two decades.”

She sat back again. “And that confuses you – how it still can hurt, as if you lost her all over again?”

Like a surgeon probing for physical signs, she’d put her finger exactly on his pain. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Since I read about her body being found, I’m all tangled up in feelings from when I was twenty-four. Even though I’m not that young guy anymore, I can’t cut myself loose. Weird, eh?”

“Not so weird.”

“No? It is for me.”

She grabbed his hand again and gave it a squeeze. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“It wouldn’t help any. What to do now is the important question.”

“How do you mean?”

“The newspaper article I showed you? I’m the mystery man in the cab.”

As did most surgeons, Janet had nerves of steel, and even the nastiest surprises couldn’t catch her off guard. Yet her pupils pulsed wide. “That was you?”

“Yeah, and maybe the cops haven’t taken up the chase just yet, but that Dr. Mark Roper will be trying to pin a face on him.”

“Oh, my God.”

“So do I go to him or the NYPD and make a clean breast of things before they get to me? As nice as Roper was, he made me nervous.”

Though they’d been talking barely above a murmur, she leaned forward close enough to whisper. “And confess you were having an affair with her? That’s nuts!”

“It’ll be worse if I say nothing and Roper or his sheriff find me out on their own. At the very least they could charge me with obstruction of justice, now that it’s officially a murder case.”

“And how the hell will you explain not coming forward for twenty-seven years?”

“I had a lot of reasons, some pretty complicated, but I could make them understand.”

“Try me first. I’m a lot more sympathetic.”

“Okay. For starters, from the very beginning she made me promise never to reveal our affair.”

“Jesus, Earl, give me a break!”

“Hear me out. At first I thought she wanted to avoid a scandal. Adultery is no small thing, and back then it was a very big deal. But, no, that wasn’t it. She told me later that she really didn’t give a damn what people thought, that she worried about Chaz and how he’d react if he ever found out. The possibility of losing her obsessed him, which fueled the abuse, to the point she figured not only did she have to make a clean break – disappear, change her name, and start over – but he must never know about our affair because it might enrage him even more.”

“She wouldn’t even trust you enough to tell you where she was headed?”

“Refused, but the issue wasn’t a lack of trust.”

“What then?”

“I told you it was complicated.”

“ ‘Screwy’ is the word I’d use, Earl.”

“Okay, okay! She wouldn’t tell me because she insisted she wasn’t going to ruin my life with all her baggage.”

“Her baggage?”

“Will you just listen? She knew she’d already jumped into Chaz’s arms to escape her parents. As a result, she didn’t entirely trust her feelings about me, wasn’t sure whether she loved me or was just using me to escape again. She promised to contact me if she ever figured it out and the time was right.”

“When the time was right? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“There were other issues, too. Ones that even I hadn’t thought of until she warned me.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how powerful the Braden family was at the hospital and NYCU. If Chaz ever did find out about me and Kelly, not only would he go after her, she was certain he’d get ‘Daddy’ to pull enough strings that I’d never graduate from medical school. So she remained adamant I do nothing to risk that happening, such as trying to follow her, and refused to tell me where she’d be in case I might come anyway.”

Janet mulled that over a few seconds. “But after no word from her at all, you didn’t get suspicious something had happened?”

“Of course! I was frantic. I even took my month’s vacation and went searching for her, despite the promise I made. But just like the police said, there were no leads.”

“Didn’t you ever think then she might have been killed, that her husband had gotten to her after all?”

“At the time I couldn’t think of anything else. Whenever I saw Chaz Braden in the hospital, I could barely keep myself from grabbing him by the throat and demanding to know what he did with Kelly.”

“Yet you still didn’t go to the police.”

He felt his cheeks start to burn again at the thought of how he’d floundered around like a complete wimp – so detestably opposite to the man he’d become. “No, I didn’t. I made a decision to keep quiet and save my ass.”

Janet’s eyebrows quirked.

“I’m not proud of it,” he continued, “but logically, I couldn’t see any point in doing otherwise. The police already suspected Chaz, and were investigating him big-time. Me, Jack, Melanie, and Tommy Leannis – we’d all told the cops everything we knew about her relationship to him, how possessive he could be, and verbally abusive. If I had confessed our affair, it would have taken their attention off him, maybe even shifted it to me, disgraced Kelly, and probably tanked my chances at NYCH. So I kept my mouth shut.”

“But when the police didn’t make a case against Chaz-”

“I again considered taking matters into my own hands. I even began to follow the creep, waiting for a chance to get him alone.”

“My God, Earl-”

“Don’t worry. I came to my senses before anything happened. What I saw, the way he ran around, red-faced, pestering everyone in my class, even me, to find out if we knew where she’d gone, I began to think maybe he hadn’t done anything to her and couldn’t find her either, that she had just run away after all, gotten rid of her ghosts, and didn’t see me as part of her life anymore. It took a long time, but eventually I accepted it…”

As he talked, he realized just how immature his desire to rescue Kelly had been. Yet he let himself be so stupidly vulnerable back then, enamored by a notion as old as Galahad, Lancelot, and Robin Hood – saving damsels in distress. Talk about naive. What’s more, the belief that he’d pulled it off – helped her get away clean from Chaz and freed her from her own ghosts – it was simply the way he needed to see things, the better to sustain himself while he got over her.

Had he learned from his folly? In a way. After all, he went into a career in ER, where he could rescue people from their worst physical catastrophes, after which they’d be whipped out of his department to face their personal demons in the care of others. It was a disconnect that suited him just fine to this day.

He reached for her hand. “I would have helped her differently now. I guess that’s part of what’s got me so tangled up – knowing I might’ve made a difference if I hadn’t been so clueless.”

“You still don’t believe Chaz killed her?”

He sighed deeply, as if to exhale his doubts. “I must have been wrong about him, too. His looking for her was probably a cynical act he put on to throw us off. It obviously worked.”

She slouched in her seat. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was studying the chandeliers and frowning in disapproval.

“So do I go to the police?” he said after what felt like minutes.

She looked directly into his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Earl, you expect the cops to believe a story like this? Let’s see. They couldn’t pin anything on Chaz in 1974. Now they find the body, and you pop up with your tale of being the mystery man, of having been her secret lover, and, what I predict will be their personal favorite, you didn’t tell anyone because you’ve been maintaining a noble silence all these years. They’ll fall down laughing, then have a field day twisting it all around so you look guilty as hell. As for what the press would do to you, don’t even think about it.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Talk to a lawyer.”

He lay wrapped in layer after layer of sleep, the kind that enveloped him only after he and Janet made love.

Yet a ringing drilled into his head.

He felt Janet’s leg draped over his, and opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in his own bed.

Instead, ornate swirls on the ceiling of their hotel suite spun like pinwheels in the ever-changing, neon glow from outside the window. He glanced at his watch and saw it was only 10:00 P.M.

After dinner they’d no sooner gone upstairs and closed the door to their room than Janet pulled him to her. “I want us to forget everything, at least for now,” she whispered, her lips at his ear.

His own desire had swelled to meet hers, displacing all anxiety, and he lost himself in her arms, for a while.

“Dr. Garnet here,” he said, fumbling the receiver to his ear.

“Dr. Garnet, it’s Mark Roper calling. I hope it’s not too late to disturb you, but I wanted to catch you before you left town. I think you’d be interested in seeing my father’s old medical file on Kelly.”

“What?”

“It contains a letter describing a man she met, someone she loved.”

Garnet felt his heart quicken. “Really.”

“I suspect he’s the one she got into the taxi with the night before she disappeared.”

Earl felt a chasm open at his feet. Into it fell Janet, Brendan, his life. “I see.”

“Do you? Shall we have breakfast together to discuss it?”

A dozen floors below, Mark hung up and stared at the ceiling. Garnet’s agreement to meet with him vanquished any doubts he had about him being Kelly’s lover. Not bad for a part-time coroner from the sticks. Twelve hours in New York and already he’d uncovered the secret that had stumped the NYPD for twenty-seven years.

He’d followed Garnet and his wife back to their hotel, then booked a room for himself, dumping his plan to return home that night. After reviewing all his files on Kelly, he went down to the hotel’s business center, where he spent time on the Internet planning what he would do.

Having successfully completed the next step, hooking Garnet into a tête-à-tête, he felt like celebrating.

Grabbing the phone, he called a number he knew by heart.

“Dr. Caterril speaking,” said the woman who answered.

“Hi, Mandy. It’s me.”

“Mark?”

“The one and only. And how’s the most beautiful veterinarian in all of Manhattan?”

“I’m fine, but where are you calling from?” She sounded put out rather than excited.

“The Plaza. I was down here on a coroner’s case, but unexpectedly had to stay the night and wondered if we could get together.”

Her silence gave him a sinking feeling.

“Well, I would have loved to,” she said after a few seconds, “but I can’t tonight.”

He heard a male voice in the background. Mandy lived alone.

“Of course,” he said, immediately casting around for a way to say good-bye without embarrassing either of them. “I just took a chance, never expecting even to find you in on a Saturday night. Stupid of me not to have called before and set something up.”

She laughed. “I won’t argue with that, Mark.”

“Well, next time lots of warning.”

“Yes, I’d like that. Perhaps we could have lunch.”

Ouch! He’d been demoted. From lover to former boyfriend status, all in an instant, suitable for get-togethers in public places, a greeting kiss on the cheek, but the rest of her body arched safely away from him. “Take care, Mandy.”

“You too.”

Definitely taken down a few rungs. Well, what did he expect? He hadn’t exactly broken her door down with return visits or rung her phone off the hook after her last weekend at Hampton Junction. To be honest, he hadn’t bothered because he knew there was no point. Mandy Caterril would never be happy away from her poodle practice in Manhattan. Just like Shauna, the uptown physiotherapist, before her, or Cindy, the TriBeCa theater director, before them.

East Side, West Side, all around the town. The tune popped into his head. Wonderful, beautiful, fun women from every part of the greatest city on earth, and not a hope in hell any one of them could cope with being the mate of a country doctor. As far as they were concerned, he’d made a mistake choosing to practice where he had.

Shit! Enough with the gloomy woulda, shoulda, coulda crap. He didn’t feel like just rolling over and going to sleep either. He grabbed the New York Magazine by his bed and flipped through the theater section. But it was long past curtain time, both on and off Broadway. Ought to kick himself in the ass for not having planned ahead and at least given himself a show.

Then he had an idea.

A crazy idea, but one that would be exactly the no-strings-attached, one-night-only encounter he felt in the mood for.

“Could you connect me with the home of Dr. Melanie Collins, please,” he said, having contacted an operator at New York City Hospital. “It’s Dr. Mark Roper.”

“The Chief of Internal Medicine?”

He hadn’t known that about her. “Is there another Melanie Collins?”

“I’ll see if she’ll take your call,” said the man on the other end. He didn’t sound very hopeful.

“Dr. Roper,” Melanie said, when he was plugged through to her. “This is a surprise.”

“It is for me, too. I had to stay over unexpectedly. If you have time, I wondered if we could continue our conversation about Kelly?”

She gave a throaty chuckle that made more than his hopes rise. “Sure, if you like. But I just ordered some Chinese food. Say, why don’t you come on over here and share it with me – they always send too much – and I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

It was so blatant a response to his overture, despite its being exactly what he had in mind, he went briefly dumbstruck. What was his problem? Seconds ago he’d wanted her to say yes. Now he balked. Why? He certainly had no hang-ups about women who took the initiative, in fact, quite enjoyed them. The age difference? No, he’d been there, too. Yet from the place in his stomach that turned when he encountered a bad taste or a foul smell, he once again felt a slight revulsion. This wasn’t right for him. “Oh, thank you, that’s really generous, but I’ve got an early meeting, which is why I’m staying over. I was hoping we could talk on the phone.”

“I see.” Her tone of voice had cooled to about minus twenty. “Of course. What did you want to know?”