The Shadow of Your Smile

41

After his initial panic attack at the realization that he had murdered Olivia Morrow, Dr. Clayton Hadley composed himself by reviewing over and over again every detail of his final visit to Olivia.

Tuesday evening he had told the clerk at the desk that Ms. Morrow was feeling very ill, and he had asked Olivia to be sure to leave the bolt of her front door unlocked so that she would not have to get out of bed to let him in. If the bolt had been on, the risk would have been much greater-she would have had to physically let him in herself. But the bolt was not on, so he had been able to slip into the apartment noiselessly.

She had been asleep when he tiptoed into her bedroom, but woke instantly when he stood over her. Olivia had a night-light near the bathroom door and he could see that as soon as she recognized him, her expression of surprise turned into one of fear.

She slept on two pillows on her queen-sized bed, and two other pillows were next to her. Long ago when he had visited her at home, after she had suffered a mild heart attack, she explained that she sometimes brought a cup of tea and the newspaper back to bed in the morning and piled those extra pillows behind her back.

As he reached for one of those spare pillows, the thought that ran through his head was, She knows I’m going to kill her. He remembered saying, “I’m sorry, Olivia,” as he held the pillow over her face.

Frail as she was, he was shocked at how fiercely she tried to push it away. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but to him it seemed an eternity before her emaciated hands finally relaxed and fell limp on the coverlet.

When he removed the pillow, he saw that while she was struggling Olivia had bitten her lip. A single drop of blood was on the pillow he had used to suffocate her. Nervously he had considered switching it with the one under her head, but he realized that the sight of the blood there might raise questions. Instead he went to the linen closet. Neatly stacked on the middle shelf he found two other complete sets of sheets and pillowcases. Each set consisted of two sheets and four pillowcases. One set was cream-colored, the other pale pink. The set on the bed was a shade of peach.

Hadley decided he had to take the chance to replace the soiled pillowcase with one of the pink ones. It’s not much different, he had consoled himself, and if anyone notices, they’ll probably think the other peach pillowcase was lost at the laundry. He knew Olivia sent her sheets out to the laundry weekly because she had joked to him that one of her luxuries was fine cotton sheets, which she had professionally washed and ironed. When he changed the pillowcase, he was horrified to realize that the blood had also gone through to the pillow itself. Panicked, he knew it would be noticed if he tried to take it with him. He decided that the best he could do was to have the new pillowcase on it and hope it would never be noticed.

He had folded the stained pillowcase and tucked it in the pocket of his topcoat, then had begun to search the apartment for the Catherine file. Olivia had made him executor of her estate and given him the combination to her safe, so that when the time came the will would be probated without delay. It was a very simple document. There were a few small bequests to longtime service people in the building and her cleaning woman. The contents of her apartment, her car, and her jewelry were to be sold. The money from them together with her small portfolio of stocks and bonds were to be left to various Catholic charities. In the will she noted that she had already made and paid for arrangements with The Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. She didn’t wish to have a viewing, but after a funeral Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer, to be cremated. Her ashes were to be buried in her mother’s grave in Calvary Cemetery.

The will was in the safe, as well as her few pieces of jewelry-pearls and a small diamond ring and earrings-certainly not worth more than a few thousand dollars.

But to his dismay, the Catherine file was not there. Acutely aware that the concierge might be noticing how long he was staying, Clay Hadley had searched every inch of Olivia’s apartment without success. The Catherine file was missing.

What had she done with it? Clay had asked himself, desperately. Was there any chance she had destroyed it then changed her mind about revealing the truth when she heard from Monica Farrell? It was the only reasonable explanation he could imagine. On the way out of the building, the clerk at the desk had stopped him. “How is Ms. Morrow, Doctor?” he asked solicitously.

Weighing his words carefully, Clay had said, “Ms. Morrow is a very, very sick woman.” Then in a husky voice added, “She’s not going to be with us for more than a few days or a week.”

The next evening, after he received the call that Olivia had been found dead, he had sat with Monica Farrell in Olivia’s living room. When the Emergency Medical Services group arrived Monica had not stayed long. She had nothing to tell them except that she had come because she had an appointment with Olivia Morrow. In retrospect, Clay prided himself on how well he had handled the medics, explaining that he was Olivia’s longtime doctor, that she was terminally ill, that only last night he had begged her to go to a hospice… Then, when the mortician from Campbell’s arrived, the medics toe-tagged her body, and he signed the death certificate.

After a sleepless night and frantic phone call to Doug, Clay had kept himself busy blotting out any trace of suspicion of his connection to Olivia’s death for the rest of Thursday. He called in the obituary notice to the Times, called the small list of people in her address book, arranged for the funeral Mass, and called a liquidator he had met socially and arranged to meet him at the apartment and inventory the contents. Then, having felt he had done everything he could to present the picture of a solicitous friend and executor, he took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

At nine o’clock on Friday morning, the first phone call he received when he reached his office was from a man he did not know, Scott Alterman. “He’s inquiring about Olivia Morrow,” his secretary informed him.

Who is this guy? Hadley wondered, his stomach in knots. “Put him on,” he said.

Scott introduced himself. “I am a friend of Dr. Monica Farrell. I believe you met her in Olivia Morrow’s apartment Wednesday evening.”

“Yes, I did.” Where is this going? Hadley wondered.

“Only the night before her death, Ms. Morrow had told Dr. Farrell that she knew her grandmother. By that it was clear that she meant her birth grandmother. From what you told Dr. Farrell at that time, you have been a longtime friend of Ms. Morrow’s, as well as her physician and the executor of her estate. As such, you must have some knowledge of Ms. Morrow’s family history?”

Hadley tried to keep his voice steady. “That’s entirely true. I became her mother’s cardiologist, then Olivia’s. Olivia was an only child. Her mother died many years ago. I never met anyone else at all who was a relation.”

“And Ms. Morrow never spoke about her background to you?”

Be close to the truth, but no specifics, Hadley warned himself. “I know that Olivia told me her father died before she was born and her mother remarried. By the time I met them, her mother had been widowed a second time.”

Then came the question that made Hadley’s mouth go dry. Scott Alterman asked, “Dr. Hadley, haven’t you been on the board of the Gannon Foundation for many years?”

“Yes, that’s true. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know yet,” Alterman said. “But I’m sure there’s an answer to be found and I warn you, I will find it. Good-bye, Dr. Hadley.”