“You know what I mean.”
He shrugged, smiling. “The whole thing is a puzzle,
“So something’s coming down.”
He nodded solemnly. “You guessed it, something’s coming down.”
“Am I being reassigned?”
He shrugged again.
“Come on, what’s coming down? Are you telling or not?”
“How about not.” Mike looked over as more uniforms joined the first two on the sidewalk outside the fence. The uniforms were talking and laughing.
“Thanks, pal.” April watched them, too.
“Oh, all right, if you really want to know, give me a kiss and I’ll tell you.”
She shook her head. Not a chance.
“Okay, so sue me for sexual harassment.”
“Maybe later, when things slow down,” she muttered.
“
At three April was sitting in the academic office of Dr. Lionel Hambug gathering her thoughts. Sally Ann Dickey had given her permission to check out her husband’s private office in the Medical Office Building, so she had gone there first. She found a room furnished with leather chairs and a leather couch. It had an artificial bamboo tree in the corner that needed dusting. Books and periodicals lined the bookshelves, and in the cupboards below, the deceased had kept files and reprints of his articles. April looked through the reprints quickly. Genetics seemed to have been Dickey’s area of interest. His files were full of graphs and charts.
In his middle desk drawer she’d found an appointment book held shut with a rubber band. She opened it to check out the coming weeks. Dickey’s time had been fully booked for the whole month of November. According to his book, he planned to speak at an association meeting in Miami in mid-December. He’d made a note to himself to inform (his letters were a scrawl) about the subject of his talk. He had blocked out the following week as a vacation and written “Aruba” across the days. His wife had not mentioned any trip to the Caribbean. Nor had Sally Ann known that in the last year Harold had added two modest life-insurance policies to those he already had and named psychoanalytic associations as beneficiaries of both of them. April had not yet been able to reach his lawyer to find out the contents of his will. No medications were kept in this office, but there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the bottom drawer. Johnnie Walker happened to be the favorite brand of the Chinese. It was expensive, but even her father drank it—showed what a big man he was. This particular bottle of Johnnie Walker was full and had not been opened. April closed the drawer, leaving it there.
“How can I help you?”
Dr. Hambug regarded her with expressionless eyes. He had granted her six minutes of his time and by the look of his face and surroundings, it seemed clear he would not allow a second more. He was a small, curly-haired man, clean-shaven, thin as a rice cracker, and clearly a tense and aggressive person even in repose. He wore a brown glen-plaid suit with a pale green shirt and brown tie and sat in a wooden rock-and-rolling chair similar to April’s in the squad room. It was like the old railroad stationmaster’s chair, hard and unforgiving to the back and bottom, not the shrink-industry-standard padded-leather job.
The chair creaked as he rocked back and forth waiting for her answer.
“I’m investigating the death of Dr. Dickey.”
“Yes, you told me that on the phone. What exactly are you looking for?” Now there was a slight gleam of curiosity in the doctor’s eyes.
“Dr. Dickey was working in his office the day he died and it’s not entirely clear to us what happened. We’re trying to establish his state of mind so we can—”
“You think Harold Dickey might have committed suicide?” Dr. Hambug seemed surprised. “Harold?”
“It’s a possibility. That or an accident.” Or a homicide.
“Gee.” Hambug stared at the reproduction of some frenzied sunflowers on his wall.
April knew it was a famous painting but not why. She didn’t know anything about art. “Does that sound plausible to you, Doctor?”
Hambug tore his eyes away from the sunflowers and smiled at her. “Plausible?”
“Your office is next door to his. You must have known him pretty well.”
“We had lunch together two or three times a week for about twenty years. I guess you could say I knew him well.” Hambug glanced at the corner of his desk, where a small clock presented its back to April.
She guessed she had about three minutes left. “What was his state of mind, Dr. Hambug? Would you say he was a happy, contented man, or a disappointed, angry man? Was he happy, was he depressed? Was he tidying up for suicide?”
Hambug swung about while the chair complained noisily for a few seconds. His narrow mouth considered the question while his brow furrowed. “I know what state of mind means,” he said coldly.
April waited. She didn’t like being patronized by people who had dozens more years of higher education than she did and thought she was stupid because of it. “So?”
He shrugged. “Dickey didn’t like the way things were going. His position had eroded at the hospital. Things were changing. Hal found that distressing.”
“He was in conflict with Dr. Treadwell.”
Hambug ignored that. “Things were changing, but Hal had a devoted following, his students liked him, the staff liked him.”
“What about Dr. Treadwell?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“They had a relationship at one time, apparently he wanted to renew it. What about that?”
“I don’t know about that,” Hambug repeated. “He certainly liked women, always had a woman friend. As far as I know, he hasn’t had anyone special for several years. His relations with his wife, of course, were strained. His children are estranged, I gather. However, Hal was an optimist. He was enormously respected in his field. His time was filled, and he was a fighter. He didn’t have the profile of a suicide.… I’ll miss him.”
Jason had said similar things. But Dr. Treadwell had hinted that Dickey had been depressed. “Was something bothering him lately?” April asked.
Hambug glanced at his little clock again. “Well, there was always
April bet he could hypothesize pretty accurately if he wanted to. Now that the specified time was up, he could look her over appraisingly. He was doing that when she stood up suddenly. She wanted to leave before she was asked to, reached in her bag for a card. “Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor. You’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, you can reach me at this number.”
Surprised, Hambug lurched out of the creaking chair to take the card and open the door for her. It occurred to April that he hadn’t expected her to leave quite so easily. Well, sometimes you got a strike on the first try and sometimes it was necessary to work the fish a different way, come back two, three, even four times until you got all a person had to tell The heels on her ankle-high boots pounded the uncarpeted floor of the hall as she headed to her next interview.
Gunn Tram was sobbing at her desk in the personnel office when April found her ten minutes later. The woman who had made such a fuss about getting her files back was not as large as her name implied. Gunn Tram was no Viking, just a small, plump hen of a woman with a number of chins, yellow hair, and neon-pink lipstick. She had to take her glasses off to blot her eyes. As she bent her head, the gray of her roots made her scalp look dirty. April figured she had to be somewhere between fifty and sixty.
“Well, what do you want to know?” Gunn Tram reached for a tissue, looking distinctly hostile, focused on the gun in the holster at April’s waist that showed when she opened her jacket, then abruptly changed the subject. “Did you hand in the bullets for that gun to the head nurse?” she demanded in a way that made April think she could be difficult to work with.
April nodded.
