Each building had a bank of painted gold mailboxes, the kind you usually see in apartment houses. I looked at 3-F. There was a small white label showing, but neither LeAnn nor the apartment manager had bothered to write her name on it.
There was nothing else to learn by hanging around outside LeAnn’s apartment. This reminded me of my days on the paper, when I’d be checking out a story and preparing to question somebody who probably didn’t want to be interviewed. I’d get nervous and my gut would knot up, and I’d hang around outside thinking up excuses not to go in. Felt worse than a job interview sometimes, although that may be stretching it. Finally, it’s like diving into cold water; the best recourse is to hold your nose and jump in.
I knocked on the door to 3-F.
Inside the apartment, I could hear soft music playing, the kind of music that’s euphemistically called Lite Rock: elevator music for baby boomers.
I knocked again. I couldn’t hear footsteps or any change in the music I was about to give it up, when the peephole went dark. I stared into it, to let her know I’d seen her.
“Ms. Gwynn,” I said, “may I talk to you for a moment?”
The peephole went bright again; then there was a fumbling with the doorknob. The door cracked a fraction, held by one of those flimsy security chains that could be popped by a loud belch. I pulled out my license and badge.
“Ms. Gwynn, I’m Detective Harry Denton. I’d like to ask you a few questions, please, if I may.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought. Spellman’s going to chew my butt ragged if he hears about this.
The half-hidden face behind the door studied the license, the badge, my picture. “You got a search warrant?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” I said, giving her the most insipid smile I could muster. “There’s no need for a search warrant. I just want to ask a few questions, and it won’t take very long.”
Her hair was coal-black, straight, cut short and sprayed. She was a little shorter than I remembered, but then I’d only seen her from a distance. In fact, I wasn’t even certain she was the woman in the hallway. She stared at me through the crack, then pushed the door closed. I heard the clicking of the chain being unlatched, then the doorknob turning. She opened the door, stood there for a moment, and I knew it was her.
LeAnn looked at me strangely, as if she were trying to place me as well, which was something I didn’t want her to do. Whatever misconceptions she was operating under, I wanted her to continue under them for a while longer. Time to distract her.
“Ms. Gwynn, I know it’s a little late to be making a visit, but when you’re investigating a murder, especially a murder of someone so prominent, you can’t delay on anything. May I come in?”
“Sure,” she said, tense and brittle. She turned and held the door open for me. I walked in and looked around, then stepped aside as she closed the door and led me toward the couch.
The place was a mismatched hodgepodge of rental furniture, bargains that she’d moved from one place to another over the years, odds and ends she’d picked up from friends, family, whoever had bought new and needed to hand me down the old.
LeAnn Gwynn was a surprise as well. Like I said, I’d never seen her up close. But if Conrad Fletcher was having a sleazy, disgusting, lurid affair with a hot, passionate, lusty nymphomaniac nurse-which was the scenario I’d always assumed-then LeAnn Gwynn would have been the last person I’d have cast in the role. In fact, she wouldn’t have even made the callbacks.
To begin with, she was attractive, but in a plainspoken, solid way. No randiness, no overwhelming sexual energy radiated from this woman. No surgically enhanced body parts. And she certainly didn’t have the kind of monied, sophisticated tastes that one assumed would appeal to Conrad Fletcher. In fact, unless this apartment was some kind of front she was using to mislead everybody, LeAnn Gwynn didn’t have much in the way of taste at all.
She wore jeans and an untucked man’s white shirt that hung down to midthigh, sort of early Patty Duke show. I wondered if the shirt belonged to Conrad, but decided to hold off on that one. She walked over to the radio-one of those late Fifties or early Sixties hi-fi floor models-and turned down the puke rock, thank God. Then she sat in the easy chair across from me, the one with lace doilies barely covering worn fabric.
“So, what can I do for you, Lieutenant, Sergeant-?”
“No, please, I’m just a detective. Detective Denton.”
She smiled uncomfortably through eyeglasses that were probably ten years old, the kind with the heavy plastic frames that today were unfashionable, if not downright geeky.
“Okay, Detective Denton, what can I do for you?”
I pulled out the pad and clicked my ballpoint, then held the two in position in front of me. “I’m investigating the death of Dr. Conrad Fletcher. I understand you knew the doctor.” A two-beat pause. “How well
She crossed her legs in front of me, a worn sandal tipping forward and dangling off the end of her foot. I could feel her fear, could tell that her calm was all surface and barely that. Finally, she sighed, as if she was relieved to get on with it.
“C’mon, Mr. Denton, if you didn’t know the answer to that already, you wouldn’t be here.”
Some color returned to her face. I saw now that her complexion was almost olive, her eyes nearly as black as her hair. When her face relaxed, she was lovely in a sort of different way, but there were the beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes and even the faintest trace of wrinkle around her mouth. She was older than she looked.
I laid down the pen and notepad. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” I said, “you want to tell me about it?”
“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but most of it isn’t true.”
“Why don’t you tell me what is true,” I suggested, my voice lowering to its warm and comforting why- don’t-we-be-friends? level.
She leaned back, almost as if to relax. “Yes, of course, I’d been seeing Conrad. And I’m sure all those obnoxious gigglers at the hospital were just delighted to dish the dirt. But it really was different with us.”
“Different? How?”
“I met Conrad Fletcher about a year ago. I did a rotation in I.C.U. We met there. He was, as I’m sure everyone’s told you, demanding, insensitive, tactless, not an easy man to like. Unfortunately, I always seem to wind up with those men. My first husband, for instance.”
“And?”
She sighed again, a noise that emerged somewhere between this side of sadness and the other side of despair. Funny, I’d shown up here convinced I was going to be dealing with a sleazoid vamp; what I had, instead, was someone who came off as a real nice person who’d been just another victim.
“I’ve got a boy and girl, Mr. Denton, and an ex-husband who hasn’t made a child support payment since the first month after the divorce came through. I don’t even know where he is. The kids live with my mother in Alabama. My son’s got muscular dystrophy. I went back into nursing because I had to, but I couldn’t work the hours I do and still raise my kids right. Every spare nickel goes for their schooling and his medical expenses. Which explains why I live …” She motioned with her hands. “Here.”
I was starting to feel like a damned fine imitation of a slimeball myself.
“I get up to see the kids about every other weekend. I don’t smoke, drink rarely, don’t do drugs, and don’t indiscriminately date married men.”
I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees, trying to relax her as much as possible with my slim mastery of body language. “So how did you meet Conrad?”
“We met in I.C.U. He was doing his usual-the ranting and raving, ordering everyone about, making a jerk of himself. He also managed to offend every woman on staff. There was a doctor’s lounge on the same floor as I.C.U. One evening, we had a question about one of Conrad’s post-surgical patients, and somebody mentioned he was still on the floor. None of the other nurses were willing to go with him alone into the doctor’s lounge. It was not so much that they were afraid; it was more like they didn’t want to get dirty.”
“Yeah, I understand,” I said. And I did.
“I volunteered. I figured I was the last person he’d try to hit on. Anyway, I went into the doctor’s lounge. It
