With a final glance at the bed where Olivia Morrow was lying, Monica left the room. But as she walked down the hall she had the nagging sensation that something was out of order, something was wrong.
Maybe I’m the one who’s going crazy, she thought. I guess I didn’t realize how very much I was counting on Olivia Morrow really being able to tell me about my background. I’m so desperately disappointed.
Sitting in the living room that was a tribute to the discerning good taste of Olivia Morrow, Monica continued to be troubled by the sense that somehow she had missed something important, something that was wrong about the death of a woman she had never met in her life.
But what?
26
On Thursday morning Doug Langdon phoned Sammy Barber. Acutely conscious that what he was about to say was possibly being recorded, he spoke briefly and tried to disguise his voice. “I agree to the terms of your settlement offer.”
“Oh, Dougie, relax,” Sammy told him. “I’m not taping you anymore. I’ve got all I need in case the terms aren’t satisfactory. You got the cash in old bills, right?”
“Yes.” Langdon spat out the word.
“Here’s the way I figure we do it. We each have a big black suitcase, the kind that we can pull down the block. We meet in the parking lot of our favorite diner in Queens. We park near each other and switch bags in the lot. No bothering to stop for a cup of coffee, even though their coffee, as I remember it, wasn’t bad. Sound like a plan?”
“When do you want to meet?”
“Dougie, you don’t sound happy. I want you to be happy. The sooner the better. How about this afternoon, maybe around three? It’s quiet then and the boss at the nightclub wants me to come in early this evening. We’ve got some red-hot celebrities who’ve booked tables, and I’m his man when the jerks try to bother them.”
“I’m sure you are. This afternoon at three o’clock in the parking lot of the diner.” Douglas Langdon no longer tried to disguise his voice. If Sammy Barber took the money and did not fulfill the contract there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Except, he told himself grimly, find someone to take care of Sammy, but if that came to pass, he would make very sure there would be no way to trace Sammy’s demise back to him.
And yet I think that when he has the money he’ll go through with it, Langdon thought, as he sat in his office waiting for Roberta Waters, his first patient, another one who was chronically late. Not that he cared. He always stopped her at precisely the time her hour was up, even if she had only been on the couch for fifteen minutes. At her protest, he had said, “I cannot delay my next patient. That would not be fair. Think about it. One of the reasons for your strained relationship with your husband is that he gets frantic because you are never on time for anything, and in consequence you make him embarrassingly late for your joint engagements.”
God, was he sick of that woman!
Face it, he was sick of them all. But be careful, he warned himself. You’ve been getting pretty snappy with Beatrice, who is after all a good secretary, and no question, she was oozing curiosity when Sammy showed up here.
The phone rang. A moment later Beatrice announced, “Dr. Hadley calling, sir.”
“Thank you, Beatrice.” Doug forced warmth into his voice. His tone changed when he heard her click off. “I tried to get you last night. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Because I was a wreck,” Clay Hadley replied, his voice quivering. “I’m a doctor. I save lives. It’s one thing to talk about killing someone. It’s another to hold a pillow over the head of a woman who was my patient.”
Disbelieving, Doug Langdon heard the unmistakable sound of sobbing on the other end of the line. If Beatrice hadn’t disconnected immediately she would have heard the outburst, he thought frantically. He wanted to shout at Hadley to shut up, but then he swallowed over the tightness in his throat and said calmly, “Clay, get hold of yourself. At the most Olivia Morrow had only a few days to live. By eliminating those few days you saved yourself from spending the rest of your life in prison. You did tell me she was going to tell Monica Farrell about Alex and the Gannon fortune?”
“Doug, Monica Farrell was in Olivia’s apartment when I went back yesterday evening. She was in the bedroom, sitting by Olivia’s bed. She’s a doctor. She may have noticed something.”
“Like what?”
Langdon waited. Hadley had stopped sobbing, but there was a hesitation in his voice when he said, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just nervous. I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.”
“Clay,” Langdon began, trying to keep his voice reassuring, “you have to be all right, for your sake
“I hear you. I hear you. I’ll be all right. I promise.”
Langdon heard the click in his ear as the other phone rang. With his handkerchief he dried the perspiration from his forehead and his hands.
The intercom came on. “Doctor, Mrs. Waters is here,” Beatrice announced. “And she’s so happy. She wants me to point out to you immediately that today she’s only four minutes late. She said she knew that would make your day.”
27
Andrew and Sarah Winkler had lived all their married lives in a comfortable apartment on York Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan, a block from the East River. Childless, they had never been tempted to move to the suburbs. “God forbid,” Andrew would say. “When I see a pile of leaves, I want them to belong to someone else.” Andrew, a retired accountant, and Sarah, a retired librarian, were perfectly content with their lifestyle. Several evenings a week they were at Lincoln Center or a lecture at the 92nd Street Y. Once a month they treated themselves to a Broadway show.
A fixture in their daily routine was their after-breakfast walk. They never broke that personal commitment unless the weather was extreme. “Mist is okay, but not a downpour,” Sarah would explain to her friends. “Cold okay, but not below twenty degrees; warm okay, but not if the thermometer hits ninety. We don’t want to turn into couch potatoes, but neither do we want to die of frostbite or heatstroke.”
Sometimes they would stroll in Central Park. Other days they would choose the pedestrian path along the East River. This Thursday morning they had opted for the river walk, and set out for it in their matching all-weather jackets.
It had rained unexpectedly during the night, and Sarah remarked to Andrew that the weatherman never gets anything right and that it made you wonder how much they got paid to stand up in front of the camera and point to the map, waving their arms to show wind currents. “Half the time when they say rain is a possibility, if they opened the window they’d be drenched,” she commented, as they approached the area of Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York. “But at least it cleared up nicely this morning.”
She broke off her commentary on the exasperating unpredictability of meteorologists by suddenly clutching her husband’s arm. “Andrew, look! Look!” They were passing a bench along the path. Partially wedged under it was an oversized garbage bag, the kind used on construction sites. Protruding from the bag was a foot with a woman’s high-heeled shoe dangling from it.
“Oh my God, my God…,” Sarah moaned.
Andrew reached in the pocket of his jacket for his cell phone and dialed 911.
