got into a car behind the hearse.
“That was her doctor and he didn’t even take a minute to talk to you,” Nan said, her tone critical. “Didn’t you tell me that you sat and talked with him while you waited for the medics to come?”
“Yes, I did,” Monica replied. “But the other day he did specifically say that he knew nothing about whatever it was Olivia Morrow was going to tell me.”
As the congregation began to leave, a few people stopped to say that they were employees at Schwab House but didn’t know anything about any personal information Ms. Morrow intended to share. Several others explained they had sometimes spoken to her after Mass, but she had never referred to anything of a personal nature.
The last to leave was a woman who obviously had been crying. With graying blond hair, wide cheekbones, and a broad frame, she looked to be in her midsixties. She stopped to speak with them. “I am Sophie Rutkowski. I was Ms. Morrow’s cleaning woman for thirty years,” she said, her voice quivering. “I don’t know anything about what she wanted to tell you, but I wish you had met her. She was such a good person.”
Thirty years, Monica thought. She might know more about Olivia Morrow’s background than she realizes.
It was obvious Nan had the same thought. “Ms. Rutkowski, Dr. Farrell and I are going to have a cup of coffee. Won’t you join us?”
The woman looked hesitant. “Oh, I don’t think-”
“Sophie,” Nan said briskly. “I’m Nan Rhodes, the doctor’s receptionist. This is a sad time for you. Talking about Ms. Morrow with us over a cup of coffee will make you feel better, I promise.”
A block away they found a coffee shop and settled in at a table. Monica watched in admiration as Nan made the other woman comfortable telling her that she could so understand how sad Sophie must be. “I’ve been working for Dr. Farrell for almost four years,” she said, “and when I heard that she was almost killed in an accident, I can’t tell you how upset I was.”
“I knew that the end was coming,” Sophie said. “Ms. Morrow has been failing for this last year. Her heart was bad, but she said she didn’t want any more surgery. She had the aortic valve replaced twice. She said…”
Sophie Rutkowski’s eyes filled with tears. “She said that there is a time to die and that she knew her time was coming soon.”
“Didn’t she have any family at all whom you met?” Nan asked.
“Just her mother, and she died ten years ago. She was very old, in her early nineties.”
“Did she live with Ms. Morrow?”
“No. She always had her own apartment in Queens but they saw a lot of each other. They were very close.”
“Did Ms. Morrow have much company as far as you know?” Monica asked.
“I honestly couldn’t be sure. I was only there on Tuesday afternoons for a couple of hours. That was all she needed. No one ever lived who was neater than Ms. Morrow.”
Tuesday, Monica thought. She died sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. “How did she seem to you when you saw her this past Tuesday?”
“I’m sorry to say I didn’t see her. She had gone out.” Sophie shook her head. “I was surprised she wasn’t home. She’s been getting so weak. I vacuumed and dusted and changed the sheets on her bed. I did the little wash there was. I don’t mean I washed the sheets. She sent them out. They were very fine cotton and she liked them to be done at a special laundry. I used to tell her I’d be happy to iron them but she wanted them done just so. This past Tuesday, I was only there for an hour. She was so generous. She always paid me for three hours, even though I told her I couldn’t find another thing to clean or polish.”
Olivia Morrow liked everything done just so. That was obvious, Monica thought. Why is it I keep thinking about that pillowcase that didn’t match the others: “Sophie, I noticed that there were lovely peach sheets on the bed but that one of the pillowcases didn’t match the other three. It was a pale pink shade.”
“No, Doctor, you must be wrong,” Sophie said flatly. “I’d never make that mistake. This past Tuesday, I put on the peach sheets. She had other sets, of course, but she preferred the pastels. One week the peach set went on. The next week the pink set.”
“What I’m getting at, Sophie,” Monica said, “is that when I saw Ms. Morrow’s body on Wednesday evening, I could see that she had bitten her lip. I thought it might have bled on the pillowcase and she decided to change it.”
“If she bit her lip and bled onto the pillowcase, she would have put that pillow aside and used one of the two spares on the bed,” Sophie said emphatically. “You must have noticed how full those pillows are. She wouldn’t have had the strength, or even tried, to change the pillowcases. No way.” She sipped her coffee. “No way,” she repeated for emphasis. Then she paused. “I work for a number of people at Schwab House. One of the handymen told me that Dr. Hadley had been to see Ms. Morrow Tuesday night. Maybe if there was blood on the pillowcase, she asked him to change it. That she would do.”
“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Monica conceded. “Sophie, I’m going to run ahead to visit a patient at the hospital. Thank you for joining us, and if anything comes to you about anyone who might have any knowledge of what Ms. Morrow wanted to tell me, please call. Nan will give you the phone numbers where both of us can be reached.”
Twenty-five minutes later she was stepping off the elevator to the Pediatric floor of the hospital. When she stopped at the nurses’ desk, a slender woman with salt-and-pepper hair was talking to Rita Greenberg. Monica noticed that Rita looked relieved to see her.
“You’d better speak to Sally’s doctor,” she told the woman. “Dr. Farrell, this is Susan Gannon.”
Susan turned to face Monica. “Doctor, my former husband, Peter Gannon, is the father of Sally Carter. I know he is barred from visiting her, but I am not. Will you take me to her, please?”
48
On Saturday morning at ten o’clock Detective Carl Forrest was seated in his car, parked directly opposite Greenwich Village Hospital. He had worked with John Hartman before his retirement. It was Forrest who had checked for fingerprints on the picture that Hartman had brought in, the one that had been sent anonymously to Monica Farrell’s office.
After Monica’s narrow escape from death, it was Forrest, again at Hartman’s urging, who had studied the security tapes of Greenwich Village Hospital, the ones that covered the time that Monica left the hospital on Thursday evening, minutes before her encounter with the bus.
Accompanying him was his partner, Jim Whelan. They were studying the pictures they had just taken of a young policewoman standing on the steps of the hospital. They had asked her to stand in the same spot where Monica had been photographed so that they could analyze the location from which the shot had been taken.
Forrest had his computer on his lap and printed out the pictures, then with a grunt of satisfaction, he handed them to Whelan. “Compare them, Jim,” he said, as he held up the snapshot that had been mailed to Monica’s office. “Whoever took the picture of the doctor with the kid in her arms was probably sitting in a car parked right here. The angle is exactly right. I thought at first that John Hartman was wasting our time, but I don’t think that anymore. Let’s review it.”
“Thursday evening the hospital security cameras show the doctor coming down the steps. Next frame we see someone getting out of his car, parked in this spot, following her down the street. This guy is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, gloves, and dark glasses, the exact description the old lady gave us. The break of the century is that fifteen minutes later the security camera shows his car being towed because the meter ran out! Now we know it was reclaimed by Sammy Barber, a two-bit thug who was acquitted of being a hitman.”
“Acquitted because he or one of his slimy friends either threatened or paid off jurors,” Whelan remembered. “They don’t come any guiltier than he was. I did a lot of work on that case. I’d love to find a way to nail him now.”
The policewoman who had posed for the picture came over. A traffic officer, she had agreed to give up a few minutes of her break to help them out. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“You bet,” Forrest told her. “Thanks.”
