She nodded. “I see,” she said impassively. “If you’re here because you think his mother may have had something to do with it, you’d better think again. I can tell you that she was in the hospital for four solid weeks before I dismissed her on Tuesday. It would have been impossible for her to have been involved.”
“Dorothy Nielsen isn’t under suspicion,” I said quietly. “Actually, I’m a little surprised to hear you say she might be.”
Dr. Leonard bristled at that. “I said no such thing! Why are you here, then? Why did you want to talk to me?”
“How did Dorothy Nielsen break her hip?” I asked.
Dr. Leonard didn’t reply immediately. When she did, her answer was subdued, controlled. “She said she fell down some stairs.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked Dr. Leonard gave me a long appraising glance. “Tell me once again: Mrs. Nielsen is in no way under suspicion?”
“No, she’s not.”
“In that case, I suppose I could go ahead and tell you what I think without betraying my doctor /patient relationship. Remember, this is only speculation on my part. I’m convinced she was pushed. She claimed she fell, of course, but I don’t believe it. Her other injuries weren’t consistent with a fall.”
“What other injuries?”
“Bruises on her arms and shoulders. A cut on her face just below her eye. I asked her about it, but she denied it. She’s always denied it.”
“What do you mean, ”always“?”
Dr. Leonard smiled. “Dorothy Nielsen has been my patient for almost forty years now, Detective Beaumont, since before Freddy was born. In fact, she came to me with that first broken wrist while she was pregnant with him.”
“She broke her wrist? How?”
The doctor shook her head. “I don’t remember now exactly what she said, it’s such a long time ago, but she’s always claimed to be accident prone. It wasn’t until much later that I began to have some inkling of what was really going on.”
Slowly an important piece of Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s background shifted into place. They say physical abuse runs in families, passed on from generation to generation like some genetically linked disease. “You mean her husband was abusive? He beat her?”
“From the very beginning, I would imagine, and probably Freddie too,” Dr. Leonard replied. “I could never understand why a woman like Dorothy would stay with a man like that. It’s possible that she felt she had married above her station, and she wanted to stay there-nice house, nice clothes, all the usual amenities. She often talked about how grateful she was to be married to a professional man. That’s what she called him.”
“Her husband?”
Dr. Leonard nodded. “She said the same thing about Freddie eventually, about how proud she was that he had followed in his father’s footsteps and become a dentist, too.”
“How many times did you treat her over the years?”
“For injuries? I don’t remember. Numerous times. I could look up her records. I haven’t seen very much of her in the last few years, though, not since Fred Senior died. I was surprised when she showed up in the emergency room a few weeks ago.
“Of course, awareness about this kind of abuse is much higher now. It’s much more out in the open nowadays than it used to be,” Dr. Leonard continued. “Even so, some women get mixed up with the same type of man over and over. I asked her that night in the emergency room if she had remarried, but she said no, that she lived with her son and daughter-in-law.”
“Did she tell you that the daughter-in-law had just taken the two grandchildren and run away to a shelter, a domestic violence shelter?”
The bushy eyebrows waggled again. “No. Dorothy didn’t tell me that, but one of her sisters did. We finally had managed to get Dorothy over a serious bladder infection, and I was trying to arrange for her release. I wanted her to go to a nursing home for a while rather than back into the same abusive environment with her son, but Dorothy was adamant. She wanted to return to her own home.”
“Did you see her son while she was here in the hospital?”
“Freddie? Of course,” Dr. Leonard answered. “He was very solicitous and accommodating the whole time his mother was hospitalized. He kept saying all the right words, that we should do whatever his mother needed to get well, that we should spare no expense. As far as he was concerned, money was no object. He’d pay the bill, no questions asked. He brought her flowers constantly and insisted that she have a private room. That kind of thing is standard, by the way.”
“Private rooms?”
“No, no, no. That kind of behavior. Abusers do that, trying to get back in the victim’s good graces. It usually works.”
“You said you talked to Mrs. Nielsen’s sister?”
“Both of them. When Dorothy absolutely refused to let me put her in a nursing home, I had to do something. I couldn’t send her back home with her son. Another episode like that last one could very well kill her. This was bad enough.”
“So you asked Dorothy’s sisters if she could stay with them.”
“That’s right. I called and had them both come down to my office Saturday morning. I wanted to discuss my concerns with them.
That’s when they told me about the wife. I’m sure that’s what sparked the attack on Dorothy-anger and frustration that his wife had somehow managed to slip out of his clutches, that she was no longer under his complete control.“
“Did you tell them what you thought had happened?” I asked.
“I certainly did.”
“How did they take it?” I asked.
“They were shocked, of course,” Dr. Leonard replied. “Very upset, both of them.”
“How upset were they? What did they say?” I asked.
Dr. Leonard paused, her face caught in the startled expression of someone who has just remembered something they had forgotten. “Why, forevermore!” she exclaimed. “I blanked it out completely until just this minute when you asked.”
“Blanked out what?”
“One of them swore about it. I was shocked. I’d never heard that kind of talk from any of them. She said he should be taken care of once and for all.”
“Could what she said possibly be construed as a threat? Tell me what she said,” I urged.
“You want me to repeat it exactly?” Dr. Leonard asked.
I nodded. “Word for word.”
Dr. Leonard sighed. “Let me think a minute. I believe she said, ”Somebody should kill that mother-fucking son of a bitch!“ ”
Even as she spoke the words, Dr. Leonard seemed as surprised to hear them coming from her own lips as she had been when Rachel or Daisy had used them the first time. From the looks and sound of Dr. Leonard, I doubted she personally allowed herself anything stronger than an occasional darn.
“Which one of them said it?” I asked. “Rachel or Daisy?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. They look so much alike that I can never keep them straight. The one said it. The other one said, ”Don’t be ridiculous.“”
“What happened next?”
“We talked for a while longer. They told me they’d see to it that Dorothy was taken care of, that they wouldn’t let any more harm come to her. I told them I’d release her on Tuesday morning, if they could pick her up then. They needed that much time to build a wheelchair ramp, rent a bed, and get Dorothy’s things moved into their house. After we finished making arrangements, they left.”
“Were they still upset?”
Dr. Leonard nodded. “Yes indeed. I heard them arguing in the hallway outside my door while they waited for
