Until Death

by Alicia Rasley

  I noticed that he was showing more enthusiasm than he’d exhibited for psychiatry, and, emboldened, I said so.

  He took a minute before answering. “Well, there’s no aftermath. You do your job and you’re done, and someone else takes over then.” There was something weary and sad in that answer, but before I could point that out, he changed the subject. “So you’ve ruled out remarriage. Does that mean you’re through with men altogether?”

  I gave him a sharp glance and considered telling him my love life, or lack thereof, was none of his business. Then again, he already knew more about my love life than anyone but maybe Barb, so I shrugged. “Not altogether. A man is handy to have around on occasion. Just not all the time, and not in my house, and not in my bank account, and not in my family.” I paused, thinking it over. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m never again going to put a man at the center of my life.”

  “So who gets to be there instead?”

  “Well, my son. That’s what kids are for, and it’s not like there’s any choice,” I added with a laugh.

  “How old is he? Fifteen? You’ll have a choice pretty quick. He’ll be graduating soon.”

  Tommy’s graduation seemed to me like a desert mirage, always the same distance ahead no matter how far we traveled, so I didn’t give this much mind. “Not soon enough to make any difference now. Anyway, there’s not a lot of room for a man. But that’s okay, because there are plenty of men who don’t want to take up much space.” I said that bravely, but I have to admit, the only men I’d met who didn’t take up a lot of space weren’t worth sharing any space at all.

  I told myself that was just fine. I missed sex, but I didn’t miss sharing a bathroom. I hadn’t yet gotten to the point where the desire for sex would make me forget the hassles that men brought along with them, and if I did, well, I’d just take the sex, and avoid the hassles.

  That cheered me up, and I smiled at Dr. Warren. “Romantic love is overrated, anyway, don’t you think? Not as a rule of life, but as a way to find happiness. It’s more a direct route to unhappiness, in fact.”

  “Really. Then why do you think Byron wrote sonnets and the Beatles sang love songs?”

  “Because it sells. That’s why.” I wasn’t sure how I, the one who never missed a romantic movie on the Classics Channel, ended up sounding Mae-West cynical, while he listened to marital horror stories every day and seemed still to believe in love. But he was in a completely different position from me. His wife had died tragically. He didn’t have to try to hate the person he used to love, or feel stupid for still sort of loving.

  No, I realized. He had to feel guilty for ever loving again. I wondered if he would even try.

  It would be a shame, I thought, stealing a glance at him, if a good-looking doctor like Mike Warren gave up on love forever. More than a shame. A travesty.

  Maybe he’d already started dating. If the single nurses at the hospital had any sense, they’d start putting cookies in his locker and notes under his windshield. Not that I’d advise anything so retro, but you could hardly blame a woman for going after him while he was eligible. It would only be a matter of time before . . .

  With a wrench I tore my thoughts away from Dr. Warren’s love life and back to my own, not that I had one. “Aren’t you going to say that it’s just because I haven’t met the right man yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think it goes without saying. Cynics are failed romantics, just waiting for a chance to change their minds back. It’s only a matter of time.”

  That irritated me. He had to be reading my thoughts, to be repeating my very words that way. “You said you didn’t want this to be a shrink/client relationship. And yet, there you are, acting like the all-wise shrink who knows everything about me and my subconscious motives.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that this is the way I really am, and I became a psychiatrist because of it? That it’s not an ‘act’?”

  I hadn’t considered that. “You mean, even before your training, you were intrusive, interrogative, and infuriating?”

  “The technical term is emotionally intelligent.”

  I heard a smile in that answer; otherwise I would have added “arrogant” to my list. “If you’re emotionally intelligent, how come you annoy me so much?”

  “Because that’s what works with you. I sense that. You need to be challenged.”

  “You’re going to say that’s why I’m always bothering you with requests.”

  “Demands.”

  “Whatever. Because I’m subconsciously seeking that challenge?”

  Mike Warren wasn’t one to answer a question with an answer. “Is that why?”

  Something dry in his tone made me peer more closely at him. I didn’t know what I saw in his face. “Well, it could be worse. You could be thinking I’m subconsciously, I don’t know, like pursuing you.” Like those nurses and their cookies, only they were doing it consciously.

  His expression didn’t change, so I added hastily, “Not that that’s an issue. Considering our past, and you know, the ethics of all that. Right?”

  “The ethics. Of what?”

  He was doing it again. Making me do all the explaining. And I’d explained enough already about this awkward subject of relationships and marriage and the past. I replied, the heat blazing in my face, “Never mind. I just meant, you know, you used to be my marriage counselor. So no need to worry.”

  “I am not, of course, any longer.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s go.”

  The faxes were waiting for us on our return. All business now, Mike glanced at them, then handed them over. I put the police report aside for a later time and studied the autopsy. It might as well have been written in a foreign language. “Can you go over this with me?”

  He took the report back and held it up to the tree-filtered light coming in through the window. “It’s been almost twenty years since I took a pathology class. Don’t expect CSI Miami here.” Scanning it, he added, “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, where in here does it say how drunk he was?”

  “Boy, this is really bringing back that morgue rotation. I’ll probably have nightmares tonight. Alcohol content . . . let’s see. Probably the equivalent of one drink.”

  “Is that enough to test positive for drunk driving?”

  “Not for a grown man.”

  “So what about that antidepressant? I didn’t even see it mentioned.”

  “That’s because they found none in his system. And no narcotics, no sedatives, no

  tranquilizers.”

  Did I detect a trace of relief? Maybe I’d guessed right, and Mike really had been worrying about the effects of that drug. “So you’re saying he hadn’t taken the antidepressant?”

  “Not that afternoon, at least. It takes eight hours to get out of the system.”

  So Don’s erratic travels on the last day of his life—to my house, to the drugstore to get a card for me, to Tracy’s house, to the pawnshop—weren’t fueled by psychoactive medication after all. “Maybe it means he wasn’t depressed anymore, so he didn’t take it.”

  “Could be.”

  It really was difficult to get a straight answer from this man. But I could work around that. I got up and went around the desk to peer over his shoulder. “Is there anything else I ought to note in here?” Maybe traces of a slow-acting poison like arsenic?

  “How about that?” He pointed to a section with a lot of percentage signs. His hands were more battered than I’d expect in a doctor, calloused and strong. Carpenter’s daughter that I was, I even recognized the telltale scars on his knuckles. I almost reached to touch the shiny raised skin, then drew back just in time.

  “What’s that?” I asked, meaning the report section, but also, perhaps, that scar.


  “Stomach contents. Might be interesting.”

  I couldn’t imagine they’d be anything but grotesque, but I told myself to be brave. “What does that mean?” I leaned closer to see, but realized that my blouse pocket was brushing his shoulder, and withdrew—not hastily as if in a panic, but gracefully, easing back towards the front of the desk.

  He waited until I was back in my own chair to reply. “He didn’t eat much. Not a full dinner.”

  Feeling safer now, I ventured a macabre joke. “So does it look like Mexican?”

  I didn’t expect an answer—oh, well, maybe one of those reluctant smiles—but I forgot he was fluent in that medicalese. He actually studied the paper again. “Lots of garlic. I’d say Italian.” He looked up from the paper, surveying me again with that sardonic expression I hadn’t seen for a while. “There you go. She probably made him eat squid cooked in its own ink. All the evidence you need to hang her high.”

  I should have known. Our moment of accord had lasted only an hour. Then the Dr. Warren I knew so well came back to . . . what did he call it? Challenge me? Drive me crazy was more like it.

  I grabbed the autopsy report out of his hand and stuffed it into my purse. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. I’ll see myself out.”

  In the mail at home was a letter from my attorney. The hearing with the insurance company’s appeals committee was set for two weeks away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  CLOSE PERUSAL OF the police report yielded nothing new, except that they’d worked really hard not to notice anything non-accidental about the fall. I knew I didn’t have enough to convince the police. Not even enough to scare the insurance company. I had no choice. I had to confront Wanda and get her to confess on tape. Hey, maybe it would work. Maybe she was proud of it. Maybe she’d brag about it.

  So, though the very notion made my insides squish weakly, I planned this next—and, I hoped, last—phase of my investigation. As Mike Warren warned me, if there was a murderer, anyone who knew would be in danger. Caution was in order. I would meet her in a public place. And I’d leave word where I was and what I was doing, just in case.

  First I typed out a letter laying out my plan to meet Wanda and all the evidence against her. I shoved it into an envelope and wrote on it, “In the event that I die or disappear.” Then, as I was about to write my attorney’s name on it, I hesitated. She was the sort of well-meaning buttinsky who would open it right away, and then I’d get a call suggesting a shrink to deal with this little paranoia problem of mine. So I scrawled Dr. Warren across the envelope. He knew about my plans to nab Wanda, so this letter would not give him any pause. And he already thought I was paranoid.

  Besides, I’d promised to let him know if I planned anything he might consider rash.

  This, I knew, he’d consider rash.

  Then I made the call. I just said, “This is Megan Ross. I have something important to discuss. Meet me at noon in the food court of the Eastwood mall?”

  Wanda’s response was hard, immediate, and predictable. “Why?”

  “It’s about how Don died. Or would you prefer me to take it to the police?”

  “You’d do something that stupid? Okay. Okay. You better come alone.”

  “You too. I don’t want to see that bruiser boyfriend hanging around the parking lot.”

  She hung up hard, and I gathered up the envelope and my phone. First stop was Mike’s office to leave the envelope. The receptionist cringed away, her hand on the phone. “The doctor isn’t here. He’s got rounds at the psychiatric ward this morning.”

  Good. Now I could say honestly that I tried to hand this to him personally, but he was gone. I waved a farewell and headed out to meet a murderer.

  Wanda was late. She was trying to make me sweat. I wasn’t going to play her game, so I got up and got in line at the Steak and Shake stand. Only when I had an iced tea in my hand did I walk back towards the table I’d staked out next to the potted tree.

  And there she was. There was a Nordstrom’s bag in her hand and that hard look on her face. We took our seats in silence. We stared at each other, neither offering a greeting. With one hand in my purse, I surreptitiously pushed the record button on my phone. I flinched as I heard the soft burp, but saw no reaction from Wanda.

  “I know.” I didn’t care if it sounded pompous. It told her she hadn’t gotten away with it.

  “What do you know?”

  I lowered my voice, hoping that the recorder was sensitive enough to catch it. “I know that Don didn’t fall off that wall. I know that he was pushed.”

  It must have been a shock for her to hear it spoken out loud. But she didn’t look shocked. She said, “I want you to quit the hell making trouble for me.”

  “I’m not doing this to make trouble.” I meant that to sound sort of tough, but it came out as a half-apology.

  She recovered her sangfroid, sitting back in her chair as if bored. “I think you better stop making threats. My attorney will go to the police if you lay one finger on me or my son.”

  This rocked me. I was being accused of something I didn’t intend. “I’d never hurt your son.” An insidious voice inside my head whispered, Oh, yeah? So what do you call putting another of his parents in prison, if it’s not hurting her son?

  “Anyone gets hurt by your revenge, you’re not to blame? Even if Travis is only six and has had enough trouble in his life.”

  Guilt’s always been my default response to any accusation, the legacy of a Catholic girlhood. To cover it up, I replied hotly, “It’s not revenge. It’s justice.”

  “Destroying everything is justice? Just to get revenge for something that is no big deal?”

  She was calling murder no big deal. “Justice for Don is the only way to begin to make things right. It’s too bad that it might hurt your son, but let me remind you, my son has suffered plenty.”

  Her voice dropped viciously. “You should have thought of that before you killed his father.”

  All the noise around us was sucked into the vacuum of her last words. Finally, I heard my own faint voice. “Me? Kill Don?”

  “Yes!” She yanked something out of her Nordstrom’s bag. “Now I have your confession here on tape. So here’s where we deal, bitch. You don’t spill your guts and cop to an insanity plea that just drags us all in the mud, and you don’t come near my kid, and no one will ever hear this.”

  I couldn’t move. Some self-protective part of my brain was screaming, I said “I killed Don!” That’s what it’ll sound like. Grab her phone! The cynical part of my brain was saying, Oh, very good, Wanda. Frame me for your crime. But mostly, I was thinking, This is crazy. She’s crazy.

  I glanced around quickly to make sure that no one had heard Wanda’s crazy accusation and saw Mike Warren coming towards us. Wanda was whispering something furious, but fell silent as he approached. Her eyes narrowed in the typical gold-digger response to the approach of a good-looking man in professional dress, in this case surgical greens.

  He got to the table and in a single quick motion, grabbed her phone and flipped it off. She made a protest, then, after getting the blast of his glare, she let her hand drop.

  I was filled with conflicting emotions—annoyance, of course, that he kept showing up to save me, an unrequested knight errant; and, okay, relief, because with all his faults, Mike Warren was as sane as a male person could be, and he’d respond in that cool detached way, so much more effective than the half-squawks that my mouth kept trying to make. He’d make matchsticks of her self-serving accusation, and maybe he’d drag me out of there and—

  And what? From the way he was looking from one of us to the other, he thought we were both hysterical females of the sort that Freud would have written up in his academic papers. But I reminded myself of the many secrets I’d let slip to this man and surreptitiously touched my phone whic
h was recording all this. Maybe he’d get her to confess.

  Then we’d have dueling confessions on tape. Now that would impress the police.

  He hooked a chair with his foot, pulled it over, and sat down. “Both of you. Don’t talk.”

  I couldn’t obey that even if I’d wanted to. I looked at his surgical greens, artistically spotted with what looked like real blood, and said, “Where did you come from?”

  “The hospital.”

  Wanda was, for once, at a total loss. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Mike Warren. I was your husband’s doctor.”

  She glanced at his shirt, at the spots of blood, and something that looked like horror dawned in her eyes. Guilt, I told myself. She stammered, “You were with him when he died?”

  “No. I was his psychiatrist.”

  “But the blood—”

  “I work in an emergency room too.”

  I had to hurry things along before my phone battery ran out. “So what are you doing here?”

  “My receptionist thought you left a suicide note, or a threat, so I had her read it to me.”

  Oh, right. The note mentioned the meeting, in case I never came back. “So you came.”

  “What in hell were you thinking?”

  “She’s thinking,” Wanda snapped, “of going to the police.”

  It came back to me suddenly. “She thinks I killed Don. Tell her she’s crazy.”

  Mike Warren didn’t take direction well. All he did was ask her, “Why don’t you want her to go the police? If she murdered Don?”

  This would sound pretty bad on that tape of Wanda’s, but I remembered Mike had turned off her phone, and I could edit my own audio if this sounded incriminating. “Good question,” I chimed in. “If you really believed I killed Don, you’d be heading to the police yourself.”

  She favored me with a withering look. “Like your son and mine haven’t suffered enough? You know, princess, where I come from, the police aren’t our friends. They’re the enemy. Or they think we’re the enemy.”