Killer Tied

by Lesley A. Diehl

  I was more than a little certain Irene would tell her story to Frida, because I would be paying a visit to her this morning to ask a few more questions about her daughter, questions we had let slip by the other night. I wasn’t trying to be unkind to Irene, but she hadn’t told us the entire story. I understood she wanted to protect her daughter, but the daughter needed more from her mother than Irene could provide.

  “How nice of you to stop by, Eve,” said Irene when she opened the motel room door to me later that morning. She tried a welcoming smile, but it barely lifted the corners of her mouth. She knew my visit wasn’t social, and the stiffening of her shoulders told me she was bracing herself for what was to come.

  There was no sense in making the woman suffer any longer. She had been through so much. It was time to bring out the whole story. I was just the one to get at it, so I asked the question that should have been asked the other night.

  “Who was Brenda’s father?”

  Irene and Don both gaped at me, astonished.

  “Why do you ask?” said Irene, recovering enough to gesture toward the sofa. I shook my head and continued standing.

  “You know why I’m asking. Here’s another question that you should answer: did Brenda know about her father. Did she know who he was?”

  “No! I would never have told her about him. He wasn’t a part of our lives.”

  “Well, no, at least not until someone paid you a visit and began asking you questions about her. You should have told us.”

  “And I told them what I had told everyone—that she was dead.” The words seemed to slip out, and when she realized what she’d said, her hand flew to her mouth as if she could shove them back in.

  My question about someone visiting her was a shot in the dark, one that paid off.

  “Tell me about them. Who were they and what did they want?”

  Irene looked at Don for encouragement.

  “It was a few weeks ago. They said they were from Bay Ridge Hospital. That was the last facility where I placed Brenda before she disappeared. They showed me some official identification indicating they were from the accounting office at the hospital. They said they were tying up loose ends and trying to bring some closure on patients they had lost track of. Brenda was one. They wanted to know where she was, and when I told them she had died, they wanted to know the circumstances. They seemed satisfied with the story about her death and were about to leave when one of them told me it would help if I could show them a copy of her death certificate. I was terrified. I have no death certificate, you know.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I told them the truth, that she had disappeared many years ago. They assured me that they would enter ‘unknown’ in the files. I haven’t heard from them since.”

  “You didn’t think their visit was important enough to tell us about it the other night?”

  “What difference does it make now? She’s alive.” Irene wrung her hands and her eyes darted around the room in anxiety.

  “Let’s get back to my original question. Who was Brenda’s father?”

  “I’d rather not say. What does it matter after all these years? He never took an interest in her. In fact, I never saw him, once he found out I was pregnant. That was a pretty clear message he wasn’t interested.”

  “Maybe he is now.”

  Irene smiled. “I don’t think so. I read his obituary in the Hartford papers. His chance know his daughter is long past.”

  Irene assured me she and Don would return to Frida’s office today to tell the detective what they knew about Brenda. Even now, it was clear the story of Brenda’s birth and her disappearance made Irene uncomfortable, bringing up memories that were unpleasant. She blamed herself for Brenda’s difficulties, and no amount of reassurance that she had done all a mother could do would dissuade her from that guilt. She believed finding her daughter alive would give her a second chance to be a good mother. Irene felt the death of Brenda’s father made his identity all the more irrelevant. Something told me it wasn’t, but the closed look on her face said she didn’t want to pursue the subject.

  Like Irene, who blamed herself for being a bad mother to Brenda and yearned for a chance to redo the relationship, I had my own guilt to deal with. I knew it wasn’t my fault that Frida and her partner showed up just when my father-in-law decided he could trust me, but I kept replaying the incident again and again in my mind, hoping for a different outcome. It all came out the same way: my chance to find out what he knew had come and gone.

  I was lost in thought as Nappi and I sped down the Beeline Highway toward the airport in West Palm the next morning.

  “You’re quiet, Eve,” he said. “Is everything all right? You’re not feeling sick, are you?”

  “Physically, I feel fine. In fact, I can’t think of when I felt better.” It was true. My appetite was back, the nausea gone, fatigue settling in only when I didn’t get at least eight hours of sleep at night. Of course, a nap in the afternoon could make up the difference.

  I recounted my conversation with Irene. “I know she thinks the identity of Brenda’s father is irrelevant, and I can’t push her into revealing his name without telling her why I think it is important. This whole thing has made her both frantic and hopeful. I don’t think she needs any more aggravation right now.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Nappi.

  “I’d bet a pair of my stiletto heels that Brenda’s father is from a prominent Connecticut family. Why else has Irene kept a lid on his identity for so long? If he’s just some average dude, why the big secret, but if he’s someone important, from a family with influence and an image to maintain, that’s another matter.”

  “He could be from the very family with connections to the law firm named by my friend Freddie,” Nappi said. “Maybe I was too quick to scare Freddie off. Now who will the firm hire to find Brenda?”

  “You think the family is that interested in Brenda?”

  He snorted. “You know as well as I do that Freddie wasn’t hired to find her, but to eliminate her.”

  “Did she see something that made her a threat to the family?” I asked.

  “I think it might be simpler than that. She is someone—her father’s heir, as is her daughter Eleanor. Someone in that family isn’t keen on sharing the wealth with either of them.”

  We had veered onto the turnpike at Jog Road. I watched the scenery go by, expensive houses and condos protected by high walls from the world of ordinary folks.

  “Isn’t it interesting,” I said, “that Brenda’s so-called delusions of someone stalking her were probably correct? Maybe the woman isn’t as crazy as everyone has made her out to be. You might have difficulty shaking the truth out of the law firm. Lawyer-client privilege and all that.”

  “Privilege between a mob guy and this hoity-toity law firm? Are we talking about the same client here? Freddie the Bull? I can be very persuasive, you know,” Nappi said, a smile in his voice.

  “Hmm, but you’ll be taking on a law firm. They know the law and can use it against you.”

  “I know a lot of lawyers, most of them better at what they do than the firm that hired Freddie.”

  We pulled into the long-term parking garage and dropped off the car. As we made our way into the terminal, Nappi put his hand on my arm. I stopped walking and faced him. “You’re going to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”

  “Hear me out before you say anything.” He looked around at the people scurrying past with their luggage, parents trying to restrain children cranky from lack of sleep, while passengers hurried toward the gates, worried they would be delayed in a security line and miss their flight. He pointed toward a nearby restaurant. “In there.”

  We took a seat in the corner where the noise was less deafening than out near the concourse.

  Nappi signaled to the waiter and ordered two iced teas.

  “It’s never a good thing to obtain your money by hiring the likes of Fred
die. That says to me these people are desperate. They don’t want anyone to get in their way. By taking on this case, you’re getting in their way, Eve. I can’t let you take point on this one. I’ll find out the name,” he held up his hand to stop me from interrupting, “and follow up on it.”

  “What do you want me to do? Go to a matinee while you use your powers of persuasion to find out who is trying to kill Eleanor and her mother? This is my case, you know.”

  “I think you’re defining ‘case’ too narrowly. Don’t you want to talk with Dr. Sandhurst again? Isn’t that part of the case?”

  “It looks as if that is about me and Selma, not about Brenda.”

  “You don’t know that for certain, do you?”

  He was right. Mary Appel as a patient in Hopkins Hospital was something I wanted to know more about, whether it concerned my mother or Eleanor’s. Or both.

  Chapter 16

  There was something to be said for delegating parts of the investigation to others, as Grandy had urged me to do, or dividing the case in half, as Nappi liked to define it. The case, however, was much more complex than Nappi determining the name of Brenda’s father and finding out who was trying to find her and my following up on the Hopkins Hospital connection. There was still the matter of who killed Mr. Montrose and why, and what bothered me most of all: where were Eleanor and her mother? My concern about Eleanor brought to mind Jerry. Neither Nappi nor I had been able to get in touch with him for days. His phone went to voicemail and later to a message saying the mailbox was full. What trouble had he gotten himself into now? Did he drag Eleanor into it with him? This was the question I asked Nappi as we deplaned in Hartford.

  He shook his head and said, “Later.”

  True to the pact we had established with Chief Raleigh in Tillahook, I called the chief and updated him on what we were doing.

  “Tell Mr. Napolitani thanks for ridding the town of those goons. No sign of them since you left,” said Chief Raleigh.

  “Nappi had a chat with them and warned them off looking for the Montrose family. He and I had to fly back to Florida, but we’re back in Connecticut now. We have some leads here to follow.

  “I’ll keep you posted on what we find here, and you’ll do the same. I’d like to think that Eleanor’s mother might want to get in touch with her daughter, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. No one has set eyes on her since she left for Florida.” I decided he didn’t need to know that Eleanor had dropped out of sight and we were looking for her. It made us look too much like rank amateurs if we couldn’t keep track of an important witness.

  We disconnected.

  Nappi took the car we’d left at the airport, and I rented a compact. While waiting for the bus to take me to the car-rental place located off-terminal, I made a call I wasn’t happy to make. The person I contacted, however, seemed to understand my request and didn’t seem surprised to hear from me. We arranged a meeting at Hopkins after lunch.

  On the way to Hopkins, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant I remembered my parents and I often visited. It overlooked Long Island Sound, today shrouded in low-lying clouds. The view was gray, visibility limited to the rocky shore nearby, but the Reuben sandwiches were as gigantic as I remembered. I gave the serving my best and left only a small remnant of crust on the plate.

  I arrived at Hopkins several minutes before one in the afternoon. Selma’s secretary told me she was in, but when she buzzed Selma, she was told she didn’t have time to see me.

  “Tell her I will let the hospital administrative board know she talked about patient files with me.”

  The secretary relayed the information. Selma opened the door to her office, her face like a Nor’easter. She beckoned to me to come in.

  “I guess my threat scared you, huh?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s your word against mine.” She didn’t ask me to sit, and she didn’t either. She wanted this to be a brief meeting.

  “There is the question of how I knew about those files if you didn’t tell me.”

  “A shot in the dark from a daughter who knew how crazy her mother was. That’s all.” She tilted her head back and to one side and crossed her arms over her chest, a posture of smug certainty. “Now, I suggest you leave or I’ll be forced to call security and—”

  “And they’ll slap me in a strait jacket and throw me in a padded cell?”

  She laughed. “You don’t know much about facilities for mentally ill people, do you?”

  “Well,” I said, standing my ground, “if the administrative board won’t move you, then how about someone else?”

  “The only person who could sway me into releasing those files would be your mother, Eve, and I understand she’s dead.”

  “No, there’s someone else, Selma.” Dr. Sandhurst, Selma’s father, appeared in the doorway, a scowl on his face. “You seem to have crossed some ethical lines here, my dear,” he said. “You told Eve about patient files, violating patient confidentiality, and you compromised me at the same time.”

  Selma reached behind her and steadied herself by grabbing her office chair. “I never implicated you, Dad. I never would do that.”

  “No? Well, the files have been compromised, and Eve is willing to go to the board to tell them that. If they find out what you said, it will be your job here, and you’ll never work anywhere else.”

  I thought Selma might break down in tears. Her hands shook and her face was pale. Her glance moved from her father to me. “Eve,” she begged, “please don’t do this to me. I’m sorry I said what I did. Can’t we just forget about it?”

  “No, we cannot forget about it. That file is important to me, not just because it has my mother’s name on it, but because there are lives at stake, lives that are intertwined with that of the woman in that file. I could get a court order to have it released, but if I do that, I won’t keep my mouth shut about how I came to hear about it.”

  “What do you want?” she asked, her mouth drawn in an ugly, tight line.

  “I’ll give the two of you some time together to talk about it. I expect to hear from you tomorrow.”

  I could have convinced Selma to show me the file, but she would have done so grudgingly. The knowledge that she had failed in her father’s eyes would work far better. Selma would fall all over herself to be helpful if her father told her to cooperate. I patted myself on the back for calling him this morning before I approached her.

  What did I think I would find in that file? I wasn’t certain, but I needed to know how old the woman named Mary Appel was when admitted to Hopkins, what year she had entered treatment, and how long she had stayed. I was taking a chance, hoping that I wouldn’t find the Mary Appel, the woman who was my mother.

  The call came the next morning. I was awake and feeling perky, satisfied that things would go my way with respect to the file. Man, was I wrong.

  “It’s Selma,” she said in a sulky voice. “I can’t let you see the file.”

  “What?”

  “It’s gone.”

  What was she trying to pull? “It was there just the other day. You were snooping into it before we met for dinner. Remember?”

  “I know, but when Dad and I went to retrieve it yesterday, it was gone.”

  “It took you almost a day to get back to me and tell me this.”

  “You gave us twenty-four hours.”

  “I gave you twenty-four hours, but not to lose the file. Are you at the hospital now?” I asked.

  “Yes. Dad’s here with me. What are you going to do?” She sounded frightened.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I called Nappi in his room. He had contacted me when he got in late last night, and we were planning to meet this morning over breakfast to compare notes.

  “Are you awake?” I asked him. “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but—”

  “I’m having my second cup of coffee. I had room service send up coffee and pastries. Come on over. We can talk.”

  “Oh, you’re not going
to believe what happened to me just now,” I said, but the line had gone dead.

  I grabbed a quick shower and was at Nappi’s door in less than ten minutes. Let Selma stew over the lost file. It wasn’t likely it would reappear on its own. I was certain she and her father were working hard on determining how they would handle this. I couldn’t imagine any story with an ending that let Selma or the institution off the hook. The file was gone.

  When I told Nappi about the missing file, he said, “I’m not surprised. This case is turning out to be uglier than I thought, but let’s set aside what I know and focus on that file. Someone had to have taken it, but why?”

  “And who?”

  I chugged a cup of decaf and grabbed a croissant. “I want you with me when I talk to the Doctors Sandhurst.” If they were lying about anything to do with that file, Nappi could use his persuasive personality to extract the truth from them.

  I could tell by the drawn expressions on their faces that they weren’t lying. Both of them looked as if they hadn’t slept at all. They’d discovered last night the file was gone, but waited until this morning to tell me. Selma seemed to have figured out when the file went missing and how it happened, or so she said.

  “We had our yearly audit last week. The auditors were in and out of my office for several days.”

  “They wouldn’t have reason to look at confidential patient files, would they?” I asked.

  “No, but the files are all here, and the auditors were in my office for the day. The patient records were locked.” Selma gestured at the file cabinets that lined one side of the room.

  “Were they broken into?” asked Nappi. “I don’t see any evidence of forced entry.” His gaze traveled over the cabinets, and he stepped across the room to get a closer look at them.

  “No, but I suppose someone could have gotten a key …” began Selma.

  “How? Who?” I spit out the questions.

  “I don’t know. One of the auditors.”