by Leslie Glass
“But certainly many years have passed since the patient’s analysis and termination with you. How could it possibly have any bearing on his suicide now?” Jason was puzzled.
“I put the file together for you. I want you to take it.”
“Clara, what exactly am I looking for?”
“I started treatment with him eighteen years ago. I handled the case correctly. Hal was my supervisor throughout. I did nothing without his approval. We did everything by the book. You have no conflict of interest here, no axe to grind. You’re respected. I have confidence in you.” She spread her hands out palms-up on the desk, as if she had answered his question.
“What is there for the insurance company to hang their case on? I can’t help you unless I know what the issue is,” Jason insisted.
Clara turned her hands over and studied her manicure. “All I want is for you to review the original file. It’s not a hard one, Jason. I want you to sit in on the meetings with the lawyers as my consultant, take Dickey’s place as Quality Assurance in this matter, be my liaison with the police. If it all works out well, as I expect it will, you’ll be in an excellent position for—well, we’ll talk about that later.”
“I’ll review your old file and examine the case.…” Jason said slowly.
“And talk to the police?” Clara asked. “My office has put in several calls, but they haven’t been returned.” Clara’s eyes were on him, bright with her conviction that he could straighten out this mess.
“I will call the police,” he heard himself promising.
“I’m counting on you, Jason. I know you’re good.”
Jason’s empty stomach heaved. There had to be more to this than Clara told him. Maybe the gossip that Clara had been sleeping with Cowles was true. Jason’s instincts told him to avoid the whole thing. He longed for escape from another police investigation and direct involvement in a messy hospital scandal. All he wanted was to do things New Yorkers never do. He wanted to meet his wife at the airport, make love to her, have a normal life.
Clara pushed her chair back and pulled open her desk drawer. Eyes still on Jason, she reached inside. Then she screamed and snatched her hand back.
“Oh, my God!” She held her hand out, staring in shock at the deep cut in the fleshy part of her palm. Blood dripped all over her green blotter.
Jason lurched to his feet. “What—?”
“I’ve been stabbed. Get me some water,” Clara commanded, pointing at a door. She kept her bleeding hand extended.
Behind the door, Jason found a small kitchen and filled a glass for her. He grabbed some paper towels. When he returned to her office, there was blood all over Clara’s desk and she was raging at the device that had cut her.
“Look at this. Will you look at this!” she hissed. The file she’d been looking for was on her desk now. On top of it was a scalpel plunged from below through a condom so the deadly blade faced up.
“Let’s see. How bad is it?” Jason addressed his attention to the wound first.
“It’s nothing, just a scratch.” Impatiently, Clara grabbed the paper towels from him and pressed them to her hand, her attention fixed on the item on her desk.
“What’s that?” Jason leaned over.
Shocked, Clara was staring at the message, on hospital stationery, that lay under the now-bloodied scalpel and condom. In words sliced and pasted together from newspaper cutouts it said: YOU’LL PAY FOR THE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.
“This is really sick.”
Yes, it was, and very cleverly done. “How’s your hand?”
Clara shook her head, uninterested in the gash. “Look at this mess—my desk, my suit, everything.”
“I think we’d better call the police.”
“No! I’m going to have to deal with it.” Clara checked her watch and pushed her chair back. “Jason, I’d like to talk further with you, but I must get myself cleaned up.” Her eyes measured him coolly, then she added, “Look, I’d like you to keep this in confidence for the time being.”
Jason shook his head. “Does this have anything to do with the Cowles death?”
“No!” Clara’s eyes shot down to the smeared blood on her hands. “No!” she cried again. “No, absolutely not. This is—”
“Clara, someone is obviously trying to hurt you. You’re going to have to bring the police into the picture.”
“I can handle it. I don’t want the police involved in this.” Her expression hardened. “This isn’t going to happen again.”
“You know who it is?”
“I have a good idea.” With no sign of repugnance, she removed the device that had cut her and the stained message below it, slid them into the top drawer of her desk. Surprisingly, no blood had fallen on the Cowles file. She held it out to Jason. “Thank you for coming. I’m counting on you,” she said, handing him the file, then rising to walk him to the door.
Once again, Jason was taken aback. “But what are you going to do about this?” he asked. He gestured to her swaddled hand. Blood had soaked through the wad of towels. One drop soon slid down her wrist, toward her pale green cuff.
“I’m going to take care of it,” she said.
Jason had to leave. He had a patient waiting. But all morning he worried about whose blood was on Clara’s hands.
twenty-four
On Thursday, a match came in for the second set of fingerprints found in Raymond Cowles’s apartment. The ID slid out of the fax machine downstairs in the precinct around one P.M. A female uniform brought it up to the squad room and handed it to Sanchez.
April was on the phone with Lorna Cowles, who had already called and been put off twice that day.
“Ray died four days ago,” the widow complained. “And what are you doing about it? Nothing. I can’t give him a decent burial. You just put him in an icebox and left him there. You keep telling me you don’t have an autopsy report. Almost a week later and you don’t even know what happened to him. What’s the matter with you people? The insurance company wants to know the cause of death. What’s taking so long?”
Mike read the fax and swiveled in his chair to face April. He waved it in her face. She ignored him.
“Look, Mrs. Cowles. I have reason to believe we’ll have the postmortem report this afternoon.”
“Will you know who killed him then?” Lorna shrilled. On each of the three previous days April had told her there was no reason to believe anybody had killed him. But Lorna still wasn’t buying it. Maybe the insurance company wouldn’t pay up on a suicide. April couldn’t get a fix on Lorna. But who knew—maybe she was just piqued because her husband had jilted her for a man.
“I told you Ray was a devout Christian,” Lorna went on when April didn’t answer. “He couldn’t have killed himself; suicide was against everything he believed.”
“Well, look, that’s not for me to say. All I can tell you is I expect to have the M.E.’s report by the end of the day. I can let you know then.” She hung up.
“Look who our little computer check came up with.”
April took the fax from Mike and read it.
“Tom White?” she said, frowning.
“You know him?” Mike asked. “He was printed as an A.D.A.”
April wrinkled her nose. An Assistant District Attorney and a suicide that could be murder. She had just been getting to think nothing in this life could surprise her.
Mike looked smug. “Nice, huh?”
“An A.D.A. was with Raymond the night he died?”
“Looks like it.” Mike had a wolfish grin on his face.
“I don’t know him, do you?” April said. They worked with a lot of the D.A.s, knew many of them pretty well.
“Nope, but he didn’t come in to chat with us. That’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“You going to talk with him?”
“Yes. Want to come along?”
“No, you boys might do better alone. I’ll go down to the M.E.’s office to get the autopsy report.” April reached in her dr
awer for her shoulder bag.
“What makes you think it’s ready?”
April knew it was ready because someone in the M.E.’s office had promised her it would be finished around now. She shrugged. “I have a feeling it’s ready.”
Nothing got past him. He smiled. “Fine, I’ll give you a ride.”
A quick check of the D.A.’s office indicated that Thomas Neale White had moved into the private sector two years ago. The D.A.’s office was happy to give out the information that Thomas N. White was currently employed at Unified Agencies in the tower at Forty-second and Lexington. That just happened to be the insurance company that had employed Raymond Cowles and which had carried his life insurance policy.
The huge agency occupied five floors. On White’s floor there was no receptionist. The elevator hall was separated from the banks of offices on two sides by a locked glass door. If you didn’t happen to have a plastic card to slip into the lock, you couldn’t get in. There was a phone by the door for people to call, but there was no operator to give assistance. The phone was useful only if you knew the extension of the person you were visiting. Mike didn’t.
He’d located Tom White’s floor on the directory in the lobby. Upstairs he played with the phone by the glass door to no avail for a few minutes before somebody came out. Then he caught the door before it closed and went in. On the other side of the glass door there were miles of desks with no identifying names on them. There were no names by the doors of the offices extending along the corridors, either. It seemed that the people who ran the place didn’t want anybody to know who worked there.
Mike stopped at the first desk he came to and asked for Tom White.
“Last door on the left,” the woman replied without looking up.
At 2:07 P.M. Sanchez found the former assistant district attorney in his office. Tom White was a thin, dark-haired, youngish man as regular and conservative-looking as they come, with a gray suit, white shirt, navy-and-white-striped tie, and short haircut. White sat at his desk with his back to the window, motionless and staring at an untouched thick sandwich on a paper plate. From the smell of it, the white pasty stuff inside was tunafish.
The office was decorated with law books and files. The nondescript credenza and bookcase were loaded with them. So was the desk and one of the two chairs. The door was open. Mike wandered in.
White looked up. “Cop,” he said wearily as if he saw hundreds of plainclothes detectives every day.
Mike nodded. “Sergeant Sanchez.” He pulled out his ID. “I guess you were expecting me.”
White took the ID and studied it, then handed it back. He didn’t appear alarmed, just tired. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
Mike studied him before replying. A man in his middle to late thirties, just slightly leaner than a healthy person his age should be. His dark eyes were sunk deep and ringed with purple. His long face, with its good patrician cheekbones and strong chin, was colorless. White didn’t look particularly gay, but he did look haunted.
“You can tell me what happened between you and Raymond Cowles on the evening of October thirty-first,” Mike said. He was neither hard nor soft, just matter-of-fact.
White swallowed and pushed the paper plate across the desk. “Want some? I’m not hungry.”
“No thanks.”
“I didn’t think so. No one does. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for hours.”
Mike decided this was going to take a while. He sat in the empty chair and unbuttoned his jacket. The very first domestic violence call he’d gotten as a young cop had been between two men. Their yelling and screaming had compelled a neighbor to call the police. When Sanchez rang the doorbell, a young man in a flowered negligee and nothing else had answered the door. The young man had a black eye and blood pouring from his nose but he didn’t want any assistance from the police.
“Men,” he’d sobbed. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Go home, honey, I love him.”
It was the first time, but it wasn’t the last. Mike Sanchez knew gay guys could get as attached to each other as normal guys did to women, but it made him uncomfortable to imagine it. He also knew it wasn’t politically correct to make any distinctions between gay and normal. For gays it was normal to be gay. But it wasn’t normal to him. As he sat in Tom White’s office, he was made even more uneasy by the distinct feeling Cowles’s lover was more bereaved about his loss than his wife was.
That didn’t make White any less the sharp-eyed lawyer, though. And he knew cops. Mike was always just a little chagrined when people picked up so fast on the fact that he was a cop.
“You know Raymond Cowles is dead?” he asked.
White picked up a pen and played with it. “Yes, it’s common knowledge in the office.”
“You knew him well.”
“Yes.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Sure. As you can probably tell, this is the legal department. Ray was in Actuarial. Normally we wouldn’t work together, but six months ago we were assigned a special project.”
“Oh, what was that?”
“Ah, addressing the issue of underwriting risks for lethal illnesses. Ray provided the statistical input I was involved in several areas—drafting policy language, legislative, statutory, and other legal issues.”
Mike raised his eyebrow. “Is that for or against?”
“What?”
“Insuring potential AIDS victims.”
White’s pale face colored slightly. “It’s an issue. We don’t want to discriminate. We can’t lawfully discriminate. But the statistics show that insuring certain groups of high-risk individuals for lethal illnesses without establishing appropriate reserves and some spreading of the risk—for example, through a government-supported pool—can bankrupt a company. We were working on that.”
Uh-huh. “So you knew Ray pretty well.”
“We put a lot of time in on that project. In fact, it’s still in the works.” White’s voice wavered. He glanced down at the pen.
“Did you see him out of the office?”
“We had lunch together occasionally.”
“What about dinner?”
“We may have, a few times. I’m not married. I eat out a lot.”
“Did you know his wife?”
White looked blank. “No. I didn’t know he was married.” He shrugged. “Maybe he was married. I don’t recall.”
“Was Ray disturbed about anything recently?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“He didn’t talk to you?”
“No, we had a business relationship. We didn’t talk about personal things.”
“So you didn’t know he was depressed, worried, troubled about—anything?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“What about his homosexuality? Did you know anything about that?”
“What?”
“Ray was a homosexual. You didn’t know that?”
Tom White studied the pen in his hands. It was a Montblanc, fat and black. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“And you were having a relationship with him.”
“Look, I’m going to deny anything you suggest. So—”
Mike took a breath and let it out. “No, you look, Mr. White. We’re investigating a death. You’ve been in the D.A.’s office. You know how that is. We’re going to keep at it until we know what happened. Here are the facts. Ray died. You were with him the night he died. We know that.”
Actually, they didn’t know that, but his words had a certain effect. Tom White shuddered. For several seconds his long body jerked as if he were on the edge of an epileptic fit. But before Mike had a chance to offer assistance, the attorney had regained control of himself. He smiled grimly. “I have the right to remain silent,” he said.
“Look, your private life is your own business,” Mike countered. “All I want to know is what happened. If you didn’t kill him, it won’t go any further than this.”
“I didn’t k
ill him.”
“Okay, was it an accident then?”
“What? Was what an accident? I don’t even know how Ray died. Maybe you’d like to tell me.”
“He was found with a plastic bag over his head,” Mike said carefully.
Tom White closed his eyes. “I’ve been wondering,” he said to the dark.
“You could have paid us a visit. We would have filled you in.”
“You know I couldn’t do that.” White’s eyes popped open. He was back on the scene. “So a plastic bag was over his head. You don’t have a cause yet?”
“This afternoon.”
“I’d like to see the report.”
“I’m sure you would, but you’re not in the D.A.’s office anymore. And it would be pretty hard to pull strings over there without drawing attention to the case and your involvement in it. Unless you have another very good friend, someone might get interested in your interest and start looking into it.” Mike paused. “You seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
That’s what happened to people who lived secret lives. There was no place to go when the shit hit the fan. Mike almost felt sorry for him. “Look, I have no vested interest in this. You’re probably safest telling me.”
White shook his head. “I don’t have anything to tell you. I wasn’t there when he died. I worked with him. He was my friend.… ” He passed his hand over his eyes. “How could I—let him hurt himself?”
“Maybe you two were getting into things he couldn’t handle.”
“I told you I wasn’t there.”
“And I told you I know you were.” Mike had pulled some strings himself. The police labs were so backed up that hundreds of rape kits hadn’t been tested against the semen of the accused rapers in the last year or so; but on Wednesday, in between following leads on an apartment in Queens, Mike had wandered over to the lab on Twentieth Street and got a friend to test the sheets from Raymond Cowles’s bed just in case they got an ID on the prints. Turned out there were two different blood types in the semen stains. Which meant two men had ejaculated. It would not be difficult to prove one of them was Tom White.
