Stalking Susan

by Julie Kramer

  Back in an edit booth at the station, Malik put the digital videotape from the bag cam in a deck and hit play. We held our breath until we were certain we weren’t looking at one of those unfortunate undercover lapses of video without audio, or audio without video. The light was good. The sound was good. Especially the part where I counted out eight 20-dollar bills and placed them in Dr. Petit’s hand. The glint in his eyes at that moment could not be mistaken for sympathy.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Roadkill?” Noreen put her head on her desk. She was a sucker for animal stories. So much for our out-of-the-box thinking.

  “This way,” I explained, “we can assure viewers no dogs were killed for the making of this story,” I explained.

  “Yeah, ’cause we used a dog already dead,” Malik pitched in.

  “This is horrible,” she screamed. “Why didn’t you check with me first?”

  Noreen should have known the answer. Not checking with her gave her plausible deniability. Meaning if this story blew up in our faces, she had an out and would keep her job while our butts would be fired. Plausible deniability is a valuable gift.

  With no thank-you forthcoming, I returned to the salt mines of TV news: logging tapes. I ducked into a claustrophobic viewing room but I ducked back out when Mike Flagg threw me a dirty look. He was already inside, showing the new newsroom intern the computer transcription program. In the dimly lit room, I could swear he rested one hand on her thigh as he patiently demonstrated how to fast-forward.

  So Malik and I headed out to meet with the family of Suicide Susan.

  JOYCE NIEMCZYK’S ADDRESS was an assisted-living facility in northeast Minneapolis. The neighborhood had hit bottom a decade earlier and was now considered fashionably funky. Inner-city housing values had soared. Ethnic immigrants brought new energy to this neglected pocket of Minneapolis. Somali restaurants with spicy foods and women in colorful head scarves decorated Central Avenue.

  Malik and I rang Mrs. Niemczyk’s doorbell. “Come in,” a voice called out. A wooden buffet with stained-glass doors was the focal point of the room. My eyes passed over it and instead focused on a dark-haired woman, younger than I had expected.

  “Mrs. Niemczyk?” I asked.

  “No, I’m her daughter, Sharon.”

  An older woman emerged from around the corner, moving toward us, haltingly, in an electric wheelchair. Thin, elderly, taut. A look about her hinted at lost beauty until an awkward grimace unexpectedly crossed her face.

  “This is my mother, Mother, Ms. Spartz.” Sharon introduced us. “She asked me to join you.”

  “Oh. I recognize you from the television,” Mrs. Niemczyk said. Her voice shook when she spoke and her arm jerked stiffly, twice.

  The women bore no family resemblance. I noticed two framed graduation photos on the buffet. The blonde woman in one picture was stunning, clearly her mother’s daughter. The brunette in the other was ordinary-looking, clearly Sharon.

  “Fraternal twins,” Mrs. Niemczyk said. “Susan looked like me. Beautiful on the outside. Cursed on the inside.” Then she laughed and started to choke.

  Sharon slapped her upper back. “Mother.” Though Sharon didn’t say it, her tone was the kind a parent might use to indicate “I’m warning you” to a child.

  Mrs. Niemczyk ignored her daughter. “Sharon takes after her father. The lucky twin. The curse missed her.”

  “Oh, Mother, please.”

  “What curse?” I asked.

  “The family curse,” Mrs. Niemczyk answered sluggishly, not for drama, I realized, but because that was simply the way she spoke. “It killed Susan.”

  I became confused. “I thought Susan killed herself.”

  Mrs. Niemczyk’s neck gave another seemingly uncontrollable yank. Her shoulders shrugged stiffly. “She did, because of the curse.”

  “Mother’s talking about Huntington’s disease. Susan inherited the gene from her. She started showing symptoms about five years before her death. An occasional facial tic. A dancing step. She mentioned the disease in her suicide note. Frankly, we were stunned. I was closer to her than anyone and I still don’t believe she took her life.”

  “I never gave her the impression my life wasn’t worth living,” Mrs. Niemczyk said. “I never did.”

  Talk of Susan’s photo gave me an opening to ask if Malik might bring the camera inside to take a picture of her picture. It’s a good way to get folks used to the camera before turning it on them.

  While Malik set up the tripod, Sharon explained that Huntington’s disease was a rare, inherited neurological disorder. Patients progressively declined physically, intellectually, and mentally. Carriers of the disease had a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to their children. And worst of all, Huntington’s has no cure.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, because I had to say something, and in tough jams where nothing can be done, “sorry” is sometimes the safest thing any of us can muster.

  Neither mother nor daughter replied. I was sure they’d heard the sentiment plenty of times before. Sharon reached for a cardboard box and set it on the dining room table. I took a seat and Mrs. Niemczyk moved her wheelchair to the other side. I wanted to open the box because Susan’s name and the date of her death were handwritten on the side. Patience, I cautioned myself.

  “What do you know about Susan’s death?” Sharon asked. Enough time had passed that she was able to speak matter-of-factly.

  “Just what I read on the death certificate and in the obit. Suicide. Asphyxiation. There weren’t any newspaper articles, but that’s pretty standard in suicides. They seldom get media attention.”

  “Why are you here now?” Mrs. Niemczyk asked.

  “I’m working on a story that involves the deaths of other women, and I found some similarities. My first call was to the detective assigned to her case, but he died a couple years back.”

  “Did these women kill themselves?” Sharon asked.

  “No, but I’m wondering whether the police ever investigated Susan’s death as anything but a suicide?”

  “I wanted them to,” Sharon said, “but they said the trail ended with her.”

  “She was not a happy person,” her mother acknowledged.

  “That was no secret,” Sharon agreed, “but we clearly misjudged the depth of her depression.”

  “I know this is painful,” I said, “even after all this time. But how exactly did she die?”

  “She died in her hotel room,” Sharon explained. “Susan was at an education conference in Rochester. She was a high school teacher and attended it to learn more about disadvantaged students. She liked networking with colleagues and listening to the lectures.”

  “Wouldn’t you think that with her being surrounded by all those people, someone would have noticed she seemed suicidal?” her mother asked.

  “Mother, we couldn’t tell, how could they be expected to?” Sharon explained that, while her mother’s twitching, jerking, and grimaces—classic Huntington’s symptoms—hadn’t started until she was middle-aged, Susan’s had begun earlier. Doctors had predicted that Susan’s form of the disease would ultimately be more severe. “They especially warned us that victims sometimes turn to suicide, but Susan’s signs weren’t that bad yet.”

  “We vowed never to take that step,” Mrs. Niemczyk said. “She and I.”

  Sharon nodded. “She told me that, too. But Susan’s personality was definitely changing. At times she seemed paranoid.”

  “Was she in a personal relationship with anyone?” I asked.

  “Not then,” Sharon said. “Even though she was a teacher, she wasn’t a terribly social person. What she enjoyed most about her work was the one-on-one student contact.”

  “She kept men away,” her mother said.

  “Mother,” Sharon corrected her, “Susan had romances.”

  “She wasn’t emotionally invested. Not like you. You have a husband and kids. She feared passing on the curse.”

  To me, the curse was sounding self
-fulfilling. But I knew better than to say that aloud, especially since Sharon was opening the box.

  “The police found these things in Susan’s hotel room,” she said.

  I saw a copy of Final Exit sticking out from behind a pile of papers.

  “She left three letters.” Sharon held them up. “A personal one telling us she loved us but didn’t love life, a legal-sounding one saying no one else knew about her decision to end her life or helped her in any way, and a brief note to the hotel staff apologizing for the shock and inconvenience.”

  The box also included the police and autopsy reports. As I rifled through the pages, I found a heavy envelope. Inside was a gold heart-shaped pendant on a fine chain. Engraved on the front of the pendant was the name SUSAN.

  “She was wearing that jewelry when she died,” Sharon said. “At least that’s what the officer handling her case told us.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “Is it a family piece? It looks like an antique.”

  “Never seen it before,” Mrs. Niemczyk said. “We considered burying it with her, but decided to dress her in a topaz birthstone necklace I’d given her.”

  “It feels like real gold.” I tried handing the pendant to Sharon, but she pulled her hands away.

  “Put it back,” she said. “I don’t want to touch it. Somehow it seems tainted.”

  I put the jewelry back inside the box with all the papers. The two agreed to let me take everything home, sort through the items, and return them later. Malik and I also videotaped a camera interview with them about Susan: their daughter and sister.

  “We’ve accepted her death as a suicide, only because the police insisted,” Sharon said.

  “I’d like to know what really happened in that hotel room,” her mother added. An awesome line, but delivered so slowly I wasn’t sure we’d be able to air the sound bite.

  The drive back to the station was subdued. I envied Malik; when he reached home he would not be walking into an empty house.

  “Suicide is lonely.” The words sounded superficial and obvious. I regretted saying them aloud.

  “It better be lonely,” Malik replied. “I don’t have to be a cop to know someone’s looking at a murder rap otherwise.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The front desk buzzed me the next morning in my office. “Guest in the lobby.”

  “Get a name?” I wasn’t expecting anyone, and experience taught me nothing good walks through the front door unannounced.

  “Dr. Brent Redding.”

  Him I wanted to talk to, but I had hoped to do more digging first. His beauty queen wife’s murder measured high on my intrigue scale. That her former flame Minneapolis Mayor Karl Skubic had been in Duluth the day she died was not lost on me as a possible clue.

  Dr. Redding’s combination of horn-rims and tweed was attractive in an academic way. He’d aged well since his wife’s death and didn’t look much older than he did in the newspaper photo I’d copied from the Duluth library. His hair was a shade between blond and white. He was about half a foot taller than I. A thin build, but he looked like he might sport some strength beneath his sport coat.

  I shook his hand and sat with him in an alcove off the lobby. I didn’t invite him back to my office because I didn’t want him to see the SUSAN charts. For amateurs, the inside world of TV news can sometimes be too much like watching sausage being made.

  “Ms. Spartz, I understand you are trying to free my wife’s killer.” He didn’t have to say it in such an accusatory way.

  “I don’t have the kind of power to free anyone,” I replied. “And you can call me Riley.”

  “You may call me Dr. Redding.”

  Okay, if that’s the way he wanted it. “Well, Doctor, I’m looking at some unsolved homicides, and stumbled onto your wife’s case. I’m not sure how, or even if, it fits in my story.”

  “My wife’s death was a tragedy, not a story. Calling it a story trivializes it, Ms. Spartz.” Dr. Redding’s voice sounded sharp, and he clipped each word as if not wanting to waste any extra ones on me.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, but your wife’s murder was a story long before I came along.” My voice sounded defensive. And I felt defensive for sounding defensive.

  “That story has already been told,” he reminded me. “It had an ending. I had accepted it. Now you’re trying to rewrite it for ratings.”

  “Ouch.” I wasn’t poking fun at him because he was a doctor. I said “ouch” because it was hard to argue with such a logical comeback. I apologized again, then uncharacteristically acted on an impulse to reach for his arm. I wasn’t flirting to get information, though sometimes I do. This was sincere. I understood his grief better than most people. Redding snatched his arm away.

  “What gives you the right?” He had an affected way of speaking that made me feel he thought he was better than me. He probably was.

  “Listen, I knew when you and I spoke it wasn’t going to be easy,” I said. “But it wasn’t something I was trying to avoid either. I looked for you when I was in Duluth. I planned on calling you at St. Luke’s today since your home number isn’t listed.”

  He listened but didn’t say anything.

  “Since you saved me a drive back to Duluth, how about I buy you a cup of coffee and we talk things through?”

  The disadvantage of snooping around a small market like Duluth is, everybody knows everybody else. Lieutenant Dex had called Dr. Redding before I’d even left the city limits. He’d also apparently checked with some law enforcement buddy at Oak Park Heights prison and confirmed that Dusty’s mom was no longer the only name on his visiting list. I didn’t doubt Dr. Redding would provide Lieutenant Dex a full report of his conversation with me, but sometimes reporters have to give information to get information.

  So in between eating deli sandwiches on a bench at an urban park along Nicollet Mall, I shared more details about the case than I really wanted to.

  It didn’t work. He told me about the important good he does for his patients, the worthwhile committees he serves on to help troubled teens throughout the state, and how highly educated he was, but he wouldn’t tell me much about his deceased wife. And nothing I said was going to get him to go on TV.

  “I prefer listening to speaking,” he said. “You might say I’m a professional listener. Part of the job qualifications. You, however, seem to be a professional talker.”

  I’ve been called worse. “The person I’d really like to talk to is your wife, but since she can’t speak, don’t you think you might speak for her?”

  “We each leave a certain legacy behind us when we die, Ms. Spartz. This is not what she would have wanted.”

  He didn’t seem upset anymore, just sort of pompous. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and started lecturing me about the correlation between violence on television and crime. As if I, by my occupation, might share some blame for his wife’s homicide.

  Fortunately for me, I didn’t need his permission to get pictures or video of Susan. Our local network affiliate in Duluth had plenty from the time she worked there, and even more from her murder coverage. Visually, I had nailed the story. I was about to write off our meeting as a necessary but unproductive block of time.

  “What about her old college boyfriend, the mayor?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “He was in Duluth the day she died. Were they still friends?”

  “Not really. They were friends with some of the same people, so occasionally they would run into each other at social events. They were always cordial.”

  “How about you? Were you friends with him?”

  “No. He had a dark side that I saw through Susan. The fact that she could share a drink with him at a university function was proof of her forgiving nature and healthy attitude.”

  “What did she have to forgive him for?”

  He paused for nearly half a minute. I’m sure of the time. TV journalists are a good judge of thirty seconds, because that’s the standard commercial length. Half a
minute is a very uncomfortable pause. Most people on the listening end would nervously try to fill the silence with chatter, but I’ve found such a pause sometimes signals that important information is near. If you’re quiet and patient, the answer to the question might be worth the wait. I just might be a professional listener after all.

  “Patient confidentiality prevents me from speaking,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve said more than I should, and I’m going to stop now.”

  “Are you speaking as a doctor or a husband?” I lowered my voice to add some good-natured drama. “Do you know what you know because she was your wife, or because she was your patient? Seems like there might be enough ambiguity there for a little chitchat?”

  Dr. Brent Redding, licensed psychiatrist, was not amused.

  “We have strict professional ethics. I’m not going to take offense because I could hardly expect a reporter to understand.”

  “But what about the ethics of dating patients?”

  I shouldn’t have gone there, especially since I wasn’t exactly pure when it came to dating sources, but since he wasn’t going to be cooperative, there didn’t seem to be much downside in pissing him off.

  Except his voice turned low and scary. “Now I will take offense. It’s none of your business. And perhaps you should consider that the man you’re attempting to free might actually be safer behind bars.”

  He threw down his napkin and left without saying good-bye, leaving me to ponder whether he had just threatened his wife’s killer.

  “I’M WARNING YOU, it’s disgusting.”

  Malik cued up the videotape he had shot that morning while parked in the alley behind Dr. Petit’s veterinary clinic.

  “Maybe you should look at this later, after your lunch has had time to settle,” he cautioned.