“So no one really has an alibi.”
“Why I love my job, by Andrew Connors.”
I debated, then figured, what the hell. “Can I run something by you, Andy?”
“Like it would matter if I said no?”
“Remember I told you Betty Rowan kept calling me, saying she wanted to get together? I think I know why.”
“I’m listening.”
And he did, intently, his eyes narrowed into slits as he swiveled back and forth in his chair with his cranelike arms laced behind his head until I’d finished my spiel.
“So you’re thinking Betty mailed teasers to prospective buyers and hedged her bets by dangling you in front of them,” he said. “Saunders. Messer. Maybe Horton. Who else?”
“Nina Weldon.” I voiced my suspicion about the phone call. “It’s odd that she didn’t mention it right away. Maybe she made it up, after you started investigating Lenore’s death as a homicide.”
“Why?”
“She and Lenore were close. Nina told her everything. Nina’s words. She probably discussed intimate details of her life. What if Betty threatened to expose all that?”
Connors looked skeptical. “Details about what?”
“Her depression. She may have some deep, dark secret. She definitely has a thing for Korwin. She almost snapped my head off when I suggested that patients become attached to their shrinks. Maybe she’s sleeping with him.”
“Maybe you need a vacation.”
“And there’s Korwin.” I told him what Donna Bergen had said, that he’d realized Lenore had fooled him. “He staked his reputation on his diagnosis. What if Lenore wrote the truth about Max’s death and Betty sent him a copy of the pages, telling him she’d make the knowledge public unless?”
Connors didn’t answer.
“It’s not just about humiliation, Andy. Korwin told me he’s hoping to get another book deal. That won’t happen if his credibility’s damaged. And he can forget about being an expert witness, about attracting more patients. Six months ago his clinic was in trouble, by the way, and now it’s going gangbusters.” I had liked Korwin, I really had. But I’d liked Lenore, too.
“I don’t know, Molly. He sounds genuine to me.”
“That’s the point, Andy. He’s doing a scientific study. He wants to help all these women, but he can’t, not if Betty Rowan discredits him. And the fact that he didn’t get Lenore’s messages from his service is awfully coincidental, don’t you think?”
“I’ll check it out,” Connors said.
At least he wasn’t laughing.
forty
“I don’t think Saunders will be happy if he finds out I talked to you about Lenore,” Darren Porter said, and laughed uneasily. “But at least he can’t fire me. I left Saunders Enterprises around a year ago.”
I’d noticed Darren at the funeral. He was in his late twenties, I guessed, tall with dark brown hair, a football player’s build, and small blue eyes set a little too close together.
“I saw the beautiful sunflowers you brought Lenore when she was in the hospital,” I said. “I wish my boyfriend brought me flowers like that once in a while.”
“They were nice, weren’t they?” He ate a bite of the tuna sandwich he’d ordered and wiped the mayonnaise that dripped down his chin. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to Lenore, though, ’cause she was sleeping. The nurse wouldn’t even let me go in. I can’t get over the fact that she’s dead. I mean, how could that happen in a hospital?”
“The two of you knew each other long?”
“About four years. We started working for Saunders around the same time, right after I got my degree from Santa Monica City College. She’d been working somewhere else before.”
“What was she like?”
“Smart. Real smart. She worked her way up fast, too, faster than I did. Well, I couldn’t marry the boss, could I?” He laughed and took another bite of the sandwich. “That was a joke. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression. Lenore worked hard, and Saunders appreciated that.”
“Did you ever go out socially?”
He laughed again. “I wish. You’ve seen her, right? She’s not hard on the eyes. I asked her out, and she said yes, but told me right off she just wanted to be friends. I figured out why pretty soon—she was saving herself for Saunders.”
“She made a play for him?”
“Saunders didn’t seem to mind.”
“He was engaged at the time, wasn’t he?”
“He was, but Lenore didn’t know. She was upset when I told her.”
Or pretended to be. “That didn’t stop her from going out with him.”
“Well, that was up to him, wasn’t it? It’s not like they were married. He was in the driver’s seat. And she would’ve gone to the moon and back for him.”
Several drivers’ seats, apparently. “So you and Lenore kept up after she and Saunders married?”
“Some. We weren’t best buds or anything. She’d call and say, did I want to go to a karaoke bar or grab a bite. She could stay out all night. And she’d send me a birthday card every year, never forgot. Well, except that one year right after the baby died. The thing is, I think she felt kind of lonely with his crowd, and she couldn’t let her hair down. Then they moved to Santa Barbara, and, well, you know what happened.”
“Did you see her after that?”
“Every once in a while. I felt bad for her, especially when I heard Saunders was divorcing her. She didn’t talk about it, but I could see she was hurting.”
“How did you know she was in the hospital?”
“We went to a movie and pizza the Thursday before she got run over. She was pretty upset that night, so I called her Saturday to see if she was okay, but she wasn’t in. When she still didn’t answer the next day or the next, I called her mother. She told me. I heard the mother was murdered, huh?” Darren shook his head. “Isn’t that something.”
“Why was Lenore upset?”
He twirled the straw in his soda glass. “I don’t know if I should be telling you Lenore’s private stuff.”
I waited.
He let out a deep breath. “It was my fault. I told her I heard Saunders had set a wedding date. I only told her ’cause I knew she’d never get over him if I didn’t. But she took it bad. She was cussing him out. She said she was going to bring him down. I heard on the news that she was pregnant, so I guess that’s why. I guess it was his kid.”
Had Lenore gone to Robbie on Saturday night to threaten him or seduce him? Probably the latter, since she’d put on Jillian’s nightgown. And then he’d thrown her out.
“Listen, I’m not a fan of Saunders,” Darren said. “He can be a mean son of a bitch, and he’s out for number one. Plus I don’t think he’s always on the up and up. That’s why I quit. If he went down, I didn’t want to go down with him.”
“Did you hear rumors?”
Darren shrugged. “There’s always rumors. He lost a bundle in the market, and he was having problems with some projects. His father-in-law bailed him out. Future father-in-law. But I can’t blame Saunders for not wanting to have another kid with Lenore. He went through hell the last time and stood by her. I was with him the day it happened, you know.”
I looked at him with interest. “Were you?”
He nodded. “I was helping him set up the Santa Barbara office. Everything was going wrong. The secretary he hired never showed, the computers were down. And this deal he’d been working on for six months fell apart. On top of all that, the housekeeper called in sick, and Lenore kept phoning, telling him the baby was crying and she didn’t know what to do.”
Not what either one of them had testified, and you didn’t have to be Johnnie Cochran to figure out why. Donna Bergen hadn’t known that, because Saunders’s office and home were only ten minutes away and probably had the same area code, so the calls wouldn’t have shown up on the phone company’s records.
“What did Saunders tell her?” I asked.
“We
ll, you have to remember he was in a foul mood, okay?” Darren sounded uncomfortable. “He told her he was sick and tired of her bitching, that if she hadn’t gotten herself knocked up she could be out shopping instead of taking care of a crying baby, that he’d offered to hire a nurse, but she didn’t want one, so what the hell did she want him to do?”
“Nice,” I said. Robbie definitely had a way with words.
“Well, he was just blowing off steam. He probably wasn’t getting much sleep either. He called her back and asked should he come home instead of going to L.A., and she said no, go ahead. I’m sure he felt bad about what he said, especially later, when he found out . . .” Darren sighed. “I’m sure he blamed himself. If he hadn’t yelled at her, maybe she wouldn’t have flipped like that. ‘Cause the doctors, they still don’t know what makes a woman think she’s hearing voices like that, right?”
“Right,” I said, although from what I’d recently learned I knew that postpartum psychosis wasn’t triggered by an argument, and Robbie had known it, too.
“I saw him a few days later,” Darren said. “He asked me not to say anything about the phone calls. He said the police might get the wrong idea about Lenore. They might think she got fed up and took it out on the baby, and that’s not what happened, but they might think so anyway. So I said okay. I never said a word to anybody, but now she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”
It might matter to Korwin, I thought. It might matter a great deal. “So Saunders drove to L.A.?”
Darren nodded. “I stayed in the office a couple of hours longer, and Lenore called again, saying she’d tried the L.A. office but everyone had gone for the day, and she’d tried Saunders’s cell, too, but he wasn’t answering and did I know where he was?”
“Did you?”
Darren was blushing. “Well, I had a guess, but I didn’t tell Lenore.”
“Jillian?”
He nodded. “She figured it out, though, and she asked me. I said no, why would you think that? He’s probably in a meeting and shut off his phone. But after I hung up, I reached him on his cell and told him Lenore was looking for him, and I heard Jillian’s voice in the background.”
That explained the phone call Lenore had made, and explained why Saunders had phoned her back. And did it explain why Lenore had picked that night? Had it been part anger, part desperation?
“Did you ever tell Lenore?”
“Two Thursdays ago, the night we had pizza. I thought she should know, so she could get him out of her system. I don’t know if I did right, telling her. She flipped. She said he’d been lying to her all these years, and she was sick of it, and she hoped he spent the rest of his life locked up where he belonged, and she knew how to do it. She had it all written down.”
forty-one
You probably think I was thrilled to learn Robbie had lied to protect Lenore because he’d felt guilty. Not only had he yelled at her, but he’d been two-timing her while she was home alone with a crying infant.
But I wasn’t. I was troubled. When you write crime fiction, you can go back before the book’s in print and change things you don’t like, things that don’t work. You made a character too old, too nasty, or too nice? Change it. You don’t like the dialogue you gave someone on page 127, or the facts of a case or a clue you planted, or the way characters behave or interact or dress? Change it. You can change it all. It’s just words on a computer screen or paper.
But I wasn’t writing crime fiction. I was writing about real events and real people whose actions and words were inconsistent. And I couldn’t go back and change anything. Not words I’d heard from those who had no reason to lie, not words in the court transcripts. I was writing true crime and was stuck with characters who didn’t ring true. My editor wouldn’t buy them. I didn’t buy them either.
For instance, why was Korwin so nervous and defensive? I didn’t believe that he’d never received Lenore’s late-night messages. If he was a caring, committed psychiatrist, why hadn’t he returned her call?
Why would Robbie, a nasty, self-serving, unethical man who had cheated not only on his wife but on his former fiancée, twice, and probably didn’t know how to spell “guilt” let alone feel it—why would he lie under oath for Lenore?
“Lenore would never have wanted to hurt our son,” he’d kept saying. “I believe my wife.”
Had she threatened Robbie even then to expose his shady business dealings unless he backed her up?
And what about Lenore? “I loved my baby,” she’d sworn. “I would never do anything to hurt my baby.”
My baby is alive, hers is dead. Her baby is dead, mine is alive.
Was Lenore a psychopath who had planned her child’s death to hold on to her man? Had she done it out of vengeance? Or was she a loving mother, frightened because she’d done the unthinkable after a tongue-lashing from her two-timing husband?
But if that were so, why had she seduced another woman’s fiancé and put on her nightgown?
Marie O’Day was shopping for groceries, something I should be doing, but her husband, Tom, was home.
“I guess you can take another look,” he said. “I’m wondering when we can clean the place up and who’s going to take her things, now that her mother’s dead.”
He walked with me to Lenore’s apartment and inserted a key into the new lock. “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll come lock up,” he said, and left me alone.
The air-conditioning hadn’t been on in a week. The place was hot and smelled mustier, but it looked the same. Books and photos on the floor, goo on the linoleum, broken dishes, a pink pregnancy tester.
A lavender hatbox filled with broken dreams.
I wasn’t sure why I’d come—maybe to take a look at Lenore’s things, now that I was seeing her differently. Maybe I hoped I’d find something she’d hidden, something the vandal had missed.
Well, I didn’t. I searched for about half an hour and gave up. I looked in her closet and under her sink. I checked her refrigerator and freezer. I held her books upside down, one by one, and fanned the pages in case she’d hidden some evidence inside one of them. That’s when I noticed that one of the books was missing. Rock-a-bye Baby, by Lawrence Korwin.
“Done, are you?” Tom said when I knocked on his door and told him I was leaving. “Find what you were looking for?”
“No.”
“Neither did that other gal, Lenore’s friend.”
I can’t describe what I was feeling. A frisson, I think they call it. “Nina?”
Tom nodded. “Jittery thing, isn’t she? Came by Monday. Thought she’d left something when she picked up some things for Lenore. Didn’t find it. Hard to find anything in that mess. I asked her what it was, maybe Marie or me would find it when we clean the place up, but she said never mind, it wasn’t important.”
Sometimes when my mind is too crowded with thoughts, I need to do something physical. At home I changed into shorts, a tank top, and running shoes, and climbed onto the treadmill.
It’s boring, isn’t it? Tedious. Kind of pointless, too—walking or running, sweating and getting nowhere, tenths of miles and minutes creeping by with painful slowness and no frequent-runner coupons to show for them. I usually put on the TV or my CD headset, but today I stayed with my thoughts.
Lenore and Robbie, Jillian and Betty. All swirling around, talking to me. Korwin, who had been unnaturally nervous when I’d asked him whether he was close with Lenore—I didn’t care what Connors said.
And Nina. What had she been looking for in Lenore’s apartment, and why had she taken Korwin’s book? She’d probably noticed it last Wednesday, when Lenore had asked her to go to her apartment. Maybe she’d been jealous that Lenore had an advance copy, although as far as I knew, Nina had a copy, too.
I hadn’t checked the book’s inscription, but I assumed it was standard fare. “All best wishes.” “Enjoy the book.” Maybe something more personal: “I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together.” Unless the good doctor
had written something intimate? “Let’s get it on—Larry”?
To tell you the truth, my suspicions had been leaning to Korwin. Because he had so much to lose. Because he’d been so nervous, because he had an ego and a temper. But there was something jittery about Nina: I’d noticed it during our phone calls and on our visit. And she hadn’t mentioned the call Lenore had made to her, until later. She’d told me Lenore had written in her journal information that could harm Robbie—names and dates and monies involved. But I only had Nina’s word for that.
She was passionate about Korwin and his work. He gave me hope. He did that for so many other women. . . . And if she thought he might not be able to help other women because of something Lenore had written and Betty had been about to expose?
Maybe Korwin inspired passion in all his patients. Maybe I was reading something complicated into nothing. I tend to do that. With Lenore dead, Nina may have taken the book to rescue it from the trash bin or from Betty Rowan’s shelves, where it would have moldered. And what was wrong with that?
I showered and changed, and after some hesitation, called Nina to sound her out. She wasn’t home. I checked on Mindy—the obstetrician had said nothing would happen for at least another ten days. As if he knew.
On a whim, I phoned my mom and talked her into joining me for a manicure and pedicure—my treat, I told her. It was five-thirty. On the way to my parents’ I drove to the post office before the lobby was locked for the night. I won’t lie and tell you I receive thousands of fan letters a week, but I do receive some, and I hadn’t visited my P.O. box in a while.
The pampering was a good idea, the time with my mom even better. We sat on adjoining chairs, our feet soaked in deliciously warm water, and she told me she was worried that Liora was rushing, for which I had no answer, and that my dad was working too hard, which all of us knew would never change.
Blues in the Night Page 26
