“Don’t hand me that, Stallings.” I grabbed his shoulder from behind. “Did it have something to do with Jergens?”
His eyebrows went up about six inches. “How…?”
“I find things out. Things you don’t want other people to know. I know what color your skivvies are.”
He slumped even more in the sofa. “I have nothing to say to you,” he tried. “Talk to my lawyer.”
I squeezed his shoulder so hard he winced. “This isn’t due process, Stallings. You can’t take the Fifth with me. But I have a hunch the SEC would like to hear about it. I’m sure you’d welcome an investigation of Jergens’ stock offering. You know how these Boy Scouts are when they start to poke around.”
“Oh, God, no.” His frame slumped even more.
While he debated whether to betray a valued client and lose a stream of future income, I surveyed the view from the fortieth floor. He had the corner office with tinted windows on two walls. From where I stood, you could see all the way down the East coast to Key West. The Statue of Liberty looked insignificant way down in the harbor, like one of those souvenir shop models. You wanted to reach out and pick it up and shake it and let the snow settle on its base.
“What about Jergens? Was he the reason you fired Alicia?”
The answer was barely audible. “Yes.”
I had to prod him. “What happened?”
Stallings practically had tears in his eyes, like I’d just punched the last hole in his meal ticket. “Jergens was going to float a new stock issue in the third quarter and we were to be the lead underwriter. The real estate market has been strong, as you know, and Jergens was one of the strongest operators. It would have taken the slightest hint of scandal to derail the offering and our underwriting fees with it. I couldn’t afford to take a chance. The future of the firm literally depended on it.”
“Why?”
“We’ve lost some large underwriting clients recently and our reputation was starting to suffer. If we’d lost this deal, people on the street would have started questioning our ability to do deals.”
“What did Alicia do?”
Stallings permitted himself a small smile and then looked up at me to see how I’d take it. “She was a clever woman, your wife. I don’t know what caused her to suspect anything, but she actually went down and inspected a bunch of properties in person. She started at the top floor in each building and went through every one, knocking on doors to determine occupancy rates. She talked to maintenance workers and cleaning ladies. What she found out was that Jergens’ financials were not strictly cricket.”
I had to hand it to Alicia. That sounded like something she would have done in the old days, before her new age, Mother Earth self. “Nice detective work, for an amateur.”
Stallings nodded vigorously, as if he wanted to get on my good side. Little did he know I’d lost my good side a long time ago, somewhere in that perfect purgatory that was called the Au Shau valley.
“That’s when you canned her?”
“Well, no,” he said. “It was a little more complicated than that. She evidently went directly to Jergens and told him of her findings. I don’t know to what end. He threatened her and told her to bury the information. Then he set up a meeting with me at an out-of-the-way restaurant and told me to fire her.”
“So you did?”
Stallings nodded. “Yes. But then an odd thing happened.” He narrowed his eyes. “He called me back a couple of weeks later and told me to re-hire her.”
“Why did he do that?”
Stallings leaned toward me. “That’s the strange thing. I don’t know why. But she came back to work as if nothing had happened.”
“What about the report?”
“It was never published. It just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I took this all in. “What did Jergens threaten her with?”
“He swore to destroy her career. I believe he even threatened her with physical violence. When she came back to the office after meeting him, she looked scared to death.” He stopped and caught himself. “I suppose that’s a poor choice of words.”
“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” I said. “No one’s going to flunk you for insensitivity.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Her starched white dress made an audible rustle as she rose to get me the file. In a single motion, she reached down and smoothed out the wrinkles on the front of the material where her legs had been.
“I really shouldn’t do this,” Pasternak’s nurse said in a tone that meant she really wanted to do it. “But since he’s dead and she’s dead, I don’t see how it can hurt anyone.”
A sob story always worked on a babe like this. Nurses were sweet, they were caring, that’s why they went into the healing professions. I’d told her how grief-stricken I was by Alicia’s death and how I thought Pasternak’s suicide might have tied into it and how I wanted to make sense out of the whole tragic business. She bought into it. But only up to a point.
“I can’t let you take the file out of the office, but I’ll let you read it here,” she told me with a tone of concern. She confirmed that the police had taken Alicia’s file. That was why I couldn’t locate it when I made the unsolicited house call to Pasternak’s office on that midnight dreary.
She led me into a cramped waiting room with a soundproof double door that was a shade more comfortable than Pasternak’s office had been. She turned and gave me a pleasant little nurse’s smile. Her accent was somewhere between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and her face was round and flat in a Balkan kind of way. “Take as much time as you need,” she said in a voice that came from years of practice in the art of comfort and solicitation. “I have a lot of paperwork to do before the office is closed down.”
She laid Alicia’s file down carefully on a coffee table covered with editions of Architectural Digest, Vogue, The New Yorker and other magazines that reflected the supposed browsing habits of the ideal clientele Pasternak wished for but didn’t have.
“Before you go, I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I said.
She looked surprised, but quickly said, “Sure, Mr. Rogan, whatever I can answer.”
“Thanks. Why don’t you sit down.”
She sat facing me in a prim and proper way with her knees pressed together and her feet in their sensible white shoes flat on the floor.
“I just want to understand why my wife is dead and why Dr. Pasternak is dead.” I tried to look earnest. “Will you help me.”
“I’d be glad to, if I can, but I don’t know very much about your wife. She came once a week, but she broke her appointments a lot. Doctor used to get very upset about that—more than with most of the other patients, you know.”
“Why do you think that was?”
She shrugged brightly. “I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe Doctor liked the sessions with her more than the others.” She furrowed her brow. “Doctor did tell me once that her sessions were…what was the word he used… fascinating.”
She leaned forward and spoke softly, almost reluctantly. “You know, Mr. Rogan, it’s like this. Most of Doctor’s patients were older you know, elderly, and they were, you know, not very interesting. They were…he called them ‘run of the mill.’ They were, in other words, boring, you know. Doctor said they had body odor and they … they had flatulence, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what that is.”
“Well, he did have a few young ladies as patients and he seemed to appreciate those sessions more. He used to tell me that was the way psychiatry should be, you know.”
“Do you think Dr. Pasternak had a physical relationship with any of his patients?”
She drew back and her face went white. “Oh, no, never, not ever. That’s against all the rules, the ethics, you know. Doctor would never do that, never.”
“I see, I see,” I said reassuringly. I didn’t want her clamping up on me. “How did you find out he committed suicide?”
“Why, I discovered his bod
y.” She seemed almost pleased with herself. “Doctor lived alone, you know, and I usually come to work at nine. Only that morning he didn’t let me in. I thought that was strange, you know. I had a key he gave me so I could do work when he wasn’t home, you know, so I opened the door and went in. I thought he just wasn’t home.”
I watched her mouth move as she told her story. Some people just love to talk. All they need is time to spare, an excuse and a listener.
“Well, anyway, I started to do my billing and then I caught up on a lot of overdue paperwork, you know. I guess I’d been working for a couple of hours and I was getting thirsty and hungry and my ears were starting to hurt from the headset, so I went to the kitchen to make myself a snack and get a soda and then I went to the bathroom. Only the bathroom door wouldn’t open. So anyway, I pushed hard and it opened a little and then I pushed a little more, you know, and I could feel something was holding the door shut, so I pushed more and I saw his foot. You couldn’t imagine how surprised I was, you know.”
“I have a pretty good idea,” I said, by way of encouragement.
“Well, anyway, I’m a nurse, you know.”
“I kind of suspected that.”
She nodded. “So I tried to resuscitate him, you know, but I could tell it wasn’t any good. He’d been dead for hours. So I just sat down and thought. I didn’t go into shock or anything, you know. I’m a professional,” she said, holding her head erect. “So anyway, after that, I walked through the whole house to see what I could make of it.”
She moved closer to me and whispered, “I even went up to the top floor, where I never went before, because he said I was forbidden to go up there. And that’s where I found it.”
“What?”
“The suicide note,” she explained.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, it was on the night table by his bed.”
“And what did it say?”
She held out her hands in front of her with the palms facing me. “The police told me not to say anything, you know.”
I was as smooth as warm butter. “Yes, I can imagine. But you can tell me because I was her husband,” I said in the most masterful non-sequitur I had ever used.
She eyed me suspiciously. “Well, I guess it’s all right. The note went something like ‘Because I loved her and now she’s gone.’ “
I nodded. “What do you think he was referring to?”
“I don’t know…I really can’t imagine.” She looked genuinely puzzled.
“What else did you see?”
“Well, there was an empty prescription bottle on the table next to the note. The police took that too. I’m not sure, but I think it was Prozac.”
“Anything else?”
She thought for a minute or two, then said, “Nothing else really, you know.”
I could see that was all she had, so I thanked her and told her I’d read Alicia’s file for a while.
I stayed in that little room for almost an hour, just getting up once for a cup of coffee. She didn’t have any real coffee, so she made me a cup of what she said was hazelnut-flavored instant decaf, but what I took to be coffee-flavored dishwater.
The file was a bitch. Pasternak’s handwriting was tough to decipher. I tried to make some sense out of the technical terms, shorthand notations and abbreviations. But the part that set me back a couple of squares was a beauty. That was the series of entries that described the sexual relationship between Alicia and Rachel.
It was like Dr. Pasternak’s own private window into a subterranean life. It appeared that both Rachel and Alicia confided their unembarrassed thoughts and actions to Pasternak, so he had a front row seat from both angles to their labial activity of huffing and puffing and sweating.
I had no reason to suspect they were screwing, or whatever it was called when lesbians did it to each other. Rachel might have had some minor justification, with her vaginismus. But Alicia…? She never showed any inclination toward women. On the contrary, she always told me it made her want to heave. And now…I could just visualize all those fingers and tongues busy at their lubricious work.
All this non-traditional sexuality was starting to make me doubt the eternal verities. Whatever happened to the good old male-female in-out? Seemed like it was on its way to becoming a niche product in the medicine chest.
I’d seen enough. Alicia’s file described a complete stranger. I was about to toss the file back onto the table when I saw another page that had been folded over and tucked into a flap in the cover.
That page surprised the hell out of me.
It described in excruciating detail how Alicia had been brutally raped and beaten several years earlier. How she’d been taken to the hospital in a semi-coma and had remained there for almost a week. How all identification had been removed from her so she was admitted as Jane Doe until the police could put a name to her. And how she’d told no one about the incident. Absolutely no one, except her shrink, for fear of the humiliation.
And who was the lowlife rapist? His name was Wheelock.
I put the file down, took another swallow of dishwater and leaned back in my chair. There was a deep dull ache in my chest. I tried to imagine the torment my girl had gone through. I wished I could have been there to comfort her. But she never told me.
The rape and beating was a new insight but I didn’t know what it was worth. Could that have caused the change in her personality? Oh, the intricate clockwork that we call the human psyche. Who could ever plumb its depths or make any sense of it?
CHAPTER XXVIII
“Find Wheelock for me,” I told Tanner. “The son of a bitch has gone to ground and I can’t locate him.”
He squinted and ran his fingers through his thinning crew cut. “Sure thing, old buddy. Maybe one of his old sailing mates has a line on him. How close did you get?”
“Tracked him down to a rented room in Greenwich. After that he just disappeared. Couldn’t scare up a trace of him.”
Tanner finished off his beer with a flourish and lit up a large foul-smelling cigar. We were in the cocktail lounge of the Hyatt on Forty-second street in the middle of a sea of marble and polished chrome and glass. As the smoke wafted over to the next table a middle-aged woman with wire-rimmed glasses and a sour expression wrinkled up her nose in distaste.
“Let us absent ourselves from this place,” I said. “I need a long walk.”
I tossed a ten on the table and headed through the lobby in the direction of Grand Central. Tanner grabbed his briefcase and hustled to catch up with me. Before we were halfway out of the hotel, our cocktail waitress came running, her rubber-soled shoes making squeaking sounds on the polished marble, and caught up with us.
I turned to face her. “What’s on your mind, honeybunch?”
She struggled to catch her breath. “It’s not enough,” she wheezed.
“What? We just had a couple of beers,” I said. “The rest is your tip.”
“I know,” she said between deep gasps.
“So?”
“Sir, the beers are five-fifty each,” she said.
Tanner and I exchanged disbelieving glances.
“Barley, malt, hops, yeast. A little fermentation. A percentage for advertising, overhead and profit,” he said with a big grin.
I shrugged and handed the girl another ten. “Does this redeem us?”
“More than enough to reserve you a place in the heavenly choir.” She put her hand on my arm. “Come back anytime, gentlemen.”
“Sure,” I said. “Next time I hit the trifecta.”
We left the Hyatt, walked through Grand Central, went up the escalator, through 200 Park and the Helmsley Building and exited onto Park Avenue.
It was lunchtime and all the office workers were out for a stroll. The day was clear and warm and sunny. Tanner and I walked for a few blocks without talking. The only thing fouling the air was his cigar.
“Jesus, will you put out that damn thing. It smells like a cathouse the morning after payday.�
�
“Sorry, old buddy,” he said as he poked me in the ribs. “Didn’t know your nose was so sensitive. You used to like the smell of WP.”
“Yeah, but that was a different time.”
His remark brought back the memory of a green lieutenant carrying a badly-wounded captain on his back from one of the hilltops guarding Khe Sanh through triple rows of wire and elephant grass to a medevac landing zone and waiting with him for the choppers to arrive while rocket-propelled grenades and mortars fell all around them. He was the kid. I was the captain. I owed him.
We walked to Fifty-ninth without a word. Old friends can do that. Wordsworth once spent an entire evening at Coleridge’s house without either man speaking. When he left, he thanked his friend for a pleasant time.
The secretaries in their summer dresses sat with their boyfriends in front of the office buildings eating salads and drinking Evian. The people strolling by studied the people sitting down who, in turn, studied them.
“Dave,” I said finally, “Did you know that Alicia’d been raped?”
“Hell, no.”
“Raped and had the shit kicked out of her. Spent a week in the hospital.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Who did it?”
“Wheelock.”
He let out a long slow whistle. “When did it happen?”
“A couple of years ago. Nobody knows about it.”
“How did you find out?” he said.
“From a dead psychiatrist.”
He nodded.
I looked at him. His eyes had tears in them.
“Find the bastard for me,” I said. “I want to exchange a few words with him.”
***
“Tell Mr. Jergens my name is Rogan.”
“Just a moment please.”
The secretary came back on the line. “Mr. Jergens says he doesn’t know you, Mr. Rogan.”
“That’s correct. Tell him it’s about Alicia Rogan.”
She clicked off and came back a minute later. “He says he doesn’t know of any Alicia Rogan.”
ER - A Murder Too Personal Page 12
