by Carrie Smith
“Was it also his responsibility to kneel at her bedside and kiss her cold forehead this morning at five thirty-three AM?”
Hodges stared at her clear mug of cold, cloudy coffee. She had never felt so blindsided in her life. The effort to appear outwardly calm was straining every muscle in her body. She had always judged Julia Merchant as just one more unremarkable adult child of insanely accomplished parents, but now she wasn’t so sure.
“And don’t tell me you didn’t think something was amiss,” Julia continued. “Why else were those caregivers in your office this morning?”
At least Hodges could respond to this. “It’s standard procedure to debrief the staff on duty when a death occurs.”
“Do you check their pockets, too? Because I’d like to know where my mother’s little gold charm is, the dancer charm she used to wear around her neck. It wasn’t in her bedside drawer this morning when I went into her room. That charm had sentimental value to me and I want it back. I want to debrief that Brandon myself.”
Hodges already knew what the unpleasant consequences of that would be. Julia Merchant would find out that Brandon had resigned. Hodges would have to acknowledge that he had violated Lucy’s nutritional plan. Then Julia might leap to the conclusion that other, more serious violations had occurred. The grieving reacted to their losses in unpredictable ways, and Julia was evidently looking to cast blame. Hodges had no choice. “Brandon is off duty tonight and tomorrow,” she lied. “But I’m sure he would never take anything from Mrs. Merchant’s room.”
“Oh? And how can you be so sure?”
Lies always begat more lies, Constance thought. But what choice did she have? “Because I have every confidence in Brandon. He is a wonderful caregiver. He was devoted to Mrs. Merchant.”
CHAPTER 11
Fine icy snow crystals stabbed Julia’s face as she pulled on the heavy glass door of Manhattan North. The nor’easter was intensifying and the wind wanted to keep the door shut. When she finally squeezed through, she felt swallowed up in this unfamiliar world within the Manhattan she knew. She supposed she had passed police precincts hundreds of times, but she had never, she realized now, actually entered one of them.
She stared through the wall of bulletproof glass ten feet in front of her. Behind the glass, uniformed officers soundlessly stared at computer screens, spoke into phones, and passed documents among themselves. They were like exotic fish in an aquarium, and she was an incidental visitor staring into their unfamiliar habitat. She hugged herself. Was it crazy to have come here? Would they believe her? Could she make them believe her? She took a step backward and slammed into a man coming through the door behind her. She lost her balance. He caught her. She turned. A shield was clipped to his belt. He asked, “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Detective Codella.”
Then his squinting eyes traveled the length of her body, but not in a lurid way. She imagined he was wondering what event or circumstance required a woman dressed like her to seek out a homicide detective. He pointed to a counter at the far end of the bulletproof glass. “Talk to the desk sergeant.”
Julia approached the counter. The desk sergeant stood with a phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. His bulging stomach pressed against the buttons of his blue shirt. Someone with so much belly fat was destined to suffer a massive heart attack and die in his early fifties, she thought. But maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he had protective genes that shielded him from his self-destructive appetites, unlike her mother, whose pernicious genes had prevailed over her ultrahealthy lifestyle. Julia found herself resenting this apparently undisciplined stranger, and by the time he hung up and acknowledged her, the resentment had fermented into disgust and rage. She struggled to hide these emotions. “I need to speak with Detective Codella.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“Not exactly, but—” She couldn’t admit that she had never once met Claire Codella or any other detective in Manhattan or any borough, city, or state. “I know her, and it’s very important.”
He jotted Julia’s name on a pad. Then he turned and walked to a desk against the back wall of his aquarium. She could not hear what he said as he stood with the phone to his ear again. Finally he returned. “She doesn’t recognize your name.”
“She’ll know me when she sees me. It’s important I speak with her. Please, just tell her I need five minutes.”
He frowned. “This is a police station. I’m not your messenger.”
Julia pushed past her antipathy and summoned a respectful tone. “I realize that—” She read his name plate quickly. “—Sergeant Mills. And I wouldn’t take your time like this if it weren’t extremely important.”
He returned to the phone grudgingly. She watched him punch numbers and speak again. She held her breath. If Detective Codella refused to see her, what then? Would she accept defeat, go home, and try to forget what had happened? Would she talk herself into believing that her mother had died a peaceful and natural death in her sleep? No. She would make a scene and demand the attention she deserved.
Finally Mills hung up and crossed the floor in her direction. He pointed to a bench against the wall behind her. “Sit over there. She’ll get to you when she can.”
The bench was hard. Maybe, she thought, it was meant to dissuade people like herself, people without an obvious, tangible emergency—blood dripping down their faces, angry purple bruises, knife cuts, gunshot wounds—from wasting the police department’s time. But she wasn’t going to be dissuaded, she told herself as the minutes passed. She would stay right here. She would stay as long as it took. She would make them so uncomfortable that they had to get the detective. If necessary, she would go back to the desk sergeant and say, “Do you have any idea who I am?”
Half an hour later, Claire Codella finally appeared. Julia guessed that she was about thirty-five years old. She was no more than five foot three, and her straight black hair was barely long enough to tuck behind her ears. She approached Julia with hands stuffed into the pockets of gray slacks. The sleeves of her black silk blouse had been rolled inelegantly to the elbows. Julia noticed the cold gray gun in her shoulder holster and the gleaming gold sunburst outlining the NYPD shield attached to her black leather belt. She couldn’t decide if the detective looked stylish or terribly disheveled.
Codella stopped two feet in front of the bench and stared at her intently. “We’ve never met.”
“No.”
“You told the desk sergeant we had.”
Julia heard the indictment implanted in the simple observation. You lied. You tricked me down here. “I know,” she admitted, “but I’ve read about you.”
“That’s hardly the same thing.”
Julia felt her confidence shrivel, but she pressed on. “My mother died this morning.”
Codella’s face registered no reaction to this. “And your mother is?”
“Lucy Merchant. Lucy Martinelli Merchant. Maybe you don’t recognize the name, but—”
“I know who she is.” The detective’s tone seemed to say, Do you think I don’t read the papers? Do you suppose I never go to see a Broadway show? “So what brings you to me, Ms. Merchant?”
“I think someone murdered her.”
CHAPTER 12
Baiba Lielkaja punched the combination code and waited for the Nostalgia Neighborhood doors to open. She did not understand why Hodges had to speak to her right this minute. Hodges knew as well as she did that Nostalgia was chaotic between five and six o’clock and that she was needed to orchestrate the multitude of simultaneous activities. The dining room had to be arranged. Meals for a range of dietary restrictions were being delivered from the downstairs kitchen. Residents had to be changed, dressed, and coiffed in a way that would please family members who showed up unannounced to share the dinner hour with their “loved ones.”
These family members knew the Nostalgia Neighborhood combination code and felt absolutely entitled—rightly so, Baiba supposed, given the exorbitant fees
they paid—to treat the premises as they would their own home. Thus they went straight into the dining room and snapped their fingers for coffee while the caregivers were trying to seat residents and serve them the correct gluten-free, sugar-free, or sodium-free meal. Some of these visitors pushed tables together and moved chairs, changing the course of well-established walkways. Not only did this make transporting plates to tables more difficult for the servers, but it made navigation next to impossible for still-ambulatory residents whose neural pathways did not adjust well to sudden alterations in the physical landscape.
Just last night, Dottie Lautner, who was in a fairly advanced stage of Alzheimer’s, had walked right into a rearranged chair, fallen onto her left elbow, and cried out in pain. Lorena Vivas, the young but highly competent day nurse, had rushed out of the dispensary in her orange coat and calmed Mrs. Lautner with her soothing voice. But the nurse had not liked the bruise under Mrs. Lautner’s skin or the swelling around her elbow, and Mrs. Lautner could not string together enough coherent words to answer simple questions like “Where do you hurt?” or “Can you bend your arm?” Lorena had asked Baiba to summon the on-call ambulance crew, and then Baiba had faced the unenviable task of calling Mrs. Lautner’s niece, who was only too ready to blame things on the staff.
What Nostalgia needed was a seating hostess for families, Baiba decided as she stepped off the elevator. In fact, she would mention this to Ms. Hodges right now, she thought. But when she reached Hodges’s office, she saw Cheryl O’Brien seated in front of the director’s desk. Why was she here two hours before her shift began? Baiba looked from Cheryl to the stony-faced Hodges and realized they would not be discussing seating hostesses today. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
“Close the door and have a seat,” said the director in a calm, cool voice.
Baiba did as she had been instructed. “What is it?”
“A small complication. Nothing the three of us can’t resolve together.” Hodges turned to Cheryl. “It’s come to my attention, Cheryl, that Julia Merchant had a hidden camera in her mother’s bedroom.”
“A what?”
“You heard me, Cheryl. A camera. Hidden in a clock radio. And that camera recorded you and Brandon last night. Apparently it shows you handing a medicine cup to Brandon and Brandon dispensing the contents to Mrs. Merchant.”
Cheryl cringed. “I tried to do it my—”
“Stop!” Hodges raised her hand like a stern crossing guard. “Let me finish. Please.”
Baiba felt a fireball combust in her chest. Heat spread to her shoulders and neck. Cheryl was going to get dismissed. And she would get fired, too. She, after all, was the one who had allowed Cheryl to violate the dispensation guidelines. What else was she supposed to have done? From her very first shift at Park Manor, Cheryl’s unremarkable face had triggered inexplicable rage within Lucy Merchant. Every time Cheryl came near her, Lucy screamed the same words: Get away from me, Daddy. You can’t make me drink it. Get out. Get out! And only Brandon’s soothing voice could calm her. He alone could inveigle her to drink her meds. So he had accompanied Cheryl into Lucy’s suite on virtually every night shift Cheryl had worked in her six months at Park Manor, and Baiba had allowed it to happen, because rules were one thing and reality was another.
Baiba glanced out the window where snow was falling onto the cedar-planked paths in the now flowerless courtyard. “Julia Merchant is upset by her mother’s death,” Ms. Hodges was saying. “She doesn’t accept that her mother has passed away peacefully. And in her effort to explain the death, she may be reading into the images her camera recorded. I believe she’s under the impression, Cheryl, that you handed Brandon medicine rather than a drink of water to give to her mother.”
Cheryl opened her mouth to speak—to confess, Baiba supposed—but again Hodges raised a hand. “You don’t need to explain, Cheryl. I know what happened. We all know what happened, and more importantly, we know what didn’t happen. You filled the medicine cup with water, and Brandon helped Lucy drink it. All three of us know that you did not violate the dispensation protocol. We know you would never jeopardize your position or a patient’s safety. Isn’t that right?” She stared straight at Cheryl.
And now Baiba understood the purpose of this conclave. Hodges, who had the most to lose if Julia Merchant uploaded that video to the Internet or took it to the press, was proffering a conspiracy of self-preservation. She had crafted a life raft, but the raft would only float if they all climbed aboard.
Baiba held her breath. Cheryl’s face was a pale canvas of panic, guilt, and indecision. Hodges repeated her invitation onto the raft. “You’re a professional, Cheryl. You would never jeopardize a patient’s well-being. Isn’t that right?” And finally Cheryl’s head began to nod, tentatively at first and then more decisively.
Hodges moved around the desk. She leaned on the front edge and continued to look directly into Cheryl’s eyes. “Julia Merchant may ask you some questions.” Her voice was gentle now. “And if she does, I don’t want you to feel alarmed or defensive. I want you to tell her the truth. You gave Brandon water. You and Brandon did your job. You kept Mrs. Merchant hydrated according to Dr. Fisher’s order. You followed the care plan, and I want you to know that Baiba and I have total confidence in you.” She turned to Baiba. “Isn’t that right?” Baiba heard the silent, serrated edge in Hodges’s voice, the subtext intended just for her: I’ll get to you next.
Then Cheryl was gone, and Hodges’s granite eyes locked onto Baiba. Baiba’s throat closed. She found that her muscles could not perform the simple involuntary reflex of swallowing. Hodges spoke in a voice that was simultaneously calm and chilling. “You have to make this right. You have to get him back here and get him on board with the narrative. Whatever it takes. Do you understand?”
CHAPTER 13
Julia Merchant tapped Pause and pointed to the image on her iPad screen. “Right there. You see? The nurse hands him the cup. Then she looks toward the door. You can tell she’s afraid someone’s going to come in.”
Codella considered. Could you really tell that? Julia Merchant believed that her mother was the victim of a crime, and so she saw malice in a potentially innocuous turn of a nurse’s head. “Maybe she just heard a noise. Maybe someone called her name.”
“At Park Manor only a nurse gives out medicine. That’s the rule, and I’ve seen how careful they are to keep the caregivers away from the nurse while she’s dispensing. I’m telling you. This nurse knew she was doing something wrong.”
“Did you share your concern with someone in charge?”
“The director. Constance Hodges. And she made up a lame story about how my mother gets dehydrated and the caregiver was only giving her water.”
“How do you know it’s a lame story?” Codella studied the young woman’s spotless twenty-something skin, her highlighted hair, and the intricate links of the expensive gold chain around her neck. “Isn’t dehydration a legitimate concern with people who can’t take care of themselves?”
“I have other evidence.” Julia Merchant reached for the Hermes bag hooked to the back of her chair. The bag’s gold hardware gleamed as she set it on her lap and carefully extracted a bulky wad of paper toweling. She lay the toweling on the desk between them and slowly unraveled it to reveal beige balls of fuzz matted with a viscous substance. “This is what they poured down my mother’s throat.”
Codella waited for the explanation she knew was coming.
“After my father and I met with Constance Hodges, I went back to my mother’s room, to the exact spot where the nurse and caregiver are standing in this video, and when I looked down, I saw a spill in the carpet—and not an old dried-up spill. Whatever they gave her last night is in these carpet fibers, and it isn’t water, Detective.”
Codella eyed the clotted beige fibers resting in the nest of toweling. Julia Merchant did not have enough evidence, she knew, on which to base her deduction. “Just because this was on her carpet doesn’t mean it was i
n the caregiver’s cup,” she said.
“No, but isn’t it likely?”
“And even if it’s from the cup, that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with her death.”
“But it could, and given the circumstances, aren’t you being a little dismissive?”
“I’m not being dismissive,” said Codella. “I’m being objective.”
As she said this, her iPhone lit up and her oncologist’s name appeared. He was a single cell tower connection away from her Manhattan North office, she thought. He was ready to give her the results of her scan. All she had to do was swipe the surface of her screen. She rubbed her eyes. She weighed Julia Merchant’s demand for attention against her own need for reassurance. Goddammit. Then she turned the phone facedown and forced her focus back to the moment. “Let’s review the facts,” she said. “Just the facts. A caregiver found your mother in her bed around four this morning.”
“Right.”
“And no one performed CPR.”
“Because my father signed a Do Not Resuscitate Order.”
“And the Park Manor physician who certified her death attributed it to natural causes.”
“He said her heart had simply stopped. But how could that be? Hearts don’t just stop. She was perfectly healthy when I fed her dinner yesterday.”
“To the best of your knowledge,” Codella pointed out.
“What do you mean by that?” The young woman pressed her lips together.
“I mean you’re not a doctor.”
“Obviously. But I know my mother. I would know if something were wrong with her.”
Would you? Codella wanted to ask. Are you sure about that? A year and a half ago, hadn’t she been equally confident about her own diagnostic skills? Hadn’t she dismissed the pain in her abdomen as a simple virus and delayed seeing a doctor for weeks and weeks because it never occurred to her that an aggressive lymphoma could be wrapping itself around her intestines? She glanced at her iPhone. She wanted those scan results. She wanted them now.
