Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  “No. No thanks, Father. I was just thinking.”

  “I understand.”

  Harry turned and headed out. The old priest walked alongside him, a Bible cradled in one hand.

  “You will be going over to the DellaRosas?” he asked.

  “Yes. For a while anyhow. I’m pretty worn-out.”

  There was no way he could avoid going to his in-laws, but he was determined to head back to the city as soon as possible.

  “I understand,” Father Moore said again. “Although we haven’t met before today, Dorothy and Carmine speak very highly of you. They say you’re a very gentle, kind man.”

  “Thank you,” Harry said.

  They left the church with Harry a few feet ahead of the priest. Several pockets of people were standing around some distance away, talking or waiting for their rides. Harry had just reached the bottom of the stairs when Caspar Sidonis stalked over and confronted him.

  “You killed her, you bastard,” he rasped, his whisper harsh and menacing. “You know it and I know it. And pretty soon everyone’s going to know it. You couldn’t stand to lose her so you killed her.”

  It had been thirty-three years since Harry had last thrown a punch at someone’s face. That time he had barely grazed the cheek of the bully who had been baiting him. The larger boy’s retribution had been swift and memorable. This time, Harry’s punch, thrown from a much better angle and with much more anger and authority behind it, was more effective. It connected solidly with the side of Sidonis’s nose, sending the surgeon spinning onto his back in some low, rain-soaked shrubbery. Blood instantly spurted from both his nostrils.

  Shocked, Father Francis Moore dropped his Bible. Harry calmly picked it up, wiped it on his trousers, and handed it back.

  “I guess I’m not so gentle after all, Father,” he said.

  * * *

  Ambrosia’s was an eternally packed, upscale bistro on Lexington near Seventy-ninth. Harry spent an hour at the office reviewing patient lab reports and catching up on paperwork before taking a cab to the club. The drizzle that had dominated most of the day was gone, and the dense overcast had begun to dissolve. The city seemed scrubbed and renewed. It was before nine, but Julia Ransome was already there, nursing a drink at one of the tall, black acrylic tables opposite the bar. It was relatively early by Manhattan standards, even for a Thursday, but the bar was already three deep.

  Julia exchanged pecks on the cheek with him. She was wearing a black silk blouse and an Indian print vest, and looked very much at home among the beautiful people.

  “Who’d you have to pay off to get this table?” Harry asked, sliding onto the stool opposite hers.

  “Donny, the bartender over there, has been writing a novel for the last ten years or so,” she said, smiling. “I promised to read it when he finishes. In the meantime, I call ahead and he puts one or two of his pals on these stools until I get here. It’s one of the perks of being a book agent. My seamstress has a first novel in progress, too. So does the plumber I can get at ten minutes’ notice anytime, day or night. The trick is being able to tell which people haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of ever finishing their book. Once in a while I’m wrong. When that happens I just have to read it and then set about finding a new mechanic or dentist or whatever.”

  “Well, I appreciate your meeting me like this.”

  “If you think for one moment that I wouldn’t have, I obviously haven’t done a good job of letting you know you’re one of my favorite people.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it, Harry.” Julia finished her drink and motioned the waitress over with a minute shake of her head. “You drinking tonight?”

  “Bourbon neat. Might as well make it a double.”

  “Whoa. Double bourbon neat. Now there’s a side of you I’ve never known.”

  “Don’t worry. If I actually finish it they’ll have to haul me out of here in a wheelbarrow.” He waited until the waitress had returned with their drinks and left. “Julia,” he said then, “please tell me about Evie.”

  The agent studied her glass. “What do you want to know?”

  “At this point, almost anything you choose to share would probably be news to me. The surgeon I pointed out to you today at the church—the one who claims Evie was in love with him—is convinced I gave her something, a drug, that caused her aneurysm to rupture. He’s wrong about it being me, but I’m not sure he’s wrong about the rest of his theory.…” Harry reviewed the nightmarish evening on Alexander 9, his conversation with the anesthesiologist, and his conclusions. “Julia,” he said, “I had no idea Evie was involved with another man, even though for a year or so she wasn’t particularly involved with me. I just thought she might have shared some other things with you that … that I didn’t know about.”

  In the silence that followed, Harry felt certain Julia was going to deny any knowledge of what he was talking about. Suddenly, though, the woman looked up at him and nodded.

  “You were outmatched from the beginning, Harry,” she said. “You may have been able to handle the Vietcong”—she gave him a quick, ironic smile—“but you didn’t have a chance against Evie DellaRosa. She and I have known each other since she lived with me one summer during college. That’s almost twenty years. She was an exciting, intriguing person in many ways, and God knows I’ll miss her. But over all those years, I’ve never known her to be content. Whatever she had—whoever she had—she always wanted more. And she didn’t particularly care what it took or, unfortunately, who got hurt in the process. That’s the part of her—that seductive charisma—that always frightened me. It kept us from getting closer than we were. John Cox was at the funeral today. Did you see him?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did Evie tell you about their breakup?”

  “That she caught him having affairs, and that when she confronted him, he got her fired from the news staff and blackballed throughout the industry.”

  “Does that jibe with his showing up at her funeral today?”

  “No. I have to say I was surprised to see him.”

  “John Cox was crazy about Evie. She had the affair, Harry—with John’s boss. I only know what John told me and that’s not much, but it was the boss, not John, who gave her the boot. And blackballed her. I think John would even have given her another chance. But she wasn’t interested.”

  “Was she at all happy with me?”

  “For a time—maybe a year or two. Harry, Evie needed to be in the spotlight. She needed to be at the center of the action. Part of her fought that need—that’s why she married you, I think. Stability. But the stronger pull was clearly winning out.”

  “Did you know about Sidonis?”

  “Nope. Not about him or any other men during your marriage—if there were any. I’m not sure that sort of thing was ever important enough for Evie to talk about. Or maybe she didn’t trust me that much.”

  “I know she was dissatisfied with her job on the magazine, but—”

  “Hated it She was born to be in front of the camera, Harry. You know that. At least you should. From the moment she started at Manhattan Woman she was searching for a ticket back into the limelight.”

  “I’ve had the impression lately that she was working on something special.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  Julia shook her head.

  “I tried to get her to tell me about it the last time we were together. All she would say was that it was big stuff, and that the producers of A Current Affair and some other tabloid shows were already offering her big bucks and on-air guarantees just to see what she had.”

  Harry stared off at a wall across the club. On it, artfully done, was a six-foot-high neon sculpture of a woman’s profile and hand. She had a twenties look and was smoking a glowing cigarette in a foot-long holder. Although Evie smoked only rarely, something about the rendering reminded him of her. He suspected it would be a long time before
things didn’t.

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” he said, finishing his bourbon. “I really appreciate your coming to meet with me like this, Julia.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a terrific guy. And whether she appreciated it or not, Evie was lucky to have you. Harry, do you really think someone purposely killed her?”

  “I don’t know what to think. The chemical analysis of her blood should be completed within a few weeks—sooner if the police detective who wants to mount my scalp on his lodge pole has his way. I’m concerned about what might happen if one of the tests is positive, but I’m also wondering whether I’ll trust the results if they’re negative.”

  “So you believe that woman, Evie’s roommate?”

  Harry studied the neon smoker as he considered the question. Two days after Evie’s death he had gone back up to Alexander 9, but Maura Hughes had been sent home. “Shaky as hell, but not chasing any spiders,” was the way one of the nurses described how Maura had looked upon discharge. Harry was sure that the real reason for the rapid discharge was the refusal of her insurance carrier to cover any more days. A typical scenario. Companies were shortening stays and refusing coverage with almost as much vigor as they were denying any responsibility for the consequences of their policies.

  “Harry?” Julia was looking at him curiously. “I asked you a question about Evie’s roommate in the hospital. You seemed like you were about to answer, and then you sort of drifted off.”

  Harry glanced down at his empty glass. Years of virtual abstinence had reduced him to amateur status as a drinker. He knew that being easily distracted was the first clue that if he wasn’t tight yet, he soon would be.

  So what, he thought. The tighter the better.

  “Yes, I believe her,” he said. “A doctor, or someone posing as a doctor, came into that room after I left. A short time after his visit Evie’s aneurysm burst. I think he injected something into that IV. You know, maybe that story Evie was working on has something to do with what happened. I wish to hell I knew what it was all about.”

  “Did you check her office?”

  “At the magazine?”

  “No, the one in the Village.”

  “What?”

  “She was renting an office—you know, workspace—someplace in Greenwich Village. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I … um … no. No, I didn’t know that either. Do you know where it was?”

  “No idea.”

  Harry brushed his hand over the pocket where he was carrying Evie’s rabbit’s foot and keys.

  “Julia, I need to find that place,” he said.

  She looked at him with concern.

  “You need to go home and get some sleep, Harry. That place’ll be there tomorrow. Besides, if you don’t know where it is, finding it may not be so easy. She doesn’t have a phone there. That’s as much as I remember of what she said about it.”

  “Thanks,” Harry said. “Julia, who in the hell was she?”

  The book agent set a twenty and a ten beneath her glass and guided him out of the bar into the cool night air.

  “Harry, if you asked ten different people in Evie’s life that question, you’d get ten completely different answers. It would be like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant by whatever part they happen to be feeling. Snake, tree, wall, stone, leaf. They’re all correct … but only up to a point. Want to share a cab home?”

  Harry knew that she lived in almost precisely the opposite direction from his apartment.

  “Hey, listen,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I need to walk for a bit to clear some of this Old Grand-Dad out of my head. I’ll get some rest. I promise.”

  They waited until he had flagged down a taxi for her, then embraced.

  “Call if you need me,” Julia said. “And don’t drive yourself too crazy trying to see any more than the rest of the blind men.”

  Harry watched as the cab disappeared around the corner, then headed slowly downtown.

  CHAPTER 12

  Harry ambled down Lexington to Fifty-eighth and then across toward Central Park South. He loved walking the city at any hour, but especially at night. That he was in no particular hurry was just as well. The double bourbon was definitely slowing him down. For a time, he considered simply writing the whole night off by stopping in another bar or two. But he wanted to think through what Julia Ransome had told him, and he had never been much of a thinker when he was tight.

  During his eighteen months in Nam, he had become something of a functional alcoholic, often drinking to excess as a means of coping with the horrors of his job. In that regard he was not much different from many of the other officers. Fortunately, he had been able to practically stop drinking after the war; and even more fortunately, he had never given in to the urge to numb his feelings with narcotics. For many of those docs and medics who did, the war was still raging, and would be until they died.

  He was crossing by the fountain in front of the Plaza when he glanced down Fifth Avenue. The offices of Manhattan Woman magazine were on Forty-seventh Street. It was almost eleven o’clock. Unless some of the staff was preparing for production, there was no chance of his actually making it up to her office. But he couldn’t face going home yet, and C.C.’s Cellar would be uncomfortably crowded. The group performing there right now wasn’t one of his favorites anyway—a popular progressive quartet whose music he found pretentious. Before he had a chance to rethink the one-night bender option, he turned downtown toward the magazine office, buying a pack of mints along the way to cover the alcohol on his breath. He chewed all of them during the ten-block walk to Forty-seventh.

  The guard at the desk in the lobby of the tastefully refurbished building put aside his National Enquirer and eyed him suspiciously. Harry explained about Evie’s death and his desire to go through her things before they were tossed into a carton by someone and put into storage. He took her picture from his wallet and extracted a twenty at the same time. The guard studied the spectacular woman in the photo for a long moment, then slipped the bill into his shirt pocket and made a call. Three minutes later, Harry stepped out of the elevator and into the twenty-third-floor offices of Manhattan Woman magazine.

  “Dr. DellaRosa, we’re all so sorry about Evie. I’m Chuck Gerhardt, layout.”

  The man, in his early thirties with thinning, closely cut hair, had on tight black jeans and a black turtleneck. The abstract metal-and-glass sculpture suspended from his neck by a heavy chain reminded Harry of a tuba. His tepid handshake could not have cost him more than a calorie.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Harry said. “And thanks for your condolences. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Dr. DellaRosa. Harry felt rapport with Evie and those other women who chose not to trade in their surname for their husband’s. There was no point in correcting the man, though. Harry had not been invited up to the office in years, and he had no intention of setting foot in the place again after tonight. He was searching for a clue—any clue as to what Evie’s secret project was, or where her Greenwich Village hideaway was located. Of course, he thought, any other tidbits offering Insight into the life of the stranger to whom he had been married for nine years would be gratefully accepted.

  “You’re lucky I was here,” Gerhardt said. “First thing next week we put the rag to bed, and I have a ton of work to do. We call it panic mode. That’s why I wasn’t at the funeral today. All the bosses went, but the peons who actually do the work around here got chained to our desks.”

  “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it. It was a beautiful service. And I apologize for disturbing you this way.”

  “Hey, no problem. I just can’t believe Evie’s gone. She was the best, Dr. DellaRosa. She’d give you the shirt off her back.”

  “I know,” Harry said. The irony of the man’s metaphor was not lost on him. “Look, I haven’t been able to sit still since the funeral. I was just walking around the city and I decided to come in, see if I could get Evie’s things.”


  Chuck Gerhardt looked at him strangely.

  “Dr. DellaRosa, I’m certain the man you sent did that already. Yesterday. No, no, the day before. I remember because—”

  “Did you see this man?” Harry felt every muscle in his body tense.

  “Only for a moment. I happened to be by the front desk when he came. Kathy—the receptionist—took him down to Evie’s office. What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Harry said, feigning sudden understanding. “I know what happened. It was my partner at work. His gym’s just a few blocks from here. He volunteered to come by for me a few days ago. With everything that’s been going on I just forgot. Okay if I just go down there anyhow?”

  “Sure.”

  “The end of that hall, right?”

  “No … um … her office is down that corridor there. It has been for a couple of years.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I haven’t been here for a while.”

  Evie’s name was still on the blond oak door. Harry went inside knowing the gesture was fruitless. He was right. The office had been picked clean. Nothing on or in the desk, nothing in the file cabinet, nothing on the walls. The books that had been in her small bookcase were neatly stacked in one corner. Harry had no doubt that every single volume had been checked for papers or hollowed-out compartments. What little doubt he had about the break-in at the apartment vanished. The robbery there was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a thorough search. But for what?

  Just in case, he checked the underside of each shelf, as well as the bottom of all three desk drawers. Nothing. The wastebasket was empty. Harry tried to imagine how anyone could have simply walked into the office and stripped it so thoroughly. The story presented to the receptionist had to have been convincing and smoothly told. The man, himself, must have been iceberg cool. This was no amateur.

  Were the thefts from the co-op and Evie’s office connected with her death? How could they not be? On impulse, Harry settled into the desk chair and switched on Evie’s computer. The hard disk prompt came on. Harry responded to it and waited. But nothing else happened. There were no files. Not one. Not a piece of correspondence or an article or even a word processing program. The data in the computer had been extracted like coins from a piggy bank.