A Circle of Wives

by Alice LaPlante

  Samantha Adams: We told you that we needed to do an autopsy. You needn’t have scheduled the funeral quite so quickly.

  Deborah Taylor: People would have wondered why the funeral was delayed. I couldn’t risk that. I needed John safely buried.

  Samantha Adams: As it turned out, someone let the cat out of the bag anyway.

  Deborah Taylor: Yes, that was unfortunate.

  Samantha Adams: Was it you who tipped off the reporter?

  Deborah Taylor: Why on earth would I do such a thing? My goal was that no one ever discover the truth. Now my own children are furious at me. They’re not stupid. They know John. They know me. They figure I must have known about the deception, even suspect that I masterminded it.

  Samantha Adams: Who else possessed this information other than the three wives?

  Deborah Taylor: No one. I’m sure John would never have confided in another soul. By the way, you’ve not yet told me why you sent the body for an autopsy. Isn’t that done only when there’s a suspicious death?

  Samantha Adams: Not necessarily. It’s performed when the cause of a sudden death is unclear.

  Deborah Taylor: What was unclear about my husband’s death? From what I gather, the medical examiner believes it to be a heart attack.

  Samantha Adams: Perhaps. We’ll have to wait on the results of the autopsy.

  Deborah Taylor: All right, but patience isn’t one of my virtues.

  12

  Samantha

  IT TAKES TEN LONG DAYS for the toxicology report on John Taylor to come back. It is inconclusive. According to the pathologist, the levels of potassium in his body were high, but then they would be after a heart attack. Nothing else—not a trace of any substance that would explain his death. Jake says the results of the forensic autopsy are also inconclusive, but that he believes enough questions have been raised by the evidence for a verdict of wrongful death to be issued by the coroner at the inquest.

  Jake is sitting at his desk with the Taylor reports in front of him, frowning. As precise and neat as Jake is in person, his office is the opposite. Files strewn over the desk and floor, articles cut from Forensic Magazine and Academic Forensic Pathology taped to the walls, a whiteboard with indecipherable scribbles on it, and a decent rendering of a cartoon rodent sniffing suspiciously at a half-erased line drawing of a cadaver.

  “The high levels of potassium by themselves would mean nothing,” Jake says without lifting his head. “But when you put them together with the needle puncture and the bruises, that’s when the jury at the inquest will get interested.”

  “So what actually killed him? Was it the head injury when he hit the desk?” I clear some papers off a chair and sit down, take out my notebook.

  Jake shakes his head. “No. The pathologist believes heart attack. The blow on his head was a nasty one, and could have knocked him out. But it wasn’t what killed him. He was alive when he hit his head. He died some time after that.”

  “I thought you said the coroner would probably issue a wrongful death verdict,” I say. “I’m confused.”

  “Heart attack it officially is.” He pauses, then picks up one of the papers from his desk. “But there was the hyperkalemia,” he says. “Serum potassium levels, when normal, are between 3.5 and 5.0. The victim’s were 10. Now that can happen with a heart attack. Or the high potassium caused the cardiac dysrhythmia. It could go either way.”

  “What’s that—hyperkalemia?”

  “Excess potassium.”

  “So the pathologist thinks . . . what, exactly?”

  “That our good doctor suffered a heart attack. That he banged his head on the corner of the dresser going down, but that what ultimately killed him was the heart attack.”

  I shake my head. I feel like I’m being run around in circles.

  “Yet you believe the inquest will be wrongful death?”

  “Yes,” says Jake, a little impatiently. “Remember the bruises? The needle mark? Here . . .” and he pulls out of the file some photographs. This time I see what he was talking about that day in the Westin. The puncture. Very distinct.

  “High amounts of potassium in the system can actually cause cardiac dysrhythmia as well as being a side effect of it. My guess is that the coroner will want a full investigation.”

  I nod. “So you’re saying he could have been injected with potassium? And that the high levels in his body may have caused the heart attack. Not the reverse.”

  “Maybe. Why not. Could have, perhaps, who knows?” says Jake, shrugging. “That’s what the inquest will try to determine.”

  I pick up copies of the paperwork he printed out for me and start reading.

  Most of the language is unintelligible. Myocardial infarction. Rigor mortis, livor mortis, skin slippage, malodor. I grasp on to phrases I can understand. Forehead trauma. Contusions on arms and neck. Wrongful death not ruled out.

  “What about fingerprints in the room?” he asks.

  Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Nothing. Not even the usual partials you’d expect from a hotel room.”

  “How about other evidence?” asks Jake. “Did he have anything on his person that was unusual? Anything in the room that was out of place?”

  “In his pockets were his cell phone and wallet. Most of his clothes were still folded in the suitcase. Interestingly enough, they were all brand new—still had tags on them. What he was wearing also seemed new—hardly worn. There was a pair of pajamas still in the packaging on the bed, and a new toothbrush and fresh tube of toothpaste in the bathroom. Otherwise, the room was as clean as a whistle.”

  “Which of course is suspect. You’d expect fingerprints all over the place—his, previous guests’, and the staff’s.” Jake pauses. “Anything not there that you’d expect to be?” he asks.

  This stops me short. I hadn’t considered it that way.

  “Let me think,” I say.

  “Razor?”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. There was a new razor and an unopened package of blades in his suitcase.”

  “Comb? Brush?”

  “Just a comb, in the bathroom.”

  “Car keys? I assume he drove to the Westin?”

  “Yes. His keys were on the dresser,” I say.

  “How about his house keys? Were they on the same ring?”

  I have to stop to think about that one. “It was a big bunch of keys,” I say finally. “But wouldn’t that bust him? He wouldn’t have keys to all three of his houses on the same key ring. Or would he?”

  “He probably had other keys as well—keys to his clinic, keys to various rooms at the clinic, keys to his office on campus . . . having one or two others probably wouldn’t make much difference unless someone was looking for trouble,” says Jake.

  Something nags at me while he talks on. What else would I possess if I’d checked into a hotel room? Clothes, check. Toiletries, check. Wallet, cell phone, and keys, check. But there should be something else . . .

  “What about the room key?” I ask.

  “What?” asks Jake.

  “I don’t recall seeing a room key in the evidence bags. I’ll have to double-check of course. It’s not that I was looking for it.”

  “It’s probably there,” says Jake. “He had his key to get into the room. It was probably such an obvious thing that you didn’t register it.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt to check,” I say.

  “It never hurts to be thorough,” Jake agrees as I take my leave.

  13

  MJ

  OF COURSE I REGRETTED SPEAKING to that reporter the minute I hung up the phone. But something puzzled me. I didn’t blab that much, drunk as I was. And that reporter definitely had information I didn’t give her.

  I never would have figured that the story would get as much attention as it did. And how that would lead to other reports, to TV and radio segments about my situation, to television vans with satellite receivers on their roofs congregating outside my door. As my grandma would say, well butter my butt and call
it a biscuit. Because the circus that followed! Reporters calling so fast and in such volume that I’d answer the phone (that was when I was still answering it) and before I could say hello I’d hear the beep that signaled another call trying to get through. I eventually unplugged the phone from the wall.

  But today my cell phone started ringing, and only my closest friends know that number. Someone has betrayed me. I turn it off and go into the garden. To weed is to close my mind to anything else. Kneeling in the dirt among the lavender, surrounded by the twelve-foot fence that safeguarded our privacy, I’m safe. I sit back on my heels and breathe in deeply, the way I’ve learned in my relaxation tapes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Again. Again. After an hour of alternately doing my breathing exercises and pulling out the crabgrass that has been accumulating, my heartbeat has slowed and I can think clearly again.

  I go back into the house to get a drink of water. I’m worried about the state of my Hummingbird Coyote Mint plants (Monardella macrantha), they are showing brown spots on their leaves and the bright red blossoms are drooping. I wash the dirt from my hands in the kitchen sink, and without thinking, move to the front door upon hearing a knock. I open it (stupidly).

  Pandemonium. People leaping from cars and running toward me, camera lights flashing, yelling for statements. When did you know, MJ? And, How are you taking it? I slam the door quickly. Still, they keep coming. At first it’s just the local channels. KGO, KTVU. Then CNN and the national news teams from CBS and NBC. I go to the AT&T store and change my cell phone number, but they somehow sniff that out. The story apparently has legs. Every entertainment and gossip rag runs with it, keeps publishing follow-up articles, digs up all sorts of things I wouldn’t have thought anyone would remember. My sneaking out on the rent of the apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco back in the 1980s when the boys were small and I needed a clean slate to start over. Which I did, in Santa Cruz, living in a tiny box of a house that had obviously once been someone’s summer vacation home scraped together using two-by-fours and plywood. The reporters find that part of my life, too, including getting busted for growing and selling weed in the early nineties, for which I had to do community service. Well, shit, I say out loud when I hear that on the radio. I was just trying to make a living.

  Naturally the reporters find out where I work, and interview my co-workers who anonymously and predictably comment on my clothing and hair and general state of disarray. No one disparages the quality of my accounting work, that’s the one good thing. The bad thing is seeing John, and by extension, myself, made the butt of jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Do you know the punishment for three wives? Three mothers-in-law! And, I take care of all my wives. Isn’t that big of me (bigamy)? And, Why did the polygamist cross the road? To get to the other bride. DJs speculate on John’s sex life on crude radio shows. One newspaper prints that John had to eat three turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is nonsense. Or is it? John always worked Christmas, or so he told me, so we had our dinner early—at 1 PM, so he could go into the hospital. But now that I think about it, a plastic surgeon needing to go into the hospital on a holiday? What, just in case someone needs an emergency face-lift? The obviousness of his lies is the truly shameful part. Thinking of him in Deborah’s house with relatives and friends eating his second turkey dinner makes me turn a hot and painful red. The third turkey dinner must have been a fantasy of a reporter or neighbor, as he would hardly have flown down to LA for dinner on the same day.

  Call me naïve, but I didn’t realize my neighbors were that interested in us. How else do they know so much? Did our gardeners, our housecleaners, gossip? The plots in our neighborhood are large, the trees and foliage mature, you can’t see other houses from ours, the garden is protected by a fence. John liked his privacy. Yet someone knew that we spent most of our hours back there, gardening or sitting under the sun umbrella drinking sweet tea, even in winter. They somehow knew the price we’d paid for the house; they knew the color of bougainvillea we’d planted. One especially alert neighbor even heard John’s car leave every morning right after five. Even on weekends. How could she not have known?

  Which is, of course, the million-dollar question.

  14

  Helen

  I SPECIALIZE IN THE TREATMENT of T-cell childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The smaller the patient, the less time we have. The cells multiply and move so fast that it’s a fierce race, the opponent impossibly swift. I typically treat the children and infants with a combination of chemotherapy and targeted therapy with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Inhibitor. That’s what I am. An introverted inhibitor. My job is to prevent, to discourage, to put up walls and deterrents against the cancer cells. I was pretty good at doing that in my personal life, too. John vanquished all my defenses, though. I still don’t know how he managed that.

  I’ve built a name for myself over the years. Professionally, I let my work speak for itself, and it’s gratifying in a small way that my practice calendar is full. Although distressing in a much larger sense, because it means a waiting list of sick kids, many of them hopeless cases, nevertheless hoping for a chance, any chance, I might offer. The fact that I often publish my research—my articles in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology and the Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology have won awards—and increasingly speak at conferences has intensified the attention on my professional life. But I’ve always kept my personal life—what little there is of it—personal. That is now proving impossible. For the media uproar has been frankly astounding.

  I’m not sure if it’s just a slow news month, or whether the idea of a man with three wives is simply so titillating that it pushed everything else off the front page. I take some satisfaction in the fact that no one has yet managed to take a clear photo of me and no usable video. I cover my face every time I go outside. Most publications and TV shows are running my official photograph from the hospital’s website. It’s not particularly flattering, with my brown hair in a neat, sterile bob and a fake half smile plastered on my face.

  The PR director of the hospital has been working with security to keep the reporters at bay at the front entrance. Still, some Judas on the hospital staff must have left a side door strategically open because a news crew managed to almost reach my office this morning. I was in there explaining to the distraught parents of a ten-year-old girl who had presented with excessive bruising on her legs and arms that it was probably not due to soccer practice. My assistant caught sight of the cameras and called the PR director, who then roused security and rooted the crew out of the building before they got to me. Even so, one particularly clever reporter bandaged her young daughter’s two kneecaps and almost managed to make it to my office before being stopped by an alert aide. Since then, a security guard has been posted at the doorway to the pediatric oncology clinic and no one is allowed into the waiting area unless they have a child with them and a scheduled appointment.

  I give the reporters nothing, and still they have the facts. So delicious are these that even the LA Times has run with the story. As have Newsweek, Time, People, inTouch, and a score of less reputable magazines. I don’t listen to the messages on my voicemail inviting me to appear on Good Morning America, Morning Joe, and other radio and television shows. I think about my fellow wives, wonder if they’re talking. I haven’t seen any comment from either of them in the press after that first, disastrous, Chronicle piece—the hole in the dam that turned into the flood.

  It’s salacious stuff. People are repeating it in the elevators, in the break room of the hospital. There are sudden silences when I walk into the cafeteria, or past the nurses’ station. One poor out-of-the-loop orderly even whispered the gossip to me. “Did you hear?” he asked, to the amused horror of everyone around us, as I filled my coffee cup. “This doctor was married to three women! And one of them works here!” I managed an “Imagine that!” before someone hissed the truth to him. He turned bright red, but I didn’t resent his words. Only a handful of people
at the medical center understood that John and I were in a relationship. Even fewer knew we’d actually gotten married. But with the press going wild, I’m resigned that everyone is privy to the most intimate details of my life.

  Then there’s the hush as I enter an examining room. The pity in the eyes of my patients’ parents. Pity—from them, who are going through so much themselves. There’s probably even a slight sense of schadenfreude there. I don’t blame them. I have to leave the hospital by a side door to avoid the reporters and photographers. I push through hordes and protect my face against the flashing bulbs when I get home to my condo in the evening. I stop seeing friends. I spend longer in the hospital every day so that all but the truly tenacious of the reporters have gone home by the time I emerge.

  These reporters are damn good at their jobs. They’ve found quite a number of people willing to talk. All anonymous, of course. Sources say. A source close to the subject. That some of my colleagues have no qualms about discussing me, dissecting me and my habits down to the tiniest minutiae, shouldn’t be as much of a shock as it is, given human nature. The reporters have ferreted out our favorite restaurant on Broadway. The vintage of the red wine we drank. That we occasionally attended the opera. Compared to what is being printed about MJ—Wife No. 2—what’s written about me is positively flattering. Highly respected. Quiet and hardworking. Can be a bit standoffish. But still, I flush when I read the purple prose describing our relationship, when I see how nothing has escaped scrutiny. Clearly deeply in love, they were often seen holding hands at the Three Roses coffee shop in the early morning before reporting for duty at the medical center. And: They were once caught kissing passionately in the parking lot. And: She drives a Prius, which was a little too small for his bulky frame, but they didn’t seem to mind being so intimately close with one another.

  It hurts to find out things about John from these media reports that I hadn’t known before. I was astounded to discover he had once been a passable jazz pianist. The photo used in the obituary was from an actual professional gig. He’d played in jazz bars throughout Chicago. Birdhouse. The Velvet Lounge. Andy’s. The John I knew eschewed music, turned off the radio when he got into my car, shook his head when I asked him if he’d like me to put on a CD at home. I thought he was tone deaf, even teased him about it. I offered to share some of my favorite recordings with him. Classical stuff. I never acquired an ear for anything but the music my father played. Beethoven. Bach. Brahms. In retrospect, I’m ashamed at my glib assumptions about John, about my certainty that I had a grip on the situation. Clearly, I’d been had on all sorts of levels.