Doc in the Box (17 page)

“I still don’t understand how you could up and leave like that. What about your clothes? You didn’t pack a bag. You didn’t take your vitamins.” I sounded like an accusing mother.

“She bought me new clothes. I didn’t want the old ones anymore. I dressed like a stripper. That awful purple muscle shirt.” He shuddered delicately and shot his medium-starch cuffs. The cufflinks looked like Cartier.

“We were married in port by a judge, before the ship sailed. So romantic.

“Don’t be angry, Francesca. You know why I did this? Because of you. You made me think about my life, with all your questions about my future. I realized I didn’t have one. I finally saw things the way they really were. All those women screaming and scratching me every night.” He winced, and I could see those long, bloody scrapes once again. “Those scratches hurt. One slip of those nails, and a man could lose everything. I didn’t want to dance anymore so women could claw me until I bleed. Nancy made me an offer and I went with her on impulse and I haven’t regretted it. Not one minute. I’m very happy.”

He smiled so sweetly, I had to forgive him.

“I won’t write about the trouble with Nancy’s kids for now,” I said sternly, “since you say it’s been worked out. The first sign that a lawsuit’s been filed, though, and the deal’s off. And I have to let my readers know you’re alive and well.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be glad to tell the world about my bride.”

He gave me his new phone number. Nancy came back to the table, sat down, and gave his knee a proprietary pat. I noticed that her unpolished nails were very short.

So much for my lurid imagination. Leo wasn’t murdered. He was married, and he’d married well. If it wasn’t true love, at least the partners in this match were getting what they wanted. I’d imagined all sorts of horrible fates for him, but Leo was just a normal, healthy, young gold digger. No gunmen were after me, and the needles on the porch were just that—someone needling me.

The newlyweds decided to finally face the world, or at least Nancy’s family. They paid their bill and left. I found an empty booth, just as Marlene came over to me.

“Wow,” she said. “Who’s your friend? I’d like to start my morning with that, even if he was guarded by his mother.”

“That was his wife,” I said.

“She rich?” Marlene said shrewdly.

“Very. That’s how she married him. That’s the former Leo D. Nardo, the missing stripper. The one I thought was dead.”

“Wish I could come back from the dead as well as he did. Speaking of dead, get a load of Mayhew. Doesn’t he look like the living dead?”

He did, except a fashion plate like Mayhew normally wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfit he was wearing this morning. His dark brown jacket hiked up in the back, his blue shirt was wrinkled, his black pants needed pressing, his shoes were brown and his socks powder blue. He looked like he just got off the
overnight bus from Omaha. The dark circles under his eyes added to this illusion. He slid into the other seat in my booth and reached for the coffee Marlene poured him like a drowning man grabbing for a life preserver.

“You look like particular hell,” Marlene said. “Is the case going that badly?”

“We finally may have a break,” he said. “We still cannot get into the doctors’ records, but we may get a look at the health insurance records. We can see if any procedures were denied and what kind of treatment the insurance is paying for. It may tell us something. It’s a step forward, but it’s going to take so damn long to sift through those records and evaluate the information.” He gulped more coffee, rather noisily.

“I know patient privacy is important, but isn’t there a law that medical records have to be revealed if there’s an emergency?” I asked.

“You’re talking about the Tarasoff case in California. It won’t help us for a lot of reasons. First, it concerned shrinks. It said mental health professionals have a duty to warn potential victims of violence if a patient threatens an identifiable individual. But these doctors aren’t shrinks, and no one’s made any threats to the victims. We don’t know if there will even be any more victims. So Tarasoff doesn’t do us any good.”

“Do you still think the killer is a disgruntled patient?” I asked. “Brentmoor died just in the nick of time for his wife. He was going to dump her and marry a pregnant nurse.”

“We know about the wife,” Mayhew said. “If every doctor’s wife killed her unfaithful husband, half the docs at Moorton would be dead.”

“Anyway, it’s a good start,” said the unhappily divorced Marlene. She seemed cheered by the thought of dead philandering husbands. She plunked down a bowl of oatmeal in front of Mayhew, a man who’d never been too faithful, either.

By ten-thirty Monday morning I was on my way to Union Station, a sturdy stone castle in the middle of downtown St. Louis. I loved this old building with its arches, turrets, and tall clock tower. The rundown old railroad station had been redeveloped into a hotel and shopping mall, but the Whispering Arch remained unchanged. It was right on the Grand Staircase to the station’s hotel. The ornate marble arch was framed by gold curlicues and set with a blazing jewel of a stained glass window. The arch was an accident of architecture, an absolutely pure semicircle. If the architects had set out to create one, they couldn’t have. The arch’s secret was supposed to have been discovered during construction, when a workman dropped a hammer on one side of the arch, and a painter heard him on the other side, forty feet away. What the workman said was lost to history, and perhaps it’s just as well. But his discovery has been the delight of lovers, tourists, and curious kids for more than a hundred years. This is where Bill proposed to Irene.

Irene and Bill stood under the arch with their minister. They were a tiny couple, hardly more than five-two. Irene’s huge white orchid corsage looked big as a cabbage on her shoulder. Bill wore a boutonniere in his best blue suit, and a fat, puffy tie that was years out of date.

This was nice, I thought, taking my place behind a
cluster of grandchildren. This was ordinary in the best sense. The hotel had roped off the staircase during the short ceremony. Bill and Irene repeated their vows. Then she walked to one side of the arch, and he went to the other. He whispered something and she giggled like a young girl. Everyone applauded, and the crowd trooped upstairs to the reception in the Grand Hall. Bill and Irene looked even smaller in that enormous, elegant room.

As I watched the couple, I knew my first impression was wrong. Bill and Irene were not ordinary. They were extraordinary. They’d been married fifty years and they were still in love. They held hands and looked at each other as if they were the only people in the room. Even with three bossy daughters issuing orders and eight grandchildren tugging at their clothes, calling “Grandma, look!” and “Grandpa, watch!”

Irene was eager to tell me their story. “I met Bill when my family was traveling to Chicago. My father bought a newspaper at the tobacco shop. Bill was a clerk there. It was love at first sight. My father was a successful lawyer, and we often took the train to Chicago. Bill asked me out, but my parents didn’t like me to see him. They wanted me to marry someone who had prospects, a lawyer or a doctor. We couldn’t meet very often, but whenever I came to the station we’d go to the Whispering Arch to talk. That’s where Bill first told me he loved me. Six months later he proposed there and I said yes, even though he had no money. My parents opposed the marriage. They thought I could do better. But I knew there was no one better than Bill. When Bill was promoted to shop manager, we eloped. I thought I’d never hear the end of it. My
parents didn’t speak to us until after our first child was born.

“Bill was determined to make something of himself. We scrimped and saved and he went to night school, and then he got a good job in sales. Twenty years ago, he bought the company. But I always knew he would do well,” she said, patting his hand.

“You were very brave to take such a chance,” I said.

“If you don’t take chances, you don’t live,” she said.

Her words were like an ice pick in my heart. This little old woman with the fluffy white hair was braver than I could ever be. She’d built her whole life on a proposal whispered into an architectural impossibility. I was too cowardly to marry. I told myself that times were different and women were expected to marry when Irene was young. But I knew she was right: if you don’t take chances, you’ll never live.

“Have you ever tried the Whispering Arch?” she said.

“Never.”

“You must. It won’t be the same with an old lady whispering in your ear, but at least you’ll hear how it works. Come on, I’ll show you. I’ll be right back, Bill,” she said.

She moved with a surprising girlish grace, as if she’d gone back in time to the days of her romance. She skipped lightly down the marble steps of the Grand Staircase. On the landing, the arch’s gold curlicues glowed like liquid fire.

“You stand there,” she said, pointing to a shallow marble recess in the wall, like the secret entrance to a mummy’s tomb. “Now, put your ear to the marble. I’ll go to the other side. Wait and you’ll hear me.”

I pressed my ear to the air-conditioned marble and
waited. Nothing happened. About three minutes later Irene came back with a big smile on her face. “Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

I shook my head and she seemed so disappointed I wished I’d lied and said yes. I wanted it to work for her sake. “We’ll try it again,” she said. “Sometimes it takes time for your ears to adjust. It’s noisy in here. There are lots of people today.”

I dutifully put my ear to the marble again. Two seconds later, I heard a whisper loud and clear. It was a malevolent hiss: “Die, bitch, die!”

That was not Irene. I stepped out of the recess and looked around. Irene was still picking her way through a sudden burst of people going up and down the marble staircase. I saw two African American kids in matching Tommy Hilfiger shirts take off running down the stairs, laughing. They pushed aside a big dishwater blonde, who glared at them, and nearly knocked down a thin man with brown curly hair. They skidded around a frail woman in a wheelchair, and the blond man pushing it yelled, “Hey, watch it!” I was about to take off after them, when a high school tour of about twenty kids with forty backpacks came up the steps. There was no way I’d get through that.

Then it hit me. I could hear it again in my mind, that soft, insinuating, evil whisper: “Die, bitch, die!” I was frightened, more frightened than I’d been when I found the bloody IV tubes on my doorstep, more frightened than when the gunman was looking for the tall one. I tried to tell myself it was a kid’s prank, but that didn’t stop the clutching in my stomach. I looked around frantically. The two kids I’d seen running down the steps were gone.

A few minutes later, Irene came back to my side of
the Whispering Arch, her corsage bouncing jauntily. “Did you hear it this time?” she asked.

“Definitely,” I said. “I got the message loud and clear.”

So much for normal life. I wasn’t cut out for it. Irene got promises of love at the Whispering Arch. I got death threats. I didn’t belong in the world of ordinary people. I managed to say good-bye to Bill and Irene. Then I left to meet Katie at the morgue. When someone whispers “Die, bitch, die!” in your ear, you definitely don’t want to go to the medical examiner’s office. The morgue was a grim reminder of all the things that could go wrong, and all the threats that became real.

Katie’s office always spooked me, because it looked so normal but it wasn’t. Katie never had anything obvious like a severed head in a jar. But I knew I’d see something strange. I checked it warily. There were framed diplomas and honors, a bookcase with fat, serious books, and a box of d-Con on the third shelf.

“You have rats?”

“No,” Katie said, with that little grin, and I knew I’d stumbled on the strangeness. “That box killed a man, but he didn’t commit suicide. He was a retired farmer who moved in with his city sister. He had to take a blood thinner called warfarin. You probably know it by the trade name of Coumadin. He knew that’s what rat poison is—the warfarin thins the rats’ blood and they bleed to death. He used it to kill rats in the barn. He didn’t want to pay the prescription co-payment, so he calculated his body weight versus a rat’s and took d-Con instead.”

“And killed himself,” I said.

“No. He did fine for ten years. Took it along with his Metamucil. Then he lost twenty pounds. That’s what killed him. He forgot to recalculate for his weight loss. The man was too cheap to live.”

Katie knew about farmers and their habits. She was a country girl, who drove a pickup and kept a loaded shotgun in her bedroom. Nearly shot her boyfriend one night when he came sneaking in the door to surprise her.

“So what do you want to know about the Doc in the Box killings?” she asked.

“What can you tell me?”

“You’re not going to print this, right?”

“Not unless I check with you first. It’s strictly background.”

“Good. My ass is grass if you use it without permission. All the victims were killed with a thirty-eight. The killer’s a decent shot, but he’s not a pro. He put between two and five shots in the victim at fairly close range. Most of the shots are in the chest area, where they tear up the heart and lungs and major arteries. Some are in the head. The guy is using hollow points, which means he shoots to kill. Hollow points do a lot of internal damage. A thirty-eight is fairly easy to conceal. Somehow, he’s getting in the doctors’ private offices and nobody notices him or sees that he’s carrying. The shooter might even be a retired cop.”

“Do you think the killer is a man?”

“Not necessarily. You have a female shooter in mind?”

“Brentmoor was cheating on his wife with a nurse and he was about to dump her,” I said. “Stephanie’s
pretty cold-blooded. Do you think she could have killed him?”

Katie snorted. “A rich Ladue lady packing a thirty-eight? No way. It would mess up her manicure.”

“How did you know she lived in Ladue?”

“Because I know the type of woman who’d marry a doctor like Brentmoor. They’re all blond, weigh ninety-eighty pounds, and don’t have the muscle mass of a gerbil.”