Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“No.”
Murphy gave me a skeptical look.
“My wife and I were close. Always. She died before …”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know. Before I thought about it, I guess. She was just the only one.”
Murphy blinked. “The only one? Like ever, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
Murphy shook his head. “You really are one of a kind, Cuddy.” He said it without sarcasm.
“You and Willa Daniels, huh?”
“Yeah. Gayle and me were married maybe three years. We wanted kids, but it wasn’t happening, so we went for one of those tests. We went twice, actually. Doctor said it was Gayle. She just couldn’t conceive. We tried all kinds of—”
He stopped.
I began, “You don’t have to—” but he cut me off.
“Look, you wanted to hear it, right?”
“Yes.”
“You kept asking about it, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. So let me tell it.” He took a breath and continued. “We tried a lot of things. Taking temperatures, scheduling making love. All for a kid. But there was something about the scheduling, the arranging of it, that took away the enjoyment of it. The feeling of it, between her and me. Especially when it wasn’t working, when she still couldn’t conceive. So …” Murphy finished his beer.
“Want another one?”
He declined. “So I met Willa. She was working in an insurance agency. Somebody at the agent’s home office thought maybe he was padding claims for one of his insureds, who seemed to have a lot of costly burglaries. I was still in uniform then, but they put me in plainclothes for a morning and lent me to Burglary to interview the guy’s black secretary. That’s how it was done in those days.”
“She married then?”
“Yeah, but her husband was already a shit. Dog track, losing the rent money and spending what he won on booze and white hookers. Willa didn’t believe in divorce.”
“Divorce? You were that serious about her?”
Murphy looked puzzled, then spoke quickly. “No, no. I didn’t mean divorce so she could marry me. With Gayle and me, it was just … well, it was like a time when it wasn’t working right after it had been great for three years. I just couldn’t see past the period we were going through. It seemed like it was a time that was going to go on forever.”
“You started seeing Willa then?”
“I suppose so.” He shrugged. “At first, we just had lunch. I’d make up an excuse, that I had to see a guy about this case or that one. Willa would meet me at a restaurant. She was afraid her boss—who turned out to be straight on the claims, by the way; we didn’t bust him—that her boss would suspect something if I came by to see her at work. Willa’s husband was a little free with his hands, and one lunch she had a bruise under her eye. I had a talk with the shit after he got off what little work he did one day. He left her alone after that. Completely alone.”
Murphy diddled with his mug. “I’ll take that other beer, if it’s still okay?”
I went to the fridge and popped another bottle for him. I’d barely touched mine. I came back in and handed him the beer.
“Thanks.” He poured half of the beer, and drank half of what he’d poured.
“Anyway,” he said, “Willa was a damned attractive woman then, and her husband was a bastard, and I was feeling, I dunno, like I wanted to fall in love again, I guess. And so we went at it.”
“Long time?”
“Two, two and a half months. More like therapy than romance, actually. We had to schedule things, like Gayle and me, only … only it was different. We were really helping each other, I think. To grow up.”
“What caused it to end?”
“Willa. Willa getting pregnant, I mean. She and I were always real careful. As careful as you could be back then. But one night her husband came home drunk, and some pross had shorted him, and, well, he … took it out on Willa, without any precautions. I don’t know whether it was him or me. But Willa wouldn’t have an abortion, wouldn’t hear of it. And her being pregnant changed the other thing we had.” Murphy sipped some more beer. “So we stopped seeing each other, pretty much stopped even talking with each other. Then William came along, and her husband got even shittier, and eventually left. I couldn’t help her much; her parents pretty much took her in. Then, with everything else in life, I sort of lost track of her and William.”
I drank some of my beer. It was getting warm, but I wanted something to do.
Murphy stopped, poured off the rest of his second into the mug. “So now you know.”
“Dr. Lopez, William’s counselor at U Mass, and Willa talked about William’s getting a free ride at Goreham. Were you helping out there?”
“A little. William wanted to live in the dormitory, like a real college kid, not a day-hopper. Willa was a little short, so I … We can borrow some against our pension.”
“Pretty good alternative investment.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Murphy, tossing off the last of his beer. “Thanks to me, William got to meet the girl they say he killed. Terrific investment.”
“I’m not so sure he killed her.”
“You got proof?”
I summarized for him the discrepancies I’d spotted so far.
Murphy mulled them, then said, “If I weren’t emotionally involved in all this, I’d say you haven’t got squat.”
“I’d like to keep looking.”
“I spoke to Willa about William not helping you. She said she talked to him and he agreed to see you again.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
Murphy got up, walked to the door.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I the first person you’ve talked with about you and Willa?”
Murphy half turned, then threw back the dead bolt to leave. “You know your problem, Cuddy? You always ask one question too many.”
It was as good an answer as any.
I called Willa Daniels and brought her up-to-date on the investigation, with the exception of the confessional with Murphy. She thanked me warmly for the small optimism I let her feel.
Next I dialed Information and got the number of the only Wald family in Marion. The operator even asked me if I didn’t mean Wall or Walsh. I thanked her and tried the number.
A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Wald?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a daughter named Deborah Wald?”
“Yes. Who is this, please? Is Debbie all right?”
“My name is John Cuddy, Mrs. Wald. I’m a detective looking into the murder of Debbie’s roommate, Jennifer Creasey.”
Mrs. Wald’s voice dropped. “I thought that was all over with.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, Debbie isn’t here right now. She’s out with friends.” A different tone crept into her voice. “I don’t think she’d be of much help to the police anyway.”
Sometimes you get further by not correcting a misimpression. “Even so, Mrs. Wald, I’d like to talk with her.”
She paused. “Well, Debbie works breakfast and lunch at the country club restaurant. She’ll be home tomorrow after two-thirty or so.”
“That should be fine. Can you give me some directions?”
Mrs. Wald dictated a long series of turns, rotaries, and ill-marked roads. She said it was about an hour and a half from Boston.
“Given the distance, Mrs. Wald, are you pretty sure that Debbie will be home then?”
“Oh, yes. She has to be. They’re …” Her voice cracked. “They’re taking the piano away tomorrow.” She started to cry and hung up.
H
AVING GONE TO
bed unnaturally early, I woke up unnaturally early the next morning. By 6:00 A.M., I was ready to run.
I crossed Beacon Street and over the footbridge, only two or three cars passing on the usually clogged Storrow Drive beneath me. I turned left and moved upriver.
The banks of the Charles are eerie at dawn. The ghost of a full moon, looking embarrassed to be still visible, stares down upon homeless men and women. They sleep on hard slatted benches, wrapped cocoon-like in stained blankets against the damp air. Four or five push shopping carts full of cans and bottles, rummaging through trash barrels and abandoned paper bags to collect enough returnables for the day’s food or drink. Interspersed are the severely mentally disturbed, also without shelter following the wholesale release of the supposedly harmless ones from the Commonwealth’s institutions. They meander slowly and mutter, or march like storm troopers and shout, their strings of obscenities provoked by inner, private devils. Toss in fifteen or twenty fitness-conscious, fast-lane urbanites who sweat and swerve along the macadam running paths, wearing designer jogging outfits and “Have a nice day” smiles for each other.
Hieronymus Bosch was born five hundred years too soon.
I got back to my place and cleaned up. Making a ham sandwich for breakfast, I settled down with the papers on Marek that Murphy had given me the previous evening.
I riffled through the forms, then organized them into what appeared to be a rational order. The first was an Application for Endorsement Registration. It had been filed only two years and eight months before, which surprised me a little. Marek was a lot more recently admitted to practice in Massachusetts than I would have guessed. Maybe his furniture really was rented.
The application requested, and Marek had provided, premedical, medical, and postmedical schooling, together with hospital appointments. He had gone to school in California, with subsequent hospital positions in New York City, Philadelphia, and finally Chicago, before coming to Massachusetts. Marek apparently had never been certified by any specialty board.
Next on the application was a list of fourteen questions, asking roughly the medical equivalent of “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?” They included whether his license had ever been revoked, whether he had ever failed a state exam, and whether he had ever been censured or dismissed by a hospital. Marek naturally had answered each of them “No.”
The next page of the application contained a completed verification of medical instruction and graduation from the dean of Marek’s medical school, along with a photograph of a younger, thinner-faced Marek. Apparently our climate was agreeing with him. There followed a certificate from a Dr. Jerome Gemelman, at the hospital in Chicago, that Marek was of good moral and professional character. Finally, there was an affidavit of the secretary of the Illinois medical association that Marek was duly licensed there, with attached Xeroxes of certificates from Pennsylvania and New York.
The second document was an application for a FLEX endorsement, which seemed to deal with some kind of standardized test. The form called for, and received, the same information in the same order as the initial application for registration.
Read in the context of the rest of the documents, it seemed that Marek, having received a high enough score on the FLEX test and having been licensed elsewhere and vouched for personally, was pretty much automatically granted a license to practice here. There was also a pro forma application for renewal from Marek and an approval of the renewal of his license. I pulled a sheet of blank paper from a desk drawer and made some notes. Then I slipped the documents into a manila folder and put them into the drawer. I dressed in a coat and tie and went down to the car.
William didn’t look any happier to see me this time. The guard who brought him took up his same position and watched William carefully.
“Hi, William,” I said. Involuntarily, I found myself examining his face for any surface resemblance to Murphy. I saw none.
“Look, my mother wants me to talk to you, I’ll talk. For her. But you and me ain’t friends, so let’s just get on with it, okay?”
“Whatever way you want it to be.”
“That’s how it is. What I want don’t matter.” He paused. “Never has.”
I started by listing the people and steps I’d pursued so far. When I finished, William snorted derisively.
“That Murphy must have you on the hook real bad for you to blow so much time on this thing.”
“Maybe I’m beginning to believe that all this didn’t go down quite like everyone says.”
“You wanna be thick, that’s your business. Ask me your questions.”
“How did you meet Jennifer?”
William made a face, but started answering. “When I got to school—Goreham, I mean—I met her one day in the dorm.”
“In Richard McCatty’s room?”
“Yeah. Him and some of his goon friends were there too.”
“McCatty give you a hard time?”
“Oh, no,” said William, exaggerating the words. “He didn’t give me no trouble. He the soul of integration, the motherfucker.”
“When did you start seeing Jennifer?”
“She come out to apologize for McCatty’s attitude. She come on real nice, asked me to have coffee with her.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. We went to the student center and talked.”
“How long?”
“Coupla hours. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Probably nothing, but I have to get a sense of how things came along.”
“‘How things came along’? What the hell you think came along?”
“What do you mean?”
“She did me, man. She took me back to her room after the coffee and all and she did me.”
“Sex.”
“No, mother’. Body painting. Shit, of course sex. Blow job. Said it was her period.”
I stopped for a minute. William looked at me reproachfully. He said, “That all your questions?”
“No. I was just thinking.”
“What?”
“Just that everybody I’ve talked to implied that you and she were serious. As in romantically serious.”
William laughed. I took a chance. “William, you’re the first one who’s suggested she was just a convenient piece of ass.”
He got angry, then tried to cover it. “People don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. You shoulda learned that by now.”
“Was Jennifer seeing other guys while she was seeing you?”
“You mean was she fucking other guys, don’t you?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Probably. Yeah, definitely. She liked to fuck.”
“Who?”
“Who she fucked?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.” He laughed again, short and bitter. “Tell you what—you bring me a student directory, maybe a faculty directory too, and I’ll underline the definites and check off the probables.”