“What doctor?”
“He had a name like a bottle of gin.” She sniffled and blotted her eyes with the back of her hand. “Gordon something.”
“Can you describe him?”
“He was driving a terrific Porsche 928. The license plate spelled
Bullion
.”
“Where’s Catch now?”
“I don’t know. He never contacted me. After two days I said to hell with this.”
“So you just left a note on the refrigerator and walked away from it?”
“I’m not a legal resident. I can’t save the world.”
There was a knock on the door. A man with an angry face peered in. “Juliana—table eighteen.”
“Excuse me. I have a living to earn.”
FORTY-THREE
8:30 P.M.
T
HEY MET AT A
quiet little Szechuan restaurant on Third Avenue.
“A doctor came in a Porsche and picked him up.” Anne sipped at a bowl of clear vegetable broth. She had butterflies in her stomach and she knew she couldn’t keep down anything heavier. “The doctor’s name sounded like a bottle of gin.”
“Gilbey’s?” Mark suggested.
“Or Gordon’s?” Cardozo said.
“Gordon. That was it.”
Cardozo’s chopsticks, clasping a ginger scallop, stopped in midair. “Gordon Gibbs?”
“Juliana didn’t remember the last name.”
“Gibbs does sound kind of like Gilbey’s,” Mark said. “Who is he?”
“Runs a clinic,” Cardozo said. “He’s a specialist in spleen viruses. And chairman of a self-help group for divorced fathers. Thursday the nineteenth, while Catch Talbot was in Seattle, he had dinner in the Oak Room with a man
calling
himself Catch Talbot. The man claimed to need moral support in a custody battle with his ex-wife.”
Mark spooned pork fried rice onto his cashew chicken. “You know what amazes me? How come the false Catch knows so damned much about the real Catch?”
“He could have got hold of the voir dire. Kyra gave the court a pretty complete rundown of her life and problems.”
“Dotson Elihu mentioned something strange in court,” Anne recalled. “He said the feds were hiding Mickey Williams in a clinic.”
Cardozo glanced at her. “Which clinic?”
“DiAngeli objected before he could say.”
“Gibbs runs a clinic.”
“Hold it.” Mark raised a hand. “If Gibbs is hiding a man who’s killed three people, he’s not going to talk to the police—not voluntarily.”
“How do you figure three?” Anne said. “Kyra and the policewoman and who else?”
“Toby.”
“No one’s found his body,” she stated flatly.
“But according to Juliana—”
She cut him off. “According to Juliana there was blood on a man’s clothing. Period. We don’t even know if the blood was Toby’s. And we know Toby escaped from the Scottsboro station house.”
“And no one’s seen him since.”
Anger flared in her. “
Toby is alive
.”
“Okay. He’s alive and Dr. Gibbs is going to hand over the fake Catch and the fake Catch is going to hand over Toby.” Mark reached into his jacket and pulled out his cellular phone. “Be my guest.”
“Mark has a point,” Cardozo said. “Gibbs isn’t going to want to talk to the police.”
“Then he’ll talk to me.” Anne grabbed the phone and tapped in the code for directory assistance. “Do you have a number listed for a Dr. Gordon Gibbs?”
“We show a Gordon Gibbs, M.D., on East Sixty-second.”
She glanced at her watch. It was almost nine o’clock—well past any Manhattan M.D.’s office hours—but most doctors were in touch with their answering services in case of emergency. She pressed disconnect and tapped Gibbs’s number into the keypad. She waited through eight interminably sluggish rings.
“Doctor’s office.” The voice was female and curt.
“Dr. Gibbs, please.”
“The doctor’s office hours are Tuesday and Thursday, ten to four.”
“This is an emergency.”
“Your name and number, please?”
“Anne Bingham.” She read the number off the headset.
“Are you a patient?”
“The doctor treats my family. Tell him I’m Toby Talbot’s aunt.”
Eight minutes later the phone rang.
“Ms. Bingham?” The voice was male and jocular and ever so slightly harried. “Gordon Gibbs. What’s the emergency?”
“The emergency is my eleven-year-old nephew, Toby Talbot.”
No reaction.
“Doctor, I want to find my nephew and I believe you can help me.”
“How did you get my name?”
“From Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo of the New York City police.”
“You said Toby Talbot?”
“Toby. As in Catch Talbot. As in Mickey Williams.”
“I’m on my cellular phone and this is a rotten connection. Could you meet me in my office in fifteen minutes?”
Even at nine-thirty in the evening, dozens of people hurried through the marbled lobby of the granite building on 62nd Street and Second Avenue. Footsteps clattered across black and white checkerboard tile.
The night guard at the security desk stopped them and Anne explained that Dr. Gordon Gibbs was expecting them.
“Third floor.” He motioned toward the first bank of elevators.
The directory on the third floor pointed them left, down a long gray corridor. A tall, full-faced man with a neatly trimmed white beard stood in the doorway of a consulting room. He was wearing yellow jogging shoes and green nylon warm-ups and a
Crain’s Business News
sweatshirt. “Ms. Bingham?”
“Dr. Gibbs?” She introduced Mark. “My lawyer.” And Cardozo. “And Lieutenant Vince Cardozo of the New York police.”
“I keep running into you, Lieutenant.” Dr. Gibbs held out a hand. “Won’t you please come in.”
Gibbs was one of those New York professionals who had it all—the leather-and-mahogany office, the signed Jasper Johns lithos, the Harvard Med and Johns Hopkins diplomas on the wall.
They sat in brass-studded armchairs.
“We should get a few things straight.” Gibbs had a voice that went fluty under pressure, like an adolescent’s. It clashed with his heavy build and beard. “I specialize in viral diseases of the spleen. I’m chiefly a researcher. I don’t discuss my patients, but I can tell you without violating medical ethics that I have never had any patients by the name of Catch Talbot or Mickey Williams. In fact, my patients are all women.” He smiled a friendly smile, sorry to disappoint. But his fingertips were jittering on the armrest like strung-out junkies. “I’ve heard the name Toby Talbot, but contrary to your beliefs, I have no idea where he is.”
Cardozo wasn’t buying the smile. Or anything else. “Where did you hear Toby Talbot’s name?”
“I’ve told you all this before.”
“My friends haven’t heard.”
“I’m president of the New York chapter of P-Wok—Pops Without Kids. When Catch—when Mr. Talbot came to town he gave me a call. We had dinner. He believed his ex-wife had a scheme to seize sole custody at the next hearing. He was furious with her.”
“Furious enough to want to harm her?”
“There’s no way I can make that judgment.”
“Tell me, Doctor. What sort of assistance were you giving the man you call Catch Talbot?”
“I’ve given him no assistance.” Gibbs’s eyes, glaring above his half-moon glasses, met Cardozo’s unwaveringly. As though the ability to stare a cop in the face was proof of candor.
“In case your friend hasn’t told you yet—he’s using the real Catch Talbot’s name and credit cards. Felony if he’s charged over five thousand. He’s murdered one of my policewomen. Felony. He’s murdered the real Catch Talbot’s ex-wife. Felony. And he’s kidnapped Toby Talbot. Felony.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it. But he’s not my patient, so how does any of that involve me?”
“He’s been using you to divert suspicion to the real Catch Talbot. Which means, like it or not, you’re very much involved.”
“As an accessory,” Mark Wells said. “And since you say he’s not a patient, I’d be very surprised if the law would consider medical ethics a defense.”
“In that case …” The doctor stood up. “I have a right to speak to a lawyer.”
“You’re speaking to one.” Mark Wells smiled. “Me.”
“Now, look here—either you people leave my office right now, or I call
my
lawyer.”
“I’d like to speak to your lawyer,” Cardozo said.
Behind Gibbs, a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, unhurriedly.
Gibbs crumpled back into the chair. “Look—can’t we straighten this out amicably? Can’t you people see I know nothing about this man or his crimes?”
“Then why did you return my call?” Anne said. “And agree to meet me?”
“I was only trying to be helpful to a lady who sounded confused and distressed.”
“Try a little harder,” Cardozo suggested, “and you might wind up helping yourself.”
“All right.” Gibbs exhaled a surrendering sigh. “Here’s the situation. Four or five days after our dinner … Mr. Talbot was having emotional trouble. He contacted me.”
“And?”
Gibbs studied Cardozo with calibrating eyes. “I came to realize he had obsessive resentments—but I swear I had no idea he was capable of acting on them violently.”
“It’s a crime,” Cardozo reminded the doctor, “to withhold information in a murder investigation.”
“Can’t you grasp the fact that I
have
no information? Catch—or whatever his name is—never confided in me. He’s not my patient.” Gibbs’s eyes dropped. “He’s being treated by Dr. Lederer.”
“And who’s Dr. Lederer?”
It was a long moment before Gibbs answered. “Hillary Lederer, one of our best psychiatrists. He and Catch had a few consultations. I arranged for Catch to move into one of the spare rooms upstairs. I had no idea he was even suspected of a felony. I had no intention of abetting any crime.”
“And is he upstairs now?” Cardozo asked.
“There’s one way to find out.” Gibbs reached across the desk for the phone.
“Let’s save the phone call,” Cardozo suggested, “and surprise him.”
Dr. Gordon Gibbs rapped on the gray door at the end of the seventh-story corridor. “Catch—are you there?”
No one answered. He rapped louder.
And still no answer.
“Why don’t you just let us in?” Cardozo suggested.
“Look, I want to be helpful, but I’m not sure I have the right.”
“Under New York State law,” Mark Wells assured him, “you have the right.”
Gibbs searched his key chain. “I’m not sure I have the passkey.”
Cardozo pointed to the Medeco skeleton key. “That one should do the trick.”
With fumbling hands, Gibbs tried the key. It turned. The door opened on darkness. A faint scent of soap drifted out.
“Catch? It’s just me—Gordon Gibbs.” He flicked the electric switch. Light came up on a comfortable room with mocha walls and bleached-pine furniture. And no occupant.
Cardozo’s eye inventoried: two walls of bookshelves. A daybed with leather bolsters. A 1950s Danish-modern desk with a phone and answering machine. A five-spring cable exerciser lay across the back of a chair; two twenty-four-pound dumbbells sat on the floor.
“Mr. Talbot seems to travel with a small gym.”
“He says he enjoys working out,” Gibbs said.
Cardozo crossed to the closet. Empty. The bathroom. A toothbrush and a Trac-II razor sitting in a Hilton Hotel tumbler.
“Don’t you have to show me a search warrant?” Gibbs said.
“Not so long as you consent.” Cardozo drew back the green metal swivel chair and sat at the desk. He slipped on a pair of evidence gloves and tried the drawer. Locked. “Do you have a key to the desk?”
“I do not.”
Cardozo took out his penknife, snapped the lock, and pulled the drawer open. Inside were two leather cases, a man’s medium-length brown wig, a simple clip-on gold earring, and a contact lens kit. The kit contained a pair of dark brown soft plastic lenses floating in clear solution.
The smaller leather case held a hypodermic syringe and eight replacement needles. The larger contained nineteen glass ampoules of a clear liquid. Cardozo held one up to read the label:
Somanabol (somatotropin) Human Growth Hormone (Synthesized)
. “Tell me, Doctor, is this the anabolic steroid you refused to get for him?”
Gibbs stiffened. “I have no idea where he got that.”
“How long would he have to inject this stuff before it altered his behavior?”
“If he injected two of those a day for eight weeks, you’d see some problems with rage.”
“And violence?”
Gibbs nodded.
Cardozo turned his attention to the answering machine. A zero glowed solid in the read-out window, indicating there’d been no messages. He pressed
replay
just in case an old message hadn’t been erased.
There was a click followed by silence.
He raised the lid and saw that the incoming message tape had been removed. But not the outgoing. He punched the
test-outgoing-message
button. The tape whirred past the sound head, blank.
But in a moment a rapid series of electronic blips sounded and then a second phone was ringing.
“He’s forwarding his calls automatically.” After eight rings, it was clear no one was going to pick up. Cardozo took out his notebook and jotted down the number on the telephone. “When did you last see the man you call Catch Talbot?”
“I don’t recall,” Gibbs said. “He can come and go as he likes. He’s not a prisoner.”
“Not yet.”
Riding down in the elevator, Mark adjusted a necktie that needed no adjusting. “At least we’ve established one thing. He’s not hiding Toby in his room.”
“Then where has he put him?” Anne said.
“I’ll contact the phone company,” Cardozo said. “They’ll trace where he’s forwarding his calls. In the meantime, I wouldn’t worry. Toby was a negotiating chip for the trial. There’s no reason to harm him now.”
Anne couldn’t be that calm about it. “There was no reason to kill Kyra either, was there?”
“He couldn’t risk leaving her alive after he had the note. She would have phoned the school. Killing her was a rational choice.”
“He’s
not
rational.” Anne shook her head. “Juliana said he was a madman. She said he and Toby were fighting.”
“Over what?”
She tried to recall Juliana’s exact words. “She said Toby was playing with his modem and going stir-crazy, and—” She broke off.