He hadn’t told Annie he was selling the house. He didn’t want her to talk him out of it. Then one nice Saturday in February, when he was working, she’d decided to take a ride to Greenwood Lake, and the house was gone. She’d come home and pounded his chest with her fists, and even though he’d driven her to Bedford to see the kind of mansion he was going to buy for her, it hadn’t helped calm her anger.
Ned was sorry that Nicholas Spencer was dead. I wish I could have killed him myself, he thought. If I hadn’t listened to him, Annie would still be here with me.
Then last night when he couldn’t sleep, he had a vision of Annie. She was telling him to go to the hospital and see Dr. Greene. “You need medicine, Ned,” she was saying. “Dr. Greene will give you medicine.”
If he made an appointment with Dr. Greene, he’d be able to go to the hospital, and nobody would think it was unusual to see him there. He’d find out where Lynn Spencer was and go into her room. And before he killed her, he’d tell her all about Annie.
EIGHT
I hadn’t intended to visit Lynn that day, but after I passed the ruin that had been her home in Bedford, I realized that I was only ten minutes away from the hospital. I decided to stop in. I’ll be honest: I’d seen pictures of that beautiful house, and now, witnessing the charred remains, it hit me how very fortunate Lynn had been to survive. There were two other cars in the garage that night. If that fireman hadn’t noticed the red Fiat she usually drove and inquired about it, she would be dead now.
She had been lucky. Luckier than her husband, I thought as I drove into the hospital parking lot. I was sure I wouldn’t have to worry about running into cameramen today. In this fast-paced world, Lynn’s brush with death was already old news, only interesting if someone was arrested for setting the fire or if Lynn herself was found to be a co-conspirator in the looting of Gen-stone.
When I got my visitor’s pass at the hospital, I was directed to the top floor. When I stepped out of the elevator, I realized it was for patients with big bucks. The hallway was carpeted, and the unoccupied room I passed could have been in a five-star hotel.
It occurred to me that I should have phoned ahead. My mental image had been of the Lynn I’d seen two days ago, with oxygen tubes in her nostrils, bandaged hands and feet—and pathetically grateful to see me.
The door of her room was partially open, and when I looked in, I hesitated before entering because she was talking on the phone. She was reclining on a divan at the window, and the change in her appearance was dramatic. The oxygen tubes were gone. The bandages on her palms were much smaller. A pale green satin robe had replaced the hospital-issue nightshirt she had been wearing on Tuesday. Her hair was no longer loose but once again was swept up in a French knot. I heard her say, “I love you, too.”
She must have sensed my presence because she turned as she closed her cell phone. What did I see on her face? Surprise? Or for an instant did she look annoyed, even alarmed?
But then her smile was welcoming and her voice warm. “Carley, how nice of you to come. I was just talking to Dad. I can’t convince him that I’m really all right.”
I walked over to her, and realizing that I probably shouldn’t touch her hand, I awkwardly patted her shoulder, and then sat on the loveseat facing her. There were flowers on the table next to her, flowers on the dresser, flowers on the night table. None of the arrangements were the kind you grab in the hospital lobby. Like everything else about Lynn, they were expensive.
I was angry at myself for immediately feeling a sense of being off-balance with her, as though I was waiting for her to establish the mood. In our first meeting in Florida, she’d been condescending. Two days ago she’d been vulnerable. Today?
“Carley, I can’t thank you enough for the way you spoke about me when they interviewed you the other day,” she said.
“I simply said that you were lucky to be alive and that you were in pain.”
“All I know is that I’ve had calls from friends who had stopped talking to me after they found out what Nick had done. They saw you, and I guess they realized that I’m a victim along with them.”
“Lynn, what do you think about your husband now?” It was a question I had to ask, the one I realized I had come here to ask.
Lynn looked past me. Her mouth tightened. She clasped her hands together, then winced and pulled them apart. “Carley, it’s all happened so fast. The plane crash. I couldn’t believe Nick was gone. He was larger than life. You met him, and I think you sensed that. I believed in him. I thought of him as a man with a mission. He’d say things like, ‘Lynn, I’m going to beat the cancer cell, but that’s just the beginning. When I see kids who were born deaf or blind or retarded or with spina bifida, and know how close we are to preventing such birth defects, I go crazy that we’re not out there with this vaccine yet.’ “
I had met Nicholas Spencer only once, but I had seen him interviewed on television any number of times. Consciously or unconsciously, Lynn had caught something of the tenor of his voice, of that forceful passion that had made such an impression on me.
She shrugged. “Now I can only wonder if everything about my life with him was a lie. Did he seek me out and then marry me because I gave him access to people he might not have known otherwise?”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“He came to the public relations firm where I work, about seven years ago. We handle only top-drawer clients. He wanted to start getting publicity for his firm and get the word out about the vaccine they were developing. Then he started asking me out. I knew I resembled his first wife. I don’t know what it was. My own father lost his retirement money because he trusted Nick. If he deliberately cheated Dad as well as all those other people, the man I loved never even existed.”
She hesitated, then went on. “Two members of the board came to see me yesterday. The more I learn, the more I believe that from beginning to end Nick was a fraud.”
I decided it was necessary to tell her that I would be writing an in-depth article on him for Wall Street Weekly. “It will be a chips-fall-where-they-may article,” I said.
“The chips have already fallen.”
The phone at the bedside rang. I picked it up and handed it to her. She listened, sighed, and said, “Yes, they can come up.” She handed the receiver back to me and said, “Two people from the police department in Bedford want to talk to me about the fire. Don’t let me keep you, Carley.”
I would love to have sat in on that meeting, but I had been dismissed. I replaced the phone on the receiver, picked up my purse, and then thought of something. “Lynn, I’m going to Caspien tomorrow.”
“Caspien?”
“The town where Nick was raised. Would you know anyone you’d suggest I see there? I mean, did Nick ever mention any close friends?”
She considered my question for a moment, then shook her head. “None that I can recall.” Suddenly she looked past me and gasped. I turned to see what had startled her.
There was a man standing in the doorway, one hand inside his jacket, the other in his pocket. He was balding and had a sallow complexion and sunken cheekbones. I wondered if he was ill. He stared at the two of us, then glanced down the corridor. “Sorry. I guess I’m on the wrong floor,” and with that murmured apology, he was gone.
A moment later two uniformed police officers replaced him at the entrance to the room, and I left.
NINE
On the way home I heard on the radio that the police were questioning a suspect in the torching of the Bedford home of Nicholas Spencer, described, as always, as the missing or deceased chief executive of Gen-stone.
To my dismay I heard that the suspect was the man who had the emotional outburst at the shareholders’ meeting on Monday afternoon at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. He was thirty-six-year-old Marty Bikorsky, a resident of White Plains, New York, who worked at a gasoline station in Mount Kisco, the neighboring town to Bedford. He had been treated at St. Ann’s Hospital on Tuesday aftern
oon for a burn on his right hand.
Bikorsky claimed that the night of the fire he had worked until eleven o’clock, met with some friends for a couple of beers, and by twelve-thirty was home and in bed. Under questioning he admitted that at the bar he had sounded off about the Spencers’ mansion in Bedford and how for two cents he’d torch it.
His wife corroborated the testimony about the time he had arrived home and gone to bed, but she also admitted that when she woke up at three o’clock, he was not there. She also said that she had not been surprised at his absence, because he was a restless sleeper, and sometimes in the middle of the night he would put a jacket over his pajamas and go out on the back porch to smoke. She went back to sleep and did not wake up until seven. At that time he was already in the kitchen and his hand was burned. He said it had happened when his hand touched the flame on the stove while he was cleaning up spilled cocoa.
I had told the investigator from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Jason Knowles, that I did not think the man I now knew was Marty Bikorsky had anything to do with the fire, that he was troubled rather than vindictive. I wondered if I was losing the instinct that is essential to anyone in the news business. Then I decided that no matter how it looked for Bikorsky, I still felt that way.
As I drove, I realized that something had been flickering in and out of my subconscious. Then it registered: It was the face of the man who had briefly stood at the door of Lynn’s hospital room. I knew I’d seen him before. Tuesday, he’d been standing outside the hospital when I was interviewed.
Poor guy, I thought. He looks so defeated. I wondered if someone in his family was a patient in the hospital.
* * *
That evening I had dinner with Gwen Harkins at Neary’s on East 57th Street. Growing up, she lived near me in Ridgewood. We went through grammar school and high school together. For college she went south to Georgetown, and I went north to Boston College, but we took semesters in London and Florence together. She was my maid of honor when I married the lemon of the century, and she was the one who kept making me go out with her after the baby died and the lemon took off for California.
Gwen is a tall, willowy redhead who usually wears high heels. When we’re together, I’m sure we make an odd sight. I’m single courtesy of a decree that says that what God has put together, the State of New York can declare asunder. She’s had a couple of guys she could have married, but neither one, she says, made her want to keep the cell phone pinned to her ear rather than miss his call. Her mother, like mine, assures her that someday she’ll meet “Mr. Right.” Gwen is a lawyer for one of the major drug companies, and when I called her and suggested dinner at Neary’s, I had two reasons for wanting to see her.
The first, of course, is that we always have a good time together. The second is that I wanted to get her take on Gen-stone and what the people in the pharmaceutical industry were saying about it.
As usual, Neary’s was bustling. It’s a home away from home for many people. You never know which celebrity or politician might be at one of the corner tables.
Jimmy Neary joined us at the table for a moment, and as Gwen and I sipped red wine, I told him about my new job. “Nick Spencer would drop by here from time to time,” he said. “I’d have pegged him as a straight arrow. Shows you never can be sure.” He nodded toward two men standing at the bar. “Those fellows lost money in Gen-stone, and I happen to know they can’t afford it. Both of them have kids in college.”
Gwen ordered red snapper. I chose my favorite comfort food, a sliced steak sandwich and French fries. We settled back to talk.
“This dinner is on me, Gwen,” I said. “I need to pick your brain. How was Nick Spencer able to get so much hype going on his vaccine if it’s a sham?”
Gwen shrugged. She’s a good lawyer, which means that she never answers a question directly. “Carley, breakthroughs in new drugs are happening practically every day. Compare it to transportation. Until the nineteenth century, people rode in carriages or stagecoaches or on horseback. The train and the automobile were the great inventions that moved the world faster. In the twentieth century we had prop planes, then jets, then supersonic aircraft, and then spaceships. That kind of acceleration and progress is happening in medical laboratories as well. Think about it. Aspirin was only discovered in the late 1890s. Before that they were bleeding people to relieve fever. Smallpox. That vaccine is only eighty years old, and wherever it was, it eradicated the disease. As recently as fifty years ago there was a polio epidemic. The Salk and then the Sabin vaccines took care of that. I could go on and on.”
“DNA?”
“Exactly. And don’t forget that DNA has revolutionized the legal system as well as making it possible to predict hereditary diseases.”
I thought about the prisoners who were being released from death row because their DNA proved they hadn’t committed the crime.
Gwen still had a full head of steam. “Remember all the books where a child was kidnapped, and then thirty years later an adult showed up at the door and said, ‘I’m home, Mommy.’ ” Today it isn’t a case of whether or not somebody looks like somebody else. DNA testing makes the difference.”
Our dinners arrived. Gwen took a couple of bites, then went on. “Carley, I don’t know whether Nick Spencer was a charlatan or a genius. I understand some of the early results of his cancer vaccine as reported in medical journals seemed to be very encouraging, but face it: At the end of the day, they couldn’t verify the results. Then, of course, Spencer disappears, and it turns out he looted the company.”
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked.
“In a big group at some of the medical seminars. A very impressive guy, but you know what, Carley? Knowing how much he stole from people who couldn’t afford to lose it and, even worse, how he dashed the hopes of people desperate for the vaccine he touted, I can’t feel a scintilla of sympathy for him. So his plane crashed. As far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”
TEN
Connecticut is a beautiful state. My father’s cousins lived there when I was growing up and when we visited them, I thought that all of the state was like Darien. But like every other state, Connecticut has its modest working-class towns, and the next morning when I got to Caspien, a hamlet ten miles from Bridgeport, that was what I found.
The trip didn’t take that long, less than an hour and a half. I left my garage at nine o’clock and was passing the “Welcome to Caspien” sign at ten-twenty. The sign was a wood carving illustrated with the image of a revolutionary soldier holding a musket.
I drove up and down through the streets to get the feel of the place. The majority of the houses were Cape Cods and split levels, the kind built in the mid-1950s. Many of them had been enlarged, and I could see where yet another generation had replaced the original owners, the veterans of World War II. Bicycles and skate boards were visible in carports or leaning near side doors. The large percentage of vehicles parked in the driveways or on the streets were SUVs or roomy sedans.
It was a family kind of town. Almost all the houses were well kept. As in every place where people dwell, there was a section where the houses were bigger, the lots larger. But there were no cookie-cutter mansions in Caspien. I decided that when people started to make it big, they set out the “for sale” sign and moved to a more pricey enclave nearby, such as Greenwich or Westport or Darien.
I drove slowly down Main Street, the center of Caspien. Four blocks long, it had the usual mix of smalltown business establishments: Gap, J. Crew, Pottery Barn, a furniture store, a post office, a beauty parlor, a pizza joint, a few restaurants, an insurance broker. I cruised through a couple of the intersecting blocks. On Elm Street I passed a funeral parlor and a shopping mall that included a supermarket, dry cleaner, liquor store, and movie house. On Hickory Street I found a diner and next to it a two-story building with a sign that read caspien town journal.
From my map I could see that the Spencer family home was located at 71 Winslow Terrace, an aven
ue that spiked off from the end of Main Street. At that address I found a roomy frame house with a porch, the kind of turn-of-the-century house I grew up in. There was a shingle outside that read PHILIP BRODERICK, M.D. I wondered if Dr. Broderick lived on the upstairs floor where the Spencer family had lived.
In an interview, Nicholas Spencer had painted a glowing picture of his childhood: “I knew I couldn’t interrupt my father when he had patients, but just knowing he was there downstairs, a minute away, made me feel so great.”
I intended to pay a visit to Dr. Philip Broderick, but not yet. Instead I drove back to the building that housed the Caspien Town Journal, parked at the curb, and went inside.
The heavyset woman at the reception desk was so absorbed in something on the Internet that she looked startled when the door opened. But her expression immediately became pleasant. She gave me a cheery “good morning” and asked how she could help me. Wide rimless glasses magnified her light blue eyes.
I had decided that instead of announcing myself as a reporter for Wall Street Weekly, I would simply request recent back issues of the newspaper. Spencer’s plane had crashed nearly three weeks ago. The scandal about the missing money and the vaccine was now two weeks old. My guess was that this hometown paper had probably covered both stories in depth.
The woman had an amazing lack of curiosity about what I was doing there. She disappeared down the hall and returned with copies of the last weeks’ editions. I paid for them—a total of $3.00—tucked them under my arm, and headed for the diner next door. Breakfast had been half an English muffin and a cup of instant coffee. I decided that a bagel and brewed coffee would make excellent “elevenses” as my British friends call their mid-morning tea or coffee break.