But then I, of all people, should know appearances deceive, she thought as she extended her hand to him and introduced herself.
“Come in, Dr. Chandler. Pam is here as well. But before we say another word, I’d like to apologize for the way I spoke to you earlier.”
“It’s Susan, not Dr. Chandler,” she said. “And no apologies necessary. As I indicated, I think you’re absolutely right that your wife’s call to my program is the reason she’s in the hospital tonight.”
The living room clearly reflected the fact that an architect and an interior designer lived there. Narrow, fluted columns separated the room from the foyer, and the room itself had crown moldings, an intricately carved marble fireplace, satiny parquet floors, a delicately beautiful Persian carpet, comfortable-looking couches and chairs, and antique tables and lamps.
Pamela Hastings greeted Susan warmly. “This is very kind of you, Susan,” she said. “I can’t tell you what your coming here means to me personally.”
She feels as though she’s betrayed Justin Wells, Susan thought as she listened to Pamela’s words. She gave the other woman a reassuring smile, then said, “Look, I know how spent you both have to be, so I’ll get to the point. When Carolyn phoned me on Monday, she said she would come to my office and bring with her a turquoise ring and a picture of the man who gave it to her. We know now that she may have changed her mind and decided to mail those things to me instead. What I hope is that there are perhaps other things—souvenirs or whatever—that she kept from her cruise that would give us some indication of the mystery man she mentioned, the one who tried to convince her to leave the ship to go to Algiers. Remember she said that when she tried to phone him at the hotel where he was supposed to be staying, they said they’d never heard of him.”
“You can understand that Carolyn and I didn’t dwell on that trip,” Justin Wells said flatly. “It was a terrible time, and we were both anxious to put that separation behind us.”
“Justin, that’s exactly the point,” Pamela said. “Carolyn hadn’t shown you the turquoise ring. She certainly hadn’t shown you the picture of that man. What Dr. Chandler hopes is that there might have been other souvenirs that she kept from you as well.”
Wells’s face flushed. “Doctor,” he said, “as I told you on the phone, you are welcome to look for anything here that will help us to find the person who did this to Carolyn.”
Susan noted an ominous quality in the tone of his voice. Don Richards is right, Susan thought. Justin Wells might be capable of killing anyone who harmed his wife.
“Let’s get started,” she suggested.
Carolyn Wells kept an office in the apartment, a large room complete with a spacious desk, a couch, a drafting board, and files. “She has a business office in the Design building also,” Wells explained to Susan. “But, in fact, she does most of her creative work here, and certainly this is where she takes care of all of her personal mail.”
Susan caught the strain in his voice. “Is the desk locked?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I never touch it.” Justin Wells turned away as though overwhelmed by emotion at the sight of the desk where his wife usually sat.
Pamela Hastings put her hand on his arm. “Justin, why don’t you wait for us in the living room?” she suggested. “You don’t need this.”
“You’re right; I don’t.” He got as far as the door before he turned. “But I insist on this; I want to know anything and everything you find, good or bad, that may be useful,” he said, his tone almost accusatory. “Do I have your word?”
Both women nodded. When he turned to go down the hall, Susan turned to Pamela Hastings. “Let’s get started,” she said.
Susan went through the desk, while Pamela rifled through file drawers. How would I like this to happen to me? Susan wondered. Other than my patients’ files, which would be protected by confidentiality, what would I be embarrassed for someone else to find, and perhaps to discuss?
She came up with a ready answer: the note Jack had written after he told her that he and Dee were in love. Some of it she still remembered: “The great sadness I have is that I have hurt you, something I would never willingly do.”
It’s time to burn that letter, Susan decided.
She realized she felt very much a voyeur, going through the personal papers of a woman she never had met. Carolyn Wells had a touch of the sentimentalist in her makeup, she decided. In the bottom drawer of the desk she found files with names written on them: “Mom”; “Justin”; “Pam.”
Susan glanced in them just enough to see that they contained things like birthday cards, personal notes, and snapshots. In the file marked “Mom” she saw a death notice that was three years old. Skimming it, she saw that Carolyn had been an only child and her father had predeceased her mother by ten years.
Her mother had been dead only a year when she separated from her husband and went on that cruise, Susan thought. Chances are she would have been emotionally fragile and extremely vulnerable to an apparently caring person.
Susan tried to recall exactly what her own mother had said about meeting Regina Clausen once at a stockholders meeting. She remembered it was something like how excited Regina was at the prospect of going on a cruise and how Regina’s father had died while he was only in his forties, and before that, he had talked about regretting the vacations he’d never taken.
Two vulnerable women, Susan thought as she closed the last of the files. That much is clear. But there’s nothing helpful here. She looked up and saw that Pamela Hastings had almost finished examining the three-drawer file. “How is it going?” she asked.
Pamela shrugged. “It isn’t. From what I can see, Carolyn kept a mini-file here of her most recent jobs: personal notes from the clients, pictures of completed rooms, that kind of thing.” Then she paused: “Wait a minute,” she said. “This may be it.” She was holding a file marked “Seagodiva.” “That’s the cruise ship Carolyn sailed on.”
She carried the file to the desk and pulled up a chair. “Let’s hope,” Susan murmured as they both began to go through it.
But the file seemed useless. It contained only the sort of information people save as mementos of a trip, things like the itinerary, the Seagodiva ’s daily bulletins listing the activities of the day, and information about the approaching ports of call.
“Mumbai, that’s the new, or at least the old and restored name of Bombay,” Pamela said. “Carolyn boarded the ship there. Oman, Haifa, Alexandria, Athens, Tangier, Lisbon—those were her ports of call.”
“Algiers is where Carolyn almost went sightseeing with the mystery man,” Susan said. “Look at the date. The ship was scheduled to stop in Tangier on October 15th. That’s exactly two years ago next week.”
“She arrived home on the 20th,” Pamela Hastings observed. “I remember because it was my husband’s birthday.”
Susan glanced through the bulletins. The last one described possible excursions from the ship. The headline was, SEE THE MARKETPLACE IN OLD ALGIERS.
That’s a line in the song—“You Belong to Me,” she thought. Then she noticed that there was something written lightly in pencil on the last page. She bent down to examine it closely. It read, “Win, Palace Hotel, 555-0634.”
She showed it to Pamela. “I think we can be sure that Win is the man she was meeting,” she said quietly.
“Dear God, do you think that means she is calling for him now?” Pamela asked.
“I don’t know. If only the picture she promised to give me was still here,” Susan said. “I’ll bet anything she kept it in this file.” Her eyes swept the desk as though expecting the photograph to materialize. Then she noticed a sliver of bright blue cardboard next to a small pair of scissors.
“Does Carolyn have a housekeeper?” she asked.
“Yes, she comes in on Monday and Friday mornings from about eight until eleven. Why?”
“Because Carolyn phoned me shortly before twelve. Say a prayer that . . .” Susan did not finish t
he sentence as she reached under the desk for the wastebasket. Retrieving it, she dumped its contents on the rug. Bits of blue cardboard scattered, and a photograph with an uneven border fell out.
Susan picked it up and studied it. “This is Carolyn, with the ship’s captain, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Pamela said, “but why did she cut it like that?”
“My guess is Carolyn wanted to send only the part of the photograph that pictured the man who gave her the turquoise ring. She didn’t want to be involved or identified herself.”
“And now it’s gone,” Pamela said.
“It may be gone,” Susan told her as she put together the scraps of cardboard, “but look at this. The name of the outfit in London that takes those pictures is printed on the folder, and there are instructions for ordering additional copies.”
She pushed back the chair and stood up. “I’m going to call that outfit, and if they still have the negative of this photograph I’m going to get it. Pamela,” she said, her voice rising with excitement, “do you realize that if that’s possible we may be on our way to learning the identity of a serial killer?”
71
Nat Small was a little surprised at how much he actually missed his friend and fellow shop owner Abdul Parki. Only three days ago, on Monday morning, when he had seen Parki outside, sweeping the sidewalk in front of his shop, he’d yelled across to him, jokingly suggesting that he bring his broom over and spruce up the Dark Delights sidewalk too.
Parki had smiled his mild, shy little grin, and called back, “Nat, you know I’d be glad to do what I could for you, but I think it might take more than me and my broom to clean up your place.” They both had had a good laugh. Then Tuesday he had seen Parki outside his shop again, this time sweeping up after some dumb kid dropped popcorn all over the place. After that, there had been nothing; he had never seen Parki again. It bothered Nat that both the police and media had paid so little attention to Parki’s death. Sure, there had been a mention of the murder on the local TV news, including a seconds-long glimpse of the store, but a big-time Mafia guy had been arrested the same day, so that got all the play. No, they didn’t bother much about Parki: “a suspected drug-related crime,” was how they phrased it, and everybody seemed to be content to let it go at that.
In the two days since then, the Khyem Specialty Shop had taken on a deserted look. You’d think it had been closed for years, Nat said to himself. There was even a FOR RENT sign on the door. I hope I don’t get any competition moving in there, he thought. It’s tough enough as it is.
On Thursday night Nat closed his shop at nine o’clock. Before leaving, however, he made a few changes in the window display. As he looked out through the window to the street, it reminded him of how on Tuesday, just around one o’clock, that sharp-looking guy had been looking in this same window, and then he had crossed the street and gone into Parki’s shop. Maybe he should have mentioned him to the cops, after all, Nat thought. Then he immediately changed his mind. It would just be a bad waste of good time, he reasoned. The guy was probably in and out of Parki’s shop like a yo-yo. His type was more likely to browse through the wares on sale at Dark Delights than to buy anything at Khyem Specialty. Parki’s stuff was strictly for tourists, and the man he had seen didn’t look like a tourist.
Nat grinned when he thought about the dopey-looking gift Parki had given him last year—a fat little guy with the head of an elephant, sitting on a throne.
“You are a good friend, Nat,” Parki had said in that singsong accent of his. “I made this for you. This is Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. There is a legend. By accident, Shiva, his father, cut off Ganesh’s head when he was five years old, and when his mother demanded that the father put it back, by mistake he gave the child instead the head of an elephant. When the mother protested that her son was so ugly that he would be shunned, the father said, ‘I will make him the god of wisdom, prosperity, and happiness. You will see, he will be loved.”’
Nat knew that Parki had put a lot of effort into making the little figure. And like most of the stuff Parki made by hand, it was inlaid with turquoise.
Nat Small rarely yielded to a sentimental impulse, but in honor of his murdered friend, he went back into the storage room, dug out the elephant god, and put it in the window, positioning it so that the elephant’s trunk was pointed at Parki’s store. I’ll leave it there until somebody rents the place, he decided. It’ll be a kind of memorial to a nice little guy.
Feeling both sad and somewhat virtuous, Nat Small locked up and went home, cheered by the thought that maybe a bagel shop would take over Parki’s space. That would be not only handy for him, but real good for business.
72
Donald Richards had told Rena, his housekeeper, that he had dinner plans, then, not wanting to dine alone, had on impulse phoned Mark Greenberg, a good friend and fellow psychiatrist whom he had seen professionally for a while after his wife’s death. By lucky chance, Greenberg was free for dinner. “Betsy is going with her mother to the opera,” he said. “I begged off.”
They met at Kennedy’s, on West Fifty-seventh Street. Greenberg, a scholarly-looking man in his late forties, waited until their drinks arrived, then said, “Don, we haven’t talked doctor to patient in a long time. How’s it going?”
Richards smiled. “I’m restless. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“I read your book. I liked it. Tell me why you wrote it.”
“That’s the second time I’ve been asked that in as many nights,” Richards said. “Obviously the subject interested me. I had a patient whose wife vanished. He was a basket case. Two years ago, when her car was found with her body in it, he was finally able to put his life back together again. She’d driven off the road and into a lake. That death happened to have been the result of an accident. Most of the women in the book met with foul play. My point in writing it was to make other women aware of the dangers out there, and to show them how to avoid the circumstances that ensnared those victims.”
“Personal redemption? Still blame yourself for Kathy’s death?” Greenberg asked quietly.
“I’d like to believe I’m starting to get over that, but sometimes it still hits me hard. Mark, you’ve heard it from me enough times. Kathy didn’t want to do that shoot. She was feeling queasy. Then she told me, ‘I know what you’re going to say, Don. It isn’t fair to the others to pull out at the last minute.’ I was always on her case about her habit of canceling plans at the last minute, especially when it came to work commitments. Well, listening to me cost her her life.”
Don Richards took a long sip of his drink.
“But Kathy didn’t tell you that she suspected she was pregnant,” Greenberg reminded him. “If anything, you’d have urged her to stay home when she told you she felt queasy.”
“No, she didn’t tell me. Afterwards I started thinking back and realized she hadn’t had a period in six weeks.” Don Richards shrugged. “There’re still rough times, but it’s getting better. Maybe turning forty soon is making me realize that it’s time to let go of the past.”
“Have you considered taking a cruise, even a short one? I think that’s an important step for you to take.”
“Actually I am hoping to take one soon. I wrap up the publicity for the book next week in Miami, and I’m looking to see if I can find a cruise that I can fit in.”
“That’s good news,” Greenberg said. “Last question: Are you dating anyone?”
“I had a date last night. Susan Chandler, a psychologist. She has a daily radio program as well as a private practice. Very attractive and interesting lady.”
“Then I gather you plan to see her again?”
Don Richards smiled. “I’d say I have big plans for her, Mark.”
When Don Richards got home at ten o’clock, he debated calling Susan, then decided it wasn’t too late to try.
She answered on the first ring.
“Susan, you sounded pretty down this afternoon. How do you feel now???
?
“Oh, better, I guess,” Susan said. “I’m glad you called, Don. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You used to take a lot of cruises, right?”
Richards realized he was clenching the phone. “Both before I was married, and after. My wife and I both loved the sea.”
“And you were on the Gabrielle a number of times?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never been on a cruise, so please bear with me. I gather that there’s a photography service on ships, and that they take a lot of pictures.”
“Oh, sure. It’s a big moneymaking operation.”
“Do you know if they keep the negatives from past cruises on file?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, by any chance do you have any pictures that might have been taken on the Gabrielle? What I’m hoping to learn is the name of the photography outfit that works—or worked—the Gabrielle.”
“I’m sure I have some pictures from when Kathy and I were on cruises.”
“Would you mind checking? I’d really appreciate it. I could ask Mrs. Clausen, but I don’t like to disturb her about this.”
“Hold on.”
Donald Richards laid down the phone and went to the closet where he had stored pictures and mementos of his marriage. He pulled down a box from the top shelf that was marked “Vacations,” and brought it back to the phone.
“Bear with me a minute,” he told Susan. “If I have it, it’ll be in the box I’m going through right now. I’m glad you’re on the other end of the phone. Poring over old memories can be depressing.”
“That’s just what I’ve been doing in Justin Wells’s apartment,” Susan told him.
“You were with Justin Wells?” Don Richards did not attempt to conceal the surprise he felt.