Let Me Call You Sweetheart

  3

  I don’t like Dr. Smith,” Robin said matter-of-factly as Kerry maneuvered the car out of the parking garage on Ninth Street off Fifth Avenue.

  Kerry looked at her quickly. “Why not?”

  “He’s scary. At home when I go to Dr. Wilson, he always makes jokes. But Dr. Smith didn’t even smile. He acted like he was mad at me. He said something about how some people are given beauty while others attain it, but in neither case must it ever be wasted.”

  Robin had inherited her father’s stunning good looks and was indeed quite beautiful. It was true that this could someday be a burden, but why would the doctor say such an odd thing to a child? Kerry wondered.

  “I’m sorry I told him I hadn’t finished fastening my seat belt when the van hit Daddy’s car,” Robin added. “That’s when Dr. Smith started lecturing me.”

  Kerry glanced at her daughter. Robin always fastened her seat belt. That she hadn’t this time meant that Bob had started the car before she had had a chance. Kerry tried to keep anger out of her voice as she said, “Daddy probably took off out of the garage in a hurry.”

  “He just didn’t notice I hadn’t had time to buckle it,” Robin said defensively, picking up on the edge in her mother’s voice.

  Kerry felt heartsick for her daughter. Bob Kinellen had walked out on them both when Robin was a baby. Now he was married to his senior partner’s daughter and was the father of a five-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. Robin was crazy about her father, and when he was with her he made a big fuss over her. But he disappointed her so often, calling at the last minute to break a scheduled date. Because his second wife did not like to be reminded that he had another child, Robin was never invited to his home. As a result she hardly even knew her half brother and sister.

  On the rare occasion when he does come through, and finally takes her out, look what happens, Kerry thought. She struggled to hide her anger, however, deciding not to pursue the subject. Instead she said, “Why don’t you try to snooze till we get to Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Grace’s?”

  “Okay.” Robin closed her eyes. “I bet they have a present for me.”

  4

  While they waited for Kerry and Robin to arrive for dinner, Jonathan and Grace Hoover were sharing their customary late-afternoon martini in the living room of their home in Old Tappan overlooking Lake Tappan. The setting sun was sending long shadows across the tranquil water. The trees, carefully trimmed to avoid obstructing the lake view, were glowing with the brilliant leaves they would soon relinquish.

  Jonathan had built the first fire of the season, and Grace had just commented that the first frost of the season was predicted for that evening.

  A handsome couple in their early sixties, they had been married nearly forty years, tied by bonds and needs that went beyond affection and habit. Over that time, they seemed almost to have grown to resemble each other: both had patrician features, framed by luxuriant heads of hair, his pure white with natural waves, hers short and curly, still peppered with traces of brown.

  There was, however, a distinctive difference in their bodies. Jonathan sat tall and erect in a high-backed wing chair, while Grace reclined on a sofa opposite him, an afghan over her useless legs, her bent fingers inert in her lap, a wheelchair nearby. For years a victim of rheumatoid arthritis, she had become increasingly more disabled.

  Jonathan had remained devoted to her during the whole ordeal. The senior partner of a major New Jersey law firm specializing in high-profile civil suits, he had also held the position of state senator for some twenty years but had several times turned down the opportunity to run for governor. “I can do enough good or harm in the senate,” was his often-quoted remark, “and anyhow, I don’t think I’d win.”

  Anyone who knew him well didn’t believe his protests. They knew Grace was the reason he had chosen to avoid the demands of gubernatorial life, and secretly they wondered if he didn’t harbor some vague resentment that her condition had held him back. If he did, however, he certainly never showed it.

  Now as Grace sipped her martini, she sighed. “I honestly believe this is my favorite time of year,” she said, “it’s so beautiful, isn’t it? This kind of day makes me remember taking the train to Princeton from Bryn Mawr for the football games, watching them with you, going to the Nassau Inn for dinner . . .”

  “And staying at your aunt’s house and her waiting up to be sure you were safely in before she went to bed,” Jonathan chuckled. “I used to pray that just once the old bat would fall asleep early, but she kept a perfect record.”

  Grace smiled. “The minute we would pull up in front of the house, the porch light started blinking.” Then she glanced anxiously at the clock on the mantel. “Aren’t they running late? I hate to think of Kerry and Robin in the thick of the commuter traffic. Especially after what happened last week.”

  “Kerry’s a good driver,” Jonathan reassured her. “Don’t worry. They’ll be here any minute.”

  “I know. It’s just . . .” The sentence did not have to be completed; Jonathan understood fully. Ever since twenty-one-year-old Kerry, about to start law school, had answered their ad for a house-sitter, they’d come to think of her as a surrogate daughter. That had been fifteen years ago, and during that time Jonathan had been of frequent help to Kerry in guiding and shaping her career, most recently using his influence to have her name included on the governor’s shortlist of candidates for a judgeship.

  Ten minutes later the welcome sound of door chimes heralded Kerry and Robin’s arrival. As Robin had predicted, there was a gift waiting for her, a book and a quiz game for her computer. After dinner she took the book into the library and curled up in a chair while the adults lingered over coffee.

  With Robin out of earshot, Grace quietly asked, “Kerry, those marks on Robin’s face will fade, won’t they?”

  “I asked Dr. Smith the same thing when I saw them. He not only practically guaranteed their disappearance, he made me feel as though I’d insulted him by expressing any concern about them. I have to tell you I have a hunch the good doctor has one big ego. Still, last week at the hospital, the emergency room doctor absolutely assured me that Smith is a fine plastic surgeon. In fact, he called him a miracle worker.”

  As she sipped the last of her coffee, Kerry thought about the woman she had seen earlier in Dr. Smith’s office. She looked across the table at Jonathan and Grace. “An odd thing happened while I was waiting for Robin. There was someone in Dr. Smith’s office who looked so familiar,” she said. “I even asked the receptionist what her name was. I’m sure I don’t know her, but I just couldn’t shake the sensation that we had met before. She gave me a creepy feeling. Isn’t that odd?”

  “What did she look like?” Grace asked.

  “A knockout in a kind of come-hither, sensually provocative way,” Kerry reflected. “I think the lips gave her that look. They were kind of full and pouty. I know: Maybe she was one of Bob’s old girlfriends, and I had just repressed that memory.” She shrugged. “Oh well, it’s going to bug me till I figure it out.”

  5

  You’ve changed my life, Dr. Smith . . . That was what Barbara Tompkins had said to him as she left his office earlier today. And he knew it was true. He had changed her and, in the process, her life. From a plain, almost mousy woman who looked older than her twenty-six years, he’d transformed her into a young beauty. More than a beauty, actually. Now she had spirit. She wasn’t the same insecure woman who had come to him a year ago.

  At the time she had been working in a small public relations firm in Albany. “I saw what you did for one of our clients,” she had said when she came into his office that first day. “I just inherited some money from my aunt. Can you make me pretty?”

  He had done more than that—he had transformed her. He had made her beautiful. Now Barbara was working in Manhattan at a large, prestigious P.R. firm. She had always had brains, but combining those brains with that special kind of beauty had truly changed her life.
r />   Dr. Smith saw his last patient for the day at six-thirty. Then he walked the three blocks down Fifth Avenue to his converted carriage house in Washington Mews.

  It was his habit each day to go home, relax over a bourbon and soda while watching the evening news and then decide where he wanted to dine. He lived alone and almost never ate in.

  Tonight an unaccustomed restlessness overcame him. Of all the women, Barbara Tompkins was the one most like her. Just seeing her was an emotional, almost cathartic experience. He had overheard Barbara chatting with Mrs. Carpenter, telling her that she was taking a client to dinner that night in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.

  Almost reluctantly he got up. What would happen next was inevitable. He would go to the Oak Bar, look into the Oak Room restaurant, see if there was a small table from which he could observe Barbara while he dined. With any luck she wouldn’t be aware of him. But even if she was, even if she saw him, he would merely wave. She had no reason to think that he was following her.

  6

  After they got home from dinner with Jonathan and Grace, and long after Robin was asleep, Kerry continued to work. Her office was in the study of the house she had moved to after Bob had left them and she sold the house they had bought together. She had been able to get the new place at a good price, when the real estate market was low, and she was grateful she had—she loved it. Fifty years old, it was a roomy Cape Cod with double dormers, set on a heavily treed two-acre lot. The only time she didn’t love it was when the leaves began to fall, tons and tons of them. That would begin soon, she thought with a sigh.

  Tomorrow she would be cross-examining the defendant in a murder case she was prosecuting. He was a good actor. On the stand, his version of the events that led up to the death of his supervisor had seemed entirely plausible. He claimed his superior had constantly belittled him, so much so that one day he had snapped and killed her. His attorney was going for a manslaughter verdict.

  It was Kerry’s job to take the defendant’s story apart, to show that this was a carefully planned and executed vendetta against a boss who for good reasons had passed him over for promotion. It had cost her her life. Now he has to pay, Kerry thought.

  It was one o’clock before she was satisfied that she had laid out all the questions she wanted to ask, all the points she wanted to make.

  Wearily she climbed the stairs to the second floor. She glanced in on a peacefully sleeping Robin, pulled the covers tighter around her, then went across the hallway to her own room.

  Five minutes later, her face washed, teeth brushed, clad in her favorite nightshirt, she snuggled down into the queen-sized brass bed that she had bought in a tag sale after Bob left. She had changed all the furniture in the master bedroom. It had been impossible to live with the old things, to look at his dresser, his night table, to see the empty pillow on his side of the bed.

  The shade was only partially drawn, and by the faint light from the lamp on the post by the driveway, she could see that a steady rain had begun to fall.

  Well, the great weather couldn’t last forever, she thought, grateful that at least it was not as cold as predicted, that the rain would not change to sleet. She closed her eyes willing her mind to stop churning, wondering why she felt so uneasy.

  She woke at five, then managed to doze off until six. It was in that hour the dream came to her for the first time.

  She saw herself in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. There was a woman lying on the floor, her large, unfocused eyes staring into nothingness. A cloud of dark hair framed the petulant beauty of her face. A knotted cord was twisted around her neck.

  Then as Kerry watched, the woman got up, removed the cord from her neck and went over to the receptionist to make an appointment.

  7

  During the evening it crossed Robert Kinellen’s mind to call and see how Robin had made out at the doctor’s, but the thought had come and gone without being acted on. His father-in-law and the law firm’s senior partner, Anthony Bartlett, had taken the unusual step of appearing at the Kinellens’ house after dinner to discuss strategy in the upcoming income tax evasion trial of James Forrest Weeks, the firm’s most important—and controversial—client.

  Weeks, a multimillion-dollar real estate developer and entrepreneur, had become something of a public figure in New York and New Jersey during the past three decades. A heavy contributor to political campaigns, a prominent donor to numerous charities, he was also the subject of constant rumors about inside deals and influence peddling, and was rumored to have connections with known mobsters.

  The U.S. attorney general’s office had been trying to pin something on Weeks for years, and it had been the financially rewarding job of Bartlett and Kinellen to represent him during those past investigations. Until now, the Feds had always fallen short of enough evidence for a solid indictment.

  “This time Jimmy is in serious trouble,” Anthony Bartlett reminded his son-in-law as they sat across from each other in the study of the Kinellen home in Englewood Cliffs. He sipped a brandy. “Which of course means we’re in serious trouble with him.”

  In the ten years since Bob had joined the firm, he had seen it become almost an extension of Weeks Enterprises, so closely were they entwined. In fact, without Jimmy’s vast business empire, they would be left with only a handful of minor clients, and with billings inadequate to maintain the firm’s operations. They both knew that if Jimmy were to be found guilty, Bartlett and Kinellen as a viable law firm would be finished.

  “Barney’s the one I worry about,” Bob said quietly. Barney Haskell was Jimmy Weeks’ chief accountant and codefendant in the current case. They both knew intense pressure was being put on him to turn government witness in exchange for a plea bargain.

  Anthony Bartlett nodded. “Agreed.”

  “And for more than one reason,” Bob continued. “I told you about the accident in New York? And that Robin was treated by a plastic surgeon?”

  “Yes. How is she doing?”

  “She’ll be all right, thank goodness. But I didn’t tell you the doctor’s name. It’s Charles Smith.”

  “Charles Smith.” Anthony Bartlett frowned as he considered the name. Then his eyebrows rose and he sat bolt upright. “Not the one who . . . ?”

  “Exactly,” Bob told him. “And my ex-wife, the assistant prosecutor, is taking our daughter on regular visits to him. Knowing Kerry, it’s only a matter of time before she makes the connection.”

  “Oh my God,” Bartlett said miserably.

  Thursday October 12th

  8

  The Bergen County prosecutor’s office was located on the second floor in the west wing of the courthouse. It housed thirty-five assistant prosecutors, seventy investigators and twenty-five secretaries, as well as Franklin Green, the prosecutor.

  Despite the constantly heavy workload and the serious, often macabre, nature of the business, an air of camaraderie existed within the office. Kerry loved working there. She regularly received enticing offers from law firms, asking her to come work with them, but despite the financial temptations, she had elected to stay put and now had worked her way up to the position of trial chief. In the process she had earned herself a reputation as a smart, tough and scrupulous lawyer.

  Two judges who had reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy had just vacated the bench, and now there were two openings. In his capacity as a state senator, Jonathan Hoover had submitted Kerry’s name for one of the seats. She did not admit even to herself how much she wanted it. The big law firms offered much more money, but a judgeship represented the kind of achievement that no money could compete with.

  Kerry thought of the possible appointment this morning as she punched in the code for the lock of the outside door and, at the click, shoved the door open. Waving to the switchboard operator, she walked at a quick pace to the office set aside for the trial chief.

  By the standards of the windowless cubbyholes assigned to the new assistants, her office was reasonably sized.
The surface of the worn wooden desk was so completely covered with stacks of files that its condition hardly mattered. The straight-backed chairs did not match, but were serviceable. The top drawer of the file had to be yanked vigorously to get it open, but that was only a minor irritation to Kerry.

  The office had cross ventilation, windows that provided both light and air. She had personalized the space with thriving green plants that edged the windowsills, and with framed pictures that Robin had taken. The effect was that of functional comfort, and Kerry was perfectly content to have it as her office.

  The morning had brought the first frost of the season, prompting Kerry to grab her Burberry as she left her house. Now she hung up the coat with care. She had bought it at a sale and intended it to have a long life.

  She shook off the final vestiges of last night’s troubling dream as she sat at her desk. The business at hand was the trial that would be resuming in an hour.

  The murdered supervisor had two teenage sons whom she had been raising alone. Who was going to take care of them now? Suppose something happened to me, Kerry thought. Where would Robin go? Surely not to her father; she would not be happy, nor welcome, in his new household. But Kerry also couldn’t picture her mother and her stepfather, both now over seventy and living in Colorado, raising a ten-year-old. Pray God I stay around at least till Robin is grown, she thought as she turned her attention to the file in front of her.

  At ten of nine, her phone rang. It was Frank Green, the prosecutor. “Kerry, I know you’re on your way to court, but stop by for just a minute.”

  “Of course.” And it can only be a minute, she thought. Frank knows that Judge Kafka has a fit when he’s kept waiting.

  She found Prosecutor Frank Green seated behind his desk. Craggy-faced with shrewd eyes, at fifty-two he’d kept the hard physique that had made him a college football star. His smile was warm but seemed odd, she thought. Did he have his teeth bonded? she wondered. If so, he’s smart. They do look good, and they’ll photograph well when he’s nominated in June.