“Then I don’t think we’re going to get very far,” Nan said, keeping her naturally resonant voice low. “There are so few people here and that man is the only one in the area that’s usually reserved for family.”
Monica thought of her father’s funeral in Boston five years earlier. The church had been crowded with friends and colleagues. The people sitting with her in the first row had been Joy and Scott Alterman. Just after that Scott became obsessed with her. Monica stared at the casket. As far as family goes, that’s the way it’s going to be for me, she thought. Olivia Morrow apparently doesn’t have a single relative to mourn her and neither would I if that bus had hit me. Pray God that will change someday.
Unwanted, Ryan Jenner’s face came into her mind. He seemed so surprised when I told him I didn’t want any gossip about us. In a way that’s as disappointing as the fact that he’s involved with someone else. Is he so casual about his relationships that he could have a serious girlfriend at home and allow himself to be linked with me in the hospital?
The same question had made her lie awake during the night.
The Mass had begun. She realized she had been making the responses to the opening prayers by rote.
The Epistle was read by Clay Hadley: “If God is for us, who shall be against us . . .” His voice was strong and reverential as he read the letter of St. Paul to the Romans.
Father Dunlap offered the intercessions. “We pray for the repose of the soul of Olivia Morrow. May the angels attend her to a place of refreshment, light, and peace.”
“Lord, hear our prayer,” the congregation murmured.
The Gospel was from St. John and the same one Monica had chosen to be read at her father’s funeral. “Come all of you who are heavily burdened . . .”
When the Gospel ended and they sat down again, Nan settled back in the pew. “He’s going to talk about her now,” she whispered.
“Olivia Morrow was a parishioner here for the past fifty years,” the priest began. As Monica listened, he spoke of a caring and generous person, who after her retirement and until her health failed had been a Eucharistic minister who regularly had brought Holy Communion to patients in hospitals. “Olivia never wanted recognition,” Father Dunlap said. “Even though she had worked her way to a position of authority in a renowned department store, in private she was modest and unassuming. An only child, she had no relatives to be with us today. This was not to be, but she is now in the presence of the God she served so faithfully. There is a reason to wish she had been with us for one more day. Let me share with you what Olivia told a young woman only hours before her death . . .”
Let someone have something to tell me that will be helpful, Monica prayed. I’m finally understanding Dad’s need to know. I need to know. Let someone here be able to help me.
The final prayers were said. Father Dunlap blessed the casket and the attendants from the funeral home came forward and lifted it to their shoulders. As the soloist sang, “Be not afraid, I go before you,” the mortal remains of Olivia Morrow were moved from the church to the hearse. In the vestibule, Monica and Nan watched as Clay Hadley got into a car behind the hearse.
“That was her doctor and he didn’t even take a minute to talk to you,” Nan said, her tone critical. “Didn’t you tell me that you sat and talked with him while you waited for the medics to come?”
“Yes, I did,” Monica replied. “But the other day he did specifically say that he knew nothing about whatever it was Olivia Morrow was going to tell me.”
As the congregation began to leave, a few people stopped to say that they were employees at Schwab House but didn’t know anything about any personal information Ms. Morrow intended to share. Several others explained they had sometimes spoken to her after Mass, but she had never referred to anything of a personal nature.
The last to leave was a woman who obviously had been crying. With graying blond hair, wide cheekbones, and a broad frame, she looked to be in her midsixties. She stopped to speak with them. “I am Sophie Rutkowski. I was Ms. Morrow’s cleaning woman for thirty years,” she said, her voice quivering. “I don’t know anything about what she wanted to tell you, but I wish you had met her. She was such a good person.”
Thirty years, Monica thought. She might know more about Olivia Morrow’s background than she realizes.
It was obvious Nan had the same thought. “Ms. Rutkowski, Dr. Farrell and I are going to have a cup of coffee. Won’t you join us?”
The woman looked hesitant. “Oh, I don’t think—”
“Sophie,” Nan said briskly. “I’m Nan Rhodes, the doctor’s receptionist. This is a sad time for you. Talking about Ms. Morrow with us over a cup of coffee will make you feel better, I promise.”
A block away they found a coffee shop and settled in at a table. Monica watched in admiration as Nan made the other woman comfortable telling her that she could so understand how sad Sophie must be. “I’ve been working for Dr. Farrell for almost four years,” she said, “and when I heard that she was almost killed in an accident, I can’t tell you how upset I was.”
“I knew that the end was coming,” Sophie said. “Ms. Morrow has been failing for this last year. Her heart was bad, but she said she didn’t want any more surgery. She had the aortic valve replaced twice. She said . . .”
Sophie Rutkowski’s eyes filled with tears. “She said that there is a time to die and that she knew her time was coming soon.”
“Didn’t she have any family at all whom you met?” Nan asked.
“Just her mother, and she died ten years ago. She was very old, in her early nineties.”
“Did she live with Ms. Morrow?”
“No. She always had her own apartment in Queens but they saw a lot of each other. They were very close.”
“Did Ms. Morrow have much company as far as you know?” Monica asked.
“I honestly couldn’t be sure. I was only there on Tuesday afternoons for a couple of hours. That was all she needed. No one ever lived who was neater than Ms. Morrow.”
Tuesday, Monica thought. She died sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. “How did she seem to you when you saw her this past Tuesday?”
“I’m sorry to say I didn’t see her. She had gone out.” Sophie shook her head. “I was surprised she wasn’t home. She’s been getting so weak. I vacuumed and dusted and changed the sheets on her bed. I did the little wash there was. I don’t mean I washed the sheets. She sent them out. They were very fine cotton and she liked them to be done at a special laundry. I used to tell her I’d be happy to iron them but she wanted them done just so. This past Tuesday, I was only there for an hour. She was so generous. She always paid me for three hours, even though I told her I couldn’t find another thing to clean or polish.”
Olivia Morrow liked everything done just so. That was obvious, Monica thought. Why is it I keep thinking about that pillowcase that didn’t match the others: “Sophie, I noticed that there were lovely peach sheets on the bed but that one of the pillowcases didn’t match the other three. It was a pale pink shade.”
“No, Doctor, you must be wrong,” Sophie said flatly. “I’d never make that mistake. This past Tuesday, I put on the peach sheets. She had other sets, of course, but she preferred the pastels. One week the peach set went on. The next week the pink set.”
“What I’m getting at, Sophie,” Monica said, “is that when I saw Ms. Morrow’s body on Wednesday evening, I could see that she had bitten her lip. I thought it might have bled on the pillowcase and she decided to change it.”
“If she bit her lip and bled onto the pillowcase, she would have put that pillow aside and used one of the two spares on the bed,” Sophie said emphatically. “You must have noticed how full those pillows are. She wouldn’t have had the strength, or even tried, to change the pillowcases. No way.” She sipped her coffee. “No way,” she repeated for emphasis. Then she paused. “I work for a number of people at Schwab House. One of the handymen told me that Dr. Hadley had been to see
Ms. Morrow Tuesday night. Maybe if there was blood on the pillowcase, she asked him to change it. That she would do.”
“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Monica conceded. “Sophie, I’m going to run ahead to visit a patient at the hospital. Thank you for joining us, and if anything comes to you about anyone who might have any knowledge of what Ms. Morrow wanted to tell me, please call. Nan will give you the phone numbers where both of us can be reached.”
Twenty-five minutes later she was stepping off the elevator to the Pediatric floor of the hospital. When she stopped at the nurses’ desk, a slender woman with salt-and-pepper hair was talking to Rita Greenberg. Monica noticed that Rita looked relieved to see her.
“You’d better speak to Sally’s doctor,” she told the woman. “Dr. Farrell, this is Susan Gannon.”
Susan turned to face Monica. “Doctor, my former husband, Peter Gannon, is the father of Sally Carter. I know he is barred from visiting her, but I am not. Will you take me to her, please?”
48
On Saturday morning at ten o’clock Detective Carl Forrest was seated in his car, parked directly opposite Greenwich Village Hospital. He had worked with John Hartman before his retirement. It was Forrest who had checked for fingerprints on the picture that Hartman had brought in, the one that had been sent anonymously to Monica Farrell’s office.
After Monica’s narrow escape from death, it was Forrest, again at Hartman’s urging, who had studied the security tapes of Greenwich Village Hospital, the ones that covered the time that Monica left the hospital on Thursday evening, minutes before her encounter with the bus.
Accompanying him was his partner, Jim Whelan. They were studying the pictures they had just taken of a young policewoman standing on the steps of the hospital. They had asked her to stand in the same spot where Monica had been photographed so that they could analyze the location from which the shot had been taken.
Forrest had his computer on his lap and printed out the pictures, then with a grunt of satisfaction, he handed them to Whelan. “Compare them, Jim,” he said, as he held up the snapshot that had been mailed to Monica’s office. “Whoever took the picture of the doctor with the kid in her arms was probably sitting in a car parked right here. The angle is exactly right. I thought at first that John Hartman was wasting our time, but I don’t think that anymore. Let’s review it.”
“Thursday evening the hospital security cameras show the doctor coming down the steps. Next frame we see someone getting out of his car, parked in this spot, following her down the street. This guy is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, gloves, and dark glasses, the exact description the old lady gave us. The break of the century is that fifteen minutes later the security camera shows his car being towed because the meter ran out! Now we know it was reclaimed by Sammy Barber, a two-bit thug who was acquitted of being a hitman.”
“Acquitted because he or one of his slimy friends either threatened or paid off jurors,” Whelan remembered. “They don’t come any guiltier than he was. I did a lot of work on that case. I’d love to find a way to nail him now.”
The policewoman who had posed for the picture came over. A traffic officer, she had agreed to give up a few minutes of her break to help them out. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“You bet,” Forrest told her. “Thanks.”
“Anytime. I never thought of myself as being a model. Neither did anyone else.” With a brief wave, she was on her way.
After she left, Forrest turned on the ignition. “Even if we bring Sammy in for a lineup and the old lady identifies him, you know what will happen. If it got to trial, which is doubtful, a lawyer would shoot holes in her identification. It was dark. He was wearing sunglasses. His hood was pulled up. On top of that, there was a crowd on the corner. The bus was coming and people were lining up for it. She was the only one who thinks the doctor was shoved. The doctor herself claims it was an accident. Case dismissed.”
“But if Barber was stalking her, it was because someone is paying him to do it. Does she have any idea of who that could be?” Whelan asked.
John Hartman mentioned Scott Alterman. “I checked him out. He’s a successful lawyer. Just moved to New York, but apparently about five years ago he was stalking Dr. Farrell in Boston. He’s the only one John heard about as someone who might have a reason to take that picture of the doctor.”
“Or have someone like Sammy take the picture for him?” Whelan suggested.
“Possibly. But where are we going with that?” Forrest asked. “If it is Alterman, he won’t be the first rejected guy to order a hit on the woman who turned him down. We’ll keep an eye on him and see if there’s anything illegal Sammy has done at that bar where he’s a bouncer that we can make stick and get him off the street.”
49
On Saturday morning Scott Alterman followed the route Olivia Morrow had taken on the day of her death. After he left the Schwab House on Friday, he had called the driver service Olivia used and asked to speak to the chauffeur who had driven her on Tuesday.
He was told that the man’s name was Rob Garrigan and he was on a job now but would call him later. Scott had gone to his office and late in the afternoon Garrigan had phoned back. “Like they probably told you in the office, it was a four-hour round trip to Southampton,” he said. “She didn’t visit nobody. She just had me drive on the ocean block, and then to a cemetery.”
Scott had been dismayed. “She didn’t visit anybody?”
“Nope. She did have me stop in front of some pretty ritzy house. Well, they’re all ritzy on that block. She told me she lived there when she was a kid, not in that house, but in a cottage that was on the property. Then she had me drive to the cemetery and stop in front of a mausoleum. Is that the way you say it? Funny word, isn’t it? And she just sat there and looked at it, and I could tell she felt real bad.”
“If you went back could you point out the house and the mausoleum?”
“Sure. I’ve got eyes in my head.”
“Did she say anything else besides the fact that she lived in that cottage when she was young? I mean about her family?”
“Hardly a word. It seemed like it was an effort for her to talk. I mean, some people don’t want to talk, and I always respect that. Other people like to gab and that’s okay with me, too. My wife says I never shut up and I do her a favor if I get the talk bug out of my system on the job.”
Now on the way out to Southampton, Scott was realizing that Rob Garrigan, who had probably given him as much information as he knew, would be hard to silence for the rest of the drive.
“You know what Long Island Expressway stands for?” Garrigan asked.
“I guess not,” Scott said.
“Think of the initials. L. I. E. Spells ‘lie.’ That’s the Long Island Expressway. It’s not an expressway. It’s one long parking lot, especially in the summer. A seventy-mile parking lot. I could tell you wouldn’t know. You’re from Boston, aren’t you? I mean like the people who take ‘a waaak in the paaak.’ ”
“I didn’t realize I talked like that. Do you think I should learn to say, ‘Noo Yawk’?” Scott asked.
“That’s the way people from New Jersey say it, not New Yorkers.”
Scott did not know whether to be angry or amused. Eight generations of Altermans had lived in Bernardsville, New Jersey. I’d have been brought up there if Dad hadn’t taken the job in Boston after he graduated from Harvard, he thought. Then he met Mom and that was that. When I was a kid I loved coming down to the big house to visit my grandparents.
After they passed away, the family property had been sold and a country club with a golf course had been built on it.
Grandparents! Mine were such an important part of my life, Scott reflected.
Olivia Morrow had specifically told Monica that she had known both her birth grandparents. I bet anything that there is a link somehow to the Gannons, Scott thought. If I could only find it for Monica.
“Is it okay if I turn on the radio real low?” Garrigan aske
d.
“That would be absolutely fine,” Scott told him gratefully.
Nearly an hour later they were driving into Southampton. “The house she had me stop at was on the ocean,” Garrigan said. “Maybe I told you that. Not far now.” He drove for a few more minutes then Scott felt the car slowing down and stopping.
“Here we are,” Garrigan announced. “It’s one of the really big ones.”
Scott was not looking at the house. His eyes were riveted on the mailbox with the name GANNON in handsome raised letters. I knew it! I knew it, he thought. She was going to tell Monica something about the Gannons.
There was a Ferrari sports car parked in the circular driveway.
“Someone’s home. Are you going in there?” Garrigan asked.
“I’m going to stop in later but first I’d like to have you show me the mausoleum that you say Ms. Morrow visited.”
“Sure thing. Did you ever hear the biggest benefit of living next to a cemetery?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have quiet neighbors.”
Too quiet, Scott thought minutes later, as he got out of the car and stood in front of the handsome mausoleum with the name GANNON carved in stone over the archway. I wish Alexander Gannon could talk to me now.
Olivia Morrow had lived as a young child on the Gannon estate, he mused. She was eighty-two, when she died last Wednesday. Alexander Gannon would be over one hundred years old now. Monica’s father was in his seventies when he died. If he was Alexander’s son, he was born when Alexander was in his mid-twenties. Olivia was a child at that time, so she certainly couldn’t have been the mother.
But what about Olivia’s mother? Scott asked himself. How old was she when they lived here? She could easily have been in her twenties. Was she involved with Alex and became pregnant, and gave up the baby for adoption? If so, did the Gannons buy her off? Why did Alex have that provision in his will, leaving his estate to a child if he had had one? Maybe he never knew, but simply suspected that someone who had worked for the family became pregnant with his child. Maybe his parents ended the relationship and made the girl swear to keep the secret? In those days, if something like that happened, the girl was usually sent away to have the baby and paid off to keep quiet about it.