Gunned: An Alex Harris Mystery

  Shelley Jamison worked in an insurance office not far from Pepe’s Pizza. If I hadn’t already had my lunch I’d order a large and gobble it all myself. It was that good. Probably the best in New England.

  I found Shelley in the outer office working on her computer. She looked up as I walked in. Recognition dawned on her face and then she smiled.

  “Oh my goodness. Have you found something out already?”

  “No, nothing like that. Sorry. I was wondering if you’d have time to talk with me.”

  “Sure. Have a seat. My boss is gone for the day. There’re some agents in the back, but they won’t bother us. I’ll just have to answer the phones if they ring. Our receptionist is out today so I’m stuck up here, but it’s quiet today. Tuesdays always seem to be like that.”

  “Shelley, you told me the other day that Mr. Spiegel came by, but your husband told him to leave and he did.”

  “Yeah, Jeff told him to get out and leave Christine alone.”

  “Here’s the thing. I have a feeling Mr. Spiegel felt there was a good chance that Christine was his daughter. I think after he spoke with you and your husband, he checked out some other people on his list, but then he went back to either your house or Christine’s apartment.”

  Shelley bit down on her lower lip.

  “Did you see him again?” I asked.

  “He came back to our house. He stopped by on Tuesday afternoon just as I got home. He asked if I could help persuade Christine to have a blood test. I told him to just stop. I told him to cherish his family and stop all this nonsense. What did it matter? Christine was happy and his interference in her life could have serious consequences, you know, with her engagement to Hunter. The truth is I’d love for Christine to dump him. He’s not good enough for her. He’s polite and everything, but I just don’t trust Hunter for some reason. I can’t explain it. Call it mother’s intuition. In the long term, I don’t think he’ll make her happy. But she’s a grown woman and needs to make her own decisions. As a mother you need to pick your battles.”

  “What did Mr. Spiegel say?”

  “He just asked me to reconsider. He said that if his theory was right, we could get on with our lives. Look,” Shelley said as she leaned forward on the desk. “I don’t honestly care if she’s the Spiegels’ child. I mean, she’s adopted. I know she’s not my biological child. My main concern is what we told you the other day; I’d hate for her to find out about who her real mother and father were, and I don’t want Jeff and me to get into any trouble over the fact that we thought we might have been given the wrong baby and never said anything about it.”

  “Were her parents really that bad?” I asked.

  Shelley let out a long breath. “MaryAnn, the mother, not so much, but that ex-boyfriend of hers was a piece of work. Scary. That’s why we didn’t want to do tests when we saw the dimples. They’d probably want his DNA to check, and I wanted to stay as far from him as I could. I know he didn’t want the baby, but he wanted money. For a long time Jeff and I kept waiting for him to show up on our doorstep with his hand out, threatening to take Christine if we didn’t give him money, but we never saw him again.”

  “So what happened with Mr. Spiegel? Did he leave at that point?” I asked.

  Shelley nodded her head. “Yes, he gave me his business card and said to call if I changed my mind. I watched him drive away and not a moment too soon. Jeff got home about five minutes later.”

  “Did you tell your husband that Mr. Spiegel had come by?”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Shelley began, and then answered a call, typed out an email and sent it off. “Sorry. Like I was saying. I wasn’t going to tell Jeff. He has a temper. But we tell each other everything. Always have. And the truth is I was upset and Jeff could tell the minute he walked in the door.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing. I ran to the grocery store for one of those roasted chickens for dinner. I wasn’t in the mood to cook, but by time I got home, Jeff had received a call from his boss and they needed him to come back in. The company he works for is expanding and they need to hire some more workers, but the overtime pay is good, and with a wedding coming up, well…”

  “What time did he get home?”

  Shelley shrugged. “I don’t know. After dinner I watched a little TV, read for a while and then I was out. I’m a good sleeper. Always have been. Even Christine’s crying as a baby never woke me up.”

  I left Shelley Jamison with a couple of things on my mind. Shelley may have been the last person to see Sheldon Spiegel alive. She may in fact have been the person who sent him to the afterlife. It would have been very easy for her to call him after her husband left, telling Mr. Spiegel she had arranged for Christine to speak with him again only to put a hole in his head when he showed up. The other thing that got me thinking was her husband. Maybe Jeff Jamison never went back to work like he told his wife. Maybe he made the whole thing up about getting some overtime. I thought about this and felt a more likely scenario was that Mr. Jamison had had enough of his family being bothered and thought it was finally time to get rid of Mr. Spiegel once and for all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The hospital where Millie and the other five babies had been born had changed hands a couple of times over the years, and along with the change in management, the name had changed as well. According to Shirley, Nurse Kathy, whose name was Kathy Pastoretti, had weathered all the changes and still worked for the Alliance Medical Center, formerly the New Haven Medical Center.

  The hospital had a large parking structure and I made my way up and around and around, until I came to the top and managed to find what looked like the last parking space. After all these years I had no idea if Kathy Pastoretti still worked with newborns or not, so I made my way to the main desk and waited in line.

  “Next!”

  I moved to the counter. “I’m looking for Kathy Pastoretti. She’s a nurse here. I have an appointment with her,” I lied. The woman behind the counter looked like a no-nonsense type and I had no idea if I would get anywhere if I told her it was a personal matter.

  “Sixth floor. Maternity.”

  “So she’s working today?” I asked.

  “Sixth floor, maternity. You’ll have to ask there. Next!”

  I thanked her and made my way to the bank of elevators. I got off on the sixth floor and saw the nurses’ station to my left. This wasn’t my best idea. The maternity ward was a beehive of activity and what were the chances that Kathy would be able to talk with me—that’s if she was even on duty. I probably should have called first, but I was in the area.

  Two nurses stood behind the counter. One was typing something into her computer and the other was on the phone. I stood there waiting for a few seconds and then the nurse on the phone hung up and looked at me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, thank you. I was looking for Kathy Pastoretti.”

  The nurse shook her head. She was wearing scrubs; black pants and a red top with frogs on it. I wish I could wear scrubs to work every day. How simple would that be? I wondered what Martha Aiello thought of scrubs with tiny frogs hopping all over.

  “Oh, she’s not working today?”

  The nurse punched something into a computer. “She’s working, just not here. They’re short staffed at our affiliate hospital in Indian Cove, so she’s over there for a couple of weeks. Do you know it?”

  I was intimately associated with the hospital. Since I had been diagnosed with RA, both my mother, who also had RA, and I had our infusion treatment at the clinic next to the hospital every eight weeks.

  “Yes, thank you. I know where it is.”

  I made my way back to Indian Cove and went straight to the hospital. I was tempted to wait until tomorrow when Annie could go with me, but we still needed to speak with Jerry Spiegel so I thought I might as well get Nurse Kathy out of the way.

  This time I went straight to the maternity ward.

  “I’m Kathy Pastoretti. H
ow can I help you?”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re exactly the person I’m looking for. I spoke with your sister, Gwen, a few days ago about the murder of a man.”

  “Yes, Gwen told me about it. Not about you, I mean, but about that man dying. He went by their house last week with some crazy story about babies being switched.”

  “That’s right. Gwen said you were working the day your niece was born. Would you have a few minutes to speak with me?”

  Kathy looked around. She saw another nurse coming back to the station and spoke briefly to her. “I can take a break, but we’ll have to go down to the cafeteria. You’re not allowed to come back into our break room.”

  We went down to the hospital cafeteria. The last time I had been here was last year when my precious nephew Henry had been struck by a car driven by a texting bastard. It was the most horrible time of my life and also the best when we got the news he was fine. Kids. I didn’t know how my sister did it. If I had kids I would never let them outside. And the older they got the worse it was. My niece Kendall was old enough now to want to go on sleepovers and movies with her friends. I was glad I didn’t have to make the decision to let them do things.

  “It’s just horrible about that man,” Kathy said, as we made our way to the counter. I ordered a tea and she got a hot chocolate. “I’m not sure I can help you. I don’t remember him.”

  I paid for our drinks and we took a table by a large window looking out onto a small courtyard where picnic tables had been set up for those wishing to dine outside.

  “So, what can I tell you?” Kathy asked. Kathy Pastoretti was a short woman in her late fifties, and age had added the inevitable pounds around her middle area. She had a kind face and a motherly air about her, and I had a feeling she was a good nurse.

  “Tell me how easy it might be to switch a baby.”

  Kathy shook her head of shoulder-length, light brown hair. “It’s not. It would be almost impossible.”

  I took a sip of my tea. “Why is that?”

  “When a baby is born, before it even leaves the delivery room, we put an identity band, which is linked to the mother, on its wrist and another on its ankle. Then we take foot prints.”

  “But someone could take the bands off and switch them,” I said.

  Kathy shook her head again. “No. They’re tight so that they don’t slip off. We have to cut them off before the baby leaves the hospital.”

  “Do you check the foot prints before they leave?”

  “No, we check the band before we cut it off.”

  “So if it was switched, you wouldn’t really know?” I pressed.

  Kathy cradled her hot chocolate in both hands. “Someone would have to cut the band off, and then what? The bands are put on in the delivery room, like I said, and we don’t have another. So if a band was cut off, or there was a baby with nothing on its wrist, we would notice.”

  I thought for a moment. “So they’re never taken off?”

  “They are, in certain circumstances, like if we need to insert an IV. Then we’d have to replace the cut band with one that’s been signed off by the doctors and the nurse in charge. It happens, but not often.” Kathy took a sip of her drink and then looked at me. “Once in a while a band is loose. Someone gets sloppy and doesn’t put it on tight enough. If that happened, it could be slipped off. But then you’d have to find another baby with a loose band to be able to exchange. That would be some coincidence and I just don’t see that happening.”

  “Take me back to the day your niece was born. You were working.”

  “Yes, I was. Our father had just died, mine and Gwen’s, but they were short staffed so I couldn’t take off as much time as I wanted. Plus, I knew Gwen would want me with her.”

  “And did they have the same system in place then to identify the babies?”

  “No. Our bands now have bar codes that directly link them with the mother’s ID number. We didn’t have that then. We took foot prints right away and put a little band on their wrist, but it wasn’t scanned like we do now and it wasn’t as secure either. It was pretty flimsy, actually. Look, the truth is back then the hospital was old school. Run by a bunch of antiquated old geezers who didn’t see the future. That’s why we got sold and rebranded.”

  I perked up. “So it would have been much easier to switch a baby then?”

  “I didn’t say that, exactly. We still had our systems in place, and we all did our jobs, but that day was a madhouse. Six babies born within the span of eight hours. We were short staffed, and things were crazy.”

  “So it would have been easy for someone to go in and switch a baby?”

  “A nursery is a very busy place. We bring the babies in to clean them and give them their vitamin K shot to help with blood clotting. The nurses are constantly in and out bringing the babies back and forth to their mothers, monitoring their temperatures, and the like. And then of course you have all the relatives coming by to look in.” Kathy’s face brightened.

  “So it would be pretty difficult with all that activity,” I said. Or maybe all that activity was just the thing to give the culprit time to make a switch.

  Kathy looked thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, but after all the excitement with all those little girls being born, it got very quiet. No new babies came for a couple of days. We were busy most of the time, but the nights were very quiet. And then there was an incident.”

  “What kind of incident?” I got chills up my spine.

  “Some guy showed up acting very weird. It was late, and I’m not sure how he got in. Just another crack in the old regime’s system, one of many, by the way, but I’ll never admit to that in court. The nurses, the doctors, we were all very dedicated professionals, but like I said, there were a lot of administrative problems. At one point there was talk of the hospital closing.”

  “Getting back to the night the babies were born,” I pressed. “What happened with that man?”

  “Sorry. There was a lot of commotion with this guy showing up. It was the night after all the babies were born. He was unkempt, looked like he was on drugs or something, and like I said, we were short staffed, and at night sometimes there’s only one or two nurses on duty. I was working that night and I was out in the hall with the other nurse trying to get him to be quiet. We called security and they arrived. They got him calmed down quickly and put him in the elevator. Then one of the mothers got sick to her stomach, several of the babies were crying. It was a mess.”

  “Do you know who the man was? Did he say anything coherent?” I asked.

  “I had never seen him before he showed up. As far as I know he was just some vagrant. The area around the hospital wasn’t the best in those days, and I figured he came in trying to find something to eat or get warm.”

  “Did he get arrested?” I asked, hoping maybe there might be a file on him somewhere that the police could check out.

  “I don’t think so. Security came and took him out, but they weren’t actual police. As far as I know they just took him back downstairs and escorted him from the hospital.”

  “So how long was the nursery unattended?”

  Kathy looked down at her hands. “More than it should have been. But before that idiot showed up, everything was really quiet. All asleep and accounted for, so when the fuss started, it didn’t seem like a big deal to go out into the lobby area and try to calm that man down. We didn’t want him waking everyone up.”

  “But conceivably there was time for someone to go in and change the bands? They would have to switch the babies in their cribs as well, right?”

  “Yes, they would have, and yes, there was probably enough time for someone to do this, but why would they?” Kathy Pastoretti looked desperate.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t done on purpose. Maybe it was an accident.”

  Kathy gave me a look that could melt titanium. “Then it would have to be the fault of a nurse and I’m telling you that never happened. Bands went on before the babies wer
e moved out of the delivery room. Every time. No exceptions. And afterward we would have no reason to remove a band. None of the babies was in critical condition requiring any special treatment.”

  “Did any of the babies seem to be at all sick?” I asked, thinking about Rhoda Newman and her little daughter who died a couple of years after her birth.

  “Not that I remember. One mother had a C-section, but her daughter was fine.”

  “Do you remember the Spiegels?” I asked.

  Kathy looked at me over the rim of her cup. “I don’t remember him. But her.” Kathy shook her head. “What a headache that one was. Treated us like we worked for her. Her mother was at the hospital constantly. We couldn’t get her to leave even after visiting hours. The fathers, well, we let them stay, but that mother was a real pain in my backside.”

  “Was she at the hospital that night? The night when that man came in?” Maybe I could find out where Mrs. Spiegel’s mother lived and find out if she remembered anything from that night—that is if the woman was still alive. I thought back to whether Jackie ever mentioned one way or the other, but I couldn’t remember.

  Kathy shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t recall. I came on duty not too long before that weird guy showed up and I was in the nursery most of the time. Everything was quiet and that’s what I remember. Until he came in. Look, I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain how two babies got switched, if indeed they did. It was a funny thing, though. All the babies had brown hair and a lot of it. It was one of the only times in my nursing career where all the babies in the nursery at one time were so alike. It was hard to tell them apart, I’ll admit that. A bit freaky, really, especially with three of them. They were just so alike. And no, I don’t remember which three.”