Let Me Call You Sweetheart (7 page)

"Okay," Robin said with an exaggerated sigh as she departed.
"I know you have patients waiting, so I won't be long, Doctor, but there is something I must ask you," Kerry said.
"I have time. What is it, Ms. McGrath?"
Kerry reduced to a few brief sentences a description of what she had seen in Dr. Smith's office. "So I guess I have two questions," she concluded. "Can you remake just any face to look like someone else, or does some fundamental factor, like a similar bone structure, have to be present? And knowing that it is possible to remake some faces so that they look alike, is this something that plastic surgeons do, I mean deliberately remake someone to look like someone else?"
It was twenty minutes later when Kerry rejoined Robin and they rushed to the soccer field. Unlike Kerry, Robin was not a natural athlete, and Kerry had spent long hours working with her, because her heart was set on being a good player. Now, as she watched Robin confidently kick the ball past the goalie, Kerry was still reflecting on Dr. Roth's flat statement: "It's a fact that some surgeons give everyone the same nose or chin or eyes, but I find it extremely unusual that any surgeon would in essence clone the faces of his patients."
At eleven-thirty she caught Robin's eye and waved good-bye. Robin would go home from the game with her best friend, Cassie, and would spend the afternoon at her house.
A few minutes later, Kerry was on the road to Trenton.
She had visited the state prison several times and always found the grim aspect of barbed wire and guard towers a sobering sight. This was not a place she looked forward to seeing again.
Kerry found Geoff waiting for her in the area where visitors were registered. "I m really glad you made it," he said. They talked little while they waited for their scheduled meeting. Geoff seemed to understand that she did not want his input at this time.
Promptly at three o'clock a guard approached them and told them to follow him.
Kerry did not know what she expected Skip Reardon to look like now. It had been ten years since she had sat in at his sentencing. The impression she had retained of him was of a tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered young man with fiery red hair. But more than his appearance, it was his statement that had been burned into her mind: Dr. Charles Smith is a liar. Before God and this court, I swear he is a liar!
"What have you told Skip Reardon about me?" she asked Geoff as they waited for the prisoner to be escorted into the visiting area.
"Only that you've unofficially taken some interest in his case and wanted to meet him. I promise you, Kerry, I said 'unofficially.'"
"That's fine. I trust you."
"Here he is now."
Skip Reardon appeared, dressed in prison denims and an open- necked prison-issue shirt. There were streaks of gray through the red hair, but except for the lines around his eyes he still looked very much as Kerry recalled him. A smile brightened his face as Geoff introduced him.
A hopeful smile, Kerry realized, and with a sinking heart wondered if she shouldn't have been more cautious, perhaps waiting until she knew more about the case, instead of agreeing so readily to this visit.
Geoff got right to the point. "Skip, as I told you, Ms. McGrath wants to ask you some questions."
"I understand. And, listen, I'll answer them no matter what they are." He spoke earnestly, although with a hint of resignation. "You've heard that old saying, I have nothing to hide."
Kerry smiled, then went straight to the question that was to her the crux of this meeting. "In his testimony, Dr. Smith swore that his daughter, your wife, was afraid of you and that you had threatened her. You have maintained that he was lying, but what purpose would he have in lying about that?"
Reardon's hands were folded on the table in front of him. "Ms. McGrath, if I had any explanation for Dr. Smith's actions, maybe I wouldn't be here now. Suzanne and I were married four years, and during that time I never saw that much of Smith. She'd go into New York and have dinner with him occasionally, or he'd come out to the house, but usually when I was away on a business trip. At that time my construction business was booming. I was building all over the state and investing in land in Pennsylvania for future development. I'd be gone a couple of days at a time on a fairly regular basis. Whenever I was with Dr. Smith, he seemed not to have much to say, but he never acted as though he didn't like me. And he certainly didn't act as though he thought his daughter's life was in danger."
"When you were with both him and Suzanne, what did you notice about his attitude toward her?"
Reardon looked at Dorso. "You're the guy with the fancy words, Geoff. What's a good way to put it? Wait a minute. I can tell you. When I was in parochial school, the nuns got mad at us for talking in church and told us we should have reverence for a holy place and holy objects. Well that's the way he treated her. Smith showed 'reverence' for Suzanne."
What an odd word to use about a father's attitude toward his daughter, Kerry thought.
"And he was also protective of her," Reardon added. "One night the three of us were driving somewhere for dinner and he noticed that Suzanne hadn't put on her seat belt. So he launched into a lecture about her responsibility to take care of herself. He actually got fairly agitated about it, maybe even a little angry."
It sounds like the same way he lectured Robin and me, Kerry thought. Almost reluctantly she admitted to herself that Skip Reardon certainly gave the appearance of being candid and honest.
"How did she act toward him?"
"Respectful, mostly. Although toward the end--before she was killed--the last few times I was with them, she seemed to be kind of irritated at him."
Kerry then ventured into other aspects of the case, asking him about his sworn testimony that just prior to the murder, he had noticed Suzanne wearing expensive pieces of jewelry that he had not given her.
"Ms. McGrath, I wish you'd talk to my mother. She could tell you. She has a picture of Suzanne that was run in one of the community papers, taken at a charity affair. It shows her with an old-fashioned diamond pin on the lapel of her suit. The picture was taken only a couple of weeks before she was murdered. I swear to you that that pin and a couple of other pieces of expensive jewelry, none of which I gave her, were in her jewelry box that morning. I remember it specifically because it was one of the things we argued about. Those pieces were there that morning and they weren't there the next day."
"You mean someone took them?"
Reardon seemed uncomfortable. "I don't know if someone took them or if she gave them back to someone, but I tell you there was jewelry missing the next morning. I tried to tell all this to the cops, to get them to look into it, but it was obvious from the beginning that they didn't believe me. They thought that I was trying to make it look like she had been robbed and killed by an intruder.
"Something else," he continued. "My dad was in World War II and was in Germany for two years after the war. He brought back a miniature picture frame that he gave to my mother when they became engaged. My mother gave that frame to Suzanne and me when we were married. Suzanne put my favorite picture of her in it and kept it on the night table in our room. When my mother and I sorted Suzanne's things out before I was arrested, Mom noticed it was missing. But I know it was there that last morning."
"Are you trying to say that the night Suzanne died, someone came in and stole some jewelry and a picture frame?" Kerry asked.
"I'm telling you what I know was missing. I don't know where it went, and of course I'm not sure it had anything to do with Suzanne's murder. I just know that suddenly those things weren't there and that the police wouldn't look into it."
Kerry looked up from her notes and peered directly into the eyes of the man facing her.
"Skip, what was your relationship with your wife?"
Reardon sighed. "When I met her, I fell like a ton of bricks. She was gorgeous. She was smart. She was funny. She was the kind of woman who makes a guy feel ten feet tall. After we were married..." He paused. "It was all heat and no warmth, Ms. McGrath. I was raised to think you're supposed to make a go of marriage, that divorce was a last resort. And, of course, there were some good times. But was I ever happy or content? No, I wasn't. But then I was so busy building up my company that I just spent more and more time at work and in that way was able to avoid dealing with it.
"As for Suzanne, she seemed to have everything she wanted. The money was rolling in. I built her the house she said she had dreamed of having. She was over at the club every day, playing golf or tennis. She spent two years with a decorator, furnishing the house the way she wanted it. There's a guy who lives in Alpine, Jason Arnott, who really knows antiques. He took Suzanne to auctions and told her what to buy. She developed a taste for designer clothes. She was like a kid who wanted every day to be Christmas. With the way I was working, she had plenty of free time to come and go as she pleased. She loved to be at affairs that got press coverage, so that her picture would be in the paper. For a long time I thought she was happy, but as I look back on it, I'm sure she stayed with me because she hadn't found any better setup."
"Until..." Geoff prompted.
"Until someone she met became important," Reardon continued. "That was when I noticed jewelry I hadn't seen before. Some pieces were antiques, others very modern. She claimed her father gave them to her, but I could tell she was lying. Her father has all her jewelry now, including everything I gave her."
When the guard indicated their time was up, Reardon stood and looked squarely at Kerry. "Ms. McGrath, I shouldn't be here. Somewhere out there the guy who killed Suzanne is walking around. And somewhere there has to be something that will prove it."
...
Geoff and Kerry walked to the parking lot together. "I bet you didn't have time for any lunch," he said. "Why don't we grab something fast?"
"I can't, I've got to get back. Geoff, I have to tell you that from what I heard today, I can't see a single reason for Dr. Smith to lie about Skip Reardon. Reardon says that they had what amounts to a reasonably cordial relationship. You heard him say that he didn't believe Suzanne when she told him that her father had given her some pieces of jewelry. If he started getting jealous about those pieces, well..." She did not finish the sentence.
...
Sunday, October 29th
On Sunday morning, Robin served at the ten o'clock mass. When Kerry watched the processional move down the aisle from the vestry, she always was reminded of how, as a child, she had wanted to be a server and was told it wasn't possible, that only boys were allowed.
Things change, she mused. I never thought I'd see my daughter on the altar, I never thought I'd be divorced, I never thought that someday I'd be a judge. Might be a judge, she corrected herself. She knew Jonathan was right. Embarrassing Frank Green right now was tantamount to embarrassing the governor. It could be a fatal blow to her appointment. Yesterday's visit to Skip Reardon might have been a serious mistake. Why mess up her life again? She had done it once.
She knew that she had worked her way through the emotional gamut with Bob Kinellen, first loving him, then being heartbroken when he left her, then angry at him and contemptuous of herself that she had not seen him for the opportunist he was. Now her chief reaction to him was indifference, except where Robin was concerned. Even so, observing couples in church, whether her own age, younger, older--it didn't matter--seeing them always caused a pang of sadness. If only Bob had been the person I believed he was, she thought. If only he were the person he thinks he is. By now they would have been married eleven years. By now surely she would have had other children. She'd always wanted three.
As she watched Robin carry the ewer of water and the lavabo bowl to the altar in preparation for the consecration, her daughter looked up and met Kerry's gaze. Her brief smile caught at Kerry's heart. What am I complaining about? she asked herself. No matter what happens, I have her. And as unions go, it may have been far from perfect, but at least something good came of it. No one else except Bob Kinellen and I could have had exactly this wonderful child, she reasoned.
As she watched, her mind jumped back to another parent and child, to Dr. Smith and Suzanne. She had been the unique result of his and his former wife's genes. In his testimony, Dr. Smith had stated that after their divorce his wife moved to California and remarried, and he had permitted Suzanne to be adopted by the second husband, thinking that was in her best interests.
"But after her mother died, she came to me," he had said. "She needed me."
Skip Reardon had said that Dr. Smith's attitude toward his daughter bordered on reverence. When she heard that, a question that took Kerry's breath away had raced through her mind. Dr. Smith had transformed other women to look like his daughter. But no one had ever asked whether or not he had ever operated on Suzanne.
Kerry and Robin had just finished lunch when Bob called, suggesting he take Robin out to dinner that night. He explained that Alice had taken the children to Florida for a week, and he was driving to the Catskills to look at a ski lodge they might buy. Would Robin want to accompany him? he asked. "I still owe her dinner, and I promise I'll have her back by nine."
Robin's enthusiastically affirmative response resulted in Bob picking her up an hour later.
The unexpected free afternoon gave Kerry a chance to spend more time going over the Reardon trial transcript. Just reading the testimony gave her a certain amount of insight, but she knew that there was a big difference between reading a cold transcript and watching the witnesses as they testified. She hadn't seen their faces, heard their voices or watched their physical reactions to questions. She knew that the jury's evaluation of the demeanor of the witnesses had undoubtedly played a big part in reaching their verdict. That jury had watched and evaluated Dr. Smith. And it was obvious that they had believed him.
Geoff Dorso loved football and was an ardent Giants fan. It was not the reason he had bought a condominium in the Meadowlands, but as he admitted, it certainly was convenient. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon, sitting in Giant Stadium, his mind was less on today's very close game with the Dallas Cowboys than on yesterday's visit to Skip Reardon, and Kerry McGrath's reaction to both Skip and the trial transcript.