Likely to Die (25 page)

 Mike waited for the elevator doors to close before he spoke. “I’d rather screw a snake. Bill Dietrich? With his Man-Tan skin and his Grecian Formula hair, he should be dating someone who owns a Laundromat. She’d have to be washing the sheets twice a day with all the stuff that’d rub off him. What was she doing with that guy?”

 “Hard to imagine. So what do you think of Spector?”

 “Well, he laid his cards out on the table. I thought he was pretty straightforward, and I suppose that cuts both ways.”

 We rehashed his comments as we drove uptown to New York Hospital. The guard at the main entrance on York Avenue directed us to Dr. Babson’s office at the rear of the fourth floor.

 A petite woman of about fifty, with shoulder-length brown hair and soft hazel eyes, opened her own door when I knocked.

 “I’m Gig Babson. It’s Katherine, really. Please come in.”

 Having presumed Gig to be a man, I was pleasantly surprised, and even more delighted at the prospect of getting a woman’s perspective on Gemma. I glanced at the diplomas on the wall—Vassar College ‘69 and Harvard Medical School ’73—while Mercer introduced each of us to the doctor.

 Babson went through the background of her relationship with Dogen. “We only met three years ago, working on something together, actually. We were part of the trauma team handling the Baby Vanessa case. Perhaps you remember it?”

 Of course we did. The story had touched everyone in New York. A private jet had crash-landed at La Guardia Airport, killing all eight adults aboard. Four-year-old Vanessa had been thrown from the wreckage and survived without a burn but remained in a coma for sixteen weeks. Relatives had wanted to take her off life support, despairing of any meaningful recovery of brain function.

 But a team of neurosurgeons—none whose names I could recall—had performed medical miracles. The child came out of the coma and within months regained all her mental faculties and was released from the hospital. The photograph of the smiling child, standing on the steps of Mid-Manhattan in front of the medical team that had given her a new life, was an image most of us would always be able to call to mind.

 “Gemma was brilliant at her work. It was she who saved Vanessa’s life. She discovered the bruising on the frontal cortex that had caused a massive clot. When the rest of us hesitated about the risks of the surgery, Gemma got in there and removed the hemorrhage—steady, daring, and absolutely flawless in her work. That child would have been a vegetable without Gemma’s involvement.”

 “Give us the other side, if you will, doctor. Why,” I asked, “why would anyone want to hurt her?”

 “Do you really think Gemma was chosen as a target? I mean, not just some thief or homeless person stumbling upon her during the night? That’s just so hard to believe.

 “You know we all thought she was crazy to stay in her office at night, the hours she did. It’s not that we ever dreamed she’d be unsafein the hospital, but I certainly worried about her comings and goings. There was no changing her, though. She didn’t need very much sleep. It was part of her routine to be at that office in the middle of the night, not getting home ‘til three in the morning. A couple of hours’ rest, then up for a predawn jog. If you knew Gemma, you’d know when to find her at Minuit.”

 “What did you know about her plans to leave New York?”

 “Only that she was making them. Nothing firm, but she’d had it at Mid-Manhattan.”

 “Not enough trauma work?”

 Babson looked at me with a questioning expression on her face. “In New York? Are you kidding?”

 “Well, Dr. Spector says that she—”

 “Forget whathe says. There’s only one person she confided in about that topic. That’s Geoffrey Dogen, her ex-husband. She wouldn’t even tell me the details.”

 “Why is that?”

 “Didn’t want me in the middle of it. Tried to protect me from the political infighting with the administration. I’m a few years younger than Gemma and she didn’t want my career derailed like she felt hers was becoming.”

 We all looked puzzled. What was the infighting about if it wasn’t the issue that Spector had described?

 “Why the derailment?”

 “You know she was a whistle-blower, don’t you? I assume Bill Dietrich has told you about that.”

 “Actually,” I said with more candor than Chapman or Wallace would have displayed at that point, “no one has mentioned any kind of whistle-blowing to us. We all assumed that this crime was the random act of a stranger, Dr. Babson. Do you know who’d been harassing Gemma?”

 “Harassed? She’d never said anything about that to me. But if she did resign, it was going to be with a major statement to the medical community. That much I can assure you. No going quietly into the good night.”

 “Well, what was the whistle-blowing about?”

 “Not sure, exactly. Some kind of ethical dilemma for her. It had something to do with Minuit, with the medical school, rather than the main hospital. She wanted to hold everyone to the standards she set for herself. That’s an extraordinary burden—some might say unreasonable.

 “There was a med student from the West Coast who applied for a neurosurgical residency with Gemma. Someone alerted her to the fact that he had lied on his application—phonied up his résumé or something like that. She booted him from the program even though a couple of her colleagues wanted him in. That kind of thing always ate at her.

 “They were all trying to shut her up over there whenever something like that occurred. None of them wanted her airing their dirty linen in public. Scares away patients and so on. But once she got up on her high horse, it was impossible to get her off.”

 The shrill noise of a beeper pierced the room. All four of us clutched at our waistbands, then looked at each other and laughed.

 “What did we do before these things were invented?” Babson asked. It was hers that had signaled and she picked up the phone to see why she had been paged.

 “Can we finish this up for now?” she asked. “I’ve got to get down to the emergency room. Second Avenue bus just went out of control and jumped the sidewalk. They’re bringing some of the pedestrians who were hit over here and want me to stand by in case I’m needed.”

 “I’d like to talk with you again, Dr. Babson, after we’ve seen Bill Dietrich.”

 “Of course. Just give me a call whenever I can be useful.”

 Babson was leading us to the door. “Can you tell us anything about her involvement with Dietrich? Personally, I mean?” I asked on our way out.

 “I’m just glad she ended it. I never trusted him, really. Just something sleazy about him, not vicious. But she was lonely, I think, and flattered by his attention. He pursued her quite avidly for a while. She didn’t talk about him much anymore. And they always seemed to be on opposite sides in her recent battles. He’s a real user. I can’t imagine what she ever saw in him, so I didn’t encourage her to bring up his name.”

 I rang for the elevator as Babson pushed open the exit door to walk down the back stairs to the ER. Mercer had one more question. “Ever go to a ball game with Dr. Dogen?”

 “Excuse me?”

 “Was she a sports fan? Baseball? Football?”

 “Gemma was a superb athlete. She loved physical challenges. Running, kayaking, skiing. Kind of thing I don’t really make time for, though. I’ve never been to a ball game with her, no. And I don’t remember Gemma ever talking about one. The only reason I ever go is for the sake of the hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, once a year. I couldn’t tell you a thing about that part of her life. Sorry.”

 Babson was off down the staircase before the elevator doors opened to take us to the lobby. It was after five when we walked out of the hospital.

 “Where to?”

 “What would you think of a nice, home-cooked meal for a change?” Mercer asked.

 “I’m out, guys.”

 “No, no. Let’s pick up something from the supermarket. Mike and I’ll cook it. All you have to do is load the dishes in the dishwasher.”

 “Deal.”

 We were only a few blocks from my apartment. I waited in the car while they went into the grocery store and came out ten minutes later with shopping bags full of food.

 “Okay. We’re doing a Caesar salad, my mother’s recipe for chicken breasts with Dijon mustard sauce, and sautéed string beans.”

 “With garlic,” Mike added. “That a problem for your love life?” he asked.

 “He’s out of town, Mikey. Let’s go.”

 We parked on Third Avenue and walked to the apartment. In place of Zac’s leash on the table in my entryway was a bouquet of flowers and a note from David’s housekeeper, who had reclaimed my weekend companion for her master.

 Mike and Mercer set up shop in the kitchen while I changed into leggings and checked my answering machine. There was a message from Drew, who had tried me at the office with no success, a call from my mother reminding me not to forget my sister-in-law’s birthday, and a rambling message from Nina while stuck in a traffic jam on the Santa Monica Freeway.

 I watched my two chefs cut and chop and squeeze their ingredients into a meal. Mike’s blazer and Mercer’s suit jacket were laid on the living room sofa, ties in pockets. Their shirt sleeves were rolled up and Martha Reeves was singing to them. “We’re all prepped,” Mercer said. “Let’s have our dinner after the evening news, okay?”

 We went into the den and I served drinks as we waited for the six-thirty broadcast. Mike called Lieutenant Peterson to tell him the results of our two interviews and to learn what had gone on with the rest of the team. Detectives continued to plod through the corridors of the underground bomb shelter, talking to vagrants and searching for leads.

 He hung up the phone and looked at Mercer and me, “Peterson wants to know what your thoughts are at this point. I told him we haven’t even talked about it yet.”

 “It’s been gnawing at me all afternoon. What doI think? I’m convinced we’ve had it all wrong from the start. From the very first moment you guys got to the crime scene.”

 Mercer leaned forward, drink in hand, and nodded his head slowly up and down. He knew where I was headed.

 “I think you saw exactly what the killer wanted you to see. A sexual assault. A victim who died trying to fight off a rapist. A chance attack by a madman who happened to come across a woman all alone in her office in the middle of the night, random and opportunistic. And I think it’s all bullshit.”

 Mike muted the television and stared at me.

 “Gemma Dogen’s death was a murder, plain and simple,” I said. “Whoever did it staged it to look like a rape, to take us off course, have us looking for somebody who had no connection to Dogen. Like Pops. Like Can Man. The place is full of them.

 “Kill her. Take off her panties, lift up her skirt. Make ‘em think sex crime. I don’t think anybody tried to rape her. That’s probably the last thing whoever killed her wanted any part of—a sexual encounter with Dr. Dogen.”

 “Maybe I wanted you to work on the case with us so bad I didn’t even consider staging as a possibility that morning,” Mike responded.

 “Isn’t it logical? The killer leaves the body positioned to look like a rape—or a good attempt at one. But there’s no semen, no trace evidence in the wounds, not even a strand of an assailant’s pubic hair on her body. Sure, he could have been interrupted or scared off, but my bet is he didn’t even want to try to rape her.

 “The more we know about Dogen,” I told them, “the more I’ve got to think that somebody wanted her dead and had the good sense to plan this to throw us off track.”

 “They’re wasting their time squirreling around in the basement with the whackjobs. It’s gonna be somebody reallysane, like the guys we’ve been talking to in business suits and white lab coats,” Mike said.

 “Like Spector told you,” Mercer said, “these doctors are already paranoid ‘cause you’re on the case.”

 “That’s asinine. They’d be hard-pressed to find someone who respects the medical community as much as I do. The two men I’ve loved most in this world,” I responded, thinking of my father and of Adam, my late fiancé, “have been doctors—the most caring and devoted people I’ve ever known.”

 “Besides,” Mike added. “Nobody’s saying the killer’s a doctor. But the odds are pretty good that it’s someone who knew Dogen. Knew her habits, her hours. Knew that everyone would think her strong enough to fight back against a rapist and fit enough to try it even though he was armed.”

 “I think tomorrow’s another day for us at Mid-Manhattan,” Mercer suggested. “Who’s reaching out for the husband? Any idea?”

 “Yeah, the lieutenant said he called London this afternoon and broke it to him. Very cooperative, appropriately upset. Told Peterson it was like losing his oldest friend.”

 “I hope they’re gonna try to bring him over here to talk to us. There must be some light he can shed on her for us.”

 We argued our way in a friendly fashion through most of the news stories, disagreeing with each other about which of the witnesses we liked or disliked and what the order of our interviews should be throughout the week.

 Mike shushed us up when he saw the lead-in forJeopardy!

 Mercer called Maureen to check on her spirits at the top of the show since neither Mike nor I took the first round seriously. He passed the phone to each of us and she told me about her day.

 She’d had a visit from John DuPre on his neurological rounds. “He’s one of the guys who found Pops in the X-ray department, isn’t he? I was tempted to give in and let him do a physical on me. Don’t you think he’s fine, Alex? Quite a looker.”

 “I’ll let you know tomorrow. Mike wants us to reinterview him. We promised your husband there’d be no hands-on medical practice, Mo. Behave yourself.”

 “What’s a girl to do? The only news from the solarium today was from my next-door neighbor. Says her internist told her Gemma had a thing for younger men.”

 “How young? And did she name names?”

 “Well, the woman telling the story is eighty-two so anything in her book is young. Sorry, no names.”

 “Sarah’s coming up to see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m being wined and dined by the other two musketeers.”

 “I’m jealous. Call me later.”