Primal Fear (23 page)

“That’s about the sum of it. Look, you get to be D.A., you can put the banker away for ten to twenty and go lenient with the little man who got wiped, how’s that.”

“That’s a damn perverse argument in favor of public service.”

“It’s a perverse world, son, and money makes the rules. You found that out ten years ago when you took on Tidy Chemicals and Good Earth Petroleum and the rest of that bunch downstate. You want to change it, change it from the inside. What the hell, you could even be a judge.”

“That’s fat bait, Mr. Shaughnessey,” Vail said.

“I’m after a big fish.”

“You know, I had a feeling you were on a fishing trip but I figured you were snooping for Venable. Or Shoat.”

“I know better ’n that. Nobody bluffs you. You don’t talk about your cases to anybody—half the time you don’t even confide in your own staff.”

“Maybe I don’t want them to know how dumb I am.”

“Bullshit.”

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“Just don’t kick the bishop around, okay? We got a lot of people waiting for their annual contribution.”

“I play ’em the way they fall. If Archbishop Rushman has some nasty little
malum prohibitum
secret in his closet and I think it will help save my client’s life, I’ll pump it up like a hot-air balloon and float it all over the state.”

“Don’t go off half-cocked, I’m not even implying there
is
anything, Martin. I’m just asking you not to go on a bashing expedition. If there’s a little smoke somewhere don’t fan it into a goddamn forest fire, that’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m not going to screw up your charity works, Roy.” Vail leaned back, smiled and took his gamble. “Not unless he chased little boys and girls or something weird like that.”

Shaughnessey looked horrified, then rolled his eyes. “Jesus, don’t even make jokes like that,” he said with a hollow chuckle. “I got all the problems I need.”

Vail continued smiling. “Why is it when we get together, I always come away feeling like the affairs of state are in such sturdy hands? I always feel reassured, Roy.”

“No kidding?” Shaughnessey answered sourly. “Why is it when we get together, I always feel nervous?” And he wasn’t smiling.

The day before, Naomi Chance had found a slip of paper Vail had given her just after the case began. She had stuck the slip
of paper in a file and forgotten it. It was a notation Vail had jotted down from Bishop Rushman’s date book: “Linda 555-4527” and the date, March 9. She was embarrassed. Goodman had been trying to track down Linda for weeks and this was possibly the lead they had been looking for. She had dialed the number and a receptionist answered: “Good afternoon, the Berenstein Clinic, can I help you?” Naomi had cradled the phone.

The Berenstein Clinic? Was it possible Linda was in the snobbish Berenstein Clinic? Was that why she couldn’t be located? Dr. Simon Berenstein was
the
Gold Coast gynecologist, his patients limited to the Rolls-Royce trade. No one got in the door without a triple-A Dun & Bradstreet rating. A gossip columnist on the
Trib
had once remarked to Naomi that Berenstein had felt up every debutante in the city—
and
all their mothers.

What was the elusive Linda doing there?

Actually Berenstein was more than a gynecologist. Mr. Banker’s little girl gets knocked up at the Lake City Club dinner-dance? Never fear. His little boy gets some unacceptable waitress in Boston in a family way? No problem. Had a bad day at the club, need a valium? Old Si will fix you up. Need a little tuck here or a transplant there, call your friendly surgical cosmetologist. All very legal, of course, and Si Berenstein didn’t keep any embarrassing records and he didn’t talk out of school.

So, while Vail was being entertained at lunch by Roy Shaughnessey, Naomi took a cab through a cold, early spring drizzle to the Gold Coast—a half mile of the most valuable property in the state. Jacked-up taxes and development predators had squeezed out the individuals who had once dominated this area, tearing down monumental old mansions and city landmarks and replacing them with sterile condominiums and office buildings. Having destroyed beauty and heritage in the name of progress and growth, the scavengers, like a pack of hyenas, had moved on, seeking other areas of charm and grace to destroy.

Waterview Towers was a masterpiece of cold sophistication, an impotent twelve-story glass-and-brass office building with a mini shopping mall in the lobby. Mauve and brass with a gray marble floor lined with oblong brass flower boxes thick with living white mums, it vaunted a flower shop, an upscale toy store, a gift shop, a bookstore and a sprawling pharmacy. The resident list beside the bank of elevators in the rear of the lobby included several prestigious law firms and half a dozen doctors.
The Berenstein Clinic occupied floors nine through twelve—enough space for a small hospital.

Naomi took the elevator to twelve and stepped out into a waiting room roughly the size of Rhode Island. White leather furniture and smoked-glass tables covered with current issues of
Town and Country, Vogue, Vanity Fair
and
Smithsonian
dominated the big room. An array of expensive perfumes had scented it, and a solitary Degas painting commanded one wall. Far below the floor-to-ceiling windows, a solitary sailboat struggled against the wind and rain on the lake while a thick bank of lead-gray clouds hovered claustrophobically just above the windows.

The receptionist would have been more appropriate in an interior decorating salon. She was in her late forties, her hair fashionably frosted with gray, and was dressed in a black Chanel dress adorned with a single strand of pearls. She looked at Naomi through hooded eyes, appraising her from top to bottom.

“Yes?” she said icily.

Naomi laid her card in front of her.

“I’d like to speak to Dr. Berenstein, please,” she said brightly.

The receptionist frowned at the card. “You don’t have an appointment.” Her tone implied that Naomi’s mere presence in the room was some kind of affront.

“This won’t take long.”

“That’s impossible. The doctor has consultations, examinations. What is this about?”

“It’s confidential.”

“Just what is a paralegal?” The receptionist continued her third degree.

“I’m a trained lawyer but I haven’t passed the bar yet,” Naomi explained.

“Oh. Kind of like a legal chiropractor?”

“Just a minute,” Naomi said, cutting off the insults. She took back her card and wrote on the back—“Re: Linda and the bishop”—and returned it to the receptionist. “Just show him the card—both sides. I’ll wait.”

“It won’t do any good. If you were the president you couldn’t get in today without an appointment,” the receptionist snapped contemptuously.

“Well, lucky me,” Naomi said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not the president,” Naomi said, smiling sweetly.

The receptionist left and came back a few minutes later. “Follow me,” she said curtly, and led Naomi across the waiting room to an office in the comer. “Wait in here, please,” she said, and pulled the door shut behind her.

The office, like the waiting room, was bordered on two sides by floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Naomi checked the doctor’s framed credentials. Choate, Princeton, Harvard Med. The perfect pedigree. Berenstein came in a minute or two later, an impressive man in his mid-fifties and well over six feet tall, trim as an athlete, with wavy, pure white hair, hawkline features and a tennis tan. He had the patronizing attitude of a man who expected respect and thrived on control.

“Miss Chance?” he said in a deep, explicit voice. “I’m Dr. Berenstein.” He regarded Naomi down the length of his equine nose. “You’re a very impatient woman. What’s so damned important?” He looked at Naomi’s card, motioned for her sit down and sat opposite her behind his desk.

“I work for an attorney, Doctor. I need to ask you a few questions. It shouldn’t take long at all.”

“Today’s impossible. Absolutely impossible.”

“I can wait until the end of the day. We can chat on the way to your car.”

“Absolutely not. I’ll have Miss Thomas set up an appointment for next—”

“Sorry, Doctor, that’s unacceptable.”

“Your attitude’s offensive. I don’t like that,” Berenstein snapped.

“You don’t have to, it’s not a requirement,” Naomi said nonchalantly.

“I think you’d better leave right now.”

“You can answer my questions angrily,” Naomi said. “You can be surly. You can even write the answers down if you don’t want to say them out loud. But you
are
going to answer my questions, Doctor.”

Berenstein chewed on the corner of his lip and snapped the business card back and forth across his fingertips several times.

“Perhaps next week,” he said finally.

“That won’t do.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to!” Berenstein demanded. His lips began to tremble with anger. He stood up suddenly, his eyes reflecting his barely controlled rage. “I think you better leave before I call the police,” he said.

Naomi looked up at him for a few moments and said quietly, “Okay. The man you’ll want to talk to is Lieutenant Abel Stenner. Want to know what he’ll tell you? He’ll tell you that I’m fully licensed and doing my job. Then he’ll probably show up to find out why I was here. He’ll also tell you that you can either talk to me now or I’ll be back with a subpoena and you can talk to my boss. His name’s Martin Vail.”

Berenstein seemed to deflate a trifle when he heard the name. The fire went out of his eyes and his mouth went slack. He unconsciously smoothed the back of his hair down and snapped back his shoulders. He looked down at Naomi’s card again.

“Am I supposed to know what this means?” he asked. “My people make dozens of appointments for me. Who are Linda and the bishop? Linda who? And who’s this person, Bishop?”

Naomi shook loose a cigarette and lit it. She leaned back and said, “Why don’t I make this real easy and go straight to the main course. We’re investigating the Bishop Rushman murder case.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“It has to do with Linda.”

“Linda who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Linda is a possible material witness. She was living at Savior House until a few weeks ago so we don’t know her last name. You know the policy, I’m sure.”

“I repeat, I don’t know any Linda.”

“The bishop made an appointment for her here on March ninth. It’s in his book, Doctor.”

“As I told you before …”

“Dr. Berenstein, if the bishop called here on behalf of Linda whateverhernameis, he didn’t talk to that sphinx at the desk or some other receptionist. Bishop Rushman talked to you.”

“I don’t recall—”

Naomi held up her hand and silenced him. “Here’s what I’d like you to tell me. What Linda’s last name is—I’m sure it’s on your records—where she’s from, when you saw her last, where she is now, and why the bishop sent her to you. That’s all. Five answers and I’m out of here.”

“You’re crazy, Miss Chance. Even if she were a patient her file is confidential—”

“Or I
will
get a subpoena and you can talk to Mr. Vail—probably in court. Which way’s easiest for you, sir?”

Berenstein, a man who knew when to cut his losses, pondered
the options for a minute or so, then unlocked a deep file drawer in his desk. He fingered through the folders, finally drew one out and laid it on the desk.

“I have to check on a patient,” he said, “I’ll be back shortly. I trust you’ll be gone by then.” He left the room. Naomi opened the folder, took out the file and started reading. Then she started taking notes.

She beat Vail back to the office by ten minutes, excited with her news.

“How was the lunch?” she asked as he entered the office.

“At first I thought it was a fishing expedition. But I think it was more than that.”

“Why?”

“Shaughnessey told me to lay off the bishop. No, actually he
asked
me to lay off the bishop.”

“You think he knows about the altar boys?”

“Oh no. He’s jumpy but not that jumpy. If Roy Shaughnessey knew about the altar boys, he’d be in cardiac arrest. He’d be in intensive care with about eighty-six different machines plugged into him. But he’s worried about
something.
What the hell do we know about the bishop, Naomi?”

“A lot more than we should.”

“I mean besides the altar boys?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, Shaughnessey’s very jittery about the charity fund. How much money do you suppose the good archbishop raises every year? You don’t suppose there’s a problem there, do you?”

“Nah,” Naomi said, but her eyes twinkled mischievously. “But I think I’ve got a list of the board of trustees and the recipients of the fund. Be a good place to start.”

“Why don’t we do that, just for the hell of it.”

“Yeah. Why don’t I just pull the whole file?”

“Bring it all in. What are these books doing on my desk?”

“Martin, you’ve been moving those books from one place to another since Tommy brought them in two weeks ago. Those are the books he found in Aaron’s place down in the Hollows.”

“Oh. What am I supposed to do with them?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you ask him?”

Vail shuffled through the battered paperbacks and one hardcover. He opened it. A stamp on the title page said, “Property of the City Library, Downtown Branch.”

“What do you know?” Vail said, dropping it back on the desk. “One of these books is overdue at the library.”

“I’ll bet Aaron’s worried to death about it,” Naomi said from the other room.

She decided to wait until Tom Goodman and the Judge came for their usual afternoon meeting to spring her news. They arrived together. Goodman got himself a cup of coffee and flopped on the couch. The Judge waited until Naomi brought him his coffee, a deference to age and position.

“I’ve run my string dry,” Goodman said dejectedly. “Not a sign of Linda, Billy Jordan or Peter.”

Naomi said, “I know where Linda was supposed to be last week.”

They all looked at her with surprise.

“Do you know who Dr. Simon Berenstein is?” she asked.