“That’s when you canned her?”
“Well, no,” he said. “It was a little more complicated than that. She evidently went directly to Jergens and told him of her findings. I don’t know to what end. He threatened her and told her to bury the information. Then he set up a meeting with me at an out-of-the-way restaurant and told me to fire her.”
“So you did?”
Stallings nodded. “Yes. But then an odd thing happened.” He narrowed his eyes. “He called me back a couple of weeks later and told me to re-hire her.”
“Why did he do that?”
Stallings leaned toward me. “That’s the strange thing. I don’t know why. But she came back to work as if nothing had happened.”
“What about the report?”
“It was never published. It just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I took this all in. “What did Jergens threaten her with?”
“He swore to destroy her career. I believe he even threatened her with physical violence. When she came back to the office after meeting him, she looked scared to death.” He stopped and caught himself. “I suppose that’s a poor choice of words.”
“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” I said. “No one’s going to flunk you for insensitivity.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Her starched white dress made an audible rustle as she rose to get me the file. In a single motion, she reached down and smoothed out the wrinkles on the front of the material where her legs had been.
“I really shouldn’t do this,” Pasternak’s nurse said in a tone that meant she really wanted to do it. “But since he’s dead and she’s dead, I don’t see how it can hurt anyone.”
A sob story always worked on a babe like this. Nurses were sweet, they were caring, that’s why they went into the healing professions. I’d told her how grief-stricken I was by Alicia’s death and how I thought Pasternak’s suicide might have tied into it and how I wanted to make sense out of the whole tragic business. She bought into it. But only up to a point.
“I can’t let you take the file out of the office, but I’ll let you read it here,” she told me with a tone of concern. She confirmed that the police had taken Alicia’s file. That was why I couldn’t locate it when I made the unsolicited house call to Pasternak’s office on that midnight dreary.
She led me into a cramped waiting room with a soundproof double door that was a shade more comfortable than Pasternak’s office had been. She turned and gave me a pleasant little nurse’s smile. Her accent was somewhere between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and her face was round and flat in a Balkan kind of way. “Take as much time as you need,” she said in a voice that came from years of practice in the art of comfort and solicitation. “I have a lot of paperwork to do before the office is closed down.”
She laid Alicia’s file down carefully on a coffee table covered with editions of Architectural Digest, Vogue, The New Yorker and other magazines that reflected the supposed browsing habits of the ideal clientele Pasternak wished for but didn’t have.
“Before you go, I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I said.
She looked surprised, but quickly said, “Sure, Mr. Rogan, whatever I can answer.”
“Thanks. Why don’t you sit down.”
She sat facing me in a prim and proper way with her knees pressed together and her feet in their sensible white shoes flat on the floor.
“I just want to understand why my wife is dead and why Dr. Pasternak is dead.” I tried to look earnest. “Will you help me.”
“I’d be glad to, if I can, but I don’t know very much about your wife. She came once a week, but she broke her appointments a lot. Doctor used to get very upset about that-more than with most of the other patients, you know.”
“Why do you think that was?”
She shrugged brightly. “I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe Doctor liked the sessions with her more than the others.” She furrowed her brow. “Doctor did tell me once that her sessions were…what was the word he used… fascinating.”
She leaned forward and spoke softly, almost reluctantly. “You know, Mr. Rogan, it’s like this. Most of Doctor’s patients were older you know, elderly, and they were, you know, not very interesting. They were…he called them ‘run of the mill.’ They were, in other words, boring, you know. Doctor said they had body odor and they… they had flatulence, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what that is.”
“Well, he did have a few young ladies as patients and he seemed to appreciate those sessions more. He used to tell me that was the way psychiatry should be, you know.”
“Do you think Dr. Pasternak had a physical relationship with any of his patients?”
She drew back and her face went white. “Oh, no, never, not ever. That’s against all the rules, the ethics, you know. Doctor would never do that, never.”
“I see, I see,” I said reassuringly. I didn’t want her clamping up on me. “How did you find out he committed suicide?”
“Why, I discovered his body.” She seemed almost pleased with herself. “Doctor lived alone, you know, and I usually come to work at nine. Only that morning he didn’t let me in. I thought that was strange, you know. I had a key he gave me so I could do work when he wasn’t home, you know, so I opened the door and went in. I thought he just wasn’t home.”
I watched her mouth move as she told her story. Some people just love to talk. All they need is time to spare, an excuse and a listener.
“Well, anyway, I started to do my billing and then I caught up on a lot of overdue paperwork, you know. I guess I’d been working for a couple of hours and I was getting thirsty and hungry and my ears were starting to hurt from the headset, so I went to the kitchen to make myself a snack and get a soda and then I went to the bathroom. Only the bathroom door wouldn’t open. So anyway, I pushed hard and it opened a little and then I pushed a little more, you know, and I could feel something was holding the door shut, so I pushed more and I saw his foot. You couldn’t imagine how surprised I was, you know.”
“I have a pretty good idea,” I said, by way of encouragement.
“Well, anyway, I’m a nurse, you know.”
“I kind of suspected that.”
She nodded. “So I tried to resuscitate him, you know, but I could tell it wasn’t any good. He’d been dead for hours. So I just sat down and thought. I didn’t go into shock or anything, you know. I’m a professional,” she said, holding her head erect. “So anyway, after that, I walked through the whole house to see what I could make of it.”
She moved closer to me and whispered, “I even went up to the top floor, where I never went before, because he said I was forbidden to go up there. And that’s where I found it.”
“What?”
“The suicide note,” she explained.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, it was on the night table by his bed.”
“And what did it say?”
She held out her hands in front of her with the palms facing me. “The police told me not to say anything, you know.”
I was as smooth as warm butter. “Yes, I can imagine. But you can tell me because I was her husband,” I said in the most masterful non-sequitur I had ever used.
She eyed me suspiciously. “Well, I guess it’s all right. The note went something like ‘Because I loved her and now she’s gone.’ “
I nodded. “What do you think he was referring to?”
“I don’t know…I really can’t imagine.” She looked genuinely puzzled.
“What else did you see?”
“Well, there was an empty prescription bottle on the table next to the note. The police took that too. I’m not sure, but I think it was Prozac.”
“Anything else?”
She thought for a minute or two, then said, “Nothing else really, you know.”
I could see that was all she had, so I thanked her and told her I’d read Alicia’s file for a while.
I stayed in that little room for almost an hour, just getting up once for a cup of coffee. She didn’t have any real coffee, so she made me a cup of what she said was hazelnut-flavored instant decaf, but what I took to be coffee-flavored dishwater.