A Circle of Wives (23 page)

I find I’m in no mood to hear more about her exercise regime. “Please sit down, Dr. Fanning,” I say, and point to the seat next to my desk.

“Call me Claire,” she says.

I nod. “And Sam for me,” I say. Even though we met previously we shake hands and it feels oddly formal, like we are entering into some contract.

“I have something to tell you about John Taylor and myself,” she says, without preamble, and without waiting for me to ask anything. Despite the perspiration and her admission that she’d been “training,” she’s surprisingly not out of breath or showing any sign she has exerted herself.

“That I figured,” I say, and then I nod and cross my arms. Clearly, this Claire is not stupid, so she must see the look on my face. Because I’m sorry. When a young attractive female mentions she has something to say about an older male colleague in a position of power, you just know what’s coming. I didn’t even need to have seen the look exchanged in the video to realize that. I say to her, “You’re going to tell me you were sleeping with John Taylor.”

She doesn’t blink. “Yes,” she says.

We sit there looking at each other.

“Why did you wait this long to tell us?” I ask.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” she said.

I don’t have to give this much thought. Her words hang between us, clearly false.

“What changed?” I ask.

“This did,” she says, and holds up the copy of the
Chronicle
with the results of the inquest declaring John Taylor a victim of foul play.

“But that article, and the media firestorm, happened weeks ago,” I say. “Why wait?”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved,” she says. “Precisely because of the . . . firestorm. I had to consider carefully what to do. I’d be involving myself in a mess that could impact my professional and personal life for years to come.” She says this very coolly, without showing any emotion. This doctor doesn’t have much of a bedside manner.

“Okay,” I say, but I still don’t uncross my arms. “So you finally decided it was your civic duty to talk to me. Fine. That means you believe that the fact you were sleeping with John Taylor was important in some way?”

“No,” she says, and shakes her head emphatically. Her thick black hair swings across her cheekbones. I feel a stab of envy of her beauty.

I lay my hands down on the table. “Hello? Isn’t that what you just said?”

“No, that’s what
you
said. There’s another reason you should want to talk to me.”

“What’s that?”

“I was John Taylor’s fiancée.”

Really, you could pick me up from the floor.

“What?” I say. “
What?”

Claire nearly smiles, but composes her face. “Yes,” she says. “And I knew about all the others.”

“You knew?”

“Yes. Part of our deal was that he would divorce Deborah and sever ties with the other ‘wives’ to marry me.”

I sit quietly, trying to absorb this.

“Did anyone know?” I ask.

“Only John and me,” she says.

I attempt to gather my thoughts. Whatever else I’d figured might come up in this case, another woman was not among them.

“Don’t you have some questions for me?” she asks.

If Claire is trying not to show disdain, she’s not succeeding. What I mean is: I feel her disdain. She isn’t hiding it. I notice again just how black her eyes are, how black her hair, against that pure white skin. And that extraordinary composure. Is there some injection that medical students take to get that damned mien of superiority? If so, she’s been fully inoculated. I want to scream at her, curse, anything to break that composure.

Instead I speak calmly. “I’m still puzzled why you would hesitate to come forward with your fiancé dead under mysterious circumstances. Weren’t you concerned to have justice done?”

“We hadn’t yet gone public with our relationship,” she says. “And it would have seemed . . . cheap . . . to have added to the circus. Not until it became clear that foul play may have been involved was I even remotely conflicted about that part of it.”

When it’s apparent she isn’t going to say anything more, I ask, “And how long were you . . . lovers?” I hate that word, it sounds so smarmy coming out of my mouth, but I can’t think of another one.

“Almost from the start. He was my professor. The nature of the relationship means we spent a lot of time together, with me shadowing him on cases. One afternoon it just happened.”

“At the clinic?” I feel like a dirty-minded voyeur.

“In the beginning. There were private places there. Then we went to my apartment, off University Avenue. We couldn’t go to his house, for obvious reasons.”

“So you knew he was married?”

“Of course. Although for a time I thought Deborah was the only wife.”

“I’m sure you understand that I need to know the details of where you were on Friday night, May 10, between 6:30 and 8
PM
,” I say.

“That’s easy,” Claire smiles. “I was at the clinic. I finished my last case at four, and I was catching up on John’s paperwork. He’d been letting it slide. And he’d asked me to be a coauthor on a couple of papers. I was preparing them for peer review. You can ask the night guard in the building. He comes on duty at 6
PM
, and I didn’t leave until after 9
PM
.

“I’ll look into it,” I say. Then I pause. I have to know.

“What, exactly, did you see in him?” I ask. “He was, what, well over twice your age? Not in the best of shape. Married. Why take him on?”

Claire laughs, a genuine laugh, the first true sign of emotion I’ve seen in her. “John Taylor was the most magnetic man I’ve ever met,” she says. “He was genuinely interesting, and genuinely interest
ed
. In the world, in others. You inhabited a private space when you were with him. It was quite remarkable.
He
was remarkable.”

“What was his rationale for having an affair? I mean, before you became engaged?” I hope my voice doesn’t betray my . . . scorn? Envy?

“He spoke of his loveless marriage, of his wife needing to keep up appearances, and his need to protect her.”

“The usual crap, in other words,” I say, wanting to get a reaction out of her.

“Yes, the usual crap,” Claire agrees. She is not disturbed by my words. I doubt anything would throw her off.

“So how long did it take to get beyond the usual crap?” I ask.

“Not long,” she says. “He asked me to marry him after about a month. He said he loved me, that we could build a life together. I believed him.”

“So when did you find out the truth?”

“What truth?”

“That he had more than one wife to dispose of?”

“Oh
that
,” she says as though it was of no consequence. “When he proposed, he told me everything. It didn’t matter.”

“So you knew? Like Deborah?”

“No, not like Deborah. I knew
everything
. She didn’t know about me.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“From the way John described Deborah, I can’t imagine she would know and not want to get her hooks into our relationship, to stage-manage it the way she did the others. But our relationship couldn’t be manipulated or controlled in that way.”

“So when on earth did the two of you have time together?” I ask. The thought of three marriages, three households, was dizzying. But a fourth? Madness.

“On the job, between procedures. On weekends, when he wasn’t in LA, or when MJ and Deborah thought he was at a conference, or on call. We made the time.”

I am beginning to digest this news. It changes everything. Everything. I need to go over the transcripts, see what the wives told me, assess it in this new light.

Claire breaks into my thoughts. “There’s something else you should know,” she says.

“What?” She is driving the interview, not me. She’s staying two steps ahead while I trail behind.

“I think I was the last person to see John alive. Other than the hotel people and the murderer, of course.”

I snap to and realize that this is a valuable witness, and she is volunteering valuable information. I need to capture it instead of sitting here gaping. Better yet, I have to seize control of the conversation. I scramble through my bag for my recorder, raise it up to get her nod, and turn it on.

“Tell me about that last week, the week he died,” I say. “We know his movements up through Thursday morning. When he left Deborah’s house that morning. After that, no one could trace him.”

“He was with me. We got into a fight. We’d met for coffee before going into the clinic, and I told him off. I felt he wasn’t going to go through with it, that he’d lost his nerve. I threatened to tell Deborah myself. Later he called MJ and Deborah and said he’d been called down to LA. He didn’t go in to the clinic that day or the next, but came to my apartment. He stayed Thursday night with me. And then Friday, when I went home during my lunch break, we got into another argument. We were both tired, it had been a long week. We weren’t faring particularly well in my apartment, which is a small studio with barely enough room for a bed and desk. I left to go back to work, and when I came home he was gone. I didn’t know where, but suspected to one of his wives. I was furious. And that was my state until I read about his death in the Sunday paper.”

“So it was you who called the
Chronicle
, who spilled it to the press about the three wives.”

Did I see a shadow of shame cross that perfect face?

“Yes,” she says finally. “It was an impulse. I don’t usually act on impulse. And I regretted it immediately.”

I can’t figure out Claire. The rest of John’s women I have more or less fixed in my mind. I see the relationship that each of them had with him, and each one makes sense to me, in an insane sort of way. But not Claire.

I have this theory about people. I can’t think of them as weak or strong personalities, I find that useless in terms of categorization. Under such a system, conventionally, Deborah would be considered the strongest, MJ the weakest, and Helen somewhere in the middle. But I don’t think of MJ as weak; I think of her broad shoulders, her height, and her large hands and intensity. Underneath that scattiness is a real person. The same applies to Helen, and dare I say it, Deborah. Perhaps that’s what I mean.
Real people.
John Taylor married three real women. He sure knew how to pick them.

But this Claire? I find I’m disappointed by John’s choice. You look at her delicate beauty and you understand why any man might consider pursuing her. But it’s still a disappointment. I’ve built an impression of John Taylor, I realize, and it doesn’t have anything to do with marrying young china dolls less than half his age.

“Do you have a way to prove your relationship with Dr. Taylor?” I ask Claire.

She holds out her hand. An exquisite, and very large, diamond ring is on her fourth finger. At least that’s what it looks like. It could have been just glass given my untrained eye. I have the feeling I’m supposed to
ooh
and
aah
at the size. I merely nod. I’ve found that being silent when I’m unsure goes a long way to making people think I’m not as stupid as I feel.

“I wasn’t allowed to wear it in public before,” she says. “Now it doesn’t matter.” She isn’t expressing sadness when she says this. Odd. Her perfect face reveals nothing.

“You could have bought that yourself,” I point out.

“I thought you’d say that,” she says. She opens the small backpack she was wearing and produces a receipt. A credit card receipt for a diamond ring from Haynes Jewelers, in San Francisco. Even I’ve heard of them.
$75,000.
Paid for by John Taylor on his American Express. Talk about a sugar daddy. Fifty thousand dollars to MJ’s brother Thomas. Seventy-five thousand dollars for a ring to a would-be fourth wife. This boy was leaking cash all over town.

“Do you have any witnesses who can verify what you’re claiming?” I ask.

“Of course not,” she says. “We were keeping things under wraps.”

“No one from the clinic knew?”

“There were the usual rumors,” she says. The disdain is back in her voice. I don’t appreciate disrespect.

“Why
usual
?”

“I’ve found that office gossip often links me to the men I work with,” she says. Then, interpreting my look correctly, she says, “Falsely.” Then, as if describing her professional qualifications she says, “An attractive young woman in a mostly male field. This sort of annoyance comes with the territory.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say.

“Oh, it’s true,” she says, not wishing to acknowledge my snarky tone. “There were rumors about John and me simply because we worked together quite closely. But no one had any proof.”