Silent Treatment (25 page)

“I’m talking about soon. If you want, I’ll go to one of those meetings tomorrow.”

“Believe me, it’s not angina I’ve been having. I
know
angina. It’s just that I’m overly aware of chest discomfort because of my family history and—”

“Deal or not?”

They stopped and looked at one another. Harry swallowed at the dryness that had recurred in his throat.

“Deal,” he said. “Provided you agree not to take a drink of any sort of booze without calling me first and giving me a chance to dissuade you.”

“Deal.” Her smile was warm and hopeful. Then suddenly, her expression changed. Her eyes widened. “Harry!” she cried, staring over his shoulder.

“Not a word, neither of you!” the man behind Harry growled.

Harry recognized the voice immediately. It belonged to the larger of the two men from Desiree’s apartment. Harry started to turn, but the thug, several inches taller, locked an arm under his neck and thrust a gun into his ribs. Maura instinctively whirled to run and collided with the man’s partner, who had come charging down the path from the road, cutting off any attempt to escape in that direction. The spot they had chosen was totally hidden from the road
above and from the reservoir below. Maura cried out as the shorter, stocky one grabbed her wrist and twisted her arm high behind her back. Then he forced her off the path and up the hillside into the dense woods. Harry’s captor shoved him rudely after her.

“No sucker punches this time, asshole,” he snarled.

Harry tripped on a thick tree root, but the giant’s grip across his neck kept him from falling. After twenty yards, the underbrush and steepness of the hill made it impossible to continue. It was much darker than it had been on the path.

“Okay, down on your knees, both of you,” the taller man ordered.

He dropped Harry with a sharp kick to the back of the knee. Maura, her hand bent up nearly to the back of her neck, was powerless to resist.

“Nice body,” the thug said as he forced her, face down, onto the ground. “Real nice.” He kneeled on the small of her back.

“Shut up and just do what you have to do,” the other rasped.

“Leave her alone,” Harry pleaded. “She’s no threat to anyone. She doesn’t remember a thing. Nothing. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Shut up, dammit!”

Something solid—the man’s fist or the revolver butt, padded somehow—slammed down on a spot just behind Harry’s right ear. Pain and a searing white light burst through his head. He pitched forward and landed heavily, air exploding from his lungs.

“No! Please don—!”

Through a semiconscious haze, Harry heard Maura cry out. Then suddenly her words were cut off, replaced by a dreadful gurgling. He could feel her kicking, her feet flailing desperately against the ground beside his face. He lifted his head. His vision was blurred, but through the darkness he could see the man with the cinder-block build straddling Maura from behind, his beefy hands tight around her
throat, pulling her head up as he strangled her, bowing her back.

“No!” Harry cried, his voice only a harsh, impotent whisper. “No, don’t!”

He struggled to push himself up, but the behemoth standing beside him drove him back down with a foot between his shoulder blades.

Suddenly, the man on top of Maura grunted, pitched forward and to one side, then toppled like a stuffed toy down the hill toward the reservoir. At virtually the same instant, the taller man cried out in pain and spun to the ground clutching his right arm. Instinctively, he rolled over twice and scrambled for cover behind a large oak. Harry’s head was clearing rapidly, but he still could not figure out what was going on. Then he saw the man’s gun lying six feet away. He crawled unsteadily toward it, expecting the giant to beat him there. Instead, the man, still holding his arm, lurched to his feet and stumbled off through the brush.

Harry snatched up the revolver and then crawled to where Maura lay. She was facedown and very still, but she was breathing. He turned her over gently and cradled her head in his free hand.

“Maura, it’s okay,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s Harry. You’re all right.”

His senses keyed, his finger tight on the trigger of the revolver, he peered into the darkness, straining to see movement or a silhouette. The noise of his assailant’s escape faded, replaced by a silence as dense as the darkness in the grove.

Harry checked the carotid pulses on both sides of Maura’s neck. They were bounding and sharp. His own pulse was bludgeoning the inside of his head. Maura’s eyes were open now, and she was sobbing softly. Harry continued scanning the woods. He set the gun on his leg and caressed the side of her face.

“He was strangling me,” she said, trying to clear the hoarseness from her throat. “I couldn’t breathe.”

“I know. Easy does it. You’re okay now.”

“Wh-what happened?”

“I’m not sure. I think both men were shot, but I didn’t hear any gunfire. Are you all right?”

“As soon as I stop shaking I will be. It happened so fast.”

“They work for that doctor you saw. I think they wanted to kill you and leave me alive, trying to convince the police that I didn’t do it.”

He helped her sit up, but continued to support her with an arm around her shoulder.

“Is someone out there?” she whispered, gesturing toward the darkness.

Again they listened. Again there was only silence. Holding the revolver loosely, he helped her to her feet. The throbbing in his head persisted, along with some dizziness. A mild concussion, he decided. Nothing more. He touched the bruise behind his ear and winced from the pain. But there was virtually no swelling—no support for his story that they had been mugged. The two thugs knew what they were doing. Professionals. But someone out there had beaten them both.

He and Maura helped one another down the steep slope. The path, dark but still somewhat lighter than the woods, was empty. Harry again rested his finger on the trigger of the revolver as they searched slowly along the treeline.

“I was certain the bastard fell this way,” Harry said.

“Maybe he was just wounded, like the other one.”

“He didn’t roll that way, but maybe.”

“I’m not sure I like it here in the park anymore,” she said.

“I think leaving may not be such a bad idea myself.”

At that moment, she pointed at the base of a tree several feet up the slope. An arm protruded from behind it, the limp hand dangling palm up. They swung a wide arc and then approached the tree from above. The man who had so nearly strangled Maura to death was wedged against the trunk. He wore dark jeans and a black turtleneck. The
side of his face was pressed into the damp soil. His visible eye was wide open, staring sightlessly up the hill.

“Here,” Harry said, pointing to a spot in the upper middle of the man’s back. “Look.”

Maura bent down and could just discern the dime-sized hole and expanding disc of blood.

“What should we do?” she asked.

Harry felt the man’s jeans for a wallet, but knew there would be none.

“I didn’t hear any gunshot,” he said again. “Did you?”

“No, but I was busy listening to the pearly gates creaking open.”

“I think whoever shot these guys had a silencer.”

“So?”

“Professional killers use silencers. Maura, I think we should get the hell out of here.”

Maura rubbed at her neck.

“I’m with you,” she said.

The discovery of a man shot to death in Central Park made the late-night news and the morning papers. Police located the body at ten p.m. following an anonymous phone tip from a male caller. The victim carried no wallet and as yet had not been identified. Preliminary impression was robbery, but police were not ruling out the possibility that the shooting was an execution.

Harry entered the hospital for morning rounds, his thoughts in their now-usual state of disarray. The mystery surrounding Evie’s death remained as murky as ever. And now other unanswered questions had darkened the picture even more. Who had been down there on the path in Central Park, silenced revolver in hand, ready and quite able to kill? Could the arrival of their savior have possibly been a coincidence? Was he some anticrime vigilante? No explanation made much sense.

A few things, very few, seemed apparent. Harry remained convinced that his life was not in jeopardy—he was
being kept around to deflect responsibility for Evie’s murder. Maura’s continued survival was not nearly so assured, though. Maybe Albert Dickinson gave her eyewitness account no credence whatsoever, but clearly the murderer did.

Throughout the night she had said little of her ordeal. But Harry shuddered at the thought of what it must have been like for her, a killer’s hands tightening around her throat, her spine bowed near the breaking point.

After leaving the park, the two of them had gone to Harry’s apartment. Maura’s place, they decided, was simply too vulnerable. And although Rocky, the night doorman, was hardly the sort of protection that would put one’s mind at ease, he was better than nothing. Maura was certain that by filing a formal report supporting her story, her brother had already put his future in the department in jeopardy. This time around she insisted that he not be involved—at least not in any official capacity. Harry did not completely agree, but with all she had endured, there was no way he was going to try and change her mind. He reported the Central Park body to 911 from a pay phone. For the time being, Tom Hughes would be left out of it.

Once in the apartment they settled onto the sofa in the small, oak-paneled den and turned on the television. Maura, physically drained, said little. She sipped herbal tea, nibbled some shortbread cookies, and stared at the screen. In just over an hour, the first news report appeared on Channel 2, announcing the homicide near the reservoir in Central Park.

“Okay, Harry,” she said when the brief report was complete, “I think I’m ready. Could you please tell me what’s going on?”

“I wish I knew,” he responded.

He told her about the bewildering, depressing discoveries he had made in Evie’s Greenwich Village apartment. He told her what he remembered of the doctor with the cultured accent, and of the two men with him who had then assaulted them in the park. Maura listened without interruption.

“So, it’s all about sex,” she said when he had finished.

“In a way, I guess you could say that, yes. Somewhere in her—what would you call it? research?—Evie apparently crossed the wrong person. Whoever it was murdered her—or more likely
had
her murdered—in a way that should not have aroused any suspicion whatsoever. Aneurysms like hers rupture all the time. I’m certain there wasn’t supposed to be any flap about it or any autopsy. But Caspar Sidonis’s claim that I had reason to kill her changed all that. Now, whoever
really
did it is committed to proving Sidonis is right.”

“And to eliminating the only eyewitness as well,” Maura added. “Harry … Evie sounds like such a sad, mixed-up soul.”

“Believe me when I tell you she didn’t come across that way.”

“What about children? Didn’t you want them when you got married?”

“Oh, very much.”

“But she didn’t?”

“She used to say she did, but—not really. Look, I know it sounds like I should have gotten out of the marriage years ago, or never gotten into it in the first place. But believe it or not, taken on a day-to-day basis, it really wasn’t that bad. We were like a lot of couples. We got up, went to work, had a reasonable amount of money, had friends, went on an occasional vacation, bought some nice things, made love—at least in the beginning. I took care of my patients, played my music, did my workouts, jogged through the park. I guess I just didn’t look at it all too closely.”

“I understand. I think everyone who’s in a bad marriage is guilty of wearing, blinders—sometimes for a long while.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “There’s still plenty of time, Harry.”

“For what?”

She yawned and stretched. “For whatever …”

Hours later, damp with sweat, Harry awoke from a dream he had experienced many times before. It was a Nha-trang dream, viewed along the barrel of Harry’s gun.
Beyond the end of the barrel, a young Vietcong soldier is raising his weapon. His face and expression are indelible in Harry’s mind. Eyes widening in fear, he tries to level his semiautomatic. Harry’s gun discharges. The youth’s chest bursts open like a ripe melon. He is hurled backward into oblivion. Moments later another soldier, even younger than the first, steps into view at the end of the barrel. He spots Harry and the wounded man on the ground beside him. He raises his weapon. Harry’s gun discharges once again.…

The television flickered across the darkened room, its volume barely audible. Maura Hughes, covered with a woolen throw, lay sleeping beside him, her head resting on his lap. Harry clicked off the set and sat in the near blackness, gently stroking her face and her downlike new hair. Not once during the entire evening had she made excuses for herself or her life, or tried to rationalize her drinking. Not once had she whined about the deadly situation into which she had been thrust. She might not have medals as proof, but in her own way, Maura Hughes was pretty damn heroic. And Harry felt drawn to her in a most powerful way. He shifted his legs. She moaned softly, then rolled onto her back and looked up at him.

“Mmmm. Am I keeping you up?” she asked dreamily.

“No. Lately I’ve spent more nights on this sofa than in bed. Why don’t you go on into the guest room and get some real sleep?”

“Is staying out here like this an alternative?”

“If you want.”

Heavy-lidded, she smiled up at him, then rolled back onto her side.

“I want,” she murmured.…

Harry had three patients in the hospital. The first, a four-year-old girl with asthma, was ready for discharge. Harry wrote out detailed instructions for the mother, who was scarcely more than a child herself. But no amount of information or reassurance seemed to be enough to calm her. Finally, Harry took a business card from his wallet.

“Here, Naomi,” he said, writing on the back of the card. “This is my home phone number. If there’s any problem with Keesha, you don’t even have to call the answering service unless I’m not home. But she’s going to do fine.”