Unbreathed Memories (13 page)

The pages covered approximately three weeks in Diane Sturges’s busy practice. Sunday and Monday appeared to be her days off, but between ten and five on all other days she had appointments scheduled back to back, six per day and sometimes seven, with no break for lunch. Fridays she knocked off early. Georgina’s appointment at three was Dr. Sturges’s last scheduled session on that day.

I flipped backward and confirmed that Georgina also visited the doctor on Tuesdays at eleven. On the Tuesday immediately before the murder, Georgina’s name was duly listed and there was an additional notation—G. Alexander. Tuesday. Poor Daddy. He hardly had time to unpack his suitcase before Georgina managed to drag him into her private hell.

Most of the patients, like Georgina, visited the doctor twice a week. A handful made single visits and two lucky individuals bared their souls to the doctor each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. I wondered what Sturges charged them. One hundred? Two hundred a session? I did some mental arithmetic. With thirty sessions per week, that was a healthy chunk of change.

I decided that anybody needing therapy three times a week was probably too screwed up to be of much help and moved on to consider the others. B. Smith.
Hah!
No way I could find a Smith in the phone book. Gini.
Could have been anyone—a patient or an appointment with her manicurist. J. Riggins. Maybe. A. Jacobs. Good bet. F. Wandowsky. Even better. Once I had a list of possible candidates, I drove to the public library on West Street, parked, and headed straight for the shelves of telephone directories. Believe it or not, there were four people named A. Jacobs in the Baltimore metropolitan area, but there was only one F. Wandowsky. I jotted down that telephone number and those of a few other likely individuals, knowing it was just the tip of the iceberg. Most telephones were still listed in the husband’s name, so there could have been any number of A. Jacobs married to those John, Henry, and Thomas Jacobs listed in the directory. Back home, I tried another resource. I logged on to the Internet and clicked over to the white pages on the Lycos search engine. J. Riggins might be the J. S. Riggins living on North Charles Street. The A. Jacobs was definitely Andrea, I decided, because her address on Cold Spring Lane was just off Roland.

Exhilarated, I picked up the phone, then dropped it back in its cradle. What the hell was I going to say? Doctors’ records are supposed to be confidential. I puzzled over that while I went for another cup of coffee, hoping the extra caffeine would jump-start my brain.

Wait a minute!
If the police had already contacted all of the doctor’s patients as they claimed, I could pretend to be Officer Williams, simply following up on something. But then I thought better of it. The last thing my mother needed was for another of her daughters to get arrested, this time for impersonating a police officer. If I impersonated anybody, it couldn’t be Officer Williams. I’d be a departmental secretary or something.

I tapped in the first number.

“Ms. Wandowsky?”

“Ain’t no Ms. Wandowsky here.”

“Ms. F. Wandowsky?”

“Name’s Frank. Whatcha selling?” The voice screamed tattooed arms, beer belly, and a round-the-clock five-o’-clock shadow.

“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I have the wrong number.”

I hung up, then thought,
You dope!
Just because F. Wandowsky was a man didn’t mean he wasn’t a patient of Dr. Sturges’s. But the man didn’t sound very forthcoming—probably resented my interruption of his daytime television viewing—so I went to the next name on my list. Andrea Jacobs wasn’t able to come to the phone just now, but if I would leave my name and number, and day and time that I called, she would get right back to me. I hung up before the beep.

J. S. Riggins answered in a voice heavy with sleep. It wasn’t so much a “hello” as a “hmmph.”

“Ms. Riggins?”

“Yes? What time is it?” She sounded as if she had a mouth full of peanut butter crackers.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, Ms. Riggins. This is Betty Smith calling from the Baltimore City Police Department. I’m working with Officer Williams, following up with Dr. Sturges’s patients on something from the other day.”

“I already told you people all I know. Can I go back to sleep now? Christ! I work nights.”

Bingo!
My heart did a flip-flop in my chest. “This will only take a minute,” I said.

I took her grunt for a yes.

“Who referred you to the doctor, Ms. Riggins?”

“Nobody did. I saw a notice on the bulletin board at Fresh Fields about a self-help group that meets on
Wednesday nights at a local church. I’d been having trouble losing weight, so I thought I’d give All Hallows a try.”

“All Hallows?” I squeaked. That was Georgina’s church! I coughed, hoping to cover up my squeak. I didn’t imagine that squeaking was a sought-after trait in selecting an employee for the Baltimore City Police Department. I doubted that Officer Williams’s voice ever got squeaky.

“Diane Sturges was in the group?”

“Hell, no. She was facilitating it.”

“So, how did you get to be her private patient?”

“Diane was helping me see that in order to be cured of what was troubling me, I’d have to come to grips with some things that happened in my past. She convinced me that one-on-one therapy would be beneficial.”

Where had I heard that before?
She and Georgina were certainly singing out of the same hymnbook. “So,” I persisted. “Some of her patients knew each other?”

“Of course we knew each other. After working in that group, we knew each other inside and out.”

“How many of her private patients were also in the All Hallows group?”

“Four or five, maybe. I can’t say for sure. They came and went.”

“Do you mind telling me who they were?”

When she didn’t answer right away, I thought for a minute she might have dozed off.

“Ms. Riggins?”

“Look, you’ve got all the names in front of you. Ask them yourself!”

I had almost forgotten I was supposed to be working for the police, so I scrambled to salvage the situation. “Just one more question, Ms. Riggins, then I’ll let you
get back to sleep. Based on what you know about these other women, do you think any of them had a reason to kill Dr. Sturges?”

Ms. Riggins sputtered into the receiver. “Hardly. She was getting us through some pretty tough stuff.” She paused for a moment. “One of the husbands might have done it, I suppose. A father, maybe. Or a Catholic priest or two.”

I chuckled and was instantly sorry.

“You may well laugh, Ms., uh, Smith, was it? But I’m perfectly serious about the priests.”

I was dying to ask if she knew my sister. Since the group met at the church where Georgina played the organ, it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. But I had already come dangerously close to blowing my cover, so I didn’t want to risk it. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Riggins. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

She grunted and hung up without saying good-bye, and I never did learn what the
J
stood for.

I sipped my coffee, now cold, sat back, and considered the other names I had jotted down. I was about to dial someone named C. Cameron when I noticed that the caller ID box attached to the phone was flashing red and the digital display said “Message Waiting.” I punched the review button and learned I had two calls—one from Connie and another from an unknown number that had come in at 10:02. I dialed the answering machine and checked my messages. Regretfully, Connie wasn’t coming. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving Dennis’s daughter alone, especially when their relationship was so fragile.
Well, nuts!
The unknown number was my plastic surgeon’s receptionist, reminding me that I had a consultation for my breast reconstruction the following day. In all the confusion, I had completely forgotten about the
appointment. They were expecting me to appear with all the necessary papers signed, and I was still being wishy-washy about it. What frightened me the most was the anaesthesia. At night, lying in bed listening to the click-click-click of the portable alarm clock, I’d worked myself up into a cold panic. They give you something to shut down your lungs, I’d read somewhere, then they hook you to a machine that breathes for you. I wasn’t sure I had that much trust in machines.

Our office has a single window, a narrow rectangle, high up and splattered with mud through which the rays of the late-morning sun were just able to penetrate. Dust motes danced in a shaft of light that caught a photograph on top of the filing cabinet in its spotlight. I picked up the photo and blew a layer of dust from the glass. The picture had been taken five years before and showed Connie and me lounging on the bow of
Sea Song
, holding beers and toothily grinning. Connie wore a red striped bathing suit and I was squeezed into a chrome yellow bikini that Paul used to say made him break out in a sweat. Lord, I had good legs then! Nice boobs, too, swelling out over the top of the bikini. Paul had insisted that the decision about reconstruction was up to me, but how could he
not
prefer a less lopsided wife? If I had been teetering on the status quo side, seeing that picture again tipped the balance.

Before I completed the forms the doctor expected me to bring, I finished my detective work by writing all the names from Dr. Sturges’s appointment book down on a yellow tablet, in columns. Beside A. Jacobs I wrote Andrea, then penciled in a big question mark. Next to J. S. Riggins I drew a check mark and wrote in the wide column to the far right: Husbands? Fathers? Priests? As I did this, I wondered if I was wasting my time, but as
the list took shape, I felt good about it. At least I was doing something.

I smiled to myself. The police must be at their wits’ end. Every one of these people could be telling stories that would make the hair of even Baltimore’s Finest who had probably heard everything stand on end. Based on what Ms. Riggins had told me, they could have dozens of suspects by now, all of them hiding secrets ugly enough to kill for. I slipped the tablet into my purse and zipped it up securely. But no matter how you cut it, it was my father’s fingerprints that had turned up on Dr. Sturges’s plate-glass window, not some suburban housewife’s funny uncle.

I was agonizing over this when the telephone rang. Even before I checked the caller ID, I knew who it was. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened; it must have been telepathy.

“Hannah?”

“Hi, Daddy.” His voice sounded as if it were coming to me from inside a barrel at the bottom of the bay. “Where are you?”

“I took the telephone into the closet. I didn’t want your mother to hear.”

Tears stung my eyes. “Oh, Daddy.”

“Your mother’s not coping very well. She sat up in bed all night, hardly sleeping, propped up on pillows. She didn’t even get out of bed this morning.”

“That’s not good.”

“She says she believes I’m innocent, but then she gets this look in her eyes like the woman I know and love has gone away somewhere. I feel like I’m losing her, Hannah.”

“She’s started smoking again, too,” I said, feeling like a snitch.

“I know. What worries me is that she doesn’t even bother to hide it.”

“I don’t know what to say, Daddy.”

“Help me, Hannah! If it were up to me, I’d be out beating the bushes to find the real killer. As it is, I can’t leave your mother in her present condition.” He paused to take a deep, steadying breath. “I don’t know what she’ll do if I’m actually arrested for killing that woman.”

Even though I had no clue about it one way or the other, I tried to reassure him. “I don’t think that arrest is likely, Daddy. The evidence against you is very slim.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this whole situation. Once I got over being angry with Georgina, I started worrying about her. She needs professional help more than ever now.”

“Don’t I know it!”

He paused, breathing audibly, then blurted, “You don’t suppose her life’s in danger?”

This was a new thought to me, but I didn’t consider it likely. “Georgina’s her own worst enemy.”

Daddy paused to ponder what I had said. “But if I didn’t do it and neither did Georgina, the real killer could be connected with one of her other patients. I can’t be the first father who wanted to silence that charlatan.” He ran possible scenarios by me, each wilder than the next, his words tumbling through the receiver and into my ear at one hundred miles per hour. How about a spurned lover, he suggested, or a jealous husband? Maybe she had a sister or brother who killed her for her share of an inheritance? Maybe Diane Sturges had to be silenced before she passed on some incriminating information that a patient had shared with her? I let him wind down, then said, “OK, Daddy, I promise to
do what I can. I’ve got an appointment with the plastic surgeon early tomorrow afternoon, but after that, I’ll stop by Georgina’s and see if I can’t get her to talk to me. It’s possible she knows some of the other patients.”

His voice brightened. “Thanks, honey. You know she won’t have a thing to do with me.”

“I know. But that will change. I know it will.” I tried to put a smile into my voice. “Now, you do something for me. Drag Mom out of bed, get her dressed, and take her out for a nice lunch somewhere.”

“I’ll try.”

“Just
do
it, Daddy.”

When I hung up a few minutes later, I decided if Georgina still refused to speak to me tomorrow, I’d camp out on her doorstep until she did.

chapter
10

I hate to admit that I’m old enough to remember
the good old-fashioned G.P. who sometimes made house calls. Nowadays, every doctor has a specialty. I swear I’ve got a doctor for every part of my body—my gynecologist, my surgeon, my oncologist, the ENT guy who once dug a plug of wax out of my ear. Most of the doctors I see in Annapolis have relocated from downtown to offices on Bestgate Road or out by the new hospital facility being built near Annapolis Mall. Consequently there had to be some sort of rule that the best plastic surgeon in the county had established her office in a 1970s-style office building on Route 2 halfway to Glen Burnie, a soulless, wall-to-wall corridor of strip malls, fast-food joints, and car dealerships.