Mary Clark - The Shadow of Your Smile

Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Clay Hadley came rushing in. He reached under the covers and lifted Olivia Morrow’s hand then gently laid it back down and pulled the covers over it again. “I was here last night,” he told Monica, his voice husky. “I begged Olivia to let me admit her to a hospital or to a hospice so she wouldn’t die alone. She was adamant that she wanted to be in her own bed when the end came. Have you known her for long, Doctor?”

“I never met her. I was supposed to see her this evening. Her voice was soft. “My father was an adopted child and Ms. Morrow claimed she had known my birth grandparents and wanted to tell me about them. Did she ever mention me to you?”

Hadley shook his head.

“Dr. Farrell, please don’t put any stock in anything Olivia said. These past few weeks since I had to tell her how very sick she was she had begun to hallucinate. The poor woman had no family and she began to think that anyone she ever met or heard of was in some way related to her.”

“I see. Frankly, I wondered if that wasn’t the case. I guess I had better stay until the police come because I was with the clerk when we found the body. They’ll probably want a statement from me.”

“Why don’t we wait in the living room?” Hadley suggested.

With a final glance at the bed where Olivia Morrow was lying, Monica left the room. But as she walked down the hall she had the nagging sensation that something was out of order, something was wrong.

Maybe I’m the one who’s going crazy, she thought. I guess I didn’t realize how very much I was counting on Olivia Morrow really being able to tell me about my background. I’m so desperately disappointed.

Sitting in the living room that was a tribute to the discerning good taste of Olivia Morrow, Monica continued to be troubled by the sense that somehow she had missed something important, something that was wrong about the death of a woman she had never met in her life.

But what?

On Thursday morning Doug Langdon phoned Sammy Barber. Acutely conscious that what he was about to say was possibly being recorded, he spoke briefly and tried to disguise his voice. “I agree to the terms of your settlement offer.”

“Oh, Dougie, relax,” Sammy told him. “I’m not taping you anymore. I’ve got all I need in case the terms aren’t satisfactory. You got the cash in old bills, right?”

“Yes.” Langdon spat out the word.

“Here’s the way I figure we do it. We each have a big black suitcase, the kind that we can pull down the block. We meet in the parking lot of our favorite diner in Queens. We park near each other and switch bags in the lot. No bothering to stop for a cup of coffee, even though their coffee, as I remember it, wasn’t bad. Sound like a plan?”

“When do you want to meet?”

“Dougie, you don’t sound happy. I want you to be happy. The sooner the better. How about this afternoon, maybe around three? It’s quiet then and the boss at the nightclub wants me to come in early this evening. We’ve got some red-hot celebrities who’ve booked tables, and I’m his man when the jerks try to bother them.”

“I’m sure you are. This afternoon at three o’clock in the parking lot of the diner.” Douglas Langdon no longer tried to disguise his voice. If Sammy Barber took the money and did not fulfill the contract there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Except, he told himself grimly, find someone to take care of Sammy, but if that came to pass, he would make very sure there would be no way to trace Sammy’s demise back to him.

And yet I think that when he has the money he’ll go through with it, Langdon thought, as he sat in his office waiting for Roberta Waters, his first patient, another one who was chronically late. Not that he cared. He always stopped her at precisely the time her hour was up, even if she had only been on the couch for fifteen minutes. At her protest, he had said, “I cannot delay my next patient. That would not be fair. Think about it. One of the reasons for your strained relationship with your husband is that he gets frantic because you are never on time for anything, and in consequence you make him embarrassingly late for your joint engagements.”

God, was he sick of that woman!

Face it, he was sick of them all. But be careful, he warned himself. You’ve been getting pretty snappy with Beatrice, who is after all a good secretary, and no question, she was oozing curiosity when Sammy showed up here.

The phone rang. A moment later Beatrice announced, “Dr. Hadley calling, sir.”

“Thank you, Beatrice.” Doug forced warmth into his voice. His tone changed when he heard her click off. “I tried to get you last night. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“Because I was a wreck,” Clay Hadley replied, his voice quivering. “I’m a doctor. I save lives. It’s one thing to talk about killing someone. It’s another to hold a pillow over the head of a woman who was my patient.”

Disbelieving, Doug Langdon heard the unmistakable sound of sobbing on the other end of the line. If Beatrice hadn’t disconnected immediately she would have heard the outburst, he thought frantically. He wanted to shout at Hadley to shut up, but then he swallowed over the tightness in his throat and said calmly, “Clay, get hold of yourself. At the most Olivia Morrow had only a few days to live. By eliminating those few days you saved yourself from spending the rest of your life in prison. You did tell me she was going to tell Monica Farrell about Alex and the Gannon fortune?”

“Doug, Monica Farrell was in Olivia’s apartment when I went back yesterday evening. She was in the bedroom, sitting by Olivia’s bed. She’s a doctor. She may have noticed something.”

“Like what?”

Langdon waited. Hadley had stopped sobbing, but there was a hesitation in his voice when he said, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just nervous. I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.”

“Clay,” Langdon began, trying to keep his voice reassuring, “you have to be all right, for your sake and for mine. Think about all the money you have in that Swiss bank account and the life you can lead with it. And think about what will happen to you and to me if you don’t stay calm.”

“I hear you. I hear you. I’ll be all right. I promise.”

Langdon heard the click in his ear as the other phone rang. With his handkerchief he dried the perspiration from his forehead and his hands.

The intercom came on. “Doctor, Mrs. Waters is here,” Beatrice announced. “And she’s so happy. She wants me to point out to you immediately that today she’s only four minutes late. She said she knew that would make your day.”

Andrew and Sarah Winkler had lived all their married lives in a comfortable apartment on York Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan, a block from the East River. Childless, they had never been tempted to move to the suburbs. “God forbid,” Andrew would say. “When I see a pile of leaves, I want them to belong to someone else.” Andrew, a retired accountant, and Sarah, a retired librarian, were perfectly content with their lifestyle. Several evenings a week they were at Lincoln Center or a lecture at the 92nd Street Y. Once a month they treated themselves to a Broadway show.

A fixture in their daily routine was their after-breakfast walk. They never broke that personal commitment unless the weather was extreme. “Mist is okay, but not a downpour,” Sarah would explain to her friends. “Cold okay, but not below twenty degrees; warm okay, but not if the thermometer hits ninety. We don’t want to turn into couch potatoes, but neither do we want to die of frostbite or heatstroke.”