J. Jance - Improbable cause

“I’m sorry, Dr. Leonard,” I apologized. “The patient is a woman by the name of Dorothy Nielsen. Her only son was murdered last Saturday.”

“Really!” she exclaimed, her shaggy eyebrows arching in surprise. With that, Dr. Wilhelmina Leonard swept open the door and motioned me into a waiting room. “My receptionist isn’t here yet. Let’s go back to my office, shall we?”

I followed her through a small suite of examining rooms and into a cramped, untidy office. Unlike Dr. Nielsen’s compulsively clean quarters, this one looked as if it had been bombed. The desk was littered with a jumbled mound of papers, files, and open magazines. Had she sat behind the desk, I doubt she would have been able to see over the top of it. Several sweaters and jackets were strewn around the room, and on a hook behind the door hung at least three tired lab jackets.

Dr. Leonard walked in, cleared one side chair of clothing and general debris, and casually tossed the resulting armload into one corner of the room. “Won’t you sit down?” she suggested, offering me the chair.

I sat. She perched on the front of the desk, while I worried about whether or not she would start an avalanche.

“Adele mentioned you to me yesterday. I seem to recall that she said something about you’re being a police officer. Is that true?” she asked suspiciously.

I nodded and gave her my identification, which she examined with exaggerated care. When she finished, she handed it back to me with a flourish. Then she leaned back on the desk, folding her arms across an ample waist.

“All right, then,” she said. “Now that I know you’re a legitimate police officer, what can I do for you?”

“As I said, I’d like to talk with you about Dorothy Nielsen.”

“First, maybe you’d better tell me about what happened to her son.”

That seemed fair enough. “Dr. Frederick Nielsen was murdered in his downtown office on Saturday afternoon by person or persons unknown.”

Dr. Leonard had sharp hazel eyes and a face that betrayed nothing of what was going on behind it. “How was he murdered?” she asked.

“Someone stabbed him with a dental pick. He bled to death.”

She nodded. “I see,” she said impassively. “If you’re here because you think his mother may have had something to do with it, you’d better think again. I can tell you that she was in the hospital for four solid weeks before I dismissed her on Tuesday. It would have been impossible for her to have been involved.”

“Dorothy Nielsen isn’t under suspicion,” I said quietly. “Actually, I’m a little surprised to hear you say she might be.”

Dr. Leonard bristled at that. “I said no such thing! Why are you here, then? Why did you want to talk to me?”

“How did Dorothy Nielsen break her hip?” I asked.

Dr. Leonard didn’t reply immediately. When she did, her answer was subdued, controlled. “She said she fell down some stairs.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked Dr. Leonard gave me a long appraising glance. “Tell me once again: Mrs. Nielsen is in no way under suspicion?”

“No, she’s not.”

“In that case, I suppose I could go ahead and tell you what I think without betraying my doctor /patient relationship. Remember, this is only speculation on my part. I’m convinced she was pushed. She claimed she fell, of course, but I don’t believe it. Her other injuries weren’t consistent with a fall.”

“What other injuries?”

“Bruises on her arms and shoulders. A cut on her face just below her eye. I asked her about it, but she denied it. She’s always denied it.”

“What do you mean, ”always“?”

Dr. Leonard smiled. “Dorothy Nielsen has been my patient for almost forty years now, Detective Beaumont, since before Freddy was born. In fact, she came to me with that first broken wrist while she was pregnant with him.”

“She broke her wrist? How?”

The doctor shook her head. “I don’t remember now exactly what she said, it’s such a long time ago, but she’s always claimed to be accident prone. It wasn’t until much later that I began to have some inkling of what was really going on.”

Slowly an important piece of Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s background shifted into place. They say physical abuse runs in families, passed on from generation to generation like some genetically linked disease. “You mean her husband was abusive? He beat her?”

“From the very beginning, I would imagine, and probably Freddie too,” Dr. Leonard replied. “I could never understand why a woman like Dorothy would stay with a man like that. It’s possible that she felt she had married above her station, and she wanted to stay there-nice house, nice clothes, all the usual amenities. She often talked about how grateful she was to be married to a professional man. That’s what she called him.”

“Her husband?”

Dr. Leonard nodded. “She said the same thing about Freddie eventually, about how proud she was that he had followed in his father’s footsteps and become a dentist, too.”

“How many times did you treat her over the years?”

“For injuries? I don’t remember. Numerous times. I could look up her records. I haven’t seen very much of her in the last few years, though, not since Fred Senior died. I was surprised when she showed up in the emergency room a few weeks ago.

“Of course, awareness about this kind of abuse is much higher now. It’s much more out in the open nowadays than it used to be,” Dr. Leonard continued. “Even so, some women get mixed up with the same type of man over and over. I asked her that night in the emergency room if she had remarried, but she said no, that she lived with her son and daughter-in-law.”

“Did she tell you that the daughter-in-law had just taken the two grandchildren and run away to a shelter, a domestic violence shelter?”

The bushy eyebrows waggled again. “No. Dorothy didn’t tell me that, but one of her sisters did. We finally had managed to get Dorothy over a serious bladder infection, and I was trying to arrange for her release. I wanted her to go to a nursing home for a while rather than back into the same abusive environment with her son, but Dorothy was adamant. She wanted to return to her own home.”

“Did you see her son while she was here in the hospital?”

“Freddie? Of course,” Dr. Leonard answered. “He was very solicitous and accommodating the whole time his mother was hospitalized. He kept saying all the right words, that we should do whatever his mother needed to get well, that we should spare no expense. As far as he was concerned, money was no object. He’d pay the bill, no questions asked. He brought her flowers constantly and insisted that she have a private room. That kind of thing is standard, by the way.”

“Private rooms?”

“No, no, no. That kind of behavior. Abusers do that, trying to get back in the victim’s good graces. It usually works.”

“You said you talked to Mrs. Nielsen’s sister?”

“Both of them. When Dorothy absolutely refused to let me put her in a nursing home, I had to do something. I couldn’t send her back home with her son. Another episode like that last one could very well kill her. This was bad enough.”

“So you asked Dorothy’s sisters if she could stay with them.”

“That’s right. I called and had them both come down to my office Saturday morning. I wanted to discuss my concerns with them.

That’s when they told me about the wife. I’m sure that’s what sparked the attack on Dorothy-anger and frustration that his wife had somehow managed to slip out of his clutches, that she was no longer under his complete control.“

“Did you tell them what you thought had happened?” I asked.