Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“How did you know my name?” Jake asked.

“You were on the front page of the paper yesterday. You see, your notoriety has reached as far as Poughkeepsie.” There was no friendliness in his manner. “As for you, Ms. Manfreda, the board voted last night to authorize me to ask the police to issue a warrant for your arrest.”

She stared at him. He avoided her eyes. “Arrest? Whatever for?”

“Theft. There’s a picture missing from our files: a photograph from the Baxter County Daily Gazette. Another had been substituted, but it’s been cropped, and we want the original back.”

Jake extended the picture. “Ms. Manfreda didn’t take it,” he said. “The photograph was found among the belongings of Dr. Peter Harrigan, the former chief medical examiner for New York City who died at his home in Turner two weeks ago. We are returning it to you.”

“It’s true I took an architectural plan when I was last here,” Manny said, opening her tote bag. “I did so inadvertently, and I apologize.” She placed it on the table. “Call off the cops.” If there’s any satisfaction in this, it’s watching Parklandius sputter.

“Dr. Harrigan couldn’t have taken the photograph,” he said.

Jake shrugged. “I found it among his estate documents.”

Parklandius had regained his composure. “Dr. Harrigan had been a member of this foundation since 1963, Dr. Rosen. Indeed, we got him his first job. We placed him at Turner after his residency. Surely he knew we would have loaned him anything from the archives.”

Pete never mentioned he had been at Turner, and it wasn’t on his rйsumй. He took the clipping, never planning to give it back, and substituted the other. It was meant for me- as what? Jake closed his eyes, remembering Pete’s struggle to say something when they met in his house. Sadness swept him like biting wind. Of course. As a confession.

“So you see, it’s all a misunderstanding,” Manny said. “If you don’t have me arrested I won’t sue you for false arrest. You have everything back, no matter who took it, and no harm done. Nice how that works out, isn’t it?” She held out her hand: palm down, like a bleedin’ aristocrat. He looks like he wants to bite it.

Parklandius left, mumbling.

“Rude man,” Manny said. “He didn’t say goodbye.”

“Still, I don’t think we can stay here. I don’t think he’d be pleased if we continued to look through the files.”

Manny called Kenneth from her cell phone. “You didn’t know Kenneth was working for us, did you?” she asked Jake, when she’d finished. “We’re all of us sleuths. Isn’t that cozy?” She turned serious. “He’s been checking into Isabella’s dentists, Iras and Lowell. Both are dead- car accidents- one in seventy-two, the other in eighty-four.”

“Murdered, you think?”

“I don’t know why not. Whoever they are, everyone connected to Turner winds up dead before their time.”

“Including us if we don’t solve this thing.” He started for the door.

She ran after him. “Where are we going?”

“Turner. I want to see Marge Crespy at the Historical Society.”

JAKE SAT IN the car with his head bowed, staring ahead through pained eyes. Manny wanted to comfort him, hold him, but held back. He’s suffering. It wasn’t only Harrigan who died but Jake’s vision of him. He needs to bear this alone.

“Pete must have known about the experiments,” he said finally. “Known about them and performed them. He was too young to have acted on his own, but he was involved. My God, how it must have weighed on him! Forty years of keeping secret the worst sin a doctor can commit.” He turned to her. “I loved him, Manny. He was my teacher and my spiritual father. I don’t know if I can ever forgive him.”

“He wanted to confess to you,” she said. “That’s why he called you back. Not to tell you he had cancer, but about this.”

“Cancer of the soul. I wonder if he’d have said anything if we hadn’t discovered the bones. He must have realized immediately whose they were and confirmed it by x-raying them. No wonder he didn’t send the X-rays to me. He must have destroyed them.”

“And somebody destroyed him,” Manny said quietly. “Don’t forget that. Someone must have known Pete Harrigan was ready to talk.”

Ms. Crespy, it turned out, lived on the top floor of the Historical Society. “You’re the doctor from New York,” she said to Jake. She was a wiry woman, plainly robust, looking younger than the fifty Jake had originally guessed. “I remember you working with dear Dr. Harrigan.” She looked at Manny. “And this is?”

“Philomena Manfreda. I’m a lawyer, helping the daughter of James Lyons, one of the patients whose bones were discovered at the construction site.”

Ms. Crespy led them upstairs to her residence, settled them in her living room, and provided them with coffee. “We think we’ve identified Skeleton Four,” Jake said. “The female.”

“Her name was Isabella de la Schallier,” Manny said, handing her the copy Jake had made of the uncropped photograph before returning it to the Academie. “She was another patient at Turner. She’s the one standing with-”

“Dr. Harrigan!” Ms. Crespy was clearly astonished. “I had no idea he was ever at Turner Psychiatric. My goodness, you’d think he’d have said something.”

Wally had said she had nothing to do with the kickbacks at the mall site, Jake thought. He was right. “Yes. Do you recognize the young woman?”

She studied the photograph. “No. But there’s no reason I should. I socialized with very few of the patients, and this picture was taken more than forty years ago.”

“Would the Historical Society have any information about her?” Manny asked. “Maybe something about her death?”

“I don’t remember seeing her name in our records. But we have only a few scraggly documents. The Psychoanalytic Academie for the Betterment of Life has more.”

“We went there this morning,” Jake said. “It’s where we got the photo.”

Ms. Crespy looked at it again. “I don’t know her, I’m afraid.” She brightened. “But look. On the path behind her and Dr. Harrigan. I recognize the girl walking by herself.”

Hope blazed in Manny’s brain. “You do?”

“My goodness, yes. That’s Cassandra Collier- when she was a teenager, of course.”

“Is she still alive?” asked Jake, his voice rising.

“Alive, if you can call it that. She’s a recluse. Lives in her daddy’s old house. People here think she’s loony, but she’s as sane as sunshine. I take food to her now and then, and we talk.”

“Will she talk to us?” Manny asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. She’s moody.”

“Why was she in Turner Psychiatric?”

“Her daddy- Timothy Collier, the well-known gynecologist- institutionalized her after her mother died. Mrs. C was a concert pianist until arthritis crippled her- died of grief, they say.”

Get on with it, Manny thought.

“Anyway, Cassandra was evidently a hellion when she was young. Promiscuous in an age when no good girl let a man touch her till she was married. Collier put her in Turner to tame her, not because she was crazy. He was a huge contributor to the hospital- there used to be a Collier Library on the grounds- and they took her in because they needed his patronage. The director wasn’t the most ethical man around-”

If you only knew.

“- but they kept the poor girl against her will until her daddy died. Then they couldn’t wait to get rid of her.”

“She’d know what was going on at the hospital when Isabella de la Schallier died,” Jake said, keeping his voice neutral.

“Suspect so.”

“But she might not talk to us?”