Mary Clark - Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Carpenter.

“I’d like to have an appointment to speak with the doctor as soon as possible,” Kerry said. “It’s important.”

“What is this in reference to, Ms. McGrath?”

Kerry decided to gamble. “Tell the doctor it’s in reference to Suzanne.”

She waited nearly five minutes, then heard Dr. Smith’s cold, precise voice. “What do you want, Ms. McGrath?” he asked.

“I want to talk to you about your testimony at Skip Reardon’s trial, Doctor, and I’d appreciate doing it as soon as possible.”

By the time she hung up, he had agreed to meet with her in his office at seven-thirty the next morning. She mused that it meant she would have to leave home by six-thirty. And that meant she would have to arrange for a neighbor to phone Robin to make sure she didn’t fall back asleep after Kerry had gone.

Otherwise, Robin would be fine. She always walked to school with two of her girlfriends, and Kerry was sure that she was old enough to get herself a bowl of cereal.

Next she phoned her friend Margaret at her office and got Stuart Grant’s home phone number. “I talked to Stuart about you and your questions about that plastic surgeon, and he said his wife will be home all morning,” Margaret told her.

Susan Grant answered on the first ring. She repeated exactly what Margaret had reported. “I swear, Kerry, it was frightening. I just wanted to have a tuck around the eyes. But Dr. Smith was so intense. He kept calling me Suzanne, and I know that if I had let him have his way, I wouldn’t have looked like myself anymore.”

Just before lunch, Kerry asked Joe Palumbo to stop by her office. “I have a little extracurricular situation I need your help with,” she told him when he slumped in a chair in front of her desk. “The Reardon case.”

Joe’s quizzical expression demanded an answer. She told him about the Suzanne Reardon look-alikes and Dr. Charles Smith. Hesitantly she admitted that she had also visited Reardon in prison and that, while everything she was doing was strictly unofficial, she was beginning to have her doubts about the way the case was handled.

Palumbo whistled.

“And, Joe, I’d appreciate it if we could keep this just between us. Frank Green is not happy about my interest in the case.”

“I wonder why,” Palumbo murmured.

“The point is that Green himself told me the other day that Dr. Smith was an unemotional witness. Strange for a father of a murder victim, wouldn’t you say? On the stand, Dr. Smith testified that he and his wife had separated when Suzanne was a baby and that a few years later he allowed her to be adopted by her stepfather, a man named Wayne Stevens, and that she grew up in Oakland, California. I’d like you to locate Stevens. I’d be very interested in learning from him what kind of girl Suzanne was growing up, and especially I want to see a picture of her taken when she was a teenager.”

She had pulled out several pages of the Reardon trial transcript. Now she shoved them across the desk to Palumbo. “Here’s the testimony of a baby-sitter who was across the street the night of the murder and who claims she saw a strange car in front of the Reardon house around nine o’clock that night. She lives-or lived-with her daughter and son-in-law in Alpine. Check her out for me, okay?”

Palumbo’s eyes reflected keen interest. “It will be a pleasure, Kerry. You’re doing me a favor. I’d love to see Our Leader be the one on the hot seat for a change.”

“Look, Joe, Frank Green’s a good guy,” Kerry protested. “I’m not interested in upsetting things for him. I just feel that there were some questions left open in the case, and frankly, meeting Dr. Smith and seeing his look-alike patients has spooked me. If there’s a chance that the wrong man is in jail, I feel it’s my duty to explore it. But I’ll do it only if I am convinced.”

“I fully understand,” Palumbo said. “And don’t get me wrong. In most ways I agree with you that Green is an okay guy. It’s just that I prefer someone who doesn’t run for cover every time someone in this office is taking heat.”

When Dr. Charles Smith hung up the phone after talking to Kerry McGrath, he realized that the faint tremor that came and went in his right hand was beginning again. He closed his left hand over it, but even so, he could feel the vibrations in his fingertips.

He knew that Mrs. Carpenter had looked at him curiously when she told him about the McGrath woman’s phone call. The mention of Suzanne had meant nothing to Carpenter, which no doubt had made her wonder what this mysterious call was all about.

Now he opened Robin Kinellen’s file and studied it. He remembered that her parents were divorced, but he had not studied the personal data Kerry McGrath had submitted along with Robin’s medical history. It said that she was an assistant prosecutor, Bergen County. He paused for a moment. He didn’t remember ever having seen her at the trial…

There was a tap at the door. Mrs. Carpenter stuck her head in the office to remind him that he had a patient waiting in examining room 1.

“I’m aware of that,” he said brusquely, waving her away. He turned back to Robin’s file. She had come in for checkups on the eleventh and the twenty-third. Barbara Tompkins had been in for a checkup on the eleventh and Pamela Worth on the twenty-third. Unfortunate timing, he thought. Kerry McGrath had probably seen both of them, and it had somehow triggered whatever memory she had of Suzanne.

For long minutes he sat at the desk. What did her call really mean? What interest had she in the case? Nothing could have changed. The facts were still the same. Skip Reardon was still in prison, and that’s where he would remain. Smith knew that his testimony had helped to put him there. And I won’t change one word of it, he thought bitterly. Not one word.

Sandwiched between his two attorneys, Robert Kinellen and Anthony Bartlett, Jimmy Weeks sat in federal district court as the seemingly endless process of selecting a jury for his income tax evasion trial dragged on.

After three weeks, only six jurors had been found acceptable to both prosecution and defense. The woman being questioned now was the kind he most dreaded. Prim and self-righteous, a pillar-of-the-community type. President of the Westdale Women’s Club, she had stated; her husband the CEO of an engineering firm; two sons at Yale.

Jimmy studied her as the questioning went on and her attitude became more and more condescending. Sure she was satisfactory to the prosecution, no question about that. But he knew from the disdainful glance she swept in his direction that she considered him dirt.

When the judge was finished questioning the woman, Jimmy Weeks leaned over to Kinellen and said, “Accept her.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Bob snapped incredulously.

“Bobby, trust me.” Jimmy lowered his voice. “This will be a freebie.” Then Jimmy glanced angrily down the defense table to where an impassive Barney Haskell sat watching the proceedings with his lawyer. If Haskell cut a deal with the prosecution and became their witness, Kinellen claimed he could destroy Barney on the stand.

Maybe. And maybe not. Jimmy Weeks wasn’t so sure, and he was a man who always liked a sure thing. He had at least one juror in his pocket. Now he probably had two.

So far, there had only been the mention of Kinellen’s ex-wife looking into the Reardon murder case, Weeks mused, but if anything actually went forward with it, he knew it could prove awkward for him. Especially if Haskell got wind of it. It might occur to him that he had another way to sweeten any deal he was trying to make with the prosecution.