Mary Clark - Let Me Call You Sweetheart

With Robin out of earshot, Grace quietly asked, “Kerry, those marks on Robin’s face will fade, won’t they?”

“I asked Dr. Smith the same thing when I saw them. He not only practically guaranteed their disappearance, he made me feel as though I’d insulted him by expressing any concern about them. I have to tell you I have a hunch the good doctor has one big ego. Still, last week at the hospital, the emergency room doctor absolutely assured me that Smith is a fine plastic surgeon. In fact, he called him a miracle worker.”

As she sipped the last of her coffee, Kerry thought about the woman she had seen earlier in Dr. Smith’s office. She looked across the table at Jonathan and Grace. “An odd thing happened while I was waiting for Robin. There was someone in Dr. Smith’s office who looked so familiar,” she said. “I even asked the receptionist what her name was. I’m sure I don’t know her, but I just couldn’t shake the sensation that we had met before. She gave me a creepy feeling. Isn’t that odd?”

“What did she look like?” Grace asked.

“A knockout in a kind of come-hither, sensually provocative way,” Kerry reflected. “I think the lips gave her that look. They were kind of full and pouty. I know: Maybe she was one of Bob’s old girlfriends, and I had just repressed that memory.” She shrugged. “Oh well, it’s going to bug me till I figure it out.”

You’ve changed my life, Dr. Smith… That was what Barbara Tompkins had said to him as she left his office earlier today. And he knew it was true. He had changed her and, in the process, her life. From a plain, almost mousy woman who looked older than her twenty-six years, he’d transformed her into a young beauty. More than a beauty, actually. Now she had spirit. She wasn’t the same insecure woman who had come to him a year ago.

At the time she had been working in a small public relations firm in Albany. “I saw what you did for one of our clients,” she had said when she came into his office that first day. “I just inherited some money from my aunt. Can you make me pretty?”

He had done more than that-he had transformed her. He had made her beautiful. Now Barbara was working in Manhattan at a large, prestigious P.R. firm. She had always had brains, but combining those brains with that special kind of beauty had truly changed her life.

Dr. Smith saw his last patient for the day at six-thirty. Then he walked the three blocks down Fifth Avenue to his converted carriage house in Washington Mews.

It was his habit each day to go home, relax over a bourbon and soda while watching the evening news and then decide where he wanted to dine. He lived alone and almost never ate in.

Tonight an unaccustomed restlessness overcame him. Of all the women, Barbara Tompkins was the one most like her. Just seeing her was an emotional, almost cathartic experience. He had overheard Barbara chatting with Mrs. Carpenter, telling her that she was taking a client to dinner that night in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.

Almost reluctantly he got up. What would happen next was inevitable. He would go to the Oak Bar, look into the Oak Room restaurant, see if there was a small table from which he could observe Barbara while he dined. With any luck she wouldn’t be aware of him. But even if she was, even if she saw him, he would merely wave. She had no reason to think that he was following her.

After they got home from dinner with Jonathan and Grace, and long after Robin was asleep, Kerry continued to work. Her office was in the study of the house she had moved to after Bob had left them and she sold the house they had bought together. She had been able to get the new place at a good price, when the real estate market was low, and she was grateful she had-she loved it. Fifty years old, it was a roomy Cape Cod with double dormers, set on a heavily treed two-acre lot. The only time she didn’t love it was when the leaves began to fall, tons and tons of them. That would begin soon, she thought with a sigh. Tomorrow she would be cross-examining the defendant in a murder case she was prosecuting. He was a good actor. On the stand, his version of the events that led up to the death of his supervisor had seemed entirely plausible. He claimed his superior had constantly belittled him, so much so that one day he had snapped and killed her. His attorney was going for a manslaughter verdict.

It was Kerry’s job to take the defendant’s story apart, to show that this was a carefully planned and executed vendetta against a boss who for good reasons had passed him over for promotion. It had cost her her life. Now he has to pay, Kerry thought.

It was one o’clock before she was satisfied that she had laid out all the questions she wanted to ask, all the points she wanted to make.

Wearily she climbed the stairs to the second floor. She glanced in on a peacefully sleeping Robin, pulled the covers tighter around her, then went across the hallway to her own room.

Five minutes later, her face washed, teeth brushed, clad in her favorite nightshirt, she snuggled down into the queen-sized brass bed that she had bought in a tag sale after Bob left. She had changed all the furniture in the master bedroom. It had been impossible to live with the old things, to look at his dresser, his night table, to see the empty pillow on his side of the bed.

The shade was only partially drawn, and by the faint light from the lamp on the post by the driveway, she could see that a steady rain had begun to fall.

Well, the great weather couldn’t last forever, she thought, grateful that at least it was not as cold as predicted, that the rain would not change to sleet. She closed her eyes willing her mind to stop churning, wondering why she felt so uneasy.

She woke at five, then managed to doze off until six. It was in that hour the dream came to her for the first time.

She saw herself in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. There was a woman lying on the floor, her large, unfocused eyes staring into nothingness. A cloud of dark hair framed the petulant beauty of her face. A knotted cord was twisted around her neck.

Then as Kerry watched, the woman got up, removed the cord from her neck and went over to the receptionist to make an appointment.

During the evening it crossed Robert Kinellen’s mind to call and see how Robin had made out at the doctor’s, but the thought had come and gone without being acted on. His father-in-law and the law firm’s senior partner, Anthony Bartlett, had taken the unusual step of appearing at the Kinellens’ house after dinner to discuss strategy in the upcoming income tax evasion trial of James Forest Weeks, the firm’s most important-and controversial- client.

Weeks, a multimillion-dollar real estate developer and entrepreneur, had become something of a public figure in New York and New Jersey during the past three decades. A heavy contributor to political campaigns, a prominent donor to numerous charities, he was also the subject of constant rumors about inside deals and influence peddling, and was rumored to have connections with known mobsters.

The U.S. attorney general’s office had been trying to pin something on Weeks for years, and it had been the financially rewarding job of Bartlett and Kinellen to represent him during those past investigations. Until now, the Feds had always fallen short of enough evidence for a solid indictment.

“This time Jimmy is in serious trouble,” Anthony Bartlett reminded his son-in-law as they sat across from each other in the study of the Kinellen home in Englewood Cliffs. He sipped a brandy. “Which of course means we’re in serious trouble with him.”

In the ten years since Bob had joined the firm, he had seen it become almost an extension of Weeks Enterprises, so closely were they entwined. In fact, without Jimmy’s vast business empire, they would be left with only a handful of minor clients, and with billings inadequate to maintain the firm’s operations. They both knew that if Jimmy were to be found guilty, Bartlett and Kinellen as a viable law firm would be finished.