Clear and Convincing Proof (16 page)

“No. I didn't keep watching her. David was shaking his umbrella, and I stepped back, out of the way.”

“Did you see your wife that morning or speak to her before Carlos came?”

“No. As I said, I made coffee and went into the study to watch the news and wait for David to finish up and leave. I heard her go out to the garage, but we didn't speak.”

“Dr. Boardman, exactly how ill is Mrs. Kelso? People keep saying she's liable to die at any time. Is that how it is?”

He nodded. “I'm surprised that she's held on this long. Every day Thomas goes out to the nursing home and feeds her, but the day she refuses food, it means feeding tubes. And years ago she signed an advanced directive forbidding heroic measures.” He shrugged. “That's how it is.”

“I see. How ill is Dr. Kelso?”

He stiffened and his craggy face seemed to change, become masklike. “I'm afraid I can't discuss my patients with you.”

“You could talk about her, but not him?”

“She isn't my patient.”

“All right. Another topic. Could Darren be accepted at most clinics? I know his background, Dr. Boardman. He told me about it.”

“Yes, he'd be accepted, and welcomed. He's had offers, in fact. He's known throughout the field and highly regarded. We made a couple of videos for the interns to watch, to see what he does, how he does it. Word got out, and now other clinics and schools use them. He gives them to anyone who asks, for the price of the cassette. He could work anywhere he chooses.”

“But he chose to remain here,” Barbara said, not
quite a question unless he responded to it. He simply nodded. “I'd like to see those videos. May I borrow them?”

“You should see them,” he said.

“If the clinic were sold to a for-profit corporation, would you stay?”

He hesitated, then stood up and walked to the window overlooking the garden. He paused for a moment before turning back toward her. “Ms. Holloway, I honestly don't know. We've talked about it, Naomi and I, and we don't know. I don't believe investors should be enriched through the suffering of others, and I know for a fact that there are many people who would receive no treatment without a clinic like this one. I'm afraid I'm not a very good team player, and I am not at all sure a corporation would even hire me. Near retirement age, you understand. I'm fifty-nine, Naomi is sixty. I'm afraid our savings would dissipate fast if we had to live on that, and we're not due for Social Security for several years. We'd both have to work at something. Would it be better to retire early with good memories of the clinic, or watch it change into a grasping octopus and then be forced into retirement? I don't know. I can't answer that question. I just don't know.”

“If David McIvey had turned it into a surgical facility, would you have stayed?”

“Not for a day,” he said. “But there wouldn't have been any choice. I knew he would boot Naomi and me out the day he took over.”

“One more thing,” she said. “What kind of se
curity do you have here? I keep hearing that the garden door is opened at seven-thirty. Who opens it then?”

“It's automatic,” he said. “That door gets closed and locked at dusk by the volunteer at the reception desk, late in the summer, pretty early in the winter, and it doesn't get opened again until morning. Whoever is on duty sees to it that the front door gets locked at ten when the last visitor leaves, and that lock is put on the computer. When the shift changes at midnight, one of the nurses comes down to let the night nurses in. And that's how it works when the shift changes again at seven in the morning. At seven-thirty the computer turns off the other locks.”

“So no one can get in before seven-thirty without ringing for someone to open the door?”

“That's right.” He hesitated, then said, “Of course, I have keys for the doors, and so does Dr. Kelso. And we gave one to Stephanie Waters in the kitchen. She lets her helpers in.”

“Okay,” she said, standing up. “Thank you.”

When he left she made a note by his name. Was the need for financial security motive enough to commit murder? Maybe, she decided. Maybe it was.

She looked up as Annie entered. She did look ill, pale and drawn, hollow-eyed, as if she had not slept since the last time Barbara saw her.

Annie sat down wearily and Barbara asked her the same question she intended to ask everyone: whom did you see that morning?

“I saw Greg at the door for just a second, then David moved in front of him. No one else.”

“Which way did you turn at the street after backing out?”

Annie seemed to see the map for the first time. She pointed. “West, I guess. I was going to Delta Highway.”

Barbara moved her checker away from the residence, out to the street, and west. “Did you turn at the intersection here?”

Annie shook her head. “No. Oaklawn Street goes to Country Club Road, and I went straight.”

“Did you see any of the other staff members, or volunteers, anyone or any car that you recognized?”

She said no, and Barbara sat down opposite her. “Did you remember anything about those dates from your diaries?”

Annie nodded. “Three of them,” she said in a low voice, looking away from Barbara. “That's all. Two were at the same time of year, May, my mother's birthday. He said I had to wait to go home until the weekend, he couldn't spare me during the week. I was pretty upset. I think I wrote quite a lot the first time it happened, maybe not as much the next year. It was…hard to take.” She glanced at Barbara, then out the window at the garden. “Actually it had come up before, just a year after we married, and I thought that time it was because he couldn't stand being separated even for a few days. I really believed that.” She shrugged, but kept her face turned away. “I was so thrilled and excited to think he couldn't bear letting me out of his sight for even a day.”

“The third one?” Barbara asked after a moment. Then she said, “Annie, I had to read them, you know. I understand how it was.”

Annie looked at her then, a quick glance, away again. “I'm so ashamed,” she whispered. “It was degrading, and I went along with it. I felt almost as if I could stand back and watch us both, as if I was someone else.” She shook herself. “The third one that I remembered was when we went to the resort, two years ago, in March. He took time off in March every year to go skiing. I don't ski. I stayed in the lodge and read while he did. There was a fatal accident while we were there, and they shut down everything for an investigation for a day. David was furious. He blamed the man for being stupid, for spoiling his vacation. He had no sense of pity or mercy. I wrote about it, that I wished it had been David, wished he was dead, things like that.” She looked very young at that moment, almost childish, her head bowed, shoulders slumped. “It was the way a child might wish a tree would fall on a hated teacher, or that the schoolyard bully would get hit by a car, but the words themselves…I think they were pretty bad.”

Her voice dropped to near inaudibility as she talked, and when she stopped, neither of them spoke for a time. That could be a big one, Barbara thought. Depending on how she had worded it, what she had written, it could be damning.

Stephanie Waters came in after Annie left, and Stephanie stated emphatically that she didn't have
time for all this. “I have lunches to get ready,” she said, perching on the edge of a chair.

“I won't keep you long,” Barbara said. “I'm trying to find out exactly when people arrived on the morning of the murder. Coordinating movements in a way. Someone might have seen something significant without realizing it at the time.”

“I got here before seven-thirty. I always get here before seven-thirty. A quarter after, twenty after. I put my stuff in my locker off the lounge and went straight to the kitchen and stayed there.”

“Did you let yourself in?”

“Yes, I always do. And I switched the bell to ring in the kitchen so I'd hear my helpers when they came.”

Barbara put her checker in the kitchen and made a note of the time. “Were the blinds open in the lounge?”

“No. And I didn't touch them.”

Her two helpers, Lori Barlson and Thelma Perle, had come in together a minute or two after she got to the kitchen, Stephanie said, and they all had stayed there getting breakfasts ready. Barbara added their checkers to hers in the kitchen.

“Do you always work ten-or twelve-hour days?”

“I never do. I see to breakfast and then I leave for a couple of hours, come back around eleven to do the lunches, which I should be doing right now, and leave again in the afternoon. I don't clean up, I cook. I come back at about four and leave at about seven and that ends my day. On and off all day long.”

Barbara nodded. “All right. So you saw Lori and Thelma. Who else?”

“Bernie. I don't know what time. Darren arrived as I was taking coffee to the lounge. I gave it to him and he carried it in for me. It was about ten minutes before eight. I always get the coffee in before eight.” She glanced at the wall clock, then at her watch and her mouth tightened.

“How did he appear?”

“Wet. He appeared dripping wet. It's crazy to ride a bike in weather like that, but he did.” She was sitting stiffly upright and she leaned forward. “I know that some people are speculating that Darren did it, but he never. If it had been Darren out there dead, I'd be just as certain David pulled the trigger as I'm sure Darren did not. He's incapable of hating anyone enough to kill.”

“You knew David McIvey?”

“Yes, from years back. I worked for him and Lorraine fifteen years ago, as cook and housekeeper.”

And no one had thought to mention this earlier, Barbara thought in surprise. “Is that generally known around here?”

“Of course not. Why would I talk about the past? David's mother and father knew. They might have mentioned it to the Kelsos. I don't know about that.”

“And David McIvey? He must have known.”

“I don't imagine he did. He never set foot in the kitchen here. And I doubt he would have remembered me if he had tripped over me. He never really saw people, not like most of us do.”

She looked at her watch again and abruptly stood up. “I told you I have to see to lunches.”

“All right, but I'll want to talk to you afterward, after you're done with the lunches.”

Stephanie's mouth tightened again and she nodded. “At one, then. I'll come back at one.” She walked out as stiffly as she had been sitting, like a windup soldier.

Barbara saw the two interns, who added nothing. They had arrived on the heels of Darren and had gone straight to the lounge to change their shoes—apparently everyone wore soft-soled shoes, walking shoes, court shoes, sneakers or the like at work. Others had been in the lounge, but they couldn't say for sure who they had been, except Darren. They thought the blinds were open when they went in, but they seemed uncertain. They had arrived together, and remained together until Tony Kranz had gone with Darren to his office at about eight.

Bernie Zuckerman came in hesitantly. “Naomi said I'm next,” she said, “but I have a lunch date with a girlfriend, and it's going on twelve….”

Barbara waved her off. “Go on. I'll catch up with you later.”

Then, alone in the directors' room, she felt she could place almost everyone who had been on hand that morning, and what it meant, she told herself, was that one of the Boardmans was the most likely candidate to have ducked out and committed a murder.

She thought of the motives for murder she had
discussed with Frank many times. He maintained that greed was the overriding one, followed closely by passion: love, hate or revenge. Zealotry in his litany came under passion. Passion for a cause or a belief. She could believe Dr. Kelso might kill to save his clinic, but Greg Boardman? If he was passionate about it, he managed to hide his emotion. Contented here, a believer in what they were doing, but passionate about it? He struck her as a go-along-get-along man, one who would not make waves. Even to ensure his next few years? Protect his security?

And Naomi? Barbara suspected that she was too self-reliant to be overly upset by any threat to her financial well-being. She would get by. Then she recalled the fury in Naomi's eyes when she thought Barbara had intimidated Annie. If she believed someone was really hurting Annie, damaging her…Maybe, Barbara thought. Maybe.

Then, moving slowly and deliberately, she picked up the checker with Annie's initials and placed it on a blank checker. Queen, she said under her breath, and put it back at the residence. She put David McIvey's checker there also. She moved his through the house, through the back garden, across the alley, onto the clinic walkway. At the same time, with her other hand, she moved Annie's doubled checker out through the driveway, turned east at the street, to the corner and around it to the entrance of the alley. She stopped it at the gravel turnoff for the gardener's truck and took off the top piece. She moved it onto the walkway in the garden, then back to the other
checker and replaced it, and moved the queened piece out of the alley and onto the street.