Paper Doll (12 page)

“Everybody agrees that Olivia Nelson is married to a Kenyan citizen named Mano Kuanda and living in Nairobi. Embassy guy talked with her, took her fingerprints. We’ve compared them to her Peace Corps prints. She hasn’t been in the United States since 1982. Never been in Boston. Has no idea who the victim is.”

“She know anything about Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.

“No.”

“Never heard the name?”

“No,” Quirk said.

“You talk to Stratton?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“He says he was sleeping with Tripp’s wife regularly, and that he wasn’t the only one.”

Quirk raised his eyebrows.

“Our Bobby?” he said.

“Shocking,” Belson said. “And him a Senator and all.”

“That’s why he tried to chase you off?”

“So he says. Says he was afraid I’d find out about them and it would spoil his chances for the nomination next year.”

“For President?” Quirk said.

“Yeah.”

“Jesus,” Belson said. “President Stratton.”

“How about Tripp?”

“I talked to him.”

“And?”

“He says everything was perfect.”

“You got anything, Lee?” Quirk said.

Farrell jerked a little, as if he’d not been paying close attention.

“No, Lieutenant, no, I don’t.”

“Why should you be different?” Quirk said. He kept his eyes on Farrell for a long moment.

“One thing,” I said. “I don’t know why you would have, but has anyone run a credit check on Tripp?”

“Worried about your fee?” Belson said.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon and his thin face already sported a five o’clock shadow. He was one of those guys who looked cleanshaven for about an hour in the morning.

“In fact, his check bounced. But I think there’s something goofy about his finances.”

I told them about the checkbook. “Might be something,” I said.

“Lee?” Quirk said.

Farrell nodded.

“I’ll find out,” he said. “Anything else?”

“The name Dr. Mildred Cockburn shows up in his checkbook a lot.”

“Written like that?” Belson said.

I nodded.

“Probably not a medical doctor,” Belson said.

“Yeah,” I said, “then the check would be to Mildred Cockburn, DMD, or Mildred Cockburn, MD.”

“Maybe she’s a shrink,” Belson said.

“Or a chiropractor, or a doctor of podiatry,” I said.

“Hope for a shrink,” Quirk said.

I asked if either of them had heard of Dr. Mildred Cockburn. Neither of them had. Still, there was risotto with crab meat and a pistachio pesto. The room was elegant, and the bartender made the best martinis I’d ever drunk.

“I’ve got to find out how he does that,” I said to Susan on the ride home.

“Well, you’re a detective.”

“And how complicated a recipe can it be?” I said.

“Vodka and vermouth?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds complicated to me,” Susan said.

“Recipes are not the best thing you do,” I said.

We were on Memorial Drive. Across the river the Boston skyline looked like a contrivance. The State House stood on its low hill, the downtown skyscrapers loomed behind it. And strung out along the flatness of the Back Bay, with the insurance towers in the background, the apartment houses were soft with the glow of lighted living rooms. It was Friday night. I was going to stay with Susan.

“Why do you want to know about Mildred Cockburn?” Susan said.

“Saw her name in Loudon Tripp’s checkbook, `Dr. Mildred Cockburn,‘ every month, checks for five hundred dollars. So I looked her up in the phone book. She’s listed as a therapist with an office on Hilliard Street in Cambridge.”

“Odd,” Susan said.

“You’d expect to know her?”

“Yes.”

“When I talk with her, what is it reasonable to expect her to tell me?” I said.

“Ethically?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“I can’t say in the abstract,” Susan said. “She should be guided by the best interests of her patient.”

On our left, the surface of the river had a quick-silver gloss in the moonlight. A small cabin cruiser with its running lights on moved silently upstream, passing under the barrel-arched bridges, its wake a glassy furrow in the surface. Susan’s street was silent, the buildings dark, the trees, half unleaved, made spectral by the street lamps shining through them.

Susan lived in an ornate Victorian house. On the first floor her office was on one side of the front hall, and her big waiting room was on the other. We went up the curving staircase to the second floor where she lived. When we opened the door, Pearl dashed at us, and jumped up, and tore Susan’s hose, and lapped our faces, and ran to the couch and got a pillow and shook it violently until it was dead, and came back to show us.

“Cute,” Susan said.

We took Pearl down and let her out into the fenced-in backyard. It was shadowy in the moonlight, but not dark, and we could watch her as she hurried about the yard, looking for the proper spot.

Later we lay in bed, the three of us, and talked, looking up at the ceiling in the moonbright darkness. Pearl had little to say, but she compensated by taking up the most room in the bed.

“Is this Olivia Nelson thing making you crazy?” Susan said. We were holding hands under the covers, across Pearl’s back.

“Nothing is turning out to be the way it appeared to be,” I said.

“Things do that,” Susan said.

“Wow,” I said.

“I’m a graduate of Harvard University,” Susan said.

A sign said Enter, which I did, and took a seat in a narrow foyer with doors leading out of it through each wall. I had an eleven o’clock appointment, and it was five of. The walls of the foyer were cream colored, though once they might have been white. There were a couple of travel posters on the walls, and an inexpensive print of one of Monet’s paintings of his garden. There was also the insistent odor of cat. The low deal table beside the one straight chair had two recent copies of Psychology Today, and a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education from last May.

At 11:06, the office door opened and a pale woman with a thin face, and her gray-streaked hair in a bun, came out of the office. She did not look at me. She took a long tweed coat from the coatrack, and put it on, and buttoned it carefully, and went out the door, maneuvering in the mailbox-sized foyer without ever acknowledging another presence.

There was a three- or four-minute wait thereafter, and then the office door opened again and Dr. Cockburn said, “Mr. Spenser?”

She wore a black turban and a large flowing black garment which I couldn’t quite identify, something between a housecoat and an open parachute. She was obviously heavy, though the extent of her garment left the exact heaviness in doubt. Her skin was pale. She wore a lot of eye makeup and no lipstick.

I stood, and she ushered me past her into the office. The office was draped in maroon fabric. The window had louvered blinds, opened over the top half, closed on the bottom. There was a Victorian sofa, upholstered in dark green velvet, against the wall to the right of the door, and a high-backed mahogany chair with ugly wooden arms, facing a wing chair upholstered in the same green. She sat across from me in the wing chair. She made a barely visible affirmative movement with her head, and then waited, her hands folded in her lap.

“This is not a therapeutic visit,” I said. “I’m a private detective, and I’ve been employed by Loudon Tripp to investigate the murder of his wife, Olivia Nelson.”

Again the barely visible nod.

“In the course of investigating, I came across your name.”

Nod.

“I’m wondering if you could tell me anything about either of them,” I said.

“That is unlikely,” she said. She had a deep voice and she knew it. She liked having a deep voice.

“I realize,” I said, “that there are questions of confidentiality here, but your patient’s best interest might well be served by helping me find his wife’s killer.”

“Loudon Tripp is not my patient,” she said.

Nothing moved when she spoke, except her lips. In her dark clothes and her deep stillness, she seemed theatrically inaccessible.

“Olivia Nelson,” I said.

She remained motionless. I glanced around the room.

“You are a psychotherapist,” I said.

Nod.

“Are you an M.D.?” I said.

She made the tiniest head shake.

“Ph.D.?

Again, the tiny head shake.

“What?” I said.

“I am a Doctor of Human Arts.”

“Of course,” I said. “And the conferring institution?”

“University of the Southern Pacific.”

“In L.A., I bet.”

Nod.

“They give academic credit for life experience.”

“That’s quite enough, Mr. Spenser.”

I nodded and smiled at her.

“Sure it is,” I said. “So tell me about Olivia Nelson.”

She paused for a long time. We both knew she was a fraud. And we both knew that if I were motivated, I could cause her a lot of aggravation with the state licensing board. And we both knew it. She shook her head ponderously.

“Troubled,” she said, “terribly troubled.”

I did a barely visible nod.

“And like a lot of women, terribly victimized,” she said.

Her deep voice was slow. Her manner was ponderous. When she wasn’t speaking, she remained entirely still. She knew I knew, but she wasn’t letting down. She was going to stay in character.

I nodded.

“At the heart of things was the fact that her father rejected her.”

“Original,” I said.

“And so she sought him symbolically over and over in other men.”

“She was promiscuous,” I said.

“That is a masculine word. It is the product of masculine culture, judgmental and pejorative.”

“Of course,” I said.

“When she came to me for help, she had already tried the route of Freudian, which is to say, masculine, psychotherapy. The failure was predictable. I was able to offer her a feminist perspective. And understanding herself, for the first time, in that perspective, she began finally to get in touch with her stifled self, the woman-child within.”

“And she slept around,” I said.

“She gave herself permission to discover her sexuality. And to do so for its own sake, rather than in the service of a thwarted father love.”

“Do you know the names of any other men she gave herself permission to discover her sexuality with?”

“Really, Mr. Spenser. That is privileged communication between patient and therapist.”

“And one of them might have killed her,” I said.

She chewed on that for a little bit.

“I would think it would be in her best interest for you to name them,” I said. “I’ll bet that in your studies at USP you learned that your patients’ best interest was the ethical rule of thumb in difficult circumstances.”

She chewed on that a little bit more.

“I don’t make notes,” she said finally. “I believe it inhibits the life force spontaneity necessary to a successful therapy.”

“Of course,” I said.

She allowed me to watch her think.

“And she never used names. She referred to the men in her life in various ways-the news anchor, for instance, and the judge, the broker, that sort of thing. There was an important clergyman, I know. But I don’t know who he was.”

“Denomination?” I said.

She shook her head. “Not even that,” she said. “She always referred to him as the Holy Man. I think it pleased her to experience a man of the cloth.”

I pressed her a little, but there was no more. I moved on.

“Did she tell you her real name?” I said.

“I was not aware that she had another,” Cockburn said.

“What was her father’s name?”

“I don’t know. I had assumed it was Nelson.”

“She ever mention the name Rankin?”

“No.”

“Cheryl Anne?”

“No.”

We were quiet. Dr. Cockburn maintained her ponderous certitude even in silence. The way she sat bespoke rectitude.

“She did say that she used another identity to get into graduate school, someone else’s records and such,” Cockburn said finally. “She herself had not finished high school. She left home at seventeen and went to Atlanta, and made a living as best she could; she said, including prostitution. At some point she came to Boston, motivated, I think, by some childhood impression of gentility, became a graduate student, made a point of frequenting the Harvard-MIT social events and met her current husband.”

“She didn’t say whose identity she used.”

“No, but if in fact she is not Olivia Nelson, as you imply, then one might assume she used that one.”

“One might,” I said. “How did her father’s rejection manifest itself?” I said.

“He failed entirely to acknowledge her.”

“Tell me about that,” I said. “How does that work? Did he pretend she wasn’t there? Did he refuse to talk to her when she came home?”

Dr. Cockburn gazed ponderously at me. She let the silence linger, as if to underline her seriousness. Finally she spoke.

“He was not married to her mother. The lack of acknowledgement was literal.”

I sat in the heavily draped room feeling like Newton must have when the apple hit him on the head. Dr. Cockburn looked at me with heavy satisfaction.

“Goddamn,” I said.