Trust Me (19 page)

“There was no investigation. It was an accident. Would you please explain why you’re asking me these questions?”

“I certainly will,” she said. “My primary work is with the rehabilitation of brain-injured children. And it’s a very sad fact
of life that sometimes these injuries come about at the hands of abusive family members. I’ve been involved with enough of
these cases to know which kinds of injuries are consistent with which kinds of accidents.”

“What are you saying?” Max asked.

“I’m saying, Mr. Giordano, that something is very wrong here. A fall down the stairs causes injuries like broken bones, or
broken teeth, or bruises on high-impact areas of the body—all the logical results of rolling and hitting the edges of a series
of stairs. Your grandfather’s injury is totally inconsistent with that. He has a depressed fracture at the base of his skull.
That kind of trauma would only result from a single hard blow to the back of his head.”

Max stared at Joanna Melhorn as her meaning became clear.

“That’s impossible,” he said finally. “He’s been examined by a team of doctors. He’s been in the hospital for more than two
weeks, and you’re trying to tell me that until this moment, no one noticed that his injury didn’t match the alleged cause?
You want me to believe that Bill Sheaffer just missed this?” He shook his head.

Her expression didn’t change. “This is the first time I’ve heard about this
alleged cause.
I would be shocked if Mr. Tremayne’s records said anything about a fall down the stairs. That would be a red flag to anyone
here. Your grandfather’s injury could be the result of a different kind of fall, if he went backward, and his head hit something
hard on the way down. But it is beginning to sound to me, Mr. Giordano, as if you don’t actually
know
what happened that night. Do you?”

“This is crazy,” Max said, but he felt less confident than he had a few moments earlier.

She fixed him with an unwavering gaze. “I assumed that your grandfather had been mugged. With an injury like his, the first
thing to rule out is assault, which should have been done when he was admitted. It’s standard procedure. The doctors in the
trauma center are required by law to notify the police when they see a suspicious injury.”

“How do you know that they didn’t?”

“Because,” she said, “
you
would know if they did. Will you excuse me? I’m going to make a phone call. Have a seat over there in the lounge. I’ll be
right back.”

Max walked over to one of the blue couches and sat down. He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and stared down
at his hands. The fluorescent light bleached his skin to a sickly beige, and he could see cookie crumbs scattered on the cheap
institutional carpet. He sat, not moving, for almost ten minutes, until he heard her voice again.

“Mr. Giordano.”

He looked up. “Well?”

“Well,” she said. She was frowning, and she looked puzzled. She sat down, facing him. “The admitting physician did notify
the police on the night that Mr. Tremayne was brought in.”

“What? Why the hell wasn’t I told about this before?”

“Because no report was filed. The records show that the woman who found him and called the paramedics—”

“Pauline,” Max said. “The housekeeper.”

“Yes. She was the one who told the admitting physician that he had fallen. I don’t know if she specifically said that he fell
down the stairs. Either way, the blunt trauma alone was enough reason to bring in the police.”

“Let me make sure that I understand this,” Max said. “Are you telling me that my grandfather did not fall? That someone
hit him
on the back of the head?”

“No. What I’m telling you is that he did not
fall down the stairs.
On the night that your grandfather was admitted, his head somehow came into contact with a fist-sized blunt object that was
hard enough to fracture his skull. That kind of injury could have been the result of a fall, or of an assault. This is what
Dr. Moore—the trauma center physician who admitted your grandfather—said to the patrol officer that night.”

“Then why wasn’t it investigated?”

Dr. Melhorn shook her head. “I can’t answer that. The officer on duty must have thought that there was reasonable cause to
believe that it had been an accident. It seems shockingly negligent to me, but I wasn’t there, and I don’t know the facts
of the case. There might be more to it.”

“Obviously, there
is
more to it,” Max said. “If the admitting physician and the police agreed that my grandfather had an accidental fall, why
should I believe you? You’re the only one telling me that something else might have happened.”

“I’m telling you what I see,” she persisted. “I don’t know Dr. Moore or the officer who took the statements that night, so
I have no reason to think that they did anything wrong. But I’ve also been around long enough to know that things don’t always
run as tightly as they should. To me, this looks like something that should have been investigated, not ignored.”

She sat quietly while he composed himself.

“I have no reason to believe that you know what you’re talking about,” he said finally.

She nodded as if she had expected such a reaction. “I’ll give you the name of a forensic pathologist whom I trust absolutely.
He testifies in court as an expert witness, and I strongly suggest that you ask him to review your grandfather’s case. But
I think he’ll tell you exactly what I just did, which will then raise an important question. If a fall down the stairs did
not cause your grandfather’s injury, Mr. Giordano, you might—for your own peace of mind— want to find out what did.”

“
S
o, it was right here that you found him,” Max said.

Pauline nodded. They were standing in the arched entrance hall, at the spot where the sweeping flight of mahogany stairs rose
toward the second floor.

“He was lying there… so still. Oh.” She closed her eyes briefly. “It was terrible. I didn’t know what had happened at first,
I was so shocked. I ran to him, and he was unconscious.”

“So you assumed that he had fallen down the stairs.”

She looked at him as if he were dimwitted. “Well, of course. I’m no TV detective, Mr. Max, but I’m not stupid. He was right
here at the foot of the stairs. How else could he have hurt his head so badly?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, and meant it.

She scowled at the staircase. “Terrible,” she said again. “I don’t know what he was thinking, trying to do something like
that with his bad knees.”

“So then, after the paramedics came, you went to the hospital with him.”

“I certainly did! I wasn’t going to let them take poor Henry away without me. Those ambulance drivers, my goodness. You hear
such terrible stories about them…”

Max had never in his life heard a terrible story about an ambulance driver, but he didn’t ask. “What happened when you got
to the hospital?”

She shuddered. “All that noise, and then they were rushing him away, and I didn’t know what was happening. I was so upset.
And that doctor! He must have been right out of school. You know, Mr. Max, I have grandchildren older than he is. I didn’t
trust him at all. I thought that Henry should have someone more experienced, and I told him so, but it all happened so fast
… I told them to call Dr. Goldblum, his regular doctor, but I don’t think they did it right away.”

“Did you talk to the police?”

“Oh, yes. I talked to an officer. He asked me what happened, and I explained to him about Henry’s knees, and his dizzy spells,
although I told him that he hasn’t had one of those in a while, not since his doctor put him on those pills. It was his blood
pressure, you know, and so I had been cooking him food without much salt, just like Dr. Goldblum told me to do; but Henry
didn’t like it very much.”

She stopped for breath, and Max seized the chance. “Did you specifically tell the policeman that Henry had fallen down the
stairs?”

Pauline pursed her lips. “Yes, I did, and to tell you the truth, Mr. Max, I think he could have been a bit more polite to
me. I suppose that I’m just an old woman, and the things I have to say aren’t of much interest to anyone, but if he is going
to ask me questions, I do think that he should listen to the answers. He wasn’t in the least bit interested in my description
of the accident—”

“But you didn’t see the accident,” Max said. “Did you?”

Pauline looked disapprovingly at him. “That is exactly what the policeman said, and he interrupted me, just like you did,
although in his case, it was done very rudely. He told me not to tell him about things that I hadn’t actually seen, which
was just ridiculous, in my opinion, because it was
very
clear to me what had happened, and I thought that someone should explain it to him so that he could put it in his report.”

Max could only imagine how the average beat cop would have responded to Pauline’s explanations, but he was not surprised to
hear that the man had not been an em-pathetic audience.

“What kind of questions did he ask you?”

“He wanted to know if anything had been taken from the house, if I’d seen anything suspicious, which I suppose are the usual
questions to ask, but it just proved that he wasn’t paying any attention to what I was saying. So I told him that of course
there was nothing like that, and how could there have been a burglar, with all of those dogs around? And Miss Martin knows
to lock the front door when she leaves.”

“So you told the policeman all of this.”

“Yes. But his radio kept making noise, and I could tell that he was impatient. And then I realized, Mr. Max, that he didn’t
even know who your grandfather was! Can you imagine that? Not knowing Henry Tremayne? I lost my temper then and told him that
Henry was a very important man, and that he was a personal friend of the mayor— well, not this mayor, but the one before him—and
so he had better make sure that everything was in order. He spoke with the doctor for a few minutes, and he left not long
after that, and I’ll tell you, Mr. Max. You’ll never find anyone with more respect for our officers than I have, but I certainly
wasn’t impressed with the manners of that one.”

Max exhaled slowly, thinking, trying to imagine the scene at the hospital that night.
I’ve been around long enough
, Joanna Melhorn had said,
to know that things don’t always run as tightly as they should.
A crowded trauma center, a harried and inexperienced admitting physician, an overworked cop confronted with a hysterical
housekeeper and an old man of no obvious significance, with an injury that could be explained away as the result of an accidental
fall… To Max, it was looking more and more as if someone had dropped the ball that night.

“And then they sent me home,” Pauline said darkly. “They told me that there was no reason for me to stay, and that there was
nothing more that I could do for him. So
I
told
them
that I could certainly sit there in that lounge and pray. But then I went, because I knew that I had to feed the kitten.
He was very small then, and he needed to be fed every four hours. I don’t usually feed the animals, but there was no one else
to do it that night. I just didn’t feel right leaving poor Henry alone in that place, though. All those strangers! He’s always
been such a private man.”

Pauline took a shaky breath and pinched her lips together.

“You did everything right,” Max said. “You saved his life. If you hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have had a chance.”

The housekeeper’s chin began to wobble. She sniffed loudly and pulled the ever-present wad of tissues out of her apron pocket.
“Oh, Mr. Max, that’s kind of you to say, but if I’d just come home earlier, it would have all been different. I stopped to
look at the magazines in the supermarket. I almost never do things like that, you know, since I truly believe that it’s a
sin to waste time. I should have come straight home. If I had, I could have gotten him whatever it was that he wanted, and
he wouldn’t have gone walking up those stairs, and none of this would have happened.”

To Max’s horror, she burst into a torrent of tears, and at that very moment, the key clicked in the front door lock, and Carly
walked in, carrying a large bag of birdseed in her arms. She took in the scene before her in one surprised glance, then quickly
plopped the bag down in the open doorway and rushed forward to wrap her arms around Pauline’s heaving form.

“My goodness,” she exclaimed, and the look she gave Max was faintly accusing. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” Max said. “We were just talking.”

“It can’t be nothing, look at her. Pauline? Pauline, calm down. It’s me, Carly. Please don’t cry. This has been a terrible
time for you, I know. You’ve been so brave and strong. It’s going to be all right, really it is.”

Over the housekeeper’s head, she turned to Max. “What on earth were you talking about that made her so upset?”

“I wanted more information on Henry’s accident,” Max said, feeling defensive. “I didn’t expect her to react like this.”