Daddy's Gone a Hunting by Mary Higgins Clark
“I’ll call you in the morning if there’s anything to report,” he promised as he got into the car. The minute he was inside, with the door closed, he pulled out his cell phone and called Jack Worth. “Have you spoken to those guys yet?”
“Yes. You know that wrecked van that was in the back parking lot?”
“What about it?”
“Some vagrant has been making it home-sweet-home for the last couple of years.”
“For the last couple of years?” Doug repeated in a nervous whisper.
“Yes. They’re wondering if he might have started the fire. That’s good. At least it’s one more angle that might take any suspicion off Kate.”
“I can see that and I agree that’s good. How often do they think he’s been there?”
“From the newspapers they found, he was there pretty regularly and almost definitely the night of the explosion.”
“So if he didn’t set it, he could be a witness.”
Douglas Connelly did not want to consider what that could mean. He broke the connection.
45
Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein had left Jack Worth and driven over the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. When they arrived at the upscale apartment building of Douglas Connelly, they were told by the doorman that he had just returned home. They went upstairs to find the same scenario they had witnessed a few nights earlier. Sandra answered the door and walked them back to the library, where Connelly was sitting, a drink in his hand.
“I just wanted you to know that Kate is running a fever and, as you can see, Douglas is very distraught,” Sandra said. “I hope that you make this very short because he needs to relax and have something to eat. The poor man is at the end of his rope.”
“We are both very sorry if Ms. Connelly’s condition has worsened,” Frank Ramsey said sincerely. “If Mr. Connelly intends to go back to the hospital tonight, we certainly understand that, and we can make an appointment to see him tomorrow.”
“No. His other daughter is playing the martyr. She wants to be alone with her sister.”
“That’s enough, Sandra.” Still holding his glass, Connelly stood up. “What is this I hear about a vagrant who might have been living in the van?”
“Was living in the van, Mr. Connelly,” Frank Ramsey corrected.
“And I understand that he may have been there over a period of years?”
“At least two. There are newspapers going back that far.”
Douglas Connelly took a long sip from the glass of vodka. “Incredible as it sounds, I can understand how that could have happened. You’ve seen the shed where the vans are housed. It’s open at the front but the sides and back are enclosed. That van was parked behind all the others. In these last few years usually two of the four in the front were in constant service. The other two formed a natural obstruction of any view of the wrecked van.
“Sometimes, when we had a long-range delivery, the driver would leave in the late evening or the very early morning. But certainly no driver would have had any reason to look into that old van. If the person in it got out before people began to arrive in the morning, he wouldn’t have been noticed. If he stayed inside the van all day, the vagrant wouldn’t have been noticed, either. But, since he would have obviously needed food and at least occasionally some kind of sanitation, I would imagine that he left by early morning, when no one was around, and came back late at night.”
“I think you’re right,” Nathan Klein agreed. “Our people have been canvassing the neighborhood. A derelict dragging a cart has been observed by some in the early-morning hours, but that area, with all the warehouses surrounding your complex, has a number of homeless taking shelter at night.”
“There is another possibility, Mr. Connelly,” Frank Ramsey said. “We believe that the vagrant may have been there at the time of the explosion. He may have been a witness to what happened that night.” With narrowed eyes he watched for Connelly’s reaction.
“We know that my daughter Kate and Gus Schmidt were on the premises. But even if by any chance the vagrant happened to see them there together, he would have no way of knowing that Kate had been lured there by Gus Schmidt.”
“And that’s going to be the official party line,” Ramsey sarcastically commented to Klein as they drove back to Fort Totten to file an updated report. When they were finished, they got into their own cars and, weary to the bone, went their separate ways home.
46
At 10:30 P.M. on Monday, Kate’s fever shot up alarmingly to 104 degrees. Dr. Patel stayed through the night in the hospital. The nurse told Hannah that he was catching some sleep in a room down the hall but could be back in an instant. Beyond tears and beyond ability to think coherently, Hannah sat in numbed silence in the ICU cubicle beside Kate. Sometimes Kate restlessly stirred, setting off an alarm and causing the nurse to rush in to be sure that she did not pull out any of the tubes that were dripping medications into her arms.
By seven o’clock the next morning, Kate’s fever broke. With a broad smile, the nurse asked Hannah to go into the waiting room while they changed Kate’s gown and the sheets, which were now drenched with perspiration.
When Hannah, weak with relief, entered the waiting room, she found a priest waiting to speak to her. He stood up and greeted her warmly. He was a tall, thin man who appeared to be in his early sixties, with hazel eyes that crinkled as he greeted her. When he took her hand, his grip was firm and reassuring. “Hello, Hannah. I’m Father Dan Martin. The doctor just stopped by,” he said. “So I know Kate is doing better. You have no reason to remember me, but when you were young, your family were parishioners at St. Ignatius Loyola.”
“Yes, we were,” Hannah agreed, thinking with guilt that since Kate had gotten her apartment on the West Side and she herself had moved to the Village, neither one of them had been much for going to church except at the major holidays.
“I wasn’t at St. Ignatius in those years,” he said, “but I was on the altar at the funeral mass for your mother and uncle. I was just ordained then and since the accident I’ve thought so often of your family. You were just a baby but your sister was there. She was only three years old and holding your father’s hand. I’ve attended many sad funerals but that one has always stood out in my mind. I’ve been praying for Kate since the accident and I just wanted to stop in and see if you wanted me to visit her.”
For a moment he paused, then added, “Kate was such a beautiful little girl with that long blond hair and those exquisite blue eyes. The two caskets were in the aisle and she kept trying to pull the cloth covering off the first one as though she knew that was where her mother’s body was resting.”
“There were a lot of reporters outside the church and at the grave,” Hannah said. “I’ve seen the television clips. It was such a horrible accident. The other two couples who died were well-known in the financial markets.”
Father Martin nodded. “I made it my business to call on your father afterward and we became a bit friendly. He was in a terrible state over losing your mother and, of course, his brother and friends as well. The poor man couldn’t stop crying. He was absolutely distraught. He told me that if it weren’t for his little girls, he’d give anything to have died in the accident, too.”
He certainly got over that, Hannah thought, and then she was ashamed of herself. “I know how much he loved my mother,” she said. “When I was about thirteen, I asked him why he hadn’t remarried. He told me that Robert Browning was asked the same question after Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. His answer was that it would be an insult to her memory to marry again.”
“A few months after the funeral, I was assigned to Rome to attend the Gregorian College, and I lost touch with your father. I’d like to give him a call now. Would you mind giving me his number?”
“Of course.” She recited Doug’s cell and home numbers and, for a moment, almost added the business number of the complex but stopped herself. Father Martin jotted them down.
Hannah hesitat
“I am prepared to offer that now,” Father Martin said quietly. “So often, even to this day, people are afraid that to receive it is a sure sign that someone is about to die, which simply isn’t the case. It is also a prayer that the patient will return to health.”
When the nurse came back to invite them back to Kate’s bedside, they found her lying quietly, now seemingly in a deep, restful sleep.
“She’s under heavy sedation but sometimes she’ll say something,” Hannah whispered. “The doctor said that whatever she says is probably meaningless.”
“I have seen many instances where the person who appears to be in a coma actually is aware of almost everything that is going on around them,” Father Martin said, as he opened the black leather case that he had carried with him into the room.
Father Martin took out his folded stole from the case, kissed it, and placed it around his neck. Then he opened a small jar of sacred oil. “This is pure olive oil blessed by the bishop,” he told Hannah. “Olive oil was specially chosen by the Church because of the healing and strengthening effects that are its characteristics in everyday life.”
Hannah watched as he dipped his finger in the oil and then made the sign of the Cross on Kate’s forehead and hands. Healing and strengthening, she thought as she listened to the words of the prayers Father Martin was offering over Kate. A sense of peace came over her and for the first time she began to believe that Kate might recover fully and be able to explain why she was in the complex with Gus that night.
Maybe I’m being too hard on Dad, she thought. From the beginning he’s been afraid that Kate set that fire. Maybe it isn’t just the insurance he’s worried about. Maybe he’s frantic at the thought that if Kate gets better and is found guilty of setting the fire, she faces many years in prison. Maybe I should give him a break.
When she and Father Martin left Kate a few minutes later, she stopped at the desk of the intensive care unit. The nurse, who by now was on a first-name basis with her, said, “Hannah, tell me you’re going home.”
“Yes, I am,” Hannah said. “To shower and change. The fashion business is fast-moving, and so I can’t stay away from the office for too long. But looking at Kate now, I’m not afraid to leave her.”
Father Martin waited while she retrieved her suitcase and coat from the closet and they left the hospital together. At the door, she said, “I’m going to be honest. I haven’t been very nice to my father since all this happened. It’s a long story but you’ve given me some things to think about and I do hope you get together with him soon. It will make all the difference to him, I know.”
47
Tim Fleming was the supervising fire marshal to whom Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein reported. Over the past five days since the explosion at the Connelly complex, they had been submitting daily detailed updates to him regarding the investigation. On Tuesday morning, both refreshed by a good night’s sleep, they were in his office at Fort Totten.
Fleming, a solidly built man in his late fifties with iron-gray hair and a poker face, had thoroughly examined the reports and went straight to the salient facts of the case. His well-modulated voice was deep and resonant. “This Connelly guy and his plant manager let a wrecked van sit in their parking lot for five years? Be interesting to see if their drunken driver really did hit only a tree and not some poor guy on a bicycle.”
“The exterior of the van was thoroughly checked for any sign of blood or human tissue,” Klein reassured his boss. “He did hit a tree. It was an elm and from what they can tell, it was already dead.”
“So the drunk driver saved the homeowner from maybe having the tree crash on his house in a storm,” Fleming observed. “What a nice guy.”
Ramsey and Klein smiled. Their boss was known for that kind of comment. But immediately Fleming was all business again. “Jamie Gordon’s notebook was found in the van, but that doesn’t mean that she brought it there herself.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And the vagrant who was squatting there doesn’t have a record?”
“None that we can find. The fingerprints in the van didn’t match up to anybody with a criminal history.”
“Okay. We’ll call a press conference for noon to give out the new information that a vagrant may have been on the premises at the time of the explosion. I understand that the descriptions of the homeless people listed in the notebook are already being circulated to all the precincts in the city.”
Klein and Ramsey nodded.
“The cops know the local street people. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t round up a few of them for us pretty fast. The commissioner has decided that we’ll pass out copies of that family picture to the media. But will continue to say nothing to the press about Jamie Gordon’s notebook. The guys at the crime lab know that her name is not even to be whispered.”
“Absolutely,” Ramsey confirmed.
“Telling the media about the vagrant will give them enough to chew on,” Fleming said. “They’ve all but convicted the Connelly daughter who was injured as having set the explosion with her buddy, the Schmidt guy.”
He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over. “Twelve o’clock sharp,” he said, then added, “You guys are doing a good job, which, incidentally, does not surprise me.”
Three hours later the media conference became hot breaking news when the information about a vagrant possibly being present at the time of the explosion was announced. Copies of the picture of the young couple and baby were handed out. After nearly a week of speculation that Kate Connelly and Gus Schmidt were arsonists, the new angle was fresh meat for reporters to keep the story on the front pages.
By two o’clock, the picture taken more than forty years ago in a modest ranch-style home on Staten Island was all over the Internet.
Frank Ramsey was more optimistic than Nathan Klein that the picture would be tied to the vagrant. “My bet is that it got thrown in the garbage when somebody’s house was cleaned out,” Nathan predicted. “I mean, when a friend of my wife, Sarah, Kat LeBlanc, recently lost her grandmother, there were drawers full of old pictures. Most of them were snapshots, some eighty and ninety years old, of her grandmother’s cousins, people Kat couldn’t even identify. Sarah asked her if she was going to bring all that stuff home and drag it up to the attic so that her kids could have the job of throwing it out in thirty or forty years.”
“What did her friend do?” Frank asked, remembering that his own mother still had boxes of pictures of long-departed relatives.
“Kat kept some of the ones that had her grandmother in them. Then she picked out a few more where she could tell who the people were, and tore up the rest.”
“I still say the picture in the van is going to give us a lead,” Frank told him, “and I’m itching to pay Lottie Schmidt another visit. The report from the New York IRS should be in sometime today. If Gus Schmidt did pay taxes on a winning lottery ticket, then, as my father used to say, ‘I’ll eat my hat.’ ”
“Your hat is safe,” Klein assured him. “I’ll give the tax guys another call and tell them that, this time, ‘urgent’ means urgent.”
48
Shirley Mercer, an attractive black woman in her early fifties, was the social worker who was assigned to visit Clyde in the hospital. She arrived at his bedside in a ward in Bellevue late Tuesday afternoon. He had been bathed and shaved and his hair had been trimmed. He was suffering from severe bronchitis but in the nineteen hours he had been there, his temperature had returned to normal and he had eaten well. He was about to be discharged and Shirley had arranged for him to be taken to a room in one of the city-run hotels.
Shirley had studied Clyde’s file before she went in to visit him. The staff at the shelter where he had collapsed knew very little about him. He had only stayed there occasionally and each time had given a differ
Some of the other regulars at the shelter had told the director that they had seen him around for years. “He comes and goes by himself. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He gets mad if someone bunks near him on the street. You almost never saw him at night for the past couple of years. Everyone figured that he had found a place to hole up.”
Another street person had claimed that on Saturday night, Clyde had punched out Sammy when Sammy tried to sleep in the same driveway.
But he has no police record, Shirley noted, and apparently has been homeless for many years. He had told the nurse that he was sixty-eight years old, which seemed about right. But one thing that is certain, Shirley thought, is that if he stays on the streets he’ll die of pneumonia.
Armed with that information, she had gone to Clyde’s bedside. His eyes were closed. Although the skin on his face was blotched, and the lines between his nostrils and his lips were deep, she could see that when he was younger he must have been a good-looking man.
She touched his hand. His eyes flew open and his head sprang up from the pillow. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hastings,” she said, her voice gentle. “I didn’t mean to startle you. How are you feeling?”
Clyde sank back as he looked at the kindly expression in the eyes of the woman who was standing beside his bed. Then he began to cough, a deep, rasping cough that shook his chest and his back. Finally he was able to again sink back into the pillow.
“Not so hot,” he said.
“It’s a good thing you were brought here last night,” Shirley said. “Otherwise, by today, you’d be having a full-blown case of pneumonia.”