The Fortieth Birthday Body Read online

  “So Jerry insists,” Kathleen answered, stuffing the notebook in which she had been writing into her large leather purse. She picked up a well-worn paperback from the seat between them and glanced at its title page. “Dr. R. Doubleday Sterling,” she said, reading the author’s name. “Jerry’s friend from Stanford says that he calls himself Day. I’m glad he’s in town. It will be interesting to hear more about Dawn’s professional life.”

  “I hope he’s not going to be late,” Susan said, pulling her car into a miraculously empty parking space about a block from Columbia University and looking up the street. “There’s the restaurant. Let’s go in and see if he’s waiting.”

  Minutes later they were seated in a booth, peering around in the dark interior of the sleazy restaurant. “What else did Jerry say about him? How did he get his name anyway?” Susan asked, moving her feet away from something gummy that was gluing them to the floor under the table.

  “He called an old friend in the English department at Stanford, who called an old friend in the anthropology department, who traced the man who worked the closest with Dawn. It was no big deal. I’ll bet the police have talked to Dr. Sterling already.”

  “Excellent guess. They have. In fact, they’ve spoken with me twice. They seem to be unable to accept what I tell them about Dawn. They keep asking the same question: What was she like? And when I tell them they don’t accept the answer, but continue to repeat the question.”

  Susan and Kathleen looked at the man standing before them. He wasn’t quite six feet tall and was very overweight. His shiny polyester pants, unironed oxford shirt, and worn Harris tweed jacket proclaimed him to be a professor, and his ink-stained fingers, disgraceful briefcase, and esoteric puffs of hair sprouting over his ears and beneath the glow of his bald head confirmed the judgment. His smile was genuine, friendly, and intelligent. Both women liked him instantly.

  “You’re Dr. Sterling!” Susan exclaimed.

  “Please call me Day,” was the reply. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.” Susan scooted over on her bench, trying to ignore the ripping sound her skirt made as it caught on a long splinter.

  A smiling waiter hurried over. “Professor Sterling? It is you, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is.” Professor Sterling returned the beam. “I always come here when I’m in town, don’t I? The best blintzes in the world!” he announced. “Three orders of cheese blintzes and three glasses of seltzer. Have either of you ladies eaten here before?” he asked, appearing to be unaware of how unlikely that was. “No? Well then, you’re in for a treat. The blintzes are heaven. Absolute heaven.”

  Kathleen worked to keep the smile on her face. She certainly wasn’t hungry, but the waiter had rushed off to the kitchen leaving them alone and she was anxious to get to work.

  “We were glad to discover that you were in town, Professor Sterling,” she began.

  “I am too.” His expression changed. “I am going to be able to attend the funeral of my great friend, Dawn Elliot, and to say good-bye properly. It will be a small consolation but an important one. When one studies anthropology, one cannot help but believe that these small ceremonies of life are in many ways as important as anything we have.”

  “You and she were close?” Kathleen asked, hating to pry but knowing she had to.

  “Yes. I loved her. Oh, not like that!” he corrected himself as Susan’s eyebrows crept half an inch up her forehead. “I did love her but we were not lovers. I think in some ways what we had was more special than that. You see, we worked in the same small area of archaeological anthropology: the Anasazi Indians. I am interested in their travels, their trade routes and migrations from the northern plateaus into the canyon walls and then down into the canyons themselves. Dawn’s work was more in the social development and the communications between the various groups of peoples living at the same time. But we were both, of course, intensely interested in knowing why these talented, resourceful, and peaceful people died out, or where they migrated to after they left the cities in which they had lived for hundreds of years. We both cared deeply for our subjects and we spent a lot of time together in the field on research as well as in libraries and on consultations with various colleagues.”

  “So you were close.”

  “Very. Anthropology is like many scholarly pursuits: Each step toward the truth is tiny, almost infinitesimal and usually unseen by anyone but those closely involved. Frequently, the comradeship is very deep. Dawn and I had a very special relationship, and I will miss her very much.”

  This intense and dignified statement was interrupted by the arrival of the enthusiastic waiter presenting each of them with large platters containing six gigantic cheese blintzes, a pint of sour cream, still in the plastic container in which it had been sold, balanced on each plate. Professor Sterling brightened considerably.

  “Wonderful, wonderful. Eat, eat, both of you,” he urged, dumping the entire pint of cream on his plate and smearing it across the blintzes with one sweep of his knife. “We’ll eat these as a tribute to Dawn Elliot. If she were here, she would order two plates of these blintzes and she would eat every morsel.”

  The two women exchanged glances and, ignoring the garnishments, put their forks into the warm, crisp, and creamy food. In minutes, both were duplicating the enthusiasm of their host, and Susan was spreading sour cream as though she couldn’t live without it.

  “These are fantastic,” Susan enthused, her mouth not quite full.

  “You didn’t think they were going to be, did you?” There was a gleam in the professor’s eye.

  They all smiled at each other and continued eating until there were three clean plates on the table and three empty glasses beside them. “Now we have something in common, now we’re ready to talk about my Dawn,” said Day. “But I don’t know what I can say about her except that she was an extraordinarily hard worker, a dedicated scholar, and a very special friend. She was beautiful, yes. And intense, very intense about anything she was involved in, from her work to her relationships with people. What else do you need to know?”

  Kathleen moved her plate to one side and put her elbows on the table. “The problem is that we are beginning to get two different pictures of Dr. Elliot. At least I am—although I’m the only person involved in this who didn’t know her.”

  “But Kathleen is right,” Susan agreed. “I knew Dawn in Hancock and she wasn’t at all like the person you’re describing …”

  “I think if you examine your assumptions, you’ll find that the statement you just made was incorrect.”

  “Pardon?” Susan had once had a professor in an Intro to Philosophy course her freshman year say much the same thing to her. She still didn’t know what it meant.

  “Did anything you saw in Dawn while she was in Connecticut contradict the description I’m giving you? Did you see that she wasn’t dedicated to her profession? That she wasn’t intense about her work? That she wasn’t a hard worker?”

  “No,” Susan admitted.

  “Then possibly you didn’t know everything about her, possibly you only saw one side of her personality,” Day suggested quietly.

  “But her marriage …” Kathleen began.

  “Ah, yes, that bombastic fool Richard Elliot. I’ve often wondered about him myself. And about his place in Dawn’s life.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never understood why Dawn married that man. He’s certainly the most pompous, egotistical, verbose failure I’ve ever met. And, while I can accept that she fell for his charm or something when she was a young girl, why stay married?”

  “Perhaps she had religious beliefs that precluded divorce?” Kathleen suggested.

  “No. Anthropologists, who study the myths that societies make up for themselves in order to understand and cope with the unknown, are just as willing to believe the myths of their own world as any other group, but I don’t believe that Dawn incorporated either a Roman Catholic or a puritanical disdain for divorce in her life.”
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br />   “Did you ever ask her?”

  “I believed Dawn to be capable of making such decisions about her own life and I dislike prying, so I never asked. But once she told me—this was years ago when we were together digging beneath the chaparral of northeastern Arizona—that Hancock was her penance.”

  “ ‘Her penance?’ Do you know what she meant?”

  “I didn’t ask. She never said her husband, but Hancock. I assumed that she meant the time she spent there, but I could be wrong. And I certainly have no knowledge of what she might be performing penance for.”

  “Did you see much of Richard Elliot during the time that Dawn was working?”

  “Rarely. He was hardly the type of man who was happy in the primitive conditions that we lived in while on digs. He preferred the Plaza Hotel to adobe shacks or tents. In fact,” the professor chuckled to himself, “I remember well the first time he ran into a snake in his sleeping bag. It wasn’t a rattler, merely a harmless saddled leaf-nosed snake looking for something worth eating. The man went crazy: screaming and hollering and misquoting Shakespeare for hours and then, instead of getting back to the business of living, he borrowed one of the Jeeps that the group owned and took off for Santa Fe and what he called civilization. We all had a hard time hiding our disgust with his behavior from Dawn. No one blamed him for being surprised and scared, mind you. It’s just that he insisted on making such a fuss and he quit so easily.”

  “This was recently?” Kathleen asked.

  “No, no, years and years ago when they were first married. I don’t think he was ever on a dig after that. At least none that I know of. Of course, when we were in more urban locations he often showed up. Especially when we were involved in conferences and symposiums in Europe.”

  “And did he fit in better then?”

  “Not a bit. Well, he didn’t go off and leave in a huff but he did bore everyone to distraction talking about himself and his nonexistent career.”

  “And Dawn? How did she take this?”

  “You mean how did she act?”

  “When he was standing around talking about himself, ignoring the work that his wife and the rest of her colleagues were involved in,” Kathleen amplified.

  “She …” He paused and scratched his bald head. “I almost said that she ignored it, but she didn’t. She lived her own life and he lived his—even when they were in the same room. And, you know, I never heard her say a disloyal thing about her husband. Nor would she allow anything against him to be said in her presence.”

  “Was she involved with men she worked with? Romantically?” Kathleen asked.

  “Not that I know of. If there was anyone, she was very discreet about it. As far as I know, she was completely faithful to that idiot of a husband,” came the surprise answer.

  “Do you think she loved him?” Susan asked, thinking that Dawn sounded like she was living two separate lives.

  Day sighed. “I can’t imagine that she did. He was simply not worth half of her, and Dawn was a woman who knew her own worth. But, if she didn’t love him, why did she stay with him?”

  No one answered the question because no one knew the answer.

  FORTY PLUS FOUR

  I

  Kathleen and Jerry were continuing the conversation that had ruined their chance for romance last night.

  “Look, I’m meeting Jed for lunch—and I had to cancel an important meeting to get that time today—but I am not going to press him for any details about Dawn or what he’s told the police or …” He stopped and took a large bite out of his bran muffin.

  “If you’re not going to bother to find out anything, why are you lunching with him?” Kathleen poured herself a cup of coffee and replaced the pot on the stove with a slight bang.

  “Look, to you this is an investigation, to me it’s trying to help out an old friend—”

  “Just because I haven’t known the Henshaws as long as you—” Kathleen began, her voice angry.

  “I’m sorry. We went through this all last night, Kath. You do what you have to do and I’ll do everything I can to help.” He reached out to pick up the wall phone; its ringing had interrupted them. “Jed, good morning … Sure, I’ll be leaving in about ten minutes. I’ll pick you up at your house, okay?” He listened a moment more before laughing and hanging up.

  “That was Jed?” Kathleen asked quickly.

  “Yes. The Mercedes is still at the garage and since Susan needs her car for something else today, he asked if we could drive in together. You remember that we have that big banquet tonight, don’t you? Did you get … ?”

  “Your tux was pressed at the cleaners yesterday and everything is hanging by the front door.”

  “Studs?”

  “I said everything, didn’t I? I don’t think you have any faith in me,” she added, laughing.

  “I …”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “I don’t take it as an insult. Have a good day, and a good dinner tonight. You know,” she added, “you’re going to be spending an awful lot of time with Jed today. You should be able to find out something.”

  “I certainly did marry a persistent person, didn’t I?” he answered, also smiling.

  “Yes, you did.”

  II

  “You would think that spending forty-seven thousand dollars for a car would be some sort of guarantee that the damn thing would work two days in a row, wouldn’t you?” Jed stuffed a black jacket into a garment bag as he spoke.

  “Jed, that’s going to be all wrinkled if you don’t straighten it out,” Susan protested without much enthusiasm. She always had mixed feelings about social office functions to which wives weren’t invited. Part of her resented seeing her husband all dressed up going off to eat, drink, and be merry without her. But she had been to enough dinners in the ballrooms of New York hotels to know that the food was fancy and mediocre and the speeches usually full of in-jokes and self-congratulations. So much for being merry.

  “You have a busy schedule today?” Jed asked, wrapping a silk cummerbund around a matching bow tie and adding it to the garment bag.

  “Sort of. The first of my new aerobic classes is today. And I still have to buy a gift for Missy. I went to the book shop last week to get something and came out empty-handed because of the storm and all and …” She didn’t stop talking as much as she just dwindled off, thinking that her activities sounded trivial compared with her husband’s.

  Jed may have thought the same thing; he didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her answer. “Have you heard anything from the police?” he asked, zipping up the bag.

  “No. Yesterday I was on the class trip, of course, but I turned on the answering machine and they didn’t call and leave a message. Although one or two calls were just people hanging up. I don’t think the police would do that, do you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, then I haven’t heard from them. Do you think I will?”

  “I don’t know.” Jed took a deep breath. “Susan, I’m going to talk to a lawyer. In fact, I have an appointment this afternoon with Andrew Weeks. He has a practice in the city. He’s very well thought of, I understand. His brother was at Yale with me.”

  “Why don’t you just call Bob O’Malley? He closed on the house and did all the work on our wills and everything.”

  “Andrew Weeks is a criminal lawyer, Susan,” Jed said quietly. “Now, I don’t want to worry you, but I think we should be prepared for anything that might happen. Dawn was found in our garage, after all.”

  “You think … ?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m just being careful. Now don’t worry. Go ahead and take your aerobics class and go to … uh, whatever meeting you were going to. I’ll give you a call after I talk to Weeks.” Jed heard the friendly honk of Jerry’s car, grabbed the bag and his briefcase, and headed for the door.

  “Have a good day,” Susan said.

  Jed turned back to her with a smile on his face. He kissed her quietly. “You thought I was g
oing to forget, didn’t you?”

  She smiled up at him. “No,” she lied.

  She kept a smile on her face until he disappeared into Jerry’s car and then she rushed to the phone and dialed. It was answered almost immediately.

  “Kathleen, Jed has an appointment with a lawyer in the city today! A criminal lawyer!”

  “Good,” was the response.

  “Good?”

  “Yes. Look, he’s not going to hire a lawyer and then lie to him about his involvement with Dawn, is he? And the lawyer will suggest that he tell the police about it, and then we’ll get past that hump in all of this. That is, he’ll give him that advice if he’s a good lawyer. He is, isn’t he?”

  “Well, his brother went to Yale,” Susan offered as credibility.

  “I suppose that says something,” Kathleen agreed, not knowing what. “Are you going to miss class this morning?”

  “Of course not! I’m dedicated enough to make it to the first of any series of classes,” Susan replied.

  “Then hadn’t you better get going? The Club’s fifteen minutes from your house and the class starts in twenty.”

  “You’re right! I’d better hurry. See you there!” Susan hung up without waiting for a reply. She ran upstairs and pulled a shiny new leotard from one dresser drawer and matching tights from another. She grabbed some warm boots and heavy socks. Her Avias were in her locker at the Club. She was stuffing everything into a bright green duffel bag that had “Forty and Fabulous” printed on one side when the doorbell rang. Mrs. Annie! She’d forgotten it was one of the two days a week she showed up to clean. Susan ran to the kitchen to let her in.

  “Mrs. Annie! I’m late for my aerobics class. You know everything to do, don’t you?”

  “After all these years, of course I do, Mrs. Henshaw. You just leave everything to me and I’ll have this house clean by three.” The woman went over to the small TV on the kitchen table and turned it on while talking.

  Susan, who knew that she would return to a house where every television was turned on in every room, headed for the door. “Well, I’ll be back before then. And I’ll be at the Club for the next few hours, if you need me.” Putting on her coat, she hurried into the freezing garage to get her car. A quick glance around reassured her that no ghosts were present, but she climbed into the Datsun as quickly as possible. It started up right away even on this cold morning. She was out of the garage in minutes. Backing down the driveway, she pushed gently on the brake, not wanting to hit the patch of ice that always formed at the end of her drive at full speed. Traveling so slowly, she was able to see the black Jeep, with its identifying smashed side, pull away from the curb and turn the corner opposite to the direction she was heading.