The Murder of an Angel Read online

  Jacob looked at me helplessly. “I had to call your doctor,” he said. “As your guardian, I had to.”

  Hugo was off the couch like a shot. He had his arms around me and he was saying, “For your own good, Tandy. For your own good.”

  I unlocked Hugo’s arms and started backing away. I knew there was nowhere to go, but I wasn’t going down easily. I made a feint toward the kitchen, then an end run around the muscle-bound goon who was still blocking my path to the doorway.

  He moved fast—a football player of some type, I could tell. He caught me and twisted my good arm behind my back and lowered me facedown to the floor.

  “Honey, please,” said Dr. Robosson. She came over to where I was lying and spoke really close to my face. I smelled wintergreen and hair spray. “You like Waterside, remember? We’re going to take good care of you.”

  I screamed “No!” loud enough to make my shrink pull back and to make my twin brother put his hands over his ears and turn away from me. I lost track of Hugo and Jacob as the orderlies lifted me up and—even as I fought them—strapped me to a gurney.

  I yelled, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a citizen of the United States!”

  I screamed inside the elevator. I shocked the porters, and the doormen and the residents in the lobby. The gurney rattled as it went over the cracks in the sidewalk. Snow swirled around us like ghosts. I called to the people walking past our building, “They’re trying to kill me!”

  Cell phones came out. Videos were shot.

  “I’m being held against my will,” I pleaded. “I’m being kidnapped.”

  A private ambulance with the wavy blue logo of Waterside Center was waiting at the curb. Parked behind the ambulance was our bulletproof car.

  Leo got out. He stood beside the open door and tracked me with startled eyes but didn’t make a move to help.

  “They’re doing it, Leo!” I screamed. “Help me, please! They’re going to make me disappear!”

  I came out of a deep, thick sleep to find myself in a hospital bed with side rails in a darkened room. I was facing a single casement window. The moon was up, and I recognized the view of the river.

  I knew where I was.

  This was Waterside, but my room was at an unaccustomed height. I was on a high floor, the psycho ward where the certifiably insane were housed.

  It was coming back to me, what had happened that morning. I tried to sit up, but I had so little strength that even using the side bars for leverage didn’t help.

  I thought at first that I was strapped down, but no.

  I’d been drugged.

  The heaviness was pinning me to the bed and tamping down whatever emotions that, without the drugs, I would certainly be having. Like justifiable three-alarm fury and overwhelming heartbreak, to name just two.

  I was here. Again.

  I turned my head to the left and saw amber pill bottles on the nightstand. Some had been tipped over, and pills were scattered everywhere.

  What had happened?

  Had I fought to stop them from gagging me with pills?

  I turned my head to the right, and there, sitting in a chair beside the door, was Leo.

  I drew in my breath, a long, sucking gasp.

  He put his finger to his mouth, like—Shhh. Don’t scream. He leaned toward me and said quietly, “It worked, Tandy. You were right.”

  It was coming back now. All of it.

  “I was right? Really?”

  Leo nodded, and as muzzy as I was, my head almost exploded. It was as if too much was flooding in—the good and the great; the bad and the horrible. It was cosmic.

  “Is it done?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  The door to my room opened slowly, and Jacob slipped in as Leo melted into the background. Jacob walked over to my bed and asked softly, “How do you feel, sweetheart?”

  “Like I weigh four hundred pounds.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  He put his arm behind me and adjusted the bed.

  He said, “I’ll help you get dressed. We have to leave now. You’ve been out of it for the whole day.”

  Just then, a noise came from the bathroom. Like someone was trying to speak. Leo opened the bathroom door and turned on the light.

  “This is Louis,” he said to me.

  It was the body builder who had been in the apartment this morning, all muscle with flame tattoos wrapping his biceps. Now he was sitting on the floor, subdued, not struggling. I looked at Leo. He showed me a stun gun in his waistband.

  Oh.

  Jacob brought my clothes from the closet, and I dressed in slow motion while Leo helped Louis to his feet.

  “Are we good to go, Lou?”

  The man nodded vacantly.

  The four of us left the room in pairs.

  Groggily, I leaned on Jacob, and we went quietly down six flights of fire stairs. When we reached the ground floor, we ducked through the side door to the garbage room. From there, the outer door opened easily, and we were standing in crisp night air on the tree-lined street lit by the full moon.

  As we got into the bulletproof car, I noticed the gray sedan parked behind us. It was a police car.

  “Cops?” I asked Jacob.

  “Yep. Friends of yours.”

  I saw Leo transferring Louis to a sergeant I happen to know by heart from ten thousand feet away and in the dark. He was lanky with wild dark hair, his pant cuffs hanging above his ankles and his zodiac goat tattooed on his wrist.

  Sergeant Caputo gave me a little wave.

  Bemused, I waved back.

  Doors slammed. Headlights flashed on. Leo got behind the wheel of the bulletproof car, and both vehicles moved away from the curb.

  Jacob said, “Tandy, this could get rough. Emotionally and physically. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  I nodded.

  As we drove down the halogen-lit West Side Highway, my uncle Jacob told me all that he knew.

  My nerve endings were tingling. My brain was humming with good vibrations. This was going to be an evening to remember always.

  I was about to solve my greatest mystery.

  I was still woozy and nauseous from the load of drugs in my system when our car pulled up to the curb on Eighty-First near Columbus and parked in front of an apartment building that I recognized all too well.

  Caputo and Hayes parked their unmarked gray Chevy sedan behind us. Caputo transferred Louis, the handcuffed orderly, to another unmarked car across the street while Hayes opened my door and helped me out to the sidewalk. I hung on to his arm to steady myself.

  He said, “Tandy, we’ll be with you the whole time, okay? Mr. Peavey, if you don’t mind, stay here and keep your phone line open.”

  Jacob, Caputo, Hayes, and I entered the foyer of the posh apartment building, where Caputo badged the doorman and said, “Police. Call up to Mr. Angel and tell him that his brother, Jacob, is here to see him. Nothing else.”

  I flashed on the last time I’d seen my loathsome uncle as the elevator ascended and we four approached the door at the end of the hall.

  Caputo indicated to Jacob to come right to the door, while the rest of us flattened ourselves against the wall.

  Is this really happening?

  Are the police really at Peter’s door?

  Jacob rang the doorbell. Locks clacked, and the door opened wide enough to accommodate Peter’s face. He was wild-haired and wild-eyed as he looked at Jacob and snapped, “What’s this about, Jake? I have company. It’s midnight, for Christ’s sake.”

  Caputo stepped forward, showed Peter his badge, and said, “I’m Sergeant Caputo. This is my partner, Detective Hayes. Mind inviting us in for a minute or two?”

  That was when Peter saw me. His eyes widened, but then he scoffed, flung open the door, and said, “Jacob, you’re a damned fool. What wild story has my niece been telling you now? I suppose she’s been accusing me of trying to murder her. And now the police are involved? Bad move, brother.”

&nbs
p; I held back snarky retorts in the interest of letting the police run this show. We followed Peter into the apartment, through the foyer, and into the barely furnished living room.

  Hayes said, “Mind if I take a look around?” He went directly to the closed doors beyond Peter’s desk.

  “Of course I mind. You didn’t answer my question,” said Peter. “What’s this about?”

  Caputo pulled a folded paper from his inside pocket. “This is an arrest warrant, Mr. Angel. As a matter of fact, I have two of them.”

  Hayes knocked on the bedroom door. A woman’s voice said, “Peter?”

  “It’s the police, ma’am. Please step outside.”

  Peter’s face was flushed as he said, “What is this trumped-up whatever? I’m under arrest for what, exactly?”

  “As you said,” Caputo said, “you’re under arrest for the attempted murder of your niece. Put your hands behind your back, Mr. Angel.”

  The bedroom door opened, and I clawed my hands down my face. I was glad to be right, but at the same time, this was the worst betrayal, ever. I’d asked Leo to follow the one person who knew my movements to the minute, who understood the workings of my mind, maybe better than I knew them myself.

  “Peter, what’s going on?” asked Dr. Mary Robosson. She was wearing a Waterside Center robe and her hair was bunched in a messy ponytail, making her look completely alien to me. She seemed strangely composed.

  Hayes said, “You’re under arrest as well, Dr. Robosson.”

  “Do not touch me,” she said.

  I wanted to feel something—rage, jubilance, ecstasy—but I was still numb and nauseated from the damned drugs.

  This was emotional robbery.

  Peter’s fury, however, was obvious. He said to me, “You wretched girl. I’ll sleep in my own bed tonight, but I’m officially done with you and your idiot brothers, Tandoori. My checkbook is closed. You have nothing on me but your hysterical, girlish imagination—no evidence, no proof, no nothing.”

  I cleared my throat a couple of times.

  Then I said, “Actually, we have something—your girlfriend and coconspirator. We also have her hired thug. If she’s offered a deal, I think she’s going take it, Uncle Peter. She has no conscience. I think she’ll tell us everything.”

  We were at the Twentieth Precinct, sitting around the scarred metal table in the break room.

  Peter and Dr. Robosson had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder. While they were chilling out in separate interrogation rooms, Leo, Jacob, and I sipped cold coffee with Caputo and Hayes and tried to fit the pieces together. It was a high: three cops, a former Mossad intelligence officer, and me, a seventeen-year-old former high school student who had, as Caputo said, “earned a seat at the table.”

  I was thinking, Thanks, Cappy. That’s not quite an apology—but I didn’t say it. He had finally collared my monstrous uncle, as well as my wretched shrink.

  As an added bonus, Robosson’s killer for hire, Louis Caltrane, was in a cell because Leo had caught him “holding the bag”—an IV bag of sedatives, that is. An overdose that was meant to kill me.

  Leo was running the story again, how after my cemetery visit, he’d followed Dr. Robosson to a coffee shop, where she had met Uncle Peter. Leo had taken a booth behind them and listened as they discussed “a permanent solution to the Tandy problem.”

  Their plan was too easy.

  They decided that after my next therapy session, she would check me into Waterside for observation. And then my dear uncle Peter, my father’s brother, my own blood relative, had suggested to his lover, “I think Tandy will commit suicide, don’t you?”

  The coffee was coming on and the drugs were wearing off. I knew this because listening to how Dr. Robosson and my uncle had plotted to murder me sent a jolt of pure white fury right through me. I could have flipped the table. I could have flipped a car.

  But I forced myself to be quiet while Jacob explained that the so-called intervention in our living room had been my idea. It had given Dr. Robosson and Uncle Peter the chance they were looking for to lock me up at Waterside, while giving us an opportunity to take control of their plan.

  Leo continued his story by saying that he had followed the ambulance to Waterside, where Caputo and Hayes talked to the management, who gave Leo scrubs, a name tag, and cover. He’d gone to the seventh floor, where he’d introduced himself to Louis as a new hire, and then he’d watched my room.

  Leo said to me, “Robosson gave you a sedative right away, but your vital signs were all good. So while you slept, I helped Louis mop floors, and when he prepared your overdose, I busied myself cleaning the bathroom. Christ, I had to wait until he had emptied all the drug bottles on the bedside table and had the IV needle in his hand.”

  He shook his head, remembering.

  “That’s when I took him down,” Leo said. “I roughed him up a little until he spilled.”

  “A pretty good move,” said Caputo. “Hats off, buddy.”

  “Outstanding,” I said. “Then what happened?”

  Leo said, “Louis told me that Dr. Robosson paid him ‘a bomb’ to kill you, Tandy, and to make it look like a suicide. He said that Dr. R. was working with her ‘boyfriend’; he didn’t know the guy’s name.”

  Leo went on. “I secured Louis in the bathroom. Then I gloved up, bagged the IV bag in a clean trash bag, and left the empty bottles on the table, so as to preserve the evidence.”

  Caputo picked up where Leo left off. He said, “Louis’s statement will indict Dr. Robosson, but all we have on Peter is an overheard conversation. It’s hearsay. If we want to hold Peter, the doctor is going to have to implicate him by name and on the record.”

  Hayes said, “Cappy’s going to interrogate Peter. And while he’s doing that, Tandy, if you’re willing, you could have a private chat with Dr. Robosson. I’ll be right behind the glass.”

  The interrogation room was the size of a walk-in closet, furnished with a metal table, four chairs, a two-way mirror, a light fixture, and a camera in a corner of the ceiling.

  Dr. Robosson was sitting at the table, wearing the clothes she’d worn yesterday: a tan gabardine suit, a silk blouse with a stain on it, and diamond studs.

  She looked up when I opened the door.

  “Oh, Tandy. I thought you were those horrible cops. Where are they?”

  “Interrogating Peter and Louis, I think. I shouldn’t be here, but we have to talk. Don’t you agree, you heinous bitch?”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Of course. Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said. Like this was a therapy session and she was still my doctor.

  “I feel glad to be alive,” I said. “But how do you feel about yourself, Doctor? I trusted you more than anyone in the world, and you betrayed that trust completely.”

  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  “No? You aren’t sleeping with my uncle? You didn’t conspire with him to kill me?”

  “Tandy, yes, I’ve been seeing Peter since you first came to Waterside. You were convinced that he was out to kill you, and I had to see for myself.”

  “And one thing led to another?” I said.

  “It’s a cliché, but that’s right. We did connect over concern for you. We fell in love.”

  I guess I thought she’d be furious, or apologetic or ashamed—something. But her affect was flat. Like this was happening to someone else.

  “Is that ethical?” I asked. “Are you allowed to sleep with a patient’s close family member without telling them?”

  “Strictly speaking, there’s nothing unethical about it. Peter is not your parent or boyfriend or child. But I can see how you might find it uncomfortable.”

  Uncomfortable? She was delusional—or worse. How had I missed this?

  “You’ve got your uncle all wrong, you know,” she said. “He’s a good man, Tandy. A big thinker. A humanitarian.”

  “Peter is a humanitarian? Is that right?”

  “Yo
u think the pills damaged you, when everyone knows that you and your siblings are extraordinary. Don’t you see that if those pills were readily available, they would benefit other children, and that that would be a tremendous asset to all of mankind? You were trying to stop that.”

  “The pills kill your emotions,” I said. “Is it a benefit for mankind to have no feelings, no conscience? You’re a psychiatrist, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ve had a real breakthrough since I met Peter. I see now that emotions impede success in life. They cause broken homes and destroy marriages and damage children. I should know. I’ve been a practicing therapist for twenty years. Has talk therapy helped you, Tandy?”

  I couldn’t answer her. Surely talk therapy with her had been a total sham.

  “I started taking the pills, Tandy. Yes, me—and they’ve given me wonderful clarity.”

  “I’m not following you,” I said, dropping a hunk of bait into the trap.

  “It’s simple, Tandy. Look. If you’d gotten your way, Angel Pharmaceuticals might have closed. The groundbreaking work your father and Peter have done would be lost along with the promise of pure analytical thinking for millions who need clear minds to survive in this challenged world.”

  Dr. Robosson was glowing. She was high on a mission that overrode common sense. Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid… did this clueless freaking maniac know what she was saying?

  “I tried to help you, Tandy, but you wouldn’t leave it alone. So you had to be sacrificed. One person for the greater good of humanity. You see that now, don’t you?”

  Not really. She was mentally disintegrating in front of my eyes. Had the shame of getting caught caused Dr. Robosson to have a psychotic break? Had the pills done this to her? Had Peter brainwashed her? Or had she been freaking crazy all along?

  “Okay, let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re saying that when Peter’s attempts to kill me failed, you decided to get me out of the way. For the common good.”

  She smiled agreeably. “You would have just drifted off to sleep.”

  That was an admission of wrongdoing.

  The trap slammed shut.

  It took everything I had not to look up at the camera. I got out of my chair and stood over her.