“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Dorothy whimpered, “but she made me so mad! She didn’t even bother to deny the relationship with my husband, she even boasted about it!”
“I know about that,” I said quietly. “She tried that little trick with me.”
“Yes! That’s why I knew she was evil, and that she’d never go away and leave us alone.
“I don’t know what happened, really,” Dorothy continued dreamily. “One minute I’m standing there holding the hammer, listening to her go on and on about how sexy my husband is, and the next minute I’m standing over her. I’m still holding the hammer. She was dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “So I put her in the trunk.
“At least I still have Kevin.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Kevin won’t let me down, not like his father did.”
Dorothy shivered, and covered her bare head with both hands. I took my cap off and slipped it over her head, making sure the tips of her ears were well-protected.
“So, you hit Jennifer with the hammer and put her in the trunk. Then what?” I prodded.
“I guess I panicked. The cast and crew would be showing up pretty soon, so I ran off the stage and wrapped the hammer in the first thing that came to hand and threw it in the Dumpster.”
“That was my sweatshirt.”
“I know,” she sniffed. “I’m sorry.”
“How can you tell me you’re sorry when you deliberately told the police that you saw me throw the hammer in the Dumpster? I thought we were friends, Dorothy.”
“I don’t know why I told them that!” she wailed, fresh tears cascading sideways down her cheeks. “I get so confused!” She covered her eyes with her hands, her freshly manicured and painted nails a stark contrast to her ravaged face.
I was trying to work out how it was that my fingerprints, and not hers, were found on the hammer, and then I remembered the gloves she always wore to protect her nails.
“Were you wearing your gloves when you hit her?”
She nodded miserably.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up!” Somebody was chanting in a tinny, faraway voice.
After a confusing second or two, I realized Dorothy’s cell phone was talking to me. I must have set it down on the terrazzo after leaving the message for Paul.
I raised the phone to my ear. “Paul?”
“What the hell is going on? I was out sprinkling salt on the sidewalk, and when I came in I heard voices coming in over the answering machine. Hannah, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Paul, so to speak. Did you hear everything?”
“Yes, I did. And the answering machine did, too.”
CHAPTER 27
With Admiral Hart shipped off to Norfolk, Virginia, where the Navy could keep a close eye on him, and Dorothy in police custody, I figured Kevin could use a friend. It had been three days since his mother’s arrest, and he was still at Bethesda, but we heard from Emma that he’d turned his room into a command post and was directing his mother’s defense from there.
“I’m glad Dorothy’s in a hospital,” I said as Paul eased his Volvo into the heavy stream of traffic moving counterclockwise around the Washington Beltway. “I couldn’t bear to think of her locked up in a cell.”
“Dorothy’s sick, Hannah. Cheevers won’t let her go to jail.”
Kevin’s father had recommended a lawyer for his wife, but Kevin turned him down flat. When Kevin asked for my advice, I’d sent him to Murray Simon. Nobody, after all, could be more familiar with the Goodall case than Murray. But citing conflict of interest, Murray handed Kevin off to James Cheevers, his colleague at Cheevers, Tanner and Greenberg, a firm that specialized in criminal law. We’d met Jim once, at Concert of Tastes, a fund-raiser for the Annapolis Symphony. Aside from a fetish for novelty ties-on symphony night he’d been wearing one decorated with cellos-Cheevers was the best, and Dorothy Hart, poor thing, was going to need him.
Paul took the Wisconsin Avenue exit and drove the short distance south to the National Naval Medical Center, the multistory hospital with the distinctive central tower, familiar to millions of television viewers as Bethesda, the hospital that had saved the lives of several U.S. presidents and a goodly number of congressmen, too. Paul flashed his Naval Academy faculty ID for the sentry, who waved us through into the parklike grounds.
Five minutes later we left our car on the second level of the parking garage and made our way across a footbridge into the hospital proper.
Paul took my hand and squeezed it three times. I-love-you.
“Me, too,” I said aloud. “And aren’t you glad you’re not married to a criminal?”
“You know what’s criminal?” he said, punching the Up button on the elevator.
“What?”
Paul stepped into the elevator and dragged me in after him. After the door slid shut, he pulled me into his arms. “What’s criminal,” he said before planting his lips firmly on mine, “is how gorgeous you look even with your arm in a sling.”
We found Kevin on 5C, in a sterile white-on-white room, sitting up in bed with an IV feeding into his arm. Emma was perched at the foot of the bed, while Jim Cheevers, wearing a wool scarf and a tweed overcoat, occupied the single chair in the room that was reserved for visitors. A Navy lieutenant dressed in khaki, her blond hair twisted into a braid and secured with a silver clip, bent over a computer terminal, typing away. I could tell from her collar device that she was a nurse.
“Hi, Kevin,” I said.
The lieutenant turned a dazzling smile on at her patient. “Midshipman Hart, this is your official notification that you are now exceeding the regulation visitor allotment by two individuals.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Aaronson,” Kevin replied with no hint of concern in his voice. “I’d like you to meet Professor and Mrs. Ives, from Annapolis.”
Lieutenant Aaronson grinned, shook our hands, and relented. “But since you’ve come all this way…”
Kevin winked at Emma. “See. She is putty in my hands.”
“Behave yourself, Kevin!” Emma slapped his leg where it rested underneath the blanket.
“Excellent advice, Midshipman,” Lieutenant Aaronson shot back over her shoulder as she busied herself again at the terminal.
Kevin’s face grew serious. He turned to Cheevers, who, we soon learned, had arrived only minutes before us. “What’s going to happen to my mother?”
Jim Cheevers unwound his scarf, shrugged out of his overcoat, then leaned forward, resting his forearms on the briefcase that lay across his knees. “She’s been arraigned, but the court has ordered a complete mental and physical evaluation. She’s up at the University of Maryland Medical Center right now.”
I nodded. “That’s good, Kevin. My mother was a patient there. They couldn’t have been more wonderful.”
“Have the doctors found anything yet?” Kevin asked.
Cheevers’s flyaway salt and pepper eyebrows hovered over his eyes, round and dark as chocolate drops. He nodded.
I was almost afraid to ask. “Is it the cancer?”
“No, something else entirely. Because of the migraines, the confusion, the problems she was having from time to time with her coordination, the doctors suspected that something was putting pressure on her brain.”
Kevin’s good eyebrow shot up. “A tumor?”
“Because of her medical history, they suspected a tumor, of course,” Cheevers said, “but the MRI showed no evidence of that. They did find something else, though. Your mother may be suffering from normal pressure hydrocephalus, which in spite of the name, isn’t normal at all. In layman’s terms, it’s an abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain. The fluid is often under pressure and can compress the brain, causing all kinds of difficulties.”
“Are you talking about water on the brain?” I wondered. “I thought that happened with babies.”