Hammond consulted the street address he had jotted down and tucked into his shirt pocket before leaving his place to visit Davee.
Uncertain that the telephone number for Dr. Ladd’s answering service was a Charleston exchange, Hammond had anxiously run his finger down a listing of physicians in the Yellow Pages until he found one Dr. A. E. Ladd. He knew immediately he had the right one because the after-hours number listed matched the one he had called from the cabin that morning.
Dr. Ladd was his only link to the woman he’d been with last night. Of course, talking to him was out of the question. Hammond’s short-term goal was only to locate his office and see what, if anything, he could learn from it. Later he would try and figure out how to go about approaching him.
Despite being preoccupied with his breakup with Steffi, and his disturbing conversation with Davee, and the Pettijohn murder and all that it implied, thoughts of the woman he had followed from the county fair and kissed at a gas station wouldn’t leave him alone.
It would be useless to try and ignore them. Hammond Cross did not accept unanswered questions. Even as a boy, he couldn’t be pacified with pat answers. He nagged his parents until they provided him with an explanation that satisfied his curiosity.
He’d carried the trait into adulthood. That desire to know not only the generalities, but the particulars, benefitted him in his work. He dug and continued to dig until he got to the truth, sometimes to the supreme frustration of his colleagues. Sometimes even he was frustrated by his doggedness.
Thoughts of her would persist until he learned who she was and why, after the incredible night they had spent together, she had walked out of his cabin and, consequently, out of his life.
Locating Dr. Ladd was an attempt, albeit a juvenile, pathetic, and desperate one, to find out something about her. Specifically, whether or not she was Mrs. Ladd. If so, that’s where it must end. If not…
He didn’t allow himself to consider the various if nots.
Having grown up in Charleston, Hammond knew the street’s general location, and it was only blocks away from Davee’s mansion. He reached it within minutes.
It was a short and narrow lane, where the buildings were shrouded in vines and history. It was one of several such streets within easy walking distance of the bustling commercial district, while seemingly a world apart. Most of the structures in this area between Broad Street and the Battery boasted historical markers. Some house numbers ended with a 1/2, indicating that an outbuilding to the main structure, such as a coach house or detached kitchen, had since been converted into a separate residence. Real estate was at a premium. It was a pricey neighborhood. The acronym for anyone living south of Broad was S.O.B.
It wasn’t surprising to Hammond that the doctor’s practice was located in a basically residential section. Many noncommercial professionals had converted older houses into businesses, often living in the top stories, which had been a Charleston tradition for centuries.
He left his car parked on a wider thoroughfare and entered the cobblestone lane on foot. Darkness had fallen. The weekend was over; people had retreated inside. He was the only pedestrian out. The street was shadowed and quiet, but overall friendly and hospitable. Open window shutters revealed lighted rooms that looked inviting. Without exception, the properties were upscale and well maintained. Apparently Dr. Ladd did very well.
The evening air was heavy and dense. It was as tangible as a cotton flannel blanket wrapping around him claustrophobically. In a matter of minutes his shirt was sticking to him. Even a slow stroll was enervating, especially when nervousness was also a factor.
He was forced to breathe deeply, drawing into his nostrils exotic floral scents and the salty-seminal tang of seawater from off the harbor a few blocks away. He smelled the remnants of charcoal smoke on which somebody had cooked Sunday supper. The aroma made his mouth water, reminding him that he had eaten nothing all day except the English muffin at his cabin.
The walk gave him time to think about how he was going to make contact with the doctor. What if he simply went up to the door and rang the bell? If Dr. Ladd answered, he could pretend that he obviously had been given the wrong address, that he was looking for someone else, apologize for disturbing him, and leave.
If she answered the door… what choice would he have? The most troubling question would have been answered. He would turn and walk away, never look back, and get on with his life.
All these contingencies had been based on the probability that she was married to the doctor. To Hammond that was the logical explanation for her placing a call to him furtively and then acting guilty when caught red-handed. Because she appeared the picture of health, and had certainly exhibited no visible symptoms of illness, it never had occurred to him that she might be a patient.
Not until he reached the house number. In the small square of yard demarcated by an iron picket fence stood a discreet white wooden signpost with black cursive lettering.
Dr. A. E. Ladd was a psychologist.
Was she a patient? If so, it was slightly unsettling that his lover had felt the need to consult her psychologist within moments of leaving his bed. He consoled himself by acknowledging that it was now commonplace to have a therapist. As confidants they had replaced trusted spouses, older relatives, and clergymen. He had friends and colleagues who kept standing weekly appointments, if only to ease the stress of contemporary life. Seeing a psychologist carried no stigma and was certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
Actually, he felt tremendously relieved. Sleeping with Dr. Ladd’s patient was acceptable. What was unacceptable was sleeping with his wife. But a cloud moved across that small ray of hope. If she was his patient, what then? It would be nearly impossible to learn her identity.
Dr. Ladd wouldn’t divulge information about his patients. Even if Hammond stooped to use the solicitor’s office as his entrée, the doctor would probably stand on professional privilege and refuse to open his files unless they were subpoenaed, and Hammond would never take it that far. His professional standards wouldn’t allow it.
Besides, how could he ask for information about her if he didn’t even know her name?
From the opposite side of the street, Hammond mulled over this dilemma while studying the neat brick structure in which Dr. Ladd had his office. It typified a unique architectural style—the single house, so called because from the street it was only one room wide, but was several rooms deep. This one had two stories, with deep side porches, or piazzas, running from front to back on both levels.
Behind an ornate gate, the front walkway extended straight up the right side of the yard to a front door painted Charleston Green—a near-black with only a dollop of green mixed in. The door had a brass knocker in its center, and like the front doors to most single houses, opened not into the house itself, but onto the piazza, from which one entered the house.
Fig vine had a tenacious hold on much of the facade, but it had been neatly trimmed around the four tall windows that offset the front door. Beneath each of these windows was a window box overflowing with ferns and white impatiens. No lights were on.
Just as Hammond was stepping off the curb to cross the street for a closer look, the door of the house behind him opened and an enormous gray and white sheepdog bounded out, dragging his owner behind him.
“Whoa, Winthrop!”
But Winthrop would not be restrained. He was raring to go and straining against his leash as he reached the end of the walkway and came up on his back legs, throwing himself against the gate. Instinctively Hammond took a couple steps back.
Laughing at his reaction, the dog owner pulled the gate open and Winthrop bolted through. “Sorry about that. Hope he didn’t scare you. He doesn’t bite, but given the chance, he might lick you to death.”
Hammond smiled. “No problem.” Winthrop, showing no interest in him, had hiked his leg and was peeing against a fence post.
Hammond must have looked harmless but lost, because the man said, “Can I help you?”
“Uh, actually I was trying to locate Dr. Ladd’s office.”
“You found it.” The young man pointed his chin toward the house across the street.
“Right, right.”
The man gave him a politely quizzical look.
“Uh, I’m a salesman,” he blurted. “Medical forms. Stuff like that. The sign doesn’t say what time the office opens.”
“About ten, I think. You could call Alex to confirm.”
“Alex?”
“Dr. Ladd.”
“Oh, sure. Yeah, I should’ve called, but… you know… just thought I’d… well, okay.” Winthrop was sniffing beneath a camellia bush. “Thanks. Take it easy, Winthrop.”
Hoping the neighbor would never connect the inarticulate idiot to the assistant D.A. frequently seen addressing reporters on TV, Hammond patted the shaggy dog on the head, then set off down the sidewalk in the direction from which he had come.
“Actually, you just missed her.”
Hammond whipped back around. “Her?”
* * *
Mr. Daniels avoided looking either Smilow or Steffi in the eye when they returned to his hospital room and took up positions on either side of his bed. To Smilow the patient seemed more uncomfortable now than he had fifteen minutes earlier, but it wasn’t gastrointestinal discomfort. It looked more like a bad case of guilty conscience.
“The nurse said you remembered something that might help our investigation.”
“Maybe.” Daniels’s eyes nervously sawed back and forth between Smilow and Steffi. “See, it’s like this. Ever since I strayed—”
“Strayed?”
Daniels looked at Steffi, who had interrupted. “From my marriage.”
“You had an affair?”
Leave it to Steffi to cut to the chase, thought Smilow. “Tact” wasn’t in her vocabulary. Mr. Daniels looked completely miserable as he stammered on.
“Yeah. This, uh… a woman where I work? We… you know.” Uneasily he shifted his skinny frame on the hard mattress. “But it didn’t last long. I saw the error of my ways. It was just one of those things that happens before you know it. Then you wake up one morning and think to yourself, what the hell am I doing this for? I love my wife.”
Smilow was sharing Steffi’s obvious impatience with Daniels’s long-winded confession. He wished the man would get to the point. Nevertheless, he warned Steffi with a hard look to give Daniels time to tell his story at his own pace.
“The reason I’m telling you this… She, my wife, gets all worked up if I so much as give another woman the time of day. Not that I blame her,” he rushed to add. “She’s got a right to be suspicious. I handed her that right when I committed adultery.
“But the least little thing—even a kind word to another woman—sets her off. Know what I mean? She goes to crying. And saying that she’s not woman enough for me. That she can’t fulfill my needs.” He looked up at Smilow with weary eyes. “You know how they get.”
Again, Smilow shot Steffi a look that told her not to jeopardize this by lambasting the man’s sexist editorial.
“I didn’t describe that lady to y’all in detail because I didn’t want my wife to get upset. We’ve been doing pretty good here lately. She even brought along some, you know, sexual aids on this trip to spice up our time alone. She sorta looked on it as a second honeymoon. Isn’t much you can do on a church choir bus, but once we get in our room each night… whew.”
He grinned up at them, but then his smile deflated as though someone had pulled the plug on a rubber mask. “But if the missus thought I had paid attention to another woman’s face and figure, she might have thought I was lusting in my heart after a stranger. I’d have had hell to pay over nothing.”
“We understand.” Steffi laid her hand on his arm with rare and, Smilow knew, insincere compassion.
“Mr. Daniels, are you now saying that you can describe the woman you saw in the hotel corridor in greater detail?”
He looked across at Smilow. “You got something to write with?”
* * *
Slowly, he pulled the old T-shirt over her head. Before, he had touched her in darkness. He knew what she felt like, but he wanted to see what his hands had touched.
He wasn’t disappointed. She was lovely. He liked seeing his hands on her breasts, liked watching them respond to his caresses, liked hearing her hum of pleasure when he lowered his lips to them.
“You like this.”
“Yes.”
He took her nipple into his mouth and sucked it. She clasped his head and moaned softly. “Too hard?” he asked.
“No.”
But he was concerned, especially when he spotted whisker burns on her pale skin. He ran his finger over the spot. “I didn’t realize.”
She looked down at the light abrasion, then raised his finger to her lips and kissed it. “Neither did I.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“But if I hurt you—”
“You didn’t. You won’t.” She curled her hand around his neck and tried to draw his head back to her.
But he resisted. “Do you mind if…” He nodded toward the bed.
“No.”
They lay down, not bothering to straighten the linens. He leaned over her and, holding her face between his hands, kissed her so passionately that her body arched off the bed in order to touch his.
His hand skimmed over her breasts, down her rib cage, onto a smooth stomach. “Jesus. Look at you. Beautiful.” He fitted his hand into the vee of her thighs, covering her mound with his palm, his fingers tapering downward. Inward. Into her softness. “You’re already—”
“Yes.”
“So sweet. So—”
“Oh…” she gasped.
“Wet.”
He rose above her for another kiss. It was a silky, sexy kiss that ended only when she gave a soft cry and climaxed around his fingers, against his thumb.
Moments later she opened her eyes and saw him smiling down at her. “I’m sorry, sorry.”
“Sorry?” he repeated, laughing softly and kissing her damp forehead.
“Well, I mean… you…”
His lips barely grazed hers. His whisper was soft and urgent. “Don’t be sorry.”
He coughed a harsh sigh of surprise when she closed her hand around him. He almost protested, almost told her that she didn’t have to feel obligated, almost told her that reciprocation wasn’t necessary, that he couldn’t possibly get any harder than he was. But when she began to explore and massage, the only sounds he made were soft groans of supreme pleasure. Not fully aware of what he was doing, he folded his hand around hers and enhanced her motions.
She nuzzled his neck. She buried kisses in his chest hair and took love bites of his skin. Unintentionally—or maybe not—her erect nipple rubbed against his. It was exciting. It was goddamn erotic. And it nearly made him come.
When he removed her hand, she angled herself up and frantically kissed his jaw, his cheek, his lips, murmuring, “Let me touch you.”
But it was too late. He repositioned himself and sank into her. Withdrew. Pressed. Deep. Deeper. Then, resting his forehead on hers, clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut, experiencing more ecstasy than he had in all previous sexual encounters put together…
“No, let me touch you.”
… he came.
The ringing telephone rudely jarred Hammond from his steamy recollection. He was embarrassed to realize that he had an erection and he was bathed in sweat. How much time had he lost to that particular memory? He checked the dashboard clock. Twenty minutes, give or take.
The phone rang a third time. He jerked it to his ear. “What?”
“Where the hell have you been?”
Irritably he said, “You know, Steffi, you need to get some new material. That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that, and in that same tone of voice.”
“Sorry, but I’ve been calling your house for an hour and leaving messages. I finally decided to try your cell. Are you in your car?”
“Yes.”
“You went out?”
“Right again.”
“Oh. I didn’t imagine you’d be going out tonight.”
She was hinting that he explain to her where he had gone and why, but he no longer owed her an accounting of his time. It probably stung her pride that on the night he ended their relationship, he wasn’t too despondent to go out.
It would really wound her to know that he was staked out on a dark street like a pervert, steeping in a sweat of sexual arousal, and waiting to see if Dr. A. E. Ladd was the woman who, about this time last night, had been stretched out alongside him naked—his sex cozily sandwiched between their bellies, his hands caressing her ass—asking if he was aware that his eyes were the color of storm clouds.
He had a mean impulse to tell Steffi. But of course he didn’t.
He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “What’s going on?”
“For starters, why didn’t you tell me that Mason gave you the Pettijohn case?”
“It wasn’t my job to.”
“That’s a bullshit reason, Hammond.”
“Thank you, Rory Smilow,” he muttered.
“He told me as a friend.”
“My ass. He told you because he’s no friend of mine. Now, are you going to tell me what’s up?”
“Not knowing that I was going to be playing second fiddle,” she said sweetly, “I joined Smilow at Roper Hospital, and we lucked out.”
“How so?”
“One of those people stricken with food poisoning?”
“Yeah?”
Headlights turned onto the street at the opposite end from where Hammond was parked. He started his car.
“Where are you, Hammond?” Steffi demanded impatiently. “Are you listening? It sounds like you’re cutting out.”
“I can hear you. Keep talking. One of the people stricken with food poisoning…”
“Saw a woman outside Pettijohn’s suite. Well, actually, he can’t swear that it was outside Pettijohn’s suite, but that’s a technicality we can iron out if everything else falls into place.”
The car stopped in front of Dr. Ladd’s office. She drove off with some guy in a convertible, Winthrop’s owner had told him.
Steffi was saying, “So after a lot of hem-hawing about an affair—”
Driving slowly, Hammond got close enough to see that the car was a convertible.
“On second thought, never mind about the affair,” Steffi said. “It’s irrelevant. Believe me. Anyway, Mr. Daniels got a much better look at the woman than he had first led us and Mrs. Daniels to believe.”
The glare of the convertible’s headlights blinded Hammond from seeing anything behind them. But as he pulled even with the car, he turned his head in time to see the occupants. A man behind the steering wheel. A woman in the passenger seat. His woman. No question.
“Mr. Daniels now admits that he remembers her approximate height and weight, hair color, and so forth.”
Hammond tuned Steffi out. Once he was past the other car, he cut his eyes to his external side mirror in time to see the man reach across the console and hook his hand around the back of her neck, bringing her face up close to his.
Hammond stamped his accelerator, taking the corner too fast and causing his tires to squeal. Sure, it was an immature, jealousy-inspired reaction, but that’s what he felt like doing. He felt like hitting something. He really felt like telling Steffi to shut the fuck up.
“Just do it, Steffi,” he said, abruptly stopping her in midsentence.
Taken aback, she took a quick breath. “Do what?”
He didn’t know what. He had been only half listening, but he wouldn’t admit that to her. She’d been telling him about a potential witness. Someone who had seen someone near Pettijohn’s suite and could provide a fairly accurate description.
Steffi might also have suggested a sketch artist. She had mentioned that about the time Hammond had rolled past the convertible, and her prattle had been drowned out by the blood that had rushed to his head. The gist of what Steffi told him had registered, but most of it had been obscured by a wild, primal urge to go back and put his hands around the throat of the bastard in the convertible.
One thing was certain: He had to assert himself or explode. Now. Immediately. He had to establish that there was something over which Hammond Cross still had control.
“I want an artist there first thing in the morning.”
“It’s late, Hammond.”
He knew what time it was. For hours he’d been sitting in a sweltering automobile, entertaining sexual fantasies. For his trouble, all he’d got was Dr. Ladd in the company of another man. “I know how late it is.”
“My point is, I don’t know if I can get—”
“What’s the guy’s room number?”
“Mr. Daniels’s room number? Uh…”
“I want to talk to him myself.”
“That really isn’t necessary. Smilow and I questioned him at length. Besides, I think he’s being discharged in the morning.”
“Then you’d better set it up early. Seven-thirty. And have the police sketch artist standing by.”