I was radiating my happiness as I made the rounds of the crowd, kissing everyone and learning how three carloads of friends had banded together to keep the plan secret and drive up here this morning.
“Open your presents!” Mike shouted at me pointing at the pile of boxes stacked up at the far end of the bar.
“You’re a few weeks early,” I chided my pals. “I’m hanging on to thirty-four every minute that I can.”
“Yeah, but Nina said you were flying down to visit your parents on the thirtieth for your birthday. And we figured the only way to surprise you was to start early.”
I accepted a cold glass of champagne and worked my way through the group. Joan steered me to a tall vase of yellow roses on the bar with a card nestled among them that was signed from Drew. I bit the inside of my lip and promised myself to call him tomorrow to make a date for dinner and a chance to talk about the past few weeks.
While I walked on to thank Sarah and Francine and compliment them on their well-kept secret, I could hear Mike and Mercer over my shoulder, back to talking about the murder of Gemma Dogen.
“You remember that conversation we had in the precinct, about whether love or money was the motive in more cases? Well, I was right again. Coleman Harper. Can you imagine, for whatever reason the guy wasn’t content to be one kind of doctor, he had to have more?”
“You’d think some of the people we’ve interviewed this week would have come forward before now, when she was killed,” Mercer responded. “Now they’re jumping out of the woodwork to tell us how resentful Harper was of Dogen, how angry he was at the way she treated him when she met him almost ten years ago.”
“You should see the crap they recovered when Zotos and Losenti executed the search warrant on the guy’s apartment.”
I was in a great position to do an overheard since Tom Kendris hadn’t wanted to tell me about any of the other evidence in the cases now that I was a witness. Mike was talking. “All kinds of disguise stuff-fake hair, mustaches, makeup. They even got a note that Robert Spector had sent him months ago saying he was doing his best, but Dogen has ‘blackballed you all over the world.’ Harper must have been thinking of every kind of way to get the job done.
“My guess is he went there in the middle of the night, knowing he’d find her alone, to talk her out of rejecting him again. He had Spector’s support and she was the only thing standing in the way of his admission to the program. If she was leaving town anyway, she was just being a spoiler in his view. I’m thinkin‘ she told him to forget about it right then and there, so he stabbed her. He had come-ready with his butcher knife-prepared to get his revenge.”
I couldn’t pretend not to listen any longer. I leaned on the bar, and even though Mike shot me a look he and Mercer kept talking.
“You know when it all started?”
I shook my head back and forth.
“Gemma Dogen’s predecessor had been the first one to have reservations about Harper’s ability. That’s a decade ago, kid. This Dr. Randall is the one who said he would admit him into the neurosurgical program, but only if he completed a residency in neurology first.
“Dogen took over when Randall left later that same year-only she made her own decision. She evaluated the reports on Harper’s work and she flat out refused to be bound by the promise that Randall had made to him. Effectively, she ended his chances of getting into the program.”
“What about the ‘Met Games’?” I asked.
“That was all Spector’s doing. It was his idea to park Harper over there for a year, figuring he’d have a chance to change Dogen’s mind. But Harper continued to screw up. Then he went down south to practice for a while. Finally, it was Spector who got his hopes up again this last time. Told him to get back up to Mid-Manhattan by doing this fellowship thing where Spector could supervise him. Thought with Dogen leaving there’d be one last chance to get his man in before he got too old to try for that kind of residency. Harper’d be fifty years old when he finished it as it is. Trouble with that plan-Spector alerted him one year too early. Dogen just wouldn’t let go.”
We were all silent knowing that it was only a few days short of April fifteenth.
“Have either of you sorted out why Spector was pushing so hard on Harper’s behalf?” I asked.
“Not completely. Yet. But you really hit a nerve when you found Gemma’s notes on that. Both of them are mum on it for the moment, but I’m diggin‘ around. We’ll find out. Besides that,” Mercer went on, “it all just kept snowballing. Robert Spector knew that Gemma would quit-just on principle-the minute Coleman Harper was admitted to the neurosurgical program. Spector’s a winner automatically ’cause he’d wind up with Dogen’s job, which is exactly what he wanted.”
Mike broke in. “I guess we rattled Harper in that last interview when we told him we’d be getting the hospital’s records from ten years back. He knew Minuit didn’t keep them that long. But what he didn’t know was how long Met kept its documents-and whether his archnemesis, Gemma Dogen, had her own set of papers on him. How much you wanna bet that he’s the guy who broke into Metropolitan to see if he could unload their file room of his own records? And that’s why he kept Dogen’s keys after he killed her. He must have slipped up to her apartment on Sunday to clean out whatever she had on him figuring sooner or later someone would find the papers that damned him.”
“Why’d he let me finish that conversation with Mercer instead of just grabbing me while I was telling him all about the files I had found?”
“If Harper had jumped you while you were on the phone, no matter how far away Mercer was he just would have called 911 and the cops would have been there before Harper could kill you and get safely out of the building. Probably thought if he got rid of you after the conversation and made off with the only set of Dogen’s files that still existed, it’d just be Mercer’s word against his with no proof to back it up.”
“We assume it was Harper in one of his disguises who got past your doorman and slipped that black-and-white note under your door,” Mercer suggested. “He may not have known the whole story on Jean DuPuy, but like Gemma he knew something was fishy about the guy’s background. Too slick, too glib. Don’t forget, they had both practiced in the South. I expect Harper knew something about the real John DuPre that started him thinking.
“Anyway, he and DuPuy were both so unhappy to be anywhere near this investigation, they were each pointing fingers at the other one. They must have been so damned excited to find that bloodstained old derelict sleeping in the X-ray department that they tripped over each other to reveal him to someone else. And we actually worried about which one found him first.”
“Do you think it was Harper who tried to run me down with the car?” I asked, thinking back to my near miss with Zac.
“No question about it,” Mike shot back without hesitation. “He probably just freaked. A couple of days earlier, he personally delivered to us a blood-covered mental patient we all bought as the killer. Then he hears on Friday evening’s news bulletins that you, Alex Cooper, exonerated the old guy. Mercer thinks that when Harper had been sitting at the precinct for hours that first night, he heard Peterson ask for a sector car to drop you off after work and gave them your home address. May have gone there in a fury when he heard the news, never expecting to actually see you. Then he hits the jackpot-out you walk at eleven o’clock. Hey, I bet he was striking out without a plan at that point. Just desperate.”
Again, we were quiet as the others reveled around us.
“Know what I can’t stand?” Mike asked. “Forget that these morons don’t want to help out the police when there’s a murder, but somehow they can’t wait to tell any reporter who comes along that they’ve known about the killer or his motives the whole time. Have you seen any of the clippings?”