Montaro Caine A Novel

9





DR. HOWARD MOZELLE WAS AN OBSTETRICIAN WHO OPERATED the Mozelle Women’s Health Center on East 67th Street near the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and had done so for nearly forty years. He was a good-hearted man of considerable integrity, a throwback, many said, to a previous age. He rarely ever refused a patient regardless of their insurance status or their ability to pay. His idealistic approach was perhaps not particularly beneficial to his bank account, but it was not all that dissimilar from that of his wife of forty-one years, Dr. Elsen Mozelle, a professor of European history at Columbia University; she had passed up dozens of think tank and consultancy positions rather than abandon the teaching job she loved.

As was nearly always the case, Dr. Mozelle had been working later than he had planned to and was just getting ready to close down his office for the night when the phone rang. His receptionist had already left, so Mozelle picked up the phone himself before his service could answer. Though he immediately recognized the voice on the other end, he was stunned to hear it; he hadn’t heard it in years.

“I hope I didn’t act incorrectly in calling you,” Madeline Pitcar told him. She spoke rapidly and Mozelle had trouble grasping everything she was saying, though he did understand her to say that there was a man who wanted very much to get in touch with him. “His name is Montaro Caine,” she said. “I didn’t let on that I knew anything about you. But, since I can’t reach Dr. Chasman, and since Mr. Caine said it was of the utmost importance, I wrote down what he said.” At which point, Pitcar repeated the story that Caine had begged her to pass on to the owner of the coin he had seen twenty-six years earlier at M.I.T. And the more Dr. Mozelle listened to that story, the more trouble he had believing his ears.

When Madeline Pitcar was through telling Mozelle what Caine had told her, Dr. Mozelle thanked her, then hung up and called his wife, who was at her office at Columbia, also working late. Then he called Anna Hilburn, who had run his office for thirty years before arthritis had forced her into semiretirement, reducing her on-the-job time to only a few hours per week. He asked both women if they could try to meet him at his office as soon as they could.

“It’s about the coin; I think something may be happening,” he told both of them, and neither had to ask what he was talking about.

Dr. Mozelle’s office had a spectacular easterly view, but he kept his blinds drawn and his door closed while he and Elsen spoke with Anna Hilburn about the strange phone call he had received from Madeline Pitcar. The call reawakened memories of events that had occurred more than twenty-five years ago when the odd and seemingly miraculous discovery of a mysterious coin had put him in contact with both Michael Chasman and Richard Walmeyer, whose young assistant Montaro Caine had found that coin to have seemingly otherworldly properties. A girl named Whitney Carson had played a crucial role in the story as well.

“Have you heard from Whitney lately?” Mozelle asked Anna Hilburn now as she sat in his office.

Anna shrugged. “Not lately,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure she’s overdue for her checkup this year.”

“I need you to try to get in touch with her and find out what her current situation is. Can you do that?”

Anna Hilburn nodded, then rose unsteadily to her feet. Mrs. Mozelle reached out and patted Anna on the arm. After Anna had exited the room, Elsen turned to her husband. “What do you think about this guy Caine?” she asked. “How do you think we should handle him?”

“We’ll hear what he has to say,” Mozelle said.

Elsen took a short, tight breath. “You’re not going to show it to him, are you, Howard?” she asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see.”

When Anna Hilburn returned to Dr. Mozelle’s office, she looked dazed and bewildered, and both the doctor and his wife immediately understood that something was amiss. In Anna’s three decades of working for the Mozelle Women’s Health Center, she had always been a model of calm and efficiency, rarely allowing emotions to get in the way of her work.

“What’s the matter?” Howard Mozelle asked.

Anna took a deep breath, then let it out. “I just got off the phone with Whitney,” she said. “She couldn’t talk long because she was at the airport and had to get on a flight.”

“And?” asked Mozelle.

“And she said she got married,” Anna said.

Howard Mozelle looked momentarily pleased. Then, he looked stunned. And then he looked worried. “When?” he asked. But before Anna could answer, he was on her with more questions, each one more emphatic than the one that preceded it. “Did you speak with Whitney herself? Who did you say she married?”

“She said her husband’s name is Franklyn Walker,” said Anna. “She sounded happy.”

“Well, can she come in for her checkup?” Mozelle asked.

Anna shook her head. “She moved,” she said.

“Moved? Where to?” he asked.

“Atlanta. And she’s traveling anyway.”

“Traveling where?”

“Abroad.”

“How didn’t we know about this?” asked Mozelle. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

“I don’t know what could have happened,” said Anna. “She said that she was in touch with the office and that she sent word.”

“In touch with whom? What does that mean? ‘Sent word’?”

“She said she was in town to pack up her apartment and dropped by to say hello and have her annual checkup, but it was when you were on vacation.”

“Damn it,” said Dr. Mozelle, remembering the most recent trip he and Elsen had taken to Budapest, for one of his wife’s academic conferences. “Who did she say saw her?”

“Dr. Chambers,” said Anna. “I saw the record of the appointment in his files. But here’s the strange thing—I didn’t see any record of it in Whitney’s chart.”

“Shouldn’t you have known she was here?” Mozelle demanded, even as his wife touched him lightly on the arm in an attempt to calm him.

“Must have been on a day when Cordiss was here by herself,” Anna said. She was referring to Cordiss Krinkle, one of Mozelle’s former employees who had left her position abruptly and apparently not long after Whitney had her appointment.

“Cordiss didn’t tell you Whitney was here?” he asked.

“No, she didn’t.”

“And Chambers’s nurse didn’t mention it to you?”

“Neither she nor Dr. Chambers knew that we were monitoring Whitney,” Anna said.

“Well, Cordiss Krinkle sure as hell knew, didn’t she?”

“She must have,” said Anna. “But Cordiss is long gone.”

“Where is she?” Mozelle asked, his face now crimson. “There’s no way Whitney could have had an examination in these offices without Cordiss knowing about it. We need to get in touch with her. Do you know where she is?”

“I have no idea,” said Anna. “She said she was going to California. But she didn’t leave any number or forwarding address. We sent her her final check, but it was returned. Her email address is dead. I tried finding her, but I couldn’t, so I just gave up.”

Elsen Mozelle took a step closer to Anna and spoke to her in a gentle voice. “You’re sure now, Anna? Cordiss never mentioned anything to you about Whitney, you’re absolutely sure?”

“I’ve got arthritis, not Alzheimer’s. I’m sure, Elsen. She never mentioned anything.”

“Married? And we missed it?” Elsen said in disbelief.

“The boy she married, what did she say about him?” asked Dr. Mozelle. And then, as his eyes met Anna Hilburn’s, he felt as if he understood everything, and the knowledge terrified him. “Is she pregnant, Anna? Has she had a child?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Mozelle,” said Anna. “She didn’t say.”

“Get her back on the phone,” the doctor told her. “We need to find out.”

This time, Anna took out her cell phone and redialed Whitney’s number, but the call went straight to voicemail.

“She said she was about to board the plane,” said Anna. “She’s probably already on it.”

“Where’s she going?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Leave her a message. Tell her to call us as soon as she can.”

As Anna left that message on Whitney’s voice mail, Elsen Mozelle stroked the lapel of her husband’s jacket, then took his hand in hers and held it close to her chest.

“Something’s going on here,” Howard Mozelle said after Anna hung up her phone. “Somebody must have found out.”

“But how could they?” asked Anna. “The three of us are the only ones who know what happened. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it. Not one word in twenty-six years. You’re not thinking that Cordiss found out, are you?”

But that was, in fact, exactly what Dr. Mozelle was beginning to think. “Well, Elsen and I haven’t spoken about it to anyone, obviously,” he said. “This Montaro Caine couldn’t know anything. He saw the coin, analyzed it, and made a report. He never had a clue about its background. I didn’t even tell Dr. Chasman. To this day, he knows nothing, and so Caine knows no more than he does, except he now says there’s another coin.”

“Which is in the hands of someone in this city,” Anna reminded him.

“Oh God,” Mrs. Mozelle suddenly gasped, and at the exact moment, she, her husband, and Anna Hilburn all had the same thought.

“The safe,” Elsen Mozelle said.

Though Dr. Mozelle had two bad hips, he sprinted out of his office, then through the corridor to a narrow hallway at the rear of the building while the two women struggled to keep pace. Just past the laboratory, he turned left and entered a small, windowless room. Forty-five years earlier, when the building had served as headquarters for a wholesale furrier, the safe had been a walk-in storage vault. When the doctor became the new tenant, it became a repository for medical and financial records.

Dr. Mozelle stopped at a steel door only to realize that he had not been here for so long he could no longer recall the vault’s combination. When Anna, helped along by Mrs. Mozelle, arrived at the door, Dr. Mozelle pointed at the lock and impatiently gestured for her to apply the combination. Once inside, they wove their way around boxes of outdated paperwork, stacks of charts, medical books, pamphlets, and a few stray pieces of office furniture. When the women reached an old wooden file cabinet in a corner against the wall, Anna Hilburn forced her arm into the narrow space between the cabinet and the wall until her fingers reached a small key hanging on a nail embedded in the wall. With the key, she unlocked the bottom drawer of the cabinet, then stepped to one side.

Dr. Mozelle kneeled quickly, slid the drawer open, plunged both hands to the bottom, and after several forceful jerks, he surfaced with a manila folder. He opened it, then shuffled frantically through many sheets of paper. He turned to his wife in horror.

“All my notes are still here, but the coin is gone. Stolen,” he said. He looked to Anna Hilburn.

“Call Montaro Caine,” he told her. “Call him now.”