“You knew?”
“Yes. Part of our deal was that he would divorce Deborah and sever ties with the other ‘wives’ to marry me.”
I sit quietly, trying to absorb this.
“Did anyone know?” I ask.
“Only John and me,” she says.
I attempt to gather my thoughts. Whatever else I’d figured might come up in this case, another woman was not among them.
“Don’t you have some questions for me?” she asks.
If Claire is trying not to show disdain, she’s not succeeding. What I mean is: I feel her disdain. She isn’t hiding it. I notice again just how black her eyes are, how black her hair, against that pure white skin. And that extraordinary composure. Is there some injection that medical students take to get that damned mien of superiority? If so, she’s been fully inoculated. I want to scream at her, curse, anything to break that composure.
Instead I speak calmly. “I’m still puzzled why you would hesitate to come forward with your fiancé dead under mysterious circumstances. Weren’t you concerned to have justice done?”
“We hadn’t yet gone public with our relationship,” she says. “And it would have seemed . . . cheap . . . to have added to the circus. Not until it became clear that foul play may have been involved was I even remotely conflicted about that part of it.”
When it’s apparent she isn’t going to say anything more, I ask, “And how long were you . . . lovers?” I hate that word, it sounds so smarmy coming out of my mouth, but I can’t think of another one.
“Almost from the start. He was my professor. The nature of the relationship means we spent a lot of time together, with me shadowing him on cases. One afternoon it just happened.”
“At the clinic?” I feel like a dirty-minded voyeur.
“In the beginning. There were private places there. Then we went to my apartment, off University Avenue. We couldn’t go to his house, for obvious reasons.”
“So you knew he was married?”
“Of course. Although for a time I thought Deborah was the only wife.”
“I’m sure you understand that I need to know the details of where you were on Friday night, May 10, between 6:30 and 8 PM,” I say.
“That’s easy,” Claire smiles. “I was at the clinic. I finished my last case at four, and I was catching up on John’s paperwork. He’d been letting it slide. And he’d asked me to be a coauthor on a couple of papers. I was preparing them for peer review. You can ask the night guard in the building. He comes on duty at 6 PM, and I didn’t leave until after 9 PM.
“I’ll look into it,” I say. Then I pause. I have to know.
“What, exactly, did you see in him?” I ask. “He was, what, well over twice your age? Not in the best of shape. Married. Why take him on?”
Claire laughs, a genuine laugh, the first true sign of emotion I’ve seen in her. “John Taylor was the most magnetic man I’ve ever met,” she says. “He was genuinely interesting, and genuinely interested. In the world, in others. You inhabited a private space when you were with him. It was quite remarkable. He was remarkable.”
“What was his rationale for having an affair? I mean, before you became engaged?” I hope my voice doesn’t betray my . . . scorn? Envy?
“He spoke of his loveless marriage, of his wife needing to keep up appearances, and his need to protect her.”
“The usual crap, in other words,” I say, wanting to get a reaction out of her.
“Yes, the usual crap,” Claire agrees. She is not disturbed by my words. I doubt anything would throw her off.
“So how long did it take to get beyond the usual crap?” I ask.
“Not long,” she says. “He asked me to marry him after about a month. He said he loved me, that we could build a life together. I believed him.”
“So when did you find out the truth?”
“What truth?”
“That he had more than one wife to dispose of?”
“Oh that,” she says as though it was of no consequence. “When he proposed, he told me everything. It didn’t matter.”
“So you knew? Like Deborah?”
“No, not like Deborah. I knew everything. She didn’t know about me.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“From the way John described Deborah, I can’t imagine she would know and not want to get her hooks into our relationship, to stage-manage it the way she did the others. But our relationship couldn’t be manipulated or controlled in that way.”
“So when on earth did the two of you have time together?” I ask. The thought of three marriages, three households, was dizzying. But a fourth? Madness.
“On the job, between procedures. On weekends, when he wasn’t in LA, or when MJ and Deborah thought he was at a conference, or on call. We made the time.”
I am beginning to digest this news. It changes everything. Everything. I need to go over the transcripts, see what the wives told me, assess it in this new light.