Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

relieved to see, no mention at all of an underage suspect. I imagined that because of Madison’s age, any information about her had been withheld.
    In the second paragraph it said that the doctor was survived by a wife, Marsha, and two sons, Alan and Rubin, all of Larchmont.
    I checked the card tacked up over my desk. The doctor’s office was on Washington Square North, which meant it was in one of the capacious town houses along the north side of Washington Square Park. Not a bad commute, probably not much more than an hour, door-to-door. But perhaps the doctor stayed over in the city one or two nights a week anyway, the better to be at the hospital early in the morning or late in the evening. The better, sometimes, to have an evening or two away from the family and in better, or at least different, company.
    I took another file card from the top left drawer and wrote down Bechman’s name and address again and under that a few questions that had come to mind. Did the doctor have a pied-a-terre in the city? Did the doctor stay over in the city during the week? Did the doctor have a girlfriend, preferably, I thought, an irate one? Where had Marsha Bechman been at the time of her husband’s murder?
    I wondered if Bechman had one of those shared offices, two or three doctors together to keep the expenses down, almost a necessity nowadays what with people suing over every little mistake doctors made and malpractice insurance being so high. In fact, I suspected that for someone injecting Botox into the faces of children, the insurance would be even stiffer than usual.
    I stopped writing and checked the time. It was too late for a doctor’s office to be open and too early for Dashiell’s last walk, but I had the sudden yen to walk over to Washington Square Park and see how many names were on the doctor’s bell. As soon as I stood up, Dash did, too. He was always willing to drop whatever it was he was doing, in this case taking a nap, in order to accompany me on a walk of any length, one of the many things I liked about dogs in general and Dashiell in particular.
    I grabbed my cell phone, my keys, a twenty-dollar bill and Dashiell’s leash, checking the pockets of my jeans for pickup bags and finding three. We headed out the door and turned right, walking a couple of blocks to West Fourth Street and then taking that toward the park, skirting it when we got there, then looking for Dr. Bechman’s address. The town house his office occupied was about a third of the way up the block, a stately building with views that at one time were more elegant than they are today, unless there were drug dealers and the homeless in the park then, too. Even so, the doctor was in a classy spot, not far from the newly renovated Washington Square Arch and just around the corner from Fifth Avenue.
    I didn’t need to open the low gate that led to the two steps down to the doctor’s office. I could read the three brass plaques from where I stood on the sidewalk. Dr. Bechman was, according to the plaque with his name on it, a plaque that was still there a week and a half after his death, a pediatric neurologist, something I didn’t know existed before that moment. Dr. Hyram Willet, who had the top plaque, was an oncologist and Dr. Laura Edelstein, a pediatrician. My guess was that Dr. Willet worked only with children, too, because there was no way an adult with a diagnosis of cancer would sit in a waiting room full of screaming kids.
    The fact that Bechman had been part of a shared practice was good news. It meant the office was still open for business, that the receptionist still had a job and I had a chance of wheedling some information out of her. What I wanted, of course, was a complete patient list as well as any personal gossip about the late Dr. Bechman I could get. At the very least, I wanted someone else’s take on Madison Spector. Since she herself wasn’t talking, and since I believed her father was holding things back in order to protect his daughter, something I couldn’t really fault him for, I had to find people who were willing to speak openly about Madison. I needed to know more about her.
    I looked at the card I’d taken off the bulletin board and pocketed, and dialed Dr. Bechman’s number. Standing in front of the doctor’s office, I listened to the recording tell me what hours the office was open and when Dr. Bechman was, or in this case used to be, available: Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to five