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bundle of green bills up front, before tey he lifts a finger.
Wants to keep the client on the hook a little ion longer, then the guy s
really grateful when he s cleared, I explained to David. as If he s
cleared, Mike threw in, as a warning to me. je No question that Jed was still
Chapman s number-one he suspect. st Those letters mean anything to you, Doc?
Did Alex tell ie you about the poem Isabella had copied into that script we
found when we packed up her belongings?
That also had Dr. C. written next to it.
No, I don t think you mentioned that, Alex.
At this point I couldn t remember whether I had or not.
It was a few lines out of a Pope poem, David. The passage Iz had transcribed
included the lines Is it, in Heaven, a crime to love too well? It looked
like she thought this Dr. C. had been the poet. I guess that s Cordelia
Jeffers. Maybe it s got more to do with this than we thought.
David tried to take us through his reasoning.
Start with the fact that there is no psychiatrist named Cordelia Jeffers. I
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expect that no such person even exists, that it s a name assumed for the
purposes of this particular correspondence.
Why? Chapman liked to get right to the point.
I don t know why, at the moment. But it s clear that the writer knew that
Isabella was going to Martha s Vineyard, and it s even more clear that
Isabella was not the source of that information. He quoted back to us from the
first paragraph, in which Jeffers commented on Isabella s trip, which she
learned about quite indirectly.
It s also obvious that she knew Isabella was going with a man shall we assume
Jed? which is far more than you knew, Alex.
So if we want to know more about Dr. C, we re looking for someone who knew
both Isabella and Jed, is that what you re telling us? Mike asked.
For openers, yes.
I thought I was the common denominator there, I was quick to acknowledge.
Perhaps there were one or two Hollywood acquaintances they had in common, but
I was certain that there was no real link independent of me, except for
friends of mine like Nina and her husband.
Even Nina confirmed that she thinks this liaison only began a few weeks ago,
when they ran into each other on the Concorde.
And the pretext for Isabella calling on Jed? David asked me again.
The fact that her accountant had been stealing her blind.
Jed gave her the name of his man when we all had dinner together, and later on
I urged him to follow up and make sure she was in good hands.
Yeah, but by the time she invited Jed to the Vineyard, the week before last,
she had a new stalker, didn t she?
Mike went on.
Did you tell David that Jed had been stalked when he ran for office?
That s one of the reasons he told you he was so sympathetic to Lascar.
What was that all about, Alex?
I hardly know what to believe at this point, guys. When we first met, in
June, one of the things Jed talked about when he heard I was a prosecutor was
the time he d been harassed. His version of the facts was that he shook hands
with a young woman in a receiving line when he was running for the Senate and
he couldn t get rid of her after that.
Phone calls, letters, showed up everywhere he went, got on airplanes with him.
Finally he had to go to the police to put an end to it.
David addressed me in his soft, professional tone.
Did Jed sleep with her, Alex? Did they have an affair?
For what it s worth, he denied they ever did. Of course, I wouldn t trust him
from here to the kitchen now, but the first night I met him, when he told me
the story, he had no reason to lie to me. st In fact, he made quite a point
of telling me that it played r a big role in his divorce. The stalker actually
called and spoke to Jed s wife. Tried to convince her that they had been
having an affair which didn t take much for his wife to believe. I m so
confused by him now I don t know what to believe anymore.
Do you know any more about this than you ve just told me?
No, David. I don t. It s sort of like what happens to doctors. Every time you
go to a cocktail party, people complain to you about their aches and pains and
hope for a free diagnosis. Well, for me, it s the high crimes and misdemeanors
they all unload on me. I listened to Jed s story, but he thought the situation
had ended when he moved to New York and neither one of us dwelt on it.
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