Doug was uncomfortably aware that Sandra had taken on a certain attitude, almost as though she were the authorized voice of the Connelly family. He put a restraining hand on her arm. “I am very anxious to see my daughter,” he said, with the emphasis on I.
“You’re not going to refuse to let me say a prayer for her, Doug?”
Doug was not happy that Dr. Patel was a witness to the exchange. He hated that, after she slipped off her coat, Sandra was wearing a tight low-cut sweater that would have been more suitable in a nightclub in the Meatpacking District. He’d been too engrossed in his own thoughts to notice it before.
But thankfully, Dr. Patel had told him that Hannah had already been there this morning. She almost certainly wouldn’t be back in the next ten minutes. He wouldn’t have to tell her that he had let Sandra go in to visit Kate. “Come along,” he said brusquely to Sandra.
Kate was stirring but her eyes were closed. Doug took her hand. “Baby, it’s Daddy. I love you so much. You’ve got to get well for me and Hannah. You can do it. We need you.”
Easy tears slipped from his eyes.
On the other side of the bed, Sandra smoothed her hand softly over Kate’s bandaged forehead. “Kate, it’s Sandra. We had dinner together the night of the accident. I thought you were so beautiful and so smart and you are. And you’re going to be again. And I want to become your best friend. And if you’re in trouble, I’ll be there for you.”
“That’s enough, Sandra,” Doug interrupted, his voice an angry whisper.
“Well, I am going to say a prayer.” Sandra closed her eyes and looked upward. “Beautiful Kate, may you be blessed and healed. Amen.”
Kate, who could not communicate with them, had heard everything. As she slipped back into sleep, she had one thought that was clear in her mind. Bimbo.
Doug had hoped that Sandra might want to check her mail or have dinner with her girlfriends again tonight, but she climbed back into the Bentley and told Bernard, “We’re going home, Bernard. But I’m making reservations for tonight at SoHo North, so we’ll need you to pick us up at eight thirty. Our boy needs to get out. He has far too much on his plate and it’s not fair.”
Doug had been about to tell Sandra that he could feel the beginning of a splitting headache and needed to lie down in a dark room and be quiet. He wanted to insist that Bernard drop her off home now. But then again, the prospect of being completely alone tonight was not appealing, either. Dinner with some good wine in the same dining room as the celebrities who were always at SoHo North was more to his liking. “Sounds good to me,” he said, trying to sound cheerful.
At twenty minutes of six, the telephone rang. Sandra had just prepared a scotch for him and an apple martini for herself. She ran to the phone and looked at the caller ID. “It’s Jack Worth,” she told Doug.
“Let it ring. I’m not in the mood to talk to him.”
Ten minutes later the phone rang again. “The number doesn’t show,” Sandra reported, as, holding the martini, she ran across the library again to glance at the landline phone on the desk.
“Forget it. No, wait, I’ll take it.” Doug had suddenly remembered who might be calling.
“Connelly residence,” Sandra answered, in a voice that was her concept of the proper way for a housekeeper or secretary to answer the phone.
“Put Doug Connelly on,” a low, angry voice told her.
“Who is calling, please?”
“I said to put him on.”
Sandra covered the speaker with her hand. “I think it’s some kind of nut. He won’t give his name and he sounds as though he’s furious about something.”
Not knowing what to expect but suddenly fearful, Doug got up and hurried across the room. “Douglas Connelly,” he said when he picked up the receiver.
“Did you know who you were messing with when you pulled that switch?”
Doug recognized the voice but was bewildered at the question.
“You thought you could get away with a dumb trick like that, you stupid idiot? You can’t. I want four million dollars deposited in my account by Friday morning or you won’t live to see Saturday. That’s the three million five hundred thousand you owe me plus interest for pain and suffering.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Then think about our last transaction and maybe you’ll get it. But tell you what? Maybe you need a little more time to put together that kind of money. So you have until next Monday. But if it goes that long, make it four million two hundred thousand dollars. The extra two hundred grand is for making me look like a fool.”
Doug heard the click of the receiver in his ears. His hand clenching, he replaced the phone in the cradle.
“Dougie, Dougie, what is it? You look like you’re going to faint. Who was that? What did he say?” Sandra was beside him, steadying the hand that was holding the drink that was now spilling down his sleeve.
“Oh my God,” Doug moaned. “Oh my God. What am I going to do?”
71
At five o’clock on Wednesday evening, Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein rang the bell of Lottie Schmidt’s home. Now that they had received confirmation that Gus had not won a lottery within the United States, they had agreed that this time there would be a harder edge to their questioning, with Frank playing the more sympathetic role and Nathan expressing disbelief at Lottie’s lottery claim.
Lottie opened the door on the second ring of the bell, but if she was surprised to see them, she did not indicate it. Something in her attitude was also different. They both noticed that right away. She seemed less frightened and more sure of herself. “I would have appreciated a phone call,” she said as she stepped aside to let them in. “And you might have saved yourself a useless trip. I’m leaving in the next few minutes to go to my neighbor’s house. She was kind enough to invite me for an early dinner.”
“Then I’m very glad we caught you, Mrs. Schmidt,” Frank said, pleasantly. “We’ll only be a few minutes.” He started to turn from the foyer into the living room.
Lottie stopped him. “I think it would be more to the point if we sat at the dining room table. I have some photo albums there that I think might interest you.”
She did not tell them that after her neighbor Peter Callow left the other day, she had sat at that table, thinking long and hard. It was obvious to her that while Peter would defend her, he did not believe that she was ignorant of where Gus had gotten the money for Gretchen’s house. If he doesn’t believe me, no one else will, she had reasoned. Well, I’ll find a story that might hold up.
With that thought in mind, she had pulled down the folding stairs to the attic, climbed up, and retrieved a now-dusty photo album and several framed pictures of severe-looking people in formal dress or military uniform. The items were from a box that had not been disturbed since the first day they moved into the house.
Carefully wiped off, the album and the pictures were now spread out on the dining room table. She invited the detectives to sit down there. Unlike the other time they had come into her home, she did not offer them water or coffee.
“You have heard my husband described as a master craftsman who was forced into retirement by Douglas Connelly and his minion, Jack Worth,” she said, her voice level. “Gus was that. He was all of that. But he was also part of one of the finest families in Germany.” She turned the album around. “In World War I, his grandfather was an aide to the kaiser. His name was Field Marshal Augustus Wilhelm von Mueller. That is his picture with the kaiser.”
Stunned, the two detectives stared at the album.
“And this is a picture of his grandfather’s home. Gus’s father was the second son in the family. Gus’s father and mother died in an accident when he was a baby. Gus was their only child. The horse-drawn carriage they were riding in overturned on a rainy night. After they died, Gus was brought here and was raised with his cousins.” Lottie pointed and continued: “It was a castle on the Rhine and it was filled with furniture and paintings that were priceless a
ntiques. My husband did not learn to love and appreciate beautiful furniture and art in a public museum. He lived for the first eight years of his life in what was in essence a museum, and he never forgot it.”
Lottie turned the page. “There is Gus with his cousins when he was six years old. You will notice that they were all girls. Gus was the only male grandchild and would eventually have inherited the castle and everything in it.”
Her voice becoming more emotional, she said, “Gus’s grandfather regarded Hitler with contempt and disdain. The family was not Jewish, but like many others of their rank they disappeared and died when Hitler came to power. Their homes and property were confiscated. Gus was in the hospital because of a burst appendix when his family was arrested and taken from their home.
“The Gestapo came to the hospital. The nurse hid Gus and showed them the body of a boy that age who had just died and told them that he was the von Mueller child. They accepted what she said and left. The nurse, whose last name was Schmidt, took Gus home that night. That is how he survived.”
“He was raised as the child of the nurse?” Ramsey asked.
“Yes. She moved to a different city and enrolled him in school. She told him that he must never talk about his former life because he, too, would be taken away. He was terrified by the cruelty of what happened on Kristallnacht and by the fact that his Jewish friends at school had to wear yellow armbands. That was, of course, before they, too, disappeared.”
“Then he was the only survivor of the family?”
“Absolutely. Everyone died in the camps. His grandfather’s castle was taken over by the Nazis and later bombed during the war. So no one was really sure if there was anything belonging to the family that was left. Gus never wanted to talk even to me about the past. After the war, the German people suffered terribly. Gus had quit school when he was sixteen, after the nurse who had adopted him became ill and died. He was completely on his own and found a job in a furniture repair shop. We were both twenty years old when we were married. He was wearing a rented suit.”
She smiled reminiscently, then said, “You see, that was why people found Gus unyielding, even autocratic. He came by it naturally. He was the offspring of a noble family.”
“Mrs. Schmidt, this is absolutely fascinating,” Frank Ramsey said, “but how does it fit in with the fact that Gus was able to give Gretchen enough money to buy a very expensive home five years ago and an annuity to help support it?”
“As you must be aware, there are organizations that track down property that was stolen by the Nazis. I knew years ago that Gus had been in touch with them. More than that I don’t know. He hated to refer to the life that existed before his family disappeared. His pain was too deep. His heart was broken. What he did tell me five years ago was that he had finally heard from one of the search organizations and they had negotiated a deal with the present owner of one of the paintings that was proven to have been in the castle. The new owner offered to pay a fair price for it, provided his name never was revealed. Gus accepted the offer. He never told me more than that but that was the money he used to buy Gretchen’s house. He received payment for a painting that rightfully belonged to him, and that is why, gentlemen, I ask you to leave my home and stop trying to make Augustus Wilhelm von Mueller II into a thief.
“I know, even though he is dead, you are convinced he is an arsonist,” Lottie said bitterly as she stood up and pushed back her chair. “Isn’t that good enough for you?”
Silently, they followed her to the door. After they went out she closed it behind them and then they heard the decisive click of the lock turning.
As they looked at each other in the gathering darkness, Frank’s cell phone rang. It was a detective from the precinct near the complex. “Frank, we just got a call from the Connelly place. They have a sinkhole in the parking lot and there’s a skeleton in it. It’s pretty obvious it’s been there a long time. It looks like a woman. She’s wearing some kind of necklace with the name Tracey on it. They think it’s Tracey Sloane, a young actress who disappeared about twenty-eight years ago.”
“We’ll be right there,” Frank said. He turned off the phone, looked at Nathan, and tersely told him of the incredible find at the complex. They both rushed to the car. As Frank turned on the engine, Nathan asked, “Frank, Hotchkiss had been missing for nearly forty years. Do you think he might have been hanging around the Connelly plant when Tracey Sloane disappeared?”
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “But if he was, it’s going to be damn hard to prove it.”
72
Justin and Hannah were seated at the table in her small dining room. They had just finished the excellent selection of the Chinese food that Justin had brought in and were reading their fortune cookies. Justin unfolded the small slip of paper in his cookie and read it aloud. “The Year of the Snake will bring you much happiness.”
He checked the search mechanism on his phone and learned that the Year of the Snake was starting in less than two months.
Hannah’s fortune was not as straightforward. “Wisdom comes to those whose minds are open to the truth . . . That’s a big nothing,” she said laughing. “I wish I’d picked yours.”
“There are more of them. Want to try again? Or I’ll share mine with you.”
They smiled at each other. Each was comfortably aware that something was beginning between them and they both liked it. Over dinner, Justin had told her about himself. “My mother was from the Bronx. My father from Brooklyn. They met at Columbia. After they got married, they moved to Princeton. My mother teaches English lit and my father is chair of the Philosophy Department. I have a younger sister. She’s a medical resident at Hackensack Hospital.”
As he spoke, Hannah could see the animation in his face and could sense that Justin had enjoyed a normal, happy childhood. Wistfully, she reviewed her own growing-up years. Dad always on his way out. Rosemary Masse telling him he should remarry, that his little girls needed a mother. Hannah thought of how she used to pretend her mother was alive and would talk to her. Her mother would tell her that it was wonderful that she got an A on her spelling test.
She did that because her best friend in the first grade, Nancy, would tell her that her mother said she was so proud of her because she got an A. And then they went out for ice cream. I told her that my mommy took me out for ice cream, too, Hannah remembered. And Nancy said, “But you don’t have a mommy. Your mommy is dead.”
I didn’t speak to Nancy for days and Kate kept asking me what was wrong. She was nine years old then. Finally I told her. She said that I shouldn’t be mad at Nancy, that I should tell her that my mommy is in heaven but I do have a big sister and she doesn’t, so I’m lucky. Then Kate and Rosie took me out for ice cream because I had gotten an A, too.
Hannah realized that she hadn’t just been thinking about that but was actually telling it to Justin. She laughed self-consciously. “Hey, you’re a good listener.”
“I hope so. On the other hand, my sister says that I talk too much.”
The phone in the kitchen began to ring. Justin saw the panic in Hannah’s eyes as she jumped to answer it. “Hannah, take it easy,” he counseled but he followed her into the kitchen, hoping against hope that it would not be bad news about Kate’s condition.
The caller was Hannah’s father. His loud, overwrought voice made it easy for Justin to overhear. “I just got a call from those fire marshals. All the water from the hoses caused a sinkhole in the back parking lot. They found the skeleton of a young woman there. They think they know her identity but they didn’t give me a name.”
“A skeleton!” Hannah exclaimed. “Do they know how long it’s been there?”
“They didn’t say. Hannah, this is so bizarre. I don’t know what to think.”
“Dad, are you alone?”
He did not answer for the moment but then said, “No, Sandra is with me. We were just going out when the phone rang.”
“Do the police want to talk to you?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, they’re on their way here. I think it’s detectives from New York, not those fire marshals.”
“Then, obviously, you have to wait for them. Send for dinner from the restaurant in your building. The marshals may be there for a long time.”
“Of course. That’s what I should do. Hannah, I don’t know what to think. Between what happened to Kate and Gus and the explosion and that tramp living in the van and the insurance company refusing to discuss payment with me . . .” Douglas Connelly began to sob.
“Dad, hang on. None of this is your fault.”
“I know it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean . . .” At the other end of the phone Douglas Connelly realized that he was babbling. He had been about to say that he had to put his hands on $4 million in the next five days. He had been counting on the insurance money for the antiques in the museum and the value of the buildings, but now he might need to talk to the broker who had people interested in buying the property. Maybe he could make a quick deal with one of them and get a $4 million deposit even if he had to let it go at a bargain price.
If they blamed the fire on Gus and Gus alone, the insurance company would have to pay at some point, but I need the money now, he said to himself.
“Dad, are you all right? Are you all right?” Hannah realized that her voice was rising.
“Yes, yes. Just terribly shocked.”
“Call me after the police talk to you no matter what time it is.”
“All right. Good-bye.”
Justin and Hannah looked at each other as she replaced the phone. Silently they went back to the table and sat down. Then Hannah poured tea into each of their cups. “Can you imagine tomorrow’s headlines?” she asked.
“I can,” Justin told her. “Your father used the word skeleton. That could mean that the body was there a long time, maybe even before your grandfather bought the property sixty years ago.”
At the surprised look on Hannah’s face, he explained, somewhat sheepishly, “I looked up everything I could find about it. Haven’t you ever done that?”