At quarter of six on Friday evening, Wanda Libbey, snugly secure in her new BMW, was inching her way along the West Side Highway. Complacent in the excellent shopping she’d done on Fifth Avenue, Wanda was still annoyed at herself that she’d gotten such a late start back to Tarrytown. The Friday night rush hour was the worst of the week, a time when many quit New York for their country homes. She’d never want to live in New York again. Too dirty. Too dangerous.
Wanda glanced at the Valentino purse on the passenger seat. When she’d parked in the Kinney lot this morning, she’d tucked it firmly under her arm and kept it there all day. She wasn’t fool enough to have it dangling from her arm where someone might grab it.
Another damn traffic light. Oh well, in a few blocks she’d be on the ramp and past this miserable section of so-called highway.
A tap on the window made Wanda look swiftly to the right. A bearded face grinned in at her. A rag began to make swishing movements on the windshield.
Wanda’s lips snapped into a rigid line. Damn. She shook her head vigorously. No. No.
The man ignored her.
I am not going to be held up by these people, Wanda fumed, jamming her finger on the button that opened the passenger window. “I don’t want—” She began to shriek. The rag was thrown against the windshield. The bottle of fluid pinged off the hood. A hand reached into the car. She watched her purse disappear.
* * *
A squad car was heading west on Fifty-fifth Street. The driver suddenly straightened up. “What’s that?” On the approach to the highway he could see traffic stopped, people getting out of cars. “Let’s go.” Siren blaring, lights flashing, the squad car lurched forward, skillfully weaving through the maze of moving traffic and double-parked vehicles.
Still screaming with rage and frustration, Wanda pointed to the pier a block away. “My purse. He ran there.”
“Let’s go.” The squad car turned left, then made a sharp right as they roared onto the pier. The cop in the passenger seat turned on the spotlight, revealing the shack Petey had abandoned. “I’ll check inside.” Then he snapped, “Hey, over there. Past the terminal. What’s that?”
The body of Erin Kelley, glistening with sleet, the silvery slipper flashing under the powerful beam from the spotlight, had been discovered again.
Darcy left Nona’s office with Vince D’Ambrosio. They took a cab to her apartment and she gave him Erin’s daily reminder and her personal-columns file. Vince studied them carefully. “Not much here,” he commented. “We’ll find out who placed the ads she circled. With any luck, Charles North is one of them.”
“Erin isn’t the greatest record keeper,” Darcy said. “I could go back to her apartment and look through her desk again. It’s possible I missed something.”
“That could help. But don’t worry. If North’s a corporate lawyer from Philadelphia, it’ll be easy to trace him.” Vince stood up. “I’ll get on this right away.”
“And I’m going back to her apartment now. I’ll leave with you.” Darcy hesitated. The light on the answering machine was blinking. “Can you wait just a minute till I check the messages?” Attempting a smile she said, “There’s always the chance Erin left one.”
There were two messages. Both were about personal ads. One was genial. “Hi, Darcy. Trying you again. Enjoyed your note. Hope we can get together sometime. I’m Box 4358. David Weld, 555-4890.”
The other was sharply different. “Hey, Darcy, why do you waste your time answering ads and my time trying to reach you. This is the fourth time I’ve called. I don’t like to leave messages, but here’s this one. Drop dead.”
Vince shook his head. “That guy has a short leash.”
“I didn’t leave the answering machine on while I was away,” Darcy said. “I suppose if anyone tried to reach me in response to the few letters I sent myself, they probably gave up. Erin started answering ads in my name about two weeks ago. Those are the first calls I’ve gotten.”
* * *
Gus Boxer was surprised and not especially pleased to respond to the buzzer and find the same young woman who had wasted so much of his time yesterday. He was prepared to absolutely refuse to allow her to enter Erin Kelley’s apartment again but did not get the chance. “We’ve reported Erin’s disappearance to the FBI,” Darcy told him. “The agent in charge has asked me to go through her desk.”
The FBI. Gus felt a nervous tremor go through his body. But that was so long ago. He had nothing to worry about. A couple of people had left their names recently just in case a vacancy came up. One good-looking gal said it would be worth a thousand bucks under the table if he put her at the top of the list. So if Kelley’s friend was able to find out something happened to her, it would mean a nice piece of change in his pocket.
“I’m just as worried about that girl as you are,” he whined, the unfamiliar sympathetic tone catching in his vocal cords. “Come on up.”
In the apartment, Darcy immediately turned on all the lights against the impending dusk. Yesterday, the place had seemed cheerful enough. Today, Erin’s continued absence was leaving its mark. A faint edging of soot was visible on the windowsill. The long worktable needed dusting. The framed posters that always gave brightness and color to the room seemed to mock her.
The Picasso from Geneva. Erin had bought it on her one school trip abroad. “I love this even though it isn’t my favorite theme,” she’d commented. It depicted a mother and child.
There were no further messages on Erin’s machine. A search of the desk revealed nothing significant. There was a new cassette for the answering machine in the drawer. Possibly Agent D’Ambrosio would want the old tape, the one that contained messages. Darcy switched the two.
The nursing home. This was around the time Erin usually called it. Darcy looked up the number and dialed. The head nurse on Billy Kelley’s floor came to the phone. “I spoke to Erin as usual on Tuesday night around five. I told her I think her father is quite near the end. She said she would spend the weekend in Wellesley.” Then she added, “I understand she’s missing. We’re all praying that she’s all right.”
There’s nothing more I can do here, Darcy thought, and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to go home.
* * *
It was quarter of six when she got back to her own place. A hot shower was called for, she decided, and a hot toddy.
At ten past six, wrapped in her favorite flannel robe, steam rising from the toddy, she settled on the couch and pushed the remote control for the television.
A story was breaking. John Miller, the investigative crime reporter for Channel 4, was standing at the entrance to a West Side pier. Behind him in a roped-off area a dozen policemen were silhouetted against the cold waters of the Hudson. Darcy turned up the volume.
“ . . . body of an unidentified young woman was just discovered on this abandoned Fifty-sixth Street pier. She appears to have been the victim of strangulation. The woman is slim, in her mid-twenties with auburn hair. She is wearing slacks and a multicolored blouse. A bizarre twist is that she is wearing mismatched shoes, a brown leather ankle boot on her left foot, an evening slipper on her right.”
Darcy stared at the television. Auburn hair. Mid-twenties. Multicolored blouse. She’d given Erin a multicolored blouse for Christmas. Erin had been delighted. “It has all the colors of Joseph’s coat,” she’d said. “I love it.”
Auburn. Slim. Joseph’s coat.
The biblical Joseph’s coat had been stained in blood when his treacherous brothers showed it to their father as proof of his death.
Somehow, Darcy managed to find in her purse the card Agent D’Ambrosio had given her.
* * *
Vince was just about to leave his office. He was meeting his fifteen-year-old son Hank at Madison Square Garden. They were going to have a quick dinner, then take in a Rangers game. As he listened to Darcy he realized that he had been expecting this call; he just hadn’t thought it would come quite this soon.
“It do
esn’t sound good,” he told her. “I’ll phone the precinct where the body was found. Sit tight. I’ll get back to you.”
When he hung up, he called Hudson Cable. Nona was still in her office. “I’ll get right over to be with Darcy,” she said.
“She’ll be asked if she can identify the body,” Vince warned.
He called the Midtown North precinct and was put through to the head of the homicide squad. The body had not yet been removed from the crime scene. When it reached the morgue, they’d send a squad car for Miss Scott. Vince explained his interest in the case. “We’d be grateful for your assistance,” he was told. “Unless this turns out to be an open-and-shut case, we’d like to have it run through VICAP.”
Vince called Darcy back, told her about the squad car and that Nona was on the way. She thanked him, her tone flat and unemotional.
Chris Sheridan left the gallery at ten past five and with long strides walked the fourteen blocks from Seventy-eighth and Madison to Sixty-fifth and Fifth. It had been a busy and highly successful week and he savored the luxurious freedom of knowing that he had the whole weekend to himself. Not a single plan.
His tenth-floor apartment faced Central Park. “Directly across from the zoo,” as he told his friends. Eclectic in taste, he’d mixed antique tables, lamps, and carpets with long, comfortable upholstered couches that he’d covered in a heraldic pattern, copied from a medieval tapestry. The paintings were English landscapes. Nineteenth-century hunting prints and a silk-on-silk Tree of Life wall hanging complemented the Chippendale table and side chairs in the dining area.
It was a comfortable, inviting room, a room which in the past eight years many young women had eyed with hope.
Chris went into the bedroom, changed into a long-sleeved sport shirt and chinos. A very dry martini, he decided. Maybe later he’d go out for a plate of pasta. Drink in hand, he switched on the six o’clock news and saw the same broadcast Darcy was watching.
His compassion for the dead girl and identification with the grief her family would experience was instantly replaced by horror. Strangled! A dancing shoe on one foot! “Oh, God,” Chris said aloud. Could whoever murdered that girl have been the one who sent the letter to his mother? The letter that said a dancing girl who lived in Manhattan would die on Tuesday night exactly the way Nan died.
Tuesday afternoon, after his mother called, he’d contacted Glenn Moore, the police chief of Darien. Moore had gone to see Greta, had taken the letter, reassuring her it was probably from a crank. He’d then called Chris back. “Chris, even if it’s on the level, how do you begin to protect all the young women in New York?”
Now Chris dialed the Darien police station again and was put through to the chief. Moore had not yet heard about the death in New York. “I’ll call the FBI,” he said. “If that letter is from the killer, it’s physical evidence. I have to warn you, the FBI will probably want to talk to you and your mother about Nan’s death. I’m sorry, Chris. I know what that does to her.”
At the entrance to Beefsteak Charlie’s restaurant in Madison Square Garden, Vince threw an arm around his son’s shoulders. “I swear you’ve grown since last week.” He and Hank were now eye to eye. “One of these days, you’ll be eating your blue plate off my head.”
“What the heck is a blue plate?” Hank’s lean face with a sprinkling of freckles across the nose was the one Vince remembered seeing in the mirror nearly thirty years ago. Only the color of his gray-blue eyes had come from his mother’s genes.
The waiter beckoned to them. When they were seated, Vince explained, “A blue plate used to be the special of the evening at a cheap restaurant. Seventy-nine cents bought you a hunk of meat, a couple of vegetables, a potato. The plate was sectioned to keep the juices from running together. Your grandfather loved that kind of bargain.”
They decided on hamburgers with everything piled on, french fries, salads. Vince had a beer, Hank a cola. Vince forced himself not to think about Darcy Scott and Nona Roberts going to the morgue to view the body of the murder victim. Rough as hell for both of them.
Hank filled him in about his track team. “We’re running at Randall’s Island next Saturday. Think you can make it?”
“Absolutely, unless . . . ”
“Oh, sure.” Unlike his mother, Hank understood the demands of Vince’s job. “You working on anything new?”
Vince told him about the concern that a serial killer was on the loose, about the meeting in Nona Roberts’s office, about the belief that Erin Kelley might be the dead woman found on the pier.
Hank listened intently. “You think you ought to be in on this, Dad?”
“Not necessarily. This may be a local homicide solely for the NYPD, but they have requested assistance from the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico and I’ll help them as much as I can.” He signaled for the check. “We’d better get started.”
“Dad, I’m coming in again Sunday. Why don’t I go to the game alone? You know your gut is telling you to follow up on this case.”
“I don’t want to pull that on you.”
“Look, the game is sold out. I’ll make a deal with you. No scalping, but if I sell your ticket for exactly what you paid for it, I get to keep the money. I’ve got a date tomorrow night. I’m broke, and I can’t stand to ask Mom for a loan. She sends me to that hunk of blubber she married. So anxious for us to be buddies.”
Vince smiled. “I swear you’ve got the makings of a con man. See you Sunday, pal.”
On the way to the morgue, Darcy and Nona clasped hands in the squad car. When they arrived, they were taken to a room off the lobby. “They’ll come for you when they’re ready,” the cop who had driven them explained. “They’re probably taking photographs.”
Photographs. Erin, don’t worry. Send your picture if they request it. In for a penny, in for a pound. Darcy stared straight ahead, barely conscious of the room, of Nona’s arm around her. Charles North. Erin had met him at seven o’clock on Tuesday night. A little more than a few short days ago. Tuesday morning she and Erin had joked about that date.
Darcy said aloud, “And now I’m sitting in the New York City morgue waiting to look at a dead woman who I’m sure is going to be Erin.” Vaguely she felt Nona’s arm tighten around her.
The cop returned. “An FBI agent’s on the way. Wants you to wait for him before you go downstairs.”
* * *
Vince walked between Darcy and Nona, his hands firmly under their elbows. They stopped at the glass window that separated them from the still form on the stretcher. At Vince’s nod, the attendant pulled the sheet back from the victim’s face.
But Darcy already knew. A strand of that auburn hair had escaped concealment. Then she was seeing the familiar profile, the wide blue eyes now closed, the lashes dark shadows, the always smiling lips so still, so quiet.
Erin. Erin. Erin-go-bragh, she thought, and felt herself begin to sink into merciful darkness.
Vince and Nona grabbed her. “No. No. I’m all right.” She fought back the waves of dizziness and made herself straighten up. She pushed away the supporting arms and stared at Erin, deliberately studying the chalky whiteness of her skin, the bruises on her throat. “Erin,” she said fiercely, “I swear to you I will find Charles North. I give you my word he is going to pay for what he did to you.”
The sound of racking sobs echoed in the stark corridor. Darcy realized they were coming from her.
Friday had been an extremely successful day for Jay Stratton. In the morning, he’d stopped at the Bertolini office. Yesterday, when he brought in the necklace, Aldo Marco, the manager, had still been furious at the delay. Today, Marco was singing a different tune. His client was ecstatic. Miss Kelley had certainly executed the concept they had in mind when they’d decided to have the gems reset. They looked forward to continuing to work with her. At Jay’s request, the twenty-thousand-dollar check was made out to Jay as Erin Kelley’s manager.
From there, Stratton went to the police station to file a comp
laint about the missing diamonds. The copy of the official report in his hand, he’d headed for the midtown office of his insurance company. The distressed agent told him that Lloyd’s of London had reinsured this packet of gems. “They’ll undoubtedly post a reward,” she said nervously. “Lloyd’s is getting terribly upset about the theft of jewelry in New York.”
At four o’clock, Jay had been in the Stanhope having drinks with Enid Armstrong, a widow who’d answered one of his personal ads. He’d listened attentively as she told him about her overwhelming loneliness. “It’s been a year,” she’d said, her eyes glistening. “You know, people are sympathetic and they take you out occasionally, but it’s a fact of life that the world goes two-by-two and an extra woman is a nuisance. I went on a Caribbean cruise alone last month. It was absolutely miserable.”
Jay made the appropriate clucking sounds of understanding and reached for her hand. Armstrong was mildly pretty, in her late fifties, good clothes but no style. He’d run into the type often enough. Married young. Stayed home. Raised the kids and joined the country club. Husband who became successful but mowed his own lawn. The kind of guy who made sure his wife was well provided for after he keeled over.
Jay studied Armstrong’s wedding and engagement rings. All the diamonds were top quality. The solitaire was a beauty. “Your husband was very generous,” he commented.
“I got these for our twenty-fifth anniversary. You should have seen the pinpoint he gave me when we got engaged. We were such kids.” More glistening eyes.
Jay signaled for another glass of champagne. By the time he left Enid Armstrong, she was excited about his suggestion that they get together next week. She’d even agreed to consider having him redesign her rings. “I’d like to see you with one important ring that incorporates all these stones. The solitaire and baguettes in the center, banded on either side by alternating diamonds and emeralds. We’ll use the diamonds in your wedding ring and I can get some fine quality emeralds for you at a very reasonable price.”