“That kid takes off in May,” he would rant. “The apartments were all rented for the next September. Half of them were canceled. The last place MacKenzie was seen was in my building, so his parents thought there might have been some nut hanging out in the stairwell . . .”
Howard realized that his boss was studying him intently.
“Howie, you look like you have more on your mind. Do you?”
“Nothing at all, Mr. Olsen,” Howard said firmly.
“Good. You been reading about that missing girl? What’s her name, Leesey Andrews?”
“Yes, I have. It’s very sad. I was watching the news before I left this morning. I don’t think they expect to find her alive.”
“These young women should stay out of these clubs. In my day, they sat home with their mothers.”
Howard reached for the check as the waitress placed it beside Olsen. It was a ritual they went through every week. Ninety percent of the time Olsen let him pick it up. When he was annoyed, he did not.
Olsen grabbed the check. “I don’t want the Kramers to leave, Howie, understand? Remember last year you stepped on the toes of the super on Ninety-eighth Street? His replacement stinks. If the Kramers leave, maybe you should look for another job. I hear my nephew is out of work again. He’s not stupid, in fact, he’s pretty damned smart. Maybe if he had your cushy apartment and salary, he’d pay a little more attention to me.”
“I hear you, Mr. Olsen.” Howard Altman was furious at his employer, but much more so at himself. He had played it all wrong. The Kramers had been as nervous as cats on a hot tin roof when Carolyn MacKenzie showed up the other day. Why? He should have been smart enough to find out what was upsetting them. He made a silent vow to get what it was out of them before it was too late. I want my job, he thought. I need it.
Neither the Kramers nor Carolyn MacKenzie were going to cause him to lose it!
24
Hope is fading that Leesey Andrews will be found alive,” Dr. David Andrews read as the latest news report scrolled across the bottom of the television screen. He was sitting on the leather couch in the den of his son’s Park Avenue apartment. Unable to sleep, he had gone in there sometime in the predawn hours. He knew he must have dozed off at some point, because shortly after he heard Gregg leave to make his rounds at the hospital, he became aware that a blanket was tucked around him neatly.
Now, three hours later, he was still there, alternately dozing and watching television. I should get showered and dressed, he thought, but he was too weary to move. The clock on the mantelpiece showed that it was quarter of ten. I’m still in pajamas, he thought—that’s ridiculous. He looked up at the television screen. What had he just seen on it? I must have read it because the setting is on mute, he realized.
He groped for the remote control, which he remembered placing on the cushion so that he could adjust the volume in an instant if something came on about Leesey.
It’s Sunday, he thought. It’s been more than five days now. What do I feel right at this minute? Nothing. Not fear, nor grief, nor that murderous anger at whoever has taken her. Right now, at this minute, I just feel numb.
It won’t last.
Hope is fading, he thought. Is that what I just read in the news tape on the screen? Or did I make it up? Why does that sound familiar?
A mental image of his mother, playing the piano at family parties and everyone joining in the singing, burst into his mind. They loved the old vaudeville songs, he thought. One of them began with the words, “Darling I am growing old.”
Leesey won’t ever grow old. He closed his eyes against the tidal wave of pain. The emotional numbness was gone.
Darling, I am growing old . . . Silver threads among the gold . . . Shine upon my brow today . . . Life is fading fast away . . .
Hope is fading . . . Those were the words that made me think of that song.
“Dad, are you okay?”
David Andrews looked up and saw the concerned face of his son. “I didn’t hear you come in, Gregg.” He rubbed his eyes. “Did you know that life is fading fast away? Leesey’s life.” He stopped, tried again. “No, I’m wrong. It’s hope that’s fading that she’ll be found alive.”
Gregg Andrews crossed the room, sat next to his father, and put an arm around his shoulders. “My hope isn’t fading, Dad.”
“Isn’t it? Then you believe in miracles. Why not? I used to believe in them myself, too.”
“Keep believing in them, Dad.”
“Remember how your mother seemed to be doing so well, then overnight the picture changed and we lost her? That’s when I stopped believing in miracles.”
David shook his head, trying to clear it, and patted his son’s knee. “You’d better take good care of yourself for me. You’re all I have.” He stood up. “I feel as if I’m talking in my sleep. I’ll be okay, Gregg. I’m going to shower and dress and go home. I’m absolutely useless here. With your schedule at the hospital, you need downtime when you’re here, and at home I’ll be better able to keep a grip on myself, I hope. I’ll try to get back into some kind of routine while we’re waiting to see what develops.”
Gregg Andrews looked at his father with the clinical eye of a doctor, observing the deep circles under his eyes, the bleak expression in them, the way in these four days his trim frame suddenly seemed extremely thin. He hasn’t eaten a thing since he heard about Leesey, Gregg thought. In one way he wanted to object to his father leaving, in another he sensed that he’d be better off in Greenwich where he volunteered at the urgent care center three days a week and where he was among close friends.
“I understand, Dad,” he said. “And maybe you think you’ve given up hope, but I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me,” his father said simply.
Forty minutes later, showered and dressed, he was ready to leave. At the door of the apartment, the two men embraced. “Dad, you know you’ll have a dozen people wanting to have dinner with you. Go out to the club with some of them tonight,” Gregg urged.
“If not tonight, I will very soon.”
After his father left, the apartment felt empty. We’ve been trying to keep up appearances for each other’s sake, Gregg thought. I’d better take my own advice and stay busy. I’ll take a long run in Central Park, then try to nap. He had already planned to go back and forth between the Woodshed and Leesey’s apartment tonight at three A.M., the same time she had started to make that walk. Maybe I’ll find someone to talk to, someone the cops have missed, he thought. Detective Barrott had told him that plainclothes detectives were doing that every night, but the need to help in the search had been building to a fever pitch in Gregg.
While Dad was here I couldn’t do it, he thought. He’d have insisted on coming with me.
The day had started overcast, but when he went outside at eleven, the sun had broken through the clouds, and Gregg felt his own spirits lift a bit. Surely on a beautiful spring morning like this, his kid sister, funny, pretty Leesey, could not be gone. But if she wasn’t dead, then where was she? Let it be an emotional breakdown or a spell of amnesia, Gregg prayed, as he covered the three blocks to the park with long strides. There, he decided to head north and swing back around the Central Park Boathouse.
Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. Let . . . us . . . find . . . her . . . Let . . . us . . . find . . . her . . . He prayed in cadence to the rhythm of the run.
An hour later, tired but somewhat less tense, he was walking back to his apartment when his cell phone rang. With conflicting emotions of hope and dread, he grabbed it from the pocket of his jacket, flipped it open, and saw that the call was from his father.
The words, “Hello, Dad,” died on his lips as he listened despairingly. He heard uncontrollable sobbing. Oh, God, he thought, they’ve found her body.
“Leesey,” David Andrews managed to say. “Gregg, it’s Leesey. She phoned!”
“She what?”
“She left a message on the answering machine less than ten min
utes ago. I just walked in. I can’t believe it. I just missed her call.”
Again, Gregg Andrews heard his father’s sobs.
“Dad, what did she say? Where is she?”
The sobs suddenly stopped. “She said . . . that . . . she loves me but has to be by herself. She asked me to forgive her. She said . . . she said . . . that she’ll call again on Mother’s Day.”
25
I spent Saturday morning in Mack’s room in the Sutton Place apartment. I won’t say it had a Sunset Boulevard quality to it, but I do know that it no longer held any sense of his presence for me. After Mack had been missing a few days, Dad ransacked his desk, hoping to find some clue as to where he might have gone, but the only things he found were the usual trappings of a college student—notes for exams, postcards, blank personal stationery. One file contained a copy of Mack’s application to Duke Law School and his letter of acceptance from them. On it he had scrawled an exuberant “YES!”
But Dad didn’t find what he was looking for—Mack’s daily calendar—which might have given us a clue to any appointments he had made prior to his disappearance. Years ago, Mom had our housekeeper take down the banners Mack had tacked on the wall and the corkboard covered with group pictures of him and his friends. Everyone in those pictures had been questioned by the cops, and later by the private investigator.
The brown and beige coverlet, matching pillows, and contrasting window treatments were the same, as was the cocoa brown carpet.
There was still a picture of the four of us on top of the dresser. I found myself studying it and wondering if by now Mack had any strands of gray on his temples. It was hard to imagine. He’d had such a boyish face ten years ago. Now he was not only long past being a college student, he was probably a suspect in absentia in more than one kidnapping and/or murder case.
There were two closets in the room. I opened the doors of both of them and detected that faint musty odor that grows when no fresh air circulates into a relatively small space.
I took a stack of jackets and slacks from the first closet and laid them on the bed. They all had plastic cleaners’ bags over them, and I remembered that when Mack had been missing about a year, Mom had everything he owned cleaned and put back in the closet. I remember at the time Dad had said, “Livvy, let’s give them all away. If Mack comes back I’ll take him shopping. Let somebody else get some use out of all this stuff.”
His suggestion had been rejected.
There was nothing to be found in this sterile clothing. I didn’t want to just dump everything in large trash bags. I knew that would make it easier to carry them to the donation center, but it would be a shame if anything got wrinkled. Then I remembered that a couple of Mack’s large suitcases, the ones he’d used on our last family trip, were in the storeroom behind the kitchen.
I found them there and brought them back to his room, hauling them up on the bed. I opened the first one and as a matter of habit, ran my fingers through the pockets to see if there was anything in them. There wasn’t. I filled the suitcase with neatly folded suits and jackets and slacks, lingering over the tuxedo Mack wore in our family photo that last Christmas.
The second suitcase was a size smaller. Again I ran my hand through the side pockets. This time I felt something I guessed to be a camera. But when I pulled it out, I was surprised to see that it was a tape recorder. I never remembered seeing Mack using one. There was a tape in it and I pushed the play button.
“What do you think, Ms. Klein? Do I sound like Laurence Olivier or Tom Hanks? I’m recording you, so be kind.”
I heard a woman’s laugh. “You sound like neither of them, but you sound good, Mack.”
I was so shocked that I pushed the stop button as tears welled in my eyes. Mack. It was as though he were in the room bantering with me, his voice lively and animated.
These yearly Mother’s Day calls and the ever-increasing resentment that was my reaction to them had made me forget the way Mack used to sound, funny and energetic.
I pushed the play button again.
“Okay, here I go, Ms. Klein,” Mack was saying. “You said to select some passage from Shakespeare? How about this one?” Then he cleared his throat and began, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes . . .”
His tone had changed drastically, had suddenly become ragged and somber.
“ . . . I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries—”
That was all that was on the tape. I rewound it and played it again. What did it mean? Was it a random selection or had it been chosen deliberately because it suited Mack’s frame of mind? When was it made? How long before he disappeared had it been made?
Esther Klein’s name was in the file of people the cops spoke to about Mack, but obviously she had offered nothing of consequence. I vaguely remembered that Dad and Mom had been surprised that Mack had been taking private acting lessons with her on the side. I can understand why he didn’t tell them. Dad was always afraid that Mack was becoming too interested in his theatre electives.
Then Esther Klein had been fatally mugged near her apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, nearly a year after Mack went missing. The thought occurred to me that there might have been other tapes that he made while he studied with her. If so, what happened to them after her death?
I stood in Mack’s room, holding the recorder, and realized it would be easy enough to find that out.
Esther Klein’s son, Aaron, was a close associate of Uncle Elliott. I would call him.
I put the recorder in my shoulder bag and began packing Mack’s clothes. When I was finished, the drawers in the dresser were empty, as were the closets. Mom had let Dad give Mack’s heavy coats away one particularly cold winter, when the charities were pleading for them.
As I was about to close the second suitcase, I hesitated, then took out the formal black tie I had tied for Mack just before we posed for our Christmas picture that last year. I held it in my hands thinking back to how I had told him to lean down because I couldn’t reach high enough to tie it tight.
As I wrapped it in tissue and put it in my shoulder bag to take back to Thompson Street with me, I remembered Mack’s laughing response, “ ‘Blest be the tie that binds.’ Now, please don’t make a mess of it, Carolyn.”
26
He wondered if her father had heard the message yet. He could just imagine his reaction when he listened to it. His little girl was alive and didn’t want to see him! She said she would call on Mother’s Day! Only fifty-one weeks to wait!
Daddy must be twisting in the wind, he thought.
By now the cops undoubtedly had a wiretap on Dr. Andrews’s phone in Greenwich. He could just imagine the frenzy they were in. Would they throw up their hands and decide that Leesey has a right to her privacy and drop the search for her? Maybe. It was just the kind of thing people did.
It would be safer for him if they did.
Would they tell the media she had phoned?
I like the headlines, he thought. And I like reading about Leesey Andrews. They’ve known since Tuesday that she’s missing. She’s been in all the headlines the last three days. But today the story about her was buried on page four, which was disappointing.
It had been the same thing with the other three girls—within two weeks the story was dead.
As dead as they were.
I’ll play around with what to do to keep Leesey on everybody’s mind, but for now, he thought, I’ll have my fun moving her cell phone around. That must be driving them crazy. “Goosey, Goosey, Gander,” he whispered. “Whither do you wander? Upstairs? Downstairs? In my lady’s chamber?”
He laughed. All three places, he thought.
All three.
27
Doctor, you’re sure that it is your sister’s voice on the answering machine?”
“Absolutely sure!” Unconsciously, Gregg kneaded his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. I never get headaches, he thought. I don’t need one to start now.
Three hours after his father called he was downtown in the detective squad section of the District Attorney’s office. The message Leesey had left on the answering machine in his father’s Greenwich, Connecticut, home had been taken from the wiretap and amplified. In the tech room, Detective Barrott had already played it several times for him and Larry Ahearn.
“I agree with Gregg,” Ahearn told Barrott. “I’ve known Leesey since she was a little girl, and I would swear that’s her voice. She sounds nervous and agitated, but of course she may have had some sort of breakdown or . . .” He looked at Gregg. “Or she was forced to leave that message.”
“You mean by someone who abducted her?”
“Yes, Gregg, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“You’ve confirmed that that call was made from her cell phone?” Gregg asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
“Yes, it was,” Ahearn said. “It was bounced from the tower at Madison and Fiftieth. That’s why she may be being held somewhere in that area. On the other hand, if she did choose to disappear, I don’t see how she can walk outside in that location even to buy groceries without worrying about being spotted. Her picture has been all over the newspapers, television, and the Internet.”
“Unless she has some kind of disguise like a burka, that would hide everything except her eyes,” Barrott pointed out. “But even that would draw attention in Manhattan.” He began to rewind the tape of Leesey’s call. “Our tech guys are working on the background sound. Let’s concentrate on listening to that.”
Larry Ahearn caught the bleak expression on Gregg’s face. “I don’t think we need to hear it again, Roy.”
“What happens now?” Gregg asked him. “If you decide Leesey did leave voluntarily, do you give up looking for her?”