Aaron had been away visiting clients in Chicago on Monday and Tuesday. Late Wednesday morning he received a call from his boss. “Aaron, do you have plans for lunch?”
“None that I can’t change,” Aaron said promptly.
“Then please meet me at twelve thirty in the dining room.”
I wonder what’s up, Aaron asked himself as he replaced the receiver. Elliott isn’t usually this last-minute about lunch. At 12:15 he got up from his desk, went into his private bathroom, ran a comb through his sparse head of hair, and straightened his tie. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, he thought sardonically, who’s the baldest of us all? Thirty-seven years old, in good shape, not bad-looking, but at the rate I’m going, by the time I’m fifty I’ll be lucky if I have six hairs left on my head. He sighed and put away the comb.
Jenny tells me that’s part of the reason I’ve done so well, he told himself. She says I look ten years older than I am. Thanks, honey.
Friendly as they had become, Aaron was always aware that to the blue-blooded Elliott Wallace, the fact that he, his chosen successor, was the grandson of immigrants had to be disappointing. That thought was in his mind as he walked toward the dining room. The kid from Staten Island approaches the privileged descendant of one of the first settlers of New Amsterdam, he thought. Never mind that the immigrants’ grandson graduated from Yale in the top ten percent of his class and has a master’s degree from Wharton; it still isn’t the same as having classy ancestors. I wonder if I’ll hear the “cousin Franklin” story again.
Aaron acknowledged that he both hated and was bored by Elliott’s oft-repeated anecdote of FDR’s having invited a Republican woman to host an event at Hyde Park when his wife, Eleanor, was away. When he was chided by the Democratic chairman, an astonished FDR replied, “But of course I asked her to be my hostess. She is the only woman in Hyde Park who is my social equal.”
“That was my father’s favorite story about his cousin Franklin,” Elliott would chuckle.
As he reached the table and a waiter pulled out a chair for him, Aaron immediately sensed that anecdotes about his revered relatives were the last thing on Elliott’s mind today. He looked thoughtful and concerned—in fact, preoccupied.
“Aaron, good to see you. Let’s order quickly. I have a couple of meetings. I assume you’ll have your usual?”
“Cobb salad, no dressing, and iced tea, Mr. Klein?” the waiter asked, smiling.
“You’ve got it.” Aaron did not mind letting his boss think that his salad luncheon was a sign of self-discipline. The fact was that his wife, Jenny, loved to cook, and even her most casual dinners far surpassed the sterile menu of the executive dining room.
Elliott ordered, and when the waiter was out of earshot he got right to the point: “We heard from Mack on Sunday,” he said.
“The usual Mother’s Day call?” Aaron asked. “I was wondering if he’d stick to form and phone this year.”
“He did that, and more.”
Aaron did not take his eyes off Elliott Wallace’s face as he listened to the account of the written communication from Mack.
“I’ve advised Olivia to respect Mack’s wishes,” Elliott said. “But oddly enough, she seems to have come to that conclusion on her own. She referred to Mack as ‘absent without leave.’ She’s going to join some mutual friends of ours for a cruise around the Greek islands. I’ve been invited to be with them and may go for the last ten days.”
“You should,” Aaron said promptly. “You don’t give yourself nearly enough time off.”
“And on my next birthday I’ll be sixty-five. In a lot of companies I’d be pushed out at that age. That’s the benefit of owning this one—I’m not going anywhere for a long time.” He paused, as if preparing himself, then said, “But I didn’t ask you to join me to discuss vacation plans.”
Surprised, Aaron Klein watched as Wallace’s eyes clouded with worry.
“Aaron, you’ve gone through the experience of losing your mother in a random crime. If the positions were reversed, if your mother was the one who had disappeared and then kept in contact, would you respect her wishes or would you feel that you should keep on trying to find her? I find myself absolutely uncertain and troubled. Did I give Olivia the right advice, or should I have told her to renew and redouble her efforts to find Mack?”
Suppose Mom had disappeared ten years ago, Aaron asked himself. Suppose she phoned once a year, then, when I told her I needed to find her and was going to track her down, she sent me a note telling me to leave her alone, what would I do?
The answer was not hard to reach. “If my mother did to me what Mack has done to his family and to you, I would say, ‘If that’s the way you want it, Mom, so be it. I have other fish to fry.’ ”
Elliott Wallace smiled. “ ‘Other fish to fry’? That’s a strange way to put it. But thank you, Aaron. I needed to be reassured I’m not failing Mack or Olivia . . .” He paused, then corrected himself: “I mean his mother and sister, of course.”
“You’re not failing them,” Aaron Klein said emphatically.
That night, as he was sipping a predinner glass of wine with his wife, Aaron said, “Jenny, today I realized that even stuffed shirts are like schoolboys when they fall in love. Elliott can’t mention Olivia MacKenzie’s name without getting stars in his eyes.”
14
Nicholas DeMarco, owner of the trendy club the Woodshed, as well as an upscale restaurant in Palm Beach, was notified of the disappearance of the NYU coed Leesey Andrews late Tuesday evening while on a golf outing in South Carolina.
On Wednesday morning, he flew home, and by three o’clock Wednesday afternoon he was following a secretary down a long corridor on the ninth floor of 1 Hogan Place to the section where the detectives assigned to the District Attorney of Manhattan worked. He had an appointment with Captain Larry Ahearn, the commanding officer of the squad.
Tall, with the lean figure of a disciplined athlete, Nick walked with long strides, a worried frown on his forehead. Absentmindedly, he passed a hand through his short hair, which, despite his best efforts, curled when it was damp.
I should have stopped home long enough to change, he chided himself. He was wearing an open-necked checkered blue and white sport shirt, which felt too casual, even with a light blue jacket and dark blue slacks.
“This is the detectives’ squad room,” the secretary explained, as they entered a large room in which rows of desks were haphazardly clustered. Only a half dozen of them were occupied, although piles of papers and ringing telephones testified to the fact that all of the others were active workstations.
The five men and one woman who were there looked up as he crossed the room, threading his way between the desks after the secretary. He was keenly aware of being the object of sharp scrutiny. Ten to one, they all know who I am and why I’m here, and they resent me. They have me pegged as the owner of one of those raunchy bars where underage kids get drunk, he thought.
The secretary knocked on the door of a private office to the left of the squad room and, without waiting for an answer, opened it.
Captain Larry Ahearn was alone in the room. He got up from behind the desk and offered his hand to DeMarco. “Thank you for coming in so promptly,” he said briskly. “Please sit down.” He turned to the secretary. “Ask Detective Gaylor to join us.”
DeMarco took the chair nearest Ahearn’s desk. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t available last night. Early yesterday morning I flew to South Carolina to meet some friends.”
“I understand from your secretary that you flew your own private plane from Teterboro Airport,” Ahearn said.
“That’s right. And I flew back this morning. I couldn’t get an early start because of the weather down there. They had heavy storms in Charleston.”
“When did your staff notify you that Leesey Andrews, a young woman who left your club at closing time early Tuesday morning, had disappeared?”
“The call came to my cell phone about nine o’clock last night.
I was out to dinner with friends and hadn’t carried it with me. Quite frankly, as a restaurant owner, I consider people who make or take calls in restaurants pretty insufferable. When I got back to the hotel at about eleven, I checked my messages. Is there any word about Ms. Andrews? Has she called her family?”
“No,” Ahearn said briefly, then looked past DeMarco. “Come in, Bob.”
Nicholas DeMarco had not heard the door open. He stood up and turned as a trim man with graying hair who looked to be in his late fifties crossed the room with a quick stride. He smiled briefly as he reached out his hand.
“Detective Gaylor,” he said, then pulled up a chair and turned it, facing Nick at a right angle to the captain’s desk.
“Mr. DeMarco,” Ahearn began, “we are very concerned that Leesey Andrews may be the victim of foul play. Your employees tell us that you were in the Woodshed at approximately ten o’clock on Monday evening and were speaking with her.”
“That’s right,” Nick answered promptly. “Because I was leaving for South Carolina, I worked late at my office at 400 Park Avenue. Then I stopped at my apartment, changed to casual clothes, and went down to the Woodshed.”
“Do you visit your club frequently?”
“I would say I drop in frequently. I no longer do, nor want to do, hands-on management. Tom Ferrazzano runs the Woodshed for me as both host and manager. And I might add he does an excellent job of it. In the ten months we’ve been operating, we’ve never had one single incident caused by an underage drinker being served or an adult being served too much for his or her own good. Our employees are thoroughly checked out before they’re hired, as are the bands we book to perform.”
“The reputation of the Woodshed is good,” Detective Gaylor agreed. “But your own employees tell us that you spent quite a bit of time talking to Leesey Andrews.”
“I saw her dancing,” Nick said promptly. “She’s a beautiful girl and a really excellent dancer. To look at her you would think she was a professional. But she also looks very young. I know her ID had been checked, but if I had to bet on it, I’d have sworn she was underage. That’s why I had one of the waiters bring her over to my table and asked to see it myself. She had just turned twenty-one.”
“She joined you at your table,” Gaylor said flatly. “You bought her a drink.”
“She had a glass of pinot grigio with me, then returned to her friends.”
“What did the two of you talk about while she was sipping that glass, Mr. DeMarco?” Captain Ahearn asked.
“The usual social-type conversation. She told me she was graduating from NYU next year and still deciding what she wanted to do. She said her father and brother were doctors but becoming a medical doctor wasn’t right for her. She said that more and more she was thinking of going for a master’s in social work but she wasn’t sure. She was going to take a year off after college and then figure out the next step.”
“Didn’t that seem to you to be a lot of personal information to impart to a stranger, Mr. DeMarco?”
Nicholas DeMarco shrugged. “Not really. Then she thanked me for the drink and went back to her friends. I would say she was at my table for less than fifteen minutes.”
“What did you do then?” Ahearn asked.
“I finished dinner and went home.”
“Where do you live?”
“My apartment is on Park Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street. However I recently bought a building in TriBeCa and have a loft apartment there. That was where I stayed Monday night.”
Nick had debated about furnishing that information to the police and decided it was wiser to put it on the table immediately.
“You have a loft in TriBeCa? None of your employees told us that.”
“I don’t share my personal investments with my employees.”
“Is there a doorman in your building in TriBeCa?”
He shook his head. “As I told you, my apartment is a loft. The building is five stories high. I own it and have bought out the leases of the tenants. The other floors are now unoccupied.”
“How far is it from your bar?”
“About seven blocks.” Nicholas DeMarco hesitated, then added, “I am very sure you must have most of this information already. I left the Woodshed shortly before eleven o’clock. I walked to the TriBeCa place and went to bed immediately. My alarm went off at five A.M. I showered, dressed, and drove to Teterboro Airport. I took off at six forty-five, and landed in Charleston at Charleston Airport. I teed off at the club at noon.”
“You did not invite Ms. Andrews to stop in for a nightcap?”
“No, I did not.” Nicholas DeMarco looked from one to the other of the detectives. “From the news reports I heard driving in from the airport, I know that Leesey’s father has posted a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to her whereabouts. I intend to match that sum. More than anything, I want Leesey Andrews found alive and well, primarily because it would be horrifying if anything happened to her . . .”
“Primarily?” Ahearn said, taken aback momentarily. “What other reason do you have to want her found?”
“My second very selfish reason is that a great deal of money has been spent buying the property on which the Woodshed is situated, renovating the premises, furnishing and staffing it. I wanted to create a safe, fun place for young people and not-so-young people to enjoy. If Leesey’s disappearance is traced to an encounter she had in my club, the media will hound us, and within six months our doors will be closed. I want you to investigate our employees, our customers, and me. But I can promise you that you’re wasting your time if you think I had anything to do with that girl’s disappearance.”
“Mr. DeMarco, you are one of the many people we are and will be interviewing,” Ahearn said calmly. “Did you file a flight plan at Teterboro?”
“Of course. If you check the records, the flying time down yesterday morning was excellent. Today, because of the nearby storms, it was somewhat slower.”
“One last question, Mr. DeMarco. How did you get back and forth to the airport?”
“In my car, I drove myself.”
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“I usually drive a Mercedes convertible unless for some reason I’m carrying a lot of baggage. Actually my golf clubs were in my SUV, so that was what I drove back and forth to the airport yesterday and today.”
Nicholas DeMarco did not need to catch the glance the two detectives exchanged to know that he had become a person of interest in the disappearance of Leesey Andrews. I can understand why, he thought. I was talking to her a few hours before she disappeared. No one can verify that she didn’t meet me later at the apartment. I took off early the next morning in a private plane. I can’t blame them for being suspicious—that’s their job.
With a brief smile, he offered his hand to both men and told them that he was going to make public immediately his offer to match the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to Leesey’s whereabouts.
“And I can assure you, we’ll be working 24/7 to find her, or if something has happened to her, find the person who did it,” Ahearn said, in a tone of voice that Nicholas DeMarco correctly interpreted as a warning.
15
As I was leaving the Sutton Place apartment, my cell phone rang. The caller identified himself as Detective Barrott, and though my pulse quickened, I kept my response to him deliberately cool. He had brushed me off on Monday, so what possible reason did he have for calling me now?
“Ms. MacKenzie, as you may be aware, a young woman, Leesey Andrews, who disappeared last night, lives next door to you on Thompson Street. I am there now, interviewing the neighbors on the block. I saw your name listed on the directory in your building. I’d very much appreciate an opportunity to speak with you again. Is it possible to set up an appointment with you soon?”
Holding the phone to one ear, I signaled to the doorman to hail a cab for me. There was one nearby just discharging a passenger. As I waited for an
elderly lady to get out, I told Barrott that I was on my way back to my own apartment and, depending on traffic, would be there in about twenty minutes.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said flatly, giving me no opportunity to let him know whether that was convenient for me or not.
Some days a cab ride between Sutton Place and Thompson Street takes fifteen minutes. Other days the traffic simply crawls. This was one of those crawling days. It wasn’t as though I was in any rush to see Detective Barrott—it’s just that once I’m on my way anywhere, I’m impatient to get there, another characteristic inherited from my father.
And that made me think of my father’s anxiety when Mack disappeared and the anxiety Leesey Andrews’s father must be feeling now. Last night on the eleven o’clock news, holding back tears, Dr. Andrews had held up his daughter’s picture and pleaded for assistance in finding her. I thought I could imagine what he was going through, then wondered if that was really true. Bad as it had been for us, Mack had after all seemingly walked out of his life in midafternoon. Leesey Andrews was surely more vulnerable, alone at night, and certainly no match for a strong predator.
All that was whirling through my mind as the cab made its way slowly to Thompson Street.
Barrott was sitting on the steps of the brownstone, an incongruous sight, I thought, as I paid the driver. The afternoon had turned warm again, and he had opened his jacket and loosened his tie. When he spotted me, in a fluid movement he stood up quickly, tightened the tie, and buttoned the jacket again.
We greeted each other with reserved courtesy, and I invited him inside. As I turned the key in the entrance door, I noticed a couple of vans with TV markings parked outside the building next door, the building where Leesey Andrews lived—or had lived.
My studio apartment is in the rear of the building and is the only one on the lobby floor. I took it on a year’s lease last September when I started working for Judge Huot. In these past nine months it has become, for me, a peaceful haven from Sutton Place, where my sense of loss over my father and anxiety over Mack are never totally absent.