A Cool Breeze on the Underground (5 page)

“Who did Scott call? You or Mrs. Chase?”

“Me,” said Liz Chase.

“Was he a boyfriend?”

“Just a friend.”

Neal picked a stem of grapes from the plate and popped one in his mouth. Something was screwy here. “And he just happened to run into Allie in London? Why was he there?”

“A trip with his school.”

Nice school, thought Neal, whose own class trip had been to Ossining.

“Anything unusual happen just before Allie took off?” Neal asked, feeling stupid. It was a stupid, pat question, and usually the kind of information parents volunteered.

Nobody answered. Neal chewed on another grape to kill time. Two grapes later, he said, “Shall I take that to mean that nothing unusual happened, or that something unusual did happen and we don’t want to talk about it?”

“Allie was home for the weekend,” Liz said. “She just hung around, really.”

“No, Mrs. Chase, she didn’t just hang around, really. She flew to Paris. You see, in most runaways, there is what we like to call a ‘precipitating factor.’ A fight with the parents, a fight
between
the parents … maybe the kid had been grounded, forbidden to see a boyfriend … had her allowance cut—”

“Nothing like that,” said Chase. He sounded really sure about it.

“Too bad. It helps if there was. If you know what a kid is running from, you have a jump on what she’s running to. But just business as usual?”

More grapes.

“When did you last see Allie?” Another stupid, pat question.

“Saturday night I went to a party, a fund-raiser,” Liz Chase said. “John was in Washington. He got home … when, darling?”

“Ten, I suppose.”

“I didn’t get in till late. I imagine it was after one. I looked in on Allie in her room. She was asleep.”

“Asleep or passed out?”

Chase said, “I don’t particularly care for your attitude.”

“Neither do I,” Neal answered, “but we’re both stuck with it.”

Liz jumped in. “When we got up Sunday … late … Allie was gone. She’d told Marie-Christine—”

“Who?”

“One of the staff. Allie told her that she was going for a walk.”

“Which she did.”

“Which she did.”

For a second, Neal felt that he should stand up and pace around the room. One of those “nobody leaves until” numbers. Instead, he sank back into the sofa and said, “All right, so after you have your coffee and omelets and read the Sunday
Times,
you notice that Allie hasn’t come home yet. Then what?”

“I drove around looking for her,” Liz said.

The Senator didn’t say anything.

“And you didn’t find her.”

“But I did find the car, parked downtown by the bus station, so right away I thought…”

She let her thought drop off as if she was trying to think up a new ending. From the looks on everyone’s faces in the ensuing silence, Neal thought this one could be a four- or five-graper. He couldn’t take it.

“You thought that Allie had taken off again.”

Liz nodded. She hit him with those brown eyes flecked with green and filled with sadness. What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Chase? “How many times has Allie run away?” Neal asked. He flipped through the report. No mention of previous times. Swell.

“Four, maybe five times,” said Lombardi, doing his job.

“Overseas?”

“No, no,” Lombardi said quickly. “Twice to New York. Fort Lauderdale once. L.A.”

“One time to her grandparents in Raleigh,” Liz said. “That was when we were in Washington.”

“Is Allie close to her grandparents?”

“Allie is not close to anybody, Mr. Carey,” said Mrs. Chase.

The sun was calling it a day. Neal watched the ocean turning a slate gray.

“So then you called the cops and the FBI and the state patrol and the National Guard?”

“I called her school,” Lombardi said as Chase turned a deep red, “and asked to speak to her—”

“Slick.”

“And they said she hadn’t come back from her weekend home.”

“So
then
you called the cops and the FBI and the state patrol and the National Guard.”

This was called “baiting the client” and was the kind of thing that got you canned. Or it could get the client jazzed up enough to drop his guard and tell you something juicy. Or it could do both.

“Or did you call the Gallup poll?”

Set the hook and yank the line. Chase came out of his chair like a trout out of a stream.

“Listen, you little bastard—”

Why
is
everyone calling me a little bastard today?

“Darling—”

“It’s all our fault, right? All the parents’ fault! We gave that kid everything! Now I’m supposed to destroy my future for her? She doesn’t want to be here, fine!”

“Yeah, it’s okay with me, too, Senator, but now you want her back in the picture.”

“You don’t work for me anymore!”

Neal stood up. “I don’t work for you, period. I work for the bank. They tell me to go after your kid, I go after your kid. They tell me to forget it, I forget it.”

Lombardi got up. Then Liz got up. “Find my daughter.”

It wasn’t a plea, it was a command. It was the kind of command that comes from a beautiful woman, the kind of command that comes from a mother. It was the kind of command that comes from a wife who doesn’t need Hubby’s okay. Neal heard it all three ways.

Good old Marie-Christine brought in coffee and they started again.

No, Allie had not used the AmEx card since buying the air ticket. Yes, she had trust funds from both sets of grandparents but no way of touching the funds without her parents’ signatures. She had her own bank account as well, but she hadn’t drawn anything from that, either. So she was on her own financially, which was very bad news. It meant that she could either beg, steal, or sell herself. Begging wasn’t very lucrative, and you usually had to buy your begging spot from the local thug. Stealing takes considerable skill. Selling yourself doesn’t.

And little Allie would need a lot of money, because drugs aren’t cheap and the people who sell them are.

“If it was strictly up to me,” Neal said, “I’d advise you to clean out Allie’s closets, make yourself a nice album, and get on with the business of mourning. Because the girl you knew probably doesn’t exist anymore.”

Because sometimes it’s just too late, folks. The streets take the child you know and turn that child into someone you don’t even recognize. Neal flashed on the Halperin kid, on that goofy look he had on his face all the time, even after …

“May I see Allie’s room now, please?” he asked.

Liz and lombardi took him there.

It looked like a hotel room: elegant, sleek, comfortable but nobody lived there. No pictures, souvenirs, no posters of rock stars on the wall.

Walk-in closet, private bath, of course. Bay window, view of the ocean. “This is going to take a while,” Neal said.

“If we’re not in the way …” Liz answered.

Neal gestured to the bed. Liz and Lombardi sat down and put their hands in their laps.

Neal searched the room. It was a relief to be doing something practical, something quiet, something he was good at. He went through the drawers and the closets carefully, slowly.

“Are you in the habit of searching Allie’s room, Mrs. Chase?”

“Wouldn’t you be, Mr. Carey?”

“But you haven’t removed anything.”

“No.”

Neal opened the top drawer of Allie’s dresser and ran his hand along the inside top. He felt the edge of the tape and gently pulled it off. He smelled the two joints.

“Emergency stash,” he said. “Expensive stuff, too.”

“Money is not Allie’s particular problem in life,” Liz said.

Didn’t used to be, Mrs. C.

Searching the contents of the drawer, Neal asked, “Did you used to take away drugs you found here?”

Liz nodded. “We fought about it.”

“What about the prescription stuff?”

“Same thing, once we caught on.”

Neal finished with the drawers and moved to the closet. Allie had a few clothes. Neal flipped through the dozen or so jackets before he found another strip of medical tape stuck to the inside lapel of a nice little denim job.

He removed the three joints from the tape and flipped them to Lombardi. “Hawaii Fourth.”

He didn’t find anything else until he got to the portable Sony TV. He twisted the fine-tune dial off and found the Valium that had been glued to the inside rim.

“Not to worry,” he said. “They use the same kind of paste you used to make in kindergarten. You can eat a quart of it and you won’t get sick.”

“I never dreamed …” Liz Chase was shaking her head.

“You’re not a pro, Mrs. Chase.”

Neal moved into Allie’s bathroom. The medicine cabinet alone took almost half an hour and yielded nothing very interesting. Likewise, the underside of the bathtub rim. Neal emptied the sink cabinet and crawled underneath. He found Allie’s major stash in a small plastic trash bag taped to the bottom of the sink.

“Jackpot!” he called out.

Liz Chase stood in the doorway. “What?”

Neal sat on the floor, rooting through the bag. “Well, we have your uppers, and your downers, and some grass and hash, and a little coke.”

“My god.”

“It’s not all bad news. No needles.”

Neal handed her the bag and smiled. “May I take a look at Allie’s car, please?”

“It’s in the garage.”

It had a lot of company. There were seven cars in the garage. Allie’s was a modest Datsun Z. The others were all sleek little sports jobs that Neal didn’t recognize. That wasn’t too hard, though. Neal didn’t know too many cars that weren’t on the IRT.

“John was very interested in cars for a while,” Liz explained. “As a matter of fact, so was Allie. It gave then something they could share, I think.”

“Everybody needs a hobby.”

Neal started with the glove compartment, just in case there was a note in there nobody had noticed. Maybe a note that read, “I’m in such and such a place and here’s my address and phone number.” He didn’t find it. He found the usual glove compartment crap. A couple of road maps, a service manual, an open package of cherry Life Savers, lipstick, an emergency pack of cigarettes, a comb, a brush, a pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

He felt around between the seats for “she went that-away” clues and didn’t find any of those, either. He also didn’t find any dope of any kind, which sort of surprised him. It was dark by the time he finished.

Neal sank back into the bathtub that came along with the guest room. He had filled it with steaming hot water to try to ease the ache in his body and his soul. The first sip of scotch spread a soothing warmth through his insides, and after a few minutes he was able to pick up his paperback copy of
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
and lose himself in the eighteenth century. Which was his life’s goal, anyway.

He relished the quiet. Chase and Jimmy Cricket had headed back to Washington for one of those crucial votes. The missus was preparing herself for yet another fundraiser for an undoubtedly good cause. What had Dickens called it? “Telescopic Philanthropy”?Although Neal had to admit that given a choice between Mrs. Jellyby and Liz Chase, there was no contest. Anyway, she’d hoped that he “wouldn’t mind dining alone.” He didn’t. The cook laid on, with hopefully unintentional irony, a London broil, rice and asparagus, and followed it up with a raspberry tart. Neal washed it all down with the appropriate wine, and was about half-bagged when he hit the tub. After a chapter of
Pickle,
he laid the book down and thought things over.

Allie hadn’t planned to take off. No good doper leaves a stash like that behind if she’s thought about it. No, Allie was upset when she left. She’d made the decision in a hurry, impulsively, sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning. She’d given it a little more thought in the car and taken whatever stuff she had with her. But she hadn’t gone back to the house to collect anything else, which meant she was a piss-poor druggie, or she really didn’t want to go home.

Also, she wanted to stay gone. Most
casual
runaways, who are fed up with the discipline, or bored at home, or want attention, want to be found. Consciously or unconsciously, they leave clues all over the place. They also find that life out there is a lot worse than life at home, and they come back. Unless life out there is better than life at home. Or life at school, which was something he’d better look into, except he didn’t think he’d be allowed to. The Chases had simply withdrawn Allie
in absentia
as it were, to avoid a scandal. So forget that. But it impressed him that spoiled little Allie hadn’t reached for the plastic, or wired for money. She was gutting it out, and this was a girl who wasn’t used to gutting it out. So why?

He fiddled the hot-water tap with his foot. He didn’t feel like sitting up to reach it and it left his hand free to fiddle with the scotch. He wished he’d taped the afternoon’s interview, because there was something back there that was bugging him, really bugging him, and it was rattling around in the dimmer corners of his mind, just out of reach.

Neal checked his watch when he heard the knock on the bedroom door. It was a few minutes past two in the goddamn morning. He said “Come in,” anyway.

Liz Chase shut the door behind her. Neal wondered why she was wearing black silk to sleep alone in, but that was her business. The black turned her blond hair gold. She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled her legs up underneath just as she had that afternoon, and tugged the hem of the nightgown down around her knees. Then she just sat there looking at him.

Neal had read about this kind of thing in detective novels, but it never had happened to him. He didn’t think it was happening to him now, either, but his throat tightened up and he swallowed hard nevertheless.

“Yeah?”

“This is not easy for me.”

She bit her lip and nodded her head several times, as if she was trying to make up her mind.

“Allie has been with a number of men,” she said.

“There are worse things, Mrs. Chase.”

“Apparently … the Senator is one of them.”

Whoa.

Allie had left a note—in the car, where she knew her mother would find it, because she knew dear old Dad wouldn’t come looking.