Entr'acte (9 page)

It was a bad suggestion. Doug paled and began rubbing his palms on his thighs. “But they found Connie dead!”

“Look, son,” the detective said quietly. “You need to face up to the fact that this young lady did not want to see you anymore, and is probably avoiding you.

“As painful as that is for you, that is almost certainly what is happening here. Every year 30,000 people are reported missing in New York City,” he said. “In the vast majority of those cases the missing person turns up a few days later saying he just needed some time.

“It may be inconsiderate, but it isn’t criminal,” Ryerson said.

“A large number of others are runaways who do not want to be found, parental abductions and some cases of foul play.”

“How do you know that’s not what we have here?” Doug insisted. “Shouldn’t you put men out on the street looking for her?”

The cop was getting tired of this interview. He tried another tack. “If we did suspect foul play, you realize you would be our prime suspect,” he said pointedly.

78

ENTR’ACTE

“Me!” Doug’s arms flailed the air as he stood up. “I love her.

That’s ridiculous.”

“The officer is just making a point,” Debbie said soothingly.

“We can’t rule it out,” Ryerson muttered.

“Look, all her stuff is still in the apartment. She was walking her dog when she disappeared,” Doug said. “Does that sound like she planned to leave?”

“Maybe she plans to come back,” the detective said mildly,

“when the coast is clear.”

“Maybe she was kidnapped,” Doug shouted. “You know, like on TV.”

“An aspiring actress kidnapped,” Debbie giggled. “Boy are they going to be disappointed. She probably doesn’t even have bus fare; Doug here was going to buy her lunch.”

Doug was back to reading Connie’s file. “It says here the autopsy report was inconclusive that the woman pulled out of the river even was Connie.”

Ryerson took the pages from him and read them out loud, tapping his pencil on the desk for accompaniment. “This says the body was too badly decomposed to make a positive identification, but that out of all the missing women on file, Miss Pettit most closely matched the victim.”

“Is that why the case is still marked “open’,” Debbie said,

“because you’re not sure?”

Ryerson pulled out a death certificate from the file. It indicated that Muriel Pettit had returned to New York seven years after the body was found in the river and had her sister declared legally dead.

“I’d say it’s an open case because the killer has not been apprehended, and there is no statute of limitations on murder,”

the detective said.

But, blowing the dust off the folder for emphasis, he went on, 79

FRANK JULIANO

“an open case is different than an active case. This obviously hasn’t been on the front burner in many years.”

They opened the box of personal effects. There were several letters, an address book and diary, and a thin gold bracelet studded with tiny emeralds.

“This stuff should have been turned over to the sister,”

Ryerson said. “Joyce could claim the jewelry and everything else by proving her relationship.” He was speaking to Debbie, who nodded.

Doug fished a large photograph out of the box. It was in its own cardboard frame and folder, of the sort expensive nightclubs in the 1930s and ’40s would provide through their “house photographer.”

He studied the photo for a moment and let out a long, low whistle. Doug passed the photo to Debbie, whose eyes widened.

“What, already?” Ryerson demanded.

“This is a picture of Joyce,” Doug said. He flipped it over; it was stamped in gold ink on the back of the folder: “El Morocco.

154 East 54th St. ELdorado <5>-8769. The Ernie Holst Orchestra entertains nightly. This souvenir photo taken June 19, 1939.”

“That’s Joyce?” The cop had become interested in the case for a moment. “Can’t be. This says she was born in 1986,” he smiled at his confused visitors. “I think we can agree that it is not unusual for a girl to look a lot like her aunt.”

The three of them kind of sighed then, and Doug shivered involuntarily.

“That’s more than two weeks after Connie was last seen,”

Debbie mused.

“Pretty hard not to be seen at the El Morocco in those days,”

Ryerson muttered. He fished around in the box and came up with the inventory sheet.

80

ENTR’ACTE

“It seems that the El Morocco photographer himself gave the photo to the police after reading about Connie Pettit’s disappearance in the newspaper,” the cop read. “It was put here with the items taken from the dead woman’s body; apparently no one noticed or followed up on the discrepancy in the dates.”

He finished filling out the missing persons report on Joyce, dutifully noting her daily requirement of Depakote. He attached the small color photo Doug had taken from his wallet and promised to handle the case himself.

81

“Maybe we ought to check the hospitals, she could’ve been hurt,” Doug said. “We probably should have done that yesterday.

Poor Joyce, here she is in a strange city and we’re here and we’re not helping her.”

Debbie had agreed to go with Doug to follow up a few ideas he had about Joyce’s disappearance; partly to keep him out of the apartment long enough to give Joyce a chance to slip in and out.

Partly also, Debbie was startled by the resemblance between Joyce and her aunt and the parallels between the two cases. Joyce did not strike her as the type of woman who would run away from a problem.

“Show me where Joyce’s car is parked,” Doug demanded, suddenly taking charge of the “investigation.” Debbie dutifully started out in that direction, Doug at her side taking notes on whatever she could remember about Joyce’s activities since she arrived in New York.

“We had lunch in here,” Deb said as they passed Nathan’s green and yellow corner restaurant. Doug went inside and Debbie followed him as far as the cash register.

He was showing another photo of his girlfriend to the short 82

ENTR’ACTE

order cooks and servers, asking if they had seen her. All of them shook their heads no, some not even bothering to glance up.

He must really love her, Debbie thought. It’s too bad they want such different things out of life, such devotion is rare and Doug would at least be good to Joyce.

When they passed the photographer’s studio, the hair on the back of Debbie’s neck stood up. “This guy gave us a tough time,”

she said.

“He came on to Joyce? What did he do?” Doug was considering a headlong rush up the stairs from the street, and Debbie had to pull him back to the curb.

“He didn’t really do anything. He was just kind of sleazy.

Mostly he tried to charge Joyce too much and he kind of made fun of her, being “from the woods” and all that,” Deb recalled.

She told him how Joyce had handled herself, getting the deal she wanted and then making the photographer stick to it.

“Joyce is like that,” Doug said admiringly. “Whenever we have a problem with a bill or a difficult salesperson, she handles it. She knows how to stand up for herself.” There was a pause, and then he asked, “So, that was it then?”

“Not exactly,” Deb started cautiously. “She was coming here this morning to pick up the photos she’s ordered…”

Doug trembled with rage. He seemed to swell up before Debbie’s eyes; a lanky version of the Incredible Hulk ready to commit all kinds of mayhem in defense of his girlfriend.

“Hold on a minute,” she said, grabbing his upper arm. “You saw her chasing somebody down an alley several blocks from here. She would have come here first, before she went to any calls.”

They had a whispered conference on the sidewalk and then retreated to the nearby New York Public Library, where Debbie called Sergeant Ryerson from a pay phone.

83

FRANK JULIANO

The two watched from one of the tall windows in the main reading room as two squad cars pulled up and uniformed officers, guns drawn, ran up the stairs.

With Debbie stationed at the window, Doug went back into the stacks and came up with a book on baffling cases of people who vanished in New York without a trace.

“Why are you driving yourself crazy?” Deb said when she saw the book. “You know in your heart that Joyce is just trying to sort out the situation between the two of you and when she’s ready, she’ll be back.”

Doug stared pointedly past Debbie through the window at the photographer’s studio. It had been several minutes and the police were still inside.

He riffled through the coarse pages of the book until he came to what he was looking for: the entry under Judge Joseph Force Crater.

“This is the guy Ryerson mentioned to me the first time I went to see him,” he said. He scanned the section and then paraphrased it to Debbie.

“Joseph Force Crater was a justice on the New York Supreme Court who disappeared on the evening of August 6, 1930. He was last seen getting into a cab on Eighth Avenue after having dinner with friends.

“He had a ticket reserved for him at a Broadway show,

“Dancing Partner,’ that started at 8. Although no one could place him there, someone did claim his ticket and sat in his seat.

“Crater was a known philanderer who was supposedly having an affair with a chorus girl in the show. The girl was also supposed to be friendly with a mob boss. That was one theory on his disappearance, that he was rubbed out.

“He also was involved in Tammany Hall, a corrupt political organization that a reform movement was about to expose,”

84

ENTR’ACTE

Doug read. “Many of its members went to jail, and as its lawyer, Crater would have known where all the evidence was.”

“So this guy got rubbed out twice?” Debbie said idly.

“Some people think he just took the cash out of the little tin boxes they used for payoffs and headed south,” Doug said. “He wasn’t happily married, so it would have solved several problems at once for him.

“Here’s the spooky part, though. There were reported sitings of him as late as 1940, 10 years after he first disappeared. The police searched his apartment twice, and the second time one of the suits that had been there was gone, but there were dirty clothes in the hamper.

“The crowning touch,” Doug said, “is that the judge always spent summers in Maine, at Belgrade Lakes. He was there when he got a mysterious phone call that lured him back to the city, where he vanished three days later.”

“Ryerson thinks that has something to do with Connie Pettit, or with Joyce?” Deb asked him.

“I think he mentioned it to show me a lot of these cases go unsolved,” Doug said.

The police came down the stairs of the building across the street, their guns holstered and unaccompanied by the photographer.

“Well, she wasn’t up there. I guess he had nothing to do with it,” Debbie said.

“Here’s another one. Dorothy Arnold, 26, was last seen crossing busy Fifth Avenue on Dec. 10, 1910,” Doug read from the book. “A socialite, she was very popular and was being courted by the son of another socially prominent family.

“In the late afternoon, after buying a box of expensive chocolates and waving gaily to her friends, Miss Arnold set off 85

FRANK JULIANO

across Fifth Avenue near 38th Street but never reached the other side,” he read. “She was never seen again.”

Debbie pulled the book out of his hands and threw it on the long wooden table, the loud slam it made startling several nearby patrons.

“Stop torturing yourself,” she said. “If you’re so concerned, you can do something practical. We can make up flyers and distribute them around the neighborhood. We can go to the places Joyce was headed this morning and see if anything unusual happened. We can see if someone turned in her purse or found her dog.”

They called as many city hospitals as they could find listed in the Manhattan White Pages, but none of them had a Joyce Waszlewski as a patient.

“I’d like to stay at your place until this is settled, if that’s all right,” Doug said as they walked toward the parking lot. “That’s where Joyce will expect me to be.”

That’s exactly the problem, Debbie thought. Besides, I hardly know Joyce, and I know her boyfriend even less.

She was uncomfortable with the idea of Doug staying with her and was about to suggest that he stay with Ron when Doug said,

“We really ought to call her parents.”

“I don’t think so, Doug. It’s only been a day, and this could needlessly worry them,” she said, uncertainly.

“They’re already upset because Joyce didn’t call them when she arrived, and I take it she hadn’t called them yet,” Doug said.

“Her parents are the worrying type.

“Anyway, there might be something going on here they ought to know about. This isn’t like Joyce. Even if I shouldn’t have come, she wouldn’t pull something like this. She’d be more likely to read me the riot act and slam the door in my face.”

86

ENTR’ACTE

His tone was reasonable, and Debbie knew that he was right.

Hiding didn’t seem like Joyce’s style, from what Deb had seen of her.

* * * *

She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. A small stuffed bear Joyce had told her was named Pepsi Koala had fallen from its perch on the sun visor, but nothing else was disturbed.

They went up to the booth and confirmed that Joyce’s keys were still there and the car had not been moved since it was brought back in after the trip to the bus station.

Doug pointed dazedly at the street sign at the corner, 40th and Broadway. “Isn’t this the corner where Connie Pettit was last seen?”

“She was coming out of the Empire Theater,” Debbie said, trying to recall the police reports they’d read. “This was the address.”

The attendant in the booth knew nothing about what had stood on the site. He directed them to a magazine stand that was diagonally across the intersection. “That guy’s been there for years; he’d know.”