Jake & Mimi (31 page)

I cross the street, and suddenly I’m standing in front of the Waverly Theater. Where all this began.

I stand just where she stood, the woman I followed. Where she stood waiting for a stranger who had touched her, unbidden,
in the dark. I remember the fear in her eyes. Terror. In her apartment I brought it out again.

I brought it out in all of them. In Melissa Clay. In Diane Silio. In Nina Torring. In Elise. Fear and, finally, pain.

I close my eyes, here in the middle of the busy sidewalk. It wasn’t enough. I went further every time, and still it wasn’t
enough. It never would’ve been.

It is 9:30. Mimi Lessing is at home, dressing quietly. Thinking of the ties. Wondering if she will have the courage to open
the door and walk inside. I touch the cell phone in my pocket, then take my hand away. If I were to call her, I’d tell her
not to marry him.

I open my eyes. I turn away from the theater and walk slowly along West Fourth Street. Nina Torring’s art gallery should be
right around here. West Fourth, she said. I look out for it, remembering again her body under the lamps. Her stillness. The
gleaming ring in her nightstand drawer. I walk past a tobacconist, a clothes store. Here it is. Tucked between a drugstore
and a florist. White Swan Galleries. I walk to the glass.

She’s had a break-in. The front door and windows are covered in yellow police tape.
DO NOT CROSS
is repeated all along it in thick black lettering. I start away but then turn back. I walk to the glass again. The gallery
lights are out, but there’s enough light from the street that I can see inside. The pictures hang on the wall undisturbed.
The room is immaculate.

I walk into the drugstore next door. The Asian man behind the counter looks up, then back at the video he’s watching on a
small TV perched on a crate on the floor. I pick up a lighter from the stand in front of the register and hand him a five.

“What happened next door?” I ask.

He rings up the sale and makes change from the register. “Lady missing.”

“Missing?”

He nods. “Missing.”

“How long?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Store close one week.”

I take the change and the lighter and step back outside. I walk back to the gallery glass. What could he mean, “missing”?
I cross the street and start down West Fourth, passing the hoop court again, then the Blue Note jazz club. I walk to Bleecker,
then to Sullivan, and turn right, the murmur of the Village dying quickly as I walk down the tree-lined block.

Three-sixty-four Sullivan Street. Nina Torring’s apartment. I look at the black gate, at the heavy mahogany door. At the flowerpots,
filled with rich earth and roses. “My New York garden,” she had said as she took out her keys. Across the street is an outdoor
café. The Caffe Lune. I walk over and take a seat at a sidewalk table. A young waitress comes from inside and sets a coaster
in front of me.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi. Absolut and tonic, please.”

“Sure. Lime?”

“Yes.”

She walks back inside.

I stare across the street at Nina Torring’s apartment. The waitress returns with my drink and sets it in front of me. I take
a long sip.

Missing
.

W
e have left the city behind us, and the river as well, and now in the darkness the suburbs slip away. I watch the white lines
of the Thruway vanish beneath the car, and I listen to the smooth murmur of its engine. And to the only other sound — the
soft breathing I know so well.

Soon the chloroform will wear off. It pained me to use it, to see her beautiful eyes dilate in terror as I pressed the soaked
cloth to her face. But I had no choice. The work we have before us tonight requires privacy, and space. And so I cut loose
from the posts the silk ties that bound her hands, and dressed her on the bed in the clothes she had folded neatly and laid
on the chair by the window. I gathered together the items that had seduced her — the tape player, the lamp, the blindfold,
and last of all the four ties — and slipped out the door and walked across the parking lot to the car. I drove the car into
the space in front of room twenty, then surveyed the lot around me. It held only other cars. Thirty yards away, through the
window of the motel office, I could see the desk clerk sitting with his back to me, the phone to his ear. I activated the
front-desk Øre, and his casual voice came through the car speakers. A personal call. I stepped from the car and opened the
far back door, the one that faced only the ice room and the fence. I slipped back into room twenty.

It took only seconds to carry Miss Lessing to the car door and ease her into the backseat. She slept there beneath a quilted
blanket until we had passed safely through the toll plaza and onto the Thruway we travel now. A short while ago, in the far
corner of the John Jay Memorial Rest Area, beside a thick bank of trees, I watched the last of the few cars disappear back
onto the open road. Working carefully in the dark, I moved Miss Lessing to where she rests now. Beside me.

Her hands are tied behind the passenger seat with one silk tie, her ankles bound in front of her with another. She is more
delicate than I have ever imagined. Her complexion is pure, her body light and graceful. Looking at her slender neck, at her
face tucked into her chest in sleep, I see again the innocent young woman of a year ago. And I can almost convince myself
that there has been some mistake.

I grip the wheel tighter and look back at the road.

Just hours ago I sat three blocks from the Century Motel, listening through the car stereo as Jake Teller canceled the reservation
to room twenty. I closed my eyes in gratitude and touched my head gently to the top of the steering column. She had refused
him. I drove to her block and parked in front of La Boheme, from whose window I had watched her on so many evenings. I lowered
the car window to let in the cool night air, and I activated her apartment Øres.

And heard, twenty minutes later, Miss Lessing ask the operator for the street address of the Century Motel.

I stared into the car speakers. And as I sat there, the truth sinking in like slow poison, Kreisler began to play. “Caprice
Viennois.” I looked out the window at the block I had learned to see through her eyes. At the delicate stonework of the prewar
building, the watercolors in the window of the art gallery. At the slate of wines on the chalkboard at Vine. Kreisler played
on, her favorite violin refrain approaching. I turned off the car stereo and sat for a few minutes in the nighttime quiet.
Then I started the car and pulled away.

I had just enough time to rent and prepare the room. And then to park again a few blocks from the Century Motel. I sat in
the driver’s seat, my eyes closed, listening to the silence of room twenty. Ten o’clock came. Silence. 10:01. 10:02. 10:03.
Could it be? Through the car speakers came the soft, damning click of the motel-room door. She had come.

She stirs. I look over quickly. She lifts her face from her chest, whispers something, then gives in again to the soft pull
of unconsciousness. I reach with a gloved hand and touch her cheek. She stirs again, her light perfume reaching me. Now she
is still. I look back at the black road.

The others were never pure. Not the young florist and not the waitress who succeeded her. Claire was her name; she poured
espressos and lattes at a First Avenue café. A young woman who wore light colors, even in winter, and kept a place in her
heart for the older customers. “Go sit,” she would say. “I’ll bring it to you.” A young woman who spent her breaks curled
in the café corner, reading Kerouac and Burroughs.

A young woman whose boyfriend, I soon discovered, brought cocaine to her each Friday night. Cocaine she could not afford on
a countergirl’s salary, so she paid him another way. As I listened.

We drive now past dark, forgotten commuter towns. Ardonia. Port Ewen. Saugerties. We are sixty miles from our destination.
An hour, no more. I look again from the road to her clear, smooth face.

The others were never pure. Miss Lessing was. She stirs again, with more authority now, wetting her lips, shaking her head
once, slowly. I look back at the dark Thruway.

She will soon be again.

A
nother?”

“No, thanks.”

The waitress smiles and walks back inside. I leave a five for her in the bill tray, step through the gate and out onto the
sidewalk. I look across the street again, at the dark mahogany door of Nina Torring’s apartment building. I wonder if her
husband is in there, waiting by the phone. My old teammate, Nick Simms. Maybe that’s it. Maybe she left him and won’t call.
I start up Sullivan Street, toward Bleecker. Just before the corner I turn around and look back, but I see only the empty
sidewalk and the dark trees that have been planted every twenty feet.

I turn onto Bleecker, glad for the lights of the Village again. A breeze brings the scent of pesto out the open door of an
Italian restaurant. In its window are loaves of bread, arranged like flowers. I step to the curb and wave down a cab.

“Eighty-first and Amsterdam,” I tell the driver. We make our slow way west through the crowded Village, then up the West Side
Highway, and now across again. “Right here is fine,” I tell him at the corner of Eighty-first Street, and step out into the
cool spring night and walk the half block to my apartment. On the front steps I look at my watch. 10:30. Mimi is home by now,
or else with her fiancé. If she ever went to the Century Motel at all.

I let myself into my building and climb the three flights to my floor. I walk down the short hallway to my apartment door
and slip my key into the lock.

“Jake Teller?”

I turn to see a man step down into the hallway from the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors. He looks about fifty, and
he is wearing a gray suit jacket, neatly cut. He stretches his legs, as though he’s been sitting there for some time; as he
walks toward me, he reaches into his jacket and in one quick, easy motion comes out with a police badge. I’ve never seen one
up close.

“Yes, I’m Jake Teller,” I say.

“I’m Detective Crusin. Can I ask you a few questions? Five minutes, tops.”

“About what?”

“A missing woman.”

I look at him. Beneath his glasses, his dark eyes are sharp. “Let’s go inside,” I say.

We step into the small kitchen, and I close the door behind us. We stand facing each other.

“You want something to drink?” I ask him.

“Yes. Water, please.”

I step past him, take a glass from the cupboard and some ice cubes from the freezer.
Nick Simms. Nina told him
. As I fill the glass at the sink, I can feel the detective taking in the place. The messy living room, the open door to the
bedroom. I turn to see him pulling out one of the low-back chairs from the kitchen table. I hand him his glass of water, and
he sets it on the table, next to the iron, which still stands upright. He sits down, and I sit across from him.

“Did her husband give you my name?” I ask him.

“Husband?” he says, a hard edge to his voice. “Her doorman gave me your name.”

I feel a touch like cold steel in my spine.

“Doorman?”

“Clete Reynolds.” He watches me closely. “Your old friend.”

“Elise?” I say. “Elise is missing?”

He sits quietly for a few seconds, his hands resting on his legs.

“Not legally. Not yet. But she missed her mother’s fiftieth-birthday party last night, a party that she helped plan. She missed
class this morning. No one can reach her.”

“If she’s not miss —”

“I went to school with her father.” His voice is tight. He takes a pen and a small notebook from his suit jacket. He pages
through the notebook, then looks back at me. “The doorman thought Elise might be with you.”

I shake my head. “I saw her last Friday night. That’s it.”

“You’re not her boyfriend?”

“No.”

“She told the doorman you are.”

“We had one date.”

“Last Friday.”

I nod.