Without a Word (2 page)

“What about Madison? Was she there?”

“No. Madison was at home. She came home right after her appointment.”

“And did she seem upset?”

Leon didn't answer my question.

“Were you there when she arrived home, Leon?”

“What I say to you, what you say to me, it's confidential, right?”

“It is as far as I'm concerned.”

He nodded. “Well, then,” he said, “I wasn't at home when she got there, at least not right at that exact moment. I got home about an hour later.”

“How do you know she was home an hour if she doesn't speak, if she doesn't communicate with you?”

“She always came straight home from…” Leon stopped and looked at me.

“So when you got home that day, did she seem upset? Was anything different, anything off?”

Leon shrugged.

“Not that you noticed?”

“No.”

“And when did the police show up?”

“Late. After Madison had gone to bed.”

“Were you asleep as well?”

“No.”

“And when they came, they told you what had happened?”

“Yes.”

“And they showed you the drawing?”

“No. They described it to me.”

“And what else did they say?”

“That no one else was there, just Madison and Dr. Bechman. And then they said that the receptionist had gone back and that she'd found him.”

“But they didn't tell you why? They didn't say she'd been called, nothing like that?”

“I never thought about it, about why she went back. They were saying that Madison was the only one there and that Dr. Bechman was dead. That's what was on my mind.”

“What else did they say?” Wondering if they'd gone beyond implying to accusing.

“One detective said they'd been told that Madison had a history of violence and that she'd been very angry at Dr. Bechman for the perceived harm he'd done to her. Can you imagine? ‘The perceived harm.' Then the second detective, he said they were told the doctor had ruined her eye. You see how it was going?”

I nodded, wondering what the cops thought about Leon that night, first his wife had gone missing and now this, the man getting agitated just telling me about it.

“What happened next?” I asked him.

Leon rubbed the back of his neck, looking away, looking anywhere but at me.

“Leon? I'm on your side. Speak up.”

“I kind of…I got angry. She's my daughter and…”

“So you said what?”

“That they should be ashamed of themselves implying that a child with a disability had committed murder.”

“Good. That's good you said that. And what was their…?”

“I was yelling—well, yelling softly, if you know what I mean. I didn't want to wake Madison. But they remained calm. Cool. It was almost spooky. They asked if I was there. You know how they do that? They knew I wasn't. Trying to trip me up, to make me out to be a liar, the way they did when Sally disappeared.” Leon's lips tight for a moment, his hands balled into fists. “I told them I hadn't been there. So then they asked what time Madison got home.” He stopped again, looking at me, then looking away.

“Confidential, Leon, straight down the line.”

“I said she'd come straight home, that she was home by five forty-five. Then they asked if she'd been upset when she'd gotten home, if anything was out of the ordinary, and I said no,” talking faster now, “that she was fine, that she did her homework before dinner, watched TV afterwards, went to bed on time, everything as usual.”

“But you weren't home.”

“No, I wasn't.” Looking me in the eye now, letting me know he'd do anything to protect his kid.

“And where were you?”

“In the darkroom. It's in the basement of the building where we live. So technically…”

“Yeah, I get it. Technically you
were
at home, just not in the apartment.”

He nodded. “So I wasn't seen out,” he said. “So no one could say they saw me elsewhere.”

“Meaning no one could tell the police you weren't at home?”

“Right.”

“Not even Madison.”

Leon blinked. “That's right.”

“But?”

“They're not finished with this. With her. That's why I need your help.”

I nodded. I was sure he was right but I didn't say so. Why tell him something he already knew, that the police probably knew he was lying and that there were other issues working against him, the question of a missing wife, a daughter's rage.

“Had Madison ever been violent?” I asked.

Leon struggled with what to say, his brow furrowed, his eyes pinched. He licked his lips, too, letting me know his mouth was dry. There was water at the run for the dogs but none for the people. I waited. I had the feeling his face was telling me more than his words would.

“She's been destructive,” he finally said. “She's been out of control on occasion.”

“What do you mean by ‘out of control'?”

“Breaking things. Ripping up mail. Kicking furniture. She scratched me a few times. Once she broke the dishes.”

“All of them?”

“It was cheap stuff. It didn't matter.”

“I see. Leon, is it unusual for Madison to go to the doctor herself, for you not to go with her?”

“She…” He stopped to think. He seemed to be a cautious man, always concerned he might be choosing a less
than perfect word. “She's very independent,” he said, nodding.

“Independent?”

“She likes to do things on her own. By herself. She doesn't respond well to…”

“Suggestions?”

Leon smiled but his eyes stayed sad. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“You're saying she's difficult?”

“She's had a difficult time.”

“What about medication? Is she on anything, besides the Botox injections, any kind of tranquilizer or antianxiety medication?” Thinking just about everyone was on something nowadays, thinking that some medications had really serious side effects, some made patients psychotic, thinking if she did do it, maybe it wasn't her fault. But how would we know what she did or didn't do if she wasn't talking?

“She's not on anything. There wasn't anything that could help her, not without terrible side effects. That's why the Botox seemed like the way to go. Dr. Bechman talked about it as if it would be a miracle, as if it would…”

Okay, I thought, not medication. Maybe Leon was right. Maybe there was only one thing to do.

“Got any pictures?” I asked.

“Of Madison?”

“No. Of Sally.”

“Just the one.”

“What one is that?” I asked.

“The one Madison didn't rip up after Sally disappeared.”

“Why not that one?”

“She didn't know about it. It's the one in her high school yearbook, those pictures they take of everyone in the graduating class.”

My own looked more like a mug shot than the marking of
a milestone and I doubted I still had it. Did the existence of her high school yearbook mean Sally was a saver? And if so, might there be other things she held on to that could help me find her? In which case I'd need a more recent picture because I wasn't all that sure I'd be able to recognize a woman in her forties from a thumbnail shot of her at seventeen.

“What about negatives?” I asked.

Leon turned away. I let it go for the moment. Something about him made my heart grow heavy. It wasn't only what he was saying, it was something about Leon himself.

“I'd like to meet Madison, too. Would that be possible?”

Leon didn't answer me again. He got up and headed for the gate. When he got there, he motioned for me to come, a man of few words, a man of gestures and images. I held up one hand and went over to the hole Dashiell had made in the far corner of the run, shoving the dirt back in with the side of my shoe, then tamping it down. When I headed for the gate, a woman came in carrying two pugs, and the little girl who had been sitting on the bench diagonally across from where we were standing left. I could see what was in her purse now. There was a plastic palm tree, a leaf of lettuce and a live turtle.

I caught up with Leon, and we headed toward the closest exit, Leon stopping once to take a picture of a drug deal in progress, the buyer and seller sitting on the wall behind the chess players.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“You'll need that picture, won't you?” He began to walk again, then remembered his manners and turned around. “Madison,” he said to the little girl with the purse who was walking in the dirt next to one side of the path, “this is Rachel. She's going to help us try to find Sally.”

Madison looked my way. The oversize shirt was the kind a repairman might wear. Or a soda jerk. The name Tito was
embroidered over the chest pocket in navy to match the collar and the trim on the short sleeves, sleeves that came down past her elbows. I walked over to the side of the path and held out my hand. “Hi, Madison,” I said, “I'm pleased to meet you.”

She lifted her free hand but not to take mine. She was reaching for her sunglasses, taking hold of them, sliding them off. The eyelid over her right eye drooped badly. The other moved quickly from left to right a few times and then stopped. Standing in front of her, Madison just staring at me, I had the same experience I sometimes got before I became a private investigator, when I used to train dogs for a living. I was suddenly privy to information that seemed to come from another creature without benefit of words. Back then, and now, it always made me want to run for cover. Have a good look, Madison seemed to be telling me, at why my mother left in the first place.

Dashiell took a step forward and put his face up to the plastic purse, his tail slapping against my leg. Madison ignored him. She put her glasses back on, turned and walked after Leon, who was already leaving the park. For a moment, I just stood there watching them, the father looking in one direction, the kid in another, the empty space between them, space where Sally could have walked were Sally here. They stopped at the corner to wait for the light to change, then crossed the street and headed down the block, neither one turning back to see if I was with them. I tapped my leg to let Dashiell know we were going and hurried to catch up.

We walked pretty much in silence, or rather we walked from Washington Square Park to Greenwich and Bank streets with the accompaniment of sirens, helicopters, pneumatic drills, horns honking, dogs barking, cell phones and bicycle bells ringing, babies crying, people shouting, the usual cacophony of a big city, but without a conversation of our own.

Leon and Madison lived in a brick apartment building on the west side of the street; there was a restaurant on the east side and a supermarket on the northwest corner of the intersection. Leon unlocked the inner lobby door, and we walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor, Leon taking the lead, Dashiell next, then me, Madison and her turtle bringing up the rear. Like most kids over ten or eleven, Madison had walked home as if she were by herself, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes off to the side, but never right alongside her parent and never, as far as I could see, holding hands.

When Leon unlocked the door, we entered a short hall with a hugely overcrowded clothing rack full of coats and jackets, then a small foyer with a desk, a laptop, a printer and a wall of books. The bookshelves continued around the next
wall and down one side of the living room, all the way to the far wall of windows facing east and overlooking Greenwich Street. The small kitchen, at the far end of the foyer, had a window, a real prize in New York City. Between the office area and the doorway to the kitchen, Leon had an oversize dining room table covered with books, tossed-off clothing, newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, empty soda cans and unopened mail.

As soon as we were inside, Madison disappeared down a hallway just beyond the archway to the living room. A moment later, I heard a door slam, but before Leon had the chance to offer me a glass of water or a place to sit, she was back, this time without her shoes and without the turtle. Or so I thought. But then she walked up to Dashiell, opened her hand, and there it was, smack in the middle of her small palm. When Dashiell leaned closer to get a good sniff, Madison took a step backwards, retreating in slow motion and taking Dashiell along with her.

“Leave the door open,” Leon said, turning to me and raising his eyebrows as a way of asking if it was okay for Dashiell to go off with Madison. But before I had the chance to answer, we heard the door to Madison's room slam again, this time louder. And a moment after that, Dashiell was back, the door apparently having been closed in his face.

Leon shook his head. “Twelve,” he said. “Just. But eleven wasn't any better. Neither was ten.”

There was a daybed under the living room windows, a small, faded love seat against the wall to the left. I sat on the love seat. Leon walked over to the wall of books opposite where I was sitting, taking a few books off a high shelf, pulling out one that had been lying flat against the back of the bookcase.

“She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Sally?”

Leon nodded. “Sally,” he repeated, grateful, I thought, for any chance to say her name.

He sat down on the edge of the daybed.

“I couldn't take my eyes off her.”

“Where did you meet?” I asked.

“I was her teacher,” he said.

“College?”

“No,” glancing down at the book in his lap, “high school.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She got pregnant so I married her.”

“How old was she?”

“Sixteen. Fifteen really. She was in the twelfth grade. She was, is, very bright and she'd been skipped a couple of times.”

“Wasn't there some kind of trouble about this, Leon, you getting a fifteen-year-old kid pregnant?”

Leon looked at me for what seemed like a very long time before responding. “I left the school. I left teaching actually. That's when I began…” He touched his camera, still hanging around his neck, lifting the strap over his head and putting the Leica down on the round wooden coffee table that sat between us.

“And what about Sally? Did she get into any kind of trouble over this?”

Leon shrugged. “We moved here,” he said. “I got her into another school for the rest of her senior year. She graduated with honors.”

“How'd you manage to marry a fifteen-year-old?”

“We drove down to Delaware. Pregnant teens can marry there without parental permission.”

“So her parents…”

“It was just her mother.”

“And?”

“It was bad.”

“Did it ever get better?”

Leon shook his head.

“What? They never spoke again?”

“No.”

“So you're saying Sally was fifteen when you got her pregnant and her mother disowned her?”

“Something like that.”

“So Sally's mother never got to see her granddaughter?”

“No.”

“Not even after Sally left?”

“She was gone by then. Cancer.”

I shook my head. “You'd think she'd taken an Uzi and shot up the school. High school kids get pregnant. It's not great, but it's a fact of life.”

Leon nodded.

“Let me get this straight, okay? Sally was a senior in high school at the time?”

“That's right. She was in my honors history class.”

I stopped for a minute to make some notes.

“And you got married in Delaware when she was only fifteen.”

“And a half.”

I nodded.

“She got to graduate,” he said. “That was good.”

“Then no one knew?”

“Only her mother.”

“Did her mother get you into any kind of trouble, with the law?” I whispered, thinking for just the briefest of moments whom it was you'd look at first when a wife disappears, then pushing the thought from my mind, at least for now. If the police hadn't suspected Leon, why should I?

“No, not really. It, it got worked out.”

“Because you married her?”

Leon didn't answer me.

“It's still considered statutory rape, isn't it, when a girl is only fifteen?”

He nodded.

“But even with an irate mother, you weren't charged?”

“No, there were no charges.” Leon turned away, but not before I could see the pain in his face.

“I see,” I said, putting the pen down. “Had you or she ever considered terminating the pregnancy?”

“No, we never did. It never came up.”

“And no one else knew?”

He shook his head. “She made it all the way through graduation without showing. Madison was born in September.”

“What about her girlfriends? Did she confide in any of them?”

Leon shook his head again. “After we came back from Delaware and moved here, she kept pretty much to herself.”

“She lost touch with her old friends?”

He nodded. “She didn't want any of them to know.”

“What about new friends at the new school?”

Leon turned the yearbook over, as if the answer to my question might be on the front cover. “No. She read a lot.”

“So she'd be what now, twenty-eight?”

Leon nodded. “June fifth,” he said. “She graduated at sixteen. She's an extraordinary…”

He looked toward the end of the living room where the little hall to Madison's room began, before opening the yearbook to where there was a picture of Sally among the graduates. He put his finger next to it, but she was the only Sally on the page, Sally Bruce, it said, talented newcomer, and above that, the picture, a pretty girl who didn't look much older than her daughter was now.

“How did this come about, Leon, you dating a student?”

Leon held up one hand, as if warding off a blow. I let it go. I had agreed to try to find her because Leon thought it might help Madison. What had happened all those years ago wasn't really the point. Or was it?

Had Sally loved him back then, I wondered, when he was her teacher? Or was it the excitement of the forbidden, an older man, the aura of romance, the fact that it had to be kept secret? Those were powerful aphrodisiacs, but aphrodisiacs don't last. Had she been happy to marry him? And then what? Somewhere along the way, as happens to so many of us, had she stopped loving him? If she ever had.

And what about Madison? Had Sally loved her? Had anyone loved Madison back then? Did anyone love her now?

“Do you have anything of Sally's I could borrow, or look at? A diary, school papers, letters, computer files, anything at all?”

“There are a few things I have put away.”

“Would you rather we do that when Madison is in school?”

“She's not in school now. I'm keeping her with me for the time being.” Leon looked very uncomfortable.

“Can you just do that?” I asked, wondering what he'd told them, if he'd said she had the flu or sprained an ankle, something that would explain the time out of school. Or had he told them the truth, that there was the possibility she'd killed someone and he didn't want her running around loose?

But all he said was, “They're faxing me her lessons,” and I let it go. There were more important issues at hand.

“Can she hear us?” I whispered.

“I don't know.”

“You said she was a suspect. Then she hasn't been charged?”

“Not yet,” he whispered. “Doesn't mean they're not trying.” He looked toward the foyer again.

“So they're attempting to make a case, but they haven't yet. Have they talked to Madison?”

“They tried. They came again the next day. Madison was here and I didn't know what to do.”

“So you let them talk to her?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“What you'd expect. She listened. She stared at them. Then she went to her room and closed the door.”

“Slammed it?”

“No. Closed it quietly. She didn't seem in the least bit angry.”

“What did she seem?”

“I figured she didn't want to…”

I waited while Leon surfed for just the right words.

“She wasn't going to deal with it,” he said. “That's how she is, since Sally left.”

“She was only seven then.”

“Correct. But that's when it started. It was all part of the package, not speaking and this, this shutting down. She'll almost always listen to what you have to say, but if Madison decides she's not dealing, there's no changing her mind.”

“Did they ask to have a psychiatrist examine her?”

“They did. But I said I'd have to think about that. When they left, I called a lawyer. He told me that unless there was a court order, I should refuse. So that's what I did.”

“And you're keeping her with you…?”

“To protect her,” Leon whispered. “She's in a bad place right now. She's in grave danger. And she's my daughter.”

I nodded. Leon had the yearbook on his lap, both hands pressing it down as if, but for that, it might fly away and disappear.

“So how do you want to do this?”

“I'll get together whatever I have,” he patted the yearbook, “and call you when it's ready.”

I picked up the pen and pad. “How do you spell her doctor's name?” I asked him.

Leon looked surprised for a moment and then reached for the pad and pen, writing down the doctor's name. “I'll work on the things you need after Madison goes to sleep,” he said.

I nodded. “I'd like to say good-bye to her, to Madison.”

Leon got up, and Dashiell and I trailed after him past the bathroom to Madison's door. Leon knocked and waited but there was no answer, nor was there any sound coming from inside that would make you think Madison might not have heard the knock. When he lifted his hand again, I shook my head.

“Another time,” I said.

There was a horseshoe hung over the apartment door, open side up to catch good luck. If any family needed it, it was this one.

Walking home along Hudson Street, I thought about the chess players we'd passed in the park, hunched over the inlaid boards at the small square tables in the southwestern corner of the park, the kibitzers standing all around watching every move. It was getting kind of cool for outdoor chess but the players would be there until the snow came, maybe even afterwards. That's how it was when you had an obsession. Something that would make another person stop and think, or turn away, foul weather, say, or the fear of running afoul of the law, might not even slow you down. Was that the way it had been for Leon? And what, I wondered, had it been for Sally?