Pretend You Don't See Her Page 13

  The voice on the other end sounded slightly irritated. “I guess we got cut off,” Lacey said lamely.

  For the next hour the phone continued to ring, and Lacey carefully managed each call. It was only later, when she was jotting down the message that the dentist’s office called to confirm Millicent Royce’s appointment for the following week, that she realized being back in her own milieu could be a trap. As a precaution she went through all the messages she had taken. A woman had phoned to say that her husband was being transferred to Minneapolis and that a friend had suggested that she call the Royce agency to help her find a house.

  Lacey had asked the usual real estate broker questions: price range? how many bedrooms? any limits on the age of a house? was school district a factor? would purchase be contingent on sale of present home? She had even put the answers in real estate shorthand: “min. 4BR/3b./fpl/cen air/.”

  I was proud of myself, she thought as she copied the woman’s name and phone number on a different sheet of paper, careful to disguise her working knowledge of the business. At the end she added the message, “good potential prospect due to immediate relocation.” Maybe even that sounded too knowledgeable, she thought, but let it stand when she looked up to see that Millicent Royce was on her way in.

  Mrs. Royce looked tired and was obviously pleased to get the messages and to see how efficiently Lacey had separated the mail for her. It was nearly five o’clock. “I will see you in the morning, Alice?” There was a hopeful note in her voice.

  “Absolutely,” Lacey told her. “But I do have a lunch date I can’t break.”

  * * *

  As she drove back into the city, Lacey felt a letdown setting in. As usual, she had no plans for the evening, and the thought of going back to the apartment and preparing another solitary meal was suddenly repugnant to her.

  I’ll go to the gym and work out for a while, she decided. At least between that exercise and the run this morning, I may be tired enough to sleep.

  When she got to the gym, Ruth Wilcox beckoned her over. “Guess what?” she said, her tone conspiratorial. “Tom Lynch was really disappointed when you didn’t show up this afternoon. He even came over and asked if you’d been here earlier. Alice, I think he likes you.”

  If he does, he likes someone who doesn’t really exist, Lacey thought with a trace of bitterness. She stayed in the gym for only a half hour, then drove home. The answering machine was blinking. Tom had phoned at four-thirty. “Thought I might see you at the gym, Alice. I enjoyed Friday night. If you pick this up by seven and feel like having dinner tonight, give me a call. My number is—”

  Lacey pushed the STOP button on the machine and erased the message without waiting to hear Tom’s phone number. It was easier to do that than to spend another evening lying to someone who in different circumstances she would have enjoyed dating.

  She fixed herself a BLT on toast for dinner. Comfort food, she thought.

  Then she remembered—this was what I was eating the night before Isabelle Waring died. Isabelle phoned, and I didn’t pick up. I was tired and didn’t want to talk to her.

  Lacey remembered that in the message she had left on the answering machine, Isabelle said she had found Heather’s journal and declared that something in it made her think she might have proof that Heather’s death hadn’t been an accident.

  But the next morning, when she phoned me at the office, she wouldn’t talk about it, Lacey recalled. Then she stayed in the library reading the journal when I brought Curtis Caldwell in. And a few hours later she was dead.

  Mental images suddenly threatened to close her throat as she finished the last bite of the sandwich: Isabelle in the library, weeping as she read Heather’s journal. Isabelle with her last breath begging Lacey to give that journal to Heather’s father.

  What is it that’s been bothering me? Lacey asked herself. It was something about the library that last afternoon, something I noticed when I spoke to Isabelle in there. What was it? She mentally revisited that afternoon, struggling to make the elusive image come into focus.

  Finally she gave up. She simply couldn’t remember.

  Let it go for now, Lacey told herself. Later I’ll try to put my mind in the search-and-retrieve mode. After all, the mind is a computer, isn’t it?

  That night in her dreams she had vague visions of Isabelle holding a green pen and weeping as she read Heather’s journal in the last hours of her life.

  31

  AFTER CHECKING INTO THE RADISSON PLAZA HOTEL, HALF a block from the Nicollet Mall, Sandy Savarano spent the rest of his first day in Minneapolis poring over the phone book and making a list of the health clubs and gyms in the metropolitan area.

  He made a second list of all the real estate agencies, putting in a separate column the ones whose ads indicated they were geared to commercial sales. He knew that Lacey Farrell would have to try to find a job without benefit of references, and the odds were those agencies would be unwilling to hire anyone without some kind of background check. He would start calling the others tomorrow.

  His plan was simple. He would just say that he was conducting an informal survey for the National Association of Realtors because there was growing evidence that adults in the twenty-five to thirty-five age group were not entering the real estate field. The survey would ask two questions: Had the agency hired anyone in that age group as an agent, secretary, or receptionist in the last six months, and if so, were they a male or female?

  He’d need another plan for checking out health clubs and gyms. Those survey questions wouldn’t work there, since most of the people who joined them were in that age group. It meant that locating Farrell through the clubs would be riskier.

  He would have to actually go to them, pretend he was interested in joining, then flash Farrell’s picture. It was an old photo, cut from her college yearbook, but it still looked like her. He would claim that she was his daughter and had left home after a family misunderstanding. He was trying to find her because her mother was sick with worry about her.

  Checking out the health clubs would be a long shot, but fortunately there were not too many in the metro area, so it wouldn’t take him too long.

  At five of ten, Sandy was ready to go out for a walk. The mall was dark now, the windows of the toney stores no longer glittering.

  Sandy knew that the Mississippi River was within walking distance. He turned right and headed in that direction, a solitary figure who to a casual viewer would appear to be a man in his sixties who probably ought not to be walking alone at night.

  A casual observer would have no idea how misdirected that concern was, since on that walk, Sandy Savarano began to experience the curious thrill that came to him whenever he began to stalk a victim and sensed that he was approaching the habitat of the hunted.

  32

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, LACEY WAS WAITING IN FRONT OF Royce Realty when Millicent Royce arrived at nine o’clock.

  “The pay isn’t that good,” Millicent Royce said with a laugh.

  “It’s what we agreed on,” Lacey said. “And I can tell I’ll like the job.”

  Mrs. Royce unlocked and opened the door. The warmth of the interior greeted them. “A Minnesota chill in the air,” Royce said. “First things first. I’ll put the coffee on. How do you like yours?”

  “Black, please.”

  “Regina, my assistant who just left to have a baby, used two heaping teaspoonsful of sugar and never gained an ounce. I told her it was serious cause for simple hatred.”

  Lacey thought of Janey Boyd, a secretary at Parker and Parker, who always seemed to be munching a cookie or a chocolate bar but remained a size six. “There was a girl like that at—” She stopped herself. “At the doctor’s office,” she finished, then quickly added. “She didn’t stay long. Just as well. She was setting a bad example.”

  Suppose Millicent Royce had picked up on that and suggested calling a coworker for a personal reference. Be careful, Lacey told herself, be careful.

  Th
e first phone call of the day came right then and was a welcome interruption.

  At twelve Lacey left for the luncheon date with Kate Knowles. “I’ll be back by two,” she promised, “and after this, I’ll have a sandwich at the desk so if you want to make outside appointments, I’ll be here.”

  She arrived at the Radisson at 12:25 to find that Kate was already at the table, munching on a roll. “This is breakfast and lunch for me,” she told Lacey, “so I started. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Lacey slid into the seat opposite her. “Not at all. How’s the show going?”

  “Great.”

  They both ordered omelets, salads, and coffee. “The necessaries out of the way,” Kate said with a grin. “I have to admit I’m getting curious. I was talking to Tom this morning and told him we were having lunch. He said he wished he could join us and sent his best to you.”

  Kate reached for another roll. “Tom was telling me that you just decided to pick up and move here, that you’d only been here once on a visit as a kid. What makes a place stick in your mind like that?”

  Answer the question with a question.

  “You’re on the road a lot with shows,” Lacey said. “Don’t you remember some cities better than others?”

  “Oh, sure. The good ones, like here, and the not-so-good ones. Let me tell you about the all-time not-so-good one...”

  Lacey found herself relaxing as Kate told her story, her timing perfect. So many show business people are like that, Lacey thought nostalgically. Dad had the same talent; he could make a grocery list sound interesting.

  Over a second cup of coffee she managed to steer the conversation to the friend named Bill that Kate had mentioned. “You talked the other night about someone you’re dating,” she began. “Bill something, wasn’t it?”

  “Bill Merrill. Nice guy. Could even be Mr. Right, although the way things are going I may never know. I’ll keep trying, though.” Kate’s eyes brightened. “The trouble is that I’m on the road so much, and he travels all the time too.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s an investment banker and practically commutes to China.”

  Don’t let him be in China now, Lacey prayed. “Which bank is he with, Kate?”

  “Chase.”

  Lacey had learned to watch for the flicker of curiosity that signaled she was being studied. Kate was smart. She sensed now that she was being probed for information. I’ve got what I need to know, Lacey thought. Get back to letting Kate do the talking.

  “I guess the best of all possible worlds for you is to get a Broadway hit that runs for ten years,” she suggested.

  “Now you’re talking,” Kate said with a grin. “That would be having my cake and eating it too. I’d love to be able to stay put in New York. Primarily because of Bill, of course, but there’s no question that Tom’s going to end up there in the next few years. He’s clearly headed for success, and New York will be where he lands. That really would be the icing on the cake for me. We’re both only children, so we’ve been more like siblings and best friends than cousins. He’s always been there for me. Plus Tom’s just naturally the kind of guy who seems to sense when people need help.”

  I wonder if that’s why he asked me out last week and called me last night? Lacey thought. She signaled for a check. “I’ve got to run,” she explained quickly. “First full day on the job.”

  At a pay phone in the lobby, she called and left a message for George Svenson. “I have new information concerning the Heather Landi case that I must give directly to Mr. Baldwin at the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

  When she hung up, she hurried through the lobby, aware she was already late getting back to the agency.

  Less than a minute later, a hand with brown age spots picked up the receiver that was still warm from her touch.

  Sandy Savarano never made phone calls that could be traced. His pockets were filled with quarters. His plan was to make five calls here, then go to a different location and make five more until his list of local real estate offices was exhausted.

  He dialed, and when someone answered, “Downtown Realty,” he began his spiel. “I won’t take much of your time,” he said. “I’m with the National Association of Realtors. We’re conducting an informal survey...”

  33

  AS U.S. ATTORNEY GARY BALDWIN TOLD NYPD DETECTIVE Ed Sloane, he did not suffer fools gladly. He had been infuriated by the phone call from Sloane the previous afternoon, informing him that several pages of Jimmy Landi’s copy of his daughter’s journal apparently had vanished while it was in the police station. “How is it you managed to not lose the whole thing?” he had raged. “That’s what happened to the original.”

  When Sloane phoned again twenty-four hours later, it gave Baldwin a second chance to air his grievances: “We’re busting our chops going over the copy of the journal you gave us, and we find that we don’t have several pages that obviously were of some importance, since someone took the risk of stealing them from under your nose! Where’d you leave the journal when you got it? On the bulletin board? Where’d you leave the copy? On the street? Did you hang out a sign on it? ‘Evidence in a murder case. Feel free to take’?”

  As he listened to the tirade, Detective Ed Sloane’s thoughts about what he would like to do to Baldwin yanked him back to his Latin 3 Class at Xavier Military Academy. When he preached on a grave sin, St. Paul had cautioned, “Ne nominatur in vobis”—Let it not be named among you.

  It fits, Sloane thought, because what I’d like to do to you would be better off unnamed. But he too was incensed by the fact that the original journal, as well as possibly several pages from the copy, had disappeared from his locked evidence box in his cubby, which was located in the squad room.

  Clearly it was his fault. He carried the keys to the box and the cubby on the heavy key ring that he kept in his jacket pocket. And he was always taking off his jacket, so virtually anybody could have taken the key ring out of his pocket, made duplicates, then returned the keys before he had even noticed that they were missing.

  After the original journal vanished, the locks had been changed. But he hadn’t changed his habit of forgetting to take his keys out of the jacket that was draped on the back of his desk chair.

  He focused once more on the phone conversation. Baldwin had finally run out of breath, so Sloane grabbed the opportunity to get in a word. “Sir, I reported this yesterday because you should know about it. I’m calling now because, frankly, I’m not at all sure Jimmy Landi is a reliable witness in this instance. He admitted yesterday that he barely even scanned the journal when Ms. Farrell gave it to him. Plus he only had it a day or so.”

  “Oh, the journal’s not that long,” Baldwin snapped. “It could be read carefully in just a few hours.”

  “But he didn’t, and that’s the point,” Sloane said emphatically, as he nodded his thanks to Nick Mars, who had just placed a cup of coffee on his desk. “He’s also threatening to be difficult, saying he’s going to bring in his own investigator. And Landi’s partner, Steve Abbott, came to the meeting with him and was throwing his weight around on Jimmy’s behalf.”

  “I don’t blame Landi,” Baldwin snapped. “And another investigator on this case could be a good idea, especially since you don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  “You know that’s not so. He’d just get in the way. But at this point it looks like it’s not going to happen. Abbott just called me,” Sloane said. “In a way, he apologized. He said that thinking it over, it’s possible that Landi was mistaken about the pages he thinks are missing. He said the night Jimmy got the journal from Lacey Farrell, it was so tough on him to try to read it that he put it aside. The next night he got smashed before he looked at it. Then a day later we took his copy from him.”

  “It’s possible he’s mistaken about the missing pages, but we’ll never know, will we?” Baldwin said, his voice cold. “And even if he is wrong about the missing unlined pages, the original journal clearly was taken while
in your possession, which means you’ve got someone in the precinct who’s working both sides of the street. I suggest you do some housecleaning up there.”

  “We’re working on it.” Ed Sloane did not think it necessary to tell Baldwin that he had been setting traps for the culprit by talking cryptically around the station house about new evidence in the Waring case that he had stored in his cubby.

  Baldwin concluded the conversation. “Keep me posted. And try to hang on to any other evidence that may come up in the case. Think you can do that?”

  “Yes, I do. And as I remember it, sir, we were the ones who found and identified Savarano’s fingerprint on the door to Farrell’s apartment after the break-in,” Sloane shot back. “I think your investigators were the ones who certified that he was dead.”

  A click of the phone in the U.S. Attorney’s office proved to Detective Ed Sloane that he had succeeded in getting to the thin-skinned Baldwin. Score one for the good guys, he thought.

  But it was a hollow victory, and he knew it.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Gary Baldwin’s staff endured the fallout from his frustration over the bungled investigation. Then his mood changed suddenly when he received word that the secured witness, Lacey Farrell, had new information for him. “I’ll wait as long as it takes, but make sure you get her call through to me tonight,” he told George Svenson in Minneapolis.

  Following the call, Svenson drove to Lacey’s apartment building and waited for her in his car. When she got home from work, he didn’t even give her a chance to go inside. “The man is jumping up and down waiting to talk to you,” he said, “so we’re going to do this now.”

  They drove off in his car. Svenson was a quiet man by nature, and he did not seem to find the need to make small talk. During her indoctrination period in the safe site in Washington, Lacey had been tipped off that federal marshals hated the witness protection program, hated dealing with all those misplaced persons. They felt they had been stuck with what was, in essence, a baby-sitting job.