Pretend You Don't See Her Page 21

  If only I could just go home to my own apartment, she thought. I’d fill the Jacuzzi, send out for something to eat, phone my mother and Kit. And Tom.

  What was Tom thinking? she wondered.

  As she had hoped, the traffic was light, and in minutes they were headed south on the FDR Drive. Lacey felt her body growing tense. Let Tim be there, she thought. I don’t want Patrick to see me. But then she realized that in all likelihood Patrick wouldn’t be around. When she had last seen the doorman, it was his plan to retire on January 1st.

  The driver got off the FDR Drive at Seventy-third Street and headed west to Fifth Avenue. He turned left on Fifth, then left again on Seventieth and stopped. Tim Powers was standing outside the building, waiting for her. He opened the door and greeted her with a smile and a pleasant, “Good evening, miss,” but he showed no sign of recognition. Lacey paid the driver and hobbled out of the cab, thankful that finally she would be able to stop moving around. It was just in time, because she could no longer deny the pain of her wrenched ankle.

  Tim opened the door to the lobby for her, then slipped her the key to the Waring apartment. He assisted her to the elevator, put his master key in the control, and pushed 10.

  “I fixed it so you’ll go straight up,” he said. “That way there’ll be no risk of running into anyone who knows you.”

  “And I certainly don’t want to, Tim. I can’t tell you how much—”

  He interrupted her. “Lacey, get upstairs fast and lock the door. There’s food in the fridge.”

  Her first impression was that the apartment had been kept in pristine order. Then Lacey’s eyes went to the closet in the foyer where she had hidden the night Isabelle Waring died. She had the feeling that if she opened the door, she would see her briefcase still sitting there, with the blood-stained pages from the journal stuffed inside.

  She double-locked the door, and then remembered that Curtis Caldwell had stolen the key Isabelle kept on the foyer table. Had the lock been changed? she wondered. She even fastened the safety chain, although she knew how ineffective a safety chain was when someone really wanted to get in.

  Tim had drawn all the drapes and turned on lights for her, a potential mistake, she thought, if the draperies weren’t usually kept closed. Someone watching the apartment, either from Fifth Avenue or Seventieth Street, might realize someone was there.

  On the other hand, if the drapes have been kept closed, it would be sending a signal to open them. Oh God, she thought, there’s no sure way to be safe.

  The framed pictures of Heather that had been scattered through the living room were still there. In fact everything seemed to be much as Isabelle had left it. Lacey shivered. She almost expected to see Isabelle walk down the stairs.

  She realized that she had not yet taken off her down jacket. The casualness of the jacket and her sweats was so far removed from the way she had dressed the other times she had been in this apartment that they added to her feeling of displacement. As she unfastened the jacket, Lacey shivered again. She suddenly felt as if she were an intruder, moving in with ghosts.

  Sooner or later she had to force herself to walk upstairs and to look in the bedroom. She didn’t want to go near it, but she knew that she had to see it just to be rid of the feeling that Isabelle’s body was still there.

  There was a leather sofa in the library that converted into a bed, and adjacent to the library was the powder room. Those were the rooms she would use. There was no way that she could ever sleep in the bed in which Isabelle had been shot.

  Tim had said something about there being food in the fridge. As Lacey hung her jacket in the foyer closet, she remembered hiding there and watching as Caldwell rushed past.

  Get something to eat, she told herself. You’re hungry, and the irritation from that is just making everything else worse.

  Tim had done a good job of putting together a meal for her. There was a small roast chicken, salad greens, rolls, and a wedge of cheddar cheese and some fruit. A half-empty jar of instant coffee was sitting on a shelf. She remembered that she and Isabelle had shared coffee from that same jar.

  “Upstairs,” Lacey said aloud. “Get it out of the way.” She half hopped her way to the staircase, then held on to the wrought-iron railing for support as she climbed the steps to the bedroom suite.

  She went through the sitting room to the bedroom and looked in. The draperies were drawn here as well, and the room was dark. She turned on the light.

  The place looked exactly the same as it had the last time she had stood there with Curtis Caldwell. She could still picture him as he looked around, his expression thoughtful. She had waited in silence, believing he was debating about whether or not to make an offer on the apartment.

  What he had been doing, she now realized, was making sure there was no way Isabelle could escape him when he attacked her.

  Where was Caldwell now? she wondered suddenly, a feeling of panic and resignation washing over her. Had he followed her to New York?

  Lacey looked at the bed and visualized Isabelle’s bloodied hand, trying to pull the journal pages from under the pillow. She could almost hear the echo of Isabelle’s dying plea:

  Lacey... give Heather’s... journal... to her father . . . Only to him... Swear...

  With sickening clarity, Lacey remembered the gasps and harsh choking breaths between each painfully uttered word.

  You... read it... show him where... Then Isabelle had made one last effort to breathe and speak. She’d died as she exhaled, whispering, man...

  Lacey turned and hobbled through the sitting room and eased her way down the stairs. Get something to eat, take a shower, go to bed, she told herself. Get over your jumpiness. Like it or not, you know you’ve got to stay here. There’s no place else to go.

  Forty minutes later she was sitting wrapped in blankets on the couch in the library. The copy she had made of Heather Landi’s journal was lying on the desk, the three unlined pages spread out side by side. In the dim light from the foyer, the bloodstains that had smeared Heather’s handwriting on the original pages resembled a Rorschach test blot. What does this mean to you? it seemed to ask.

  What do you see in it? Lacey asked herself. As exhausted as she was, she knew she was not going to fall asleep anytime soon. She turned on the light and reached for the three unlined pages. They were the hardest to read because of the bloodstains.

  A thought came to her. Was it possible that Isabelle had been making a special effort to touch these particular pages in her last moments of life?

  Once again Lacey began to read these pages, searching for some clue as to why they were so important that someone had stolen the only other copies that existed. She had no doubt that these were the pages that Caldwell had found it worth killing for, but why? What was the hidden secret in them?

  It was on these pages that Heather had written about being caught between a rock and a hard place, about not knowing what to do.

  The last entry that seemed upbeat was the one at the top of the first unlined page, where Heather wrote that she was going to have lunch with Mr. or Max or Mac Hufner, it was impossible to tell. She had added, “It should be fun. He says he’s grown old and I’ve grown up.”

  It sounds like she was going to meet an old friend, Lacey thought. I wonder if the police have talked to him to see if Heather dropped any hint to him? Or did she have their reunion lunch before things went so drastically wrong for her?

  The original journal had been stolen from the police. Had they made a list of the people mentioned in it before it was taken? Lacey wondered.

  She looked around the room, then shook her head. If only I had someone I could talk to about this, she thought, someone to bounce ideas off of. But, of course, there is not, she told herself. You are completely alone, so just get on with it.

  She looked at the pages again. Neither Jimmy Landi nor the police have these three pages now, she reminded herself. Mine is the only copy.

  Is there any way I can find out who th
is man is? Lacey wondered. I could look in the phone book, she thought, make some calls. Or maybe I could simply phone Jimmy Landi himself.

  Again she paused. She knew she had to get to work on trying to solve the mystery hidden in those pages. If anyone was going to unravel the secret, clearly it would have to be her. But could she do it in time to save her own life?

  53

  WHEN FLIGHTS FROM THE MINNEAPOLIS AIRPORT WERE resumed, Sandy Savarano took the first available direct flight to New York. He reasoned that Lacey Farrell must have grabbed the first plane she could get on, which was the only reason she had gone to Chicago. He was sure that from there she would connect to New York. Where else would she go?

  While he waited for his flight, he got a list of scheduled departures of major airlines from Chicago to New York. His bet was that Lacey Farrell would stick with Northwest. It would make sense that when she deplaned she would go directly to the nearest Northwest agent and make inquiries.

  Even though his instinct told him she would be on that airline, Sandy managed to cover most of the areas through which passengers deplaning from Chicago would have to pass.

  Finding and gunning down Lacey Farrell had become more than a mere job for him. At this point, it was consuming him. The stakes had become higher than he wanted to play for. He liked his new life in Costa Rica; he liked his new face; his young wife intrigued him. The money he was being paid to get rid of Lacey Farrell was impressive but not necessary to his lifestyle.

  What was necessary to him was not having to live with the knowledge that he had botched his final job—that, and eliminating someone who could send him to prison for life.

  After checking all the New York flights for a stretch of five hours, Sandy decided to call it quits. He was afraid that he would only draw attention to himself if he hung around any longer. He took a cab to the brownstone apartment on West Tenth Street that had been rented for him. He would wait there for further information on Lacey Farrell.

  He did not have the slightest doubt that by midafternoon tomorrow he would once again be closing in on his quarry.

  54

  JIMMY LANDI HAD INTENDED TO GO TO ATLANTIC CITY FOR the weekend to see for himself that everything was in readiness for the opening of the casino. It was an exciting time for him, and he found it difficult to stay away. There were millions to be made, plus there was the genuine thrill of glad-handing the movers and shakers, the excitement, and the noise of the slot machines ringing as a hundred buck.’ worth of quarters gushed out from them, making the players feel like big-time winners.

  Jimmy knew that real gamblers were contemptuous of people who played the one-armed bandits. He was not. He was only contemptuous of people who played with other people’s money. Like people who gambled away salaries that were supposed to pay the mortgage or keep a kid in college.

  But the people who could afford to gamble—let them spend as much as they wanted in his place. That was the way he saw it. His boast was quoted and requoted in articles about the new casino: “I’ll give you better rooms, better service, better food, better entertainment than you’ll find anywhere else, whether in Atlantic City, Vegas, or even Monaco.” The opening weeks were booked solid. He knew that some people were coming just to pounce on anything they could find not to like, to complain about anything they could. Well, they would change their tune. He had vowed that.

  He felt it was always important for a person to have a challenge, but it was never more important to him than now, Jimmy acknowledged. Steve Abbott was taking care of the day-to-day routine of running the operation, which freed him for the big picture. Jimmy didn’t want to know who printed the menus or ironed the napkins. He wanted to know what they cost and how they looked.

  But he didn’t seem to be able to keep his mind on the casino, no matter how hard he tried. The problem was that since he had gotten back the copy of Heather’s journal last Monday, he had become obsessed with it and was spending too much time reading and rereading it. It was like a gateway to memories he wasn’t sure he wanted to revisit. To him, the crazy thing about it was that Heather only started the journal when she moved to New York to try for a show business career, but throughout it she referred to times in the past when she had done something with either him or her mother. It was like an ongoing diary and a memory book.

  One thing in the journal that had bothered him was a suggestion that Heather had been afraid of him. What did she think she had to be afraid of? Oh sure, he had bitten her head off a couple of times, just like he always had with anyone who stepped out of line, but surely that wasn’t enough for her to be afraid of him. He hated to think that.

  What had happened five years ago that she was so anxious to keep from him? he wondered. He couldn’t help dwelling on that part of her journal. The thought that somebody had pulled something on Heather and gotten away with it was driving him crazy. Even after all this time, he still needed to get to the bottom of it.

  The question of those unlined pages from the journal was also gnawing at him. He could swear he had seen them. Admittedly he had only glanced at the journal the night Lacey Farrell brought it over, and the next night when he had actually tried to read it, he had gotten drunk for the first time in years. Still, he retained a hazy impression of seeing them.

  The cops claimed they never got any unlined pages. Maybe they didn’t, he told himself, but assuming that I’m not wrong, and that the pages were there originally, then chances are they wouldn’t have disappeared unless someone thought they were important. There was only one person who might be able to tell me the truth, he thought: Lacey Farrell. When she made the copy of the journal for me, surely she would have noticed if some of the last pages were different from the others.

  There were stains on them—he vaguely recalled that. Jimmy decided to go ahead and call Lacey Farrell’s mother and again ask her to pass on to Lacey the question he needed to have answered: Did those pages exist?

  55

  LACEY GLANCED AT THE CLOCK WHEN SHE WOKE UP. SHE must have been asleep for about three hours. When she opened her eyes, she felt as she always had when she was in the dentist’s chair and under light sedation. She experienced a sensation of something hurting, although now it was her ankle rather than her teeth. She also felt out of it, but not so much so that she was unaware of what was going on. She could remember hearing faint street sounds, an ambulance, a police car or fire engine.

  They were the familiar Manhattan sounds that always had elicited mixed emotions from her—she felt concerned for the injured but was aware of a sense of being protected. Someone is out there ready to come if I need help, she had always told herself.

  I don’t feel that way now, she thought as she pushed back the blankets and sat up. Detective Sloane had been furious because she had taken Heather’s diary; U.S. Attorney Baldwin must have gone ballistic when he learned that she had told her mother where she was staying and then had run away.

  In fact, he had threatened to take her into custody and hold her as a material witness if she didn’t abide by the rules of the witness protection program, and she was sure that was exactly what he would do—if he were able to locate her. She stood up, automatically putting most of her weight on her left foot, biting her lip at the throbbing discomfort of the swollen right ankle.

  She put her hands on the desk to steady herself. The three unlined pages still lay there, commanding her immediate attention. Once again she read the first line of the first page. “Lunch with Mr.”—or was it Max or Mac?—“Hufner. It should be fun. He says he’s grown old and I’ve grown up.”

  That sounds like Heather was referring to someone she had known for a long time, Lacey thought. Who could I ask? There was only one obvious answer: Heather’s father.

  He’s the key to all this, Lacey decided.

  She had to get dressed, get something to eat. She also had to remove any trace of her presence here. It was Sunday. Tim Powers said that he would warn her if a real estate agent intended to bring a potential buyer
to see the apartment, but still she worried that someone might show up unannounced. She looked around, making a mental inventory. The food in the refrigerator would be a dead giveaway that the apartment was being used. So would the damp towel and washcloth.

  She decided that a quick shower now would help to wake her up. She wanted to get dressed, to get out of the nightshirt that had belonged to Heather Landi. But what do I wear? she asked herself, hating the fact that she was once again going to have to find something in Heather’s clothes closet.

  Shortly after she had arrived there she had showered, then she had wrapped the big bath towel around her and made herself go upstairs again, to find something to sleep in. She had felt ghoulish opening the doors of the walk-in closet off the bedroom. Even though she only wanted to grab something to wear to bed, she couldn’t help but notice that there were two different styles of clothes on the hangers. Isabelle had dressed conservatively, in flawless taste. It was easy to tell which were her suits and dresses. The rest of the rack and open shelves contained a collection of mini and long skirts, funky shirts, grandmother dresses, cocktail dresses that probably didn’t consist of more than a yard of material, baggy oversized sweaters, and at least a dozen pairs of jeans, all of it obviously Heather’s.

  Lacey had grabbed an oversized nightshirt with red-and-white stripes that must have belonged to Heather.

  If I go out, I can’t wear my sweat suit and jacket, she thought. I was wearing them yesterday. I might be too easy to spot.

  She fixed herself coffee and a toasted roll, and then showered. The underwear she had rinsed out earlier was dry, but her heavy socks were still wet. Once again she had to go through the personal belongings of two dead women in order to get dressed.

  At eight o’clock, Tim Powers called on the apartment intercom. “I didn’t want to use the telephone in the apartment,” he said. “Better that the kids and even Carrie don’t know that you’re here. Can I come up?”