Jake & Mimi (32 page)

“What did you do?”

“We went to a bar.”

“And then?”

The speed of his questions is disarming. I almost reach for his glass of water, which sits untouched on the table. Instead,
I stand and walk to the refrigerator. I take out a can of Coke and open it. “After the bar, we went to her place,” I say,
my back to him. I walk to the chair and sit down again.

“Just the two of you?”

I pause. “Her roommates were away.”

“The two of you were alone?”

I look at the table, then at the iron. On its metal face I can see threads of white silk.
This guy knows whatever Clete knows
. I meet his eyes again.

“A friend of mine came up for a little while.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

I look away again, then back at him.

“I can’t tell you her name, Detective.”

“Why not?”

“Because she wasn’t supposed to be there.”

He lowers the notebook to his leg and looks hard at me.

“A girl is missing,” he says.

“Not legally.”

His eyes flash, and then he smiles grimly.

“She probably went away for the weekend,” I say.

“Probably. That’s what I told her parents.” He runs a hand through his slick hair, then reaches for the glass of water and
turns it slowly. Then he clips his pen onto the notebook and slides the notebook back into his suit jacket. “Do you have a
business card?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah.”

I take out my wallet, find one, and hand it to him. He turns it in his fingers, and then he looks out into the living room
for a few seconds, and finally back at me.

“Last Friday night, Mr. Teller, Elise’s neighbors…
heard things
.”

Somehow I hold his eyes. He waits for me to say something. I’m quiet.

“What do you think they heard?” he asks.

Again I’m quiet. Ten seconds, he waits. I can hear the soda fizzing softly in the can. Finally, he takes out a card of his
own from his jacket pocket and lays it on the kitchen table.

“When you figure it out, I suggest you call me. Because if Elise isn’t in class Monday morning, I’m going to come by” — he
looks down at the card I gave him — “Hyson, Levay, and I’m going to take you into your boss’s office and ask you some pretty
hard questions.”

He lets his words sink in, then stands up and slides the chair carefully back under the kitchen table. He walks to the front
door and unlocks the deadbolt. He turns around.

“Who did you think was missing, Jake?”

“No one.”

“No one,” he says. He nods, then opens the door and leaves.

I listen to his footsteps reach the stairs, start down them, fade, and disappear. I sit still for a few minutes, then stand
and walk slowly to the sink. I dump out the Coke and rinse the can carefully with hot water. I set it on the counter. I walk
into my bedroom and sit down on the bed.

Elise Verren is missing. And Nina Torring
.

I go to the dresser and find on top of it the phone number for Anne Keltner. Mimi Lessing’s maid of honor. The first seduction
I let her witness. I lift the cordless phone from its wall mount and dial her number. Two rings, and then her voice.

“Hi. I’m not here. Say the right things, and I’ll call you back. Bye.”

Her voice is playful, assured, as it was at the Roosevelt Hotel in the first moments. The
beep
of her answering machine sounds and I cut the call. I walk out into the living room to the far window. I push it open and
step out onto the fire escape. The night air is a relief. I lean on the black railing and look down at the street below. I
watch the flowing lights of the taxis, listen to the rising nighttime murmur of the city.

Mimi witnessed the seduction of three women. Two of them are missing and the third isn’t home. I shake my head. No.
One
of them is missing — Nina Torring. Elise Verren has high-strung parents. She could have met somebody last night, the way
she met me a week ago, and she could have blown off her mother’s birthday, and her class today. Anne Keltner could be anywhere
— it’s Friday night.

I run my hands over the rough black railing and breathe in the hard, mineral smell of the night. I look at the windows of
the building across the street. Most of the blinds are drawn, but a few are open, and through one I can see a young woman,
standing at the counter in her lit kitchen. She is mixing something in a bowl.

But what if Elise really is missing? What does it mean? The only connection in this world between Nina Torring and Elise Verren
is that I seduced them and Mimi watched. But no one could possibly have known. I’ve told no one. Mimi… there’s no way she’s
told a soul.

The young woman across the way looks up suddenly from her mixing bowl, wipes her hands on her apron, and answers the phone.
She smiles, leaves the counter, and sits down at her kitchen table. She twists the phone cord in her fingers as she talks.

Only one person has ever seen Mimi and me together. Anne Keltner.

The young woman looks out her window. She looks away, and then out her window again. She stands, lays the phone on the table,
and walks to the window, her smile gone. She looks straight across, at this building, this fire escape, at me. She lowers
the blinds.

I stare at the closed blinds, and it hits me — someone is watching. If Elise Verren really is missing, then someone has been
watching us. Nick Simms? No way. If he had found out, he would have come straight at me. Who else? No one on my side. Mimi
then. Her fiancé? Not likely. He doesn’t strike me as a fighter. Who, then? Anne Keltner is the only one who’s ever seen us
together. I close my eyes. No, that’s not quite true. Mr. Stein saw us together. Brought us together, the morning he assigned
us to the Brice account. And then again the day we prepped him for their lunch. But Mr. Stein, our senior partner, a voyeur?
Violent?

I open my eyes and stare now into the rusted, peeling metal of the black railing.
Andrew Brice requested her
. That’s what Mr. Stein said. Twenty years without even one question for the firm, and then one morning he calls and requests
Mimi Lessing. What was it she said? She had met him a year earlier, at the elevators.
For thirty seconds
. I look down into the street again, at the lit doorways of the apartment buildings, the dark walkers making their way toward
Amsterdam. I shake my head. It’s too crazy. But why does an old man request a young woman that he met for thirty seconds a
year before? Because she’s beautiful, that’s why. Okay. But why does a cop, who could’ve gotten my number a hundred ways,
wait in my hallway to talk to me if he’s just doing a favor for a friend? If he doesn’t think in his gut that Elise is missing?

I breathe in the night air a last time, then step back through the window and close it behind me. I latch it, walk to the
bedroom, and pick up the phone.

P
lease answer me. Please.”

Even in terror she is beautiful. Even with the high red of her cheeks gone white.

She woke gradually, and then all at once she began kicking her bound ankles off the car floor and twisting her body in an
effort to see what held her wrists. Then she looked suddenly at me and was still. I had imagined this moment in so many ways,
but never like this. Shock, then recognition, then terror flooded her brown eyes.

“Andrew Brice,” she whispered, and I was riven by the sound of my name from her lips. I kept the wheel steady and looked back
at the dark road ahead of us.

“Where are we going?” she asked, her voice trembling. I didn’t answer. “Why?” she asked a minute later.

She has courage. For five miles she sat without speaking. She tested the strength of the silk, quietly twisting her bound
hands behind the seat back. She searched the darkness outside her window. She tried, somehow, to imagine what had brought
her here and what might see her through. But now, as we pass the sign for Medway and she sees how far from the city we have
come, the silence and the darkness and the strict ties overwhelm her.

“Please answer me,” she says. “Please.”

I reach with one hand for the storage compartment between our seats. She leans away from me, toward the car door. I lift the
top and remove a plastic case. I take a cassette tape from the case and slip it into the stereo. Silence for a few seconds,
and now, filling the car, soft, plaintive piano.

“Convento Di Sant’Anna.”

I watch the shock register in her eyes. Her wrists are suddenly still.

“Nina,” she whispers, almost too low for me to hear.

Yes, Nina.

I spread Nina Torring as Jake Teller had spread her, leaving her eyes free so that she might see the metal instruments laid
out beside her on the black felt. She remembered everything. The length of the binds. The position of the lamps. The order
of the music. When she had given me every detail I needed, I asked her why she had allowed it. I told her that if she could
make me understand, truly understand, she would be released.

No one can be introspective under torture. But under the threat of it, yes. Such concentration. She had grown up in a strict
household. She was sure that was part of it. She had learned to value control. I took a cloth from the stand beside me, and
her eyes followed my hands as I selected a sharp length of metal from the felt and began to polish it. Please. Control. She
had learned to value control. Above all else. And so to surrender that control… to have it taken away… Did I see? And it was
only once. Would only ever have been once. Please. The perspiration poured down her Nordic face, and still she strained for
precision. For truth. It hadn’t just been surrender. No, it had been something else. Something more. Release. That had been
it. Yes, release. She had wanted release. Please. Could I understand that? Please.

“And what of your vows?” I asked her, and laid the polishing cloth aside and raised the shining metal to the light.

Now we pass the sign for Ravena as the last piano notes fade. In the silence before the next song begins, Miss Lessing tries
to meet my eyes. She cannot, so she is looking down into her dress when the twin acoustic guitars begin to play. Peaceful,
meandering. Her slender legs shake now, as if she has stepped from cold water. They shake because she recognizes the music
again. The song that played as I sat in my car, across the street from the Harlem apartment, listening not only to these gentle
Spanish guitars but to the gasps and the cries of Elise Verren.

Elise, too, was given to understand that her lies would be punished. That the truth might set her free. And she, too, remembered
everything. From her I learned of his toys. She described each in detail — its attributes, its purpose. And when I needed
no more, I showed her that I, too, had toys. Harder ones.

A new sound intrudes, and Miss Lessing turns her face toward the backseat. Her purse lies back there, on the floor, and coming
from inside it are the tones of a cell phone. Two rings. Three rings. Four. She looks at me desperately, and again toward
her purse. Five rings. Six. And now silence. She closes her eyes, and I see tears start down her cheek.

She is quiet as we drive on. The Spanish guitars build, build, and now finish, leaving us in deep, intimate silence. Lines
of perspiration have broken on her forehead. She waits, tensed, for the next song. And as the violin starts up, she gives
a soft sigh of shock.

“No one could know,” she whispers, biting her lip in anguish.

Kreisler. “Caprice Viennois.”

She fights to control her breathing. “Please,” she says, but as the magic refrain approaches, I hold up a hand for silence,
and this gesture and then the notes themselves make her turn her face into the leather seat. These seventeen pure notes were
her
notes. She had confided their beauty to no one, not even her fiancé, and yet here they are, chosen by the man who drives
her, bound, into the night.

The notes end, giving way to the body of the piece again, and I engage the turn signal, its steady click cutting through the
music for a few seconds as I ease into the right lane and then onto the exit ramp. Miss Lessing looks back, back toward the
relative safety of the Thruway, and now ahead through the windshield at the empty, desolate rest stop before us.

I pull in behind the low brick restrooms to a spot hidden from the rest of the lot but with a view of the exit ramp behind
us. I turn off the engine, then turn the ignition key to auxiliary, so that Kreisler can continue to play. I release the trunk
latch. “Please,” she whispers, meeting my eyes now, trying to measure my intentions, my limits. I use the button beside me
to lower her window. The touch of the night wind on her face makes her gasp and close her eyes and breathe in deeply what
must to her be the smell of freedom.

I step out my door and walk to the trunk. I open the stout black bag and take from it the cloth I used at the Century Motel.
It still reeks of chloroform, but I hold it over the mouth of the heavy glass bottle and douse it again, and then, holding
it out and away from me, I step to her window.