Tight Lines (6 page)

I have friends who are homicide detectives. They have described for me in gleefully colorful language the odor a human corpse gives off after a few days in a heated and poorly ventilated room. They have told me how a body bloats, how it discolors, how houseflies lay their eggs on it and how those eggs hatch into maggots. They have described bodies that were found hanging by the neck, how the eyes bulge, and bodies that left impossibly large puddles of dried black blood on a linoleum floor, and bodies that drowned in bathtubs, and bodies that lay in bed for weeks after they had ceased functioning.

I tried not to think about dead bodies. The harder I tried, naturally, the more vivid became the images that whirled in my brain.

Jill Costello stood beside me, operating the elevator. The top of her head didn’t quite reach my shoulder. She was staring up at the blinking lights. I hoped, for her sake, that she didn’t have friends who were homicide detectives.

The elevator opened into a large square hallway. Four doors opened onto it. Jill led me to the one marked 4-B. She paused outside it, then rapped on it with her knuckles. “Mary Ellen. It’s Jill. Can I come in for a minute?”

She stood with her head cocked to the side for a minute. Then she looked up at me and shrugged. “Let’s go in.”

She took a ring of keys from her pocket, twisted one of them in the lock, and turned the knob. The door swung inward. It didn’t come up against a chain lock. This I took as a small positive sign.

Jill pushed it all the way open. She gestured with the palm of her hand. “After you.”

I stepped inside. I took a small, tentative breath through my nose.

It smelled musty, closed in, empty.

It didn’t smell fetid.

I turned to Jill. “Come on in. I think it’s okay.”

“You were thinking…?”

I nodded.

I switched on the light. The door opened directly into a large living room. A small area was sectioned off into a dining area. There was a rectangular drop-leaf maple table with eight matching chairs, matching buffet and china closet. Cherry, I guessed, with lots of fancy scrollwork. The larger half of the room contained a baby grand piano, two sofas, a big leather armchair, and a wall-sized shelved unit that held a television, VCR, stereo system, books, a few potted plants, and knick-knacks.

The knickknacks were pieces of pottery and crude statues and carvings. The pottery looked Indian. The sculptures and carved pieces were erotic.

The potted plants were dead.

Over the piano hung a huge oil portrait. I recognized the subject. It was Charles Ames, Mary Ellen’s father, at least twice as big as life in her Beacon Hill living room. A craggy man of about sixty in the painting, with a magnificent head of curly steel-gray hair, shaggy gray eyebrows, long, lumpy nose, and the same sensuous mouth that I had seen in the photograph of Mary Ellen. I had seen photos of Charles at Susan’s house in Concord. Susan had no oil portraits of her late husband.

A small floodlight attached to the ceiling, which had gone on when I’d thrown the room switch, illuminated the painting.

“So what are we looking for?” said Jill.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We went into the kitchen. Appliances of every description lined the counters. Microwave, blender, toaster oven, food processor, cappuccino machine, coffee machine, coffee bean grinder. Other things the function of which was not apparent to me.

In the sink was a coffee mug and a bowl with a spoon in it. I bent to examine the bowl. A patch of green mold was growing on the bottom.

I opened the refrigerator. A few bottles of white wine lay on their sides. A brown head of lettuce in a plastic bag. Some Schweppes ginger ale. Half a dozen cans of Coors beer. A cardboard carton of milk.

I removed the milk and opened it.

“Whew!” said Jill.

The milk had soured long before.

“She hasn’t been here for a while,” I said.

“The bedrooms and bath are down this way,” she said, gesturing with a jerk of her head.

I followed her. In the bathroom the usual array of feminine beauty aids was stacked on the back of the toilet and on a wicker shelf that hung over it. An opened box of Tampax sat on the floor beside the toilet.

Two towels lay crumpled on the floor. I picked one up and sniffed it. It smelled sour.

I slid open the medicine cabinet. Aside from one bottle of prescription drugs, the rest was over-the-counter stuff.

We went into the bedroom. The queen-sized bed was unmade. A pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, three pink silk panties, one bra, and about half a dozen white athletic socks were strewn about the floor. There were only a couple of empty hangers in the well-stocked wall-sized closet.

Jill fingered some of the garments that hung there. “Boy,” she said. “This is all designer stuff.”

“She has plenty of money,” I said.

On the floor in the back of the closet sat four matching pieces of leather luggage and an Imelda Marcos collection of footwear.

“It doesn’t look as if she packed a lot of stuff for a trip,” I said.

Jill and I had been talking in low whispers, as if we feared being overheard. When the telephone beside the bed suddenly rang, she reached out reflexively and grabbed my wrist. “Shit,” she mumbled. “I nearly wet my pants.”

It rang three times. Then from another room we heard a muffled click and Mary Ellen’s voice requesting, as it had of me when I tried calling, an “intriguing message.”

This caller left no message.

I turned to Jill. “Where’s that machine?”

“Must be in the other bedroom.”

The other bedroom contained a sofa and a pair of bookcases and a desk with a Macintosh computer atop it. The room appeared to have served as Mary Ellen’s study. The answering machine, along with a telephone, sat on the desk. The red light on the machine was blinking furiously. Jill and I both stared at it. I turned to her. “What do you think?”

“Oh, boy. It’s an egregious invasion of privacy.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

She shrugged. “I apologize.”

“Let’s listen,” I said. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Fair enough.”

I sat at the desk and depressed the button on the machine. It whirred, clicked, and clanked, and a man’s voice said, “Hey, kiddo. You there? Thought we had a date. Give me a jingle.”

Click, beep. A different male voice. “Mary Ellen? It’s me. Just checking on tomorrow night. I’ve got the stuff. Talk to you later.”

The same voice again, essentially the same message, no name or phone number given. Then a woman’s voice, “Just wanted to shoot the shit.”

There were several hangups. There was one computer-generated recording, a quick-talking high-energy voice that mainly kept repeating an 800 phone number. Each of the two male voices returned a couple of times, neither leaving a name, a time, a date, or what I would call an intriguing message.

My own voice startled me. Jill looked at me when it came on. I shrugged. At least I left my name and a message.

Then came a voice that jerked my head back, a heavily accented voice that I recognized instantly. “Mary Ellen,” it said, “I must speak with you. It is imperative. Please call me at the office.”

He didn’t leave his name or a phone number. He didn’t need to. It was Sherif Rahmanan.

Each of the two unnamed men called again. I called again. I used the word “urgent.”

Sherif Rahmanan called again. He repeated the word “imperative.”

The tape rewound. I held down the button so the recorded messages would not be lost.

“Lots of people looking for her,” said Jill.

I nodded. “And not a damn one of them even left a name.”

“Except you.”

“I’m well bred.”

“What do you think?”

I shrugged. “She’s been gone for a while. Safe to infer that none of these callers knows where she is, or even that she planned to be away.”

“As if she just decided to get away from everybody,” said Jill.

“Like that.”

“I wonder why.”

“I don’t know,” I mused. “For all we know, there are plenty of people who do know where she is. They wouldn’t bother trying to call her.”

“Yeah, except some of these men who called, they seemed to know her well. I mean, they didn’t even leave their names, as if they assumed she’d recognize their voices.”

“They might be the very ones she wants to get away from,” I said.

Jill went over and sat on the sofa. She lit another cigarette. I looked around for an ashtray and, finding none, slid a metal wastebasket toward her with my foot. “What if she already knew about her mother?” said Jill. “What if that’s why she’s gone away?”

“You mean to avoid the whole scene? To wait somewhere until she dies?”

She shrugged.

“How could she know?”

“Hey,” she said. “You tell me. There must be doctors, friends, hospital people, whatever.”

“Regardless,” I said. “I’ve still got to try to see her.”

Sherif Rahmanan, I thought. The bastard lied to me. His message came directly after mine. He had called her to warn her about me.

But she had been gone for a while already by then. If Rahmanan knew where she was, he wouldn’t have tried calling her here.

I sat beside Jill and lit a Winston. “Now what?” she said.

I sighed. “I don’t know.” I smoked for a minute and watched the red light of the answering machine wink at me. Suddenly I snapped my fingers. I stood up.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

“There was a prescription bottle in the bathroom. There must be a doctor’s name on it.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know. So she’s got a doctor. So she might be sick or something. Maybe she’s in a hospital. Maybe he’s treated her recently. Maybe she confides in him.”

“Or her,” said Jill.

“I stand corrected.” I went into the bathroom. Jill followed me. I removed the bottle. It contained capsules of something called Pertofrane. I shook it. Half empty. Or half full, I suppose. I’m a half empty man, myself. I read its label. The prescribing doctor’s name was McAllister. She was supposed to take two of the capsules by mouth every morning. The prescription had been filled on September 9. Less than a month earlier. She had three refills left.

“Let’s find a phone book,” I said.

The big NYNEX Yellow Pages was in the bottom drawer of the desk. I looked under Physicians. It listed three McAllisters. Arline, Peter, and Warren. Arline’s office was in Cambridge, Peter’s was in Chelsea, and Warren’s in Brookline.

I took out my notebook and jotted all three names and numbers into it. Then I flipped the Yellow Pages forward to the section where the physicians were listed by their practice.

Arline was a gynecologist.

Peter turned out to be a plastic surgeon.

Warren was a psychiatrist.

I had no idea what the drug Pertofrane was for.

But I suspected that patients probably confided in their plastic surgeons and gynecologists. They certainly told secrets to their therapists.

I glanced at my watch. It was ten after nine. I’d call the three McAllister doctors in the morning. Maybe I’d give Sherif Rahmanan a call, too. I didn’t like being lied to.

I stood up. “Let’s go,” I said to Jill.

“Don’t you want to look through her papers or something? Maybe find a little black book, love notes, overdue bills, threatening letters, like that?”

“I’m already feeling like a rapist,” I said. “I think I’ve violated her privacy enough for one evening. If I come back, will you let me in?”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

A
S WE RODE DOWN
in the elevator, Jill said, “This has been kinda fun.”

“Fun?”

“I mean, playing detective.”

I rolled my eyes. “Susan Ames is dying. Her daughter’s missing.”

She hugged herself. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry. You’re right. It just—I kinda forgot about all the crap in my own life there for a while.”

I patted her shoulder. “That’s all right.”

The elevator shuddered to a stop. “You want to stop in for a drink?” she said.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

We walked across the lobby toward the stairwell. Donald watched us from his desk, smirking. We descended one flight of stairs and Jill unlocked the single door at the landing. Her apartment was small and cramped, just a single room divided by strategically placed furniture. It looked as if it had been built into the basement as an afterthought. A convertible sofa at the far end was pulled out and rumpled with a tangle of sheets, blankets, and pillows. A stand-up kitchen at the opposite end was separated from the rest of the room by a waist-high island. A large round table was piled with open books and yellow pads of paper. A single narrow window at head height over the sofa emitted yellow light from Beacon Street. Cheap prints of Andrew Wyeth paintings hung from the imitation knotty pine-paneled walls.

“Well,” said Jill with a sweep of her hand, “such as it is.”

I sat in one of the wooden chairs at the table. She pushed aside the books and papers. “I’m after my MBA,” she said. “The damn technical courses are driving me nuts. I’m good at the people stuff. Leadership, human resources, shit like that. Computers, accounting, micro-economics? I don’t know a spreadsheet from a bedsheet. Anyway, what do you like to drink? I’ve got beer.”

“How about a beer?”

“Miller’s or Miller’s?”

“Got any Miller’s?”

“Whatever you like,” she said.

She took two cans of Miller’s from her little refrigerator and sat across from me. We both lit cigarettes and sipped beer. She began to talk. She had grown up outside of Scranton. Her dad repaired automobiles. She got some loans and went to Penn State. Majored in sociology. Useless field. Met John Francis Costello. Married him and followed him to Maiden, Massachusetts, where he took over the family restaurant. He wanted her to be the hostess there while they tried to make babies. She hostessed her ass off, hated it, finally told Johnny she wasn’t doing it anymore. They were having no luck creating babies. She decided to get a master’s degree in something with utility. John Francis Costello forbade it. He wanted his wife barefoot and pregnant, the way all the Costello women had been. She enrolled at Simmons anyway. He wouldn’t forgive her for betraying him that way.