Where Are You Now? (26 page)

I could imagine Mack stealing his own car, but not Mack holding Leesey hostage and torturing her father. I looked at Nick. “I don't know what to think about Mack,” I said. “I swear to you and to anyone who will listen that other than those Mother's Day calls, I have not heard from Mack or seen him in ten years.”

Nick nodded, and my guess is that he believed me. Then he asked, “Do you think that
I
am responsible for Leesey's disappearance? That I have her hidden somewhere?”

I examined my heart and my soul before I answered. “No, I don't,” I said. “But both of you have been dragged into this, Mack because I went to the police, you because she disappeared from your club. If it's neither one of you, then who
is
responsible?”

“Carolyn, I don't know where to begin to look for the answer to that.”

We talked for more than an hour. I told him I was going to try to see Lil Kramer alone, because she was afraid to say anything in front of her husband. We went round and round about the fact that, just before he vanished,
Mack had been upset with Mrs. Kramer but hadn't told Nick why. I told Nick how Bruce Galbraith had been so hostile about Mack when I saw him last week, and that I thought Barbara had rushed to visit her father in Martha's Vineyard just to avoid being questioned.

“I'm going to drive up there tomorrow or Tuesday,” I said. “Mother doesn't want to see me, and Elliott will take care of her.”

Nick asked me if I thought that Mom would marry Elliott.

“I think so,” I said. “Quite honestly, I hope so. They're very good together. Mom certainly loved Dad, but he delighted in being a bit of a rebel. Elliott is actually more of a soul mate, which of course is a little hard for me to swallow. They're both perfectionists, and I think they'll be very happy together.” Then I added words I'd never thought I'd say. “That's why Mack was always her favorite. He did everything right. I'm too impulsive for Mom's taste. Witness going to the police and opening up this whole mess.”

I was appalled that I had confided that to Nick. I think he was about to come over to me, maybe put his arms around me, but he must have known that wasn't what I wanted. Instead, he said, his tone light, “See if you can guess this one: ‘She sprang full-fledged from her father's brow.' ”

“The goddess Minerva,” I said. “Sister Catherine, sixth grade. Man, how she loved teaching mythology.” I stood up. “You did ask me to have dinner, you know. How about Neary's? I want a sliced-steak sandwich and french fries.”

Nick hesitated. “Carolyn, I have to warn you. There
are cameras outside. My car's near the door. We can make a run for it. I don't think they'll follow us.”

That was the way it turned out. The camera lights flashed the moment we exited the building. Someone tried to shove a microphone in my face. “Ms. MacKenzie, do you think your brother . . .” Nick grabbed my hand, and we ran for his car. He drove up York Avenue until Seventy-second Street, then turned and doubled back. “I think we should be okay now,” he said.

I didn't agree or disagree. My one consolation was that Mom was in a safe place where the media couldn't get at her.

Neary's is an Irish pub on Fifty-seventh Street, a block away from Sutton Place. It's like a second home for many of us in the neighborhood. The atmosphere is warm, the food is good, and the odds are that on any given night, you'll know half the diners.

If I needed moral support, and God knows I did, Jimmy Neary provided it. When he saw me he crossed the room instantly. “Carolyn, it's a disgrace what they're insinuating about Mack,” he told me, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “That boy was a saint. You wait and see, the truth will come out.”

He turned, and recognized Nick. “Hey, kid. Remember when you and Mack came in, you bet me that your father's pasta was a match for my corned beef?”

“We never put it to the test,” Nick said. “And now my dad is in Florida, retired.”

“Retired? How does he like it?” Jimmy asked.

“He hates it.”

“So would I. Tell him to come back, and we'll finally get the answer.”

Jimmy ushered us to one of the corner tables in the back. That was where Nick told me more about the visit to Florida. “I begged my mother to keep the New York papers away from Pop,” he said. “I don't know what it will do to him if he finds out I've been designated a ‘person of interest' in Leesey's disappearance.”

Over sliced-steak sandwiches, by unspoken mutual consent, we drifted into neutral territory. Nick talked about opening his first restaurant and how well it did. He hinted that these last five years, he'd moved too fast. “I think I read Donald Trump's success story once too often,” he admitted. “I got the idea that skating on thin ice was fun. I've banked an awful lot on the Woodshed. It's the right spot at the right time. But if the State Liquor Authority wants to shut it down, they'll find a way. And if that happens, I'm in big trouble.”

We talked cautiously about Barbara Hanover. “I remember thinking how beautiful she was,” I told him.

“She is and was, but Carolyn, there's something else about Barbara, a kind of calculated ‘What's best for Barbara?' agenda. It's hard to explain. But after we all graduated and I went for my MBA, Mack was gone, and as for Bruce, I didn't care if I ever saw him again.”

We both had a cappuccino, then Nick drove me back to Sutton Place. There was just one television van halfway down the block. He rushed me into the building and to the elevator. As the operator held the door open, Nick said, “Carolyn, I didn't do it and neither did Mack. Hang on to that thought.”

He skipped the social kiss and was gone. I went upstairs. The message light was blinking. It was Detective Barrott. “Ms. MacKenzie. At eighty forty
P.M.
tonight, you received another call from Leesey Andrews's cell phone. Your brother didn't leave a message.”

L
ucas Reeves had not taken the weekend off. He had spent it in his office, working with his technicians. Charles MacKenzie Sr. had hired him nearly ten years ago to find his missing son, and the fact that he had never been able to uncover even the slightest hint of what happened to Mack had given Reeves a sense of failure that was never far from his consciousness.

Now he considered it even more urgent that he find the answer, not only to learn what had happened to Mack, but to find the real killer and perhaps save Leesey Andrews's life.

On Monday morning, Lucas was back in his office on Park Avenue South at eight o'clock. His three permanent investigators had been told to get in early. By eight thirty they were seated around his desk. “I have a hunch, and some of my hunches have worked in the past,” he began, “so I'm going to act on it. I am going to assume that Mack is innocent of these crimes, and I am going to assume that someone who knew him at least reasonably well
is
responsible. By that, I mean knew him well enough to
hear about the Mother's Day calls, and to have his family's unlisted phone number.”

Reeves looked from one investigator to another. “We are going to start by concentrating on the people around Mack. By that I mean his two roommates, Nick DeMarco and Bruce Galbraith. We are going to dig up everything we can learn about the superintendent couple, Lil and Gus Kramer. From there we will concentrate on Mack's other friends from Columbia who were with him in the nightclub the evening that first girl disappeared. Over the weekend, our techs have gathered all the newspaper accounts and media clips that were headlines when each of those other three girls vanished. We have enhanced the faces of everyone caught in those pictures, whether he or she was identifiable or not. Study those faces.
Memorize
them.”

Lucas had come in so early that he had made his own coffee. He took a sip, grimaced, and continued. “The media is camped outside Sutton Place. One of you must be in the vicinity at all times. Have your cell phone out, and be using it as a camera. Somebody also has to be on the street when the Woodshed opens tonight, taking pictures not only of guests entering and leaving, but of people hanging around in the streets. There are a couple of other clubs opening in SoHo this week. Be there with the paparazzi.”

“Lucas, that's impossible,” Jack Rodgers, his most senior aide, protested. “The three of us can't cover all that ground.”

“No one asked you to,” Reeves snapped, his normally
deep voice several octaves higher. “Get out the list of the guys we use when we need extra help. We must have thirty retired cops available.”

Rodgers nodded. “Okay.”

Reeves lowered his voice. “My hunch is that the perpetrator loves attention. He may want to be on-site when there's a media rush. The faces that show in every picture you snap will be enhanced in our lab. I don't care how many there are, and I assume there will be hundreds. Maybe, just maybe, one of them will be a match for someone who was around during the media frenzy that followed those other disappearances. I repeat, for the present we are going to assume that Mack MacKenzie is innocent.”

He looked at Rodgers. “Why don't you say it, Jack?”

“All right, Lucas, I'll say it. If you're right, we may find a picture of a guy who shows up all over the place. He may be fat, he may be thin, he may be bald, he may have a ponytail. He'll be someone his own mother wouldn't recognize, and he'll be Charles MacKenzie Jr.”

D
etective Bob Gaylor began searching for Zach Winters on Sunday after the squad meeting. He was not at the Mott Street shelter that was his off-and-on home. He had not been seen on the streets since early Saturday morning, when he had been hanging around the Woodshed, and then had gone to Gregg Andrews's apartment. He had been interrogated on Saturday afternoon, then presumably had gone back to his usual haunts. But he had not gone back to the shelter.

“Zach usually shows up at least every other day,” Joan Coleman, an attractive thirty-year-old volunteer kitchen worker on Mott Street, confided to Gaylor. “Of course, it depends on the weather. He loves the club area in SoHo. He brags that he gets better handouts there.”

“Did he ever talk about being near the Woodshed the night Leesey Andrews disappeared?”

“Not to me. But he's got a couple of what he calls his ‘real good buddies.' Let me talk to them.” She brightened at the idea of doing detective work.

“I'll go with you,” Gaylor volunteered.

She shook her head. “Not if you want to get any information, you won't. I don't usually come in for dinner, but I'm subbing for a friend tonight. Give me your phone number. I'll call you.”

Bob Gaylor had to be content with that. He spent the better part of the day wandering through SoHo and Greenwich Village to no avail.

Zach Winters might have disappeared from the face of the earth.

T
rue to his word, Derek Olsen arrived at Elliott Wallace's office promptly at ten
A.M.
His gait stiff, his suit cleaned and pressed, but shiny with age, his remaining tufts of white hair plastered down on his skull, there was a certain buoyancy about him. Elliott Wallace observed him and correctly interpreted that Olsen, if he followed his plan to liquidate all his holdings, was looking forward to telling his nephew Steve, his buildings manager, Howie, and anyone else he could think of, to go jump in a lake.