I'll Walk Alone (15 page)

35

A
s he had promised, Willy took Zan home in a hired car. He offered to drop Fr. Aiden along the way, but he did not accept the ride. “No, you go along. I’ll visit with Alvirah for a little while,” he said.

When Fr. Aiden said good-bye to Zan, he looked directly into her eyes and said, “I will pray for you.” Then he reached out and took her hands in his.

“Pray that my little boy is safe,” Zan answered. “Don’t bother to pray for me, Father. God has forgotten that I exist.”

Fr. Aiden did not try to reply. Instead he stepped aside to let her pass into the hallway. “I’ll just stay five minutes, Alvirah,” he promised after the door closed behind Zan and Willy. “I could see that the young woman wanted no part of my company, and I didn’t want to wish it on her even for a short ride in the car.”

“Oh, Aiden,” Alvirah sighed. “I’d give anything if I could believe that Zan didn’t take Matthew out of his stroller that day, but she did. There’s no question about it.”

“Do you think the child is alive?” Fr. Aiden asked.

“I could no more conceive of her hurting Matthew than I could imagine running a knife through Willy.”

“I think you told me that you only came to know Ms. Moreland after her son disappeared,” Fr. Aiden said.
Be careful,
he warned himself. There is no way you can possibly let Alvirah think that you’ve met Alexandra Moreland before.

“Yes. We became friendly because I wrote a column about her, and she phoned to thank me for it. Oh, Aiden, I believe that Zan must have been in some sort of catatonic state, or maybe even has a split personality. The point is, I don’t know anyone she has ever mentioned who might be raising Matthew for her.”

“There are no other family members?”

“She was an only child. So was her mother, and her father had one brother who died when he was still a teenager.”

“How about a close friend?”

“I’m sure she has friends, but I don’t care how good a friend you are, who would be party to a kidnapping? But, Father, suppose she just abandoned Matthew somewhere and doesn’t know where? The one thing I would swear is that in her mind, her child is missing.”

In her mind, her child is missing.
Fr. Aiden was still pondering that thought when, a few minutes later, the doorman hailed a cab for him downstairs.

I am an accessory to an ongoing crime and to a murder that is about to be committed.

Does that young woman indeed have a split mind — or what is the new term for it, a dissociative identity disorder? And if so, was it Alvirah’s friend, the real personality, trying to break through when she rushed into the Reconciliation Room?

The cab the doorman hailed was waiting. Grunting from the pain in his arthritic knees as he climbed into the backseat, Fr. Aiden thought, I am bound by the seal of the confessional. There is no way I can hint as to what I know. She asked me to pray for her child. But oh, dear Lord, if a murder is in the offing, I beg you to intercede and stop it.

What the elderly friar could not even begin to imagine was that there were now three murders being planned. And that
he
was first on the list.

36

J
osh was already in the office when Zan arrived at eight
A.M.
Thursday morning. From the expression on his face, she knew immediately that something else had happened. By now too numb to feel anything except cold acceptance, she merely asked, “What is it?”

“Zan, you told me that Kevin Wilson agreed to hold off on deciding between you and Bartley over those model apartments.”

“Yes. But I know with those pictures in this morning’s papers of me being carried out to the ambulance yesterday, it’s all over for that job. I’ll be surprised if everything I left with him isn’t back here before noon.”

“Zan,” Josh said passionately, “that’s probably true, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Zan, how could you have ordered all the fabrics and furniture and wall hangings for those apartments before you got the okay on the job?”

“You’ve got to be joking,” Zan said flatly.

“Zan, I wish I were. You put the order in for the fabrics and the wall hangings and the custom furniture and the fixtures. My God, you’ve ordered
everything.
We’ve got delivery notices on the fabrics. Forget the money! Where are we going to
put
all that stuff?”

“They never would have begun delivering without being paid,” she said. This, at least, I can prove is a mistake, Zan thought frantically.

“Zan, I called Wallington Fabrics. They have a letter from you requesting deferment of the usual ten percent down because time is of the essence, and saying you’ll be able to pay in full as soon as the contract with Kevin Wilson comes in. You claim he’s already signed it, and the check will be arriving very soon.”

Josh grabbed a paper from his desk. “I asked them to fax me a copy of the letter. Here it is. On our stationery and that’s your signature.”

“I didn’t sign that letter,” Zan said. “I swear on my life that I didn’t sign that letter, and I didn’t order anything for those model apartments. Absolutely all I ever took from any of our suppliers were the upholstery fabric, drapery and wall hanging samples, and pictures of the furniture and Persian carpets and window treatments that I would use if we got the job.”

“Zan,” Josh began, then shook his head. “Look, I love you like you’re my own sister. We’ve got to call Charley Shore right now. When I phoned Wallington Fabrics, I thought someone had made a mistake. Now they’re going to start worrying about getting paid. And you
did
send minimal deposits to hold the carpets and some of the antiques. You must have written the checks from your personal account.”

“I didn’t sign that letter,” Zan said, her voice now quiet. “I didn’t write any checks from my personal account. And I am not crazy.” She saw the look of combined disbelief and concern on the face of her associate. “Josh, I accept your resignation. If this is going to turn out to be a scandal with our suppliers suing us, I don’t want you caught in it. They might accuse you of being in some kind of rip-off scheme along with me. So why don’t you get your stuff together and take off?”

As he stared at her, she added, sarcastically, “Admit it. You think I kidnapped my own son and that I’ve lost my mind. Who knows, maybe I’m dangerous? Maybe I’ll clobber you over the head when your back is turned.”

“Zan,” Josh snapped. “I’m not leaving you, and I’m going to find a way to help you.”

The phone rang, a sharp, ominous sound. Josh picked up the receiver, listened, then said, “She’s not here yet. I’ll give her the message.”

Zan watched as Josh scribbled a phone number. When he hung up, he said, “Zan, that was Detective Billy Collins. He wants you to come to the Central Park Precinct with your lawyer today, as soon as possible. I’m going to call Charley Shore right now. It’s early but he told me he always gets to his office by 7:30.”

Yesterday I fainted, Zan thought. I can’t, I won’t, do that again.

During the night, after Willy dropped her off, she lay in bed in quiet, absolute despair, a single light shining on Matthew’s picture again. For some reason, the look of compassion in the eyes of the priest who was Alvirah’s friend kept coming back to her. I was rude to him, she thought, but I could feel that he wanted to help me. He said he’d pray for me, but I told him to pray for Matthew instead. When he took my hands, it felt as though he were blessing me. Maybe what he was doing was helping me to face the truth?

All night long, except for brief periods when she dozed off, Zan had kept her vigil, looking at Matthew’s picture. As dawn was breaking she said quietly, “Little guy, I don’t believe that you’re still alive. I’ve always sworn that I would know if you were dead, but I’ve been fooling myself. You are dead, and it’s over for me, too. I don’t know what’s happening, but I can’t fight anymore. I guess in my soul, all these many months, I’ve really believed that you were grabbed by a predator who abused and then killed you. I wouldn’t have thought I would come to this, but there is a bottle of sleeping pills in this drawer that will bring us back together. It’s time to take them.”

A sense of relief and exhaustion had come over her, and she finally closed her eyes. With Fr. Aiden’s face before her, she had prayed for forgiveness and understanding before she reached for the pills.

It was then that she heard Matthew’s voice calling out to her. “Mommy, Mommy.” She had leapt up from the bed screaming, “Matthew! Matthew!” In that moment, against all rational belief, she knew with absolute certainty that her little boy was still alive.

Matthew is alive, she thought fiercely, as she heard Josh talking to Charley Shore. When he replaced the receiver, Josh said, “Detective Collins wants to question you this morning. Mr. Shore will pick you up at 10:30.”

Zan nodded. “You said that I must have paid any deposits on the furnishings for the model apartments out of my savings account. Pull my bank account up for me on the computer.”

“I don’t have the password for your account.”

“You’ll have it now. It’s ‘Matthew.’ I have a little over twenty-seven thousand dollars in it.”

Josh sat down in front of the computer and began to send his fingers flying across the keyboard.

Zan saw the expression on his face, troubled, but not surprised. “What is my balance?” she asked.

“Two hundred thirty-three dollars and eleven cents.”

“Then there is a computer hacker at work,” she said flatly.

Josh ignored that. “Zan, what are we going to do about all the orders you placed?” he asked.

“You mean, what are we going to do about all the orders I
didn’t
place,” Zan said. “Look, Josh, I’m not afraid to go to the police station and talk with Detective Collins. I believe there is an answer to all this. Somebody hates me enough to try and destroy me, and his name is Bartley Longe. I told Detective Collins and his partner about him when Matthew disappeared. They didn’t take me seriously. I know they didn’t. But if Bartley hates me enough to try to destroy my reputation and my business, I think he may hate me enough to kidnap my son and maybe turn him over to a friend who wanted a child.”

“Zan, don’t repeat that to the cops. They’ll turn that kind of talk against you in a heartbeat,” Josh implored.

The intercom phone rang. Josh picked up the receiver. It was the service manager of the building. “Shipment arriving for you. It’s a large load and pretty heavy.”

Ten minutes later twenty long rolls of fabric were delivered to the office. Zan and Josh had to push the desk to one side and pile the chairs in the back room in order to make room for it. When the delivery men left, Josh opened the statement that was attached to one of the rolls and read it aloud. “One hundred yards of discontinued fabric at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a yard. Special arrangement nonrefundable purchase agreement. Full payment due within ten days. Total including tax, thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-four dollars.”

He looked at Zan. “We have forty thousand dollars in the bank and sixteen thousand in accounts receivable. You’ve been concentrating so much on the model apartments, you haven’t done anything on at least four of the smaller jobs we have lined up. The rent is due next week and so is the payment on the start-up loan you got to open this place, to say nothing of the usual overhead and our salaries.”

The phone rang again. This time Josh made no effort to answer, and Zan hurried to pick it up. It was Ted. His voice bitter and angry, he snarled, “Zan, I’m on my way to meet Detective Collins. I have rights as Matthew’s father, rights that you have willfully taken from me. I am going to insist that they arrest you immediately, and I’ll move heaven and earth to make you tell me what you have done with my son.”

37

T
oby Grissom pushed open the door of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan and, ignoring the comings and goings in the busy reception area, approached the sergeant behind the desk.

“I’m Toby Grissom,” he began timidly, but there was nothing timid in his voice when he added, “My daughter is missing and I think some big shot interior decorator may be the reason for it.”

The sergeant looked at him. “How old is your daughter?”

“Thirty last month.”

The sergeant did not show the relief he felt. He’d been afraid that it might be another case of a young teenage runaway who sometimes gets picked up by a pimp and ends up a hooker or disappearing for good. “Mr. Grissom, if you’ll just take a seat, I’ll ask one of our detectives to take down the information.”

There were a couple of benches in the area near the desk. Toby, his wool cap in hand, a manila envelope under his arm, sat on one of them and watched with detached curiosity as uniformed cops went in and out of the building, sometimes accompanying people in handcuffs.

Fifteen minutes later, a large-framed man in his midthirties with thinning blond hair and a quiet manner approached Toby. “Mr. Grissom, I’m Detective Wally Johnson. Sorry to keep you waiting. If you’ll follow me to my desk, we can talk.”

Obediently Toby stood up. “I’m used to waiting,” he said. “Seems to me I’ve been waiting for one thing or another most of my life.”

“I think we all have times when we feel like that,” Wally Johnson agreed. “It’s this way.”

The detective’s desk was one of many in a large, cluttered room. Most of the desks were empty, but the files strewn on them suggested that each of the missing occupants was actively working cases.

“We got lucky,” Johnson said as, arriving at his desk, he pulled up a chair beside it. “I not only got promoted to being next to the window with the view, such as it is, but it’s one of the quieter spots in the whole precinct.”

Toby did not know where he got his courage to speak up. “Detective Johnson, I don’t really care if you like where you sit. I’m here because my daughter is missing, and I think either something has happened to her, or she’s mixed up in some kind of trouble that she has to get out of.”

“Can you explain what you mean by that, Mr. Grissom?”

By now, after visiting Bartley Longe’s office and speaking with the two young women Glory had been living with when she disappeared, Toby felt as though he could not go through the full story again. But that’s crazy, he told himself. If I don’t come across to this detective as a guy to believe, he’ll just blow me off.

“My daughter’s legal name is Margaret Grissom,” he began. “I always called her Glory because she was such a glorious, beautiful baby, if you know what I mean. She left Texas when she was eighteen to come to New York. She wanted to be an actress. She won best actress in the senior play at her high school.”

Oh God, Johnson thought, how many of those kids who were best actress in the school play come running to New York? Talk about the “field of dreams.” It was an effort to keep his mind on what Grissom was telling him, about his daughter taking the name of Brittany La Monte, and what a good person she was. She was so pretty she was offered jobs in porno films but wouldn’t touch them, how she got started doing makeup because that way she could make enough money to support herself and even send nice little gifts to him on his birthday and Christmas. And —

It was time for Johnson to interrupt. “You say she came to New York twelve years ago. How many times have you seen her since then?”

“Five times. Like clockwork. Glory always spent Christmas with me every other year. Except almost two years ago this coming June, she phoned and said she wouldn’t be coming next Christmas. She said she was working on a new job that was real hush-hush, but that she’d be getting paid a lot of money for it. When I asked if she was talking about some guy keeping her, she said, ‘No, Daddy, no, I promise you.’ “

And he believes that, Wally Johnson thought sympathetically.

“She said that she had an advance payment for the job and was giving almost all of it to me.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
Can you imagine? It was to be sure I wouldn’t need anything, because she had to be out of touch. I thought maybe she was working for the CIA or something.”

Or more likely, Margaret-Glory-Brittany found herself a billionaire, Detective Johnson thought.

“The last I heard from her was a postcard from New York six months ago saying that the job was taking longer than she expected and that she was worried about me and missed me,” Grissom continued. “That’s why I finally came to New York. I got some real bad news from my doctor, and besides that I have a feeling now that maybe somebody is holding Glory somewhere. I went to see the girls she shared an apartment with and they told me that this big shot designer was snowing her about how he’d introduce her to theatre people and make her a star. He made her go up to his house in Connecticut on weekends so she could meet important people.”

“Who was this designer, Mr. Grissom?”

“Bartley Longe. He has fancy offices on Park Avenue.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“He gave me the same line he gave Glory. He told me that he hired her as a kind of model when he was showing off places he’d decorated and he’d introduced her to a lot of theatre big shots. But they all told him that Glory didn’t have what it takes, and finally he couldn’t pester people about her anymore. And according to him, that was that.”

And it probably was, Wally Johnson thought. The usual thing. The guy promises her the moon, has a little fling, gets tired of her, and tells her not to bother showing up at his place next weekend.

“Mr. Grissom, I’m going to follow up on this, but I warn you that I’m afraid that we’re not going to get very far. I’m more interested in the job your daughter was so mysterious about. Is there anything more specific you know about it?”

“Not a thing,” Toby Grissom said.

As he asked the question, Wally Johnson felt like a phony. I’d be better off telling this poor old guy that his daughter is a hooker who got involved with some guy, and it’s worth her while to stay under the radar, he thought.

Nevertheless, he asked the usual perfunctory questions. Height. Weight. Color of eyes. Color of hair.

“All this is on Glory’s publicity shots,” Toby Grissom said. “Maybe you’d like one.” He reached into the envelope he was carrying and brought out a half dozen eight-by-ten photographs. “You know, they want the girls to look kind of sweet and innocent in one picture, and kind of sexy in another, and if they have short hair like Glory, they try them with different wigs or extensions or whatever you call that stuff.”

Wally Johnson rifled through the photos. “She
is
very pretty,” he said sincerely.

“Yeah, I know. I mean, I always liked her better with long hair, but she said that it’s easier to have good wigs ‘cause you can be anybody you want.”

“Mr. Grissom, why don’t you leave me the photograph with the montage showing her in her different poses. That will be more useful to us.”

“Of course.” Toby Grissom stood up. “I’m going back to Texas. I need my chemo treatments. They won’t save my life, I guess, but maybe they will keep me alive long enough to see my Glory.” He started to walk away, then came back to Johnson’s desk. “You will talk to that Bartley Longe?”

“Yes, I will. And if anything develops we’ll be in touch with you, I promise.”

Wally Johnson tucked Margaret-Glory-Brittany’s glossy photo montage under the clock on the corner of his desk. His gut instinct was that the young woman was alive and well and probably involved in something dirty, if not illegal.

I’ll give that Longe guy a call, Johnson thought, then I’ll put Glory’s picture where it belongs, in the dead letter file.