Inherit the Dead (3 page)

“I need to know if—”

“I
said
they are under control.” The steel was back in her eyes—and her voice.

“Mrs. Drusilla.” Perry spoke quietly and chose his words carefully. “If I’m going to find your daughter, I need to know everything.”

“Norman would never do anything to harm Angel. It’s just that—” A short intake of breath. “He drinks. Or did. And when he does—Well, you’ve never seen such a personality change. It’s quite”—she shook her head—“extraordinary.”

“Is that the reason you two—”

“Divorced? No. It had nothing to do with
that,
” she said, hard. “But he’s stopped drinking. At least I think so, hope so.” Then more quietly, “All I was saying is that if Norman had been tougher, Angel might not have disappeared without a word. He doesn’t lay down any rules.”

“What about your rules?”

“I’m afraid I have little say over what Angel does. She doesn’t live here, remember?”

“But you’re her mother.”

“I repeat: she does not live here. I cannot be a disciplinarian from a distance, and Angel . . . well, we don’t see each other very often.”

“When was the last time?”

“We have not seen each other in . . . ” She looked up at ceiling. “I can’t say for certain but . . . probably close to a year.”

“A year?”

“Yes. Give or take a few . . . weeks.”

“That’s a long time. Did you have a fight?”

“No. We just . . . don’t get along very well. The distance is good for us.” She sighed. “I’d hoped Angel would grow out of her rebellious phase—all teenage girls have issues with their mothers, don’t they, Detective? Lord knows I gave my poor mother a terrible time. But Angel can’t seem to get past it.”

“So you
did
argue.”

“In the past. But not anymore. It’s hard to argue when you rarely speak.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do, Detective.” She leaned closer, her breath
minty with a hint of something medicinal. “Despite our disagreements, I am her mother, and I love her very much. And I believe down deep she loves me, too. One day—soon, I hope—she will come to realize how
much
I love her.” She sniffed as if she was fighting tears, but her eyes were perfectly clear, her tone clipped. “It’s why I must find her. Why
you
must find her.” She laid a bony hand on Perry’s. It was cold and dry. “I don’t have much time, and I need to make things right between us, need to . . . ” Her breathing became labored, a wheezing sound, as if there was cotton wadding in her nose and throat.

“Are you all right?”

“Y-yes. Or . . . I will be once you find my daughter and bring her back to me.”

Bring her back? But she was never here.

She took deep breaths, a hand to her throat. “All I know is that she is gone and no one has heard from her. I’m frightened, Detective.”

Perry tried to read her face, but it was flat, expressionless. “You said that your daughter often took off,
wandered,
so there’s probably no reason to suspect anything is wrong—or is there?”

She looked away, and when she turned back there was something ferocious in her eyes though she spoke calmly, “No. There’s nothing. Nothing at all.” She continued to stare at him, not speaking.

Perry let the quiet expand between them. Something he’d learned as a cop: let the suspect fill the uncomfortable void.

And she did. “There’s something you should know, Detective. Angel will be twenty-one in less than two weeks, at which time she will come into a sizable fortune.”

“I see. And Angel knows this?”

“No. At least I never told her. Of course she knew she would get money,
my
money, which is considerable, though she has a small, serviceable income of her own. I thought it best she not spend her youth knowing she would come into tremendous wealth. I did not want
money to stifle her need to work, to grow as a human being. It’s better to come into money later and not know about it, don’t you agree, Detective?”

“Sure,” said Perry. “Though I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I do. Money can make one lazy, even corrupt.”

Money can make people do all sorts of things,
thought Perry.

“All Angel has to do is sign some papers and the money is hers. I would not have waited until the last minute, but the trust stipulates that she sign on her twenty-first birthday. Not a day earlier—or later. A ridiculous technicality, but I suppose it was put there in the event that”—she heaved a sigh—“that Angel was not alive on her twenty-first birthday. My God, what a horrid thought.”

“And if she doesn’t sign?”

“The trust remains entirely with me. We are meant to split what remains of my father’s money, which he put in trust for his heirs.”

“Let me get this straight. If Angel signs, she gets half the money.”

“Yes.”

“And if she doesn’t,
you
get it all.”

“Yes.” She painted on a smile. “I see what you’re thinking, Detective. That I might want to keep all of the money for myself.”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Please. I have more money than I know what to do with. And I’m dying.” Her eyes locked on his. “Why would I want you to find my daughter if I wanted to keep her money?”

Perry didn’t know, but he let the question sit there.

“Another two or three hundred million makes no difference to me.”

“Which is it?”

“Which is
what
?” She stood up and shook out her arms, then started to pace again, her white tunic floating behind her.
She looks like a ghost,
Perry thought.

“Two or three hundred million?”

She stopped pacing and looked at him. “I’m not sure. Does it really matter?”

“We’re talking about a lot of money.”

“I suppose.” Julia Drusilla shrugged her bony shoulders. “I just want Angel to have what is rightfully hers—to have the life she was meant to have, the freedom to do whatever she wants. Money can buy freedom, Detective.” She started pacing again, tapping her bony hand against her thigh as she did.

“I can imagine,” said Perry, and almost corrected himself: he could
not
imagine. He was trying to think it through: a girl about to inherit a fortune who disappears. Did she know—or didn’t she?

“Is there anyone who might benefit if Angel doesn’t sign those papers?”

Julia Drusilla stopped pacing again. “None who I know of.”

“But there could be?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said none who you know of, but could there be someone out there you don’t know of?”

“Like who?”

“What about your husband?”

“Norman? That’s ridiculous. He’s perfectly comfortable. His needs are well taken care of. I’ve seen to that.”

“Two or three hundred million dollars can fulfill even more needs.”

“Don’t be absurd. Norman adores Angel. And he has plenty of money.” Her voice went hard then softened, and she came closer, her hand on his hand again.

An air-conditioned breeze grazed the back of Perry’s neck, and he shivered—or was it Julia Drusilla’s touch?

“Anyone else?” he asked.

“No. No one.”

“If Angel doesn’t sign the papers, do you still get your half of the money?”

She let her hand drop from his. “It may take a bit longer but . . . yes.”

“That must be a relief.”

“I’ve already told you, Detective, the money means nothing to me.” She stared at him, her gray eyes a mix of steely and needy that made Perry uncomfortable. “You will find her, won’t you?”

“I’ll need a picture.” Perry glanced around the room; there wasn’t a single photograph anywhere.

Julia disappeared down a hallway then reappeared with a wallet-size photo, a portrait, the girl’s face filling it.

“Does she always look like this?” Perry asked.

“You mean, does it look like her?”

“Yes.”

“It does.”

Perry studied the photo: Angel’s hair looked like gold, her eyes a startling shade of blue. There was something old-fashioned about her, too, something that brought to mind movie stars of the 1940s and ’50s, her hooded eyes and the way the corners of her lips tipped up into a sly Kewpie-doll smile.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.

“Yes,” said Julia. “Very beautiful. Everybody says so.” The veins in her neck stood out.

Perry took one more look at the photo then slipped it into his pocket, feeling as if he’d accepted something forbidden.

“Well then, you have everything you need,” said Julia. She folded her thin arms across her chest and glanced at the hallway, his cue to leave.

He stood up, once again noticed the Jackson Pollock painting, and
wondered why someone would buy a multimillion-dollar painting when she was about to die.

Julia led him toward the door.

“Your husband’s address?” he asked.

“Of course.” She wrote it down on a piece of lavender notepaper and placed it in his palm, her bony hand wrapping around his. “Find her, Mr. Christo. Bring my Angel back to me.”

One more time,
thought Perry,
it was not a question.

You sit in the rental car you can’t afford, not yet, but soon, soon, waiting outside her fancy apartment for almost an hour now, freezing, the heat switched off to save on gas, and finally he comes out in that ratty trench coat. Almost makes you laugh. I mean, Is he kidding? A private eye in a trench coat? What a fucking cliché. But this is no laughing matter.

You straighten up, concentrate on what you have to do: follow him. Not easy, following someone who is on foot, in your car, in the city, taxis and buses and people cutting ahead of you, and you don’t dare use the horn and bring attention to yourself, worrying he will spot you.

Then he stops beside a parked car, fumbles keys out of his pocket, his striped scarf blowing in the wind like a banner.

You pull into a bus stop, hoping a traffic cop does not come by, and you watch from a half block away, sipping your third black coffee of the morning, holding the damn Styrofoam cup so tight it cracks and coffee leaks onto your hand and into your lap and you’re trying to mop it up, cursing, and keep an eye on him at the same time, and suddenly he’s driving away and you forget the damn coffee, pull out of the bus stop so fast you practically hit a taxi, the driver laying on his horn so loud you’re sure the private eye can hear so you duck, keeping your head down but peering over the steering wheel, afraid you will lose him, telling yourself to be calm, to breathe, to watch, your eyes like lasers taking in the scratches on the trunk and his license plate, which you memorize, just in case, as you creep down Second Avenue, keeping a few cars between you, the way people do in the movies. But then the traffic eases and he’s driving fast, weaving around cars, but no way you’re going to lose him because this is the most important thing you ever did in your life so it doesn’t matter if you’ve got hot coffee soaking your lap or that your head is aching and your eyes itch from too little sleep and your heart pounds from all the caffeine because it’s finally happening: it’s not just a dream anymore.

You tell yourself to relax, to be cool as you watch him steer his crummy car into the single lane that’s merging into the Midtown Tunnel, your eyes on those paint scratches and license plate, repeating the numbers in your head until his car disappears into the tunnel and you follow it into the darkness with the plan in your head and murder in your heart.

P
erry hated Long Island. Maybe it was the traffic, maybe it was the smells, maybe it was the sense that everybody else mired in the unmoving sea of metal on the expressway was heading out to a five-million-dollar house in the Hamptons in a vehicle worth ten of the aging but faithful Datsun (which was pretty much the only thing he’d been able to salvage from the divorce). Montauk was the far end of the island, so he’d be annoyed for a while. People out that way claimed that their town had been the inspiration for
Jaws,
and Perry in his sour moments liked to imagine a two-ton great white emerging from the water to gobble up all the actors and investment bankers and their fawning acolytes.

He’d had a client a couple of years ago, an economist at Columbia who thought his boyfriend was cheating. They had a place in Southampton, and the boyfriend lived there full time, while the professor drove out on weekends. Perry must have braved the Long Island Expressway a dozen times over the course of a month. Passersby gawked at his ancient car and took him for common, which he certainly was. Finally, Perry concluded that the boyfriend was true as steel. But the client sent him back to take another look. Perry went along, because in those days he was what his father used to call
short funds
. It took
him another week to figure it out. The boyfriend was clean. It was the professor who was cheating, and hoping to find evidence of a dalliance by his partner to make the breakup easier.

Clients lied. All of them, without exception. Perry pondered this most basic rule of the business as his Northstar V8 allowed him to accelerate past the shiny new Priuses and Audis of environmentally conscious millionaires. Clients lied. There were the clever ones who lied because they were proud, and the shy ones who lied because they were ashamed. There were the mothers who lied about what they’d done to their children, and the husbands who lied about what they’d done to their wives. Clients lied to protect their own guilt or somebody else’s innocence. Lots of the lies were innocuous. But a lot of them weren’t. Half the time, the job the client really wanted Perry to do was a lot grubbier than the job he had supposedly been hired for.

Like his new client, Julia Drusilla. She might not have been lying, but she certainly wasn’t telling the whole truth. Perry had felt it from the moment he walked in. She had sat there beneath that fading portrait of her father and smiled her butter-won’t-melt smile and sipped her tea and told him considerably less than half the story.

Perry didn’t know yet what she was leaving out, but he could make some educated guesses.

Take Norman, Julia’s ex-husband. Whoever heard of a missing-child case in which the mother wasn’t screaming that the whole thing was her ex’s fault? And then there was the ammo. The drinking. But all Julia had to say was that Perry should be sure to talk to him. Then there was her sad confession that she couldn’t actually remember the last time she had clapped eyes on her daughter—an event no mother was likely to forget. Or maybe it was her determination to keep the investigation away from the police. Lots of clients asked for that when the question was whether some relative had a hand in the till. But when a family member vanished, they usually hired the Perry
Christos of the world to supplement, not to supplant, the official inquiry.