Vanished in the Dunes (10 page)

The report on Wisdom's meetings with Posner and Welbrook rests in a growing folder he holds in his lap. Posner remains a very long shot possible suspect in Heidi's disappearance based solely on the chance bus meeting, although Wisdom has no reason to put much faith in this theory. He doesn't need to find the interview report with Welbrook to remember that particular exchange.

Benjamin Welbrook agreed to meet with Wisdom on short notice. His house is larger than Posner's and has more panoramic ocean views, but both houses exude a level of wealth found with some prevalence throughout the area. Wisdom's summary describes Welbrook as a very poised middle-aged individual involved in entertainment law. He dresses in simple, yet elegant clothing; white linen pants and a blue designer shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. He uses the house in Amagansett to entertain clients and for weekend getaways with his partner whom Wisdom meets during the meeting.

Welbrook introduces his partner as Steven Hoyle. Hoyle has dark hair and wears a tee shirt and worn jeans with a large hole over one knee. He appears slightly younger than Welbrook and is an editorial associate for a major publishing firm. They offer coffee and sit on the opposite couch from Wisdom. Welbrook drapes an arm around Hoyle's shoulder, which he periodically massages. The effect is obvious. Wisdom has no interest in the man's sexual orientation except that it minimizes Welbrook's possible interest in Heidi Kashani, although that doesn't mean elimination. Welbrook still remains a minor focus, but is now in the second tier, if such a distinction is possible.

In Wisdom's opinion Dr. Stern is still front and center the most likely to be involved. All this flashes through Wisdom's mind in seconds, but the chief doesn't seem to notice any delay in his answer.

“Let me think about how to approach this. Stern is a more likely suspect that these other two. Sounds like he's just trying to throw us off. Did the city cops happen to mention whether Stern did anything to indicate that he felt he was a possible suspect?”

“Nothing they picked up on. But if I wanted to off my girlfriend, one good way to cover up might be to report her missing and then try to steer the blame to someone else. That's if I had a girlfriend I wanted to disappear, which I don't, and if I had one that looked like Heidi, I absolutely wouldn't.”

Wisdom stands and sighs in one motion, almost as if his body was controlled by some outside puppeteer. He starts to walk toward the door then stops and turns sharply.

“You said there were two more things. Another go-round with these two dudes is one. What's the other?”

Ferris smiles into his nearly empty coffee cup.

“The hospital got a call. Seems Heidi has a sister and she'll be arriving in the city in a week and plans on visiting us the following Tuesday.”

Wisdom glances at the wall calendar, which is distributed by a local nonprofit. Smack in the middle of the last week in August, as busy a week as they're likely to get all summer.

“The Austrian Consulate in the city has asked that she be given the full treatment. Actually the call to the hospital came from State. The sister's a special assistant to some UN bigwig in Geneva. And if you're at all curious why I'm so interested in this case, then you can blame the State Department. Enjoy your weekend.”

Brigid Kashani sits on the chair in Ferris's office. She is flanked on one side by a man from the Austrian Consulate who introduces himself as Bernd Weis. He's dressed all in charcoal gray except for a dazzling white shirt that is slashed by a tie that matches his suit color. Sergeant Rick Bennett, who runs the squad of seven detectives on the town force and is Wisdom's boss, sits on her other side facing Wisdom and Ferris. Lieutenant Walker might otherwise have taken the chief's place, but international embassy visitors call for a certain protocol.

Bennett's hair is starting to gray and his belly just begins to push against a wrinkled shirt bunched at his gut, but his appearance is deceptive. His mind is both fertile and agile, always on the alert to ambush a contradiction in a story. After twenty years on the job, he's become a very good cop. Bennett actually started with the department in East Hampton Village as a teenage summer traffic control officer—what the locals still call “a sand cop”—writing parking tickets. Today he's arguably one of the best general detectives in the whole county and the town is lucky that he never left.

Wisdom looks again at Brigid while Ferris relays soft drink requests on the phone to his secretary. Brigid looks very much like Heidi down to the same short black helmet of hair Wisdom memorized from the photo; a slightly larger than normal nose, full lips, wide dark eyes and a light-brown Middle Eastern coloring. There is one major obvious difference. Brigid Kashani wears a business suit
over a blouse buttoned to her neck. There is no hint at sexuality either in her choice of clothing or her makeup, which are both understated and practical. Yet when he looks only at her eyes, Wisdom sees a hint of the veiled sensuality that Stern and presumably others have seen in Heidi.

Soft drinks arrive at the same time as a written message for Ferris that causes him to make excuses and exit, leaving Wisdom and Bennett to run the meeting. Bennett winks at Wisdom. It's an old game they've played before to keep the chief out of the details.

She begins to speak. Wisdom hears a German accent for sure, but it sounds as much British as German. Presumably she'd learned her English from a Brit. There's also the absence of any of the rough throaty edges usually associated with German. Bennett comments on this and she explains that years in the French speaking part of Switzerland together with a year and a half of graduate school in Boston has softened her Austrian inflection.

“I only saw the message about Heidi last weekend when I went back to Vienna. My father never saw it, and if he had, he wouldn't have answered. It was my aunt who lives with my parents who saw the message and sent the answer, because for both of my parents, Heidi no longer exists. It's not even as though she had died. It's as if she'd never existed.”

Bennett mirrors Wisdom's look of bewilderment. Weis sits as before, if anything he is more stoic and Wisdom wonders if a test of his diplomatic skill is whether he can absorb such news without as much as a quiver of facial expression. Brigid, however, doesn't miss Wisdom's reaction. She is ready to go on.

“I needed to be in New York anyway, so I decided to come directly to see the authorities rather than handle it long distance. Let me say that I do acknowledge that Heidi exists, but I don't really care whether she's alive or dead.”

Her words hang in the air. Everyone waits for the explanation— the complete version—there is nothing else to say.

Even Weis moves perceptibly forward to the edge of his seat. He doesn't have long to wait.

“Let me tell you a story,” she says, her hands clasped together demurely in her lap, as if in church.

“I am three years older than Heidi. We were both born in a suburb of Tehran. My Persian name was Behjat. Hers was Hediyeh. After we moved to Vienna, our parents changed the first names to conform to local customs, so hers converted into Heidi and mine became Brigid. We moved in the last days of the shah. My father had already arranged for money to be sent out of the country so we were quite comfortable after we arrived in Austria. We had a fine house, went to the best schools, learned to ski in the winter and sail in the summer. Heidi wanted to study medicine and I was interested in economics and international affairs. We both did college and graduate work in Switzerland.

“Soon after I started with the UN in Geneva, I met a young French Jewish lawyer who worked in the same agency. We fell in love and got engaged. We were to be married the next summer. That Christmas I invited him home to Vienna to meet my parents and Heidi.”

She stops abruptly, takes a long swallow from a cup of Sprite, and looks up at Wisdom.

“Can one smoke here?” she asks.

Wisdom might have denied her, but now just waves his hand and reaches for a battered brass beaker from the top of a bookcase where it still rests despite an official ban on smoking. Bennett gives a perceptible tilt of his head in agreement. She takes a cigarette from a blue packet within her small bag and lights up with a silver-colored lighter. In a moment the air fills with an acrid grayish-blue cloud. Wisdom absently wonders whether Bennett who has recently again given up
smoking is crawling inside his skin. She takes another puff then grinds the butt into the brass.

“Take your time,” Bennett offers, possibly sensing that the next part will be more difficult.

“Thank you. Two days after we'd arrived back in Vienna, my mother and I were looking for some old photo albums and tried an unused storage room. That's where we found them. Heidi and Philippe were half naked and having sex. Philippe was shocked and embarrassed, but all she did was half turn around and smile. I'll never forget that smile. It was like she was saying ‘so what!'

“They left the house together minutes later and we never saw either of them again. That night my father said that if we were all back in Iran, under Sharia or Islamic law, the Koran would call for her to be stoned to death and her family forever held in contempt by the local community. Well, we weren't back in Iran, but since then my parents acted as if she had brought dishonor to our household. They pronounced her a nonperson and just behaved as if she never existed. I never saw Philippe again. He quit the agency, and I later heard he died in an automobile accident in Bavaria. It was partly my mistake in getting involved with such a weak person, but Heidi was in a way already crazy, only we didn't see it.”

She stops, pulls another cigarette from her bag, and holds it up. Wisdom signals his agreement and she repeats the earlier ritual of two puffs before extinction. She seems to possess incredible self-control, he thinks, to be able to handle all this with strangers. He shifts in his seat and leans forward.

“When she was only sixteen, I found out that she already had sex with a neighbor's son. After I challenged her with this, she only laughed and said she planned to do it next with his father. I never confronted her again, but over the next few years, bits and pieces of what she did and what she thought came out. I learned that it was Jewish men she went after. She was determined to prove herself better,
determined to show them she was in control. And she found she could use sex as a way to get the power.

“I wasn't sure why she felt this way unless she got it from our father who blamed the Jews for displacing us years ago. But then he also blamed the other Arab states, the Americans, and the Communists. Why she singled out the Jews I'll never know.”

The words hang in the air like wood smoke. Bennett clears his throat. Weis bends to the side and whispers to her as she reaches for another cigarette. She hands one to Weis and they both smoke. Wisdom thinks that Chief Ferris was very shortly going to be pissed big-time at the invasive tobacco smell in his office. This time, as if to reinforce his thoughts, she keeps the cigarette alive past a few drags, although Wisdom thinks she'd be better off with a glass of vodka. He certainly would.

“When was the last time you heard from her?” asks Bennett. “Was it the night she left your parent's home in Vienna?”

“No. About two years ago I got a very short note from her. Said she had just come to the States for her residency. That's all. No apologies. No suggestions we meet. No matter what happened or what my parents feel or I feel, she's still my sister. I need to end this. I need closure. Please find out what happened to her.”

No one speaks. The room is quiet except for the distant hum of an air conditioner.

“Do you know if a man might be involved? Probably a Jewish man. It would make some sense if there was.”

Wisdom catches Bennett's eye without difficulty and tilts his head perceptibly.

“The police are pursuing some possibilities,” Bennett says, “But there isn't anything concrete at this time.”

She stares ahead and jams the cigarette out. Then for a brief moment she looks like she was going to cry, but the moment passes and she's back in control. She leans toward Weis and mumbles something
in German. Wisdom looks at Bennett who shakes his head sideways. Weis asks if they're done.

“For now.” Wisdom and Bennett both answer. Weis rises and takes Brigid's arm to help her stand, but she eases her arm free.
This is one tough lady,
Wisdom thinks.

“Can we reach you if we need to speak again?” he asks.

“That won't be a problem,” she says. “I'll be staying at the guesthouse of one of the Washington Embassy people for a few days. It's actually very close to here. My luggage is in Herr Weis's car. I also plan to take a leave of absence from work for as much as a few months and rent a place in the area. I understand it will be easy to do after your Labor Day weekend. The senior people in Geneva have already approved the idea. I need to find out what happened and I think the answer is out here somewhere. If you need me, Herr Weis will have my number and address.”

Then she points to the photo of Heidi that rests atop the open file. “May I have a copy of that?”

Wisdom is quick to answer. “Yes. We have copies,” and he hands her the picture.

Weis produces a card that seems to appear from up his sleeve and passes it to Wisdom. They all shake hands. Wisdom is surprised that Brigid's feels incredibly warm for someone with such a controlled exterior. The two Austrians walk a few steps toward the door that Bennett holds open. Weis waits for Brigid to pass ahead when she stops and faces Wisdom.

“Do you think she's still alive?” she asks. He feels her eyes bore right through him.

Before he can answer, she turns and walks through the door with Weis in pursuit. Wisdom watches them disappear down the hall through the opaque glass on the top half of the door.