Mary Clark: Where Are You Now?

E very year for the past nine years, Aaron Klein had made the long drive from Manhattan to the cemetery in Bridgehampton, to place a stone on the grave of his mother, Esther Klein. She had been a lively fifty-four-year-old divorcee, who died at the hands of a mugger as she was on her daily run early one morning near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Aaron had been twenty-eight then, newly married, comfortably secure in his upward climb at Wallace and Madison Investment Bankers. Now he was the father of two sons, Eli and Gabriel, and a small daughter, Danielle, who bore a heartbreaking resemblance to her late grandmother. Aaron never visited the cemetery without once again experiencing anger and frustration at the fact that his mother’s murderer was still walking the streets, a free man.

She had been struck in the back of the head with a heavy object. Her cell phone was on the ground beside her. Had she sensed danger and taken it out of her pocket to try to dial 911? That possibility was the only one that made sense.

She had to have been attempting to call. The records the police obtained showed she had neither made nor received a call at that time.

The cops thought it was a random mugging. Her watch, the only jewelry that she ever wore at that time of day, was missing, as was her house key. “Why take her house key if whoever killed her didn’t know who she was and where she lived?” he had asked the cops. They hadn’t had an answer to that one.

Her apartment had its own street-level entrance around the corner from the doorman-monitored main entrance of the building, but as the detectives who worked on the case pointed out, there was nothing missing from it. Her wallet, containing several hundred dollars, was in her pocketbook. Her jewelry box, open on the dresser, held the few pieces of valuable jewelry he knew her to own.

The intermittent rain began to fall again as Aaron knelt down and touched the grass over his mother’s grave. His knees sank into the muddy ground as he placed the stone, and whispered, “Mom, I so wish you had lived to see the kids. The boys are finishing the first grade and kindergarten. Danielle is a little actress already. I can just see her in a dozen years auditioning for one of the plays you’d be directing at Columbia.”

He smiled, thinking of what his mother’s response would be. “Aaron, you’re a dreamer. Do your math. By the time Danielle is in college, I’d have been seventy-five years old.”

“You’d still be teaching and directing and you’d still be full of spunk,” he said aloud.

O n Monday morning, carrying the note Mack had dropped in the collection basket, I set off for the District Attorney’s office in lower Manhattan. It was beautiful out, sunny and warm with a balmy breeze, the kind of weather that would have been appropriate for Mother’s Day instead of the cold, wet day that had spoiled any hope of outdoor gatherings.

Mom and Uncle Dev and I had gone out to dinner Sunday night. Obviously the note that Uncle Dev handed us sent Mom and me into a tailspin. Mom’s initial reaction was to be thrilled that Mack might be so near. She has always been convinced that he is far away in Colorado or California. Then she became fearful that my threat to find him had put him in some kind of jeopardy.

At first I simply didn’t know what to think about it, but now I had a growing suspicion that Mack might be head over heels in trouble and trying to keep us away from it.

The lobby at 1 Hogan Place was crowded, and the security was as tight as it gets. Even though I had plenty of identification, without a specific appointment to see someone, I could not get past the guard. As the people on line behind me began to get restless, I tried to explain that my brother was missing, and we might finally have something to indicate where we could begin looking for him.

“Ma’am, you’ll have to place a phone call to Missing Persons and make an appointment,” the guard insisted. “Now, please, there are other people who need to get upstairs to their jobs.”

Frustrated, I walked outside the building and pulled out my cell phone. Judge Huot had been in civil court, and I never had much contact with the Assistant D.A.s, but I did know one, Matt Wilson. I called the District Attorney’s office and was connected to his phone. Matt wasn’t at his desk and had recorded the usual answering machine instructions. “Leave your name, number, and a brief message. I’ll get back to you.”

“This is Carolyn MacKenzie,” I began. “We’ve met a few times. I was Judge Huot’s law clerk. My brother has been missing for ten years. He left a note for me yesterday in a church on Amsterdam Avenue. I need help to see if we can track him down before he disappears again.” I finished by giving my cell phone number.

I was standing on the steps. A man was going past me, a square-shouldered guy in his midfifties with close-cropped gray hair and a purposeful stride. I could tell that he had overheard me because, somewhat to my dismay, he stopped and turned around. For a moment we eyed each other, then he said abruptly, “I’m Detective Barrott. I’ll take you upstairs.”

Five minutes later, I was sitting in a shabby small office that contained a desk, a couple of chairs, and stacks of files. “We can talk in here,” he said. “Too much noise in the squad room.”

He never took his eyes off my face as I told him about Mack, only interrupting me to ask a few questions. “Calls only on Mother’s Day?”

“That’s right.”

“Never asks for money?”

“Never.” I had put the note in a plastic sandwich bag. “I don’t know if his fingerprints might be on it,” I explained. “Unless, of course, he had someone else drop it in the basket for him. It seems so crazy that he would take a chance on Uncle Dev spotting him from the altar.”

“Depends. He might have dyed his hair, could be twenty pounds heavier, be wearing dark glasses. It isn’t hard to disguise yourself in a crowd, especially when people are wearing rain gear.”

He looked at the scrap of paper. The writing was plainly visible through the plastic. “Do we have your brother’s fingerprints on file?”

“I’m not sure. By the time we reported him missing, our housekeeper had dusted and vacuumed his room at home. He shared the student apartment with two of his friends, and like most of those places, there were at least a dozen others who were in and out every day. His car was washed and cleaned after the last time he used it.”

Barrott handed it back to me. “We can run this paper through for prints, but I can tell you now we won’t get anything. You and your mother handled it. So did your uncle, the monsignor. So did the usher who brought it to your uncle. My guess is that at least one other usher might have helped to add up the collection.”

Feeling as though I needed to offer more, I said, “I’m Mack’s only sibling. My mother and father and I came in to register with the familial DNA laboratory. But we’ve never heard from them, so I guess they’ve never found anyone who could be even a partial match.”

“Ms. MacKenzie, from what you tell me, your brother had absolutely no reason to willingly disappear. But if he did that, there was and is a reason. You’ve probably watched some of these crime programs on television so you probably have heard that when people disappear, the reason usually ends up being an accumulation of problems caused by either love or money. The jilted suitor, the jealous husband or wife, the inconvenient spouse, the addict frantic for a fix. You have to reexamine all your preconceived notions about your brother. He was twenty-one. You say he was popular with the girls. Was there one special girl?”