Mary Clark - Where Are You Now?

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 the other. “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.

A cordial smile on his face, Wallace urged Olsen to take a chair. “I know you won’t refuse a cup of tea, Derek.”

“Last time, it tasted like dishwater. Tell your secretary I want four lumps of sugar and heavy cream, Elliott.”

“Of course.”

Olsen barely waited for Elliott to instruct his secretary before he said with a satisfied smile, “You and your advice. Remember you said I should get rid of those three broken-down town houses that have been closed for years?”

Elliott Wallace knew what was coming. “Derek, you’ve been paying taxes and insurance on those dumps for years. Of course real estate has gone up, but if you wish I will show you that if you had sold them and bought the stocks I recommended, you’d be ahead.”

“No, I wouldn’t! I knew that someday they’d tear down those buildings on the corner of 104th Street and developers would want my place.”

“The developers seem to have managed without it. They already broke ground for those condominium apartments.”

“The same firm came back to me. I close on the sale this afternoon.”

“Congratulations,” Wallace said sincerely. “But I do hope you remember that I’ve made you quite a lot of money investing on your behalf.”

“Except for that hedge fund.”

“Except for the hedge fund, I agree, but that was quite a while ago.”

Olsen’s tea and Elliott’s coffee arrived. “This is good,” Olsen said, after taking a wary sip. “The way I like it. Now let’s talk. I want to sell everything. I want to establish a trust fund. You can run it. I want it to be used for parks in New York, parks with lots of trees. This city has too many big buildings.”

“That’s very generous of you. Are you planning to leave anything to your nephew or anyone else?”

“I’ll leave Steve fifty thousand dollars. Let him get a new set of drums or a guitar. He can’t look at me over a dinner plate without trying to figure how much longer I’ll last. I heard from a couple of my building supers that he announced he’ll be taking over Howie’s job as my overall manager. He buys me a fountain pen and takes me to dinner, and because I show good feelings to him, he thinks he can take over my business. Him and his gigs. Every time he stops getting jobs at those club dumps, he invents a new name for himself and his loser band, finds the latest kind of weird outfit, and hires a broken-down PR agent. If it wasn’t for his mother, my sister, God rest her, I’d have given him the bum’s rush years ago.”

“I know he’s been a disappointment to you, Derek.” Elliott tried to maintain his compassionate expression.