Missing Persons (25 page)

I looked out the window to the overgrown bushes in her backyard. “It doesn’t look like he got very far.”

“He was working on it little by little. I suggested we just hire a gardener. I had one for years but I thought it was better for the environment if I just let it grow wild.” She laughed. “Frank said a gardener was a waste of money. He said he would get it back under control, grow some vegetables and some fruits, and maybe someday cook me dinners from our very own garden.”

That sounded familiar. I guess there was a certain comfort in knowing he was just reusing the old material—the misunderstood artist, the passionate cook—but it did make me wonder if there was a single moment of our marriage that belonged just to me and hadn’t been warmed over for her.

I got up to leave. “You can always frame the sketches.”

“You’re right. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Why don’t you call your friend Susan? Maybe go out and have a nice dinner.”

I was getting anxious to get out of there. Vera was fine to be with, I was discovering, as long as Frank wasn’t the subject.

“Susan is a little annoyed at me,” she said. “But I will have a nice dinner. Just do me a favor and call me if you find the paintings.”

“Who else would I call?”

I meant it to be sarcastic but as I walked out of her beautiful home I wondered, who else would I call? Vera thought her family fortune had kept her from real friendships but what was my excuse? My friends were really the wives of Frank’s friends, and many of them had disappeared at the time of the separation. I had coworkers, like Andres and Victor, but I really only saw them when we were working together. And I had family, but we had nothing in common except a bloodline and a stubborn streak.

Depressing as it was, Vera might have been the closest thing to a friend I’d made in a while. And that would have been great, except for the pesky and uncomfortable reality that she was my husband’s mistress, and possibly his killer.

For my entire career, I had scrupulously avoided working in the lowest forms of reality TV—the group of strangers who are forced together under the guise of finding true love, losing weight, or winning large sums of money. The real point of these shows, of course, is to watch people having highly amusing emotional breakdowns as they form temporary connections with people they secretly plan to betray.

Now I was doing the same thing as those awful contestants. I was going back and forth, shifting allegiances between Lynette and Vera. And for what? So I could uncover more of Frank’s secrets, see him happy with someone else, and wonder what could have been?

I
went to bed late and didn’t sleep. At seven I got up and made myself breakfast. As I sat on the front steps, drank coffee, and watched people rush to work, I tried to put myself in a good mood. One of the advantages of being freelance is that you often have Mondays off. Not that I had nothing to do. I had to do what I’d promised—figure out what had happened to Frank, and to his paintings. And it wasn’t going to be easy.

One sweep of the garage that morning confirmed what I already knew. There were no paintings. All I discovered was that Frank had thoughtlessly rearranged some of the boxes on his last visit to the house, putting the box with fragile Christmas ornaments underneath the heavy one with mementos of happier days. I looked in the basement and attic and still found no paintings. If Frank had intended to keep them at the house, then he would have left the ones that were hanging exactly where they were. He had made a point of taking them and of telling me he was taking them. Why would he have done that if he were only going to store them in the garage?

But that wasn’t what bothered me as I started my day. It was the sight of him yesterday, so happy and so ready to start a new life. It would have been easy to say that his beaming smile on that videotape was because Vera’s money was buying him his dream, but it would have been a lie. Frank could have been painting these last few years. I hadn’t been supportive but I hadn’t stopped him. He didn’t even need Vera for a space to paint. We had a basement, a garage, and a spare bedroom. All of which sat unused. And as Victor pointed out, a man in love can’t be swayed by another woman’s money.

There was the possibility that he’d gotten caught up in her image of him. Vera clearly believed in Frank with the same wide-eyed certainty that I’d had twenty years ago. That seemed a much more likely cause of his happiness. Maybe he just wanted that again—that fleeting moment when each person is perfect to the other—before it all returns to earth. Before she stops shaving her legs every day and he stops listening when she talks. That I could understand. And even envy.

But there was something more than that. Whenever I pictured him standing in that empty space, smiling and laughing and saying, “I love you,” I was struck by the genuineness of his affection, the comfortable, easy way he had with her. There was nothing about him that seemed like a man looking for an escape. And if he was really in love with Vera, she had no motive to kill him.

Except—and it kept nagging at me—why did he stop the divorce? Why was he reading
Travels with Charley
? Why did he tell Neal he wanted to come back to me?

And if those things were true, why open an art studio with Vera?

I could have spent the whole day asking those questions and coming up with nothing. Lucky for me, Mike had other plans. I’d barely finished my coffee when he called.

“Talked to the network,” he said without bothering to first say hello. “We figured it out. Two-part special. In the first part is the stuff we already have. Theresa is missing. Heartbroken mother, blah, blah, blah. Then we end with finding the purse at the scene. Second part is the discovery of the body, a second round of interviews. We still end the show with ‘If you have information . . .’ but instead of finding Theresa, it’s about finding the killer. It will be the premiere episode of the series, so it makes us look like we helped crack the case. It’ll be great. Three extra days of shooting, no overtime. Start making calls. We need this shit ASAP. And listen, Kate, no more slipups.”

Then he hung up. In the entire call, the only word I’d said was “hello.”

“She’d better not come back from the dead, or Mike will have my ass,” I said, finally in the good mood I’d been searching for. Nothing like an insane boss to make me feel normal again.

 

 

“This is an ongoing police investigation, involving a number of departments,” Detective Rosenthal told me when I called her about a second interview. “She was found in an unincorporated area of Cook County, so we’re working with the sheriff ’s office. We are all focused on solving the case and bringing her killer to justice. That’s all I can tell you, except that we won’t be doing any additional interviews at this point. I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure it’s Theresa?”

“Off the record? Yes. There was jewelry found with the remains that were identified as belonging to Theresa. We’re still waiting for dental records, though. Sorry, Kate, I wish I could help you more.”

“I understand.” I’d almost told her about the dead bird and all the other odd happenings in my life, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go into the mess that was my life while she was immersed in Theresa’s death. “If there is anything else . . .”

Instead of saying good-bye, Rosenthal hesitated. “Let me get back to you tomorrow.” Then she hung up.

I called the others, asking for another interview. Gray and Wyatt, not surprisingly, agreed. Julia said she’d have to talk it over with David and get back to me. Linda kept me on the phone for nearly twenty minutes telling me, again, what a perfect daughter Theresa had been, before eventually agreeing to another interview. Jason didn’t pick up any of the three times I called.

I got an e-mail from Mike telling me to expect a package with dubs, that is, copies of the tapes we’d already shot. He asked me to review them before shooting the next interviews. There were fifteen hours of tapes, and we were shooting again in a few days, but I replied with a simple “You bet” and made the necessary, but completely futile, middlefinger hand gesture.

 

 

Three hours later when the dubs arrived I made myself a large cup of coffee and popped the first DVD into my computer. It was the interview with Linda. I made notes of the best sound bites, the ones I would use for the final script.

Usually there are far too many good bites that end up cut from the show, but this time we had the luxury of a two-part special, which was especially good in this case because I could really go in so many directions. I had Linda and Gray telling me that Theresa was a saint. I had enough to create a Wyatt-Theresa-Jason love triangle, and bites from Julia suggesting a dark side.

And there was the money. I’d held back from telling Mike about it. He would have been proud of how I’d found out, and he would definitely want to play it up, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Maybe Rosenthal had kept it a secret because something ought to be secret. Maybe finding out the entire truth wasn’t as helpful as I’d once thought.

I watched Rosenthal’s interview, which was, as I remembered, the standard police kind with succinct impersonal answers, but it would be a nice counterweight to the emotional stuff. I made a note of her best sound bites, then I popped in the DVD with Gray’s interview on it.

There was something riveting about it, something behind all of that attractiveness and polish that I couldn’t take my eyes off. Now that I had the chance to look without the need to be polite, I could study him. I noticed that a few times during the interview his eyes darted, just for a second, toward the camera. It was what people did when they were nervous. Why would a man who had been in front of the camera dozens of times, and who was just an acquaintance of the victim, be nervous? I made a note to push him more on his relationship with Theresa and was about to go on to Jason’s tape when there was a knock at the door.

A few weeks ago that would have meant nothing to me, but since then I’d found homicide detectives and dead birds on my porch. I grabbed my cell phone, dialed a 9 and a 1, and kept my finger ready to push 1 again, just in case.

O
nce I looked through the window, I put the phone down. It was a familiar, if not altogether happy, face.

“Neal?”

Neal blushed a little. “Sorry if I’m getting you in the middle of something.”

“You’re not. Come in. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I took a long lunch.” He walked in the house and looked around, as if he were unsure of what to do. “The place looks good,” he said.

“The place looks exactly the same as the last time you were here, and the thousand times before.” I gestured toward the couch.

Neal didn’t move.

“Is everything okay?”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Of course. I have coffee that’s still pretty fresh,” I said and disappeared into the kitchen before he had a chance to protest. I poured two mugs of coffee and found some cookies. I put it all on a tray and headed back to the living room.

When I came back Neal was sitting on the couch, nervously folding and unfolding his hands. He stood up when he saw me.

“How chivalrous.” I laughed.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Standing up when a lady walks in the room.” I put the tray on the coffee table and handed him a mug. “Never mind. Obviously you have something you want to tell me, so why don’t you?”

He sat down again and I sat on the chair facing him. I waited. Neal sipped his coffee and stared at the floor. “I’ve always liked this couch.”

“Frank found it at some small shop about a block away,” I said. “You know how he only liked buying things from small businesses. He said the quality was better and we were supporting real people, not corporations.”

Neal smiled. “God, he would go on about that shit. He tore into me when he found out Beth and I had bought our bedroom set at Pottery Barn. I tried to tell him that real people worked for corporations but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

I looked at him. “But that’s not why you’re here. Another trip down memory lane.”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “I talked to Frank’s dad. He told me you were looking into Vera as being the reason Frank died.”

“Lynette asked me to.”

“When have you cared what Lynette wants?”

I sighed. “Sadly, I have cared my entire marriage. But it’s not just that, Neal. I want to know too.”

“I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t think Frank would want you and Vera spending time together.”

“Frank doesn’t get a vote. And if he did, I’d like to think he’d want his killer to be brought to justice.”

“I think it’s better to just leave things as they are. I know that’s hard for you. It used to frustrate the hell out of Frank the way you were so . . .”

“Anal, pushy, annoyingly persistent?” I’d heard it a thousand times from Frank. “I know it drove Frank crazy. I used to bring this purple binder on our vacations with the plane, car, and hotel reservations printed out, plus a list of the hours and costs of all the sights we wanted to see.”

“I remember,” Neal said. “He threw it out the window when we all went to Key West.”

“And when we got to the hotel, they didn’t have our reservation, and we didn’t have the confirmation number,” I pointed out. “Don’t you remember that we had to pay more for the rooms than we’d planned because I couldn’t prove we had a reservation?”

He smiled. “Okay. You were right then, and you’re probably right now, but there are police detectives involved in this. If Vera—if anyone—killed Frank, they will find out.”

“You’re forgetting they already have a suspect. Me. I’m not a big fan of their investigative skills so far.”

“Just do me a favor, stay away from her.” His voice had gotten insistent, even annoyed.