Second Chance (5 page)

"Did she mention Stein when you talked on
Thursday?"

"Yes." The man stood up, walked over to the
armoire, and poured himself a stiff drink. "You already know
that she became involved with Jay last year."

"He had an affair with her?"

"I don't know," he said, turning back to me
with the bottle in his hand. He splashed a little more Scotch in my
glass. "She was pretty damn attached to him—I know that. I'm
afraid she still is. She told me on Thursday that she was seeing him
again."

"Seeing him meaning sleeping with him?"

"I think so."

The man pursed his lips as if he'd bitten into
something rotten. Or maybe he just caught a whiff of what I was
thinking about Stein.

"Look, I care for that girl deeply," he
said. "And I'll do
anything I can to
help you find her. But Jay isn't the reason she's disappeared. There
isn't one reason."

"Stein blamed it on genes."

Heldman blushed. "I realize he can be an
obnoxious ass. But you've got to understand that he stepped into a
situation he wasn't equipped to deal with—a situation very few
people could deal with. Kirsty's life has a pattern to it that
predates Jay—a pattern that has slowly solidified into something
like a fate. Events have conspired to make her believe that no matter
what she does, she is bound to end as her mother did—crazy or a
suicide. Her brother has apparently done a lot to reinforce that
belief by constantly obsessing about the mother's death. And of
course, so has her father, whose overprotectiveness kept Kirsty a
child in many ways. But the point is-so has Kirsty herself.

"For years now, consciously or unconsciously,
she has been making choices that will lead her in the direction of
suicide. The Stein thing is just one more instance. The fact that
she's infatuated with Jay is beside the point. In a way, Kirsty
understands that herself. Deep down she's chosen Jay Stein precisely
because she knows he will reject her. "

"It's a theory," I said.

The man gave me a rueful look. "You don't
believe me?"

"I believe the girl is deeply troubled, but I
think it's a bit too damn enlightened to blame Kirsten for Jay
Stein's callousness. Or to a need for affection as a death wish. "

Heldman blushed. For a second I thought he was going
to get pissy, but he surprised me. "I didn't mean for it to
sound that way. All I meant to say is that Kirsty honestly believes
we are trapped by our pasts. Our childhood pasts. And no one gets a
second chance at childhood?

He wanted it to sound profoundly sad. It only sounded
sadly adolescent to me. But most literature professors I'd known
developed that same lump in their throats when they spoke of life's
inequities—kind of like narrators in PBS documentaries.

"Was she depressed when you saw her on Thursday
morning?" I asked him.

"Not depressed so much as agitated, excited."

"About Stein?"

"Yes, and about seeing her brother, Ethan. It
was almost as if she felt she had to choose between the two of them,
if for no other reason than to find an ending for her book."

"What does the book have to do with seeing Stein
or Ethan?" I asked.

"As I told you, she is living out what she
writes. Stein and Ethan represent different paths to her—present
and past, roughly. Frankly I'm afraid they lead in the same
direction."

"Suicide?"

He nodded. "She thinks it's her destiny."

"I don't believe in destinies," I said,
getting to my feet. "Could I use your phone? I need to make a
couple of calls."

The man pointed to a phone on the desk. "I'll
leave you alone," he said, standing up and walking to the door.
"If there's anything I can do . . ."

"I'll let you know,"
I told him.

* * *

I had only one contact in the Chicago area—an
ex-FBI agent named Brandt Scheuster, who had opened his own P.I.
agency in Skokie. I found his number in my address book and phoned
him. All I got that late on a Sunday night was an answering machine.
I left my name, Kirsten's number, and told him I'd be back in touch.
I tried calling Marnee Thompson at the apartment, but there was no
answer there either. Marnee obviously hadn't been forthcoming with me
about Kirsten and her brother. But then, I was working for Papa Phil,
and Kirsty was her friend.

I thought about phoning Pearson himself, and decided
to wait. judging by how much of his children's pasts—and his
own—he'd already concealed, I didn't think I'd get him to talk
openly without some leverage. Or a body.

After a time Heldman came back into the room. He had
a beautiful little girl of about ten with him.

"This is my daughter, Katie. Katie, Mr. Stoner."

Katie curtsied as if I were royalty.

"Go on, toots," he said, giving her a smack
on the rear.

She gave her father an indignant look and marched off
up the hall.

"She thinks she's too old to be given a potch on
the tuckus."

"She's very pretty."

Heldman smiled proudly. "I think so. Did you
finish your ca1ls?"

"All except for a cab to take me back to
Kirsty's apartment."

"I could drive you."

"That's all right, Professor. I need you to run
another errand."

"Anything," he said.

"How close are you to Jay Stein?"

"He's a colleague," the professor said with
a stilted air of professional courtesy. "He came here this past
year as an instructor, fresh out of the Iowa workshops. I very much
doubt he will be renewed this coming year—if that's what you're
getting at."

It wasn't what I was getting at, but I was glad to
hear it anyway. Glad to know that forbearance had its limits, even
among professors of literature.

"I'm sure that Stein has told me a few
self-protective lies," I said. "But there is probably a
certain amount of truth mixed in with them. It's important for me to
know what Kirsty and he actually talked about on Thursday morning—if
she did in fact tell him she was going to see her brother or someone
else. Do you think you could . . . ?"

"What?" Heldman said uneasily. "Pump
him?"

"I was thinking of something a little more
hardball than that. It wouldn't be a lie if you said that you'd just
talked to me and that I'd raised some disturbing questions about his
conduct, would it?"

"You want me to threaten him?" Heldman said
with humor.

"I want you to find out where Kirsten went.
Otherwise, she may well be destined for calamity."

Heldman thought it over for a moment. "I'l1 do
what I can" was all he said.

6
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I called for a cab and, before leaving, told Heldman
to phone me at Kirsten's apartment after he'd talked to Stein. He
wasn't comfortable with the idea of blackmailing the man—that was
obvious. But I had the gut feeling that he'd get the information I
wanted, because he really did care for Kirsten, as I myself was
beginning to care for her in spite of my misgivings about the case.

On the cab ride back to the apartment I wondered why
Phil Pearson had waited for the girl to go missing before calling for
help. He had talked vaguely about "disturbing signs" in
Kirsten's behavior—he'd talked vaguely about everything having to
do with his daughter, as if her past was a personal embarrassment to
him. But the signs of Kirsten's disintegration were quite clear to
everyone who knew her. They had to be just as clear to her father,
who was a trained psychiatrist. Perhaps Pearson couldn't bring
himself to intervene in his daughter's life again after his
disastrous rescue attempt of the previous summer. Perhaps he thought
that another such intervention would drive her over the edge. I
didn't know. But there was an  inconsistency about his behavior,
about everyone's behavior toward Kirsty, that almost amounted to
ambivalence. It was as if her friends had decided to let her life run
its course, even if it meant her death.

I'm sure they felt they were respecting her wishes,
showing her the courtesy of treating her as an adult. But it seemed
heartless to me when she was so obviously not fully an adult. Even
Professor Heldman seemed irresponsible, knowing as he did that
Kirsten was close to suicide and still letting her walk off to her
self-pronounced doom. Maybe that was the way enlightened people
treated each other in academia.

It was past nine when the cabbie dropped me off at
the brownstone on 54th. No light was on in the second-floor apartment
windows, and no one answered the entry buzzer. I fished through my
pocket, found the keys that Pearson had given me, and let myself into
the front hall. The hallway was dark, and the cat piss smell was
overwhelming. I fumbled up the staircase to the apartment, unlocked
the door, and went in.

A sliver of moonlit sky hung in the darkness like a
hallucination. It took me a second to realize that it was being
reflected off the mirror in Marnee Thompson's bedroom. I
found the desk light and clicked it on.

The boxed manuscript was the first thing I saw. The
box had been opened and the manuscript removed. At first I thought
that Marnee Thompson must have taken it out to read. But on further
thought I couldn't see Marnee tampering with Kirsten's things—not
with her fierce sense of propriety. Which meant one of two things.
Either someone else had broken in and stolen the manuscript. Or
Kirsty Pearson herself had come back for it. I liked the idea of
Kirsty taking it, for several reasons.

One, the apartment lock hadn't been tampered with, so
whoever had removed it had had a key to the room. Two, Kirsty hadn't
finished the book yet. According to Art Heldman she was waiting for
real life to supply her with an ending. Maybe she'd found that ending
over the past four days.

There was a third reason why I liked the idea. If
Kirsty had taken the manuscript, it meant she was still alive. And I
wanted her to stay alive until I could find her. I went down the hall
to Kirsty's bedroom, flipped on the light, and went through the
trashy room again—carefully this time—looking for any other sign
that Kirsty might have returned to the apartment. But nothing else
had been moved or taken—the clothes were still disarrayed, the
books made their tipsy towers, the birth control pills were hidden in
the underwear drawer, the picture of Phil Pearson lay facedown in the
panties.

I hadn't examined the loose papers scattered on her
desk the first time I'd searched the room. This time I read each one
through. They were fragments of prose, mostly journal entries that
made little sense to me and one that made too much sense, a scrap cut
from The New York Times Magazine and pasted to a blank page:

Suicide was a crime—ironically, a capital crime—in
most Western nations well into the nineteenth century. In England,
failed suicides were frequently nursed back to health in order to be
hanged.

There was a fragment of a prose poem, copied out
several times. Presumably one of her own:

Closing windows at dawn
Against
the heat of the day,
He is suddenly lost
among bulky
Colorless furnishings

The windows stick
in
swollen tracks;
the blinds will not close

under thin sheets
his
feet search out her legs
his hands . . .

And that was all, as if she'd stopped those hands
with her own. I put the paper down and thought about Jay Stein—about
paying him another visit—when the phone in the living room rang. I
went back down the hall and picked it up. It was Brandt Scheuster,
returning my call.

"I've got a missing person, Brandt," I told
him. "A Cincinnati girl, going to school up here, who dropped
out of sight about four days ago. She's unstable, possibly suicidal.
I need you to check with the cops—see if she's been picked up or if
they've got her in a morgue. You could canvass hospital emergency
rooms and psych wards, too."

I gave him Kirsty's name and physical description.

"I'll see what I can do," Brandt said.
"Does she have a car?"

"A yellow VW Bug. I don't know the plates yet,
but if you could run her name through Illinois BMV, I'd appreciate
it. I'll check in Ohio myself to see if she registered the car
down there."

"You want this to go out as an APB, Harry? You
want to make it official police business?"

I didn't even have to think about it. "Yeah. I
want the kid found."

"If we do locate her . . . ?"

"Call me. I'll be checking into a hotel later
tonight. When I have a new number I'll let you know. Until then you
can get me here at the girl's apartment?

After finishing with Brandt I called Al Foster at the
Cincinnati Police Department and asked him to run Kirsten's name
through the Ohio BMV computer. I told him it was urgent.