The Girl in Times Square (20 page)

“Why don’t you just ask me? If there’s something you need, don’t make me guess, just ask me. If I can, I’ll take care of it. My father had a nurse for a while when he was sick. Heart attack, he’s fine now. It cost him seven-fifty a week, but it was money well spent. I’ll call the agencies. I’ll get you someone.”

“Thank you. Please could you put in a request for a tall, dark, Hawaiian, good-looking, easy-going solitary man who answers to the name of Keanu. Nursing experience a plus but not a must.”

Spencer laughed. “I’ll take care of it.”

Lily looked grateful and relieved. “When I get out, I’ll take you to lunch, somewhere nice. If you want.”

“That’ll be some lunch, Lily, for seven million bucks.”

She held the check in her hands. “Mary can come, too. I don’t want to exclude her. We can go for Sunday brunch at the Palm Court, and dress up like we belong on the Upper East Side.”

“What a good memory you have. Can’t remember my beeper number, but remember fine the name of my girlfriend.”

Lily twinged.

“Look,” said Spencer, “DiAngelo is coming to throw me out any minute, and believe me, I know you’re not up to this, but I have to ask…”

Her gaze cooled dramatically. “Quid pro quo, huh, detective?”

Spencer went on. “Why didn’t you tell me after you came back from Hawaii that Amy worked at a homeless shelter? I mean you
don’t think it would have been helpful to know if she was in her regular life that Friday morning?”

“It slipped my mind. I wasn’t thinking. I still don’t see the big deal.” Lily paused. “Did she go that Friday morning?”

“She did.”

“Did she leave the soup kitchen?”

“Well,” said Spencer, “she’s not still there.”

“No, of course not.” Lily was pensive.

Both Spencer and Lily watched each other, warily, sickly, thinking, formulating, trying to put into words what they couldn’t articulate, couldn’t figure out.

Lily was not in any shape to be made upset, and so Spencer didn’t tell her that in the bottom of one of the couture bags, folded neatly at the bottom of Amy’s closet, he found a small receipt—though from the rest of the bags the receipts had been thoroughly removed. A receipt for a Ferragamo belt, bought on one Friday afternoon last March, for a hundred-and-ninety-five dollars, paid for in cash. Two hundred dollars for a
belt
, paid for in
cash.
Did Lily really think Amy had been jogging all those hours?

Bags from Prada, from Louis Vuitton, from Versace. Small bags from Tiffany’s. And where
was
that jewelry or crystal? It certainly wasn’t in Amy’s room. Where were the belts, the purses? All the things Spencer suspected Andrew Quinn of buying for her?

If Andrew Quinn, a man making a government salary, with a wife and family to support, was so generous with Amy McFadden, did that sound like he was mired in a shallow fling? And yet the only things Amy had kept were the empty shopping bags.

“Why did Amy go to the soup kitchen?” Spencer asked.

Lily was thoughtful before she replied. “I think once she might have been hungry herself.”

“Have you ever heard the name Milo?”

“Who?”

Spencer told her about Milo.

Lily said nothing because there was nothing to say.

“Could Milo be one of the people Amy had gone traveling with, one of the other people who went missing?”

Her mouth agape, Lily said meatlessly, “Could be. So what?”

“Maybe this Milo knows where she is. Wouldn’t you like to help me find him if he can help clear your brother?”

She mutely and dumbly nodded.

DiAngelo burst through the door. “That’s it, detective,” he said. “Wrap it up.”

Standing from his chair, Spencer wished he could touch Lily’s hand before he left. She looked as if she desperately needed it.

Marcie and DiAngelo had been taking blood from her every two days to see how she was responding to the chemo. She could see the results of her blood counts by the looks on their poker faces. They didn’t have to tell her anything, but she asked anyway, and they hemmed and hawed, and they brought in another nurse, who gave Lily a transfusion of red and white (and blue, ta-dah!), of plasma, of platelets. Her Hickman became infected; they gave her antibiotics, and forbid visitors for two days until the infection went away, and DiAngelo didn’t think she was strong enough for a continuous drip of cytarabine, so they waited, a day, another day. But her body wasn’t recovering, so they went ahead and gave her the drug anyway and counted her blood, the platelets were at 48, 45, 42 when they should have been inching up to a 100.

Lily didn’t want to ask because she didn’t want to know but finally she said something like, “Is that forty-two platelets in my
whole
body?”

And the doctor smiled and shook his head. “It’s short form. Add three zeros, then you’ve got something.”

And Lily smiled in return, so hopeful, so encouraged. “Forty-two thousand is a colossal amount!”

“Sure, Lil. Compared to what? To normal? Normal on the low side is two hundred thousand.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly.”

Third day with no visitors. The hospital staff wore masks around her, and in the night when she had the strength to wake up and retch, Lily thought she saw angels with wings in her room, and the angels were all wearing masks, too.

“This is the worst of it,” DiAngelo said. “It’s intense, no doubt about it. It gets better, and you get better. Just buck up, Lil, you’re doing great. You really are, I’m proud of you. Just keep going.”

She kept going. “How much longer?”

And the doctor paused and then said portentously, “How much longer for what?”

And Lily said, “Before the pizza comes.”

“Just one more day. Then you’ll rest, a quick biopsy and you go home. Just one more day, Lil.”

But one more day was more than she could take. She couldn’t breathe on her own. They took her off the drug and put her on an oxygen machine instead, and Lily wanted to ask if the oxygen could just go into her little port, like everything else, but she didn’t have enough breath to say it.

And so she lay and imagined dying.

She stared at the dark ceiling and imagined herself getting sicker and sicker, imagined the black mass amassing at the corners and the borders of her body, moving in, marching through all her organs on their way to her heart. What was it like to sleep and not wake, to fall into the blackness and never come back?

She wouldn’t like being alone at the moment of her death. No, she would die in the hospital with her family around her, holding her hands, stroking her face, her head, crying over her, and then she would slip away and still hear them, but fainter, hear them cry and see them bent over her, but dimmer.

There was no pain anymore, no cancer.

And they would sing for her, sing in a beautiful church, and her mother, bent with grief, would stand at the altar of her daughter and sing “Panis Angelicus,” and the church would echo with her lovely voice, and she would make everyone cry even more—

Wait right there.

Hold on right there to those colorful horses.

Even the dream was having a hard time believing itself. Her mother at the church?

Lily’s mother wouldn’t be at the church! Her mother would still be in Hawaii, and she would call Grandma and say,
I want to come, really I do, but I can’t, I’m very sick, I can’t even move off the bed. I don’t have the strength to go to the bathroom. George is doing everything for me, bless him. That’s why he can’t come either.

Ugh. Suddenly breathing on her own, Lily struggled up from the bed. Unbelievable. Her mother ruined death for her even in fantasies. Even in fantasies, Lily’s death couldn’t be about Lily, it was all about Lily’s mother. She couldn’t even die the way she wanted to.

The next morning, feeling better and off the oxygen, Lily asked Anne to go to the art store for her and buy her some pastel-colored pencils, which when wet turned into pastel watercolors. She spent the afternoon drawing. When Spencer came to see her later that day, Lily was sitting propped up in her bed, and he said, “What in heaven’s name are you painting on your mouth?”

She picked up a small make-up mirror. Around her chin, her tongue, her lips were lavenders and lilacs and pinks. She smiled and showed him her small painting of…“Spring,” she said. “I’m redecorating.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes, I’m redecorating myself. Here, do you want it for your apartment? You haven’t got a blessed thing on your walls.”

From then on, Lily no longer fantasized about the hour of her death.

DiAngelo wrote out the discharge papers, telling Lily she would have a week at home, and then would come back on the first Monday in October to start thirteen weeks of consolidation. She would have chemo drips Monday and Tuesday, and then recuperate at home Wednesday through Sunday. She would be done by New Year. Just in time for the new millennium.

Was the cancer all gone?

“No, but I told you not to expect it to be all gone after induction. We just expected to kill the existing cancer cells.”

“Did we?”

“Most of them.”

“Most of them? Does
almost
even count in a cancer treatment?”

DiAngelo laughed. “That’s the new adage:
almost
doesn’t count in hand grenades, pregnancy, or cancer.”

Lily said nothing, stuck on the word
pregnancy.
DiAngelo quickly stopped laughing and went on. “It does look like we have slowed down the production of new cancer cells. That’s extremely significant.”

“Slowed down?”

“Oh, look, Lil. This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning.”

“That’s all I need—my oncologist quoting Churchill.”

September 22 came and went. Lily cancelled her twenty-fifth birthday.

Complicating matters of intuition for Spencer, a subpoena of registration records from the Four Seasons Hotel did not yield Andrew Quinn’s name. Certainly it didn’t produce Amy’s. Yet the 57/57 matchbook remained. Perhaps the four-star diamond hotel was too rich for Andrew, and he took his young lover to the Sheraton on Seventh. There were three thousand hotels in mid-town New York City. What a fruitless search it would be.

He was stuck on the Four Seasons Hotel because the full essence of it matched Amy’s empty shopping bags. One did not bring Prada purses home from 57th and Frederick Fekkai mousse home, also from 57th, and Mont Blanc pens, also from 57th, and then traipse to Seventh and 51st to fuck at the Sheraton.

And Spencer was stuck on May 14, because Amy told her mother she would be home that Friday night. She told her mother she would be coming, she never came, never called, and there were no phone calls made from her apartment after Thursday May 13. She had been at the soup kitchen on the morning of May 14. It seemed highly probable that this was the day Amy disappeared.

And now there was Milo.

Police went to every homeless shelter in New York City to look for an average-size man in rags with freaky eyes and
possible facial tattoos who answered to the name of Milo.

He had Harkman call Riker’s, Sing-Sing, Attica, asking if there had been a man named Milo released from prison recently. He had no luck.

Spencer didn’t know what this Milo was up to on Friday, May 14, and so he concentrated his efforts on what Andrew Quinn was up to on Friday, May 14. Andrew was easier to track.

Andrew’s schedule told Spencer that Andrew was in D.C. on Thursday, to which five hundred or more people could testify, and came back to New York City on the early train on Friday, to which sixty-three people who were on the train with him could testify. He was home by 8:30 that evening, according to his wife. A little late for a Friday night? Not at all, Miera said. He usually came home around then.

Was he upset, preoccupied, normal, odd when he came home? Miera icily said into the phone she did not remember.

Before he came home, Andrew stopped at the bank and at his Port Jeff office. He took out money for the weekend from an ATM in the Port Jeff Main Street branch of Chase Bank at 7:22 p.m., and carried a receipt to prove it. Was that odd? Carrying on his person a receipt from four months ago for an insignificant ATM transaction? Spencer didn’t keep ATM receipts from a hundred minutes ago.

Andrew’s bank statements showed that indeed he took out five hundred dollars at 7:22 p.m., but also showed that he had taken out two thousand dollars at Penn Station at eleven that morning. That was a lot of cash to carry in his pocket. Why the two ATM trips?

A look through Andrew’s bank statements going back to the beginning of 1999 showed Spencer that on a regular basis, on a Thursday and Friday, vast amounts of cash moved out of Andrew’s account and into Andrew’s hands, explaining perhaps some of the Prada shopping bags. Did he pay for the Four Seasons in cash? Even so, he would still have to register as a hotel guest.

The staff at the Four Seasons could not corroborate one way or another if Andrew Quinn had used their concierge or bellman services. Perhaps they had seen the congressman, but they couldn’t be sure. Perhaps they had seen Amy, but they couldn’t be sure of that either.

Andrew’s train from D.C. arrived at Penn Station in New York at 10:45 a.m., yet he didn’t alight in Port Jeff until seven that evening.

Train from Penn Station to Port Jefferson took about eighty minutes. Where was Andrew in the intervening six and a half hours?

Andrew’s office manager in Port Jeff confirmed that he came into the office just after seven, as she was about to go home, signed a few documents, dictated a letter that she was able to show Spencer, regarding new parking regulations on Main Street, and checked on his schedule for the following week.

With this kind of scrutiny, how did the congressman manage to have an affair at all? Still, there were six-and-a-half unaccounted hours. He couldn’t take money out of the ATM without someone checking the time on the receipt. Didn’t anyone notice Andrew Quinn with a young attractive redhead on his arm? How did Amy escape such scrutiny? Andrew said he and Amy had ended their relationship mid April, yet here it was the middle of May and he was missing on a Friday afternoon.

The alibi hours were narrowing. It was time to talk to Andrew Quinn one more time. But apparently, in an attempt to save his marriage, Andrew and Miera were spending two weeks in Oahu, Hawaii, even though Congress was in session. Andrew had asked for a leave of absence.