The Shadow of Your Smile (18 page)

At six o’clock, Dr. Ryan Jenner rang the bell of Monica’s office and waited expectantly. Maybe she’s in one of the back rooms, he thought, and rang the bell again. But after the third try, when he’d pressed the bell for an extended time, he decided that Monica had completely forgotten her promise to turn over the file of the O’Keefe boy to him.

He realized that he had been looking forward to spending the evening studying all of the diagnostic tests to see if there was any explanation for the advanced brain cancer to simply disappear.

Shrugging off his disappointment, he walked from the sidewalk to the curb and hailed a cab. On the way home, he wondered if he would find Alice Halloway waiting for him there. He had not been able to refuse his aunt’s request when she told him that Alice, “one of her favorite people in the whole world,” was coming up to Manhattan on a business trip and had asked to stay in the apartment. And did Ryan mind?

“It’s your apartment so how can I mind?” Ryan had asked. “She even has her choice of your two guest bedrooms.” In his mind he had expected that Alice Halloway would be a contemporary of his aunt, somewhere between seventy and seventy-five. Instead when Alice arrived last week, she had turned out to be a very pretty woman
in her early thirties who was going to be attending a convention of beauty editors in Manhattan.

The convention had lasted two days but Alice stayed on. A few nights earlier she had invited Ryan to join her at the theatre. She had told him she managed to get two house seats for the sold-out revival of
Our Town
. They had gone to get a quick bite after the show, and it had been too late for Ryan’s taste when they finally got back to the apartment. He was operating at seven the next morning.

It was only when Alice tried to insist they have an after-dinner drink by the fire that Ryan had caught on to the fact that his aunt was trying to set him up with “one of her favorite people in the whole world,” and that Alice was more than willing to go along with it.

Now, in the cab on the way uptown, Ryan pondered what to do about the situation. Alice kept delaying her departure. She was always in the apartment when he got there, with cheese and crackers and chilled wine waiting for him.

If she’s not gone soon, I’m going to a hotel until she clears out, he decided.

Usually at the end of the day he was relieved and pleased to turn the key in the door of the large, comfortable apartment. Tonight, he grimaced as he pushed the door open. Then the enticing scent of something baking in the kitchen teased his nostrils and he realized he was hungry.

Alice was curled up on the couch in the living room watching a quiz show on cable. She was wearing a casual sweater and slacks. A small plate of cheese and crackers, two glasses, and a bottle of wine in a cooler were on the round table in front of her. “Hi, Ryan,” she called as he stopped in the vestibule.

“Hello, Alice,” Ryan said, trying to sound cordial. He watched as
she unfolded herself from the couch and walked across the room to greet him. Planting a butterfly-light kiss on his cheek, she said, “You look done in. How many lives have you saved today?”

“None,” Ryan said briefly. “Look, Alice—”

She interrupted him. “Why don’t you shed that jacket and tie and put on something comfortable? Virginia ham, macaroni and cheese, biscuits, and a salad is the dinner I’m famous for.”

It had been Ryan’s intention to say that he had dinner plans, but the words died on his lips. Instead he asked, “Alice, I do have to know. How long are you planning to stay?”

Her eyes widened. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m leaving Saturday morning so you’ll only have to put up with me for two more days, a day and a half, actually.”

“I’m embarrassed. This is not my apartment, but . . .”

“But you don’t want the doorman smirking at you. Don’t worry. I already told him you were my step-brother.”

“Your step-brother!”

“Sure. Now how about that Virginia ham dinner? It’s your last chance.
I
have plans for tomorrow night.”

She’s leaving Saturday, and she’s out tomorrow night, Ryan thought with relief. I can at least be civil now. With a genuine smile he said, “I’m delighted to take you up on dinner, but I won’t be much company. I’m operating at seven tomorrow morning again, so I’ll be turning in early.”

“That’s fine. You don’t even have to help clear the table.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Ryan went down the corridor to his room and walked over to the closet to hang up his jacket. The phone rang but Alice picked it up on the first ring. He opened the door in case she called him but she did not. Must be for her, he thought.

In the kitchen Alice lowered her voice. A woman who introduced
herself as Dr. Farrell had asked for Dr. Jenner. “He’s just getting changed,” Alice said. “May I take a message?”

“Please tell him that Dr. Farrell phoned to apologize for not being in her office to give him the O’Keefe file,” Monica said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’ll make sure he has it in the morning.”

36
 

Now that positive identification had been made on the body of Renée Carter, the elaborate process of finding and apprehending her killer was set in motion. While her friend Kerianne sat protectively by her side, Kristina told the detectives the little she knew about her late employer.

Renée Carter had been an event planner who slept late, then was gone for most of the day, and was always out till very late at night. She spent little or no time with her child. “She showed a lot more affection to Ranger, the Lab, than she did to Sally,” Kristina recalled. In the short time Kristina had been there, Renée had had no company. She did not have a land line, so any calls that came while she was in the apartment rang on her cell phone.

“I just don’t know very much about her,” Kristina said apologetically. “I was hired through the agency.”

Barry Tucker gave her his card. “If you think of anyone we might contact, get back to me. You handled it very well by taking the baby to the hospital, so you go home and get some rest. We’ll be talking to you again.”

“What’s going to happen to Sally?” Kristina asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Tucker told her. “We’ll start looking for relatives.”

“If you do find out who her father is, I don’t think he’ll want her.
Unless she was joking, the way Ms. Carter said that he was ready to finally cough up some money doesn’t sound as if he was supporting her.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“And what about Ranger?” Sally asked. “We can’t just leave him alone. Can I take him with me for now? Kerianne and I have a really small apartment, but my mother loves dogs. She’d look after him. I know she would.”

“I think that’s a pretty good temporary solution,” Tucker agreed. “All right. I’ll walk you girls down and put you in a cab. I want to talk to the people at the desk. They must have a contact for someone to call if there was a problem in this apartment and they couldn’t reach Ms. Carter.”

Ten minutes later, after dispatching the young women and the Labrador, Barry Tucker had introduced himself to Ralph Torre, the manager of the building, and after explaining that Ms. Carter had been the victim of a homicide, began to question him.

Eager to be cooperative, Torre told him that Renée Carter had been in the apartment for a year. Before she was allowed to sign a lease she had submitted financial information which showed she had made one hundred thousand dollars at her last job as the assistant manager of a restaurant in Las Vegas and had assets of “give or take a million bucks.” She had listed a Flora White as the person to contact in case of emergency. Torre wrote down White’s cell phone and business number. “Will Ms. Carter’s family be giving up the apartment?” he asked hopefully. “We have a waiting list for the park view.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Barry said curtly, and went back up to the apartment to phone Flora White. He tried her cell phone first.

She picked up on the first ring. The somewhat breathy tone of her voice changed when Tucker told her he was calling about Renée Carter.

“I really don’t give a damn about Renée Carter,” White snapped.
“She was in charge of one of our big events last night, and she never showed up. You can tell her for me she’s fired.”

Tucker made the decision to hold off telling White that Renée was dead. “I am Detective Barry Tucker,” he said. “When did you last see Renée Carter?”

“Detective? Is she in trouble? Did anything happen to her?” To Tucker’s trained ear, the shock in Flora White’s voice sounded genuine.

“She didn’t come home night before last,” Tucker said. “The babysitter had to take her child to the hospital.”

“She must have met someone really good,” White scoffed. “It wouldn’t be the first time she got on a private plane to nowhere with someone she just met. From what I hear that kid is sick a lot.”

“When was the last time you saw Renée Carter?” Tucker repeated.

“Night before last. We did the red carpet routine for the premiere of some lousy movie, and ran the party after it. But Renée took off at ten o’clock. She was meeting someone. I don’t know who.”

“Did she ever speak about the father of her child or about her own family?”

“If you can believe her, which is doubtful, she ran away from home when she was sixteen, got some bit parts in movies in Hollywood, then was out in Vegas for a while. I met her here about three years ago. We were hostesses at the same club in SoHo. Then she found out she was pregnant. She must have gotten some big payoff from her boyfriend to get out of town because suddenly she’s not around anymore. I heard nothing from her for a year. Then one day she called me up. She’d gone back to Vegas but now was bored. She missed New York. I’d started the event planning business, and asked her if she was interested in working at it.”

Tucker had been making notes as Flora White talked. “She was interested, I suppose?”

“You bet she was. Where better to connect with another guy with money?”

“She never talked about her baby’s father?”

“If you mean did she tell me his name, the answer is no. But my guess is that she got plenty to make sure that baby wasn’t born, but then decided she’d be better off having a hold on the guy.”

Flora White is a fountain of information, Barry Tucker thought, the kind of person any detective would love to find in an investigation, but her casually brutal assessment of Renée Carter left him acutely sorry for the child who was now in a hospital and might easily end up unwanted by anyone.

“Let me know when you hear from Renée,” Flora White was saying. “I didn’t mean it about firing her. I mean, of course, I could kill her for not showing up last night, but on the other hand she’s really good at what she does. When she wants to turn on the charm, she puts people at ease and makes them laugh, and they come back to us when their next lousy movie is being screened for their friends.”

“Ms. White, you’ve been very helpful,” Barry said. “You tell me that Renée left the party early night before last. Do you know if a driver picked her up or if she took a cab?”

“A cab? Renée? Are you kidding? She has a driving service and boy oh boy, the chauffeur had better have a uniform and cap on, and the car better be a Mercedes 500 and looking like it just came off the lot. She always wanted to give the impression that she was loaded.”

“Do you know the name of the service?”

“Sure. I use them, too. But I don’t drive them crazy the way Renée does. They’re Ultra-Lux. I’ll give you the phone number. It’s . . .” She paused. “Wait a minute, I never get numbers straight. I have it here.”

It was time to tell Flora White that Renée Carter would not be available for future screenings.

After he had heard her cries of dismay and managed to calm her down, Tucker requested that she meet him at the District Attorney’s Office in the morning to sign a statement verifying the facts she had just given him.

A few minutes later, as Detective Dennis Flynn went through Renée’s desk looking for any information on next of kin, Barry Tucker talked to the dispatcher of the Ultra-Lux driving service, who told him that Renée Carter had been dropped off at a bar on East End Avenue in the vicinity of Gracie Mansion, and she had told the driver that he didn’t have to wait for her.

“We were short that night,” the man explained, “and when Ms. Carter’s driver checked in to say he was free, I wanted to make real sure he had it straight. I didn’t need her calling me screaming if the driver wasn’t there. My guy was insistent. He said that Ms. Carter told him her date would drop her off home because he lived not far from her on Central Park West. Then he told me something else. It’s kind of gossip, if you know what I mean, but it may help you. When Renée was in a good mood she was really friendly. Anyhow, the other night she laughed and told our guy that her date thought she was broke, so she didn’t want to have a fancy car waiting for her when she came out.”

37