The Thanksgiving Day Murder (16 page)

Thanks, I thought. I'm already three-quarters there.

The house was one large room, more like a studio apartment in New York than a place to live in the country. And it was clearly an artist's studio. Although there was a bed off to one side and what looked like a kitchen against the back wall, the rest of the space was covered with sculpture. I didn't know how the man got from one piece to another, so close were they to each other. And centered in the large room was a stove with a chimney rising through the roof.

It was actually hot inside. I waited a minute, then unbuttoned my coat with stiff fingers, pulled off my gloves, and finally took the coat off. He didn't offer to take it, so I made my way to the bed and left it there.

“Who are you?” DiMartino said.

“Chris Bennett. My husband is a detective sergeant at the Sixty-fifth.”

“The Six-five. I know the Six-five. What's his name?”

“Jack Brooks.”

“Brooks. I remember him. He's OK.”

I thought he was a little better than that, but this wasn't the time to promote the man I loved. “He said you were the best.”

“A lot of good it did me.”

“I need your help.”

“Yeah.”

That seemed the end of the conversation. DiMartino reached for an open bottle of liquor and poured some into a water glass, looking questioningly at me as he did so. When I shook my head, he drank some.

“I drink a little,” he said.

It didn't come as a surprise. He settled back in his chair. I found another one next to his bed and dragged it to the center of the room. DiMartino looked like a man who had given up all those little things we take pains to do to show ourselves we are civilized human beings. His clothes were less than clean and he wore them sloppily. His hair, which was receding, was too long and choppily cut, as though he took a chunk from here and a chunk from there when it suited him or when he got tired of looking at it in the mirror. He had a gut, which must have made it hard to chop wood, and that seemed to be the fuel of choice in his stove.

“You know what they did to me?”

“Jack said you got a raw deal.”

“I was always a little outspoken, said what I thought when I thought it. I had a little disagreement with my lieutenant about some evidence, and later on I got cornered by a reporter. So I told him what I thought, which wasn't what everybody else thought, and the dummy quoted me and printed my name and it got back to the guy who runs the lab.”

“You mean they fired you for expressing an opinion?” I could feel my ire rise.

“Nobody fired me. They just piled up a lot of junk against me.” He had started to speak more carefully, his diction more correct, as though he might be a man not afraid to show the effects of education. It was hard for me to believe it was this same man who had shouted “Get outa here” only an hour ago. “Then one day I took a piece of evidence from the property room, checked it out with the clerk, and forgot to get it back in time. I put it in my locker overnight and the next morning they said I'd stolen it.”

“How terrible.”

“Right. How terrible. Something people do all the time, only that time they wanted me, so it became a violation of
department rules and procedures. I had a great choice, sit in a radio car in Brooklyn for two years or retire.”

“It really was a raw deal.”

“So here I am. My wife left me and I'm living the life of Riley in Broome County. Sure you don't want a drink?”

“I'm positive.”

“So you want me to help you find someone.”

“She disappeared at the Thanksgiving Day parade the year before last. The police haven't found her and a private detective hasn't found her. I'm looking as a favor to her family.”

“You have pictures?”

“Out in the car.”

“Let's take a look.”

It was dark when I left. The transformation that had taken over DiMartino had been wonderful to watch. As his speech had changed, so did his demeanor. Before my eyes he went from the sloppy, angry hermit to the consummate professional. He looked at the pictures with a magnifying glass he found in a desk almost hidden behind sculptures. He looked at the dentist's report and the hair swatches I had gotten from the hairdresser. He listened to everything I had to say and took notes.

“Probably made herself over,” he grumbled at one point. Then he went back to the pictures.

Finally he asked if I would leave everything with him overnight and we would talk in the morning.

“I'll bring breakfast,” I said. “What time do you open for business?”

He gave me the first hesitant smile of my visit. “Eight o'clock for breakfast. Work as soon as we're finished eating. Bring an extra coffee.”

I said I would and I drove into town and got myself a room for the night.

I was back at the stroke of eight. He had shoveled in front of the carport so there was room for me to park. As I reached the door, he opened it.

“Come on in. I've cleared a place where we can sit.”

The place was a table in the kitchen area. Yesterday it
had been buried under what looked to me like debris, but one man's art is another's debris, as most of us have learned. We sat and ate a hearty breakfast with eggs and sausage and muffins, juice and coffee.

“Better when someone else cooks it,” he said.

“Jack sends his regards. He told me you were always nice to women.”

“Most cops are.”

I thought that was rather gallant, considering. “I think we have some business to conduct before we go on.” I had talked to Sandy last night, and he was willing to spend more than I had imagined on this project.

“We'll talk business later. I was up most of the night working. Come over here.”

I had wanted to clean up the table first, but he had no time for that. He led me to a cloth-covered object set about shoulder height and pulled the sheet off. A white, bald-headed Natalie looked at me.

“I can't believe it,” I said.

“It needs the right wig and I don't have one. Do you have a scarf?”

I got the long wool scarf that I wrapped around my neck in cold weather. He put it over Natalie's head and crossed it along the front of her neck.

“It's fantastic,” I said.

“It needs some color, but I'll take care of that later. I use white clay and I don't fire it. If you're going to fire it, you have to cut it open around here—” he pointed to the place where the eyebrows would be “—and scoop out the inside so it'll dry, which takes a few weeks, and I figure you want this yesterday. You're using this for photos, right?”

“Right,” I said. “And I have her cosmetics. Her husband gave them to me.” I took a small plastic bag out of my shoulder bag and gave it to him. Her lipsticks were in there, her foundation, her powder.

“This is good, gives me an idea of her color preferences.”
He took the foundation and smeared it on the white clay face and it sprang to life. I half expected to see the lips move, to hear Natalie's voice.

“It must be the Pinocchio syndrome,” I said. “I thought I saw her move.”

This time I got a real smile. “I live with these guys. They're pretty quiet.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“From here I take her back. You said you couldn't find anything about her before five years ago. I think she made herself over, straightened her teeth, capped the bad ones, changed her hairstyle and color. I've been looking at that nose and I can almost give you the name of the plastic surgeon.”

“You think she had her nose fixed?”

“I'm almost sure of it. I think she made herself from a plain little girl, maybe even a homely little girl, into a good-looking woman.”

“How old do you think she is?”

“I could be off, but I'd say thirty-eight, forty.”

That was Susan Hartswell's guess, more or less. “What will you take her back to?”

“Say, twenty years. The people who went to high school with her will remember her. That's what you want, isn't it?”

“I want the person who may have kidnapped her. Maybe her old high school friends can put me onto him.”

“Can I make a suggestion you won't like?”

“Go on. I'll take all the professional help I can get.”

“Have you checked out the husband?”

“The detective who inherited the case checked him out and seemed convinced it was a happy marriage, and there were no rumors about him. He really acts as though he wants to find her.”

“Because he's the guy to check out first. It could be he never took her to the parade.”

“There's a picture of her in the crowd.”

“It's easy to take a picture in a crowd. You see the strip of negatives with the balloons in the one before her and the one after her?”

I hadn't. I shook my head.

“Could have been taken at a baseball game. You have to see if the people in the crowd fit, if the clothes are right for the time of year. Little things like that can tell you a lot.”

“I don't think he did it,” I said. “He got a phone call the other day from someone who read the ad I put in the paper.”

“How do you know he got a phone call? Because he told you? If I'd killed my wife, I'd tell you the same thing. But I'd come up with a better story.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

“You're a nice girl. Jack Brooks did himself a favor when he married you. You've got a good face, too, nice bone structure.”

“Me?”

“You. OK. The question was, where do we go from here? From here on, I work alone. You give me your phone number, and when I have something to show you, I call you. There's nothing you can do here except look over my shoulder, and I don't work that way.”

“So I go home.”

“And wait for my call.”

“You want me to leave the pictures?”

“I tell you what. Take the wedding album. Leave the rest. They're safe here.”

“Then I'll be going.” I got my coat and put it on. Then I turned and looked at the sculpted face with the lipstick. It was about to undergo what a lot of people would sell a soul for, taking off twenty years. “You seem in a much better mood today, Sergeant,” I said.

“It's like Jack told you. I'm nice to women.”

I called Sandy in midafternoon when I reached home. He sounded ecstatic, almost as though his missing wife were on the verge of being delivered to his doorstep. I had very little hope that that would ever happen.

Jack listened to my story when he came home from law school. “So it's really remote,” he said after my description of DiMartino's house.

“I doubt whether he sees anyone besides the people in the supermarket and the bank.”

“And he probably picks up his mail at the post office. Does he have a phone?”

“I didn't see one, but he said he'd call me when I should come back for the sculptures. Was he a drinker when you knew him?”

“It's not unheard-of for a guy on the job to take a sip now and then.”

“This was more than that. He kept an open bottle where he could reach it. Though this morning I noticed it wasn't there. I think he was energized by having an assignment, especially one he'd be paid for.”

“Work does magic. So what's the game plan?”

“I guess I just sit and wait for DiMartino's call. I've followed up on just about everything I can. The next move has to be another ad in the Indiana paper with the picture of Natalie as a nineteen- or twenty-year-old. If she grew up there, there have to be people who remember her. There has to be a high school yearbook with a picture that'll be close to what DiMartino's going to give me.”

“So we wait for the phone to ring.”

“It won't be the first time.”

On Friday morning I decided to talk to Sandy for the first time about Natalie's mysterious “brother.”

“Of course you're not bothering me,” he said over the phone. “I always have time for this. Is something up?”

I told him about my conversations with Dickie Foster
and the super at Natalie's former apartment near Gramercy Park.

“She had no brothers,” he said. “No brothers and no sisters. The feeling I got, although she never came out and said it, was that she was illegitimate, given up by her mother, and raised by a foster family. Whether they were related by blood or not, I wasn't sure from the way she told it.”

“But you know, if her natural mother married later, she might have had more children that would be related to Natalie.”

“She was pretty emphatic about being an only child.”

“The question is who this man is. Maybe he's the abusive husband we've talked about.”

“Whoever he is, this is confirmation that you're on the right track, Chris. I think when that sculpture is done, we're going to get some answers.”

It turned out, eventually, that he was right. But the answers we got were to questions we had never asked.

Just as I was about to go out to do some necessary shopping, the phone rang. An operator was at the other end.

“I have a call from Mabel Bernstein in Antigua,” she said. “Will you pay for the call?”

“Yes, I will.” There was a little static and then I said, “Mrs. Bernstein?”

“Christine?”

“Yes, it's me. How's your vacation?”

“Warm and wonderful. I remembered something that may help you.”

“I'm all ears.”

“Natalie went away one weekend—can you hear me all right?”

“I hear you fine.”

“She went away with a friend,” she continued, straining her voice. “A man friend. And she wrote me a postcard.
She said she was having a great time and he was a real jewel.”

“A jewel?” I repeated. “Like a diamond?”

“Yes. That kind of jewel.”

“Do you remember when she wrote it to you?”

“Early on. Probably the first year she lived on Greenwich Avenue.”

“Mrs. Bernstein, do you remember where it was mailed from?”

“Yes. It came from one of those lakes or something upstate.”

“Upstate in what state?” I asked.

“New York. I bet it was Saratoga Springs or one of those places.”

“You're sure it didn't come from New Jersey?”

“I haven't lost all my marbles yet. It came from New York. I may even have the card somewhere at home, but I'm not going to be home for another month.”

“Thank you for keeping this in mind. This has really been very helpful.”

“Did you expect New Jersey?”

“I did.”

“Does this put a monkey wrench in your investigation?”

“No. It just means someone's memory wasn't as good as yours.”

“You mean he lied, don't you?”

“It's possible. Enjoy the tropics, Mrs. Bernstein. And keep in touch if you remember anything else.”

I took myself off to the supermarket to think about what I had learned. Martin Jewell had been absolutely certain he and Natalie had gone to Cape May and that he had chosen the spot. When someone lies to me with such conviction, I am naturally alert. As I pushed my cart through the aisles, loading it in preparation for our weekend, I asked myself whether I wanted to challenge Jewell's statement, whether
it was important, whether he had just become a suspect in Natalie's disappearance because they had spent a weekend in one place instead of another.

By the time I got home, I knew I had to call him. The person who answered the phone gave me a little trouble but relented and put me through.

“Yes, how are you?” Martin Jewell's voice said. “Any news on Natalie?”

“Something has come up,” I answered, avoiding the question. “It seems Natalie sent a friend a postcard the weekend you and she went away.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it looks like you didn't go to Cape May.”

“Sure we did. I always—” He stopped. Then he mumbled something under his breath that might have been an obscenity. “You're right, we didn't. We went to New York State. North, not south.”

“Do you remember the place?”

“It was a hotel. I don't remember the name of it. It was five years ago.”

“Was it her idea to go there?”

“It must have been. I always pick Cape May. I mean when I go away for the weekend.”

“Do you remember the town?”

“It was north of Albany, around Saratoga Springs, I think. It was a hell of a drive.”

“Do you know why she picked that place?”

“If she told me, I don't remember. It was a nice place, though, now that I think about it, a country inn or something, fireplace in every room kind of thing.”

“Anything else you remember? Did you visit anyone she knew?”

“We didn't spend much time sightseeing,” he said, as though instructing me on the purpose of the trip. “Wait a minute. I do remember something.” He sounded eager.
“She got up in the middle of the night and went somewhere.”

“Alone?”

“Without me anyway. I woke up and she wasn't there. She walked in, fully dressed, a little while later, said she couldn't sleep and had gone out for a walk. But I think she took my car.”

“She drove somewhere?”

“There was more mileage on it than I remembered. My keys were on the dresser. She could have taken them with no trouble.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Jewell.”

“No problem.”

“Let me know if anything else occurs to you.”

He was awfully smooth. He was so believable, I found myself believing him, as I had before. Maybe he had made an honest mistake. Maybe he usually weekended at Cape May and it had slipped his mind where he and Natalie had gone together. It was, as he had said, five years ago.