The Thanksgiving Day Murder (3 page)

I met Melanie early Monday morning when I went out for my walk. It was really too cold to spend much time out of doors, and we did a quick circle of our block and parted. She didn't mention Sandy Gordon and I didn't either.

On Tuesday morning I taught my poetry course at a local college and then came home. It was the beginning of the spring semester and I was still getting to know my students, still trying to match names to faces. At home I had other work to do, preparing materials for Arnold Gold, my lawyer friend in New York who gave me away at my wedding last August. I was typing away at the ancient word processor he had given me when I thought I heard the doorbell ring. I saved my file, having long ago learned the consequences of not doing so, and went downstairs.

Sandy Gordon stood outside my front door, carrying a box big enough to hold a portable typewriter. “May I come in?”

“Sure.” I felt a little disoriented, my head still on the legal brief I had been typing. “What brings you to Oakwood today?”

“You.” He came in, put the box on the floor, and unbuttoned his coat. “Have you thought about it?”

“I have, yes.”

He took his coat off and I hung it up, knowing this was an invitation for him to stay.

“You don't look very positive.”

“Jack and I talked about it, Sandy. We both think that unless your wife caused her own disappearance, the chances of finding her alive are very small.”

“I'm aware of that. I'm resigned to it, although no way do I believe she ran off.”

“I thought about where I would start,” I said, not responding to his forceful dissent to my suggestion, “who I would talk to, for example, and I came up blank. I can't believe there's anything on Seventy-fourth Street or anyone who was there that day that could help me.”

“I agree with you. I think the parade isn't the place to start.” He pointed at the carton on the floor. “I think that is. I've collected everything I could find in the house and put it all in that box. It's yours to look at, go through, whatever you want. Then make a decision.”

“You're a very persuasive man. Does anyone ever say no to you?”

“All the time. But I don't want you to be one of them.”

“Sandy, I feel very sad about your wife's disappearance.”

“You're leading up to a no and I don't want to hear it. Will you do this for me? Go through the carton. OK?”

“I will.”

“Thanks. We'll talk again.”

Maybe that's why I do it, take on investigations that will lead me away from the safe and the ordinary, that innate desire to know about people's lives, where they've been, what they've done, what makes them tick, if anything. The carton sitting on the floor of my living room was too tempting to set aside. I lifted it onto the coffee table and pulled open the four flaps that had been neatly folded into each other. Since I was in my second year and fourth semester of teaching the same course, I had a great lesson plan prepared, and although I changed and updated it regularly, I had little to do to prepare for next Tuesday's class. And I would get to Arnold's work later. The carton won.

On top was a small, white leather photograph album that said
OUR WEDDING
in gold on the cover. The pages were plastic envelopes and each one was filled, front and back, with a picture the size of the page. The first few pages showed a bride dressing, a white, street-length dress going over her head, her carefully coiffed hair being brushed into place by a man with a brush and a very dedicated expression, mascara being applied in a mirror shot that focused on her reflection.

Sandy had not exaggerated. She was beautiful, with reddish brown hair and a smile as lovely as it was natural. The dress was simple and elegant, the short veil, when she finally had it put on, very fine-looking. There were a few snapshots also of the ceremony, which took place under the traditional canopy of a Jewish wedding. In one picture, Sandy was stamping on a white package on the floor, probably the glass he was to break to assure good luck to the couple. The luck hadn't lasted very long.

It was a small wedding, with the groom's father, gray-haired and considerably shorter than Sandy, a woman who was probably his sister, two children who were surely his. His bride, however, seemed to have only a single attendant, a pretty woman about her age in a peach-colored dress. If Natalie Gordon had had any other friends or any relatives, they had not attended, or at least not participated in the ceremony.

It struck me that my own wedding had resembled this one in some degree. My parents and aunt are gone, and except for my cousin Gene, I am pretty much without family. But I count all the nuns of St. Stephen's as my friends, and it was there that our wedding took place. Natalie had apparently come to Sandy without family.

None of the faces in the second half of the book looked familiar. I suppose second weddings are smaller and less lavish than first ones, and only the closest members of the circle are invited. The food looked wonderful, the guests at
the handful of tables happy, and the final pictures of the couple being showered with rice a classic conclusion to a wedding.

I set the small album aside on the coffee table. I must admit I was itching to open my notebook and make some notes, not a good sign for someone who has turned down a case. I restrained myself and continued into the carton. There were a few books near the top—there seemed no organization to the contents; Sandy had probably just gathered things and stuffed them in—and I looked at them with interest. The first one was an anthology of modern American and English poetry, well read, from the look of the jacket. I opened it and found an inscription: “To Natalie with love forever, or for as long as it takes. Ron.” The date was eight years ago. I leafed through the pages, but it was a thick book and I didn't notice anything special on the pages I saw.

The second book was quite different, a small, maroon leather-bound volume of
Othello
, the pages tipped with gold, surely part of a set and perhaps picked up in an antiquarian bookshop. This one had a surprising inscription: “To Scottie, For all the right reasons. With love, Natalie.” Either it was a book she had given to Scottie and he had returned it, or she had inscribed it and never got to present it to him, or decided not to. In any case, it seemed a small treasure.

The last of the three books was another gift, a cookbook for a person living alone. The message in this one was, “To Natalie, So you don't cook your goose. Love, Mom.” It was dated about seven years ago and was identified in no other way. At least Natalie had had one parent not too long ago.

There were envelopes of snapshots deeper in the carton. Sandy must have taken a camera with him everywhere they went, because there were pictures from the vacations he had described, pictures of their home, pictures taken both indoors
and outdoors, with and without other people present, and even a few snapshots from the Thanksgiving Day parade. If I thought these last would give me a point of departure, I was disappointed. Most of them were of Macy's balloons, including Babar, coming down Central Park West far above where people stood watching them. There was only one picture of Natalie—proof, if I needed it, that she had gone to the parade—with her head raised in profile to look up at what was going by. There were no identifiable people, no balloon man, no hot dog man, no candy man.

The last envelope was quite different. It had a return address from a man with D.D.S. after his name. Inside were some copies of dental records and a letter, dated last year, written in layman's English to Sandy. It said that in discussions with Mrs. Gordon when she first visited him, she had acknowledged having orthodontia as an adult. From his own examination, he had been able to determine that Mrs. Gordon had had extensive cosmetic work done on her teeth, namely crowns on teeth he identified with numbers. Thus, I assumed, the perfect smile.

I set the letter and all the photographs aside with the books and looked at the rest of the things in the carton. For the most part they were quite impersonal. A copy of
New York
magazine was open to the middle of an article. A yellow telephone message said “Sandy” for the person called, “Marty” for the caller, and there were check marks next to
TELEPHONED
and
PLEASE CALL
. No message was written, but an
N
appeared at the bottom line. The piece of paper was undated and had no time on it.

An expensive-looking black satin evening bag with a gold frame and a long gold chain caught my eye and I took it out. Since I am now affluent enough to own two purses, I have discovered that I leave certain things in the one I'm not using, sometimes a receipt stuffed inside when I bought something or a memento of a place I have visited. This one was no different. Besides several carefully folded clean tissues,
there was a folded card that said
MR. AND MRS. SANDY GORDON
on the outside and
TABLE
12 on the inside. A matchbook from Lutèce indicated the kind of restaurants the Gordons frequented, and a small ivory comb attested to expensive taste. But there were no receipts, no notes, no scribblings.

A recipe file was filled mostly with recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers and occasionally some written for Natalie by other people. A few of them were on printed cards that said
FROM THE RECIPE FILE OF
, followed by a name. Although I went through the whole file, I found nothing written in Natalie's hand except a notation to bake a cake forty minutes instead of thirty-five.

There were a few other magazines in the carton, a postcard to Sandy and Natalie from Paris, two bottles of cologne, two small bottles of perfume, all about half-full and all names that I recognized, a box of dusting powder, a toothbrush, a brush and comb, two lipsticks, one a pink shade, one on the orange side, both about half-used, several bottles of nail polish, and makeup including powder, rouge, moisturizer, base, mascara, and lotion to remove all of the above. Although these were certainly personal possessions, they didn't give me anything to go on, although I suppose I knew a little more about Natalie when I finished looking at them.

Down at the bottom, where it had probably dropped through the layers of disorganized items, was a key ring with several keys on it. None, I could see immediately, was for a safe-deposit box. One might have been for a suitcase, one or two for front doors, one small one just a mystery.

So that was Natalie Gordon's legacy. I assumed Sandy had her clothes in his home, perhaps other pocketbooks, too, but if he had hired a private detective, I had to believe all of that would have been expertly checked out. What was missing was a Social Security card, probably in the bag she had carried the day she disappeared, stubs from paychecks,
tax returns for the last few years, at least for the few before she married, letters from family or friends, diaries, almost anything in her handwriting. Some of those things, credit cards, a pocket agenda, a shopping list, might have been in the bag she was carrying. But records of past jobs would have been filed away somewhere. I learned when I married Jack that he keeps all of his records in case the IRS has questions years hence. Following his example, I began to do the same.

But Natalie Gordon hadn't, or Sandy hadn't thought such records were relevant. He had said that this carton was the place to start, but having looked through it, I still didn't know where to go from here. No cosmetics counter was likely to give me a lead, nor was Lutèce, where she had enjoyed a meal. Her choice of magazines told me something about her, as did the books, but unless I could identify the men who had given and received them, they were pretty useless.

I had opened the carton with an almost breathless anticipation. Now I felt disappointed. Knowing what Natalie looked like, sniffing her perfume and looking at the shade of pink she chose for her cheeks, touching the evening bag she carried to Lutèce, were all very interesting but gave me no clue as to what had happened to her. Nor did they give me any clue as to who she was or what her life had been like before Sandy Gordon married her.

I put everything back, more or less in the order in which I had taken it out, leaving the keys for last. But they, too, needed a name or address to be hung on. Whatever doors they opened were as firmly locked as the doors to Natalie Gordon's past.

I went back upstairs to finish my work for Arnold.

I drove into the city with Jack the next morning. Before he reached the Sixty-fifth Precinct in Brooklyn, he dropped me at a subway station and I went into Manhattan to Arnold Gold's office. When I was finished there, I would take the train back to Oakwood and Jack would go to his classes. As I put my coat on before I left the house, I saw the carton. I had talked to Jack about it very briefly when he came home the night before, exhausted as usual. I could tell he didn't like the idea of Sandy dropping in uninvited, and he had no desire to look at anything in the box.

In the last few days my own memories of the Thanksgiving Day parade had started to come back with greater clarity. I now recalled that my father had taken me to see it several times, and he had looked forward to those annual morning trips with an eagerness as great as my own. But there was something odd about those trips, something that didn't quite make sense. On the drive into the city, I asked Jack about it.

“On the morning of the Thanksgiving Day parade, my father used to drive us in and then we took the subway the rest of the way. I don't know what stop we got off at, but I remember we used to see the Statue of Liberty.”

“In the harbor?”

“That's what's so weird. It was near the parade. We walked down a street and saw it.”

“Sixty-fourth,” he said without hesitating. “Between
Broadway and Central Park West, north side of the street.”

“So it wasn't a crazy dream.”

“There's some company in that building, or there used to be. Liberty something. She's on the roof.”

“Then that must be where we watched the parade from, Sixty-fourth and Central Park West.”

“There's a big building there, Ethical Culture, I think. Takes up the block between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-third.”

“It seemed like such a crazy memory, the parade and the Statue of Liberty.”

“You don't talk about your father much.”

“I don't remember much about him. This memory really came out of the blue.”

“Here OK?” He was slowing the car, my subway station just across the street.

“Fine.” I leaned over and we kissed. “See you tonight.”

He grinned at me and touched my shoulder as I opened the car door. On the sidewalk I waved and he took off.

“So we got you instead of a FedEx package.” Arnold Gold was standing at his secretary's desk as I came in.

“You said you had some more work,” I said. “Good morning. Nice to see you all.”

The phone rang on the secretary's desk and Arnold said, “Let's get to work, friends.”

He took me out to lunch, one of the fringe benefits of working in his office. Arnold is not a one-restaurant man. There are days he wants a salad, other days a delicatessen sandwich, or a big bowl of soup and nothing else. Today he thought we'd try a new pasta restaurant that had opened about a month earlier, and he had noticed that the crowd had diminished, although his gourmet colleagues had assured him it was worth the walk. We walked, fighting the winds of downtown Manhattan. When we arrived, my face was so stiff with cold, I could hardly talk. But his colleagues were right.

“Looks like a good menu,” Arnold said, putting his glasses on to read it. “I think I'll try this one with the clams and red sauce.”

“I'm going for the primavera.”

“Because you want spring to come. Will it be enough to keep you happy all afternoon?”

“You know what I usually have for lunch, Arnold.”

“I noticed the tuna fish market collapsed after you got married. You must make better lunches for Jack than you used to eat yourself.”

“I do. But I haven't given up tuna fish altogether.”

A wonderful machine was spinning out miles of fresh pasta and I watched it for a minute.

“Looks like we get a free show.”

“It's a very pretty place.”

“So how've you been since Christmas? We still haven't stopped talking about St. Stephen's. What a beautiful place that is. What a remarkable woman your friend Sister Joseph is.”

“Yes on both counts. We've been fine. Something just came up the other day.”

“Uh-oh.”

I laughed. “You smell it, don't you?”

“Find a body under your bed?”

“Melanie's uncle's wife—young, beautiful, second marriage—”

“Usual story.”

“Right. She disappeared during the Thanksgiving Day parade the year before last.”

“And he wants you to find her. I wouldn't touch it.”

“Why not?”

“She probably ran off with the milkman and doesn't want to come back. They still deliver milk out where you live?”

“A couple of times a week.”

“I can remember the clip-clop of the horses' hooves at six in the morning. And that was every day.”

“You're just trying to impress me with how old you are.”

“Just with how good my memory is.”

“There's something else, Arnold.”

Our lunches arrived at that moment and we were both impressed at how beautiful they looked. I am not only a very ordinary cook, I am the least artistic one I've ever met. My attempts at arranging food to look like the dishes I see on television have been thoroughly without success. But here was a deep dish of swirling pasta interlaced with colorful vegetables and a fragrant sauce that made my mouth water.

“Well, I knew lawyers were good for something,” Arnold said, digging in. “They always know the best new restaurants.”

“So do cops.”

“Cops are always thinking of their stomachs.”

I laughed, but it was true. “Is that prejudice?”

“Pure truth based on years of observation. You were saying there was something else.” Arnold never forgets where he is in a conversation, what the last witness mumbled in his testimony, what a member of the group said under his breath that he wishes everyone would forget.

“Talking to this man about his missing wife, I remembered something about my own childhood. My father used to take me to the parade.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to continue.

“I think I know where we watched it from because I remember seeing a small Statue of Liberty on top of a building.”

“There is one up there, you're right.”

“Jack says it's on Sixty-fourth.”

“I'm sure he knows his geography a lot better than I know mine.”

“My father met a woman there while we watched the parade.”

“I run into people I know all the time in New York, Chrissie. Harriet sees people in stores and on the streets; I see them in courtrooms and restaurants, and if I went to parades, I'd probably see them there, too.”

“It wasn't like that. And it wasn't just once. They met there. They were looking for each other.”

“And it's thrown you into a tizzy.”

“I'm afraid it has.”

“Did he have a sister?”

“Yes, my aunt Meg. That's the only one.”

“And you want to find a woman you met a couple of times fifteen or twenty years ago?”

“More like twenty-five.”

“Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you.”

“I've started to wonder—”

“Don't wonder, Chrissie,” he said firmly. “Your mother told you he died. He died. Your mother was an honorable woman.”

“She spent her whole life protecting me.”

He reached over and patted my hand. “And you met me in spite of it and you married a good cop.”

I smiled and nodded, feeling teary. Arnold is the father who replaced my natural father. I met him while I was investigating a forty-year-old murder shortly after I left St. Stephen's. He gave me work so that I could join his medical plan, and I've stayed with the work since my marriage because I love it and I love him. I enjoy the trip into the city, the occasional visits to one court or another in downtown Manhattan, the opportunity to be part of a world different from the one I live and teach in.

“I want to try, Arnold,” I said. “Just see if I can find something.”

“And this other thing, the woman who disappeared, she's your excuse.”

“Sort of.” I twisted some pasta on my fork and speared a nice piece of red pepper. How hard could it be to make something like this? I wondered, enjoying the tastes. Probably harder than boiling spaghetti. “It's intriguing, Arnold, a woman turning a corner and never seen again. He said when he finally went to look for her, a couple of minutes later, he saw a single balloon floating up to the sky.”

“Very romantic, doesn't mean a thing. Some kid who wouldn't hang on tight let go a balloon and suddenly we have high drama.”

“You're incorrigible, Arnold.”

“Join the crowd. It's how I'm listed in the directory of the ABA.”

“This is a great lunch.”

“And you're great company. I expect you want to take a little ride up the west side to Sixty-fourth Street as long as you're in the city.”

“I have work to do.”

“It can wait till tomorrow.”

“So can Sixty-fourth Street.”

“Just keep me posted. These are two hopeless efforts. I give you a fifty-fifty shot at finding some answers.”

“As usual, I think you overrate my abilities.”

I was able to finish the work for Arnold before three and I took the Broadway subway up to Sixty-sixth Street, the Lincoln Center area. I came up to street level on a triangular island with traffic going off in more directions than I could count. I was at the point where Broadway veered east on its southerly route, crossing Columbus Avenue, which ran parallel to it for miles uptown. Broadway is a strange street, going from northwest Manhattan to the southeast, intersecting with one avenue after another so that eventually it runs east of Fifth Avenue when it starts out west of Eighth Avenue. All these intersections leave chaos in their
wake, triangles, rerouted traffic, complicated lights, and irrational traffic patterns.

I made my way down to Sixty-fourth and looked at the rooftops of the old, five-story buildings that still lined part of the street. There she was, a green Statue of Liberty a couple of stories high poised on a roof. My heart was beating as though I'd made a discovery when all I'd done was reach a place on a street I walked along the south side of Sixty-fourth toward Central Park West, passing Liberty Storage, the building on the north side that sported the statue. The block was mostly residential, partly high-rise, partly smaller old buildings. As Jack had remembered, the Ethical Culture Society occupied the corner and stretched south along Central Park West.

I crossed Sixty-fourth and turned north. The number of people who lived on Sixty-fourth and the block of Central Park West from there to Sixty-fifth had to be enormous, had to be in the thousands. But I was sure the street was significant. If we got off the subway at Sixty-sixth, the most natural thing to do would have been to walk directly east to Central Park West. But we hadn't. The woman must have had a connection to Sixty-fourth Street.

Across Central Park West was the western edge of Central Park, a green anomaly in the center of concrete Manhattan. I kept walking north. At Sixty-sixth a road pierced the park, and through the trees I could see the Tavern on the Green. I speeded up my pace and continued north.

Seventy-fourth Street, where Natalie Gordon had disappeared, was as bland and unavailing of secrets as every other corner I had passed on my way. There was nothing exceptional, nothing different, nothing even interesting, about the corner. I looked at the facade of the large, magnificent building facing the park. A doorman in uniform came out with a well-dressed woman and hailed a taxi for her. She was wearing fur and high heels and she sat inside the cab for only a second before it pulled from the curb.
Otherwise, there was nothing, a few walkers, not surprising on a day as cold as this, a small amount of traffic, a single dog with its well-trained master ready to scoop at first need.

I turned down Seventy-fourth and walked the block to Columbus Avenue. Up here, Broadway was two blocks and one triangle west of Central Park West. The street was lined with town houses with plenty of doorways that a woman could be dragged into. I looked at each of them as I passed. At Columbus I continued on to Amsterdam, then turned left to find the subway at Seventy-second where Broadway and Amsterdam converged. I got an express, made a change at Times Square, and shuttled over to Grand Central Station. I caught the last train home before the rush hour.

I told Jack about my father and the woman when he got home.

“That's what's been bothering you,” he said. We were sitting at the kitchen table, he eating some warmed-up stew left over from a meal I had cooked over the weekend.

“I want to find out more about it.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“What are you afraid of? That your father had a girlfriend?”

“I don't know. I don't really believe he did, but I'm sure she was someone he knew, someone he met by appointment, not accident, at least after the first time.”

“You think you met her more than once?”

“I'm sure of it. I'm sure I went to the parade more than once and I'm sure she was there each time.”

“What about this Sandy Gordon thing?”

“I'll give it a try. But only if he has more to tell me. With what I have now in that carton, I don't have enough to go on. He must be holding something else, some papers
or something. She must have filed a tax return that would tell me where she worked. If not, that's it.”

“Where are you starting on your father's case?”

I had thought about that. “I guess downtown Manhattan where he worked—if the company is still there.”

“You know where to turn if you need help.”

“Thanks.” I leaned over and kissed him. “Anyone ever tell you you're a peach?”

“Yeah, but I kissed her good-bye years ago.”