“I’m surprised to see you,” Dianna admitted. “Any news?”
“Non-news, mostly,” I said. “I checked with the police—”
“I thought Donna didn’t want you to.”
“She didn’t. There’s no unidentified women in the morgue or any public-hospital bed who matches Meredith’s description.”
“That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“It might be; it’s too soon to tell. Her car hasn’t turned up in an impound lot yet, either. That could be good news, too. At the moment, however, they’re just facts, neither good nor bad.”
Dianna frowned and thought about it and chewed her lower lip a little. Today, I could see when she stood up behind the desk to greet me, she wore a black cowl-neck sweater with black slacks and a lavender jacket with three-quarter sleeves. Lavender on eyelids and lips. Lots of gold. The pale hair was as it had been yesterday.
“Like they always say, not knowing is the worst,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want anything bad to happen—or have happened—to Meredith, but, geez, at least you can deal with that. This way you’re just … hanging.”
“At least it can’t last indefinitely.”
“Some consolation there,” she said. “How’s Thomas taking it?”
“I just finished with him. Or he with me.” I gave her the Cliffs Notes version of my meeting with Waynes père et fils.
“Well,” she said, “you can hardly blame him for being upset.” She shook her head. “Poor Meredith. I had no idea she was so …” She spread her hands. “Whatever. Lonely. Mixed-up. I don’t know. I guess it was a mistake to push her at Thomas.”
“ ‘Push her at’?” I echoed. “Yesterday it was ‘They met at a party I gave,’ today it’s ‘Push her at’?”
Dianna shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “Well, let’s say I introduced them real good.” The grin vanished the way your fist vanishes when you open your hand. “I guess it’ll be a long time before I play matchmaker again.”
“Don’t blame yourself. There’s no reason to think it would have been any different with anyone else, or if Meredith and Thomas Wayne had met under different circumstances. And anyhow, we have only Wayne’s say-so that the situation really was as outlined.”
She frowned perplexedly and toyed with a long black stapler next to her desk blotter. “You mean Thomas just wants you to think Meredith … imagined the whole engagement?”
“I mean there’s no one to contradict him. Meredith told you they’re engaged. He told me they never were. He told me he had several conversations with her on the subject, trying to straighten her out. She’s not here to say one way or the other.” I shrugged. “I found a diary at her place yesterday. It was blank, but some pages had been sliced out. Any idea what might have been on them?”
“I didn’t even know Meredith kept a diary. Do you think it has anything to do with her being missing?”
“Oh, who can say? Maybe she’d written wonderful things about Thomas and ripped them out when he broke off the engagement. If there ever was one.”
Dianna looked hard at me, her eyes narrow and shrewd. “You think Thomas did something with Meredith.”
“If I weren’t so clean-thinking and morally upright I would say something unbelievably crude about what sort of somethings young Wayne may or may not have done with Meredith Berens. But I am, so skip that. Instead, let’s define our somethings here. There are two possibilities. Meredith did something with herself or someone did something to her. Of the former, there are two possibilities. She’s hidden herself away or she’s killed herself.”
Dianna gasped as if I’d dumped a pitcher of lemonade down her pants.
I said, “Sorry to be indelicate, but there are indelicate possibilities that must be faced. As time passes, it becomes more important to face them. And they become more and more indelicate. Of the two, the former is more likely. I can’t help but think that if she’d killed herself we’d know by now.”
“What if she went away somewhere to … to do it?”
“Could be. Suicides usually die in familiar surroundings—home, workplace, the home of a friend or loved one—but not always. Some check into hotels. But a maid would have found her long before now, and at the very least we’d have a Jane Doe, which we do not.”
“What if she went out of town?”
“Now we’re reaching. But even if she did, there are registers to be signed, arrangements for payment to be made … She’d have a car with Nebraska plates; that could be easily checked. Again, we’d know by now.”
Dianna’s face brightened. “Then she’s alive.”
“Then she didn’t commit suicide,” I corrected. “There’s still the second possibility—that someone did something to her. Under that heading there are again two possibilities: Purposely or accidentally. I rule out the latter for the same reason I rule out suicide: If Meredith had been accidentally hurt or killed, we would know by now.”
Dianna jumped on it. “Not if she had gone out of—Oh. The car. The license plates.”
I nodded. “All kinds of ways to identify someone. On Perry Mason, of course, innocent people were forever spiriting away the corpses of people they’d accidentally killed, or been made to believe they had; but in real life it hardly ever happens. Would you know what to do with the body of someone you’d accidentally killed? Not to mention his car?”
“Put ’em with the trash in back of this place,” she said promptly. “It never gets collected.”
“So we’re left with someone willfully doing something to or with Meredith. And the way I look at it—”
“There are two possibilities,” Dianna supplied.
“Very well put. And the possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive, are kidnaping and murder.”
Again she recoiled, but less so than the previous time.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, “but I think enough time’s been spent thinking happy thoughts. It’s time to consider all possibilities and just hope that the nastier ones prove wrong.”
She waved it off impatiently. “I’m all right. I—Well, why would anyone want to kidnap Meredith?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question. And I’ve hoped that you would have a better answer than I have, which is none at all.”
“Well, there’s no money there. Donna’s well enough off, I think, but she’s certainly not wealthy. At least, Meredith sure never gave—gives—any indication of having come from a lot of money. Plus, there’s been no ransom note or anything, right?”
“Not as far as we know.”
She looked at me quizzically.
I said, “There’s still this mysterious father of hers.”
Dianna’s eyes and mouth opened in a silent Ah-ha.
“For all we know, the old man’s an eccentric billionaire recluse. Howard, we’ll call him. Someone snatches Howard’s kid; naturally they’d present their demands to him, not his estranged wife.”
“Holy balls,” Dianna breathed, “do you think so?”
“I would if we were on Falcon Crest; in real life, all the good eccentric billionaire recluses are dead, it seems. In any case, I want to know more about the old man before I commit myself to that theory.”
“Then that leaves murder.” She did a good job of saying it matter-of-factly. “But why would anyone murder Meredith?”
“Here’s a fairy tale I tried out on Thomas Wayne. See what you think of it. Let’s say there’s a young up-and-comer who finds himself involved with a young woman who has become a liability. Maybe she hasn’t got enough stuffing in her Oreos. He tries to shoo her off but she won’t be shooed. She doesn’t even hear him. His political future and possibly even his business career are turning dark before his eyes. What does he do?”
Dianna stared at me. “You cannot be serious.”
“Wayne’s reaction was much the same, albeit more emphatic.” I scratched beneath my chin. “I’m not serious. Very. It could turn out to be that way, but not necessarily. Mostly I just tossed it out to see what would h
appen. And what happened is, Thomas Wayne pounced on it. Or me, more accurately.”
Her eyes were still on me but now they were narrowed, disgusted. “Can you blame him?”
“We’re not to the blame stage yet,” I said. “Right now I’m just interested in reactions, and his was … well, interesting.”
She shook her head. “Not Thomas,” she insisted stolidly. “Not a chance.”
“You could be right,” I said lightly. It infuriates the hell out of people, being open-minded like that. Leo Buscaglia tells a funny story about agreeing with people in order to defuse arguments and, on one occasion, frustrating his would-be opponent to the point where the poor fellow blurted, “But—but I could be wrong!”
It didn’t get quite that far with us. Dianna shook her head a couple more times, to underscore her resolve, then said, “What does Donna think of all this?”
“I haven’t spoken with her today. I wanted to talk with Wayne first. I don’t really know anything of substance yet, and what little I do know I know from talking to the cops—exactly what Donna didn’t want me to do. Speaking of cops, they mentioned something to me that we should tuck away in a tickler file with tomorrow’s date on it, in case we don’t know anything concrete by then: Donna Berens isn’t the only one who’s allowed to put in a missing-person report.”
Dianna’s eyes grew. “What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t file, because that would be going against my client’s wishes even more than I have already. But I don’t see why a concerned employer—”
“And friend.”
“—and friend couldn’t.”
“That’s great!” She reached under the desk and jumped up holding the enormous bag. “You wanna drive?”
“I would, but we’d have to hang around the station until tomorrow, and the coffee there is lousy. They have a thirty-six-hour rule down there, and as of this moment Meredith’s not been missing even twenty-four hours yet. We’ll do it tomorrow afternoon, if we haven’t learned anything helpful by then.”
“Well, crap.” Dianna threw the bag on the floor. “You bring any other balloons to pop?”
I laughed. “That’s the last one. I really stopped by to check out Meredith’s desk, if that’s all right with you, and also to chat with this Steve Lehman fellow you mentioned yesterday. Although it doesn’t look like he’s around …”
“He’s on a call, I think.” She raised her voice and sent it over my head. “Hey, Kelly.” I turned as the young blond receptionist looked up from her work. “When’s Steve gonna be back?”
The girl consulted a spiral-bound appointment book on the desk. “He had to go out to Traveso’s, I think … Yeah.” She looked up. “It doesn’t say when he’ll be back, but he’s supposed to meet Tom Flanagan for lunch at twelve-thirty.”
I looked at my watch. It wasn’t quite ten-thirty. “Traveso’s the restaurant-supply people? What do they need with public relations? They don’t deal with the public.”
Dianna shrugged. “The big guys can afford to pick and choose and stick with straight PR, lobbying, that kind of thing. Us little guys, we take whatever we can get. The line between PR and advertising gets kind of blurry now and then anyhow, and if someone asks us to put together a brochure or an ad slick for them, we don’t squeak. We’re doing catalogue sheets for Traveso’s. The things their salesman would have in a loose-leaf binder to show you, if you were a restaurant. I think Steve went and picked up some press proofs to show them. It’s not public relations; it’s advertising, but I won’t tell them if you won’t.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t know the difference either.”
She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers over her stomach. “Well, let’s say you’ve written a book—”
“I have written a book.”
“Really? What kind of book?”
“Private-eye thing, of course. A mystery.”
“Really? I love mysteries.”
Everybody says that. And everybody asks whether it’s been published and what the title is and where they can find it and whether it’s available in paperback. If everybody who said that to me actually went out and bought a copy of The Book, even in paperback, I’d have more money than Paul McCartney.
Anyhow, I gave her all the gory details and she wrote them down and said, “Well, if you came to me and said, ‘Let’s do a PR number on this book,’ we’d get in touch with the papers, the TV stations, the bookstores. We’d send out releases, we’d follow up with phone calls, we’d set up interviews and signings, try and come up with some sort of promotional angle—you know, arrange a donation to the community chest for every copy sold, something like that. That’s public relations. Promotion, if you prefer. Advertising is more straightforward. Instead of calling the newspaper and saying, ‘You should do a story about this guy,’ we design an eyecatching ad and buy space in the paper. Or we do a direct-mail campaign, which, more and more, is working out to be the best way to target a market. Have you thought of doing any advertising for your book? I’d think there’d be a real strong local angle … not too many professional novelists living in little old Oma-har.”
“Not a bad idea. You’d be willing to work on a contingency basis, wouldn’t you, taking a commission for every book sold through your efforts?”
“Well, it’s been real nice talking to you …”
“Yeah, right.” I looked at my watch. “Since Lehman probably won’t be back until after lunch, I might as well take a peek at Meredith’s desk and get out of your hair.”
“Sure. It’s that one in front of the window.” She pointed at a desk positioned in front of the big picture window that looked out on the wet intersection. The big window pointed to the fact that this space was originally retail, not office. “What do you want Steve for anyway?”
I looked at her. “From what you told me yesterday, you and Steve Lehman are Meredith’s only friends here—and outside of here she doesn’t appear to have any friends. Meredith may have said something to Lehman, or within his earshot, that might be helpful. Or he might have some insight to offer. That’s all. Put away your gloves.”
She laughed. “So I’m a mother hen, so sue me. Meredith’s desk is unlocked. What are you hoping to find?”
I stood up and so did she. “I’m hoping to find the name and telephone number of the resort she’s vacationing at in Baja. I doubt I will, however. Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever I can get.”
We were at the desk in question by then. I sat in the armless swivel chair and surveyed the desktop. In contrast with Meredith’s apartment, it was as tidy as a dowager’s parlor. However, there was one similarity to Meredith’s home, in the same oddly impersonal air: There were no photographs, no coffee mug with funny sayings, no plants, no knickknacks, no personality of any kind. There were the In and Out baskets, stacked, filled with work. A black Merlin telephone. A Rolodex, the kind that sits in the little plastic tray. A pencil cup containing three black pens. A white ashtray filled with paper clips. A small appointment calendar on a plastic pedestal. A blue IBM Selectric sat on the return, the little built-in typing stand that jutted from the left side of the desk.
I checked the calendar. It still showed last Friday’s page, and last Friday’s entries, penciled in a neat, light script: St. Joe was on the eleven-o’clock line. O’Sullivan was on the one-o’clock line. Ofc. mtg. was on the four-o’clock line. I looked at Dianna.
“We’re doing some work for St. Joe’s Hospital; the preliminary copy deadline was Friday. O’Sullivan is another client. We ghosted a speech he’s delivering at some convention or something. Meredith gave it to him on Friday.”
“Here or there?”
“He came here. Geez, you’re suspicious. Anyhow, Meredith was on hand for the weekly office meeting—that”—she pointed at the four-o’clock entry with a lavender fingernail—“at four. And we went out for a drink afterward, Meredith and Steve and I.”
“Yes,” I said distractedly, “I remember your mentioning it.”<
br />
I flipped forward in the calendar. Nothing on the single Saturday-Sunday page. Nothing on Monday’s. Today’s page showed GP Hosp. against the eleven-o’clock mark.
“Great Plains Hospital,” Dianna explained. “A pitch. I had to handle it solo.”
That was about it for the calendar. I flipped quickly both forward and back, covering a month or so in each direction. Nothing caught my eye.
“If she planned her vanishing act,” I said, as much to myself as to Dianna, “she didn’t jot herself any convenient reminders.” I looked at Dianna. “Take a look through the stuff in that stack and the baskets, will you? Also her Rolodex. I’m interested in anything—anything—that isn’t business.”
She nodded and went to work.
I slid back in Meredith’s swivel chair and pulled open the center drawer. Pens and pencils, scissors, stapler, staple remover, loose change—more loose change!—Liquid Paper, rubber bands, that kind of junk. I closed it. There were no left-hand drawers, thanks to the return, and only three right-hand drawers. The top right-hand drawer was almost as exciting as the center drawer. She had The American Heritage Dictionary, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and The Elements of Style in their paperback editions, as well as a supply of paper: yellow, plain white, and letterhead. The middle-right drawer held a stack of professional magazines and newsletters and a bottle of Bayer aspirin. Bottom-right contained a slim stack of manila folders—current files, by the look of them. I flipped through them. Nothing of note caught my eye. In the back of the drawer was the box in which her Rolodex thingy had come. It was empty.
I slid this last drawer shut and looked at the woman. She had made a stack that included a woman’s mail-order clothing catalogue, a magazine-subscription offer, and four cards from the Rolodex. “Her doctor,” Dianna said, sliding the first card at me, “her dentist, the service station around the corner, and this.”
“This” was a slotted Rolodex card, empty except for a telephone number penciled in the same light hand.
The telephone number was preceded by a 312 Area Code. Chicago region.
I met Dianna’s eyes. “Mind if I use your phone?”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 9