The Lost Years

by Mary Higgins Clark

  64

  Billy Declar had been dismayed to hear that his old friend and prison cell mate, Wally Gruber, had been caught dead in the act of breaking into a house in Riverdale.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he kept muttering to himself as he shuffled around his secondhand furniture store in lower Manhattan. “He’s as dumb as they come because he thinks he’s so smart.” At seventy-two years old, having endured three separate stints in the slammer, Billy was not looking forward to going back there.

  I gave him big bucks for the stuff from New Jersey, Billy thought. Four days later the greedy lowlife goes after another haul. I know Wally. He’ll rat me out to get a better deal for himself. I’d better move up my trip to Rio. I’m out of here now.

  As usual there had been no customers for the tired and well-worn couches and chairs and headboards and dressers that were placed in forlorn groupings in the so-called showroom. Whenever one of the guys who had stolen jewelry came in and sold it to Billy, he’d offer them a choice of furniture. He would call it their “bonus.”

  “Select any piece that you may desire to grace your home,” he would say grandly.

  Their suggestions as to what he could do with his furniture made Billy roar with laughter.

  But he was not laughing now. The jewelry he planned to sell in Rio was hidden under the floor in the back room of the store. It was two o’clock. I’ll put the “Closed” sign on the door, get the jewelry, and go straight to the airport, he thought. I’ve got my passport and plenty of cash. I’m ready to go. So what if I stay in Rio for a while? It’s winter there but that’s okay with me.

  Billy hobbled as quickly as he could, wincing in pain from his chronically swollen left ankle. It was the result of his leap out of a second-story window, when he was sixteen years old, to avoid the police who had come to arrest him for stealing a car.

  He grabbed his fully packed suitcase, which he always kept ready for any such emergency departure, from the closet. He knelt down, rolled up the rug, and lifted up the floorboards that covered the safe he kept hidden there. He punched in the code, opened the door of the safe, and pulled out the large canvas bag containing the jewelry from the Scott home. Then he quickly closed the safe and put the floorboards and rug back in place.

  Scrambling to his feet, he grabbed the suitcase, flung the canvas bag over his shoulder, and turned off the light in the back room.

  Billy was halfway across the showroom when the buzzer at the front entrance went off several times in quick succession. His stomach churned. Through the bars on the window of the door, he could see a cluster of men outside. One of them was holding up a shield.

  “Police,” someone shouted. “We have a search warrant. Open up the door immediately.”

  Billy dropped the bags on the floor with a sigh. The image in his mind of Wally’s round face, and his phony ear-to-ear smile, was as clear as if Wally was standing in front of him. Who knows? Billy asked himself, resigned to being a guest of the state of New York once more. Maybe we’ll end up bunking together again.

  65

  At three fifteen P.M. Peter Jones received a call from the law clerk of Judge Kenneth Brown. “Sir,” the young woman said in a very respectful tone, “we wanted to let you know that the report on the Kathleen Lyons case has come in and you can pick it up now if you wish.”

  What I really wish is that the Kathleen Lyons case would go away, he thought wryly. “Thank you very much,” he replied. “I’ll come right up.”

  As he waited for the elevator to take him to the fourth floor, he thought fleetingly of when he had started his legal career as a clerk to a judge in the criminal division. Judge Brown is sitting in the same courtroom where my judge used to sit, he thought. Mom knew how much I wanted that job. When I got it, the way she carried on, you’d think that they had made me chief justice.

  At the end of his one-year clerkship, he had been ecstatic to be hired as an assistant prosecutor. That was nineteen years ago. Since then he had worked in several units, including Major Crimes, before being appointed chief of the trial section five years ago.

  Thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and hereafter king of Scotland, he thought, reflecting on one of his favorite lines from Shakespeare. That’s the track I thought I was on. Until now.

  Shrugging, he got into the elevator, went up two flights, got off, and went into the judge’s office. He knew that Judge Brown was on the bench conducting a jury trial. He greeted the secretary, turned the corner, and went over to the law clerk’s desk.

  She was a small, very attractive young woman who could have passed for a college freshman. “Hello, Mr. Jones,” she said as she handed him the ten-page report.

  “Has the judge had a chance to look at it yet?” Peter asked.

  “I’m not sure, sir.”

  Good answer, Peter thought. Never say anything that might return to bite you. Three minutes later, back in his office, he closed the door. “Hold the calls,” he told his secretary. “I need to concentrate.”

  “You’ve got it, Peter.” Gladys Hawkins had worked in the prosecutor’s office for thirty years. In the presence of outsiders, she addressed both Prosecutor Sylvan Berger and Peter Jones as “sir.” Otherwise, when they were among themselves, the prosecutor was “Sy” and Assistant Prosecutor Jones was just “Peter.”

  With trepidation, Peter Jones carefully absorbed the psychiatric report. As he did, the burden of carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders began to lessen.

  The doctor had written that Kathleen Lyons was clearly in a worsening stage of Alzheimer’s and had, on two occasions while in the hospital, exhibited symptoms of violent tendencies. Both awake and in her sleep, she had demonstrated severe antagonism toward her late husband and his companion Lillian Stewart. It was the recommendation of the treating doctors that, at the present time, and as a result of underlying mental illness, she was a danger to both herself and others and required full-time and intense supervision. It was their opinion that she should remain in the inpatient setting for further observation, medication, and therapy.

  With a deep sigh of relief, Peter leaned back in his chair. There’s no way the judge is going to cut her loose, he thought. He can’t with this kind of report. Sure, we’ll go through the charade with Wally Gruber and the composite artist. This is just what I’ve suspected. Gruber knows how to play the system. I wonder what face he’ll decide to invent. I don’t care if it’s Tom Cruise or Mickey Mouse. It’s a total dead end.

  Peter stood up and stretched. Kathleen Lyons killed her husband, he thought emphatically. I’m sure of it. If she ends up incompetent to stand trial, so be it. If she ends up not guilty by reason of insanity, so be it. Either way, she’ll never get out of a mental hospital.

  He turned on the intercom. “I can take calls now, Gladys.”

  “That was a pretty short deep-think session, Peter. Wait a second. There’s a call coming in. It’s Simon Benet’s extension. Do you want to take it?”

  “Put him through.”

  “Peter, I just got a call from the New York guys,” Benet said tensely. “They just arrested Gruber’s fence. They got him at his shop. In another minute he would have been on his way to the airport. They recovered the missing Scott jewelry. All of it.”

  66

  At one o’clock on Thursday afternoon, Mariah arrived back at her parents’ home and walked into the kitchen. There was a note from Betty on the table. “Mariah, I stopped in and left some cold cuts for you in case you came home for lunch. Tidied up quickly but feeling under the weather and leaving now—8:20 A.M.”

  The message light on the kitchen phone was flashing. Mariah pushed the button to retrieve the messages and punched in the code. Her parents had kept it easy to remember by choosing the year of her birth. “The happiest event in our lives,” her father had told her.

  Besides his attempts to reach her on her cell, Richard had also called on this phone at nine fifteen that morning. “Mariah, please, we have to talk.” She quickly delet
ed the rest of the message, not wanting to hear the sound of his voice.

  As Greg had told her, he had tried to reach her twice on this line. “Mariah, you’re not answering your cell phone. I’m worried about you. Please call me.”

  Alvirah’s three calls, made before Mariah had spoken to her from the apartment, were first about trying to trace Lillian and then wondering why Mariah wasn’t calling her back.

  Mariah made a turkey and cheese sandwich from the assortment of cold cuts that Betty had brought in. She took out a bottle of cold water and carried it and the sandwich into her father’s study. This was Dad’s favorite sandwich, she remembered, and then realized that no matter what she did or where she went she always felt his presence.

  She ate the sandwich and realized that her eyes were heavy. Well, I did get up early and I haven’t exactly been sleeping much lately, she thought. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. I can’t concentrate on anything until Lloyd calls about that report. I wouldn’t mind dozing off for a while.

  At three thirty she was awakened from a surprisingly deep sleep by the ring of the phone on her father’s desk. It was Lloyd. “Mariah,” he began, “it almost sounds like a cliché, but the truth is that I have good news and bad news. Let me tell you the good news first, because I think it will soften the rest of what I have to tell you.”

  Afraid of what she was about to hear, she clutched the phone as Lloyd explained the developments surrounding Wally Gruber.

  “You mean to tell me that this guy says he saw somebody running out of here right after Dad was shot? My God, Lloyd! What does this mean for Mom?”

  “Mariah, I just got off the phone for the second time today with Peter Jones. He told me that the New York police have arrested Wally Gruber’s fence and all of Lisa’s jewelry has been recovered. Of course, Lisa and I are relieved about that, but much more important, it does give at least some credibility to this Gruber fellow.”

  “Did he get a good look at that person? Was it a man or a woman?”

  “So far, he’s not even getting that specific. He’s been trying to make a deal to get time taken off the sentences he’ll get for the burglaries. Jones has agreed to have him brought from the New York jail to the prosecutor’s office tomorrow morning so that he can sit with their composite officer. Hopefully, they’ll get a good sketch and with any luck at all it will help Kathleen.”

  “You mean that it would prove Mother didn’t kill Dad?” Mariah had a vivid flash of the image of her mother arriving at the courthouse in a prison uniform.

  “Mariah,” Lloyd cautioned her, “we don’t know where this is going, so don’t get your hopes up too high. But of course, if the sketch turns out to be someone whom you recognize or the detectives recognize, it would go a long way to proving that she had nothing to do with your father’s death. Don’t forget, his closest friends swore that they never saw the parchment. If they’re telling the truth, Jonathan may have consulted a different expert or experts in the field and we don’t even know who they are. And there’s always the possibility that Gruber was telling the truth about the jewelry but the rest of his story is a sham.”

  “Lloyd, there’s something you don’t know yet. Greg told me that he’s had a tip that Charles Michaelson has been shopping the parchment. He said he heard it from a collector in the field. That’s all I know.”

  There was momentary silence on the other end of the phone, then Lloyd said quietly, “If that is proven to be true, then at the very least Michaelson is guilty of possession of stolen property.”

  Mariah’s relief at the possibility that someone whose face they might recognize would be revealed on the sketch gave way to the frightening thought that Lloyd had also told her that he had bad news.

  “Lloyd, you said you had bad news for me. What is it?” she demanded.

  “Mariah, the psychiatric report recommends that your mother be kept in the hospital for further observation and therapy.”

  “No!”

  “Mariah, it indicates that several times your mother has exhibited very aggressive behavior. ‘Further observation’ could mean her staying there as little as a week or two more. I’ve had other defendants with psychiatric problems who’ve been in that hospital. They were well treated and safe there. The report says that she not only needs round-the-clock care but additional security measures as well. You would have to make all of those arrangements before the judge would agree to release her. I’ve already consented to putting off tomorrow’s hearing.”

  “Lloyd, most of the time when she seems to be aggressive, it’s because she’s so frightened. I want to see her.” Mariah knew her voice was rising. “How do I know for sure that she’s being treated well?”

  “You can start by seeing it for yourself. I told Peter Jones that I wanted you to have the right to visit her. He had no problem with that. He promised that he’ll get an order from the judge by the end of the court day. They’ll fax the order to the hospital. There are visiting hours this evening from six to eight.”

  “When we do we get to see that sketch that Gruber will do tomorrow morning?”

  “Jones promised me that I could come to his office after it’s done and look at it. He said he’ll give me a copy. I’ll bring it directly to you.”

  With that, Mariah had to be content. She called Alvirah, told her about the conversation with Lloyd, and then, unable to even think about trying to do any work on her computer, went upstairs to her father’s bedroom. She looked sadly at the handsome four-poster bed. They bought this house and this furniture when Mom was expecting me, she thought. They told me that when I was born, they were so afraid that I might stop breathing they kept me in a crib right next to their bed for the first six months.

  Until four years ago, her parents had shared this room. It had then become necessary, because of her mother’s nocturnal wanderings, to create a separately secured two-bedroom suite for her and her caregivers.

  When Mom comes home, I know that Delia will fill in for me during the week until I can get a new Monday-to-Friday person, she thought. God knows where Rory’s disappeared to. But one thing is for certain. I’m giving up the apartment in New York and moving back here. So I might as well get settled into this room now. I’ve got to do something to keep myself busy. It’ll help keep me sane.

  She was relieved that she had already gone through her father’s clothing. With feverish haste, she moved back and forth between the bedrooms, bundling in her arms the hanging garments from her closet and transferring them to the large walk-in closet in her father’s room. Then she pulled out the drawers from her own dresser and, not even noticing how heavy they really were, carried them down the hall and emptied their contents into her father’s mahogany dresser.

  At five minutes of five, she was finished. Her father had never moved her mother’s vanity table from this room. In the early stages of her dementia, Kathleen had been frightened by the mirror over the table. Sometimes when she saw her own reflection, she had been afraid that there was an intruder in the house.

  Now Mariah’s cosmetics and comb and brush were neatly arranged on its glass top. I’ll get a new spread and dust ruffle and curtains for in here, she decided. And I think I will eventually redo my old room, with those red walls and the red-and-white flowered coverlet. She recalled the Bible verse that began, “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” and ended with, “when I was a man, I put away childish things.”

  Realizing what time it was, she began to worry. Why hadn’t Lloyd called again? Surely the judge wouldn’t refuse to allow her to visit her mother. That can’t happen, she thought. It simply can’t.

  Ten minutes later, the phone did ring and it was Lloyd. “They just faxed me the judge’s order. Permission granted. As I said earlier, the visiting hours are from six to eight.”

  “I’ll be there at six,” Mariah said. “Thanks, Lloyd.” She heard her cell phone ringing in the study. She hurried downstairs and looked at the caller ID. It was Richard. With a mixture of
anger and sadness, she decided not to take the call.

  67

  It’s a blessing that Albert West lives only a few blocks away from us and we don’t have to bother with the car,” Alvirah remarked as she and Willy left their apartment building, walked to the corner, and turned onto Seventh Avenue. They were meeting Albert at five o’clock for a cup of coffee at a diner on Seventh Avenue near 57th Street.

  Hoping against hope that she would catch Albert at home and that he would agree to meet them right away, she had been pleasantly surprised on both levels. “Willy, unless he’s a good actor, he sounded like he actually wanted to come,” she remarked.

  Puffing a bit as he endeavored to keep up with Alvirah’s quick strides, Willy asked himself why these emergency meetings always seemed to come up in the middle of a Yankees game. Although Alvirah had insisted it would be perfectly okay for her to meet him in a public place by herself, Willy was taking no chances. “I’m coming with you. End of discussion.”

  “Do you think that little guy is going to kidnap me in the middle of a coffee shop?” Alvirah had joked.

  “Don’t be so sure he wouldn’t be capable of it. If he’s mixed up in this whole thing and he thinks that you’re onto him, he could offer to walk you home, but you might not make it.”

  As they crossed the street, they could see Albert entering the diner. He was already seated at a booth when they got inside and he waved his hand to get their attention.

  As soon as they settled in, a waitress came over and took their orders. All three decided on caffe latte. Alvirah could see the disappointment on the face of the young woman, who had obviously hoped for a food order that would run up the tab and bring a bigger tip.

  She was surprised that after the waitress was out of earshot, Albert, in a tone that was both nervous and abrupt, said, “Alvirah, I know your reputation as a darn good detective. You certainly didn’t call me to socialize over coffee. Have you come up with anything?”