by Lee Harris
“Always. All collectors do. Nowadays a lot of mail is marked by a machine. It’s mostly personal letters that have stamps.”
“Did Natalie give you stamps off her envelopes?”
“All the time. She loved my collection. I don’t think she’d ever seen a stamp collection before, and mine is pretty extensive. I showed her how to tear off the right part of the envelope, and every so often she’d give me a bunch. In fact, I remember when we were first married, she—Chris, you’re a genius.”
“What is it?”
“She gave me an old stamp from an envelope that had been mailed a long time before. She started to tear it wrong and I stopped her and showed her what I wanted, including the postmark.”
“Sandy, did you see how it was addressed? I know it was a couple of years ago, but do you remember anything at all about that envelope?”
“It was handwritten. That’s all I caught. She tore off the stamp, with the postmark, and gave it to me. It’ll take me some time, but I can find it for you. I’m sure that’s in a box that I haven’t worked on yet.”
“OK. That’s your assignment. Maybe we’ll find somebody somewhere who knows Natalie Miller.”
“You’ll hear from me.”
—
That gave me a lift. If it came from someplace in Indiana, we could take out ads in local newspapers. I wondered whether Miller was her maiden name or the name of someone she had married. Sandy’s explanation of how she had not left a forwarding address certainly pointed to a woman trying to lose her past.
At a few minutes after nine I called Annie’s Angels again, and this time Annie herself was there. She asked why I wanted the information on Natalie and I told her the truth.
“I remember her,” Annie said, not giving anything away. “I went to her old apartment to give her an estimate.”
“Do you have that address?” I crossed the fingers of my free hand.
“I do, but I don’t know who you are and I’m kind of reluctant to give it out.”
“I’ll be glad to come down to your office. I can be there before noon.”
“What the hell, it’s five years.” She gave me an address on the east side over near Gramercy Park.
“You said you remembered her. I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.” I went on, not giving her a chance to turn me down. “Did she have a roommate?”
“She’s the only one I talked to and the only one I saw. She signed the contract and she paid for the move.”
“How did she pay?”
“In cash. That’s not unusual. We don’t take checks unless they’re certified. In this business, it’s easy to get stiffed.”
“Was the apartment pretty much a one-person residence or did it look like there might have been a family or another person living there?”
“It had one bedroom, but there were two beds in it. We only agreed to move one of them. She said she was selling the other one.”
“Do you remember anything about the furniture? Did it look like the kind of stuff you pick up at the Salvation Army or was it bought new?”
“I’d have to say a mixture. People don’t usually spend the money to move old furniture that they can replace. It just doesn’t pay. She had an old Formica kitchen table that she didn’t move either, and a couple of chairs. All she moved from the kitchen was a box of dishes and some pots and pans. The living room furniture went. I have that down here.”
“Thanks very much, Annie.”
“This gal’s really missing?”
“Over a year. Since Thanksgiving of the year before.”
“I hope you find her. I’ll ask the guys if they remember anything.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
—
So there might have been a roommate. It was like pulling teeth, but at least I was starting to get somewhere. And the picture was not all that promising for Sandy. It certainly appeared as though Natalie had tried mightily to cover her tracks. Only Susan Hartswell, of all the people I had spoken to, knew where she had gone when she got married. I picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answered quickly.
“Susan? This is Chris Bennett.”
“Oh, hi. Have you found Natalie?”
“No, I’ve just picked up a few crumbs of information. I’ve got an address for where she lived before she moved to Greenwich Avenue.”
“That’s great.” She sounded genuinely happy. “Maybe someone there will remember her.”
“I hope so. I’m going to visit the building today. I just heard some news that may interest you. Hopkins and Jewell are breaking up.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It was on the radio this morning, on the advertising news. They’re splitting into two companies.”
“I can’t believe it. They’re, you know…” Her voice trailed off.
“They’re what?”
“Well—lovers. At least I thought they were.”
“I see. Maybe the magic ended.”
“I guess it would be tough to be partners if the other relationship came to an end.”
“I would think so,” I said.
“Keep me posted.”
I promised I would.
16
Gramercy Park is one of those pleasant anomalies in Manhattan, a private park, fenced in and locked, with keys available to the residents of certain buildings in the area. Ads for apartments often include the fact of a key. I had never been in it, although I had walked alongside it on several occasions. It lies between East Twentieth and East Twenty-first Streets only a block or so west of the Police Academy. On this sunny Thursday morning two women sat on a bench moving their strollers idly back and forth to keep their youngsters content.
I found the address Annie had given me. It was a small apartment house about a block from the park, and I guessed there were no keys to the park for the tenants. A superintendent with an apartment on the first floor instead of in the basement opened the door at my ring. The person turned out to be a woman and she said she remembered Natalie Miller.
“Do you know how long she lived here?” I asked.
“Maybe one lease, like two years.”
“Did she have any roommates?”
“Oh, honey, I couldn’t tell you that. They all do now. There was a time you had some control over who lived in your building, but no more. The courts let them do anything. She’s the only one who signed the lease.”
“Do you remember another woman sharing the apartment?”
“It could be.”
“A man?”
“Like I said—”
“Do you know if she moved out in a hurry?”
“Lemme check.” She consulted a file in a cabinet in the room we were talking in. “She didn’t skip out without paying if that’s what you mean. We let her apply her security to the last month’s rent because there wasn’t any damage to the apartment and it says here she left in the middle of the month.”
“Do you remember anything about her?”
“They come and go,” she said. “When they’re gone a while, I can’t really tell you very much.”
“Does anyone still live near her old apartment that lived there five years ago?”
“You got me. Not right near her, I don’t think. We been renovating those apartments, getting them off rent control one by one. Hers was first, then one across the hall. Hold on.” She went to a different file and turned some pages. “There’s a couple down the hall you could talk to. They’ve been living there six, seven years, since they got married. There’s two kids there now. They’re dying to buy a house in the suburbs, but they can never afford one. I’ll take you up.”
They were on the third floor and I could hear the children before we rang the doorbell. The woman inside shouted something at them and then opened the door. She was only about my age and quite pretty, dressed in wool pants and a paisley blouse with a couple of gold chains. The super made a quick introduction and then left us.
“Come on in,
I’m Dickie Foster,” she said.
“Hi. Chris Bennett.”
“My kids are driving me crazy, but they’ll probably calm down now that there’s company.”
She was right. They were suddenly silent and wide-eyed, staring at me as though I were a visitor from a foreign planet. I smiled and said hello to them, and the younger one, a little girl, giggled and covered her face with her hands.
We went into the living room, which was set up like a day care center, a small, colorful wooden slide in one corner, toys everywhere, balls of all sizes. We walked through the children’s area and sat near the windows, the only part of the room that still looked as though it catered to adults.
“What can I tell you?”
“I’m trying to find Natalie Miller. Do you remember her?”
“That’s a long time ago, isn’t it?”
“About five years.”
“She lived down the other end of the hall, didn’t she?”
“So I’m told.”
“We used to say hello, sure.”
“Anything else? Were you friendly? Sit and talk once in a while?”
“Not really. I was working when we moved in, and she was, too.”
“Do you know where?”
She shook her head.
“Did she ever have a roommate?”
“Male or female?”
“Either.”
“Some guy used to come out with her in the morning sometimes. We’d meet in the elevator. That was when we first moved in.”
“How long ago is that?”
“We’ve been married seven years.”
“Seven years ago,” I said. “And then what?”
“Then he wasn’t there anymore.”
“Female roommates?”
“Toward the end someone was with her, I think. I don’t know the name. I only saw her once or twice.”
“Did Natalie say good-bye to you before she moved?”
“You know, I think she did. I think she said something about a job she was interested in. She’d answered an ad and they called her for an interview. She was pretty excited about it.”
“She must have been even more excited when she got it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t remember anything about that. She just moved. I never saw her again.”
The super had said she had moved in the middle of the month, so I assumed there hadn’t been a lot of time for good-byes. And Dickie Foster certainly didn’t speak of her as a friend. As usual, I wrote my name and phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. “If you ever think of a roommate’s name or if you remember Natalie ever telling you where she came from or where she was going to, I’d appreciate a call.”
“You said you were trying to find her. What happened?”
“She went to the Thanksgiving Day parade with her husband the year before last and disappeared. No one’s seen or heard of her since.”
“How bizarre.”
I stood. “So anything, anything at all.”
“I’ll rack my brain, I promise. It’s nice she got married. What’s he like?”
“A very nice divorced man who was crazy about her. Is,” I corrected myself. “He wants to find her. Tell me, what’s your estimate of how old Natalie was when you knew her?”
“Back then? Not old. Twenties, late twenties. Something like that. I’m terrible on ages.” Which put her back at the age she claimed for herself.
I thanked Dickie and walked down the hall to the elevator, stopping in front of Natalie’s apartment. It had been renovated, the super told me, but the door looked as old as Dickie Foster’s. On a far-out chance, I took Natalie’s key ring out of my bag and tried the first key in the lock. It turned easily. Feeling a little panicky, I relocked the door, got in the elevator, and rode downstairs.
—
“You picked the worst day of my life to call.” Wormy sounded pretty down on the phone.
“I heard the news,” I said from the pay phone I had found on a street corner near Gramercy Park. “Is there any connection between what’s happening and my questions about Natalie Miller?”
“I can’t talk to you about that. Let me get Marty on the line.”
I waited, hoping I wouldn’t become disconnected, but after a brief silence, he came on the line.
“Miss Bennett? This is Martin Jewell.”
“Mr. Jewell, I wondered if we could talk for a minute.”
“Are you somewhere close?”
“Not far.”
“Meet me outside the building in ten minutes. We’ll have lunch.”
“I’ll be there.”
—
“I was nuts about her.”
We were sitting in a very nice restaurant a couple of minutes walk from H and J, the kind of place I hadn’t dressed for but no one seemed to care. We hadn’t been given a table near the kitchen or anything approaching that, so I guessed that Jewell’s presence was all that counted.
“Natalie,” I said.
“Natalie. I’m telling you this not because I feel the need to confess but because I know you’re having a hell of a time finding her. I know a couple of things no one else knows. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ll try.”
“Thank you.”
“I never saw her until the moment she walked into my office to be interviewed. I’d looked at her resumé—and I can’t remember where she worked—and decided she was promising. She crossed the threshold and that was it. I have a wife and two kids and I’ve had something going with Arlene for a long time, at least it was going until recently. I needed an assistant because Wormy is my cousin and she didn’t want to take orders from me. That’s how she put it. She felt we’d all be better off if she kept her independence.”
It’s nice to hear similar stories from different people, and this one had the ring of truth. “Go on.”
“What can I tell you? It just happened. We were around each other and something clicked. We began an affair.”
“Did anyone know?”
“Arlene probably suspected. I didn’t see her as much, so she had reason to ask questions. We were very discreet, believe me.”
“Did Natalie want to marry you?”
“I’m the wrong guy to ask. I never know what women want. I wanted her body and I assumed she wanted mine.”
“Where did you meet?”
“At her apartment sometimes.”
“On Greenwich Avenue?”
“The same. Sometimes we’d stay late in the office and work. I had a couch in my old office.”
“But the affair ended,” I said.
“Long before she left. And it ended because I couldn’t handle it anymore. I had a family and I had a partner who was more than a partner. It was too much. I told her we had to stop.”
“But she stayed on in the company. That must have been very uncomfortable.”
“I thought it would be worse if she left. I thought Arlene would really figure out for sure that something had been going on and now it was over. I kind of eased Natalie into other work so we didn’t see as much of each other. I’ll tell you something. It was a relief when she met Sandy. He was the right kind of guy for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was available.”
I was eating a delicious seafood salad and Martin Jewell was sipping a drink and eating a big green salad with diet dressing. “Did she ever talk about her family?”
“Very little, no specifics, no names.”
“Did you ever go away together?”
“Once. We spent a weekend down at Cape May in New Jersey. We couldn’t go to Long Island because everyone I know has a house out there.”
“Who picked Cape May?”
“I did.”
That had certainly been an unequivocal answer. “Did you ever go to the apartment she lived in before she moved to Greenwich Avenue?”
“Didn’t know she had one. Wormy might have known. She sends out the checks. I have something else to tell you.”
/> It sounded ominous and I put my fork down and drank some of the sparkling water he had insisted on ordering.
“I gave her a key to the office.”
“I see.” I opened my bag, felt around and found the key ring. “Is it one of these?”
“This one.”
“What you’re telling me—”
“What I’m saying is, I don’t think Arlene took those papers out of Natalie’s file. Wormy wouldn’t do it and she had no cause to. I know I didn’t. Arlene is pissed because she thinks you think she took the stuff in Natalie’s personnel file. I think Natalie took them.”
“Can you think of a reason why she would do that?”
“She was a very secretive kind of person. I never got the feeling she was hiding anything, just that there were things she’d rather not talk about. She didn’t have a great childhood somewhere in the middle of this country. She was born into a family that didn’t exist anymore. She lived for today. I never had the feeling she sent birthday cards to people the way my wife does.”
“Why did you give her the key, Mr. Jewell?”
He looked a little uncomfortable at my formality. “We met at the office sometimes. We never left together. If I left first, she would wait half an hour and then go.”
“Did you ever see Natalie after she married?”
“Not once. And I never saw her again intimately after the night we broke up.”
“Did you ever meet Sandy?”
“Her husband?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Do you think Natalie might have been married before she came to work for you?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. You think she was running away from someone?”
“Among other possibilities.”
“There was something missing from her. I can’t tell you what it was, but it almost scared me. Maybe you hit on it. Maybe there was an abusive husband in her life that she never wanted to see again.”
“How old do you think she was?” I asked, tossing out my last question.
“Ageless,” he said with a smile. “Like me. It’s what we had most in common.”
—
So there I was again with nowhere to go and a variation on my theme that sounded as plausible as my own idea. Somehow the notion of an abusive husband hadn’t occurred to me, perhaps because I don’t like to think about things like that, but it would certainly explain a lot of what I now knew. A woman who wants to cover her tracks because of fear of being found by someone who might hurt her is exactly the person who would remove papers with her hometown, high school, and last address on them. If Natalie had come to New York as a young single woman and married here, her husband—or ex-husband—might never have met anyone from her hometown. I had certainly heard enough horror stories of women being stalked by ex-husbands to be impressed with the seriousness of such a situation. My own version, of a wife deserting a family, was surely less flattering to Natalie. Martin Jewell’s version, an abused wife, was far more sympathetic but potentially more deadly. An abusive man whom she had escaped from was far more likely to kill when and if he found her.