The Thanksgiving Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “From the villa,” Joseph said. “No one will ever forget what you did for us at Christmas.”

  “Not enough, I’m afraid,” I said with the touch of sadness that the memory of the past Christmas would always evoke in me. “The debt is all mine.”

  “There are no debts among friends,” Joseph said with finality. “Sit down. I’m eager to hear about your case. You were chintzy with details on the phone, if I may say so.”

  I sketched the story, as I always did when I came to Joseph for help. She had her stack of unlined paper and pencils beside her, and as we sipped tea and munched on cookies she took notes, interrupting from time to time to ask questions.

  In a very literal way, I laid my case on the table, showing her pictures of Natalie and finally putting the ring of keys down between us.

  “And where did these come from?” she asked.

  “From a carton Sandy brought over before I agreed to work on the case. There were some books of Natalie’s, inscribed by men but none of them a Terry, some cosmetics she used, their wedding album and some loose pictures, quite a few because Sandy must have taken every opportunity to photograph her.”

  “So the carton was brought into the marriage, so to speak, by Natalie and added to by her husband.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me. He claimed never to have seen the keys, so I guess they must have fallen out of an envelope of pictures.”

  “And which of the keys have you identified?”

  “This small one opened the desk she sat at at Hopkins and Jewell. This one turned the front-door lock in the apartment she lived in five years ago. And this one Martin Jewell identified as opening the door of their old office.”

  She looked at the remaining keys, the ones that probably opened suitcases. “So they represent Natalie’s old life. When she left Hopkins and Jewell to get married, she started a new key ring.”

  “Which is probably in the purse she was carrying when she disappeared.”

  “Let me think about these keys for a moment. She couldn’t return the door key to Hopkins and Jewell because no one except Mr. Jewell knew she had it.”

  “She could have returned it to him.”

  “True, but perhaps she didn’t want to be alone with him or perhaps she’d even forgotten about the key. Presumably she hadn’t used it for some time.”

  “If we accept his story, that’s true.”

  “And she couldn’t turn it in to this Wormy person because Wormy doesn’t know Natalie’s been given a key.”

  “Right.”

  “But she also kept the key to her desk before she left.”

  “It would seem so,” I said. “Maybe that key is the oversight. I’ve begun to think she kept the key to the office in case she wanted to check out her file again.”

  “A bit of paranoia,” Joseph said.

  “If there was someone in her past whom she had reason to be afraid of, she didn’t want her new address and name in their files. I know they sent her a W Two form after she disappeared.”

  Joseph made a note. “So they had to have her new name and address.”

  “Until January of last year. Maybe she was planning to sneak back one night and get rid of it after tax season.”

  “It’s probably on a computer now, but from what you’ve said, she would have been knowledgeable enough to know the system and expunge any damaging information. Of course, we’ll never know if she intended to.” Joseph picked up the ring of keys. “It’s this key that concerns me most.” She held up the key to the door of the apartment near Gramercy Park. “It’s marked Segal. That’s the name of a lock that’s used a lot in New York apartments, and if it has the name of the lock on it, it’s one of the original keys that was issued with the lock.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She pulled her own large ring of keys out and found one to show me. “I had this one made just a few days ago. It’s a duplicate for a broom closet in the dormitory. The original is marked with the name of the lock, but this one isn’t. This one is stamped Morgan Hardware, the hardware store in town. Just out of curiosity I asked the locksmith there about it when he was cutting it for me. He said duplicates don’t have the name of the lock on them. They may have the name of the company that makes the blanks like Ilco, the International Lock Company, or they may be stamped by the hardware store or locksmith with their name, as mine is.”

  I looked at Natalie’s key. “So this is an original key, probably the one the landlord gave her or the locksmith if she had the lock installed herself.”

  “My question is, how could she have gotten away with not turning in the key? If they’re still using the same lock, they must have gotten a key back.”

  “Maybe a roommate had a duplicate, or the brother.”

  “Which means she returned the duplicate and kept the original. A little odd, don’t you think? Well, perhaps it was more convenient to return the duplicate; it wasn’t on her key ring. But I think it warrants a phone call, Chris.”

  I agreed and wrote it down. “There’s a possible explanation for why she only returned one key,” I said, thinking it over. “She didn’t want the landlord to know she’d had overnight guests, male or female.”

  “Good thinking. If she returned two keys, there might be questions. Funny, though, that she returned the duplicate, not the original.”

  “No answer, Joseph. Not at this point anyway.”

  “Let’s see where we are. We have a good-looking woman in her thirties who, like many women, uses cosmetics and hair color to enhance her looks and make her look younger, a woman who married the man of her dreams, lives in the house she has always wanted, and now is possibly pregnant with a child. Nothing unusual anywhere except that her life seems to start five to seven years ago and she is the best suspect for removing all evidence of her earlier life from her personnel record. Would she have removed those papers if she had married Martin Jewell?”

  “She may have removed them quite early in her employment, early enough that her relationship with him was still going on.”

  “So it wasn’t a question of whom she married—or was intimate with—it was a matter of keeping her past a secret from everyone.”

  “And one reason for doing that may have been in order to hide from one person who had the power to destroy everything she had built, perhaps even to kill her.”

  “She certainly did an effective job of it. The police haven’t found her, a private detective failed, and although you’ve come closer than anyone else, no one has answered your ad in the Indiana paper. All of which means she’s well hidden or dead, and if she’s dead, her body has been well hidden.” She looked down at her notes. “Tell me again what the neighbor, Dickie Foster, said.”

  “They moved in as newlyweds about seven years ago, so they lived there for two of the years Natalie was there. Early on they met her in the elevator with a man she introduced as her brother, possibly named Terry. They had a casual acquaintanceship, but when Natalie moved out, after very excitedly telling Dickie she was being interviewed for a great job, she dropped the Fosters a postcard from somewhere.”

  Joseph smiled. “And that somewhere may be crucial. What this seems to mean, Chris, is that the job with Hopkins and Jewell was a turning point in Natalie’s life. She had no qualms about sending them a resumé and references, but once she was on their payroll, she wanted that information to go no further.”

  “And she moved in the middle of the month, as though she couldn’t wait to get out of the Gramercy Park apartment,” I added. “Maybe he came back. Maybe she married—or knew—this man in her early to mid twenties, got away from him, moved to New York, thought she was free of him. Then one day she sees him, or he finds her and she becomes terrified. She changes jobs, moves, leaves no forwarding address, hoping to escape from him.”

  “It would seem she did for five years.”

  “And then he saw her at the parade,” I said, feeling a shiver.

  “What do you know about this man
Martin Jewell?”

  “Only that he seems very successful at his job, that he and his partner started with very little and have built up a lucrative business. Do you think he could be involved in this?”

  “He sounds like a man who piles his plate a little too high. I’m sure there are men who manage to maintain several relationships at one time, but from where I sit, it sounds as though it can’t be easy.” She pulled a sheet of paper closer to her. “Let’s see who we have. The husband, of course, although both you and Jack don’t think he’s a serious candidate for murder. The nameless abusive husband or lover who’s been after her for years. Or, as you suggested, perhaps a fitting but unexciting husband that she simply wanted to get away from.”

  “In which case she’s still alive somewhere.”

  “Certainly a happier ending,” Joseph said. “Then there’s the elusive brother or lover who may be named Terry. It would certainly be nice to find him, wouldn’t it?”

  “He might know a great deal about her, and if he cared, he would help. But I have no idea where to look or even if his last name is Miller.”

  Joseph picked up the ring of keys. “I’m still bothered, Chris. I’m not sure I can put into words what it is, but this house key is a problem for me.”

  “I’ll call the super when I get home.”

  —

  It wasn’t as easy as picking up the phone. I hadn’t gotten the super’s name and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask for her phone number. But a call to Dickie Foster gave me both and a call to Mrs. Franco gave me the additional information that Joseph wanted.

  “Sure she gave us the key. I can’t remember now whether she handed it to me or left it in the apartment, but I got it back.”

  “Was it an original or a copy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It looked like the real thing to me.”

  I thanked her and was hanging up when she said, “You still there?”

  “Yes. Is there something else?”

  “I was talking to my husband about Natalie after you were here. He said some guy came around a couple of years ago asking about her.”

  “Really? Asking what?”

  “Where she moved to. Rich didn’t tell him because he didn’t know and the guy left.”

  “Did he leave a name or address?”

  “I don’t think so, but he said he was Natalie’s brother.”

  Interesting. “Thanks for telling me, Mrs. Franco.” The news gave me a chill. Maybe someone had been looking for her for a long time, someone up to no good.

  I didn’t bother telling her I still had a key that opened that door. When this was all over I would see to it that the key was returned.

  —

  The next day I taught my class, came home, and prepared my lesson for the following Tuesday, just in case something happened and I didn’t have much time. It turned out to be lucky that I did.

  Late in the afternoon Sandy called. “I just got a response,” he said, but he didn’t sound happy. “It was a man’s voice. He said, ‘You’ll never find her.’ ”

  19

  “So it wasn’t much of a conversation,” Jack said.

  “It was very short.” He had just come home and we were at the kitchen table, as usual. “He picked up the phone—he’s been answering it since yesterday morning without letting calls go through his secretary—and a man said, ‘You looking for Natalie Miller?’ and he said he was and asked if the man had any information. And the man said, ‘She’s been missing since Thanksgiving Day two years ago and you’ll never find her.’ ”

  “That sounds like our man. You didn’t mention Thanksgiving Day in the ad, did you?”

  “No, but the people I’ve talked to know that’s when she disappeared.”

  “But they don’t know you put an ad in an Indiana newspaper.”

  “Only you and Sandy know.”

  “And there’s no way of knowing if the call came from Indiana or next door.”

  “No way that I can think of.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to ask if he recognized an accent or an age in the voice.”

  “He said the only thing he was sure of was that it was male and he spoke English.”

  “Look, Chris, it means you’re in the right area. Either this guy read your ad or someone out there read it and told him about it. Either way, there’s a connection between Natalie Miller and that part of Indiana.”

  “But thousands of people must have read those newspapers. Why should the only person to call be someone who wishes Natalie ill?”

  “I can’t answer that. Let me make a suggestion. I’ve been thinking about the fact that she changed her looks. There was a forensic sculptor that used to work at the Police Academy years ago. He was actually a sergeant for a long time and there was some trouble, I don’t know the details, and he retired kind of suddenly and left New York. He lives somewhere over in Broome County on the southern tier—I can get his address from the Pension Section—and maybe you can use your charm on him.”

  “I don’t understand. Don’t these people take a picture of someone a long time ago and project what they’d look like today?”

  “Sure, but they can do the reverse, too. They can take what you look like today and go back in time to when you were younger.”

  “So someone in Indiana who doesn’t recognize today’s Natalie might recognize her as a high school graduate.”

  “Right.”

  “You seem to think it’ll be tough getting him to talk to me.”

  “From what I’ve heard, he lives alone in a shack that isn’t much better than a chicken coop. A guy I know once made a trip out there to see him and he was turned away pretty nastily.”

  I looked across the table at him. “Where did we leave the book on charm? I think I have some serious reading to do.”

  “Honey, you’ve got charm written all over you. You think I married you for your short hair and master’s degree in English?”

  My hair had been little more than a bristle when I’d left St. Stephen’s and only half an inch longer than that when I met Jack at the Sixty-fifth Precinct. “I never thought of myself as charming,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s why you’ve got me. To let you know how terrific you are.”

  Marriage is a never-ending wonder.

  —

  Jack called his friend in the morning and got both meticulous directions to Sergeant Albert DiMartino’s little house and a strong caution on DiMartino’s personality. “I’ll translate it into polite language because you don’t want to hear the original,” Jack said when he got off the phone. “He says the guy acts like a rotten bastard.”

  “And that’s the clean version.”

  “Very clean. My friend was really ticked. He made the trip with Al’s best interests at heart—he thought Al got a raw deal on the job—and Al wouldn’t open his door. I’m having second thoughts about you going there, but my recollection is, he was always very nice to women, probably too nice.”

  “If he doesn’t open his door, there isn’t much chance of trouble.”

  “I guess that means you’re going.”

  “I’m also packing a bag. There must be a motel around the area. I’ll check with Sandy before I go. But I may not get home tonight.”

  “Here we go again, huh?”

  “You know I’ll miss you.”

  “Just keep calling, OK?”

  “You couldn’t stop me.”

  —

  Sandy was all for it. He asked if my expense fund needed an infusion and I said I’d let him know. I hadn’t been billed for the newspaper ads yet, so I hadn’t drawn all that much out of the bank. Before I left, I put the rest of the expense money in our checking account so I could pay a motel bill if I had to. I called Mel and told her where I was going.

  “A forensic sculptor?” she said in surprise. “Where is all this leading?”

  “I hope to someone who knows or knew Natalie. Our ad in an Indiana paper got a response.” I described it and s
he gasped. “So I’ll be going to Broome County in a little while.”

  “Poor Jack.”

  “I know. But he put me up to this. I think he gets as much of a kick as I do when I turn up something.”

  “Happy landings.”

  —

  Route 17 took me right into Broome County, and then the directions Jack had written down took over. On a road that was generously considered secondary, I finally spotted Cowles’s Fruit Orchard, alerting me that I had a turn coming up. It seemed impossible, but the next road was in worse shape than the last one, pitted and rutted, so narrow I would have to move off it onto a nonexistent shoulder if anyone approached, which was not very likely. The next landmark was a sign that said PROCEED AT OWN RISK, but that sign had not survived. It lay defeated in the scrub at the side of the road, a victim, perhaps, of Al DiMartino himself in a fit of anger, or of a windstorm or a large animal on a dark night. I slowed to a crawl, searching the left side of the road for Mr. DiMartino’s “driveway.” Even so, I missed it, realizing only after my front wheels had overshot it that the track into the woods and brush was the “drive.”

  I backed up and turned sharply, my first real fears materializing as I pulled into the narrow opening. I would have missed it completely if not for the tire treads imprinted in the snow. I drove slowly, encountering no obstructions, and suddenly, ahead of me, there was a clearing with a small wooden structure on the right and a car parked in a kind of lean- to tacked onto the right-hand side.

  I left my car in the clearing and got out. The front door must have been the only entrance, because there were footprints and trampled snow between it and the carport. It was so quiet that I was sure he must have heard my car pull up, but there was no sound from inside either. I walked up to the door, looked for a bell, and then, laughing at my naïveté, knocked loudly. There was no answer.

  I knocked again and called, “Mr. DiMartino?”

  “Go away,” an angry man’s voice came back at me. “I don’t give directions.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t speak the language.”