After Dad died, it was Aunt Mo who came to stay with us, and took care of us in those crucial first weeks without him. It was Aunt Mo who insisted I have a tenth birthday party, three months after my Dad died, and, because my mother was too shell-shocked to handle it, Aunt Mo came to town and threw a pretty good party for me. That day was the first happy one I had after Dad died. In high school, when I didn’t have enough money for a new dress for the junior prom, it was Aunt Mo who sent me a nice check, unasked. Sure it came with a long letter about the sin of vanity and scriptural prohibitions against fornication, but it’s the check that counts.
It could even be said that, in her inimitable way, Aunt Mo had been a positive influence in my life. For example, her attempts to get custody of me had made me work hard to keep it together for me and Mom and keep Aunt Mo at bay. I learned to cook, and at age ten I was cooking all our meals and doing all the housework, making sure Mom signed the checks for the bills and took her medication. Now, I rarely cook and I hate to clean. I did enough of that crap by age twenty-one to last me my entire life, and when my Aunt Minnie was widowed and moved in with us, I took the opportunity to ditch Chuck Turner and get out of Ferrous, Minnesota.
But the point is, rebelling against Aunt Mo made me a lot more independent. Granted, my life wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but I made my own living. I could take care of myself.
Poor Aunt Mo. Alone in this big, wicked city, with nobody to take care of her. Was she even still alive? It was impossible to sleep, waiting for the phone to ring or the buzzer to sound, expecting, fearing the voice that said, “We found your aunt’s body at a Staten Island landfill,” hoping and praying for the voice that said, “We found your aunt and she’s alive.”
I needed a drink. Shortly after midnight I called down to Sally, asked her if I could borrow a cup of vodka to help me sleep. She not only had a premium vodka at hand, she brought it up to me and did a tarot, which foretold wonderful things in my future. Before she left, she promised to burn a candle for me and assured me I had every reason to be optimistic. My aunt was missing, my job was in jeopardy, and someone was shooting at men who went out with me. Yeah, I was feeling really optimistic.
Who was this guy? Was it Joey Pinks’s half-brother Vern? Had Joey done forgery work for him? What would he need forged? What kind of things did people get forged, anyway, stuff like Social Security cards, green cards, maybe letters of reference? I wasn’t sure.
Green cards. Why did that stick with me? I knew a few people with green cards. Mike had one, because he’d been married to an American. Tamayo, she had dual citizenship, so she probably had an American passport. Phil was British . . .
Phil would have to have one to work at ANN. Or a work visa. It bothered me, because Phil had been in the freight elevator the evening Kanengiser was killed. He’d gone up to a floor in the twenties. Could have been twenty-seven. It would have been easy for him to steal my handbag . . . and then steal a few more to cover it up. Who would suspect him, a cheerful, philosophical senior citizen?
But no, that’s not right, I thought. The vodka was addling me. I mean, what was I thinking? That I was being stalked by a seventy-ish British handyman? He was too old to be Joey Pinks’s half-brother. Besides, Phil had been out with the flu that day. If he’d lied about the flu and come back to the building to kill Kanengiser, he’d hardly strike up a conversation with Hymie from the newsstand.
But he was on that tape.
However, the tapes, while time-coded, were not date-coded. Someone must have replaced the right tape with a tape from another day . . .
Maybe it was someone who had worked in U.S. Army Intelligence, who was able to sneak in somehow and change the tapes. Someone like Reb Ryan.
Reb Ryan wasn’t his real name. He’d changed it years before, Mike said. Maybe his real name was Vern.
Reb was clearly nuts. He knew how to take a beating, he had a masochistic desire to be in war zones, and he enjoyed drinking his own urine.
Yeah, I had dated Reb. But so had the younger, prettier, beestung-lipped Bianca. I had to be realistic here. If I were Reb, would I be obsessed with me, or with Bianca? As attractive as I think I am, Bianca was indisputably one of the most beautiful women to grace ANN’s air. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t men I dated who were the targets, but men Bianca dated—coincidentally, many of the same men.
MaybeReb was upset that Bianca had ditched him for Pete. Maybe he had picked a fight with Dillon at Keggers because Dillon had gone to Bianca’s table and shamelessly flirted with her, not because Dillon had walked out with me.
After talking to Pete and tracking a promo the night of the bar fight, Reb would have had plenty of time to get over to Dillon’s building and take a shot
My mind was racing. Or maybe it wasn’t Reb.
Someone in security could have replaced that tape.
Pete controlled security and he could switch the tapes. How much did we know about him anyway? Some second-rate celebrity bodyguard who had won Jack Jackson’s trust during a drunken moment. Maybe he was brother Vern, with forged identification as Pete Huculak. There were probably a lot of men who would whip themselves silly just to hear Bianca say their names through those acclaimed lips. Pete could be one of them. He was known to be jealous. They practically lived together, so he would know her schedule, and if she didn’t tell him about the guys she dated, he could have picked it up from the company grapevine.
My Filofax, though . . .
Well, we hadn’t seen the thing. It might not be my Filofax. It could be Kanengiser’s mythical black book after all ...
Now I had a new theory. Joey Pinks had come to me because he knew me from interviewing Anya and he didn’t know Bianca at all, or he couldn’t get close to Bianca because he’d risk running into Pete, or Pete’s deputy Hector. To warn her, he had tried to go through me.
Maybe I’m not so irresistible, I thought.
Aunt Maureen must have seen something, or Pete must have seen her . . .
My phone rang. It was Hector calling from the car phone downstairs, where he and Franco were “guarding” me.
“We found your aunt. She’s alive. Wanna go see her?”
I didn’t even bother to get dressed. I grabbed my purse, threw a coat on over my pajamas, and rushed downstairs to the company car.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said chirpily, sliding into the front seat.
There was a flash of white over my face, I heard a loud pop, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When I came to, my head was covered in a leather mask, and I was standing against a wall, my feet and hands chained. I felt queasy, maybe from the ether or chloroform or whatever I’d been knocked out with. I looked around, but the mask impaired my peripheral vision. It was a big room, bare, with rough wood floors. The windows were bricked up, so I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. But the bricking and the fact that the only light in the room was strung in from elsewhere—indicating pirated electricity—told me we were in a condemned or abandoned building, or a squat.
Was there anything in this room that would make a good weapon? Not really. There was a broken-down sofa missing its arms, and a queen-size bed. There were two doors.
I looked at myself. My hands were linked with a foot-long chain, as were my feet, allowing me to move with limited flexibility. I was hooked up to a retractable harness attached to the wall, with wire cables attached to my arms, like marionette strings. The cables went to the ceiling, rather like trolley cables, to a track, like the tracks used in track lighting.
With a little effort, I could move away from the wall and walk within a ten-foot circumference. I made it, with some strain, to one of the doors and opened it. Down the hallway, I could see a sliver of another room and part of a table, with my purse on it.
I tried wriggling out of my restraints, but no amount of struggling could free me. I was pretty well secured. And I was getting really angry.
“Robin, is that you?” a voice called from another roo
m.
I heard mechanical motion. One of the doors opened—the door to the attached bathroom—and a zaftig woman harnessed in black leather came out. Like me, she was masked and hooked up like a trolley. But I recognized the voice.
It was Aunt Mo.
“You’re alive!”
“Of course I am,” she said.
“Where are we?”
“Dear, I don’t know. But it’s an empty place. I’ve tried screaming and nobody has heard me.”
“Aunt Mo, have you seen the guy who kidnapped us?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Tall, protruding, forehead . . .”
God, it could be Hector, Howard Gollis, Pete Huculak, the ex-con on the subway train with the Aryan Nations tattoo. It could be any number of men I passed every day in the streets or in the hallways of ANN.
“Can’t you be more specific?”
“Didn’t see his hair color. He wore a hat of some kind, a hunting cap . . . my eyes aren’t what they used to be ... I’m doing the best I can, you know? I came to New York to enjoy a nice conference, see how my niece was doing, see a few shows. I end up kidnapped. . . . He was wearing a security guard uniform.”
“Hector?” It happened so fast I couldn’t be sure.
“Hector? Is that his name? He told me his name was Elroy Vern.”
“Elroy Vern? Elroy? Where is he now?”
“He went out. He said he’d be gone a few hours but I don’t know how long ago that was.”
“Has he hurt you?”
“He hasn’t touched me, except to put me into this contraption.”
Was Deputy Hector really Elroy Vern? It made a little sense, and lately things had been so senseless that a little went a long way. Using his position in security, Hector must have switched the tapes from the freight elevator, so nobody would see he’d gone up to twenty-seven the night Kanengiser was murdered. He had been able to switch tapes, because he worked in security. He had been able to steal my Filofax and keep tabs on me, because he worked in security.
“What else did Elroy Vern say?”
“Oh, not very much. He says he was ‘away’ for five years and he watched you on television in that time and wrote you letters. He came here to find you.”
“Away where? Where was he?”
“Judging by the time I’ve spent with him,” Aunt Mo said, “I’d guess a mental hospital.”
“What else did he say?”
“Not much. Sometimes he just won’t talk at all. He just stares at a photograph of you.”
“We have to get out of here, Aunt Mo.”
“I’ve tried to get out of this thingamajiggy, but I haven’t been able to.”
“Is it day or night?”
“Day,” she said. “I think.”
“Aunt Mo, how did you get the Filofax? How did you end up involved in this?”
“Your neighbor Dulcinia Ramirez met a man outside your building, and he had this book for you and a message . . . Didn’t you get my message? I left messages all about this on your answering machine.”
“You did?” Oops. Those must have been the messages I fast-forwarded through. “I guess my machine screwed up. I didn’t get the message. What was it?”
“According to Dulcinia, your pimp was hurting your boyfriends and this man she met thought he might hurt you too. I tried to warn you. I tried to help you. But you just ignored me.”
“Why didn’t you let my boss know when you saw him? He could have warned me.”
“I certainly didn’t want to tell your employer all these terrible things about you. I wanted to talk to you personally.”
“Now tell me about this so-called boyfriend of mine who called you up.”
“Well, he called me at the hotel and said he was very, very concerned about you. I said I was concerned too, but that you wouldn’t listen to me. We agreed to meet. That’s when he knocked me out and abducted me. I’d seen him before.”
“Where?”
“One night, I saw him outside your apartment building.”
“What night was that?”
“I hardly know what day it is now, dear. It was a few days ago. There were several strange men outside your building that night. A young man shouting about a blindfold . . .”
Howard Gollis.
“. . . an older man, middle-aged with hair plugs.”
Fennell Corker.
“And Hector,” I said. “Or Elroy Vern.”
She nodded. “Now, tell me how you managed to get us into this mess,” Aunt Mo said.
It was so like her to assume that it was something I’d done that started this whole ball rolling, that at its root, the responsibility for all this lay with me.
So I gave her the whole story and tried to impress upon her that it wasn’t me at fault, it was just my bad luck. But Aunt Mo didn’t hear a word of it. When I was done, she said, “Robin, this is where sin and abandon lead . . .”
It was very disorienting to hear her voice coming out of that outfit.
“I don’t need a lecture right now, Aunt Mo. All that stuff you heard about me, and saw, it’s not true. I was researching a story. I was being stalked by a crazy man. There was nothing I could do, really, to prevent this.”
“You could have prevented this a long time ago, by making different choices with your life,” Aunt Mo said. “If you’d married Chuck Turner and stayed in Minnesota, instead of running off to New York and going into television, I daresay we wouldn’t be sitting here dressed like minions of the devil and being held hostage by a crazy person.”
She trolleyed closer to me and put her hands over mine. “You know, dear, we may die here. So I want you to think seriously about some things. It’s not too late for you to be born again,” she said. “Do it for me, so if we die, I’ll die knowing you’re going to be in heaven.”
Aunt Mo, she just never gives up. On one hand, it was really sweet of her to think of me. On the other, I saw this as a last-ditch effort to win our lifelong battle of wills.
When I was little, Aunt Mo had said to me, “Don’t you want to go to heaven?” I paused, thought about it, and asked, suspiciously, “Are you going to be there?”
That’s the thing. If she’s right, then heaven is going to be full of people like her. Frankly, the idea of spending eternity with Aunt Mo, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oliver North, Paul Mangecet, and Phyllis Schlafly is, well, hell.
“I can’t do that for you, Aunt Mo,” I said. “Can we talk about something else, other than how I’ve fu— . . . fouled up my life and yours?”
“You are so stubborn. Just have to spite me and try to pick a fight ...”
“I’m not picking a fight. Why is it, if ever I disagree with you, I’m picking a fight? I’m merely defending myself.”
“Defending yourself? Against whom?”
“Against you.”
“I’m not your enemy!. I’m on your side!”
This is a confrontation I have played out in my head a thousand and one times. Never in a million years would I have pictured it happening like this, however. Here we are, dressed like something out of an Anne Rice novel, pushing each other’s buttons again, screaming at each other.
“What did I ever do but help you, or try to help you?” she asked.
“You found constant fault with me and you embarrassed the hell out of me—”
“Well, I had to get the hell out of you somehow.”
“This isn’t the time or place to discuss this . . .”
“Name one time I embarrassed you.”
“What about the time I was fifteen and I came in with a boy I liked and you grabbed my face and started talking about my acne . . .”
“You’re still holding a grudge about that?” Aunt Maureen said.
“There are so many times. You always saw only the worst in me, Aunt Mo,” I said. “Whenever I was feeling weak, you were there to make me feel weaker.”
“Well, your parents praised you to the heavens,
and I didn’t want you to get a swelled head. Your mother and father thought you could do anything. Your father thought you could be the first woman president of the United States and your mother thinks you’re an English princess royal. She thinks you should be a queen. I felt they were feeding you false expectations of what a woman could expect in this world. I felt you’d be happier if you’d submit your will to God and accept your fate, accept your place as a woman. Look at you. You’re not happy now.”
“I’m happy sometimes. We shouldn’t be arguing right now,” I said. It’s funny how she and I can get going and lose perspective. Still, I was glad I had had it out with her, glad I’d stood up to her at last.
“No, we shouldn’t,” she said.
We sat in silence for a while. Whenever we’d been together before, we’d only argued, or rather, Aunt Mo had berated me and I’d listened sullenly. We didn’t know how to relate to each other in any other fashion. Every conversation we’d ever had, it seemed, had degenerated quickly into a battle. Small talk wasn’t really appropriate at this juncture.
For a few long minutes, we sat there, staring at each other.
“Did you know your father was a miracle baby?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Our mother had four daughters, and she and father wanted a boy, but the doctor told her she couldn’t conceive any more children. But then she had your dad. A miracle baby. He was a cute baby too. When he was little, he used to follow me around like a puppy dog. And did he get into trouble! He was so curious and full of mischief.”
She told a story about when she was a teenager and one of her young suitors came to call, and Dad hid in the back of the suitor’s automobile and spied on them their whole date. It was hard to imagine my dad as a kid, even harder to imagine Aunt Mo as a teenager who “sparked” with suitors in the parlor.
I remembered a photograph of Aunt Mo when she was about seventeen, in my father’s family photo album. In it, she had her hair done in a very glamorous 1940s fashion—I think they call it a finger wave. Even then, she had looked like Mussolini, but a young Mussolini with the hairstyle of Veronica Lake. She was wearing shorts and a striped T-shirt and leaning on the hood of a car, almost flirtatious. There was a young man in the picture, just back from the war. It wasn’t Uncle Archie.
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