by Greg Aunapu
"But I'm the only one who can recognize Amy," Artie said. "I have to go with you." Jack smiled. “Then you gotta blend in. If you go in without colors, someone's gonna stomp you. Pat, what can you do for the man?”
Pat rustled up an Outlaw T-shirt and leather jacket. 'They'll fit," Jack said.
Artie was nervous but excited, changing into the biker clothes. "How do I look?" he asked.
Sue laughed. "I wish I had a picture!"
Jack shook his head. "Not enough. We gotta get you some chains and stuff. And you gotta walk with some oomph! But don't look anyone in the eye for too long. We don't want to get your ass out of a knife fight."
"Knife fight!" Artie blurted. "I don't have a knife."
Jack reached into his pocket and came out with a stiletto-type "You can't go in with no protection."
Sue looked around and saw all the guns sticking in the men's belts. "Will the other guys have guns, too?"
"Of course," Jack said. "No one's going to a party without one. Good way to end up dead."
Sue grabbed Artie's arm. "I think you should stay here. We'll figure out another way."
"I'll be all right," Artie said. "We gotta get this over with. My dad and my wife are going crazy back home. And I know Amy, so this is our best bet."
"Please, Artie."
"I'm going," he told her.
Jack stayed behind to keep Sue company while the crowd jumped into trucks and vans. Billig guessed bikers didn't always need motorcycles to be a bike gang, but it seemed strange that only a few men were actually riding machines.
Sue watched the taillights disappear into a mist and threw a kiss after them.
"Make yourself comfortable," Jack told her. "They'll be a while."
The minutes stretched to hours. Jack was very sympathetic and said he knew the entire story. How a girl had been taken from Coconut Grove. He said he knew Harry Kramer, who was now living in Portland, Oregon, and “That son of a bitch, Paul Branch."
He made a pistol motion with his fingers. "I'll fucking kill him if I ever get the chance. He's not the kind of guy you ever turn your back on."
During the conversation, as he learned more about what Sue had been through, he promised, "If Willow isn't Amy, I'll follow this up for you. I'll use whatever powers I have to get the truth."
A dime store clock on top of the television ticked the seconds, and Sue watched the minute hand slowly revolve. Three hours, and she was getting nervous. "It's all right," Jack said, toking a joint, watching an old biker B-movie on television. The bikers on the tube were stupid and mean, and Jack laughed at them. 'This is what Hollywood thinks is a biker?"
Late in the evening a couple of motorcycles rattled into the driveway, followed by the truck and a couple vans. Jack rushed to the window with his gun, and put it away when he saw the visitors were friendlies. The horde barged into the house, drunk and raucous, but with no bloody noses or bruises.
Artie came in behind them and shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said.
"You're sure you saw Willow?'
Artie nodded. "Looks a lot like her, but she's not. It's been a while, but I'd know Amy anywhere."
Sue wiped a tear from her eye. She hadn't realized how much hope she had invested in Willow. "I wish I had gone," she said. "Can we go back? I have to be sure."
Artie gripped her shoulders. "It's not her!" he told her. She fell into his arms, and he hugged her. "We've done our best. It's time to go home now."
Just as they were leaving for the airport the next day, the phone in their room rang. It was a biker calling from the Blue Edge Lounge.
"This is Darryl, I met you at Jack's," he said.
"I remember you," Sue said.
"Well, I got a girl here looks like your daughter. I'll hold her here until you come by. But come quickly, because I don't know what I'll do if she makes a fuss."
Susan and Artie threw their bags in the trunk of the Mustang and rushed over to the bar. By this time they knew where every place was.
Sue ran in, fingers crossed, her heart pounding. She recognized Darryl, who sat beside a girl in a back booth. The young woman matched Amy's description and was quite the knockout, but Sue could tell from the door that this was not her daughter. She walked the rest of the way to the booth.
Darryl left them together. Sue spoke to her for what seemed hours, with the girl crying now and again and admitting she was a runaway. She wouldn't tell Sue her name or age.
"If I had a mother like you, a mother who loved me, I'd go back in a minute," the girl wept.
"Believe me, she loves you," Sue said. "A sweet, gorgeous girl like you? How couldn't she? You may not know it, but she does. Please, tell me where you live. Come to the airport with us, and I'll buy you a ticket home. You don't want to be all alone out here. Things can happen." She told the girl all about Amy. "I would want someone to do the same for her."
The girl shook her head. "My mother doesn't want me. I can't go home."
Sue hugged her and wrote down her name and number on a napkin. "You keep this. If you ever need a mother, you call me from anywhere collect."
As the plane blasted from the earth, Sue watched another city slip beneath her wings and thought about the sweet runaway and about all the lost people in these cities she had visited.
And, right now, she felt as lost in her own life as any of them.
-15-
T he trip to Seattle was a watershed event in many ways. While it did not end the search for Amy among the biker subculture—as clues and sources would continue to explode into existence, sending the Billigs into a frenzy of activity, only to have all clues fizzle into a vacuum just as suddenly—it did mark the culmination of a four-year investigation and a need for some soul searching. Just how long could they continue their efforts? Could they devote their lives to their daughter's rescue, or did their human and financial resources have an end?
They closed the gallery. This was a heartrending decision on their part, which meant they were giving up hope that their family life would soon return to normal, and conceding that the search for Amy was not a sprint to the finish, but a marathon. Ned got a job managing another store for a salary.
Next, the financial costs caused them to lose their home on Poinciana, Amy's only home in the Grove. They moved into a much smaller cottage around the corner. In between all of this, Sue would find interior design jobs to keep up a cash flow.
Sue had kept Amy's room just as she'd left it all this time, dusted and neat. One time when she thought Amy had been found, she bought new Bill Blass sheets and a nightgown to welcome her home. Now she packed Amy's artwork, books, clothes and all the stuff of a teenager's life into a few boxes from the dry cleaners and carried them to the new house. She couldn't believe how compact it all was. "My daughter's entire life fit into a few boxes," she recalls. She couldn't summon the emotional strength to tape the boxes closed. Josh had to tape them and bring them up to the attic.
"If I take them out," Sue told him, "it will be like creating another shrine. It will be like saying she's dead."
Sue walked back to their former house to show the new occupants a photograph of Amy in case her daughter should ever return home looking for them. "It was the most devastating thing," she told Ned. "I never wanted to leave there. It was Amy's home!"
About this time a nationally syndicated television crime show aired a segment about Amy's disappearance. Hundreds of people, from bikers to housewives, telephoned or wrote in to say they had seen Amy here or there. One man claimed to be Amy's husband and was tracked down by an investigative reporter, only to find the man had no connection to Amy. A man in Ocala swore he had seen Amy with a biker three years earlier. Weeks and vast amounts of energy were wasted in dealing with inefficient police from the area following up the useless information.
On Amy's twenty-first birthday Sue cooked a small dinner and cried. "She's no nearer to us than she was four years ago!" She told Ned, "But I feel like there is some connection that if she was no longe
r on this Earth, I would know it."
Ned continued to be her anchor in this confusing maelstrom. "Then she must be alive," he said. "We have to keep looking for her."
Rosie, from Oklahoma, called on June 8, saying she had just met Amy at a Texas gathering of a motorcycle club called the Banditos. "It was like looking in a mirror," she said. The girl called herself Sharon, but "had an accent just like Sue's" and "couldn't remember where she was from." The girl even had the secret appendix scar like Amy's. But Rosie suddenly stopped calling and could not be found.
Prosecutors finally turned Bracket against Big Jim Nolan in the Hell's Angels murder case and allowed Sue to meet with him in a secret locale in Fort Lauderdale. Bracket told her Paul Branch was the common denominator between all biker and Amy links and suggested Sue "hire some heavies to beat it out of him!”
But the worst moment was when Bracket shook his head and told Sue, "Don't you think it's time to give it up?”
Sue had heard that from so many people now, from authorities to bikers, from friends to inimical callers who told her "Amy was a sex slave now."
But those words just drummed against her consciousness like so much static. "I won't give up until I find her grave or I find her."
In many ways, the Billigs were only able to live their lives between telephone calls, like some couples who only talk during commercials. Each lead subsumed the entire focus of their lives for however long it took. Each blamed themselves for Amy's disappearance, starting with the ironic move from New York to Miami to get away from crime.
"How could something like this happen among all this beauty?" Sue would ask as they took one of their rare walks to Coconut Grove's famous Dinner Key Marina and sat on a bench watching the boats, the rigging slapping against the masts.
"Amy loved that sound," Sue reminisced. "It sounds like hundreds of bells tingling."
The couple still tried to get out and see their large circle of friends. Rex Ryland, who became good friends with the Billigs, says, "Ned always had a smile on his face, no matter how badly he was feeling inside. Everyone in the Grove knew him, even many people who he didn't know back. And whenever people would ask about news, or how he was feeling, no matter who they were, he always said something positive."
But home life was difficult, Sue says. "Talking just hurt too much, so we hid in silences."
Josh rarely spoke about Amy anymore, even though it plainly hurt him deeply. "People would say 'poor Sue and Ned,' but never 'poor Josh,' " Sue says. "And that must have been difficult for him. Now, I realize the despair he must have endured. Why didn't I spend more time with him? He must have needed me, but couldn't tell me about his pain. He seemed to become a different person, as though he didn't deserve the things he had."
By now Josh was becoming a self-taught stonemason. He and a friend began building coral rock walls, and he liked the feeling that he was helping to protect people. He was pained by his father's drinking, which became a friction between them, so he didn't like to spend a lot of time at home. His observation now: "I think my father had a lot of sorrow." Their best times came when they would accidentally meet at the grocery store and "just go up and down the aisles shopping, talking to the friends we'd meet."
Theirs was also a difficult kind of celebrity. "We didn't want to be martyrs," Sue says, "but we were famous because of a tragedy. People would ask, 'Haven't I seen you on television?' And usually I would just say it must be someone else. Or people would say, 'It's so good to see you going on with your life,' and I'd say yes, because that's what they wanted to hear."
Ned became increasingly depressed. His doctor gave him Halcyon and doubled the dose when Ned said it wasn't working. The drug made it difficult for him to concentrate, and he lost his job. So, in March 1979 the couple went to Longboat Key for five days of rest and recuperation, their first vacation in years. They returned feeling refreshed, having made some decisions about how to continue their lives. They would never forget Amy, but they couldn't forget their son, either. They would never stop searching for Amy, but they couldn't lose themselves in the search. It was a fine line that would be difficult to ascertain, but they would try.
But a man who called himself "Hal Johnson" was waiting in the wings, and he had other plans.
When they returned home, Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan updated the story. As usual, this prompted a new deluge of phone calls and letters, many of which were sympathetic prayers, others suggesting they contact certain psychics.
One call was very disturbing. An angry man who Sue immediately imagined as a biker threatened, "Listen, lady, you better keep your mouth shut unless you want more problems with the rest of your family."
Sue had by now heard several of these. They were very scary, but she'd learned to deal with them. "Thank you for the warning," she said, and hung up the phone.
Sue and Ned were developing a true love-hate relationship with the telephone. It was the lifeline that might solve all their problems, and it was the one thing that made their lives miserable.
Hal Johnson, with an earnest-sounding, mildly southern voice, was going for the latter. He introduced himself politely on the phone, saying he was from Fort Pierce and was staying at a local Ramada hotel on business when he read the newest article about Amy. "I saw a girl who looks very much like Amy hanging out with bikers on Fisherman's Pier," he told Sue.
There was something very practical and firm in his voice that made Sue believe he was not the type to spread false hope. "Would you come down to the gallery my husband manages in Coconut Grove and look at some photos there?" she asked.
"I'd be glad to, Mrs. Billig," he said. He got the address and made the appointment for the following day during lunch hour.
Sue and Ned brought the photographs into the store and waited patiently for the visitor who never came. When they called the Ramada Inn, they were told that no one by that name was registered.
But Johnson did call again a few days later, apologizing for standing them up. "Listen," he told them, "she will be posing for me and another artist in Fort Pierce on Thursday. If you want to see her, come by." He gave her a phone number and an address—913 Ohio Avenue—along with instructions on how to get there. "You take U.S. 1 to Searstown, and the first light past that is Ohio. You can't miss it."
Sue thanked him profusely before he hung up. But as soon as she hung up she turned to Ned. "Something doesn't sit right with me about this." "Call the number back," he said.
Sue dialed the number Johnson had just given her and received a recording. "We are sorry, but the telephone number you have dialed is not in service. Please try again."
Sue's next call was to the Fort Pierce Police Department. The officer she spoke to, Fred Brosilow, was familiar with her case and left immediately to drive past the address. He called back shortly later, saying, "There is no 913 Ohio, Mrs. Billig. It stops at 911 and starts up again at 1002. I also checked and can't find any listing for a Hal Johnson. There's a Harold listed at a different address."
Brosilow suggested they contact FBI agent James Franklin, who was in charge of that area. Again, there was another frenzy of phone calls getting everything set up. Eventually, Ina Shepard convinced the FBI to provide backup while she and Fort Pierce police provided surveillance of Sue. FBI agent Harold Phipps, newly stationed in Miami, set up watch as well.
Sue spent another sleepless night and rose at dawn to make the two-hour ride to Fort Pierce before rush hour with Ina, with whom she was becoming good friends.
The sun broke through high cumulus clouds in the east, spreading a golden spray of light slanting across the highway. Someday, Sue hoped, she would be able to enjoy such a dawn again, breathing deeply on a beach while nursing a cup of coffee. Simple pleasures were some of the things she missed most in her life. But that would have to wait for another time. Now they were racing up the highway her expectations peaked, throat dry, blood pressure high.
The directions were easy to follow. They first went to the FBI office to m
eet Franklin, and from there to the police station to allow the authorities time to coordinate their surveillance. One agent sat in a car; another dressed as a meter reader walked from house to house.
The neighborhood was one of modest middle-class CBS houses, with green lawns and hedges of hibiscus and Surinam cherries. Sue and Ina, dressed in simple jeans and blouses, walked up and down Ohio Avenue knocking on every door and ringing every bell. Sleepy looking octogenarians, with coffee cups in hand, answered the doors.
No Hal Johnson here, honey.
No Amy.
No girl. No artists.
While most were retired folks, some younger people were mixed in. At number 608 an obvious biker answered the door.
"No Hal Johnson," the guy groused. "Would you throw me that newspaper?"
After they had exhausted all the addresses, Ina turned to Sue. "I'm really sorry, but it's another wild goose chase," she said.
Back at the police station, a Captain Parker said, "Really, Mrs. Billig, it would be much better if you would go back home. We'll see if we can get some information on Johnson and look at Fisherman's Pier for you."
"My God," Sue cried. "What is this Hal Johnson doing to me?"
Parker shook his head. "Go home, he'll probably call again."
Little did he know just how prophetic those words would be.
The next day she received the call from Johnson. "Why didn't you come?" he berated her. "She was there!”
Sue protested, "I came, the address didn't exist." "We were there," Johnson said.
"If you saw her, tell me how she looked," Sue asked, trying but not succeeding in keeping a pleading note from entering her voice.
"Oh, she's beautiful," Johnson said. "Very nice body. And she's got great tits!"
"Don't talk like that, I'm her mother," Sue snapped. "And she's got a beautiful mouth," Johnson said. "She knows how to use it!" He hung up.
Sue held the phone in her hand, looking at it with revulsion, feeling as if something unbearably slimy had touched her.
Feeling violated.