“How did this come about, Leon, you dating a student?”
Leon held up one hand, as if warding off a blow. I let it go. I had agreed to try to find her because Leon thought it might help Madison. What had happened all those years ago wasn’t really the point. Or was it?
Had Sally loved him back then, I wondered, when he was her teacher? Or was it the excitement of the forbidden, an older man, the aura of romance, the fact that it had to be kept secret? Those were powerful aphrodisiacs, but aphrodisiacs don’t last. Had she been happy to marry him? And then what? Somewhere along the way, as happens to so many of us, had she stopped loving him? If she ever had.
And what about Madison? Had Sally loved her? Had anyone loved Madison back then? Did anyone love her now?
“Do you have anything of Sally’s I could borrow, or look at? A diary, school papers, letters, computer files, anything at all?”
“There are a few things I have put away.”
“Would you rather we do that when Madison is in school?”
“She’s not in school now. I’m keeping her with me for the time being.” Leon looked very uncomfortable.
“Can you just do that?” I asked, wondering what he’d told them, if he’d said she had the flu or sprained an ankle, something that would explain the time out of school. Or had he told them the truth, that there was the possibility she’d killed someone and he didn’t want her running around loose?
But all he said was, “They’re faxing me her lessons,” and I let it go. There were more important issues at hand.
“Can she hear us?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“You said she was a suspect. Then she hasn’t been charged?”
“Not yet,” he whispered. “Doesn’t mean they’re not trying.” He looked toward the foyer again.
“So they’re attempting to make a case, but they haven’t yet. Have they talked to Madison?”
“They tried. They came again the next day. Madison was here and I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you let them talk to her?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“What you’d expect. She listened. She stared at them. Then she went to her room and closed the door.”
“Slammed it?”
“No. Closed it quietly. She didn’t seem in the least bit angry.”
“What did she seem?”
“I figured she didn’t want to…”
I waited while Leon surfed for just the right words.
“She wasn’t going to deal with it,” he said. “That’s how she is, since Sally left.”
“She was only seven then.”
“Correct. But that’s when it started. It was all part of the package, not speaking and this, this shutting down. She’ll almost always listen to what you have to say, but if Madison decides she’s not dealing, there’s no changing her mind.”
“Did they ask to have a psychiatrist examine her?”
“They did. But I said I’d have to think about that. When they left, I called a lawyer. He told me that unless there was a court order, I should refuse. So that’s what I did.”
“And you’re keeping her with you…?”
“To protect her,” Leon whispered. “She’s in a bad place right now. She’s in grave danger. And she’s my daughter.”
I nodded. Leon had the yearbook on his lap, both hands pressing it down as if, but for that, it might fly away and disappear.
“So how do you want to do this?”
“I’ll get together whatever I have,” he patted the yearbook, “and call you when it’s ready.”
I picked up the pen and pad. “How do you spell her doctor’s name?” I asked him.
Leon looked surprised for a moment and then reached for the pad and pen, writing down the doctor’s name. “I’ll work on the things you need after Madison goes to sleep,” he said.
I nodded. “I’d like to say good-bye to her, to Madison.”
Leon got up, and Dashiell and I trailed after him past the bathroom to Madison’s door. Leon knocked and waited but there was no answer, nor was there any sound coming from inside that would make you think Madison might not have heard the knock. When he lifted his hand again, I shook my head.
“Another time,” I said.
There was a horseshoe hung over the apartment door, open side up to catch good luck. If any family needed it, it was this one.
Walking home along Hudson Street, I thought about the chess players we’d passed in the park, hunched over the inlaid boards at the small square tables in the southwestern corner of the park, the kibitzers standing all around watching every move. It was getting kind of cool for outdoor chess but the players would be there until the snow came, maybe even afterwards. That’s how it was when you had an obsession. Something that would make another person stop and think, or turn away, foul weather, say, or the fear of running afoul of the law, might not even slow you down. Was that the way it had been for Leon? And what, I wondered, had it been for Sally?
CHAPTER 3
I unlocked the wrought iron gate that leads to the tunnel formed by the town houses on either side, picked up my mail and watched Dashiell run ahead into the cool October light that filled my garden. The small brick back cottage I rented was in the far left corner of the garden, an herb patch I’d planted on the side facing the town house my landlords owned, a cobalt blue water bowl on the far side of the stairs where Dashiell was taking a long, noisy drink. I sat down on the steps leading to my front door and opened the mail, three offers of credit cards, all preapproved, a free pass to one of the local gyms, an envelope full of discount coupons, three catalogs.
I unlocked the door and left it open for Dashiell, who was inspecting the land, first checking the perimeter, then quartering the yard looking for something that would require his attention. Today was also the day we’d check out the town house to make sure no one had broken in and that everything was working properly, the job that earned me a rent so low I could afford to live in Greenwich Village, the increasingly unaffordable neighborhood where no matter what changed, I still felt most at home.
Leon had a different kind of deal. I knew the building anyway, but the signs were all there as well, no doorman during the day, a small, no-frills lobby, halls that could have used a paint job. Leon’s deal was called rent stabilization, one of the factors that gave the city its remarkable diversity, allowing the old, the young, the newly arrived, the fresh out of school as well as artists, writers, actors and photographers to live here. The young managed by taking on roommates. Others, the newly arrived, lived in the outer boroughs, the Russians in Brooklyn, the Chinese in Queens. And the luckiest ones, many of the city’s elderly and everyone in Leon’s building, survived because their landlords were bound by laws which limited the percentage they could raise a tenant’s rent.
I picked up the key to the town house, whistled to Dashiell, and we went back out the front gate, locking it behind us. We went up the steps to the front door of the town house, unlocking both locks and stepping into the small hall that led first to the library and next to the living room. The Siegals had been home only for three weeks in the last six months and the house looked more like a museum to me than a home. The Siegals’ house, since they owned more than one, was not crammed full of a lifetime of personal artifacts. But even with the ones that were here, photos of their parents and their children, the collection of hand-carved wooden animals from all over the globe, the paintings of flowers in the living room, the house didn’t seem to have the personal feeling of a lived-in space.
Leon’s apartment was different, and though the living room had a sparse coolness to it, little furniture and black-and-white photos on the white walls, the rest of the apartment, at least the parts I had seen so far, were cluttered with the detritus of the occupants—peeled-off clothing that had been tossed on the backs of the dining room chairs, piles of negatives and contact sheets on Leon’s messy desk, a red wagon, like the one I used
as a coffee table, filled with toilet paper parked between the kitchen and the bathroom. There were canisters on the kitchen counters, tea and coffee, perhaps cookies in one, signs of life that were missing in the Siegal house. In fact, on those occasions when my landlords blew into town, they ate out every night, went to the opera, the theater, a museum or two, and then they’d be off again, to England or Italy or Greece.
Would the way Leon’s space looked make more sense when I got to know him better, the blackboard scribbled with notes over his busy desk, the dining room table covered with at least a week’s worth of mail, most of it not yet opened, and then the stark living room? There were no plants, no rugs, no knickknacks, no doodads, nothing collected in a trip to Denmark or Kenya, no photos of Sally or any other family member, just the three of Madison and those weren’t in the living room. They were over the dining room table. I’d stopped there for a moment on the way out. Madison at two holding a small wooden giraffe. Madison at what looked like four reading a book, precocious like her mother. Madison at six holding up a drawing the way kids do, proffering favorite artifacts to the eye of the camera. Nothing more recent. Nothing, it seemed, since her mother had disappeared, as if she, Madison, had disappeared along with her.
Dashiell and I took the stairs down to the Siegals’ huge kitchen. I checked the windows, he checked the odors. With nothing out of the ordinary there, I sent him on ahead to check all the rooms, following slowly behind him. Anything I found might need a glazier or perhaps a plumber. What he might find would be of more concern, and while I checked for signs of break-ins, too, Dashiell was the one who would actually find the intruder were there one. There was nothing to worry about this time. When I got to the top-floor bedrooms, I opened the back windows to give the place some air. I’d stop back and close them in a day or two.
We always left by the back door, emerging into the light of the garden. Dashiell followed me into the cottage and up to my office on the second floor. I sat at the desk, thinking about Madison, about the tics that the late Dr. Eric Bechman was treating with Botox. I turned on the laptop and Googled Botox to see what I could find and discovered that Botox is not only used for wrinkles, but that it’s used medically as well, to mitigate the pain of migraine headaches and to stop the muscle spasms of Tourette’s syndrome. Leon hadn’t mentioned Tourette’s. He hadn’t mentioned any disease, just the fact that Madison suffered from tics. I wondered if it was Tourette’s, and if so, what the timing was in Madison’s diagnosis and her mother’s departure.
Botox, or botulin toxin A, paralyzes muscles. That had been the point, of course, in injecting it into the muscles that controlled Madison’s eyelid. And even though it had caused ptosis, or drooping, rather than merely stopping the tics, Dr. Bechman, it seemed, had planned on injecting the other eyelid. Wasn’t that why there’d been a hypodermic needle there, already filled?
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what that injection might do to any other muscle, including the heart. Even a kid, say a twelve-year-old, could figure that out.
I thought about the little girl I’d met that day. She wasn’t the same little girl I’d seen in the three portraits her father had taken. The little girl in the pictures was serious, not smiling at the camera for Daddy. But the little girl I’d met in Washington Square Park was seething with anger, and from what I had already learned, with good reason.
And what about her mother? Had Sally been angry, too, trapped by a pregnancy at fifteen? I thought about the girls who got pregnant when I was in high school, Amy Mandel and Claire something or other. Amy had married her boyfriend. They were both seventeen. They had a boy. I heard later that they got divorced and that Amy and the kid had moved back home, to her parents’ house. Claire disappeared for the rest of the term, and when she came back to school she was neither married nor did she have a child. Someone said she gave it up for adoption. Someone else said that since she was a devout Catholic, abortion had been out of the question. But apparently sex hadn’t been.
I didn’t know of any other girls at school who were pregnant before graduation, but I’m sure there were a few others. And I didn’t know of any girls who were having sex with their teachers, something frowned upon by society in general and by the state of New York in particular. But we all knew things happened. Every girl in the school knew never to be caught alone with Mr. Margolies. We called him the Groper. And there were rumors about two of the gym teachers as well, Ms. Edison and Mr. Morris. Mr. Morris was married, but still the rumors flew that he liked boys. Ms. Edison looked like a truck driver and everyone said she lived with another woman. If you got her for gym, she’d pat you on the ass when it was your turn to play, or if you got a basket, ran faster than you had the day before or simply stood close enough for her to reach you.
Leon said no one knew that Sally was pregnant. I wondered if that were so. I wondered if it might be possible to find someone who had gone to school with Sally Bruce, someone with a good memory and a loose tongue. I took out the little pad and made some more notes, then I transferred my questions to three-by-five cards and tacked them up to the bulletin board over the desk.
Sally’s classmates, one note said. I was sure Leon would put the yearbook in with the papers he was going to collect for me. But the one with her picture in it wouldn’t help. What I needed was the yearbook from Sally’s old school. That’s where her friends had been and that’s where, if there had been any rumors, they would have been. I bet the school library kept all the yearbooks. I added, “Name of high school where Leon taught and Sally went?” to the card.
After she’d married Leon, Sally didn’t make new friends. Or so Leon said. I’d have to check that out, too. And find out what she liked, what she did, who she was, all of which seemed to have changed when she got pregnant. And wasn’t that the case when I was in high school, too? Plans to go to college, hanging out with friends, senior trips, after-school clubs, all became a thing of the past. Suddenly everything was about the baby, the baby you didn’t plan for, the baby you didn’t want in the first place.
Leon hadn’t said what kind of dog Roy was and there were no pictures of him hanging over Leon’s desk, over the dining room table, on those stark white living room walls. Had Madison torn up the pictures of Roy, too?
I’d been hired to find Sally. In order to do that, I’d need to know more about whom she chose to take with her and whom she’d left behind. If there was a chance in the world she could be found in the first place.
I went downstairs to fix Dashiell’s dinner and think about my own, whether to order in a salad with some grilled chicken from Pepe Verde or a pizza. The Times was sitting unopened on the small table outside the kitchen where I’d dropped it after Dashiell had brought it in from where the delivery lady slid it through the curlicues in the fence. I got a card from her every Christmas. “Season’s Greetings from Estella Gonzalez, your New York Times delivery person,” it said, my reminder that a tip would be appreciated. I took the paper over to the couch and began to page through the depressing news, one page of it after another, stopping to read an article with the headline “Body Found at LaGuardia.”
“A headless body,” it said, “and a head, floated to the surface of the East River near a runway at LaGuardia Airport yesterday morning, the authorities said, but it was unclear whether they were from the same person.”
Who was I kidding, I thought, or more accurately, who was Leon kidding, hiring me to find his missing wife? Sooner or later, most missing people turn up dead like the poor chap who was found in the East River just yesterday. The body, the article said, was male, apparently a young man in his twenties. “No details about the head,” it said, “were available yesterday.”
What if it turned out that Sally Bruce Spector wasn’t alive and well in, say, San Francisco? What if it turned out that she was dead? Then what? Sure, I would have done my job, but what about Madison?
I dropped the paper and went back upstairs to my office, first looking in the phone book for a D
r. Eric Bechman and writing down his address. Then I did an Internet search to see what was out there, what if anything I could learn about the man Madison had supposedly killed.
CHAPTER 4
Everything was on the Internet now, instructions for making bombs, herbs guaranteed to enlarge your penis, sites listing the side effects of drugs, people’s family albums. No more little black corners needed to affix your precious photos in a real-life album. Now you could use a virtual one. Instead of baby books, infants had their own Web sites starting with their sonograms, scanned and put online as baby’s first picture.
Eric Bechman had no Web site, which wasn’t surprising, but something useful did come up when I searched, a two-paragraph article that had been in the Times two days after the murder. The article said that Eric Bechman, fifty-one, a pediatrician, had died suddenly and that the police suspected foul play. They were “following some leads,” an unnamed spokesperson for the department was quoted as saying, and the case was “under investigation.” There was, I was relieved to see, no mention at all of an underage suspect. I imagined that because of Madison’s age, any information about her had been withheld.
In the second paragraph it said that the doctor was survived by a wife, Marsha, and two sons, Alan and Rubin, all of Larchmont.
I checked the card tacked up over my desk. The doctor’s office was on Washington Square North, which meant it was in one of the capacious town houses along the north side of Washington Square Park. Not a bad commute, probably not much more than an hour, door-to-door. But perhaps the doctor stayed over in the city one or two nights a week anyway, the better to be at the hospital early in the morning or late in the evening. The better, sometimes, to have an evening or two away from the family and in better, or at least different, company.
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