Aphrodite

by Russell Andrews

  Or what?

  Justin decided his imagination was running away with him. The various answers to his question all suddenly seemed foolish. Or it was a front. Or it didn’t really exist. Or—

  Stop it, he told himself. This is exactly what you don’t do as a cop. You don’t imagine. You go for logic. You latch on to what’s real and understandable. There are no “or”s in police work. You eliminate them. That’s your entire job. You eliminate them and that’s how you find what’s real.

  Justin went back down to Elron who, miraculously, actually knew how to reach the building manager, a man named Byron Fromm. Byron Fromm turned out to be puffy and pale and maybe forty years old. When Justin showed him his badge and explained what he wanted, Byron Fromm got even puffier and paler.

  “Well, have they done anything wrong?” he wanted to know.

  “What I’m trying to do, Mr. Fromm, is actually find out who they are.”

  “You mean Growth Industries?”

  Justin nodded. “What do they do?”

  “Well,” Fromm said, his voice rising a notch above its normal pitch, “they’re in market research.”

  “For whom?”

  “Don’t know. For whoever hires them, I guess, but that’s really none of my business.”

  “Do you know how long they’ve been here?”

  “They were our very first tenant. They’ve been here since we opened in 1972. You know, at the time, we were the only mall in town. This was a very classy address then. It still should be but they’ve kind of let it run down a bit.”

  “And who is that?”

  “The real estate company that built it. Alexis. The Alexis Development Company.”

  “Why do you think they’ve let it run down?” Justin asked.

  “Why? Why does anybody do anything? Or rather not do anything? Money. Either they don’t have it or they have it but don’t want to spend it. Those are the only choices, aren’t they?”

  Justin had to agree with him. But those choices weren’t what interested him. ”Do you know who owns this building?”

  “I work for the people who manage the mall. That’s who I know. I deal with the individual tenants. I’m responsible for upkeep, within a budget, and day-to-day stuff like security and tenant complaints. The owner deals directly with my contact at Alexis. Bert Stiles.”

  “Growth Industries,” Justin said. “They pay their rent on time?”

  “Never been a minute late.”

  “Why do you think there’s no one there right now? This is prime business time, right?”

  “It should be. Although, I gotta say, this place hasn’t had a prime business time in quite a few years.”

  “Mr. Fromm,” Justin said, slowly, “how’d you like to let me into room 301?”

  “Detective, I would be happy to. Except I quite like this job. It’s easy and they pay me really well. And, aside from the fact that you don’t have a warrant—do you have a warrant?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not even local. So I can’t see as there’s anything in it for me at all if I let you in. Except trouble.”

  Justin decided he’d hold off on his answer, give himself a few seconds to see if he could think of something other than trouble that just might be in it for Mr. Byron Fromm, but before he could come up with anything, his cell phone rang.

  “Yeah?” he said, answering it.

  It was Jimmy Leggett. “Where the hell are you?” the chief said. “Actually, I don’t care where you are. Just get the hell back.”

  “I thought it was my day off,” Justin said.

  “Not anymore,” Leggett said. “The shit’s hit the fan.”

  “What happened, Jimmy?”

  “We got another body, that’s what happened. We got another god-damn body.”

  “Who?”

  Leggett told him who it was and Justin heard his own sudden intake of breath.

  “Where?” he said. “When?”

  “I can’t give you any details over the phone. Just get back here.”

  “All right,” he told the chief, glancing over at Byron Fromm. “I just need about half an hour here to—”

  “No half hour,” Leggett cut him off. “I’ve been ordered to get you back ASAP.”

  “You’ve been ordered?” Justin asked. “Ordered by who?”

  “By me,” a strange voice said over the phone. Justin could hear the receiver being wrested away from his boss.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Special Agent Leonard Rollins. FBI. And that’s the end of your little Q and A, Detective. Get your ass back here. Now.”

  Justin heard the receiver at the other end of the line click off. His cell phone went dead. He stared at the pale, overweight man standing in front of him. A harsh rock song blared into his head. Nick Cave. Is there anybody out there, please? It’s too quiet in here and I’m starting to freeze. Under fifteen feet of clear white snow …

  The words and music felt as if they were going to smother him. It was exactly the way he felt: freezing and isolated, buried under an unbearable weight.

  “Something wrong, Detective?” Byron Fromm asked.

  “Yeah,” he told the building manager, and he thought the man looked a little too gleeful, as if whatever information had just been transmitted over the phone had somehow gotten him off the precarious hook he was on in his shabby-and-getting-shabbier suburban sanctuary. “Life’s about as wrong as it can possibly be.”

  12

  Before leaving the Weston mall, Justin went into a Barnes & Noble, strode over to the magazine rack, and stared at the rows of new magazines. By his count, eight of them had a picture of Maura Greer on the cover. Maura Greer, the onetime East End Harbor townie turned Washington intern who’d been missing for over three months. The girl whose body, according to Justin’s frantic boss, had just been found floating in East End Bay.

  Justin flipped through several of the magazines, read a page of Dominick Dunne’s theorizing in Vanity Fair, checked out what Mark Singer had to say in The New Yorker. He bought them both, along with a copy of Jump magazine. He drove back to the ferry and, as it cruised across the sound back to Long Island, he read the piece in Jump. Then he read it again. And then a third time.

  And he began to wonder if East End Harbor would ever again be the quiet little town it had been just forty-eight hours before.

  HEALTH, WEALTH, AND … DEATH?

  by

  Leslee Carter Reese

  On the day her daughter Maura disappeared, Rachel Greer had a psychic experience.

  It had never happened to her before, not like this. Before this particular Thursday it was just the usual I-knew-who-was-on-the-phone-the-moment-it-rang or I-was-just-thinking-about-you-exactly-when-you-called kind of thing. But on February 23, at four-fifteen in the afternoon, she felt a chill sweep through her entire body. The feeling was both disturbing and enthralling. It was as if a ghost had plunged inside her, filling her with the frigid sensation of death and the glowing power that she is now convinced came with her brief foray from this world to the next and back again.

  There is little question in her mind that a ghost did, in fact, plunge inside her.

  There is also little question in her mind that the ghost was her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Maura Devon Greer.

  Maura, who has been living in Washington, D.C., for the past eighteen months, interning at the Food and Drug Administration, has been missing for three months. She has, in essence, disappeared off the face of the earth, and her disappearance has not only caused scandal, it has disrupted the political landscape in a way not seen since the emergence of Monica Lewinsky or Chandra Levy. It has stirred widespread national debate from both the left and right about the nature of the media. In our post–September 11 world we were all going to be focused on the serious and pressing issues that swirl around us. The emphasis on celebrityhood was over, as was our obsession with scandal, sex, and frivolity. Yet, since this young Jewish girl disappear
ed, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio call-in shows seem to have done little but speculate about the sordid details of Maura Greer’s life and presumed death.

  It is essential to the well-being of the United States and our efforts to cope with the potential threat of biological warfare that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring, function without distraction. Instead, the search for Maura Greer has damaged Secretary Manwaring’s credibility, possibly beyond repair, and put a stranglehold on his effectiveness.

  But most of all, Maura’s disappearance has caused heartache for her family. In the midst of our global obsession with terrorism, it is easy to forget that there are other, smaller tragedies in life. Unless, of course, you happen to be living in the middle of such a tragedy.

  Maura Greer left her one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., at approximately four o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, February 23. It is presumed that she went to pick up her car, a three-year-old silver Honda Accord, in the underground garage beneath her apartment building. Although she was not spotted there, the garage was vandalized and the attendant, Hector Diaz, has also been missing since that day. (For a time, Mr. Diaz was a suspect in the disappearance, but police have since ruled out that possibility.) According to a neighbor who saw her in the hallway on her way out, there was nothing about Maura’s demeanor that struck him as strange. He did say that she was dressed rather provocatively, but Maura usually dressed provocatively. She had never been a shy girl, and that aggressiveness carried over to her sexuality. She was never afraid to voice her opinions or take over a room with her personality or use her body to give her an advantage. There was only one area of her life about which Maura seemed to turn inward, reticent to reveal details even to her closest friends: her relationship with the current man in her life.

  “For the longest time, she would talk about it only in vague generalities,” said her best friend since childhood, Gay Chilcott. “I’d ask her who she was seeing and she’d get this beatific smile on her face and say things like, ‘You’ll meet him soon,’ or ‘It’s going really well but I can’t talk about it yet.’ It didn’t take a genius to figure out she was going out with a married man. From a few hints that she dropped, it was pretty obvious it was also an older married man. Then, about two weeks before she died …I mean, disappeared … she became a little more open. Started revealing a few details. She told me that he was fifty. And that he was a great lover. She also told me he was very important and she made it pretty clear he was with the government. One of the last times I talked to her on the phone she said that there was a decent chance she’d get to go to the White House and meet the president soon.”

  According to friends and family, Maura’s affair had been going on for at least six months, probably closer to eight. Those who knew about the affair also knew that she expected her lover to leave his wife—and marry Maura.

  “She was certain that she was going to be the winner in this relationship tug-of-war,” Chilcott says. “I told her that men do sometimes leave their wives—but I sure as hell wouldn’t count on it. But people believe what they want to believe in situations like that. And Maura believed that everything would end up happily ever after.”

  So far, things have ended up anything but happily. Whether that unhappiness is forever depends on two things. Will Maura Greer turn up alive? And what will happen to her married lover—our current secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring?

  Manwaring has denied any role in Maura’s disappearance. For weeks he also denied that he and the young intern had been having an affair, but recently, as incontrovertible evidence of the affair was publicly released by the Greer family, the secretary made a televised confession and apology. Maura’s parents do not believe the confession went far enough. And they most certainly do not accept the apology.

  “He denied his relationship with Maura until we forced him to admit it,” says Maura’s father, Marcus. While Rachel is strong and definite in her belief that their daughter is the victim of foul play, Marcus can’t speak about Maura without weeping, and he says he prays every day for her safe return. “Everything Frank Manwaring says has been a lie—until someone forces him to tell the truth.”

  Having an affair, of course, is a far cry from committing murder. And while it’s not been proven that everything Secretary Manwaring has said about his relationship with Maura Greer has been false, many of his statements have been reticent and incomplete. Police feel he has been less than forthcoming. Maura’s parents believe he has not only hindered the investigation, they are convinced that he should be at the center of it.

  On Friday, February 24, Maura was supposed to visit her parents in East End Harbor, a small town on the outskirts of Long Island’s chic Hamptons. It was Marcus’s birthday on Saturday, and Maura was going to spend the weekend celebrating. Marcus had reserved an hour of tennis at a local indoor court on both Saturday and Sunday because Maura loved to play tennis and they had a friendly competition going back to Maura’s teens. Rachel made a salon appointment for both mother and daughter on that Saturday afternoon. They were going to get facials, manicures, and pedicures. “She loved being pampered,” Rachel says. “And I loved being able to pamper my daughter.”

  Marcus went to the train station to pick up Rachel. She was supposed to arrive on the 4 p.m. train. But when the train pulled away and the platform was cleared of people, there was no Maura. “At first I wasn’t too concerned,” Marcus says. “Maura was not always the most responsible person in the world, at least when it came to her parents. But when I called Rachel to see if Maura had called, she started talking about how she’d had a premonition. Rachel said that something bad had happened, that she’d felt it the day before but didn’t say anything.” So when he got home, Marcus called the Washington, D.C., police and said that Maura was missing. The D.C. police asked a few questions and, according to the Greers, basically dismissed their concern. “She hadn’t been missing long enough to be ‘missing,’” Rachel says, her voice tinged with anger. “We couldn’t get them to do anything for forty-eight hours.”

  When the police finally did decide to act, they went to Maura’s apartment. What they found was a spotless home with alphabetized CDs, a closet full of designer clothes, and nothing but two cans of Diet Coke and two cartons of unflavored yogurt in the fridge. Oh yes. They also found Maura’s purse. In it were her driver’s license and all of her credit cards.

  “Why would she leave her purse?” Rachel asks. “We think it’s because she was told to leave it behind. We believe that Secretary Man-waring didn’t want her to meet him if she was carrying any identification. From the things that Maura said about the relationship, the man she was seeing was obsessed with secrecy. He had all sorts of rules for her to follow when she met him. We believe that this was one of those rules. It’s why we believe she was on her way to meet him when she disappeared.”

  Manwaring did indeed try to keep the affair secret. Not only is he married with two college-age children, he is in a highly visible and sensitive cabinet position, appointed by a president whose popularity is partly based on his constant reaffirmation of his belief in and the country’s need for faith and traditional family values. He is the tough, honest, anti-scandal leader. That is the image he ran on, it is the image that has kept his poll numbers higher than those of any president in recent memory, and it is the image he insists on maintaining for himself and his advisers. Manwaring’s affair does not conform to that image. It is not just damaging to the president on a political level. According to several advisers, it offends the president’s personal sensibility.

  Although Manwaring at first denied that he was meeting Maura the day she disappeared, the Greers also forced him to admit the truth about that. Maura had a reservation at a local Marriott Hotel and was due to check in the afternoon of February 23. Manwaring admitted, nearly a month after Maura went missing, that he was supposed to meet her there and spend the afternoon and evening with her in the suite they
regularly frequented.

  Two weeks after Maura’s disappearance, the D.C. police had uncovered no clues and had no leads in the case. They had not made a connection to Manwaring at this point. That came after the Greers got their phone bill. While scrutinizing it, Marcus Greer noticed that there were several long-distance calls made that month to a Washington number he was unfamiliar with. He realized that the dates of the calls coincided with the last weekend Maura had visited East End Harbor. He mentioned this to Rachel, who immediately went to the phone and dialed the number. It was a pager. Fifteen minutes later, the Greers’ phone rang. The call to the pager was being returned. The person who returned it was Secretary Frank Manwaring.

  The Greers asked Manwaring if he knew their daughter. He was nonplussed, they say, and evasive. He refused to speak to them. They immediately took their information to the Washington police. It took the police another four days before they contacted Manwaring. They went to his D.C. apartment, interviewed him for half an hour, then released a statement that the secretary knew Maura Greer, they were friends and nothing more, and that he had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance. The police announced that he was not a suspect.

  The media immediately jumped on the story. Two days after it was made public, a woman named Eva Grey called a press conference. Ms. Grey is a lap dancer at a Washington club called Privates. At the conference, she revealed that several years earlier she had had a four-month-long affair with Secretary Manwaring. The affair ended, she said, when she confronted him about his promise to leave his wife. According to Ms. Grey, the secretary got violent during the conversation. She alleges that he choked her until she almost passed out and told her that if she ever brought up the subject of his divorce again, he would make sure she disappeared. Secretary Manwaring immediately called a press conference to say that not only was Ms. Grey’s story untrue, he had never met her or heard of her.