I hadn’t wanted Pop to have a storefront anymore. I didn’t know what I was doing to him when I put him in charge of my new restaurant. He was miserable. Mom missed being in the kitchen, too. Their high-class son wouldn’t let them be who they are.
Nick DeMarco, the big success, voted bachelor of the month, the guy the girls chased, he thought, with an edge of bitterness. Nick DeMarco, the big risk-taker. And now maybe it’s Nick DeMarco, the fool who took one chance too many.
Leesey Andrews.
Did anyone hear me offer to help her get a start in show business? It wasn’t on the camera when I gave her the card with my address, but did anyone happen to see me slide it over to her?
33
On Tuesday morning, Captain Larry Ahearn and Detective Bob Gaylor, both relatively fresh from six hours’ sleep, were back in the tech room of the District Attorney’s office, reviewing security tapes from the three other nightclubs in which young women had last been seen before they disappeared.
The cases of all three young women, Emily Valley, Rosemarie Cummings, and Virginia Trent, had been reopened. The grainy photos from Emily Valley’s case, now ten years old, had been sharpened and brightened by the latest in cutting-edge technology. In the crowd of students who had entered the club, named The Scene, it was possible to identify clearly Mack MacKenzie and Nick DeMarco.
“When we started looking for Emily Valley, all those Columbia kids came forward in a group after we contacted the ones who signed with credit cards,” Ahearn commented, thinking aloud. “It was only a month or so after we talked to all of them that the MacKenzie boy disappeared. Looking back, maybe we should have treated that disappearance as suspicious and tied it to the Valley case.”
“He doesn’t show up in any security videos of the clubs where the other missing girls were hanging out. Of course, it was three years later that the Cummings girl vanished, and the Trent girl was four years ago. In all that time, he could have changed his appearance a lot. He was heavy into dramatics in prep school and in college,” Gaylor pointed out.
“I’d have sworn that DeMarco is our guy, but the missing tapes from the drama teacher’s apartment and the reference to Mother’s Day throw it back into Mack MacKenzie’s court,” Ahearn said, frustration in his tone and on his face. “How has he managed to hide for ten years? What is he living on? How can he be moving between Brooklyn and Manhattan carrying her cell phone without somebody spotting him? Every cop in New York has an age-enhanced picture of him. And where did he keep Leesey from the time she disappeared till the time she made that call Saturday? And if she’s still alive, where is he keeping her now?”
“And what is he doing to her?” Roy Barrott asked bitterly.
Neither of his associates had heard him come into the tech room. They both looked up, startled.
“You’re supposed to be home getting some sleep,” Ahearn said.
Barrott shook his head. “I did. I got as much as I need anyway. Listen, I just stopped at the tech room. They finished enhancing the two pictures that Leesey’s roommate, Kate, took of her, including the one we used on the poster. She took these two pictures less than a minute after she snapped pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their kids. We can now see the faces of the people in the background.”
“And what did you find?” Ahearn asked.
“Look at this picture. See if you recognize the guy on the left.”
“It’s DeMarco!” Ahearn said, then repeated it as if he could not believe what he was seeing. “DeMarco!”
“Exactly,” Barrott confirmed. “DeMarco never told us he had been in Greenwich Village a week before Leesey disappeared and was across the street when Kate took her picture. He also told us that when he isn’t using his SUV, he drives a Mercedes convertible. There wasn’t any mention of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes sedan.”
Ahearn stood up. “I think it’s time we invite this guy back for some more questioning and squeeze him real hard,” he said. “It would have been easy for him to have his chauffeur get Leesey out of his loft apartment in the middle of the night and hide her somewhere. Our guys keep coming up with new stuff on him. DeMarco’s bought a lot of property, with not much money down. He’s on thin ice, financially. If he loses the liquor license from that fancy new Woodshed place, he could end up back in Queens running a pasta joint.” Ahearn looked at Bob Gaylor. “Bring him in.”
“Ten to one he’ll have a lawyer with him,” Barrott snapped. “I’m surprised he took a chance on coming in alone last week.”
34
Mother was scheduled to fly home from Greece on Wednesday, and my anxiety was mounting. Elliott had come over after my frantic phone call to him on Monday evening to calm me down. There was something intensely comforting to me about the way he took everything that I had to tell him, including the fact that Aaron Klein, his designated successor at Wallace and Madison, now believed that Mack was responsible for his mother’s death.
“That’s absolute nonsense,” Elliott said emphatically. “Aaron forgets he told me at the time nothing had been taken from her apartment. I remember his words clearly—‘Why would someone have killed my mother, stolen her key, and not bothered to rob the apartment?’ I told him that whoever killed her was probably a drug addict who panicked when he realized she was dead. Aaron has been fixated on trying to find someone to blame for his mother’s death for ages, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to try to pin it on Mack.”
There was nothing formal or reserved about Elliott’s heated response. Dad himself could not have been more vehement. I think that was the moment when any hesitation I felt about the growing closeness between Mom and Elliott disappeared for good. It was also the moment when I decided to drop “Uncle” and call him Elliott.
We agreed that it was inevitable I would be called in for questioning about Mack and that we had to hire a defense lawyer. “I will not allow Mack to be tried and convicted in the newspapers,” Elliott swore. “I’ll search around and get the best person I can find.”
We also agreed that we had to let Mom know what was going on. “It won’t be long before an enterprising reporter links Mack’s disappearance with that of the missing girl, because of the reference to Mother’s Day,” Elliott decided. “Worse yet, I wouldn’t put it past the detectives to leak it to the media deliberately. Your mother must not look as if she’s hiding from them.”
Elliott made the call and suggested gently that she head home early. By the time Mom got home on Wednesday evening, everything Elliott had predicted had come to pass. The media, like bloodhounds on a fresh scent, had effectively reopened the cases of the other three young women who had disappeared from nightclubs, and reported the fact that Mack and his college friends had been present at The Scene the night the first girl, Emily Valley, vanished. The Mother’s Day connection between Mack’s routine phone calls and Leesey Andrews’s message to her father was also headline news, of course.
Mom, Elliott’s arm around her firmly, had to fight her way past the cameras and microphones when she and Elliott arrived at Sutton Place. Her greeting to me was exactly what I expected but hoped wouldn’t happen. Circles under eyes that were swollen with weeping, for the first time looking every day of her sixty-two years, my mother said, “Carolyn, we agreed to let Mack live his own life. Now because of your meddling, my son is being hunted down like a criminal. Elliott has very kindly offered me the hospitality of his home. My bags are still in his car, and I intend to go there. In the meantime, you can contend with the mess out on the streets and make your apologies to our neighbors for destroying their privacy. Before I go I want to hear that tape.”
Quietly I retrieved the tape, then sat with her in the kitchen and played it for her. Mack’s voice, joking with his drama teacher, “Do I sound like Laurence Olivier or Tom Hanks?”—then—the dramatic change in his tone when he began to recite the Shakespeare quote.
When I turned it off, Mom’s face was pale with grief. “There was something wrong,” she whispered. “Why didn’t he com
e to me? Nothing could have been so bad that I wouldn’t have helped him.” Then she reached out her hand to me. “Give me the tape, Carolyn,” she said.
“Mom, I can’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a subpoena for it. You think it means Mack was in trouble. Another explanation is that he was simply reading a drama assignment. Elliott and I are meeting tomorrow morning with a criminal defense lawyer. I need to have it with me to play for him.”
Without another word, my mother turned from me. Elliott whispered, “I’ll call you later,” before he rushed down the hall after her. When they were gone, I turned on the tape again. “ . . . I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries—”
Mack may have been acting, or he might have been talking about himself, but with a combination of pain and bitterness, I thought that now those words were fully applicable to me. A couple of minutes later, the apartment phone rang. As I picked it up and said, “Hello,” whoever was on the other end hung up.
35
He couldn’t get enough of the new media stories about the other three girls, Emily, Rosemarie, and Virginia. He remembered them all so clearly. Emily had been the first. The newspapers hadn’t made too much of her disappearance at the beginning. She had been a runaway, so when she once again didn’t come home to Trenton, New Jersey, even her parents conceded it was possible she had simply chosen to disappear.
But when Rosemarie went missing three years later, they began to think it was possible Emily had been abducted. Then, when Virginia vanished four years ago, the media had a field day connecting the three of them.
Of course, it didn’t last. Every so often some would-be Pulitzer Prize winner would write a feature story linking the three young women, but with nothing new to report, the public’s interest dropped to zero.
Leesey had changed all that. “Mack, where are you now?” was the question on everyone’s lips.
Dressed in a hooded running suit and wearing dark glasses, he was jogging on Sutton Place. As he expected, it was crowded with media vans. Wonderful, he thought, wonderful. He removed the small metal box from his pocket, unsnapped it, and took out Leesey’s cell phone. Now when he dialed, they’d be able to pinpoint his location as being around here. But that’s what I want, isn’t it? he asked himself with a smile, as he dialed the phone number of the apartment, waited to hear Carolyn answer the call, then disconnected. Then, quickening his pace, he disappeared into the brisk pedestrian traffic on Fifty-seventh Street.
36
Bruce Galbraith and his wife, Dr. Barbara Hanover Galbraith, had, so far as possible, avoided talking about Mack MacKenzie. But finally, on Wednesday evening, after the children were in bed and they had finished watching the ten o’clock news, Bruce knew he had to raise the subject.
They were in the library of their spacious Park Avenue apartment. Whenever Bruce was away on a business trip, the realization of how happy he was in his home and with his family hit him afresh. Barbara had changed to light green pajamas and unpinned her ash blond hair so that it fell loose on her shoulders. He had long since passed the days when he felt clumsy and awkward in her presence, but even so, the sense that he might one day wake up and find he’d been dreaming, that life as he knew it was an illusion, always lingered in his subconscious.
He had witnessed the growing tension in Barbara for the past few days since the media began linking Mack to the disappearance of Leesey Andrews, the girl from Connecticut, and then to the murder of the drama teacher.
During the broadcast, with the jealousy he had never overcome, Bruce had watched his wife’s face when pictures of Mack were flashed on the screen. After he pushed the power button on the remote and watched the screen turn dark, he knew it was time to discuss what needed to be done.
“Barb,” he said, “I was in the nightclub the night that first girl disappeared.”
“I know, but so were twenty other guys from Columbia, including Nick and Mack,” Barbara said, avoiding his eyes.
“Carolyn MacKenzie called me, but I haven’t returned her call. I’ll bet anything that she follows up on it. As the police investigation widens, it’s inevitable they’ll look me up. Nick and I were Mack’s roommates, after all.”
He watched as his wife tried to force back tears. “What are you driving at?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
“I think you and the kids should visit your father in Martha’s Vineyard. He’s had three heart attacks. No one would question it if you tell people he’s in bad shape again.”
“What about school?”
“For what we’re paying, we can arrange to get lesson plans and a private tutor. The school year is over in a few weeks’ time anyhow.”
He saw the uncertainty on his wife’s face. “Barbara, you joined a practice with two other pediatric surgeons so you’d have a measure of control over your personal life. I would say this is a time to assert that control.”
He got up, walked over to her, bent down, and kissed the top of her head. “I could kill Mack for what he did to you,” he said quietly.
“I’m over it, Bruce. I really am.”
No you’re not, he thought. But I’ve learned to live with that, and there’s no way on God’s earth I’ll let Mack hurt you again.
37
On Wednesday evening, shortly after Mom and Elliott left, Detective Barrott phoned. I had thought that things couldn’t get much worse, but I was wrong. Barrott quietly asked if I knew that the call I had just received, that I had thought was a wrong number, had been made from Leesey Andrews’s cell phone. I was so shocked that I think it was a full minute before I said something like, “But that’s impossible.” I paused to digest the fact. “That’s absolutely impossible.”
Barrott curtly assured me that it was true and did I think it was my brother trying to reach me?
“When I answered it, someone hung up. I thought it had to be a wrong number. Can’t you tell that I didn’t speak to anyone?” I asked him angrily.
“We know that. We also know that this is an unlisted phone in your home, Ms. MacKenzie. Make no mistake. If your brother is the one who has Leesey’s phone, and if he tries again to contact you and you do not help us find him, you could become an accessory to a very serious crime.”
I didn’t answer him. I simply broke off the connection.
Sometime between four and seven A.M. on Thursday morning, I decided to phone Lucas Reeves and ask to meet with him as soon as possible. I needed help from someone I could trust to be thorough and impartial. I had already seen, from studying his file on Mack, that he had done a good job interviewing seemingly every possible person who had been close to my brother. The opinion he had given Dad was very clear. “There is nothing in your son’s background that would suggest he was experiencing a problem that would cause him to flee. I would not rule out the possibility of a mental illness that he had successfully concealed from everyone.”
Elliott and I were meeting at noon at the office of Thurston Carver, the criminal defense lawyer whom Elliott had found to represent us. At nine A.M., I phoned Reeves. He was not in yet, but his secretary promised he would call me back as soon as he arrived. It was obvious that she recognized my name. A half hour later, he returned the call. As briefly as possible, I explained what had happened. “Is there any chance you could see me this morning?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my voice.
His voice was deep and resonant as he answered. “I’ll rearrange my schedule. Where is your meeting with the lawyer?”
“On Park and Forty-fifth,” I said, “the MetLife Building.”
“My phone number is the same, but I moved my office two years ago. I’m on Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, just a few blocks down from MetLife. Can you be here at ten thirty?”
Yes, I could. I was already showered and dressed. The unpredictable weather had served up another blustery day. Looking out the window at people wearing jackets and keeping their hands in their pockets, I changed from the light suit I
had planned to wear to a velour running suit, which made me look less like a lawyer and more like somebody’s sister. I won’t say that it flattered me. It was dark gray, and when I looked in the mirror I could see that it brought out the circles under my eyes and the unusual paleness of my skin. I don’t usually bother with much makeup during the day, but I took the time to use foundation, a touch of eye shadow, blush, mascara, and lip gloss. All tarted up in defense of my brother, I thought, then hated the bitterness in my thinking.
If only I had not gone to see Detective Barrott. If only I had not found the tape in Mack’s suitcase. Useless thoughts.
I could feel the beginning of a headache, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I went down to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, and toasted an English muffin. I carried it to the breakfast alcove and sat at the table, gazing at the spectacular view of the East River. Thanks to the strong breeze, the current was visibly swift, and I found myself identifying with it. I was being carried by a current I could not fight, and I had to let it take me along until it either overwhelmed or released me.
I had been glad that Mom was in Greece for those few days and I had the apartment to myself. But that was when she was supposed to be somewhere else. It was incredible to me that she was in New York and not staying in her own home, but when I left the apartment, I understood why. The media trucks were there in full force, and reporters rushed to me looking for a statement. This is what happened to her last night, I thought.
I had phoned down to the doorman to hail a cab for me, and he had one waiting. Ignoring the microphones, I jumped into it and said, “Start driving.” I didn’t want anyone to overhear my destination. Twenty minutes later, I was in the reception room of Lucas Reeves’s office. Promptly at ten thirty, he escorted a tense-looking couple, whom I guessed to be other clients, to the outer door, looked around, and came over to me. “Ms. MacKenzie, come right in.”
Where Are You Now? Page 13