Pretend You Don't See Her

by Mary Higgins Clark

  The pages she had picked up in Isabelle’s room were in Lacey’s briefcase now. Isabelle had made her swear to give them only to Heather’s father. She had wanted her to show him something that was in them. But show him what? she wondered. And shouldn’t she tell the police about them?

  “Lacey, drink some coffee. You need it.”

  Rick was crouching beside her, holding a steaming cup out to her. He had already explained to the detectives that he had no reason to question a phone call from a man claiming to be an attorney with Keller, Roland, and Smythe, an attorney transferring to New York from Texas. “We do a lot of business with the firm,” Rick had explained. “I saw no reason to call and confirm.”

  “And you’re sure this Caldwell guy is the one you saw running out of here, Ms. Farrell?”

  The older of the two detectives was about fifty and heavyset. But he’s light on his feet, Lacey thought, her mind wandering. He’s like that actor who was Dad’s friend, the one who played the father in the revival of My Fair Lady. He sang “Get Me to the Church on Time.” What was his name?

  “Ms. Farrell?” An edge of impatience had crept into the detective’s voice.

  Lacey looked back up at him. Detective Ed Sloane, that was this man’s name, she thought. But she still couldn’t remember the name of the actor. What had Sloane asked her? Oh, yes. Was Curtis Caldwell the man she’d seen running down the stairs from Isabelle’s bedroom?

  “I’m absolutely sure it was the same man,” she said. “He was carrying a pistol and the leather binder.”

  Mentally she gave herself a hard slap. She hadn’t meant to talk about the journal. She had to think all this through before talking about it.

  “The leather binder?” Detective Sloane’s tone became sharp. “What leather binder? That’s the first you’ve mentioned it.”

  Lacey sighed. “I really don’t know. It was open on Isabelle’s desk this afternoon. It’s one of those leather binders that zips closed. Isabelle was reading the pages in it when we were in here earlier.” She should tell them about the pages that weren’t inside the leather binder when Caldwell took it. Why wasn’t she telling them? she thought. Because she’d sworn to Isabelle that she would give them to Heather’s father. Isabelle had struggled to stay alive until she had heard Lacey’s promise. She couldn’t go back on her word...

  Suddenly Lacey felt her legs begin to shake. She tried to hold them still by pressing her hands on her knees, but they still wouldn’t stop trembling.

  “I think we’d better get a doctor for you, Ms. Farrell,” Sloane said.

  “I just want to go home,” Lacey whispered. “Please let me go home.”

  She knew Rick was saying something to the detective in a low voice, something she couldn’t hear, didn’t really want to hear. She rubbed her hands together. Her fingers were sticky. She looked down, then gasped. She hadn’t realized that her hands were sticky with Isabelle’s blood.

  “Mr. Parker is going to take you home, Ms. Farrell,” Detective Sloane was saying. “We’ll talk to you more tomorrow. When you’ve rested.” His voice was very loud, Lacey thought. Or was it? No. It was just that she was hearing Isabelle scream Don’t... !

  Was Isabelle’s body still crumpled on the bed? she wondered.

  Lacey felt hands under her arms, urging her to stand. “Come on, Lacey,” Rick was saying.

  Obediently she got up, allowed herself to be guided through the door, then down the foyer. Curtis Caldwell had stood in the foyer that afternoon. He had heard what Isabelle said to her about not selling the apartment.

  “He didn’t wait in the living room,” she said.

  “Who didn’t?” Rick asked.

  Lacey didn’t answer. Suddenly she remembered her briefcase. That’s where the pages from the journal were.

  She remembered the feel of the pages in her hand, crumpled, blood soaked. That’s where the blood came from. Detective Sloane had asked her if she had touched Isabelle.

  She had told him that she had held Isabelle’s hand as she died.

  He must have noticed the blood on her fingers. There must be blood on her briefcase too. Lacey had a sudden moment of total clarity. If she asked Rick to get it for her from the closet, he would notice the blood on the handle. She had to get it herself. And keep them from seeing it until she could wipe it clean.

  There were so many people milling around. Flashes of light. They were taking pictures. Looking for fingerprints, dusting powder on tables. Isabelle wouldn’t have liked that, Lacey thought. She was so neat.

  Lacey paused at the staircase and looked up toward the second floor. Was Isabelle still lying there? she wondered. Had they covered her body?

  Rick’s arm was firmly around her. “Come on, Lacey,” he said, urging her toward the door.

  They were passing the closet where she had put her briefcase.

  I can’t ask him to get it for me, Lacey reminded herself. Breaking away, she opened the closet door and grabbed her briefcase in her left hand.

  “I’ll carry it,” Rick told her.

  Deliberately she sagged against him, weighing down his arm with her right hand, making him support her, tightening her grip on the handle of her briefcase.

  “Lacey, I’ll get you home,” Rick promised.

  She felt as though everyone’s eyes were staring at her, staring at the bloody briefcase. Was this the way a thief felt? she wondered. Go back. Give them the journal; it’s not yours to take, a voice inside her insisted.

  Isabelle’s blood was on those pages. It’s not mine to give, either, she thought hopelessly.

  When they reached the lobby, a young police officer came up to them. “I’ll drive you, Miss Farrell. Detective Sloane wants to make sure you get home okay.”

  Lacey’s apartment was on East End Avenue at Seventy-ninth Street. When they arrived there, Rick wanted to come upstairs with her, but she demurred. “I just want to go to bed,” she said, and kept shaking her head at his protests that she shouldn’t be alone.

  “Then I’ll call you first thing in the morning,” he promised.

  She lived on the eighth floor and was alone in the elevator as it made what seemed to be an interminably long ascent before stopping. The corridor reminded her of the one outside Isabelle’s front door, and Lacey looked around fearfully as she ran down it.

  Once inside her apartment, the first thing she did was to shove the briefcase under the couch. The living room windows overlooked the East River. For long minutes Lacey stood at one of the windows, watching the lights as they flickered across the water. Finally, even though she was shivering, she opened the window and gulped in the fresh, cool night air. The sense of unreality that had overwhelmed her for the past several hours was beginning to dissipate, but in its place was an aching awareness of being as tired as she had ever felt in her life. Turning, she looked at the clock.

  Ten-thirty. Only a little over twenty-four hours ago, she had refused to pick up the phone and talk to Isabelle. Now Isabelle would never call her again...

  Lacey froze. The door! Had she double-locked the door? She ran to check it.

  Yes, she had, but now she threw the dead bolt and wedged a chair under the handle. She realized suddenly that she was shaking again. I’m afraid, she thought, and my hands are sticky—sticky with Isabelle Waring’s blood.

  Her bathroom was large for a New York apartment. Two years ago, when she had modernized the whole space, she had added the wide, deep Jacuzzi. She had never been as happy she had gone to the expense as she was tonight, she thought, as steaming water clouded the mirror.

  She stripped, dropping her clothes on the floor. Stepping into the tub, she sighed with relief as she sank into the warmth, then held her hands under the faucet, scrubbing them deliberately. Finally she pushed the button that sent the water swirling around her body.

  It was only later, when she was snugly wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, that Lacey allowed herself to think about the bloodied pages in her briefcase.

  Not now, she
thought, not now.

  Still unable to shake the chilling sensation that had haunted her all evening, she remembered there was a bottle of scotch in the liquor cabinet. She got it out, poured a little into a cup, filled the cup with water, and microwaved it. Dad used to say there was nothing like a hot toddy to help shake off a chill, she thought. Only his version was elaborate, with cloves and sugar and a cinnamon stick.

  Even without the trimmings, however, it did the trick. As she sipped the drink in bed, she felt a calmness begin to settle over her and fell asleep as soon as she turned off the light.

  And almost immediately awakened with a shriek. She was opening the door to Isabelle Waring’s apartment; she was bending over the dead woman’s body; Curtis Caldwell was aiming the pistol at her head. The image was vivid and immediate.

  It took her several moments to realize that the shrill sound was the ringing of the telephone. Still shaking, she picked up the receiver. It was Jay, her brother-in-law. “We just got back from dinner and heard on the news that Isabelle Waring was shot,” he said. “They reported that there was a witness, a young woman who could identify the killer. Lacey, it wasn’t you, I hope.”

  The concern in Jay’s voice was comforting. “Yes, it was me,” she told him.

  For a moment there was silence. Then he said quietly, “It’s never good to be a witness.”

  “Well, I certainly never wanted to be one!” she said angrily.

  “Kit wants to talk to you,” Jay said.

  “I can’t talk now,” Lacey said, knowing full well that Kit, loving and concerned, would ask questions that would force her to tell it all again—all about going to the apartment, hearing the scream, seeing Isabelle’s killer.

  “Jay, I just can’t talk now!” she pleaded. “Kit will understand.”

  She hung up the phone and lay in the darkness, calming herself, willing herself to go back to sleep, realizing that her ears were straining to hear another scream, followed by the sound of footsteps racing toward her.

  Caldwell’s footsteps.

  Her last thought as she drifted off to sleep was of something Jay had said in his call. He said it was never good to be a witness. Why did he say that? she wondered.

  When he had left Lacey in the lobby of her apartment building, Rick Parker had taken a taxi directly to his place on Central Park West and Sixty-seventh Street. He knew what would be awaiting him there, and he dreaded it. By now, Isabelle Waring’s death would be all over the news. There had been reporters outside her building when they had come out, and chances were that he had been caught on-camera getting into the police car with Lacey. And if so, then his father would have seen it, since he always watched the ten-o’clock news. Rick checked his watch: it was now quarter of eleven.

  As he had expected, when he entered his dark apartment he could see that the light on his telephone answering machine was flashing. He pressed the PLAY button. There was one message; it was from his father: “No matter what time it is, call me when you get in!”

  Rick’s palms were so wet that he had to dry them on his handkerchief before picking up the phone to return the call. His father answered on the first ring.

  “Before you ask,” Rick said, his voice ragged and unnaturally high pitched, “I had no choice. I had to go over there because Lacey had told the police that I’d been the one who’d given her Caldwell’s number, so they sent for me.”

  Rick listened for a minute to his father’s angry voice, then he finally managed to break in to respond: “Dad, I’ve told you not to worry. It’s all fine. Nobody knows that I was involved with Heather Landi.”

  4

  SANDY SAVARANO, THE MAN KNOWN TO LACEY AS CURTIS Caldwell, had raced from Isabelle Waring’s apartment and down the fire stairs to the basement and out through the delivery entrance. It was risky, but sometimes you had to take risks.

  Quick strides took him to Madison Avenue, the leather binder tucked under his arm. He took a taxi to the small hotel on Twenty-ninth Street where he was staying. Once in his room, he tossed the binder on the bed and promptly poured a generous amount of scotch into a water glass. Half of it he bolted down; the rest he would sip. It was a ritual he followed after a job like this.

  Carrying the scotch, he picked up the binder and settled in the hotel room’s one upholstered chair. Up until the last-minute glitch the job had been easy enough. He had gotten back into the building undetected when the doorman was at the curb, helping an old woman into a cab. He had let himself into the apartment with the key he had taken off the table in the foyer when Lacey Farrell was in the library with the Waring woman.

  He had found Isabelle in the master bedroom, propped up on the bed, her eyes closed. The leather binder had been on the night table beside the bed. When she realized he was there, she had jumped up and tried to run, but he had blocked the door.

  She hadn’t started screaming. No, she’d been too scared. That was what he liked most: the naked fear in her eyes, the knowledge that there would be no escape, the awareness that she was going to die. He savored that moment. He always liked to take his pistol out slowly, keeping eye contact with his victim while he pointed it, taking careful aim. The chemistry between him and his target in that split second before his finger squeezed the trigger thrilled him.

  He pictured Isabelle as she started shrinking away from him, returning to the bed, her back to the headboard, her lips struggling to form words. Then finally the single scream: “Don’t!”—mingling suddenly with the sound of someone calling her from downstairs—just as he shot her.

  Savarano drummed his fingers angrily on the leather binder. The Farrell woman had come in at that precise second. Except for her, everything would have been perfect. He had been a fool, he told himself, letting her lock him out, forcing him to run away. But he did get the journal, and he did kill the Waring woman, and that was the job he was hired to do. And if Farrell became a problem he would kill her too, somehow... He would do what he had to; it was all part of the job.

  Carefully Savarano unzipped the leather binder and looked inside. The pages were all neatly clamped in place, but when he thumbed through them he found they were all blank.

  Unbelieving, he stared down at the pages. He started turning them rapidly, looking for handwriting. They were blank, all of them—none had been used. The actual journal pages must still be in the apartment, he realized. What should he do? He had to think this through.

  It was too late to get the pages now. The cops would be swarming all over the apartment. He’d have to find another way to get them.

  But it wasn’t too late to make sure that Lacey Farrell never got the chance to ID him in court. That was a chore he might actually enjoy.

  5

  SOMETIME NEAR DAWN LACEY FELL INTO A HEAVY, DREAM-filled sleep in which shadows moved slowly down long corridors and terrified screams came relentlessly from behind locked doors.

  It was a relief to wake up at quarter of seven even though she dreaded what she knew the day would bring. Detective Sloane had said he would want her to go to headquarters and work with an artist to come up with a composite sketch of Curtis Caldwell.

  But as she sat wrapped in her robe, sipping coffee and looking down at the barges slowly making their way up the East River, she knew there was something she had to decide about first: the journal.

  What am I going to do about it? Lacey asked herself. Isabelle thought there was something in it that proved Heather’s death was not an accident. Curtis Caldwell stole the leather binder after he killed Isabelle.

  Did he kill her because he was afraid of what Isabelle had found in that journal? Did he steal what he thought was the journal to make sure no one else could read it?

  She turned and looked. Her briefcase was still there, under the couch; the briefcase in which she had hidden the bloodstained pages.

  I have to turn them over to the police, she thought. But I believe I know a way I can do it and still keep my promise to Isabelle.

  At two o’clock, Lacey
was in a small office in the police station, sitting across a conference table from Detective Ed Sloane and his assistant, Detective Nick Mars. Detective Sloane seemed to be a little short of breath, as though he had been hurrying. Or maybe he’s just been smoking too much, Lacey decided. There was an open pack of cigarettes poking out of his breast pocket.

  Nick Mars was another story. He reminded her of a college freshman football player she had had a crush on when she was eighteen. Mars was still in his twenties, baby faced with full cheeks, innocent blue eyes, and an easy smile, and he was nice. In fact, she was sure that he was being set up as the good guy in the good guy/bad guy scenario interrogators play. Sloane would bluster and occasionally rage; Nick Mars would soothe, his manner always calm, solicitous.

  Lacey had been at the station for almost three hours, plenty of time to figure out the scenario they had worked up for her benefit. As she was trying to describe Curtis Caldwell’s face to the police artist, Sloane was clearly annoyed that she wasn’t being more specific.

  “He didn’t have any scars or birthmarks or tattoos,” she had explained to the artist. “At least none that I could see. All I can tell you is that he had a thin face, pale blue eyes, tanned skin, and sandy hair. There was nothing distinguishing about his features. They were in proportion—except for his lips, maybe. They were a little thin.”

  But when she saw the artist’s sketch, she had said, hesitantly, “It isn’t really the way he looked.”

  “Then how did he look?” Sloane had snapped.

  “Take it easy, Ed. Lacey’s had a pretty rough time.” Nick Mars had given her a reassuring smile.

  After the artist had failed to come up with a sketch she felt resembled the man she had seen, Lacey had been shown endless mug shots. However, none of them resembled the man she knew as Curtis Caldwell, another fact that clearly upset Sloane.

  Now Sloane finally pulled out a cigarette and lit up, a clear sign of exasperation. “Okay, Ms. Farrell,” he said brusquely, “we need to go over your story.”