Pretend You Don't See Her

by Mary Higgins Clark

  He saw the look of interest in the young woman’s eyes and was amused. Women actually found him attractive. Dr. Ivan Yenkel, a Russian immigrant who had given him this new face two years ago, had been a genius, no doubt about it. His remolded nose was thinner; the bump caused by the break he had suffered in reform school was gone. The heavy chin was sculpted, his ears smaller and flat against his head. Formerly heavy eyebrows were thinned and spaced farther apart. Yenkel had fixed his drooping eyelids and removed the circles under his eyes.

  His dark brown hair was now the color of sand, a whimsy he had chosen in honor of his nickname, Sandy. Pale blue contact lenses completed the transformation.

  “You look fabulous, Sandy,” Yenkel had boasted when the last bandage came off. “No one would ever recognize you.”

  “No one ever will.”

  Sandy always got a thrill, remembering the look of astonishment in Yenkel’s eyes as he died.

  I don’t intend to go through it again, Sandy thought, as with a dismissive smile to his seatmate he pointedly picked up a magazine and opened it.

  Pretending to read, he reviewed his game plan. He had a two-week reservation at the Radisson Plaza Hotel under the name James Burgess. If he hadn’t found Farrell by then, he would move to another hotel. No use arousing curiosity by staying too long.

  He had been supplied with some suggestions as to where he might find her. She regularly used a health club in New York. It made sense to assume she would do the same thing in Minneapolis, so he would make the rounds of health clubs there. People didn’t change their habits.

  She was a theater buff. Well, the Orpheum in Minneapolis had touring shows virtually every week, and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater would be another place to look.

  Her only job had been in real estate. If she was working, the odds were she would be in a real estate agency.

  Savarano had located and eliminated two other witnesses who had been in the witness protection program. He knew the government did not give false references—most of the people in the program began jobs in small outfits where they had gotten to know someone and had been hired on faith.

  The flight attendant was making her announcement: “We are beginning our descent into the Twin Cities... place your seats in the upright position... fasten your seat belts...”

  Sandy Savarano began to anticipate the look he would see in Lacey Farrell’s eyes when he shot her.

  27

  ROYCE REALTY WAS LOCATED AT FIFTIETH STREET AND France Avenue South in Edina. Before leaving the apartment, Lacey studied the map, trying to determine the best way to drive there. Her mother had once remarked that it was a wonder how Lacey could have such good practical sense and such a lousy sense of direction. She surely was right about the last part, Lacey thought, shaking her head. New York had been a snap—she and the client would hail a cab, and it took them wherever they wanted. A sprawling city like Minneapolis, though, with so many scattered residential areas, was another matter. How will I ever take people around to see properties if I get lost every five minutes? she wondered.

  Following the map carefully, however, she got to the office having made only one wrong turn. She parked her car, then stood for a moment in front of the entrance to Royce Realty, looking in through the wide glass door.

  She could see that the agency office was small, but attractive. The reception room had oak-paneled walls that were covered with pictures of houses, a cheerful red-and-blue checked carpet, a standard desk, and comfortable-looking leather chairs. There was a short corridor leading off the reception area to an office. Through the open door she could see a woman working at a desk.

  Here goes nothing, she thought, taking a deep breath. If I get through this scene successfully, I’ll be ready to make my Broadway debut soon. That is, of course, if I ever get back to New York. As she opened the door to the agency, chimes signaled her arrival. The woman looked up, then came out to meet her.

  “I’m Millicent Royce,” she said as she extended her hand, “and you must be Alice Carroll.”

  Lacey liked her immediately. She was a handsome woman of about seventy whose ample girth was clothed in a well-tailored brown knit suit, and whose clear unlined complexion was devoid of makeup. Her shiny gray-white hair was swept back into a bun, a hairstyle that reminded Lacey of her grandmother.

  Her smile was welcoming, but as Lacey sat down she could see that Millicent Royce’s keen blue eyes were studying her intently. She was glad she had decided to wear the maroon jacket and gray slacks. They were conservative, but attractive—no-nonsense, but with style. Besides, she had always believed the outfit brought her luck on sales calls. Now maybe it would help her get a job.

  Millicent Royce waved her to a chair and sat down opposite her. “It’s turning out to be a terribly busy day,” she said apologetically, “so I don’t have much time. Tell me about yourself, Alice.”

  Lacey felt as though she were in an interrogation room with a spotlight shining on her. Millicent Royce’s eyes did not leave Lacey’s face as she answered. “Let’s see. I just turned thirty. I’m healthy. My life has changed a lot in the last year.”

  God knows that’s true, Lacey thought.

  “I’m from Hartford, Connecticut, and after finishing college I worked for eight years for a doctor who retired.”

  “What kind of work?” Mrs. Royce asked.

  “Receptionist, general office, some billing, submitting the medical forms.”

  “Then you’re experienced with a computer?”

  “Yes, I am.” She watched as the older woman’s eyes glanced at the computer on the reception room desk. There was a stack of papers beside it.

  “This job entails answering the phones, keeping listings up to date, preparing flyers of new listings, calling potential buyers when a new listing comes in, helping with an open house. No actual selling. That’s my job. But I’ve got to ask: What makes you think you’d like real estate?”

  Because I love matching people to places, Lacey thought. I love guessing right and seeing someone’s eyes light up when I take that person into a house or apartment and know that it’s exactly what he or she wants. I love the wheeling and dealing that goes into settling on a price.

  Dismissing these thoughts, she said instead, “I know I don’t want to work in a doctor’s office anymore, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of your business.”

  “I see. Well, let me call your retired doctor and talk to him, and if he vouches for you—as I’m sure he will—then I say, let’s give it a try. Do you have his phone number?”

  “No. He changed it and made it unlisted. He was adamant about not wanting to be contacted by his former patients.”

  Lacey could tell from the slight frown on Millicent Royce’s face that this obviously sharp lady was finding her answers too evasive.

  She remembered what George Svenson had told her: “Offer to work free for a couple of weeks, or even a month.”

  “I have a suggestion,” Lacey said. “Don’t pay me anything for a month. After that, if you’re happy with me, you’ll hire me. Or if you feel I have no aptitude for the work, you’ll tell me to forget it.”

  She met Millicent Royce’s steady gaze without flinching. “You won’t regret it,” she said quietly.

  Mrs. Royce shrugged her shoulders. “In Minnesota, the Land of Lakes, that’s known as an offer I can’t refuse.”

  28

  “WHY WASN’T MR. LANDI INFORMED ABOUT THIS EARLIER?” Steve Abbott asked quietly.

  It was Monday afternoon. Abbott had insisted on accompanying Jimmy to a meeting with Detectives Sloane and Mars in the 19th Precinct station house.

  “I want to know what’s going on!” Jimmy had said to him that morning, the anger in his voice reflected in his face. “Something’s up. The cops have to know where Lacey Farrell is. She can’t have just disappeared. She’s a witness to a murder!”

  “Did you call them?” Steve had asked.

  “You bet I did. But I ask about her and they jus
t tell me to have Parker and Parker assign another agent to handle the sale of the apartment. That’s not what I called about. Do they think that’s what’s bugging me, that this is about money? That’s nuts! I told them I was coming to see them, and I wanted answers.”

  Abbott knew that painting Heather out of the restaurant murals had if anything increased Jimmy Landi’s anger and depression. “I’m going with you,” he had insisted.

  When they had arrived, Detectives Sloane and Mars brought them into the interrogation room off the squad room. They had admitted reluctantly that Lacey Farrell had been placed in the federal witness protection program because an attempt had been made on her life.

  “I asked why Mr. Landi hadn’t been informed earlier about what happened to Ms. Farrell,” Abbott repeated. “I want an answer.”

  Sloane reached for a cigarette. “Mr. Abbott, I have assured Mr. Landi that the investigation is continuing, and it is. We’re not going to rest until we find and prosecute Isabelle Waring’s murderer.”

  “You gave me a cock-and-bull story about some guy whose racket is getting into expensive apartments as a potential buyer and then coming back to burglarize them,” Jimmy said, his anger exploding once again. “At that point you told me you thought Isabelle’s death was just a matter of having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Now you’re telling me that the Farrell woman is in the witness protection program, and you’re admitting that Heather’s journal was stolen from under your noses right here in this station. Don’t play games with me. This was no random killing, and you’ve known it from day one.”

  Eddie Sloane saw the anger and disgust that flared in Jimmy Landi’s eyes. I don’t blame him, the detective thought. His ex-wife is dead; we lose something intended for him that may be crucial evidence; the woman who brought the killer into his ex-wife’s apartment has disappeared. I sympathize because I know how I’d feel.

  For both detectives it had been a lousy four months since that October evening when the 911 call from 3 East Seventieth had been received in the station house. As the case developed, Eddie was grateful that the district attorney had gone toe to toe with U.S. Attorney Baldwin’s office. The DA had been adamant that the NYPD was not signing off on this one.

  “A murder occurred in the 19th Precinct,” he had told Baldwin, “and like it or not, we’re in it for the duration. We’ll share information with you, of course, but you’ve got to share it with us. When Savarano is collared, we’ll cooperate in a plea bargain if you can cut a deal with him. But we’ll cooperate only, and I repeat only, if you don’t try to upstage us. We have a very real interest in this case, and we intend to be involved.”

  “It wasn’t a cock-and-bull story, Mr. Landi,” Nick Mars said heatedly. “We want to find Mrs. Waring’s killer just as much as you do. But if Ms. Farrell hadn’t taken that journal from Isabelle Waring’s apartment, apparently with the idea of giving it to you, we might be a lot further along in this investigation.”

  “But I believe that it was after it arrived here that this journal was stolen,” Steve Abbott said, his voice dangerously quiet. “And are you now suggesting that Ms. Farrell may have tampered with the journal?”

  “We don’t think she did, but we can’t be sure,” Sloane admitted.

  “Be honest with us, Detective. You can’t be sure of very much except that you botched this investigation,” Abbott snapped, his anger now evident. “Come on, Jimmy. I think it’s time we hire our own investigator. With the police in charge, I don’t think we’ll ever find out what’s going on.”

  “That’s what I should have done the minute I got the call about Isabelle!” Jimmy Landi said, getting to his feet. “I want the copy of my daughter’s journal I gave you before you lose that one too.”

  “We ran off extras,” Sloane said calmly. “Nick, get the set Mr. Landi gave us.”

  “Right away, Eddie.”

  While they waited, Sloane said, “Mr. Landi, you told us very specifically that you read the journal before you gave it to us.”

  Jimmy Landi’s eyes darkened. “I did.”

  “You told us that you read the journal carefully. Thinking back, would you say that’s true?”

  “What’s carefully?” Jimmy asked rather irritably. “I looked through it.”

  “Look, Mr. Landi,” Sloane said, “I can only imagine how difficult all this is for you, but I’m going to ask you to read it carefully now. We’ve gone through it as thoroughly as we know how, and except for a couple of ambiguous references in the early pages about something involving an incident that happened on the West Side, we can’t find anything even potentially helpful. But the fact is that Mrs. Waring told Lacey Farrell that she’d found something in those pages that might help prove your daughter’s death was not an accident—”

  “Isabelle would have found something suspicious in the Baltimore catechism,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.

  They sat in silence until Nick Mars returned to the interrogation room with a manila envelope which he held out to Landi.

  Jimmy yanked it from him and opened the envelope. Pulling out the contents, he glanced through them, then stopped at the last page. He read it, then glared at Mars. “What are you trying to pull now?” he asked.

  Sloane had the sickening feeling that he was about to hear something he didn’t want to know.

  “I can tell you right now that there were more pages than this,” Landi said. “The last couple of pages in the set I gave you weren’t written on lined paper. I remember because they were all messed up. The originals of those pages must have had bloodstains... I couldn’t stand the sight of them. So where are they? Did you lose those too?”

  29

  UPON ARRIVAL AT THE MINNEAPOLIS–ST. PAUL AIRPORT, Sandy Savarano went directly from the plane to the baggage area where he picked up his heavy black suitcase. Then he found a men’s room and locked himself in a stall. There, he placed the suitcase across the toilet and opened it.

  He took out a hand mirror and a zippered case containing a gray wig, thick gray eyebrows, and round glasses with a tortoiseshell frame.

  He removed his contact lenses, revealing his charcoal brown eyes, then with deft movements placed the wig on his head, combed it so that it covered part of his forehead, pasted on the eyebrows, and put on the glasses.

  With a cosmetic pencil he added age spots to his forehead and the backs of his hands. Reaching into the sides of the suitcase he took out orthopedic oxfords and exchanged them for the Gucci loafers he had been wearing.

  Finally he unpacked a bulky tweed overcoat with heavily padded shoulders, placing in the bag the Burberry he had worn getting off the plane.

  The man who left the stall looked twenty years older and totally different from the man who had entered it.

  Sandy next went to the car rental desk where a car had been reserved for him in the name of James Burgess of Philadelphia. He opened his wallet and took out a driver’s license and a credit card. The license was a clever fake; the credit card was legitimate, an account having been set up for him using the Burgess name.

  Cold, bracing air greeted him as he exited the terminal and joined a group of people waiting at the curb for the jitney to take them to the car rental area. While he waited he studied the map the clerk had marked for him and began to memorize the routes that led in and out of the city and to estimate the length of time each should require. He liked to plan everything out carefully. No surprises—that was his motto. Which made the unexpected arrival of that Farrell woman at Isabelle Waring’s apartment all the more irritating. He had been surprised and had made a mistake by letting her get away.

  He knew that his attention to detail was the main reason he was still a free man, while so many of his fellow graduates of reform school were off serving long prison terms. The very thought made him shiver.

  The clanging of a cell door... Waking up and knowing that he was trapped there, that it would never be any different... Feeling the walls and ceiling close in on him, squeezing him
, suffocating him...

  Underneath the strands of hair he had so carefully combed over his forehead, Sandy could feel beads of sweat forming. It won’t happen to me, he promised himself. I’d rather die first.

  The jitney was approaching. Impatiently, he raised his arm to be sure the vehicle stopped. He was anxious to get started, anxious to begin the task of finding Lacey Farrell. As long as she was alive, she remained a constant threat to his freedom.

  As the jitney stopped to admit him, he felt something slam against the back of his legs. He spun around and found himself facing the young woman who had been his seatmate on the plane. Her suitcase had toppled over against him.

  Their eyes met, and he took a deep breath. They were standing only inches apart, yet there was no trace of recognition in her expression. Her smile was apologetic. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  The jitney door was opening. Savarano got on, knowing that this clumsy woman had just confirmed that with his disguise he would be able to get close to Farrell without fear of recognition. This time she would have no chance to escape him. That was a mistake he would not repeat.

  30

  WHEN MILLICENT ROYCE AGREED TO TRY HER OUT ON A volunteer basis, Lacey suggested that she spend the rest of the afternoon familiarizing herself with the files in the computer and going through the mail that was stacked on the reception desk.

  After four months away from an office, it was pure pleasure to be at a desk, going through listings, familiarizing herself with the price range of homes in the area covered by the agency.

  At three o’clock, Mrs. Royce took a potential buyer to see a condominium and asked Lacey to cover the phone.

  The first call was a near disaster. She answered, “Royce Realty, Lace—”

  She slammed down the receiver and stared at the phone. She had been about to give her real name.

  A moment later the phone began to ring again.

  She had to pick it up. It was probably the same person. What could she say?