The Lost Years (33 page)

Richard paused, by now clearly upset. “I am very concerned that a woman I consider to be a friend is missing. I am completely floored that you obviously think that I had something to do with her disappearance. I assure you that I will be available to you at any hour of the day or night until the first day of class next week and then I will be in my lecture hall at Fordham University on the Rose Hill campus. If necessary, you can reach me there.”

He turned and walked out of the interrogation room, forcibly closing the door behind him.

Benet and Rodriguez looked at each other. “What do you think?” Benet asked.

“He’s either completely truthful or completely lying,” Rita said. “I don’t think there’s any in-between.”

“My gut says that he’s an accomplished liar,” Benet declared. “He claims he was hanging around all day outside an office until five o’clock, when he left to go to Mommy and Daddy’s Park Avenue apartment. Come on, Rita, get real.”

“Should we get him back tomorrow and see if he’ll take a lie-detector test?” Rita asked. “The way we talked to him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he lawyered up.”

“Let’s check with Peter about any polygraph. I’m not sure what he’s going to want to do.”

B
illy Declar had been dismayed to hear that his old friend and prison cell mate, Wally Gruber, had been caught dead in the act of breaking into a house in Riverdale.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he kept muttering to himself as he shuffled around his secondhand furniture store in lower Manhattan. “He’s as dumb as they come because he thinks he’s so smart.” At seventy-two years old, having endured three separate stints in the slammer, Billy was not looking forward to going back there.

I gave him big bucks for the stuff from New Jersey, Billy thought. Four days later the greedy lowlife goes after another haul. I know Wally. He’ll rat me out to get a better deal for himself. I’d better move up my trip to Rio. I’m out of here now.

As usual there had been no customers for the tired and well-worn couches and chairs and headboards and dressers that were placed in forlorn groupings in the so-called showroom. Whenever one of the guys who had stolen jewelry came in and sold it to Billy, he’d offer them a choice of furniture. He would call it their “bonus.”

“Select any piece that you may desire to grace your home,” he would say grandly.

Their suggestions as to what he could do with his furniture made Billy roar with laughter.

But he was not laughing now. The jewelry he planned to sell in
Rio was hidden under the floor in the back room of the store. It was two o’clock. I’ll put the “Closed” sign on the door, get the jewelry, and go straight to the airport, he thought. I’ve got my passport and plenty of cash. I’m ready to go. So what if I stay in Rio for a while? It’s winter there but that’s okay with me.

Billy hobbled as quickly as he could, wincing in pain from his chronically swollen left ankle. It was the result of his leap out of a second-story window, when he was sixteen years old, to avoid the police who had come to arrest him for stealing a car.

He grabbed his fully packed suitcase, which he always kept ready for any such emergency departure, from the closet. He knelt down, rolled up the rug, and lifted up the floorboards that covered the safe he kept hidden there. He punched in the code, opened the door of the safe, and pulled out the large canvas bag containing the jewelry from the Scott home. Then he quickly closed the safe and put the floorboards and rug back in place.

Scrambling to his feet, he grabbed the suitcase, flung the canvas bag over his shoulder, and turned off the light in the back room.

Billy was halfway across the showroom when the buzzer at the front entrance went off several times in quick succession. His stomach churned. Through the bars on the window of the door, he could see a cluster of men outside. One of them was holding up a shield.

“Police,” someone shouted. “We have a search warrant. Open up the door immediately.”

Billy dropped the bags on the floor with a sigh. The image in his mind of Wally’s round face, and his phony ear-to-ear smile, was as clear as if Wally was standing in front of him. Who knows? Billy asked himself, resigned to being a guest of the state of New York once more. Maybe we’ll end up bunking together again.

A
t three fifteen
P.M
. Peter Jones received a call from the law clerk of Judge Kenneth Brown. “Sir,” the young woman said in a very respectful tone, “we wanted to let you know that the report on the Kathleen Lyons case has come in and you can pick it up now if you wish.”

What I really wish is that the Kathleen Lyons case would go away, he thought wryly. “Thank you very much,” he replied. “I’ll come right up.”

As he waited for the elevator to take him to the fourth floor, he thought fleetingly of when he had started his legal career as a clerk to a judge in the criminal division. Judge Brown is sitting in the same courtroom where my judge used to sit, he thought. Mom knew how much I wanted that job. When I got it, the way she carried on, you’d think that they had made me chief justice.

At the end of his one-year clerkship, he had been ecstatic to be hired as an assistant prosecutor. That was nineteen years ago. Since then he had worked in several units, including Major Crimes, before being appointed chief of the trial section five years ago.

Thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and hereafter king of Scotland, he thought, reflecting on one of his favorite lines from Shakespeare. That’s the track I thought I was on. Until now.

Shrugging, he got into the elevator, went up two flights, got off,
and went into the judge’s office. He knew that Judge Brown was on the bench conducting a jury trial. He greeted the secretary, turned the corner, and went over to the law clerk’s desk.

She was a small, very attractive young woman who could have passed for a college freshman. “Hello, Mr. Jones,” she said as she handed him the ten-page report.

“Has the judge had a chance to look at it yet?” Peter asked.

“I’m not sure, sir.”

Good answer, Peter thought. Never say anything that might return to bite you. Three minutes later, back in his office, he closed the door. “Hold the calls,” he told his secretary. “I need to concentrate.”

“You’ve got it, Peter.” Gladys Hawkins had worked in the prosecutor’s office for thirty years. In the presence of outsiders, she addressed both Prosecutor Sylvan Berger and Peter Jones as “sir.” Otherwise, when they were among themselves, the prosecutor was “Sy” and Assistant Prosecutor Jones was just “Peter.”

With trepidation, Peter Jones carefully absorbed the psychiatric report. As he did, the burden of carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders began to lessen.

The doctor had written that Kathleen Lyons was clearly in a worsening stage of Alzheimer’s and had, on two occasions while in the hospital, exhibited symptoms of violent tendencies. Both awake and in her sleep, she had demonstrated severe antagonism toward her late husband and his companion Lillian Stewart. It was the recommendation of the treating doctors that, at the present time, and as a result of underlying mental illness, she was a danger to both herself and others and required full-time and intense supervision. It was their opinion that she should remain in the inpatient setting for further observation, medication, and therapy.

With a deep sigh of relief, Peter leaned back in his chair. There’s no way the judge is going to cut her loose, he thought. He can’t with
this kind of report. Sure, we’ll go through the charade with Wally Gruber and the composite artist. This is just what I’ve suspected. Gruber knows how to play the system. I wonder what face he’ll decide to invent. I don’t care if it’s Tom Cruise or Mickey Mouse. It’s a total dead end.

Peter stood up and stretched. Kathleen Lyons killed her husband, he thought emphatically. I’m sure of it. If she ends up incompetent to stand trial, so be it. If she ends up not guilty by reason of insanity, so be it. Either way, she’ll never get out of a mental hospital.

He turned on the intercom. “I can take calls now, Gladys.”

“That was a pretty short deep-think session, Peter. Wait a second. There’s a call coming in. It’s Simon Benet’s extension. Do you want to take it?”

“Put him through.”

“Peter, I just got a call from the New York guys,” Benet said tensely. “They just arrested Gruber’s fence. They got him at his shop. In another minute he would have been on his way to the airport. They recovered the missing Scott jewelry. All of it.”

A
t one o’clock on Thursday afternoon, Mariah arrived back at her parents’ home and walked into the kitchen. There was a note from Betty on the table. “Mariah, I stopped in and left some cold cuts for you in case you came home for lunch. Tidied up quickly but feeling under the weather and leaving now—8:20
A.M
.”

The message light on the kitchen phone was flashing. Mariah pushed the button to retrieve the messages and punched in the code. Her parents had kept it easy to remember by choosing the year of her birth. “The happiest event in our lives,” her father had told her.

Besides his attempts to reach her on her cell, Richard had also called on this phone at nine fifteen that morning. “Mariah, please, we have to talk.” She quickly deleted the rest of the message, not wanting to hear the sound of his voice.

As Greg had told her, he had tried to reach her twice on this line. “Mariah, you’re not answering your cell phone. I’m worried about you. Please call me.”

Alvirah’s three calls, made before Mariah had spoken to her from the apartment, were first about trying to trace Lillian and then wondering why Mariah wasn’t calling her back.

Mariah made a turkey and cheese sandwich from the assortment of cold cuts that Betty had brought in. She took out a bottle of cold
water and carried it and the sandwich into her father’s study. This was Dad’s favorite sandwich, she remembered, and then realized that no matter what she did or where she went she always felt his presence.

She ate the sandwich and realized that her eyes were heavy. Well, I did get up early and I haven’t exactly been sleeping much lately, she thought. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. I can’t concentrate on anything until Lloyd calls about that report. I wouldn’t mind dozing off for a while.

At three thirty she was awakened from a surprisingly deep sleep by the ring of the phone on her father’s desk. It was Lloyd. “Mariah,” he began, “it almost sounds like a cliché, but the truth is that I have good news and bad news. Let me tell you the good news first, because I think it will soften the rest of what I have to tell you.”