Nice Girls Finish Last (26 page)

“No. Are you sure she didn't come in after you were sleeping and then get up early to pray or something?”

“I don't think so. She was acting very strange when she left last night.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“I'm not sure. She got a call and said she had to go out. But she'd been reading your diary …”

My diary is kept on my home computer. To read my diary, she would have to break into my apartment, boot up my computer, access the software, load the relevant floppy disk, and find the relevant files, of which there are many, all locked. Then she would have to guess all the passwords, not an easy task, some of them in obscure languages, some of them made-up words, or she would have to find my secret password file in a separate subdirectory and then guess the password for the locked password file,
tushnob,
a Pushtu word for toilet I learned from Mike.

That's a hell of an accident for a woman who can't set the clock on her VCR.

“Diary?”

“I think it was your diary …”

“My Filofax,” I said.

She began to cry. “Oh dear, I never should have let her go out yesterday.”

“Why did she?”

“Your boyfriend called her and she went to see him.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I'll be right over.”

I collected Hector and we went over together. I had to take Hector with me since it would have been impossible to sneak out of the office without him seeing me. Even if he hadn't been parked right outside the door of Special Reports, guarding me like I was a vault full of money, someone would have seen me on the vast network of in-house video cameras.

On the way, I called Ferber from the car phone.

When we got to the Gotham Manor Hotel, which is owned by Paul Mangecet Hotels, Inc., the lobby was full of smiling Christians, milling about after some sort of symposium. I could tell they were Christians because they smiled so much and because they all had adhesive name tags with crosses on them.

Just as I was about to raise my hand to knock on Mrs. Sadler's door, it opened. I guessed she'd been watching for me through the peephole.

“Thank heavens you're here,” she said, ushering me into the chintzy, twin-bedded room.

“Tell me about the diary,” I began.

“One of your neighbors ran into a man outside your building who gave her the diary,” she said.

“That would be Joey Pinks,” I said. “He gave it to Mrs. Ramirez and she gave it to Aunt Maureen?” I was thinking out loud.

“That sounds right.”

“What did the man tell Mrs. Ramirez, my neighbor? Did Aunt Mo say?”

“No.”

Not that it mattered. Mrs. Ramirez put her own spin on things. For that matter, she made stuff up out of whole cloth.

“Did she say anything about this ex-boyfriend?”

“Oh, I am sure she said ‘boyfriend,' not ‘ex-boyfriend.' And other than that, she said nothing.”

“It doesn't sound like Aunt Maureen to be so reticent,” I said.

“Well, we didn't speak much … we weren't …”

I watched her struggling for the Christian thing to say.

“You weren't friends,” I helped.

“No, we weren't.”

“How did you come to be roommates?”

“Well, er, I … nobody else wanted … oh dear.”

“Nobody else wanted to room with Aunt Maureen.”

“Well, yes,” said Mrs. Sadler, apparently the group martyr.

Boy, even the other right-wing Christians didn't like being around Aunt Maureen very much. Poor Aunt Mo. It was like being the last kid chosen for softball, in a way.

Poor Aunt Mo. I had no doubt the shooter had her. I didn't hold out much hope for her. A madman alone in a room with a gun and my bigmouthed Aunt Maureen? It would be awful hard not to kill her.

If only I'd seen her. Maybe she would have given me the Filofax and we could have given it to the cops and the shooter wouldn't have come after her …

As traumatic a figure as she cut in my life, she was my aunt and blood is thicker … and stickier … than water. And, to be fair, there had been times when I was glad she was my aunt. Now that she was missing, I started remembering other times, other events. Episodes flashed before me all day and well into the night as I lay in my bed, inconsolable by rain forest singers or purring cats. Like the time I was cornered by a group of menacing older boys in the playground, and Aunt Mo saw out her kitchen window and came out with God's Little Helper. She just went nuts with those boys, like a samurai, swatting them every which way until they scattered.

After Dad died, it was Aunt Mo who came to stay with us, and took care of us in those crucial first weeks without him. It was Aunt Mo who insisted I have a tenth birthday party, three months after my Dad died, and, because my mother was too shell-shocked to handle it, Aunt Mo came to town and threw a pretty good party for me. That day was the first happy one I had after Dad died. In high school, when I didn't have enough money for a new dress for the junior prom, it was Aunt Mo who sent me a nice check, unasked. Sure it came with a long letter about the sin of vanity and scriptural prohibitions against fornication, but it's the check that counts.

It could even be said that, in her inimitable way, Aunt Mo had been a positive influence in my life. For example, her attempts to get custody of me had made me work hard to keep it together for me and Mom and keep Aunt Mo at bay. I learned to cook, and at age ten I was cooking all our meals and doing all the housework, making sure Mom signed the checks for the bills and took her medication. Now, I rarely cook and I hate to clean. I did enough of that crap by age twenty-one to last me my entire life, and when my Aunt Minnie was widowed and moved in with us, I took the opportunity to ditch Chuck Turner and get out of Ferrous, Minnesota.

But the point is, rebelling against Aunt Mo made me a lot more independent. Granted, my life wasn't anywhere near perfect, but I made my own living. I could take care of myself.

Poor Aunt Mo. Alone in this big, wicked city, with nobody to take care of her. Was she even still alive? It was impossible to sleep, waiting for the phone to ring or the buzzer to sound, expecting, fearing the voice that said, “We found your aunt's body at a Staten Island landfill,” hoping and praying for the voice that said, “We found your aunt and she's alive.”

I needed a drink. Shortly after midnight I called down to Sally, asked her if I could borrow a cup of vodka to help me sleep. She not only had a premium vodka at hand, she brought it up to me and did a tarot, which foretold wonderful things in my future. Before she left, she promised to burn a candle for me and assured me I had every reason to be optimistic. My aunt was missing, my job was in jeopardy, and someone was shooting at men who went out with me. Yeah, I was feeling really optimistic.

Who was this guy? Was it Joey Pinks's half-brother Vern? Had Joey done forgery work for him? What would he need forged? What kind of things did people get forged, anyway, stuff like Social Security cards, green cards, maybe letters of reference? I wasn't sure.

Green cards. Why did that stick with me? I knew a few people with green cards. Mike had one, because he'd been married to an American. Tamayo, she had dual citizenship, so she probably had an American passport. Phil was British …

Phil would have to have one to work at ANN. Or a work visa. It bothered me, because Phil had been in the freight elevator the evening Kanengiser was killed. He'd gone up to a floor in the twenties. Could have been twenty-seven. It would have been easy for him to steal my handbag … and then steal a few more to cover it up. Who would suspect him, a cheerful, philosophical senior citizen?

But no, that's not right, I thought. The vodka was addling me. I mean, what was I thinking? That I was being stalked by a seventy-ish British handyman? He was too old to be Joey Pinks's half-brother. Besides, Phil had been out with the flu that day. If he'd lied about the flu and come back to the building to kill Kanengiser, he'd hardly strike up a conversation with Hymie from the newsstand.

But he was on that tape.

However, the tapes, while time-coded, were not date-coded. Someone must have replaced the right tape with a tape from another day …

Maybe it was someone who had worked in U.S. Army Intelligence, who was able to sneak in somehow and change the tapes. Someone like Reb Ryan.

Reb Ryan wasn't his real name. He'd changed it years before, Mike said. Maybe his real name was Vern.

Reb was clearly nuts. He knew how to take a beating, he had a masochistic desire to be in war zones, and he enjoyed drinking his own urine.

Yeah, I had dated Reb. But so had the younger, prettier, beestung-lipped Bianca. I had to be realistic here. If I were Reb, would I be obsessed with me, or with Bianca? As attractive as I think I am, Bianca was indisputably one of the most beautiful women to grace ANN's air.

Maybe he was upset that Bianca had ditched him for Pete. Maybe he had picked a fight with Dillon at Keggers because Dillon had gone to Bianca's table and shamelessly flirted with her, not because Dillon had walked out with me.

After talking to Pete and tracking a promo the night of the bar fight, Reb would have had plenty of time to get over to Dillon's building and take a shot.

My mind was racing. Or maybe it wasn't Reb.

Someone in security could have replaced that tape.

Pete controlled security and he could switch the tapes. How much did we know about him anyway? Some second-rate celebrity bodyguard who had won Jack Jackson's trust during a drunken moment. Maybe he was brother Vern, with forged identification as Pete Huculak. There were probably a lot of men who would whip themselves silly just to hear Bianca say their names through those acclaimed lips. Pete could be one of them. He was known to be jealous. They practically lived together, so he would know her schedule, and if she didn't tell him about the guys she dated, he could have picked it up from the company grapevine.

My Filofax, though …

Well, we hadn't seen the thing. It might not be my Filofax. It could be Kanengiser's mythical black book after all …

Now I had a new theory. Joey Pinks had come to me because he knew me from interviewing Anya and he didn't know Bianca at all, or he couldn't get close to Bianca because he'd risk running into Pete, or Pete's deputy Hector. To warn her, he had tried to go through me.

Maybe I'm not so irresistible, I thought.

Aunt Maureen must have seen something, or Pete must have seen her …

My phone rang. It was Hector calling from the car phone downstairs, where he and Franco were “guarding” me.

“We found your aunt. She's alive. Wanna go see her?”

I didn't even bother to get dressed. I grabbed my purse, threw a coat on over my pajamas, and rushed downstairs to the company car.

“Okay, let's go,” I said chirpily, sliding into the front seat.

There was a flash of white over my face, I heard a loud pop, and everything went dark.

20

W
hen I came to, my head was covered in a leather mask, and I was standing against a wall, my feet and hands chained. I felt queasy, maybe from the ether or chloroform or whatever I'd been knocked out with. I looked around, but the mask impaired my peripheral vision. It was a big room, bare, with rough wood floors. The windows were bricked up, so I couldn't tell if it was day or night. But the bricking and the fact that the only light in the room was strung in from elsewhere—indicating pirated electricity—told me we were in a condemned or abandoned building, or a squat.

Was there anything in this room that would make a good weapon? Not really. There was a broken-down sofa missing its arms, and a queen-size bed. There were two doors.

I looked at myself. My hands were linked with a foot-long chain, as were my feet, allowing me to move with limited flexibility. I was hooked up to a retractable harness attached to the wall, with wire cables attached to my arms, like marionette strings. The cables went to the ceiling, rather like trolley cables, to a track, like the tracks used in track lighting.

With a little effort, I could move away from the wall and walk within a ten-foot circumference. I made it, with some strain, to one of the doors and opened it. Down the hallway, I could see a sliver of another room and part of a table, with my purse on it.

I tried wriggling out of my restraints, but no amount of struggling could free me. I was pretty well secured. And I was getting really angry.

“Robin, is that you?” a voice called from another room.

I heard mechanical motion. One of the doors opened—the door to the attached bathroom—and a zaftig woman harnessed in black leather came out. Like me, she was masked and hooked up like a trolley. But I recognized the voice.

It was Aunt Mo.

“You're alive!”

“Of course I am,” she said.

“Where are we?”

“Dear, I don't know. But it's an empty place. I've tried screaming and nobody has heard me.”

“Aunt Mo, have you seen the guy who kidnapped us?”

“Yes.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Tall, protruding forehead …”

God, it could be Hector, Howard Gollis, Pete Huculak, the ex-con on the subway train with the Aryan Nations tattoo. It could be any number of men I passed every day in the streets or in the hallways of ANN.

“Can't you be more specific?”

“Didn't see his hair color. He wore a hat of some kind, a hunting cap … my eyes aren't what they used to be … I'm doing the best I can, you know? I came to New York to enjoy a nice conference, see how my niece was doing, see a few shows. I end up kidnapped. … He was wearing a security guard uniform.”

“Hector?” It happened so fast I couldn't be sure.

“Hector? Is that his name? He told me his name was Elroy Vern.”

“Elroy Vern? Elroy? Where is he now?”

“He went out. He said he'd be gone a few hours but I don't know how long ago that was.”