'Maslow's disappearance is on the news?' Jason was astounded.
'They have a pack of dogs. They're searching the park.' Jerome glanced at his wife. 'She's suffered enough. She doesn't need to hear this.'
Adina stood up to leave.
Jason shook his head. 'Please stay, I want to talk to you both.'
Jerome looked away from his wife. 'What happened? The police won't tell me anything.'
'I don't think they know yet. Has anyone from the police talked to you about it?'
'No, no, I've called them. They're calling me back. Let me tell you, this is a terrible blow.' Beads of perspiration dotted the man's forehead. 'I'm sure he's dead. If he were alive, I'd know it.' He said this with no emotion.
Jason was surprised by how many people associated with Maslow were ready to accept that with no evidence to support it. 'Well, I don't want to jump to that conclusion. That's the reason I'm here. I want to talk to you a little about your son's life to see if there's somewhere he might have gone, some reasonable explanation for his disappearance.'
'No,' Jerome said sharply. 'Let's not go into it. We know what happened. You don't have to sugarcoat the truth for us.'
Jerome Atkins cut him off angrily. 'They can't even find his body-this is a disgrace.' He glanced at his wife. The couple sat so far from each other in the cavernous wood-paneled Park Avenue living room, he had to turn his whole body to get a view of her.
Jason sat between them. He, too, had to shift positions to see her. As he did, he took in the rose-colored drapes on huge windows, the multitude of small pink sofas and gold chairs. Mrs. Atkins had taken a brocade pillow onto her lap and was busy twisting one of its gold tassels in her hand. Her face was pale, shut down. Jason suspected that she was in shock, a hurricane on a distant horizon.
'Are you all right? I could arrange for you to have some medicine-' he asked.
'He's not the first one,' she said, shaking her head.
'First what?'
Mrs. Atkins played with the fringe. 'Maslow had a twin sister.'
'I didn't know that,' Jason murmured.
'That's not exactly relevant to anything, is it?' Jerome said nastily, turning back to Jason. 'She died over twenty years ago. No point in talking about it.' He raised a hand to his forehead, realized it was wet, and pulled out a handkerchief.
'She was a beautiful child, a perfect child-blond, blue eyes-smart. Very smart. And Chloe had a wonderful nature. She never complained, no matter what. Never a word. Her name was Chloe. Isn't that a pretty name?'
'Beautiful name.' Jason could hardly breathe through the layers of pain in the room.
'She died when she was eleven. Leukemia.'
'Adina, it was twenty years ago,' Jerome said sharply, dabbing at his forehead.
'I'm sure you know, Doctor, that over eighty percent of children who have leukemia now survive,' she lectured him.
'She's probably the reason Maslow became a doctor,' Jason said softly.
'Too late for us,' she said bitterly.
'Were the twins close?' Jason asked.
'Of course. Maslow adored Chloe. Everyone did. She was a magical person, her daddy's dream girl.' Mrs. Atkins gave her husband a smug smile.
'He didn't come about Chloe, he came about the boy.'
'Chloe was an angel. He's always been a heartache,' his mother said.
Jerome Atkins covered his eyes.
'Really?' This was news to Jason.
'Yes, Chloe was an absolute angel. Always smiling, no matter how sick she was.'
'I was asking about Maslow.'
'What's there to say about him?' Atkins broke in angrily. 'A young man with a bright future couldn't think about anything else but being a damned shrink. Doesn't that tell you all you need to know?'
Jason had heard a similar view expounded by his own father, who'd wanted him to be a heart surgeon. 'Is that a bad thing in your book?' he asked, feeling the sting of rejection all over again.
'The boy probably provoked his attacker,' Atkins speculated coldly.
Jason's distress escalated. 'Why do you say that?'
'It wouldn't be the first time. He was interested in crazy people, wasn't he? He talked to the wrong people all the time. It can get you in trouble in this city.'
'Chloe was no trouble at all. She was an angel,' Adina said.
Jason repressed, the urge to muzzle her. 'Did something happen to Maslow recently?'
'Oh, the kid hasn't lived with us for years. He used to get into bar fights, street fights regularly. He'd come home with a black eye or a bloody nose. What a waste!' Jerome Atkins waved his hand impatiently. 'The city is to blame for this. These people shouldn't be out on the street.'
'What about his friends? Maybe they can tell us more.'
'What more do you need? He was a misguided young man. All he talked about was work. He didn't have friends.'
'What about girlfriends?'
Atkins snorted. Clearly he didn't think much of his son in that department either. Jason turned to Mrs. Atkins. She looked like a person having an out-of-body experience, maybe on a visit to an angel in heaven.
Jason felt like shaking these two people. The mother couldn't talk about anything but her dead daughter. The father could only think of his disappointment in Maslow's decision to become a psychiatrist. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, his father spoke of his son as if he were dead. But so had Maslow's analyst. Jason was also saddened by the fact that neither parent had called their son by his name. Speaking of him the way they had was a kind of soul murder. If this were a homicide, that alone would be a reason for the police to suspect them. But Jason wasn't a cop.
It seemed that he alone was praying that Maslow Atkins was alive and well and for some unknown reason playing hooky from his life. Jason left the apartment knowing no more about Maslow's present life than he had before his visit. But it was certainly no mystery why the young man had defied his parents to become a doctor of the mind.
Twenty-two
April was in a hurry. She had three things on her to-do list before meeting Mike. She wanted to search Maslow's office, locate his appointment book and list of patients, and listen to the messages on his answering machine. After that she needed to run over to Jason's apartment on Riverside Drive and spend half an hour reviewing everything he knew about the missing man. She also had to question Pee Wee James again now that he'd had time to sober up.
Between worrying about keeping Mike waiting and not being able to clear the case in the next ten minutes, April was feeling a lot of stress. By the time Woody double-parked on the block between Eighty-ninth and Ninetieth streets, a deep ache had traveled down her spine from the base of her head to the space between her shoulder blades and was now gathering momentum, jabbing sharply at her lower back as well. She was feeling so much muscle distress she didn't have the energy to complain about Woody's traffic violation. If he got a summons, he'd have to deal with it. Tough. Before he had a chance to kill the engine, she was already out of the car, trying to stretch her screaming muscles into a semblance of quiet.
Something was wrong with those kids. She couldn't get them out of her mind. Brandy's mugging for Woody's camera, David's being freaked out by it. Both of them stoned, knowing Zumech, and worse, being in the right place at the right time during a police investigation. There were too many matches for comfort, but they didn't seem to have any connection to Maslow. They didn't even know who he was or what was going on. She shrugged them onto
