Mask Market

So this woman had—what?—skipped out on a big pile of money she owed to this guy Parks? That didn’t add up. Walking away from all those assets would have to cost her a cubic ton more than any commission she could owe a money manager.

I shrugged my shoulders at Clarence.

He tapped a key, and another screen popped up, displaying a whole page of thumbnails. “Put the pointer on the one you want to see, double-click, and it will blow right up, like enlarging a photograph.”

The first one was a young woman—hard to tell her age without a tighter close-up—standing next to a fireplace, one hand on the mantel. She was fair-skinned, willowy, with long, slightly wavy dark hair. I couldn’t see much else.

I scanned the thumbnails with my eyes, looking for a full-face shot. Found it. Clicked it open.

And went back twenty years.

“You know her, mahn?” Clarence said, reading my face.

“Let me look at a few more,” I told him, moving the cursor and clicking the mouse.

I flicked past the ones with her in outfits—everything from French maid to English riding costume—and the nudes, which were all posed as if she was sitting for an artist’s portrait. It was the close-ups that sealed the deal. Those icy topaz eyes hadn’t changed at all.

“Yeah, I know her,” I said.

Beryl Eunice Preston had just turned thirteen when she disappeared from her parents’ mansion in one of Westchester’s Old Money enclaves. It was her father who came to see me, back when I had an office carved out of what was once crawlspace at the top of a building in what the real-estate hucksters had just started to call “Tribeca.” I lived in that office, in a little apartment concealed behind a fake Persian rug that looked like it covered a solid wall.

Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.

The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.

That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.

Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.

Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.

So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent for the Animal Control guys.

Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.

After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.

“I’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.

“You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”

“I don’t want the police….”

“I don’t want them, either.”

“Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”

“It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”

He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.

“My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.

“How do you know?”

“What…what do you mean by that?”

“You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”

“Beryl is a troubled child,” he said, as if the empty phrase explained everything.

I blew smoke at the low ceiling to tell him that it didn’t.

“She’s done it before. Run away, I mean.”

“How’d you find her those other times?”

“She always came back on her own. That’s what’s different now.”

“How long’s she been gone?”

“It will be two weeks tomorrow. If school wasn’t out for the summer, it would be difficult for us—my wife and me—to explain. As it is…”

“You did all the usual stuff, right?”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“Contacted her school friends, checked with any relatives who might be willing to let her hide out at their place, read her diary…”

“Yes. Yes, we did all that. Under normal circumstances, we would never—”

“Does she have a pet?”

“You mean,” he said, glancing involuntarily at Pansy, “like a dog or a cat?”

“Yeah.”

“What difference would that make?”

“A kid that’s going to run away permanently, you’d expect them to take their pet with them.”

“Beryl never had a pet,” he said flatly, his tone making it clear that, if they had deemed one advisable, her devoted parents would have run out and gotten her one. The very best.

“Okay. What about clothes? Did she take enough to last her awhile?”

“It’s…hard to tell, to be honest. She has so many clothes that we couldn’t determine if anything was missing.”

“What makes you think she’s in Manhattan?”

“One of the private detectives we hired was able to trace her movements on the day it…happened. We don’t know how she got to the train station—it’s about twenty minutes from our house, and the local car service hadn’t been called—but there’s no question that she bought a ticket to Penn Station.”

“Penn Station’s a hub. She could have connected with another train to anywhere in the country. Did she have enough money for a ticket?”

“I…don’t know how much money she had. None of the cash we keep in the house was missing, but we’ve always been very generous with her allowance, and she could have been saving up to…do this. But the last detective agency we retained was very thorough, and they are quite certain she didn’t catch a train out…at least, on the day she left.”

“So you hired this ‘agency,’ and…?”