“I forgot all about it! I always left the task of answering those messages to my assistant.”
“You speak in the past tense. Is he no longer with you?”
“I’m not certain. Ever since last Tuesday, he has not been in.”
“Was it an unplanned absence? Or might he have taken some time off for the holidays?”
“Oh, yes, it is unplanned, indeed. You see Al lives with me, in his own small unit on the third floor. Surely, he is not in some trouble?”
“First, let’s be sure we are talking about the same person. I’m inquiring about Ali Abdulhazar, a man who would be just short of forty years old this year.”
“That is my assistant’s legal name, but he has called himself Al Hazard for many years now. He came to me as an apprentice many years ago, to learn how to tune pianos. Now he carries the lion’s share of my business. I don’t know what to tell my customers about when he will return. This is so terribly unlike him.”
“Do you have any reason to think he’s visiting family, in trouble, or perhaps run off with a woman?”
“None, except that he did not tell me he’d be away. His family returned to the Middle East before he reached age twenty, and he’s hardly mentioned them since. It did occur to me that perhaps he’d received a message from them, calling him home to attend to an illness or, God forbid, a funeral. Not that they’d ever given him much in the way of family support. I took the liberty of looking in his room, but I didn’t find any letter.”
“Did you try his telephone answering machine?”
“He doesn’t have a telephone upstairs. He always used the one in the workshop. But, of course, I never checked that! How stupid of me.”
“Perhaps it holds the answer. Might we check it together?”
“That would be helpful. I’m terrible at all this technology. But first I must know why it is you are looking for him.”
Liz might have said she was an old friend or offered up some other tall tale, but she opted to tell the truth. It seemed to give Van Wormer pause, until Liz added, “If you read today’s newspapers, I think you might find you’d rather have me than my competitor look into the connection between Al and Ellen. I promise to tell the whole story and not to rake up dirt on your assistant just for the sake of it. Most likely, his absence is unconnected, anyway.”
Van Wormer led Liz to the phone machine. The tape of recorded messages was mostly filled with several concerned—and a few angry—inquiries about upcoming and then missed piano tuning appointments. Only one of them offered anything different, and it was from a male caller with a Middle Eastern accent, suggesting that Al meet him “in the usual place” on December 19. The day Ali went missing and the day after Ellen left home.
Another dead end.
Liz asked Van Wormer if he would like her to run a check on Ali, using his Social Security number, only causing Van Wormer to draw the line on helping her any further. “You may mean well, Miss Higgins, but unless and until my employee is gone for a far longer period of time, I am not willing to share his private information with you.”
“Of course, I understand,” Liz said. She knew it was best to mask her frustration here. If she remained pleasant and helpful, it maximized the chances that Van Wormer would turn to her later. “I hope Al returns soon. If he does, I hope you will let me know. If he doesn’t, perhaps you might turn to me for help. I know how upsetting and expensive it would be to use the services of a private investigator. I have free access to some investigative databases at the
Handing the keyboard expert her business card, Liz made her exit and hurried to the newsroom, where it fast became clear that Samir Hasan’s Social Security number was a fake.
And that was no surprise.
Chapter 22
Liz’s newsroom stature rose substantially after she topped the
Liz did tell her city editor about Nadia’s missive, but he had her follow up on Samir Hasan’s Social Security information instead of pushing for coverage of the purloined letter. The Social Security search only proved Samir Hasan was paid for three years under that name by the cab company Jake headed. The Social Security Administration also had fallen for the fake address, and there was no information about Hasan holding any other jobs. A follow-up on the short-wave radio license also led nowhere. False identification had been used successfully here, too.
Hasan’s genetic identity was easier to pin down when, eleven weeks to the day after Kinnaird submitted the cigarette butts and spots of blood on the tissue and on the poinsettia for testing, DNA results proved the cabbie had been injured in the Johansson kitchen. Liz got the scoop on this, since police DNA testing did not come back until four weeks later. Still, beyond the DNA results, the cabbie’s trail was cold.
Since he had no knowledge that Liz had read Nadia’s letter, Erik Johansson had no notion of how much Liz now questioned his role in Ellen’s disappearance. Grateful for Liz’s part in exonerating him of the child abuse charge, and for making it possible to welcome Veronica home to a beautifully wallpapered room, Erik kept in touch with Liz as winter wound its way into springtime. He shared with her Veronica’s belief that Ellen was wearing her Christmas sweater with a reindeer pattern knitted into it when she went missing. Although Veronica said her mother had not been wearing her “Rudolph sweater” when she drove Veronica to school that day, the sweater was nowhere to be found in the Johansson house and it seemed likely Ellen donned it sometime before she disappeared.
Erik also showed Liz more incoming mail—all postcards—from Nadia. None of them had a word to say about the secret the pen pals had shared in New York. Nor did they indicate when Nadia expected to return to her home in Jerusalem.
In addition, Erik let Liz know he phoned Nadia’s Jerusalem home twice a week, every week. Liz had been doing the same thing. There was no answering machine, so the phone just rang and rang each time either of them called. In February, while Veronica spent her school vacation with Olga, Erik made an unproductive trip to Nadia’s Jerusalem address, only to have neighbors tell him they had no idea when she would return. They insisted they had no information to share about relatives or friends of Nadia.
Unwilling to trust Erik on this, Liz prevailed on the
Once a month, Liz penned a letter to Nadia, expressing her concern for Ellen and her hope that Nadia would contact her at the first opportunity. She also phoned Jan Van Wormer on the eighteenth of every month, the anniversary of Ellen’s disappearance. But there was never news of the man who called himself Al Hazard. Spring came and went as Liz, working with Erik, systematically contacted United Nations personnel who they thought might require the services of a translator with skills in English and Arabic. Not one of them knew a thing about Nadia.
Still, the pen pal’s postcards kept coming. Most were sent from airports and bore messages indicating Nadia was about to leave for another destination. This had been true throughout the pen pals’ correspondence, Erik said, recalling how his wife had envied the international life her correspondent enjoyed.
Veronica’s June 11 birthday came and went with no word from Ellen. However, that day there was a phone call made to the Johansson home from Ellen’s cell phone. The caller—was it Ellen?—said nothing. Investigation of the cell-phone records indicated no roaming charges for the call, which must have been placed from a location tantalizingly close to home. At the urging of the police, Erik continued to keep the cell phone in service, in case another call came through.
For her birthday gift to Veronica, Olga had Veronica’s birthstone attached to Ellen’s wedding ring circlet to
