of the executive dining room.
Elliott ordered, and when the waiter was out of earshot he got right to the point: “We heard from Mack on Sunday,” he said.
“The usual Mother’s Day call?” Aaron asked. “I was wondering if he’d stick to form and phone this year.”
“He did that, and more.”
Aaron did not take his eyes off Elliott Wallace’s face as he listened to the account of the written communication from Mack.
“I’ve advised Olivia to respect Mack’s wishes,” Elliott said. “But oddly enough, she seems to have come to that conclusion on her own. She referred to Mack as ‘absent without leave.’ She’s going to join some mutual friends of ours for a cruise around the Greek islands. I’ve been invited to be with them and may go for the last ten days.”
“You should,” Aaron said promptly. “You don’t give yourself nearly enough time off.”
“And on my next birthday I’ll be sixty-five. In a lot of companies I’d be pushed out at that age. That’s the benefit of owning this one-I’m not going anywhere for a long time.” He paused, as if preparing himself, then said, “But I didn’t ask you to join me to discuss vacation plans.”
Surprised, Aaron Klein watched as Wallace’s eyes clouded with worry.
“Aaron, you’ve gone through the experience of losing your mother in a random crime. If the positions were reversed, if your mother was the one who had disappeared and then kept in contact, would you respect her wishes or would you feel that you should keep on trying to find her? I find myself absolutely uncertain and troubled. Did I give Olivia the right advice, or should I have told her to renew and redouble her efforts to find Mack?”
Suppose Mom had disappeared ten years ago, Aaron asked himself. Suppose she phoned once a year, then, when I told her I needed to find her and was going to track her down, she sent me a note telling me to leave her alone, what would I do?
The answer was not hard to reach. “If my mother did to me what Mack has done to his family and to you, I would say, ‘If that’s the way you want it, Mom, so be it. I have other fish to fry.’”
Elliott Wallace smiled. “‘Other fish to fry’? That’s a strange way to put it. But thank you, Aaron. I needed to be reassured I’m not failing Mack or Olivia…” He paused, then corrected himself: “I mean his mother and sister, of course.”
“You’re not failing them,” Aaron Klein said emphatically.
That night, as he was sipping a predinner glass of wine with his wife, Aaron said, “Jenny, today I realized that even stuffed shirts are like schoolboys when they fall in love. Elliott can’t mention Olivia MacKenzie’s name without getting stars in his eyes.”
14
N icholas DeMarco, owner of the trendy club the Woodshed, as well as an upscale restaurant in Palm Beach, was notified of the disappearance of the NYU coed Leesey Andrews late Tuesday evening while on a golf outing in South Carolina.
On Wednesday morning, he flew home, and by three o’clock Wednesday afternoon he was following a secretary down a long corridor on the ninth floor of 1 Hogan Place to the section where the detectives assigned to the District Attorney of Manhattan worked. He had an appointment with Captain Larry Ahearn, the commanding officer of the squad.
Tall, with the lean figure of a disciplined athlete, Nick walked with long strides, a worried frown on his forehead. Absentmindedly, he passed a hand through his short hair, which, despite his best efforts, curled when it was damp.
I should have stopped home long enough to change, he chided himself. He was wearing an open-necked checkered blue and white sport shirt, which felt too casual, even with a light blue jacket and dark blue slacks.
“This is the detectives’ squad room,” the secretary explained, as they entered a large room in which rows of desks were haphazardly clustered. Only a half dozen of them were occupied, although piles of papers and ringing telephones testified to the fact that all of the others were active workstations.
The five men and one woman who were there looked up as he crossed the room, threading his way between the desks after the secretary. He was keenly aware of being the object of sharp scrutiny. Ten to one, they all know who I am and why I’m here, and they resent me. They have me pegged as the owner of one of those raunchy bars where underage kids get drunk, he thought.
The secretary knocked on the door of a private office to the left of the squad room and, without waiting for an answer, opened it.
Captain Larry Ahearn was alone in the room. He got up from behind the desk and offered his hand to DeMarco. “Thank you for coming in so promptly,” he said briskly. “Please sit down.” He turned to the secretary. “Ask Detective Gaylor to join us.”
DeMarco took the chair nearest Ahearn’s desk. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t available last night. Early yesterday morning I flew to South Carolina to meet some friends.”
“I understand from your secretary that you flew your own private plane from Teterboro Airport,” Ahearn said.
“That’s right. And I flew back this morning. I couldn’t get an early start because of the weather down there. They had heavy storms in Charleston.”
“When did your staff notify you that Leesey Andrews, a young woman who left your club at closing time early Tuesday morning, had disappeared?”
“The call came to my cell phone about nine o’clock last night. I was out to dinner with friends and hadn’t carried it with me. Quite frankly, as a restaurant owner, I consider people who make or take calls in restaurants pretty insufferable. When I got back to the hotel at about eleven, I checked my messages. Is there any word about Ms. Andrews? Has she called her family?”
“No,” Ahearn said briefly, then looked past DeMarco. “Come in, Bob.”
Nicholas DeMarco had not heard the door open. He stood up and turned as a trim man with graying hair who looked to be in his late fifties crossed the room with a quick stride. He smiled briefly as he reached out his hand.
“Detective Gaylor,” he said, then pulled up a chair and turned it, facing Nick at a right angle to the captain’s desk.
“Mr. DeMarco,” Ahearn began, “we are very concerned that Leesey Andrews may be the victim of foul play. Your employees tell us that you were in the Woodshed at approximately ten o’clock on Monday evening and were speaking with her.”
“That’s right,” Nick answered promptly. “Because I was leaving for South Carolina, I worked late at my office at 400 Park Avenue. Then I stopped at my apartment, changed to casual clothes, and went down to the Woodshed.”
“Do you visit your club frequently?”
“I would say I drop in frequently. I no longer do, nor want to do, hands-on management. Tom Ferrazzano runs the Woodshed for me as both host and manager. And I might add he does an excellent job of it. In the ten months we’ve been operating, we’ve never had one single incident caused by an underage drinker being served or an adult being served too much for his or her own good. Our employees are thoroughly checked out before they’re hired, as are the bands we book to perform.”
“The reputation of the Woodshed is good,” Detective Gaylor agreed. “But your own employees tell us that you spent quite a bit of time talking to Leesey Andrews.”
“I saw her dancing,” Nick said promptly. “She’s a beautiful girl and a really excellent dancer. To look at her you would think she was a professional. But she also looks very young. I know her ID had been checked, but if I had to bet on it, I’d have sworn she was underage. That’s why I had one of the waiters bring her over to my table and asked to see it myself. She had just turned twenty-one.”
“She joined you at your table,” Gaylor said flatly. “You bought her a drink.”
