from Mack again, he certainly knew we were going to talk about my brother. I wondered if perhaps he didn’t want Benny to hear that conversation. My suspicion was that Benny was gifted with very keen hearing.
The restaurant Nick had chosen, La Provence, was everything he had promised. It had been a private home and retained that atmosphere. The tables were far apart. The centerpieces on them were made up of a candle surrounded by budding flowers, and each table had different flowers. Paintings that I guessed to be of the French countryside were hung on the paneled walls. It was obvious from the warm greeting the maitre d’ extended to Nick that he was a regular customer. We followed him to a corner table with a window that looked over the Hudson. The night was clear, and the view of the Tappan Zee Bridge spanning the river was splendid.
I thought of my dream of trying to follow Mack as he crossed a bridge. Then I tuned it out.
Over a glass of wine, I told Nick about Mack’s usual Mother’s Day call and then about the note he left in the collection basket. “The fact that he wrote that I must not try to find him makes me feel that something is very wrong in his life,” I said. “I’m just afraid that Mack needs help.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Carolyn,” Nick said, quietly. “I was witness to how close he was to you and your parents. He would know that if he needed anything in a financial way, your mother would provide it on the spot. If he’s sick, I would think he’d want to be around you and your mother. I never saw Mack touch drugs, but I don’t know, maybe he had started and knew it would crush your father if he found out about it. Don’t think I haven’t tried all these years to figure out what would make him vanish.”
I guess it’s what I expected to hear, but even so, I felt as if every door I tried to open was being slammed in my face. When I didn’t respond, Nick waited me out for a minute, then said, “Carolyn, you said yourself that Mack sounded pretty chipper when he called on Mother’s Day. Why don’t you look at that message not as a plea for help, but as a firm request, or even a command? You can certainly read it that way, too. ‘Tell Carolyn she must not look for me!’”
He was right. I know he was. But in a much bigger sense he was wrong. Every instinct in my body told me that.
“Let it go, Carolyn,” Nick said. Now his voice was gentle. “When and if Mack decides to surface, I am going to give him one swift kick for the way he’s treated you and your mother. Now, tell me about yourself. I guess your clerkship with the judge expires soon. Isn’t that the way it works?”
“I’ll tell you about that,” I said. “But just a little more about Mack first. I went to see the Kramers Wednesday morning.”
“The Kramers? You mean the superintendents of the building where Mack and I lived?”
“Yes. And Nick, you may not believe me, but Mrs. Kramer was nervous. She kept looking over at her husband to make sure whatever she told me was all right. I swear to you, she was afraid of making some kind of mistake. What did you think of them when you lived there?”
“To be honest, it’s not what I thought of them, it’s more that I didn’t think about them. Mrs. Kramer cleaned the apartment, thanks to your mother’s generosity, and did our wash once a week. Otherwise it would probably have been a pigsty. She was a good cleaning woman but downright nosey. I know Bruce Galbraith was furious at her. He came in one day and she was reading the mail on his desk. If she was reading his, I figured she was probably reading mine, too.”
“Did you challenge her on it?”
He smiled. “No. I did something dopey. I typed a letter, signed her name to it, and stacked it with my mail so that she would find it. It read something like this: ‘Darling, it is such a pleasure for me to wash your clothes and make your bed. I feel like a young girl when I look at you. Sometime will you take me dancing? All my love, Lilly Kramer.’”
“You didn’t!” I exclaimed.
The boyish twinkle I remembered appeared in Nick’s eyes for a brief moment. “When I thought it over, I threw it out before she could see it. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”
“Do you think Mack might have had a problem with her going through his mail?”
“He didn’t say it, but I have a feeling he was upset about her, too. But he never said why, then he was gone.”
“Do you mean it was just before he disappeared?”
Nick’s expression changed. “Carolyn, surely you don’t think the Kramers had anything to do with Mack’s disappearance?”
“Nick, just talking about them to you brought up something that obviously never came up at the time of the investigation, that Bruce caught her snooping, and that Mack may have been upset with her, too. Give me your assessment of Gus Kramer.”
“Good superintendent. Nasty temper. I heard him yelling at Mrs. Kramer a couple of times.”
“Nasty temper?” I asked, raising my eyebrows, then said, “You don’t have to answer, but think about it. Suppose he and Mack had some kind of confrontation.”
The waiter then came to take our orders, and Nick never did answer my question. After that we kept the conversation to catching up on the past ten years. I told him that I was going to apply for a job in the District Attorney’s office.
“‘Going to apply’?” Now it was Nick who raised his eyebrows. “As Brother Murphy said, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’ Any special reason for waiting?”
I answered vaguely about taking a little time to find an apartment. After dinner, Nick opened his BlackBerry discreetly and checked it for messages. I asked him to see if there was any update about Leesey Andrews.
“Good idea.” He pushed a button, scanned the news briefs, then turned off the BlackBerry. “‘Hope is fading that she’ll be found alive,’” he said soberly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m asked to drop in to the DA’s Office again tomorrow.”
And I may get a call from Barrott, I thought. We finished our coffee, and Nick signaled to the waiter for a check.
It was only later, when he was dropping me at the door of Sutton Place, that he brought up the subject of Mack again. “I can read you, Carolyn. You’re going to keep trying to find Mack, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Who else are you going to talk to?”
“I have a call in to Bruce Galbraith.”
“You won’t get much help or sympathy from him,” he said wryly.
“Why not?”
“Do you remember Barbara Hanover, the girl who came with Mack and me to dinner at your house?”
And how, I thought. “Yes, I remember her,” I said, but then I couldn’t help adding, “I also remember that you had a big crush on her.”
Nick shrugged. “Ten years ago I had a crush on someone different every week. Anyhow, it wouldn’t have done me any good. If she cared about anyone, my guess is that it was Mack.”
“Mack?” Could I have been so focused on Nick that I didn’t notice?
“Couldn’t you tell? But Barbara was looking for a ticket to medical school. Her mother had a catastrophic illness that ate up all the money that had been earmarked for Barbara’s education. That is why she married Bruce Galbraith. They eloped that summer, remember?”
“That’s something else that never came out during the investigation,” I said slowly. “Was Bruce jealous of Mack?”
Nick shrugged. “You never knew what Bruce was thinking. But what’s the difference? You talked to Mack less than a week ago. You certainly don’t think Bruce sent him into hiding, do you?”
I felt like a fool. “Of course not,” I said. “I really don’t know anything about Bruce at all. He never came here with you and Mack.”
“He’s a loner. That last year at Columbia, even the nights he’d hit the clubs in the Village and SoHo with a crowd of us, he always seemed to be by himself. We called him ‘the Lone Stranger.’”
I searched Nick’s face, eager for more detail. “After Mack disappeared, when the investigation started, did the police question Bruce at all? The only thing I found about him in the file was his statement about the last time he saw Mack in the apartment.”
“I don’t think they did. Why would they? He and Mack never hung out together.”
“I was just reminded by an old friend that a week or so before he disappeared, Mack and some other guys
