III WEDNESDAY February 20
On Wednesday evening, Darcy arrived at Nona Roberts’s office promptly at six-thirty. She’d had a meeting with a client on Riverside Drive and phoned Nona to suggest they cab over to the restaurant together.
Nona’s office was a cluttered box in a row of cluttered boxes on the tenth floor of the Hudson Cable Network. It held a somewhat battered oak desk piled with papers, several filing cabinets, the drawers of which did not fully close, shelves of reference books and tapes, a distinctly uninviting-looking love seat, and an executive swivel chair which Darcy knew no longer swiveled. A plant which Nona consistently forgot to water drooped wearily on the narrow windowsill. Nona loved that office. Darcy privately wondered why it didn’t destroy itself by spontaneous combustion. When she arrived, Nona was on the phone, so she went out seeking water for the plant. “It’s begging for mercy,” she said when she returned.
Nona had just completed the call. She jumped up to embrace Darcy. “A green thumb I have not.” She was wearing a khaki wool jumpsuit that faithfully followed the lines of her small frame. A narrow leather belt with a white-gold clasp sculpted in the form of linked hands cinched her waist. Her medium-blond hair, streaked with touches of gray, was blunt-cut and barely reached her chin. Her animated face was interesting rather than pretty.
Darcy was glad to see that the pain in Nona’s dark brown eyes had been almost completely replaced by an expression of wry humor. Nona’s recent divorce had hit her hard. As she put it, “It’s traumatic enough turning forty without your husband bumping you for a twenty-one-year-old nymphet.” “I’m running late,” Nona apologized. “We’re meeting Erin at seven?” “Between seven and seven-fifteen,” Darcy said, her fingers itching to skim the dead leaves from the plant.
“Fifteen minutes to get over there, provided I throw myself in front of an empty cab. Terrific. There’s one thing I’d like to do before we go. Why don’t you come with me and witness the compassionate side of television.” “I wasn’t aware it had one.” Darcy reached for her shoulder bag.
All the offices rimmed a large central area which was crowded with secretaries and writers at their desks. Computers hummed and fax machines clattered. At the end of the room, an announcer was on camera giving a news update. Nona waved a general greeting as she passed. “There isn’t a single unattached person in that maze who isn’t answering the personal ads for me. As a matter of fact, I suspect there are some supposedly attached guys who are also quietly getting together with an intriguing box number.”
She led Darcy into a screening room and introduced her to Joan Nye, a pretty blonde who didn’t look more than twenty-two. “Joan does the obits,” she explained. “She just finished updating an important one and asked me to take a look at it.” She turned to Nye. “I know it will be fine,” she added reassuringly.
Joan sighed. “I hope so,” she said, and pushed the button to start the film rolling.
The face of film great Ann Bouchard filled the screen. The mellifluous voice of Gary Finch, the Hudson Cable anchorman, was properly subdued as he began to speak.
“Ann Bouchard won her first Oscar at the age of nineteen, when she replaced ailing Lillian Marker in the 1928 classic Perilous Path…” Film clips of Ann Bouchard in her most memorable roles were followed by highlights of her personal life: her seven husbands, her homes, her well-publicized battles with studio executives, excerpts of interviews throughout her long career, her emotional response to receiving a lifetime achievement award: “I have been blessed. I have been loved. And I love you all.” It was over. “I didn’t know Ann Bouchard died,” Darcy exclaimed. “My God, she was on the phone with my mother last week. When did that happen?” “It didn’t,” Nona said. “We prepare the celebrity obits in advance just the way the newspapers do. And we regularly update them. The farewell to George Burns has been revised twenty-two times. When the inevitable occurs, we just have to drop in the lead. The rather irreverent name for the project is the Toodle-oo Club.”
“Toodle-oo Club?”
“Uh-huh. We do the final portion and say toodle-oo to the deceased.” She turned to Nye. “That was terrific. I’m positively blinking back tears. Incidentally, have you answered any new personals?”
Nye grinned. “It may cost you, Nona. The other night I made a date to meet some jerk. Naturally got caught in traffic. Double-parked my car to rush in and let him know I’d be right back. Rushed out to find a cop ticketing me. Finally found a garage six blocks away and when I came back-“
“He was gone,” Nona suggested.
Nye’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”
“Because I’ve heard this from some other people. Don’t take it personally. Now we’d better run.” At the door Nona called over her shoulder, “Give me the ticket. I’ll take care of it.”
In the cab on the way to meet Erin, Darcy found herself wondering what it was that made someone pull a trick like that. Nye was genuinely attractive. Was she too young for the man she had met? When she answered the ad she must have given her age. Did he have some image in mind that Nye didn’t fit? It was a disquieting thought. As the cab bumped and lurched through Seventy-second Street traffic, she commented, “Nona, when we started answering these ads, I thought of it as a joke. Now I’m not so sure. It’s like having a blind date without the security of being introduced to the guy because he’s the best friend of somebody’s brother. Can you imagine any man you know doing that? Even if for some reason Nye’s date hated the way she dressed or wore her hair or whatever, all he had to do was have a quick drink and say he was rushing for a plane. He still gets away fast and doesn’t leave her feeling like a fool.” “Darcy, let’s face it,” Nona said. “From all the reports I’m hearing, most of the people who place or answer these ads are pretty insecure. What’s a lot more scary is that just today I got a letter from an FBI agent who’d heard about the program and said he wants to talk to me. He’d like us to include a warning that these ads are a natural for sexual psychopaths.”
“What a lovely thought!”
As usual, Bella Vita offered encompassing warmth. The wonderful, familiar garlicky aroma was in the air. There was a faint hum of talk and laughter. Adam, the owner, greeted them. “Ah, the beautiful ladies. I have your table.” He indicated one by the window.
“ Erin should be along any minute,” Darcy told him as they were seated. “I’m surprised she isn’t waiting. She’s always so prompt, it actually gives me a complex.”
“She’s probably stuck in traffic,” Nona said. “Let’s order wine. We know she’ll have chablis.”
Half an hour later, Darcy pushed her chair back. “I’m going to phone Erin. The only thing I can imagine is that when she delivered the necklace she designed for Bertolini’s, there might have been some adjustment needed. She loses track of time when she’s working.”
The answering machine was on in Erin ’s studio apartment. Darcy returned to the table and realized Nona’s anxious expression mirrored her own feelings. “I left a message that we’re waiting for her and to call here if she can’t make it.” They ordered dinner. Darcy loved this restaurant, but tonight she was hardly aware of what she was eating. Every few minutes she glanced at the door hoping that Erin would come flying in with a perfectly reasonable explanation of why she had been delayed.
She did not come.
Darcy lived on the top floor of a brownstone on East Forty-ninth Street, Nona in a co-op on Central Park West. When they left the restaurant they took separate cabs, promising that whoever heard from Erin first would contact the other. The minute she got home, Darcy tried Erin ’s number again. She tried an hour later, just before she went to bed. This time she left an emphatic message. “ Erin, I’m worried about you. It’s Wednesday, 11:15. I don’t care how late you get in, call me.”
Eventually, Darcy fell into an uneasy sleep.
When she awakened at 6 a.m., her immediate thought was that Erin had not called.
Jay Stratton stared out the corner window of his thirtieth-floor apartment in Waterside Plaza on Twenty-fifth Street and the East River Drive. The view was spectacular: the East River arced by the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, the twin towers to the right, the Hudson behind them, the streams of traffic, agonizingly slow in the evening rush hour, flowing well enough now. It was seven-thirty.
Jay frowned, a gesture that caused his narrow eyes to become almost invisible. A head of dark brown hair, expensively cut and attractively threaded with gray, helped to foster his cultivated look of casual elegance. He was
