and access routes on a circuitous course toward Central Park West.
But Central Park, despite its beauty, despite its variety of natural attractions, is usually deserted after dark. Occasionally, couples will stroll along the pathways near the southern end of the park, where there are hansom cabs, the reassuring glitter and crowds of Fifty-ninth Street, and the huge, graceful bulk of the Plaza Hotel.
But few prudent citizens would consider venturing north beyond the upper Sixties because at night the park is infested by human predators that prey on anyone foolish or reckless enough to stray into their terrain.
Uninformed or incautious tourists, wandering drunks and questing homosexuals, narcotics pushers, sexual freaks, masochists of all varieties, the strange and lonely neurotics who exist in all sprawling cities-these are the potential victims of the rapists and muggers who are hidden in the nighttime shadows of this immense, graceful sprawl of lakes and meadows and trees.
In this darkness Central Park (save perhaps for battlefields of warring nations) is potentially one of the more dangerous stretches of real estate in the world.
Chapter 13
Luther Boyd checked his wristwatch. It was close to six thirty.
Barbara was pacing restlessly, her hands locked around her elbows in a curiously defensive and vulnerable gesture.
They had been circling their problems with words since Kate had gone off with Harry Lauder and still hadn’t come to the heart of it. God knows, it wasn’t all Luther’s fault, she thought, because he had been bred to treat people as statistics.
Barbara wondered if she were listed in his precise mental files as a slender object which catered to his tastes in food and drink and-asterisk and footnote-object also programmed for sexual activity.
“Didn’t Kate say she’d be back in about fifteen minutes?” she asked him.
“Yes,” Boyd said. He had been concerned about her absence for the last ten minutes or so to the extent that he had hardly been listening to Barbara’s catalogue of disillusionments. But he realized now that she had also been participating in the charade; he knew her well and suspected that her present aimless, almost erratic manner reflected an anxiety she was perhaps afraid to articulate.
It was then the phone rang. Luther Boyd picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”
“It’s John Brennan, Mr. Boyd. Is Kate up there with you?”
“No, she’s not, John.”
“I had to carry out some luggage for Mrs. Cadwalader, then get her a cab.” The old man sounded worried. “But I didn’t have my eyes off Kate for more than a minute or so.”
“She’s not out front on the sidewalk?”
“No. I figured she went upstairs while I was whistling for a cab.”
“Any sign of Harry Lauder?”
“Not as far as I can see, Mr. Boyd.”
Barbara walked across the room to her husband, her eyes searching his face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him. “Is it Kate?”
“Thanks, John.”
“I don’t understand this, Mr. Boyd. But I feel terrible about it.”
“You’ve got responsibilities to all your tenants, not just the Boyd family.” He hung up on John Brennan’s further apologies and looked at Barbara.
“Kate’s wandered off,” he said.
“But where?”
Boyd rubbed his jaw, a gesture which alarmed Barbara, for she knew it was one of his few physical reactions to stress. “You tell me,” he said.
“Wait. Maybe she went up to see Tish Tennyson.”
“You have her number?”
“Yes, I’ll get it.” Barbara hurried along the hall to Kate’s room, collected Kate’s address book, and returned to the drawing room, flipping the pages. “Here it is,” she said, and gave the book to her husband.
Luther Boyd dialed the number and spoke with Mrs. Tennyson and with Tish. But Kate hadn’t been to the Tennysons’.
Boyd dropped the receiver into its cradle, and when Barbara noted the stillness of his expression, the cold appraisal in his eyes, she experienced an uncomfortable twist of fear. “This isn’t like Kate, Luther. You know it isn’t.”
“You stay here in case there’s a phone call.”
This was not a request or a course of procedure to be discussed; this was a bird colonel talking to the troops, and Barbara nodded quickly.
In the lobby, Boyd cut off still more apologies from Mr. Brennan.
“Forget it, John. It’s not important now. But this is: Where was Kate when you saw her last, and what time was it?”
“She was a half block north of here, on this side of Fifth.” The old man frowned, then nodded with obvious relief. “That would have been just a minute or two before six o’clock. Because Mrs. Cadwalader told me she was giving herself an hour and a half for her seven thirty flight at Kennedy.”
Boyd checked his watch, noted that it was a few seconds past six thirty-five. Which meant Kate had been off on her own about thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes.
He hit the revolving door with the heel of his hand, and it was still spinning when he walked to the curb and looked up and down the avenue. Traffic was normal, a half dozen pedestrians on the sidewalks, a man in uniform removing a box of flowers from the rear of a florist’s van. Boyd noted the chestnut vendor standing beside his cart at the intersection south of their building. He walked to him and said, “Did you see a young girl”-he indicated Kate’s height with his hand-”wearing a red ski jacket and walking a black Scottie?”
Halfway through the sentence, the old man shook his head helplessly and pointed to his mouth.
“You can’t speak?” Boyd asked.
The old man nodded quickly. He repeated Boyd’s gesture by which he had indicated Kate’s height and pointed across the avenue to Central Park.
“She went into the park?”
Instead of responding with a nod or headshake, the old man knelt and made a scrambling motion with his fingers on the sidewalk.
“The dog?”
The old man nodded rapidly.
“The dog went into the park?”
The chestnut vendor put his right forefinger into the palm of his left hand and made a fist over it. Then he abruptly jerked the forefinger free from his own grasp.
“The dog pulled the leash from the girl’s hand?”
The old man nodded again.
“The dog got away from her, ran into the park.”
Again a quick nod.
“And she followed him?”
The old man’s expression reflected impotence and frustration. He pointed across the avenue to the approximate place that Harry Lauder had scrambled across the wall and disappeared into thickets of shining sumac. As Boyd looked at him questioningly, the old man gave him an emphatic shake of his head and pointed north to a footpath which entered the park two blocks from where they were standing.
Luther Boyd saw exactly what had happened, as clearly as if he were watching the sequence of action on a motion-picture screen.
He thanked the old man and stared at the sprawl of the park, while he examined the first three scenarios that occurred to him. One, Kate was in the park searching for the Scottie. Two, she was lost and was trying to find her way back to Fifth Avenue. Three, she was in trouble, hurt or restrained, physically unable to leave the park.
He rapidly sorted out his options: to go after her immediately or risk a few precious moments to prepare himself for potentially dangerous contingencies.
