elbows. He uses the house in Amagansett to entertain clients and for weekend getaways with his partner whom Wisdom meets during the meeting.
Welbrook introduces his partner as Steven Hoyle. Hoyle has dark hair and wears a tee shirt and worn jeans with a large hole over one knee. He appears slightly younger than Welbrook and is an editorial associate for a major publishing firm. They offer coffee and sit on the opposite couch from Wisdom. Welbrook drapes an arm around Hoyle’s shoulder, which he periodically massages. The effect is obvious. Wisdom has no interest in the man’s sexual orientation except that it minimizes Welbrook’s possible interest in Heidi Kashani, although that doesn’t mean elimination. Welbrook still remains a minor focus, but is now in the second tier, if such a distinction is possible.
In Wisdom’s opinion Dr. Stern is still front and center the most likely to be involved. All this flashes through Wisdom’s mind in seconds, but the chief doesn’t seem to notice any delay in his answer.
“Let me think about how to approach this. Stern is a more likely suspect that these other two. Sounds like he’s just trying to throw us off. Did the city cops happen to mention whether Stern did anything to indicate that he felt he was a possible suspect?”
“Nothing they picked up on. But if I wanted to off my girlfriend, one good way to cover up might be to report her missing and then try to steer the blame to someone else. That’s if I had a girlfriend I wanted to disappear, which I don’t, and if I had one that looked like Heidi, I absolutely wouldn’t.”
Wisdom stands and sighs in one motion, almost as if his body was controlled by some outside puppeteer. He starts to walk toward the door then stops and turns sharply.
“You said there were two more things. Another go-round with these two dudes is one. What’s the other?”
Ferris smiles into his nearly empty coffee cup.
“The hospital got a call. Seems Heidi has a sister and she’ll be arriving in the city in a week and plans on visiting us the following Tuesday.”
Wisdom glances at the wall calendar, which is distributed by a local nonprofit. Smack in the middle of the last week in August, as busy a week as they’re likely to get all summer.
“The Austrian Consulate in the city has asked that she be given the full treatment. Actually the call to the hospital came from State. The sister’s a special assistant to some UN bigwig in Geneva. And if you’re at all curious why I’m so interested in this case, then you can blame the State Department. Enjoy your weekend.”
CHAPTER 6
Brigid Kashani sits on the chair in Ferris’s office. She is flanked on one side by a man from the Austrian Consulate who introduces himself as Bernd Weis. He’s dressed all in charcoal gray except for a dazzling white shirt that is slashed by a tie that matches his suit color. Sergeant Rick Bennett, who runs the squad of seven detectives on the town force and is Wisdom’s boss, sits on her other side facing Wisdom and Ferris. Lieutenant Walker might otherwise have taken the chief’s place, but international embassy visitors call for a certain protocol.
Bennett’s hair is starting to gray and his belly just begins to push against a wrinkled shirt bunched at his gut, but his appearance is deceptive. His mind is both fertile and agile, always on the alert to ambush a contradiction in a story. After twenty years on the job, he’s become a very good cop. Bennett actually started with the department in East Hampton Village as a teenage summer traffic control officer—what the locals still call “a sand cop”—writing parking tickets. Today he’s arguably one of the best general detectives in the whole county and the town is lucky that he never left.
Wisdom looks again at Brigid while Ferris relays soft drink requests on the phone to his secretary. Brigid looks very much like Heidi down to the same short black helmet of hair Wisdom memorized from the photo; a slightly larger than normal nose, full lips, wide dark eyes and a light-brown Middle Eastern coloring. There is one major obvious difference. Brigid Kashani wears a business suit over a blouse buttoned to her neck. There is no hint at sexuality either in her choice of clothing or her makeup, which are both understated and practical. Yet when he looks only at her eyes, Wisdom sees a hint of the veiled sensuality that Stern and presumably others have seen in Heidi.
Soft drinks arrive at the same time as a written message for Ferris that causes him to make excuses and exit, leaving Wisdom and Bennett to run the meeting. Bennett winks at Wisdom. It’s an old game they’ve played before to keep the chief out of the details.
She begins to speak. Wisdom hears a German accent for sure, but it sounds as much British as German. Presumably she’d learned her English from a Brit. There’s also the absence of any of the rough throaty edges usually associated with German. Bennett comments on this and she explains that years in the French speaking part of Switzerland together with a year and a half of graduate school in Boston has softened her Austrian inflection.
“I only saw the message about Heidi last weekend when I went back to Vienna. My father never saw it, and if he had, he wouldn’t have answered. It was my aunt who lives with my parents who saw the message and sent the answer, because for both of my parents, Heidi no longer exists. It’s not even as though she had died. It’s as if she’d never existed.”
Bennett mirrors Wisdom’s look of bewilderment. Weis sits as before, if anything he is more stoic and Wisdom wonders if a test of his diplomatic skill is whether he can absorb such news without as much as a quiver of facial expression. Brigid, however, doesn’t miss Wisdom’s reaction. She is ready to go on.
“I needed to be in New York anyway, so I decided to come directly to see the authorities rather than handle it long distance. Let me say that I do acknowledge that Heidi exists, but I don’t really care whether she’s alive or dead.”
Her words hang in the air. Everyone waits for the explanation— the complete version—there is nothing else to say.
Even Weis moves perceptibly forward to the edge of his seat. He doesn’t have long to wait.
“Let me tell you a story,” she says, her hands clasped together demurely in her lap, as if in church.
“I am three years older than Heidi. We were both born in a suburb of Tehran. My Persian name was Behjat. Hers was Hediyeh. After we moved to Vienna, our parents changed the first names to conform to local customs, so hers converted into Heidi and mine became Brigid. We moved in the last days of the shah. My father had already arranged for money to be sent out of the country so we were quite comfortable after we arrived in Austria. We had a fine house, went to the best schools, learned to ski in the winter and sail in the summer. Heidi wanted to study medicine and I was interested in economics and international affairs. We both did college and graduate work in Switzerland.
“Soon after I started with the UN in Geneva, I met a young French Jewish lawyer who worked in the same agency. We fell in love and got engaged. We were to be married the next summer. That Christmas I invited him home to Vienna to meet my parents and Heidi.”
She stops abruptly, takes a long swallow from a cup of Sprite, and looks up at Wisdom.
“Can one smoke here?” she asks.
Wisdom might have denied her, but now just waves his hand and reaches for a battered brass beaker from the top of a bookcase where it still rests despite an official ban on smoking. Bennett gives a perceptible tilt of his head in agreement. She takes a cigarette from a blue packet within her small bag and lights up with a silver-colored lighter. In a moment the air fills with an acrid grayish-blue cloud. Wisdom absently wonders whether Bennett who has recently again given up smoking is crawling inside his skin. She takes another puff then grinds the butt into the brass.
“Take your time,” Bennett offers, possibly sensing that the next part will be more difficult.
“Thank you. Two days after we’d arrived back in Vienna, my mother and I were looking for some old photo albums and tried an unused storage room. That’s where we found them. Heidi and Philippe were half naked and having sex. Philippe was shocked and embarrassed, but all she did was half turn around and smile. I’ll never forget that smile. It was like she was saying ‘so what!’
“They left the house together minutes later and we never saw either of them again. That night my father said that if we were all back in Iran, under Sharia or Islamic law, the Koran would call for her to be stoned to death and her family forever held in contempt by the local community. Well, we weren’t back in Iran, but since then my parents acted as if she had brought dishonor to our household. They pronounced her a nonperson and just behaved as if she never existed. I never saw Philippe again. He quit the agency, and I later heard he died in an automobile
