She was interrupted by the sound of the office door opening. I turned to see a tall, attractive woman enter, her age indeterminable through a combination of the gentleness of nature and the magic of cosmetics. At a glance I would have guessed she was in her late forties, but if this was Isobel Barton, then I knew she was closer to fifty–five, maybe older. She wore a pale blue dress that was too subtly simple to be anything but expensive and displayed a figure that was either surgically enhanced or extremely well preserved.
As she drew closer and the tiny wrinkles in her face became clearer, I guessed it was the latter: Isobel Barton did not look like the sort of woman who resorted to plastic surgery. Around her neck gold and diamonds glittered, and a pair of matching earrings sparkled as she walked. Her hair too was gray, but she let it hang long and loose on her shoulders. She was still an attractive woman and she walked like she knew it.
Philip Kooper had borne the brunt of the media attention following the disappearance of the Baines boy, but that attention had not been significant. The Baines boy was from a family of dopers and no–hopers. His disappearance merited a mention only because of the trust, and even then the trust’s lawyers and patrons had called in enough favors to ensure that speculation was kept to a minimum. The boy’s mother was separated from his father and they hadn’t been getting along any better since he left.
The police were still trying to trace the father in case of a possible snatch, even though every indication was that the father, a petty criminal, hated his child. In some cases, that might be enough to justify taking the child and killing him to get at his estranged wife. When I was a rookie patrolman, I once arrived at a tenement to find a man had abducted his baby daughter and drowned her in the bath because his ex–wife wouldn’t let him have the TV after they separated.
Only one piece of coverage of the Baines disappearance stuck in my mind: a picture of Mrs. Barton, snapped head–bowed as she visited the mother of Evan Baines in a rundown project. It was supposed to have been a private visit. The photographer, returning from the scene of a drug killing, just happened to be passing. One or two papers took the picture, but they ran it small.
“Thank you, Caroline. I’ll talk to Mr. Parker alone for a while.” She smiled as she said it but her tone brooked no argument. Her assistant affected a lack of concern at the dismissal but her eyes flashed fire. When she had left the room, Mrs. Barton seated herself on a stiff–backed chair away from the desk and motioned me toward a black leather couch, then turned her smile on me.
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t authorize any such agreement but Caroline can be overprotective of me at times. Can we offer you coffee, or would you prefer a drink?”
“Neither, thank you. Before you go any further, Mrs. Barton, I should tell you that I don’t really do missing persons work.” In my experience, searching for missing persons was best left to specialist agencies with the manpower to chase up leads and possible sightings. Some solo investigators who took on that kind of work were at best ill equipped and at worst little better than parasites who preyed on the hopes of those who remained to keep funding minimal efforts for even smaller returns.
“Mr. Loomax said you might say that, but only out of modesty. He told me to say he would regard it as a personal favor.”
I smiled, despite myself. The only favor I would give Tony Loo–Loo would be not to piss on his grave when he died.
According to Mrs. Barton, she had met Catherine Demeter through her son, who had seen the girl working at DeVries’s department store and had pestered her for a date. Mrs. Barton and her son — her stepson, to be accurate, since Jack Barton had been married once before, to a Southern woman who had divorced him after eight years and moved to Hawaii with a singer — were not close. She was aware that her son was engaged in activities that were, as she put it, “unsavory,” and had tried to get him to change his ways, “both for his own sake and the sake of the trust.” I nodded sympathetically. Sympathy was the only possible emotion to feel for anyone involved with Stephen Barton.
When she heard he was seeing a new girlfriend she asked if they could all meet together, she said, and a date had been arranged. In the end her son had failed to appear but Catherine had turned up, and after an initial awkwardness, the two quickly struck up a friendship far more amicable than the relationship that existed between the girl and Stephen Barton. The two had continued to meet occasionally for coffee and lunch. Despite invitations, the girl had politely refused offers from Mrs. Barton to come out to the house, and Stephen Barton had never brought her.
Then Catherine Demeter had simply dropped out of sight. She had left work early on Saturday and had failed to keep an early dinner appointment on Sunday with Mrs. Barton. That was the last anyone had heard of Catherine Demeter, said Mrs. Barton. Two days had now passed and she had heard nothing from her.
“Because of, well, the publicity that the trust has received recently over the disappearance of that poor child, I was reluctant to cause a fuss or draw any further adverse attention down on us,” she said. “I called Mr. Loomax and he seemed to think that Catherine may simply have drifted on somewhere else. It happens a lot, I believe.”
“Do you think there’s something more to it than that?”
“I really don’t know, but she was so happy with her job and she appeared to be getting on well with Stephen.” She stopped for a moment at this mention of her son’s name, as if considering whether or not to proceed. Then: “Stephen has been running wild for some time — since before his father’s death, in fact. Do you know the Ferrera family, Mr. Parker?”
“I’m aware of them.”
“Stephen fell in with their youngest son, despite all of our efforts. I know he keeps bad company and I know he’s involved with drugs. I’m afraid he may have dragged Catherine into something. And …” She paused again, briefly. “I enjoyed her company. There was something gentle about her and she seemed so sad sometimes. She said that she was anxious to settle down here, after moving around for so long.”
“Did she say where she had been?”
“All over. I gather that she had worked in a number of states.”
“Did she say anything about her past, give any indication that something might be troubling her?”
“I think something may have happened to her family when she was young. She told me that she had a sister who died. She didn’t say any more. She said she couldn’t talk about it and I didn’t press her on it.”
“Mr. Loomax may be right. She may simply have moved on again.”
Mrs. Barton shook her head insistently. “No, she would have told me, I’m sure of it. Stephen hasn’t heard from her and neither have I. I’m afraid for her and I want to know that she is safe. That’s all. She doesn’t even have to know that I hired you, or that I was concerned for her. Will you take the case?”
I was still reluctant to do Walter Cole’s dirty work and to take advantage of Isobel Barton, but I had little else on my plate except an appearance in court the following day on behalf of an insurance firm, another case I had taken for the money and to pass the time.
If there was a connection between the disappearance of Catherine Demeter and Sonny Ferrera, then she was almost certainly in trouble. If Sonny had been involved in the killing of Fat Ollie Watts, it was clear that he was going off the rails.
“I’ll give it a few days,” I said. “As a favor,” I added. “Do you want to know my rates?”
She was already writing a check, drawn on her private account and not that of the trust. “Here’s three thousand dollars in advance and this is my card. My private number is on the back.”
She moved her chair forward. “Now, what else do you need to know?”
? ? ?
That evening, I had dinner at River on Amsterdam Avenue, close to Seventieth Street, where the classic beef made it the best Vietnamese in town and where the staff moved by so softly that it was like being waited on by shadows or passing breezes. I watched a young couple at a nearby table intertwining their hands, running their fingers over each other’s knuckles and fingertips, tracing delicate circles in their palms, then gripping their hands together and pressing the heel of each hand forcefully against the other. And as they simulated their lovemaking, a waitress drifted by and smiled knowingly at me as I watched.