The Girl in Times Square Page 47

  “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

  “I do. I do. Andrew’s alibi is bust. I know it looks bad, very bad, I know, but please. Please. For me, just a couple of days to look for the man to whom Amy gave Andrew’s gifts.”

  Spencer was silent.

  At last he said, “You know who knows who Milo is? Your brother. He knows, and twitches in agony every time I say Milo’s name out loud. He knows but he’s not telling.”

  They slept.

  The next bright and early morning, Spencer and Gabe were on their way to Port Jefferson to talk to Lindsey Kiplinger’s mother. “Prepare yourself,” Spencer said. “We’re dealing with a grieving parent. Fix up your tie, look sharp and solemn.”

  Lindsey Kiplinger’s mother was not happy to see them. She showed them into her kitchen, but she moved as if she wished she could call the cops on them. She was wary and confirmed it by saying belligerently, “I don’t know what kind of questions you could possibly have. My daughter has been dead for five years.”

  “And we’re very sorry about that, Mrs. Kiplinger,” said Gabe, solemnly, as instructed. He was terrible at the straightened tie and sympathy. He always looked and talked like he wanted to knock somebody’s block off. When the mother turned around, Spencer elbowed him, whispering, “Shut the hell up, will you?”

  “Just trying to help.”

  “Help by shutting the hell up.”

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Reluctantly she offered them some coffee. Gabe accepted, Spencer declined for both of them. “No, no, Mrs. Kiplinger, thanks, but we really have to be running.” As if to prove it, he got up and made Gabe stand up, too. “Look, losing someone so young is terrible, especially in a drunk-driving accident. Was it a hit and run?”

  Mrs. Kiplinger looked at them as if they were speaking Russian.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “She didn’t die in a drunk-driving accident.”

  “No? I’m sure that my notes say…” Spencer took out his blank notebook and started flipping through it.

  “You can flip through War and Peace for all the good it’ll do you. I know what my daughter died of and it wasn’t drink.” She clasped a mug hard in her hand. “It was some kind of hallucinatory drug. They did an autopsy on her, she had large amounts of something called mescaline in her blood.”

  Slowly Spencer closed his notebook. Gabe said, “That’s terrible. But mescaline doesn’t usually cause death, car crashes…”

  “It does when the person who’s on it drives the car off a cliff in the Superstition Mountains.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize she—”

  “She didn’t. What kind of notes do you have, she didn’t drive the car, her damn boyfriend did!”

  Spencer opened his notebook, this time for real. He actually needed to write this down. “That’s awful. Do you have his name so we can pay respects to his family?”

  “Respects? The bastard didn’t die.”

  Spencer looked up from his notebook. “No?”

  “No, he lived, the son of a bitch. He’s never come back home. They did some kind of a weird drug trip, crashed, my Lindsey died, and he suffered serious injuries, I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past his family to lie about the injuries so we don’t sue. But he hasn’t been back, that I know.” She narrowed her eyes at them. “What’s this about, anyway?”

  “Was it just him and Lindsey in the car?”

  “In the car, yes. I think there was a group of them involved in the—whatever.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Kiplinger, do you know anything about the Native American Church?”

  “Oh, some tomfoolery thing them kids was involved in. I only heard about it afterwards.”

  “Lindsey was involved in it?”

  “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

  “Because we’re trying to find him.” Spencer showed her a picture of Milo. She recoiled, squinted a little at the eyes, and then said that she would have remembered if she saw a face like that. But Spencer could tell that something in Milo’s eyes looked familiar to Mrs. Kiplinger.

  “If you give us the last name of your daughter’s boyfriend, we’ll be on our way.”

  “Clark. They live off Old Post Road. Why do you want to know?”

  Spencer didn’t understand why people had to ask so many questions. Gabe, who was suddenly the less brusque one, replied. “Nothing serious. Just a couple of questions. Thanks so much, you’ve been real helpful. Have a nice day now. And good luck.”

  After they were in their car, Spencer said, “Have a nice day, and good luck?”

  “Oh, I just freeze up in those situations. I don’t know what to say. All I want to do is ask my questions and go. All those niceties get stuck in my throat.”

  “No fucking kidding.”

  “O’Malley, what do you think the Native American Church has to do with all this?”

  “Not sure. If the kids joined the church, they could get peyote, or mescaline, legally and for free.”

  “How many kids are we talking about?”

  “Well, Lily told me there were six of them. Lindsey and her boyfriend. Amy and possibly Milo. And two others. Out of the six of them, the Clark kid, Milo, and Amy are missing. Amy told Lily the other three are dead.”

  “Man, that’s one rough joy ride,” said Gabe.

  “We’ll find out. Let’s go and talk to Mrs. Clark. Do me a favor, though. Smile and nod politely, but whatever you do, don’t speak.”

  Mrs. Clark was even more reluctant to talk to Spencer and Gabe than Mrs. Kiplinger, and wouldn’t open the door for them until they threatened her with a warrant. The scene thus set, she walked outside and with her arms tightly folded stood on the porch in the middle of a suburban Long Island neighborhood, with well kept lawns and double car driveways.

  She didn’t look at them but at her freshly cut lawn when she said, “His life has been ruined. He has only a little peace now. Why can’t you leave him alone?”

  Spencer tried to impress upon her that a crime may have been committed. Gabe McGill from HOMICIDE added weight to that nebulous statement.

  “A crime was committed,” said Mrs. Clark. “Against my son.”

  “By who?”

  “By the losers he went traveling with. They poisoned his mind, they brainwashed him.”

  “Did one of the losers look like this?” Spencer showed her Lily’s Milo picture, and then the mug shot of John Doe.

  “I don’t know who that is,” she said, with barely a reaction, as if Milo’s face was not the scariest thing she had seen. “Never heard of any Milo.” She seemed on guard.

  “How well did your son know Amy McFadden?”

  She raised her eye brows. “So that’s what this has to do with?” She snickered. “The missing McFadden girl? You think she’s visiting my boy?”

  “I couldn’t say. How well did he know her?”

  “Not well, she was a year younger than him in school. But they may have been friends.”

  “Do you know who else Amy went with?”

  “I don’t know. I only met her because she used to hang out with that Lindsey, who used to hang out with my son.”

  “Is that why your son wanted to go traveling with them?”

  “Oh, he pretended he liked the Kiplinger girl, but she meant nothing to him. He was too good for her.”

  “So why did he go?”

  “Brainwashed, I told you. Got involved with some bad people. I told him, too. I told him and told him, it’s not healthy not to tell your parents about the things you get up to in high school. I think this Amy was up to no good. Jerry never talked about what they did. It was always so hush hush. What did you do, son? Oh, nothing.” She huffed. “And then he left. Left, and we never saw him. When I didn’t hear from him for the first year, I knew he was doomed. I said to my husband, just you wait, the phone call in the middle of the night will come. We waited another year for that phone call.”

  “And what did the phone call say?”

&
nbsp; “I would have never let him go had I known what I know now. I thought they were just kids, playing around, wanting to see a bit of the world.”

  “What do you know now?” Spencer couldn’t get anything concrete out of her.

  “They all died, I heard.”

  “Well, you know they didn’t all die. Your son is alive.”

  “If you can call it that. But the rest of them are dead.”

  “Well, Amy didn’t die. She came back to New York.”

  “Where is she now?” said Mrs. Clark acidly.

  “And Milo didn’t die.”

  “I don’t know anything about this Milo.”

  She steadfastly refused to say where her son was being kept.

  She didn’t want him “bothered.” First Spencer was gentle with her, then he insisted, then he threatened to subpoena all her bank records, for surely the monthly payment to the place that was keeping her son would be on her statement. Only that explicit threat forced Mrs. Clark’s tongue to tell Spencer and Gabe that her son was “remaining” (her term, not Spencer’s) in a St. Augustine convent in Mexico, just south of Nogales, Arizona. To the question of why the mother wouldn’t bring her son home, Mrs. Clark said, “Are there any Catholic missions here on Long Island that you know of, Detective O’Malley?”

  “Does your son…need a Catholic mission, Mrs. Clark?” Spencer said carefully.

  “It’s either the Augustinian order or a psychiatric hospital for him.”

  That did not sound promising.

  In the car, Spencer said, “Gabe, I think you and I have to take a little trip.”

  Gabe had a good laugh about that one. “Yes, Whittaker will instantly approve—a child who belongs in Bellevue is instead being taken care of by Mexican non-English-speaking nuns, and we are going to go twenty-five hundred miles to ask him…what? Where Milo is? How his final peyote trip was? I’ll tell you right now and we don’t have to fly all the way to fucking Mexico. It was baaaaaad, man.”

  Whittaker did not approve this one. “It’s not New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, or Delaware, or wherever else you go on your wild goose chases, O’Malley.” He declared that if Spencer wanted to go on a wild goose chase to Nogales, he would have to go on his own time and his own dime. “Ah, you feel different about it, don’t you, when you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is?” He grinned. “Suddenly seems a lot less important? Though I must admit, I’m impressed that you’re finally following a lead on the McFadden case on something other than Quinn.”

  “Yeah, well…” But Spencer said nothing. He was going to keep Bill Bryant to himself for just a few more days.

  “Why don’t you call this Jerry Clark on the phone?”

  “He’s in a monastery.”

  “What, they don’t have phones in a monastery?” Whittaker shrugged. “Oh, what do I know. Perhaps they should. Nevertheless, can’t go, O’Malley. You do have some vacation time. Would you like to put in for it? You haven’t taken a full week’s vacation in five years. Take some time off—go to Arizona, have a good time, get some sun. You need it, you look terrible.”

  Spencer didn’t know what to do. Even if he could go, there was the issue of Lily. Could he go and leave her when she was so sick? What if they found a donor? What if she took a turn for the worse?

  When he told her about Jerry Clark, Lily said, oh my God, go, of course, you have to go. “You go and you get answers. And we haven’t had any answers for so long. Go. I’ll be your Bill Bryant, your own personal benevolent patrolmen’s benefactor.”

  He hemmed, hesitated. “What about you?”

  “What about me?” She smiled. “How long do you plan to be away, detective? I’m only approving Thursday to Sunday. You’ll be back for our Sunday comedy. I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. Ever since the chemo stopped, I’m not as miserable, have you noticed? No more throwing your white lilies on the floor.”

  “I don’t think that was the chemo,” he said, hugging her. “I need Gabe to come, too.”

  “You do what you have to do.”

  “But you, you don’t go far from the house.”

  “Like I would.”

  “And don’t go out at night, for anything. I’m going to ask for a patrol unit outside while I’m gone, just in case, but please, take reasonable precautions for your own safety.”

  “Okay.” Lily was sitting on the couch gazing at him with a melted face.

  “I mean it. I’ll get you everything you need beforehand. Otherwise, call Joy. Call Anne, old Colleen down the hall, anyone.”

  “I know the drill.”

  “And beep me if you need me. Try not to forget the number this time.”

  68

  A Day at the Abbey

  The hues in the Sonoran Desert were beach sand below and blue sky above, the air was warm, though it was evening, and the white flowers were fluttering on the tips of the spires and arms of the giant saguaro cacti. Spencer saw something in the landscape beyond the desolation, something embracing and holy and transcendent. Perhaps this wasn’t a bad place for a broken boy named Jerry to be. He loosened his tie as he drove, and took off his suit jacket, rolling up his sleeves and rolling down the window. A shirtless Gabe was sleeping in the passenger seat, oblivious to the desert.

  The small Augustinian convent called Asuncion was comprised of a small adobe church, and through an oval passageway, arranged around a courtyard, the buildings of a sixteenth-century monastery. It was in northwestern Mexico, forty miles south of the U.S. border, two-and-a-half thousand miles away from Lily. The abbess, a small woman with a black veil covering her head and an acute inflammation of the eye, and two stern reverend mothers all in black, came out to meet them. Turned out they spoke quite good English.

  The nuns to the one were unimpressed with Spencer’s credentials as either a detective or a Catholic—particularly a Catholic, he thought. While making quite a judgmental sign of the cross on him and Gabe, the diminutive abbess refused to give him any information on the state of Jerry Clark, except to tell him that Hobbit was the only name he now responded to.

  “We don’t answer to you, detective,” said Mother Agnes, unafraid of him.

  Spencer clammed up. They were told it was late in the day and there was “no way” that Jerry was going to be disturbed. The nuns would revisit the issue in the morning. Spencer and Gabe were taken to their quarters with all deliberate speed, especially when they passed two open double doors that led to a dining room where thirty or so young nuns were sitting at long tables breaking their bread. The nuns looked up, “indelicately inquisitive,” Gabe whispered, and the reverend mother, said, “Don’t dawdle, please.” They were hurried along to their rooms, where chorizo with beans and rice and some tequila and tea was eventually brought to them. There was plenty of chorizo, not nearly enough tequila. “Spence, do you feel something in the air?” Gabe asked, finishing the last of the tea, after all the other food and drink had gone.

  “No, what?”

  “I don’t know. The erotically-charged air of the breath of three dozen young girls who have not seen a man, much less two men, in years?” Gabe grinned. “Other than the inmates.”

  “I think you’re blaspheming in a holy convent,” said Spencer, grinning back. “Go to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.”

  “It’s going to be a long night,” reflected Gabe.

  Night passed slowly indeed, with Spencer all the black lone hours of it craving for more tequila.

  The next morning, when they convened with the abbess and the reverend mothers, the first thing out of Gabe’s mouth was, “So what’s wrong with him?”

  “We’d like to see him now,” said Spencer, less confrontationally.

  There was no answer from the nuns who squinted reprovingly at Detective McGill. Spencer, in sudden throes of deep apprehension of the nuns of his strict Catholic childhood, hemmed and hawed and finally said with hands knotted into prayer, “Abbess, this is very serious. I know your patient is sick, but a young girl’s life is
at stake. We think he might be able to shed some information that will help us find her.”

  The abbess was unmoved. “Did the girl just go missing?”

  “Yes!” Spencer said, thinking that would help her see the emergency of it, but instead the abbess replied, “Well, there you have it. He hasn’t been out of his room for four years except to get some fresh air in the courtyard. He knows nothing.”

  Letting out a breath, Spencer tried again. “This girl was someone he knew five years ago.”

  “He’s had no visitors, except for his parents on Christmas. He has not talked on the phone, he has barely talked to the doctors. He seldom speaks of the experience that brought him to us, or of his past life. You’re looking in the wrong place, detective. You will find no answers here.”

  Spencer prodded and pushed and cajoled, and became more frustrated, and finally had to persuade her by threatening a court order to get Hobbit out of the convent and into a Nogales hospital where he would be under the jurisdiction of the Arizona State Police. Then and only then did the abbess relent, but not before she imposed on Spencer strict orders not to upset him (“he has been making such good progress”). On the way up to the third floor, Gabe whispered, “O’Malley, we better get the answers we need from him. I can’t stay here another night, this place is about to corrupt me. I’m too much of a sinner, plus I haven’t been willingly inside a church in ten years.”

  “You’ve come to the right place to beg forgiveness,” Spencer whispered back. “I’d get started if I were you. Ten years is a long time.” He hadn’t been willingly inside a church in twenty.

  On the third floor in front of an unpainted canvas wall covering, the abbess stopped. “Detective, he is a soul on the brink.”

  Aren’t we all. Spencer became peripherally interested in the canvas. Lily could do wonders with it. Why was it left deliberately blank and then hung on the wall, as if it were art? Why was it left blank? So he could supply the content?

  “Jerry has no more protections. He is raw, he has no defenses. They’ve all been stripped away from him. We use prayer and soothing voices to bring him back from the abyss. But he hovers there all day long. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. He spends his days either in catatonia or in a deep state of panic. He imagines himself being killed, being buried alive, he sees poisonous snakes in his room, adders in his bed, scorpions on walls, everything is supremely frightening to him. Sometimes when he sees new people—doctors, social workers, even nuns—it triggers a memory sequence, in vivid detail, of his original trauma. That’s why we usually don’t allow visitors. It can take him weeks or months to recover from the flashbacks. He flogs himself with his terrors. We comfort him with prayer.”