Missing Girls- In Truth Is Justice Read online

  As Marcella folded the note, she spotted Hannah in the backseat scrunched-up against the far door.

  “Hello darling. Are you going to stay with me for the whole trip back?”

  Hannah didn’t talk.

  “You should’ve seen it, Sweetie—it was weird in there. Deafening clanking doors. Grumpy old men behind mesh demanding picture ID. Being scanned for weapons or something. Dad’ll be amazed. But I told him I was going to do it. I won’t tell him I wished I hadn’t, a minute after walking through the door. Think Dad’ll come after me? I hope so, but I wouldn’t let him know it.

  “Why don’t you tell me where you are so I can come get you? That’s a stupid question, isn’t it? Well, now I have to figure out my next step. One thing. He isn’t smelly. He gives off a scent of Mitchum aftershave or something Daddy might use. He swears a lot. Tries to take me down to his level.

  “Face-to-face with evil like the one who took you away. Somebody said: keep your enemies as close as you can. So far, it’s terrifying, but okay as long as I don’t panic and run.”

  She glanced into the backseat once again and saw that Hannah was gone.

  * * *

  1 Smith, Brief, 4.

  Chapter 23

  The door of the apartment in Weehawken was unlocked. Gavin stood at the sink in the kitchen washing dishes, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. “Hello, sweetheart. It’s about time,” he said, looking over at her with a smile on.

  “Gavin! What are you doing here?” Marcella said.

  He took up a dish and went to work on it with a towel. “Just hold on,” he said. “Leland—he’s the super—called the night you ran out of the house to tell me some lady let herself into the apartment. He thought I was clearing everything out to leave. I went into total backpedal mode—told him we’d like to keep the place for a while longer. Like, sorry, forgot to tell you. He was relieved that he wouldn’t have to find another tenant. So we lucked out. As of when he called, we’re working on a new six-month lease. What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t need to come all the way here to tell me that. Last I heard, they invented the telephone. Never mind. I was about to check into a Holiday Inn when I discovered the key. The gods were with me. You know, you can’t be sneaking around after me—following me.”

  “Actually, I’m all for this arrangement,” he said. I had visions of you sitting at your typewriter in some pay-by-the-day rooming house in Hackensack, swatting at cockroaches. If you’re going to run off on your own, I ought to at least know where you are. Also, you didn’t need all the drama. We could have just agreed that you’d camp out here.”

  “That’s baloney and you know it. You were totally against me doing this. I’m not the least bit sorry,” she said.

  “Not even for hijacking the car?”

  She threw her coat over the back on the easy chair and continued on to the windows. “What are you really doing here?”

  “I thought I’d give you a couple of days to settle into your new digs before I came over. What am I doing? What does it look like? I’m making dinner.”

  “Go home,” she said. She slid over to the couch, fell back into it, brought her fist up under her chin and stared at him.

  “I felt stupid as hell sitting out in the car for three hours. Leland saw me and let me in. I didn’t get very far with the cooking.”

  “You didn’t even start.”

  “You can’t walk out on a person and not leave permanent scars,” he said. He plopped a dry dish onto the kitchen counter and flipped the towel in the general direction of the sink.

  “Come on. We’re talking minor scratches,” she said.

  “Yeah but, they sting like hell. Why can’t you do what you’re doing here back home with me?”

  “Gavin, you know this will take all the strength I have. I’ll be going full bore with a murderer and I’m not quitting. Go home.”

  “I’ve never said don’t do your thing. I’ve supported every new project you came up with.”

  “This is not my thing! I would never think of calling an alley brawl you were in your thing.”

  “Okay! I get it. Listen, I’ll help you get in shape for this. I’m good at coming up with plans, we agree on that. You’re right. You’re going straight into his territory, and that’s challenging him, no matter what you want to call it. Mano a mano. So, you need to essentially become Muhammad Ali. We’ll turn the house into a mountain boxing camp. We’ll sleep on cots in opposite corners. No pillows. No candy. No sex. Not that we… Anyway…”

  A couple days ago he was begging me not to leave, now it’s let’s set up camp in some place far away from the creature comforts. Of course. How else could I steel myself for what I need to do? It’s a little amazing that he’s so right. How did he understand so well how hostile and nasty Smith was going to be? Is it a male of species issue?

  “Oh, you’re just having so much fun mocking me, aren’t you?” Marcella said.

  “I’m serious. You need to be separated from the easy life. Tape your fists. Drown in sweat. You need roadwork—a mouthpiece and a cup—and smelly leather gloves.”

  “Fifteen rounds, unless one of us gets coldcocked. I understand. Stepping into a maximum security prison is extreme macho land. It’s now or never, and there’s nobody to get hurt except you.”

  “And god knows I’m expendable,” Gavin said. “Listen, why can’t we operate as a team?”

  Now he comes out with this thoroughly female concept. Team. We’re a team.

  “Face it,” she said. “You’re nowhere near the fanatic on this that I am. I gave in to you on moving here to New Jersey, but I still lie awake at night shuddering at the thought that Hannah might come back to the house someday and find it empty. It kills me. I hate it.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” he said.

  She brought her knees up to her chest and moved to a corner of the couch. “But that’s not the worst. The absolute worst is that there’s nothing we can do except badger Nickerson and Rathskeller to badger the FBI. They’re as helpless as we are. There is nothing we can do but wait for some miracle to materialize. Nothing. So, I sit. And the guilt eats at me like a rat.”

  “Yes, and the people in town weren’t helping. That’s why we had to move.”

  “I admit I’m completely irrational when it comes to this. It has nothing to do with mixing up Hannah with Vickie. I want to actually do something effective—push back. Does this make any sense to you yet?”

  Gavin came over and sat with her on the couch. He put his arm around her, and they just sat, without talking.

  Finally, he said, “I’ve been thinking about the trial. Smith’s lawyer, Selser I think it is, based his case on Smith’s story about this kid Hommell supposedly showing up at the sandpit, out of the blue. Smith is supposed to have left Vickie with Hommell that night. The kid Hommell said he was making a pharmacy delivery up to nine o’clock and then went straight to a bar afterward. No way was he at the sandpit at all. Hommell’s telling the truth. Smith is lying and that’s all you need to know.”

  “Smith’s a liar. Of course he’s a liar,” she said. “I saw it in his face. I went to see him. You do know that, don’t you? He insulted me in all kinds of ways, but it was really a relief because I need to detest him. He gave me a lot of reasons to. He’s no fool. His brain is cooking away all the time, evaluating what he needs to do to keep his appeal process and himself alive. He’s a manipulator. Good-bye, Gavin. Thanks for coming. But, go away now.”

  “Philomena left a copy of Esquire Magazine with me. Buckley wrote a long article in it on the subject of Edgar Smith, victim of injustice. I’ll bring it to you after I’ve digested it,” he said.

  She walked out on Gavin into the bedroom.

  “One more thing,” he shouted from the other side of the door. “Rathskeller called again.”

  “What is it? Why didn’t you tell me right away? When did he call?” She came running out. He backed away from her as if he thought s
he’d scratch his face.

  “Calm down. I just heard this last night. He’s putting two and two together—opining that Pinky wrote the letters but someone else probably mailed them. He’s going to work on tracking down that person.

  “Now that he sees this as a pretty good lead, he’s going to call every Nugent in Missoula. That’s where the first letter came from. If that doesn’t pan out, he’ll do the same for Burlington, where the second letter was mailed. Marce, he cautioned me not to get too excited about it. It’s still a one-in-a-million chance of having anything to do with Hannah. Some people have a weird sense of things. They get their kicks playing with people’s emotions. He didn’t even think I should tell you about it.”

  “If you hadn’t told me I’d have killed you,” she said. “Go home and leave me with this, I just need to think about it. Don’t hate me if I decide to call Rathskeller myself.”

  She heard him leave. She looked at the couch and recalled immediately how uncomfortable it was as a bed and why she’d spent the night on it. If I’m going to go running off on a tangent of my own like this, I might just barge into some illuminating stuff—stuff somebody wouldn’t bother to set straight living alone—a rumpled bed, or Gavin mucking around in the bathroom and leaving little incriminating baubles lying around in a soap dish. There’s a lesson in it. When you blunder into a mess and things have turned to shit, you just have to grit your teeth, hold your nose and carry on, MacDuff.

  She burrowed under the bedspread in her clothes. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Celia and Gavin think I’m emotionally unstable—that I’d come apart at the seams if I was told anything, she thought. Could this Pinky woman be for real? Who is sending off these letters from different places?

  She drifted off and re-played in her head all the scenarios involving this person, Pinky, and Hannah. Was Pinky a man or a woman? Was she to believe that some person had succeeded in luring Hannah into their car and had simply driven off somewhere? Hannah went willingly or maybe even eagerly? She’s forgotten all the stern warnings about nasty people plying her with gifts or kindness? She couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t happen. But it did.

  She spun off in another direction, back to Victoria, and recalled Edgar Smith’s lying version of what happened as he told it on the stand under oath to the trial jury:

  In the car, Vickie said, ‘…your wife has been running around with a friend of yours.’ I slapped her in the face and told her to get out of the car. Another car had stopped on Chapel Road directly south of the entrance to the sandpit. I heard an argument, a commotion. I saw two people walking back up the road toward me. I thought it might have been Vickie’s father. I reached in the car and took a baseball bat out of the back seat. I saw who it was, Vickie and Don Hommell. Blood was running down the side of her head, it was matted in her hair. Hommell said, ‘I’ll take care of her,’ I think at that time I said to him, ‘It’s your girl, you know her, you know the family, she’s yours.’ I drove home to the trailer.1

  About three in the morning, Marcella awoke to see Hannah standing in the far corner of the room, plain yellow dress, blue coat and knee socks. She stared at her with solemn eyes.

  “Hannah,” she said. “Honey, come here. Come on. Please.” She patted the bedspread beside her.

  “Hannah, I’m on the move. It’s what you want. Isn’t it?”

  Hannah nodded.

  At least she got that much.

  * * *

  1 Smith, Brief, 4.

  Chapter 24

  She had her pick of a stool at the bar. Pelzer’s Tavern. Within a couple of minutes Connie Breckenridge, an early-thirties woman, came over. She was well turned out in an umber turtleneck tunic over flared slacks that hid the shoes. She wore a trench coat and a knit Ali McGraw-in- Love Story-hat over her pageboy. She threw her coat, bag, and hat onto the stool beside her. She was much too fancy for Pelzer’s where the bitter smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke polluted the air.

  “I’ll have a Jack and Coke, Danny,” she said. “So, you want to interview me.”

  Marcella ordered an old-fashioned. “Just digging for facts and things right now, Connie. I’ll submit it to my boss for approval and we’ll see where we go from there.”

  “What kind of things?” she asked.

  “You’re Class of ‘57. I need to get a feel for Ramsey High back then. You cheerleaders specifically.” Probably not a whole lot different from my ‘42 Hinsdale High class in all its cliquish glory, Marcella thought. “How did you get on the squad?”

  “The squad? Oh, the squad,” Connie said. “Tryouts. We had two youngish teachers as coaches. Looking for clones of themselves, I think.”

  “I imagine you could just see them shaking their pom-poms back in the day,” Marcella said. “And you knew you had what it took.”

  “I could do all sorts of tricks. Cartwheels. Flips.”

  “Did you know right away that you were in?”

  “I knew who wasn’t,” Connie said.

  “So, you wanted to cheer.”

  “Of course. Everyone did. They were the big guys. The elite. The cream of the crop. Who wouldn’t?”

  “What’d your outfit look like?” Marcella asked.

  “Letter sweater. Skirt cut on the bias, above the knee. Flippy. Bobbie socks and saddle shoes. We just went out there and swished around. Cute getup.”

  She was still basking in the glory of it, cheerleading. Why not? If just anyone could do it, they would do it, instead of coming up with all the reasons why they just sat on their hands in the football stands, watching. I couldn’t do it, Marcella thought.

  “Show me a cheer.”

  “In here? No thanks,” she said.

  “Chicken. So, you were out there—swishing and waggling. Feeling what?”

  “Feeling like everyone knew me. They could see me—out there in front.”

  “Smiling. High kicking. Showing off.”

  “Yeah. Being audacious. And flirty, I guess. If the team won we hung round to give the guys a kiss,” Connie said.

  “And of course, they wanted a kiss from you.”

  “Well, they didn’t back away. Let’s put it that way.”

  “Apple pie.”

  “With a scoop of vanilla,” Connie said.

  “Not everybody gets that chance.”

  “It was great. The greatest feeling in the world.”

  “Until it crashes down. A cheerleader was murdered in ‘57,” Marcella said.

  An expression of sheer dread took over Connie’s face. She closed her eyes and breathed in. “Oh god. That. Wow. You had me wondering why Ramsey, why me? Now I know. A blast from the past. Vickie Whatshername. We let her on the B-Squad. They did the Jayvees. Saturday mornings in an empty gym.”

  She shrunk a little on her barstool. Feeling small for being small. She deserved it.

  “That’s cold,” Marcella said.

  “A big crowd can really warm it up in there.”

  “No. I mean… She was murdered for goodness’ sake. She must have done something mean to you.”

  “Actually, I never talked to her. I had to dig to even picture her,” Connie said.

  She was either impervious to criticism or just plain stupid. She had to see that she came off as a snooty bitch. But she didn’t care.

  “But to say something like that—”

  “I just remember it was like a bomb going off in the girl’s locker room. We all started trying to remember her.”

  Connie waved to someone across the room. It might have been just an act.

  “Try to remember her again,” Marcella said.

  “She wanted to cheer. She was barely a sophomore.”

  “Barely? She either was or she wasn’t.

  “Okay, she was. There were things about her. She was a little tough. Big, up top. Wore these sweaters. Today, I’d say use it. Then—”

  “Vickie Whatshername, is that what you said?” Marcella asked.

  “I don’t want to come off as—
I don’t know. Didn’t you have little names for people? Hey, go ahead and say that she was a cute little number. Have it your way,” she said.

  “And you said you let her on the B-Squad. Who made those decisions, really? Did your coaches say anything?”

  “Actually, I think the coaches and some of us sort of merged into a consensus,” Connie said.

  “Birds of a feather? Just curious.”

  “You’re coming across really snippy here. I don’t deserve that. All right, she wasn’t tough. Okay? Say anything you want. But your clothes say something about you, don’t they?”

  “Was she cute?”

  “To me, she wasn’t.”

  “But, to the wrong people, she was?”

  “Yeah. Say that. That’s good,” Connie said.

  “I want the truth. Was she cute to Donald Hommell?”

  “Who? Oh! Oh, him. He wasn’t even in school anymore. He was a sailor or something.”

  “Was Victoria his girlfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t in that crowd,” she said.

  “Which crowd?”

  “Kids from Mahwah. I was in the Allendale group. Oh shit, I keep getting in deeper and deeper. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Soften up, Marcella thought. You have no idea where you’re going with this. You sound so superior. Weren’t you ever callow? Of course you were. A little compassion please.