Without a Word (3 page)

I unlocked the wrought iron gate that leads to the tunnel formed by the town houses on either side, picked up my mail and watched Dashiell run ahead into the cool October light that filled my garden. The small brick back cottage I rented was in the far left corner of the garden, an herb patch I'd planted on the side facing the town house my landlords owned, a cobalt blue water bowl on the far side of the stairs where Dashiell was taking a long, noisy drink. I sat down on the steps leading to my front door and opened the mail, three offers of credit cards, all preapproved, a free pass to one of the local gyms, an envelope full of discount coupons, three catalogs.

I unlocked the door and left it open for Dashiell, who was inspecting the land, first checking the perimeter, then quartering the yard looking for something that would require his attention. Today was also the day we'd check out the town house to make sure no one had broken in and that everything was working properly, the job that earned me a rent so low I could afford to live in Greenwich Village, the increasingly unaffordable neighborhood where no matter what changed, I still felt most at home.

Leon had a different kind of deal. I knew the building
anyway, but the signs were all there as well, no doorman during the day, a small, no-frills lobby, halls that could have used a paint job. Leon's deal was called rent stabilization, one of the factors that gave the city its remarkable diversity, allowing the old, the young, the newly arrived, the fresh out of school as well as artists, writers, actors and photographers to live here. The young managed by taking on roommates. Others, the newly arrived, lived in the outer boroughs, the Russians in Brooklyn, the Chinese in Queens. And the luckiest ones, many of the city's elderly and everyone in Leon's building, survived because their landlords were bound by laws which limited the percentage they could raise a tenant's rent.

I picked up the key to the town house, whistled to Dashiell, and we went back out the front gate, locking it behind us. We went up the steps to the front door of the town house, unlocking both locks and stepping into the small hall that led first to the library and next to the living room. The Siegals had been home only for three weeks in the last six months and the house looked more like a museum to me than a home. The Siegals' house, since they owned more than one, was not crammed full of a lifetime of personal artifacts. But even with the ones that were here, photos of their parents and their children, the collection of hand-carved wooden animals from all over the globe, the paintings of flowers in the living room, the house didn't seem to have the personal feeling of a lived-in space.

Leon's apartment was different, and though the living room had a sparse coolness to it, little furniture and black-and-white photos on the white walls, the rest of the apartment, at least the parts I had seen so far, were cluttered with the detritus of the occupants—peeled-off clothing that had been tossed on the backs of the dining room chairs, piles of negatives and contact sheets on Leon's messy desk, a red
wagon, like the one I used as a coffee table, filled with toilet paper parked between the kitchen and the bathroom. There were canisters on the kitchen counters, tea and coffee, perhaps cookies in one, signs of life that were missing in the Siegal house. In fact, on those occasions when my landlords blew into town, they ate out every night, went to the opera, the theater, a museum or two, and then they'd be off again, to England or Italy or Greece.

Would the way Leon's space looked make more sense when I got to know him better, the blackboard scribbled with notes over his busy desk, the dining room table covered with at least a week's worth of mail, most of it not yet opened, and then the stark living room? There were no plants, no rugs, no knickknacks, no doodads, nothing collected in a trip to Denmark or Kenya, no photos of Sally or any other family member, just the three of Madison and those weren't in the living room. They were over the dining room table. I'd stopped there for a moment on the way out. Madison at two holding a small wooden giraffe. Madison at what looked like four reading a book, precocious like her mother. Madison at six holding up a drawing the way kids do, proffering favorite artifacts to the eye of the camera. Nothing more recent. Nothing, it seemed, since her mother had disappeared, as if she, Madison, had disappeared along with her.

Dashiell and I took the stairs down to the Siegals' huge kitchen. I checked the windows, he checked the odors. With nothing out of the ordinary there, I sent him on ahead to check all the rooms, following slowly behind him. Anything I found might need a glazier or perhaps a plumber. What he might find would be of more concern, and while I checked for signs of break-ins, too, Dashiell was the one who would actually find the intruder were there one. There was nothing to worry about this time. When I got to the top-floor bed
rooms, I opened the back windows to give the place some air. I'd stop back and close them in a day or two.

We always left by the back door, emerging into the light of the garden. Dashiell followed me into the cottage and up to my office on the second floor. I sat at the desk, thinking about Madison, about the tics that the late Dr. Eric Bechman was treating with Botox. I turned on the laptop and Googled Botox to see what I could find and discovered that Botox is not only used for wrinkles, but that it's used medically as well, to mitigate the pain of migraine headaches and to stop the muscle spasms of Tourette's syndrome. Leon hadn't mentioned Tourette's. He hadn't mentioned any disease, just the fact that Madison suffered from tics. I wondered if it was Tourette's, and if so, what the timing was in Madison's diagnosis and her mother's departure.

Botox, or botulin toxin A, paralyzes muscles. That had been the point, of course, in injecting it into the muscles that controlled Madison's eyelid. And even though it had caused ptosis, or drooping, rather than merely stopping the tics, Dr. Bechman, it seemed, had planned on injecting the other eyelid. Wasn't that why there'd been a hypodermic needle there, already filled?

It didn't take a genius to figure out what that injection might do to any other muscle, including the heart. Even a kid, say a twelve-year-old, could figure that out.

I thought about the little girl I'd met that day. She wasn't the same little girl I'd seen in the three portraits her father had taken. The little girl in the pictures was serious, not smiling at the camera for Daddy. But the little girl I'd met in Washington Square Park was seething with anger, and from what I had already learned, with good reason.

And what about her mother? Had Sally been angry, too, trapped by a pregnancy at fifteen? I thought about the girls who got pregnant when I was in high school, Amy Mandel
and Claire something or other. Amy had married her boyfriend. They were both seventeen. They had a boy. I heard later that they got divorced and that Amy and the kid had moved back home, to her parents' house. Claire disappeared for the rest of the term, and when she came back to school she was neither married nor did she have a child. Someone said she gave it up for adoption. Someone else said that since she was a devout Catholic, abortion had been out of the question. But apparently sex hadn't been.

I didn't know of any other girls at school who were pregnant before graduation, but I'm sure there were a few others. And I didn't know of any girls who were having sex with their teachers, something frowned upon by society in general and by the state of New York in particular. But we all knew things happened. Every girl in the school knew never to be caught alone with Mr. Margolies. We called him the Groper. And there were rumors about two of the gym teachers as well, Ms. Edison and Mr. Morris. Mr. Morris was married, but still the rumors flew that he liked boys. Ms. Edison looked like a truck driver and everyone said she lived with another woman. If you got her for gym, she'd pat you on the ass when it was your turn to play, or if you got a basket, ran faster than you had the day before or simply stood close enough for her to reach you.

Leon said no one knew that Sally was pregnant. I wondered if that were so. I wondered if it might be possible to find someone who had gone to school with Sally Bruce, someone with a good memory and a loose tongue. I took out the little pad and made some more notes, then I transferred my questions to three-by-five cards and tacked them up to the bulletin board over the desk.

Sally's classmates, one note said. I was sure Leon would put the yearbook in with the papers he was going to collect for me. But the one with her picture in it wouldn't help. What I
needed was the yearbook from Sally's old school. That's where her friends had been and that's where, if there had been any rumors, they would have been. I bet the school library kept all the yearbooks. I added, “Name of high school where Leon taught and Sally went?” to the card.

After she'd married Leon, Sally didn't make new friends. Or so Leon said. I'd have to check that out, too. And find out what she liked, what she did, who she was, all of which seemed to have changed when she got pregnant. And wasn't that the case when I was in high school, too? Plans to go to college, hanging out with friends, senior trips, after-school clubs, all became a thing of the past. Suddenly everything was about the baby, the baby you didn't plan for, the baby you didn't want in the first place.

Leon hadn't said what kind of dog Roy was and there were no pictures of him hanging over Leon's desk, over the dining room table, on those stark white living room walls. Had Madison torn up the pictures of Roy, too?

I'd been hired to find Sally. In order to do that, I'd need to know more about whom she chose to take with her and whom she'd left behind. If there was a chance in the world she could be found in the first place.

I went downstairs to fix Dashiell's dinner and think about my own, whether to order in a salad with some grilled chicken from Pepe Verde or a pizza. The
Times
was sitting unopened on the small table outside the kitchen where I'd dropped it after Dashiell had brought it in from where the delivery lady slid it through the curlicues in the fence. I got a card from her every Christmas. “Season's Greetings from Estella Gonzalez, your
New York Times
delivery person,” it said, my reminder that a tip would be appreciated. I took the paper over to the couch and began to page through the depressing news, one page of it after another, stopping to read an article with the headline “Body Found at LaGuardia.”

“A headless body,” it said, “and a head, floated to the surface of the East River near a runway at LaGuardia Airport yesterday morning, the authorities said, but it was unclear whether they were from the same person.”

Who was I kidding, I thought, or more accurately, who was Leon kidding, hiring me to find his missing wife? Sooner or later, most missing people turn up dead like the poor chap who was found in the East River just yesterday. The body, the article said, was male, apparently a young man in his twenties. “No details about the head,” it said, “were available yesterday.”

What if it turned out that Sally Bruce Spector wasn't alive and well in, say, San Francisco? What if it turned out that she was dead? Then what? Sure, I would have done my job, but what about Madison?

I dropped the paper and went back upstairs to my office, first looking in the phone book for a Dr. Eric Bechman and writing down his address. Then I did an Internet search to see what was out there, what if anything I could learn about the man Madison had supposedly killed.

Everything was on the Internet now, instructions for making bombs, herbs guaranteed to enlarge your penis, sites listing the side effects of drugs, people's family albums. No more little black corners needed to affix your precious photos in a real-life album. Now you could use a virtual one. Instead of baby books, infants had their own Web sites starting with their sonograms, scanned and put online as baby's first picture.

Eric Bechman had no Web site, which wasn't surprising, but something useful did come up when I searched, a two-paragraph article that had been in the
Times
two days after the murder. The article said that Eric Bechman, fifty-one, a pediatrician, had died suddenly and that the police suspected foul play. They were “following some leads,” an unnamed spokesperson for the department was quoted as saying, and the case was “under investigation.” There was, I was relieved to see, no mention at all of an underage suspect. I imagined that because of Madison's age, any information about her had been withheld.

In the second paragraph it said that the doctor was survived by a wife, Marsha, and two sons, Alan and Rubin, all of Larchmont.

I checked the card tacked up over my desk. The doctor's office was on Washington Square North, which meant it was in one of the capacious town houses along the north side of Washington Square Park. Not a bad commute, probably not much more than an hour, door-to-door. But perhaps the doctor stayed over in the city one or two nights a week anyway, the better to be at the hospital early in the morning or late in the evening. The better, sometimes, to have an evening or two away from the family and in better, or at least different, company.

I took another file card from the top left drawer and wrote down Bechman's name and address again and under that a few questions that had come to mind. Did the doctor have a pied-à-terre in the city? Did the doctor stay over in the city during the week? Did the doctor have a girlfriend, preferably, I thought, an irate one? Where had Marsha Bechman been at the time of her husband's murder?

I wondered if Bechman had one of those shared offices, two or three doctors together to keep the expenses down, almost a necessity nowadays what with people suing over every little mistake doctors made and malpractice insurance being so high. In fact, I suspected that for someone injecting Botox into the faces of children, the insurance would be even stiffer than usual.

I stopped writing and checked the time. It was too late for a doctor's office to be open and too early for Dashiell's last walk, but I had the sudden yen to walk over to Washington Square Park and see how many names were on the doctor's bell. As soon as I stood up, Dash did, too. He was always willing to drop whatever it was he was doing, in this case taking a nap, in order to accompany me on a walk of any length, one of the many things I liked about dogs in general and Dashiell in particular.

I grabbed my cell phone, my keys, a twenty-dollar bill
and Dashiell's leash, checking the pockets of my jeans for pickup bags and finding three. We headed out the door and turned right, walking a couple of blocks to West Fourth Street and then taking that toward the park, skirting it when we got there, then looking for Dr. Bechman's address. The town house his office occupied was about a third of the way up the block, a stately building with views that at one time were more elegant than they are today, unless there were drug dealers and the homeless in the park then, too. Even so, the doctor was in a classy spot, not far from the newly renovated Washington Square Arch and just around the corner from Fifth Avenue.

I didn't need to open the low gate that led to the two steps down to the doctor's office. I could read the three brass plaques from where I stood on the sidewalk. Dr. Bechman was, according to the plaque with his name on it, a plaque that was still there a week and a half after his death, a pediatric neurologist, something I didn't know existed before that moment. Dr. Hyram Willet, who had the top plaque, was an oncologist and Dr. Laura Edelstein, a pediatrician. My guess was that Dr. Willet worked only with children, too, because there was no way an adult with a diagnosis of cancer would sit in a waiting room full of screaming kids.

The fact that Bechman had been part of a shared practice was good news. It meant the office was still open for business, that the receptionist still had a job and I had a chance of wheedling some information out of her. What I wanted, of course, was a complete patient list as well as any personal gossip about the late Dr. Bechman I could get. At the very least, I wanted someone else's take on Madison Spector. Since she herself wasn't talking, and since I believed her father was holding things back in order to protect his daughter, something I couldn't really fault him for, I had to find
people who were willing to speak openly about Madison. I needed to know more about her.

I looked at the card I'd taken off the bulletin board and pocketed, and dialed Dr. Bechman's number. Standing in front of the doctor's office, I listened to the recording tell me what hours the office was open and when Dr. Bechman was, or in this case used to be, available: Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to five and Fridays from one to four.

I took the stairs, a wide, long stoop up to the front door, which led to the parlor floor of the town house, just as they did in the smaller version I took care of on West Tenth Street. I had a penlight in my pocket but found I didn't need it. The light hanging over the doorway, brass and etched glass, lit the name on the bell. There was just one. Apparently Dr. Willet lived in the rest of the town house and Drs. Bechman and Edelstein commuted. I made a note to check under Bechman again in the phone book to see if there was a residential listing as well.

Standing at the top of the stairs I reminded myself that whatever Dr. Bechman had done, with or without Botox, it was unlikely he deserved his early demise. I had to be sure that in my zeal to get Madison off the hook, inspired not by my belief in her innocence but by the fact that the likelihood of finding her mother was so slim, I did not fall into the trap of blaming the victim. I didn't plan to do anything with whatever I discovered unless I was sure it impacted on the case. I was just, for the moment, doing what my job had taught me to do, following every thread, no matter where it went, because you never knew what it could reveal.

I dialed Leon's number next. He answered on the first ring.

“Are you planning to be with Madison every second of the time until this case is resolved one way or another?”

“Rachel?”

“Sorry. I should remember to say hello first.”

I expected Leon to laugh at that but he didn't. I doubted he'd had much to laugh about for a very long time.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. Then he whispered, “Do you think it's odd that I don't want her on her own now, Rachel? After all…” His voice trailed off, but I didn't need Leon to finish his last sentence.

“No, it's not odd.”

“I don't understand. What is it you want?”

“I was thinking I'd like to spend some time with Madison, just the two of us. Would that be possible?”

There was silence on the phone while Leon processed my request.

“Why? She's not going to tell you anything,” he whispered. “She's not going to talk to you, if that's what you're thinking.”

I looked at my watch wondering if Madison was still up and if that was why he was whispering.

“Even if you had a court order saying that you had to keep her with you, you'd probably still be able to occasionally hire a responsible person to take care of her when you weren't able to.”

“There is no court order. She hasn't been arrested.”

I ignored his comment. “Hire me,” I said. “I'm responsible and my rates can't be beat.”

Silence.

“Don't tell me you couldn't use a break, Leon? I'm offering you a break.”

“What's this all about?”

“You're going to have to trust me on this, Leon,” I told him. Then the silence was coming from my end. “I'm not sure what it's all about but I think that in order to do the job you hired me to do…” Stopping in mid-sentence,
sounding more like Leon than myself. “Here's what I'm doing, Leon. I'm exploring every possible connection to Sally in the hope that someone or something will eventually lead me to her. That's all I can do after all these years and that's what spending time with Madison is all about.”

“But Madison…” He stopped. I figured I knew what he was going to tell me but I didn't say so. “She won't talk to you, Rachel. And even if she did, she was only seven when Sally left. I don't know how much she remembers or if any of it would be useful to you. And she's difficult. You won't find it easy being with her. You can see that already, can't you?”

“I don't have a lot of options, Leon.”

I heard him blowing his nose. Then coughing. “Okay,” he said. “You do what you feel is best. I'll explain it to Madison.”

“No, don't do that,” I said much too quickly.

“Don't explain it?”

“What would you say?”

“I'd say that…” He stopped, unable to answer my question. “What would I say?”

“Does Madison understand the arrangement and the reason for it?”

“I believe so.”

“So she knows you're not willing to leave her alone right now?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, then tell her that you have to do something on Saturday morning and you can't take her with you. Tell her that I'm going to stay with her.” There was another silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn't even hear Leon breathing. “Leon?”

“Oh,” he said.

“Oh, yes or oh, no?”

“Oh, yes. I was nodding. I forgot you couldn't see me.”

“I'll be there at ten,” I told him. “Day after tomorrow.”

“I'm working on the papers for you.”

“Good. When will I be able to get them?”

“Tomorrow night, after eight. Madison goes to sleep at eight.”

“I'll be there,” I told him.

“Just ring the bell. I'll bring them down.”

This time I was the one who nodded, but not until after Leon was off the line. It wasn't that I'd forgotten that Leon couldn't see me. I was nodding to myself, agreeing with my plan to try to get to know Madison. As I walked home, that's all I could think about, wondering how I might connect somehow with this unreachable person, wondering when I did, if I did, what her response would be, wondering if she had, indeed, killed Dr. Bechman in a fit of rage, as the authorities presumed.

When I got home, Dashiell and I stayed outside for a while. I thought I'd sit on the steps, look up through the branches of the oak tree in the center of the garden and watch the stars. But it was cloudy and there wasn't much to see, the sky an inky black with just the occasional wisp of silver-gray cloud visible beyond the tree. Dashiell sat next to me, on the top step, waiting to see if I might toss a ball or order a pizza, or perhaps just waiting with no other purpose in mind. I thought we'd stay out for a while and then go in and go to bed, but I couldn't stop thinking about Madison.

What if Sally were still alive? What if I were able to find her? What if I could convince her to come back and try to help the daughter she'd abandoned five years earlier? And suppose she did that, suppose she agreed and suppose, as Leon wished, seeing her mother, Madison began to talk again? And suppose when she did, she said she had killed
Dr. Bechman, that she was guilty as charged? Or rather as not yet charged.

I worried at first that even if Madison did speak up, no one would believe her. But that would only be the case if she claimed she hadn't killed Dr. Bechman. I was pretty sure that if she confessed to the crime, everyone would think she was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even her own father.

Was that why I was so concerned about this angry, uncommunicative little girl, because in the end she might have no one else on her side? I hadn't even been hired to solve the crime she'd been thought to have committed. I'd only been hired to try to find Sally.

Sally.

Had she planned to disappear, wouldn't she have left when Leon was out working and Madison was in school? She could have taken some things then, some clothes, some money. She could have left a note.

But that's not what had happened. She'd gone out to walk Roy. And then what? Had someone snatched her off the street? Had her body floated to the surface somewhere like the one that had turned up near LaGuardia Airport? Was Sally dead and gone, buried in potter's field or in some woods in New Jersey, her bones, perhaps, dug up and carried away by animals, one or two at a time?

Or was it something else entirely, a lover, say, closer to her own age, someone she'd met quite by accident at the supermarket or in the drugstore, someone she'd been seeing and couldn't find a way to tell Leon about?

Or had she just wanted some air? And once outside, once she'd started putting distance between herself and the life she'd been living, she found she couldn't go back. Who hasn't imagined that scenario, I thought, walking out of the house one night, letting the door close behind you, never
going back. You wouldn't necessarily know where you were headed. That wasn't the point. You'd only know where you had been, and that it was a place you didn't want to be, a place you couldn't be, not ever again.