Loves Music, Loves to Dance

  There was a time to placate Hamilton; a time to intrigue him. Nona chose the second option. “I had no idea how explosive this personal-ads business might be.” She fished on her desk for the letter from Vincent D’Ambrosio and handed it to Hamilton. His eyebrows went up as he read it.

  “He’s coming here at three o’clock.” Nona swallowed. “As you can see, he points out that there’s a dark side to these ads. A good friend of mine, Erin Kelley, answered one on Tuesday night. She’s missing.”

  Hamilton’s instinct for news overcame his petulance. “Do you think there’s a connection?”

  Nona turned her head, abstractly noted that the plant Darcy had watered two days ago was beginning to droop again. “I hope not. I don’t know.”

  “Talk to me after you meet with this guy.”

  Disgusted, Nona realized Hamilton was salivating over the potential media value of Erin’s disappearance. With a visible effort to sound sympathetic, he said, “Your friend’s probably fine. Don’t worry.”

  When he was gone, Nona’s secretary, Connie Frender, poked her head in the door. “Are you still alive?”

  “Barely.” Nona tried to smile. Had she ever been twenty-one? she wondered. Connie was the black counterpart of Joan Nye, the Toodle-oo Club president. Young, pretty, bright, smart. Matt’s new wife was now twenty-two. And I’ll be forty-one, Nona thought. With neither chick nor child. Lovely thought.

  “This single black female wishes to meet anyone who breathes,” Connie laughed. “I’ve got a whole new batch of responses from some of the box numbers you wrote to. Ready to look at them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Want some more coffee? After Awesome Austin, you probably need it.”

  This time Nona knew her smile was almost maternal. Connie did not seem to know that offering the boss a cup of coffee was frowned upon by some feminists. “I’d love one.”

  She returned with it five minutes later. “Nona, Matt’s on the phone. I told him you were in conference and he said it was vital that he talk to you.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Nona waited for the door to close and took a swig of coffee before she reached for the phone. Matthew, she thought. Meaning of the name? Gift of God. For sure. “Hi, Matt. How are you and the prom queen?”

  “Nona, is it possible for you to stop being nasty?” Had he always sounded this querulous?

  “No, it really isn’t.” Damn, Nona thought. After nearly two years, it still hurts to talk with him.

  “Nona, I was wondering. Why don’t you buy me out of the house? Jeanie doesn’t like the Hamptons. The market’s still lousy so I’ll give you a real break on the price. You know you can always borrow from your folks.”

  Matty the moocher, Nona thought. Marriage to the child-bride had reduced Matt to this. “I don’t want the house,” she said quietly. “I’m going to buy my own place when we unload this one.”

  “Nona, you love that place. You’re just doing this to punish me.”

  “See you.” Nona broke the connection. You’re wrong, Matt, she thought. I loved the house because we bought it together and cooked lobsters to celebrate our first night in it and every year we did something else to make it even greater. Now I want to start absolutely fresh. No memories.

  She began to go through the new batch of letters. She’d sent out over a hundred to people who had placed recent ads requesting them to share their experiences. She’d also persuaded the cable anchorman, Gary Finch, to invite people to write in about the results of personal ads they’d either placed or answered and the reason they no longer would do it.

  The result of the on-air announcement was proving to be a bonanza. A relatively small number wrote ecstatically about meeting “the most wonderful person in the world and now we’re engaged” . . . “living together” . . . “married.”

  Many others expressed disappointment. “He said he was an entrepreneur. Meaning he’s broke. Tried to borrow money the first time I met him.” From Bashful Single White Male: “She criticized me all through dinner. Said I had a nerve putting in the ad that I was attractive. Boy, did she make me feel lousy.” “I started getting obscene phone calls in the middle of the night.” “When I got back home from work I found him sitting on my doorstep sniffing coke.”

  Several letters were unsigned. “I don’t want you to know who I am, but I’m sure one of the men I met through a personal column is the man who burglarized my house.” “I brought a very attractive fortyish executive home and found him trying to kiss my seventeen-year-old daughter.”

  Nona felt heartsick at the final letter in the pile. It was from a woman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “My twenty-two-year-old daughter, an actress, disappeared almost two years ago. When she did not return our calls, we went to her New York apartment. It was obvious that she had not been there in days. She was answering personal ads. We are frantic. There has been absolutely no trace of her.”

  Oh God, Nona thought, oh God. Please let Erin be all right. Her hands trembling, she began to sort through the letters, adding the most interesting to one of three files: Happy About Ads. Disappointed. Serious Problem. The last letter she held out to show Agent D’Ambrosio.

  At one o’clock Connie brought her in a ham and cheese sandwich. “Nothing like a little cholesterol,” Nona commented.

  “There’s no point in ordering tuna for you when you never eat it,” Connie commented.

  By two, Nona had dictated letters to potential guests. She made a note to herself to invite a psychiatrist or psychologist to be on the program. I ought to have someone who can do a wrap-up analysis of the whole personal-ads scene, she decided.

  Vincent D’Ambrosio arrived at quarter of three. “He knows he’s early,” Connie told Nona, “and doesn’t mind waiting.”

  “No, that’s fine. Ask him to come in.”

  * * *

  In less than one minute, Vince D’Ambrosio forgot the remarkable discomfort of the green love seat in Nona Roberts’s office. He considered himself a good judge of people and liked Nona immediately. Her manner was straightforward, pleasant. He liked her looks. Not pretty but attractive, especially those large reflective brown eyes. She wore little if any makeup. He also liked the touches of gray in her dark blond hair. Alice, his ex-wife, was also blond but her sunny tresses were the result of regular appointments at Vidal Sassoon. Well, at least now she was married to a guy who could afford them.

  It was obvious that Roberts was desperately worried. “Your letter coincides with the most recent responses I’ve been receiving,” she told him. “People writing about meeting thieves, moochers, addicts, lechers, perverts. And now . . . ” She bit her lip. “And now, someone who never would have dreamed of answering a personal ad and did it as a favor to me is missing.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  Nona was fleetingly grateful that Vince D’Ambrosio did not waste time with empty reassurances. “Erin is twenty-seven or -eight. We met six months ago in our health club. She, Darcy Scott, and I were in the same dance classes and became friendly. Darcy will be here in a few minutes.” She picked up the letter from the woman in Lancaster and handed it to Vince. “This just arrived.”

  Vince read it quickly and whistled silently. “Somebody didn’t file a report with us. This girl isn’t on our list. She brings the count up to seven missing.”

  * * *

  In the cab on the way to Nona’s office, Darcy thought of the time she and Erin had gone skiing at Stowe their senior year of college. The slopes had been icy, and most people had headed for the lodge early. At her urging, she and Erin went for one last run. Erin hit a patch of ice and fell, her leg snapping under her.

  When the patrol came with the meat wagon for Erin, Darcy skied beside her, then accompanied her in the ambulance. She remembered Erin’s ashen face, Erin trying to joke. “Hope this doesn’t affect my dancing. I plan to be queen of the stardust ballroom.”

  “You will be.”

  At the hospital, when the X-rays were developed, the surgeon rai
sed his eyebrows. “You really did a job on yourself, but we’ll fix you up.” He’d smiled at Darcy. “Don’t look so worried. She’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not just worried. I feel so damn guilty,” she’d told the doctor. “Erin didn’t want to make the last run.”

  Now as she entered Nona’s office and was introduced to Agent D’Ambrosio, Darcy realized she was experiencing exactly the same reaction. The same relief that somebody was in charge, the same guilt that she had urged Erin to answer the ads with her.

  “Nona only asked if we wanted to try them. I was the one who pushed Erin to do it,” she told D’Ambrosio. He took notes as she talked about the phone call on Tuesday, about Erin’s saying she was meeting someone named Charles North in a pub near Washington Square. She noticed the change in D’Ambrosio’s manner when she spoke about opening the safe, about giving the Bertolini necklace to Jay Stratton, about Stratton’s claim that there were diamonds missing.

  He asked her about Erin’s family.

  Darcy stared at her hands.

  Remember arriving at Mount Holyoke first day of freshman year? Erin already there, her suitcases piled neatly in the corner. They’d sized each other up, both liked what they saw. Erin’s eyes widening as she recognized Mother and Dad but not losing her composure.

  “When Darcy wrote to me this summer introducing herself I didn’t realize that her parents were Barbara Thorne and Robert Scott,” she’d said. “I don’t think I ever missed one of your films.” Then she added, “Darcy, I didn’t want to settle in until you were here. I thought you might have a preference about which closet or bed you wanted.”

  Remember the look Mother and Dad exchanged. They were thinking, what a nice girl Erin is. They asked her to join us for dinner.

  Erin had come to college alone. Her father was an invalid, she explained. We wondered why she never even mentioned her mother. Later she told me that when she was six, her father developed multiple sclerosis and needed a wheelchair. Her mother took off when she was seven. “I didn’t bargain for this,” she’d said. “Erin, you can come with me if you want.”

  “I can’t leave Daddy all alone. He needs me.”

  Over the years, Erin completely lost touch with her mother. “The last I heard she was living with some guy who owned a charter sailboat in the Caribbean.” She was at Mount Holyoke on a scholarship. “As Daddy says, being immobilized gives you plenty of time to help your kid with her homework. If you can’t pay for college, at least you can help her get a free ride.” Oh Erin, where are you? What’s happened to you?

  Darcy realized that D’Ambrosio was waiting for her to answer his question. “Her father’s been in a nursing home in Massachusetts for the last few years,” she said. “He’s not aware of much anymore. I guess I’m the closest thing Erin has to a relative besides him.”

  Vince saw the pain in Darcy’s eyes. “In my business I’ve observed that having one good friend can beat having a passel of relatives.”

  Darcy managed a smile. “Erin’s favorite quote is from Aristotle. ‘What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.’ “

  Nona got up, stood beside Darcy’s chair, and put her hands reassuringly on her shoulders. She looked squarely at D’Ambrosio. “What can we do to help find Erin?”

  A long time ago, Petey Potters had been a construction worker. “Big jobs,” as he liked to boast to anyone whose ear he could get. “World Trade Center. I usta be out on one of them girders. Tell ye, the wind wuz whippin’ so ye wondered if ye were gonna stay up there.” He’d laugh, a wheezy chortle. “Some view, lemme tell ye, some view.”

  But at night the thought of going back up on the girder began to get to Petey. A coupla shots of rye, a coupla beer chasers, and the warmth would flow into the pit of his stomach and spread through his body.

  “You’re just like your father,” his wife began to scream at him. “A no-good drunk.”

  Petey never got insulted. He understood. He’d start to laugh when his wife ranted about Pop. Pop had been some card. He’d disappear for weeks at a time, dry out in a flophouse on the Bowery, and then come back home. “When I’m hungry, it’s no problem,” he’d confided to eight-year-old Petey. I go to the Salvation Army shelter, take a dive, get a meal, a bath, a bed. Never fails.”

  “What’s ‘take a dive’ mean?” Petey had asked.

  “When you go to the shelter, they tell you about God and forgiveness and we’re all brothers and we want to be saved. Then they ask anyone who believes in the good book to come forward and acknowledge his Maker. So you get religion. You run up, fall on your knees, and shout something about being saved. That’s taking a dive.”

  Nearly forty years later the memory still tickled the homeless derelict Petey Potters. He’d created his own shelter, a combination of wood and tin and old rags that he’d piled together into a tentlike structure against the sagging, shuttered terminal on the abandoned West Fifty-sixth Street pier.

  Petey’s needs were simple. Wine. Butts. A little food. Litter baskets were a constant supply of cans and bottles that could be redeemed for the deposits. When he was ambitious, Petey took a squeegee and a bottle of water and stood at the Fifty-sixth Street exit of the West Side Highway. No drivers wanted their car windows smeared by his efforts, but most people were afraid to wave him away. Only last week he’d heard an old bat explode to the driver of a Mercedes, “Jane, why do you allow yourself to be held up like this?”

  Petey had loved the answer. “Because, Mother, I don’t want to have the side of this car scratched if I refuse.”

  Petey didn’t scratch anything when he was rejected. He just went on to the next car, armed with his squirt bottle, a coaxing smile on his face.

  Yesterday had been one of the good days. Just enough snow so that the highway became messy and windshields got sprayed with dirty slush from the tires of cars ahead of them. Few people had refused Petey’s ministrations at the exit ramp. He’d made eighteen bucks, enough for a hero sandwich, butts, and three bottles of dago red.

  Last night he’d settled inside his tent, wrapped in the old army blanket the Armenian church on Second Avenue had given him, a ski cap keeping his head warm, a tattered greatcoat, its moth-eaten fur collar cozy around his neck. He’d finished the hero with the first bottle of wine, then settled down to puffing and sipping, content and warm in an inebriated haze. Pop taking a dive. Mom coming back to the apartment on Tremont Avenue, worn out from scrubbing other people’s houses. Birdie, his wife. Harpie, not Birdie. That’s what they shoulda called her.

  Petey shook with mirth at the play on words. Wonder where she was now. How about the kid? Nice kid.

  Petey wasn’t sure when he heard the car pull up. He tried to force himself to wakefulness, instinctively wanting to protect his territory. It better not be cops trying to knock over his place. Nah. Cops didn’t bother with this kind of shack in the middle of the night.

  Maybe it was a druggie. Petey gripped the neck of an empty wine bottle. Better not try to come in here. But nobody came. After a few minutes he heard the car start up again; he peered out cautiously. Taillights were disappearing onto the deserted West Side Highway. Maybe somebody had to take a leak, Petey decided as he reached for the last bottle.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when Petey opened his eyes again. His head had that empty, throbbing feeling. His gut burned. His mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage. He pulled himself up. The three empty bottles offered no consolation. He found twenty cents in the pockets of the greatcoat. I’m hungry, he whined silently. Poking his head from behind the piece of tin sheeting that served as door for his shelter, he decided that it must be late afternoon. There were long shadows on the dock. His eyes moved to focus on something that was clearly not a shadow. Petey squinted, muttered a profanity under his breath, and dragged himself to his feet.

  His legs were stiff and his gait clumsy as he made his unsteady way to whatever was lying on the pier.

  It was a slim woman. Young. Red hair cu
rling around her face. Petey was sure she was dead. A necklace was twisted into her throat. She was wearing a blouse and slacks. Her shoes didn’t match.

  The necklace sparkled in the fading light. Gold. Real gold. Petey licked his lips nervously. Bracing himself for the shock of touching the dead girl he reached around the back of her neck for the clasp of the elaborate necklace. His fingers fumbled. Thick and unsteady, they could not get the clasp to release. Christ, she felt cold.

  He didn’t want to break anything. Was the necklace long enough to pull over her head? Trying to ignore the bruised, blue-veined throat, he tugged at the heavy chain.

  Grimy fingerprints streaked Erin’s face as Petey freed the necklace and slipped it in his pocket. The earrings. They were good, too.

  From a distance, Petey heard the whine of a police siren. Like a startled rabbit he jumped up, forgetting the earrings. This was no place for him. He’d have to take his stuff, get himself a new shelter. When the body was found, just his being around here would be enough for the cops.

  An awareness of his potential danger sobered Petey On stumbling feet he rushed back to the shelter. Everything he owned could be tied in the army blanket. His pillow. A couple pairs of socks, some underwear. A flannel shirt. A dish and spoon and cup. Matches. Butts. Old newspapers for cold nights.

  Fifteen minutes later, Petey had vanished into the world of the homeless. Panhandling on Seventh Avenue netted four dollars and thirty-two cents. He used it to buy wine and a pretzel. There was a young fellow on Fifty-seventh Street who sold hot jewelry. He gave Petey twenty-five dollars for the necklace. “This is good, man. Try to get more like this.”

  At ten o’clock Petey was asleep on a subway grating that radiated warm, dank air. At eleven, he was being shaken awake. A not-unkind voice said, “Come on, pal. It’s going to be real cold tonight. We’re going to take you to a place where you can have a decent bed and a good meal.”