The Thanksgiving Day Murder (22 page)

“Yes.”

“That's it, then. A phone call is evidence. Hold on.” She picked up her phone, made a call, and asked for Billy Houseman. Then she said, “Billy, this is Evelyn Hogan. We still lovers, darling?” She grinned as he replied. “I sure do. Please let me know if this number—” she recited the number in my book “—called—” and she gave him my number. “You bet I'll hold. I need it five minutes ago.”

It didn't take long. She wrote, smiled, honeyed him a little more, and hung up. “He's our man,” she said with satisfaction. “That's my guy at the phone company. Takes less time than going through channels and there's no paperwork. Now, question two. To get a warrant, I have to know what we're going to find in that apartment.”

“I don't have the faintest idea. I think he came to New York, stalked her so cleverly she didn't know it, and grabbed her on Thanksgiving Day year before last. He'd already lived in the city for some time. I don't know what he did to her, where he buried her if he killed her—” I really felt kind of dumb, but I knew she was right. Only on television do cops get warrants just by asking for them. In real life they need to know what they expect to find and where
they expect to find it. “I suppose he might have kept a memento of his deed, her handbag, her ID.”

“Good thinking. Then if they find what's left of the body, it's harder to identify. Good enough. I think we're in business.”

“I hope you find him.” I said it with mixed emotions. He had the best motive for murder I could think of; he was killing his sister's killer.

“We will. We know who he is now. I suppose you don't walk around with a cellular phone in your bag, so keep in touch with me. I can leave a message for you at home. Meantime, I'm going to call around in Indiana and see what I can find out there.”

I left and made my way over to Sixty-fourth Street. Seconds after I rang Olive's bell, a voice came through the intercom asking me who I was. When I responded, the door buzzed open.

Upstairs, a visiting home care worker opened the door for me with a smile and took me to the living room, where Olive sat on the sofa, dressed, her face made up, her hair clean and tidy.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

“I feel pretty good. Hospitals don't agree with me. And Amelia here is a big help.”

“Are you, as they say, ambulatory?”

“Can I walk? Oh, sure. I'm really feeling pretty good today.”

“Suppose we have lunch at the Tavern on the Green.”

“The Tavern on the Green,” she repeated, almost with wonderment. “I haven't been there for years. Longer than that.” She smiled, looking like an older, tougher, thinner version of my mother. “I don't know if I can walk the three blocks or so.”

But she hadn't said no. “I'll get a cab to pick us up downstairs and drop us in front of the restaurant.”

“That'd be great, Kix.”

The cabbie thought we were nuts, but he drove us to the restaurant, which was just inside Central Park three blocks north of the corner where I had first laid eyes on Aunt Olive. We had a table with a view of the park, and Olive ate as though she was very hungry. I guess I was born an optimist, but watching her, talking to her, I knew she had months, maybe years, ahead of her.

We talked about a lot of things, places she had visited—she had spent most of her vacations traveling—people she had run into, known, loved. We never mentioned my mother or my grandparents. When we were finished, after several cups of coffee and sweet desserts, we taxied back to her building and I helped her up to the apartment. She was tired by then, ready to lie down for a nap. She refused my offer of help but thanked me warmly for the lunch and the company. At the door, we hugged each other.

I never saw her again.

The call from Detective Hogan came after nine o'clock that night. “Chris? Evelyn Hogan here. We've got him in custody.”

My heart did strange things. Since we'd uncovered the body of the real Natalie Miller, I had developed so much sympathy for Ted, her brother, that part of me hoped he would be gone. “Tell me,” I said.

“We got the warrant and I had the Borough Task Force detectives waiting when he got home from work. We'd already gotten into his apartment and found what we were looking for.”

“Her handbag?”

“Everything of importance that was in it, but he must have trashed the bag itself. Her wallet has a snapshot of her in a wedding dress and her husband next to her.”

“It's very sad,” I said. “Can I talk to him?”

“Come on down tomorrow.”

“What about the other guy?”

“Say, he's something else. ‘How ya doin'?' and all that. We picked him up, too, but we don't have enough to hold him. He said he and Miller kind of traded identities when they hooked up in New York, at least so that Miller could get his job.”

“Does Miller have a lawyer?”

“The court'll appoint one. He's not what I'd call rich. And he's pretty depressed.”

“I'll be down tomorrow afternoon.”

I drove down right from the college, munching a tuna fish sandwich as I drove. Evelyn had arranged an interview room for me at the Sixtieth Precinct in Brooklyn as a special favor since I had contributed to the case. I sat down in the empty room and waited only a few minutes. Then the door opened and Steve Carlson, Natalie's friend at Hopkins and Jewell, walked in. He looked pale and tired, his hands cuffed behind him, his hair wild.

“Hi,” I said.

“You figured it out.”

“It was the phone call that clinched it,” I said, “the one your friend made last week. I hadn't given my number to many people and I couldn't believe Martin Jewell had gone looking for Natalie's old apartment house or that Arlene had hired someone to play the brother. It didn't make sense. It had to be someone who had known her and lost track of her. When your friend called, I knew he'd gotten the number from someone and I didn't believe his story that it came from the Indiana newspaper. It was just too farfetched. Also, it was my husband who called them to place the ad, and he's pretty careful about throwing around our phone number. I figured you'd asked him to call, pretending to be her brother.”

“I shouldn't've had him call.”

“It would have occurred to me eventually that you had gotten a job with Hopkins in order to befriend the new Natalie. How did you know she worked there?”

“I read my sister's last letter to my mother, but not till a long time after she wrote it. My mother died around the time Natalie was killed. I tried to get hold of her, but she'd moved and left no forwarding address and no new phone number. I wrote and the letter came back. I called and the
number'd been disconnected. I had a job up in Alaska and I didn't have time to look for my sister. I had all my mother's things put in storage, and when I came back a couple of years later, I started going through them. There was the letter from Natalie, and she said she'd just been called for an interview at a new ad agency called Hopkins and Jewell.”

“She hadn't had the interview yet?”

“Didn't sound like it. So on a chance, I got the number, called, and asked for her. When they put someone on, I said, ‘Hi, it's Teddy,' and she said, ‘Who?' as though she'd never heard of me. And it wasn't her voice, I mean my sister's voice. It was just too much of a coincidence, my sister getting an interview with this company and someone else with the same name holding a job there. So I took everything I had out of the bank and went to New York.”

“You knew she had last lived near Gramercy Park.”

“I not only knew it, I'd visited her there when I was in New York almost seven years ago.”

“And one morning in the elevator she introduced you to her neighbors, the Fosters.”

He looked at me curiously. “You know, you're right. I didn't think to look for anyone in the building. I just asked the super when and where she'd gone. He knew when, but he had no forwarding address. Neither did the post office. And there was no listing in the phone book under her name. I suppose she had an unlisted number, but if she did, that is, the other woman, I couldn't get hold of it. I called a bunch of N. Millers, but they'd never heard of Natalie.”

“So you decided to get a job with Hopkins and Jewell,” I said.

“I had to learn word processing first, but it wasn't hard. I've learned a lot harder stuff in my life. What was hard was getting a job at H and J. I started out at another place, kind of to hone my skills. Then I found out what employment
agency sent people to them. Arlene liked me. She hired me right off.”

“Arlene interviewed you herself?”

“After Wormy. They run a pretty tight ship there. One of the partners approved of everyone who was hired.”

“So you became Natalie's friend.”

“That wasn't easy either. She didn't want boyfriends who weren't rich or promising, and I'm a lot younger than she is. But I managed. We talked a lot and I think she liked me.”

“I guess by that time you'd met up with Steve Carlson.”

“Yeah. He had no problem lending me his ID. He thought it was a gas. He knew the whole story. He just never knew what I did on Thanksgiving Day.”

“Did the fake Natalie ever slip up?”

“Never. She was very cool, always in control. I once asked her where she'd worked before and she was very vague, said it was some place on Sixth Avenue that'd gone out of business. Everything she said was possible. Nothing was checkable.”

“You knew where she lived, though, didn't you?”

“She couldn't really keep that a secret. They had her address on file, and Wormy used to distribute a Christmas card list every fall. But she never actually said who she was marrying, not his last name anyway. He was Sandy Somebody and he lived in New Jersey.”

“How'd you find her?”

“I followed her a lot and then one day he picked her up. I drove my car to work on a day when they were going out. After that it was easy. And Wormy had her new address after she got married. She needed it for the W Two.”

“Did you always intend to kill her?”

“I just wanted to find my sister. I wanted to know what happened to her. I started out thinking maybe this was a coincidence, a second Natalie Miller at H and J, but then I got the feeling there was more to it. I tried to get over it when
she left to get married, but I couldn't. I knew I'd only have one chance, that if I let her live, I'd have to get out of town, and I was ready to do that. But I didn't want to burn my bridges. I picked Thanksgiving Day on the chance she'd go to the parade. She'd told me once how much she wanted to go, but no one would take her. So I followed them and waited till one of them might be occupied. She walked around the corner and I gave her a big smile and said hi.”

“And she was just as happy to see you.”

“Until I grabbed her and ran her through the crowd on Central Park West to the next block. If he went to look for her, she was long gone.”

It's very satisfying when everything you know and theorize starts to link up, but this was all so sad, I couldn't take pleasure in the satisfaction. “Did she tell you what she did?”

“When I applied a little pressure.”

“Did she tell you why, Ted?”

“I gather they'd both applied for the job at H and J and my sister was called for an interview. The fake Natalie did a little research on her own, went to see what Jewell looked like, and she liked what she saw. She asked my sister to let her go in her place and my sister refused. They went away for a weekend before the interview, she didn't say where, and I guess they had a big fight and my sister ended up dead.”

“She didn't tell you where she buried the body?”

He shook his head. “I was desperate to know. She said if I let her go, she'd tell me after she was safe.”

“She couldn't have done that,” I said. “Your sister was buried on family property. The body would have led right to her killer.”

“You found her?”

“On Saturday. The woman posing as your sister was named Connie Moffat. She buried Natalie on her cousin's
property that weekend that they went upstate. There was a handbag with the remains and it had Natalie Miller's driver's license in it. And a picture.”

“My God.”

I pulled Connie's key ring out of my bag.

“That's the key to her desk,” he said.

“And this is the key Martin Jewell gave her for the door to the old office when they were having an affair. This one fits the apartment at Gramercy Park.” I showed it to him. “What surprised someone I showed it to was how she would have an original key to the apartment on an old key ring if she had to turn it in when she moved. But Connie was a subtenant. She must have given the super her duplicate key from her own key ring without thinking about it. The key she kept was your sister's. There were no keys in the pocketbook.”

“She roomed with my sister for a while at the end. They'd met at a class a couple of months before. She told me that on Thanksgiving Day when I was prying information out of her.”

“It probably started very innocently.”

“I hate that woman,” he said with a sob in his throat.

“What did you do with her?” I asked gently.

“Sorry. That's my secret.”

“Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head. “Thanks for coming. I led you a merry chase. I didn't expect you to be nice to me.”

It hadn't all been kindness. I wanted information from him. I wanted to know the missing details, the motives, the means he had used to achieve his end. “Do you need a lawyer?”

“They read me my rights last night. They'll supply one.”

“I can get you someone very good.”

He put his head down and wept. I patted him on the back and called for someone to come and let me out.

I went home and made some phone calls. The first one was to Arnold.

“Haven't heard from you for a while. You get your man yet?”

“Last night. I didn't get him; the police did.”

“With a little help from the suburbs.”

“A little,” I admitted. “It's a very sad case, Arnold.”

“Murder is always sad.”

“This is a brother avenging his sister's death. I really feel for him.”

“You feel for everyone, Chrissie. It's why we love you. I guess he needs a lawyer.”

“Very badly. I hate to ask—”

“It sounds like an interesting case. What more can a lawyer ask for?”

Plenty, I thought, but I thanked him and gave him the information he needed. Then I called Sandy Gordon.