Chapter 6

My mind was churning as I walked to the car. Opening the door, I tousled Fargo’s head. “The plot thickens, Dr. Watson. How would you feel about pizza for lunch?” The increased tempo of his tail wag gave me my answer. I decided to leave the car in the bank lot, figuring Saturday was slow and no one would mind. I put Fargo on the lead and we walked the couple of blocks to Mickey’s Pizza.

You could hear it and smell it before you saw it. Conversations were carried on at a mild shout to compete successfully with numerous iPods and cell phones ringing with tidbits of songs the owners thought reflected their personalities or looks in some way. Horns blew to summon friends out to the curb or to urge another car to move on. But the aroma—ah, now that made up for any minor faults I may have been finding with the ambiance.

The menu was beautifully simple on its blackboard behind the counter. Pizza by the pie or the slice, calzone, meatball or sausage grinder, small or large salad. Dessert was Italian ice or cannoli.

When my turn came at the counter, I ordered half a small pie with sausage and mushrooms, small salad and—remembering they sold no alcoholic drinks—a Diet Coke for me plus a cup of water for my friend tied to a table outside. Getting a firm grip on my tray of goodies, I eased my way through the crowd to the table Fargo had reserved for us and sat down beside him. I broke him off a crust of pizza—leaving a piece of sausage and picking off the mushrooms—and opened my Diet Coke for a sip.

I looked around, hoping to spot one or more of the kids. I really didn’t expect to see Zoe, but who knew? I gazed until the scene began to blur and then stopped looking for a few minutes while I enjoyed some pizza and salad.

And then I saw him.

Harry was walking down the edge of the sidewalk, turning his head back and forth to check both cars and pedestrians. He, too, was looking for someone. When he reached my table, I called his name softly.

“Harry? Harry Maddock?”

He looked at me, his face a question mark.

“Yes. I’m Harry Maddock. Do I know you?” He was obviously on guard and untrusting of anyone who looked old enough to vote. Along with jeans and T-shirt, Harry also wore an unmistakable air of guilt.

“My name is Alex Peres. I’m a friend of Rob Catlett and also of Mrs. Marie Catlett. I’m a private investigator, and I am very quietly looking for Zoe. Marie and Rob fear she might be in some danger, and I’d like to be able to reassure them. Would you sit down and talk to me for a minute or two?”

He more or less collapsed into a chair, as if he had removed a suit of armor that was all that had held him erect. “Thank God somebody’s doing something. I think I’m going nuts.”

“Yes, I’m trying to do something, but I need all the help I can get. I noticed you were looking around as you walked. Were you expecting someone?”

“Dana. Dana Portman. She really got roughed up in the confusion last night. I hope she’s okay. She’s supposed to meet me here.”

I wondered what he meant by roughed up. But I thought we’d better start at the beginning. “Harry, can you tell me from the get-go how this all came about? Is Zoe kidnapped or not?”

He looked at me for a long minute, then apparently decided he had to trust someone. He leaned over and stroked Fargo, probably to let his voice steady. “Okay, sure. Zoe and I will be seniors in high school when it opens next week. Dana is a year older and will be going to Yale in a couple of weeks. We didn’t want the three of us to be separated for a year. We wanted to stay together like we are now. We tossed around various things we could do—like moving to New York, getting an apartment, Dana going to Columbia, Zoe and me finishing high school there. Then Zoe could either get a good role in a TV serial or on stage or go to acting school. I could either get on a pro hockey team—I’m pretty good—or get a hockey scholarship at a college in the New York area. With the money we could borrow from Reed Catlett, we could afford to do that until we started making money on our own. Then we would pay him back, of course. Excuse me a minute.”

He stood and walked into the restaurant, leaving me to marvel at how teenagers could simplify the complex and complicate the simple. Harry returned with pizza and soda and resumed his “explanation.”

“Dana thought we were being silly. She said we should leave things as they are. She’d be home from Yale plenty of weekends, or we could come down there to visit. I could try for scholarships or student loans either at Yale or at other colleges in Connecticut or Rhode Island for the next year, while Zoe made sure her grades were good enough to get into Yale next year as a drama major. But Zoe wanted us all to be together—in one town, if not one school. And she was afraid Reed would never come up with a cent for such an unusual—what he would call harebrained—scheme. Of course, Dana might not need any of it. She has her own money from her grandmother, but it’s pretty well tied up till she’s twenty-five. And, obviously, she’s committed to Yale. I think she was kind of relieved that she is.”

I took the last bite of pizza, splitting it with Fargo. “Dana seems to have some common sense. And Zoe might be going to Fairfield, Connecticut, to live with her grandmother. That’s quite near New Haven. Did you know that?”

Harry nodded and swallowed. “Yes. But we weren’t certain. And we needed to get things nailed down. Time was flying. And we still didn’t know what I could do.”

He took some soda and went on. “We all agreed that Reed or Mr. Portman wouldn’t agree to any of this. We were about to give up when Zoe said, kind of dreamily, ‘I have it. You can kidnap me. My father will pay the ransom, and away we go.’ We all laughed, and started just some crazy talk about kidnapping her, my wearing a mask and carrying a hockey stick and demanding money, Dana blindfolding Reed and taking him somewhere to give us the money. You know, just nonsense.”

I nodded and held the cup down so Fargo could drink part of his water. “I understand. But then it began to seem plausible, no longer just a joke. Where were you going to keep her?”

“We thought of Dana’s house. It’s real big with lots of unused rooms. But she says her grandmother—who lives there, too, since Dana’s father travels so much—sometimes roams around the house, looking into the rooms, remembering years ago when she was a girl and they used them for weekend parties and dances and all.”

He paused for a bite and a sip. “So we decided on the apartment over our garage. It’s not rented for the winter.”

I had to laugh. “Oh, God, Harry, your house or Dana’s? I, or the police, would have found her in twenty minutes.”

“Well, you won’t find her in twenty minutes now.” He looked frightened and angry. “We’ve looked all over town and can’t find a trace. She’s just . . . gone.” The tears rolled unbidden. He buried his face in his napkin, shoulders shaking.

Suddenly a hand appeared on his shoulder, and behind him stood what should have been a lovely girl. “Harry, what’s wrong? Have they . . . found . . . something?” She looked up. “Who are you?”

“I’m Alex Peres, a private investigator. I’m looking for Zoe Catlett, and Harry’s been giving me some background. And you’re...”

She extended her hand. Her voice was perfectly modulated, her hair was professionally styled, her clothes informally fashionable. And she was a mess. Dark, dark glasses partially concealed a whopper of a black eye. She had a nasty scrape on one forearm and another on her right leg. Her left ankle was in a soft cast, and she carried the type of cane that hospitals give to you on loan from the emergency room. I had seen her picture just this morning. I preferred that version.

“I’m Dana Portman, and this is . . . ?” She stroked Fargo’s willing head.

“He’s my partner, Fargo, the brains of the outfit.”

“They so often are, aren’t they?” She smiled. Then sobered. “Have you any news of Zoe? Is she all right?”

“As of yesterday afternoon, her father spoke with her briefly. She was okay, just scared. As of this morning, no contact.”

“This is turning into a nightmare.” She took a wallet from her purse and pulled out a bill. “Harry, would you get me some coffee, please? My damn leg is killing me. And for you and Alex, too, of course.”

“Thanks, black, please. Dana, what happened to you? You look as if you barely survived a train wreck.”

“It all goes back to where this kidnapping stopped being funny.” She pointed to a table near the sidewalk. “The three of us were sitting there, talking and laughing about how we could stage a kidnapping with enough realism to pry the money out of Reed. I never really took it seriously. And I didn’t really believe Harry and Zoe did, either. It was just childish play. Reed is so tight we all roared at the thought of his face when one of us told him the ransom was a million dollars. And Merrilou is so hungry for Reed’s money and social status we just loved thinking of her not only watching him fork out a million, but doing it to save his lesbian daughter. She would be mortified beyond belief, and we loved the thought of it. No, we were not being nice, but I thought we were just playing. We talked of how it would make a great sitcom, and that’s all it was to me.”

Harry returned with the coffees in time to hear Dana’s last remarks. “It was funny, but Zoe and I did need the money. You were all set financially, Dana, but I still thought you were going along with us.”

She shrugged. “I was. I would love to have had Zoe stay with me, if that had worked. It would have been wonderful to be alone and play house together for at least a few days. Or I’d have taken food to her at your place, made phone calls, that sort of thing. But, to be honest, I thought Reed, or more likely Merrilou, would see through it fairly quickly. I thought Zoe would go home trying to make a joke of it or crying that she had been desperate for money to help Harry or some damn thing. She could always get around Reed. At least until she said she was gay. I doubt Merrilou has given him a minute’s peace over that. Of all the scenarios I visualized, it never occurred to me she’d really be kidnapped.”

I sipped my coffee and found it surprisingly welcome. The breeze coming off the water was turning chilly and the hot coffee felt good going down. “How in the world did you get from a sitcom to a real kidnapping? Who arranged it? Who are ‘they’? Where did they take her? Did they do it to get the money for you? You hired them?”

They looked confused and guilty. Harry simply stared at his coffee. Dana sighed heavily and began to talk rather fast, as if she just wanted to get it over with.

“These two guys had the table next to us. I guess they had been listening to us. God knows we hadn’t been especially quiet about it. One of them leaned over and said, ‘You kids are gonna fuck it up. The cops will find her in no time, and they’ll know she was part of it, all tucked up comfy in her friend’s apartment. Somebody will recognize your voice on the phone. And even if you get away with all that, you’ll screw up the money exchange because you don’t know what you’re doing. You guys need help. You need it ba-ad.’”

I was more confused than ever. Kidnappers for hire in the middle of Ptown? Just volunteering like someone saying, “You say your yard needs mowing? I can do that for twenty bucks.” And the three teenagers just went along with it? I’d had a Diet Coke and half a cup of coffee, but I had that three-martini feeling.

“Who were these men? Had you seen them before? What did they look like? Did you hire them to carry out this idiot plan? Were they serious?”

I probably would have asked another dozen questions, but Dana raised her hand like a traffic cop.

“Stop. I can’t keep up with you. No, we’d never seen them before. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t place them. I just assumed maybe I’d seen them around here. They were in their early-, maybe mid-twenties, just dressed like most people. Jeans, I think, T-shirts. One had on a Windbreaker. He had brown hair, average build, fairly good looking. The other one was shorter and skinny and had blondish hair.” She paused and sipped her coffee.

Harry took up her tale. “At first I thought they were just older guys, having a little fun jazzing us. Then I thought they were hitting on the two girls. But they were telling us how they’d handle Reed and a lot of serious stuff. About then I realized something really funny... weird. The blonde never spoke. He smiled and laughed. He’d shake his head for ‘no’ or ‘yes.’ The other guy said it would take them three days to set it up, but the blonde shook his head and raised two fingers, so the other guy said, ‘Okay, two days.’ So we agreed to meet them, and they left. I think we were all a little scared. It was becoming real now.”

Dana shook her head. “I didn’t believe them. I thought in two days, they’d just leave us sitting here. That we’d never see them again and they’d have a good laugh at the naïve kids.” She laughed rather sadly. “Zoe was a nervous wreck. She believed every word of it. She even wondered what clothes to take. I reminded her you didn’t pack a bag to be kidnapped. She said, well, at least she’d cram some clean undies and makeup in her handbag... and her diary. She might induce someone to write a play about it, in which she would star, of course. And she’d have to remember how to act, how she felt, et cetera. She thought the whole thing was a lark. I wonder how she feels tonight?” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue, and I patted her hand. Big help.

I turned to Harry. Maybe I could at least keep them crying only one at a time. “So you met them Thursday night?”

“Yes.” He polished off his cannoli and wiped his mouth. “I could eat those things all day.”

Even if bombs were falling around us, I silently completed for him. So could I. I asked, “They had a plan?”

“Oh, yeah. They knew a closed-down house with no immediate neighbors who might notice a little activity when the guys had to leave her and go to work. She’d have to make do with a sleeping bag, but the place was clean enough and the water was still on.”

“What kind of work do they do?”

“Handyman stuff,” he guessed. “They hadn’t really said. But they assured her she’d only be there a night or two. They really knew how to pressure Reed, so he’d come across with the million in a hurry. And out of the million, they’d only keep five thousand apiece. And they laughed that they wouldn’t even charge her room and board. They made it all sound so simple. They sounded like really nice guys who would enjoy a bit of adventure and a big chunk of money.” He drained his coffee and looked wistfully at my cigarettes on the table.

I nodded for him to take one, continuing to prove my theory that while millions still smoked cigarettes, only I purchased them. These guys sounded too good to be true. If they were so “nice,” why were they willing to put an entire family through a nightmare experience? Why were they willing to help steal a million dollars for someone else, and someone they didn’t even know? Better yet, why were they willing to work so cheaply? Why was the blonde mute? Was he foreign, with a heavy accent? Obviously, he understood English. Did he lisp or stutter? Somehow I doubted it, and though I couldn’t figure what it was, I’d bet it was something that made him easily identifiable. I didn’t trust them an inch.

Dana echoed my thoughts. “I didn’t trust them,” she said. “I thought ten thousand was too cheap. They did the work, took the risks, and Zoe got all the money except a pittance. Something smelled about the whole thing. But Zoe was all for it, and so were you, Harry, so, I just tagged along. Stupid me. I should have stopped it somehow. And now everything, including me, is a mess.” No tears this time, just good old-fashioned anger.

I finally got around to it. “Yeah, Dana, did you run into a sawmill?”

“You know it. We all met here Thursday night at nine. They said they had a van up the street, which they would get and drive slowly past Mickey’s. They would stop for just an instant. The side door would be ajar. Zoe should open it enough to jump in and they would drive off, and in two days we would all be rich.”

Dana shook her head as if she could not believe her own naiveté. “They reassured us that Zoe would be in a safe and reasonably livable place. Zoe was on a real high. I don’t mean drugs, just excitement. I was excited, too, but I was also a bit scared. I wanted to know where this place was. The men had been a little vague, and I wanted to see that it was as livable as they claimed. So, I said I’d go with them, see Zoe settled in, and one of them could drive me back here to pick up my car. They agreed and left to get their van.”

Harry was obviously on the masculine defensive. “Naturally, I felt I was the one who should go with Zoe and had said I would follow them in my car. They said a parade might cause attention on the back roads, so I agreed to stay and wait for Dana.” He snickered bitterly. “It wasn’t much of a wait.”

The more they told me, the more my heart sank. “What happened?” I asked.

Dana answered. “This whitish van came creeping up the street, the blonde driving. Zoe and I stood on the curb. It stopped, the door slid open a bit, and Zoe hopped in. The van started to move away, fast. I jumped inside, off balance. Zoe grabbed for me, but someone pushed me back and I fell out. And here I am.”

“I ran out and picked Dana up.” Harry doused his cigarette in the remains of Fargo’s water and got a dirty look from both of us. “I got her back to the table. A couple of people asked what happened, and I had sense enough to say she stepped off the curb wrong and sprained her ankle. Then I drove her to the clinic. We told them the same story. They patched her up and I drove her home, walked back and drove my car home.”

He sighed. “And Zoe is just... gone.”