Julie was near despair when she got home. Reggie Bauer’s scenario could be due entirely to his own aberration. Great. But if that were so, what to do next? Once more she checked in with her service. A call had come from Nuba Bradley of the Actors Forum. They had found a sign saying PUPPET SHOW INSIDE. A homeless person was incorporating the sign into his wind shelter. A building-by-building search was under way. Julie called Detective Russo. He confirmed the search and the discovery of a pair of sneakers that could belong to the missing subject. “You might as well know the worst,” Russo summarized. “They’re bringing in a squatter from the building across the way. He watched two people load something into a station wagon about eight o’clock last night. We’ll try to improve his memory, but all there is so far-a black wagon. Even the windows looked black to him.”
Julie phoned Kevin Bourke. The line was busy. She had left his place only ten minutes before and had not even taken off her coat. She ran back to and up Eighth Avenue. A cabbie pulled alongside her and tapped his horn. She signaled that she wanted him, but kept on running. She could see the black car at the curb outside Bourke’s shop. Not a cop in sight, not even a meter maid.
Mr. Bourke stepped out of the shop with the customer, who looked at his watch and poked a cautionary finger at Bourke. He strode to the wagon and pushed the street person out of his way. When he drove off, the cabbie took over the spot.
“I tried to call you,” Bourke said. “You’d have known what I meant.”
“I got a bead on him,” the cabbie said as Julie jumped in. The wagon turned left at the stoplight. The late afternoon traffic was building. On Ninth Avenue it was at a crawl. The wagon stayed near the middle lane; the cabbie, to be sure the car he followed didn’t opt for the Lincoln Tunnel, kept to the fire lane himself.
Julie made a note of the California license number and asked the driver if he couldn’t radio a message to the police.
“No, ma’am. I’m a gypsy. I don’t have that intercom stuff. But don’t you worry none, he ain’t going to get away.”
But he almost did get away, slipping into a tunnel lane and then spurting out of it instead of turning west. He ran the light and went free while the westbound traffic closed in ahead of Julie’s cab,
“He sure drives California style,” the driver said. “What’re you after him for?”
“I’m pretty sure he helped kidnap an eleven-year-old girl,”
The cabbie shot out on the orange light and within four blocks of progressive lights was headlights-to-back-bumper with the wagon. “I’ll ram him if you want me to.”
“For God’s sake, no. I want to see where he’s going.”
At Fourteenth Street the wagon made a couple of starts in the wrong direction before taking off down Hudson. Now Julie was afraid he’d know the cab was following him. At Bleecker and Bethune he came to a full stop at the playground gate.
“Keep going,” Julie said.
But the driver in the wagon rolled down his window and signaled. The cabbie stopped alongside him.
“How in hell do I get to Houston Street from here?” He pronounced it like a Texan.
“Follow me,” the cabbie said, and then to Julie as he led the way through the Greenwich Village maze, “See my point?”
The cabbie crossed Houston, a one-way street going west at that point, and signaled the wagon. But the wagon turned east, the wrong way.
The cabbie swore and ran two lights to get back on Houston by way of Sixth Avenue where Houston was two-way by then. They kept their distance as the wagon slowed down at every intersection, the driver looking for his street. He turned in at Wooster. But Wooster, they discovered when they got there, was blocked this side of Prince Street. A movie shooting there? So where were the trailers, where were the cops? The cops loved movies. Julie overpaid the cabbie and took her chances on foot. She knew SoHo pretty well.
She soon spotted the black wagon parked tight against a high wire fence midbloek. The driver was wriggling across the front seat to get out on the passenger side. He went to the back and unloaded a couple of high-wattage lamps and a reflector. Could be they were on rental from Mr. Bourke. The man started up the street with them on the opposite side to the crowd. Julie stayed on the crowd’s side, but at the fringe. At last the distant wail of approaching police. Two things happened at once: the man set down the lamps and reflector and, ignoring the crowd, took out his keys to unlock a door, and the crowd let out a collective cry, “Look! Look!”
Julie looked. A woman was dancing nude in the third-floor picture window. Not dancing, but jumping up and down, flailing her arms, and not a woman. It was Juanita.
Julie plunged across the street, waving to the girl and calling out, “Juanita!”
Some of the crowd moved with and past her. Interpreting for themselves, they caught hold of the man, pushed him from one to another, and pulled at his clothes. The multi-locked loft door swung open. The redheaded woman took a step into the street, then tried to retreat inside the building again. When no one else took hold of her, Julie lunged and grappled her to the ground. The crowd loved it. The police came finally, swinging their nightsticks to disperse the crowd.
Julie and Juanita rode home in the chief inspector’s car after they had stopped at One Police Plaza, to swear out the necessary complaints. There were things Juanita would not or could not talk about-mostly her fear and what she’d imagined might happen to her, but she liked to tell the action parts, especially how, when Dee had chased and caught her, she clung to the front window drapes and brought them down on top of Dee and her. By the time Dee had found her wig, Juanita was dancing in the window. Oh, yes, she insisted, she was dancing.
In time, police across the country fleshed out the chronicle of Dee and Danny, a horror story. They would arrive in a city, sublet quarters, recruit local talent, film, and move on. They supplied a flourishing market in underground cassettes. The true horror was not only in their corruption of the innocent, but in the despair in which they left the corrupted. These unfortunates rarely went home again and almost never broke their silence on the street.
THE SCAR by Nancy Pickard
A winner of the Anthony, Macavity, and American Mystery awards, NANCY PICKARD is a native midwesterner, residing in Fairway, Kansas. Her Jenny Cain novels, including I.O.U., Bum Steer, Dead Crazy, Generous Death, Say No to Murder, and Marriage Is Murder, have made her one of the fastest rising stars in the mystery field.
The reason Jean Williams took her son to the Botanic Gardens every day they were in Wellington, New Zealand, was that her husband was in such a lousy mood that she wanted to get out of the hotel and far away from him.
“I’m taking Zach to the park,” Jean announced on the second morning of Lyle’s sulk. Lyle had acquired an upper respiratory infection while they were up north in Auckland, and that accounted for some of his mood. But the truth was that coming to New Zealand on this vacation was Jean’s dream, not his; Lyle wanted to visit only Australia, and it would be another ten days before they flew there. New Zealand, he complained, was too expensive and too cold, and he hated driving on the “wrong” side of the road. “But it’s so beautiful,” Jean said. “So is Alaska,” he griped, “and we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune to get there.”
Well, if he was going to pout, Jean decided, she’d take Zach and they’d explore on their own. There was no point in ruining the trip for all of them. So she said, with more enthusiasm than she really felt, “Let’s go, Zach!”