Naïvely, the younger girl had even stopped at the bank and asked to apply for a loan.
The family was stumped. Grace had always been content with her dollar-a-week allowance and the wages from a few babysitting jobs. What could she need so much money for?
Later that ghastly week, Mrs. Toltecci said, Theresa too had failed to come home. The police did the best they could — Mick kept going door to door for blocks around, even on his days off — but no leads turned up. No bodies either, which left the grieving parents in a wretched limbo, balanced between hope and despair.
Leaving her, I took the long way around to Thom McAn’s.
“Missed you this morning,” I said as Carl shoehorned a pale-pink pump onto my left foot. “Heat got your appetite?”
The salesman shrugged. “Guess so. How does that one feel?”
I got up and walked around the store, modeling the shoes and watching his expression in the tilted mirrors.
“I’ll bet you’re heading out on your boat tonight,” I said. “Any chance of me tagging along? Marjie said it was fabulous.”
His answer was a raised-eyebrows stare.
“Wasn’t she out with you last week?” I pressed, smiling. “I could’ve sworn she said you two had a date. Or am I thinking of Angie, that girl from down at Novak’s? You dated them both, didn’t you?”
“Not lately,” he dodged, deadpan. “And sorry, but I’m not sailing tonight. How are the shoes? Shall I wrap them?”
“It’s funny, them both being missing,” I said as he wrote up the order. “And that girl from Curtis Street. They say she was headed this way.”
His long lashes flickered. “Missing? I didn’t know. How awful for their families.” With that automatic smile, he handed over my receipt and the crisp brown bag. “See you around.”
Dismissed, I ambled along the sidewalk, trying to think. Five girls — that I knew of — vanished in the last five months. Nice girls, who worked, lived at home with their parents, and weren’t engaged or going steady. And no corpses had turned up.
Ronnie, one of Marjie’s pals from the salon, was coming toward me.
“Any news?” she said. “Mick the cop was in again asking questions. At least no unclaimed bodies match hers — so far — he said.” Ronnie was holding out for the elopement theory, though like me she couldn’t imagine who the groom was. And deep down we both doubted Marjie would do that to her mother.
“But I did see her going over to Holy Cross a few times,” Ronnie added as the light changed and she stepped off the curb. “I don’t know why, but it seemed like she was always running across Grand River to the church lately.”
A devout Polish Catholic seeking solace in a Lutheran chapel? That was a new one on me.
Jerry said the bar was buzzing today with talk of the missing women. Mick had alerted the precinct’s detectives and two gray-suited, crew-cut guys had been canvassing the intersection.
“Are they starting to doubt it’s coincidence?” the bartender said. “Outwardly they’re saying it’s just routine. But Mick told me they’ve got a clerk going back through records, looking for similar cases over the past few years. Especially where no bodies have turned up. The thing is, none of these girls had anything in common. Think about it.”
Some of them knew Carl, I said. “I could see him shoving a girl out of a sailboat if she started to be a nuisance. We know he dated Angie and Marjie; for all we know Grace could’ve fallen for him too. Or that girl from Dearborn — she shopped around here. I am positive it was her in the drugstore. Maybe she bought shoes around here too.”
We went back and forth. Steve could probably stuff corpses into those heavy newsprint tubes, for that matter, Jerry said. But it was doubtful he’d crossed paths with the younger girls.
It was the money that puzzled me. Mick told Jerry that all of the older girls had gone missing with several hundred dollars on them. Grace had seemed in a big hurry to earn some money. And Theresa had vanished trying to find out why. Was someone touting a get-rich-quick scheme? Or offering “modeling” contracts to pretty young women?
Jerry went to refill our gin but his paring knife slipped on the lime rind and deeply gashed his fingertip. We both froze for a minute, watching the thick dark blood well out and drip on the corrugated drain board. He fished out his handkerchief and I folded it around some ice and pressed it on the cut. Within moments a bright red stain seeped across the bleached white cotton.
The heat and the gin made me light-headed at the sight. My thoughts swirled.
Blood. Money. Missing women. Shadowy silhouettes on blazing white blinds.
The ice burned the palm of my hand and my stomach churned.
I knew.
“Jesus, you gonna stand there and let me bleed to death?” Jerry teased. “Run down to the kitchen, okay? They’ve got bandages and gauze and all that in a locker on the wall.”
Bleed to death. That’s what my friend had done. And all the girls before her.
I felt my pockets for change and ran downstairs. The barroom was smoky and congenial. Someone shoved the quarter tray forward and pool balls clattered down their chute.
The phone booth was empty. I put my icy-cold finger over the 0 and turned the dial.
“Oh, miss. Could we get some more butter here, please?”
It was nice to be the one being waited on for a change. I savored another bite of my Delmonico and added a little more chive-flecked sour cream to the baked potato.
Mick was picking up the tab. He knew I’d turned down the Ballard reward and insisted on treating me and Jerry to a white-tablecloth dinner a few miles down the avenue at Carl’s Chop House.
I leaned back in the curved red-leather booth and sipped my wine. What I really wanted was more details. Mick wasn’t supposed to talk much since the trials hadn’t started yet, but we promised to be discreet.
“Of course, we all thought you were goofy at first,” he repeated for perhaps the tenth time. “Why would well-off guys like them get involved in that kind of scheme? Then we thought about the money potential and, well, it seemed worth asking around.”
Buddy, a longtime waitress at Novak’s, was the first to crack. Seated at one of the tavern’s red-checkered tables, she told detectives she’d been in trouble once too, and she told them who had recognized the symptoms and offered to help her out of it. When Angie had the same problem, she sent her to the kindly dentist at the intersection.
Then, Mick said, one of Irene Ballard’s girlfriends told a similar tale. She said it was well known up and down Green-field that Mr. Smith could help you out of a fix.
And Marjie, who had apparently succumbed to Steve after all in the backseat of his ’49 Ford, heard from a girl at Federal’s that the Reverend Gruenwald was understanding about these matters.
Grace, of course, applied for a bank loan and got a different kind of assistance there.
“And Theresa?” Jerry asked.
“She found out what was going on,” Mick said, forking up some dessert. “A lot of girls around the intersection knew about Bishop’s. They kept it quiet because, well, because of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of thing. When we realized the volume they were doing, it was obvious the money — a girl or two a week at $400 apiece — made it worth the risk.”
Shaking my head with chagrin, I said, “I thought I knew everything that went on around there, and I never suspected a bit.”