“Another dead end,” Liz said to Tom after hanging up the phone.
“Well, at least I have some good news. I found the Charlotte’s Web wallpaper. Wait a minute while I get the sample book.”
The big book held an eighteen- by twenty-inch sample sheet of the wallpaper. With its pink pastel tone and Garth Williams line drawings of Wilbur and a spider’s web that read, “SOME PIG!” the paper introduced a much-needed moment of pleasure to the tension-packed morning.
“It’s perfect! Veronica will love it.”
“Since it appears Erik will be welcoming Veronica home after all, I’d better get going on picking up that wallpaper,” Tom said. “Then I’ll try to reach him to set up some time to hang it over the weekend.”
Before he could leave, Liz wrapped her arms around Tom. This time, she was the last to release the embrace. After Tom left, she slipped out of her robe, dressed for work, fed Prudence, and drove straight to South Boston and the Van Wormer Piano Workshop.
Located in the basement of an architecturally pleasing, three-story brick row house, the workshop was accessible through an arched front entrance underneath and shaded by the first floor’s front steps. A small sign with a keyboard motif identified the premises and drew Liz’s attention while she waited for the proprietor to open the door. The nonagenarian piano man kept the door chained so it would open only about two inches until Liz introduced herself and showed him her I.D.
“Old habits die hard,” he said in a German, or perhaps Dutch, accent. “This used to be a much more dangerous neighborhood.”
“I tried to phone to make an appointment but your message machine has been filled.”
“I forgot all about it! I always left the task of answering those messages to my assistant.”
“You speak in the past tense. Is he no longer with you?”
“I’m not certain. Ever since last Tuesday, he has not been in.”
“Was it an unplanned absence? Or might he have taken some time off for the holidays?”
“Oh, yes, it is unplanned, indeed. You see Al lives with me, in his own small unit on the third floor. Surely, he is not in some trouble?”
“First, let’s be sure we are talking about the same person. I’m inquiring about Ali Abdulhazar, a man who would be just short of forty years old this year.”
“That is my assistant’s legal name, but he has called himself Al Hazard for many years now. He came to me as an apprentice many years ago, to learn how to tune pianos. Now he carries the lion’s share of my business. I don’t know what to tell my customers about when he will return. This is so terribly unlike him.”
“Do you have any reason to think he’s visiting family, in trouble, or perhaps run off with a woman?”
“None, except that he did not tell me he’d be away. His family returned to the Middle East before he reached age twenty, and he’s hardly mentioned them since. It did occur to me that perhaps he’d received a message from them, calling him home to attend to an illness or, God forbid, a funeral. Not that they’d ever given him much in the way of family support. I took the liberty of looking in his room, but I didn’t find any letter.”
“Did you try his telephone answering machine?”
“He doesn’t have a telephone upstairs. He always used the one in the workshop. But, of course, I never checked that! How stupid of me.”
“Perhaps it holds the answer. Might we check it together?”
“That would be helpful. I’m terrible at all this technology. But first I must know why it is you are looking for him.”
Liz might have said she was an old friend or offered up some other tall tale, but she opted to tell the truth. It seemed to give Van Wormer pause, until Liz added, “If you read today’s newspapers, I think you might find you’d rather have me than my competitor look into the connection between Al and Ellen. I promise to tell the whole story and not to rake up dirt on your assistant just for the sake of it. Most likely, his absence is unconnected, anyway.”
Van Wormer led Liz to the phone machine. The tape of recorded messages was mostly filled with several concerned—and a few angry—inquiries about upcoming and then missed piano tuning appointments. Only one of them offered anything different, and it was from a male caller with a Middle Eastern accent, suggesting that Al meet him “in the usual place” on December 19. The day Ali went missing and the day after Ellen left home.
Another dead end.
Liz asked Van Wormer if he would like her to run a check on Ali, using his Social Security number, only causing Van Wormer to draw the line on helping her any further. “You may mean well, Miss Higgins, but unless and until my employee is gone for a far longer period of time, I am not willing to share his private information with you.”
“Of course, I understand,” Liz said. She knew it was best to mask her frustration here. If she remained pleasant and helpful, it maximized the chances that Van Wormer would turn to her later. “I hope Al returns soon. If he does, I hope you will let me know. If he doesn’t, perhaps you might turn to me for help. I know how upsetting and expensive it would be to use the services of a private investigator. I have free access to some investigative databases at the Banner.”
Handing the keyboard expert her business card, Liz made her exit and hurried to the newsroom, where it fast became clear that Samir Hasan’s Social Security number was a fake.
And that was no surprise.
Chapter 22
Liz’s newsroom stature rose substantially after she topped the World’s incomplete and inaccurate reports about Veronica’s bedroom and the taxi driver’s blood. Not only did she garner numerous lead stories as 2000 came to a close and 2001 began, but she gained a demanding workload, too. Like well-placed reporters in all of the local media, she found herself absorbed in the case of a cross-dressing dermatologist from a well-heeled suburb who slaughtered his wife, and then in a mystery surrounding a woman who was killed in a Cape Cod beach house.
Liz did tell her city editor about Nadia’s missive, but he had her follow up on Samir Hasan’s Social Security information instead of pushing for coverage of the purloined letter. The Social Security search only proved Samir Hasan was paid for three years under that name by the cab company Jake headed. The Social Security Administration also had fallen for the fake address, and there was no information about Hasan holding any other jobs. A follow-up on the short-wave radio license also led nowhere. False identification had been used successfully here, too.
Hasan’s genetic identity was easier to pin down when, eleven weeks to the day after Kinnaird submitted the cigarette butts and spots of blood on the tissue and on the poinsettia for testing, DNA results proved the cabbie had been injured in the Johansson kitchen. Liz got the scoop on this, since police DNA testing did not come back until four weeks later. Still, beyond the DNA results, the cabbie’s trail was cold.
Since he had no knowledge that Liz had read Nadia’s letter, Erik Johansson had no notion of how much Liz now questioned his role in Ellen’s disappearance. Grateful for Liz’s part in exonerating him of the child abuse charge, and for making it possible to welcome Veronica home to a beautifully wallpapered room, Erik kept in touch with Liz as winter wound its way into springtime. He shared with her Veronica’s belief that Ellen was wearing her Christmas sweater with a reindeer pattern knitted into it when she went missing. Although Veronica said her mother had not been wearing her “Rudolph sweater” when she drove Veronica to school that day, the sweater was nowhere to be found in the Johansson house and it seemed likely Ellen donned it sometime before she disappeared.