“What was that all about?” Wit wanted to know when I got back.
“Let’s go get that drink,” I said.
I led Wit in the direction of the bar, but through the marsh. I spotted a mud-caked handbag and a woman’s wallet right about where my buddy said they would be, at the place where the marsh, the road, and the gas station lot began to converge.
“Wit! Gimme a pen.”
He handed me a black Montblanc without missing a beat. I knelt down and flipped the wallet over.
“Fuck! It’s not her,” I said to myself, but loudly enough for Wit to hear.
“But it’s somebody,” he reminded me.
I hated when people did that, when they refused to conform to first impressions.
“Yes, she is. You better get Millet over here.”
Her name was Susan Leigh Posnar, a graduate student in psychology at the nearby State University of New York at Stony Brook. She’d been missing for nearly fourteen months. That’s what Millet told us. Susan had been having trouble with her boyfriend and was falling behind in her work. “Something about not turning in her Ph.D. data or some shit like that,” as the captain so articulately explained. He was sorry it wasn’t our girl.
“That’s okay,” Wit comforted him. “At least one set of parents can finally start grieving.”
We got that drink, Wit and I. I think I needed it even more than my hungover companion. I had beer. Wit stuck with his usual, but had it in a tall glass with a lot of water. The bartender asked us about all the police activity. And when we told him the cops had found a body, he told us about the curse of Lake Ronkonkoma. An Indian princess had drowned in the lake hundreds of years ago while trying to save her lover, so the story went. Every year, when the warm weather came, her ghost would pull swimmers and boaters down to the depths of the lake in the hope that one might be her lost love.
“Yes, sir,” the barman said, “at least one or two people get pulled to the bottom every year.”
Somehow, seeing the bones of Susan Posner had, for the day at least, taken all the romance out of myth or death. Undoubtedly, however, her death, at her own hand or someone else’s, would be woven into the fabric of local lore. This writer, a regular customer of mine at City on the Vine, said he never let the facts get in the way of a good story. So it would be here. Wit and I moved to a table.
“How did you know?” he asked, finally acting the part of the journalist.
“I was a street cop in Coney Island for ten years before the wine shops. Junkies are junkies, drugs make them a little less human. They see some bum, a stiff, they’re not thinking about CPR or calling 911. They’re wondering if they can steal something they can sell from the bum or if it’s a stiff. You get the picture. I guess maybe I didn’t feel like waiting around all day. And you,” I said, “with tears in your eyes. What, were you thinking about your grandson?”
“Always. I’m always thinking about him.”
For the next half hour, one bloody detail at a time, Wit outlined the events surrounding the kidnapping, torture, and death of his only grandchild. He had identified the body, refusing to let his daughter or his son-in-law suffer any further trauma. I wanted him to stop, to not have to relive this part again, but it seemed as if stopping him would have hurt more. I felt sick. Me, who’d found Marina Conseco left to die alone at the bottom of a filthy water tank. Me, who’d seen what knives and shotguns and maggots could do to the human body. I was sick. My second beer glass remained utterly untouched.
I broke the painful trance. “You know, Wit, Geary and Brightman think they can use you.”
“I know, Mr. Prager. They all think they can use me. It’s a rare talent I have.” He mocked himself. “Somehow they never do manage to use me quite in the manner they expect.”
“And you thought you could use me.”
“We can use each other,” he said, but didn’t explain.
The car ride back into the city began as quietly as the trip out. Again, there was very sparse traffic. I decided I wanted to see something other than blacktop and concrete barriers, and switched over to the Northern State Parkway. Here there were trees, bushes, lush green shoulders, tiger lilies, and pretty stone overpasses.
“So, Thomas Geary tells me you two know each other.”
“We do.”
Okay, the cordiality thing was short-lived. If he was going to give me one- or two-word answers, it wasn’t worth trying. But I figured I’d give it one more shot.
“What’s Brightman’s story?”
“I’m here to write it,” Wit answered smartly. “What do you want to know about him?”
That caught me off guard. “I don’t know…. What part of the city is he from?”
“He isn’t.”
“He isn’t what?”
“From the city. Brightman was born in a very lovely little town in New Jersey.”
“Is there such a thing as a lovely little town in New Jersey?”
“This question asked by a man from Brooklyn … Please!”
“Was he rich?”
“To you, I imagine his family would have seemed quite wealthy, yes,” Wit said without a hint of guile. “To someone like Thomas Geary, he would seem almost poor. The Brightmans were well off, I would say. His father was a senior partner in the biggest real estate law firm in the country, but he did have to earn his keep. The mother came from old money, but there was more old than money by the time it trickled down her way.”
“When’d the Brightmans move into the city?”
“In ‘57, when he turned fourteen.”
I stopped asking questions. This was all very interesting, much like the rest of the case, but it got me no closer to Moira Heaton. I knew more about Susan Leigh Posner, for chrissakes! Wit might’ve been able to detail every aspect of the lives and times of Thomas Geary and Steven Brightman and it probably wouldn’t do me a damn bit of good. I was now more determined than ever to get some insight into Moira Heaton.
I dropped wit back at the Pierre around three. That still left me plenty of time to get over to Brightman’s relocated community affairs office. Not wanting to give anyone time to concoct a story or edit his responses, I didn’t call ahead.
This office was pretty much like the storefront I’d been at with Detective Gloria, only it was flanked by a pizza place and a unisex hair salon. It must’ve been difficult for Brightman’s staffers to keep their weight down. I got lucky. At least that’s what I thought when I first walked in. Everyone on my list was still in the office. Unfortunately, Brightman had earlier alerted them that I might be dropping by someday soon. So much for the element of surprise.
“Could you sign in, please?” a round-faced woman asked, pointing at a clipboard. “It’s a rule.”
“No problem.”
The place was nicely appointed with gray carpeting, wood veneer desks, leather furniture. There was a water cooler, a coffee machine, a little fridge. The walls were covered with informational placards, a few in Spanish, ranging in subject from how to reach a suicide hotline to how to apply for food stamps. The main feature on each wall was a poster featuring Moira Heaton’s face. It was much like any such poster. MISSING-$25,000 REWARD was printed boldly above her picture. Her physical description, the date she disappeared, what she was thought to be wearing at the time, and a phone number were listed below.
It was sort of a wasted trip. All five members of the office staff seemed to try their best to cooperate, some clearly distraught and frustrated over their inability to contribute anything to the search for Moira. To a person, they treated me with complete respect, even when I asked the ugly but necessary questions about their boss and Moira. It wasn’t quite a total waste of time, because certain themes became clear to me during the course of the interviews.
The staff were categorically behind Brightman, certain he would never sleep with an employee, let alone murder one. They were at least half wrong about that. He was a caring, compassionate warrior for the causes in which he, and by extension they, believed. Generous to a fault, he inspired loyalty not only from his staff, but from the voters in his district. Even after Moira’s disappearance, he won reelection with over a 70 percent majority. A wise man once said that all politics are local. Like most adages, it was only partly true. Because he got the streets plowed in the snow, he could probably get reelected for the next hundred years in his own district, but he wouldn’t be elected to any higher office until the nagging suspicions about Moira Heaton’s disappearance were cleared up.