Dream Girl(48)

“If that’s so, it’s news to her mother.”

“Well, the fact that she even has a living mother is news to me.”

“She lives on Long Island. Gertrude Chessler. Appears Ms. Chasseur changed her name legally when she was in her twenties.”

Gerry tries to remember what Margot had told him of her past. Very little, he realizes. She had always presented herself as an Aphrodite, rising on her clamshell in New York circa 1995, young and lovely and feral. He had not known her then—he was back in Baltimore, living with Gretchen, teaching at Hopkins—but Margot had shown him the photographs taken of her in her heyday, the little society squibs in which she made appearances. He had pretended to care.

He repeats, stuck on the fact: “I never even knew she had a mother.”

“Why would Ms. Chasseur come see you if she knew she couldn’t stay here?”

“Because she wanted money.” He allows himself another sigh. “It’s all she ever wanted from me.”

It’s depressing, this accidental truth. He was a meal ticket; she was a gold digger. He never saw it this way before now. Their relationship was completely transactional. All Margot’s relationships were transactional.

“Did you give it to her?”

“No. She’s an adult woman in her fifties. I feel no obligation to support her. Truthfully, I never officially asked her to live with me. She just moved in, bit by bit. If I hadn’t sold my New York apartment, I’m not sure how I would have gotten her out of it.”

“Her mother says that her daughter was saying she knew something about you.”

There it was again, the vague threat. To what could she possibly be alluding? Gerry’s conscience was clear. Except for the part about Margot dying.

“She knew a lot about me. We were together for several years.”

“Her mother said she said she had a secret about you. That she was going to confront you.”

“Yes, and she did, but it was nothing more than an empty threat.” His gaze is level and cool. He is a man immobilized by injury. He cannot be a suspect in anything. “The sad truth is that Margot was—is—a hysteric. She’d say anything to get what she wants. She was very angry at me. She attacked me in my bed. Victoria, my assistant—she was here, she’ll tell you what happened. Margot hit me, she scratched my face, I managed to push her off with this walker I can’t yet use.” He indicates his walker, his trusty sentry. “I could have filed a police complaint. I let it be, because—well, she was a delightful companion once. I preferred to remember the good times. My scratches are no longer visible, but the night nurse saw them. She bought me some Mederma to help them heal.”

Detective Jones smiles ruefully. “Women.” Then: “I’d like to talk to your assistant. And maybe your nurse?”

Shit, shit, shit. As competent as Aileen has proven herself to be, Gerry does not think this is a good idea. Why had they not anticipated this, agreed on a mutual version?

“She wasn’t here when it happened. Only Victoria. It was the afternoon and my nurse is here at night. You can check that with the front desk.”

“Yes, I asked the young woman if she remembered Ms. Chasseur. She did. She says she arrived here that afternoon, then ran out about fifteen minutes later.”

Then how did she get back in, in the middle of the night, without being heard or observed by anyone? Gerry has to stop himself from asking the detective that question.

“It is baffling,” he says instead. “Did she get a cab, take an Uber?”

“No one knows. She vanished into thin air.”

Gerry turns the cliché over in his mind, wondering why it’s always thin air. It’s not as if people disappear only at high altitudes. He also wonders where Margot spent the hours before she returned, how she got into the building. The front desk was unmanned—unwomanned? unPEOPLED?—after nine P.M. Another resident could buzz one in, but otherwise, someone would have to have a key card to enter the lobby, and a key for the twenty-fifth floor. It was also possible to take the elevator from the garage straight to the apartment. But, even then, one would need the elevator key.

Oh my God—he knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. He sees Margot, picking herself up from the floor, then taking his wallet and eliciting several bills, saying the least he could do was pay her cab fare. His security card for the building was in his wallet. Obviously he had no use for it, wouldn’t notice it missing. And his keys, they hung by a hook next to the front door, under the mirror where she had stopped and fussed with her hair. Margot would have been able to identify his key ring, a sterling silver loop from Tiffany’s. She had given it to him. He would bet anything it’s not there now.

“It’s a dangerous city,” Gerry says. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“But not a city where a fifty-one-year-old white woman disappears without a trace.”

“I guess you’ve never heard about Susan Harrison.” Gerry decides to distract the detective with his knowledge of the 1994 case, which he had researched for a novel he ended up abandoning. A woman and a man in a folie à deux, although that term was considered politically incorrect now, he supposed, given that the man had almost certainly killed the woman, and where was the “folie” in that? Gerry had been drawn to the fact that a drunk, an unsubtle man with little intellect, seemed to have committed the perfect crime almost by accident. But as he burrowed into the material, he could find nothing more to say about it. The story almost begged to be written as a dark comedy, a nasty Candide or another riff on Being There, and even Gerry realized that was not going to fly in the twenty-first century.