Sunset Beach(94)

“His name is Jimmy Zilowicz, but everybody calls him Jimmy Zee,” Drue said, relenting.

“Don’t worry. I’m very discreet about my sources,” Vera assured her. “That name vaguely rings a bell. And he was a detective at the time?”

“Not when Colleen first disappeared. I think he was promoted later. At the time, he and my father were patrol officers, and partners.”

Vera closed her eyes and pursed her lips. “You know,” she said slowly. “Earlier that year, in March, Colleen insisted we have lunch at this seedy bar downtown. Mastry’s.”

“Mastry’s Bar? I’ve been there,” Drue said.

“It was not at all the kind of place we usually went to back then,” Vera said primly. “I think we were the only women in there that day. A very blue-collar kind of place, and maybe it was a cop hangout too. I remember, Colleen got up to go to the bathroom, and she stopped to talk to these two young officers who were sitting at the end of the bar. I remember asking her why she didn’t introduce me to them. After all, I was single at the time.”

“Did she say who they were?”

“I think she said they were just making idle conversation. Sort of hitting on her,” Vera said. “It was so long ago. And it was just that one time.”

She reached for the yearbook and paged back to the senior class pictures. She tapped a fingertip on Brice Campbell’s photo, then looked up at Drue. “I can’t swear it was him that day, but I can’t swear that it wasn’t, either. You don’t happen to have a photo of this Jimmy Zee, do you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“No problem.” Vera rolled the tray with her laptop over to the lounge chair. “How do you spell that last name?”

“Z-I-L-O-W-I-C-Z,” Drue said.

Vera opened the cover and began typing at an impressive clip.

“Ah,” she said, a moment later. She swiveled the screen so that Drue could see. It was a photo of a smiling Jimmy Zee, dressed in his characteristic black polo shirt, shaking hands with a white-haired man in a dress shirt.

VETERAN POLICE DETECTIVE RECEIVES AWARD was the caption under the photo.

“That must have been taken when he retired a few years ago,” Drue said.

Vera clicked her cursor until she came to a 1978 photo of a much younger version of Jimmy Zee. The black-and-white photo showed him as a stern-faced man, wearing a coat and tie in which he looked supremely uncomfortable. His hair was thick, and his jowls were nonexistent.

“Very Jack Webb,” Vera murmured.

“Who?”

Vera smiled. “Dragnet. I suppose you weren’t even born then.”

“Do you think he was one of the cops Colleen talked to that day at Mastry’s?” Drue asked.

“I wish I could say,” Vera said. She closed the laptop. “Back to your father. Was he by any chance a patient at our office?”

“Um, I don’t know,” Drue said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Vera said. “Dr. Garber has been dead a long time now. We girls all thought he was ancient back then, but he was barely fifty. A heart attack took him, poor man.”

She leaned back against the recliner’s headrest. “The police hounded all of us, for months and months after Colleen disappeared. It affected the dental practice. People were asking questions that we couldn’t answer. There was a lot of innuendo. We lost several patients. It was unbelievably upsetting. Particularly for poor Dr. Garber. The police were convinced he was having an affair with her.”

“Was he?”

Vera laughed. “He was having an affair, all right, but not with Colleen. He had a young boyfriend, a waiter who worked at Ten Beach Drive, that was a nightclub back in the day. It all came out when the police started digging around. When Dr. Garber’s wife found out, she left him and took the girls with her. The poor man was shattered.”

“Mrs. Rennick?”

“Vera.”

“You said you thought at first that Colleen had run away. Is that still your theory?”

“Haven’t you read my blog? I’ve laid it out very succinctly.”

“Forgive me, but I just discovered the blog last night. I only had time to skim.”

“I think it was Allen,” she said finally.

Drue leaned forward. “But I thought he had an alibi. Wasn’t he down in the Keys on a fishing trip?”

“Alibis can be cooked up,” Vera said. “And remember, Allen’s alibi was his own father. A prominent doctor in town. Chief of staff at Bayfront Medical Center, as it was called back then.”

“Why would Allen Hicks kill his wife?”

Vera shrugged. “Lots of reasons. I always suspected there was another woman, a girl who worked in his insurance office. He didn’t waste much time marrying her, either. Got himself a quickie divorce in Mexico just three years later.”

“Why didn’t he just divorce Colleen while she was alive?”

“You don’t know very much about men and murder, do you?”

“I guess I don’t,” Drue admitted.

“Well, I do,” Vera said. “There’s a name for it, you know. Uxoricide. It means the killing of one’s romantic partner. The vast majority of the time a woman is the victim. And the men who kill them are jealous, possessive and controlling. For the man, it’s a power thing.”