Missing Persons, page 4
part #1 of Kate Conway Mystery Series
The rest of the package had the usual stuff: a list of interview subjects, a summary of the case, and photos of the victim. Everything I needed to come up with a story good enough to kick off a new show and get it the media attention, and thus the ratings, the network needed.
The only unusual thing was the police report. Normally in cases for Caught! I would receive a full report, with everything from the initial statements to the arrest. But Caught! dealt with solved crimes, and this was most definitely an open investigation. Someone had taken a black marker and marked out some of the information on my copy of the report. It made sense that they weren’t willing to reveal everything they knew, but I did wonder what the police were holding back.
As I went through the file, I started to relax. It was one of the things that I really enjoyed about producing: the chance to dig deep into something I knew nothing about. Whether it was a documentary on World War II or a missing girl, I could immerse myself in the subject and forget everything else, including my crappy, mixed-up life.
I took out a blank notepad and began making notes.
Her name was Theresa Moretti. She was twenty-two when she disappeared just over a year ago. She’d graduated from college three weeks before and was looking for a nursing job. She lived with her mother and a younger brother in the Bridgeport neighborhood on the city’s South Side. She spent her spare time doing volunteer work at a local hospital, even becoming the recipient of the mayor’s Volunteer of the Year Award. And when she wasn’t being the community do-gooder, she hung out with friends, including her best friend, a woman named Julia Kenny.
The Saturday of last year’s Memorial Day weekend, she’d told her mother she was going out to meet Julia at Hank’s Restaurant, a local coffee shop. But, according to police statements, Julia had no plans to meet her and hadn’t seen her that day. Where Theresa actually went, and what she did that day, was anyone’s guess. After she walked out of her front door, she was never seen again.
About four months before she disappeared, she’d begun dating a man named Wyatt Brooks, a twenty-five-year-old aspiring actor she’d met at a bar. He’d agreed to be interviewed for our story, as had her mother, her friend Julia, and the police detective who worked the case. The A.P. included a note saying that an interview was tentatively set up with the mother for Tuesday and the detective Wednesday, and she was still pursuing a former assistant state’s attorney and Theresa’s ex-boyfriend Jason Ryder for potential interviews.
I spread out the photos on the table. There is a term in television—camera friendly—which means that someone is attractive enough to be watchable on TV. Being camera friendly is usually the minimum required for the home buyers on real estate shows or the chefs on cooking shows.
But the standard for true crime is higher. As Mike once told me, “Ugly girls may get murdered, but they don’t get featured on Caught!” Watch any true-crime show and I guarantee you the vast majority of women featured will be young and beautiful, a bias that probably gives the viewing public the mistaken impression that attractiveness is a risk factor for murder.
Theresa was no exception. She was very pretty with light-brown hair, brown eyes, and an open, relaxed way about her. The A.P. had scribbled a note that said Theresa had been beauty queen at fifteen. Miss Bridgeport, whatever that was. There was even a photo of a teenage Theresa wearing a crown.
The rest were all the typical photos to describe a happy, wholesome life—Theresa with her family, all wearing Santa hats; another with a good-looking young man I assumed to be her boyfriend; a third taken when she would have been maybe ten years old.
There were a dozen pictures all telling the same story. A beautiful, happy girl, the light of her family, a bright future, a career helping others, in love and perhaps ready to marry (we’d push that even if it wasn’t true), had vanished into thin air.
Could she have run away from their smothering attention, into the arms of an unknown lover? Or met her fate at the hands of a stranger? Or, worse, could she have been murdered by one of the people in these photos—someone she loved and trusted? Stay tuned through the commercial break and find out.
Or I guess in this case, don’t find out. We would end the show with no answers, just a lot of desperate people whose lives had stopped the day Theresa vanished. I knew Mike was drooling at the follow-up shows that would inevitably be ordered by Crime TV—the ones showing the missing person found somewhere, and claiming that the show somehow had a hand in solving the case. We weren’t just making television, we were helping people. That would be the network’s press release.
Although I always enjoyed certain aspects of true-crime shows—the interviews with cops and forensic experts, the walks through the crime scene, the speculation about the murder itself—I never enjoyed dealing with the family. It was raw pain, up close. But, for the moment at least, it had an odd attraction. Sure, it was grief and confusion and anger. But it was someone else’s. Someone else’s life torn up. And right now that was about all I could handle.
I e-mailed Mike and told him that after reviewing the materials, I felt close to the story and wanted to help this family find answers. It was bullshit, and he’d know it was bullshit, but he wouldn’t call me on it. Twenty minutes later, he wrote back saying he felt better knowing that someone with my talent and sensitivity would handle the episode, also bullshit, and we agreed I’d start on Tuesday—the day after Frank’s funeral.
It was only two o’clock, but I was done for the day. I had Chinese food delivered, grabbed some candy from the kitchen, and crawled into bed. I watched the first two seasons of Gilmore Girls on DVD, while eating fried wontons and chocolate-covered raisins, a surprisingly delicious combination. I tried not to think about Frank, Detective Podeski, Theresa Moretti, or creepy Mike of Ripper Productions. Instead, I relived Lorelei Gilmore’s anguish over borrowing money from her parents, the wackiness of her friends and neighbors, and the delights of raising a nearly perfect daughter.
What I didn’t do was cry.
Ten
When I got up the next day, I watered the grass, cut away the dead flowers that had wilted under the July heat, and tried to pretend everything was normal. Then I went to bed again and stayed there until it was time to get up for Frank’s wake.
By then I’d lost my wedding ring again. I’d taken it off and put it on so many times I couldn’t remember where it was. I promised myself that the next time I took it off, it would be forever. Kind of a reverse wedding ceremony. I’d light candles and say a few words and make an evening of it.
It took me nearly a half hour to find the ring, next to the book Travels with Charley, on the desk in the tiny office that also served as our guest room. It had been my favorite book in high school. John Steinbeck and the call of the open road. Frank didn’t think much of the book. Or, I should say, he never bothered to read it. I’d written his paper for English class, taking away what little incentive there was for him to discover it for himself.
When we were first married, I tried once to get him to read it, and to learn about other things I liked. He smiled, made some comment that he already knew exactly what I liked, and before I knew it we were both naked. Those were good days.
Once I had the ring on my finger again, I dressed in black, pinned my hair into a French twist, and drove to the funeral home. I was early. I wanted to be the first to arrive, or I guess I knew I was supposed to be. When I walked in the door, though, the director met me, breathless and nervous.
“We have a small situation,” he whispered. “My absolute apologies but Mr. Conway’s . . . fiancée has insisted on spending some time with him. I thought it was best not to make a scene. We have another service going on across the hall.”
He seemed on the verge of a breakdown. He was probably already nervous about a rematch of wife vs. the in-laws. Now he was getting the full-on soap opera that was my life, and he wasn’t any happier about it than I was.
“It’s fine,” I said. “She’s welcome here.” That was nonsense, of course, but I didn’t want the man to collapse on me.
“You might want to suggest she conclude her time with the deceased before his mother arrives.”
I smiled. I felt for the first time that I had someone on my side. Someone who realized just how really nuts this all was.
“Don’t worry. We’re all one big happy family,” I told him.
Vera was kneeling at the coffin, talking softly to Frank, or Frank’s body, I guess. But she wasn’t alone. At the back of the room, sitting off in the corner, was another woman about Vera’s age. If this was another “fiancée” I was going pull Frank’s corpse of out his coffin and throw him out the window. It would probably kill the director to have a fuss like that in his funeral home, but at least it was a handy location to die.
“Can I help you?” I asked the woman.
She looked up. Her face turned red. “Are you, um, the wife?”
I nodded.
“I’m so sorry about this,” she said. “I’m a friend of Vera’s. She insisted on coming. She wanted to say good-bye.”
She looked so distressed and embarrassed, I felt sorry for her. I sat down next to the woman. “I’m Kate.”
“I’m Susan. And I really am sorry about all of this. It must be hell for you. Vera is a good person. She sees the best in people. She just doesn’t always see what’s obvious to other people. She really needed to be here and I don’t think she’s really thought about how his family would view her.”
“Has she met any of them yet?”
“Just Neal.”
“Frank’s best friend.”
I felt a stab of betrayal, as if by meeting Vera, Neal had taken Frank’s side. But then why wouldn’t he? Neal wasn’t my friend. Not really. We’d just known each other for over twenty years. He was best man at my wedding and I babysat his daughter when his wife was in the hospital having their twins. But he had been Frank’s friend first.
Vera got up from the kneeler by the casket and leaned over to Frank, kissing him on the cheek. Then she saw me. I was expecting her to turn white and flee the room. I think common decency required it. Instead she rushed toward me, pulled me from my seat, and hugged me tightly, while my arms flailed about, unwilling to return the gesture.
“Neither one of us is alone,” she whispered to me. “We’ll always be tied to each other because of our love for Frank.”
“Okay.” I pulled myself from her, a move that took considerable force.
As I did, I noticed my sister and her husband walk into the room. It wouldn’t be long before the place was filled with lots of people who were tied together because of Frank. I wondered if she planned to hug them all.
“Maybe we should go.” Susan stood up and put her arm around Vera.
Vera seemed confused. “But I thought . . . It’s too early. I can’t leave yet.”
Susan looked at me, an apology in her eyes. “What do you think?”
I wanted to laugh. The wife and mistress arm in arm at the husband’s wake. What did I think? That it’s ridiculous. That we’re not French. That it would kill his mother.
“I think you should do whatever you feel Frank would want,” I said.
As I walked away I saw Frank’s parents come into the room. “Let the fun begin,” I muttered.
Eleven
“He was such a wonderful man, and you were such a great couple,” my friend Lucy said to me.
“Thank you.” I gave her a hug.
I’d been standing by the coffin with Frank’s parents for more than two hours, greeting person after person, many of whom knew that Frank and I had been at each other’s throats for months.
“This is just so horrible for you,” she said. “You must feel so bad about all the things you said about him.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Don’t be like that, Kate. Frank was a great guy. He was just going through a weird time. An early midlife crisis. You guys would have worked things out. We all thought so.”
There it was—the rewrite I’d been hearing variations of all evening. Just two weeks ago, Lucy had described Frank as the most pathetic waste of space she’d ever seen. It was such a harsh statement that I’d actually come to his defense. And now Frank was a great guy, and this pesky divorce was just a bump in the road that he and I would have laughed about on our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Nearly every one of my female friends made some statement to that effect. Frank was great, and we had been great together. Always looking to be unique, Frank’s sister took a different route. She told me that in a way I was lucky. I was already used to his being gone, so his death wouldn’t be as hard on me as it would have been if we’d stayed together.
Frank’s male friends skipped the whole affair/separation issue. Instead, they were obsessed with finding out about Frank’s medical history, wondering who would be next. I told each one in turn that as far as I knew he had been healthy, but if they were looking for recent information, I wasn’t the one to ask.
About halfway through the evening, it spread around our friends that “she” was there. Everyone looked, but no one, not even Neal, went over to talk to her. If his parents had noticed her, they didn’t acknowledge it. They just stood next to me telling each mourner that Frank was a great artist and how proud they were of his talent. If Frank had been alive to hear his parents, the shock probably would have killed him.
“Which one is she?” my sister, Ellen, whispered to me, pointing a less than discreet finger toward Vera and Susan.
“The one with the short hair.”
“She’s old.”
“I don’t think so. I think she just doesn’t dye her hair.”
“You are way prettier.”
“And yet he chose to be with her,” I reminded Ellen. “I guess he wasn’t superficial.”
“I’m going to tell her to go. She’s upsetting you.”
I grabbed her arm. “Ellen, she’s sitting at the back of the room, not speaking to anyone. Leave her alone. I don’t want to draw attention to her or to this whole mess.”
“You are much nicer than I am.”
It was a typical Ellen insult. By wrapping it in a compliment, she had deniability in case I got upset. But I knew what she meant. She meant I was weak. I had let my husband walk all over me, and my in-laws, and now his mistress. I’d heard all of it from her before. She meant well, but she didn’t get it.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to draw attention to Vera. I also kind of respected what she was doing. She sat quietly in the back corner of the room, talking to Susan and glancing miserably toward Frank’s coffin. It had to be hard being in a room full of people who knew Frank in a way she never would. People who didn’t want to know her, who didn’t see her loss, just the makings of an awkward social situation. She wasn’t wanted and she didn’t belong. But she stayed. And probably Frank hadn’t yet screwed up, hadn’t disappointed, hadn’t lied or broken a promise or shut down emotionally. The Frank she knew was perfect, and he’d always be perfect. Looking over at her I did sort of admire her. But since I knew the real Frank, mostly I thought she was an idiot.
“Hey, there.” Andres was suddenly at my side. He hugged me tightly, and I leaned into his shoulder. “This sucks, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Mike told me you are doing the Missing Persons shoot. Are you up for it?”
I shrugged. “A sudden and unexplainable tragedy. Looks like that’s becoming my specialty.”
“This probably isn’t the time, but the police called me today. They were asking where you were the day Frank died.”
“They were what?” My voice had gotten an octave higher and a tad too loud, so I pulled Andres out of the room and into a side area where people had brought food and coffee.
“It was some detective,” Andres told me as he poured me a coffee. “He said he was just looking into some concerns there were about Frank’s death. He asked me, you know, what you said about Frank since the separation.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that we worked together sometimes. When we worked, we talked about the shoot and where we would eat lunch, that’s it. I told him I never heard you say an ill word about Frank.”
I smiled. “So you lied.”
“You said a few things, okay. But you didn’t kill the guy.”
“Did the detective say Frank was murdered?”
“No. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions, just kept asking me what I knew. A real-life Dragnet episode.” Andres looked around. There were two people in the room, both Frank’s cousins, but they were engaged in a serious conversation about the stock market and weren’t paying attention to us. “Do you think he was murdered?” he asked me.
“Of course not,” I said. “The doctor got this all started. The wife and the mistress were hanging out together in the emergency room. I guess we looked suspicious, a little too cozy. But the paramedics said it was a heart attack.”
“They told you that?”
“They told Vera.”
Andres nodded, deep in thought. “Man, if he was murdered, Mike’s going to want to feature it on an episode of Caught!”
An hour later, friends and relatives had begun to say their good-byes. Everyone offered a comforting squeeze of the hand, but no one knew what to say. Under normal circumstances it’s tough to know what words to offer a grieving widow. In my case, the not-quite-ex-wife, not-really-widow situation, few managed to look anything other than embarrassed.
Vera outlasted even Frank’s parents. Then she and Susan quietly left. As they were leaving, Susan promised me Vera would not attend the funeral and thanked me for being so understanding.
“How that guy managed to get two such wonderful women, I’ll never know,” she said. It broke my heart a little to realize that even in his new life, he wasn’t fooling anyone but the woman who loved him.
