“Did she ever have a roommate?”

“Male or female?”

“Either.”

“Some guy used to come out with her in the morning sometimes. We’d meet in the elevator. That was when we first moved in.”

“How long ago is that?”

“We’ve been married seven years.”

“Seven years ago,” I said. “And then what?”

“Then he wasn’t there anymore.”

“Female roommates?”

“Toward the end someone was with her, I think. I don’t know the name. I only saw her once or twice.”

“Did Natalie say good-bye to you before she moved?”

“You know, I think she did. I think she said something about a job she was interested in. She’d answered an ad and they called her for an interview. She was pretty excited about it.”

“She must have been even more excited when she got it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t remember anything about that. She just moved. I never saw her again.”

The super had said she had moved in the middle of the month, so I assumed there hadn’t been a lot of time for good-byes. And Dickie Foster certainly didn’t speak of her as a friend. As usual, I wrote my name and phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. “If you ever think of a roommate’s name or if you remember Natalie ever telling you where she came from or where she was going to, I’d appreciate a call.”

“You said you were trying to find her. What happened?”

“She went to the Thanksgiving Day parade with her husband the year before last and disappeared. No one’s seen or heard of her since.”

“How bizarre.”

I stood. “So anything, anything at all.”

“I’ll rack my brain, I promise. It’s nice she got married. What’s he like?”

“A very nice divorced man who was crazy about her. Is,” I corrected myself. “He wants to find her. Tell me, what’s your estimate of how old Natalie was when you knew her?”

“Back then? Not old. Twenties, late twenties. Something like that. I’m terrible on ages.” Which put her back at the age she claimed for herself.

I thanked Dickie and walked down the hall to the elevator, stopping in front of Natalie’s apartment. It had been renovated, the super told me, but the door looked as old as Dickie Foster’s. On a far-out chance, I took Natalie’s key ring out of my bag and tried the first key in the lock. It turned easily. Feeling a little panicky, I relocked the door, got in the elevator, and rode downstairs.

—

“You picked the worst day of my life to call.” Wormy sounded pretty down on the phone.

“I heard the news,” I said from the pay phone I had found on a street corner near Gramercy Park. “Is there any connection between what’s happening and my questions about Natalie Miller?”

“I can’t talk to you about that. Let me get Marty on the line.”

I waited, hoping I wouldn’t become disconnected, but after a brief silence, he came on the line.

“Miss Bennett? This is Martin Jewell.”

“Mr. Jewell, I wondered if we could talk for a minute.”

“Are you somewhere close?”

“Not far.”

“Meet me outside the building in ten minutes. We’ll have lunch.”

“I’ll be there.”

—

“I was nuts about her.”

We were sitting in a very nice restaurant a couple of minutes walk from H and J, the kind of place I hadn’t dressed for but no one seemed to care. We hadn’t been given a table near the kitchen or anything approaching that, so I guessed that Jewell’s presence was all that counted.

“Natalie,” I said.

“Natalie. I’m telling you this not because I feel the need to confess but because I know you’re having a hell of a time finding her. I know a couple of things no one else knows. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

“I never saw her until the moment she walked into my office to be interviewed. I’d looked at her resumé—and I can’t remember where she worked—and decided she was promising. She crossed the threshold and that was it. I have a wife and two kids and I’ve had something going with Arlene for a long time, at least it was going until recently. I needed an assistant because Wormy is my cousin and she didn’t want to take orders from me. That’s how she put it. She felt we’d all be better off if she kept her independence.”

It’s nice to hear similar stories from different people, and this one had the ring of truth. “Go on.”

“What can I tell you? It just happened. We were around each other and something clicked. We began an affair.”

“Did anyone know?”

“Arlene probably suspected. I didn’t see her as much, so she had reason to ask questions. We were very discreet, believe me.”

“Did Natalie want to marry you?”

“I’m the wrong guy to ask. I never know what women want. I wanted her body and I assumed she wanted mine.”

“Where did you meet?”

“At her apartment sometimes.”

“On Greenwich Avenue?”

“The same. Sometimes we’d stay late in the office and work. I had a couch in my old office.”

“But the affair ended,” I said.

“Long before she left. And it ended because I couldn’t handle it anymore. I had a family and I had a partner who was more than a partner. It was too much. I told her we had to stop.”

“But she stayed on in the company. That must have been very uncomfortable.”

“I thought it would be worse if she left. I thought Arlene would really figure out for sure that something had been going on and now it was over. I kind of eased Natalie into other work so we didn’t see as much of each other. I’ll tell you something. It was a relief when she met Sandy. He was the right kind of guy for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was available.”

I was eating a delicious seafood salad and Martin Jewell was sipping a drink and eating a big green salad with diet dressing. “Did she ever talk about her family?”

“Very little, no specifics, no names.”

“Did you ever go away together?”

“Once. We spent a weekend down at Cape May in New Jersey. We couldn’t go to Long Island because everyone I know has a house out there.”

“Who picked Cape May?”

“I did.”

That had certainly been an unequivocal answer. “Did you ever go to the apartment she lived in before she moved to Greenwich Avenue?”

“Didn’t know she had one. Wormy might have known. She sends out the checks. I have something else to tell you.”

It sounded ominous and I put my fork down and drank some of the sparkling water he had insisted on ordering.

“I gave her a key to the office.”

“I see.” I opened my bag, felt around and found the key ring. “Is it one of these?”

“This one.”

“What you’re telling me—”

“What I’m saying is, I don’t think Arlene took those papers out of Natalie’s file. Wormy wouldn’t do it and she had no cause to. I know I didn’t. Arlene is pissed because she thinks you think she took the stuff in Natalie’s personnel file. I think Natalie took them.”

“Can you think of a reason why she would do that?”

“She was a very secretive kind of person. I never got the feeling she was hiding anything, just that there were things she’d rather not talk about. She didn’t have a great childhood somewhere in the middle of this country. She was born into a family that didn’t exist anymore. She lived for today. I never had the feeling she sent birthday cards to people the way my wife does.”

“Why did you give her the key, Mr. Jewell?”

He looked a little uncomfortable at my formality. “We met at the office sometimes. We never left together. If I left first, she would wait half an hour and then go.”

“Did you ever see Natalie after she married?”

“Not once. And I never saw her again intimately after the night we broke up.”

“Did you ever meet Sandy?”

“Her husband?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Do you think Natalie might have been married before she came to work for you?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. You think she was running away from someone?”

“Among other possibilities.”