“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Brooks,” she said. “I’m Evelyn.”

“I’m Chris, Chris Bennett most of the time.”

“I hear you succeeded where I tried and failed.”

“You didn’t fail. You were right as far as you went. I had a lot of time, some very special help, and a lot of luck.” I thought fleetingly of Sergeant Al DiMartino. “I think I know who kidnapped the woman known as Natalie Gordon, but I don’t know what he did with her.”

“I’m all ears. Can I get you some coffee?”

“Sure. Black.”

We talked for some time and I let her Xerox my notes. She was impressed that I’d found the building near Gramercy Park and also that I had dug into the people at Hopkins and Jewell. Her predecessor on the case had made a few phone calls and listed them on the D.D. 5s but had never gone down to see anyone in person.

“So this is the one,” she said when we reached the point in my notes where his name was.

“This is the one. It has to be.”

“Let’s give it a try.” She picked up the phone, dialed, and asked for our suspect. “I see,” she said, doodling on a piece of paper on her desk. “When was that?…Uh-huh. Any forwarding address?…OK. Thanks for your help.” She hung up. “He quit. Didn’t come in one day and they haven’t seen him since. We’ll have to stake out his apartment. You have that address?”

I had found it in the Brooklyn phone book yesterday and written it down.

“I’m not calling till we have manpower in place,” Evelyn said. “I don’t want to alert him that we’re on to him. That call your husband made yesterday must have scared him. I hope it didn’t scare him into leaving.”

“So do I.”

“We’ll have to get a photo and put out a Want for Questioning, do some digging into his background, former employers, that kind of thing.”

“I wonder what he’s doing since he left Hopkins and Jewell.”

“I’d guess he’s found himself another job. It’s pretty hard to live in New York without work. I’ll get the Brooklyn Borough Detective Task Force in on it and assume we’ll make our move when he gets home tonight. You’re sure he has no idea you went upstate over the weekend and found that skeleton?”

“I’m sure. And it won’t be published till Wednesday. It’s a weekly that covered it.”

“But there are police records now, and papers pick up that kind of story. I’m going to get the task force moving right away, in case he’s home and tries to make a getaway. Can you identify him for us?”

“Absolutely.”

“Now I’ve got to ask you some questions, and your answers are very important. I need more than a strong suspicion that this man, Theodore Miller, or whatever name he’s using, is a killer.”

“Before we go on,” I said, interrupting her, “I’m a little confused. The body we dug up over the weekend isn’t the body of Connie Moffat. How are you going to build a case against Ted Miller if we don’t have a body?”

“It’s tougher without a body, but it’s been done before and we can do it this time if we have enough evidence, or a corroborative statement from someone who may have witnessed the killing or who Miller may have told about it, maybe with some incriminating details. At this moment I don’t have a case. What I need from you is enough evidence that I can bring him in for questioning and search his apartment. So tell me, what have you got that says he’s our man?”

I stared at her. Logically it worked, but in terms of solid evidence, I had nothing. “It has to be him,” I said lamely.

“Tell me why.”

Everything added up, but I didn’t have anything tangible I could hand her or point to. “I guess it’s all in how I see it. This man with a down-home way of speaking called on Friday and—”

“He called you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it, then. A phone call is evidence. Hold on.” She picked up her phone, made a call, and asked for Billy Houseman. Then she said, “Billy, this is Evelyn Hogan. We still lovers, darling?” She grinned as he replied. “I sure do. Please let me know if this number—” she recited the number in my book “—called—” and she gave him my number. “You bet I’ll hold. I need it five minutes ago.”

It didn’t take long. She wrote, smiled, honeyed him a little more, and hung up. “He’s our man,” she said with satisfaction. “That’s my guy at the phone company. Takes less time than going through channels and there’s no paperwork. Now, question two. To get a warrant, I have to know what we’re going to find in that apartment.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea. I think he came to New York, stalked her so cleverly she didn’t know it, and grabbed her on Thanksgiving Day year before last. He’d already lived in the city for some time. I don’t know what he did to her, where he buried her if he killed her—” I really felt kind of dumb, but I knew she was right. Only on television do cops get warrants just by asking for them. In real life they need to know what they expect to find and where they expect to find it. “I suppose he might have kept a memento of his deed, her handbag, her ID.”

“Good thinking. Then if they find what’s left of the body, it’s harder to identify. Good enough. I think we’re in business.”

“I hope you find him.” I said it with mixed emotions. He had the best motive for murder I could think of; he was killing his sister’s killer.

“We will. We know who he is now. I suppose you don’t walk around with a cellular phone in your bag, so keep in touch with me. I can leave a message for you at home. Meantime, I’m going to call around in Indiana and see what I can find out there.”

I left and made my way over to Sixty-fourth Street. Seconds after I rang Olive’s bell, a voice came through the intercom asking me who I was. When I responded, the door buzzed open.

Upstairs, a visiting home care worker opened the door for me with a smile and took me to the living room, where Olive sat on the sofa, dressed, her face made up, her hair clean and tidy.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

“I feel pretty good. Hospitals don’t agree with me. And Amelia here is a big help.”

“Are you, as they say, ambulatory?”

“Can I walk? Oh, sure. I’m really feeling pretty good today.”

“Suppose we have lunch at the Tavern on the Green.”

“The Tavern on the Green,” she repeated, almost with wonderment. “I haven’t been there for years. Longer than that.” She smiled, looking like an older, tougher, thinner version of my mother. “I don’t know if I can walk the three blocks or so.”

But she hadn’t said no. “I’ll get a cab to pick us up downstairs and drop us in front of the restaurant.”

“That’d be great, Kix.”

The cabbie thought we were nuts, but he drove us to the restaurant, which was just inside Central Park three blocks north of the corner where I had first laid eyes on Aunt Olive. We had a table with a view of the park, and Olive ate as though she was very hungry. I guess I was born an optimist, but watching her, talking to her, I knew she had months, maybe years, ahead of her.

We talked about a lot of things, places she had visited—she had spent most of her vacations traveling—people she had run into, known, loved. We never mentioned my mother or my grandparents. When we were finished, after several cups of coffee and sweet desserts, we taxied back to her building and I helped her up to the apartment. She was tired by then, ready to lie down for a nap. She refused my offer of help but thanked me warmly for the lunch and the company. At the door, we hugged each other.

I never saw her again.

28

The call from Detective Hogan came after nine o’clock that night. “Chris? Evelyn Hogan here. We’ve got him in custody.”

My heart did strange things. Since we’d uncovered the body of the real Natalie Miller, I had developed so much sympathy for Ted, her brother, that part of me hoped he would be gone. “Tell me,” I said.