“We got the warrant and I had the Borough Task Force detectives waiting when he got home from work. We’d already gotten into his apartment and found what we were looking for.”

“Her handbag?”

“Everything of importance that was in it, but he must have trashed the bag itself. Her wallet has a snapshot of her in a wedding dress and her husband next to her.”

“It’s very sad,” I said. “Can I talk to him?”

“Come on down tomorrow.”

“What about the other guy?”

“Say, he’s something else. ‘How ya doin’?’ and all that. We picked him up, too, but we don’t have enough to hold him. He said he and Miller kind of traded identities when they hooked up in New York, at least so that Miller could get his job.”

“Does Miller have a lawyer?”

“The court’ll appoint one. He’s not what I’d call rich. And he’s pretty depressed.”

“I’ll be down tomorrow afternoon.”

—

I drove down right from the college, munching a tuna fish sandwich as I drove. Evelyn had arranged an interview room for me at the Sixtieth Precinct in Brooklyn as a special favor since I had contributed to the case. I sat down in the empty room and waited only a few minutes. Then the door opened and Steve Carlson, Natalie’s friend at Hopkins and Jewell, walked in. He looked pale and tired, his hands cuffed behind him, his hair wild.

“Hi,” I said.

“You figured it out.”

“It was the phone call that clinched it,” I said, “the one your friend made last week. I hadn’t given my number to many people and I couldn’t believe Martin Jewell had gone looking for Natalie’s old apartment house or that Arlene had hired someone to play the brother. It didn’t make sense. It had to be someone who had known her and lost track of her. When your friend called, I knew he’d gotten the number from someone and I didn’t believe his story that it came from the Indiana newspaper. It was just too farfetched. Also, it was my husband who called them to place the ad, and he’s pretty careful about throwing around our phone number. I figured you’d asked him to call, pretending to be her brother.”

“I shouldn’t’ve had him call.”

“It would have occurred to me eventually that you had gotten a job with Hopkins in order to befriend the new Natalie. How did you know she worked there?”

“I read my sister’s last letter to my mother, but not till a long time after she wrote it. My mother died around the time Natalie was killed. I tried to get hold of her, but she’d moved and left no forwarding address and no new phone number. I wrote and the letter came back. I called and the number’d been disconnected. I had a job up in Alaska and I didn’t have time to look for my sister. I had all my mother’s things put in storage, and when I came back a couple of years later, I started going through them. There was the letter from Natalie, and she said she’d just been called for an interview at a new ad agency called Hopkins and Jewell.”

“She hadn’t had the interview yet?”

“Didn’t sound like it. So on a chance, I got the number, called, and asked for her. When they put someone on, I said, ‘Hi, it’s Teddy,’ and she said, ‘Who?’ as though she’d never heard of me. And it wasn’t her voice, I mean my sister’s voice. It was just too much of a coincidence, my sister getting an interview with this company and someone else with the same name holding a job there. So I took everything I had out of the bank and went to New York.”

“You knew she had last lived near Gramercy Park.”

“I not only knew it, I’d visited her there when I was in New York almost seven years ago.”

“And one morning in the elevator she introduced you to her neighbors, the Fosters.”

He looked at me curiously. “You know, you’re right. I didn’t think to look for anyone in the building. I just asked the super when and where she’d gone. He knew when, but he had no forwarding address. Neither did the post office. And there was no listing in the phone book under her name. I suppose she had an unlisted number, but if she did, that is, the other woman, I couldn’t get hold of it. I called a bunch of N. Millers, but they’d never heard of Natalie.”

“So you decided to get a job with Hopkins and Jewell,” I said.

“I had to learn word processing first, but it wasn’t hard. I’ve learned a lot harder stuff in my life. What was hard was getting a job at H and J. I started out at another place, kind of to hone my skills. Then I found out what employment agency sent people to them. Arlene liked me. She hired me right off.”

“Arlene interviewed you herself?”

“After Wormy. They run a pretty tight ship there. One of the partners approved of everyone who was hired.”

“So you became Natalie’s friend.”

“That wasn’t easy either. She didn’t want boyfriends who weren’t rich or promising, and I’m a lot younger than she is. But I managed. We talked a lot and I think she liked me.”

“I guess by that time you’d met up with Steve Carlson.”

“Yeah. He had no problem lending me his ID. He thought it was a gas. He knew the whole story. He just never knew what I did on Thanksgiving Day.”

“Did the fake Natalie ever slip up?”

“Never. She was very cool, always in control. I once asked her where she’d worked before and she was very vague, said it was some place on Sixth Avenue that’d gone out of business. Everything she said was possible. Nothing was checkable.”

“You knew where she lived, though, didn’t you?”

“She couldn’t really keep that a secret. They had her address on file, and Wormy used to distribute a Christmas card list every fall. But she never actually said who she was marrying, not his last name anyway. He was Sandy Somebody and he lived in New Jersey.”

“How’d you find her?”

“I followed her a lot and then one day he picked her up. I drove my car to work on a day when they were going out. After that it was easy. And Wormy had her new address after she got married. She needed it for the W Two.”

“Did you always intend to kill her?”

“I just wanted to find my sister. I wanted to know what happened to her. I started out thinking maybe this was a coincidence, a second Natalie Miller at H and J, but then I got the feeling there was more to it. I tried to get over it when she left to get married, but I couldn’t. I knew I’d only have one chance, that if I let her live, I’d have to get out of town, and I was ready to do that. But I didn’t want to burn my bridges. I picked Thanksgiving Day on the chance she’d go to the parade. She’d told me once how much she wanted to go, but no one would take her. So I followed them and waited till one of them might be occupied. She walked around the corner and I gave her a big smile and said hi.”

“And she was just as happy to see you.”

“Until I grabbed her and ran her through the crowd on Central Park West to the next block. If he went to look for her, she was long gone.”

It’s very satisfying when everything you know and theorize starts to link up, but this was all so sad, I couldn’t take pleasure in the satisfaction. “Did she tell you what she did?”

“When I applied a little pressure.”

“Did she tell you why, Ted?”

“I gather they’d both applied for the job at H and J and my sister was called for an interview. The fake Natalie did a little research on her own, went to see what Jewell looked like, and she liked what she saw. She asked my sister to let her go in her place and my sister refused. They went away for a weekend before the interview, she didn’t say where, and I guess they had a big fight and my sister ended up dead.”

“She didn’t tell you where she buried the body?”

He shook his head. “I was desperate to know. She said if I let her go, she’d tell me after she was safe.”

“She couldn’t have done that,” I said. “Your sister was buried on family property. The body would have led right to her killer.”

“You found her?”

“On Saturday. The woman posing as your sister was named Connie Moffat. She buried Natalie on her cousin’s property that weekend that they went upstate. There was a handbag with the remains and it had Natalie Miller’s driver’s license in it. And a picture.”