A Cool Breeze on the Underground Read online

Lombardi stopped the car at a gate. He pulled one of those garage-door gadgets out of his pocket and hit a combination of numbers. The gate swung open.

  “Ali Baba,” he said. “It’s this post-Watergate ethics thing, Neal. Everybody’s talking values. Family. You have a front-runner who’s been ‘born again,’ although you’d think once was enough, right? Everybody looking for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Shit, we’d probably run Jimmy Stewart, except he’s a buddy of Ronald Reagan’s.”

  Lombardi pulled the car slowly down a long, crushed-stone driveway flanked by willows.

  “The front-runner,” Lombardi went on, “dresses like Robert What’s-his-name in Father Knows Best, and drags his daughter around all over the place. We have more kids in this campaign than in the Our Gang comedies.”

  “Maybe Chase should just buy a dog, with a cute little ring around the eye.”

  “I’ll make a note. But seriously, Neal, we have to have Allie back by convention time.”

  “Looking like Elinor Donahue.”

  “Yeah. And quietly, Neal. The press and the Party people are going to be all over us.”

  He parked the car on the side of the circular driveway in front of the house, or in front of part of the house. The house was endless, like The Ancient Mariner. A broad expanse of manicured lawn led down to the ocean and a private dock and boat house. Neal saw a fence he assumed screened a pool, and a double tennis court. Grass.

  “Where’s the helicopter pad?” Neal asked.

  “Other side.”

  Lombardi handed Neal’s bag to your basic livened servant, who disappeared with it.

  “Hey, Rich, I have an idea. Maybe you could make like Allie never existed—airbrush her from photos, steal her birth records, kill anyone who remembers her….”

  “Pretty good, Neal. But don’t joke like that in the house, okay?”

  Okay.

  Senator John Chase was one of those rare people who resemble their photographs. He was tall, craggy, and muscled, with an Adam’s apple and a set of shoulders that competed for attention. He looked like an Ichabod Crane who had bumped into Charles Atlas on the road someplace. He stalked into the room and headed straight for the bar. “I’m John Chase and I’m having a scotch. What are you having?”

  “Scotch is fine, thank you.”

  “Scotch is fine, and you’re welcome. Soda or water?”

  “Neither.”

  “Ice?”

  “Mr. Campbell in fifth-grade science told me ice melts and becomes water.”

  “Mr. Campbell wasn’t drinking fast enough. Here you are.”

  Just because the room was exactly what you’d expect doesn’t mean it didn’t impress, Neal thought. Three walls were glassed in, and all the furniture was casual and expensive. Each seat offered an ocean view. Neal took the proffered drink, perched himself on the edge of the sofa, and took a sip. The whiskey was older than he was. A point that Chase picked up on right away.

  “Are you as young as you look, Neal?”

  “Younger.”

  Chase turned a chair around and sat down, leaning over the back. It was a campaign photo of the no-nonsense legislator getting down to some serious turkey talking. “I thought the bank would send somebody a little more mature.”

  “You can probably still trade me in for the toaster or the luggage.”

  “How old are you, Neal?”

  “Senator Chase, how old do I have to be to find her? How old did you have to be to lose her?”

  Chase smiled with all the joy of a dog eating grass. “Rich, get Mr. Kitteredge on the phone. This isn’t going to work out.”

  Neal finished off his scotch and stood up. “Yeah, Rich, get Mr. Kitteredge on the phone. Tell him the Senator wants Strom Thurmond or somebody.”

  “Let’s just everybody sit down, shall we?”

  Neal looked at the woman who had just spoken, and couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed her standing in the doorway. She was a lovely woman and she stood framed in the doorway just a second longer than necessary to let Neal realize that she was a lovely woman. She’s made such entrances into this room before, Neal thought. She used the door frame like Bacall used a movie screen, but she was small. Her long blond hair was pulled tightly back, almost prim. Brown eyes flecked with green smiled at him. She wore a black jersey and jeans. She was barefoot. She walked over to her husband, took a sip of his drink, made a face, and moved behind the bar, where she poured grapefruit juice over crushed ice. Then she sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from Neal and pulled her legs up under her. Nobody said a word during all this. Nobody was expected to.

  “Neal Carey is twenty-three,” she said to the room at large in a voice that whistled “Dixie.”

  “How do you know?” Chase asked.

  “I inquired.”

  “And you don’t think he’s too young?”

  “Of course I do, John. I think they’re all too young. But what you and I think hasn’t worked out all that well, has it?”

  She fixed her husband with those brown eyes. The issue was settled.

  Then she turned them on Neal. “I’ll bet you have some questions for us.”

  It was all pretty much as Rich Lombardi had described. Alison Chase was a brat of the first order, a spoiled baby turned spoiled kid, turned spoiled teenager, and on the fast track toward turning ruined adult. Bored by age ten, jaded by thirteen, hopeless by the time she celebrated sweet sixteen, Alison was the classic case of too much too soon and too little too late.

  Child Allie had garnered all kinds of attention from the doting parents who hauled her out to perform for dinner guests and hauled her back in when the evening’s supply of cute had been played out. She made the usual adolescent progression from ballet to horses to tennis, and had littered New England and Washington with the tattered detritus of dance teachers, horse masters, and court coaches. The proud parents made all the recitals, most of the field trials, and quite a few of the tennis matches until Allie started losing and the fun went out of it.

  As Allie grew up, John Chase’s political career thrived and the demands of the young congressman’s time increased, especially when he made the giant step to Senator. Likewise, the politician’s wife made her obeisance to the Junior League and the torturous committees of Washington wives who devoted their afternoons and evenings to worthy causes such as saving other people’s children.

  Nothing was too good for Allie, however, so off she went to the very best schools, first to day schools in D.C., and later to those New England boarding schools whose role it is to prepare young women for the next generation of committees. And as Allie had learned young that she had to perform to get attention, perform she did—badly. Because while nothing was too good for Allie, Allie was never good enough for Mom and Dad. Not the tentative jeté, the imperfect seat, the lazy backhand that sliced out, certainly not the grades that started with B’s and made a steady slide to F’s as desperate but futile stabs at perfection gave way to sullen indifference and then determined screwups. If she could not be the perfect success, she would be the perfect failure. If she could not be the ideal princess, she would be the ideal dragon. She would turn her beauty around to be the beast. And nobody had intended that to happen: not Mom or Dad, not the coaches or the teachers—not even Allie.

  What in most girls was adolescent rebellion settled into a protracted war: Allie against her folks, Allie against her teachers, Allie against the world, Allie against Allie. She had no real friends, just a series of temporary allies and co-conspirators. She did most of her talking to shrinks, then stopped talking to them altogether, unless to exercise her blossoming talent for sarcasm and disdain.

  Allie discovered early on that the pretty bottles in the household bars and liquor cabinets gave her a powerful weapon in her war against life as she knew it. Surreptitious sips from guests’ glasses soon became nighttime raids to snatch half-full bottles, bottles that gave her a breezy high to chase boredom away, smoothed the anxieties, and placed her parents at the
far end of a telescope when looked in at the wrong end.

  She met the challenge when Mom and Dad took to locking the liquor cabinets, as willing cohorts at school taught her that credit cards opened doors in more than the symbolic sense, and that your basic manicure tools, when handled with panache in a manner never described in Seventeen, will open most of the locks installed to prevent the servants from pilfering.

  Later on, she discovered the potential hidden in Mom’s medicine cabinet. How when you drop a Valium in a glass of scotch, your afternoon is pretty much taken care of. She drifted through entire days and nights without a hassle in sight or a care in the world except how to restock the chemical larder. An unusually cooperative shrink bought her story about anxiety attacks and prescribed the stuff for her, in nifty five and ten mils, and Allie became known in the hallways of academia as a girl who could actually give pharmaceutical change. Then Allie went to another doctor and claimed to be really, really depressed, whereupon the good doctor referred to his PDR and discovered that the treatment for depression was an antidepressant and wrote scrip for it. So Allie had an unlimited and legally sanctioned supply of speed. Allie had her dawns and dusks, and could swap and trade with her friends.

  Teenage boys, their hormones bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls in a vacuum, sniffed her out as an easy mark. Allie discovered sex, which wasn’t so bad except she didn’t discover birth control with it, and she got pregnant. Scared enough to confide in her mother. Allie then made the discreet visit to the discreet office. (“Dad is going to have you killed,” she told the doctor and nurse, “to keep you from talking.”) After that, teenage boys became too immature for Allie, who made the important transition from prey to predator and found any number of older men willing to be stalked and brought down.

  And it was pathetically easy; boring, really. Allie had inherited her mother’s hair, and from somewhere a pair of blue eyes that shone with life even in the photographs. The genetic sculptor had fashioned a classically chiseled face and a form that embodied the current American ideal. “How could a girl as pretty as you …” was a refrain that Allie heard over and over again after spectacular screwups or misbehavior. She was expected to be the prom queen and the sweetheart, and she responded to these expectations with an almost savage perversity. Sex was a weapon. Sex was revenge.

  So by age seventeen, she had done it all: all the drinks, all the drugs, all the boys, and all the men. And she was so tired of it all. So one fine day, she looked out her window at the big ocean and decided that the other side might offer something new, and she whipped out the old credit card one more time to open the airplane door and flew to Paris. That was three months ago, and nobody had heard from her or seen her until three weeks ago, when some kid had spotted her in London.

  The description of Allie’s youth had taken some time, and a working lunch had been served by a staff quite used to serving working lunches. Chicken sandwiches, fruit salad, wheat crackers, and cheeses had been laid out quietly and consumed with no great enthusiasm. Allie’s story had a way of sapping an appetite—except Neal’s. He ate it and enjoyed. Surveillance work had taught him that whenever food appeared, you ate and appreciated it.

  “Why did you wait three weeks to tell anyone that Allie had been spotted?” The more interesting question, Neal thought, was why they had waited three months to do anything at all, but he knew better than to ask. That was a question for later, if at all.

  “We didn’t. Scott did,” Chase said eagerly, finding something for which he couldn’t possibly be blamed. “Teenage loyalty, whatever. He came to us just five days ago. We went to Kitteredge.”

  “Who did Scott call? You or Mrs. Chase?”

  “Me,” said Liz Chase.

  “Was he a boyfriend?”

  “Just a friend.”

  Neal picked a stem of grapes from the plate and popped one in his mouth. Something was screwy here. “And he just happened to run into Allie in London? Why was he there?”

  “A trip with his school.”

  Nice school, thought Neal, whose own class trip had been to Ossining.

  “Anything unusual happen just before Allie took off?” Neal asked, feeling stupid. It was a stupid, pat question, and usually the kind of information parents volunteered.

  Nobody answered. Neal chewed on another grape to kill time. Two grapes later, he said, “Shall I take that to mean that nothing unusual happened, or that something unusual did happen and we don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Allie was home for the weekend,” Liz said. “She just hung around, really.”

  “No, Mrs. Chase, she didn’t just hang around, really. She flew to Paris. You see, in most runaways, there is what we like to call a ‘precipitating factor.’ A fight with the parents, a fight between the parents … maybe the kid had been grounded, forbidden to see a boyfriend … had her allowance cut—”

  “Nothing like that,” said Chase. He sounded really sure about it.

  “Too bad. It helps if there was. If you know what a kid is running from, you have a jump on what she’s running to. But just business as usual?”

  More grapes.

  “When did you last see Allie?” Another stupid, pat question.

  “Saturday night I went to a party, a fund-raiser,” Liz Chase said. “John was in Washington. He got home … when, darling?”

  “Ten, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t get in till late. I imagine it was after one. I looked in on Allie in her room. She was asleep.”

  “Asleep or passed out?”

  Chase said, “I don’t particularly care for your attitude.”

  “Neither do I,” Neal answered, “but we’re both stuck with it.”

  Liz jumped in. “When we got up Sunday … late … Allie was gone. She’d told Marie-Christine—”

  “Who?”

  “One of the staff. Allie told her that she was going for a walk.”

  “Which she did.”

  “Which she did.”

  For a second, Neal felt that he should stand up and pace around the room. One of those “nobody leaves until” numbers. Instead, he sank back into the sofa and said, “All right, so after you have your coffee and omelets and read the Sunday Times, you notice that Allie hasn’t come home yet. Then what?”

  “I drove around looking for her,” Liz said.

  The Senator didn’t say anything.

  “And you didn’t find her.”

  “But I did find the car, parked downtown by the bus station, so right away I thought…”

  She let her thought drop off as if she was trying to think up a new ending. From the looks on everyone’s faces in the ensuing silence, Neal thought this one could be a four- or five-graper. He couldn’t take it.

  “You thought that Allie had taken off again.”

  Liz nodded. She hit him with those brown eyes flecked with green and filled with sadness. What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Chase? “How many times has Allie run away?” Neal asked. He flipped through the report. No mention of previous times. Swell.

  “Four, maybe five times,” said Lombardi, doing his job.

  “Overseas?”

  “No, no,” Lombardi said quickly. “Twice to New York. Fort Lauderdale once. L.A.”

  “One time to her grandparents in Raleigh,” Liz said. “That was when we were in Washington.”

  “Is Allie close to her grandparents?”

  “Allie is not close to anybody, Mr. Carey,” said Mrs. Chase.

  The sun was calling it a day. Neal watched the ocean turning a slate gray.

  “So then you called the cops and the FBI and the state patrol and the National Guard?”

  “I called her school,” Lombardi said as Chase turned a deep red, “and asked to speak to her—”

  “Slick.”

  “And they said she hadn’t come back from her weekend home.”

  “So then you called the cops and the FBI and the state patrol and the National Guard.”

  This was called “baiti
ng the client” and was the kind of thing that got you canned. Or it could get the client jazzed up enough to drop his guard and tell you something juicy. Or it could do both.

  “Or did you call the Gallup poll?”

  Set the hook and yank the line. Chase came out of his chair like a trout out of a stream.

  “Listen, you little bastard—”

  Why is everyone calling me a little bastard today?

  “Darling—”

  “It’s all our fault, right? All the parents’ fault! We gave that kid everything! Now I’m supposed to destroy my future for her? She doesn’t want to be here, fine!”

  “Yeah, it’s okay with me, too, Senator, but now you want her back in the picture.”

  “You don’t work for me anymore!”

  Neal stood up. “I don’t work for you, period. I work for the bank. They tell me to go after your kid, I go after your kid. They tell me to forget it, I forget it.”

  Lombardi got up. Then Liz got up. “Find my daughter.”

  It wasn’t a plea, it was a command. It was the kind of command that comes from a beautiful woman, the kind of command that comes from a mother. It was the kind of command that comes from a wife who doesn’t need Hubby’s okay. Neal heard it all three ways.

  Good old Marie-Christine brought in coffee and they started again.

  No, Allie had not used the AmEx card since buying the air ticket. Yes, she had trust funds from both sets of grandparents but no way of touching the funds without her parents’ signatures. She had her own bank account as well, but she hadn’t drawn anything from that, either. So she was on her own financially, which was very bad news. It meant that she could either beg, steal, or sell herself. Begging wasn’t very lucrative, and you usually had to buy your begging spot from the local thug. Stealing takes considerable skill. Selling yourself doesn’t.

  And little Allie would need a lot of money, because drugs aren’t cheap and the people who sell them are.

  “If it was strictly up to me,” Neal said, “I’d advise you to clean out Allie’s closets, make yourself a nice album, and get on with the business of mourning. Because the girl you knew probably doesn’t exist anymore.”