The Best Friend

by Adam Mitzner

  “Yeah. I’ve looked everywhere,” I lied.

  Both detectives nodded. Apparently, that was the right answer.

  “Outside too?” Detective Hibbitts asked.

  “Yes. I went out to the beach to see if she might have taken a walk. I also went to the pool because . . . well, I thought that maybe she had gone for a swim or something and . . .” My voice was trembling, as I was off-script now, telling them things that I might later regret.

  “Could she have gone into the ocean? Either last night or this morning?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said and left it at that. Less is more in these situations, as Clinton once told me.

  “I’m going to go check out the beach,” Detective Hibbitts said to his partner. “Why don’t you take Mr. Zamora through the timeline?”

  Detective Yuhas’s invocation of my name snapped my attention back to him. “You told us that last night you left the party alone, then came home and went to sleep. What time was that?”

  “Like I said, I left the party a little after midnight.”

  “Okay, and then you fell asleep? And your wife, to your knowledge, never came home?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was your argument with the director about?” Detective Yuhas asked.

  This was the first sign that the police were already considering the possibility of foul play. They’d gone from trying to find Samantha to thinking about why she might be missing.

  This would be ground zero of my fight for survival. The first battle in the war to convince the police that I wasn’t holding back.

  “I think it was mainly about our both being drunk, to tell you the truth. I said something about how I didn’t like the way he was acting toward Samantha, and he said something to me like I was too old for her. You know, stupid stuff like that.”

  “You said that there were drugs at the party?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t partake, but the others did. Ecstasy, I think.”

  I put my head in my hands, if only to hide from the scrutiny I was receiving. I had more or less accurately described the altercation. The other party guests would undoubtedly have more colorful iterations of who had said what to whom, but at least the cops wouldn’t be able to say that I hadn’t been candid from the get-go.

  “And after that, you left the party alone?”

  He meant without Samantha. And what he really meant was that she had stayed behind with the director that I thought she was sleeping with.

  This was the big lie. The one that mattered. To convince the police that Samantha was not angry with me. That Tyree was the villain.

  “She said that she needed to make nice with Tyree or she’d get fired. I understood. The movie meant a lot to her. She told me to go home and let her deal with him.”

  “Okay,” Detective Yuhas said, as if he were buying it. “Then when you woke up, tell me what happened at that point.”

  I was pleased to be back on safer ground. There was no need for me to tell him anything but the God’s honest truth about the events of this morning, which I proceeded to do.

  “When did you realize that her phone was here?” Detective Yuhas asked.

  “I remember her saying something about leaving it at home when we were at the party. I didn’t think about it again until the PA came by this morning. She said that she’d been trying to reach Samantha, so I went upstairs and called her myself. That’s when I saw that her phone was still on her night table.”

  “Okay,” Detective Yuhas said in a way that made me feel like he accepted my lie at face value. “Can I see your wife’s car?”

  “Sure. This way.”

  In the garage, Detective Yuhas put his hand on the front hood. “It hasn’t been driven lately,” he said, like a Native American tracker in an old western. Then he opened the driver’s side door. He took a quick set of pictures with his phone, then turned on its flashlight to peer inside.

  “Did you notice anything that was missing?” he asked after turning off his phone’s flashlight and closing the car door.

  The question didn’t make much sense to me. “In the car?”

  “No. From the bedroom,” he said.

  That’s when it clicked. He was probing whether Samantha had come home, collected her clothing, and left again. I had apparently done a less-than-persuasive job of convincing him that Samantha wasn’t leaving me for Tyree.

  My first impulse was to lie. No, nothing’s missing, officer. I checked that too, and everything is exactly as it should be. But my paranoia worked in my favor this time, and I realized Detective Yuhas had laid a trap. There was no reason for me to check to see if anything was missing because I had told him that I didn’t think she’d even come home last night.

  “I honestly don’t know. I didn’t think to check.”

  Detective Hibbitts reemerged through the living room. “The rain did a good job of washing everything away,” he said. “All I saw out there were your footprints, Mr. Zamora.”

  “The car engine’s cold to the touch, and there’s no sign she’s used it in the last twenty-four hours,” Detective Yuhas said, bringing his partner up to speed with how he’d spent the last few minutes. “We were just about to go upstairs to check out the bedroom. In particular, I wanted to see if her suitcase is still here and take a look at her phone.”

  The detectives walked a step behind me up our grand staircase, and then they followed me down the long hallway. When we entered the bedroom, I immediately went to the closet and opened the door. Among Samantha’s hundred pairs of shoes and enough clothes for a small boutique were her two suitcases.

  “Is anything missing?” Detective Hibbitts asked.

  “No. At least not that I can tell. It looks like it always does.”

  “Is the clothing she wore last night here?”

  “Let me see.”

  I rummaged through Samantha’s closet, pretending to look for the dress she had worn the night before. After I’d touched half of the hanging garments, I announced my find.

  “It’s not here.”

  I tried to look terrified now. If her dress wasn’t in the closet, that would mean she hadn’t come home last night. And if she hadn’t come home, that would mean that something was seriously wrong.

  Detective Hibbitts was examining Samantha’s phone. “Do you know the password?”

  “I don’t,” I said, truthfully.

  “Mind if we take it? Someone might be able to open it.”

  “Of course,” I said, momentarily panicked that there might be something in her phone that I wouldn’t want them to see. Sexting with Tyree, perhaps.

  I decided to put my thumb on the scale a little. “Tyree Jefferson told me he drove Samantha home, but he must be lying,” I said, as if shocked by the realization. “Maybe she left his house and walked home. It’s only a few houses away along the beach. Maybe someone grabbed her?”

  I thought this was clever on my part. I was planting the seed that Tyree Jefferson was a liar, but not going so far as to accuse him of killing Samantha. The detectives were more than capable of connecting those dots on their own.

  “There’s no reason to leap to any conclusion,” Detective Hibbitts said. “Most of the time in a missing-persons situation, it ends up being crossed signals. When the wife finally gets home, she can’t understand why all the commotion.”

  He smiled, as if that might be the case here. From the look in his eyes, though, I knew he didn’t believe it.

  33.

  After the police left, I did what I told them I’d already done—searched every room in the house. My lie turned out to be harmless on that score. Of course none of the rooms contained Samantha. But more importantly, there also wasn’t any evidence to reveal that she had ever come home last night.

  I’d now have about twenty-four hours of solitude. Time to think through the next steps and mourn Samantha. Come tomorrow morning, when it became clear this wasn’t, as Detective Hibbitts had said, a crossed-signals thing, the police wo
uld need to go public with the fact that Samantha was missing, and the charade would begin again.

  It turned out I was wrong. By about twenty-three hours.

  The first call was from a number I didn’t recognize. I invariably let those go to voice mail, but today I couldn’t follow my usual protocol. A man with a missing wife would answer a call from an unknown number on the chance that it was from Samantha using someone else’s phone. Or even a kidnapper making a ransom demand.

  “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end spoke so quickly that I didn’t catch his name, but the TMZ part I heard loud and clear. Someone with the East Hampton police department had apparently leaked the news of Samantha’s disappearance. Before I could respond to the caller’s introduction, my phone beeped again, alerting me to another call coming in. This one also came from a number outside of my contact list. A moment later, a third unknown caller flashed on my screen.

  The media frenzy had begun.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have any comment,” I said to the TMZ guy and hung up.

  I put my phone on the coffee table and asked myself: What would Nick Zamora, worried husband of a missing wife, do now? I concluded he would call the police.

  I dialed the number on the card Detective Hibbitts had given me.

  “Hibbitts.”

  “It’s Nick Zamora. I’m being inundated with press calls. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to answer the phone, but I’m worried that Samantha might try to call me from a different number—one I don’t recognize.”

  Silence from the other end of the line. I thought I might have been disconnected.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. I’m just . . . look, if it’s already out, maybe it’ll get some tips coming our way. Or prompt your wife to call.” I heard some clicking on a keyboard. “Yeah, it’s all over the internet,” he confirmed.

  I was momentarily distracted by a firm knock at my front door. From the window I saw a mob walking up the front lawn, having gained entry through a narrow gap in the shrubbery that surrounded the property. It reminded me a bit of one of those zombie movies, where the undead march en masse.

  “Uh, now there are people at my front door,” I told him in a bit of a panic.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” the detective said calmly. “I’m going to send a car there right now. They’ll take you back to the station, and then we’ll make a public announcement. Sit tight until they get there.”

  I went upstairs to the bedroom and shut the door behind me. Out the window I could see the press corps growing on the street. I drew the curtains and grabbed my laptop.

  It was worse than I had feared. Every website I clicked on had Samantha’s disappearance as the lead story under a BREAKING NEWS banner. My phone was now buzzing nonstop—phone calls, texts, tweets—and the doorbell was blaring.

  Within minutes, I heard the sirens. They steadily got louder as the police cruisers approached the house. Four uniformed men alighted. Two of them moved back to the front gate, which had automatically closed behind the squad cars. The other two walked up the path to my front door.

  Neither cop introduced himself when I opened the door. Instead, one of them said, “The other officers are going to stay here to keep the press behind the gate. There’s nothing we can do about them congregating in the street. That’s public property.”

  I nodded that I understood. I’d been told the same thing by the Westchester police thirty-four years earlier.

  The East Hampton Town Police Department was actually located in the town of Wainscott. It had jurisdiction over everything east of Wainscott, all the way to Montauk. It was not to be confused with the East Hampton Village Police Department, which was located in the village proper and had jurisdiction over only the smaller community. I wasn’t clear how responsibility was divided between the two departments, but by virtue of the fact we were in the Town building, I assumed they had taken the lead.

  The moment I stepped inside, I was transported back in time. Once again, I was in a police station regarding my wife. The workplace for cops had changed dramatically since Ronald Reagan was president, of course. Computer terminals were on every desk, the phones were modern, and even the coffee station was up to date. It was a Keurig, not a Mr. Coffee in sight.

  My police chauffeurs had brought me directly to the detectives’ room. I was greeted there by Detective Hibbitts.

  “It’s for the best that our timeline was moved up,” he said. “It’ll be a little embarrassing for your wife if she shows up on her own after we go public . . . but if it’s something else, we’ll be glad we got the jump on it. And I want to tell you that even though we’re a small department by city standards, we’re not some backwater place. About twenty years ago, there was a big murder investigation here, and we caught the guy and he got life in prison. They made a TV movie about it. Murder in the Hamptons.”

  I nodded but hadn’t caught the film. I winced at the thought that someday, maybe not long from now, this entire sequence of events would be similarly re-created by B-list actors for some Lifetime special.

  Through a sliver in the doorway, I saw that the pressroom was filled beyond capacity. Not only were the one hundred or so chairs occupied, but people were also lined up along the back wall.

  The Chief of Police was a guy named Richard Dempsey. He was a man in his sixties, tall and thin, with a silver mustache and thinning hair that still managed to cover most of his scalp. He was wearing his formal blues, complete with two rows of medals on the breast of his jacket.

  He shook my hand. “I’m sorry about all of this,” he said. “But making this type of public statement is the best way of figuring out what we have here. If your wife really is just taking some time for herself, she’ll get the message that people who love her are worried, and she’ll call in. And if it’s something else, we’ll know that too because we won’t hear from her.”

  That horrible euphemism again . . . something else.

  “Okay. Whatever you think is best.”

  “I’ll start off by telling the press what we know, which isn’t very much. Just her last known whereabouts. The clothing she was in, that kind of thing. Sometimes family members want to say something too. You know, in case she’s watching.”

  The character I was now playing—concerned husband of missing wife—would have agreed. He would have stepped up to the mic and said how worried he was, how much he loved his wife, and if anyone knew anything that could help bring her back, they should call the police. He would shed tears as well. But I couldn’t go that far.

  “I . . . don’t think I can,” I said.

  Chief Dempsey squinted, which I took to mean that he would have preferred I was more helpful. But then he said, “Okay, in that case, just stand behind me, and I’ll do the talking.”

  With that, he nodded and headed into the pressroom. I was a step behind, with the detectives bringing up the rear. Chief Dempsey walked to the lectern while I stopped to his right and Detective Yuhas and Hibbitts stood on either flank.

  “I want to emphasize that we are literally merely hours into the investigation, and thus far we have drawn no conclusions,” Chief Dempsey began. “We are hopeful that Ms. Remsen will be found safe, and soon. She was last seen at approximately one thirty this morning, in the Ocean Avenue vicinity of East Hampton, wearing a black cocktail dress. We have no reason to suspect foul play of any kind. Not at this point. Anyone with any information regarding Samantha Remsen’s whereabouts should contact the East Hampton police department. I will now answer your questions.”

  At that, seemingly every member of the press started shouting at once.

  Chief Dempsey shouted over them. “I’m going to call on people whose mouths are shut and hands are raised, just like in kindergarten.”

  A dozen or so reporters got their turn. The first few questions were all variations on whether the police thought Samantha was dead. To each of those questions, Chief Dempsey said that there
was no reason to believe that.

  A redheaded reporter of about fifty asked, “Is Mr. Zamora a suspect?” As if I weren’t standing feet from her.

  Chief Dempsey said, “At this time, there are no suspects because, as I just said, we have no reason to believe that a crime has been committed.”

  The final question was asked by a guy who looked like he was still in college. “Would the same level of manpower be used if the missing person was not famous?”

  Chief Dempsey didn’t hesitate: “Yep.”

  As soon as Chief Dempsey moved for the door, the press started shouting their questions at me.

  Detective Hibbitts grabbed my elbow and led me out of the room.

  When I returned home, the press was still out in full force, but as the police had told me when I left, they were cordoned off the property, relegated to the street.

  I entered the house without looking back, poured myself a stiff drink, and focused on the truth.

  Samantha was dead. Our marriage hadn’t been perfect, but I’d truly loved her. Only the day before, I’d been praying with all my might to a God I’d never believed in for Samantha not to leave me—either for Tyree or just because. And now she was gone forever.

  I meandered through the rooms of the rental house without purpose. From time to time, I went out on the deck and peered over, reliving Samantha’s fall. I stared at the ocean, imagining her body moving with the current, trying to keep from my mind the image of her providing sustenance for the fish.

  I wondered how much longer I could maintain the charade.

  For as long as it takes, came the answer in my mind.

  At ten o’clock that night, Detective Hibbitts’s number flashed on my phone screen. He could have been calling for a multitude of reasons—to tell me about a lead or to follow up on something he had previously forgotten to ask me. But I instinctively knew the reason.

  “We found your wife’s body,” he said in a flat voice. Then, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “I’m sorry, Mr. Zamora.”