Vanishing Act

by John Feinstein

  “And one of them might be my uncle,” Susan Carol said.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Kelleher said. “The question is, what do we do next? Do we call the cops?”

  “I think we need to play this out a little bit,” Stevie said.

  “How do you mean?” Mearns asked.

  “I don’t know how, exactly, but I think Evelyn Rubin is tied into this whole Symanova thing. That would mean their match is the key. Think about it: Labor Day weekend, no football to go up against, the whole world watching on CBS…”

  “I think Stevie’s right,” Susan Carol said. “And my uncle has made some kind of deal with the Symanovs and SMG.”

  “Another fix, like in New Orleans?” Kelleher said.

  “That makes no sense,” Susan Carol said. “Evelyn is an improving player, but she shouldn’t be a serious threat to Symanova.”

  “What if the deal is for Symanova to lose?” Mearns said.

  They all looked at each other. “But why?” Stevie asked.

  “Who knows?” Mearns said.

  “And where does Makarova fit in?” Kelleher said. “Maybe Gibson’s deal with the Symanovs involves her and not Rubin.”

  “Yeah, but somebody beat up Stevie right after he talked to Evelyn,” Susan Carol said.

  “Could be coincidence,” Stevie said. “They could have followed us from the tennis center and had to wait until I left the hotel before they could try anything.”

  “That still doesn’t answer why they would see Stevie as any kind of a threat,” Mearns said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Kelleher. “But it does tend to point to Rubin as the key. Stevie’s gotten close to her, anyway. Maybe too close for someone’s comfort.”

  “So we need to figure out who and why,” said Susan Carol.

  “And fast,” added Stevie.

  18: VANISHED

  STEVIE KNEW it was pointless to argue with Susan Carol about getting more rest, so he went into the bedroom, figuring he would lie down until everyone left, then get up and take a shower. He wasn’t planning on spending the entire day in bed doing nothing. He lay down on top of the covers, closed his eyes, and the next thing he knew the phone rang. He fumbled around till he found his cell.

  “Did you call your parents yet?”

  “Huh? What time is it?”

  Susan Carol laughed. “It’s almost three o’clock. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  Stevie waited until he heard someone come on the line. “Stevie, it’s Dr. McDevitt. How are you feeling?”

  “Sleepy. I just woke up.”

  “That’s good, you needed some sleep. How does your head feel?”

  The cobwebs were slowly clearing now. Actually, Stevie felt fine. “It feels okay,” Stevie said. “Maybe I can get dressed and come on out there. I really feel much better.”

  “Whoa, Stevie, slow down. Susan Carol told me you went back to sleep at about nine. That means you slept for six hours. Your body is still in recovery mode. You need to take it easy for a while longer. How’s your appetite?”

  Stevie smiled. “It’s fine. I slept through lunch, but now that you mention it, I’m kind of hungry.”

  “That’s a very good sign. You take it easy the rest of the day and if you’re feeling okay tomorrow, you can come back out here Saturday.”

  “Saturday?!” Stevie was horrified. “But I’m fine. I need to get back out there tomorrow.”

  “I know you do. But you’re not going to. Look, Stevie, I’m not terribly comfortable not calling your parents, so you have to pay me back by doing exactly what I tell you to do. I feel confident you aren’t seriously hurt. But you can’t rush your recovery. You have to trust me on this. I know more about it than you do.”

  Stevie sighed. He knew the doctor was right. “Okay,” he said.

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And just in case you forget your promise, we’re going to have your credential turned off until Saturday morning. So if you come out here, you won’t be able to get in.”

  Stevie remembered the electronic scan done on his credential each day. He knew when he was beaten.

  “I understand. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll put Susan Carol back on.”

  “Kelleher says if you’re hungry, there’s a menu for a Chinese restaurant that delivers on the refrigerator,” she said when she got back on the phone. “Plus, there’s chicken soup from last night.”

  “Maybe I’ll go out and get something,” he said.

  “You do and I’ll tell them to turn your credential off for Saturday too.”

  Stevie groaned. “All right already,” he said. “Will you tell me what’s going on out there? Or am I too delicate to listen?”

  She laughed. “There’s not much to tell. None of the major characters in the story are even out here today. Symanova doesn’t play, neither does Evelyn. Makarova played her second-round match and won in forty-seven minutes. I haven’t seen Uncle Brendan all day. He left me a message on my cell, but I haven’t called him back. I’m just not sure what to say to him right now.”

  Stevie could think of a few things to say—even though he still wasn’t sure if Brendan had been involved in his assault. “So you’re coming over here later?” he said.

  “Try and stop me,” she said.

  Kelleher and Mearns and Susan Carol gave Stevie the complete update on what he had missed that day over Chinese takeout. There was a rumor going around that SMG was going to announce a movie deal of some kind for Symanova on Monday. Kelleher had tried to confirm it but even Kantarian and Ross didn’t know any more than they did.

  “I guess you know Andy lost last night,” Susan Carol said.

  “I saw the highlights this afternoon,” he said. “You’ve had a tough year, haven’t you? First Coach K. loses the national championship at the buzzer, and now Andy loses in the first round of the Open.”

  “And I met you,” she shot back. Then she smiled. “For better or worse, I’m glad to see you becoming your old self.”

  He was feeling a lot better. He thought for a second about asking Susan Carol to convince Kelleher to get his badge turned on the next morning, but he knew he had no shot. “We need to find out what’s up with Symanova and Evelyn before they play on Sunday,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I asked Bobby about confronting Uncle Brendan to find out exactly what he knows. But he talked me out of it. He doesn’t think he’s likely to tell me anything. I wish I thought he was wrong, but I don’t.”

  She left around nine-thirty to go back to Riverside Drive. She didn’t really want to go but didn’t have a good excuse not to without making her uncle suspicious.

  Stevie went to bed soon after that and didn’t wake up until Kelleher came in the next morning to tell him that he and Mearns were leaving. “We’ll check in with you during the day,” he said.

  Stevie didn’t argue. He went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until eleven. He took a shower, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and turned the tennis on, flopping down in front of the television. Symanova and Annabelle Kim were the second match on the stadium court. Kim was a young American who, Ted Robinson was explaining, was the daughter of Korean immigrants. Robinson was working with John McEnroe and Tracy Austin. Early in the match, Stevie heard a familiar voice—but not one he expected to hear on USA: Mary Carillo.

  Kim had just run down a Symanova forehand and whipped it down the line for a winner. Symanova looked stunned. “She needs to wake up,” Carillo said. “This isn’t a photo shoot or a press conference or a movie set. This is a tennis match, and Annabelle Kim isn’t here to follow a script.”

  Stevie smiled. That comment was so Carillo. She never pulled a punch.

  “Kim did hit a wonderful shot,” Austin said.

  “She did,” Carillo answered. “But Symanova was flatfooted. She should have been all over that ball.”

  Stevie sat back and enjoyed the match. C
arillo was clearly correct about Symanova. She seemed annoyed by the fact that Kim wasn’t just rolling over for her. So was the crowd, which screamed every time Symanova hit a good shot and was near silent when Kim hit a winner. “You don’t see this in tennis very often,” McEnroe said. “Most of the time when an underdog is playing well, they get behind the underdog. But this crowd wants no part of an upset. They want Symanova all the way.”

  “That’s probably because they’re sympathetic to what she’s been through,” Austin said.

  They split sets and went to 4–all in the third, with the crowd—and Symanova—getting jumpier with each passing game. Austin was saying something about the fact that Symanova still appeared to be recovering from the trauma of the past few days when a backhand from Kim, serving at 30–all, appeared to land right on the baseline for a winner.

  “Out!” Stevie heard the linesman say and heard the crowd roar its approval. Kim approached the chair, asking for an overrule. “Too close to overrule,” the umpire said.

  “Too close?” Kim said. “I could see it land in from where I was standing!”

  TV showed a replay. The ball was clearly in from every angle they showed. “Bad time for a bad call,” Robinson said.

  “Good time for Symanova,” Carillo said. “She needed a break and that was a big one.”

  Clearly upset, Kim double-faulted on the next point to lose her serve. Symanova then served the match out, mustering her power for two straight aces. As they shook hands at the net, Robinson said, “A narrow escape for Symanova.”

  “Ted, she will have to play a lot better than this on Sunday,” Austin said. “No one knew much about Evelyn Rubin before this tournament, but she has shown herself to be a rising player in her first two matches.”

  “A rising star,” Carillo said. “She’s got a lot of game and a lot of personality. She was terrific on Letterman the other night.”

  Stevie had completely forgotten that Evelyn had been on Letterman. He had missed it. Of course, he’d missed a lot in the last two days.

  Because Symanova had played early and that had been the story of the day, Kelleher, Mearns, and Susan Carol turned up at the apartment by seven-thirty and took Stevie to dinner at a steak house called The Palm. Like Stevie, his three companions were surprised by how much Symanova had struggled.

  “Evelyn can beat her,” Susan Carol said.

  “If they play straight up, if there’s nothing screwy going on, I think you’re right,” Kelleher said.

  They discussed strategy for the next day. Stevie was to report to Dr. McDevitt in the morning for one last checkup to make sure he was okay. There really weren’t any prime matches going on, so they would all have time to check in with the various characters in the plot. Kelleher had talked to his friend at the FBI to see if they had anything new and learned that Symanova had been left by her kidnappers downtown in the Meatpacking District. Her parents had been told where to pick her up. “She told the FBI guys that they kept her blindfolded the whole time,” Kelleher said. “They pushed her out of the car—still blindfolded—and told her to walk away. By the time she recovered and got the blindfold off, she had no idea which car she might have been in. Her parents were there a few minutes later.”

  “I feel like we’re very close to figuring this out,” Mearns said. “But I’m not exactly sure why I feel that way. We need someone to make a mistake.”

  They were at the tennis center by ten o’clock Saturday morning. Stevie felt as if he was coming home, walking back through the gate he had never seen prior to Monday. Several people in the media center asked him if he was feeling better and, without giving details, he said he was fine. Dr. McDevitt confirmed that, then handed him an envelope. “What’s this?” Stevie asked.

  “It’s a full report on what happened to you,” he said. “It describes what I did, what meds you took. Give it to your parents when you get home. I wasn’t at all comfortable not calling them, but I was ninety-nine percent sure you had just fainted and nothing more. They should know what went on.”

  Stevie nodded and thanked him.

  The rest of the day was an exercise in frustration. None of the players in the plot seemed to be around. Mearns found Hughes Norwood at one point and asked about the movie rumors. “He gave me that sick smile of his and said, ‘When there’s something to announce, we’ll announce it,’” she said.

  “Helpful as ever,” Kelleher said.

  Bud Collins reported a rumor that Symanova had asked for medical treatment after the match on Friday. If so, Eddie McDevitt hadn’t been the doctor who had treated her. He knew nothing about it. By late afternoon, they found themselves sitting in the pressroom while Mearns and Kelleher attempted to write columns. Stevie felt defeated. On Wednesday, he’d felt that they were on the verge of finding the truth—that there was some momentum behind their investigations. But here it was Saturday and they were no closer. Symanova and Rubin were scheduled to play at three o’clock the next day—technically, they were the second match on the stadium court, but the schedule noted, “not before three p.m.” Midafternoon on Labor Day Sunday. CBS had reported that Symanova’s first-round match had been the third-highest-rated tennis match ever. That was why Carillo had been doing the match on USA on Friday afternoon: CBS had wanted to air that match too, but USA had agreed to pay CBS extra money to hold on to it and to have Carillo work the match. Sunday’s match was back on CBS and promised to be huge. The USTA had already informed the media that it would issue only one seat per news organization and some—like the Fayetteville Observer—would have no seat at all in the media section for Sunday’s match.

  “This is worse than a final,” Ed Fabricius had told Kelleher earlier in the day. “I got a call today from the president of NBC News because I told NBC they could have someone from News or someone from Sports but not both.”

  Something was going to happen in this match. They were all convinced of it.

  Susan Carol’s cell phone rang—Stevie could tell it was hers because it played the Duke fight song. She answered and then sat up straight. “Hi, Evelyn,” she said.

  That got Stevie’s attention.

  She listened for a minute and then said, “But how can you be sure?” More listening. “Have you called the police?”

  That really got Stevie’s attention.

  “Okay, okay. I promise. Let me call you right back.”

  She hung up, stood, and indicated that Stevie should follow her. “We need to talk,” she whispered. “Someplace quiet.”

  Stevie wondered why she hadn’t gone over to get Kelleher and Mearns to join them, but he followed her outside. The day matches were just about finished and the plaza was relatively empty.

  “That was Evelyn,” she said once they were clear of any listeners. “She says my uncle Brendan is missing.”

  “Oh, come on,” Stevie said, incredulous.

  “I know,” Susan Carol said, putting up her hand to indicate he should let her finish. “She said they were supposed to meet for lunch and he never showed.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s missing.”

  “Will you let me finish?”

  “Sorry.”

  “She waited awhile, then called his apartment and his cell phone. Nothing. She thought he might have had a meeting that he forgot or maybe something came up with the Makarovs. So she went back to the hotel where she ran into the Makarovs. Before she could say anything, they asked if she had seen Brendan. She said no, they were supposed to meet for lunch. Then they told her they had a dinner appointment with him on Friday and he never showed. No phone call—nothing. They had called and left messages and hadn’t heard anything.”

  “Now that’s strange. But didn’t you see him last night at the apartment?”

  “No. To be honest, I thought he was coming in late to avoid having to talk to me. I didn’t think that much about it, and I didn’t see him this morning either. After she talked to the Makarovs, Evelyn got scared and called me, hoping I had seen him.”

>   “When did Evelyn last see him?”

  “Good question. I should have asked her that. I know my dad talked to Uncle Brendan on Thursday, but I haven’t seen him since then.”

  “So what does Evelyn want us to do?”

  “Well, first, she made me promise not to tell Bobby and Tamara. She’s afraid they’ll put something in the newspaper.”

  “But they won’t do that….”

  “I know. She’s freaked. So am I, to tell you the truth.”

  “So what should we do?” he said. “Should we call the police?”

  “Not yet, I don’t think. I’ll try calling him again first. And we should check out his apartment…. Evelyn wants us to come into town and meet her.”

  Stevie suddenly smelled a trap.

  “I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” he said. “The last time I spent time with Evelyn, I got beat up. A couple days later, we’re still sniffing around and suddenly we get a call from her to come meet her in Manhattan?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “But I can’t imagine she’d be involved in this. Then again, I didn’t think Uncle Brendan would be involved either. But I still think we need to meet with her. Except we’ll do it on our terms.”

  She took out her cell phone and started dialing.

  19: THE SEARCH

  SUSAN CAROL’S plan was simple. She called Evelyn back and told her to try to stay calm, that they were going to come back to the city as soon as Kelleher and Mearns finished writing. She asked her to meet them at the apartment at eight-thirty. Kelleher and Mearns had to go to a USTA dinner that night and would be gone by seven-thirty.

  “She said okay,” Susan Carol said, closing the phone. “All she did was ask again that I not tell Tamara and Bobby.”

  “So maybe it’s not a trap,” Stevie said.

  “Yeah, but you’re right. At this point, we don’t need to take any chances.”