Vanished in the Dunes

by Allan Retzky

  “I only saw the message about Heidi last weekend when I went back to Vienna. My father never saw it, and if he had, he wouldn’t have answered. It was my aunt who lives with my parents who saw the message and sent the answer, because for both of my parents, Heidi no longer exists. It’s not even as though she had died. It’s as if she’d never existed.”

  Bennett mirrors Wisdom’s look of bewilderment. Weis sits as before, if anything he is more stoic and Wisdom wonders if a test of his diplomatic skill is whether he can absorb such news without as much as a quiver of facial expression. Brigid, however, doesn’t miss Wisdom’s reaction. She is ready to go on.

  “I needed to be in New York anyway, so I decided to come directly to see the authorities rather than handle it long distance. Let me say that I do acknowledge that Heidi exists, but I don’t really care whether she’s alive or dead.”

  Her words hang in the air. Everyone waits for the explanation— the complete version—there is nothing else to say.

  Even Weis moves perceptibly forward to the edge of his seat. He doesn’t have long to wait.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she says, her hands clasped together demurely in her lap, as if in church.

  “I am three years older than Heidi. We were both born in a suburb of Tehran. My Persian name was Behjat. Hers was Hediyeh. After we moved to Vienna, our parents changed the first names to conform to local customs, so hers converted into Heidi and mine became Brigid. We moved in the last days of the shah. My father had already arranged for money to be sent out of the country so we were quite comfortable after we arrived in Austria. We had a fine house, went to the best schools, learned to ski in the winter and sail in the summer. Heidi wanted to study medicine and I was interested in economics and international affairs. We both did college and graduate work in Switzerland.

  “Soon after I started with the UN in Geneva, I met a young French Jewish lawyer who worked in the same agency. We fell in love and got engaged. We were to be married the next summer. That Christmas I invited him home to Vienna to meet my parents and Heidi.”

  She stops abruptly, takes a long swallow from a cup of Sprite, and looks up at Wisdom.

  “Can one smoke here?” she asks.

  Wisdom might have denied her, but now just waves his hand and reaches for a battered brass beaker from the top of a bookcase where it still rests despite an official ban on smoking. Bennett gives a perceptible tilt of his head in agreement. She takes a cigarette from a blue packet within her small bag and lights up with a silver-colored lighter. In a moment the air fills with an acrid grayish-blue cloud. Wisdom absently wonders whether Bennett who has recently again given up smoking is crawling inside his skin. She takes another puff then grinds the butt into the brass.

  “Take your time,” Bennett offers, possibly sensing that the next part will be more difficult.

  “Thank you. Two days after we’d arrived back in Vienna, my mother and I were looking for some old photo albums and tried an unused storage room. That’s where we found them. Heidi and Philippe were half naked and having sex. Philippe was shocked and embarrassed, but all she did was half turn around and smile. I’ll never forget that smile. It was like she was saying ‘so what!’

  “They left the house together minutes later and we never saw either of them again. That night my father said that if we were all back in Iran, under Sharia or Islamic law, the Koran would call for her to be stoned to death and her family forever held in contempt by the local community. Well, we weren’t back in Iran, but since then my parents acted as if she had brought dishonor to our household. They pronounced her a nonperson and just behaved as if she never existed. I never saw Philippe again. He quit the agency, and I later heard he died in an automobile accident in Bavaria. It was partly my mistake in getting involved with such a weak person, but Heidi was in a way already crazy, only we didn’t see it.”

  She stops, pulls another cigarette from her bag, and holds it up. Wisdom signals his agreement and she repeats the earlier ritual of two puffs before extinction. She seems to possess incredible self-control, he thinks, to be able to handle all this with strangers. He shifts in his seat and leans forward.

  “When she was only sixteen, I found out that she already had sex with a neighbor’s son. After I challenged her with this, she only laughed and said she planned to do it next with his father. I never confronted her again, but over the next few years, bits and pieces of what she did and what she thought came out. I learned that it was Jewish men she went after. She was determined to prove herself better, determined to show them she was in control. And she found she could use sex as a way to get the power.

  “I wasn’t sure why she felt this way unless she got it from our father who blamed the Jews for displacing us years ago. But then he also blamed the other Arab states, the Americans, and the Communists. Why she singled out the Jews I’ll never know.”

  The words hang in the air like wood smoke. Bennett clears his throat. Weis bends to the side and whispers to her as she reaches for another cigarette. She hands one to Weis and they both smoke. Wisdom thinks that Chief Ferris was very shortly going to be pissed big-time at the invasive tobacco smell in his office. This time, as if to reinforce his thoughts, she keeps the cigarette alive past a few drags, although Wisdom thinks she’d be better off with a glass of vodka. He certainly would.

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” asks Bennett. “Was it the night she left your parent’s home in Vienna?”

  “No. About two years ago I got a very short note from her. Said she had just come to the States for her residency. That’s all. No apologies. No suggestions we meet. No matter what happened or what my parents feel or I feel, she’s still my sister. I need to end this. I need closure. Please find out what happened to her.”

  No one speaks. The room is quiet except for the distant hum of an air conditioner.

  “Do you know if a man might be involved? Probably a Jewish man. It would make some sense if there was.”

  Wisdom catches Bennett’s eye without difficulty and tilts his head perceptibly.

  “The police are pursuing some possibilities,” Bennett says, “But there isn’t anything concrete at this time.”

  She stares ahead and jams the cigarette out. Then for a brief moment she looks like she was going to cry, but the moment passes and she’s back in control. She leans toward Weis and mumbles something in German. Wisdom looks at Bennett who shakes his head sideways. Weis asks if they’re done.

  “For now.” Wisdom and Bennett both answer. Weis rises and takes Brigid’s arm to help her stand, but she eases her arm free. This is one tough lady, Wisdom thinks.

  “Can we reach you if we need to speak again?” he asks.

  “That won’t be a problem,” she says. “I’ll be staying at the guesthouse of one of the Washington Embassy people for a few days. It’s actually very close to here. My luggage is in Herr Weis’s car. I also plan to take a leave of absence from work for as much as a few months and rent a place in the area. I understand it will be easy to do after your Labor Day weekend. The senior people in Geneva have already approved the idea. I need to find out what happened and I think the answer is out here somewhere. If you need me, Herr Weis will have my number and address.”

  Then she points to the photo of Heidi that rests atop the open file. “May I have a copy of that?”

  Wisdom is quick to answer. “Yes. We have copies,” and he hands her the picture.

  Weis produces a card that seems to appear from up his sleeve and passes it to Wisdom. They all shake hands. Wisdom is surprised that Brigid’s feels incredibly warm for someone with such a controlled exterior. The two Austrians walk a few steps toward the door that Bennett holds open. Weis waits for Brigid to pass ahead when she stops and faces Wisdom.

  “Do you think she’s still alive?” she asks. He feels her eyes bore right through him.

  Before he can answer, she turns and walks through the door with Weis in pursuit. Wisdom watches them disappear down th
e hall through the opaque glass on the top half of the door.

  “So what do you think?” Wisdom asks after they reassume their seats.

  Bennett pulls his chair closer to Wisdom despite the fact that they’re alone.

  “I think we just found someone who had a real reason to make our friend Heidi disappear. Lucky for her she wasn’t in town back in early May. But we’ll check that out just to be sure. By the way. Posner and Stern are both Jewish, aren’t they?”

  Wisdom nods then leaves to find and update Chief Ferris while Bennett returns to his routine, which includes updating NYPD, whose interest had fallen from curiosity to nonexistent in the past few months. As far as he can tell, he’s the only one in law enforcement who has the slightest interest in finding out about what happened to Heidi Kashani. There is Bennett, of course, but his interest at this point seems more academic than anything else. Maybe he thinks it’s all just a waste of everyone’s time. And the chief? Well, his top priority is not to discover a body hidden away somewhere in tourist season. Soon after the issue was first raised, Wisdom and Chief Ferris briefed two town councilmen and the supervisor about the case and left the elected officials with the assurances that, “If something bad happened to the young woman, it couldn’t have been in our town.”

  Wisdom is for all intent and purposes on his own. So be it, he thinks.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ten days have gone by since the first meeting with Brigid. Summer is now almost officially over and nothing about the missing New York female doctor has surfaced to disturb the Town Board. Then out of nowhere, Brigid calls to advise Wisdom she’s rented a house in Montauk for the next two months.

  “It’s on the Old Montauk Highway and looks out over the ocean. I’ve never lived in such a place before.”

  Wisdom tells her he hopes she’ll find some peace and comfort and was about to hang up when she says she has an idea she needs to speak to him about. She says it’s important.

  He reluctantly agrees to meet with her later that afternoon, but not before repeating to her what Bennett said at their initial meeting,

  “You realize that this is still a local investigation. So far there’s no basis for calling in the County on suspicion of a major crime. And as far as NYPD, the New York City Police, well, they’re just happy she didn’t disappear in the city.”

  “Yes, I know all this,” she says almost too quickly, “But I am living here for now and I want to do something. I need to talk to someone, certainly not the FBI or the New York City Police. It’s far easier to talk to someone I’ve already met who’s also out here. Can’t I just do that?”

  At five thirty that afternoon Wisdom pulls his unmarked blue Ford Crown Vic into an empty driveway that descends slightly from Old Montauk Highway. The driveway curves around to behind the house where he assumes she parks, but he stops and parks just feet from the front door. He sighs with a controlled weariness and glances again through the case file that rests on the empty passenger seat. He stares one last time at the photo of Heidi. He has gotten to know her face well over the past several months, but until meeting her sister he never really began to have a sense of the person.

  The house is low and wrapped with horizontal slices of worn cedar planks that glisten with flashes of silver in the late afternoon sun. From the driveway with the curtains open he looks through the large picture window that exposes a stark interior. He sees an even larger picture window at the back of the room that guards a rear deck cantilevered out from the cliff it had been built into. Specks of white foam fly out from above the ocean beyond. From experience he knows that there is likely another floor downstairs that isn’t visible from the outside. All in all, quite a house.

  He walks from the car to the front door. As he waits for a reply to his knock, he hears the rhythm of rolling surf some hundred feet below interspersed with the shriek from a circling bird.

  “Come in. The door is open.”

  It’s Brigid’s voice. He prefers that she open the door, but there’s no further sound so he pushes forward and the wood slides silently open. He moves into the house and stands a few feet from the door. Everything is in white; the walls, furniture, and rugs all bring a dazzling starkness that competes favorably with the still visibly robust sunlight.

  “Hello,” he calls out into the silence. He waits. It’s probably no more than thirty seconds, yet seems longer, until he hears a rustle of movement to the side. He turns to the right barely in time to catch a flash of a minidress with pink-and-white polka dots.

  “What do you think?” she says and spins onto a short pirouette.

  Wisdom draws in his breath. She is no longer Brigid, but has transformed herself into Heidi. He feels he’s seeing a ghost. She has used the photo in the police files to copy her sister’s look. The dress is tight and cut low over her breasts. He hasn’t a clue how she managed to get so similar a dress in such a short a time. She wears hoop earrings and a hint of color seems to swell her lips. There is barely a touch of other makeup. She stands scarcely five feet away and he realizes this is what Heidi’s boyfriend, the doctor, and obviously others have seen; a voluptuous woman with a dark riveting stare that has the capacity to instantly arouse.

  That’s the moment when he remembers the name of the old film he’d thought about over the past weeks. It was called Laura. The protagonist is a cop investigating the murder of a woman whose face had been obliterated by a shotgun blast. The cop sits in the dead woman’s apartment trying to make sense of her death while a portrait of the slain woman, which hangs in the room, becomes a visible companion. The woman is beautiful and the cop can’t help but stare wistfully at the waste her death has brought, while he imagines what it might have been like to know her. Then the door opens and the woman appears, still alive and even more attractive than the painted image. Another woman had been killed by accident and the cop is suddenly confronted with the live object of his fantasies.

  This is how Wisdom feels. He is looking at Brigid, but seeing Heidi. Seeing her as all the others may have seen her, and in a moment as clear as fall air, he’s pretty sure he knows why she’s asked him here and what this is all about.

  Two days later Chief Ferris can only promise Wisdom a short meeting, but it turns out he miscalculates. The New York Times is doing one of its endless annual pieces on life in the Hamptons, or as one reporter had asked the previous year, “Other than DWIs, do you get any serious crimes here after Labor Day?” But this interview will have to wait. That morning’s half-finished cappuccino cup rests on the corner of the gray steel desk dangerously close to Wisdom’s loafers. He checks his watch, swings his legs off the desk, and grunts silently at the minor effort. He gathers the Heidi file in one hand, snatches the cappuccino in the other, and moves quickly down the corridor toward the chief’s office.

  Wisdom takes nearly ten minutes to tell his story and then does it again when they are joined by the town attorney, and then for a third time when Sergeant Bennett arrives. They discuss whether it’s still too early to call in County’s major-crimes people. In the end, they compromise on the plan to have Bennett call his counterpart at County and fill him in on where they stand as of as now. Then they go round and round regarding the strategy Wisdom has presented and its pitfalls, particularly entrapment.

  “It’s all her idea. Brigid’s,” he explains. “But I think it’s worth trying. She feels that since she looks so much like her sister, if she appears suddenly in front of any possible suspects, it might trigger a shock that could produce some worthwhile reaction. We have nothing to lose if we’re careful about the entrapment issue and we could have a wire available to avoid a problem.”

  “Shock and awe,” mumbles Bennett. His voice fills a momentary lull before the town attorney infuriates Wisdom when he asks him to review the plan still again.

  Wisdom dutifully repeats his earlier narration of his visit to Brigid’s rented house in Montauk. He describes how she looked much like her missing sister whose photo has previously been shared wi
th all participants. But this time the review of the meeting with Brigid produces an unusual, more personal effect. His thoughts wander even as he speaks about her plan. It is as if his brain separates the area that controls his mechanically delivered speech that deals with a strategy from another, more distant part of his mind that replays a more private memory about her effect on him on that afternoon.

  She leads him into the whitewashed living space and waits until he sits on the light beige leather sofa. The wide planked floors are bleached and coated with a clear dull finish. The walls are bare, except for one abstract oil composed of slashes of black, gray, and the ubiquitous white. A heavy glass ashtray rests on a white painted rattan coffee table that fronts the sofa.

  “Would you like something to drink? Some wine?” she asks. “I’m having a nice Chardonnay from here on Long Island. From a vineyard called Wolffer Estate. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, it’s got a good reputation, and thanks, but I’ll pass for now.”

  As he speaks, she reaches down to an end table and lifts a half-filled glass to her mouth. After she sips he sees a wet film spread across her lips. He feels a flush rising in his face.

  “I imagine that I don’t need your permission to smoke in my own house, but do you mind?”

  “No,” he says although something actually makes him want to smoke himself even though he hasn’t had an urge for several years.

  He watches her draw a cigarette from a packet of Gauloises and light the end with a blue flame. She sits next to him with one arm on the back edge of the sofa barely inches from his shoulder while she holds the cigarette in her free hand. He notices that she wears no jewelry and that her nails are clipped short and without polish. She crosses one leg over the other so that the already short skirt rides up her thigh.

  It is all so obvious and he tells her so then adds, “So what’s this all about? Why the show?”

  She smiles. A good smile. He hadn’t seen her smile before. She uncrosses her legs, sits up straight and smoothes her skirt.