Daughter of Darkness

by Ed Gorman

  Coffey enjoyed listening to the cabbies' stories. They were sarcastic and sardonic social commentators, and this included those who barely spoke English. The world was a different place when viewed through the eyes of a cabbie. He was about to leave when Benny Margolis came in. "Man, I sure hope I run into this chick. If I do, I won't turn her over to the cops, I'll head directly to a no-tell motel." He waved a police sketch at everybody.

  Cabbies were always getting police sketches. Nobody got around the city as much as cabbies, so handing out sketches over here made sense.

  The sketch made the rounds. Every man who looked at it had something to say about the person depicted on it.

  "Hey," Margolis said, taking the sketch for a second look. "You know who I think this is?"

  "Who?" somebody asked.

  "Tom Stafford's daughter."

  "Tom Stafford, the investment banker?" Coffey said. Stafford was one of the wealthiest men in the state.

  "Yeah, and she's just the kind of chick the police would want for murder," one of the drivers said.

  "They say they just want to talk to her because she may be a material witness," somebody said.

  "They always say that bullshit," a third man argued. "It means that she's really their suspect."

  "You really think it's her?" somebody asked Margolis.

  "I'm sure of it." Margolis glanced at his watch. "I used to haul her around sometimes. Nice kid, actually. I've got to pick my wife up. She wants to take me out for my birthday lunch."

  "You don't look a day over eighty-seven," one of the cabbies joked.

  Margolis smiled. "And that's just how old I feel, too."

  He handed Coffey the sketch. When Coffey looked at it, his entire body froze, as if it had just received a heart-searing jolt of electricity. His palms began to sweat and he felt dizzy, claustrophobic, unreal.

  The sketch was clearly that of last night's dark-haired woman.

  It took him a few minutes before he was able to function again. Meantime, the other drivers continued to make salacious remarks.

  Margolis waved good-bye and left the coffee room.

  Coffey walked out of the lunchroom with Margolis. "You really think that was Tom Stafford's daughter?"

  Margolis shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't bet my nice little house in Hyde Park on it, but, yeah, I'm pretty sure it was. She was too beautiful to forget."

  Coffey wished Margolis a happy birthday. "I'll walk out with you," Margolis said.

  As they reached the parking lot, Margolis dug in the pocket of his green windbreaker and took out a business card. He handed it to Coffey. "This guy was asking questions about you this morning."

  INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS, INC.

  Ralph Cummings

  Coffey looked it over. "What kind of questions?"

  "Mostly, if any of us had seen you since last night and did we know if you had a girlfriend."

  "Girlfriend?"

  "That's what he asked."

  "Thought I'd better tell you," Margolis said. He checked his wristwatch. "Well, time to meet my wife. Better get to it." He nodded to the card. "You can keep it." He grinned. "Pretty nice of me, huh?"

  "Yeah." Coffey said. "Real nice."

  Twenty-three minutes later, Coffey was in the library.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Molly always used to do this when Jenny was a little girl-sit on her bed with Jenny's head on her knee, and Jenny stretched out on the bed. They were in that position now in the big, bright bedroom.

  Just after a late breakfast, Jenny had slumped into an anxiety state, the kind Priscilla Bowman had warned them to watch carefully. Jenny had been in this kind of mood when she'd left the house and not returned for eight days.

  So Molly took Jenny upstairs and asked her to lie on the bed as they had in the old days. At first, they were both self-conscious about doing it-like trying to rekindle feelings and needs long dead-but after a few minutes of actually being on the bed, they both relaxed and began to enjoy themselves.

  It was comfortable and private here. They couldn't hear sounds from anywhere else in the house and the warm sunlight through the windows made them feel as lazy as napping cats. The white drapes and furnishings and bedclothes gave the room a brilliance and cleanliness that automatically improved Jenny's mood. She felt safe and loved here. The darkness of her eight missing days no longer weighed on her mind. She had banished it, at least temporarily.

  When Jenny was a little girl, Molly would always read to her. Jenny had two favorite stories that she liked to hear over and over again, "Cinderella" and "Hansel and Gretel," the first because it was so romantic-even rich little girls dreamed of being the princess-and the second because it was so terrifying.

  Today, there were no stories. But there remained the old love and tenderness. And that was more than enough.

  Molly wore a blue running suit. She ran two miles a day, always after lunch. Jenny's white blouse and fashionably knee-torn jeans gave her the look of a teenager. The back of her head rested on her mother's knee. Molly dragged a comb lazily through Jenny's lovely dark hair. She might have been a doll that Molly was grooming.

  "David already called twice today," Molly said. "He practically lived here while you were gone. I don't have to tell you how much he loves you."

  "I know he loves me," Jenny said. "I just wish I loved him. After he dumped me-I just don't feel the same way anymore."

  "He'd like to take you to dinner tonight. That's what he said both times when he called this morning. I told him with all that's happened, I think you need your rest."

  She reached up and touched her mother's hand. "I don't want to feel that I'm in a sickbed again. Mom. The way I was after-" Once again, the situation that had put her in the mental hospital came to mind-and she immediately pushed it away. "You know what I was thinking about doing today?" Jenny said, changing the subject.

  "No, what?"

  "Visiting Ted."

  Molly hesitated. Then, "Well, that would be nice."

  "God, I like him so much."

  "And he certainly likes you."

  Jenny rolled over so she could put her chin in her hands and face her mother. "You know what?"

  "What?"

  "I think he still has a crush on you."

  "Oh, stop being silly."

  "But you went out together for a long time."

  "Not a 'long time.' Our sophomore year in college was all."

  "Well, that's a long time."

  Molly put her hand on the crown of Jenny's head and began stroking her hair. "I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

  "He always seems so lonely to me," Jenny said.

  "I don't think I'll tell Daddy where I'm going," she added, and smiled. "He's still threatened by Ted. isn't he?"

  "Well, I'd be threatened if the situation was reversed. Ted is a very good-looking man. And he's always being written up in the papers. And he's on TV a lot." Ted had been Molly's boyfriend before Tom Stafford met her. Tom wasn't crazy about the fact that Ted always sent them gifts and had befriended Jenny-but he'd learned to accept it.

  "He told me he hates the publicity," Jenny said. "But that he doesn't have any choice. He has to do the publicity, or his paintings won't sell."

  Jenny rolled over so that the back of her head was on her mother's knee again. "This room has more interesting ceiling patterns than mine does."

  "Ceiling patterns?"

  "You know. The patterns that sunlight makes through the trees."

  "Oh."

  "That's why I always used to come in here in the afternoons." Jenny laughed softly. "You always had a lot more going on on your ceiling than I did."

  "Now there's a compliment if I ever heard one," Molly smiled.

  "I used to do that in the psych hospital, too. My room had very interesting ceiling patterns, too."

  Jenny's stay in the psych hospital was something rarely discussed in the Stafford house.

  Molly put her hand on Jenny's head, as if she wanted to drive out a
ll memories of that terrible time. And then-

  They fell silent again, trying to just enjoy the moment here on the bed.

  Jenny said, "When I got up this morning, I was afraid my period was starting. Thank God, I was wrong. I'm not ready for it yet."

  Her mother stroked her hair some more. "You probably shouldn't go anywhere. You're exhausted. You should stay home." Then, "You always run to Ted when you have a problem, don't you?"

  "Does that hurt your feelings?"

  "No. Not really."

  Jenny thought for a long moment. "I just like hanging out with him. He's fascinating. All the reading he does-He's always got some new passion. It's great spending a long afternoon with him. He'll start out talking about the current political scene and then end up telling you about how the gladiators prepared for battle. His mind's so full of information, and he's so enthusiastic about things. He's really alive."

  "He certainly is that," Molly said.

  Jenny said, "I'm trying not to think about it."

  "I know, honey."

  "Maybe I'll never know. Where I was for those eight days. When I was in the psych hospital, I met alcoholics like that. They'd lost days, even weeks, and they never got them back. I just don't want to think about it now. I just want to try and get my mind off it. So I thought I'd go see Ted."

  "Then by all means, go see Ted."

  "Just don't tell Daddy, all right?"

  Molly laughed. "That's the first thing I'm going to do," she said, and then tickled Jenny under her arm. "Drive right over to his office and tell him where you're going."

  Then she leaned over and kissed her daughter tenderly on her forehead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The library was crowded.

  At the information desk, Coffey asked an attractive young woman if there was a section of books on Chicago society, and if it was kept up-to-date. Her answer was yes to both questions.

  Coffey spent his first hour in the stacks, thumbing through books that referenced the Stafford family. In 1918, George Stafford, the founding father, brought a good deal of his oil money-he was a good friend of John D. Rockefeller's-back to Chicago. He had grown up here, one of six children born to an immigrant and impoverished family of Irish Catholics. Like many poor boys, he wanted to impress the city of his birth. He impressed them immediately. He went into investment banking with an almost religious zeal. He soon became great friends with the Wrigley folks.

  His son Robert continued on in investment banking. Between world wars, Robert began to take great interest in European markets. He put the firm in a good position to take advantage of key European investments following World War II.

  But it was Tom Stafford who brought the firm to true dominance. He took an early interest in computers. His roommate at Harvard, in fact, would become a major player in developing mainframe computers for IBM. This was at a time, the late fifties, when Wall Street and its allies in Chicago and Los Angeles still had doubts about the relevance of computers to their particular kind of work. Could you really trust computers? Tom Stafford believed you could, and this got him an extraordinary jump on his competitors. Stafford Investment Bankers became one of the most important players in contemporary investment banking.

  Socially, Tom Stafford was also a noted figure. He spent his early twenties breaking the hearts of several beautiful debutantes. He also dated a few movie stars. Not many investment bankers found themselves in the pages of both Esquire and GQ. Stafford watchers were thus surprised when he settled his attention and fondness on a young woman he met working behind the counter of a small jewelry store near the Drake Hotel. Her name was Molly Davis and while her father, who owned the jewelry store, was a successful merchant, he certainly wasn't in the Stafford league. There was another unlikely aspect to the tale as well; though Stafford was handsome, charming, and rich, Molly Davis took no particular interest in him. She thought he was nice, she thought he was amusing, but when he asked her to marry him, she thought he was kidding. She said no. Nobody had ever said no to Tom Stafford. It was, at least to Tom Stafford, unthinkable. He redoubled his efforts. He courted her for nearly a year before she finally gave in. The wedding was one of the most lavish ever staged in Chicago. They day they married, Tom Stafford was thirty-eight (he'd had a long run as an eligible bachelor) and his Molly was twenty seven.

  Seven months to the day of their wedding. Jenny came along. This was 1973. According to press reports, she was just about the perfect child-beautiful, joyful, and hypnotized by her parents, just as they were hypnotized by her. She spent seventh grade in Sweden, trying out a very tony private school. She didn't quite make it through the year. She was lonely for her parents, and they were miserable without her. She stayed in Chicago from then on, attending a private Catholic school and quite seriously studying ballet. The local press loved her as much as they'd loved her father. And she was even more photogenic than he'd been. She was an impossibly lovely seventeen-year-old when her Porsche convertible was back-ended by a truck and knocked down a steep ravine. The bets were she wouldn't make it. The Chicago news establishment held a death watch. The story had everything. People who didn't give a damn about high society-indeed, resented it-stayed fixed to their TV screens. Would the young heiress make it? Could the fates be so cruel as to snatch her life away?

  She lived. But it was not easy. She spent two months in the hospital slowly and painfully learning to walk again. She had blinding headaches. And her memory was shaky. She'd lost long periods of time.

  A year later, everything was fine. Her smashed leg had healed very well, the disk in her back was once again where it belonged, her memory had been fully restored and-if it was possible-she was even more beautiful than she'd been before the accident.

  The press went right on loving her. For another whole year, she was their darling. She didn't want the attention-she was truly a shy person-but what choice did she have?

  At about the time the press found a new life to suck dry-a dazzling young blonde skater who was, it seemed, headed for the Olympics and who had already been offered a modeling contract from the Ford Agency in New York-Jenny began to change.

  All that anybody knew for sure-though it was the subject of much coy speculation in the local gossip columns-was that Jenny had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and was in a psychiatric hospital. One sympathetic gossip columnist noted that breakdowns were often a delayed reaction among people who suffered great physical traumas, such as Jenny had when her sports car had been knocked down a ravine.

  This was where the story ended. There were no more references to Jenny in the books Coffey found. There had also been-for all the talk of her great good looks-no photograph of the young woman.

  Coffey noted the approximate date when Jenny had been rumored to suffer a breakdown and then went over to the microfiche newspaper files.

  Coffey was not a mechanical genius. Indeed, it took him a full ten minutes to string the microfiche roll into the machine properly. He did a fair amount of cursing which earned him a number of hostile glances from the people around him.

  Then he got to work, and it didn't take long before he had his answer.

  He stared at her photograph with an almost drugged expression. Not even the smudgy microfiche image could spoil her looks. He found himself drawn to her in a near-mystical way. He found himself longing to touch her, hold her, as he had last night. The longing was physically painful.

  He had to see her. And soon. He had to find out how she was.

  There was only one logical place to look for her. Her home, the Stafford mansion. But how could he ever approach them? What could he say? He'd sound like some kind of con artist, or a madman. Either way, they wouldn't take him seriously. They would most likely call the police. And what would he tell the police? He certainly couldn't tell them about last night, not without getting Jenny in a lot of trouble.

  Jenny.

  Did she even know she was Jenny?

  And maybe she hadn't gone home. Maybe she was
still wandering the streets, trying to reconstruct everything that had happened to her.

  He rolled through several more feet of microfiche. He found two more pictures of her. They were as stunning as the first had been.

  The second one was contained in a story about her going berserk in a posh pub on the Gold Coast. The story reported that she had slapped a woman and then proceeded to overturn several tables. She then began hurling glasses at the liquor bottles displayed behind the bar. The damage was estimated to be in the $5,000 range. She had been taken into custody and released two hours later to her attorney and her family. When she appeared in court the following morning, she claimed to have no memory of the entire incident. The judge set a trial date and suggested that Jenny look into Alcoholics Anonymous.

  After this, there were no more stories about Jenny Stafford.

  Coffey sat back in his chair. He knew what he had to do. Now he had to figure out the best way to do it. the best way to help Jenny.

  As he sat there, he thought of several clever ways that he might get into the Stafford mansion. But that's all they were-clever. They wouldn't guarantee that he'd get to see her alone so that they could talk.

  And that's what they badly needed to do. Talk. Alone. See if she'd had any luck puzzling through her loss of memory.

  He checked his watch. Nearing noon now. He'd wait till dinnertime. It was more likely the family would be home then.

  In the meantime, he'd buy the morning papers and see if there was any more information on the unidentified man they'd found dead in the motel room.

  He rewound the microfiche, put it neatly back in its box, and left the library.