Chapter 8

More snow was falling as Liz dropped Lucy off at the library. She trudged through it to use the phone booth on the premises.

“So, did you nab an interview with the grandmother?” Dermott asked her over the phone.

“No, Dermott, I didn’t, but I’ve been pursuing some other leads that came up.”

“Have they led to a story you can file tonight?”

“Not yet.”

“Then take this one and run with it,” Dermott said. “Seems some jogger called in from Newton and said he saw a couple of Arab guys at the Johansson door about an hour before the kid came home. Take this down. Guy’s a hairdresser. Calls himself P.D. Cue but his real name’s Paddy McCuddy. He’s probably a fuckin’ fairy.”

“Hey!”

“Ah jeez, don’t get all PC on me. Be glad you’re back on the missing mom story with a real lead after chasing shadows all day. Or was it playing elf? I hear you were wrapping presents with some gal all morning, on company time, no less! And you wanted to step out of features territory!”

“You have a number for the hairdresser?”

“Yeah, but I got better than that. He’s at his shop now. On Cue Hair Design, in Newton Upper Falls.”

“Say no more. That’s part of features territory. I know where it is.”


The hairdresser was no fairy, although he could charm the socks off every one of his mixed bag of customers. When Liz walked into his shop, he had two clients’ coiffures well under control.

“Just sit here for a few minutes, Miss Monroe,” he said to an elderly woman whose head was covered with old-fashioned rollers. Leading her to a seat under a hair dryer, he inquired, “Or may I call you Marilyn?”

“You can call me Norma Jean,” the woman replied, smiling broadly. “I reserve that name for my intimates.”

“I’m honored, Norma Jean,” the hairdresser said, bowing slightly. “OK, buddy,” he said, changing tone as he spoke to a mailman who had apparently shown up for a haircut during a lunch break. “Do you think the Celtics have a chance in hell of winning tonight?” he asked, as he fitted a plastic sheet around the mailman’s neck. “Do you have an appointment?” he said, turning to Liz. “I’m not sure if I have time to take a walk-in at the moment.”

“Actually, I’m here in response to your call to the Beantown Banner.” Liz held out her hand. “Liz Higgins” she said.

“Paddy McCuddy. I had to change the name for the shop. McCuddy’s Hair Design might make it in Dublin but it doesn’t cut it in this suburb.”

“Shame about that mother running out on her kid,” the mailman offered.

“What makes you think she ran out on her family?” Liz asked.

“They’re on my route. A mailman sees more than most people think.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there’s the deliveries we make, for one thing. There’s one household on my route keeps receiving pink envelopes. I’m not surprised to see the house went up for sale recently. They’re up to their ears in debt.”

“What about the Johanssons? Anything unusual there?”

“You bet. Lots of letters from the Middle East. All for the missus. She’s been receiving them for years. And he receives all kinds of insects. I don’t deliver them. UPS does. But I see them sitting on the stoop. Trusting household. Has a little card on the mailbox that says, ‘If we’re not home, please leave deliveries.’”

“What are the bugs for?” Paddy asked.

“Guy’s an eco-nut. I guess he releases them into the garden to eat other bugs. Seems like a waste to me. You open a box of ladybugs and who’s gonna tell ’em you paid for them so they better stay in your yard?”

“You got a point there,” Paddy agreed.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said “Miss Monroe.” “We need people like that to keep down the use of pesticides. Let some of the ladybugs fly into my garden anytime. They bring good luck, you know.”

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn,” the hairdresser said as he turned on the electric razor to trim the mailman’s neck hair.

“Name’s Len Fenster,” the mailman said loudly over the razor’s buzz.

“May I quote you about the Johanssons?” Liz asked.

“Yeah, sure. Don’t quote me on the dunning slips, though, will ya?”

“No problem.”

“That’s it, buddy,” Paddy said.

“What do I owe ya?”

“The usual.”

Paddy turned to his curler-covered customer and told her, “You need another ten, fifteen minutes, Norma Jean.” He turned the drier to high.

Over its airy hum, Liz asked him, “Have you spoken to anybody else about what you saw at the Johanssons’ house?”

“Sure. My wife. She’s the one who told me to call the Banner after they found blood in the house.”

“How about the World?”

“That rag! Nah.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this exclusive.”

“No problem. It was weird, though, to see two guys on the Johanssons’ doorstep on the day in question,” the hairdresser said, sounding like he fancied himself to be an actor in a TV-courtroom drama.

“Why?”

“They just didn’t fit in.”

“In what regard?”

“Well, they were Arabs, for one thing.”

“Surely some people of Middle Eastern extraction live in Newton.”

“Sure they do. I have one or two families who bring their kids for haircuts in my shop. But they live here. They don’t drive up to houses in big, jazzy cars without license plates and then stand around at people’s doors.”

“Are you saying there was no license plate on the car they arrived in?”

“That’s right. They drove up in a Crown Victoria with no plates. They looked pretty put out when nobody answered the door, I can tell you.”

“What do you mean by ‘put out’?”

“They were talking to each other a mile a minute. I couldn’t understand a word that they said. It must have been Arabic they were speaking. They were shaking their heads and talking away. Finally, they got in their car and drove off.”

“If you hadn’t heard about the apparent crime scene at the Johanssons’, do you think you would have thought their behavior was significant?”

“I think so. Like I said, they were out of place.”


Liz left the hairdresser and drove straight to the Johanssons’ street. She wasn’t keen on running herself but she knew enough joggers to be aware that exercise nuts are creatures of habit. Chances were good that one or more of the two o’clock joggers would pass by at the same time today.

It was 1:50 when Liz introduced herself to the first jogger on Fenwick Street.

“I would have been passing by then,” said a woman dressed in Olympic-quality running gear, “but I’d stopped to see the events on the City Hall Common. It was hilarious, I tell you! Until the little girl ran into the scene. Hey, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Liz interviewed six more runners before a pair of women had information to add.

“No plates on the car? I didn’t notice that,” the taller of the two said.

“But it would make sense!” her running partner exclaimed. “They probably forgot to put dealer plates on the car when they took it out.”

“Dealer plates?”

“Yeah, it was Sam Maksoud and his son at the Johansson house. I know them because I bought my car from them.”

“‘We always go the extra mile,’” the two women said in unison.

“Not us as runners,” the tall gal laughed in response to the puzzled look on Liz’s face. “The Maksouds. That’s the dealership’s motto.”

“Is that the dealership on Needham Street?” Liz inquired.

After the joggers nodded confirmation, Liz drove her Tracer straight to it.

“Yeah, I remember the lady,” Sam Maksoud said, waving Liz into a chair in his glassed-in office with a view of the car showroom. “After the deal I gave to her, I’ll never forget her!”

“I’ve heard you’re doing some great price cutting for end of the season sales,” Liz said, remembering Tom Horton’s tip.

“That is true, but in Mrs. Johansson’s case it was a different story.”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“You have met the lady, yes?”

Liz nodded.

“An attractive lady, with the berry-blonde hair. I would never have imagined she would know the niceties of our language, our Arabic ways. Nor did I think such a polite lady had it in her to bargain like that. She so charmed me that I took some big dollars off the price of her car.”

“How did she do that?”

“She arrived here in her husband’s car, not the one she wished to trade in. When I asked her about the other vehicle, she said it needed a repair and she didn’t want to put any more money into it. When the customer says that, we know the car is rather iffy, but, of course, our mechanics can fix most anything. It’s often a different story if the vehicle is not running. So I asked the lady, ‘Does it run?’”

“What did she tell you?”

“That’s when she surprised me. ‘Hamdu-lillah,’ she said.”

“What does that mean?”

“Thanks to God. For those words, I took another two thousand dollars off the price of her car,” he grinned. “That’s not all the story. It turned out the trade-in was truly on its last legs. That delightfully devious lady had it towed up the steep hill of Walnut Street and then drove it the last few blocks to my dealership, on the level road! I know, because she hired my cousin to do the deed!”

“You’re smiling! Didn’t that make you angry?”

“Not at all! I have respect for such a woman. And I made up my losses by the end of the same day by bargaining hard with some customers who could afford it. Of course, she was much less comfortable when it came time to pick up her new car. So amusing it was! She hurried off without picking up the title. That piece of paper proves you own it, of course. I phoned her more than once about it. And when she was never in, I decided to deliver it myself. My son and I tried to drop it off at her house, it turns out, on the very day she disappeared. By the way, you need a new vehicle, you let old man Maksoud know, OK?” the car dealer said, pressing his business card into Liz’s hand.

That eliminates one of the ‘foreign’ phone callers, Liz thought to herself as she returned to her car. The guy who called about “some title” was not a library patron, after all. It was the car dealer. Placing the business card on her dashboard, Liz noticed the pair of boldfaced Ms. Could the two Ms on Ellen’s blackboard have referred to Maksoud Motors rather than the colorful candies that “melt in your mouth, not in your hand?”


Still, positive news was a hard sell at the Banner. Back in the newsroom, Liz’s satisfaction in tying up some loose ends was short-lived under the city editor’s scrutiny.

“OK, five inches,” he told her. And play up the mailman’s reaction.”

It turned out that Dermott McCann made an excellent, if reluctant, decision. When Maksoud and son were taken in for questioning an hour after Liz left them, the World was onto the story—their only source an oil delivery man and Gulf War veteran who had seen men he took to be “Iraqi thugs.”

Liz did mention the mailman’s take on things in her story’s lead, but only to make him look as suspicious of airmail letters as he was of insects. Fortunately for the Banner, Dermott McCann had other fish to fry that night, so he didn’t edit Liz’s piece. He was occupied overseeing coverage of a basketball player who was hauled in and then released by police for attempted rape of a nightclub “date.” While the papers that came off the Banner’s press splashed the headline “BOUNCER BOUNCED,” the World’s front page broke the news, “Father & Son Car Dealers Implicated in Missing Mother Case.”

In the early hours of the morning, after the first copies of the World reached the Banner’s newsroom, night editor Esther O’Faolin saw to it that in late editions, Liz’s story got a front-page teaser headed: “TITLED GENTS: Do-Good Dealers Slammed Unjustly.”


New York City, December 16, 2000

Ellen waited at the elevator bay to ascend to the Windows on the World restaurant. Excitement about meeting Nadia was foremost in her mind, but it did not prevent her from noticing that the small crowd with whom she stood waiting for elevators was also a melting pot of peoples. While many were well dressed businessmen and women sporting corporate duds, they possessed complexions and facial characteristics from every corner of the world. Others in the crowd were an international mix, too, whether they wore the camera gear and belly packs marking them as tourists, casual dress and envelopes that identified them as couriers, the uniforms and clipboards that announced them as UPS or FEDEX delivery staff, or the garb of other workers, including telephone, copy machine, and computer repairmen. Ellen scanned every face she could see in case she and Nadia were already keeping company, but she did not recognize her pen pal among the elevator crowd.

The experience made her call to mind an arrival at a large international airport, where, after fetching baggage and going through customs, you step through double doors into a huge lobby to find yourself suddenly surrounded by a crowd of expectant faces. If you’re looking for someone from whom you’ve been long separated, you feel pressured to recognize the person first, so you scrutinize the crowd in earnest haste. But if you know no one is among the crowd to greet you, you nevertheless feel the full weight of the crowd’s attention and experience the urge to do something—a casual soft-shoe, perhaps, or quick juggling act—to merit it.

But Ellen was not the center of attention here. Except in the eyes of one Middle Easterner. And it was not Nadia.

Finally, the elevator doors opened. After some thirty people exited the single car, Ellen pushed forward to board it for its return trip. Then someone grabbed her shoulder firmly and spun her around.

“Ellen, Ellen!” Nadia cried out with delight. “I am giving thanks to Allah that it’s you. Only my pen friend could be wearing the scarf I sent to her twenty years ago.”

“You sent it to me for my fourteenth birthday, when you said I had become a woman. Oh Nadia, how wonderful to see you after all these years! And look, you are wearing the leather belt I tooled for you when I was thirteen!”

“Not, I am afraid, as easy to see as that scarf. I wonder, would you have recognized me if I hadn’t seen you first?”

Ellen paused. Then she said, “Ya sadiqati al habibah aa rifuki kull al-awqat.

Nadia smiled and shook her head in pleased amazement, swinging her chicly bobbed brown hair from side to side. And then she pressed her cheek against Ellen’s and held it there for a good few seconds.

After opening their hearts to one another in letters for decades without laying eyes on anything but photographs of one another, the two women only had eyes for each other. Arm-in-arm, they joined the crowd entering an elevator.

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