The Big Dirt Nap

Thirty

Before Lucy and I were to meet at Titans, she'd had an appointment. With Billy and Claude Crawford. They were her sources for an exposé on casino gambling that involved some of the most prominent names in this part of the state and some pretty unsavory characters as well. The three of them had met in the parking lot outside of Titans. I watched the sun go down as she told me what happened.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to get into a car with two strange men?" I asked.

"I don't remember the stuff my mother told me. Besides, I didn't get in a car with two men; Billy had to meet someone in the hotel; he joined us later." Lucy and Claude drove to the Crawfords' attorney to discuss what they knew and how best to reveal it.

"You went to Betty Smallwood's?" I asked, incredulous.

"You know her?" Now it was Lucy's turn to be surprised.

"I just came from her office. I showed her a picture of you and she didn't bat an eyelash. She didn't utter a word about having met you." That was one cool customer.

"After I left the message for you I called this other guy I was supposed to meet," she said.

"Nick Vigoriti?"

"How do you know this?" she asked, exasperated that I was cutting into her story.

"I met him instead." Now I understood some of Nick's cryptic remarks. He had thought I was Lucy, in the hotel to interview him for the casino story. And so, obviously, did some other people who had showed an inordinate amount of interest in a woman who was there to write about the corpse flower. I told her Nick was dead but she already knew.

"Betty called Claude and told him. That's why the guys haven't wanted to drive back. Some local cop has a real hard-on for them and probably thinks they did it. The boys stashed their car in the woods and we walked the rest of the way here."

"And where is here?"

She was somewhere on the reservation in a log cabin off a dirt road. "It's kind of nice, like one of those places pictured in the Sunday Times real estate section with a view that you can never afford. High on the mountain, lake, there's even a small waterfall in the distance."

Waterfront property notwithstanding, she was brought to a secret place, car stashed, and incommunicado for three days. Any minute she'd start speaking Swedish. I forced myself to stay calm and not scream at her.

"Okay, why are you still there?" There was a silence and after being Lucy's friend for many years and through many relationships I knew exactly what it meant.

"Jeez, Lucy, both of them?"

"No, just Claude. You have to see him, he's gorgeous. He's got this amazing hair and skin. Our kids would be phenomenal."

Oh, brother. The only reservation in Lucy's future was at Balthazar, downtown, table by the window, but she was playing out some fantasy. One of us had to be the grown-up.

"It's not as if I just met him," she rationalized. "We've been e-mailing for weeks—I felt as if I knew him." I tried not to be judgmental with friends, but my silence smacked of disapproval.

"Lucy, I just heard the cops say they had evidence that implicated the Crawfords in Nick's death. What do you know about that?"

"I know they've been persecuted by some psycho local cop with an ax to grind . . ."

"And hotel security at Titans has instructions not to admit the Crawfords," I said. "There's a restraining order against them entering the hotel, so Billy's got to be lying about meeting someone there. Luce, physical evidence. Ted Bundy was cute, too. Not my type, but someone thought he was cute."

I checked my watch; it would be dark in about thirty minutes, and it was getting chilly. As it was, I didn't know if I could make it back down the mountain in the dark with all of those switchbacks—and the very real possibility of going over the side like poor Mrs. Mishkin made it an unattractive prospect. I had to find her, and soon.

The light was fading but I had a picture of the spot on my phone and Lucy had given me a description of what she could see from the cabin; I tried to match it up with what I saw from my perch on the side of the dirt road. She told me the lake was on her right.

"That's west," I said.

"Is it? Oh yeah, setting sun." Clearly she hadn't been a Girl Scout. Neither had I for that matter—west was the Henry Hudson Parkway and east was the FDR, what else did you need to know in Manhattan?

"I've got it!" she said. When Lucy rented the car, YoDrive had provided her with a TomTom, a portable global positioning system. Since no New Yorker leaves anything of any value in her car, she had automatically taken it with her. She rummaged through her bag to get the Tom.

"Great! What does it say?"

She waited for a satellite signal. Finally the screen lit up. "It says I'm screwed. I'm at the corner of nowhere and battery low," she said, frustrated. "I'm a speck. What's the point of this thing? You have to know where you are to know where you are."

I told her to minimize the screen to see as much of the surrounding area as possible. She was somewhere west of 95, which was not much help since so was most of the United States.

"Plug in Titans as a destination," I said. If she'd used it on the drive up it would have been her last address on the TomTom. She groaned.

"I didn't use it. The clerk at YoDrive said all I had to do was take 95, so that's what I did."

"It's near Academy Road. Start with that."

Titans's exact address was on my Jeep's system and I ran to get it before the power drained on Lucy's Tom. We waited until her handheld unit processed the information. She was eleven miles from Titans, but the TomTom was having a rough time choosing a route selection since there weren't any established roads through the reservation.

"Keep at it," I said, "and call me back if something comes up. Wait a minute, give me your longitude and latitude. Maybe I can figure out how to use that to find you."

"How do I do that?"

I told her to hit browse map but it was too late. The TomTom ran out of power.

"Lucy, is there electricity in that cabin?"

"No."

"Well, light some candles and make a fire. And save your cell power. Turn it back on in one hour. I'll call you to let you know where I am." Assuming I knew.

Before I risked losing my cell signal, I made one more call.

"Paradise Diner."

Babe and company were gearing up for the dinner crowd, not as busy as breakfast or lunch, but busy enough so that Babe didn't answer the phone herself.

"She's with some customers. Want me to get her?" Alba, the budding rock singer/waitress, took a message. I could hear her making change at the register, and she read the message back to me with no reaction at all to its contents: Lucy missing, searching Quepochas reservation, just in case you never see me again. Paula.

"Okay, so, like, is that it?"

"That's it."