“You girls, I mean ladies, you had no clue she was working up to some big change, selling all?”
“Anne wasn’t the sort of person you could ever get too close to. I guess we all had the feeling there was something in the wind. She seemed to be hiding some kind of big excitement. It made her a little bit flushed and bright-eyed and absentminded. We wondered if, unlikely as it seems, she was in love.”
I went through the office files in my inside pocket and found the picture of Anne Farley. “She doesn’t look unlovable,” I said to Libby.
“Wow, this is some old kind of picture.” She went away, and over the muted sound of her high fidelity system, I heard drawers opening and banging shut. She came out with color photographs and sat and dealt them out on a table, picked two of them, and gave them to me.
OK, in the color flash shots she did not look lovable. She looked more like she would make you into a lampshade: grim mouth, hair pulled back tightly and welded into a knot. They were taken at an exhibit of jewelry designed by a famous actress.
Libby let me have the negatives. And in time I could find no more new items about Anne Farley in her memory banks, so we went on to other subjects.
In the morning I found a custom photography lab, and they let me work with the technician to get what I wanted. I got some four by fives in black-and-white glossies, cropped to show Anne Farley full face and in left profile. The face was neurotic, vulnerable, and imperious, all at once. In Underground Atlanta I found an artist who could do very good pencil work. Thirty dollars later I had three realistic sketches of Anne Farley in three different blond hairstyles.
I spent four full days and evenings drawing blanks. I worked through the weekend. People do leave marks. The trick is to find those footprints on the trail and see which way they point. Her bank was no help. She had closed out checking and savings two weeks before the day of the theft. I bought ten minutes with her retail credit bureau records. That led me to Belk-London’s, and to a merry, round, white-haired little woman who, she said, had sold Anne Farley and her mother their clothes for twenty years.
“Oh, yes!” she said. “She said to me, ‘Mattie’ — she always calls me Mattie — ‘I am going to have to buy some resort clothes for very hot weather. Very, very hot weather.’ I was pleased for the poor dear. She has always dressed so much older than her years, you know. And she has a pretty figure. A very pretty figure, a bit too lean maybe. I had to have some idea of where she would wear the resort clothes. You wouldn’t take the same things to Cannes you’d take to Sea Island, now would you? She told me never to tell anyone and here I am telling you, breaking my promise, but I think the darling girl has come to harm. She said it would be Cancun, at a fancy hotel called the Garza Blanca. I can remember about the hotel because I looked up the words over in the book section. Garza is a heron, and blanca is white.”
“She buy a lot?”
“Very little. But practical. Pretty and practical. Wash-and-wear things. She said she couldn’t take much with her.”
“What makes you think she has come to harm?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I think this business of the police looking for her because they say she stole diamonds is terrible. I’ve known her since she was a child. She would never steal.”
“Even if she got very, very tired of the life she was stuck with?”
“Not Anne Farley,” she said firmly.
With Cancún as a guidepost, I went rooting around in the airlines schedules. The best way to go, it appeared, was by Eastern or National to Miami, and by Mexicana from Miami to Yucatán. Eastern and National run big, busy desks at Atlanta. I was a nuisance. Me and my pictures and drawings. Seven months ago? You’ve got to be kidding, friend. Do you have the faintest idea just how many thousand people we run down to Miami every week? Sorry to have troubled you, fella.
I went back to my uniquely architectured hotel, with its Gee Whiz lobby and my sterile plastic room on floor nine, and went through the travel agencies again and made a little list of the ones close by.
I told Libby Franklin how it went. It was Monday night. Eighteen pounds of gray cat lay curled up arid purring on my stomach, full of egg roll. The soft denim of her jeans, stretched tight around a long slim thigh made a pillow effect that just fit the nape of my neck. Everyone had had some egg roll. And almond gui ding. And shrimp fried rice.
I said, “It was about the third or fourth agency, a little one in that arcade off the Omni complex. A neat little redheaded lady with, I swear, rings on every finger and both thumbs, she looked a long time at the drawing — the one where he gave her blond bangs to her eyebrows — and then she went and poked around in her files, biting her lip, frowning, and came up with a card that said she had sold such a blond person a round-trip ticket, tourist class, for two people, Atlanta to Cancun, for cash money, a Mr. and Mrs. Dan Barley. More anagrams. She figured it was an illicit pair slipping away for fun and games: the woman buys, cash deal, no reservation on return. So what she did was tell the blond person that she was going to have to get tourist cards, and she could fill out the blank there and take one for her husband, or they could do it at the Mexicana desk in the Miami airport. They would have to show birth certificates, passports, or something like that. She said it seemed to upset the blond person a little, but she said they would apply at Miami.”
Libby scowled down at me. “Anne Farley? Fun and games?”
“There is always somebody for everybody,” I said. “The reservation was made three weeks in advance for the Sunday flight, with a two-hour layover in Miami before catching the five-thirty flight to Cancun. Did the Dan Barley couple catch it? Who knows? Maybe passenger manifests are tucked away into some computer somewhere, with no awareness or access except in the microelectrical heart of some other computer.”
“So?” she said.
I tried a fixed leer, staring up at her. “Wanna go to Yucatán, sweetie?”
“I can’t take off work, and Fido hates kennels and sitters, and I seldom go out of the country without being married first.”
“I could go ask that neat redheaded lady.”
“With all the rings? Sure. Good thinking. She can probably get you a discount on everything. Bite him, Fido. Sic’um.”
Tuesday morning I plodded into Wescott and Sons, right after my hotel coffee shop breakfast, braced for a lot of resistance from J. Trevor Laneer. But he greeted me with rueful smile, waved me into the deep leather once again, and said, “I’m glad you came back, Mr. Rhoades. I’m afraid I was very rude the last time. You’re trying to do a job. I appreciate that. It is in the interests of the industry to — make certain no one gets away with gem theft. And a so-called inside job is especially disheartening.”
“So-called?”
He paused, obviously choosing his words with care. He was wearing fawn slacks, a bushy white turtleneck, a long gold neck chain with a dangle of coins and gold replicas of animal teeth. “Miss Farley was such a scrupulous person. So loyal and reliable and thorough, I can’t help feeling that she was exposed to some terrible pressure from outside, somehow, to do what she did, some merciless form of blackmail.”
“You’ve heard about all the preparations she made, selling everything, moving?”
“Of course. We all had no idea site was doing anything like that. Of course, she would have had to disappear once she had stolen those thirty-two pieces.”
“With a man?”
He shrugged. “A blackmailer.”
“Or the fellow she fell in love with.”
“It is hard to see her in that light — throwing everything away for love.”