Another nod, and she went out, leaving the two of us. “I get the idea that you wanted to get rid of her,” Lily said, narrowing her eyes.
“Was I that obvious?”
“Oh, I suppose not, at least to anyone but me. I figure that you want to have free rein to go through Lily’s private quarters, right?”
“You have found me out. I assume you’ve been in this part of Miss Carr’s residence.”
“Yes, but only a few times.”
“Does she have some sort of an office?”
“Oh, she does, right through here,” Lily said, opening a door on the far side of the bedroom. Referring to the room we entered as an office would be doing it an injustice. As spacious as the bedroom, it contained among other items a dark wood rolltop desk with pigeonholes that looked like it belonged to a small-town banker. Next to the desk was a wooden, three-drawer filing cabinet of the same vintage as the desk.
“These certainly don’t seem to go with the rest of the decor I’ve seen so far,” I said to Lily, gesturing to the desk and cabinet.
“Maureen told me once that these belonged to her father, the Pennsylvania steel man, and she keeps them to honor his memory, much like I have a gallery of photos of my own father from when he was building all those sewers that run under Manhattan.”
“Makes sense. Now if you don’t have any objection, I’m going through the desk and the files.”
“I have no objection whatever. Do you need some help?”
“Yes, let’s take a look at what we find together,” I said as I pulled open the center desk drawer, which contained only a few recent press clippings from New York papers in a manila folder. I showed them to Lily.
“I have several of these, too,” she said. “They are all items, mostly in the newspapers’ society pages, about events held by some of the organizations we both are involved in. Maureen and I, along with the others in our women’s circle, love to see publicity, not as much for our own egos but because we have found that these stories about our events end up drawing in new volunteers — and financial gifts, as well.”
“Admirable,” I said, checking the pigeonholes but finding nothing in them other than a couple of playbills from recent Broadway shows. “Tell me about Maureen’s social life,” I asked Lily.
“Since her divorce from Corcoran, she has gone out with probably at least a half-dozen men.”
“I am not surprised. Anyone in particular she’s serious about?”
“I’m not sure. Maureen doesn’t talk a lot about the men she sees. You’ve probably run into one or more of them in gatherings at my place.”
“Now that you mention it, I have. I ran into an ad man there named Eric one night. Very extroverted, hardly surprising for someone in advertising. It’s easy to see how he could make a hit with the clients that the agency is trying to land.”
“Yes, I’ve met him several times,” Lily said, “tall, well dressed, and full of smiles, last name Mason, and he wears a tuxedo well. I remember running into them at the opera. I’m not sure whether he and Maureen are still an item, although they very well might be.”
“After she got divorced, she returned to using her maiden name,” I observed.
“Actually, Maureen never changed her last name. She is what you would call a modern — and independent — woman in that respect, meaning that she is not about to take a man’s name just because she has married him.”
“Hmm. What is your opinion on that subject?”
“I applaud the lady’s stance.”
“Good to know... Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything of help for us in the desk, so I’m going to tackle the filing cabinet,” I said, pulling open the top drawer and taking out a batch of neatly labeled manila folders. I spread them out on a small table on the other side of the room.
“Okay, let’s find out what we can,” I told Lily.
“I really feel strange about this, as though I am somehow a trespasser.”
“I can understand that, but what you call ‘trespassing’ may be the only way we have right now of learning what has happened to a very good friend of yours.” She nodded her agreement, and we began wading through the file folders.
Chapter 3
Maureen turned out to be very thorough in her record keeping, which did not surprise Lily, who said, “She has always been very precise and efficient in everything she does.”
Her precision, admirable though it was, did nothing to help us learn anything as to her possible whereabouts. Although Maureen was a wealthy woman, she was not careless with money, and she was very meticulous in putting down every dollar she spent, from four-figure designer gowns to eight-dollar lunches, as we found in reviewing her receipts.
“You look troubled, my dear,” Lily said after I had waded through the last of the folders in the filing cabinet.
“What I had hoped to find, either in the desk or in the files, was a datebook, or at least a schedule of her activities,” I said.
“She probably took it with her,” Lily said, but then she snapped her fingers and slapped her forehead lightly. “Of course — I have been a fool, and so have you, although you should be more ashamed than me, having searched through so many homes and offices in the past. It’s back to the bedroom for us.”
I followed Lily, and of course quickly realized what she was talking about. She went straight to the elegant white nightstand with an elegant lamp next to the bed and pulled open the drawer, tossing aside a black sleeping mask and a couple of bottles of pills before holding up a small book, white, of course, and looking at me from over her shoulder with what I would best describe as a triumphant smile.
“The shame is on both of us for not thinking about that nightstand right away,” she said as we sat side by side on the bed and began paging through the personal journal, working backward from the last entry, which was more than two weeks ago.
That last entry, on a Thursday, was Katonah weekend, written in her finishing school cursive. “Well, you know that one,” Lily said. “The gathering that Maureen never showed up for.”
“Yeah, and everything covering the last two weeks-plus is blank.”
“We flipped to the next-to-last notation, on a Wednesday: Met Opera, Tannhäuser, L.T. “Any ideas who this L.T. is?”
Lily thought for a second, forehead creased, and said, “It must be Lloyd Thorne. I didn’t realize she had been seeing him anymore.”
“What can you tell me about the man?” I asked, sliding my notebook out of a pocket.
“I met him only once, at a single mothers’ benefit at my place, several months ago. You weren’t there that night because you had your weekly poker game at Saul Panzer’s. Thorne seemed like an amiable fellow, a patent attorney at one of the big, prestigious firms in Midtown.”
“Any idea how Maureen feels about him?”
Lily shrugged. “Maureen always has been circumspect in discussing her social life. She dates a lot, which should not surprise you, especially given how impressed you seemed to be with her.”
“Merely an objective observation,” I replied.
“You did not seem so very objective at that Waldorf cocktail party raising money for women’s shelters. You spent so much time in a corner talking to Maureen that I had to break up your tête-à-tête and remind you both to circulate.”
“She was just curious about how a private detective works, and to be polite, I was telling her about some of my experiences.”
“Okay, that explanation is almost plausible,” she said. “Let’s get back to work.”
We came across a variety of appointments — hairdresser, massage, dress fitting — and meetings, some of which Lily recognized: “BCR, that’s Breast Cancer Research, WRO, Women’s Rights Organization. I was at that session; I remember it was right here, on Maureen’s terrace.”