Toby Grissom pushed open the door of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan and, ignoring the comings and goings in the busy reception area, approached the sergeant behind the desk.
“I’m Toby Grissom,” he began timidly, but there was nothing timid in his voice when he added, “My daughter is missing and I think some big shot interior decorator may be the reason for it.”
The sergeant looked at him. “How old is your daughter?”
“Thirty last month.”
The sergeant did not show the relief he felt. He’d been afraid that it might be another case of a young teenage runaway who sometimes gets picked up by a pimp and ends up a hooker or disappearing for good. “Mr. Grissom, if you’ll just take a seat, I’ll ask one of our detectives to take down the information.”
There were a couple of benches in the area near the desk. Toby, his wool cap in hand, a manila envelope under his arm, sat on one of them and watched with detached curiosity as uniformed cops went in and out of the building, sometimes accompanying people in handcuffs.
Fifteen minutes later, a large-framed man in his midthirties with thinning blond hair and a quiet manner approached Toby. “Mr. Grissom, I’m Detective Wally Johnson. Sorry to keep you waiting. If you’ll follow me to my desk, we can talk.”
Obediently Toby stood up. “I’m used to waiting,” he said. “Seems to me I’ve been waiting for one thing or another most of my life.”
“I think we all have times when we feel like that,” Wally Johnson agreed. “It’s this way.”
The detective’s desk was one of many in a large, cluttered room. Most of the desks were empty, but the files strewn on them suggested that each of the missing occupants was actively working cases.
“We got lucky,” Johnson said as, arriving at his desk, he pulled up a chair beside it. “I not only got promoted to being next to the window with the view, such as it is, but it’s one of the quieter spots in the whole precinct.”
Toby did not know where he got his courage to speak up. “Detective Johnson, I don’t really care if you like where you sit. I’m here because my daughter is missing, and I think either something has happened to her, or she’s mixed up in some kind of trouble that she has to get out of.”
“Can you explain what you mean by that, Mr. Grissom?”
By now, after visiting Bartley Longe’s office and speaking with the two young women Glory had been living with when she disappeared, Toby felt as though he could not go through the full story again. But that’s crazy, he told himself. If I don’t come across to this detective as a guy to believe, he’ll just blow me off.
“My daughter’s legal name is Margaret Grissom,” he began. “I always called her Glory because she was such a glorious, beautiful baby, if you know what I mean. She left Texas when she was eighteen to come to New York. She wanted to be an actress. She won best actress in the senior play at her high school.”
Oh God, Johnson thought, how many of those kids who were best actress in the school play come running to New York? Talk about the “field of dreams.” It was an effort to keep his mind on what Grissom was telling him, about his daughter taking the name of Brittany La Monte, and what a good person she was. She was so pretty she was offered jobs in porno films but wouldn’t touch them, how she got started doing makeup because that way she could make enough money to support herself and even send nice little gifts to him on his birthday and Christmas. And—
It was time for Johnson to interrupt. “You say she came to New York twelve years ago. How many times have you seen her since then?”
“Five times. Like clockwork. Glory always spent Christmas with me every other year. Except almost two years ago this coming June, she phoned and said she wouldn’t be coming next Christmas. She said she was working on a new job that was real hush-hush, but that she’d be getting paid a lot of money for it. When I asked if she was talking about some guy keeping her, she said, ‘No, Daddy, no, I promise you.’ ”
And he believes that, Wally Johnson thought sympathetically.
“She said that she had an advance payment for the job and was giving almost all of it to me. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Can you imagine? It was to be sure I wouldn’t need anything, because she had to be out of touch. I thought maybe she was working for the CIA or something.”
Or more likely, Margaret-Glory-Brittany found herself a billionaire, Detective Johnson thought.
“The last I heard from her was a postcard from New York six months ago saying that the job was taking longer than she expected and that she was worried about me and missed me,” Grissom continued. “That’s why I finally came to New York. I got some real bad news from my doctor, and besides that I have a feeling now that maybe somebody is holding Glory somewhere. I went to see the girls she shared an apartment with and they told me that this big shot designer was snowing her about how he’d introduce her to theatre people and make her a star. He made her go up to his house in Connecticut on weekends so she could meet important people.”
“Who was this designer, Mr. Grissom?”
“Bartley Longe. He has fancy offices on Park Avenue.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“He gave me the same line he gave Glory. He told me that he hired her as a kind of model when he was showing off places he’d decorated and he’d introduced her to a lot of theatre big shots. But they all told him that Glory didn’t have what it takes, and finally he couldn’t pester people about her anymore. And according to him, that was that.”
And it probably was, Wally Johnson thought. The usual thing. The guy promises her the moon, has a little fling, gets tired of her, and tells her not to bother showing up at his place next weekend.
“Mr. Grissom, I’m going to follow up on this, but I warn you that I’m afraid that we’re not going to get very far. I’m more interested in the job your daughter was so mysterious about. Is there anything more specific you know about it?”
“Not a thing,” Toby Grissom said.
As he asked the question, Wally Johnson felt like a phony. I’d be better off telling this poor old guy that his daughter is a hooker who got involved with some guy, and it’s worth her while to stay under the radar, he thought.
Nevertheless, he asked the usual perfunctory questions. Height. Weight. Color of eyes. Color of hair.
“All this is on Glory’s publicity shots,” Toby Grissom said. “Maybe you’d like one.” He reached into the envelope he was carrying and brought out a half dozen eight-by-ten photographs. “You know, they want the girls to look kind of sweet and innocent in one picture, and kind of sexy in another, and if they have short hair like Glory, they try them with different wigs or extensions or whatever you call that stuff.”
Wally Johnson rifled through the photos. “She is very pretty,” he said sincerely.
“Yeah, I know. I mean, I always liked her better with long hair, but she said that it’s easier to have good wigs ’cause you can be anybody you want.”
“Mr. Grissom, why don’t you leave me the photograph with the montage showing her in her different poses. That will be more useful to us.”
“Of course.” Toby Grissom stood up. “I’m going back to Texas. I need my chemo treatments. They won’t save my life, I guess, but maybe they will keep me alive long enough to see my Glory.” He started to walk away, then came back to Johnson’s desk. “You will talk to that Bartley Longe?”
“Yes, I will. And if anything develops we’ll be in touch with you, I promise.”
Wally Johnson tucked Margaret-Glory-Brittany’s glossy photo montage under the clock on the corner of his desk. His gut instinct was that the young woman was alive and well and probably involved in something dirty, if not illegal.
I’ll give that Longe guy a call, Johnson thought, then I’ll put Glory’s picture where it belongs, in the dead letter file.