Page 109 of Sunset Beach
“Mastry’s Bar? I’ve been there,” Drue said.
“It was not at all the kind of place we usually went to back then,” Vera said primly. “I think we were the only women in there that day. A very blue-collar kind of place, and maybe it was a cop hangout too. I remember, Colleen got up to go to the bathroom, and she stopped to talk to these two young officerswho were sitting at the end of the bar. I remember asking her why she didn’t introduce me to them. After all, I was single at the time.”
“Did she say who they were?”
“I think she said they were just making idle conversation. Sort of hitting on her,” Vera said. “It was so long ago. And it was just that one time.”
She reached for the yearbook and paged back to the senior class pictures. She tapped a fingertip on Brice Campbell’s photo, then looked up at Drue. “I can’t swear it was him that day, but I can’t swear that it wasn’t, either. You don’t happen to have a photo of this Jimmy Zee, do you?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“No problem.” Vera rolled the tray with her laptop over to the lounge chair. “How do you spell that last name?”
“Z-I-L-O-W-I-C-Z,” Drue said.
Vera opened the cover and began typing at an impressive clip.
“Ah,” she said, a moment later. She swiveled the screen so that Drue could see. It was a photo of a smiling Jimmy Zee, dressed in his characteristic black polo shirt, shaking hands with a white-haired man in a dress shirt.
VETERAN POLICE DETECTIVE RECEIVES AWARDwas the caption under the photo.
“That must have been taken when he retired a few years ago,” Drue said.
Vera clicked her cursor until she came to a 1978 photo of a much younger version of Jimmy Zee. The black-and-white photo showed him as a stern-faced man, wearing a coat and tie in which he looked supremely uncomfortable. His hair was thick, and his jowls were nonexistent.
“Very Jack Webb,” Vera murmured.
“Who?”
Vera smiled. “Dragnet.I suppose you weren’t even born then.”
“Do you think he was one of the cops Colleen talked to that day at Mastry’s?” Drue asked.
“I wish I could say,” Vera said. She closed the laptop. “Back to your father. Was he by any chance a patient at our office?”
“Um, I don’t know,” Drue said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Vera said. “Dr. Garber has been dead a long time now. We girls all thought he was ancient back then, but he was barely fifty. A heart attack took him, poor man.”
She leaned back against the recliner’s headrest. “The police hounded all of us, for months and months after Colleen disappeared. It affected the dental practice. People were asking questions that we couldn’t answer. There was a lot of innuendo. We lost several patients. It was unbelievably upsetting. Particularly for poor Dr. Garber. The police were convinced he was having an affair with her.”
“Was he?”
Vera laughed. “He was having an affair, all right, but not with Colleen. He had a young boyfriend, a waiter who worked at Ten Beach Drive, that was a nightclub back in the day. It all came out when the police started digging around. When Dr. Garber’s wife found out, she left him and took the girls with her. The poor man was shattered.”
“Mrs. Rennick?”
“Vera.”
“You said you thought at first that Colleen had run away. Is that still your theory?”
“Haven’t you read my blog? I’ve laid it out very succinctly.”
“Forgive me, but I just discovered the blog last night. I only had time to skim.”
“I think it was Allen,” she said finally.
Drue leaned forward. “But I thought he had an alibi. Wasn’t he down in the Keys on a fishing trip?”
