do you make of it?” I asked Mara.
“It’s an either-or case,” she said.
“Explain yourself.”
“Either something drastic has happened to him, or there are secrets in his life no one knows anything about.”
“Or both,” I suggested. “The place to begin looking for a missing New Orleans businessman should have been New Orleans, not St. Louis.”
The photos had arrived when we reached her office, and both of us took time to study them. Marc DeVarnay certainly was a fine-appearing man. He was clean-shaven, his thick, dark hair had just the right stylish suggestion of a wave, and—as the fact sheet indicated—he appeared to be in robust good health. He also appeared to be the intense type of person who takes himself and life much too seriously, but a shy smile in one of the photos made me wonder whether he might be concealing a sense of humor. He looked much too open and forthright to be a successful businessman, but that could have been an asset for him.
We started at his hotel. Since there already had been inquiries by the St. Louis police at the request of the New Orleans police, our visit surprised no one. The attitude was a resigned, “Here we go again.” His photo was duly studied and identified; his registration card, a copy of which we already had in his dossier, was displayed. The signature matched as well as signatures usually match. He had stayed there several times before but at long enough intervals so that no one remembered him. The hotel staff couldn’t say whether he had behaved normally, but it found him a pleasant guest who caused no problems and tipped generously. He had checked in late that Wednesday night, he was out all day on Thursday as far as anyone knew, and he checked out and left early Friday morning.
DeVarnay had taken a cab to the airport, and the St. Louis police had located the driver and talked with him. He recognized DeVarnay’s photo and also the description of the leather suitcase. The one thing he remembered vividly was that when they reached the airport, DeVarnay had given the skycaps the brush-off and entered the terminal building carrying the leather suitcase himself—which surprised the cab driver. DeVarnay obviously was capable of carrying a suitcase, if he wanted to, or even two or three of them, but he had seemed like an affluent type who would disdain such drudgery.
Our next stop was the auction house. The Forsythe Galleries were a trendy art merchandising establishment. I disliked them the moment I walked through the door, and I disliked Jeremy Forsythe, its owner/manager, even more. He was the prissy kind of businessman—small mustache; small smile; small, evasive eyes. His galleries seemed to be hugely successful, but I wouldn’t have bought anything at all with confidence there, not even a da Vinci cosigned by Michelangelo with an attestation of authenticity from Rembrandt.
He was candid enough with us. “I know all about it—the police were asking,” he said. “Certainly DeVarnay was here. I remember him only too well. Since he was going to disappear anyway, I wish he’d done it earlier—before he screwed up my auction.”
We asked him what he meant by that.
“DeVarnay has a reputation,” he said. “He’s rich, he’s built a very nice business in a short time, and he’s maybe the country’s foremost Mallard collector. Supposedly he’s also an important authority on Mallard. I’d never met him before, but I’d heard all about him.”
Both Mara and I wanted to know who or what Mallard was.
“Prudent Mallard was a famous nineteenth-century New Orleans furniture maker,” Forsythe said condescendingly. “We don’t see much of his work this far north, but he’s very popular with New Orleans collectors. I’d managed to pick up five exceptional items, all in excellent condition, along with a few minor things, so I put them in a private auction with other pieces I’d been holding back. It was a special sale for serious Midwest collectors—admission by invitation only—and I invited DeVarnay and a few other out-of-state dealers and collectors I knew were interested in the type of things I was offering. The Mallard items were so good I thought DeVarnay would bid up the prices, in which case our local collectors, seeing how interested a big wheel like him was, would try to buy them themselves. Instead, he did very little bidding—he made a few cursory passes at the main Mallard pieces and then dropped out. That was his privilege. Unfortunately, I’d made the mistake of puffing him in advance, and because the out-of-town expert obviously wasn’t interested, the local people thought there must be something wrong with the items, and they wouldn’t bid, either. It was almost a disaster. Just to add insult to injury, DeVarnay suddenly came to life almost at the end and bought a small nightstand, a throwaway item, for more than it was worth.”
“You say you’d never met DeVarnay?”
“No, and I hope I never meet him again. The police showed me his photo,” he added when Mara pulled one out of her envelope. “That’s him. He was here, but I can’t imagine why he came. He thoroughly screwed up my auction by an almost total lack of interest even though he did buy one item.”
“How did he pay for it?” I asked.
“In cash, and he arranged to have it shipped to his store in New Orleans. Then he left. Where he went from here was no concern of mine and still isn’t.”
Back in the car, Mara paused before starting the motor. “He could have been preoccupied by something—the question of whether he was going to disappear, for example. Or where he was going to disappear to. That would account for the inexplicable behavior.”
“Perhaps so. But in that case, why bother to attend the auction at all?”
“Because he was expected to. Or because he hadn’t made up his mind.”
“There’s another explanation. Forsythe had DeVarnay set up to make a sucker of him. DeVarnay was supposed to function as a shill and bid the prices up, and if he wanted something himself, he would have to pay through his nose. DeVarnay saw what was going on and refused to play. Buying a nondescript nightstand at the end was his way of thumbing his nose at Forsythe. That’s one possibility. It’s also possible that DeVarnay really is an expert, and those fine items weren’t nearly as good as Forsythe represented them to be.”
“What would that have to do with his disappearance?”
“Perhaps nothing. Up to the point Friday morning when he entered the airport terminal carrying his own suitcase, he hadn’t disappeared. He was right where he was supposed to be. His disappearance happened after that.”
“I suppose he could have rented a car or met someone—”
“Or taken a different plane from the one he was supposed to take. This is where we go to work.”
How much of a problem you have finding traces of a person who passed through a place two weeks earlier depends on the place. With a village on the edge of an outback, which sees on the average one strange face a month, you probably won’t have much difficulty. With an airport serving a metropolis, with thousands of people passing through it daily if not hourly, you’ll have a job on your hands.
No one we talked with remembered Marc DeVarnay. Eventually the airlines’ computers saved us, but it took time. It was early afternoon before we established that he had left St. Louis on a MidAmerican flight to Denver, traveling under his own name, shortly before he was supposed to depart for New Orleans. He bought his ticket with cash.
At that point I needed instructions. I telephoned Raina Lambert at her work number in Minneapolis and dictated a report to her answering machine. It wasn’t a long report, but I had to call her back twice in order to get it finished
