“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 between the beeps. Then Mara and I went back to her office to wait for Raina to telephone.
When she did, she greeted me with a question. “If DeVarnay went on to Denver, why are you still in St. Louis?”
“There are odds and ends that need cleaning up here,” I objected. “Did something happen that sent DeVarnay winging into the blue? Did he meet someone? It would be a great help to know why he’s on the run.”
“Tell Mara to give it another day and then report directly to me. I have something else for you. DeVarnay was carrying traveler’s checks, and he’s cashed some of them. Four that we know about. He always carried a small reserve of money in traveler’s checks when he traveled, five hundred dollars in fifty-dollar checks. They’re issued by a New Orleans bank, and four of them have been returned to the bank in the usual way.”
She dictated the names and addresses of the four firms that had cashed them and the dates they were cashed. When I finished writing, I looked at the list and whistled. Three of the checks had been cashed the day he disappeared: One in Denver, one in Reno, and a third in San Francisco. One was cashed in Seattle on the following day.
“Do you still want me to go to Denver?” I asked. “Obviously Seattle is the last place he surfaced—as far as we know—but that was two weeks ago. Today he may be cashing checks in Nome or Beijing.”
“I have someone trying to pick up his trail in Seattle. See what you can find out along the way.”
By then it was late afternoon, and the people DeVarnay had encountered in his travels would no longer be on duty. I stayed overnight in St. Louis, working with Mara in a vain attempt at finding out how DeVarnay spent his one free evening there.
The next morning, taking the same flight DeVarnay had, I was off on the next lap of the great DeVarnay goose chase. In Denver, no one at the gift shop that had cashed his traveler’s check remembered him. I asked about the shop’s procedure with traveler’s checks. The check had to be no larger than fifty dollars, and DeVarnay had to purchase something, show his driver’s license, and sign the check in the clerk’s presence.
He had parted company with MidAmerican Airlines when his plane landed, and no employee remembered him. After more recourse to airlines computers, I placed him on a Sierra Western flight bound for Reno. Again he paid for the ticket with cash.
He had taken an afternoon flight to Reno, and so did I. I spent the flight pondering his unnatural preference for small airlines. In Reno, he had cashed another traveler’s check—this time in a downtown casino where gamblers cash checks of all kinds as fast as they run out of money. He had shown his driver’s license and endorsed the check in the presence of the cashier. No one remembered him. I hoped he had taken time off from his frantic dash west to play a few slot machines. Otherwise, he wasn’t getting any more fun out of this trek than I was.
He had taken a Sierra Western night flight to San Francisco, and so did I. He had checked in at the Golden Sunset Motel near the airport, paying for one night with a traveler’s check plus some cash. I stayed at the same motel.
Early the next morning, which was a Saturday for me, I caught a Pacific Northern Airlines flight to Seattle, the same one DeVarnay had taken on Sunday two weeks earlier. The last traveler’s check we knew about had been cashed at an airport gift shop in the Seattle terminal.
Mort Morris, the Seattle agent for Lambert and Associates, met me at the airport. He was a big, bristly man with a disarming smile, and it was said he could talk his way through a brick wall. He had already done the obvious.
Marc DeVarnay had not booked any flight under his own name, nor had he rented a car or stayed at any hotel or motel near the airport or in downtown Seattle. We set about systematically eliminating everything that was left. That done, we started over again, and the next step was harder. Instead of merely asking about a name, one of us had to call personally and see if anyone recognized DeVarnay’s photo.
We had an almost nibble from a bus driver on the Los Angeles run. At first he thought he’d had DeVarnay as a passenger. Then he changed his mind.
And that was all. When we finished, Marc DeVarnay was just as thoroughly missing as he had been in the beginning. All we had established was that he now was missing from a different place.
On Wednesday night, precisely one week after she had cancelled my Savannah vacation, Raina Lambert telephoned. She listened to my report without comment. Very little can be said about a long, extremely thorough list of negatives.
“What do you think?” she asked finally.
“Is there any insanity in the DeVarnay family?”
“Not that I know of. What does that have to do with it?”
“There is now. No one but an insane person behaves this way.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I still think this search should have begun in New Orleans. DeVarnay very neatly led us all the way to Seattle and left us here. Then he went wherever he intended to go all along, using an assumed name.”
“So why look in New Orleans when he was last seen