“Does she resemble your daughter?” I asked. “She doesn’t look anything like my daughter. Why? Who is she? I thought you had news of Marilyn. Don’t you? Dick? I don’t understand.”
She handed the sketch to her husband, who held it with both hands, then drew back from it, turned it over, and put it facedown on the table in front of him.
“Mrs. Varick, this is a drawing of an unidentified woman whose remains were found a few days ago in San Francisco. I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you —”
“Don’t worry, it’s not my daughter,” Mrs. Varick said, her voice getting high. “Wait here. I’ll show you my daughter.”
Virginia Varick left the room, and I said to her husband, “When was the last time you saw Marilyn?”
“We haven’t seen her in two years.”
“And why is that?”
“She didn’t want to see us,” Dick Varick told me. He was clasping his hands tightly together. His knuckles were white, his complexion gray. “I think she was doing drugs. She called from time to time and my wife and I would talk to her for ten or fifteen minutes, although Ginny and I did most of the talking.
“Marilyn said she was fine. And she asked us not to try to find her. We looked for her anyway, but she’d gone underground. None of her old friends had
seen her or knew where she lived.”
I said, “Did something happen at about the time she stopped seeing you? An incident or trauma?”
“Nothing that I know of,” Varick said to me.
“I need something of hers that might contain her DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush. Maybe a hat.”
“We don’t have anything like that. She never lived here.”
Virginia Varick returned to the room carrying an enormous blue-leather-bound scrapbook. She sat on a footstool, opened the book, and turned it so that I could see the pages.
I recognized many of the photos, but others were new to me; family photos with her parents, her dog, boyfriends, all of which made me wonder how it was that no one had identified her when the Chronicle had run the sketch.
Had Marilyn changed so much?
Was the sketch a poor likeness of Marilyn Varick?
Or had Harry Chandler’s assistant been wrong when she identified the person in this sketch as Marilyn Varick?
I scrutinized the photos Ginny Varick showed me, and I was convinced they were of the same person as the one in the drawing. Virginia Varick just didn’t want to face the truth.
“She was a beautiful young woman,” I said.
The anguished woman stood up and snarled at me, “Don’t say was. She is a beautiful woman. I told you, whoever this person is, she’s not my Marilyn.”
Chapter 46
DICK VARICK REACHED OUT for his wife, but she drew away. He said, “Ginny, you haven’t seen Marilyn in a long time. Listen, I brought her some money about eight months ago. She didn’t want me to tell you.”
“You saw her? And you didn’t tell me?”
“She was in bad shape, dear. She was high and talking crazy. She wouldn’t come home. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t let me get her any help. She said all she needed was a loan. I gave her a thousand bucks. She called us twice after that, so I knew she was okay.”
Ginny Varick put her hands to her mouth and then ran from the room.
Dick Varick stood, jammed his hands into his pants pockets, and walked to one of the glass walls. He looked out at the Japanese maples and the sharp shadows they cast across the back lawn. Then he turned to face me.
“I’m sorry I lied to you about not having seen her. I didn’t want to tell Ginny. And now I have, in the worst possible way.”
“So this drawing is of Marilyn?” I asked.