After high school, she spent four years at the University of South Florida in Tampa, studying international affairs. She modeled for local boutiques and danced in a ballet troupe, with which she flew to New York for the first time. Hooked on the city, Gruart headed back after college, working as a hostess at several restaurants and trying to model.

In the fall of 1983, she was lured to Milan, where it was easier to get work. It was only six years since the top Italian design houses had relocated north from Florence, and the scene was still new and exciting. Gruart moved into a residence hotel in the heart of the old town and was signed by Why Not?, a small yet prominent agency. It was a glamorous life, but not entirely lucrative: Rates were often low, about $200 a show. What she made she rarely saved, splurging on outrageous clothes and accessories. "Whatever was hip, whatever was hot, fierce, whatever, Lourdes had to have it," says a friend.

Every night was the same for Gruart's crowd, starting with dinner at Leone's, a chic yet informal restaurant where they were welcome to stroll into the kitchen and check out what was cooking in the pots. It was all free for models, but Gruart rarely ate. "A little white wine and a pack of cigarettes," says a friend, makeup artist Donyale McRae. "Lourdes didn't eat -- she perched." Around midnight, the city's playboys would show up, adding table after table to the party before escorting the women to discos like Amnesia, Plastique, and La Penta. They came with drugs; Gruart would smoke the occasional joint, but chronic sinus problems kept her away from cocaine. "Lourdes was a party girl, but a party girl with restraint," says McRae. "She wasn't sleeping around, but she made herself available to get the weekend at Como, the fabulous dinners, the open door at the club."

She was still in town a year later as the city was convulsed by scandal when American model Terry Broome murdered Francesco D'Alessio, the son of a rich Italian horse breeder. D'Alessio, a mean-spirited womanizer, had told Broome's fiancé that she had participated in orgies; when the fiancé demanded his engagement ring back, Broome, wired on cocaine, shot D'Alessio at point-blank range in his apartment. The story made headlines around the world, and American models in Milan panicked as policemen began stopping them to check their I.D. cards, sending home those whose visas had expired.

Gruart hid in her hotel with her best friends, African-American models who were still a novelty in Italy. Like her, they hadn't landed editorial jobs or ad campaigns, but their strut on the runway was electric. "All Lourdes's friends were black divas, and yet she always fancied herself a blonde, blue-eyed, corn-fed-type girl," says a friend. She idolized big blondes like Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley. In Milan, Gruart denied that she was Cuban-American to all but her closest friends. She told everyone else that she was a Spanish princess.

"I'll do anything for money," says Gruart's brother, Mario. "I mean, I've done anything in the past."

A favorite on the runway of designers like Missoni, Fendi, and Valentino, Gruart soon found herself on the European modeling circuit -- Paris, Milan, sometimes even Tokyo. She rented an apartment in Paris in the 8th Arrondissement with Rebecca Ayoko, a popular St. Laurent model from Africa, and gained entrée to the highest echelon of the city's social world. Through Ayoko, Gruart became part of an "in" clique of black models including Iman, Grace Jones, Guinean model Katoucha, and Coco Mitchell, an ex-girlfriend of John DeLorian who would remain Gruart's friend for years. Gruart herself is said to have dated a slew of Persian playboys, as well as Gregory Peck's son Tony, and Stan Dragoti, Cheryl Tiegs's first husband, who was famously arrested en route to the Cannes Film Festival with 22 grams of cocaine in his suitcase and an ounce taped to his back. "She would never go out with just anybody," says a friend. "It always had to be a name. She'd say, 'If you can't do something for me, I don't want to know you.' "

By the late eighties, however, things had started to change. "Photo models started to realize that they could promote their careers on the runways," explains Michael Gross, author of Model. Mannequins like Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, and Cindy Crawford started to edge out career runway girls like Gruart. No one cared anymore how well you could swing a blazer over your shoulder or how adeptly you could unbutton a raincoat. Gruart was also keenly aware that she was starting to age, and even started to include tear sheets in her modeling book from another, younger model who resembled her, Patricia Hartmann. Finding less and less work available, Gruart moved back to America in 1988.

Her passport expired that year, too.

Gruart's apartment is on the fourth floor of a short tenement building on one of those way-east streets with a cleaner's halfway down the block and a pizzeria on the corner. The apartment is long and narrow, the size of half a subway car. There's no rug, no dinner table, nothing on the walls except for a dry brown leaf that hangs by a nail. Gruart didn't even hook up a phone, deciding to save money by using her cell phone instead. The television rests on a makeshift stack of Gruart's small collection of books: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; How to Get the Job You Really Want; The Nutrition Superbook; and Kevin Aucoin's Making Faces.

The only other book in Gruart's apartment is Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus Trilogy, but that belongs to Mario. "The thing I like to do with books," he explains, "is not really read them. I just open up to a certain page and look at the words there. Then I make up a poem with those words. I find that works better for me."

Mario speaks in a soft, calm voice as he sits cross-legged on the hardwood floor in Gruart's apartment, his long legs curled beneath him. He's a head-turner, with the high cheekbones and doe-eyed look of a model, his long brown hair hanging in a loose ponytail over the shoulder of a bright-orange fleece pullover. When he moved up to New York from Florida six years ago, Gruart sent him to Boss Models, Marcus Schenkenberg's agency at the time, and though it's said they liked his tests, he never followed through.

Although Gruart was already away at college by the time Mario was 4, she is said to have had warm feelings toward her brother. When he couldn't scrape together the money to move out of their parents' home, Gruart lent him $1,000 so he could move to Miami, then $500 a week later when he had blown it all. "It was always, 'Oh, Mario, he's still finding himself,' " says a friend. "But she also said that he had the most terrifying temper."

On this sunny afternoon nearly three weeks after Gruart's disappearance, Mario has been sleeping in her bed, an unmade queen-size with beige sheets that hardly fits in her tiny bedroom. In fact, he's made quite a mark on the place. Among many changes, Mario has moved Gruart's glass coffee table into a corner of the living room, covering the surface with a tableau of 50 or so of his knickknacks: Buddha figurines, slate-gray rocks he collected from the Central Park lake, a knotted lock of his hair. "I put all that out to please my own eyes," he says by way of explanation. Anything personal of Gruart's, like her modeling book, he's stuck underneath the kitchen sink.