Feature

The Model Vanishes

Panicked that she had missed out on her last opportunity to marry well, Gruart became obsessed with winning Khashoggi's affections. With Fletcher in tow, she would spend afternoons in Barneys looking for the perfect frock to make him fall at her feet. She'd plot for hours at Indochine, where she ate a light supper of egg rolls and champagne once a week. She even began calling her aunt in Miami for tarot-card readings -- Khashoggi loved her, said the aunt, but someone was "standing in her way."

Soon she had an idea of who that person might be. A couple of sublets after she left Jordan's apartment, Gruart moved into Murray Hill with a redheaded Midwesterner who she thought was into Santería, the African-based religion that some of her Cuban relatives practiced. Convinced that the woman was performing rituals to prevent her from obtaining Khashoggi's love, Gruart forced her out of the apartment. She liked her next roommate even less. This one, she was certain, was a lesbian who was in love with her. Sick with nervousness about why things were going wrong in her life, Gruart no longer trusted anyone. "All these bitches are bringing me down," she'd say. "They're after my man, my frocks, my head."

Friends attribute Gruart's increasing sense of paranoia to a bigger problem, one that she could not make go away: Her modeling career was coming to an end. "People started to say, 'Now, how old is Lourdes really?' " says a friend. "Mama ain't 26 no more, and she ain't 36 neither." She had started to worry about her looks, complaining about age spots, saggy skin on her elbows, and spending hours putting herself together. No longer always able to afford her favorite salon, Warren Tricomi, Gruart settled for haircuts at places like Vidal Sassoon's training school, and she was often unhappy with the results. "She was so self-absorbed, but so insecure!" says photographer and ex-model Yvonne Allaway, a friend. "It was really sad. Girl needed to get a grip."

Allaway helped Gruart write a résumé, her first, and through an old contact she landed a job with a head-hunting firm, the Saxon Group, in 1998. Remaking herself called for a new name, and Gruart rechristened herself "Lori." "She was so excited," says Fletcher. "She kept saying, 'I'm going to work on Wall Street,' even though the office was on Lex and 52nd." Her salary was $25,000 a year, though Gruart thought she'd make $70,000 with bonuses; but the work was harder than she'd imagined, and she became despondent. "Anything I told her to do, she was giving me a frown and a fight. She'd say, 'Whatever, whatever,' " says Stephen Sacks, president of the Saxon Group. "Finally, I said, 'Lori, it's obvious that you're not happy. Would you like to leave?' " Gruart cleaned out her desk, but not without telling friends she'd sue for her 70 grand.

Increasingly sure that she needed a man to put things right, Gruart began visiting an elderly Spanish woman off Fordham Road who practiced Santería. She asked the woman to put a spell on Khashoggi or her newest crush, Barneys scion Gene Pressman, whom she'd started to fixate on after she applied for a job as a greeter at Barneys in 1998. "She felt that if Mohamed didn't come through, she always had Gene," says a friend. After the visits, say friends, Gruart would buy herbs and candles at a nearby botanica for her nightly rituals to appease the goddess of love and beauty. She would burn a yellow candle with the men's names on a slip of paper underneath it while drinking a glass of wine.

Gruart's trips to the Bronx became a monthly event, and then a weekly one. Even after she found a new job, at Winston, she'd insist that friends like McRae accompany her on her days off. Afterward, they would return to McRae's Harlem brownstone for a powwow about Khashoggi, trolling the Web on his computer for new information. "She'd print out a picture of him from some Website and say, 'Didn't he look good, he had lost weight, he's wearing funkier clothing,' " says McRae. "She had the idea that Adnan was going to send him to do a venture in Cuba, and she'd help out down there." Yet several days after one of their marathon rap sessions, Gruart called a mutual friend in Spain to complain that McRae was not being supportive of her interest in Khashoggi because he wanted him for himself.

"And here I am in this seven-year relationship," says McRae, a good-looking, well-built black man with long dreadlocks. "But I want Mohamed for myself. Right." He lights a cigarette and leans back on a red damask couch in his gingerbread mansion of a home, with purple walls and a signed photo of Esther Williams on the mantelpiece. "Lourdes just didn't understand that it wasn't '83 and she wasn't on the runways," he sighs. "She wasn't the center of attention, and she couldn't take it."

McRae's roommate is a beat cop, and after he changes from sweats into his uniform he comes over with a book in his hand, Gay Talese's The Overreachers. He points to a passage: They make the same mistakes, the same stupid, reckless, dramatic, wonderful mistakes. They take that extra step; dive too deep, climb too far, get too grabby with the gods. "Read this," he says. "And you'll understand Lourdes."

Late on November 14, exactly a month after Gruart's disappearance, Mario is hanging out in her apartment, padding around in white socks, running shorts, and the same orange fleece jacket he was wearing a week before. Though his Star Wars figures are still vigilant on the window ledge, he's moved all the rest of his tchotchkes to the kitchen counter and fanned out Gruart's collection of Bloomingdale's catalogues and old Allure magazines on the coffee table, the way it was before she left. "I'm trying to get things ready for when my sister comes back," he says. "It's probably soon. She said several weeks."

Several weeks sounds quite different from the couple he had initially told the police. "Oh, I don't know about words," says Mario. "Words don't mean anything to me." He gets upset when asked more questions, and refuses to let a photographer take any pictures of the apartment, himself, or Gruart's modeling book, which he promised he would allow earlier that day. "The police were here last night, poking around," he complains, a flicker of anger crossing his face. "My sister said she was going to Europe on a job opportunity. That's all I know. Now could the lot of you roll out of here?"

The idea that Gruart could have actually done as Mario says, however, is little solace to their mother. "We talked each week," she moans. "She never went anywhere without telling me. I was visiting her for Thanksgiving -- what, she forgot it? No." Nor is it much comfort to her friends. "Job opportunity?" cries McRae. "What job opportunity was there for a 46-year-old model in Europe?" No one can believe that Gruart would have gone anywhere without picking up her last check from Winston: "That girl would fly back from Paris to get a penny if she was owed it," claims a friend.

Other friends, former models, point to her delusions about men and her depression. They talk about how a working model called her in early October to offer her some clothes she'd been given by a designer, but Gruart, who would normally "pounce" on such things, never returned the call. She acted odd a few months ago at an informal modeling gig at Bergdorf's, "lethargic, not herself, like she was on something." They say she seemed so blue that she could have simply up and left town, deciding either to start over or end it all.

Another theory that has been floated is that Gruart's desperation had led her to another line of work: prostitution. She would sometimes go out until extremely late, says Mario, and the fact that all of her underwear, bras, and makeup are missing supports the notion that she may have led a double life, with an apartment somewhere else that she worked out of. She was aggressive in courting attention at hotel bars like the St. Regis, says one man, to the point where she nearly humiliated herself. A friend who did her makeup for one of her last test shots points out that he was asked to leave during the shoot, and suggests that something sexual might have been going on. "It happens," he says, shrugging.

"No way," says Fletcher, aghast. "That girl was collecting cobwebs waiting for those fantasy guys. I was telling her, 'Bitch, you need to buy a dildo or something because you got to get laid!' It's not that she wasn't into kinky sex -- she wasn't into sex." He sighs. "What a mess. Maybe Mario fed her to the snakes."

Mario, at this point, is no longer a suspect. He might've been wrong about Europe because he was too out-of-it to understand what Gruart was really saying; the police have even stopped looking for the couch, deeming it "irrelevant." "Is it weird that your sister disappears and you move around her stuff, maybe even throw stuff out?" asks a detective. "Yes. Is it a crime? No." He sighs. "At this point, we got nothing. A total mystery."

There's always one other possibility: Gruart could have found the man she was looking for, the one who would make up for all the disappointments of the past years, who could give her the jet-set life she'd always craved. Unsurprisingly, Mario is willing to buy into this theory. "In my mind, I'm thinking she's gone off with one of her rich boyfriends," he says. "Manhattan is an opportunist world, people coming from all over the place looking for entertainment, for a companion, for all things that are pleasing. Maybe she met one of them." Perhaps she's off with him right now, sailing the Greek Islands in a big white yacht, lingering over a ten-course dinner with a group of dashing, fascinating people, their chatter spreading out over the sea as the sun goes down.

"You go, girl," says a friend, weighing the possibility that Lourdes might be out there somewhere, finally living the high life. "Whip 'em all."

If you have any information about Lourdes Gruart, please call 800-577-tips. Anonymous calls are accepted.