I was only slightly soaked by the time I plopped down in the uncomfortable green chair next to Kim Banner’s desk. Kim Banner was not at her desk. The sergeant up front said she was meeting with “the boss” and would be available soon. He knows me, by sight at least, so he gave me a visitor’s badge and admission to the sanctum sanctorum rather than making me wait up front with the great unwashed. I drank piss-warm gritty brown water from a Styrofoam cup and waited.
The wait wasn’t long. Banner edged into the three-walled cubicle—the cubicle was small; edging was the only way to get in—and plopped into a well-worn swivel chair that squealed alarmingly when plopped into.
“Well, then, Sherlock,” she said with an attempt at levity that didn’t quite come off. “What’s news?”
“Not much. Is this a bad time?”
“Of course.” She tossed her dark-blond head in the general direction of her lieutenant’s office. “He’s being his usual pain-in-the-ass self.”
“I heard that, detective,” came a male voice from somewhere in the maze of cubicles.
“You were supposed to, Giannini.”
Banner faced me with a look that could melt titanium and scrubbed a hand through her short mop of hair. She’s a compact woman, Kim Banner, with small, sharp features and a throaty rasp of a voice and an easy, sure confidence in herself and her abilities. That last quality makes her easy to work with. Competent people always are easy to work with, since competence means not only technical proficiency but also a consuming interest in getting the job done and done well. The guy who’s “good at what he does but impossible to get along with” is, ipso facto, not good at what he does.
I said, “I’ll just say what I have to say, then get out of Dodge, as Marshal Dillon always said.”
“Maybe a good idea,” Banner said, the steam still rising off her.
I filled her in fast about Donna Berens and the missing Meredith. Banner is a good cop; I didn’t need to connect all of the dots for her to see the picture. I’d known her for less than a year, but we had had occasion to work together two or three times, and we’d seen each other socially, as the saying goes, two or three times, and we were pretty much on the same wavelength. Which helps.
“Tell the mom to come in tomorrow and file an MP,” Banner advised.
“She won’t. She doesn’t want the police involved.”
“I guess that explains what you’re doing here.”
“You know how it is. Mom’s writing the checks, but it’s the kid who needs the help. Probably. I told Donna Berens that I wouldn’t go against her wishes as far as OPD is concerned—but I meant officially.”
“And I guess that explains why you’re talking to a homicide cop about a missing person.”
“I need to know about any Jane Does. Would’ve turned up last night or today. Cauc, twenty-five, brown hair, brown eyes, five-six or five-eight, say a hundred and ten. Here.” I handed over the picture of Meredith Berens.
“Cute kid. Hang on a sec.”
She lifted the handset on the black desk phone and punched in two digits. “Leroy? Kim Banner. Not too bad. Listen, Leroy, I need a Jane Doe from yesterday or today.” She repeated the telegraphic description I had given her. “Uh-huh. Anything from the hospitals?” Her gray eyes came to me. “He’s checking. How’s the literary life? I shouldn’t say so, but when you show up here it’s usually a sign that you’re stalled out. Or broke.”
“Or both. Lately it’s the checking account that’s been dry. The writing’s okay, but it always takes longer than you’d like, and you don’t get paid until you finish. If then.”
“So grow up and get a real job. —Yeah, Leroy, I’m still here. Okay, thanks much.” She cradled the phone and leaned across the desk to hand back the photograph. “No match,” she said. “They found her under the overpass off of Seventh, by the river. It’s where she lived.”
“Yeah, well, those people will be a lot better off when the Strategic Defense Initiative is in place.”
Banner laughed. “Riiiight. Is that it?”
I could almost taste her impatience to get me out of there and get herself back to whatever it was that her boss was unhappy about. I said, “I was interested in knowing whether the girl’s car had been picked up. But I can check up fron—”
“Cut it out,” she said gruffly, grabbing the phone again and stabbing out the two-figure number. “You know the number?”
“Of course not.” I gave her the description of Meredith Berens’s two-year-old Mazda and she repeated it into the phone. Less than a minute passed before she thanked whoever was on the other end and hung up.
“We’re oh-for-two,” Banner said. “Want to try for three?”
“Pass. It would have made fast work of the job if the girl were in the care of the coroner’s people, but sometimes you’d just as soon the job not be wrapped up quite that fast, quite that way.”
“You know,” Banner said cagily, “the mom isn’t the only one who could file an MP.”
“I thought of that,” I said. “I couldn’t do it—I’m only stretching my promise to my client by talking with you off the record; to file a report would be to break it—but I bet I know someone who would be willing, even eager to sign the papers. That would certainly up the odds of the kid getting found.”
“What’s the mom’s problem anyway? Doesn’t she like cops?”
“Some people, huh? La Donna’s a queer case—I haven’t got her pegged yet. Cold as a mackerel on the one hand, all worked up about her kid on the other. Both at the same time. First she says she’d rather not contact the police. Then she says her reason is that she doesn’t want to wait until you’ll let her make the report. There is more there than meets the eye, as Cyclops said, but I’m damned if I know what.”
“Do you care?”
“Not enormously. Only to the extent it may or may not affect my search for the kid. If it doesn’t … fine, let her be a woman of mystery. If it does … well, we’ll worry about that when it’s time to worry about that. Meanwhile, I said I wouldn’t take much of your time, so …” I stood up.
So did Banner. “I’ll walk up front with you. I want to run off a copy of that picture. In case something—someone—turns up.”
“Good idea.” I handed it over and followed her to the over-lighted little room where the copying machines and the Teletype and all the other officey machinery was kept.
“Really I just like using this color Xerox machine,” Banner confessed.
“How do those things work?”
“Well, you put the picture here and you push this button and it makes you a copy.”
“This isn’t a police station, it’s a comedy club.” The copy floated out into the tray. “That’s not too bad,” I said.
“No, it does all right,” she agreed, taking the photocopy from me and handing back the original. “I made it enlarge the picture a little because the copier has trouble with smaller pictures. The colors sort of bunch together. This isn’t good enough to put in a photo album, but it’ll be more than sufficient to help with a preliminary ID, if anyone turns up matching the general description.”
I pocketed the picture. “I’ll appreciate hearing from you if someone does.”
Banner smiled. It takes her whole face for her to smile, and she can barely keep her eyes open when she does. “What else are we here for?” she said.
It was late and I was hungry—it’s funny how even sixteen or seventeen cups of coffee really don’t stick with you more than, say, eight hours or so. I swung down to the Old Market and shoved my heap into a parking space down the block from M’s Pub. Parking was easy; the Market was deserted. The tourist season, such as it is here in this Florence of the Farm Belt, had passed, and the drizzly, unreliable weather took care of any stragglers. The low, dark brick buildings looked forlorn in the grayness. The brick pavement was wet and slick underfoot. I figured the shopkeepers and restaurateurs were having a boring time of it today. I wondered if it wasn’t something of a r
elief every now and then.
Business was light at M’s. I conned a waitress into fixing me a cold sandwich from the leftovers of lunch, and made it and two Harps disappear in record time. I was working on the third beer when Koosje came through the door at five-oh-eight. Her office is just down and across the street, over the bakery. She spotted me at my back table and came back, peeling off her pale-green raincoat as she did. She was perfectly professional in a black suit with gray pinstripes, a gray bow tie, and a blouse the color of bone. There were pearls on her wrists, at her throat, and in her ear lobes. Her makeup, what little there was, was light and flawless. Her lips were very pink. She slid in next to me and pecked me perfunctorily on the cheek.
Things had not been just right between me and Koosje Van der Beek, Ph.D. We were out of step, somehow, out of synch, and had been since earlier that summer. It was my fault, too, which only made it worse. While ours was not a relationship of pledges and promises and exclusivity, it had at its foundation a bedrock of trust and an implicit understanding which I had violated. Not to put too fine a point on it, I hopped into the sack with another woman, an old flame who had come back into my life after a twenty-year hiatus. I nearly got my head blown off as a result, but that didn’t seem to mollify Koosje much. Not that she was angry—or hurt, or accusatory, or sullen, or anything, really. She was just … different. Or maybe I was. Or maybe the whole relationship was. Koosje may have understood where my head was at when I went to bed with Carolyn Longo—in fact, I’m sure she understood: Her reputation in the professional community is not based solely upon her great legs—but I guess there’s a considerable difference between understanding and acceptance.
Koosje ordered a vodka and tonic and said to me, “Are you working?”
I lifted my glass an inch from the table. “On my third one.”
She rolled her eyes. “On a case, I mean. The one you mentioned this morning.”
“Oh, that.” I swallowed some beer. “Yes, I took the job. Rent’s due.”
Koosje smiled tolerantly. “You like to pretend to be mercenary. I think we both know there’s more do-gooder than mercenary in you, Nebraska.”
“Well, don’t let it get around.” I told her a little about the case and she listened with close, professional interest. Koosje is Dutch by birth, although by now she has spent most of her life in this country. Still, there’s something inexplicably European about the set of her mouth, the intensity of her green eyes. Her accent, while usually so faint as to be unnoticeable, comes on strong in moments of stress or emotion. Her name doesn’t quite transliterate into English pronunciation, either. KOHshuh VANderbeck is pretty close, though.
“You may have something on the mother-daughter conflict,” she said when I had finished my synopsis and she had taken a sip of her drink. “It’s hard to say without knowing the personalities, but there’s nothing at all unusual about people making a conscious break from the beliefs, traditions, and habits of their parents. As we go about ordering our lives, most of us decide, consciously or unconsciously, either to imitate our parents’ behavior or depart from it. Some of each, most frequently. Your Meredith Berens may have opted for the latter to a great extent, probably consciously.”
“Because she resents her mother? Because she wants to be as unlike her as possible?”
“Mm,” Koosje said. “That’s as good a guess as any. Another good one would be that there’s no resentfulness as such, but that Meredith has observed her mother’s life and has decided that she doesn’t want her life to be like it. How to prevent that? Change, radically, the external things. It doesn’t work, of course, or rather it doesn’t necessarily work, but people still do it.”
I sipped some of my Irish beer and considered it.
“Does the girl have any brothers or sisters? It would be interesting to see how they conduct their lives. It could provide clues about the extent to which Meredith’s lifestyle may be a conscious rebellion against her mother’s.”
“No siblings,” I said.
“Mm. It doesn’t matter. Some of the other things you’ve told me about Meredith’s behavior toward her mother—not telling her mother about her engagement, especially—lead me to suspect you’re probably right about some bottled-up resentments in the girl. ‘Lead me to suspect you’re probably right,’ ” she echoed, shaking her head in mild disbelief. “Can you spot the psychologist in this picture?”
The bar trade was beginning to pick up with after-fivers straggling in from the drizzle. The noise level had increased slightly but noticeably. I slid a little closer to Koosje and said, “Let’s stick with the resentment bit for a minute, with Meredith’s kind of sneaky rebellion against her mother. Do you think it would prompt her to establish contact with her father, a man whom Donna Berens obviously would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist?”
Koosje downed a little vodka and pursed her lips and gave it some consideration. “Maybe,” she said at length.
“Well, there you have it: It always pays to ask.”
She laughed. “Diagnosis is a tricky art at best, Nebraska; these long-distance diagnoses you’re always pumping me for make me nervous. The correct answer to your question is ‘maybe.’ Maybe Meredith’s feelings toward her mother are such that she figures, ‘If Mother doesn’t like the man, he must be okay.’ Maybe she thinks initiating a relationship with her father will get her mother’s goat when she finds out, as she almost certainly will. And maybe the idea of contacting her father never entered her head—the man has been out of her life for, what, ten years or better.”
“Perhaps not entirely.” I reached into my pocket and brought out the envelope I had found in Meredith Berens’s wastebasket. “I realize a lot of people live in and around Chicago, but I have this sneaking suspicion that this might have come from Meredith’s father.”
“Mm.” She took the envelope and studied it. “You’re one of the most suspicious people I’ve ever met,” she said, “which means you’ve gotten good enough at suspicion that your suspicions are usually fairly accurate. Of course, her father writing to her is no guarantee that Meredith has reciprocated.”
“She read the letter, at least. Witness ye that the envelope has been opened, the contents removed.”
“Did you find the letter elsewhere in the apartment?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t give the place as thorough a going-over as I might have if Dianna Castelli hadn’t interrupted me, but no. I had already learned what was at the top of my list—whether or not Meredith had packed for a brief vacation—and I think what Castelli had to tell me is worth more than anything I might have gleaned by going through every shoebox in the closet.”
Koosje handed back the envelope. “Will you have to go to Chicago?”
“I hope not. It’d be a waste of time. I’ve spent a little time in that big-shouldered town, but I really don’t know my way around worth a damn. I’ve got a friend there, an old army buddy—guy’s you knew in the army are always ‘old’ and they’re always ‘buddies,’ have you ever noticed?—who’s also in ‘the life.’ He’s with the district attorney’s office. I think I’ll put him to work on finding the old man. He owes me a favor.”
“You saved his life at Omaha Beach?”
“How old do you think I am? Actually, I saved his life from Omaha, by backing up some cockamamie story he had told his wife about how he was out all night because I had—”
“Never mind, never mind.” She turned serious. “What do you really think has happened to the girl?”
I sighed and finished my beer. “I wish to Christ I knew,” I said. “My track record with little girls lost isn’t the greatest.”
“You saved Kate Castelar. In two or three senses of the word.”
“How is Kate?”
“We’ve cut back to two sessions a week for her, but I’m still keeping Amy at three.” Amy was Kate’s sister. The Castelar business—Kate and Amy’s old man had been done in, Kate was missing, and it looked like Kate’s boyfriend was responsi
ble for both the murder and the disappearance—had brought Koosje and me together, nearly ten months ago. Koosje was right: I had saved Kate; I had saved her life, although there was no way to save her from the scars that were reluctant to heal even under Koosje’s capable treatment. The younger sister, Amy, was even worse off; Koosje’s professional guarded optimism these past months hadn’t fooled me.
Before the sisters there was Adrian Mallory, now dead; after them was Carolyn Longo, also dead. And stretching back into the swirlings mists were others, men, women, and children—the lost, the hapless, the victims. I saved some of them, too. I lost some. Some of them wouldn’t be saved and some of them saved themselves.
Meredith Berens. A name, a face in a stiffly posed graduation photograph, and a collection of contradictions. That was Meredith Berens. That was all I knew about her. Would she be saved? Would she save herself? Or would she be a victim—was she already a victim, of somebody or something? At first blush she certainly appeared a victim: held back by a smothering, overprotective parent; then running to a somewhat overbearing employer, adopting her—or being adopted by her—as a second mother; now, perhaps, running again. But I had labeled people victims before and seen them turn, seen them stand their ground and fight back. Perhaps Meredith would prove one of them. I hoped so. I hoped so, and I didn’t even know her.
I looked at Koosje, who was looking at her wristwatch. “It’s late,” she said. “I should get home.”
“It’s early,” I said. “Let’s hit Gorat’s for a little dinner.”
“You can’t get a ‘little’ dinner at Gorat’s. And it is late if you have a lot of work to do, which I have.” She lifted her purse from next to her on the booth seat.
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