I said, “Gotta eat sometime.”
Koosje paused, and looked at me, and smiled. “Don’t let’s do this, all right? You know what. Don’t push, Nebraska. Not now. Not like this.”
I gripped my empty glass with both hands and stared hard at it.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “I don’t know how to act. I don’t know what to say or do or not say or not do.”
“It’s no different for me.”
“Why, dammit?” I lowered my voice. “What is it you want?”
“I don’t want anything.” There was an edge there now. Anger.
“I’ve told you I regret it. I’ve said I never wanted to do anything to hurt you, and I meant it. It’s still true.”
She looked away. “I know that.”
“Then what?”
“I trusted you, dammit,” she said with a sudden, startling vehemence. “Trusted. Do you have any idea what that means? What it means to me, I mean? Stop thinking of yourself, for a change. That’s all you’ve done. Your old girlfriend appears from out of nowhere and you have the opportunity to—I don’t know, prove something, make some kind of statement.”
“Look, lady, I didn’t—”
“Like hell.” The Dutch accent was strong now. “You bedded her, then you bragged about it to me, then you told her there was nothing between the two of you. Are you sure you weren’t showing her? Are you sure you hadn’t decided that this time you were going to break things off?”
All of a sudden I wasn’t sure of anything. I kept quiet.
“What was it you said to me before you slept with her?” Koosje’s voice was calmer now, quieter, more controlled, almost reminiscent. “That you wanted to have her and then wake up the next morning and find it had never happened. Have her, and yet have none of the responsibility. Typical adolescent fantasy. Well, I’m sorry, I can’t go along with your scenario. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. It did happen—it does hurt.”
Nothing was said for the longest time. Then I spoke: “I know it hurts, Koosje. I may have wished that I could sleep with Carolyn and have had it never happen. Now I wish that it had never happened at all. But, as you say, it did happen. There’s nothing I can do about that. What can I do about this?” I put my hand over hers.
She left it there for a while, then gently pulled hers away, gathered her things, and stood. Her eyes shone with tears. I suspect mine may have too.
“Give it time,” she said softly. “Just give it time.”
I stayed for a few more hours after that. I drank a few more beers, but they didn’t dull the pain, didn’t dull the world’s hard, sharp edges quite as much or as fast as I would have liked. Eventually I pulled crumpled bills from my pocket and left them on the table, and headed for the door.
No rain, but moisture hung in the air, waiting for the right moment. It gathered around the street lamps in little haloes of haze. I got behind the wheel of my ancient Impala and headed for Decatur Street. The apartment was dark and cold. Damp. And empty. I left the lights out and my jacket on and sat in the big chair by the sliding glass doors, bathed in the lifeless blue light of the night. Outside, on the little balcony, water dripped in a slow, irregular beat from the balcony overhead. At the end of the block, traffic whispered past on the Radial Highway.
Eventually the flavor of beer on the back of my tongue grew oppressive, so I stood and peeled off the jacket and raided the fridge for a fresh beer. I drank it in the dark at the little square dining table shoved into a corner of the kitchenette. At ten I flipped on the idiot box to see what was going on in the great wide wonderful world. There was talk of our former governor, the one who used to date Debra Winger, running for senate. The president said he didn’t trust the Soviets much. A television evangelist stood accused of having once behaved unholier-than-thou. The weather was going to stay the same. The Royals were in the cellar.
Another day.
I turned off the tube and sat and listened to the water and the traffic some more. So far I hadn’t put a strain on a single light bulb, except the one in the fridge, and it seemed a shame to start now. I dozed a bit in the big chair. Later I awoke, cold and cramped, and staggered to bed. Alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
It wasn’t easy getting up the next morning, but I managed it and was downtown in Midlands Realty’s overdone offices a little before ten. I hadn’t been entirely slothful up until then, you understand. I rolled out of the sack and went running—what a less imaginative citizen would call brisk walking—for an hour, then cleaned up and ate a low-cholesterol breakfast and called Meredith’s bank and called Chicago.
You might think that this mad exercise regimen I had adopted—using the stairs, walking several blocks when a perfectly serviceable automobile was available, running in the morning drizzle—was a typically middle-aged thing to do. You might think, Here’s a guy rushing headlong at the forty-year mark. Suddenly he realizes that the actuarial tables all agree that more than half of his life is over. So, in an effort to prove them wrong and stave off the inevitable, he plunges into exactly the kind of crazed activity I have just described. You might think that. And you might be right.
In any event, I ate a low-cholesterol breakfast of whole wheat toast and peanut butter that I ground myself from fresh dry-roasted peanuts—no sugar, no hydrogenated oil, no salt—and called the bank whose name had appeared on the blank checks and savings-account passbook I found in Meredith’s apartment. They put me on hold three times before palming me off on the VP who ran the branch. After a little cajoling in both directions, he decided he could at least tell me whether Meredith Berens had made any large withdrawals or closed out an account late last week. He checked. She hadn’t.
I called Chicago and caught Elmo Lammers just as he was reaching his desk.
Elmo Lammers, my old army buddy, is an almost completely nondescript black man of about my age. We met in Southeast Asia, where we witnessed and endured the kinds of things that frequently forge an invisible link between men, a bond of friendship and something beyond friendship, a covenant that continues, unweakened by time, even if the individuals never set eyes on each other again.
As it was, I had seen Elmo half a dozen times in the years since then, when business had taken me to Chicago, and had spoken with him perhaps twice as frequently. He greeted me warmly and, over the wire, I heard the soft click of his battered gold lighter as he thumbed it to life and fired up one of the long brown cigarettes he favored.
Elmo Lammers was a good investigator. Not only was he utterly inconspicuous—like most detectives, he looked like your next-door neighbor, not like Tom Selleck; he had a regulation family, a house and a mortgage, and a second-hand car that was rusting out underneath—he also was smart and tenacious and stricken with a total inability to let anything alone until he was completely satisfied he had done everything he could. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough for him.
We shot some breeze for a few minutes, since it had been five or six months since we’d touched base, and then I got down to cases.
“I need a line on a guy who lives or recently lived ’round those parts,” I said. “Wilmette.”
Elmo chuckled into the phone. “Nice neighborhood.”
“If you say so. The name’s Berens.” I spelled it.
“First name? Or is he like you and only’s got one?”
“I’ve got more than one,” I said. “I just use only one. I assume Berens has more than one, too, but I don’t know what they might be.”
“Uh-huh. You got anything hard you want me to do in my spare time?”
“I called directory in Wilmette; they didn’t have a listing.”
“They wouldn’t show one if he was unlisted,” Elmo said. “Non-published, they say these days. The phone company’s got two kinds of unlisted numbers these days, y’know? One of them they won’t put in the book, but they’ll give it out through directory assistance. One of them they won’t give out at all.”
>
“Unless you know who to ask. And how.”
“And how,” Lammers agreed, chuckling. “Anyhow, the place to check is with the utilities—power, gas, and phone. Between ’em they know more about what’s going on than the FBI, CIA, and YWCA put together.”
“And what does that spell?” I wondered.
“I’ll check with the electric company first,” Lammers said, talking mostly to himself. “If there’s anyone in Wilmette name of Berens, and if he’s got lights, they’ll have a record of him. If he’s moved, they’ll have that, too. If he never was there, well, then, that gets hairy. How far you want me to go on this?”
“Don’t put a whole lot into it. Try Wilmette—we know for a fact he did at one time live there—and take it back five years. If you don’t turn him up, give me a call and we’ll plan from there.”
“You don’t want to hear from me if I do turn him up?”
“Thanks, Elmo.”
“Bye, guy.”
And I was downtown in Midlands Realty’s overdone offices a little before ten.
The young woman I had spoken with the day before—secretary, receptionist, whatever the official handle was—was occupied with a tall, ruddy-faced old gentleman in what I always think of as golf clothes: knit sport shirt, high-rise plaid pants, and bucks. When she had completed her business with him she looked over, recognized me, and smiled in a kind of lamentful way. “I’m sorry,” she said before I could speak, “but Mr. Wayne isn’t in and I don’t know when he’ll be back. Are you sure you don’t want to just leave a message? I’ll make certain he gets it.”
The old gent, who had aimlessly wandered a few feet from the reception desk, caught up in the handful of papers he had been discussing with the receptionist, looked up and said, “Can I help?”
The woman said, “This gentleman needs to see your son, Mr. Wayne, but you know how difficult that can be to arrange sometimes.”
The man smiled, closed the short distance between us, and extended a large, blunt-fingered hand. “Yes indeed,” he said jovially. “Well, maybe I can help, sir. I’m the chairman of this company, or at least that’s my title.” He canted his head slightly and winked at the receptionist, who smiled and shook her head and went back to her business. “Alexander Wayne,” the white-haired man continued. “Mister …”
“Nebraska.”
“Ne …”
“Yes, like the state.” After nearly four decades, I’m used, almost, to the momentary bewilderment. I don’t understand it—if the name was England or Ireland or France, even Montana, there would be no glimmer—but I’m used to it. Every so often I feel obliged to explain that it’s the monicker the patriarch hit upon when he emigrated to the States and discovered that he had only enough money to carry him half the distance from Ellis Island to California. As I get older and crankier, I find myself less willing to go into the story. Though, as ever, I’m eternally grateful that the old boy ended up in Nebraska and not, say, Xocotepec de Juárez or someplace with as many consonants as his original name had had. “Can we talk in private, I wonder?”
He indicated the space beyond the reception area, past the halfwall cubicles of the rank-and-file worker bees. “They still let me have an office,” he said pleasantly.
They did indeed. Alexander Wayne’s was big and plush, heavy, with rough, rustic paneling on the walls, good wildlife prints and landscape paintings on the paneling, and very little paperwork on the desk, a slab of wood big enough for Huck and Jim to take down the Mississippi. Three soft, low-backed chairs were lined up in front of the desk. Alexander Wayne motioned me into one and sank into another.
“Get you anything? Coffee?”
“No, thanks; I’m trying to cut back to just thirty cups a day.” He chuckled politely. I guesstimated his age at early-to mid-sixties. He had the puffy, soft look that a lot of good-looking men acquire when age and the good life catch up to them. Wayne’s features were still good, the gray eyes bright and quick-moving, the teeth white in a weather-beaten face. But the hair looked worn out and there was too little of it to quite cover his pink scalp, and loose fat hung beneath his chin and across his chest and over his belt. He would be one of those guys, I decided, who hits a little white ball with a stick, gets into a cart and drives after it, hits it again and so on for eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six holes, then brags about what a great workout he got. The flab under his chin gyrated when he laughed and when he said, “Well, then, Mr., eh, Nebraska. What can I do you for?”
“I really do need to speak with your son,” I said, reaching for my wallet, “but perhaps you can help me, too.” I showed him the permit. “Mr. Wayne, I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by Donna Berens to look for her daughter, who has been missing since Sunday evening.”
The white-haired man looked from the ID to me; his gray eyes darted in confusion. “I don’t … Meredith is missing? What happened?”
“Nobody knows. Apparently.” I took back the paper. “Her mother spoke with her Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening and Sunday night she didn’t answer her phone. Yesterday morning she didn’t show up for work.”
“Maybe … maybe she’s sick.”
“Perhaps, but she’s not at home. I checked it myself. She seems to have vanished, though, of course, people don’t simply vanish. She hasn’t been in touch with her mother or her friends at work. Has she been in touch with your son, Mr. Wayne?”
He wasn’t with me; his eyes were focused on an invisible point on the desktop.
“Mr. Wayne?”
He looked up, startled. “What?”
“Your son. Do you know if he’s heard from Meredith Berens in the last couple of days?”
“No. No, I don’t. Listen …” He leaned forward and laced his broad fingers, his hands hanging loosely between his knees. “Meredith isn’t … well, that is, they don’t think anything’s happened to her, do they?”
“ ‘They,’ Mr. Wayne?”
“The police.”
“So far, this isn’t a police matter. They know the girl’s missing, although no official report has been made yet, and they know that I’m looking for her. The assumption I’m working on is that, for reasons known only to her, Meredith took off for parts unknown Sunday evening. Her car is missing, too, you see.”
“An accident, perhaps? An auto accident?”
That would explain why Meredith hadn’t packed a bag or taken any of life’s little necessities with her—who packs just to go for a drive?—but it wouldn’t explain her absence of nearly two days. Even if she had had a wreck and been killed on the most remote highway in the state, she’d have been found by now. Cars are easily traced. We would know. Whether she was alive or dead, we would know.
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so. Mr. Wayne, I understand your son was—”
“Wait a minute.” He got up slowly and went around to the business side of the great desk, where he lifted the telephone receiver and punched a button on the console. “Joanie, get ahold of Thomas. I know. It doesn’t matter, just get him, please, and get him down here. This is an emergency.” He put down the phone and leaned heavily on the desk, his white-haired arms braced to support himself. He looked at me. “No point your asking me a bunch of questions I can’t answer. We’ll get my son in here and you can ask him direct.”
“I appreciate that.”
He sat behind the desk and leaned back and studied a framed print on the adjacent wall. It was one of those warm, woodsy scenes, the kind they put on the L.L. Bean catalogue covers. “Missing,” Wayne said ruminatively. “Missing. Funny word. Nobody goes missing these days, do they, Mr. Nebraska.” He glanced at me. “My God, how do you escape that thing?” He waved a hand at the mute phone on his desk. “Cordless phones, car phones, briefcase phones, cellular phones, pocket pagers, answering services, answering machines … Arthur C. Clarke—you ever read him?”
“Some.”
“Clarke talks about giving everyone some kind of two-way wrist-radio thingummybob, l
ike Dick Tracy’s, that could bounce signals off of satellites and guarantee that no one would ever be lost again.”
“Unless they wanted to be lost,” I said.
He looked at me. “Poor little Meredith.”
“You know her well?” It was becoming increasingly difficult to not refer to Meredith in the past tense. But I was not allowing myself to slip into it.
“Oh, no, not really. You know. She was by the house a few times, Thomas told me a little about her … that’s about it.”
“What did Thomas tell you about her?”
He frowned, his pale white brows nearly meeting above the bridge of his nose. “Well, that’s an odd sort of question,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘what’? He told me her name, of course, and how he met her, what she did, where they were going when they went out—that sort of thing. You don’t have kids, do you, Mr. Nebraska?”
I admitted it.
“Well, then, I guess you wouldn’t know how it is when your kid’s dating someone, the way they kind of tell you this and that but can’t really tell you anything, if you understand me.”
“I’m not sure …”
“See, it’s like they’re on their own wavelength, kind of, and the things they do they do in private, even when they’re out in public, and that’s the way it should be, isn’t it? Alone together? And if they open up about it too much, well, that only spoils things.”
“You seem very … wise about Young Love.”
He laughed. “I’m not as old as I—well, no, I guess I am as old as I look, but my memory’s still okay. And Thomas, let’s see, he’s thirty-nine, so I guess we’ve been going through this dating business for—God, twenty-some years now.”
“Thomas never married?”
“No.” The quick eyes shifted away from me, then back. “Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry?”
He smiled, one of those big good-buddy smiles. “Go ahead and ask why. Everyone does. Man’s thirty-nine years old, never married, still lives at home. Why?”
“There’s a word for it,” I said. “Bachelorhood.”
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