Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  “The place to go around here,” he said, trying to recover himself, “is the Silver Lake Resort. Try the fried lobster. You won’t believe how good it is. Or maybe you tried that the other night?”

  “Why are you trying to get yourself beaten up, Mr. Ullman?”

  But there was no use in that. He was in enough trouble already; he couldn’t risk another charge, especially assault.

  STANDING AT HIS front window Ullman watched O’Keefe turn the Lincoln around in front of the house and drive off down the street out of sight. He guessed he would not see the private detective again. The guy didn’t seem all that smart, despite that cute little trick about Angie’s. He looked at the telephone hanging on the wall in the kitchen as if he were considering calling someone. Then he thought he heard a noise, a thumping sound from the direction of the back porch. He considered going out there to check things out but instead returned to the table and his bottle of Jim Beam. His ears had taken to hearing things lately.

  CHAPTER 19

  WHEN O’KEEFE ARRIVED back in town the next day, he knew he should go to the office, but he went home instead. The message light blinked hopefully on his new telephone-answering machine. He pushed the button beneath the blinking light to rewind the tape. A small, nervous cough. Then a hesitation, so much a part of the man that it amounted to a character trait, revealed his identity even before he spoke. “Pete,” the voice said, “this is Ernest Anderson. I want you to call me. I want you to find my daughter. I think I know where she is.”

  Ernest Anderson’s house was as far out in the suburbs as it possibly could be, in the middle of a street without trees—standard cookie-cutter Colonial, white Doric columns, reddish white brick, white trim—here in late autumn the lawn still green as if it had been painted onto the front yard. Zoysia grass, the grass with no soul. No flowers, just evergreen shrubs planted in little, white pebbles looking like they had been carefully scrubbed clean one by one.

  The sky had darkened on the drive to Anderson’s house, and thunder exploded above him as he reached for Anderson’s doorbell. Fat little pancakes of rain began to fall. Anderson opened the door with an insurance man’s smile on his face. He wore white shoes, light-blue pants, a white belt, and a white knit shirt. He looked like a retiree heading for Florida.

  “Good to see you, Pete. Come on back to the great room.”

  O’Keefe followed Anderson through a house full of Early American reproductions standing against the most ornate wallpaper he had ever seen. Light green carpet. Fake rubber plants spotted around. He could not believe she had grown up in this house, that anything could grow in this house.

  When they entered the great room, O’Keefe thought for a moment that Tag herself was there. In a way she was. The room itself, uglier even than the other rooms he had come through—knotty pine on the walls, hooked rugs on the linoleum floor. But she was in there too. Everywhere in there. The walls of the room were covered with photographs, some of them blown up to poster size. Like a gallery. Like a temple. Tag on horseback, Tag the school spelling champion, Tag holding a string of fish she had caught, Tag accepting a prize at a horse show, Tag in a boat, Tag in her convertible sports car, Tag as a little girl opening presents, Tag and Lenny at college, Tag in her wedding gown, Tag stuffing white cake into her new husband’s mouth, Tag in her cut-off jeans shorts and T-shirt, Tag in her low-cut prom dress, Tag in her tank top, Tag in her white bikini sunning by the pool.

  Dark testimony. Testimony to a bewitchment, an indecent obsession. She had been telling the truth about one thing at least. He accompanied Anderson to the far end of the room where a round, wooden table sat in front of a fireplace. Above the fireplace hung a huge portrait of Tag. She must have been eighteen or so then. She had not changed much since. Every time he saw her it seemed like some small sinew snapped in his heart. From the portrait she looked down on the two men, both obsessed with her in ways they should not have been.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Coffee?”

  “How do you take it?”

  “Black.”

  Anderson lifted the receiver from a fancy telephone console on the table and punched a button on the console.

  “Mr. O’Keefe would like some coffee. Black. And I’ll have some too.”

  O’Keefe wondered if Anderson had servants.

  The rain had become a deluge, pounding on the roof of the house and the ground outside. O’Keefe plucked his pen from his pocket and laid it on the table, then zipped open his brown leather portfolio and removed a simple spiral notebook, the pages empty and waiting—a clean slate. Anderson sat there for a few moments staring at him, and O’Keefe remembered the awkward pauses in the conversation that day in Harrigan’s conference room and the hesitations in the voice on the telephone. As if explaining himself, Anderson said, “Let’s wait for the coffee.”

  As long minutes dragged on while they waited for the coffee, they made the smallest of talk, endured long, uncomfortable pauses, and listened to the rain pounding on the roof.

  The woman stepped uncertainly into the room, looking down at the tray in her hands. What had Tag said in the nightclub? “The pious old bastard ground her to dust a long time ago.” The woman dressed exactly like Donna Reed used to dress in her television show. One of his favorites from childhood. O’Keefe had always wished his mother could be more like the lovely, bright, fresh Donna instead of the foul-mouthed harridan she actually was, but then whatever beauty may have once shined in Tag’s mother existed no more, all allure in it long gone, being unanimated by any discernible spirit whatsoever.

  She set the tray down on the table.

  “Pete, this is Tag’s mother,” Anderson said, as if he were announcing a rather boring home slide show.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” O’Keefe said earnestly, standing up and extending his hand. She seemed confused, looked at his hand as if it meant her some harm, and quickly withdrew her own hands behind her back.

  “The pleasure is mine,” she said and averted her eyes before his could meet them, busying herself pouring cups of coffee from the pot on the tray. When she finished, she looked around as if searching for a chair to pull up to the table. Apparently she intended to stay. O’Keefe moved to offer her his chair, but Anderson waved him back down into his seat.

  “Thank you, dear. That will be all.” He had dismissed her, banished her from his presence as he would a servant. She hesitated for a moment, and O’Keefe thought he detected the tiniest quiver of rebellion far back in her eyes, but she wilted quickly under Anderson’s glare and left without saying another word.

  “This has been a terrible thing for her to endure,” Anderson whispered as they watched her leave. “She’s dying right before my eyes.”

  O’Keefe wanted to tell him she was already dead.

  The thunder sounded as if it intended to rip open the sky. The lights dimmed and then came up strong again. Something, probably a tree branch, thudded against the house.

  “Terrible storm we’re having,” said Anderson. Then he sat in silence for several long seconds. The man seemed to thrive on awkward pauses.

  “Nice house,” lied O’Keefe.

  “Thank you.”

  Another awkward pause.

  “The nicest thing about it is that it’s paid for. No mortgage. In fact, I have no debt whatsoever.”

  “That’s very impressive, sir,” O’Keefe lied again. “Especially in this day and age.”

  “Our world is only what we make it.”

  You can say that again, you rotten old bastard, O’Keefe thought.

  “When I was a young man, and we lived on the farm, in terrible poverty and want, even then, through the grace of Jesus Christ, I was able to see that America was still, and would continue to be, a land of plenty, and that the things of this world would come to those who worked hard and lived right and kept an eye out for the main chance. And since then, my life has been blessed in every way. At least until now.”

  You�
�re never safe until it’s all over, old man.

  A pause. Anderson coughed his little cough.

  “Have you found Jesus Christ as your personal savior, Pete?”

  “No, sir,” he said, embarrassed, trying to play the man straight. “No, I haven’t. Not yet,” he said, trying to leave the impression that this great transformation might, indeed, someday happen even to him.

  “I hope you find Him, Pete, and soon. It seems to me that your life has been blessed too.”

  “How is that, sir?”

  “Well, the war for one thing. How many miracles happened every day to save you from death in that war?”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way. I think more about the others, the ones who died. Where were their miracles? It seemed like dumb luck—who lived, who died.”

  “And that, Pete, is the most terrible and foolish of all the terrible and foolish delusions of this modern world. That everything is left to luck, to chance. God has a Plan, Pete, a Plan for each human life. All we have to do is help Him by living in such a way that His Plan may unfold for us.”

  Anderson summoned up another awkward pause and presided over it like a god.

  “Do you have life insurance, Pete?”

  O’Keefe wanted to laugh, but Anderson was too eerie to laugh at. “Some,” he responded. “thirty thousand dollars of term, I think.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “A little girl. I’m divorced.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Not sorry that you have a daughter, of course, but that you’re divorced, and that you have such a small dab of insurance. Think of your daughter’s future, Pete. If God claimed you early, and look what almost happened to you down there, thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t even be enough to pay for her education.”

  O’Keefe squirmed. Just pull out the paper. I’ll sign up for any amount.

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Ten.”

  “And I’m sure you love her very much.”

  “I do.”

  “Then maybe you can understand what I’m going through now. Imagine how you would feel if, despite everything you could do, your daughter somehow fell into an evil web.”

  Anderson paused again and pawed with his hand at the photo album on the table in front of him.

  “I was just sitting here looking at this album, her life spread out before me here. I said to you that my life has been blessed. And she was the greatest blessing of all. A gift from God, a perfect child in every way. And I prepared her in every way I could for an abundant and prosperous life. Yet she has fallen into an evil web.”

  “You mean Lenny?”

  “I mean those men who were trying to kill her down there. And I guess Lenny too though it’s hard to believe. It seems that Lenny has given his soul to the Devil. When he was a young man in college, there was no finer young man in this world. When I first shook his hand, I knew he and my daughter were destined to spend their lives together.”

  “Did Tag think that way too?”

  The question had a bitter edge, and it took Anderson back a little. O’Keefe could tell that whatever she’d wanted had meant nothing to her father until she’d escaped him and rejected him, which must have been the greatest shock of his life.

  “It was always hard for me to know what she was really thinking. She’s quite a mystery. But you’ve met her. You know that.”

  I do know that.

  “Mr. Anderson, I think Lenny started out believing his own story, but then he figured out that the mink-farm deal just wasn’t going to work. But he, and Tag too, had grown too attached to the lifestyle to give it up. And then the evil, as you say, came along. I’m sure Lenny didn’t seek them out. But they found him, and he was weak. The same old story.”

  “But why? What would they want with Lenny?”

  “I think they were using Lenny’s operation to launder their dirty money.”

  “And Tag?”

  “Like you say, sir, she’s a mystery.”

  “You have to find her. You have to protect her. My wife couldn’t go on living if something terrible happened to Tag.”

  “It’s a big country, and I don’t even know where to start.”

  “I think I know where she was two days ago.”

  Anderson presided over another pause, heightening the suspense.

  “For many years we’ve vacationed in southern Arizona. Tucson and that area. That’s where Tag learned to ride horses. She’s quite a horsewoman. She won many prizes when she was younger . . .”

  Anderson must have sensed O’Keefe’s impatience and dispensed with the rest of the biographical detail. “Anyway, we have many friends out there. One of them called me two days ago and said he thought he had seen Tag in a grocery store there. And there’s no mistaking her, as you know. If he thought he saw her, I’m sure he did.”

  “Did he talk to her?”

  “No. He said he made eye contact with her once, that it seemed like she recognized him but didn’t want to acknowledge it. She was halfway across the store from him. She went down an aisle. When he went to find her, all he found was her basket, abandoned half full of groceries.”

  “Does anyone else know this?”

  “No one.”

  “I guess I should tell you that you should tell this to the police.”

  “Would that help Tag?”

  O’Keefe considered this for a few moments. Anderson was really asking him another question—if the police caught his daughter, would they end up protecting her or arresting her?

  “No,” O’Keefe said, “it probably wouldn’t.”

  “It seems to me it ought to be handled more discreetly than that,” Anderson said. “Privately.”

  “Privately,” O’Keefe said, echoing Anderson, nodding in agreement.

  O’Keefe remembered Jane had said that Tag and Lenny visited Arizona often and now Anderson had told him the family had frequently vacationed there. He quizzed Anderson about all the places they had stayed the places she had especially liked. What were her favorite landmarks and sight-seeing places? Could she speak Spanish? Did Anderson know where Tag and Lenny stayed when they visited there? O’Keefe scribbled Anderson’s memories in his notebook. Something Anderson said would end up being important. Or the separate pieces would come together for O’Keefe in a kind of gestalt. Your history made you. You might vary it some, but you would likely repeat most of its essentials. Something in those notes could lead him to her if only he had brains enough and time to figure it out. When he could not think of any more questions, he closed the notebook and said, “If you think of anything else, no matter how trivial or stupid it may seem, get hold of me, and let me know what it is.”

  “I’ll get you your retainer check,” Anderson said.

  He didn’t tell Anderson that he would have done it for free. That would have seemed like a confession of some kind, what the lawyers called “an admission against interest.” Anderson left the room to go to wherever he kept his bag of gold. O’Keefe scanned the picture album on the table and the photographs on the walls. She gazed down on him from all over the room, especially from the portrait on the wall above him. Those eyes. The expression in those eyes stirred a memory he couldn’t quite catch. Where had he seen that look before?

  O’Keefe was still staring at her portrait when Anderson returned. “Pete,” he called, standing in the doorway, waving the check. A temptation, O’Keefe thought. Not gold. Thirty pieces of silver.

  O’Keefe took several photographs from the album, grabbed his portfolio, and left the room without looking back though the pictures on the wall beckoning him to stay. He wondered how much time Anderson spent in that room. At the front door Anderson handed him the check. And hesitated. After the customary pause, he said, “And Pete, I don’t believe in keeping secrets. I think I know what happened between you and Tag down there.”

  O’Keefe closed his eyes. Guilty as charged.

  “And I just want you to know that I forgive it. Becaus
e I understand. She is such a wonderful girl, and in a moment of weakness, just a moment, anything can happen. Let it be a lesson. We have to maintain control at all times. At all times.”

  Since Anderson did not believe in keeping secrets, O’Keefe considered telling the old man the secret he knew about him. But he kept it to himself. The keepers of secrets possess great power but also great guilt. Later, brooding over that meeting in Anderson’s house, O’Keefe could not keep from thinking that his own guilty knowledge had somehow made him an accomplice to Anderson’s crime, and that he and Anderson had made some unholy covenant, the subject of the contract being Anderson’s daughter, and it seemed like an obscure and unspoken arrangement to share the booty and divide the spoils.

  “I’ll report to you whenever there’s anything to report,” O’Keefe said, sealing the covenant.

  He started to go but remembered something he had forgotten to ask. “One more question. What made you name her ‘Tag’?”

  Anderson hesitated, put his hands in his pockets, examining his shoes and the light-green carpet on the floor.

  “That’s not her real name. Her real name is Constance. Tag is just a nickname. When she was a tiny little girl, she loved to play tag. Everywhere. With everyone. All the time. It almost drove us crazy. ‘Tag, you’re it!’ she’d say. So we started calling her ‘Tag,’ and the neighborhood kids did too. She liked it and started calling herself that, and it just stayed with her.”

  O’Keefe walked away from the tears streaming down Anderson’s face.

  CHAPTER 20

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time he left Anderson’s house and the rain had subsided to a thick and misty drizzle. Back at his apartment, he did not go in but donned a windbreaker and a pair of Sportos he kept in the van and walked through the haunting, rain-ravaged streets. The storm had blown down huge tree branches and even whole trees, and had littered the streets with sticks and branches and leaves that had been crimson or golden just a few hours before in the glory of their dying but now lay in dark and forlorn clumps, sodden and forever expired. The streets were empty of people and even cars, as if all creatures but him were cowering in their burrows. There was no dark as dark as this, no loneliness as lonely as this, and it seemed this night had been created for him to wander in.