by Sean Little
“Nice of her to reference Star Wars so we can fully appreciate the gravity of the situation.” Duff fell back into his chair. “How do you want to start, Mr. Kenobi?”
Abe split the sheaf of papers in half. He held out one half for Duff. “You start here. I’ll start with my half. Then, we’ll start going through the documents on the thumb drive.”
Duff fanned the stack of paper and gave a low whistle. “It’s a lot of paper. What are we even looking for?”
“No idea.” Abe shrugged and scratched at his lack of hair. “I hope we’ll know it when we see it.”
AFTER TWO HOURS of silent reading, Duff cast his papers onto his desk. “You see anything that makes sense to you?”
Abe tossed his papers onto his own desk. “Nothing. It looks like she was doing a standard search into adoptions of African American males during the month of March in 1983. Why anyone would come after her for this is beyond me.”
“There were four private adoptions of African American males in the state of Illinois in March of 1983. Three more in April. Only two in June.” Duff looked at a sheet of notebook paper which had been part of his sheaf. A scrawl of handwritten notes was next to the four names in the March adoptions. “It looks to me like she narrowed down the field of candidates for us and was going about eliminating them based on physical impossibilities like blood types. She was down to what looked like two or three names.”
Abe scrawled through several open .pdf files on his laptop. “She was trying to locate birth certificates issued in the state of Maryland on her birth date in 1983. She found her own in the state records system, but it only shows a single live birth was attributed to her mother.”
Duff stood and stretched. A satisfying crack issued from his neck as he flexed. “There we go, then. We’re done. No certificate of live birth means it never happened.”
“Why would her mother tell her she had a brother, then?”
“She was literally on her deathbed, dying of cancer. How do we know she was coherent? How do we know she wasn’t doped out of her gourd on painkillers? Remember that time you had to have back surgery? Remember when you were coming out of the anesthesia? You told me Napoleon should have been canonized.”
“In my defense, he was a brilliant military mind.”
“You meant Neapolitan though, as in the ice cream. You wanted to be able to pray to Saint Three-Flavors.”
“It is a miracle those three flavors go so well together; you have to admit.”
Duff weighed the idea. “You might be right. Need three miracles to be a saint, though.”
“Well, there’s still time. The Church works slowly.”
“Why did Mindy keep pushing if she got to the single live-birth certificate? Pretty much says mom was having a dying delusion to me.”
“We must be missing something else, then.” Abe stood and stretched, too. It was almost eight in the evening. He wanted to go back to his crappy bachelor apartment, take a shower, and then go to bed. He was not sleeping much anymore. After so many years of sleeping next to Katherine, having a bed to himself again felt foreign and strange. In truth, he wasn’t sleeping so much as he was laying on his back and staring blankly at the ceiling until dawn.
“Maybe someone in the C.I.A. is hunting her for something she knows and it’s completely unrelated to her hunt for this mythical brother?”
“Could be anything at this point.” Abe checked his phone for messages. Matilda had sent him a text from her mother’s phone with three heart emojis on it, but other than that—nothing. Abe was never really a social butterfly. Usually only Katherine, Duff, or Tilda ever texted him. When he looked at his contact list on his phone, he did not even have to scroll. “Should we call it for the night?”
Duff checked his own phone. “Might as well. Cubs should be into the sixth inning by now. If I head over to Wheels’s place, maybe I can catch the last three innings.”
“Try not to get punched again.”
“You’re not my father. I’m an adult, and if I want to get punched again, I’ll get punched again.” Duff gave Abe a toothy grin and walked out of the apartment. “G’night, Dad.”
Abe watched his partner in investigations leave the apartment. Abe stacked the papers for Mindy’s case in a pile and hooked an oversized paperclip on them. He tossed the flash drive into a corner of his desk drawer where it would blend in with other odds and ends and look entirely unimportant.
The Fucking Embarrassment started angry. The engine sputtered and reminded Abe it was a relic in the internal combustion game. Abe guided the Volvo down the street. He passed Wheels’s bar. Through the oversized front window, he saw Duff already anchoring a stool at the end, a cold Leinie’s in his hand.
Abe always liked Chicago. On a hot summer night with the windows down it felt like a city of mystery and action, a place where anything was possible. There were a million cars moving through the arteries of the various neighborhoods and towns all lumped together to form the megalopolis everyone called Chicago. When you’re from a major city, it’s easier to tell someone you live in Chicago than it is to explain to them you’re from Berwyn or Kenilworth, and as far as the names of the little neighborhoods go—forget it. Might as well just tell them you’re from an oil rig in the mid-Atlantic. Takes the same amount of explaining
Abe stopped at a Chick-fil-a for something to eat. He tried to be a good LBGTQ ally and support their causes, but since Katherine’s revelation and their separation Abe had started eating there a little more often than he used to. It was a petty sort of revenge. He did not hold it against Katherine one iota for being a lesbian. He knew it was not her choice, and she had not wanted to hurt him. He knew she’d buried her feelings for a long time, and there was a large part of him that was legitimately happy for her new expression of her true self, but at the same time he still had to move out of the house he loved and see his daughter less; a chicken sandwich and waffle fries every so often was his reward for that burden.
Abe went through the drive-thru and ate in the parking lot. Since the divorce, he had been doing that a lot more than usual. He no longer liked going into restaurants and eating alone. It felt safer to eat in the dark in his car. He listened to the radio, scanning the talk radio channels with his right hand while stuffing his gob with his left.
He listened to the radio a lot more now, too. When he was married, before Katherine’s issues surfaced, he never minded silence. Now he was around silence a lot. Too much. Even when he and Duff worked in the office during the day, there was not a lot of chatter. He’d been friends with Duff almost as long as he’d been with Katherine, and there was a similar sort of familial silence between them, the sort of silence you can only achieve around a spouse or very old, very good friends. If Abe didn’t fill the silence by listening to the radio, he started to think about how alone he felt all the time. It got oppressive. If he listened to some dunce chatter about sports or politics, it kept him from living in his own head.
When he finished the sandwich and waffle fries, he tossed the bag in the nearest waste bin and pulled back into traffic. The idea of going back to his apartment made him sad, no matter how much he wanted to shower and sleep in a real bed instead of a bathtub. He’d have to get used to sleeping alone eventually, but it had only been a little while. He was still in mourning.
An itchy part of his brain told him he and Duff missed something at Mindy’s apartment. They had the stuff she had wanted them to have, but what had she not wanted them to find? What did they fail to recognize inside the practically empty apartment? Sometimes when a scene is obviously devoid of clues it means they missed the biggest one. That thought worked its way into Abe’s frontal cortex like a worm. He stopped at a light and drummed his fingers anxiously on the wheel. He needed to go back, he realized. There was something missing. It would drive him nuts until he figured out what it was. Abe turned the car off the main thoroughfare and started heading back to Mindy’s apartment. He needed another look at the place.
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sp; Abe found a spot along the street a block down from Mindy’s apartment building. At night, the street was a bit more intimidating than it had been in the day. The empty industrial plant was a looming beast in the darkness. The blue-white glare of the arc-sodium streetlights seemed to give a look of evil to what remained of the building’s cracked glass windows. The homeless woman with the Home Depot cart was camped on the sidewalk, a makeshift tent made out of Huffy-brand garbage sacks over her head. Abe slipped a ten from his pocket and handed it to her as he passed. She did not say anything this time. Her face was buried in the filthy arms of her sweatshirt as she hugged her knees to her chest and hummed a song to herself.
Abe kept his head down and hustled to the safety of the fifteen-story high-rise. He punched in the five-digit code for the door, made his way to the twelfth story on the elevator, and walked to Mindy’s apartment door. They had left the door unlocked because it was how they found it. Besides, it wasn’t like there was a lot to steal.
Abe opened the door and hit the light switch on the wall to the left. The single overhead entry light blazed on and lit the apartment. Abe pushed the door wide and froze. The apartment was trashed. In the hours since they were there in the afternoon to that moment, someone had entered the apartment and tossed everything. The couch was stripped, the stuffing for it scattered everywhere. The TV had been ripped from the wall. The papers on the coffee table were scattered. Abe could hear the sound of motion in the bedroom. Whoever scrapped the place was still in the apartment.
The intruder, realizing the door was just opened and a light was on, stuck his head out of the bedroom. He was large, very tall and well-built. He wore a hooded sweatshirt despite the heat, the hood pulled low over his face.
Before Abe could go for his phone to call 9-1-1 or even call out to say something to him, the intruder rushed him. The man was extremely fast. It was like an NFL running back seeing a hole. One second he was in the doorway of the bedroom, the next he was rocketing down the hall at full speed. Abe, soft and out of shape, could only brace for impact. The guy slammed into Abe and crushed him into the wall. All the air rushed out of Abe’s lungs and his legs crumpled beneath him. He fell heavily to the floor. The intruder was out the door before Abe could get his bearings. The room was spinning.
Abe struggled to figure out if he was supposed to inhale or exhale. His body was going into panic mode. Once back in fifth grade, someone had convinced Abe to play football at recess. He took a hard, tight spiral just below the sternum knocking all the air out of him. The panic attack that occurred while his body tried to suck in air and found it couldn’t was enough to put him off sports forever. The next recess, he was back on the swings where he belonged. He never thought he was going to die on the swings. Memories of that formative terror came rushing back to him as his lungs struggled to re-inflate. Abe staggered to his feet, still trying to breathe. He was heaving, making a horrible noise. His eyes watered. By the time he got to the door the intruder was gone. Abe had no idea which direction he’d run or if he took the elevator or stairs. The hallway was silent.
Abe closed the door to the apartment and locked the deadbolt. He slid to the floor and tried to figure out if he had a cracked rib or not. It hurt to breathe, but not horribly. He pulled his phone from his pocket; he had to tell Duff what just happened.
DUFF ANCHORED A stool at the bar at Wheels’s place nursing a Miller Lite and staring blankly at the game. His eyes were vacant and unfocused. To most people in the bar, it looked like he was very interested in the Cubs game despite the Brewers hat he wore. In truth, Duff was thinking about Mindy and her case.
Duff’s O.C.D. was no joke. He had undergone intensive therapy for years to get him to a point where he could handle it without it interfering with his daily life—to a degree. When presented with a new puzzle the old familiar itch in the middle of his brain came creeping back. Mindy had handed him just such a puzzle, and it was bothering him. When things like that bothered him, he was not much good to anyone until his brain could sort it out.
Duff had come to grips with his mind years back. He had two segments in his brain: the first one he called his “normal brain” and the second was the “puzzle brain.” The puzzle brain used to be the dominant half. It was only through Dr. Burlington’s treatment that he was able to transfer ownership of the daily function back to the normal brain and resume a somewhat normal existence. Sometimes though, the puzzle brain had to rise up and assert itself, remind the rest of the body who was the real boss.
The normal brain was struggling to tell the puzzle brain Mindy was wrong. Occam’s Razor, it said. The simplest answer is usually the correct one. The simplest answer to Mindy’s problem was her mother was wrong. Drugs and dying do a number to the brain’s grasp on reality. It could be argued reality was fluid and hard to grasp to begin with. Add in a morphine drip and the body beginning to go into total system failure and it was likely all manner of insane images and notions could pop into someone’s mind.
Duff had to put aside the simple explanation. He had to work in a realm of assumption instead of connecting the most logical dots. Assume Mindy’s mom was not delusional, assume she was correct: Mindy had a brother. Why did the certificate of live birth only show one female baby? Assuming there were two babies, something had to have happened at the time of the birth to make sure one of the babies was never formally recorded. Why?
If Duff’s assumption of someone fixing the live birth certificate was correct, then it was only right to assume someone with power and money could have rigged it. Clearly no Average Joe off the street would have been able to swing something like that. It could only have been someone well-connected. But, who? And why?
Puzzles like this bothered Duff to no end. Murder was simple. Someone committed murder usually out of one of three reasons: passion, envy, or stupidity. It was easy. Figure out which reason, and it always pointed to the killer. When the murder happened because of something without emotion, like mob hits, or as Abe liked to call them: “business transactions,” it was harder. When the reason for the crime was not obvious it threw the whole thing open to speculation as to who was the killer. But even then it still pointed back to someone eventually. Which family had the beef against the dead guy? Who were their best hitters? Then, start eliminating alibis and start checking video tapes of security cameras around the crime scene. It all worked out in the end.
This, however, was something new. Was it a real puzzle at all? If a highly educated C.I.A. operative brought Abe and him in on a matter like this, it must be real. Despite the logical points in his brain telling him otherwise, Duff obsessed to a point in his mind where the disappearance of the woman’s twin was real. It happened. The puzzle fell into place around the disappearance, and that’s what he needed to solve.
Wheels snapped his fingers in front of Duff’s face and jerked him back to reality. “You zoned out hardcore, pally.”
Duff tried not to look embarrassed. “Sorry about that. What did I miss?” He tried to force his puzzle brain to transition back to the normal brain. It did not shift easily. It fought tooth-and-claw.
“Sally wanted to know who you were gonna vote for in this election in November.”
Duff looked to his right. One of the bar’s regulars, a rotund Latino man called Rodrigo Salazar, Sally to his friends, was nursing a Miller Lite and eating peanuts from a wicker bowl. “You like this Stevens guy, Duffy? Or you like his opponent?” Sally’s khakis were frayed at the knees and hung too far down his ass, and he wore a stained V-neck T-shirt which had gone all loose and ribbony. He also sweated constantly, his underarms a perpetual swamp.
“Who’s his opponent this year?”
“Dat fuggin’ Republican bastard with the big horse teeth,” said Sally.
“The lawyer or the businessman?” A lot of political candidates had horse teeth.
“The fuggin’ lawyer.” Sally spat a peanut shell to the floor. “Hate that fuggin’ build-the-wall bastard.”
“You wer
en’t an immigrant, Sally,” said Wheels. “What’s the wall to you?”
“Hey, man—I support anything that gets rich white guys’ panties in a twist.”
Another regular, a retired bus driver by the name of Billy Butkis, leaned over. “The gal from the Libertarians—what’s her name?”
“Annie Sachs.” Duff didn’t like talking to Billy Butkis because Billy had large, fat, old man ears with hair sprouting heavily off the helix, lobe, and tragus. He always wanted to bring a razor and shave that shit for him.
“Yeah, Annie Sachs,” said Billy. “She’s got some good ideas, but the Libertarians don’t stand a chance.”
“Neither does the Green Party,” said Sally. “I seen they’re throwing up some doofus chick who believes in crystal healing as a sacrificial lamb.”
“Good luck to her.” Billy took a pull off his Budweiser. “Probably reads Tarot cards, too.”
“What’s wrong with Tarot?” asked Wheels.
“A gypsy once kicked me in the dick. Never trusted all that fortune teller nonsense after that.”
“When?” Sally’s nose was wrinkled in disbelief. “When did you fuggin’ know a gypsy?”
“When I was in the Navy. We were in port in Italy. A gypsy kicked me in the dick ‘cause I didn’t want to give her money to read those damned cards.”
“I should kick you in the dick.” Sally waved Billy’s comments off like he was shooing a fly.
“Speaking of kicks in the dick.” Wheels gestured at the windows. In the light of the neon beer signs hanging in front of the greasy, filmy glass, one of the local prostitutes was sauntering into the bar. Tall Jenny was over six-feet tall when she wore heels. In the summers, she favored crop-tops and hot pants. She had a mannish face, but she was not trans, just wide-cheeked and square-jawed naturally. Her eyes were baggy and had heavy lids. She had a perpetual scowl. It made Duff think her father probably looked a little like a bulldog. Tall Jenny stumbled into the bar, limping on her long, wobbly sticks.
