Janice is Missing

by Rod Kackley

  “It’s actually not 12 minutes slow,” the secretary said with a smirk as she looked back at Joy on her way to through the Chief’s Office door. “The clock stopped working about a month ago. But the radio is still good.”

  “At least the clock’s right twice a day,” Joy whispered to Amanda. “That’s probably a better record than anybody else in this place.”

  Amanda scribbled.

  Joy waited.

  Finally, after what seemed an eternity — Joy checked her smartphone. They had been waiting 15 minutes, not a second less — the secretary’s phone buzzed.

  She rose slowly, walked almost majestically around her metal desk — just like ours, Amanda thought — passed in front of Joy and Amanda, opened the Chief’s Office door with a flourish, and said, “You may go in, now.”

  Amanda quickly closed her notebook, rolled her gold Cross Pen to hide the point, and stood, waiting for Joy.

  Joy didn’t budge. Oh, she straightened herself in the hard, orange plastic chair. Joy looked to the left, and then the right, flashed a quick smile at Amanda, and slowly rose from her chair.

  If we can wait, so can they, Joy thought to herself.

  “And we are ready now, too,” she said to the secretary, and slowly, oh so slowly, led Amanda into Doolan’s sanctuary.

  Doolan invited Joy and Amanda to be seated with a simple nod of his fat head.

  Wood paneling must have been scalding hot way back when Joy thought. She was reminded of being with her father in the office of the guy who ran the Weed, Seed, and Feed store back home before the city she was born in turned into a suburban, cul-de-sac bedroom community of baby boomers and their kids.

  Doolan sat sideways in his chair, left arm on his metal desk, tapping the fingers of his right on the arm of his chair, looking at Joy and Amanda, waiting for them to speak.

  ‘The chief’s fingers were like sausages drumming a rhythm,’ Amanda wrote.

  Doolan cleared his throat and shot a laser beam stare in her direction. Amanda cleared her throat, swallowed hard, closed her Moleskin, stowed away her pen, and did her level best to meet Doolan’s stare.

  Doolan only laughed.

  He glanced back at Joy, then at Amanda, and then at Joy, before turning his chair 90 degrees and resting both massive arms on the desk.

  “Good morning, Chief Doolan,” Joy said. “I am Joy...”

  “I know who you are.”

  “And this is...”

  “And I know who she is.”

  Advantage Doolan.

  He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, laced his sausage fingers together, and waited.

  “We came to talk to you about the killings of girls and young women that have been happening in St. Isidore since the 1970s,” Joy said, trying to regain her momentum.

  Doolan unlaced his fingers, as he slowly leaned forward. He unbuttoned both sleeves and rolled them up to his elbows.

  Doolan made a fist with each hand and squeezed tight and looked at his desk as he flex the muscles in his forearms.

  “I know why you are here," he murmured.

  Doolan waited. He knew how to make people squirm and he enjoyed it. He absolutely loved it when he could do it to a couple of youngsters who thought they were the smartest ones in the room.

  “Shapiro called,” Doolan finally said with a sigh, “and you’ll get your man.”

  Joy and Amanda exchanged a quick glance that was painfully obvious to the third person in the room.

  “Oh, you mean you didn’t know?” Doolan used sarcasm to add to their discomfort. So these two aren’t even close to being the sharpest knives in the Chronicle’s drawer. Fine, this will be a perfect match, he thought.

  “Your Mr. Shapiro called last night,” he said, “and told me what you two were doing and that I had better assign one of my best police officers to help just so you didn’t hurt yourselves.”

  Joy was amazed. To begin with, it showed how important this mission was to the Chronicle. Not only was Esther behind them, but her father was too, and he was pushing the cops to help.

  The bad news was that a St.Isidore police officer was now embedded with Joy’s team, and she was not happy about that. It was like letting the fox bunk down in the hen house to guard the place against a weasel attack.

  And it also meant that while the mission was important, old man Shapiro didn’t think Joy was important enough to be brought into the loop on this.

  The worst of it was that Doolan knew all of that, too. What Joy also realized, and Doolan probably knew too, was that it was going to be awfully tough to wipe that smirk off St. Isidore Police Chief Lumpy Doolan’s face.

  “You’ll get your man, all right,” Doolan said. “Officer Jimmy McKenzie, we call him Jimmy Mack, will be at your office this afternoon at 1 p.m.”

  Thirteen

  If Joy thought her head was swirling when she and Amanda left Chief Doolan’s office, it would soon be spinning like a World War Two fighter plane tumbling out of the sky after being shot down in the Battle of Midway.

  She’d been so flummoxed by their conversation with Chief Doolan, that had not gone anything like she wanted it to, that Joy only replied to Amanda’s questions and the usual conversational thrusts of a subordinate worried about their boss, with grunts and occasionally a groan.

  They had coffee, then lunch, then desert, and finally Amanda stopped trying. She just followed Joy through the meal, eating when she ate, drinking when she drank.

  When Joy decided to leave, they left. Joy leading, Amanda following.

  Joy walked to her thinking spot, the bench in the park, and without even asking, Amanda sat down beside her.

  “Do you realize what just happened?” Joy said as much to herself as Amanda.

  “Yes, I do,” said Amanda.

  “What?” Joy said, surprised for a moment that there was a second person in this discussion.

  “I do.”

  Joy stared at Amanda like Christopher Columbus wondering how he was going to communicate with the people whose civilization his people were destined to conquer.

  “I don’t think you do,” Joy said. “We just got roasted in our first attempt to grill Doolan about his department’s weak-ass investigation, and we found out our publisher doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us, or at least me.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Joy said with a dry chuckle. “Fuck.”

  Resigned to whatever life had to offer next, Joy picked herself up off the bench and noticed for the first time that winter was changing to spring early this year in St. Isidore.

  She looked at Amanda, realized the young woman was biting her lip out of fright, reached down, took her hand and said, “Come on. Let’s get back to work.”

  Amanda stood and squeezed Joy’s hand.

  They looked at each other with an embarrassed flash of recognition, and tried to release their grips so quickly, their fingers got tied up for a moment.

  A quick look at each other to make sure they were okay and Joy led Amanda back to the office.

  The noise of the lobby area was always reassuring to Joy. The building was so old-school that she loved it. It wasn’t old school like Chief Doolan’s office. That was more like a tar pit where the dinosaurs went to die.

  The St.Isidore Chronicle building was something else. This was the building where people lived and had lived.

  Its hallway walls were lined with the front pages of days gone by. The front page of the paper the day the stock market crashed in 1929, another front page published on the day in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, then there was the page from the day in 1963 when JFK was killed. The day, the day the day. Front page, front page, front page.

  It was all here. All in glass-encased frames on the walls of a giant stone building the tallest structure in all of St. Isidore, its 35 floors looking down on the rest of humanity.

  Joy was thrilled to be a part of it, as Amanda pressed the “down” button to begin their short, bumpy jo
urney to the basement.

  At least she was in the building, Joy thought. It wouldn’t be her last career stop, she was sure of that. But it was a good stop, a better stop than Joy had ever thought.

  She felt in control again, as Amanda held the elevator door for her to into the basement hallway.

  Joy stopped as she noticed the lights were on in their offices.

  Amanda touched her arm.

  They looked at each other.

  “What now?” Joy whispered.

  Just as she was reaching for the handle, the door flew open.

  “Surprise!”

  Behind Esther were three, no, four people, all young, all working on desks on top of which were “27 inch iMac with Retina 5K displays,” whispered Amanda.

  The computer geek in her was in total awe of the digital power that had manifested itself if their little basement office.

  Amanda glided as if on wings into the office, as Joy pulled Esther into the hallway.

  “You couldn’t have told me?”

  “Told you what?”

  “Told me THIS!” Joy said as she waved frantically in the air to the left and then the right over the hubbub in what had been her quiet little domain.

  “Like I didn’t have a right to know?”

  “Of course, you did, and now you do. Know, I mean. Now you know.”

  Joy was seething. This was like electrified hot sauce slathered over the insult she had just sustain in Chief Lumpy Doolan’s office.

  “Joy, honey,” Esther said as she massaged Joy’s trembling shoulders. “My father decided. He decides everything fast. There was really nothing I could do.”

  If a look of disbelief could be deadly, the El Maleh Rachamim prayers would have been heard along with the Mourner’s Kaddish over Esther's body.

  “Your father did all this?” Joy said as Esther reached back to close the office door.

  “Yes, Joy,” replied a crestfallen Esther.

  “And he called Lumpy last night?”

  “From home, he called. I mentioned what we were working on at the dinner table,” said Esther. “He jumped up and the next thing I know, I am dealing with this.”

  Joy leaned back against the wall and decided it was time to count her blessings. After feeling the sting of being ignored daily for the past several years and sentenced to exile covering city council meetings, she had to admit this was better.

  “He wants to set up a special division like the Boston Globe had to investigate the priests who were messing with the altar boys.”

  “No, shit.”

  “Right, no kidding. You’ll be the head of it, reporting to me. We are going to hire Amanda full time, and you have four new interns.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Oh, my God is right, Joy. You’ve made it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes, that is right, too. Fuck.”

  Joy couldn’t remember ever being so happy that she would cry, but this had to come close.

  “There’s just one more thing.”

  “Aoy neyen, another shoe is going to fall?”

  “Aoy neyen,” Esther laughed. “Nice touch. I didn’t know you spoke Yiddish.”

  Joy smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Here it is,” said Esther.

  She took a deep breath, grabbed Joy by the shoulders and said, “You begin by investigating the latest disappearance, this girl or woman, Janice, who went missing about a week ago.”

  Joy started to sputter, and actually stopped herself.

  “What about the cop?”

  “Cop? What cop?”

  “Lumpy is assigning one of his officers to work with me, he said, so I don’t hurt myself.”

  “My father must have wanted that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, can you do it? Can you work with the interns, Amanda as your #1, reporting to me, and ‘your cop?’”

  Don’t fuck it up, Joy thought to herself. They want Janice, we will give them Janice.

  “She is all over Facebook,” Esther said. “Some friends of hers set up a Facebook page. They are putting flyers all over town.”

  “Wow.”

  “I don’t want to hear ‘wow.’ I need to hear you say ‘Yes, Esther, I am in. I need to know you can handle your whole plan being turned upside down.”

  Could she handle it? Joy didn't answer right away. She wasn’t negotiating, she was thinking. What would be best for her?

  “Yo ikh bin in,” said Joy.

  Esther let a sigh of relief escape and squeezed Joy’s shoulders.

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  Fourteen

  “So where is he?” Joy said, looking as exasperated as any boss would concern an employee who had failed her, and whose tardiness could be taken as an insult.

  Amanda, sitting across from Joy in their Chronicle division newsroom, lifted both hands about shoulder height in the universal sign of “I don’t know, but I am upset, too.”

  Jimmy McKenzie, Jimmy Mack, as he was known by his fellow officers on the St. Isidore force was unconscionably late.

  “Maybe we'll be lucky, and he won't show," Joy said tapping her pen in a quick rhythm on Amanda's desk.

  Again, Amanda raised both hands in a sign of submissive agreement.

  "Maybe he fell down and hurt himself," Joy said. "Jimmy McKenzie has been nothing but trouble for the Swingin' Izzy P.D.," Joy added. "Have you checked out the old stories I sent you about him?"

  Amanda raised her eyebrows to confirm that she had read what her boss had sent to her email at 3 a.m.

  "Suspended for drunk driving. Accused of hitting a prisoner," Joy said, counting the infractions off on the fingers of her right hand with the index finger of her left.

  “And, now it’s 2:30 p.m.,” Amanda noted in a gesture of support and understanding.

  The four interns were busily looking online for anything they could find on this woman that old man Shapiro had deemed to be the division’s highest priority, Janice Underwood.

  Even though the eager beavers who looked to Amanda as a role model of what was possible for an intern at the St. Isidore Chronicle were typing as fast as they could, the little basement newsroom sounded nothing like its fictional TV and movie counterparts.

  Now those offices were newsrooms, Amanda thought. Big, clanging, news wire machines that spit out news from around the globe, typing it automatically on long, winding reams of yellowish paper.

  Hard-bitten, grizzled newspaper people, men, and women, slamming their fingers into the keyboards of manual typewriters, pounding out the stories that a city would read the next morning.

  Cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke filled the air. Amanda wrinkled her nose at that, but it was part of the ambiance, no?

  Her fantasies were not much like reality. But at least they were doing, if not God’s work, then the public’s work, the people’s work.

  “Have we found anything yet?” Joy said.

  Amanda took a deep breath. It was never easy to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear, especially someone who wore their angriest emotions close to the surface.

  She just shook her head. The team had failed, so far, to find any common thread between the half-dozen women who had been found dead in the trees of St. Isidore Park.

  She and Joy had gone out knocking on doors, talking to as many surviving family members and friends as they could.

  They all had similar histories. Who wouldn’t in a town this size? They all went to St. Isidore High School. Again, who didn’t?

  But beyond the obvious connections, there wasn't any straight line that ran from dot to dot to dot.

  We have to be missing something, Joy thought. It has to be hiding in plain sight, and we just can't see it.

  Amanda could tell Joy was boiling inside. Her boss was like a volcano just looking for a place to explode. It was probably the one thing, other than her beautiful black eyes, Amanda thought about at night when she was alone.

 
She would have to hold that thought.

  Amanda and Joy jumped together when they heard the “ding” of the hallway elevator.

  Perhaps the great Jimmy Mack had arrived.

  Amanda went back to her desk.

  Joy hurriedly took a “I’m busy, please don’t bother me” posture as she opened her laptop and went to the Chronicle’s online morgue to look for stories of disappearing women.

  This damn thing isn’t working, Joy thought, which really was not helping her draft the picture she was trying to paint.

  As quietly as they had been working, when one intern after another stopped what he or she was doing, it became even more still in the division’s basement space.

  Jimmy Mack had arrived.

  As the 6’3”,250-pound man with unruly white hair pulled back in a pony tail and puffing out of his bare forearms. He had a stomach that could have had its own nickname. Jimmy's belly was barely contained by his official St. Isidore P.D. blue polo shirt that hung outside a pair of khaki pants that should have been retired a month ago, interns stopped to look. And to smell.

  “He stinks,” Amanda mouthed silently to Joy after the force of nature known as Jimmy Mack had moved by her desk.

  Joy forgot about her subterfuge of appearing to be too busy to be interrupted.

  Even if he hadn’t been wearing a Glock in a belt holster and a gold detective’s badge on a chain around his neck, the dimmest bulb in this journalistic Parthenon known as the St. Isidore Chronicle would have known, this guy is a cop.

  “And you are?” Joy's neck hurt. She had to tilt her head back so far to see Jimmy's face that Joy felt like her head was banging off her back.

  Jimmy Mack just looked down the 12 inches difference in their height and smiled.

  “Detective Jimmy McKenzie reported as ordered, ma’am,” he said.

  Joy looked past this behemoth of law enforcement locked eyes with Amanda, and together they raised their eyebrows.

  “You’re late.”

  Jimmy Mack looked down and smiled.

  “Well, sit down.”

  Jimmy Mack stood. He looked around the newsroom, paying special attention to the girls, as he thought of them, the young women as they thought of themselves.