by E M Kaplan
What she needed to track down was someone who’d done more research on the woman. Why backtrack through all the scraps and breadcrumbs when someone might have done all the legwork?
She scrolled back through some of the other articles about Mary Clare that she’d saved until she found the follow-up one about Billy being taken in for questioning written by a reporter named Skip Richmond.
A few more clicks determined that he still occasionally contributed to the local paper. She dug in her back pocket for her cell phone but came up empty. Not only was her phone still up in the room, but it was dead because she’d never found a charger.
Darn it.
That was a drag. She was going to have to go use the room phone.
Well, well, well, how quickly the technophobe becomes the addict.
“I take it that’s a no-go on the salad?” the bartender with the young face said. He had come to clear her dishes and stood over her with one ginger eyebrow cocked.
She shrugged. “No offense to the salmon. I’m just not into it. It’s all the meat I’ve been eating this week. I’ve had more animal-based protein this week than in the last year. I think it’s making me more aggressive, too.”
In fact, now that she was thinking about it, Baby-Faced Bartender here was the one who’d shut down the minute she’d mentioned Smiley’s earlier. She reached out with a hand on his wrist as he was picking up her plate. His pretentious black finger nail polish was mostly chipped off.
“Not done after all?” he asked. His blond soul-patch jutted out from his chin when he grinned.
“Tell me,” she said. “How come you don’t like Smiley’s?”
Speaking of smiles, his immediately faded. He pulled his wrist away, but she tightened her fingers just a little. Her strongest rendition of being a bad cop—a pinch on the wrist.
He glanced at the bar where another bartender was handling the light afternoon clientele. Then he pulled out the chair next to her and flopped down, legs apart, hands with various silver rings dangling between them. His knuckles were all banged up.
“Look,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s just…it was my first job. I thought it was totally lame. I mean, who has good memories of their first job? Seriously.”
She’d give him that. Her first job was in her mother’s restaurant wiping down tables and filling sauce bottles. Although…she’d kind of liked it. But she would have been inclined to believe him had his eyes not gone up and to his right—and he was wearing a watch on his left wrist. There was that ridiculously easy tell to spot again. She wanted to shake her head in disbelief.
If people only knew how common the eye giveaway is.
She wondered, for a second, if she could train herself to avoid the tell herself, but what was the use? She couldn’t even keep a straight face when she was telling a joke, never mind a lie.
“Why’d you leave Smiley’s?”
He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, his dark fingernails showing through the blond strands. He had one of those trendy undercut buzzes with the floppy part on top that seemed to require him to play with it often.
“I didn’t really like bussing tables like a low-life scrub, so I found a better job. I don’t mean this job here—I left Billy’s a couple years ago.” He was quick to add that part, as if she were going to call up his past workplaces for verification. If she were more detail-oriented, she would’ve gotten right on that task. She had a feeling there was more to his story than he was willing to impart, but instead of doing the tedious legwork, she was hoping he’d make it easy on her and just spill the beans.
“I’m working on my sculptures now. I work with steel.” He dug in his back pocket and handed her a card that said My Band Is Better Than Yours works of art in steel.
“That’s uh…an unusual name for an art exhibit.”
He shrugged. “It’s supposed to be ironic.”
So ironic, she didn’t get it.
He pointed to his hands. “I really mess up my hands sometimes working with metal. I need to be more careful, but I get so caught up in my work in progress that I forget to watch what I’m doing until it’s too late.”
Though it was a turn-off to be served by someone with open sores, at least they were acquired in the name of art. She could get behind that.
“So you were moving onto bigger and better things, pretty much. Did something specific happen to make you quit Smiley’s?”
“Nah, yeah,” he said.
Whatever that meant. And there went the hand through the hair again. He was going to be sporting a bald patch by the end of their conversation. She waited for him to settle on one answer.
“I mean, Billy was cool and all.” His eyes went up to the right.
Pants on fire.
“Yeah?” she asked. “I hear he has kind of a reputation.” She was careful not to say more.
“People always talk about his crazy temper, but I never saw anything like that.” He didn’t elaborate, but his gaze was straight forward—no twitching and no playing with his hair. Whatever beef he had with Billy hadn’t involved the man’s epic outbursts.
“So he was pretty good to work for?”
“Yeah, I mean, it was just the job that sucked.” His eyes were back to their shifty dance. Something had happened between him and Billy, but she wasn’t able to pry it out of him.
“You know what? You’re totally right,” she said, closing her laptop. “First jobs are good for what they are, but we always have to move on, you know?”
He was back to smiling, which was good. She didn’t want to be forced to go elsewhere for breakfast.
Chapter 15
Upstairs in the room, Josie found her phone charger under a bed, hidden half under the bed covers that had slid to the floor when she’d gotten up. She plugged the cord in and opened her laptop to search for a phone number for The Legislator. She picked up the room phone and dialed out, making a mental note to tidy up the explosion of tees and jeans coming out of her suitcase. Not for her sake, but to be less annoying to Drew, or so she aimed to be. She squinted…how’d her hairbrush end up under the chair? That explained why finger-combing her unruly mop of dark hair had been her only choice after her shower.
By some miracle, her call wound through the tortuous newspaper switchboard and reached Skip Richmond’s desk line. She figured she’d leave a message and hope against hope that he’d call her, some unknown out-of-towner digging up old news.
Yeah right. Might as well start playing the lottery.
“Y’ello,” he said, his voice a twangy croak like a knife being dragged across a coat hanger—some kind of homespun instrument that would have been at home fronting a jug band.
She paused in shock, long enough that he repeated his greeting, the second time sounding like he’d been getting more than his fair share of robocalls, telemarketers, and angry readers today.
“Mr. Richmond,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t flip her the digital dial tone. “I’m interested in an article you wrote many years ago.” She paused to figure out the best way to proceed. Leaving a message on his voicemail would have been a lot easier.
“Lady, I’ve been at this desk for three decades. I have underwear older than most of the people who work here. You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”
She could hear him shuffle papers and move things around on his end of the phone, clearly interested in doing anything at all other than talk to her. A slurp and a thunk suggested he was a late-afternoon coffee drinker.
“It’s about Mary Clare Blake.”
First silence, then a stream of creative cursing warbled through the line. Something about the son of God and crackers. Very derivative New Testament. She was impressed.
“You people from Exposé Tonight and all those other trash rags, your so-called investigative reporting, need to leave me in peace. That poor woman’s been gone now for nearly 22 years and you keep dragging her story out like a rotted corpse on display. For what? To sel
l ads. To get higher ratings. Whatever happened to common human decency? Just like that little JonBenét girl in Colorado. We all know her family did it, for the love of God. Why don’t you find some other dead horse to beat? Because not even the blowflies will touch this one.”
His voice grew faint at the end of his diatribe, like he was on a crash course to slamming down the receiver. She had to figure out what to say. And quick.
“Mr. Richmond, I’m not a reporter,” she yelled. She froze and squinted, as if that would make her hear better, waiting to see if her words had had any effect.
Well, pretty much not a reporter. Blogging doesn’t count, does it? Semi-philosophical food-obsessed ramblings.
“And I’m not a detective.”
Another little white lie. The P.I. license in her pocket made her face burn with the fib, but in her heart, she knew she wasn’t a P.I. because the thought of that was ridiculous. She was a nosy bumbler at best. A half-Thai female Columbo. The last time she’d been on an official case, she’d been next to useless and then paraded out like a hero on local TV. She was still trying to live that one down. The thought of it embarrassed her so much, she had to shove it to the back of her mind whenever it resurfaced or her face turned bright red. Which was often, thanks to her friends.
“I swear I’m not in this for profit or glory. I don’t want to make a buck or write a story. I just want to know what happened to that poor woman and maybe help bring a modicum of peace to her family.”
The silence bloomed over the line, and she couldn’t tell if he’d hung up while she’d been fast-talking. She sighed. Talking to him could have cleared so much up. Now she’d have to muddle through this riddle the old fashioned way…by speculation and gossip. Certainly not as effective, but with her knack for ferreting out the truth, or at least pushing people until they eventually gave it up, she might have a small chance in finding out what happened to the missing woman.
Okay, a small snowball’s chance in a Tucson summer.
At last, he said, “Well then, who are you? And what do you know about Mary Clare?”
Josie’s heart thumped. “I’m just a person who has a knack for figuring things out. I heard the story over lunch the other day and it stuck with me. It’s like a pricker in the ankle band of my sock and it won’t stop bothering me.”
“Well, what is it you want to know about her?”
“I want to know whatever you know.”
#
Skip, as he’d asked Josie to call him, was in his sixties, kind of an aging hippie. He was thin, slightly built and looked desiccated, skeletal, and dried out, like the spines of a cactus. He was a mostly brownish-gray person—hair, skin, and clothing alike. Yet he also had a timeless look as if he could have been sitting there in a toga, a set of Wild West Davy Crockett skins, or tie-dye and a fringed vest and looked equally at home in any state.
She met him while he was on his third cup of java in a coffeehouse-slash-café that specialized in what they called “bespoke donuts.” In fact, there was a brochure in papyrus font on recycled elephant dung paper in a hemp basket that explained the philosophy of made-to-order fried dough. Josie put the brochure back and discreetly wiped her hand on her jeans. It seemed their napkins were made of the same pachydermal by-product, which they proudly proclaimed. She set aside the napkins and made a note not to order anything with powdered sugar. As grossed out as she was by wiping her mouth on it, the threat of a little animal poo contamination didn’t stop her from putting in an order for a half-dozen. Who knew—maybe it would help mend her grumpy gut or whatever was wrong with her.
Josie shook Skip’s dry, weathered hand across the metal bistro table.
“I can’t believe you’re interested in Mary Clare, after all these years. I mean, I get all kinds of calls from crackpots and weirdos. This case was as big as the UT sniper, Charles Whitman case. Or the case of David Villarreal, ‘The Rainbow Killer,’ who slashed and hammered men to death. Or the one about Joe Ball, the ‘Butcher of Elmendorf’ over in Bexar County. That guy kept an alligator pit. People were coming out of the woodwork trying to get into the limelight with their false leads and so-called tips. Others were calling up just trying to get details out of us. What is people’s fascination with the misery of others? Or, even worse, murder fetish types who like to tour the homes of dead people.”
Josie swallowed hard, discomfort making her mouth dry. Her appointment with Lizzie the Goth ghost hunter later that night was making her feel a tad ghoulish under his scrutiny.
Skip anchored his longish gray hair behind his ear and heaved a large shoulder bag onto his lap. “You sound really sincere. And after I hung up, I checked out your blog and background. No lawsuits. No arrest record, at least as an adult. Good education. Married once, no kids—”
Her eyes bugged out as he recited her background in bullet points. And what the hell? That quickie mistake marriage had been annulled. Technically it didn’t exist, at least in the eyes of the Pope or whoever. She was working hard to forget it herself.
“—Looks like you’ve had your fair share of hospital stays.”
“How do you know all this? That information isn’t public record.” Anxiety zinged down her spine. Her stomach went numb for once, which was disconcerting after months of mostly pain. She had enemies and a half-hearted Internet stalker who sent her blurry pictures of his anatomy every few months, almost on a quarterly schedule. Her entire life was available to those people? Elephant dung in her donuts was the least of her worries now.
“Relax,” he said. “I have my ways, methods of finding things out that are not available to mere mortals.” His thin, colorless lips curled up in a sardonic smile. He had so many wrinkles in his face, she was concerned about his hydration level.
His vague reassurance that he had skills beyond the average Googler didn’t make her feel better. A guy wearing—she looked under the table to confirm her suspicion—sandals in November shouldn’t be so adept in this stuff, should he? She studied his face. Maybe his bloodshot gray eyes were hiding more intelligence than she’d given him credit. And duh, he was a legitimate journalist, unlike her.
“Moreover, your secrets are safe with me. I keep my findings strictly confidential. That is, unless I’m legally bound to inform law enforcement. I’m not a priest, after all.” He dropped an overstuffed accordion folder case on the table between them, jostling his mug. The drops of coffee that splashed on the front flap weren’t the first to adorn it.
“Here’s everything I have. And I have to warn you, these are not duplicates. All these papers are the real thing, the last of their kind. This is my original file, so anything you want to copy, we have to find a copy machine.”
She could already tell the file was his original collection by the various impressionist shades of caffeine that painted it. She bet if she scraped DNA samples off the coffee splashes, she could track a path from Indonesia all the way back to Juan Valdez.
“Go ahead. Dig in,” he said with a nod toward the file as he drained his cup. He craned his neck to look at the café’s counter. “The line’s down and I need a refill.”
Chapter 16
As creeped out as Josie had been by the amount of details Skip had dug up about her, she was enthralled by how much information he had about Mary Clare as she rifled through the pockets of the accordion file. She figured she’d paid the price by sacrificing her privacy.
His info on the supposedly dead woman was pay-dirt. Bank statements. Cancelled checks. Grocery store receipts. Her junior high school report cards. Two thank you notes addressed to her from charities—the Horton House and her college alumni fund. Three articles from the society column of a Texas Hill Country magazine. A paid-in-full billing statement from a dentist that mentioned an edentulous space and prosthesis, whatever that was. A cassette tape marked “voicemail outgoing message.”
She’d have to ask him about the tape. How in the world did people play tapes anymore? The last tape player she’d seen was in the Green Gian
t, her ‘75 Lincoln Continental currently undergoing reconstruction at a celebrity chop shop.
I’m being unfair. John Dwyer is a legitimate mechanical engineer, even if he was the star of a reality TV show.
Whatever, she mentally warred with herself. Without her car, she felt edgy and more bitter than usual. Not that she drove it very often—it was a two-ton security blanket that reminded her of her family in Arizona who’d given it to her. In any case, she didn’t have a car or a cassette tape player handy.
One pocket of the file contained a stack of dog-eared pages, a typed transcript of a conversation that had taken place in June 1996, approximately nine months after the disappearance. Josie looked closer. The speakers’ names, marked in brackets, were Skip Richmond and someone named Bunny Rogers. Josie set aside the rest of the file to read the interaction. She skimmed through the requisite greetings and verbal permission for him to tape the conversation.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Can you please tell me about the last interaction you had with your daughter Mary Clare?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Yes. It was a telephone call. She called me the morning of September 28. We had a normal conversation, just chit-chatting about this and that. We talked in the morning several times a week, but I’ve since checked on my day planner, in case you’re wondering how I know the date. Also, I’ve been asked many, many times this same question by the police.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Of course. I’m sorry if it’s annoying. I just want to get it in my records.
[BUNNY ROGERS] To tell you the truth, I don’t mind at all if it helps someone figure out what happened to my Mary Clare. One little fact, one little tidbit of information—if there’s anything I know that will help one person figure this out, I’m willing to keep repeating myself till my last breath.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I’ll do my best, ma’am. I’ve had a lot of successes in the past, but I don’t want to get your hopes up too much. I’ve just had a lot of experience in these types of things.
