by G. M. Ford
"That all seems so ... I don't. . . now."
"I understand," I said. "I'll call you when I get back."
"Oh, Leo—" Her eyes filled. "I don't know if I want to."
I took both of her gloved hands in mine. "I want to," I cut her off.
Her eyes gave no indication that she'd heard me. Her mother was suddenly at her side, whispering in her ear. When Marge turned her dull eyes that way, I slipped off through the crowd.
Ray Townsend was puffing on a butt in the parking lot around the corner from the front door.
"Hope I didn't spoil your gig, Ray."
"Lotsa other gigs, Leo. Don' sweat. Son of a bitch is a pain in the ass anyway. I let him, he have me standin' out on his lawn holdin' a lantern when I ain't drivin'."
He flicked the butt to the pavement and retrieved his handkerchief from the hood of the gleaming
black Acura Legend he'd been leaning against. He put a massive hand on my shoulder, leaning in close. His breath held the asphalt-licorice odor of Sen Sen.
"You remember that time you and me duked it out down by where the Kingdome is now? By the old Burlington tracks there, when I was workin' for that fuck Enos?"
"It's not something I could forget, Ray; I still have to shave around some of those places."
"I'da kicked your ass, you hadn't kept hittin' me with that pipe."
"It was a bolt," I corrected. "A real big bolt."
"Heh, heh, heh," Ray said, unconsciously rubbing his cheek. "Can't recall, though, for the life of me, Leo, just what in hell it was we was fightin' over."
"I don't think it was over anything much at all, Ray. I was young, just starting out, mostly serving process. As I recall, old Enos was still holding some grudge against my old man. About the time he figured out who this punk was that had just slapped a subpoena into his palm, he suddenly decided that the sins of the fathers ought to be visited upon the children, so he sicced your big ass on me."
"That surely was a wang dang doodle."
"I mostly remember them yarding us both up to Providence afterward, us laying side by side in emergency, and how I wasn't up and around for a couple of weeks."
He chuckled again. "I 'member, Leo, how when I got home and looked in the mirror, my head was all swole up. They had my face all stitched up with this maroon thread. I looked like a big black baseball."
"Those were good days, Ray."
"They surely were, Leo. They surely were."
Ray and I were beginning to sound like Sam and Ralph, the sheepdog and the coyote in those old Warner Brothers cartoons. Just a couple of good old
boys punching in for another day of madcap mayhem. It was definitely time to go. "Later, Ray."
I shook his hand again, ducked between cars, and started across Ninth Avenue. "Later, Leo," he growled to my back.
14
Carl had first objected on botanical grounds. "It's too fuckin' green."
"Chlorophyll is the essence of life on the planet," I assured him. Scientifically thwarted, he'd taken a more cultural approach.
"Oh, yeah. Me and Sam Spade a thousand miles from home, surrounded by about a million cheese-heads. Be still my heart."
"They won't harm you. They'll all be out pruning their shrubs." Next, he'd tried the old business excuse.
"I am in business, ya know, Leo. What am I supposed to tell my customers—Come back in a week or so, I'm goin' to Wisconsin to get my bratwurst polished?"
"Mark can handle things while you're gone."
"Fuckin' kid will steal me blind."
From the far end of the counter, Mark piped up. "I already steal you blind."
I knew I had him when he then slipped totally out of character and went trolling for sympathy.
"Right, so I'm gonna roll through a couple of major airports so the citizens can gawk at the freak. Right? Sit in my little chair on the plane, in the aisle"—he jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder—"in the back, right next to the shifter, listening to the white-
knucklers tooting 'Stairway to Heaven' on their sphincters."
"It's a short flight," I countered.
"And what then? You gonna load me and the chair on the roof of some rental car, tool us over to the university?"
"There's a company in Madison that'll rent us the same kind of van you've got. Lift, hand controls, the whole ball of wax. You can drive."
This was my trump card. Carl enjoyed nothing more than terrorizing the citizenry in his specially equipped Chevy van, ignoring any and all traffic laws, parking in places that would make a UPS driver blush. I was banking that the prospect of having an entire new state at his mercy would be more than he could resist.
"No way. It'll be a piece of shit. Cheap. No way they'll have a—"
Mark jumped in. "Exactly the same equipment you've got, Carl. I talked to them myself this morning. I explained that you were a discerning consumer."
"A discerning consumer, huh. Those were your exact words?"
"Actually, pain in the ass were my exact words."
By 9:00 a.m. Thursday morning, Carl and I had found our way to West Lake Street in Madison, Wisconsin. We watched as the blue-clad janitor slid back the bolts on the smoked-glass front doors of Alumni House. An insistent, swirling breeze moved my hair about. Carl fidgeted with the buttons on his chair, bumping over the uneven stones, rolling three feet forward then three feet back.
"This is a hell of a reach, Leo."
"I know."
"I can't believe this is all you got. Most of all I can't believe I let you talk me into this crap." "It's all I've got."
"It's pathetic."
"I know," I repeated. "In my business, this is what I do when I don't have anything. I just go around turning over rocks, waiting to see what crawls out."
"This isn't a rock; it's a crock."
"She's consistently used Madison and the university as her background story. She even managed to bounce it by a guy who knew a lot about the place. It's the best thing I've got."
"It ain't much," he said again. "Let's go." Flicking away a butt, he suddenly rocketed forward. Most motorized wheelchairs are intended to putt along at a top speed of three or four miles per hour, a demure pace designed to fit nicely into normal foot-traffic flow. Never having been one to go with the flow, Carl Cradduck had commissioned modifications that would have turned many a NASCAR driver green with envy. His chair in high gear was considerably faster than any number of inexpensive foreign cars. A frightening top speed, combined with Carl's utter disregard for his fellow man, invariably turned crowded sidewalks and airport concourses into human bowling alleys. I tried to stay out of the way and pretend we weren't together.
Alumni House was a surprise. From the lush carpets to the Philippine mahogany paneling and hunt club prints, no expense had been spared in an all-out effort to distance this island of good taste from the general squalor of an urban university campus. The result was a kind of no surprise, unevolved English manor-house elegance. Created intact, climate controlled, simultaneously purified and rarefied.
"How may I help you, sir?" The name plate read Pamela Shincke. She had about her an air of competence. Firmly in charge of the reception area. The guardian of the gate. The keeper of the flame. I sensed we were in good hands.
Her appearance provided a much-needed contrast to the rest of the furnishings. She was sporting a smile and one of those modern MTV hairdos with those mysterious radar bangs that I still find it difficult to believe any woman would inflict upon herself intentionally. Maybe after three or four days of unshowered salt and sailing, or after a death-defying ride on the back of a motorcycle, but certainly'not purposely.
"We'd like to see copies of the Badger Annual from nineteen-seventy-eight through nineteen-ninety-two," I said.
Since we had no knowledge of the girl's actual age, we'd decided to operate from the premise that, right now, she was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Allowing for error, we had decided to cover a fourteen-year span—1978 through 19
92.
Pamela was eager to help.
"Certainly, sir," she beamed. "Are you gentlemen by any chance Badgers yourselves?"
"Badgers," Carl growled, "we don't need no stinking Badgers."
"Oh," Pamela said. "I get it. The movie with Humphrey Bogart. How cute."
"The annuals?" I said
"Which campus?"
Carl remained calm.
"How many are there?" he asked.
"Two-year or four-year?" she asked.
Carl flicked me a short, murderous glance.
"Four-year," I said quickly.
"Twelve in addition to the main campus here in Madison."
"I see," said Carl through his teeth. "And I take it that each campus issues its own annual?"
"Yes, sir. Altogether, the University of Wisconsin has nearly a hundred fifty thousand students. Just imagine how big just one yearbook for all the campuses would be."
I tried not to.
She picked a brochure from the counter, leaned over, and handed it to Carl. "This might help you, sir. It lists all the campuses, the number of students on each campus, and all that kind of stuff."
"Thank you so much." Carl beamed back. "My colleague and I had better discuss this before we proceed."
"Would you like to use our reading room?"
She gestured toward a large conference room on our immediate left.
"You're too kind," Carl said.
She came out from behind the counter.
"It's my pleasure. Things have been kind of slow around here lately. To tell you the truth, it's nice to have somebody in here. Homecoming's not for another month. That's when we get real busy around here. That and graduation time."
She led us into a large room, decorated in the same dark woods and thick fabrics as the reception area but considerably lightened by a set of leaded windows running along the top of the three exterior walls.
"I was just going to make coffee. Can I get you gentlemen a cup?"
"Please," I said.
"Many thanks," answered Carl.
"If there's anything else you need, just let me know."
"Thanks again," Carl said.
She closed the door behind her. Carl watched her go and then motored up to the edge of the table.
"You suppose she's that nice all the time?" he asked.
"I think it's a distinct possibility." "Scary."
"Yeah," I agreed.
Carl placed both palms on the table.
"Let's see here, Einstein. Thirteen campuses times twelve years. What's that, about a hundred and a half?" "Something like that."
"So, you wanna call and get us a flight out of this shit burg or should I do it?"
As a professional investigator, I sensed that Carl was losing his enthusiasm for the task.
"It all points here to Madison," I said quickly. "The address she had given for her missing aunt was in Madison. The stories of her childhood and college days all supposedly took place in Madison. It's gotta be Madison."
"Yeah, but what if, Leo? What if? What if we dragged our moldy asses all the way out here into cheesehead bumfuck and it turns out that the trim went to"—he fingered the list of campuses in his hand—"the Parkside campus or Riverfalls, or maybe even Oshkosh by fucking gosh? What then, huh?"
"No way we can go through that many annuals," I conceded.
"No shit, Sherlock."
"We'll have to try to cover as many bases as possible." "This is sick."
I persisted. "How many total students did she say they had?"
"Just under a hundred-fifty thousand."
Carl smoothed the list on the table and pulled a pen from his pocket. I leaned over his shoulder.
"If we just do these..." He circled Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, and Oshkosh.
"Whitewater too," I added. "It's the only other campus with more than ten thousand students."
"Okay, Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, Osh fucking Kosh, and Whitewater. How many total bodies is that?"
We both mumbled slightly as we totaled the columns
"Almost two-thirds of them," Carl said. "Just over ninety-five thousand on those five campuses."
"Even then, that's sixty annuals," he groused. "We better get started."
Carl folded his arms over his thin chest. No comment. No movement. Just the thousand-yard stare. When I returned ten minutes later with my arms full of annuals, he still hadn't moved.
"I figured we'd do all the Madisons first," I said.
Carl uncrossed his arms, drumming now with his fingers on the control panel of his chair. "You fuck," he said.
I ignored him. "Should we start at the ends and work toward the middle or start in the middle and work toward the ends?"
No reply. More drumming.
"Okay," I said. "I'll do from seventy-eight through eighty-four. You do eighty-five through ninety-two." I began to sort the bright red pile. "Every other year," Carl said. "Excuse me?"
"Every other fucking year. You do the odds. I'll do the evens. It'll keep us from seeing the same faces too often." He added another "You fuck" as an afterthought.
Scanning pictures looking for a specific face turned out to be harder than I'd imagined. It took me the better part of an hour to find my rhythm. Going too slow slipped me into an inattentive fog where, after about a half hour, I wouldn't have recognized my mother. I had to completely redo the senior section of 1989 when I'd started off too slow. Too fast and I didn't have time to mentally allow for either the ravages of time or the vagaries of fashion. It was trial and error. At my workable speed, it took me about two hours to work my way through my first yearbook. Even then, there was no way to be certain that I hadn't mentally drifted off and missed her somewhere along the way.
By eleven-thirty, Carl hadn't uttered a syllable. He hadn't even gone out for a smoke. Other than to turn pages he hadn't moved. Pamela had appeared at regular intervals to freshen our coffee. I decided not to mention lunch. I was afraid that if he ever got out of the room I'd never get him back in, so I shut up and kept working. Two-thirds of the way through the 1985 edition, I came across a possible.
"Maybe," I said, sliding the book across to Carl.
"Which one?"
"The one with the drink in her hand." "This one?" He tapped the face. "Uh huh."
Carl studied the image for no more than five seconds.
"Jesus, Leo. I hope to God you've been doing a shitload better than this over there."
"That's a no, then."
"Look at the hand on this honey."
He pivoted the book back in my direction. "We're looking for a petite woman here, Leo. Look at the paws on this one."
I looked. She had all five fingers. Nothing came immediately to mind.
"Look." He tapped the page harder now. "This one has fingers longer than our trim's whole hand. Large Marge here could palm it and take it into the paint. Jesus. Gimme seventy-nine."
I handed it over.
"Pay attention, for chrissakes," he said over the top of the book. I did the best I could. By quarter to three, my stomach was growling as I was finishing my third annual. The faces were beginning to swim before my eyes. The steady stream of coffee provided by the ever-affable Pamela failed to stem the swirling tide of hopeful faces. I was now using my finger, as if
touching each face would somehow make it more distinct. No help. Everybody was beginning to look like Mr. Potato Head. Grudgingly, I concluded that we were, as Carl had suggested, wasting time.
"Maybe we should—" I started.
Carl sat with his arms folded over his thin chest, staring at me.
"When I was sixteen, my mother married a drunken pipe-fitter name Hallinan," he said.
I waited.
"A real asshole. One of those low-grade morons with a cutesy little aphorism for every occasion." He paused. "So?"
"Two of his rectal tidbits come to mind here, Leo." "Such as?"
"Whenever I did anything right, which was none too often, he'd always say, 'Ev
en a blind pig will occasionally root up an acorn.'"
"A nurturing type."
"Yeah. Big time," Carl mused. "And whenever he'd fuck up, which was a regular Friday-night occurrence, and the old lady would have to go down to the station house and bail his hairy ass out, he'd always say he'd been saved because 'God protects fools and drunks, and only the good die young.'"
I waited for the tie-in. None was forthcoming.
"I'm all ears," I said.
He uncrossed his arms and held out his right hand.
"Gimme nineteen eighty-one."
No point in asking why. Instead, I rummaged through the pile and slid the volume over to his side of the table.
He consulted the index, thumbed his way about three quarters of the way to the back, and began to slowly go through the pages.
"Maybe we should—" I started again.
Without looking up. "Shut up, will ya."
Pamela made another pass, refilling our cups. Carl took no notice. After twenty minutes, he closed the volume and slid it back over toward me. "I think what galls me the most is the idea that that asshole Hall-inan might have been right."
"How so?"
"Obviously some higher power must be in charge of looking out for hummers like you, Leo. There's no other possible explanation."
"Oh."
"Shit yeah. No doubt about it. We shoulda crapped out here, Leo. Big time. If there was any justice at all, we shoulda pissed away a bunch of old Warheads' dinero and come home with nothin' more than heartburn from this shitty coffee." He sat back in his chair. "I mean, we've got fourteen years times thirteen campuses, not a goddamn thing to go on other than some half-assed idea that this twat might have spent time at a university at some time in her life. We've got half the books being scanned by the Helen Keller of photo identification, who probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Joan Rivers and the Lindbergh baby, and what happens?"
"Hauptmann turns out to be innocent?"
"What happens is, right there as big as life in the second book I look at is daddy's little girl just staring me right in the fucking face with that same deer-in-the-headlights look she gets whenever she spots a camera."
