“That’s her stage n—” the woman began to explain.
Her husband said, “Hush,” then turned to Dom. “What do you mean, routine? What’s she done?”
“We’re not sure she’s done anything, but we need to talk to her. Just to ask her a couple of questions about something that happened in L.A. An old case.”
“And I’m afraid,” Jordan found herself adding smoothly, “we can’t reveal the nature of our inquiry, not until we’ve talked to your daughter.”
Half-expecting Dom to signal her to be quiet, she was surprised when he leveled her a look and cocked an eyebrow but indicated nothing about her shutting up. So she went on. “Myra has a child, is that correct?”
The woman nodded. “Yes. Rory.”
Jordan opened her purse, took out her small notepad and silver pencil. “That’s right. Rory Foster?”
“Yes.”
“Is Foster your daughter’s married name?”
“No,” Mrs. Kaczmarak said, “it’s her stage name.”
“She never did marry the father,” her husband said sourly.
“Myra wanted to be an actress.”
“Not the way she looks now, she can’t be no actress.”
The woman rose and walked to the piano, a small upright in the corner. From there, she took a color picture in a brass frame and showed it to her visitors, a hint of pride on her face. “That’s her.”
“Was,” her husband amended.
Jordan took the picture and studied it. Myra had been given the full glamour treatment at her photo session. Lots of wavy tumbling blond hair, a low-necked, tight-fitting top that showed off an abundance of cleavage. Her eyes were made up heavily, her lips glossy, slightly parted in invitation.
Definitely Reynolds’s taste in bed partners, Jordan admitted, if not in wives. Myra was an attractive young woman without being really pretty. In the broad cheekbones and wide nose, Jordan could see the same Slavic background as her mother.
“She’s very pretty,” Jordan murmured, handing the photo to Dom.
“Used to be,” said the father gruffly. “Add fifty pounds to that, and that’s what she looks like now.”
“Don’t, George.”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
“Do you have any recent pictures of her?” Dom asked. “Say, with the little boy?”
The woman shook her head sadly. “No, Myra doesn’t like to have her picture taken now. She says it depresses her.” Sighing loudly, she lowered herself onto the couch. “Just about everything depresses her, seems like.”
The father snorted disdainfully. “Can’t keep a job, goes off for days at a time, we have to look after the child.”
“He’s a good little boy,” the woman interjected. “Doesn’t talk much, but—” She shrugged.
“Where are they now, Mrs. Kaczmarak?” Dom asked.
“I have no idea. Her brother, Walter, called, is all I know, and said to put her on the phone quick. Whatever he said to her, Myra just climbed in the truck and drove off.”
“How long ago?” Dom asked.
At the same moment Jordan asked, “Alone?”
The man answered. “About five hours or so, I guess. Just after lunch. No, not alone. She had the kid with her.”
“I suspect she’ll turn up soon,” Mrs. Kaczmarak said. “Sometimes she takes these drives, says they relax her. Our daughter is kind of, well, unstable, Detectives. It breaks my heart to say it, we raised her proper and all, with manners and church, but she always had these crazy ideas.”
“And you have no idea where she went?” Jordan asked, trying to keep her voice from betraying her mounting concern. “It’s really important that we talk to her.”
“No. Sorry.”
“What kind of car is she driving, Mrs. Kaczmarak?” Dom asked.
The man looked from Dom to Jordan and back again. “Hey, this isn’t some routine thing, not if you’re trying to track her down.”
“It’s time-sensitive,” Jordan blurted, then looked at Dom.
He continued smoothly. “We’re on a deadline and although your daughter isn’t directly involved, there are lives at stake. That’s about as much as we can say.”
Mrs. Kaczmarak shot her husband a look, her eyes widening slightly. “Tell them, George.”
“She drives my old truck. An old beat-up pickup, used to be red, now it’s mostly rust. Seventy-two Ford,” he added, and gave them the license plate number.
Jordan scribbled it down, then wrote her car phone number on a separate piece of paper. This she tore off, then stood and handed it to Mrs. Kaczmarak. “If you hear from your daughter, will you call us? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a phone.”
“We use the pay phone downstairs.”
“We don’t want any trouble,” her husband said.
“And we hope there won’t be any,” Jordan replied.
Dom stood, too. “We’d appreciate the names of a couple of her close friends. People she might go to?”
The woman looked doubtful. “Well, they were high school friends, she hasn’t kept up much contact with them.”
“Every little bit of information helps.”
All four of them trooped into the kitchen, where Mrs. Kaczmarak kept her address book. After leafing through the pages, she read off three names and phone numbers, which Jordan wrote down.
Thanking the Kaczmaraks for their cooperation, Jordan and Dom took their leave. They didn’t speak to each other until they’d walked down the stairs and gotten into the Rover and Dom had driven away from the laundromat.
Jordan glanced at Dam. “I hope I didn’t talk too much. Did I ruin anything?”
“Nah.” He smiled in admiration. “I take back what I said about you being a lousy liar. You’re a champ.”
“In the right circumstances, I guess I can be.”
As night descended over the small town, a cool mist filtered in. As the street lamps came on, they seemed like ghost lights. Jordan peered anxiously out the window. “Where do you think the police station is?” she asked him.
Dom shrugged. “Town this size may not have one.”
“Well, then, what do we do now? Put out a—what do you call it? An APB?”
“For Myra’s truck?”
“Yes. For my little boy.”
How many times, he wondered, would they have this discussion before she got her answer and, most probably, got her heart broken all over again? “Jordan, you don’t know if Rory is Michael. I can’t go to the local cops based on your gut feeling and some ex-con’s story he came up with to get money from you.”
“But Myra’s been gone—”
“For five hours. She’s an adult,” he continued with as much patience as he could muster. “As far as we know, she’s gone for a drive with her little boy. Taken him to the zoo.”
“After a phone call from Wally—”
“Who might have said any number of things to her. Let’s give it some time.”
“Time?” She glared at him as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “We don’t have time. Wally called five hours ago. Myra could be halfway to Mexico or Canada by now.”
“Jordan,” Dom said, “please, try to—”
The car phone rang. Jordan snatched it up, said, “Yes?” and listened, then nodded and said, “we’ll be right there.”
Disconnecting, she said to Dom, “We have to go back to the Laundromat. It seems Myra ran off so quickly, she forgot to take her purse. It’s still there. Do you think that’ll help?”
“Can’t hurt to check it out.”
They were at the Kaczmaraks within minutes. Jordan ran up the stairs ahead of him, and when Mrs. Kaczmarak opened the door, she said, “Thanks for calling. May we look through Myra’s purse?”
Dom winced. Jordan had been a champ so far, but in this instance, the direct approach might not be the best one. If the Kaczmaraks knew their rights, they could refuse.
As though he’d had a pipeline to Dom’s thoughts, the husband s
aid, “I don’t think we should let you—”
Jordan jumped in. “But—”
Dom put a restraining hand on her arm, and she seemed to catch his signal because she clammed up. He stepped in with a little hardball.
“Mr. Kaczmarak,” he said, with a small warning smile that he knew was not a pleasant thing to see, “if I remember correctly, your son served some time, didn’t he? Let’s all work together so your daughter doesn’t have to do the same. Okay?”
The husband and wife looked at each other, then nodded.
At the kitchen table, while the Kaczmaraks hovered anxiously, Dom emptied out Myra’s purse. Inside were used tissues, a pack of cigarettes, a disposable lighter, several lipsticks, sunglasses, two candy bars and a cheap plastic wallet, which he opened.
Apart from her driver’s license, which said Myra Kaczmarak, there were three pictures—a wallet-size version of Myra’s glamour shot, a photograph of Myra and a man Dom recognized as Reynolds Carlisle, and an infant wrapped in a blanket.
“Not Michael,” Jordan told him under her breath.
The wallet also contained seven dollars and some change.
“Did she take a credit card with her?” Dom asked Myra’s father.
“She doesn’t have any credit cards.”
From the purse’s side pocket, Jordan brought out a yellow flyer, which she read, then told Dom, “It’s an invitation to a school art sale. Does Myra go to school?” she asked Mrs. Kaczmarak.
“No, Rory does. Day care, over at the Methodist church.”
“Where is it?”
“Two blocks south, on Broad.”
Dom and Jordan said their thanks one more time, then headed for the church. It was seven-thirty at night and the mist had become a light fog. Businesses were closed, the streets were empty and lamps were lit in living room windows. The church was closed and locked, there were no inside lights visible, and repeated rattling at the back gate didn’t produce a janitor or night watchman.
Jordan scowled in disappointment. “I remember when churches were open all the time, you know, to offer sanctuary.”
“Not any more. Too many homeless, too much robbery, too little respect for tradition, not enough members to pay the electricity. Come on.”
They got in the Rover, and Dom circled the grounds, looking for an old red pickup truck, but to no avail. After that, he drove up one street and down the other, slowly—it was difficult to make out the details in the fog—on the lookout for the vehicle, while Jordan called Myra’s old friends.
The story she came up with was a pretty good one. She claimed to be an agent calling from Hollywood, trying to contact Myra Foster, whose parents had given this number. There was a chance for a small part on an afternoon soap opera.
Two of the women said they had run into Myra in town in the past year but hadn’t renewed any kind of friendship or knew who her current friends were. The third one was more emphatic, saying she wouldn’t go near her. “Myra’s always been weird,” she told Jordan, “and since she’s back, she’s really weird.”
“Another dead end,” Jordan said at the end of the third phone call.
“She can’t get far without money. She can’t buy any food or gas.”
“Tell me again why we’re not going to the police? I mean, you’re an L.A. sheriff, you’re a detective, for heaven’s sake. Don’t they have to listen if you tell them to?”
Dom turned onto one more side street and checked the vehicles parked there. “Depends—sometimes they resent us guys from the big city. But apart from that, say they accept what I tell them, that I’m looking for Myra Foster, aka Myra Kaczmarak, license number etcetera. They call down to my bureau to verify, which they always do, and when they do, they’ll find I’m out on sick leave, that there is no open case having to do with Michael Carlisle or Myra Foster or Myra Kaczmarak or Wally Foster, that I’m not working on anything like that, and I get hauled in on charges of abusing my power.”
Turning left into an alleyway that ran behind a row of houses, he continued, “Not that I wouldn’t gladly do that, Jordan, I’d abuse the hell out of my power if it would do any good, but it won’t. Myra’s not missing, can’t be reported missing for days. Best-case scenario? They decide to help us. What a small-town police department would do is this—they send out a patrol car to look for the truck. Which is what we’re doing right now. I’m sorry, Jordan, but that’s how it goes.”
Her long sigh told him he’d accomplished what he’d meant to. Worn her down with words because he was tired of explaining himself to a woman too frantic to hear him.
Jordan said nothing for a little while, then she shook her head sadly. “I’ll bet you’re sorry you ever met me.”
“Sometimes I am,” he said truthfully. “Yeah, sometimes. Mostly not, though.”
The barrier between them, he observed, erected when she had burst in on him today, was way diminished, but it was still there. She’d apologized for her anger, but he was still angry at himself and frustrated with her. She was frustrated with waiting. Neither of them could offer the other the comfort they needed, he concluded, which was the pits.
They were in farm country, on the outskirts of town. Up and down dirt roads and side streets they drove, looking for Myra’s truck, but they had no luck.
The fog had diminished, but that didn’t mean visibility was any better. The three-quarter moon was about the only illumination available this far from town.
Dom glanced at Jordan. In the moonlight, her face looked so drawn, her cheekbones more prominent than ever.
In the time he’d known her—two and a half or three weeks, he figured—she must have dropped five or six pounds. On her, that didn’t look good.
Coming to a decision, he wrenched the wheel to the left and made a U-turn, found the highway and headed toward town.
“Where are we going?” Jordan asked sharply.
“To get something to eat.”
“But Michael—”
“You have to eat, and after that, you have to sleep.”
She shook her head adamantly. “No, I can’t.”
“You’ll fall apart if you don’t.”
“How can I sleep when my child is out there with a madwoman? Did you hear what they said? She’s unstable, gets crazy ideas. Her friends say she’s weird.”
“And if it is Michael, he’s been with her for a whole year, so whatever crazy ideas Myra’s had, he’s still all right.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t, but tell me this. What good are you going to be to him if you pass out, get sick? Because you’re on the way, Jordan. I’m watching it happen,” he continued grimly, “right in front of my eyes.”
It was all too familiar to him, that motherhood thing again. With Theresa, she couldn’t have babies, so she got crazy. With Jordan, she was positive her kid was in danger, and that led to another kind of insanity. Couldn’t she see it?
As though in answer to his unspoken question, Jordan closed her eyes and seemed to concentrate on steadying her nerves. Then she nodded. “You’re right. I’m close to the edge and I don’t know how to stop it. Sorry,” she added in a small, apologetic voice.
Maybe he should feel good that she’d heard him, but it almost broke his heart, seeing her so defeated. However, he couldn’t afford to let down. One of them had to remain strong here, and as he was the professional, he got the job.
He found a run-down coffee shop, scarfed down a hamburger and a cup of coffee and kept watch over her while she ate some oversalted soup and a small roll. Then he checked them into a motel She was so exhausted, the moment they walked into the room, she sank onto a chair and closed her eyes.
“Come on,” he said, “take off your clothes.”
Jordan’s eyelids lifted halfway. “Tell me you don’t mean what I think you mean.”
“I’m not going to jump your bones. I’m going to run you a bath.”
She struggled to sit up. “Did you bring the phone in from the car? I
n case the Kaczmaraks call?”
“Yes.” He went into the bathroom and started the hot water running into the tub. Then he returned to Jordan, who hadn’t moved from the chair. When he undressed her, she didn’t protest, just went along like a rag doll. He earned her into the tub, set her in it, soaped a washcloth, washed her all over.
The automatic male part of him was aroused by her nakedness—thin as she was, his body remembered the pleasure she had given him—but he ignored his reaction. As he gazed at her, all soapy and sad, he felt moved in another, decidedly unsexual way. Tenderness toward her filled him. She was so tired, so worn down with stress, and yet that fire still burned fiercely in her, that fire for her son.
As he rinsed her off, Dom couldn’t help smiling ruefully at the direction of his thoughts. Way to go, D’Annunzio, he told himself, you’re just a little bit jealous, aren’t you? Of a toddler. You want all that attention, all that fire, for yourself.
By the time he’d finished rinsing her off, Jordan was sound asleep. Dom let the water run out, rubbed her as dry as he could, wrapped her in a towel and carried her to bed. After pulling the covers up to her chin, he arranged the pillows so her neck was comfortable, then sat in the armchair near the foot of the bed, propped his feet on the coffee table and gazed at her while she slept.
His thoughts were not peaceful ones. For the first time that day, he allowed them free rein, and they did not go toward self-love.
He’d screwed up, he told himself, all down the line, by not taking the first letter seriously, then by not insisting Jordan get her son’s case reopened. If he had, at least now he’d have backup instead of feeling like some rogue cop on his own, surrounded by the bad guys, who were calling all the shots.
And because he hadn’t taken the letter seriously, he hadn’t been on the lookout, hadn’t been checking his rearview mirror, hadn’t observed the passersby when he visited Jordan at her shop. Had given Wally ammunition.
The list of screwups could go on and on, a bottomless well of lists, but that was enough for now. On the professional front, anyway. Because then there were the personal screwups, beginning with Jordan.
He watched her as she slept, deep purple shadows under her lower lids, her hands twitching in sleep. It was almost as if her body was insisting on resting, but her mind didn’t know how to turn off. He wanted to do something wonderful for her, but he was just a man, and an imperfect one at that.
The Tough Guy and the Toddler Page 22
