Edited Out

by E. J. Copperman

  “The apartment where Damien was living when he vanished,” Duffy said. “As you might suspect, there is another tenant there now, but it might help us to see the layout of the rooms. Our other appointments were only available later in the day.” It never would have occurred to him to leave later, avoid some traffic, and let me sleep in past six in the morning. Of course not.

  “Does the new tenant know anything about Damien?” I asked. Duffy had parked the car in a public lot, an open space with meters, saying Poughkeepsie was too large a city for us to walk to all our destinations and we’d need the car again later.

  “Her name is Rosalind Woo,” he said. “She is seventy-two years old and moved here from Cooperstown three years ago. She is not even the tenant who lived in the apartment immediately after Damien. I have done a little research and see no connection between the two of them.” He pointed at the three-story brick apartment building. “Second floor.”

  I stopped walking, and Duffy stopped, confused at my action. “Look around,” I said. “This is your hometown. Does anything look familiar?”

  Duffy’s eyebrows rose a bit; the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He stood in the middle of the street, which was okay because luckily, no one was driving through at the moment. Duffy took in the scene slowly and turned a complete 360-degree circuit. He looked up and down, out in every direction.

  “Nope,” he said finally.

  * * *

  Sure enough, Rosalind Woo seemed a little puzzled about our reasons for looking over her apartment, which seemed natural to me. I had no idea what we were looking for, either.

  “None of the things here were this Damien’s,” she said after ushering us in. She had put out a plate of Oreos and a pot of tea on her dining table, but Duffy had refused the snack. I saw he was in full investigator mode, but Rosalind clearly had never seen that before and was eyeing him warily. In order to appear normal, I took an Oreo. Okay, three Oreos. Did I mention Duffy hadn’t let me stop for breakfast?

  Duffy stood in the center of the living room, which had a fireplace and built-in bookshelves on one wall. There was no television in the room, as Rosalind said she preferred to read until bedtime, so she had the TV in the bedroom.

  “Were these bookshelves here when you moved in?” he asked.

  Rosalind nodded. “Far as I know, they’re original equipment.”

  Duffy took in the information and scratched his nose. I hadn’t written him that little move, so I assumed it was just itchy. “Did the landlord tell you how old this building might be?”

  She looked at him for a while this time, no doubt wondering why this strange man would think she’d know about the history of the building in which she had rented an apartment. “Somehow it didn’t come up,” she said.

  Duffy nodded. He does that and makes you think he’s agreeing with you. The fact is he’s thinking something, and the nod means he’s agreeing with himself. His eyes glanced around the room in a way that would seem casual if, unlike me, you didn’t know he was essentially taking pictures with his eyes. He’d probably ask Rosalind in a moment if he could use his phone to take a few shots, and she’d once again give him an expression indicating that he was quite insane.

  “May I look in the bedroom?” he asked. That was enough for a strong glance from the current lessee.

  But she couldn’t think of a reason to keep him out. “If you want,” she said without a whit of enthusiasm in her voice. “Did you say you were from the police or something?”

  “We are not acting with the authority of any law enforcement agency,” Duffy told her with an air that said he’d explained this before. “I do sometimes work as a consultant with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, but I am not here in that capacity today.”

  “Bergen County?” Rosalind sounded like the words were coming at her too fast.

  “New Jersey,” I said.

  “Oh.” That explained everything, apparently.

  Duffy let her lead us to the bedroom, which was down the hall past a galley kitchen. Rosalind opened the door, and Duffy stepped in first, probably to make sure she didn’t change anything in the room. We were, after all, searching for a man who hadn’t been here in five years.

  The bed was made, thankfully, and there were no clothes strewn about the room. Duffy looked around, particularly at the higher sections of the walls, which to my eye were entirely unremarkable. He did not attempt to open the closet door.

  He did, however, drop to the floor and look under the bed. Rosalind gasped, either because she hadn’t expected that or because she was considering the idea of a stranger assaying the dust bunnies next to her slippers. Duffy spent a few seconds down there, then got himself back to his feet.

  “Very well,” he said, heading for the bedroom door. I guess he thought we understood.

  He gave the kitchen a closer look on the way back but did not comment on anything. Rosalind was by now watching Duffy the way one would watch a dangerous mental patient and was especially tense when he got near her block of knives, but he didn’t touch anything.

  Back in the living room, he stopped again and looked up at the ceiling. He pointed at a small section of the wallboard that appeared to be damaged or purposely cut into a rectangular shape. “Is that removable?” he asked.

  “What?” Rosalind looked up, and her mouth twitched.

  “Is there a step stool?” Duffy said, looking around. He spotted one in a corner not far from the ceiling cutout and started walking toward it. “May I use this?”

  “No!” Duffy stopped in his tracks when Rosalind shouted. “Now that’s enough. You’ve come into my house and looked around at all my things. You’ve looked under my bed. I’m not going to let you take my living room apart. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave now, please.”

  I felt like I was watching a very odd movie. Duffy stared at Rosalind, no doubt trying to determine her motivation and coming up with very little. “I just want to—”

  “I said no.” Rosalind’s tone had less volume but more immovability. “You said yourself that you have no authority to come in here. You’re just looking around because I let you in. For all I know, you’re casing the place so you can rob me later. I’ve had enough of this, and I want you to leave.” She turned toward me, and her voice softened. “Please.”

  “Let’s go, Duffy,” I said without looking at him. I’m sure his face was registering astonishment at my capitulation. He saw a perfectly clear reason to do what he wanted to do, and this irrational woman was recruiting me to frustrate him.

  “But—”

  “Ms. Woo has been very hospitable, and we’ve taken up enough of her time. We have other people to talk to, so let’s go.” I actually took him by the arm and started leading him toward the door.

  Duffy did not say anything as we walked out, but his face was absolutely stricken with my lack of understanding. He’d spotted something that probably had no connection to Damien Mosley at all, and here I was insisting he leave. But Rosalind Woo smiled warmly at me as we left.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  And she handed me another Oreo.

  Chapter 5

  “I don’t understand what kind of investigator you believe yourself to be,” Duffy Madison said to me.

  We were sitting in a booth at Patty’s Diner, which was probably not owned by anyone named Patty and was a diner, by Jersey standards, in name only. This was a little café trying desperately to appeal to hipsters. The exposed brick and beams were juxtaposed ironically with neon signs and menus that offered no fewer than seventeen types of coffee. We’d each ordered a regular, visibly disappointing the multipierced server.

  It was further evidence of a view I was forming of Poughkeepsie, that it was a city (or town—who knew which we were in at the moment?) that had once fallen on hard times and was now trying to gentrify itself into a haven for students and faculty of Vassar College, which it counted as one of its assets. As with most such efforts, the areas trying to be cool were putting
in so much effort, you wanted to sit them down and explain that these things take time and that they had no reason to worry.

  “I don’t think I’m any kind of investigator,” I said. “I think I’m a crime fiction writer. Look, we went into that poor woman’s home with no authority whatsoever, and we poked around in places she didn’t want us to poke around. She said nothing.”

  “Exactly. She didn’t want me to look under her bed, and yet she did not protest. But when I wanted to check a small irregularity in her living room ceiling, she asked us to leave. Do you not find that suspicious?”

  Marlene, our server, came by to ask if we wanted any lunch. I asked for a tuna salad on rye toast, and again Marlene appeared to disapprove of my choice; she clucked her tongue a bit and then looked hopefully at Duffy. He was even more of a letdown—he just asked for a refill on his coffee. Duffy rarely eats when he’s working a case because he’s so engrossed in the task at hand. Probably I was trying to lose some weight when I first wrote that behavior for him.

  As soon as Marlene left the table, I picked up where we had left off. “No, I don’t find that suspicious,” I said. “I find it a woman who had put up with enough finally drawing the line. Damien Mosley hasn’t been in this town in five years. Why do you think a hole in the ceiling of his former apartment is going to make a difference?”

  Marlene refreshed Duffy’s coffee and walked away. “The problem here,” Duffy said, “is that you are approaching the case with a particular solution in mind. You expect us not to find Damien Mosley because you believe that I am Damien Mosley. So you are not treating the situation with an open mind.”

  “And you are? Do you even acknowledge the possibility that you used to be Damien Mosley?”

  Duffy didn’t get the chance to answer because a man at a table next to our booth looked over at us. “Excuse me,” he said. “Did you just say Damien Mosley?”

  We had said it so often, I was starting to think it had become our mantra. But Duffy was already the embodiment of attention; his posture had straightened, and his eyes were wide. No doubt he was taking every possible solution into account. “Yes we did,” Duffy told the man. “Do you know him?”

  “To tell you the truth, I kind of thought you were Damien,” the man said. He reached his hand out to Duffy. “I’m Walt Kendig. I went to high school with him, and I was on Damien’s bowling team for a while.” He looked carefully at Duffy. “You do look a lot like him.”

  I gave Duffy a significant look, which he worked valiantly to ignore. “Does he?” I said. “Could you tell the two of them apart?”

  Walt looked at me, then back at Duffy. “I haven’t seen Damien in years,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s hard to tell. Why? Is there something I can help with?”

  Duffy shook Walt’s hand and smiled his ingratiating but professional smile, the one that’s supposed to make witnesses more likely to tell him more than they want to say. “It’s nice to meet you, Walt. My name is Duffy Madison. I’m here trying to find Damien Mosley.”

  Walt Kendig laughed, which was sort of unexpected.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?” he asked.

  Duffy, eyes narrowing just a touch, regarded him with some bafflement. “I am Duffy Madison.”

  “Really?” What did that mean?

  I decided to break the moment by sticking out my own hand. “Hi, Walt. I’m Rachel Goldman. Duffy and I—”

  Walt laughed again. “You’re Rachel Goldman?” Did he do this to everybody?

  “Yeah. And we’re looking for Damien Mosley.”

  Walt sat back in his chair and looked mightily amused. “Rachel Goldman and Duffy Madison,” he said, shaking his head. He turned toward Duffy. “I didn’t think you were real.”

  Duffy has a sense of humor so dry, you’d swear it was from Arizona. “I get that a lot,” he said, looking at me.

  “I mean, I read all the books.” Walt was addressing me now. “And I’m a big fan, but it never occurred to me you were basing them on a real person.”

  “I’m not,” I answered somewhat automatically. “He’s basing himself on what I wrote.”

  Walt, not surprisingly, looked confused.

  “What Ms. Goldman is saying is that it is a coincidence that I have the same name and profession as her fictional character,” Duffy told him. “But I am wondering about Damien Mosley. We’re searching for him, and we have very few leads. Do you know anything about where he might have gone?”

  Wait. I’d just met a fan who actually had read my books. I got slightly annoyed that Duffy was stealing my moment in the spotlight. It just doesn’t happen all that often.

  Walt shook his head again, but he was just absorbing all he’d heard and not responding to Duffy’s question. “Rachel Goldman and Duffy Madison,” he said to himself. “Go figure that one out.”

  It’s always nice to meet a fan, believe me. There’s nothing better than knowing that someone has taken the time to read my work and, even better, that they enjoyed the experience. I would have happily discussed every Duffy Madison novel with Walt for the rest of the day and gone home a satisfied person, but the apparition across the table from me had other plans.

  “Damien Mosley,” Duffy reminded Walt. “Is there anything you can tell us?”

  That seemed to bring Walt back to the present moment. He looked at Duffy again. “Well, like I said, I was on his bowling team, but that’s gotta be five years ago. I didn’t know him much outside of that, even when we were in school. Different years. He was a bartender at a place near here, Rapscallion’s. They’ve gone out of business now, though, and a new bar called Oakwood opened where it used to be.”

  “How did you happen to end up on the same team?” I asked, trying to stay relevant to the conversation and not laugh at the very thought of Duffy Madison in a bowling shirt.

  “Damien worked at the bar, and one of the waiters there was on the team with me.” Walt sat back in his chair, reveling in the ability to help out a fictional detective and the author who made him up. He’d have a story to tell the little woman when he got home, for sure. “I don’t even know if they were friends or anything. Barry—that’s the waiter—knew we needed a fifth guy, and I guess he talked Damien into it.” He looked at Duffy again, studying him carefully. “You do look a lot like him.”

  That was fueling my argument, so I followed up on it. “Really? How much?”

  Duffy gave me his raised-eyebrow look that was supposed to be withering and came up somewhere around mildly irritated.

  Walt considered his answer and sucked on his front teeth briefly. “Well, it’s not like they’d be identical twins or anything, but again, you’re talking about a few years already, and I didn’t know the guy that well. What made you come up here to look for him now? Is he gonna be in the next Duffy Madison book?” He sounded so excited; it was adorable.

  “No,” Duffy said flatly. “Damien Mosley will definitely not be featured in a work of fiction. Nothing in those books is real.” Duffy rarely lets emotion cloud his judgment, and I wasn’t sure he was doing that even now. But he certainly wanted to communicate to Walt that there was a difference between Book Duffy and Living Duffy.

  “Too bad,” Walt said. “I could say I was there when it all happened.” He turned toward me. “Would you mind signing something for me, Ms. Goldman? I’m really a big fan, and if I’d known you were gonna be here, I would have brought a book for you to autograph.”

  “Of course I will,” I told him. I’ll pretty much sign your mortgage statement if you show some interest in my books. I mean, it won’t do you any good, but I’ll sign it. I reached into my purse to see if there was a blank scrap of paper and a pen. But Walt was quicker than I was; he proffered a fairly clean sheet of paper from the pocket of his pants and pulled a marker from his jacket.

  I didn’t ask Walt if he wanted an inscription. That’s something you do if you’re signing a book, because some people just want the signature (those are the ones more likely to try
and sell it on eBay twenty minutes after you die) and feel the book loses value when personalized. This was simply a piece of paper, and Walt seemed like a legitimate fan. I don’t run into those every day, so I wanted to show my sincere gratitude.

  Hence I wrote: “To Walt, with sincere gratitude, Rachel Goldman.”

  I never know what to write to people I just met.

  “Wow,” he said when I handed him the paper. “I can’t believe it.”

  Duffy, impatient with what he undoubtedly saw as an unnecessary distraction from the matter at hand, cleared his throat to get our attention and said to Walt, “Do you have any idea why Damien Mosley might have left Poughkeepsie, or where he might have gone?”

  Walt looked blank and shook his head. “No idea. Like I said, I didn’t really know the guy that well. But listen, if there’s anything I can do to help you two find out what you need to know, well,” he looked at me, “it would be an honor.”

  There are fans and there are scary fans. I wasn’t sure which kind Walt was yet. I mean, I’ve never had a real Annie Wilkes kind of nut, and hope I never do, but there are a few people out there who know my books better than I do, and that means I keep a file called “Duffy Bible” open whenever I’m writing a book so I’ll remember that he never eats meat but isn’t a vegan or that his cousin Rafael was once mentioned in passing on page 215 of Little Boy Lost. Because if I make a mistake, the e-mails will pour in.

  I also have Paula for exactly that reason, and many more.

  Duffy, however, was less concerned with my welfare than his goal, which was finding Damien Mosley. Whether or not he remembered the reason he wanted to do that—to prove to me that they were not the same person—was anybody’s guess.

  “You could be helpful indeed if you knew people who were more intimately acquainted with Damien,” he told Walt. “Who should we try to contact? Who might know more than you do?” Duffy doesn’t mean to sound insulting at least half the time. He doesn’t really hear his own tone and rarely takes into account how his words will affect others because he sees the good and the urgency in finding the missing person.