Edited Out

by E. J. Copperman

  “No! I’m saying I don’t think that had anything to do with it at all!” Everyone spent a long moment avoiding eye contact.

  I decided I’d end the awkward silence. “We’ve been to Damien’s old apartment,” I said. “There didn’t seem to be much there. Any other places you think we should look?”

  Louise looked over to me slowly, as if waking up and realizing she had been asked to do something. “His apartment here in town or the other one?” she asked.

  Duffy perked up.

  “There was another one?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Damien had a place his mother gave him in West New York.”

  I glared at Duffy. We’d driven for two hours. “West New York,” I repeated.

  “Yeah,” Louise said, misunderstanding. “Over in Jersey.”

  Chapter 7

  “We can see that apartment tomorrow,” Duffy Madison said. “I don’t see why you are so upset about this.”

  “I’m not upset!” I shouted. Luckily, Duffy had the car windows closed, or my not being upset would have been heard three blocks away. “I’m just wondering why I’m here in Poughkeepsie, New York, today not writing when I could be home in Adamstown, New Jersey, not writing.”

  Duffy wasn’t clutching the wheel especially tightly; his ability to remain calm in heated situations was infuriating. “There is still more value in being here than in the West New York apartment,” Duffy said. “The fact that Damien spent more time here and just used the New Jersey home on weekends is particularly important. He knew people here, and they knew him. We would have had to come here anyway.”

  I sat back and closed my eyes, which I do sometimes in an attempt to lower my blood pressure. I don’t have blood pressure problems, but it’s never too soon to start being healthy.

  “I think what bothers me is that you didn’t know about the West New York place,” I said when I could breathe normally again. “You know everything. That seems like something you would have had filed away weeks ago.”

  “Obviously, I don’t know everything, or we wouldn’t need to investigate at all,” he answered, voice as unemotional as if he were informing Captain Kirk that logic dictated turning the ship around. “That is an area I had not investigated because Damien’s salary at Rapscallion’s seemed incapable of supporting two residences. It had not occurred to me that he might have been given one by his mother.”

  “Louise said his mother gave it to him,” I reminded him. “Does that mean the mother is wealthy, or did she die and leave it to him?”

  “Louise didn’t know,” Duffy reminded me. “But I could find no obituary or death notice for Damien’s mother, which would be very unusual if she had died even in the past twenty years. I think it unlikely.”

  Opening my eyes, even after the coffee at the diner and the single sip I’d taken at Louise’s, wasn’t an attractive prospect. It felt nice to have them closed, so I kept them that way. It was an advantage to having my fictional creation drive the car.

  “Where are we heading now?” I asked him.

  “There is a high school friend of Damien’s for us to question,” he answered. “Rod Wilkerson had stayed in touch with him until Damien disappeared. He might be able to provide a trail even if he doesn’t know it yet.”

  A thought occurred to me that caused me to open my eyes and look at Duffy. “Shouldn’t we be looking for people who knew you?” I asked. “People you went to high school with, someone who could confirm that you were here back in the day?”

  His mouth twitched just a bit; he had come to hate my suggesting he actually had a past before I’d started writing him, or whatever it was I had started writing. “That will not help us find Damien Mosley,” Duffy said.

  “No, but it could get us to an answer to the bigger question. You want me to believe you sprung full-blown from my iMac? Fine. At least make the effort to prove your point.”

  It was dirty pool, no doubt, to challenge Duffy using his own thought process, but if I couldn’t do that, who could? He took the time to consider it, which Duffy would do, and nodded slightly.

  “Perhaps that is something we should do on a later trip,” he conceded. “But right now I can’t provide a list of people who might have been here at the same time you believe I was growing up. There is no one to interview.”

  “I can provide that,” I said. “It’s not like I want to make it a regular practice to hike up here so we can ask people if you exist.” I reached for my phone and texted to Paula:

  Can you send a list of people who went to high school with Duffy?

  I knew she’d done that basic research when living Duffy had first surfaced months before, so she would have the information available. Sure enough, she answered my text moments later. Paula is the most efficient person on Earth.

  How many do you want?

  It was a good question. No doubt Paula had a list of the entire graduating class for Duffy’s assumed senior year and the ones immediately before and after it in case he’d been held back or skipped a grade. But time limitations for a one-day visit to Poughkeepsie meant we should be as efficient as possible.

  Send up to four, if any were in the same clubs or anything. What does Duffy look like at 18?

  Paula must have been anticipating that question because the answer came back quickly, even for her.

  No pic of Duffy. Damien could grow up to be Duffy based on his pic but can’t really tell.

  And she sent the picture of Damien to my phone, which did not help much. It was tiny to begin with and worse on a phone screen. When I tried to enlarge it, the photo became grainy and almost impossible to see.

  “There is a Duffy Madison entry in the yearbook, but no photo where a picture should be,” I reported to my traveling companion.

  “Well, that proves my point,” he answered.

  “I really don’t think so.”

  The list of classmates arrived two minutes later, and I read the names to Duffy, whose face showed no reaction at all. But two names caught both of our attention.

  Rod Wilkerson and Walt Kendig.

  “Well, that’s convenient,” I said. It’s possible there was just a hint of satisfaction in my voice.

  Duffy said nothing for the rest of the drive.

  We arrived at Rod’s house a few minutes later. It was a well-appointed but small brick-faced building with an attached garage and a well-tended lawn. As we got out of the car, Duffy photographed it for his files.

  “Let me do the talking, please,” Duffy said as we approached the door. The news that Rod might have been a classmate of his as well as Damien’s seemed to have shaken him.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He rang the doorbell, and we waited a bit until Rod Wilkerson opened the door and asked us in.

  He was a large, jovial sort of man who seemed to find it awfully entertaining that a county investigator (sort of) and a famous (not even close) crime fiction writer had asked to talk to him. He led us into a room he called his office, where he worked as a real estate agent and financial advisor from home.

  He started by offering to grease the wheels with the local authorities as a way to show what an important guy he was. “I have some friends in the police department,” he said.

  “I don’t believe that will be necessary,” Duffy told him. Duffy has little patience for people who try to curry favor with influence. Or anything else.

  Rod shook his head a bit in wonder. “When I first saw you at the door,” he said to Duffy, “I thought you were Damien. You look like him.”

  “But then you realized I am not Damien Mosley,” Duffy told him, just in case Rod had any doubts as to what he had realized.

  “Yeah. But then I haven’t seen Damien in five years, and it’s not like I keep pictures of him around the house.” Rod’s home was fairly neat. He told us he was divorced and had kept the house because his ex-wife had moved back to her family’s home in Missouri. He had considered selling the place�
��he did work in real estate, after all—but he’d inherited it from his parents and did not have to pay a mortgage, so he’d held onto the house.

  I considered showing Rod the yearbook picture of Damien that Paula had sent to my phone, but naturally, he would have a copy of his own and could probably look at it whenever he wanted. The picture was clearly at least fifteen years old by now anyway.

  “Were you good friends with Damien?” Duffy asked. “When we e-mailed, you indicated you’d kept in touch with him after high school and were very upset when he suddenly vanished.”

  “Yeah, depending on when,” Rod told us. “Before I got married, he and I would have dinner once a week or so, and Damien was at my wedding. But you know, you get married, and your life tends to be eaten up with that. My wife Brenda wasn’t that crazy about Damien, and even though she never said she didn’t want him around or didn’t want me to hang with him much, the message got across.”

  “Why didn’t she like Damien?” I asked. I was building up to my own question and had to establish myself in the conversation.

  Rod considered and sort of flattened out his mouth in a who knows expression. “Some people are oil and water. That was Brenda and Damien. He didn’t like her either and warned me not to marry her the night before the wedding. I guess he was right, considering how things ended up.”

  Duffy was eager to get the interview back on the track he’d decided it should be on, so he didn’t give me time to follow up. “Damien was working as a bartender before he disappeared,” he said. “Did you ever go into Rapscallion’s and talk to him over a drink? Without your wife there? Anything like that?”

  Rod nodded, then reconsidered and shook his head. “Well, I did see him, but not at his work,” he said. “It wasn’t like Brenda, you know, forbade me from seeing an old friend. It was more like I sensed how she felt and over time just saw Damien less and less. I really couldn’t figure it out when suddenly he was gone like that.” He took a breath. “I mean, I hope nothing happened to the guy, you know?”

  “Why didn’t you go to Rapscallion’s?” Duffy asked. I thought it was a redundant question, but he seemed to think it was important. “You seemed to say it as if that wasn’t a possibility.”

  “Well, I didn’t go in there much,” Rod told him, “even before I was married. It’s just not my thing.”

  “Not your thing?” Now I wanted to know what that meant.

  “Yeah, you know. A strip club. I always thought those are the saddest places on Earth. All those guys watching this girl and thinking they had a chance with her. Sad.”

  “Rapscallion’s was a strip club?” Duffy said. Obviously, his research had not unearthed that piece of information.

  “Yeah, you didn’t know that? Damien didn’t seem to mind—I guess he got used to the place because he needed the money. But I never really took to it. So when he and I would get together, it was at the diner or another bar called The Look Inn on nights he wasn’t working.”

  Duffy blinked a couple of times. I seriously doubted he’d ever been inside a strip club in his life, and now he was trying to absorb what he was being told. I have been inside one, doing research on a book, so I wasn’t nearly as scandalized. It’s a way some people make a living; whatever.

  Duffy’s reaction did give me an opening, though, and I was definitely going to use it. “Do you remember another classmate?” I said. Duffy’s eyes focused sharply, and he turned toward me but too late. “Duffy Madison?”

  Rod blinked and looked confused. He turned toward my odd companion. “I thought you were Duffy Madison.”

  “I am,” Duffy said.

  “Did we go to high school together?”

  “No.”

  “If you look through your yearbook, you’ll find a space for a classmate named Duffy Madison with no photograph next to it,” I told Rod, ignoring Duffy’s glare. “I just wanted to see if you remembered anything about him.”

  Rod looked at me, then at Duffy, then back at me with consternation in his eyes. “I can’t say as I do.” He turned toward Duffy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” the impostor said. “You and I were not classmates. Now, we came here from the home of Louise Refsnyder. Do you know her?”

  Rod’s face changed just for a microsecond, but I saw it, and I’d bet that Duffy, having successfully changed the subject back to his topic, did too. Rod looked just a little panicked, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, his voice still in an ingratiating and confident tone. “Should I?”

  “She was a . . . friend of Damien’s and worked at Rapscallion’s with him,” Duffy informed him. “We were wondering if you had ever met her.”

  Rod shook his head, and if I hadn’t seen that flash on his face a moment earlier, I’d have believed him. “I don’t think so. Was she one of the dancers?”

  Actually, that was a very good question. “We were told she waited tables,” I said.

  He shrugged. “As I understand it, some of the dancers work the tables when they were not onstage to pick up extra tips. Personally, I don’t know that much about the place, but that is what Damien told me.”

  Uh-huh. I was getting the impression that good ol’ Rod knew the strip club better than he wanted us to think. Why he’d care about our opinion of him—and why he’d think it would be unfavorable if we knew he went to a strip club now and again—was beyond me at that moment.

  “So you couldn’t tell us if Damien Mosley and Louise Refsnyder were lovers who broke up just before he vanished,” Duffy said. I noticed him watching Rod’s face closely.

  Again the reaction was brief but telling. Rod’s eyes widened in surprise, then he self-consciously wiped them as if they’d been tearing, which they hadn’t.

  “Damien never said anything like that,” he said after a quick recovery. “I don’t think he ever mentioned the name. Louise . . . what?”

  We thanked Rod for his time and hospitality and headed out to Duffy’s car. When we were far enough away from the front door, I looked at Duffy and asked, “Do you think anything he told us was true?”

  Duffy got in on the driver’s side. “I believe he is divorced,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  I called Walt Kendig as Duffy headed back toward Mill Street in our quest to head back to New Jersey before the Tappan Zee fell down, which could be any minute. I’d promised I’d call him, so I did. Yes, we’d found out he was in Damien Mosley’s high school class, but so were two hundred other people. The poor man seemed so happy to hear from me that it was just a touch pathetic.

  “This is amazing!” he gushed. Duffy, who could no doubt hear Walt’s voice despite my holding the phone to my ear, grimaced a little. “Duffy Madison and Rachel Goldman.”

  I decided not to debate his choice of billing and thanked him again for his help in our search for Damien Mosley. Walt seemed surprised somehow that we had not wrapped the whole thing up and found Damien, returned him to Poughkeepsie, and moved on to our next adventure before three in the afternoon.

  “I thought for sure you’d be able to track him down,” he said.

  “Well, maybe we still can, but it’s going to take more time,” I told him. “Anyway, you were a big help, and we really appreciate your contribution. If we ever come back up to Poughkeepsie . . .” Maybe Duffy might come back to look for Damien Mosley, but I didn’t see how this was going to help my writing at all, so he’d be doing any further digging on his own.

  “Hang on,” Walt said. Damn! Just when I thought I’d made a clean break of it. “I found something back at my office that might be of help to you. Do you want to come over here and see it?”

  “What is it?” I asked, suppressing a sigh. I just wanted to go home and write something bad.

  “A picture. Something that could give you an idea of Damien and what he was like.”

  A photograph of Damien Mosley would certainly go a long way to proving he was or was not actually the Duffy Ma
dison now driving me away from Poughkeepsie. “Can you just send it to my phone?” I asked Walt.

  “It’s a real printed-out photograph,” he said. “It’s a little faded, and I don’t think a scan would hold up well. You need to take a look. I mean, I don’t want to tell you your business.”

  “My business is making stuff up,” I told him, then looked at Duffy, who was frowning. “Walt says—”

  “I heard him.” Duffy made a right turn to begin his process of turning us in the opposite direction, back toward Walt’s office. He’d do this by making three right turns rather than pulling into someone’s driveway and then backing out in a K-turn or simply making a U-turn like any other normal American.

  “We’re on our way,” I told Walt and hung up before he could be exultant at me. I just wasn’t in the mood. I was tired of the detective life and wanted to go back to being a hack writer. I leaned back—I don’t know why I always tend to move forward when I’m on the phone in a car—and moaned a little.

  “What’s the problem?” Duffy asked. “We might very well be on the verge of finding out something truly significant about Damien Mosley’s disappearance.”

  I went back to closing my eyes. It just felt good. “I’m not an investigator, Duffy. I’m less interested in finding Damien than I am in finding my mojo.”

  It was very relaxing not to see anything but to feel the movement of the car as Duffy made his numerous right turns, then a left to get us back in the proper direction. “As we’ve discussed, I believe the two are intertwined. Your writer’s block is bound to be relieved by finding the truth so you can accept that I am what I say I am.”

  I didn’t open my eyes, but I did feel my teeth clench. Still, I managed to push between them, “I don’t have writer’s block. There is no such thing as writer’s block. I’m still writing. What I have is a slump brought on by your messing with my head.”

  In my mind’s eye, I could see the look on his face. If you believed him, I could have seen it before he had a face. “I am not messing with your head, Rachel.”