Edited Out

by E. J. Copperman

  That was enough; I opened my eyes and faced him. Duffy, of course, did not take his eyes off the road because he’s Duffy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and Duffy would never do that.

  “You are,” I said. “You can’t have it both ways, Duffy. If you’re not messing with my head, then you are delusional. Those are the only two possibilities, and you’ve already told me you’re not delusional, so what does that leave?”

  There was no answer; we were already pulling up to Walt Kendig’s place of business at Associated Accounting Services, as generic a name for a business as I could possibly imagine, and I have to name fake businesses all the time. Duffy parked the car across the street from the office, which was indicated by a sign in a third-floor window. There was a really dilapidated little MG, a two-seat sports car that had seen better days before 1974, its front right fender held on with duct tape, parked in front. I was glad we had gotten the address ahead of time, or I, personally, would have driven right by the unremarkable building and kept going until we’d gotten to Albany. Which I was guessing would be pretty far.

  We got out of the car, Duffy changing his face from glum at having been challenged to businesslike and inquisitive. I imagine my face was going from frustrated to impatient but didn’t have a mirror handy and was glad for it.

  After trudging up the stairs (the building was only four stories and old enough not to have required an elevator) to Associated Accounting Services, I let Duffy lead me to the office door. I was still sort of longing for the lovely moment I’d spent in the car with my eyes closed. I resolved to sleep the whole way home. It had already been a long day, and it was still the middle of the afternoon.

  “How far are we from Woodstock?” I asked Duffy suddenly. My father lives in Claremont, New York, near Woodstock, and if it was not very far from here, I could look forward to feeling guilty for not going to see him.

  “About an hour,” Duffy answered. “Why? Is there some reason you believe Damien Mosley might be there?”

  We found the office door and opened it, so I didn’t have to answer him. It wasn’t a large office, but there were five or six people in cubicles in a sort of bullpen operation and a very bored-looking receptionist at the front desk.

  She didn’t get a chance to ask us what business we might have there for two reasons: (1) Walt Kendig appeared out of nowhere, undoubtedly having been watching out the window for us, and greeted us too warmly; and (2) she was applying nail polish and was very engrossed in her work. Black polish, if you were wondering. And Halloween wasn’t even on the horizon yet.

  “I’m so glad I caught you before you left!” Walt gushed. “I think you’ll find this very interesting.” He led us back toward his desk, third cubicle on the left, with the air of someone who was having way too much fun and knew it. “I found it after I talked to you because you reminded me of those days.”

  We didn’t have to ask which days. We stood at Walt’s desk, and he sat behind it, reaching for a folder.

  “It was taken with a regular film camera, not a digital one,” Walt said, seemingly apologizing for the poor visual quality of what we were about to see. It sort of made me wonder why we were bothering until I remembered Duffy and how I was about to discover that he was not Damien Mosley.

  And that wasn’t going to make me feel better, I knew.

  “When was it taken, and where was it processed?” Duffy was the professional. I was the writer. We were each acting to type. I sat down in a spare chair because I was tired.

  “Probably about a year before Damien left,” Walt said. “And if I remember correctly, I had the roll developed at the CVS on South Road. Why does that matter?”

  He handed the photograph to Duffy, who looked like he didn’t want to touch it. It was evidence, even if there had been no crime committed, and Duffy was uncomfortable about contaminating the evidence. I knew he wished he had a pair of latex gloves in his pocket, or maybe he did and just didn’t want to be seen for the anal retentive nut that he is.

  “Everything matters in an investigation,” he said. It’s boilerplate; something he says when he doesn’t have a reason for the nutty question he’s asked but is afraid that if he doesn’t ask it, he’ll discover it is the key to the whole puzzle later. Duffy is haunted by something that happened to him as a young man, but I haven’t decided what it was yet.

  It didn’t matter. Walt looked sufficiently impressed with the import of the moment. Besides, he had called us with this juicy piece of evidence and wanted (it was obvious) to be seen as a useful and helpful member of the team. Which was fine, since I was resigning from the team as soon as I got back to Adamstown. It was nice Duffy would have somebody to play with after I left.

  “Wow,” Walt said. “I could maybe check and see if they have records that go back that far.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Duffy said. “But if it becomes important, I will check with you.”

  Walt, awed, leaned in as Duffy turned his complete attention to the photograph. I was disengaged at this point but not so much that I didn’t look at the desk surface to see what all the fuss was about.

  It was, as advertised, a pretty ragged printed photograph on what I’m sure was promoted as premium stock, in a matte finish that actually made the image less sharp than it might have been. I was trying to show off how indifferent I could be about it all—writers are such children—but I had to lean over the desk to get anything approaching a good look.

  The picture showed five people in bowling shirts, which was not a huge surprise. Walt’s major connection to Damien Mosley appeared to be the bowling team, so any images he’d have would probably be related. The bowlers were standing around the ball return pointing to the screen over their heads, where presumably the score of their latest game was being displayed. It was too small a picture to make out the numbers and letters on the screen, but the team all looked pleased.

  I recognized most of them. Walt, of course, was at the center, his arms around the shoulders of the two bowlers to his right and left, who were Louise Refsnyder (right) and Rod Wilkerson (left). Wearing a baseball cap on the far right was a man about Duffy’s size and build, wearing a baseball cap (for a local minor league team, I was guessing, because the logo was not a Major League affiliate) that cast a shadow on the top half of his face and almost completely obscured his eyes.

  “Rod’s standing two people away from Louise,” I told Duffy. “He said he didn’t know her.”

  “We knew he was lying.” Duffy shrugged.

  “Rod said he didn’t know Lou?” Walt sounded astonished. “They were pretty tight for a while before he married Brenda.”

  Duffy and I exchanged a look.

  “That’s Damien,” Walt said, pointing at the man in the cap. He didn’t know we’d visited with Rod, so it was a natural comment to make. I still found myself mentally rolling my eyes at him; of course that was Damien. Someone who looked like Duffy but would be frustrating enough not to let us see his face? Who else could it be?

  At the far left was a woman, not perfectly slim but attractive, her dark hair parted in the middle and hanging to her shoulders. She was grinning but in an artificial way. It was easy to see she was doing her best to look happy. The fact that she was indifferent showed around the corners of her eyes.

  “Who is that?” Duffy asked, indicating the woman.

  Walt didn’t even have to look. “That’s Michelle,” he said. “I forgot she was on the team until I found the picture.”

  Gee, thanks, Walt. That was way helpful.

  Duffy looked at him a moment and asked, “Michelle?”

  “Michelle Mosley. Damien’s wife.”

  Chapter 9

  “The strange part is that no one else had even mentioned Damien Mosley was married,” Duffy was saying.

  In the passenger seat of his car, I was doing my very best to seem asleep, but it wasn’t doing any good. Duffy was rambling on anyway, and in a way I felt it was necessary to indulge him since I had
gotten my way about driving home immediately after leaving Associated Accounting.

  Duffy had naturally wanted to go back to everyone we had spoken to that day and demand an explanation. The fact that Damien Mosley was married to a woman named Michelle, whom Walt said left Poughkeepsie to live in Damien’s West New York apartment a few weeks before Damien evaporated, had not come up in any of our conversations in Poughkeepsie until Walt had produced the photograph.

  Duffy had asked Walt why he didn’t tell us about Michelle before, and his response was that he figured we already knew. Because we (especially Duffy) should have, and he knew it. That was why he wouldn’t shut up even now on Rt. 287 heading back toward New Jersey.

  “Well, you did all that research on him, and you didn’t know he was married,” I pointed out now.

  I had vetoed the repeat visits to our Poughkeepsie sources for a number of reasons, all of which were that I wanted to go home. I’d argued that the traffic at the Tappan Zee Bridge would no doubt be horrific and would become more so with each minute we got closer to rush hour. And I noted that there was no reason follow-up couldn’t be done on the telephone by Duffy after he had safely dropped me off at my home, where his fictional counterpart awaited to botch up another day of writing.

  Duffy had argued that face-to-face confrontation was necessary, and I’d countered that his use of the word confrontation indicated he was acting emotionally and not rationally, not basing his actions on facts but feelings.

  He started driving home at that moment. Sometimes it really helps in an argument if you invented the thought patterns of the person you’re trying to convince.

  “I’m aware of my shortcomings,” Duffy told me now. I’d tell you exactly where we were on the drive, but I had my eyes closed on principle and did not open them. “Thanks for the reminder.”

  “Not what I meant.” Now I’d opened my eyes, but I wasn’t looking at the road signs strictly out of disinterest. Duffy was driving, and we’d get there when he got us there. I had no control. It didn’t matter. Spring Valley, New York. “I’m saying, it seems like Damien and Michelle, or maybe just Michelle, took great care to cover up their marriage. Otherwise you would have found some evidence of it.”

  Duffy considered that while never taking his eyes off the windshield. “That is likely the case,” he said. The man has an ego, but in this instance (particularly since I’d said it first) I had to agree with him.

  “Look, Duffy. I got involved in this because I wanted to see if there was any evidence that you are or ever were Damien Mosley. Instead, we spent a day looking for Damien Mosley and finding out he could bowl and was married, probably cheating on his wife, and that he had a second apartment in West New York. None of that helps me with what I wanted to get out of this. So if you want to keep on searching for Damien, I’m afraid you’re going to be on your own from here, okay? I’m a novelist, not Doctor Watson.”

  “As I recall, Watson did chronicle all of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures,” Duffy noted. “But I take your point. Thank you for coming with me today, Rachel. You were invaluable. I’ll take it from here.”

  I heard him say the words, and I knew he meant them. He would go on searching for Damien Mosley, and he probably would find the guy. Duffy was good at what he did. But he wouldn’t concentrate on proving or disproving his theory that I’d concocted him straight out of my head and he’d come into being at the exact time I’d started writing the character in my novels. If I needed proof of that to write something decent again, I’d have to find it myself.

  Well, actually Paula would have to find it for me, but that was almost the same thing.

  While I was still there in the car, though, Duffy wanted to hash over more of the details. “I’ll have to check the address Rod Wilkerson gave us in West New York and see if anyone named Michelle is living there now. Rod said Damien’s mother willed him the apartment, which would indicate that she is deceased and that the space is owned like a co-op or a condominium; the real estate records will be public and easy to find. But none of the people we met today seems to know the surname Michelle Mosley was born with, and that will slow down my progress.”

  Just as I was starting to wonder why I was in the car at all if he was going to just spout things he was thinking, Duffy asked, “What makes a woman decide to change her name when she marries, or not to do so?”

  It was touching that Duffy came to me for all questions about women, but if he started asking me about his relationship with Emily Needleman, I had already decided to make that an off-limits topic. “Tradition, I guess,” I told him. “Some women feel bound to that idea, and others don’t. You have to remember that I’ve never been married, Duffy.”

  “No, but surely you’ve thought about it.”

  “Actually, I haven’t. When it becomes an issue, I’ll let you know.”

  “Do you think there is any significance to Michelle taking Damien’s name when they married?” That would be more the point to Duffy. Whether or not I would change my name, or get married, or have a life outside of helping him find missing people, was not irrelevant but definitely secondary.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “We really have no sense of who Michelle is or what their marriage was like, other than Louise saying he cheated on her a couple of times, and then she and Damien broke up right before Damien left.” I preferred the term left to vanished or disappeared. Don’t even get me started on went missing, which doesn’t actually mean anything. Writers care about words.

  “That is important, don’t you think?” Duffy asked. We were about to get in line for everyone’s favorite death trap of a bridge. “If Damien was having a physical relationship with Louise Refsnyder, that would indicate his marriage to Michelle was not very strong, wouldn’t it?”

  There are times I really do think Duffy just came to being five years ago because his responses, particularly when dealing with adult relationships, come from a place of such innocence and wonder that it’s like he’s experiencing it all for the first time and needs a parent to explain.

  “Everybody’s marriage is different,” I told him. “Some people would consider that an irreparable breach of trust. Others would shrug their shoulders. I’ve heard of people who have open marriages and sleep with other people as a matter of course. I don’t know anything about these two, so I can’t say what it means. The real question at this point is whether we believe Louise about her relationship with Damien. She isn’t necessarily the most reliable witness.”

  Duffy’s eyebrows rose. “You think she was lying?” he asked.

  The traffic on the Tappan Zee wasn’t as bad this time, oddly. I guess more people wanted to get into New York than New Jersey, which was something of a stumper to me. We were moving slowly, but we were moving. “I don’t know if she was lying, but just because she was flirting with you doesn’t mean she’s reliable, Duffy. In fact, it makes me wonder if maybe she was distracting you because she knew something she didn’t want you to find out.”

  Duffy’s response almost made me laugh out loud. “She was flirting? With me?”

  “She wasn’t flirting with me,” I told him.

  “I did not notice anything. Are you certain?”

  “If she were any more obvious, I would have had to leave the room and give you two some privacy,” I said.

  Duffy actually looked a little nauseated. “You think she wanted to sleep with me?” His voice rose in pitch out of the baritone range and into the lower areas of tenor.

  “No, I think she wanted to distract you. But from your reaction, I’d say she distracted me and missed her target completely.” We made it back past the sign welcoming us to New Jersey, and I relaxed back into my seat again.

  “It’s distressing that I missed the signals.” Duffy looked upset with himself, shaking his head just a bit and pulling his lips into his mouth then letting them out. “I’m glad you were there.”

  The crazy thing is that I didn’t feel the trap going up around me; I heard what he’d said
as a compliment. “Well, so am I,” I told him. And that was a mistake.

  “It would be a miscalculation for me to think I can handle this case on my own.” Duffy drew in a deep breath to indicate he was thinking.

  I’m not stupid. This time I saw the kind of case he was building and did my best to sidestep it. “I don’t think so,” I said quickly. “You’re perfectly capable of finding missing people without me. You’ve done it plenty of times.”

  “Yes, but I had the authority of the prosecutor’s office behind me and a support staff that could handle things. I had Ben Preston along on almost every interview, and he could point out the things I missed. This case doesn’t have that official stamp on it. It’s just you and me.” He chewed on his lower lip.

  It was going to be necessary to bring him down to earth, and the landing might not be a soft one. “Duffy,” I said, “you have to understand. I’m not going to be helping on this case. I have my own work to do, and I don’t see how finding Damien Mosley, if he’s findable anymore, is going to serve the purpose I had coming into this. Even if we find him, I’ll still wonder if there’s someone else who got knocked on the head or something and became you. So if you’re going to devote yourself to this investigation—and I can see by the look in your eye that you are—it will have to be without my help. Okay?”

  The GPS, which was completely unnecessary at this point, indicated we still had about a forty-five-minute drive ahead of us, and judging from Duffy’s expression, it was going to be a quiet one.

  Which was what I had wanted in the first place.

  * * *

  Paula had not been working in my house that day, so it was peaceful and empty when Duffy dropped me off, and we exchanged the usual pleasantries about seeing each other soon. I opened the front door and went inside as I heard the tires of Duffy’s car backing up on the gravel in my driveway.

  The beast, which was what I’d decided to call my new manuscript (not as a title but as a description), awaited.