Ask the Right Question

by Michael Z. Lewin

  As I cranked my way to the end of the year it occurred to me that there was a slightly more efficient way to go about things. There were three more events of significance to the family that I knew existed: Eloise’s conception, Eloise’s birth, and the death of Estes Graham.

  If Eloise was sixteen now, then her birth took place in 1954 or the end of ’53. The conception nine months earlier. And Graham had died, according to Maude, in ’53 or ’54.

  The whole thing came to me in a flash! At the annual birthday party of 1953, some crude reporter had gotten Fleur drunk on illicit hooch, and then had knocked her up. Leander had been occupied elsewhere at the time, and Fleur was too ashamed to tell him or her father that she had been drinking. Later when she found she was pregnant, nobody knew that the father wasn’t Leander, until Eloise had stumbled on it. End of case. Reporters can be such bounders!

  I took a look at the social pages of February 13, 1954, in search of a birthday party.

  There was nothing. Presumably no party. Estes either dead or sick. Or for reasons I did not know, uninclined to celebrate his eighty-third.

  I cranked backward in time, day by day. This time checking both sociable pages and obits.

  I got as far back as October 2, 1953, before I found anything. And that was a picture of Fleur, Leander and Estes, back at Weir Cook Airport. The Crystals leaving for France. No indication of how long they would be away. Just that they were going to visit some of the ground Leander had covered in the war. And to visit the place where Fleur’s older brother Joshua had died in the same war.

  The picture also showed that Estes had been alive in October, ’53, and presumably for his birthday too.

  I knew why Estes hadn’t held his annual soirée: he couldn’t get a decent bouncer to replace Leander.

  So the old man had to have died after his eighty-third birthday. I cranked back to February ’54 and started the social-obit circuit going the other way.

  The job was getting morbid. I found the obituary of a kid I’d gone to grade school with. I hoped that Fleur and Leander got back before Estes went.

  And at 11:50 I was rewarded for my charity. April 18, 1954. Fleur and Leander returned to Weir Cook after their long sentimental journey. I counted fingers. They had been gone for six and a half months.

  I decided I’d had enough for a while. I broke for lunch.

  After refilling the cartons of microfilm I headed for fresh air and sunlight. Better make that just plain air and sunlight. On the way out I stopped in a phone booth and called my own number. My answering service reported, sleepily, that there had been no calls of any kind for me all morning. That was mildly depressing. It would make nine days without ordinary business.

  For lunch I had to choose between quality and convenience. Having resolved to live the day with a degree of class, I opted for quality. That meant Joe’s Fine Food, and a walk of five blocks to the corner of Vermont and Illinois.

  Joe’s has only been around for a few years, but it’s one of the best joints in the city for lunch. Especially on Monday and Tuesday, when it specializes in Mexican food. But even on Thursday, it is good enough for a man of quality.

  I was moderately lucky to get a counter seat near the door. The place was packed. It really takes something for a lunch joint to be packed. I know about things like that because my mother runs a luncheonette.

  I ordered a cheeseburger with other delicacies. And took a drag on a glass of water.

  I reflected on the Crystals’ European tour. They’d been gone for nearly seven months. If Eloise was sixteen, the odds were good that she had been conceived in Europe.

  That realization did a creditable job of depressing me.

  Looking for a biological father is hard enough when you have a finite number of boyfriends sniffing around a young girl’s door. But when the girl was impregnated nearly seventeen years ago while traveling in Europe, the choice of biological fathers is dazzling.

  I ate my meal with resignation and with a good deal less relish than I had expected.

  If my conjecture was right, if Eloise was born between about the middle of June, 1954, and say, the middle of December, she was conceived on a foreign shore. And in that case it was probably best to cut losses—half a day’s work—and let her find a big detective agency with contacts abroad. But me?

  I had an extra coffee.

  Ah, well. Something that looks like an interesting case walks in the door, during a period which is otherwise a drought, and then it walks out again.

  I had another coffee. And mentally I let my head sink to the counter.

  Ah, well. Don’t let’s hurt other folks. I left a big tip, and went back into the autumn sun.

  All problems at the beginning are too big to grasp. The important knack is to break them down into individual soluble parts. To ask the right questions.

  Just what questions had I asked? Only “Where was the mother at the time of conception?” So I hadn’t gotten an answer I wanted. So big deal.

  I hadn’t even asked the real question. I hadn’t gone to Fleur Crystal and asked her straight. Maybe she would tell me. Maybe if I charmed her. Or tricked her. There were all kinds of possibilities. All kinds of things I could do.

  I increased my stride. One of the questions I had to ask was whether the blood typings were the way Eloise said they were.

  I picked up the microfilm reels for April, 1954, through December, 1954. And I cranked inexorably on, more aggressive than I had been in the morning.

  On June 3 I learned that Fleur Crystal was expecting. Eloise’s first appearance. The baby and heir was due in the middle of October. I counted fingers to reveal that the conception was located roughly mid-February, 1954. Right in the middle of a cold French winter.

  I did not jump straight to October. I was still interested in finding Estes’ death. And I was also interested in the possibility of one of those wretched rituals called a baby shower. I might pick out a useful friend or two to talk about Fleur with.

  But I never got to wet my mind with a baby shower. All through the summer none was reported. I found Estes Graham’s obituary instead. He died of a heart attack on August 20, 1954. He had not lived to see his granddaughter.

  The obit gave me my first information about Fleur’s mother. She was the former Irene Olian, daughter of a Reverend Billy Lee Olian. She had married Estes in 1916 and had given him four children. Three sons had been killed in World War II. But Irene Olian Graham had already died in 1937. Estes was survived only by Fleur and Leander and Eloise in utero.

  I thought about the wedding picture. Especially about Leander Crystal getting married in his uniform. Crystal was the perfect son-in-law for a man who’d lost three sons in war. About the right age, something of a hero himself, and alive.

  Estes’ funeral was scheduled for August 23.

  I cranked on.

  To a surprise. In the innards of Friday, August 27, I found another picture of Fleur and Leander at Weir Cook Airport. Leaving, according to the caption, for New York City. Not happy. Fleur, clearly pregnant, dressed in black. No additional story.

  Not a very good time to go to New York. They certainly didn’t travel places in the comfortable seasons. A French winter and a New York summer.

  The only thing I could think of was that there was some complication in Fleur’s pregnancy. So they were going to New York to birth the child.

  There was no notice of Eloise’s birth in the Star between August 27 and October 31, 1954. That gave me a moment’s hesitation. But I decided to check out the New York records. I got the New York Times microfilms out and began a search there.

  I finally found her. Born, November 1, 1954, a daughter, Eloise Graham Crystal, to Leander and Fleur Crystal of Indianapolis, Indiana.

  I had to laugh. Yesterday had been October 14, 1970. That gave me a fifteen-year-old client, not a sixteen-year-old one. She had hedged by a few days. Poor thing.

  Of course in some states those few days make all the difference.

&nb
sp; I went back to the Star. And found, on November 16, a picture of the family Crystal returning to Indianapolis. Eloise’s first introduction to Indianapolis. The airport photographer was on the ball. His combings of the names of people with reservations and the names on the incoming flight lists had yielded some pictures that I appreciated.

  From November 16 on I found only one item more.

  December 30, 1954. Notice of the completion of probate of Estes’ will. Worth in the neighborhood of twelve million. Nice neighborhood.

  With that I packed up shop. It was pushing three. I was expecting Eloise Crystal, and had a call to make before I saw her. I refiled all the microfilm, gathered my notes and walked briskly home.

  4

  First thing back in the office, I called Clinton Grillo. He’s one of my lawyers, the one I use for actual and possible criminal prosecution of my nearest and dearest. Me. His secretary asked me to hold on. Which I did, for nearly ten minutes.

  The question I needed answering was whether I was legally free to take on a fifteen-year-old female client.

  “You’ve come up with some interesting questions in your time Albert. Is this one hypothetical?” He is also the father of one of my closer high school friends.

  “No, sir, it’s not.”

  “I am presuming the young lady wishes to employ you without the knowledge of her parents.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, I know of no specific prohibitions, but there would seem to be many dangers. For instance, you would have no legal recourse should such a client decide to withhold payment of monies owed you. And were she to visit you alone in your office you would be particularly vulnerable should such a client take it into her head to make, sexual accusations. Especially, shall we say, if someone else had already done what the client decided to accuse you of.”

  “You have a dirty mind, sir.”

  “True, my boy. How true.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t it enough for you to think about?”

  “Guess so.”

  It all depends on just how much you trust the minor client. How serious you believe it is and how likely to turn sour.

  Eloise Crystal arrived at my office ten minutes before four o’clock. By doing so she gave me a time measure of the hesitation which preceded her arrival at 4:25 the day before.

  But the difference was more than one of time. Confidence declared itself in her walk, in the efficiency with which she took the chair. Today the chair was her own. The net impression was the inverse of her last visit. Today she dressed younger—skirt, blouse, sandals, no shades—but she radiated more maturity. An assured young woman. My fifteen-year-old chamelion.

  “Well,” she said. “How are we doing? Found his name yet?”

  She was joking, but I also suspected that she knew little of the tedium and irresolution of the world. Today’s joke might be a serious inquiry next week and I could easily have just as little to tell her.

  “I did do a little work today, as a matter of fact. But we still haven’t settled whether I’m going to work for you or not.”

  She dropped her head a little, and said, “I know. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m really glad that I decided to come yesterday. It’s a load off my mind somehow. That I’ve finally taken a positive step to get it all solved.”

  “I thought you only found out about those blood types in the last couple of weeks.”

  She nodded. “But I’ve always known something was wrong. Before I just didn’t know what.”

  “Wrong with you?”

  “Yeah. Something about me that made it bad between them. Like, I used to think I was an orphan.”

  Almost everybody does. “And what do you think now?”

  She paused and tried to get it right, the way she felt it. “I think, well, that Leander knows that I’m not his and that he’s sort of repressed my mother for it.”

  Repressed? “Don’t they get along?”

  “They don’t really not get along. But they don’t do anything together. They don’t smile at each other. He goes off to work in the morning and sometimes doesn’t come back till late. Mummy worries a lot that she’s sick. And they don’t have any friends.”

  She resented it. Parents should have friends.

  My cuckoo sounded off four times.

  I leaned back in my chair and put my foot up on the bottom desk drawer edge. It’s one of my favorite thinking positions. “Eloise,” I said. It was the first time I had said her name.

  “I’m listening,” she said. She wasn’t happy.

  “You see, I’m in a difficult position. Basically that is because the particular problem you want me to solve is one which I can’t be sure I can solve. I could work for weeks and not have any information that would help you. And that runs into money, pretty big money.”

  “I understand that. I have money. I have a trust fund that my grandfather made for me.”

  “The problem is that you might be spending a lot for nothing.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t have anything else I want that I can spend it on.”

  Which seemed fair enough, as a matter of fact.

  “Another thing is that you might be better off with one of the big agencies. I’m just one man.”

  “I tried one of them,” she said. “One with a big ad in the yellow pages.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “They wouldn’t take me seriously. They weren’t rude or anything, but they just said they couldn’t help me and that I should go to my parents and ask them.”

  “That might not be bad advice.”

  “Oh, I just couldn’t do that.” She shuddered. “The man at the agency just thought I was crazy.” She gave me a smile. “At least that’s some progress I’m making. You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said honestly. “But I will have to check the blood typings you gave me.”

  “But why?” she said heatedly. “They’re right. I did them myself.” Defending her handiwork. An attitude I like.

  “That’s the point. I would have to check them myself. As you’ve outlined things the entire investigation would depend on the accuracy of those blood types. With any crucial facts it is essential to check them and cross-check them.”

  “OK,” she said. “Will you do it?”

  A question I hadn’t really answered in my mind. There was one more set of conditions that needed to be met, but I could hardly ask her for some way to prove her personal reliability. For one reason because she was not really competent to evaluate it.

  “Let’s do it this way,” I said. “I will take your job, but with the following limitations. It will be on a day-to-day basis. I’ll keep working as long as I think I am finding out things that might be useful. But no longer.”

  “So you’ll take it?”

  “On those conditions.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad. I was afraid there for a minute that you were going to send me away too.”

  “I may.”

  “But not for a while. I’m so glad. I just feel sure that you’re going to settle it all for me.

  “I guess it’s time to undermine your confidence,” I said. “Here’s my first report. I’ve found out that you were conceived in Europe, probably France, during the winter of 1953–54.”

  She was a little surprised. “I never thought—” She was silent.

  “Your parents were traveling there during the winter and I counted backward from your exact birth date.”

  She blushed. I just smiled and watched the color come to her cheeks and then go back to wherever it came from.

  “I also saw a picture of your mother pregnant with you and a picture of you arriving in Indianapolis from New York when you were two weeks old.”

  “I was born in New York,” she said, though it must have been obvious that I already knew.

  “Do you know why your parents went there before you were born?”

  “To get away, after my grand
father died. He died in that same summer.”

  I nodded. And I was realizing that in my thinking about the case I had been working mostly on whether I should take it or not. Not on how I should go about it if I did take, it. Here I had my client all ready and willing to answer questions, and I didn’t really know what questions I wanted to ask her.

  So I thought of one.

  “I need to find some people who knew your parents around the time they were married and you were born. Can you think of any who go back that far?”

  She thought. “There’s Mrs. Forebush. She used to be my grandfather’s maid or nurse or something. Until he died. She comes over to see me sometimes and she tells me what a man my grandfather was.” She made her eyes big on the word “man.” “Sometimes she brings me little presents, funny things like flowers or stones or old calendars she’s found. Mummy hates her. Mummy goes to her room whenever Mrs. Forebush comes around.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “She’s OK. A little funny maybe, but she likes me.”

  “Is there anybody else?”

  “Well, Dr. Fishman. He’s my family doctor. I know he used to be my grandfather’s doctor and I know he knows Mummy and Leander because he asks me about them sometimes.”

  I began to feel that she was tiring, but I plunged on. “Do you talk about old times with your mother?”

  “Not really.”

  “You must have asked her things like whether she had a lot of boyfriends when she was a girl, or how she did in school. Stuff like that.”

  “Not really. Not a lot. That’s one of the things about our family. We don’t ever talk like that. The only real thing, Mummy used to take me up to the attic and read me letters she has there.” She thought. “But I don’t think she had real boyfriends before Leander. That’s my impression.”