by Jude Hardin
Maybe Parks had done his homework. Or maybe he’d done a quick search on his computer and had picked the name at random.
Camden A. Retro Detective Agency.
It does have a certain ring to it.
At any rate, Everett Parks was right. These things hardly ever ended well.
And the phone call from the man named Thrasher was especially troubling. Strange, to say the least. My immediate thought was that Thrasher might have had something to do with Anna’s disappearance. He was definitely someone I would need to take a look at if Parks decided to hire me.
“I’m assuming your daughter is of legal age,” I said.
“She’s twenty-seven.”
“If you decide to move forward with this, I’m going to need—”
“So you’ll take the case?” Parks said.
“Yes. But I want you to know that it could get expensive.”
I told him my hourly rate, and how much money I would need up front.
“I don’t care how much it costs,” he said. “I have plenty of money. I just want my daughter back.”
I talked to him for another forty-five minutes, getting as much information about Anna as I could. By the time we finished, I felt like I knew her pretty well. Everett Parks said he would email some pictures, although he didn’t have any that were very recent.
After we disconnected, I tried calling Kei Thrasher. No answer. I left a message for him to call me.
I jotted a few things down in a little notepad, grabbed my car keys and my gun and headed outside.
It felt good to be working again.
3
My office is in a strip mall not far from the house I rented when—according to my legend—I left Colorado and moved to Florida. It’s a pretty nice shopping center, as far as they go. There’s a doctor’s office, and a lawyer’s office, and a florist, and a diner, and a grocery store, and a little print shop where you can fax things and ship things and have photocopies made. The little print shop is called Max’s Print Shop. I’d ordered some business cards last week, so I stopped in to see if they were ready yet.
A young lady had been behind the counter the first time I walked into the store. She wore jeans and a red and white football jersey that was way too big for her. I figured she was probably still in high school. Maybe her boyfriend played on the team. Maybe that was where she’d gotten the shirt. She smiled a lot and she was very energetic. This time, there was a man standing there thumbing through a stack of papers. Curly black hair, glasses, faded tattoo of an anchor peeking out from his left shirtsleeve. He wore a diver’s watch and a white apron smudged with ink stains. He didn’t smile much, and he didn’t seem nearly as perky as the girl.
“I ordered some business cards last week,” I said.
He pulled out a fat indexed binder and opened it.
“Mr. Retro, right?”
“You can call me Cam.”
“I’m Max,” he said.
We shook hands.
“I rented the unit two doors down,” I said.
“Ah, so we’re neighbors. What kind of business?”
“It’s a detective agency. My sign hasn’t come in yet.”
“You’re a PI?”
“Yes.”
“Have you met Molly yet?” he said.
“The girl who was working here the other day?”
“No, that was Kira, my daughter. Molly Belinger is the attorney on the far end over there. I think she uses private investigators sometimes. I could introduce you to her if you want.”
“Sure. I would appreciate that.”
“No problem. Your cards are in the other room. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Thanks.”
He walked away. There was a corkboard on the wall by the door. I stood there and looked at it while he was in the other room. Everyone was having a yard sale, or a garage sale, or a firewood sale. I used to have some friends who lived in the northern part of the United States, and they would always laugh when I talked about houses in Florida having fireplaces. They thought it was sunny and hot all the time. Bikinis and palm trees and white sand beaches. But the postcards are only partially true. It gets cold at night in the winter sometimes. Nothing like up north, but pretty chilly. The other day I heard this was supposed to be one of the coldest Januarys on record for Florida, so the firewood sellers were probably doing okay.
The people who weren’t having yard sales or garages sales or firewood sales were giving away free kittens or trying to get hired to paint your house or landscape your yard or fix whatever happened to be broken.
I started thinking of the corkboard in Max’s Print Shop as kind of a microcosm, a tiny version of the world on the other side of the door. Everyone crowded around competing for attention, everyone trying to make a buck.
Except for the free kitten people. They were the only ones you could really trust.
Max came back carrying a plain cardboard box with RETRO written on the top in black marker.
“Here you go,” he said.
He opened the box and dumped out five stacks of business cards, each stack secured with a rubber band. I pulled one of the cards off the top of one of the stacks and looked it over.
“These are nice,” I said.
“Just let us know when you need some more. You might want to order a thousand next time instead of five hundred. It’s cheaper that way.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Great. Stop in and see us anytime.”
Max went back to thumbing through his stack of papers. I started to push my way through the door, stopped and turned around and tacked one of my new business cards up on the corkboard.
I stood there and looked at it for a few seconds, and then I changed my mind. I took my card down and tore off one of the tabs with a phone number for a free kitten written on it and left the store.
4
I was getting a pretty nice pension check every month, enough to live on, but you get bored after a while. You play tennis and go fishing and watch TV and drink and play tennis and go fishing and watch TV. One day starts blending into the next, and before you know it, a year is gone. You start feeling like all your time is spent waiting for something that you know is coming but is taking too long.
Maybe I would embrace the whole retirement thing someday, but for now I needed to work. Or wanted to, anyway. It was my choice, but sometimes I felt like it was the only thing that would keep me sane.
Everett Parks had told me the name of the supermarket where his daughter Anna had been employed. It wasn’t far from my office, so I decided to stop there first. I’d been inside the store a couple of times before, but I usually did my shopping at a little independent grocery called Rita’s Wholesome Foods. It was closer to my house. And it was wholesome. It seemed that way, anyway. It always smelled like fresh apples when you walked in there.
I parked and climbed out of the car and walked into the less-wholesome supermarket that didn’t smell like fresh apples and stepped up to the deli counter and asked to speak with the manager.
“I’m the manager,” the woman standing behind the counter said. “What can I help you with today?”
“Cam Retro,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I was hired to find a woman named—”
“Anna Parks?”
“That’s right. Would it be possible for us to talk privately for a few minutes?”
“Do you have some have some kind of identification, Mr. Retro?”
I showed her my PI license. “You can call me Cam,” I said.
“Jan Kennington. Come on back to my office.”
Jan Kennington was an attractive woman, in a managerial sort of way. She wore a navy blue pinstriped suit and a white blouse and her hair was tied back in a bun. Nice wristwatch, no rings. She was slim and sleek and she walked with confidence. She opened a little gate by the counter that said EMPLOYEES ONLY, and I followed her to the back of the deli and through a set of swinging doors that led to the storage
area. There were some deep sinks and some shelves back there with some big jugs of cooking oil for the fried chicken and some big cans of olives and peppers for the sandwiches and some plastic carryout containers. A teenage boy was tearing down some boxes back by the service entrance.
As we approached the door that said MANAGER, a palmetto bug the size of a bowling ball scurried across my path. I came down on it with the toe of my shoe. Heard it crunch. Jan pulled out a key ring and opened the door to her office and we walked in.
“Have a seat,” she said.
She sat behind her desk and I sat in the padded steel chair in front of it.
Jan Kennington seemed to be a very neat person. There was a computer monitor on her desk and a keyboard and some fresh flowers in a vase and a decorative box of tissues and nothing else. No stacks of papers, no hole punchers or tape dispensers or pencil caddies or candy dishes. No clutter of any kind. I thought about asking her how much she would charge to come by my place sometime and organize my life for me.
“Is this where you do your job interviews?” I said.
“Yes. Want to put in an application?”
She smiled and winked, but I might have actually considered it back when I was waiting for my PI license to come through.
“No thanks,” I said. “I was just wondering if you could—”
“A man named Thrasher was here asking about Anna a few days ago, and yesterday I talked to a police detective named Hollinger. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told them. Which is all I know, which isn’t much.”
“I’m just getting started on this,” I said. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to. Sorry if you’re having to repeat yourself.”
“Maybe I should just make a recording.”
I pulled my little notepad out of my back pocket.
“Was this Thrasher guy her boyfriend?” I said.
“He said they’d been out one time.”
“Do you know his first name?”
“Kei.”
“Is that just an initial, or—”
“K-E-I. The only reason I know is because he spelled it for me. I never would have guessed it on my own.”
“Ms. Parks sent you a letter of resignation,” I said. “Is that correct?”
“Yes. Via email. I have a copy of it right here.”
She opened her top desk drawer, pulled out a sheet of paper, handed it to me. The letter was brief and to the point. Anna Parks apologized for not giving the company any notice about her decision to resign.
“Are you the one who hired Ms. Parks?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you were her immediate supervisor up until the time she quit?”
“That’s correct.”
“It seems like the letter should have been addressed to you, instead of To Whom It May Concern.”
“Business etiquette isn’t what it used to be,” Jan Kennington said. “Most employees who decide to leave the company don’t even bother with a letter. They just don’t show up for work.”
I didn’t have much of an idea about what business etiquette was now or what it used to be, but burning bridges didn’t seem like the way to go.
“Would it be possible for me to get a copy of Anna’s original job application?” I said.
“No. That information belongs to the company, and handing it over to a third party would be in violation of our privacy policy.”
I reached down and peeled the dead palmetto bug off the bottom of my shoe.
“What would this be in violation of?” I said.
Jan Kennington gasped. She backed her rolling chair to the wall and gazed on in horror as I dropped the smashed carcass on top of the desk.
“If you don’t get that thing out of here right now, I’m going to scream,” she said.
I pulled a tissue from the box and wiped up the mess.
“I could have this place shut down,” I said. “All it would take is one phone call.”
“What is this? Some kind of extortion?”
“I prefer to call it a mutually beneficial agreement. Give me a copy of the application, and I won’t say anything about your insect problem.”
Jan Kennington settled back in her chair. Gone now was the winning smile and the fearless confidence. She suddenly looked tired and defeated. I could see it in her eyes. She’d probably been having an okay day until I came around. I felt sad that I had ever walked into her office.
But not sad enough to back down.
My client deserved to know what had happened to his daughter, and I was going to do whatever it took to see that he did.
“I can’t give you a copy of the application,” Jan said. “I could lose my job. What exactly was it that you wanted to know?”
“I would like to see her list of personal references,” I said. “That’s the main thing. People who might be able to provide me with some insight into her current whereabouts.”
Jan got up from her chair and pulled out her key ring and opened one of the drawers to the file cabinet behind her desk. A few seconds later she turned around and handed me the application. It was filled out in black ink. Anna Parks was never going to win any awards for penmanship, but I could read most of it. I wrote down the names and numbers of her personal references and her former employers.
“I usually don’t let people intimidate me like that,” Jan said. “You’re different. You’ve been doing this for a while, haven’t you?”
“Actually, it’s my first day,” I said.
I stood and we shook hands and I thanked her for her time. On my way out I reminded her that she needed to call an exterminator.
5
I stopped at a fast food joint, walked inside and ordered a cheeseburger and a small order of fries and a large iced tea with lemon. I carried the food to a table, sat down and looked at my notes.
Anna Parks had listed three personal references on her job application: Thelma Watson, a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles; Dorothy Green, a housekeeper at a local hotel; and Haley Nilstrom, a stay-at-home mom. The date on the application was a little over a year ago, so I had no idea if the contact information was current on any of them.
I decided to try Dorothy Green first, for no particular reason. I pulled out my cell phone and punched in the number. It went to voicemail. I started to leave a message, and then someone picked up. It wasn’t Dorothy Green. It was a man. I told him my name and asked if I could please speak with Ms. Green.
“She’s at work,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for a woman named Anna Parks.”
“She in some kind of trouble?”
“No. Her father hasn’t been able to get in touch with her for a few days. He’s worried about her. Do you know Anna?”
“She used to come around sometimes. Not so much anymore.”
“Anna and Dorothy were friends, right?”
“You could say that. How did you get this number?”
“Would you please tell Dorothy to give me a call at her earliest convenience?” I said, ignoring his question.
“How did you get this number?” he said again. “It’s unlisted, and we don’t give it out to just anyone.”
“I don’t think I caught your name,” I said. “Are you Dorothy’s boyfriend? Husband?”
“That’s none of your business. I’m going to ask you one more time. How did you get—”
“How I got the number is not important,” I said. “I won’t bother you again. Just tell Dorothy to call me. Okay?”
I hung up. He was getting irate, and I had no intention of telling him anything about my little talk with Jan Kennington. I didn’t want to get her in trouble, for one thing. I could have made something up, but I learned a long time ago that omitting the truth is usually preferable to telling a lie.
I took a bite of my cheeseburger. It had gotten cold already, or maybe it had started out that way. The fries weren’t very hot either. I picked up the fresh lemon we
dge floating on top of the iced tea and squeezed some juice into the enormous plastic drinking cup, and then I called Haley Nilstrom. She answered on the first ring, but she wasn’t much help. She said she’d only seen Anna two times since high school, once in line at a movie theater and once at their ten year reunion. The last she’d heard, Anna was engaged to be married, but she couldn’t remember the guy’s name.
I tried Thelma Watson, but the number I’d written down from Anna’s job application was no longer in service. I ran a search on the Internet, came up dry there as well. Maybe Thelma Watson’s new number was unlisted, or maybe she’d moved away from the area. I had no idea, but the Department of Motor Vehicles was only a few blocks away, so I decided to drive on over. Maybe she still worked there. I grabbed my iced tea and threw the cold and greasy food into the trash can on my way out the door.
I had to drive around for a while to find a parking spot at the DMV. I put my gun in the glove compartment, killed the engine, climbed out and walked inside. The place was crowded. It smelled like floor polish and human sweat. I took a number and took a seat. Twenty minutes later, it was finally my turn to get up and walk over to one of the service windows and speak with one of the clerks. Female, fifty-something, short hair with a decent dye job. Her nametag said Brenda. There was a computer monitor in front of her and a telephone with a bunch of buttons on it.
“I’m looking for a woman named Thelma Watson,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Thelma Watson. Does she still work here?”
“Could I ask the nature of your business, sir?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “I just need to talk to her for a few minutes.”
“One moment, please.”
“Thank you.”
Brenda lifted the phone’s handset from its complicated base and punched in some numbers. The room seemed to get hotter while I stood there and waited. A tense vibe permeated the atmosphere, resentment from the twenty or so people still sitting against the wall with numbers bigger than mine. Or maybe it was just my imagination. Being cooped up with a bunch of other people in a tight space has always made me nervous.
