Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  Cynthia had nothing more to say. She left the bed and dressed in the dark. The rustle of her clothes and the creak of floorboards told me she was near, but I couldn’t see her, and when I reached out, I caught only air. I wanted to say something to her, but what? I’m sorry? Yeah, right, that would cover it. I’m sorry, Cynthia, I was only joking. Sure.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that,” I told her.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Cynthia?”

  The floorboards creaked again.

  “Cynthia, if you loved me, you would ignore me when I say stupid things.”

  “Taylor, you’re a jerk,” she answered softly. And then she was gone. I listened as she made her way down the stairs to the front door, slamming it behind her.

  “Taylor, you are a jerk!” I agreed.

  I had run out of coffee beans and was finishing my last Dr Pepper when Hunter Truman called. He wanted an update. I told him I had nothing positive to report and asked if I should give it up. He said no, and I sighed my relief. I had no intention of quitting the chase, but it was starting to get expensive. That’s why so many skips and missing persons remain unfound because it’s not worth the cost of finding them. And I would rather hunt for Alison on Truman’s nickel than mine.

  “What do you want ’em for?” Stephen Emerton asked when I requested all of his and Alison’s canceled personal checks starting one year prior to her disappearance.

  I convinced him that I was helping the Dakota County attorney strengthen his case against Irene Brown; told him that if she were convicted of killing Alison, the insurance company would be forced to pay off on Emerton’s claim. He gave me a box of canceled checks dating back eighteen months.

  “What do you want them for?” Sarah Selmi asked when I requested Alison’s complete employment history at Kennel-Up, emphasizing those days when she did not report to work, plus a record of all her business trips and a list of the long-distance phone calls she had made.

  I was bound by Hunter Truman’s directive not to tell her the truth, and I couldn’t think of a viable lie, so I simply said: “Because it’s important that we have all the information correct for the trial.” It sounds absurd, I know, but it worked. It usually does. Half the time when you start a sentence with the word “because,” people don’t even hear the rest of it. They hear only the word “because,” which they translate to mean, “It’s all right, go ahead.” If you don’t believe me, try it sometime.

  Sarah Selmi gave me everything I requested except for the phone information. Kennel-Up had a WATS line, and they had no way of determining which employees called where. She said it was an ongoing problem since her employees shamefully abused the service, dialing up long-lost relatives halfway around the planet.

  I got back to my office and started sifting through the information I had gathered. Kennel-Up promoted itself as a national company, yet in reality it was strictly regional, selling its products almost exclusively in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Alison had visited each of those states several times in the months before she went missing. However, she wrote no personal checks in any of them.

  One personal check, though, did catch my eye. It was made out to Bosch Publications. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I closed my eyes and let it bounce around for a while, but nothing came of it. When I opened my eyes again, I was staring at my bookcase, specifically at the volume with the blue cover and the title Minnesota Sex Offenders on the spine. The book listed the names and offenses of nearly everyone who had been convicted of a sex crime in the state of Minnesota, along with the criminal’s current address and any other information that the author could secure. It was very popular among the “not in my neighborhood” crowd.

  I went to the bookcase, slipped the volume out, opened it to the title page, and noted the publisher.

  Bosch Publications, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Stephen Emerton was becoming increasingly annoyed by my presence in his life. But he did remember seeing a copy of the book I described. It was probably in one of the boxes he had stuffed with Alison’s belongings and stashed in a ministorage garage near the intersection of Highway 36 and I-694. And, yeah, he’d leave the key with his secretary if I wanted to take a look.

  I did.

  It turned out that Alison had a great many books. Maybe a thousand. At least it seemed like that as I rummaged through the boxes stacked inside the garage designated 54A. It took about two hours before I came up with Minnesota Sex Offenders.

  I took it out of the garage into the light, leaned against my Colt, and flicked through it. The corners of seven pages were turned down. Alison had circled the name of at least one sex offender on each of them. One of the names circled belonged to Fleck, Raymond G. The copy under his name listed Raymond’s offense, how long he had spent in prison, his record there, and his current address and place of employment.

  Well, well. I put the book back, locked the storage garage, and returned to my office, stopping to drop off Stephen’s key on the way. Once inside my office, I examined the canceled check, the one written to Bosch Publications. Alison had bought the book two months before she left the health-care organization to work for Kennel-Up, Raymond’s employer.

  She had known about Raymond’s record before she even met him.

  I smiled.

  “Mistake number two, Alison,” I said aloud. “You should never have kept the book.”

  I continued to search through Alison’s canceled personal checks. Three more interested me. One was written for Dog Universe magazine and a second for X-Country, a magazine for cross-country skiers. I contacted both publications and arranged to purchase their subscription lists.

  The third check had been made out to a print shop a few weeks before Alison began working for Kennel-Up. I guessed it was written to pay for copies of her résumé. I guessed wrong.…

  The woman behind the counter at the print shop was confused, so she called on a co-worker for assistance. He was no help, so she summoned the manager. The manager inspected my photostat and the canceled check and asked, “Why do you need this information?”

  “Because it’s vital that we compare it to other information that we have.”

  Sounded reasonable to him.

  After about ten minutes, the manager produced an invoice with Alison’s name on it dated seven months before she disappeared. The check hadn’t paid for the printing of résumés after all.

  “It was a joke,” the manager said. “I remember now. Mrs. Emerton asked us to make a plate of her birth certificate, burn off the name and date, then run off a few copies; it had something to do with her parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.”

  I almost said it out loud: You should have paid in cash, Alison. Third mistake.

  A birth certificate is the cornerstone for creating a new identity. It’s the most widely accepted form of identification in the United States. And Alison had several on which she could print any name and date she desired.

  Once she fills in the blanks, she leaves them in the backyard, letting the sun age them. She mails one stating that she’s fifteen to the Social Security Administration, along with a note written in longhand on ruled paper saying, “Daddy is making me get a job.” Wham, she has a bona fide social security number.

  She brings a second birth certificate stating her age at anywhere between twenty-four and thirty, along with the social security card, to the Department of Motor Vehicles, pick your own state. If anyone should ask, she explains that after living overseas for ten years with her father, who is in the U.S. Air Force, she needs a valid driver’s license. She takes a test. Bam, now she has the second most widely used form of ID, accepted by grocery store clerks and traffic cops throughout the nation.

  Now she can get a passport, a bank account, credit cards, insurance; she can get a job, start her own business, borrow money. All she needs is time and patience—and Alison had both.

  Perfect. Just perfect.


  Spurred by yet another hunch, I fired up my PC and began conducting a credit-bureau sweep and a vital-information trace against Rosalind Colletti, Alison’s erstwhile stage name.

  It was a waste of time.

  “She’s good,” I decided, depressed by the realization that merely throwing my glove on the field wasn’t going to beat her, that she might actually beat me.

  I’ll get her yet, my inner voice vowed. She might have genius on her side, but I had experience

  Only I wasn’t encouraged. You can divide private investigators into two camps. The first will declare vehemently that the longer an individual goes missing, the harder she is to find. The second, a much smaller group, will insist that the longer an individual is missing, the easier she’ll be to find. I tend to agreed with the first group.

  fifteen

  Scott Dumer was a bartender. Not a bartender who was studying the law or working on a graduate thesis. Not a bartender who wanted to be an actor or a musician or a writer. He was simply a bartender. It was what he liked to do, and he was good at it. He poured a Summit Ale without my asking for it and set it in front of me. He didn’t recite the price and wait for me to pay it. He didn’t ask where I had been lately. Nor did he tell me I was a sight for sore eyes. Instead, picking up a conversation we had left off nearly a month earlier, he said, “With their piddling payroll, no free agents, bunch of minor leaguers in The Show for the first time, I figure the best the Twins can do is fourth in the Central, and that depends on what Kansas City does.”

  Considering how badly they’d been crushed by Oakland before going on to lose five of seven to Seattle and California, fourth place looked good. Still, hope springs eternal.

  “Second,” I told him. “The kids will come around. Besides, it’s early.”

  “More pennants are lost in June than in September,” he reminded me, then moved down the stick to attend to another patron.

  Hey, a good bartender is like a good mechanic: When you find him, keep him. Scott was the only reason I went into The Dusty Road. Well, that and its close proximity to my home in Roseville. It’s where I go when I grow tired of my own company and can’t find someone to impose myself upon. Like Cynthia.

  The bar was about a third filled, a weeknight crowd, quiet. The most noise came from a table of expensive-looking college girls. The girls were clearly slumming. They had tried to dress poor, but, being rich, they couldn’t manage it. They generated a lot of wistful glances from us older, blue-collar guys who frequented the bar. All that young, taut, college-girl flesh—a man is never immune no matter how agreeably attached he might be to another.

  I tried not to stare, reminding myself that I was on the far side of middle-age. Because by my calculations, middle age is not forty-five or fifty and certainly not sixty. If a man’s average life expectancy is seventy-two or seventy-three, middle age is thirty-six, thirty-seven. You’re just kidding yourself to believe otherwise. And to think that these sweet adolescents would be interested in a man of my advanced years would be just vanity, pure and simple. Besides, I didn’t need an adoring-coed fantasy. I still had Cynthia. Didn’t I?

  I wished she’d take my calls so I would know one way or the other; I thought it was unfair of her to keep me hanging. Were we through or weren’t we?

  I was debating whether to call Cynthia at home—maybe she would beat her answering machine to the phone this time—when a woman came through the door, moving with a clear sense of purpose. She was well favored, and if she had seen better days, it wasn’t too long ago. Her hair was glossy and so were her eyes, and although she didn’t look like her, for a moment I recognized Alison. I dismissed the image with a sip of beer. Lately I had been seeing Alison everywhere.

  The woman’s presence silenced the college girls. They stared at her and she stared back, and in the moment their eyes met something was exchanged. I have no idea what. Her past and their future, perhaps. She was older than the girls by a couple of decades. She could have been their mother. For all I knew, maybe she was. By my standards she was merely middle-aged.

  The woman made her way to a stool and ordered a shot, water on the side. It wasn’t until Scott left her that she began surveying the bar for likely prey. Her eyes fell on me, lingered for a second or two, passed by, then came back. My pulse quickened.

  I nodded.

  She nodded back.

  I smiled.

  She smiled.

  When Scott served her shot, she asked him a question, gesturing toward me with her chin. Scott, looking like someone who had just lost his dog, spoke about six words in reply. The woman downed her shot and left the bar. I felt betrayed.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked Scott.

  “Just another woman looking for love in all the wrong places.”

  “Can the country-western shit. What did she say?”

  “She asked me who you were and why you looked so unhappy.”

  “And?”

  “I told her you’re in mourning because your roommate just died of AIDS.”

  “You’re an asshole, Scott.”

  “I’d hate to see you do something you’d regret in the morning.”

  “Shut up and pour me another beer.”

  Like I said, a good bartender. We spent the next hour or so talking sports, segueing from baseball to football to basketball while he filled the drink orders of his waitresses and the other customers at the stick.

  How did I come to this? I wondered during one of his brief absenses. Alone in a bar, pretending that the man who served me drinks was a long-lost pal. When I was a cop, when I played ball and hockey, when Laura was alive, I had lots of friends. But after she died … It was four years, ten months, two weeks, two days ago. You’d think I’d have lost track by now. In fact, it’s how I judge the passage of time: Before Laura. Laura. After Laura.

  I had dated her for sixteen glorious months. Maybe a million times I came this close to asking The Question, only to lose my nerve at the last moment and leave it for another time. Then in exasperation she told me, “If you ask me to marry you tonight, I’d say yes. But if you keeping putting it off until tomorrow or the day after …” I didn’t put it off. She did say yes.

  We were together for seven years, one month, one week, one day. Then a drunk driver took her away; her and my baby girl, Jennifer.

  The memory of it tempted me to chug my beer. Only I had chugged so many beers—and anything else with alcohol in it—in the months immediately after her death that I purposely pushed it away just to prove that I could. My bout with alcoholism had been temporary. Temporary insanity. I’d gotten over it just as I had gotten over Laura’s death.

  I tested my willpower for about ninety seconds, then finished the Summit and ordered another.

  I did a quick survey of the bar. I was the only one sitting alone. But that was okay. I like being alone. I like relying only on myself. It’s so much easier.

  I admit that sometimes—not often but sometimes—I regret quitting the cops, the teams; I chastize myself for neglecting to return the phone calls of my friends and refusing their invitations until they stopped issuing them; I regret being alone. When that happens I call Anne Scalasi. And if she’s busy, I hang out with her kids, take them to ball games, listen to their troubles about school and girlfriends and boyfriends and such—things they probably don’t tell their mother. And if they’re too involved with their own lives for my Big Brother act I call … who?

  There have been women to chase away the alone feeling. Not many. But some. Like Cynthia. No, not like Cynthia. She’s more than a warm body to lie near. She’s someone I could actually care about, whose troubles I’d take to heart. That’s what love is all about isn’t it? Caring about someone who cares about you? It’s that simple. And that complicated.

  I drank some more beer.

  I was working on my fourth beverage when Freddie sauntered in. Sidney Poitier Fredericks was tall and black and as mean as a politician who’s behind in the polls. Some time ago he pistol-w
hipped me in an alley, causing me a mild concussion and great embarrassment. I returned the favor a few evenings later, breaking into his condo and shoving the business end of a nine millimeter up his nostril, letting him know how bitterly disappointed I was by his behavior. I was content to let it go at that, too—keep your distance and neither of us will get hurt. But then a few months later the sonuvabitch turned around and saved my life. Twice.

  Freddie made his way noisily around the stick to where I sat, appraising the college girls as he passed their table. I was glad to see him. If not a friendly face, his was at least a familiar one.

  “Mr. Fredericks,” I said happily in recognition as he sat next to me. “Let me buy you a beer.”

  He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “Why?” he asked bluntly.

  “Well, you did save my life.”

  “Don’t get misty-eyed about it; it wasn’t anything personal. I was paid, remember? It’s not like we’re friends. Is that what you think? We’re friends now?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Shit,” he said, making the word sound like sheet.

  “We are in the same business,” I reminded him.

  “Only as competitors.”

  Scott took Freddie’s order. Pete’s Wicked Ale. I insisted on paying for it.

  “Call it professional courtesy,” I told him.

  Freddie gave me a look when he snatched the bottle from the bar top, but there was no thank you in it. Yeah, me and Freddie. Pals forever.

  “What brings you down here?” I asked, just to be polite.

  “Lookin’ to git me an order of spare ribs,” Freddie grunted.

  “They don’t serve spareribs here.”

  “Oh, man … Spare ribs, Taylor. Spare ribs. You know, like Eve was made from Adam’s spare rib.”

  “Do you make this stuff up, Freddie, or do you subscribe to a magazine or something?”

  “Is this banter? Huh, Taylor? Are we supposed to be fucking bonding now?”

  “Apparently not.”