by Sara Gran
“Stocks?” I guessed.
Mr. Nelson shook his head. “Real estate. He sold me fifty acres of land in Florida. Eventually I realized I had bought a nice chunk of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Sure,” I said. I tried not to smile. “He’s a professional, Mr. Nelson. He’s fooled a lot of men of very high stature—you’d be surprised if I told you who.” I didn’t know who, exactly, we were talking about, but it was probably true. “What I mean is, you’re in very good company.”
Mrs. Nelson kept her eyes straight ahead, on whatever ghost she was staring at.
“Thank you, Miss Flannigan. That’s a kind thing to say. Anyway, fortunately I realized this before Mr. Paganas left town, so I was able to recoup my losses. And something else. I told Mr. Paganas that I wouldn’t report him to the police on one condition. If he would help me find my daughter.”
“And he recommended me?”
“Yes. He recommended you,” Mr. Nelson answered. “He said you no longer used drugs, that you were honest, that we could trust you. He said you knew—well, you knew the type of places where she might be. You see . . .” He paused and looked at his wife. She pulled her eyes out of the void and looked back at him. He turned to me again. “My daughter is on drugs, Miss Flannigan. My daughter is a . . . a dope fiend.”
I held back a laugh. I read the papers: every square in America these days thought their kid was a dope fiend. Mostly from what I gathered their kids smoked a little tea and cut school once in a while. And the paperback novels were full of them—kids who started off popping a benny and ended up on heroin, murdering a dozen of their neighbors with their bare hands. Kids from nice families who got lured in by evil pushers. On the book covers, the pushers always had mustaches.
I had never met an addict who came from a nice home. I’d met addicts who came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home. And I’d never met a dealer who had a mustache.
“Tell me about your daughter,” I said.
He sighed. “Nadine. About a year ago—”
“How old is she now?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“Nineteen,” the mother cut in. She said it slowly, like it had only just occurred to her what was going on here.
“Yes, nineteen,” Mr. Nelson continued. “About a year ago—”
“It started before that,” Mrs. Nelson interrupted. She looked directly at me for the first time. “She started going into the city on the weekends with her friends.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Westchester.”
“Ah.”
She continued: “She started going into the city with her girlfriends every weekend. Didn’t want to go to the club, didn’t want to see her old friends anymore. Nothing so wrong with that. She was in her last year of high school.”
Mr. Nelson picked up the story. “Except she started coming home—well, we thought she was drunk.”
“Now, of course,” Mrs. Nelson said, “we’re not so sure.”
“She started coming home later and later. Drunk or whatever she was.”
“It seemed normal,” Mrs. Nelson pointed out. “She was a young girl and she wanted to have fun. She wanted to spend some time in the city.”
“She wanted to go to Barnard,” Mr. Nelson said. “So she went to Barnard. We thought . . . You can imagine. We thought she’d get it out of her system after a few years of living in the city. Sow her wild oats and then get married or even start a career, whatever would make her happy.”
“She always loved to draw,” Mrs. Nelson said. “I thought she might like to work in fashion or advertising or something like that. It might be fun for her.”
“But that didn’t happen?” I asked.
“No,” Mr. Nelson answered. “No. Instead we got complaints from the dorm mother, then from the dean. Nadine was coming home late, staying out, failing her classes.”
“Even art,” Mrs. Nelson pointed out.
“Even art,” Mr. Nelson agreed. “And she was avoiding us. We hardly ever saw her anymore. Finally one night it all exploded. The dorm mother found something in her room—a kit for injecting drugs.”
“Shooting up,” Mrs. Nelson clarified. I nodded solemnly.
“We wanted to take her to the doctor,” Mr. Nelson continued. “But she refused. It turns out there wasn’t anything the doctor could do for her anyway. . . . Well, I’m sure you know about that.”
I nodded again.
“She promised to stop on her own,” Mr. Nelson said. “But she didn’t. She couldn’t. This went on for months. Finally, they had to expel her from school.”
“That was when she left,” Mrs. Nelson cut in. “The day she had to leave the dorm. We went to go pick her up—”
“She was going to come home with us.”
“But she wasn’t there. She had left the night before. Just left, in the middle of the night.”
“We haven’t heard from her since.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“Three months ago,” Mrs. Nelson answered.
“And you’re just starting to look now?”
They looked at each other, annoyed. “We’ve been looking,” Mrs. Nelson said. “First we called the police—”
“They didn’t care. They said they would look into it.”
“We never heard from them again,” Mrs. Nelson continued. “That was the New York City police. Of course everyone in Westchester was very concerned, but there was nothing they could do. We tried looking around on our own, talking to her friends at school, trying to find out where—where people like that would be. But we got nowhere.
“So we hired a private investigator.” Mrs. Nelson reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph. “He found out she was living with this man, Jerry McFall, in some little dump down on Eleventh Street. But by the time he told us about it, they were gone. He couldn’t find them again.”
She handed me the photo. A man and a girl were standing on Eleventh Street, near First Avenue. It was a sunny day. The girl was looking down at the ground. She had light hair and light eyes and small symmetrical features that didn’t draw any attention. She was pretty, but only if you took the time to look. And there was nothing there to grab you and make you do that. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a tight black sweater with a black skirt and white high-heeled shoes. She looked like a cross between a college girl and a whore. And she didn’t look happy.
The man didn’t look happy, either. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a fancy tweed suit. He looked like a pimp. He was thin and his face was long and narrow. I guessed he was a little younger than me, maybe thirty, give or take a few years. His eyes were dark and his hair was probably light brown. Not good-looking. Not ugly, either.
“What color are her eyes?” I asked.
“Blue,” her mother answered. “Her hair is blond, like mine.”
“How tall is she?”
“Five feet three,” Mrs. Nelson said.
That would put the man at a little under six feet. He looked like he wanted to smack the girl.
“The investigator took that,” she said.
“We fired him,” Mr. Nelson added. “That was all he came up with. I don’t think he had the connections.”
“Underworld connections,” Mrs. Nelson explained.
“What we mean is, we need someone who knows about drug addicts, and girl drug addicts in particular. What concerns us the most is that Nadine doesn’t have any money.”
“This man, Nick the Greek, he said that you would know where people like that go, how they make money and where they buy drugs and that sort of thing. You see, Nadine doesn’t have any money—”
“We’d rather have her home, even as a drug addict, where we can keep our eyes on her and know that she’s safe.”
“We think you can find her,” Mrs. Nelson said, looking at me. “We’d like to have her at home.”
“We think you can find her, Miss Flannigan,”
Mr.
Nelson repeated. “If you start looking today I’ll give you a thousand dollars, cash, right now. And a thousand more if you find her. But that’s to include all of your expenses, gasoline and meals and anything else you might incur—even travel.”
A thousand dollars. Cash.
I looked from one to the other. They looked anxious and eager and hopeful. I knew they weren’t telling me everything. Like I said, I’d never met a dope addict from a nice home. Maybe Mrs. Nelson hit the bottle, or maybe Mr. Nelson had a girl on the side, or five or ten girls. Maybe they spanked Nadine too much when she was a kid, or still did it, or gave her hell over her grades or were trying to get her to marry the guy from next door. Maybe the girl wasn’t on drugs at all and just thought Westchester was a boring place to be and didn’t want to go back there.
It didn’t matter. With a thousand dollars up front, it didn’t matter if I found her at all. If and when I found her I would worry about what to do with her.
I was walking out with a thousand dollars. That was what mattered.
“I have to be honest with you,” I said. They already seemed ready to hand over the money but I figured it couldn’t hurt to tighten the screws. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m not sure if I’m the right person for the job.”
“I’m not sure, either,” Mr. Nelson said. “Frankly, Miss Flannigan, all I know about you is that you live in New York City, you’re . . . that you’re in the same line of work as Mr. Paganas, and that you used to be a drug addict. But for now, you’re our only hope.”
I wasn’t in the same line of work as Mr. Paganas, whoever he was, if he was selling real estate to Mr. Nelson. Not really. We’d probably started off in the same line of work, years ago, and while he moved up to selling real estate to people like Mr. Nelson, I’d moved down to boosting jewelry and pickpocketing. I figured he had recommended me because he didn’t know any other dope addicts, and the whole business was probably not enough dough for anyone else he knew. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking from one to the other, like I was thinking.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
They both looked like a weight had fallen off their shoulders. I told them the thousand would buy them a month. After that, if they wanted me to keep looking, they’d need to cough up more. I’d call them right away if I found anything, and if I didn’t find anything I’d call them at the end of the week to check in. They agreed. Mr. Nelson handed me an envelope with ten hundred-dollar bills inside.
“So you’ll call,” Mrs. Nelson said again before I left, her eyes begging me. “You’ll call right away if you find out anything at all.”
“Of course,” I told her. “You can trust me.”
Chapter Three
I’d never been to the campus of Barnard before, and after spending the morning there I didn’t plan on ever going again. The buildings looked like courthouses, and the place was so far uptown I thought I was in Boston. The closest I’d been to it before was up to 103rd Street, where a fellow I knew sold junk in a cafeteria. When the subway had stopped there I’d almost gotten off the train out of habit.
It’d taken me most of the afternoon the day before to get an appointment with the dean of students. Now we were in his office, in one of the buildings that looked like a courthouse, a messy room with books everywhere and no fresh air. The dean was a skinny man in a cheap suit past middle age, with small narrow eyes and limp hands. It was hard to imagine anyone taking a look at this fellow and thinking, Now here’s a man I trust around a bunch of college coeds. He remembered Nadine all right.
“A lovely girl,” he said, more than once. “Really lovely.”
“Right. I know. I’ve seen her picture. So you knew her well?”
“Not well,” he said. “I don’t get a chance to know any of the individual girls that well, unfortunately. But of course when she began having her problems, that was brought to my attention, and I spoke with her a few times.”
“Oh yeah? What’d you talk about?” I wanted to get out of that stuffy room. Through the window I could see the sun shining outside. Green things were starting to grow all over the place and flowers were popping out every way you looked. The kids walking across campus were all smiling. It was hard to imagine the girl I’d seen in the photo here. She looked like another breed.
He took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Well, the nature of her problems, naturally. I mean, she was using drugs, and I advised her against it. I let her know the school’s policy on that kind of thing.”
“I’m sure that was very helpful to her,” I said. “But did you try to get her into any kind of therapy? Get her into a hospital or anything like that?” None of those cures did a whole lot, but they were a little bit better then nothing. Especially for a young girl, not too far gone, like Nadine.
The dean of students looked at me with his small eyes. “Miss Flannigan, we have some problems we are ready to help our girls with. Homesickness, a little rebellion, trouble adjusting to the schoolwork—we even have a girl, occasionally, who drinks a little too much. But frankly, Nadine is the first drug addict I have ever met. It’s not that I didn’t want to help her. Of course I did. But that is simply beyond the scope of what we can deal with here. That,” he added firmly, as if he were convincing himself, “falls under the realm of what we would consider a family problem, not a problem for the school. I mean, drugs. On a college campus . . .” He lifted his hands up in the air and tried to look sympathetic.
“How about the one who actually found the drugs in her room, the dorm mother?” I asked. “Could I speak with her?”
Miss Duncan, the dorm mother, weighed about four hundred pounds, and she hated the girls she was supposed to be watching. She lived in a room in the dormitory a little bigger than the rest, but not quite big enough for all that weight. We sat on her sofa together while Miss Duncan told me all about Nadine.
“Well, I had never had any experience with that kind of thing,” she assured me. She wore a black dress that was very large, but still tight, and her eyebrows were drawn on in a high round arch, making her look surprised. “Not before I came here. But these girls . . .”
She let her voice trail off. I smiled. “College girls. I was certainly never one myself.”
“Me either,” Miss Duncan confided, in case I had any doubts. “I mean, what’s the point? I mean, if you’re going to do something with your education, sure. If you’re going to do something. I mean, for someone like me, it would have been nice. I could have done something. But these girls—well, you know. They’re all here getting their M-R-S degree. That’s as far as it goes with them.”
“Oh I know,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Nadine’s parents tell me she was interested in art. Did she spend a lot of time on that?”
Miss Duncan rolled her eyes. “Nadine was like the rest of them. Boys, parties, clothes—that was all she cared about.”
“Did you know anything about her condition before you found works in her room?”
She looked at me for a minute. “Oh,” she finally said. “You mean the syringe and all that. Works. No, I had no idea. Like I said, I didn’t know anything about that kind of thing until I came here. These girls, they’ve given me quite an education, I can tell you that.”
“I can imagine. Did you know her parents?”
Miss Duncan nodded. “They came by once a month or so. They’re in Westchester, it’s not far. They’re one of those . . . you know. Very prominent families. The father is a very prominent lawyer in Manhattan. Of course all the girls here are from that type of a family. You know, ship the girl off to Barnard, have her meet the right people, that whole nine yards.”
I asked her if I could speak to Nadine’s roommate. It took some work, but she stood up and led me to a room on the second floor of the dorm, where the girl still lived by herself. Miss Duncan knocked once and then opened the door. It was a small, plain room with two single beds, two desks, and two d
ressers. One half of the room was obviously empty: no sheets on the bed, nothing on the desk, no knickknacks on top of the dresser. A young girl with red hair was sitting at the other desk writing in a notebook. She wore a plaid skirt with a white blouse and saddle shoes, and her skin was so white it almost blended in with the blouse.
Miss Duncan introduced us and explained that I was trying to find Nadine. The girl’s name was Claudia. She smiled.
“Sure, anything I can do to help,” she said. She sounded like she came from a farm. I sat down on the empty twin bed and stared at Miss Duncan until she left.
“So,” I said to Claudia, once the dorm mother was gone. “You must have known Nadine pretty well. This is an awfully small room.”
Claudia shrugged. “We weren’t that close. I mean, we lived together and all, but mostly Nadine kept to herself.”
“What was she like?”
Claudia wrinkled up her brow. “She was kind of moody. Kept to herself, like I said.”
“She didn’t go out a lot? Have boyfriends, go dancing?”
The girl shook her head. “No, she really wasn’t like that at all. She liked to stay in the room a lot when she wasn’t out with her friends. She didn’t join any clubs or go to football games or anything like that.”
“Who were her friends?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Claudia said. “I know she had some friends down in the Village who she saw, but I don’t know who they were. I guess she’d spent some time there before she started school. And then she had a regular fellow. Jerry something-or-other. I think by the time all that stuff happened, she was pretty much only spending time with him, and not seeing any of her other friends anymore. When she wasn’t out with him, she sat around the room, mostly. Drawing. Oh, look—” She pointed at a sketch above her desk. It was a sketch of Claudia. I didn’t know anything about art, but it looked an awful lot like Claudia. More than a photograph would have. “Nadine did that. She gave it to me. To be honest, she kind of got on my nerves. I mean, she wasn’t very friendly, seeing as we were roommates and all. She never invited me to go out with her, never introduced me to her boyfriend. And when she was here, she just sat in bed and drew pictures. We never talked much. Of course now, well, I just feel so bad. . . .”
