The Helper cd-2

by David Jackson

  She has told him about how she came to New York at the age of three, her father wanting to put his tailoring skills to good use in the garment district. Naturally enough she became a dressmaker herself, but gave it up to go to drama school. It was one night after singing her heart out despite a strained throat that she met and fell in love with Bernard, a jeweler by profession and doing very well for himself, thank you very much. They married, he continued to prosper. Twenty years ago they had amassed enough riches to buy a townhouse on Stuyvesant Street. Six months later Bernard died when he stepped out in front of a car. Doyle is not sure whether he is supposed to laugh or not when she tells him that, ironically, the car that killed him was an Opel.

  ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ Mrs Sachs croaks at Doyle. ‘In the sunlight they’re like jewels. Emeralds. Did anybody ever tell you that before?’

  He looks across the desk. Mrs Sachs’s own eyes are milky. It’s hard to tell what color they are behind the film. She has to be ninety if she’s a day. And now she’s hitting on him?

  ‘My wife,’ he says with emphasis. ‘Sometimes I think it’s the only reason she married me.’

  Mrs Sachs sneaks out a hint of a smile. ‘Is she what brought you to America?’

  Doyle feels the hurt, although he knows he shouldn’t. When he was whisked across the Atlantic at the age of eight, he made it one of his most urgent tasks to shed the Irish accent that most of the natives here found impenetrable and some used as an excuse for beating the crap out of him. It comes as a shock to discover he hasn’t been as successful as he has always believed, and he finds his tone suddenly becoming less accommodating.

  ‘Mrs Sachs-’

  ‘Olivia,’ she interrupts. ‘Please, call me Olivia.’

  ‘Olivia,’ he says, although he intends it to be the last time he gets so familiar, ‘you mind if we cut to the chase here? I’m still not sure why exactly you felt the need to speak with a detective.’

  ‘My daughter has eyes like yours,’ she says, and now Doyle wants to pick up his stapler and fire its contents into those orbs of his that she finds so remarkable. For Christ’s sake, he thinks, what did I do to deserve this, on a beautiful spring day like today?

  ‘Not green,’ continues the old lady — and she is certainly old: a hundred if she’s a day. ‘Blue, actually. But stunning to look at. Like a wolf’s eyes. Or a husky. Have you ever seen a husky’s eyes?’

  Doyle suppresses a sigh and tries again. He has patience — he has been trained to have patience — but sometimes. .

  ‘Mrs Sachs-’

  ‘She worked in the South Tower.’

  And now the spell is cast. She has him. Doyle is a cop, and like every other cop in this city, anything connected with the World Trade Center has a direct line to his very core. 9/11. Nine-One-One. The mother of all emergency calls. The mere mention of that day is enough to bring a lump to his throat. He can almost taste the dust.

  He looks more intently at the woman opposite, and she suddenly seems so frail, so in need of human support. Her beige coat — an expensive one with a fur trim — seems baggy on her now, as if she has shrunk. She has to be a hundred and twenty years old if she’s a day.

  ‘Her name is Patricia,’ she says, and Doyle notices her use of the present tense. ‘She worked for Hadlow-Jones. You know it? The insurance company? She was doing so well there.’

  Doyle remains silent. Spring is put aside while he awaits her story.

  ‘She called me that day. On her cellphone. Twice, actually. The first time to tell me she was planning to come see me after work. The second time to tell me she thought she was about to die.’

  She pauses for a moment while she turns her own gaze toward the window. Doyle guesses that she is traveling back in time, that she is hearing her daughter’s words all over again. Moments like that, they never leave you.

  ‘She told me she didn’t think she would be able to make it to my house after all. A slight change of plan, she called it. She kept apologizing, because she felt she was letting me down. But the fire. . She didn’t think she would be able to make it through the flames.’

  Mrs Sachs faces Doyle again. ‘In the background I could hear people screaming. Have you ever heard the sound of a roomful of people all screaming for their lives? You don’t want to, believe me. It’s the worst sound on earth. A sound like that tears your heart out. It made me say a prayer. You want to know what I prayed for at that moment? I said to God, let it be me in that building. I’m old, I’ve had a good life, let it be me who has to walk into that wall of fire. Anything to save my baby.’

  Doyle has been here before. Many times, with the relatives of many victims. Usually he will toss them a crumb of condolence: ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ or some equally pat phrase that has been robbed of all sincerity through overuse. But Mrs Sachs has stepped over a threshold and touched him. She deserves more. And so he offers her his patience and his silence.

  ‘They never found her. Not a trace. Not a hair, not a fingernail, nothing. But still they offered me money. She was insured with Hadlow-Jones themselves, and they offered me a lot of money. You think I needed money? My husband, God rest his soul, was a very successful man. I told them if they wanted to give me something useful, they could give me proof that my daughter was dead. I’m still waiting for them to get back to me.’

  ‘You’re not alone, Mrs Sachs. There are many, many victims who still haven’t been identified. In a lot of cases it’s simply that the technology isn’t advanced enough yet. Maybe one day soon you’ll get the closure you need. I hope so.’

  She looks at him for a moment, and he wonders if that’s all she came to hear. A splinter of hope to take back to her empty townhouse.

  She reaches for the leather purse on her lap and unsnaps the silver clasp, then reaches in and slips out a buff-colored envelope. She passes it across the desk to Doyle.

  He opens the envelope and slides out a grainy black-and-white photograph. It shows a city street scene. Crowds of people hurtling along a sidewalk. One woman in particular stands out because she is not looking where she is going. Instead, her head is twisted toward the camera and she is smiling. The woman is smartly dressed but not attractive. Her smile seems forced somehow.

  ‘Your daughter?’ Doyle asks. He wonders why she didn’t bring a better photograph than this. When Mrs Sachs doesn’t answer he says, ‘When was this taken?’

  ‘Last month,’ she answers.

  Doyle stares at her, but finds no trace of mischief hidden in her lined features. ‘Last month? So she’s alive?’

  ‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘I don’t know. I think so. I mean, it looks like Patricia. But it’s so hard to tell. The photo, it’s so grainy. I. . I don’t know what to think anymore.’

  ‘Please, don’t get upset. Can I ask who took the picture?’

  ‘A man by the name of Travis Repp. Well, actually, somebody who works for Mr Repp.’

  ‘And Mr Repp is?’

  ‘A private detective.’

  ‘What made you go to him? Someone recommend him to you?’

  ‘Actually, he contacted me. He just called me on the telephone one day, about two years ago. He told me he’d done a lot of work on the 9/11 victims. Mainly on behalf of relatives, insurance companies, the firms that were in the Towers, like that. He said he wanted to talk with me about my daughter. About Patricia. I told him there was nothing to discuss. She was gone. She was killed on that day. I had no reason to talk with him about it. And then he said maybe there was a reason. He said he had learned something about Patricia. Something curious, was the word he used.’

  ‘Did he say what it was?’

  ‘Not at first. He suggested a meeting. He even said he would come over to my house to discuss it.’

  ‘And did you have the meeting?’

  ‘Of course. Why would I not? Look, Detective Doyle, I know what you’re thinking. I may be old, but I’m not senile. He is a real private detective with a real office. It’s on Thirty-third Street. Close to T
hird Avenue. I’ve been there myself on several occasions.’

  ‘So what did he tell you?’

  ‘The first thing he said was that he didn’t usually approach people out of the blue like this. He said that if I wanted nothing more to do with him after our meeting, then that was fine by him. He just felt it was his duty to tell me what he’d learned.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That there was a chance my Patricia was still alive.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And did he explain how he reached this conclusion?’

  ‘He said it was luck more than anything. Back in 2001 he was asked to investigate a list of people from the Towers. You know, the missing ones. Patricia was one of the people on his list. He didn’t find her. Not alive, not dead. And nobody else who could say she was alive or dead. ’Course, he wasn’t the only one looking. None of the experts could find anything either. But because Patricia had been seen at work that day, they said she must have perished. Officially, she was declared deceased, and that was that.’

  She goes silent for a moment, seemingly gathering her thoughts.

  ‘Two years ago, Mr Repp took on another client. A totally unrelated case. But this client also worked in insurance. Anyhow, they got talking, and the topic of 9/11 cropped up. The client told Mr Repp that he knew a lot of people who died that day, and he mentioned a few firms. One of the firms he mentioned was Hadlow-Jones. So when he said this, Mr Repp dug out his old list and started reading out the names. And then he got to Patricia.’

  ‘He recognized her name?’

  She nods. ‘He wanted to know what the list was. So Mr Repp told him it was the employees of Hadlow-Jones who lost their lives. And this client, you know what he said? He said, “Not if Patricia Sachs is on there, it isn’t. When I saw her a couple weeks after the attack, she couldn’t have been any healthier.” ’

  Doyle stops her with a raised finger. ‘Wait a minute. This guy saw Patricia after 9/11?’

  ‘Yes, after. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She was getting aboard a Greyhound.’

  Doyle sees a gleam somewhere behind the dim surface of her eyes. He tries to imagine how overwhelmed Mrs Sachs must have felt when confronted with the possibility that her daughter was still on this earth. With a rope like that dangling before her, she would have been willing to be led anywhere.

  ‘What else did Repp tell you?’

  ‘Not much. Not at that meeting, anyhow. He simply gave me his card and said that if I wanted him to look into it further, he would be only too happy to help.’

  ‘For a fee, of course.’

  ‘Yes. For a fee. But money is not the issue here. Not if my daughter is still out there somewhere. Alive.’

  Doyle would like to differ over the money issue. In his opinion, financial considerations are probably very much at the center of what’s going on here. But, for now, he keeps it to himself.

  ‘So you hired Repp?’

  She shoots him a sharp look intended to remind him of her mental acuity. ‘Not immediately. I told him I wanted to speak with the man who said he saw Patricia.’

  ‘Did Repp set that up?’

  ‘Yes, he did. The man’s name is Pinter. He used to work for Invar Insurance. I have his business card somewhere. The meeting we had didn’t take long. He didn’t know Patricia very well, but he’d met her on a few occasions, and he was pretty sure it was her he saw at the Bus Terminal. He said he even called her name, and she glanced his way, but then she jumped on the bus like she was afraid of something.’

  ‘Did Pinter seem genuine enough?’

  ‘Absolutely he seemed genuine. Even if he was mistaken about seeing Patricia, I think he truly believed it was her.’

  ‘Did he explain why he hadn’t spoken up about this before?’

  ‘You think I didn’t ask him that? I asked him. He said he didn’t even know that Patricia was supposed to be dead. He hadn’t worked with the Hadlow-Jones people in a long time, and so the first time he heard Patricia’s name again was when Mr Repp mentioned her.’

  ‘So then you hired Repp?’

  ‘I did. You wanna call me a fool, then call me a fool. I don’t care. I would give everything I own in the world to see my Patricia again.’

  Doyle rests his index finger on the photograph. ‘And he came up with this?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes.’

  ‘Did he say where the picture was taken?’

  ‘Boston.’

  ‘Boston? Is there any reason why your daughter would go there?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘Mrs Sachs, how old is your daughter?’

  ‘I’m eighty-three now. I didn’t have Patricia until late in life. I was forty at the time.’

  Doyle studies the photograph again. It’s not the sharpest of snaps. The woman could be forty-three, but she could also be somewhere around thirty.

  ‘You get anything else from Repp?’

  ‘Several more sightings. The last one in Chicago.’

  Doyle sighs. It’s all so neat, so convenient.

  ‘Mrs Sachs, when people disappear like this, just dropping off the edge of the world, it’s not on a whim. They have reasons. Big reasons. They’re throwing away a life, usually because they’re so sick of it they need to start a new one. Was it like that for Patricia? Did things get so bad?’

  Mrs Sachs shifts in her chair. She’s uncomfortable, and Doyle knows it’s not because of the seat. This is deep, personal shit he’s asking her now, but it has to be put out there.

  ‘Patricia made a big mistake. The man she married was a bum, a parasite. He was also a control freak. She didn’t talk to me about it much, but I knew Joe made her life miserable. One time, I saw a bottle of anti-depressants in her bag. I think. . I think he even beat her sometimes. If she wanted out, then who could blame her? So what Mr Repp was suggesting, about her running away from it all, it didn’t seem so crazy.’

  ‘Did you speak with her husband about the disappearance?’

  ‘Not in any depth. Joe doesn’t do depth. Far as he’s concerned, Patricia is dead. He got a lot of money from it, and he’s happy with that. It tells you everything about him you need to know.’

  Doyle hesitates before voicing his next words. Dashing the hopes of desperate mothers is not his favorite pastime.

  ‘Okay, let’s suppose that Patricia did survive somehow, that nobody she knew saw her leave the WTC, and that she then decided to use it as the ideal opportunity to change her life forever. She would then have to go into hiding. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t pack a bag, couldn’t go anywhere she might be recognized, couldn’t take any money from an ATM. She would have to go it alone, using only what she had on her. That’s a tough stunt to pull off.’

  Mrs Sachs nods all through this, as if to say, Yes, yes, don’t you think I haven’t already considered all this?

  ‘But not impossible,’ she says. ‘People disappear all the time, don’t they? They fake their deaths and just go. They leave everything behind them.’

  Doyle hears the touch of agony in her last sentence, and he knows he has to reach out for it.

  ‘I think that’s why you came to see me today, isn’t it, Mrs Sachs? If Patricia is still alive, if she has run away from her past life, then she has run away from you too. She has left you behind, left you with all the hurt of believing your daughter has suffered a tragic death. Do you really think she could do that to you, to her own mother?’

  Mrs Sachs raises her face and catches some of that spring sunshine herself. It glints off the wetness in her eyes.

  ‘I’m not very well, you know, Detective. I have diabetes and high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. I don’t know how much longer I have to live. I have few friends and no family, unless Patricia is alive. When Mr Repp came to see me I was overjoyed. I was filled with hope. But you know what? You’re right. The pain of believing that Patricia could abandon me in this way, without a word or a message of some kind — well, that’s come to hurt even more than believing sh
e died on that awful day, along with all those other poor souls. So now I need the pain to end. If she’s alive, then maybe she can tell me why she did this. If not, well. . Either way, I need to know the truth. It’s all I have left.’

  Doyle taps the photograph a few times. ‘I’ll look into it,’ he says. ‘You mind if I keep this for a while?’

  When she shakes her head, he reaches for the envelope. Before he can withdraw his hand, Mrs Sachs takes hold of it.

  ‘Thank you.’ Then she gets up from her chair and shuffles away.

  Doyle looks with sadness at the retreating form. And even when she has disappeared from view, he continues to stare for several minutes.

  He jumps when he hears the booming voice.

  ‘We got a homicide. And it’s messy.’

  THREE

  For the briefest of moments Doyle experiences a surge of excitement. This city isn’t the murder hot-spot it once was. In fact it’s become pretty tame lately. A homicide landing on one’s desk these days is almost a cause for celebration for an NYPD detective.

  So when he looks up and finds the square-jawed face of Lieutenant Cesario pointed decidedly in the direction of the only other two detectives in the room, his disappointment is almost enough to make him cram his gold shield into his mouth and swallow it.