I crossed over to the small closet. There were a lot of wire coat hangers and an empty plastic laundry basket, but no clothes or shoes, except for a worn pair of pink rubber flip-flops. They were at least three sizes smaller than my own size 9 gunboats.
Beside the closet, another door opened to a bathroom: white tile, gold-and-white-flecked vinyl flooring, an institutional-looking sink, toilet, and plastic-walled shower stall. A limp towel hung from the single plastic bar. It was dry but obviously used. I pushed open the plastic shower door. A bottle of Pantene shampoo, the kind I'm too cheap to buy, stood on the floor. It was nearly full. So was the bottle of conditioner. I reached for the soap in the soap dish and sniffed. Attar of Roses. The Caswell-Massey imprint was hardly worn off. Little Kristee liked expensive things. She'd left about $20 worth of beauty products behind just in the shower stall. I wondered why she'd been in such a hurry. And how she'd afforded those nice things on a nanny's salary.
There was an overflowing trash basket on the floor. My scalp tingled pleasantly. One thing cops and cleaning ladies have in common: we pay attention to trash.
I took it into the bedroom and got a pair of rubber gloves from my cleaning supplies. I sat on the La-Z-Boy and started picking through the garbage.
It was the usual bathroom-variety stuff: a wadded-up plastic cleaner's bag, used strands of dental floss, Q-Tips, razor blades, lots of clumps of blond hair, dark at the roots, an empty tube of toothpaste.
There were also some things I hadn't expected to find, too. For one, there was a plastic birth control pill dispenser. It still had a week's worth of pills in it. The prescription label, from the pharmacy at the nearby A&P, read Nordette and was made out to Kristee Ewbanks. There was a doctor's name and phone number. I peeled the label off and tucked it in my smock pocket. I found a crumpled cigarette pack and two empty Diet Coke cans, both with fuchsia lipstick marks.
At the bottom of the basket I found a small crushed brown paper bag. Inside there was another empty cigarette pack, a worn-out tube of lipstick, some movie ticket stubs, a package of three rather furry-looking cherry LifeSavers, and some moldy white tablets that tasted like aspirin. This looked just like the detritus that layered the bottom of my own purse. Miss Kristee had recently cleaned out her pocketbook, I decided. Too bad she hadn't left it behind, with a detailed itinerary.
It never hurts to be optimistic, right?
I sat still for a moment and thought about what I'd found. Not much. But what I hadn't found was sort of interesting. There were books, but no religious tracts, not even a Bible. I'd thought these Mormons were supposed to be so devout. Maybe Kristee was a different kind of Mormon. I thought about the Coke cans. I wasn't sure, but I thought I recalled that Mormons regarded caffeine, in coffee, tea, or even cola, as taboo. The same with tobacco. I didn't know how they regarded their young maidens who slept with another woman's husband.
But I knew how to find out. The yellow pages had a listing for the information office of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, their formal name. A booming male voice on the other end identified himself as Elder Jackson. In my sincerest voice I asked if he could send me some information about the Mormon church.
"Certainly," he boomed. "We'd be happy to welcome another Saint into the fold. If you'll give me your address, we'll send you a packet in today's mail." We exchanged pleasantries and I hung up.
As nice as it felt to sit in the chair, I hauled myself up and headed for the hall. I had a lot of grout to clean. There were some nasty crayon marks on that second-floor hallway wallpaper that I didn't like the looks of. And who knew what kinds of grunge lurked behind all those other closed doors. It was a veritable "Let's Make a Deal" of dirt. And all I had to do was choose a door.
7
BY THE TIME I FINISHED de-grunging the Beemish house and had made the drive home to Candler Park through rush-hour traffic, it was close to 7 P.M.
I was tired, dirty, and hungry. But no matter how tired or pissed off I am, the sight of my house always makes me smile. It's nothing special, really, just a dumpy little aqua-blue Craftsman-style frame house in a kind of dumpy neighborhood. The locals call Candler Park "an emerging in-town community."
By that I guess they mean it's the kind of neighborhood where gays and straights, blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives live cheek to jowl. The houses are modest working-class affairs, 1920s bungalows and a few very late, very plain Victorians. Lots of dogs, joggers, and economy cars bearing NO NUKES bumper stickers. Our business district is a funky crossroads called Little Five Points. We've got a vegetarian supermarket called Sevananda, three or four vintage clothing stores, a futon shop, a New Age gift shop, a feminist bookstore, and Atlanta's largest collection of honest-to-God spike-haired black-leather-clad punkers. Most of the business owners are unreconstructed hippies turned reluctant capitalists.
My house is maybe seven blocks away on a wide tree-shaded street called Oakdale. There's a wide porch across the front where Edna displays her giant mutant ferns, and we always plant bright pink geraniums in the front in the spring. When I bought it seven years ago, friends stuck a tacky pink plastic flamingo in the front planter. He's still there.
I recognized the beat-up olive-green Buick parked at the curb that night. Inside, the house was quiet. I walked through to the kitchen, yoo-hooing along the way. As I expected, they were sitting out back on the brick patio, yakking away. The screen door banged as I stepped out, and all three of them got quiet for a minute.
Edna had changed into a cotton sundress and was barefoot. As usual she had a lit cigarette in one hand and a big glass of iced tea in the other. Sitting at the table with her were two itty bitty black women. The larger of the two wore coke-bottle glasses perched on her nose, with her gray hair skinned back in a bun. The younger woman was shorter but rounder, and she wore a floppy straw hat. Between them, the two had a large pile of scraps of paper, and they were busy scratching the papers with a pencil.
"Look, Callahan," Edna greeted me. "Sister and Baby got back from their trip to Florida, and they brought me a bunch of blank lottery slips."
"It's Callahan," Baby hollered to her older sister. "Tell her how-do!"
Sister looked up and peered through the thick lenses. Behind the glass her bright brown eyes were filmed over by cataracts. "Don't you shout at me, you old biddy," she instructed her younger sister. "You're the one deaf as a doorknob. I knew who was there.
"Hi, baby," she cooed at me. "Bring your sweet self over here so I can hug on you."
I moved over closer, leaned down, and gave her a hug. Even if you were blind you could always pick out Sister Easterbrook in a crowd. She's the one who smells of Lily of the Valley. I don't know where she gets the stuff, but she always has a fresh bottle of it sitting on a crocheted doily on her dresser.
Sister and Baby Easterbrook are the oldest of our "girls." God knows just how old they are. They both live in a high-rise retirement home over on Ponce de Leon Avenue and clean a couple of houses a week for us, just to keep themselves in lottery tickets. We send them out together on jobs and always pay them in cash, so they don't lose their social security. Baby drives because her eyes are still fairly good, but she's nearly totally deaf, so she has to have Sister in the car to hear if an ambulance is coming or a train is approaching a crossing. Sister is legally blind. They get along just fine, but we usually try to send them to a house where the people aren't home, because once the clients see how old and fragile the sisters look, they usually want to set them in a chair and call the feds and report me for abuse of the elderly.
Baby patted a wrought-iron chair next to her. "Set here and tell us all about the new job Edna's so excited about. She's saying you're gonna get a hundred and seventy-five dollars. Can that be right?"
I poured myself a glass of iced tea from the pitcher on the table. "Looks like it might be more than that, now."
Edna sat up straight at that news. "How?"
I filled her in on the plight of my sorority s
ister and explained that I'd taken on one last investigative case because I couldn't resist the money.
"Hell, no," Edna exclaimed. "Besides, think of the kind of undercover work we could do if you got the detective agency going again. Nobody ever pays attention to the cleaning lady. Most of these people act like we're part of the woodwork. Why, we could collect evidence and do surveillance and all that stuff."
"That's right," chimed in Sister. "I seen them private eye shows on the television. Ooh, you should see the stuff me and Baby find in these fine people's houses. Liquor bottles and sex magazines and I don't know what all."
I held up my hand like a traffic cop. "No. We're not getting back into the detective business. This is a very simple one-shot assignment. No surveillance, no stakeout, no nosy cleaning ladies digging through dumpsters."
Edna waved her hand dismissively at me.
"I mean it, Edna," I said, giving her my best narrow-eyed look. "You are going to stay out of this, and the girls are going to stay out of this. My private investigator's license expires in another month. I'll find this girl, and that'll be the end of it."
Sister and Baby struggled to their feet. They must have been sitting there for a while, because they both had rolled their stockings down around their ankles. Both pecked Edna on the cheek. "Well, we're gonna get on home," Baby said. "I don't like to be in this neighborhood after dark."
I gave them both a quick hug and walked them to the front door. Inside, Edna had turned on the light in the kitchen and was rattling the pots and pans. "Soup and sandwich all right for dinner?" she called to me.
I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. "Just a quick sandwich, Ma," I told her. "I'm gonna make some phone calls on this Beemish thing, and then I'm gonna ran over to the Yacht Club to see if any of the guys are hanging out there tonight. I need to get somebody to ran something on the computer for me."
Before I'd left her house, Lilah had given me the names and numbers of some half-dozen friends who had hired Mormon girls to take care of their kids. I managed to talk to two or three girls, but none of them had ever met Kristee, they said.
I got lucky with Ashley Zucker. The woman she worked for answered the phone and put her on right away. "Did you know Kristee Ewbanks?" I asked.
There was a long pause. "Well, kinda."
"What was she like? Can you tell me?"
The girl on the other end of the line had to think about that for a minute. "Different. She was different from the other girls I've met here."
"Did she socialize with the other Mormon girls?"
Ashley giggled a little. "I don't think Kristee liked us. I called her three or four times to invite her to do stuff with us, but she always said she couldn't. She said Mrs. Beemish was real strict about her going out at night. But then Mrs. Beemish told Betsy, that's the lady I work for, that she didn't know where Kristee went every night. She thought she was going to church." Ashley giggled again. "Not even the LDS kids go to church every night."
I thought about this information for a minute. "Did you ever actually see her at church?"
"Just once. The elder introduced her as a new member. Later I saw her talking to this really cute guy. In fact, he was the cutest guy at our church."
"Do you know his name?" I asked.
"Only his first name, Whit. And one of the girls said he works for some accounting company."
I jotted down Whit and accountant on the yellow legal pad in front of me.
"OK, good. Do you happen to know if Kristee made friends with any of the other LDS girls?"
"Mmm," Ashley said. "Well, I heard she was sort of friendly with Patti Jo Nemeyer. She works for a family down the street from the Beemishes, but I just heard today that Patti Jo went back home to Utah this past weekend. Missed her family."
Patti Jo Nemeyer's name was already on my note pad. "Do you happen to know anything about the service that placed Kristee?" I asked.
"No," she said quickly. "And that's another funny thing. There are about five of those agencies around Salt Lake City. Most of us girls have talked to at least a couple of them. But only two of them place girls in Atlanta. The others send girls to Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston and New York. The girls I know here in Atlanta were placed by Mother's Finest or Nannies Unlimited. Kristee told me the name of her agency, but I'd never heard of them before."
Ashley gave me the phone number of Nannies Unlimited, the agency that placed her. I thanked her for her time and hung up, called Nannies Unlimited, but all I got was an answering machine. I left a message and hung up.
Edna slid a plate in front of me. She'd fixed me a bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toasted whole wheat, my favorite sandwich. The tomatoes were gorgeous, thick and red. "Where'd you find these?" I said, lifting the bread to salt the sandwich.
"Sister and Baby got them down in Ruskin on their bus trip." She brought her own plate over to the table, and we ate in companionable silence. When I finished I took both empty plates and put them in the dishwasher.
In my bedroom I stripped off the hated smock and grimy jeans and slipped on a pair of white shorts and a big baggy T-shirt. I left off the bra, shoved my feet into a pair of sandals, and headed for the front door. "I'm going to the Yacht Club, Edna," I called to her. "I'll talk to you in the morning."
I thought about walking. The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club is only about half a mile from my house. But we've had a couple of rapes in the neighborhood, and although I can hold my own in a tight situation, I'd just as soon not have to deal with the hassle. So I fired up the van and circled the block around Euclid until a parking space came open.
It looked like a fairly slow night at the Yacht Club. I pushed open the door and looked around. The place is a narrow joint, about forty feet long by fifteen feet wide. The bar runs down the right side, and there are some homemade wooden booths on the left side. When the owners started the bar with their savings from the pension fund at Johnny's, another neighborhood bar, they furnished it with stuff their customers gave them. So they've got old sports jerseys, stuffed and mounted tarpons, and all kinds of junk hanging from the ceiling and the walls. The television set is always tuned to ESPN, and there is almost always somebody, like a newspaper reporter, an intern from Grady Memorial, or a cop, trying to talk the bartender into letting him use the phone behind the bar.
I scanned the room until I saw what I needed to see: a cop. Tonight it was a guy named Charles "Bucky" Deaver. Bucky is about my age and he is a big boy. Stands about six-foot-three and weighs about 240. He's the only grown-up I know still fighting acne. He has short brushy-cut blond hair and wears Buddy Holly black nerd glasses. He shops the vintage clothing stores in the neighborhood. This night he had on a short-sleeved chartreuse Ricky Ricardo bowling shirt with wide black lapels tucked into pleated baggy black-and-white checked trousers. His panama hat was pushed to the back of his head. In his left ear I could see a tiny gold earring. From where I stood it looked like a little piglet.
He was concentrating on a monster hamburger and didn't see me walk up until I slipped behind him and gave him a little goose.
He didn't even look up. "Callahan Garrity, you hot-blooded vixen. You never could keep your hands off me, could you?"
I grinned into the mirror over the back bar, slid onto the stool next to his, and helped myself to one of his onion rings.
"Got that right, Bucko. What's shakin'?"
He swallowed and shook his head. "Not a damn thing. Braves are losing. That new starter of theirs is getting the shit shelled out of him."
"What else is new?" I said, not bothering to cover my yawn.
Bucky and I go way back. We got to know each other years ago when a bunch of us were part of a special task force assigned to investigate a rash of murders of young black kids around Atlanta. We worked long hours and parried and drank—and sometimes slept—together. We got to be a pretty tight bunch. The unit was disbanded after we arrested a twenty-one-year-old record promoter for the killings. But most of us have ke
pt in loose contact ever since.
From the other end of the counter, Tinkles, the bartender, caught my eye. I nodded and he reached into the beer box and brought out an ice-caked green Heineken's bottle. He came down the bar and put the bottle and a frosted mug in front of me.
When the foam on my beer had settled and the Braves had safely lost the game, I was ready to talk business with Bucky.
"What's going on down at the shop, Bucky?"
"Guess you heard Fryberg got transferred over to vice," he said.
I nodded. "Somebody mentioned it to me. What do you hear from the other guys?"
My buddy didn't answer for a minute. He was occupied in trying to suck a white string of onion out of a large onion ring. That done, he inhaled the brown crust and delicately wiped his hands on the paper napkin in his lap.
"Shaloub went and got himself elected sheriff in that little hick town he moved to out in Forsyth County. You hear about that?"
I had. I hoped my face didn't turn pink at the mention of Eddie Shaloub's name. He was, you might say, a former gentleman caller. "Yeah. And I heard he left the sheriff's office last year to go into business for himself. He's selling those beepers, right?"
I actually knew exactly what Eddie Shaloub was doing these days. He'd called me several months earlier, ostensibly to sell me a beeper for the cleaning business. We'd had lunch at the Colonnade, one of those old-lady lunch places that has chicken salad and frozen fruit compote, and finished up at the motel next door. That's how it had been with Eddie and me for the past three years. It wasn't anything serious between us. I didn't think.
Bucky pushed aside the lettuce leaf on his plate, searching fruitlessly for another morsel of deep-fried food. That failing, he rolled the lettuce up like a cigarette and chomped down on it.
Every Crooked Nanny Page 4
