by Earl Emerson
The brilliant macho detective tumbles for the elusive prey he stalks. Shades of Laura.
Bit by bit, I went through their house like a monkey combing his tail for ticks. I was shameless, snooping under their pillows to see what sort of night gear they wore, rifling their medicine cabinet to check on contraceptives.
Geez, I love to snoop. We all do, given the right opportunity. I found no contraceptives. Perhaps she had taken them with her. Perhaps she would be needing them. Folded tidily beneath her pillow was a floor-length cotton nightgown. Her pillow smelled of wildflowers and, like all pillows, of spit.
All my hocus-pocus could draw no more of their story out of the house. It was rented and shabby. By the looks of the penciled marks on the baby’s wall, charting her growth, they had lived in the house since before she could walk. The baby had few toys. The parents had fewer clothes. It was all very spartan and hip, right out of the late sixties and early seventies. Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, and A.S. Neill dotted the bookshelf.
I had lived like that once. Now I was a full-time American. Now I cherished my La-Z-Boy and my color television, and I hoarded pennies for the copper content no matter what the treasury said.
In the living room, someone had embroidered a sampler in colored floss and hung it on the wall. It said: Love is having a family that cares.
Some family. The daughter kidnapped by grandpa. The mother missing. The father at Ballard Hospital getting his nostrils cauterized. You would almost suspect they were jinxed.
The 49ers were annihilating San Diego when Kathy and Burton came through the front door.
“Good game?” asked Burton jovially, as if that were all that mattered that morning. A small Band-Aid had been pasted to his cheek and he was still limping, still anemic. I clicked off the black-and-white Zenith and said, “I suppose Kathy told you I was a detective?”
“Why, no.” Burton turned around and gave Kathy an awkward look. “She didn’t. I’ll bet that’s interesting work.” He shook my hand limply. “I’d like to sit down and talk to you about that sometime. You might have some interesting material for my novel.”
“Don’t be so damned complacent,” I said. “Somebody just kidnapped your daughter. Your wife is missing. A jackass spent most of the morning playing break-a-face with your face. Get mad!”
He did the opposite. Burton Nadisky’s voice collapsed into softness. ‘I’m sorry if I don’t live up to some expectation that you have of me.” He dumped a pile of doll clothing from the end of the sofa onto the floor and offered Kathy a seat, which she accepted. “I’m not like other men, I guess. I can’t get angry at any of these people. They’re only doing what they think is right.”
“Ill tell you what,” I said. “You sit here and feel sorry for yourself and I’ll go find your wife.”
Burton looked like a man in a Chinese restaurant who’d just been informed that his bill was six thousand dollars, no charge for the fortune cookies. Kathy interceded.
“Burton, we want to help you. It won’t cast you a thing. ‘May is Sunday, but tomorrow I’ll get a friend of mine who owes me some favors and we’ll get an injunction to get Angel back. In the meantime, Thomas can look for your wife. He’s really very good. He once located a cat that had been missing for two years.”
My eyes rolled involuntarily toward the ceiling. “Gee. That’s awfully nice of you to offer, Kathy. You don’t know what it means to me to have a friend like you. But really…there’s nothing to be done.”
“Don’t you want Angel back?” Kathy asked.
“Of course I want her back. But Im not sure it’s the right thing for her. We don’t have much money. The family’s kind of breaking up. Maybe she is better off with Nanna and Angus.”
“What about your wife?” I asked, pointedly.
A muscle in his right cheek quivered. “She’s… I’m sure she’ll come back if
Really, I don’t know what good it would do to find her.”
“You know where she is then?” Kathy asked, hope-fully.
“Melissa? Gosh, no. Do you?”
“How did she disappear?” I asked.
“I took Angel to the park last Sunday afternoon. When we got home, she was gone.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah. It was kind of funny. You know. Odd?”
“No warning? You hadn’t been quarreling? Was she worried about something?” In their financial straits it was difficult to imagine her not worrying.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“She leave a note?”
Digging into his jeans pocket, Burton pulled out a partially shredded scrap of paper and handed it to me. He was reminiscent of a kid caught with his fingers in mama’s undies drawer, as if the note were something he shouldn’t have and was ashamed of being caught with. He’d obviously had it in his pocket all week. Perusing the wrinkled note over my arm, Kathy leaned in until I could smell her greasepaint.
Burty, I have to go away. Things haven’t been working out and I know they won’t get better unless leave. I am no good for you so please don’t worry. Love, Melissa.
Where she wrote “I am no good for you” there was a natural break in the continuity of the writing so that “I am no good” was almost a separate entity and not connected with “for you.” As if she unconsciously wanted to make a point of the words: “I am no good.” The script was less businesslike and precise than her handwriting in the checkbook.
Melissa Crowell Nadisky was a woman in trouble. ?
Chapter Four
“SHE HAVE ANY MONEY WITH HER WHEN SHE LEFT?” I asked.
“Cripes,” said Burton. “I never thought about that.” I wondered what he did think about. Money was the first thing most people would have considered. “No, she didn’t. A couple of bucks, maybe. And we only have the one checkbook. She left that.” I knew why. “She didn’t take hardly any of her clothes.”
“Where do you think she went?”
Burton shrugged. “I really couldn’t say.”
“We’re going to find her,” said Kathy. “If she doesn’t want to come back, fine. But we’re going to locate her and talk with her.”
“Sure,” said Burton. We probably could have said “let’s go get your balls amputated” and he would have said “sure.” I bet the Fuller Brush men and the Avon ladies and the pixie girls selling Scout cookies loved him. For that matter, I bet his little girl loved him.
“You must have a theory,” I said.
“I really don’t. I just believed she would be back. And now it’s been over a week. Mid they took Angel. I don’t know what’s happening. Angus said I was a Jew. Why would he say that?” His voice began to grow strangled.
“I’m Lutheran, just like he is.”
“Would she go to her folks’ house?”
“No!” said Burton emphatically. It was the largest bullet of emotion he had fired all morning. Then, in a more controlled tone, he added, “They don’t get along real well. They’ve had a few tiffs. She’s okay with her mom. But her dad and her…”
“Any other relatives? Or friends I might try?”
“We don’t have a whole lot of close friends. I’ve phoned everyone here in town.”
“Maybe somebody’s hiding her.”
“Melissa doesn’t know anyone that well.” “Where else might she go?”
“There’s an aunt, maybe. I understand Melissa stayed with her one summer during high school. They used to be close.”
Burton staggered into the other room and returned with a Christmas card and its torn envelope which he handed over timidly. The aunt’s name was Mary Dawn Crowell. The address was in Bellingham.
“She ever run away before, Burton?”
He hesitated, but not for long. I had the feeling he would tell me anything I wanted, if I askedeven how and where they had sex, as if the rest of us had more rights to his life than he did. “She’s been gone before. Never this long.”
“Where did she go?”
“I never fou
nd out.”
“Weren’t you mildly curious?”
“I figured if she wanted to tell me, she would. I guess she never wanted to.”
“When was the last time she took off?”
“About six months ago. But she only stayed overnight. I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t love me. I honestly want her to be happy. If she’d be happier somewhere else, I’ll even help her move. She knows that.” He was a real scrapper, like a worm on a sunbaked sidewalk.
When we left him, Burton was heading toward the kitchen to hack away at his poem. He had given me a photo-booth snapshot of his wife. I stuck it in my wallet. In spite of his passiveness, I liked him. He was goofy, but maybe that was what it took to be a poet. Maybe that was what it took to spill your guts across the page for the whole world to see, and maybe to laugh at.
Under a sky the color of a bad bruise, we stood together beside the truck, each wrapped in our own thoughts.
Kathy chewed on her lower lip, a habit I invariably found appealing, even in white face. Across the street from the Nadisky household stood another tumbledown bungalow, the only other rundown place on the tidy block. I’ll bet the neighbors loved it.
A woman leaned over a davenport and stared at me through the window, curlers in her hair, lines from a sleepless night tweezering her eyes, heavy breasts tugging at her bathrobe. Something told me she had more interest in Nadisky’s problems than just that of a snoopy neighbor. If I reached any dead ends I would double back and look her up. Sometimes the neighbors knew more than the husband. Lots of times the neighbors knew more than the husband.
Before I realized what was happening, Kathy began trembling. I reached out and held her in my arms. She was small and frail as she shivered in my grip. The woman across the way didn’t take her eyes off us for one moment. Perhaps she had never seen a man hug a clown before.
“Oh hell,” said Kathy. “This is the second time I’ve gotten the heebie-jeebies over this family.”
We climbed into the truck. She had shrugged off her shivering fit and was now staring at the top hat in her hand. From it she produced three colored juggling balls and began fiddling with them. I slid the seat all the way back from where she had adjusted it to drive Nadisky to the hospital. The woman across the street had vanished from the window. I could see a football game on their color television in the background.
“What about that man? That awful guy who was beating up Burton? Who was he?”
“He works for various detective agencies. He freelances when somebody offers him a wad of bills. He’s a nice guy. He was going to give your dentist a lot of work before I grabbed you.”
“He wouldn’t hit a woman?”
I fired up the truck and edged into the street. Kathy had buried the tires against the curb. They made a ripping noise. “Don’t bet on it. Holder’d whack himself in the head with a brick if the money was right.”
“What was he doing with the Crowells?”
“My guess is Angel’s grandfather brought him along as a sort of policeman, to make sure there were no hitches.”
Kathy tumbled the colored juggling balls into her top hat and spoke through gritted teeth. “Oh, that gripes me. That makes me so mad how they waltzed in and beat up Burton and took his daughter.”
“Burton doesn’t seem as angry as you do.”
“Don’t let him fool you. I’ve seen him mad before. He’s written some real angry poems. You should see them.”
“I read some of them.”
Kathy did a double take. “Thomas, you didn’t! These are my friends. How could you do such an embarrassing thing?”
“He had a poem right out on the kitchen table in plain sight.”
“Oh.”
“But I snooped through their place anyway.”
“Thomas!”
“You want me to find Melissa? Or would you rather I was polite?”
“Can’t you do both?” I shrugged. “I never have yet. I wouldn’t know how to start.” ?
Chapter Five
BELLINGHAM IS A LONG HAUL WHEN YOUR THOUGHTS ARE dark and distant. Kathy’s premonitions were beginning to worry me. I’m not easily frightened, but she was seeing something in conjunction with this family that didn’t belong, something ugly, and I didn’t know if I wanted to find out what it was. Years ago, I had wanted to know everything. Needed to know. Now, I realized there were some things you were better off not discovering.
North and over eighty miles distant, Bellingham was a small city, not mentioned much in Seattle. The central feature of the burg was Western Washington State College. A long time ago I had seriously contemplated enrolling there.
I could have telephoned Mary Dawn Crowell, but you never find out as much on the phone. Besides, I had nothing else to do. The drive would give me a chance to think things through. My buggy was a six-cylinder and red-lined at seventy. I saw no reason to strain the old girl. I kept the needle a hair past the double nickels. It showered most of the way. It was pouring in Bellingham.
Mary Dawn Crowell lived near the heart of the city in a condominium that had clean lines and freshly planted, plastic-looking shrubbery in front. She wasn’t home. The manager, a congenial grandmother-type with gray hair and gray eyes and gray dentures, was more than helpful to the tall stranger who had motored all the way up from Seattle in the rain squalls.
She escorted me up carpeted steps to the third floor where we spoke to one of Mary Dawn Crowell’s neighbors, a hunched-over gentleman named Felton who must have immigrated from Latvia or some other obscure country. He wore a shabby suit, though it was readily apparent that he hadn’t gone out and wasn’t planning to. He lived in suits. He probably had two of them and rotated every Tuesday. He told me Crowell had taken a Sunday drive with some oldsters and would be home in the late afternoon.
I conned her phone number out of the manager and drove around looking for someplace to wait. It was just after one o’clock.
I grabbed a hamburger at a greasy spoon opposite a shopping mall. Strolling across the street to the mall, I window-shopped and watched the young girls in tight jeans. I watched the old girls in tight jeans, too, and the matrons in tight jeans, but mostly the young girls in tight jeans. Everyone was dressed the same. Same designer denims with the same decals on their butts, same baseball caps with the same logos on their brains, same reds and blues, same cuts and styles.
One man trundled past wearing my shoes. Another came past in my coat. In the parking lot outside, there were at least two trucks identical to mine. It made you wonder how many had your brain.
I bought a thick Sunday paper and found a movie theater playing Body Heat. I’d seen the flick, but I could easily tolerate it again. After the murder, I slipped out to the lobby and phoned Mary Dawn Crowell. No reply. That particular flick always made me thirsty. I floundered back to my seat with a tall cool Seven-Up and evaporated into the celluloid miracle.
It was half past five before a woman who might have been Crowell parked a shiny new road-gray Buick in back of the condominium and scurried through the pattering rain to the glass doors. I allowed her enough time to get inside and take care of business before I climbed out of the truck. I stalked through the wet and thumbed the buzzer next to 304.
“Yes?”
“I’m Thomas Black, a friend of your niece’s, Melissa Nadisky.”
“Who?”
“Melissa Crowell? Your niece. She married a fellow named Nadisky.”
“Yes, of course. Is Melissa with you?”
“Not today.”
“Come on up.” The door buzzed and I went in. The joint smelled of new carpets.
Mary Dawn was a spicy old gal, a spinster or widow by the looks of her clothing, which was thirty years out of date. The world was full of short little mannish women like her. She had a wide, squat body and a broad face that seemed to get broader toward the chin, as if the wide jaw belonged on someone else. Brown curls lay so snug that her scalp looked bald in patches. She sized me up while I introduced myself.
She spoke in bursts the way a lot of people with pent-up energy do.
Though I was an exceptional liar, I decided the direct approach would be the most efficient.
“My name is Thomas Black. I’m a detective. Some friends of your niece asked me to find her.”
“I didn’t realize she needed finding,” said Mary Crowell, abruptly plunking into a wooden armchair smothered in cushions. The apartment was crowded with wooden furniture, all of it meticulously polished.
She motioned for me to sit opposite her on a cushioned love seat. “Would you happen to know where she might be?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Haven’t seen Melissa for a spell. Don’t get along with her father, Angushe’s my older brother. What’s the matter with that husband of hers? Doesn’t he know where she is?”
I shook my head. “When was the last time you heard from her?”
“Last time I talked with Melissa was Tuesday.”
“What’d she say?”
“She telephoned and asked if she could stay with me for a few days. Said something was bothering her, something that had been bothering her for a long time. Something from her childhood. I told her of course she could stay. She’s been up before, don’t you know.”
“Has she? When was the last time?”
Mary Crowell mulled it over and her eyes grew distant. I shifted on the love seat. My trousers were wet all down the back from splashing through the rain in the parking lot.
“Maybe six months ago?’ I suggested.
“Yes, about six months ago. How did you figure that?”
“She turns up missing every once in a while. Generally, it’s just a day or two at a time. I gather she was up here each of those times.”
“I don’t know when she was missing, as you call it. She’s visited me a few times.”
“Have you heard from her since this week’s phone call?”
“No. Said she’d be up the next morning, which would have been Wednesday, but she never appeared. Greyhound, she said.”
“And she didn’t let on where she was phoning from?”
“Matter of fact, she did.”
