Knot My Sister's Keeper

by Mary Marks

  Poor Uncle Isaac. My anger drained away as quickly as it appeared. He’d devoted his life to taking care of my mother and me. What a great sacrifice. The only thing he asked in return was that I be happy. I reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  “She refused to talk,” he continued. “That’s when I decided if I couldn’t stop her, the least I could do was protect her. I took her to the doctor and got her some birth control pills.” He shook his head. “Quinn. I had no idea.”

  “Did she ever mention if he maybe asked about me? Or tried to see me? Did she ever say anything about child support, for God’s sake?”

  “She never said a word. If he offered to pay, your mamma never took him up on it—at least as far as I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  Uncle Isaac stared at me for a moment. “I wanted to protect you from the truth about your mamma’s behavior. It would’ve set a very bad example for a young girl.”

  “Well, what about two years ago, when you finally revealed that my father hadn’t died in a train accident? Wouldn’t that have been a good time to tell me the whole truth?”

  “In my day, you didn’t speak about such things. You just kept it under the rug.”

  “Swept it,” I softly corrected him. “Swept it under the rug.” I shoved the sandwich in my mouth, trying to chew away my resentment. “He was my father.”

  His eyes pleaded for understanding. “How could I know they were still seeing each other?”

  A heavy silence settled around us as we finished our lunch. Had my uncle told me everything, or was he still holding back? The pounding in my right temple increased and fibromyalgia pain began to spread through all my muscles. Thank goodness I kept a tiny pillbox in my purse. I walked my empty plate to the sink, retrieved my meds, and swallowed them with a glass of tap water. My uncle remained seated at the table, staring into the distance.

  “Please understand, Uncle, I don’t blame you for anything my mother did.”

  His body seemed to relax and he turned his face my way.

  “But I’m not stopping until I know the truth.”

  “What about your half sister? How does she feel about this?”

  “Giselle and I are both determined to learn what happened to him.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.” He spoke so faintly I could barely hear him. “You say he disappeared over thirty years ago? Who knows what you might turn up under that rock? Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  He didn’t have to say anything. The look on his face said, No.

  I cruised along Pico Boulevard until I found Kresky’s Kosher Market. A moist breeze from the west smelled like the Pacific Ocean. I fed the meter and stood on the sidewalk with my hands in my trouser pockets. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to imagine what my mother felt long ago as she waited for my father to pick her up in his Cadillac. She must’ve known he was married, because Uncle Isaac said he openly wore his wedding ring. Yet she apparently loved him enough to accept her role as a secret mistress.

  Her last words before she died of cancer at the age of sixty had always puzzled me. “Where’s Quinn?” she’d asked. Now I finally understood why. Even though he’d disappeared a second time, her whole life had been defined by the hours she waited for him.

  And how did Jacob Quinn Maguire feel about her? Was she just a little something he kept on the side? An adoring dog who would come whenever he beckoned? I retrieved my cell phone from my purse and took another look at the photos I’d taken of her portraits through time. I couldn’t shake the feeling the artist had feelings for his subject.

  A homeless woman wearing several layers of ragged clothes pushed her loaded shopping cart next to me and thrust a dirty hand in my direction. “Spare change for a meal?”

  Over fifty thousand homeless people lived in LA, lured here by the warm winter climate and tolerant government policies. They were especially visible in this part of town. I pulled a twenty out of my purse, handed it to her, and smiled.

  “God bless.” She snatched the bill from my hand and hurried down the street.

  That could have been my mother without Uncle Isaac’s help.

  I stood for several minutes more in front of Kresky’s, imagining a world long before cell phones and computers and homeless people. It was easy to do in this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. A pregnant young woman in a long skirt, long sleeves, and a head scarf pushed a baby stroller into the market just as another emerged with several sacks of groceries. Tomorrow was the Sabbath, and I assumed they needed to get the shopping out of the way today because they’d be busy cleaning house and cooking all day tomorrow.

  By the time I got back to Encino, my headache and the fibro pain had disappeared. I opened my computer and Googled Jacob Quinn Maguire. Not surprisingly, I got several hundred hits, including a row of images of his paintings marching across the top of the screen.

  Formal portraits stared out from the canvases, men and women sitting in rooms lined with bookshelves or draped with blue velvet. His style tended toward impressionism, using short brushstrokes. But he also borrowed from the Dutch school, relying heavily on the contrast of strong light and shadows. No wonder his portraits had been in demand. His works were a bold and brilliant fusion of styles.

  The ringing of the phone pulled me away from the screen.

  Lucy didn’t waste words. “So, what happened with your sister? What is she like? Does she look like you? What did you find out about your father?”

  “Honestly, Lucy, it’s been a tough day. There’s a lot I learned about both my parents, but I’m just too exhausted to talk right now. Can we save this for tomorrow?”

  “Both parents? Now my curiosity is killing me. Are you okay? Do you want me to come over?”

  “I just need some time to process everything. I’ll see you tomorrow. Promise.”

  I returned to the search results on my computer. Dozens of photos showed Quinn with art luminaries of his day, like Bengston, Warhol, and Leibovitz. I felt a stirring of resentment. How different would my life have been if he’d settled down with my mother? Or, at the very least, if he’d claimed me as his daughter? Would I have been raised Catholic? Gone to private schools? Owned a car at sixteen? Traveled the world? Met famous people? Married someone else?

  I spent the next two hours reading accounts of his disappearance in old newspaper and magazine articles. Even Wikipedia devoted a short paragraph about the mystery at the end of his biography. The Los Angeles Times had been especially enthusiastic, assigning not one but three reporters to follow the story. Jacob Quinn Maguire, successful member of the LA art scene, had suddenly disappeared. His wife, daughter of prominent oil baron Jerome Eagan, reported him missing after Maguire failed to show up at a gallery opening in New York.

  That sudden disappearance certainly jibed with what Giselle had told me earlier in the day.

  Subsequent investigation revealed he had never boarded the plane from Los Angeles. One lurid article in the tabloids speculated about gambling debts and Mafia connections. But if the police ever suspected foul play, the papers never reported it. Besides, if someone wanted to get rid of a body, Los Angeles and the surrounding deserts, ocean, and forests had an infinite number of possible dumping grounds. Without any evidence of murder, a search wasn’t practical.

  A plea had gone out for witnesses to step forward, but none appeared. A reward of $100,000 was offered by the Eagan family, but even that failed to produce any clues. Eventually, the media coverage petered out. As far as anyone knew, this was a simple missing-persons case that had gone cold.

  The Beverly Hills Police Department spokesman on the case had been Captain Bela Farkas. The name was familiar. When my friend Harriet Oliver had been murdered, the LAPD detective who worked on her case was Gabriel Farkas. I wondered if the two were related.

  I looked up from the computer and drained my glass of wine. I closed my eyes and vaguely remember
ed reading about the Maguire case all those years ago. But never in my wildest imagination would I have guessed the missing man was my father. How would I have felt if I’d read about my parents’ affair in the newspapers? My husband at the time, Aaron, was intent on building a career as a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. He would’ve been horrified with such a scandal so close to home.

  Thankfully, neither the police nor the newspapers knew about the relationship between my parents. Nowadays the tabloids would jump at the chance to exploit a sleazy story about the dead man, his mistress, and an illegitimate child.

  An unaccustomed heaviness burned once more in my gut as I realized there would never be a mention of me or my mother in any version of his life. It suddenly dawned on me I still might be dealing with some unresolved abandonment issues. Get hold of yourself, Martha. That water moved downstream a long time ago. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

  I was still in a bad mood when Crusher came home that evening. He’d hardly had a chance to walk through the front door when I blurted out, “My whole life has been a lie!” Then I burst into a thunderstorm of tears.

  CHAPTER 5

  Friday morning, I woke up exhausted after spending a restless night trying to switch off my brain. I shuffled into the kitchen, still wearing my blue pajamas printed with penguins on surfboards.

  Crusher stood at the sink, already dressed for his job in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a fresh red bandana on his head. He was an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. For the last two weeks he’d been part of a stakeout watching a group of terrorist sympathizers suspected of shipping firearms to Syria from the port of Los Angeles. He handed me a steaming cup of Italian roast. “Feel any better, babe? You had a rough night.” He should know. He’d listened patiently while I cried my eyes out and dumped everything I’d learned about my parents. When we went to bed, I tossed and turned in his arms most of the night, finally falling asleep at three.

  “Sorry if I kept you up.” My voice croaked. “I just couldn’t stop going over everything in my head. I’ve got to find out what happened to my father. Maybe I’ll even learn why he denied my existence.”

  Crusher placed a plate of buttered toast in front of me. “What do you need?”

  That question was one of the reasons I loved the man. He never tried to “manage” me or tell me what to do. And he understood me well enough to know I would never abandon my quest.

  “To start with, I’d like to see the police files on his missing-persons case. I can’t ask Noah Kaplan to get them for me. He’s LA, not Beverly Hills. Besides, he might ask something in return for the favor.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a blessing on his romance with Quincy.”

  Crusher laughed. “You can’t stop love, babe. Listen. ATF often works with local police departments. Let me see what I can do. What else do you need?”

  “I’d like to speak to the detective who worked on the case.”

  “When was that? Thirty years ago? Thirty-two? Chances are the dude’s long gone. He probably aged out and retired. Might even be dead.”

  I frowned and picked up a golden piece of toast, softened in the middle by melted butter. “Yeah, but I’m still going to try. I even have an idea where to start.”

  He bent down and kissed me. “I’m sitting inside the surveillance van again today, but I’ll see what I can do.” He headed for the front door, lifting his keys, ATF badge, and gun from the hall table. “Do you want me to pick up anything for Shabbat tonight?”

  “No thanks. I’ve got it covered.”

  An hour later, I sat in Lucy’s kitchen, tracing the squares on the checkered blue tablecloth with my fingertip. “. . . and that’s the whole story.”

  My friend had been listening with her elbows on the table and chin in her hands. When I finished speaking, she sat up straight and slowly shook her head. “Dang. I mean, what’re the odds of your parents finding each other in a big city like LA? Sounds like your mother wasn’t as out of it as you thought. She was able to hide a huge secret from everyone. For years, no less.”

  “But why didn’t he ever want to see me?” Tears stung my eyes.

  “Are you sure he didn’t try?” She pointed to Quinn’s photo I’d put on the table. “Do you remember your mother ever introducing you to a man with red hair?”

  I swiped at the tears running down my cheeks. “No. I’ve racked my brain a thousand times, but I don’t remember ever seeing this man.”

  “I’m sorry, hon.” She got up from the table and came back with a box of tissues. “Do you honestly think you can solve a thirty-two-year-old cold case?”

  Good question. What made me think I could succeed where the police had failed? Quinn was a high-profile missing person. Surely the BHPD had been under a lot of pressure to find him. I put the photo back in my purse and stood to leave. “If I can figure out where the investigation failed, maybe I can figure out which rock to look under.”

  Lucy walked me to the front door and gathered me in a hug. “You know I’ll help you in any way I can.”

  Before walking outside, I remembered another reason I wanted to talk to my friend. “By the way, is everything okay with you? You and Ray went to see your lawyer yesterday.”

  She swiped the air with a dismissive hand. “Nothing to worry about. We were just bringing our wills up to date.”

  Why did I get the feeling there was more she wasn’t telling me? “Good to know, Lucy. Because if there is something unusual going on, you know you can always talk to me. Right?”

  “Of course!” she said just a little too brightly.

  Instead of driving home, I sat in the car in front of Lucy’s house and opened my cell phone. I scrolled through my contacts until I found what I was looking for, the phone number of the man who worked on my friend Harriet Oliver’s case a couple of years ago, LAPD Detective Gabe Farkas.

  “This is Martha Rose. Remember me?”

  “Granny Oakley!” He referred to the name the news stories dubbed me right after I stopped Harriet’s killer with his own gun. “How could I forget? It’s been how long?” He wheezed like a fat man with asthma and chuckled. “Solved any more murders lately?”

  “A couple.”

  “Really? I was only kidding.”

  “Really. Anyway, right now I’m looking into a cold case, and I have some questions for you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Do you have time to see me this morning?”

  “Can’t we take care of this over the phone?” His voice turned cautious.

  “It’s complicated and very personal. I’d rather do this face-to-face.”

  “I’ll be at my desk until noon.”

  “Thanks, Gabe. I’m driving over the hill from Encino. I’ll see you in about a half hour.”

  I hopped on the 405 south, exited right on Santa Monica Boulevard and headed toward the West LA station on Butler. My watch read eleven-thirty when I checked in at the front desk. I didn’t have to wait long.

  The extremely heavy forty-year-old lumbered out of his office with a big smile on his face. “Well, if it isn’t Granny O!” He zeroed in on my engagement ring and whistled. “Is that what I think it is? Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “His name is Yossi Levy. He’s ATF.”

  Farkas’s brown eyes twinkled. “No kidding! I guess I’m not surprised you ended up with a guy in law enforcement.” He led me through a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM and gestured for me to sit. The padded seats were a step up from the solid metal chairs in the cramped interrogation rooms. “Can I get you some stale, bitter coffee?”

  “As tempting as that sounds, I think I’ll pass.” I looked around for a camera lens on the ceiling and blue walls. “Is anyone else listening?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “You can speak freely.” He leaned back, clasped his hands on top of his portly stomach, and his voice softened. “You said this was about something personal?”

  I took a deep breath and told
him how I found my half sister, Giselle Cole, and the subsequent discoveries I made about my parents. “I want to find out what happened to my father.”

  “Even if the cold squad reopened this case after more than thirty years, what makes you think they’ll find anything new at this late date?”

  “For one thing, the police never knew about his affair with my mother. Maybe that’ll shed a different light on the facts, open a new line of inquiry.” I could tell by his expression he was about to discourage me. I held up my hand like a stop sign. “Look, Gabe. I know I’m grasping at straws, but if I could only get a look at the file, maybe talk to the officers involved. Actually, I’ve done some preliminary research online. Old newspaper articles about the case often quoted a spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department, a Captain Bela Farkas. Is he a relative of yours?”

  Farkas sat up straighter and raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? That’s my old man. He’s the reason I became a cop.”

  All my senses went on high alert. “Could you give me his phone number and address? I really need to talk to him.”

  He unwrapped a protein bar from his jacket pocket. “Pops retired to Green Valley, Arizona, an old folks’ community south of Tucson.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Yeah, it’s a nice place, but way too hot for me. My wife says if I lose weight, I’d be able to tolerate the heat better. She keeps putting me on different diets, hoping one will stick. Right now, she has me doing Weight Watchers again.” He handed me half the bar.

  “A fellow traveler.” I bit into the caramel-covered nuts and dried cranberries. “How’s it working for you?”

  He spoke around a bulging cheek. “Fine. If you don’t cheat.”

  “Same here. So, will you help me talk to your father?”

  Farkas swallowed the last of his illegal snack. “Unfortunately, no one can reach him right now. He’s on what he calls a ‘spiritual retreat.’” He made air quotes with his pudgy fingers. “He’s done this before, where he leaves his cell phone at home and goes fly-fishing up in Oak Creek Canyon.”