by Robert Crais
“True. But I understand if you can’t make the time.” I touched her arm.
The tip of her tongue peeked out and wet the left corner of her mouth. “Well,” she said, “maybe if we hurry I can give you a short tour.” She said it deviously.
Some guys can charm the stitches off a baseball.
Mrs. Farley came around the counter, put her hand on my back, and gave me the short tour. The short tour included a lot of laughing at unfunny things, a lot of her feeling my shoulder and arm, and a lot of her breathing in my face. Violets. We saw the new gymnasium and the new science labs and the newly expanded library and the new theater arts building and a lot of coeds with moussed hair and bright plastic hair clips and skin cancer tans. Five girls were standing in a little knot outside the cafeteria when Mrs. Farley and I walked past, Mrs. Farley’s hand on my back. One of the girls said something and the others laughed. Maybe Mrs. Farley didn’t require as much charming as I thought.
When we got back to the office, a man in a flowered shirt and a woman in sweat pants and a New Balance running shirt were waiting. Mrs. Farley’s appointment. She smiled at them and told them she would only be another moment, then thanked me for my interest in Glenlake, holding my hand a very long time as she did, and apologized twice for not having more time. She offered to be available whenever I might have more questions. I asked her if it would be all right to take a short stroll around on my way out. She took my hand again and said of course. I smiled at the man in the flowered shirt and the woman in the sweat pants. They smiled back. To think that I dressed for this.
Two minutes later I was back in the library. There was a birch-and-Formica information table as you walked in, and a girl sitting behind the table chewing bubble gum and reading a Danielle Steel novel. The girl had the same moussed, sun-streaked hair and walnut tan that every other girl at Glenlake had, and the same large plastic hair clip. I said, “I thought Glenlake didn’t require its students to wear uniforms.”
She gave me blank eyes and blew a bubble.
“Where could I find last year’s yearbook?”
The bubble popped. “In reference, over there on the shelf above California history. You see the David Bowie poster? To the left of that.”
Traci Louise Fishman was on page 87 of last year’s yearbook, sandwiched between Krystle Fisher and Tiffany Ann Fletcher. She had a heart-shaped face and a flat nose and pale frizzy hair and round, wire-framed glasses. Her lips were thin and tight, and her eyebrows looked like they would have a tendency to grow together. Like her friend Mimi, she wasn’t what you would call pretty. From the look on her face, you could tell she knew it. I put the yearbook back on the shelf, left the library, went back to the Corvette, cranked it up, drove off the campus, and parked in the shade of a large elm just outside the school’s front gate. Traci’s letters to Mimi said she would be taking two morning classes to leave her afternoons free. It was 10:20.
At 11:45, Traci Fishman came around the rear of the administration building, walked into the student parking lot, and unlocked a white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. Dad wasn’t such a cheap shit after all. She was putting the top down when I walked up behind her. “Traci?”
“Yes?” She pronounced the word clearly.
“My name’s Elvis Cole. I’m a private detective. Could I talk with you for a few minutes?” I showed her my license.
She stopped futzing with the top, looked at the little plastic card, then looked at me out of round, expressive eyes. No glasses. Maybe when you started thinking in terms of having some guy “make you a woman,” you ditched the glasses and got contacts. “What do you want to talk with me about?”
I put my license away. “Mimi Warren.”
“Mimi’s been kidnapped.”
“I know. I’m trying to find her. I’m hoping you can help me.”
The big eyes blinked. The contacts didn’t fit well, but in a world of plastic hair clips and chocolate fudge tans, she was going to wear them or die trying. Also, she was scared. She said, “I don’t know. Are you working for her parents?”
“I was. Now I’m working for me.”
“How come you’re not working for Mimi’s parents if you’re trying to find Mimi?”
“They fired me. I was supposed to be taking care of her when she got snatched.”
She nodded and glanced toward the front of the school. More girls were coming from behind the administration building and from other places and were going to their cars or heading through the gates to the street where parked cars waited. Traci chewed at her upper lip and stared at them through blinking alien eyes. Her frizzy hair was cut short and stuck out from her head. She was heavy and her posture was bad. Some of the girls looked our way. More than a couple traded looks and made faces. Traci said, “You want to sit in my car?”
“Sure.” I held the door for her, then closed it and went around to the other side.
Three girls with moussed hair and plastic clips and mahogany tans and pearl-white lip gloss walked past the Rabbit to a catch-me red Porsche 944 Turbo. I watched Traci watch them. She tried to do it sneaky, out the corner of her eye so they couldn’t tell. The girls at the Porsche leaned against its fenders and looked past each other so they could see the Rabbit and me and Traci, and there was lots of laughter. One of them stared openly. I said, “You think they share the same lip gloss tube?”
Traci giggled. She looked at me sort of the same way she looked at them, out from under her eyes, as if she really didn’t want you to know she was looking, as if she thought that if you knew, you’d say something sharp or do something hurtful. “Don’t you think they look like clones?” she said. “They have no individuality. They’re scared of being unique, and therefore alone, so they mask their fear by sameness and denigrate those who do not share their fear.” She just tossed that off, like saying, Hey, buddy, how about a bag of nuts? She said, “They’re talking about us, you know. They’re wondering who’s that guy and why are you sitting with me.”
“I know that.”
“I knew they would. That’s why I wanted us to get into the car.”
“I know that, too.”
She looked at me a long time, then looked away. “Do you think that’s shallow? I hate to be shallow. I try not to be.” Sixteen.
“Traci,” I said, “I think maybe Mimi was mixed up with some people who might’ve had something to do with her kidnapping. People she might’ve thought were her friends and who she might’ve gone out with.”
Traci pooched out her lips and chewed them and shrugged. “Friends?”
Even Traci Louise Fishman did it. I said, “Do you know a couple of Mimi’s friends named Carol and Kerri?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You sure?”
Traci chewed the lips some more and shrugged again. Nervous. “Why would I know them?”
“Because you guys were buddies.”
Shrug.
I said, “Traci, I’ve seen seven letters that you wrote to Mimi last year when she was away. I’ve read them.”
She looked shocked. “You read other people’s mail?”
“Monstrous, isn’t it?”
She chewed harder. “If you find her, what are you going to do?”
“Rescue her.” Sir Elvis.
“You won’t tell her that I’m the one who said?”
I said, “I know you want to protect your friend, babe, but you have to understand that right now she is in a world of trouble. We’re not talking about her shoplifting a radio and you telling. Bad people have her and whatever you know might be able to help me find her.”
She chewed harder and then she nodded. “You really think it was people she thought were her friends that did it?”
“Yes.”
The irritated eyes grew pink and blinked faster. Maybe starting to cry. “It’s just that Mimi liked to make things up, you know. She was always telling me about these stud guys and the parties they would have and how they would ride around in limousines and go to clubs and all t
hese things that you just knew she’d made up.”
“Bigger-than-life stuff.”
“Uh-huh.” She began to sniffle. “So when she told me about these new people, I didn’t believe her at first. She said she had these new friends and that they weren’t full of bullshit like everybody else in her life. She said she had a boyfriend and she said he was really buff and they partied every night and had real good cocaine and stuff and that they were the seeds of a revolution and all this crazy stuff, and after a while I said, ‘Mimi, you’re full of crap,’ just like I always did, and she said it was true and she’d prove it.”
Traci Louise Fishman dug through her purse and took out a battered red leather wallet and dug through that and pulled out a bent color snapshot. “A couple of days later she gave me this. Kerri’s the girl with the white hair. I don’t know about Carol. I really don’t.”
The photograph had been taken on the street at night and was of half a dozen smiling young men and women. Mimi Warren was standing next to a girl with white hair, but Mimi Warren wasn’t Mimi Warren as I had ever seen her. She had blue electroshock hair and heavy emerald eye shadow and she was giving the finger to the camera. She was also standing beside a big, good-looking kid with huge shoulders. The big guy was giving us the bird with his right hand and had his left hand on Mimi’s breast. I took a deep breath, then let it out. Carol and Kerri didn’t matter anymore. The big kid was Eddie Tang.
I touched his image in the photograph. “And this is Mimi’s boyfriend?”
“Uh-huh. That’s what she said.”
21
One of the moussed girls by the 944 went around to the driver’s side, got in, and leaned across to unlock the passenger door. The other girls climbed in, but the Porsche didn’t start. One of the girls lit up. The one in the tiny back seat turned crosswise, and kept raking her fingers through her hair. Music blasted out of the Porsche’s door-mounted speakers, rolling across the parking lot, and you could see them passing around an Evian bottle. They had gotten in the car, apparently, to better watch us from Black Forest comfort.
I looked at the photograph that Traci had given me and at the people in it. Eddie was the oldest, and the biggest. The other two guys were probably not out of their teens and were slight, one wearing narrow-legged jeans and a white shirt and a couple-of-sizes-too-big cloth jacket with a lot of buckles and studs, the other a uniform that looked like something a Red Chinese National would wear, all gray and plain with a single row of buttons down the front and a Nehru collar and a Red Army cap. The kid in the uniform was Asian. He didn’t look like a yakuza thug, but maybe he was executive material. Kerri and the other woman were also Asian. The one Traci didn’t know was dressed in Jordache jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a Swatch watch. Normal. Kerri was a Clorox blonde with a spike cut and a powdered face and neon-red lips and nails. There was a dog collar around her neck. Billy Idol. I said, “Traci, this is important. Did Mimi ever say what she talked about with these people?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was it about something called the Hagakure?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What did she talk about?”
“Stuff I didn’t understand. She said they were real. She said they loved her. She said they were the first people she’d ever met who truly had purpose.” I looked out the window. Purpose. When you’re sixteen, maybe all life is drama. I looked back at Traci. Her big eyes went from pink to red and she rubbed at them and said, “I gotta put in drops.”
She took a little plastic bottle from her purse and put two drops of something into each eye and sat with her eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Trying not to cry.
“When was the last time you spoke to her?”
Nervous shrug. “About three weeks ago.”
“Did she tell you what she would do when she was hanging out with these people?”
Traci stared at the photograph. I handed it back and watched her put it in her wallet like something precious that had to be handled carefully.
“She told me they went to all these clubs. She told me they did all these drugs and had sex and it sounded just like when she would make stuff up only this time I believed her. I said she ought not. I said she was gonna get in trouble or get fucked up or get arrested, and Mimi got real mad so I shut up. This one time she got so mad at me she didn’t talk to me for a month. You have to be careful.” Traci said it like she was telling me a secret that only she knew, like it was important and special and I had probably never heard anything like it ever before.
I said, “Mimi could sneak out, make herself up and change her clothes, and be with these people, then undo it all and go back home and be a different Mimi and her parents never knew.”
Traci nodded, sniffling.
“Man.” I stared out the front of the Rabbit at the Administration Building. It was large and clean and old with thick Spanish walls and a red tile roof. The hedges and the lawn and the trees were neat and well-groomed. Small knots of girls still moved along the walks, some carrying books, some not, but almost all were smiling. I shook my head.
Traci Louise Fishman picked at the steering wheel some more, then gave me the Special Secret look again. Like there was something else I’d never heard before, and something Traci had never been able to tell, and now she wanted to. “You want me to tell you something really weird?”
I looked at her.
“Last year, we were up in my room, smoking. My room is on the second floor and in the back, so I can open the window and no one knows.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We were smoking and talking and Mimi said, ‘Watch this,’ and she pulled up her shirt and put the hot part of the cigarette on her stomach and held it there.” I sat in the Rabbit, listening to sixteen-year-old Traci Louise Fishman, and my back went cold. “It was so weird I couldn’t even say anything. I just watched, and it seemed like she held it there forever, and I yelled, ‘That’s crazy, Mimi, you’ll have a scar,’ and she said she didn’t care, and then she pushed down her pants and there were these two dark marks just above her hair down there and she said, ‘Pain gives us meaning, Traci,’ and then she took a real deep drag on the cigarette and got the tip glowing bright red and then she did it again.” Traci Louise Fishman’s eyes were round and bulging. She was scared, as if telling me these things she had been keeping secret for so long was in some way giving them reality for the first time, and the reality was a shameful, frightful thing.
I ran my tongue across the backs of my teeth and thought about Mimi Warren and couldn’t shake the cold feeling. “Did she do things like that often?”
Traci Louise Fishman began to sob, great heaving sobs that shook her and made her gag. The secret had been held a long time, and it had been scary. Perhaps even incomprehensible. When the sobs died, she said, “You’ll find her? You’ll find her and bring her back?”
“Yes.”
“I told her I was real. I told her I had purpose.”
I nodded.
“She’s my friend,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and bubbly.
I nodded. “I know, babe.”
The sobs erupted once more and took a long time to die. I gave her my handkerchief. With the pale skin and the out-from-under eyes and the heavy little-girl face, there was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don’t know why and there’s no one else and never will be. A left-behind look.
We sat like that for another few minutes, Traci rubbing at her flat nose and me breathing deeply and thinking about Mimi and Eddie Tang and what that might mean. Most of the cars had long since gone, but the red 944 still sat in its spot, music playing, girls within pretending not to stare toward Traci Louise Fishman’s white Volkswagen Rabbit. After a while I said, “They’re still watching us.”
Traci nodded. The eyes weren’t watering anymore and the nose was dry and she gave back my handkerchief. “They can’t believe a good-looking guy like you is sitting here with me.”
“Maybe,” I said, “they can’t believe a good-looking girl like you is letting me.”
She smiled and looked down at her steering wheel again, and again picked at the plastic. She said, “Please bring her back.”
I looked at the Porsche. The girl in the back seat was staring our way. I said, “Traci?”
She looked up at me.
I leaned across and kissed her on the lips. She didn’t move, and when I pulled back she was a vivid red. I said, “Thanks for the help.”
Her chin went down into her neck and she swallowed hard and looked mortified. She touched her lips and looked over at the girls in the Porsche. They were gaping at us. Traci Louise Fishman blinked at them, and looked back at me. Then she squared her shoulders, touched her lips again, and folded both hands very neatly in her lap.
I got out of the Rabbit, went back to the Corvette, and drove to my office.
22
I parked in the bottom of my building, went into the deli, bought a pastrami sandwich with Chinese hot mustard, then used the stairs to go up to the office. Walking the stairs made it easier not to think about Mimi Warren holding a lit cigarette to her skin. Maybe Traci Louise Fishman had made up that part. Maybe she’d made up all of it. Maybe if I didn’t think about Mimi Warren or Traci Louise Fishman or Eddie Tang they would all disappear and living would be easy. Elvis Cole, Existential Detective. I liked that. Not thinking, properly done, creates a pleasant numbed sensation in the brain that I like a lot. There are women who will tell you that not thinking is one of my best things.
I let myself into the office, got a Falstaff out of the little fridge, put the sandwich on a paper plate, and called Lou Poitras.
Lou said, “Don’t tell me. You’ve cracked the case.”
I said, “The girl knew Eddie Tang.”
He told me to hang on and then he put me on hold. When he put me on hold, the phone started playing music. Michael Jackson singing about how bad he was. Our tax dollars at work.
