The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  Mrs. Defonte said she would call me back and did so a few minutes after we hung up. She reported that she had tried her husband’s cell, twice, but there was no answer. When my husband left, I had wanted to call him very badly, but had gotten drunk instead; at the time I told myself I was washing the urge out of me. I wondered if another postcard had turned up at Julia’s apartment in Opa-locka.

  “I guess we’re not sure what to do,” I said, worried Mrs. Defonte might start losing faith in us. “We’ve been up here a long time.”

  “You’re the detectives,” she said.

  * * *

  When morning came, Julia sucked down a coffee and two jelly doughnuts. She picked up the black nylon messenger bag that contained the Defonte case file, stalked over to the fire escape, and started climbing down.

  “Where are you going?” I said. “You just made a breakfast run.”

  “Fuck this motherfucker,” Julia said, her hands gripping the ladder.

  I followed her down the fire escape. She didn’t check for cars before crossing the street. When I caught up with her, she was looking for the blond woman’s name on the row of silver mailboxes in the lobby.

  “There she is.” Julia pointed at box 703. Belinda Singer. Flecks of icing were stuck to her finger.

  “This isn’t what we do,” I said. Private investigators were watchers, waiters. We waited for people to do whatever it was they were going to do, recorded it, and then handed over the evidence. We didn’t jump into the middle of situations. We didn’t intervene.

  “We went to detective school, am I right?”

  “I went to detective school,” I said. “I did all the work. Everything is in my name.”

  “Well, we call ourselves detectives, don’t we?”

  I gave her a little shrug. The lack of sleep had made everything bleary.

  “I’m ready to do some detecting.” Julia held me in a hard stare. She had bright hazel eyes, more green than brown, and could be very convincing.

  We rode the elevator to the seventh floor and knocked on the blond woman’s door. She looked older up close, her tanned skin creased lightly around the eyes and forehead, her lips thin and dry. She wore a white sleeveless tennis dress and white sneakers with ankle socks. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail.

  “Are you Belinda Singer?” Julia flipped open her wallet and flashed the heavy brass badge issued to licensed PIs; if you didn’t look closely, it could pass for the real thing. “Let us in. We’re detectives. Police.”

  The woman didn’t move from the doorway. I peered over her shoulder, but didn’t see anyone inside.

  “Ms. Singer? Did you hear me?” My sister’s voice was forceful. I would have believed anything she said. The blond woman opened the door a little wider. Julia edged into the apartment.

  “You’re a detective too?” she asked as I entered.

  I glared at her in a way I hoped was intimidating.

  My sister moved into the blond woman’s living room. She stood on a leopard-print rug, next to a glass coffee table piled high with issues of South Florida Living. I hung out closer to the front door. The floor was cream tile; large cockleshells, each the color of a sunset, had been arranged on the pale pink walls.

  “Where is Peter Defonte?” Julia asked.

  The woman cocked her head. “Who is Peter Defonte?”

  Julia told the woman that she knew exactly who Peter Defonte was, that he had been in this apartment for the last two nights and was probably still here.

  “I wish,” the blond woman said.

  “Do you think this is a joke, Ms. Singer?” Julia replied.

  “No one’s been here. Look around.”

  We checked the two bedrooms, the closets, the bathrooms. We looked under the beds and behind the shower curtains. When we were finished, Julia pulled a head shot of Mr. Defonte from her messenger bag and handed it to the blond woman.

  “This man, we know that you know him.” Julia’s voice was softer. She touched the woman’s forearm. “Go on, take a look.”

  The woman pinched the sides of the photo and frowned. “I don’t know him at all.” She handed the photo back to Julia and surveyed us for a moment, her nose wrinkling like she’d just smelled something unpleasant, which was entirely possible, seeing as we’d been baking on the roof, unshowered, for two days.

  “I think your detecting skills need some work,” she told us.

  “This is the law you’re talking to,” Julia said. And then we got out of the apartment as quickly as we could. We went back down to the ground floor and showed the photo to the building manager, the superintendent, and a few maintenance men. If anyone asked, Julia did the badge flash and said we were police. No one recognized Mr. Defonte. The maintenance men showed us the side entrance, which had been visible from the roof. Besides the front door, that was the only way out; there was nothing that went through the back.

  “Not unless you’re Spider-Man,” one of the men said, moving a mop across the floor.

  In our time with Mr. Defonte, he had never seemed wily or agile, like some kind of escape artist. To me he had always looked weak, with his sluggish gait and doughy face and ridiculous hat. Outside I sat on the sidewalk and slumped against the building. The heat was as strong as ever. I felt like my skin was melting.

  “What the fucking fuck?” Julia paced in front of me.

  I pressed my face against my knees and groaned.

  Later we had to call Mrs. Defonte and tell her we’d lost her husband. She’d phoned his office in Boca Raton and the firm he was supposed to be meeting in Memphis; no one had seen or heard from him. He had simply vanished. Since it had been forty-eight hours, Mrs. Defonte called 911 and then the real police got involved.

  * * *

  We had seen him go into that building. We had seen him open the door and walk inside. Our stakeout had just started; we were sharp and rested and hydrated. We had taken photos. Could he have slipped out when we were on the seventh floor, even though no one saw anything? Can buildings eat people? At a certain point that seemed as likely as anything.

  We were required to turn our camera and film over to the police. They had examined every inch of the building, impounded his car and searched it for clues, and were as flummoxed as we were. Me and Julia and Mrs. Defonte met with an officer at the Boca Raton police station, a Detective Gregerson. He was an older man dressed in black slacks, sweat-stained shirtsleeves, and orthopedic shoes. He didn’t look capable of much, but then neither had Mr. Defonte. He slid the photos we had taken across the metal table and asked Mrs. Defonte if she could identify her husband. She gazed at the photos of him standing on the sidewalk, staring at his feet; reaching for the door; pulling it open and stepping inside. She wore a quarter-sleeve dress patterned with red and pink flowers and leather sandals. Her black hair was pulled into a tight bun. She looked tired and confused, as though she’d just woken up in a place she didn’t recognize.

  “It’s him,” she said.

  “Are you certain?” Detective Gregerson said.

  She nodded and pushed the pictures away.

  “What about the blond woman?” I asked.

  “Belinda Singer.” Julia cracked her knuckles, her go-to move when she was nervous.

  “We questioned her,” Detective Gregerson said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “What about all those pictures of her and Mr. Defonte?”

  “Did you ever see them talk to each other? Hold hands?”

  “No,” Julia and I said.

  “Did you ever see them interact in any way? Any contact at all?”

  We glanced at each other.

  “No,” Julia answered for us.

  “There you go.” He swept his hand to the side, like he’d solved something.

  “There you go what?” I said. “It’s an excessive amount of coincidences.”

  He sighed. “Fucking PIs.”

  “What did we do?” Julia slapped her hand against the table.

  Detective
Gregerson said that, in his experience, if you wanted to go looking for trouble, all you had to do was spend ten minutes with a few PIs.

  “It’s your aura,” he said.

  “We never stopped watching that building,” I said. We hadn’t. Not for a minute, save for when we searched for him inside. That was the one thing I was sure of.

  Mrs. Defonte looked at us and then at Detective Gregerson. “I never should have hired them,” she said. “I just wanted some answers.”

  “Don’t we all,” said the detective.

  I didn’t think it was fair for Mrs. Defonte to blame us, but at the same time I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband, as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.

  “We tried our best,” I said. “We did just what you asked. We were very professional.”

  “You should have seen the mess they left on the roof,” Detective Gregerson said. “Beer cans, food wrappers. Styrofoam cups, which are hell on the environment. And you shouldn’t take those caffeine pills.” He patted his chest. “Bad for the heart.”

  Mrs. Defonte folded her hands on the table and sniffed.

  When the police found out we’d posed as real detectives, we were charged with impersonating an officer, fined one thousand dollars, and stripped of our private investigator and gun licenses. Winslow & Co. was over. Because Julia had a prior, her probation was extended by five years. The police said that if it weren’t for overcrowding, she’d have gone right back to jail. That same week, a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot of our building in Opa-locka. Even after the body was taken away, streaks of dried blood stayed on the asphalt until it rained.

  * * *

  The rest of the Defonte saga unfolded on local TV. Boca Raton resident vanishes into thin air! The story got a lot of air time on Florida stations, but never went national. Still, I developed an addiction to the news. I would stay inside for days, reading and watching everything I could find. I would sleep for hours and wake up tired. Some nights I lay on the sofa and thought as hard as I could about what we’d seen, what it meant. Was his body in that building? Was Belinda Singer some kind of criminal mastermind? Had he faked his own disappearance and made off to South America? What had we missed? I didn’t come to a firm conclusion about anything.

  Julia had no patience for my brooding. The Defonte case reminded us all too much of our father—not just the vanishing, but the inscrutability of it. My sister threw away our Winslow & Co. business cards and letterhead and started working with a shady, unlicensed PI outfit, whose clients were usually as culpable as the people they wanted investigated—a husband with domestic violence priors looking for his wife, a crooked businessman searching for the equally crooked partner who fleeced him. I brought this up to Julia one night, the morality of it. Who isn’t guilty, she said, and maybe she had a point. On the nights she didn’t come home at all, I would wait up on the sofa, in the glow of the TV, and worry.

  New postcards arrived in the mail, another cloud and a rocky slope with scrubby bushes. I gathered all the cards and took them next door to Mirabella, who read tea leaves for a living. She was twenty-one, single, and rarely home. She took me into her bedroom. Her walls were covered with posters of tea leaves in various formations. She flopped down on her bed, spread the cards out in the shape of a rainbow, and examined them.

  “This is not in Florida.” Mirabella lay on her stomach. She had acne scars on her cheeks. She picked up the river and fanned herself with the card. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to say more without all the pieces.”

  “Harder than reading tea leaves?”

  Mirabella said she wasn’t charging me and so I couldn’t expect her best work. Besides, she added, pointing at one of the posters with the card, the leaves always told the whole story.

  “Like I knew I was going to get robbed before it happened,” she said.

  “If you knew, why didn’t you do something?”

  “What could I do?” she said. “Not go home?”

  I looked at the poster. The tea was a soggy, dark swirl, like wet dirt in the bottom of a white cup. Maybe I just didn’t have a knack for seeing things.

  Back at the apartment, I called my husband. If he would tell me what he was sending pieces of and why, I was willing to give him the satisfaction of saying he knew working with my sister would only bring trouble. I tried calling three times, but I couldn’t get through; his cell phone had been disconnected. For a while I pretended the beep-beep-beep was my husband trying to reach me. I told myself he was using Morse code, which I had learned about in detective school. Hello, I said. I’m listening.

  One afternoon, when Julia was out on a job, two things happened: Another postcard arrived. It looked like part of a gorge, the same shade of brown rock, WISH YOU typed across the back. The second thing would have been easy to miss. I was unwrapping a Hot Pocket in the kitchenette when I heard something on the news about a man in Nevada who had been arrested for defrauding senior citizens. I left the frozen Hot Pocket on the counter and went to the TV. According to the reporter, this man’s racket had been going on for two years. He had raked in hundreds of thousands. A Nevada DA said he would be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They showed the man being led up the steps of the courthouse. His hands were cuffed behind his back. A police officer gripped his elbow. He wore a gray trench coat. The wind blew his white hair across his face, revealing a toupee. He was much older, of course, but there he was.

  * * *

  “No fucking way,” Julia said when I told her what I had discovered. The eleven o’clock news replayed the story and she gasped when she saw him walking up the courthouse steps. I felt relieved that she’d recognized him as immediately as I had. We called the number our mother had left; her boat was docked in the Maldives and she was on an excursion to a fishing village. We told the cruise director to tell our mother it was an emergency.

  For a weekend, Julia partook in my addiction to the news. We kept the TV on day and night. The Senate was considering a bill designed to safeguard the personal information of senior citizens, so our father’s story was getting national play. We read everything there was to read on the Web. Julia let her cell phone ring. When we came across more photos online of our father entering the courthouse, she held on to my arm. In one, he was looking right at the camera, his gray eyebrows raised, his lips parted. Age spots dotted his face; his skin sagged. We made fun of his toupee to keep from crying.

  The facts went like this: our father, posing as a financial consultant, had convinced seventeen elderly Nevadans to give him power of attorney over their finances and then fraudulently cashed checks on the accounts. The victims had lost everything. It was Mrs. Calhoun, a ninety-six-year-old widow, who got him caught. Her daughter got suspicious of our father and called the authorities. An investigation was launched. When our father was arrested, he was getting ready to skip town. I wondered what, if anything, he would have been leaving behind.

  On the first night, we printed news articles and cut out the photos of our father. We sat next to each other on the sofa, the TV blaring, and studied them under a magnifying glass. He and Julia shared the same high forehead and sharp cheekbones. I wondered if there was anything of him she saw in me.

  “He looks so old,” Julia said, rubbing her thumb over the paper.

  When we called our mother a second time, the cruise director was able to get her on the phone. We put Julia’s cell on speaker and told our mother everything. That we’d found our father in Nevada. That what had happened to him, where he’d been, was no longer a mystery. We were breathless, talking over each other. Once we finished, we leaned toward the phone and waited.

  “We’re going to Sri Lanka next,” our mother said. “We’re going to ride elephants.”

  “Mom?” we said. “Did you hear what we just told you?”

  “This wasn’t an emergency,” she whispered before hanging up.
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  On the second night, we watched a TV special called “Preying on the Elderly” that featured our father and a con man right here in Florida, who had defrauded a whole retirement home full of seniors last winter. They showed one of our father’s victims, a hunched old man named Reginald. He was leaning into a walker, a tiny white dog at his feet. The program offered a list of tips for elders: Don’t give out personal information over the phone. Be suspicious if someone says you’ve won a fabulous prize. Get-rich-quick schemes never make you rich. Do background checks on everyone you meet. Julia pointed out that it sounded like the elderly were in need of private detectives. I nodded. I hoped Reginald was watching the same thing we were.

  Later, while Julia was in the shower, I realized that after our father was arrested, the postcards had stopped coming. I decided they hadn’t been from my husband at all, and was surprised by my disappointment. I didn’t say anything to my sister at first. I stood by the closed bathroom door and listened to the water. I took a beer from the fridge and drank it standing up. When Julia emerged from the shower, I suggested we watch a movie. I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels. Beverly Hills Cop was on. All night, I kept my secret.

  On the third night, I couldn’t stop myself from telling Julia about my theory. My husband hadn’t sent the cards. It had been our father all along.

  “It makes sense,” I said. “A bunch were postmarked in Nevada.”

  “I should have known.” Julia was on the couch in a long T-shirt and socks. “A typewriter didn’t seem like your husband’s style. Too romantic.”

  I sat next to her. The news was on. Julia turned down the volume. The cards were stacked on the coffee table. He knew where we lived. He had kept track of us. Was it out of love, or a calculation, keeping tabs on his family in case he ran out of strangers to con? More questions we couldn’t answer. I wondered if he knew about my divorce and Julia’s stint in jail, if he had seen Mr. Defonte on the news and knew it had to do with us.

  “I think this one goes here.” Julia picked up the image of the gorge and placed it in the middle of the table. We put the sky and the clouds above it. The river to the left, the ledge to the right. We played with the positioning of the cards, tried to complete the sentence that began with WISH YOU.