Rubbed Out

by Barbara Block

“Yes.”

  “How long have you been seeing her?”

  “Six months.”

  “Six months?”

  “I never meant for this to get out of hand.”

  “Meaning?”

  George rubbed the stubble on his chin with his hand, then took a deep breath and let it out. The sound filled the room. “I guess the best thing to do is just say it. Natalie’s pregnant. It’s my baby. We’re going to get married. I don’t know what else to do.” He reached over and patted my shoulder. “I can’t tell you how badly I feel. You have to believe that.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words. I felt as if all the air had been squeezed out of me. I watched a squirrel run along the telephone line.

  “I’m sorry,” George repeated.

  Then he was gone. I heard him close the downstairs door. I heard him drive off. So it was over. All those years. Just like that.

  Zsa Zsa whimpered and nosed at my hand. I patted her head mechanically. “It’ll be fine,” I told her. But the way she was looking at me, I could tell that she knew it wasn’t.

  I threw the covers off me, got up, and took a shower. The bottle of shampoo I was using slipped out of my hands and fell on the floor. Rivulets of yellow ran toward the drain. I left the bottle, got out of the stall, dried myself, and got dressed. I knew I should cry or scream or do something. But I couldn’t. I felt as if my guts had been ripped out, and there was a pain in my chest that wouldn’t go away.

  The phone was ringing when I walked into the store. I picked it up. It was George.

  “I’m calling to see if you’re okay.”

  “Don’t call.”

  “Robin, I feel terrible.”

  I hung up. The phone started ringing again. After five rings the answering machine came on. I listened to George while I took a cigarette out of the pack I’d just purchased and lit up. When he was done, I erased his message and gave Zsa Zsa a treat. Then I got to work. Sweeping the floor comforted me.

  Half an hour later, Walter Wilcox came by. As I watched him slowly walk across the floor, it occurred to me that we had something in common. We’d both had people we loved walk out on us. That should have made me more sympathetic. But it didn’t. It made me not want to look at his face.

  “So,” he said, shoving the shoebox with the items I’d requested from him yesterday across the counter.

  A faint odor of unwashed clothes and alcohol came off him. I wondered how much he’d been drinking last night. Certainly he didn’t look as if he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. His eyes were sunk back in his head, and the circles under them looked as if they’d been painted on skin that was pasty white from lack of sun.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take?”

  “To find your wife?”

  He scrunched his eyes against the light. “Who else are we talking about?”

  “It was a rhetorical question.”

  “Sorry. I don’t feel very well. I think I might be coming down with something.”

  Like a hangover.

  “Did you speak to my daughter?”

  I nodded.

  “She wasn’t much help, was she?”

  “No, she wasn’t. You were right about that.”

  “Janet and she never got along. It was tough. I felt bad for Stephanie.” Wilcox stared into the shoebox as if it contained the past. “One day Janet would say it was okay for Stephanie to walk to her friend’s house, the next day she’d throw a fit and insist she hadn’t said anything like that.” He gave a deprecatory shrug. “I tried to smooth things over, but I had to work.”

  “Stephanie told me she was adopted.”

  Wilcox nodded and unbuttoned his coat. It was standard lawyer’s issue. Gray. Mohair. Conservative. Only there was a stain on the lapel, as well as a stain on his blue-and-white striped tie.

  “She was. Janet really wanted a child. And sometimes she was a good mother . . .” His voice drifted off. “I don’t know. I never figured out what the problem was.”

  “Why don’t you just let me go through this stuff, and then we’ll talk.” I told him.

  “Fine.” His eyes never left my hands as I took the top off the box and laid it aside. “The photo’s a couple of years old,” he said as I lifted the picture of his wife out of the box. “She’s gained weight since then. Maybe thirty pounds or so. That’s why she went to that charlatan. But I told you that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Janet Wilcox was her husband’s opposite. Neat to a fault. In the picture her hair had been teased and shellacked into something that resembled a blond helmet. I didn’t know women wore their hair that way anymore. It reminded me of photos I’d seen from the fifties.

  Her face was perfectly made up, but that couldn’t hide the nondescriptness of her features. She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t ugly. She was plain. The frilly white blouse with ruffles around the neck that she was wearing belonged on someone younger and cuter.

  I reflected that her daughter couldn’t have been more different from her.

  As I studied the photo, I thought about the comment George had made last night about Janet Wilcox running off to Cancun. He was one hundred percent wrong, I decided. Janet Wilcox did not look like the type of person who would ever shack up with a beachboy. Or anyone else for that matter. She looked like someone who wouldn’t even buy a brand of toilet paper she wasn’t familiar with, let alone go in for a romantic fling.

  “I couldn’t find another photograph. Janet didn’t like having her picture taken.”

  “This will be fine.” I laid the picture aside and looked at Wilcox. “Does your wife have an e-mail account?”

  “She doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer. We don’t have one in the house.”

  “I notice you didn’t include a list of her friends in here.”

  “I already told you. She doesn’t have any”

  I raised an eyebrow. “None?”

  Wilcox relented. “Well, there are the women in her book group, but I don’t know their names. She was a stay-at-home kind of person,” Wilcox added. “I know that’s unusual today, but it’s true.” He sounded defensive.

  “What did she do at home?”

  “Cleaned house, cooked. She watched a lot of TV Especially those women’s shows in the afternoon, the ones where everyone always has something wrong with themselves.” That jibed with what the daughter said. “I was trying to encourage her to get her real estate license. At least it would get her out of the house.”

  I picked up Janet Wilcox’s appointment calendar and leafed through it. Apparently Wilcox spoke the truth. It was mostly bare.

  “Do you know where the book group met?”

  “At Barnes & Noble on Thursday nights. But she stopped going a month ago. She said she didn’t like the books they were choosing now. Too violent.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was something. I made a note, then went back to rummaging through the box.

  “How long is locating her going to take?” Wilcox asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to have some idea.” Wilcox’s tone was querulous.

  “Not really.” Zsa Zsa leaned against my leg. I bent down and scratched her rump. “Depending on what I come up with, it could take me two days, a couple of weeks, or six months.”

  “Six months?” he yelped “That’s ridiculous. Paul said you’d do this fast.”

  Or maybe I’ll never find her, I wanted to say as I picked a piece of packing tape off the fur on Zsa Zsa’s leg. Sometimes people don’t want to be found. Sometimes they just disappear into the ether. Sometimes they start a new life. Sometimes they die on the road and are buried in pauper’s graves. Sometimes they’re killed and buried in forests and bogs.

  But mostly they come back. They go away and decide it was a mistake. The new lover turns out to be like the old husband or wife, or the freedom to do what they want turns into boredom and loneliness. Only their pride won’t let them call home, so they start d
oing things like using their old credit cards, signaling to the people they left behind to come and get them. Sometimes the people they’ve left behind do. Other times they don’t because they’ve discovered they’re better off without them. But I wasn’t being paid to say those things to Wilcox. I was just being paid to find his wife.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” I told him.

  Wilcox looked around the store. “You’re going to be working on this full-time, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. My associate will be taking over my retail duties.” Associate indeed. Good thing he couldn’t see Manuel.

  “Why six months?” he continued. “This is a simple job.”

  “Then you do it.”

  “You’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry. I apologize.” He took off his hat and unbuttoned his jacket. “Since Janet’s gone, I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m just worried that she’s done something stupid.”

  “I know you are. I’ll try and wrap this up fast—mostly cases like this are fairly simple—but I can’t promise anything until I see what I have.”

  That seemed to satisfy him because he said, “I’ll call you first thing tomorrow morning for an update,” as he wiped his brow with the back of his forearm.

  “By all means.” I gave him a big, insincere smile. “I look forward to it.”

  I began to understand why Paul had given me this job.

  After Wilcox left, I made myself a large pot of French roast and drank it down while I went through the papers Wilcox had given me. On a first, casual pass, none of it yielded much in the way of information, but I pulled the phone bills out to take a more detailed look at them. Then I called Paul and asked him to run a check on Janet Wilcox’s license and credit cards and see what turned up.

  “Sure, I can do that for you,” he told me. “So what did you do last night?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. I wasn’t talking about George with him. “I went to bed early. What can you tell me about Wilcox?”

  “Good old Walter?” I heard a creak as Paul turned his chair around. “Not too much to tell.”

  “He’s a friend of yours? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “More of an acquaintance really.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes, and then I hung up and phoned the psychologist Janet had been seeing. He must not have been very busy because he picked up on the second ring.

  He had one of those professionally soothing voices. I wondered if there’s a required class psychologists have to take to get that tone—Calming Voice 101.

  I told him I was having anxiety attacks because I didn’t think he’d talk to me if I told him the real reason I was coming to see him. As luck would have it, he happened to have a cancellation at five that afternoon. I told him I’d see him then and hung up.

  I spent the next hour cleaning out the fish tanks and fending off my creditors, smoking cigarettes, and trying not to think about George.

  Chapter Nine

  I was lighting my fourth cigarette of the hour when the kid from the house on Fayette Street walked through the door and started toward me.

  “I thought you were in jail,” I said as I reached for the phone.

  “I got bailed out.”

  “Stay where you are,” I warned, “or I’m phoning the police.”

  “You got no call to do that.” And he threw a crumpled-up piece of newspaper on the counter.

  I smoothed it out with my right hand while I kept hold of the phone with my left. Down at the bottom of the page was a three-line item mentioning the incident. Although it didn’t give his name because he was underage, it mentioned Robin Light, proprietor of Noah’s Ark, as the complainant. Wonderful.

  “You her?” the kid said.

  “No. I’m the Queen of Sheba. I’m just filling in here. What do you want?”

  I shoved the paper back toward him. Now that he was closer, I could see he was wearing a threadbare jacket and sneakers. Little hairs were starting to come in on his skull. I wondered if they itched.

  “Why’d you have to fuck everything up?” he demanded.

  “Why’d you have to steal my friend’s dog?”

  “I didn’t. Myra found her. Maybe you should have asked her before calling Animal Control.”

  “I would have called them anyway.”

  He jabbed his finger at me. “You had no right to do that. They were Myra’s babies. They was the only thing she had.”

  “Then she should have taken better care of them. They could have died out there.”

  “She was doin’ the best she could.”

  “She was doing a bad job.”

  The kid hit the counter with the flat of his hand. The gecko that was on the ceiling skittered away in alarm.

  “People like you are always big with advice, but you never help out,” he cried. “Now she’s crazy, and it’s your fault.”

  “Look. What do you want?”

  “I want to tell you what you did.”

  “Well, you have. So how about leaving.”

  His face scrunched up, and he whirled around and ran for the door.

  I threw the article in the trash and started mopping the floors, but the kid’s words, the ones about always being big with advice, lingered in my mind. Calli had said that to me too. So had Murphy for that matter. Oh, well. I went back to thinking about where Janet Wilcox could have gone. It was more productive.

  When Manuel arrived, I cut out and headed for Woodchuck Hill Road. It was time to talk to the neighbors and see what they had to say about Janet Wilcox.

  Woodchuck Hill Road has two ends. The cheap end and the expensive end. The Wilcoxes lived on the cheap end, which is still more expensive than my neighborhood. The houses there are closer together, as opposed to the doctors’ end, where the houses are separated from each other by an acre or more of woods and the only things you see out your window are trees.

  It had started snowing again, a slow, steady drift. I had a vision of the snow piling up and up, shrouding everything, until silence was all that was left. As I turned onto Woodchuck Hill Road, I went by two cars that had slid into a ditch.

  Janet Wilcox’s house, as well as the ones around it, all looked as if they’d been built by the same builder. Three- and four-bedroom wooden colonials with attached garages. Only the trims on the houses were different. And the outside plantings. Other than that they were all the same.

  I started with the house on the left of the Wilcoxes. The young woman who opened the door looked to be about nineteen. She was blond and blue-eyed, and except for the ring through her right nostril, a ring that would have done Ferdinand the Bull proud, she could have been in a contest for All-American Girl.

  “Put a plug in it, Sam,” she yelled before turning her head back to me and asking what I wanted.

  I told her.

  Her eyes widened. “Boy, and I thought nothing ever happened around here.”

  “So you know Janet Wilcox?”

  “I’ve seen her pulling in and out of her driveway.”

  “You’ve never spoken?”

  “Except to say hello. I’m the au pair.” She said it as if that explained everything.

  “Pretty fancy.”

  “I thought so too until I started working.” Her grin flickered off. She wrinkled her nose. “Too many romance novels. That’s my problem. You probably want to speak to Mrs. Goldstein, but she isn’t in right now. You’ll have to come back later.”

  Before I had a chance to ask her when Mrs. Goldstein would be returning, the sound of wailing hit the air. The girl turned and ran toward it. I followed. Two five-year-old twins were locked in combat over a ball.

  The au pair put her hands on her hips and glared at them. “You’re both going to your rooms if you don’t stop that right now.”

  They didn’t.

  “I mean it.”

  The twins kept fighting. The au pair grabbed one of them and held him under her arm sideways like a football. The volume of screams increased. I gave the au pair my ca
rd, told her I’d be back to speak with Mrs. Goldstein, and left before I suffered permanent ear damage.

  It was wonderfully quiet outside. The snow had stopped falling. The branches of the trees were etched in white against the steel-gray sky. One by one, I watched the streetlights come on. Darkness comes early this time of year. I slogged from one house to another, my feet leaving a trail of prints, but got about as far as I had with the first place I’d visited. Either no one was home, or if they were, they didn’t know the Wilcoxes well. None of the women I spoke to even knew that Janet Wilcox was gone.

  “Oh, my,” two of them said when they heard.

  By the time I’d covered the area, it was almost five o’clock. I got back in my car and drove over to Janet Wilcox’s psychologist on East Genesee.

  Peter Simmone’s office was a step up from Wilcox’s. Better furniture in the waiting room. Beige carpet on the floor. Neutral darker beige sofa. White walls with a hint of tan. Innocuous pictures of generic landscapes on the walls. Soft track lighting. Warm temperature. A box of Kleenex on one of the end tables. For those sudden fits of emotions?

  I hung my parka on the coatrack, sat down, and picked up the only reading matter. The book was entitled, You Can Be Your Own Best Friend. I put it down and tried to think about my strategy, but my eyes kept closing. The warmth was making me sleepy. I was on the way to dozing off when Peter Simmone opened the door to his office and beckoned me in.

  His appearance went with the soothing voice I’d heard on the phone. He was about five-eleven, in his late forties, early fifties, with a slight paunch above the belt of his brown corduroy pants. His wedge-shaped nose dominated his face. His beard was salt-and-pepper. Ditto for his hair. He looked like an easygoing kind of guy, but his eyes weighed and measured me. I had the feeling they didn’t miss much.

  “So,” he said, indicating that I should take a seat on the leather sofa while he sat down in the chair across from me. “Tell me about these attacks you’ve been having.” I guess he didn’t believe in wasting time.

  I handed him my card. “Actually, I didn’t come to see you about anxiety attacks.”

  He read it slowly, his frown increasing, then reread it before handing it back to me. “Then what did you come to see me about?”