“That she was half black and half Native American.”
“Yes, and this bothers me. Naomi has now exhibited a pathological pattern of lying from an early age, possibly caused by her family dynamic. Teddy must have picked up on this. But what’s interesting to me, very interesting in fact, is that her so-called training occurred in Eastern Europe, which is not so far from Russia. If we could make some connection between Naomi and Igor or Igor and Relativity.com, we might have something. And that’s where you come in, Jonathan. I don’t need much for a warrant.”
“I’m in.” Jonathan stood and shook DeRosa’s hand. “Whatever you need.”
The detective reached for his wallet and counted out two hundred dollars. “First thing tomorrow, I need you to get a haircut and shave the beard. I want you to buy a white, collared golf shirt and a pair of pressed khakis. Good shoes and a belt and absolutely no thrift shop finds. Cheski and Lamendola will beef up your resume to cover the gap since you’ve been farming. Be back here by ten thirty sharp and we’ll do some practice runs on your background. Got it?”
“I got it.”
“One more thing, and please don’t argue: you need a professional manicure to soak the farmer out of your hands.”
Jonathan’s face dropped at the mention of a manicure.
“I’ll handle that,” Trina interrupted.
DeRosa nodded. “And Jonathan, try to remember that before the farmer was the scientist. You need to play the role.” DeRosa turned to Trina and, with the poise and assurance of Clark Kent, said, “Trina, you have my word. He’ll be fine.”
Then it was my turn to receive his Superman strength. “CeCe, I have a feeling we scared off Igor.”
“How so?”
“Because chasing him through the streets of D.C. like a madwoman sends a message that you’re not afraid.”
“But I am afraid. I’m terrified.”
“Trust me on this one,” DeRosa said. “If Igor tracked us in D.C., then whoever he’s working for knows we saw Naomi’s apartment. We’re gaining on them, and that puts them on the defensive.”
“Won’t that just make them angrier?” I shot back.
He glanced at his watch, ignoring my irritation. “Look, I can’t stay here tonight.”
“Frank, you can’t just ditch me like this,” I yelled as he grabbed his coat and headed to the door.
“I have something personal I need to attend to. But I feel confident leaving you here with Lamendola,” DeRosa stated. He turned to Lamendola. “You good with that?”
“I guess I can do that, Frank. I’ve got a change of clothes in the car.”
“So that’s it?” I said incredulously. “You haven’t even told me what happened with my father.”
“Tomorrow, CeCe.” And with that, Frank DeRosa departed.
I had to admit his excuse hurt. Something personal? Like a girlfriend, or a wife? Did DeRosa owe me anything? I guess not. Maybe I exaggerated Charlie’s observation that the detective was “into me.” Just because he liked me didn’t preclude him from liking someone else. Again I was struck by the complete transparency of my life compared to DeRosa’s Fort Knox exterior. I couldn’t just get up and go home, the way he could, because this was my home, and my entire background and family history was on display for people I’d met only two weeks ago.
The heaviness in the air gave way to nervous laughter with DeRosa’s absence. Lamendola also assured me I’d be fine, and the room moved its focus to Jonathan’s upcoming adventure. Cheski and Lamendola began pumping Jonathan up for his first undercover exploit. Trina lovingly stroked his soon-to-be-shaved Unabomber beard and then hugged him like he was stepping onto the space shuttle.
When the kitchen phone trilled, I walked out to answer it, taking the opportunity to disappear. There were a lot of moving parts in this case, and I needed a few moments to organize my thoughts. Before I could make a hasty exit, Trina grabbed my arm and led me to a far corner of the kitchen.
“Here,” she said, handing me a phone number scribbled on a napkin. “A woman with a Spanish accent called earlier and said it was urgent. I think maybe it was the woman who came to the house with your mother the other day.”
“Norma?”
“Yes, I think so. She called at the same time this Relatively.com stuff exploded. Maybe that’s her calling back.”
“Thanks, Trina.” I held her close and whispered in her ear. “I’m sorry Jonathan has to do this for Teddy and me.”
I hurried to the one and only phone in the house: a wall-mounted, rotary-dial throwback with a five-foot spiral cord. Charlie had his own cell phone, but I had refused to give in to the inane cellular chats that dominated our public spaces. On the issue of communication devices, my stubbornness was admittedly ridiculous, since I was too young to have grown up with the antiquated clunker in our kitchen. I had, however, come to love the weighty feel of the handset, snug between my ear and shoulder. Cell phones have a way of making conversations disposable and if this was in fact Norma, I assumed it was a message worth keeping.
I answered and received a tentative hello in response.
“Is this Norma?”
“Yes, Miss Prentice.”
“You called earlier.”
“Mrs. Prentice, she very drunk. She is drinking all day.”
“I’ll come right over.”
“No, no. You come tomorrow. She sleeping now. I just think, I should call.”
“Okay, Norma. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”
“One more, Miss Prentice. Your father. He very sad today. No work. Home all day.”
The news of my father’s unexpected hiatus astonished me. He had never missed a day of work in my entire memory. His life was his work and even if he were at home, he would hole up in his library to read scientific papers. I placed the phone in its cradle and sank down the wall. Just as my rear end swept the floor, Charlie stumbled in the front door, wagging a floppy finger at me. Disheveled and cotton-mouthed, he picked up midsentence, as if we had been deep in debate.
“So that’s it. It’s over between us. Don’t even think of knocking on my door tonight.” And then he crawled up the stairs like a toddler refusing the hand of his mother.
twenty-six
I sat on the kitchen floor until well past lights out. The house was quiet, but I was anxious. I had to admit that a few hours of moronic television would have provided an escape from my own circling thoughts. Unfortunately, Harbor House was television-free—a hasty decision, it now seemed. I felt too jumpy to sketch, and food was out of the question given my earlier Russian gorge. I wandered through our library of used books and found an old atlas. I cracked the spine, letting the odor of mildew fill the room, and then turned the pages until a map of southeast Europe appeared. Bonetti, Italy. There it was, right near the border of Yugoslavia, now Slovenia.
Without questioning ethics, I decided it was time for a firsthand look at the police evidence stored on the second floor of my house. I tiptoed upstairs, heading for the room Frank had commandeered for police use, only to be sidetracked by the closed door to Becky’s room. I laid my hand on her door and listened for signs of life although I knew she had already moved out. I counted to ten and then turned the knob. The door swung slowly on its hinges as it drew my body past the threshold.
As strange as it seems, a creaking floor board or rattling chains would have made me feel safer, if only to break the eerie silence of an empty room. I tried to remind myself that this room was technically mine, merely a few square feet of space in the house I owned. I flicked the switch, but the glare only highlighted the barren remains of a hasty departure. Scraps of material littered the floor and a random pile of unmatched socks, undergarments, and hangers lay in a corner. Becky’s sewing equipment, her lifeline, had been removed. The only thing left on her cutting table besides straight pins and loose threads was a picture
of Becky, Teddy, and Charlie, arm in arm, taken shortly after she moved in. By all accounts, the trio seemed happy, gleeful even. Given Charlie’s grip on Becky’s slim waist, I guessed they had begun their affair by the time of the photo. Teddy, ever the diplomat, showed no offense at being the third wheel. Instead he seemed pleased for the social outlet. I guessed Becky left the photo on purpose; her way of saying thanks and goodbye. I inched my way backward out of the room, fearful to turn my shoulder on the unknown. Closing the door, I moved swiftly down the hall to the room DeRosa and his partners had been occupying for the last two weeks.
Between the excursion to Washington, D.C. and my field trip to the Bronx, it appeared that a serious amount of investigative work had gone on. One wall of the room was papered with a map of the East Coast indicating Naomi’s movements over the last two years. The facing wall included photos and bios of everyone involved in the case.
What caught my interest was the file cabinet in the corner of the room. I walked over and gave each drawer a solid pull, but the cabinet was locked. In a childish move, I shoved my shoulder into it, but no amount of roughhousing would jar it open. I searched around the room for a key, running my hands under the edge of the conference table and behind the cabinet, then grabbed a chair and felt around the molding above the door. Still nothing. Perched on top of the chair, I noticed a light on in the bathroom across from the room where Lamendola was sleeping. I let myself down from the chair and made my way in silence across the hall. No key in the bathroom, but Lamendola’s door was slightly ajar and his pants hung on the back of a chair. I tiptoed across the room and slid my hand into the pants pocket, pulling out a set of keys. I felt a twinge of guilt that was quickly overshadowed by my annoyance at DeRosa. I did not feel ready to be released from his protective custody, but apparently my safety had been reprioritized.
I tiptoed back to the conference room and worked the keys quickly until one slid easily into the lock.
The top two drawers were stuffed thick with files. I opened one to find a thorough history of my mother, although it appeared that nothing of note took place after I was born. Another file contained years of press releases from the labs, and yet another included awards and grants bestowed to the labs. There were also recent aerial shots of the labs, my family’s home, and Harbor House, all taken with a telephoto lens. The overheads were so crisp, I was able to detect Jonathan and Trina on the grounds of Harbor House. This got my back up. Freegans were used to living on the low-down. Worse, the evidence of our surveillance was stored in my own home. An acid taste filled my mouth, and I crumpled the photos and tossed them in the wastebasket. I wondered how DeRosa would like it if I had hired a private investigator to sniff around Freeport.
I persisted in my snooping for a good hour, and it quickly became evident that nothing in our lives was beyond scrutiny. Charlie’s file read like a chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, and my own file was riddled with words like dissociative. Before long, I located a file on my father, the largest of the bunch, which began with his many achievements in high school. Unlike Naomi, my father’s accomplishments were genuine, and I didn’t begrudge him the honors he had accumulated. To his credit, he was a producer, and not for the purpose of filling a resume. He didn’t just develop theories, he tested and proved them with enough evidence to receive FDA approval.
I flipped through the sheaves, stopping at a report with a raised seal issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dated three days earlier. The memo was addressed to DeRosa and gave an exhaustive list of international travel as recorded on my father’s passport. The travel log was dense with entries, since my father had traveled regularly on behalf of the labs for over forty years. I scanned his jet-setting itinerary, overwhelmed by the volume, until one destination stuck out like a flashing neon sign. Twenty-nine years ago almost to the day, one year before the birth of his children, my father traveled to Italy, landing at the Trieste airport.
I scrambled for the atlas downstairs, tearing pages in my hurry to locate the correct map. Trieste was an Italian city on the far eastern peninsula of the country. At the top right of the boot and a stone’s throw from Bonetti, Trieste was mostly likely the nearest airport to the town. Something about the timing of my father’s trip troubled me.
Back upstairs, I fumbled for my mother’s file, searching madly for a similar notation. I felt the familiar seal through the papers and spotted the evidence immediately. Entry to Italy through Trieste. At that moment, I realized I had no idea how my parents had met. I’d always assumed they’d known each other through a network of wealthy North Shore families. Now it seemed entirely credible that my parents met on my mother’s European travels. Maybe they had fallen in love in Italy. Maybe Teddy and I were conceived in Italy. How could it be that I had never heard the stories a normal family repeats with religious devotion—the day Mom and Dad met, that one magical moment that secures your entry into the world? I pushed my brain a little harder without a single memory surfacing.
I carefully put everything back in place and locked the cabinet before slithering back to Lamendola’s room, wondering if I could pull off the key swap twice in one night. I didn’t like my odds, especially when I heard a faint ring from the kitchen.
When I’d cleared the door, I walked quickly down the hallway and then made a mad dash down the stairs to catch the phone before losing the caller. It was too late for a purely innocent call.
Please, let my mother be okay, I thought.
I fumbled for the phone in the pitch-black kitchen. “CeCe?” I heard my name through the receiver. No Spanish accent.
“Frank?” I said softly.
“Bad timing earlier,” he said. “I realize I left you hanging.”
“Yeah, by a rope.” I caught myself avoiding the windows for fear of spotting an intruder. “I know it’s late, but can we see each other now? I’m a little shaky.”
“Can’t do it. I’m at JFK.”
“Let me guess, you’re booked on the red-eye to Trieste, Italy.”
“Wha—how did you figure that out?”
“I haven’t figured anything out. I happened upon the US Customs report in my dad’s file,” I admitted. “And then I checked my mom’s file.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised I went through the files or surprised by what I found?”
“I expected you to look, but I hadn’t thought to check your mother’s file. What’s the timing?”
“One month before my father.”
“I’ll make note of that,” he said. “I’m actually calling because I need a favor.”
“You can ask, but I’m not making any promises.”
“I need you to sketch a head shot of me from memory. Then, I want you to age it at two points in time: me in my mid-fifties and then in my seventies. I’ll give you a fax number for my hotel. Have Cheski fax it to me the minute you’re done.”
His request caught me off-guard. Outside of Igor’s quickie head shot, I wasn’t in the business of criminal art. “Come on, that’s stretching the limit of my talents. You need a practiced police sketch artist familiar with aging techniques.”
“I’ve seen experts who don’t hold a candle to you. You’ve got something special, and all I’m asking is that you put it to good use.”
The compliment flowed over me like warm water, and I could feel my hesitance slipping away. I didn’t consider DeRosa an especially persuasive individual, yet here he was working his magic. I started to think there was more to his meteoric rise in the police department than simply hard work. In fact, he had easily worked his way into my home, established a network of contacts in Washington, D.C., convinced Jonathan to shave his beard and go undercover, and won over Charlie while flirting with me. And now it seemed that after ditching me without explanation, DeRosa planned to change my career path and hire me as a police sketch artist.
“I have no idea where you’re
going with this, and I’m not even sure why you’re traveling to Italy. Really, it was just a stab in the dark on my part. I happened to notice your reaction earlier at the mention of Italy and it stuck in my head, but I guess you won’t tell me the purpose of your trip.”
“Not yet.”
“Can I get a photo of your parents at least? That would give me a starting point.”
“It won’t help,” DeRosa replied. “Trust me.”
“Let me think,” I said as I re-created his face in my mind.
“What are thinking about?”
“Your earlobes,” I said. “You and Teddy have the same earlobes.”
“Is that unusual?” Frank asked.
“Eighty percent of the population’s earlobes are detached. Like mine.” I pulled my blond strands back and tugged on my ear, remembering my mother’s lobes.
“One facial feature down and only a few more to go,” DeRosa noted.
I started to explain why I couldn’t do the drawings, digging deeper into a list of excuses. He said nothing; he planned on winning this one. My options were disintegrating, and I realized that one of DeRosa’s gifts was his ability to pull back. The less he said, the more you prattled on, ultimately giving in to his will. I tried another tactic: tit for tat.
“How about this? I’ll do the drawings, but you’ll need to tell me what happened when you met with my father. Your meeting must have hit a nerve. I got a tip that my mother is drinking again, and my father took his first day off in a half a century.” I pressed my ear into the hollow cup of the receiver and placed my hand over my own mouth, trying to stop myself from rambling. If my theory was right, I’d need DeRosa to break the silence first. Not talking was harder than it looks and much quieter than one might expect.
Apparently, I was not up for the challenge. I folded within seconds.
“Frank, you still there?”
“Still here.”
“So about my dad?”
Drawing Conclusions Page 15
