by Kyra Davis
“And then what?”
“And then you’re going to stick by the phone and your computer in case Melanie calls or e-mails, and I’m coming back here.”
“Here, as in this house?”
“Here, as in Contra Costa County. I’ll start in Livermore. I think the time has come for me to start tailing Anne Brooke.”
There were no messages on either one of our answering machines. While Anne Brooke worked in Livermore she lived in Lafayette, and Anatoly and I both agreed that in a suburban city known for its manicured lawns and safe family environment a Harley might be a little conspicuous, so he put in a call to Avis. I offered to lend him my car, but as he pointed out, the amount Melanie had paid him for this case was enough to cover the expense of renting a car, every day for a month, if necessary.
For once I didn’t ask to tag along. I felt the bizarre need to wait by the phone. The phone that didn’t ring. I tried to distract myself by calling Dena, but she was in the middle of an inventory, so I called Mary Ann at the dinner party. She told me that Fitzgerald and his wife were there and that Johnny felt awful about having to uninvite me. She swore up and down that she didn’t know why Fitzgerald had come to the Rotunda earlier that day, and I actually believed her, although I still felt she was holding something back. Eventually I let her off the phone and I brought my laptop into the living room, determined to lose myself in the creation of a new manuscript. But I couldn’t concentrate. At nine-thirty I called Leah on her cell. We hadn’t spoken since I stormed out of the restaurant in Pleasanton, but that was only because we had both been busy. Leah and I stormed out on each other all the time; we knew better than to take it seriously.
“Sophie, I just wrapped up that retirement dinner at the Marines’ Memorial,” she said triumphantly as soon as she picked up. “The whole event went off without a hitch!”
“Congratulations. Are you heading home now?”
“I was. I actually didn’t expect to be done this early so the babysitter won’t be expecting me for another hour. New babysitter,” she said, before I could ask, “not Liz-the-lap-dancer.”
When Leah had arrived to pick Jack up early after Eugene’s funeral she had found Liz sitting on Bruce’s lap listening to music. I’ll confess that I found this news a little shocking until Leah admitted that Liz hadn’t actually been sitting on Bruce so much as she had been sitting beside him with her calves resting on his lap and that Jack had been no more than ten feet away, trying to convince an incredulous puppy to attack a plastic squeaky hamburger. Oh, and the music that was playing was from The Little Mermaid sound-track. Nonetheless Leah had been horrified by the “vulgarity of it all.”
“Why don’t you stop by and tell me more about the party?” I asked.
“You want me to come over there and tell you about a dinner party I threw for a retiring CEO?” Leah asked slowly.
She knew as well as I did that under normal circumstances I’d rather get a root canal than listen to her drone on about something like that, but these weren’t normal circumstances. I needed a distraction and I’d take it in any form I could get it. “Yes,” I said firmly. “I want to know all the juicy details.”
Leah was silent for an uncharacteristically long stretch of time.
“Leah? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I was just thinking how odd it was that the earth could be warming at the same time that hell is freezing over.”
“Hell doesn’t have to freeze over for me to be interested in formal entertaining.”
“Really? That’s news to me,” she said with a note of amusement. “I’m only a few minutes away from your apartment, but with parking—”
“I’ll meet you at my front door and drive around with you while you look for a spot,” I suggested. “That way we won’t waste twenty minutes of visiting time.”
“Very well, see you in a minute.”
I knew my sister well enough to know that “a few minutes” usually meant a quarter of an hour, but Leah surprised me by pulling up in front of my door a mere ten minutes later. I hopped in the passenger seat and pushed aside the few shopping bags that she had placed on the floor of the car in order to make room for my feet.
“So,” Leah said as she slowly drove down a side street. “Why am I really here?”
“I told you. I want to hear about the party.”
“Yes, and earlier this evening I told an attractive stockbroker that I was twenty-four. That doesn’t make it true.”
“Leah! You’re only twenty-nine! You can’t start lying about your age until you’re at least forty!”
“But everybody expects you to lie about your age at forty. If you start lying at twenty-nine people don’t question you. That way when you reach forty everyone will actually believe you when you tell them you’re thirty-five.”
“So you’ve figured out what lies you need to tell now in order to make the lies you will want to tell eleven years from now more convincing?” I asked. “God, you are so organized. I could never plan for anything that far in advance.”
“It always pays to think ahead,” she said. “Now, tell me why you wanted me to come over. Does it have something to do with this investigation you’re doing for Melanie?”
“Sort of,” I hedged. I didn’t want to tell anyone that Melanie might be missing. There was no reason to alarm everyone until more time had passed and I was sure there actually was something to worry about.
“You figured out why you feel compelled to help her, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” I lied. “I’ve finally come to terms with how much I owe Melanie. When I was at my lowest, she was there for me. She helped me find my way and she basically turned me into a novelist. Everything I have, everything I am is the result of the decisions she helped me make during my college years. Now, with Eugene gone, Melanie’s going to have to take her life in a new direction. Maybe by helping her get justice for Eugene I will be giving her the peace of mind she needs to find that direction. I have to at least try to do for her what she did for me.” I f lashed Leah a proud smile. “So it seems your therapist was right, I was able to figure out my own issues without your spelling them out for me.”
Leah made a face but kept her eyes on the side of the road as she continued to look for parking. “I think my therapist would agree that telling you you’re still not seeing the big picture isn’t so much a criticism as it is a helpful hint.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I dropped by head back against my seat. “What do you think I’m repressing now?”
“I’m not supposed to tell—”
“Enough, Leah. Knock off the Freud crap and tell me what’s on your mind!”
“Fine.” She double parked the car and shifted in her seat so she could look me in the eyes. “Melanie helped you get your life together. She showed you how to channel your anger and do what you needed to do in order to ensure yourself a prosperous future. But if you had stayed in touch with her, as in seen her more than once every other year, she would have started to push you to take the next step, which is to deal with the past. You were a daddy’s girl, Sophie. You two had a connection that he and I never had.”
“He loved you, too, Leah.”
“He adored me,” Leah agreed, “but you were his favorite and I’m Mama’s. Or at least I was Mama’s favorite until I married a slimeball in a church. I’m still making up for that. But as kids I was Mama’s princess and you were Dad’s pride and joy. And Dad-Dad was your world. You know you’ve never really said goodbye to him.”
I swallowed hard and looked away. “Maybe you should drive down Lexington. Sometimes I find parking there.”
“See! You can’t even talk about it! Melanie’s the only one you’ve ever really opened up to about Dad. You’ve shared your innermost feelings with her and now you expect her to play caretaker to those feelings so you don’t have to examine them again. It’s like you see grief as an object and you just gave yours to Melan
ie and asked her to put it somewhere so you didn’t have to look at it anymore. But by doing that you’ve created a situation that requires you to distance yourself from Melanie, because if you don’t she’ll eventually make you take your grief back and deal with it.”
“If I want to distance myself from her, why am I helping her? I could have left this whole thing to Anatoly.”
“Two reasons. At the moment, Melanie’s too upset about her own life to make you deal with yours, so it’s safe to help her now. The second reason is that she truly appreciates how much you cared about Dad and how much his death affected you and that makes her your friend whether you like it or not. You have never been able to walk away from a friend in need. Oh, and you also want to be around Anatoly—I suppose that’s three reasons.”
“Are you seeing a therapist or becoming one?” I asked.
“Really, Sophie, you know I’ve always been very good at figuring out what other people’s problems are. It’s my problems that elude me.”
“Join the club,” I said. “Everything would be so much easier if we could just run one another’s lives instead of our own.”
“Well that’s why I have a therapist. I’m hoping he’ll tell me how to run my life, although he’s done an awful job of it so far. He still hasn’t told me how to find a husband.”
“Maybe you can order one from the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.”
Leah smiled and started the car again. “You’re changing the subject again.”
“Yeah, but you let me do it.” I looked out at the dark streets and sighed. “A lot of years have gone by since Dad died.”
“Twelve,” Leah said softly.
“Do you think I’ll ever come to terms with it?”
“Maybe. Melanie helped you with it when you were in college, maybe you could talk to her about it again—after you’ve solved this case, of course.”
I understood that Leah had just given my involvement in this case her approval and oddly enough that meant something to me. I was going to take her advice and start talking to Melanie about Dad again. It was time. But what if Melanie was no longer around to listen?
The fear that I had been trying to distract myself from came back with a new force.
“Sophie, by the time I find parking I’m going to have to leave,” Leah grumbled.
“I know,” I said. “Why don’t you drop me off at my door and you can go home and take care of Jack.”
My visit with Leah hadn’t calmed me. If anything, it had intensified my need to find Melanie. I needed to help her. I needed to talk to her. But most of all, I needed her to be safe.
Once back in my apartment I checked my e-mails in hopes of finding something from Melanie, but of course there was nothing there. I took out a piece of paper and tried to make a list of all the places she might be, but when I couldn’t come up with anything I tore the paper up. At eleven I turned on the television but found that even Jon Stewart didn’t have the power to distract me from my growing trepidation. At eleven-twenty Anatoly called.
“Have you heard from Melanie?” I asked hopefully.
“Not yet.” He didn’t bother asking me if I had heard anything. There were lots of things that Anatoly and I were willing to keep from each other, but not this kind of stuff.
I turned off the TV and adjusted my legs so Mr. Katz could make himself at home on my lap. “Okay, so what’s Anne been up to?”
“Nothing interesting. She was at the campaign headquarters until seven-thirty, then she and a few people from her office went out for pizza and now she’s home with her husband.”
“Scintillating.”
“Mmm…but the night hasn’t been a total waste.”
“How do you figure?”
“Anne may not be doing anything out of the ordinary, but I’m not the only one interested in her. There’s another man who’s been following her.”
“You’re kidding me!” I scooted to the edge of the couch, earning a look of admonishment from my pet.
“No, some guy in an old white Dodge Conversion. I’m watching him right now.”
“A Conversion? I don’t know much about cars, but isn’t that a van?”
“Yep, and from the looks of it I’d say it was a model from the early eighties and hasn’t been washed or serviced since the nineties.”
“Someone is following Anne Brooke in a white dilapidated van? Isn’t that kind of conspicuous?”
“You could say that.”
“Do you think Anne has noticed?”
“Hard to tell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she has. Unfortunately that means that if she was planning on doing something incriminating, she’s probably changed her mind. On the plus side this guy is making it less likely that she’ll notice me.”
“How totally weird.”
“Ah, he’s leaving. I’m going to see where he’s headed. I’ll call if I find out anything important. Otherwise I’ll call tomorrow morning—late morning.”
“Okay. After you’re done chasing Mr. Smog Emissions do you think you could swing by Melanie’s place again?”
“I was planning on it.”
“And if she’s home you’ll call me, right?”
Anatoly waited a few moments before speaking. “We will find her, Sophie. I promise you that.”
An unexpected wave of relief washed over me. Anatoly rarely made promises, and when he did he never broke them. When Leah was accused of murder he never said “Everything’s going to be okay” or “She’ll be fine.” It had pissed me off at the time, but now I was grateful for it because it meant that this last promise was valid. He felt confident in his ability to track Melanie down.
“Thank you, Anatoly,” I breathed. “I think I might even be able to sleep now.”
“You’re welcome. Good night, Sophie.”
“Wait!” I should have let him end the call on a good note, but now that he had given me a taste of reassurance I craved more. “You think Melanie’s okay, right? I mean she’s going to be fine.”
“Try to get some sleep, Sophie. I’ll call you tomorrow.” No promises that time. And with that he ended the call, along with any hopes I had of a good night’s rest.
At nine-forty-five the next morning, Anatoly forgot his promised phone call and showed up on my doorstep instead. Nine-forty-five does not fit my definition of “late morning” but I forgave him because he came bearing muffins and Frappuccinos. I polished off my drink and was halfway through my muffin before I worked up the nerve to ask him what he had discovered the night before. Anatoly and I may have our differences, but we both firmly believe in the Jewish rules of life, first and foremost being that every sweet moment must be balanced with a healthy dose of bitterness. And the fact that Anatoly had brought me a breakfast rich in refined sugar was not lost on me.
“I found out the name of the man who was following Anne last night,” Anatoly said after swallowing a mouthful of blueberry pastry. “His name’s Darrell Jenkins and he’s a private detective.”
“What!” I set down my muffin and stared at Anatoly across my dining table. “Are you sure about that?”
“Very sure. After he left Anne’s he went straight home. He didn’t check his mail, which turned out to be an incredibly lucky break, although from the looks of it he only picks up his mail once or twice a week.”
“What was in his mail?”
“Two credit card bills and a notice from the IRS, complete with his full name and social security number. It only took an hour or so on the Internet and a few phone calls earlier this morning to get a fairly complete account of this man’s life.”
“Give me the Cliffs Notes version.”
“He’s a high school dropout born and raised in Gilroy. He tried to join the army but was rejected because he didn’t have a GED.”
“I thought the military had some kind of program these days to help dropouts who want to enlist to get their GED,” I said.
“That program isn’t open to everyone and you do still have to pass t
he GED at some point, and Darrell failed. So when the army turned him away he got a job as a nighttime security guard at the local Pak’nSave but was fired because he was trying to frisk the female customers. That’s when he came up to Contra Costa County. He worked as a bouncer at a nightclub for a long time but eventually he got in a fistfight with one of the owners after that owner reportedly called our president a pussy.”
“Well, in Darrell’s defense the owner was out of line,” I said. “It’s been decades since we’ve had a president sensitive enough to be called a pussy.”
“Yes, well, there’s that,” Anatoly agreed. “Criminal charges were filed, but it was unclear who instigated the physical aspect of the fight and the whole thing was thrown out of court in short order. Soon thereafter Darrell managed to actually pass a test and he got himself a private investigator’s license, courtesy of an online training course.”
“Kind of puts a chink in the exclusivity of your industry, doesn’t it?”
“This from an author of murder mysteries. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to get a book published these days.”
I groaned and fell back in my chair. “I’m so tired of being criticized for not writing like some guy who died four hundred years ago. I bet when Shakespeare wrote his first sonnet the sixteenth-century critics got out their quills and wrote, ‘While the work doest have merit, William doth not compare to the greatness that was Chaucer.’”
Anatoly started to laugh, which was problematic since he had a mouth full of coffee. Once he managed to swallow he said, “Literary greats aside, Darrell Jenkins is not very good at what he does.”
“The white van was probably a bad call.”
“Yes, particularly when you consider that Anne lives in Lafayette, a town in which most of the cars have German or Italian names and cost about the same as a two-bedroom condo in Arkansas. But his incompetence doesn’t stop there.”
“No?”
“He advertises in the Yellow Pages.”
“You advertise in the Yellow Pages.”
“Yes, but my ad doesn’t feature a five-by-six color photograph of myself. Do you see the problem with exposing your identity to the world when your job requires a degree of anonymity?”
