by Tim Cockey
“That might be. But you can also anagram that sentence and it would be just as true.”
“Don’t I know.”
Mike Gellman was Libby’s husband, though when I first heard his name some six years previous, he had simply been the unlucky fellow from whom Libby had broken off her engagement. It was about a month after Libby pulled the plug that I met her. She was sitting across from me in a booth at Burke’s Restaurant ignoring a plate of French fries with gravy, looking very grave and very pretty. I’m a fiend for French fries with gravy, so I had insinuated myself at her booth and remained there until I finally got a laugh out of her. Eventually I was able to convince her to go out dancing. I keep a list of women who have been able to resist the patented Hitch two-step, and even in my excessive humility I’m proud to say it’s a very short list. One thing led to about a dozen others, and Libby and I ended up spending the next several months together making the world go away, which I strongly recommend trying if you haven’t already done so. I was fresh off my goofball marriage with Julia, and Libby proved a vivacious panacea for that unfortunate episode. It turned out that Mike was still very much on the sidelines, lobbying hard to get Libby to come back to him, and his pull on her was more than even Libby had realized. Several months into our festive bacchanalia Libby abruptly called it to a halt. Despite her jitters, she did want to marry and start a family. I didn’t. I bowed out with considerable grace and at Libby’s request agreed to meet Mike. As far as summits go, ours was not a qualified success. I found Mike Gellman charming and tolerable, but also a little too patronizing. I like a humble man—even if it’s cleverly disguised—and that certainly wasn’t Mike Gellman. But then I didn’t have to live with the guy; I only had to sweat through a couple of drinks and as much phony bonhomie as I could muster.
Libby’s hair was drying out now, thickening before my very eyes. Like one of those flat sponges you drop into water. She shifted uncomfortably, crossing her arms. Her eyebrows collapsed in on each other.
“That was a strange time for all of us. I really behaved very badly with you. You were so kind not to hate me.”
“I like to think so.”
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you did hate me.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe you do hate me.”
“I think we used each other in equal measure. In the end nobody seemed to get seriously hurt.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Hitch. I’ve thought about you a lot the last six years. You showed a lot of style the way you handled all that. I wish I could say the same thing about Mike.”
“Well, Mike and I had our differences, one of them being that I was a good loser and he was a sore winner.”
Libby raked her fingers through her hair. She suddenly seemed uncomfortable.
“Mike has been . . . We’ve had our ups and downs in the marriage, Hitch. I know that’s to be expected. Nothing’s perfect. It’s all looked pretty good from the outside, but I’m afraid it hasn’t always been the greatest.”
“No one said marriage is a walk in the park.”
“Mike can be a little difficult sometimes.”
“Now, for example?”
“Oh yes. Now is a good example. An excellent one, in fact.” Libby set her hands on the counter as if she was going to perform an impossible gymnastic move. Her mouth drew a grim line. “Mike’s in some sort of hot water down in Annapolis. I don’t know the details, but I can tell it’s bad. He’s been under a lot of pressure lately.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Mike’s an assistant in the D.A.’s office in Annapolis. He’s been a big rising star there. There’s been some talk recently of his maybe running for his boss’s job in the next election. Mike would like nothing better. You wouldn’t believe how ambitious he is. He’s a maniac. The problem is, there’s some sort of internal investigation that has started up. And Mike’s the focus. I overheard him on a call with his uncle last week. He didn’t know I was listening. It was scary. He was talking about possible disbarment. That would kill him, Hitch. He’d be crushed. I don’t even want to imagine. Maybe you remember Mike has a little bit of an ego.”
Nine parts ego and one part water, if I remember correctly. But I didn’t say anything. The kettle began to whimper. Libby turned off the flame and poured water into my cup, then hers. I unwrapped my berry tea bag and commenced to dunking.
“So then why are you in Baltimore, Libby?” I asked. “Does it have to do with this trouble your husband’s in?”
“No. It’s not that.” Libby was going with Earl Grey. She removed him from his packet and lowered him slowly into the boiling water. Not a sound.
“I’m here because the bastard hit me.”
Libby and I went back into the front room. The room looked like the prelude to the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. All of Lily’s stuffed animals had been lined up facing the wall. Only Lily wasn’t paying attention to the dolls. She was paying attention to a chubby little boy who was sitting in the middle of the floor. The boy was dressed in red pants and a blue shirt, like the baby Superman when he came down from Krypton. Lily was covering the boy with kisses. A fiftyish woman was seated on the couch, poking through her purse. She had thick ankles and a jowly face. Libby made the introductions.
“Hitch, this is Valerie. I’m borrowing Valerie from a neighbor of Shelly’s. She’s helping me look after the children. Valerie’s a godsend.”
The godsend looked up from her purse and smiled. She had large teeth and a mole to the left of her right eye. The eye was also a little lazy, but then some days, so am I.
“And this is Toby.”
The force of a hundred kisses was finally too much for the baby Superman. He fell sideways and seemed content to stay there. I tilted my head to look at him.
“He’s chubby.”
“You’re supposed to say he’s cute.”
“He’s cute,” I said. “And he’s chubby. Is he yours, too?”
“Yes.” She added, “And he has my nose.”
Valerie was taking the kids out to a nearby park. She loaded Toby into a double stroller. Lily stepped over to the wall of stuffed animals and marched back and forth a few times like a junior field marshal. She finally picked up a tiger by the tail and climbed into the stroller. Valerie leaned into the stroller like Sisyphus into his rock and got it moving. Libby walked with them to the door and I stepped over to one of the large windows. Bolton Hill is one of Baltimore’s handsome old neighborhoods. I believe the Cone sisters lived here for a while. And F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wacky Zelda. Gertrude Gertrude Stein Stein might have set a spell here, too, at least so I’ve been told.
A man across the street wearing several sweaters and shouldering two bulging garbage bags was peeing on a fire hydrant. Nothing handsome about that. Luckily, Valerie and the kids were headed the opposite direction. I turned around as Libby came back into the room.
“There’s a man out there peeing on a fire hydrant,” I said.
“Good for him,” Libby grumbled.
I came away from the window and went over to the couch and sat down. Libby had moved to the fireplace, where she picked up a porcelain figurine from the mantelpiece and was fussing absently with it. The figurine was of a maid milking a cow. Libby ran her thumb absently over the cow’s nose. Her mood had darkened. Libby set the figurine back on the mantelpiece and glanced in the mirror. Whether she was looking at herself or at me or at the tail end of Alice, I couldn’t say. Finally she turned around.
“Ask,” she said. “I know you want to.”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
She held her gaze on me. “Okay. The answer is no. It is not the first time Mike has hit me. It has happened before. He has a temper.”
“A person can have a temper and still not hit people.”
“I’m not making excuses for him.”
“I hope not. You’d find me hard to convince.”
“It’s a difficult relationship to explain. Mike and—”
I held my hand up to stop her. “I’m not asking you to explain it, Libby. I’m of the opinion that one strike and you’re out, but it’s not my marriage, it’s yours.”
“It might not be for long.”
“Are you pulling the plug?”
“Something has happened. I mean besides Mike’s hitting me.” She moved over to an armless chair and settled onto it. “Our nanny is missing.”
“Your nanny?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean ‘missing’?”
“Missing, Hitch. She’s gone. She disappeared.”
“When did this happen?”
“Just this past Friday night. Or Saturday morning. I guess it depends how you want to look at it. Her name is Sophie. She’s very sweet. We’ve only had her a month or so. She’s around twenty-two, twenty-three? Great with the children. She’s from Hungary originally. Her father died and her mother remarried an American who brought them both over. She’s very quiet. Pretty much keeps to herself. I’m worried.”
“Have you spoken to her friends? Anything like that?”
“She doesn’t have any. Or if she does she hasn’t brought them around. For the most part, after the children go to bed, Sophie goes to her room and reads or watches videos. Though the thing is this last week she started going out. She didn’t say where she was going and it’s not really my business to pry. It did seem to me though that she was in a peculiar mood. Sort of preoccupied. But I didn’t think anything particular about it.”
“How about a boyfriend?” I asked.
“I suppose it’s possible. She’s shy. Maybe she wouldn’t feel comfortable telling me.”
“So what happened?”
“Like I said, it was this past Friday. Mike was working late. No surprise there. I wasn’t feeling so great. I was coming off a cold I’d had most of the week and I was bushed, so after Sophie and I put the kids to bed I went to bed early. Sophie said she was going out. The next morning I got Toby and Lily up. Mike was up and out already, on his run. He jogs down to the river and across the bridge to the Naval Academy campus every morning. I looked in Sophie’s room and she wasn’t there. Her bed was still made. She hadn’t come home the night before.”
“Has she ever done anything like that before?”
“Never. Our last nanny was a regular party girl, but not Sophie. She’s just the opposite, in fact. Which has been fine by me.”
“Did you call the police?”
“That’s the thing, Hitch. We didn’t. Not right away. And I could kick myself. At first we just waited for Sophie to come back. I wasn’t real thrilled that she would stay out all night like that and not tell us, but maybe she’d suddenly gotten a life. I was still going to read her the riot act, of course. We waited all through Saturday. Nothing. I did want to call the police by late Saturday, but Mike overrode me. He insisted we hold off. Mike deals with the police practically every day. He said they don’t respond to a missing persons call until the person has been missing for forty-eight hours. If they’re an adult, that is. Which Sophie is. So what did I know? I argued with him a little bit, but he kept saying we didn’t want to overreact. He said most of the calls the police get are people overreacting.”
“What about her parents?” I asked. “Maybe she decided to go home for a visit.”
“I’ve been trying that. Her mother and stepfather live up on Long Island. All I’ve gotten is a phone machine. I’m guessing they must be away on vacation or something. And I’m certainly not going to leave a message on their phone machine saying, ‘Hi, your daughter is missing. Call me.’ ”
“Could Sophie have maybe gone on vacation with them?”
Libby shook her head. “I wish I could think so. But there’s no way she’d just take off like that without saying anything. It just doesn’t make sense. So anyway, on Sunday Mike finally did agree we should notify the police and they sent someone out to take a report. It was after the police left that I went into Sophie’s room and started looking around. I hadn’t felt right about it up to then. That’s when it happened.”
“It?”
“That’s when he hit me. Mike came in and saw what I was doing and . . . well, he just went ballistic. He snapped. He started screaming at me that I had no right snooping around in Sophie’s room and all sorts of garbage. I told you, he’s been under a lot of pressure. He just blew. One minute we were standing there screaming at each other and the next thing I knew, I was down on Sophie’s bed with blood coming out of my nose.”
Libby put her fingers lightly against her cheek. “I thought he had broken my nose. It was horrible. Then Mike took off. He just turned around and stormed out of the house.” Her eyes went flinty. “And goddamn it, Hitch, so did I. Maybe he knocked some sense into me. You’re absolutely right. There is no excuse for that sort of thing. And I’m not about to make one for him. I called up Shelly, told her what had happened, and she said we could use the place as long as we needed. She wanted me to call the police but I said no. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I threw some of the kids’ stuff into the car and here I am. I have no idea what I’m going to do next.”
“Has Mike contacted you?”
“You’d better believe it. I let him know where I was. I didn’t want him filing a missing persons on me. He’s called. He wants me to come back, of course. He apologized for hitting me, but every conversation has still ended in a yelling match. It’s really no good, Hitch.”
“And still no word from your nanny?”
“None. I feel responsible for her. I could shoot myself for letting the whole weekend go by without contacting the police. What the hell was I thinking?”
Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. She looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll be damned. I am not going to cry.”
I got up from the couch and handed her a handkerchief. No self-respecting undertaker leaves the house without one. She took it and buried it in her lap.
“Look, Libby, maybe I can help with this. I can’t promise you anything, but I know someone who has got some experience in tracking down missing persons. He’s a private investigator. Maybe I can talk to him.”
She shook her head. “That’s very kind, Hitch. But there’s no reason for you to get involved in this. I’m just being silly.”
“It couldn’t hurt just to ask.”
Libby poked at her eyes with my handkerchief then wrapped her arms around herself and began to cry in earnest. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no.
I usually take that as a yes.
CHAPTER
3
I won’t go so far as to say that the Fell’s Point section of Baltimore is an area that time forgot, though I do think it’s fair to say that time hasn’t made nearly as much of an impression here as it has on other sections of town. Our buildings are on the small side and have been around long enough to settle at slight angles, giving the impression that they’re leaning against each other in order to keep from falling. It’s a posture that you can see somewhat mimicked—especially on weekends—by the hordes who descend on Fell’s Point’s poorly cobbled streets to negotiate the numerous dockside bars that proliferate in the neighborhood. Fell’s Point used to be a sailors’ haven and many of these bars have changed little from that time. The counters are scarred, the floors are uneven, the air is smoky and stale. They filmed a popular police show in this area for a number of years. The show got a lot of bang for its buck when it came to local color. Whenever there was a crowd scene to be filmed, the production crew let groups of locals bunch together in the background to gawk on cue. I come across the show in reruns sometimes when I drag my television out of the closet and fire her up. It’s like having a little magic window onto the neighborhood, seeing my neighbors there on the tube, all of them working hard to get their crowd-scene-gawker Emmy. The show is gone now, but they did leave behind a false door d
own at the maritime building that has “Baltimore City Police” stenciled on it. You can yank on that thing all day if you’d like to—I’ve seen people do it—but if you’re looking for the affirming balm of law enforcement, you’re not going to get it there.
The funeral home that I run with my Aunt Billie is a couple of blocks in from the harbor. It’s called Sewell and Sons Family Funeral Home, but don’t let that fool you. There was never a son in the game; Aunt Billie and my ugly Uncle Stu never had any knee nibblers, they simply thought the name would be good for business. I moved in with the two of them when I was twelve, after the beer truck made its quick work of my parents and my sister. One thing led to another—which is, after all, the nature of things—and came a day that ugly Uncle Stu was dead and I was a licensed mortician all ready to take his place. I took a stab at convincing Billie to rename the place Harold & Maude’s. To Billie’s credit, she almost bought it.
Aunt Billie and Darryl Sandusky were sitting on the front steps of the funeral home smoking cigarettes as I came up the sidewalk.
“Hey, Sewell,” I said to Billie. “What’s with the runt?”
“I’m not a runt,” Darryl said.
“How tall are you?” I asked.
“Five feet one and a quarter inches.”
“That’s a runt.”
Darryl snorted. “Give me a break. I’m only twelve.”
“I forgot. The cigarette makes you look older. Gee, I guess that’s the point.”
Aunt Billie shaded her eyes to look up at me. “Darryl and I are discussing the state of the world.”
“It stinks,” Darryl said. He took a humongous drag on his cigarette.
“Shouldn’t you be off chasing cars with your friends?” I asked.
The kid squinted up at me. “What do you think I am, a dog?”
“Does your mother know you’re sitting here with an old lady putting nails in your coffin?”
“Huh?”
“Skip it.”
“Darryl wants to be a mortician,” Billie said. “I’ve been explaining to him the vagaries of the profession.”
