The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  • • •

  By ten o’clock, we’d been on the roof for seven hours. The darkness had brought little relief from the heat. We’d used up all the ice cubes, eaten the bologna sandwiches I’d packed, drunk a beer apiece. Over the last two weeks, we had observed Mr. Defonte entering hotels, high-end places near his office, and exiting after an hour; it was always the same days of the week, the same times. Fifteen minutes after he left, the same blond woman always emerged. From the blonde’s photo and license plate number, we located her address and tracked Mr. Defonte to her high-rise on Royal Palm Avenue. The first time we followed him to her building, it was observational; this time, we were prepared to document. Catching him going in and out of her residence was significant to our case. The hotel meetings could, with some effort, be explained away. He was a lawyer, after all. He could say he was meeting clients, that the blonde’s presence was a co-incidence. Spending seven-plus hours in her building, however, would be harder to dismiss.

  When it was my turn to watch the door, Julia stretched out on one of the white plastic beach chairs behind me. The chairs had mildew on them, which we hoped meant the roof deck didn’t get much use. If anyone discovered us, Julia planned to tell them we were police. Before starting Winslow & Co., we’d enrolled in an online detective school. We learned how to take fingerprints and write reports, how to run credit and background checks, how to do surveillance and skip tracing. I liked the school; it made everything seem official. At the end, there was a certificate. Julia was less interested, so I did most of the work for our classes. One thing we were never supposed to do was impersonate a police officer.

  Around midnight, the conversation turned to our father.

  “Here’s a story,” I said to Julia.

  Once, my father told me a story about a business trip to Chicago with his friend Bill Keller. At a bar, Bill picked up two prostitutes. They were young, with accents and fake fur coats. They all went back to a hotel, an old grand place called the Iron Horse. My father and Bill disappeared into separate rooms, but instead of doing what one would normally do with a prostitute, of doing what Bill Keller was doing in that very same moment, my father said they lay down on his bed and he read to her.

  “Read what?” I’d asked.

  “A novel,” my father had said.

  I was eleven. The story made me feel strange. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We were eating lunch at Bojangles’. The Kingsmen were playing on the radio. I knew what a prostitute was, but I didn’t yet understand how unusual it was not to do what one normally does with a prostitute, to read her a novel instead. I didn’t understand that my father wanted me to see him as being above temptation and superior to Bill Keller, whom I had never met. I didn’t know the right questions to ask. What kind of novel? What did she smell like? Did she fall asleep on your arm? What was her name? Now I thought I would like to find that prostitute and get her side of the story.

  “So?” Julia said, her voice drowsy from the heat.

  “I realized the other day that it couldn’t possibly be true. I don’t think I ever saw Dad read anything, let alone novels, for starters.”

  “What was true?” Julia said.

  Our father was a grifter. He spent our childhood selling fake insurance policies. When he vanished, he left behind a mountain of debt; the house we’d grown up in went to the bank. Our mother moved us to Athens, Georgia, where she was from. She threw away all the photos we had of our father and encouraged us to tell people he was dead. All we were left with was the stories. The prostitute in Chicago. The time he escaped the Vietcong by jumping off a cliff. The time he ran with the bulls in Barcelona and saved his best friend from being gored in the ass. Things only children would believe. All story and no truth.

  I liked to tell myself that, unlike our father, we were on the right side of the law, me and Julia, with our firm and its solid-sounding name, but that hadn’t always been the case. Two years ago Julia had been arrested for breaking into houses. She’d been at it for a long time, picking places where the owners were away. When she finally got caught, in a mansion on Fisher Island, she did six months in Broward Correctional. The idea for the private detective business was hatched during visitation. We talked about how exciting it would be, how lucrative. My husband, a tax consultant for H&R Block, had always thought Julia was a professional house sitter; he was furious that I had lied to him, that I’d once gone down to Coral Gables to swim in the Olympic-size pool of an estate my sister was robbing, and even more furious that I insisted on visiting her twice a week in jail. Can’t you just write to her? he’d say. Do you have to actually go there? Our mother talked about Julia like she was away on a long trip. So it was just my sister and me, like always.

  In Georgia, we had gotten bored with college and dropped out, drifting back to South Florida like homing pigeons. I met my husband while working at a watch store in Pinecrest. He brought a Swiss Army in for repair. He’d had it for a decade; he said he liked to hold on to things. We married a year later, in the Miami courthouse. I loved him, but I didn’t always understand how to be honest. Over time, each of us became less sure the other was something we wanted to hold on to. And then there was Julia’s arrest and visitation. I saw how small she looked in her gray jumpsuit, how she wanted to ask if our mother was coming but knew better. As I listened to her talk about the PI business—her voice quick and grasping—I realized my thirties were on the horizon and I’d never had a job I found interesting. And that I liked the idea of busting people for doing things they shouldn’t be. Since Julia had a record, I’d been the one to apply for our firearm and PI licenses. I told my husband Julia and I were starting a catering company. When he discovered a Winslow & Co. business card in my purse, he bypassed fury and went straight to sadness.

  “Do you think Bill Keller was a real person?” my sister asked.

  “I don’t know.” I pulled at the collar of my T-shirt; the fabric was stuck to my skin. “The hotel is a real place, though. The Iron Horse. I looked it up once.”

  “Any sign of Defonte?” I could tell she was ready to change the subject.

  I raised the binoculars and scanned the entrance. The perimeter of the building was brightly lit and still. “Nothing,” I said. We were prepared to keep waiting. There were two more beers, a thermos of water, and a bag of Cheetos in the cooler, plus a packet of NoDoz in the back pocket of my shorts.

  “Maybe Mrs. Defonte is out of town,” Julia said.

  “Maybe.” I happened to know that was unlikely, since she’d had rehearsal the night before and had it again tomorrow.

  We waited through the night, and when the sun rose behind us, it brought a heat that was painful. We put on big sunglasses and baseball caps and draped towels over our shoulders. I’d taken too many NoDoz and my hands were shaky, my mouth dry. All the water was gone. We had not taken our eyes off the building since he went inside, not for one single moment.

  Julia searched around with the binoculars. I rested my elbows on the edge of the roof. It was unusual for a target to change the pattern so rapidly, to go from one-hour stretches to all-nighters. Maybe Mrs. Defonte really was out of town. Or maybe he had decided to up and leave her.

  “Keep looking,” she said, passing me the binoculars. “I’ll go get us coffee.”

  “Water,” I said. “I feel like I’m being roasted.”

  A lot of PI-ing was about waiting. Knowing how to wait, being prepared to wait, not giving up on waiting even when it felt like God was one of those assholey kids who holds a magnifying glass over ants until they explode, only He’s using the sun. What we didn’t know was that sometimes all the waiting in the world won’t give you what you need.

  After twenty-four hours, we decided something had to be done. It felt like we had been on the roof for years. We’d been trading off for bathroom breaks. Julia had made two runs to the convenience store down the street for water, Nutri-Grain bars, and coffee (while she was at it, she had checked to make sure Mr. Defonte’s car was stil
l parked in the same spot; it was). Still, we couldn’t stay up there forever. My stomach gurgled. The back of my neck and my legs were sunburned. My eyes itched. Birds had shit on our camera bag and on Julia’s wrist. Mr. Defonte had to come out of there eventually, we figured. It was a Wednesday. He had a wife, a job. But the blazing afternoon stretched on and on until finally it was night again.

  “We should call Mrs. Defonte,” Julia said. “See if she’s heard from him.” She tossed me the cell phone and said she was going out for more coffee. She liked to do the talking until we had to tell clients something they might not want to hear.

  I kneeled on the roof, facing the building Mr. Defonte had vanished into. I’d never had a conversation with Mrs. Defonte alone.

  “Do you have any news?” she asked when I called. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined what her words would sound like if she was singing them.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Have you heard from your husband lately?”

  She said that she hadn’t. He was on a business trip in Memphis.

  “That can’t be true. We photographed him going into an apartment building on Royal Palm yesterday afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “We haven’t seen him since,” I said. “We’ve been watching the building. He hasn’t come out yet.”

  She was silent. I guessed she was considering what her husband had been doing in that building for so long and who he’d been doing it with. I pictured her sitting stiffly on the elegant sofa with the cream-colored cushions and the curved wood legs, a hand resting on her knee.

  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 headshot 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 t
hen 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.