by Bill Crider
“What’d you find out?” I said, but I figured I knew.
“Not a goddamn thing,” Dino said. “Not one solitary goddamn thing. The cops don’t know from nothing. Nobody’s seen her. She’s just gone. Just like--”
“Like Jan,” I finished for him. “You can say it. I won’t mind.”
“She’s younger than Jan,” Ray said. “It’s not the same thing.”
I could have told him that he was making a mistake right there. You never assume anything. If you do, you mislead yourself. But I didn’t tell him. Instead, I said, “What about her friends? Teachers? Does she work? When was she last seen? I’ve got to talk to her parents and find out things like that.”
“I can tell you,” Dino said.
“This is beginning to smell,” I said. “I don’t think I want to be involved in it, even if I owe you.” I stood up.
“You’re gonna have to tell him, Dino,” Ray said.
“Shit,” Dino said. He looked at me hard and then said, “All right, goddammit. Sit down. I’ll tell you.”
I didn’t move.
“Please,” Dino said. “Please sit down. Is that polite enough for you? You want pretty please with sugar on it?”
I sat down. Ray handed me the folder again.
“There’s not any parents,” Dino said. “I mean, there’s not any father. The mother is one of my uncles’ girls.”
I looked at Ray.
“He’s telling it, not me,” Ray said.
“She stayed in town after the houses closed down,” Dino said. “Nobody knew where she’d worked before, and she’s a respected woman now. She had the kid a few years after leaving the houses but before she’d really established herself. She was naturally a little upset at the idea that part of her past might come out in an investigation, and she asked me to see what I could do.”
“Another favor from big-hearted Dino,” I said.
“Yeah, another favor. Nothing wrong with that. We take care of our own, you know?”
“I know.”
“I know a few people on the cops,” Dino said. “They didn’t ask to see the parents.” He gave me a hurt look.
“They don’t work like I do. They’ve got computers and terminals everywhere, which is good in a way, but it keeps them from doing some of the legwork they used to do.”
“Well, Evelyn--the mother--didn’t want to talk to them, and she didn’t have to. I guess she’ll talk to you, but you gotta promise that you won’t talk to anyone about her past, uh, occupation.”
“No promises,” I said. “I don’t really want to do this.”
Dino looked at me for a second or two. “Go call Evelyn, Ray. Tell her the deal. See what she has to say.”
Ray faded out of the room again.
“This Evelyn have a last name?” I said. “A job?” I opened the folder and looked at the picture again. “I’m just curious, but I’m going to have to know sooner or later. Why not now?”
Dino walked back over to the sofa and sat down. He picked up the button-covered TV control and turned it over and over in his hands. “Her name’s Matthews,” he said finally. “Evelyn Matthews. And, yeah, she’s got a job. She works at the Medical Center as a receptionist. I don’t think she’s going to want to talk to you there, though.”
Ray came back into the room. I didn’t hear him coming, but there he was. “She’ll talk to him,” he said. “But she’s not too thrilled about it.”
“That’s just because she hasn’t seen me yet,” I said.
Dino smiled faintly. “I forgot what a high opinion you had of your looks. But somehow I don’t think you’ll impress this one.”
“We’ll see. When and where?”
“Her house,” Ray said. “After she gets off work. I’ll write down the address.”
This time he was back quickly. He handed me a piece of white paper with the address written in black ball-point. It was just off Ferry Road.
“Easy enough to find,” I said. “All the streets over there are named after fish, though.” I looked at Ray and then at Dino. “There’re probably a few more things you guys want to tell me now.”
“Huh?” Dino didn’t get it.
“I mean, you must’ve found out something about the girl, maybe something I should know. You must’ve done a little nosing around here in town.”
“Oh,” Dino said. “Yeah. We did that. A little. But it’s your turn now. Maybe we did it wrong, and anyhow, everything we know, we got from Evelyn. If you’re gonna talk to her, you can get everything we got. After that, it’s up to you. You’re the ace private eye.”
“Your faith in me warms my heart,” I said. “Especially considering my track record around here.”
“Look, Tru,” Dino said. “You gotta quit blaming yourself. We told you it wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. I just can’t convince myself.”
“Well, this may help you get it off your mind. Working for somebody else, I mean.”
“Maybe.” I didn’t believe it any more than he did.
“Sure it will. Now, what’s the freight?”
“It’s a favor,” I said. “Like you did for me.”
Ray laughed somewhere behind me. “How much money you got in the bank, Tru?”
I turned my head so I could see him. “A little.”
“I bet ‘little’ is just the right word,” he said.
“I never thought house painting was going to make me rich.”
Dino stepped over to my chair. “I want this official, and I want your best shot. What do you usually charge? Two hundred a day and expenses? Tell me if that’s not enough.”
“Well,” I said, “it beats painting houses.”
He reached into the pocket of his wool-blend slacks and pulled out a sheaf of bills folded in half. He counted out ten of them. “Here’s for five days, not counting the expenses. You can keep a record or not. I’ll trust you on them.”
I took the money. It had been a long time since I’d held that much. “What if I don’t find her? I looked for Jan hard for six months, a lot of the time for three more, and off and on for the last three. I still haven’t found a trace.”
“You get paid for doing the work, not for the results,” Dino said. “Besides, this is just a kid. This is different.”
“Sure it is,” I said. I stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”
Chapter 3
From Dino’s house I cut back to Broadway and drove toward the beach. There’s a lot of Galveston’s history along Broadway. The wide esplanade is covered with oleander bushes and tall palm trees and often looks quite pretty, but on either side of it are the signs of what’s become of a once beautiful city.
The long cotton warehouses of the old compresses, once jammed with bale after bale of cotton, stand deserted and empty. It’s a polyester world, but all the cotton shipping had long departed Galveston before people started dressing in miracle fibers. Signs of decay are all around. A huge hardware store, empty, its windows boarded up, its parking lot cracking and weeds growing through the cracks. An old movie house that’s gone through every phase there is. Not so long before it had been showing Debbie Does Dishes and now it was trying to make a go by showing G-rated family films. Muffler shops. Pawn shops.
But on down the street are Ashton Villa and the Bishop’s Palace, once a private home that would knock your eyes out if you could see it in the middle of a lavish country estate instead of cramped up between other houses of a less noble appearance. Galveston had once been the most powerful and richest city in Texas; now it was a vestige.
I turned over to The Strand, named for the famous London street. This was where the town was really making its comeback, restoring the old buildings and regaining some of the grandeur of the past with the Tremont House and the 1894 Grand Opera House. I drove on down to the Medical Center, one of the few things in Galveston that Houston hadn’t managed to steal. The wonderful old main building, Old Red, was still there, but it was hardly visible from the street, thanks t
o all the new buildings that surrounded it and almost hid it from view. Evelyn Matthews worked somewhere inside the complex, but she had said that she wanted to see me later, at her home, so I wouldn’t bother to stop.
I had a thousand dollars in my billfold and what appeared to be an unlimited expense account. Whatever she wanted was fine by me.
I drove on up Seawall Boulevard and down to the South Jetty. The area was deserted, thanks to the weather, which had not improved a hell of a lot since my run that morning. I didn’t mind. I liked having the jetty to myself, and I didn’t feel too cold in the sweatshirt. The wind had died down somewhat, but the sky was still gray and low, the temperature still hovering in the forties.
I parked the car and walked out on the jetty, which was basically just a pile of granite boulders with the Gulf water sloshing around them. It was fairly smooth walking if you kept to the middle, but the edges were just a jumble. The granite had been hauled in on railroad flatcars, and the railroad had been built right on the jetty as it got longer and longer. The engines had backed the flatcars right into the Gulf, so to speak.
About halfway out I sat down and thought about Jan. Black hair, brown eyes that laughed all the time. White teeth, just the least bit crooked. The kind of kid sister that could keep up with her older brother when he climbed a tree or rode his bike. She’d disappeared at just about this time of year, or a little earlier. I’d missed her letters for a couple of weeks, and it was unusual for her not to write. So I called. No answer. I called back every few hours for two days; then I’d gotten into the Subaru and driven to Galveston. Her apartment had been neat but empty. There was dust on the tables and knick-knacks. There hadn’t been anyone there for a while. There was no note, no message, nothing. She was just gone.
I’d gotten in touch with some old friends, including Dino. I’d talked to her co-workers, her friends, anyone who might have known her. They were no help. Neither were the cops.
I waited. No credit card bills came in. There were phone calls, but just from people wanting to know where the hell Jan was. I couldn’t find her car. The cops couldn’t find any trace of it in their computer records of arrests or accidents.
It was as if she’d just vanished into the Gulf breeze.
There was nothing unusual about a woman vanishing, God knows. It happens every day, and probably several times a day, in and around a city like Houston, and Galveston is certainly a part of the Greater Houston area, no matter how much it galls the BOIs to admit it. Sometimes bodies and bones are found months or years later by some kid playing in a field or taking a short cut home from school. It makes the news for a day or two. Then everyone forgets.
I showed her picture everywhere. In the places I knew she went, in the clubs and dives, in the shops and the corner groceries. Nothing. No one knew a thing, no one had seen her. For six months of hard looking, nothing. And all the time after that. Nothing.
Dino was right. I’d quit the business for a year, obsessed with my own search, and I’d found nothing. It was time for me to get back to trying to find something for someone else. Just to see if I still could.
But I knew I was never really going to stop looking for Jan.
A woman and a small boy came out on the jetty. She was holding his hand. A gull flew down by them hopefully. The woman had on a long cloth coat, and the boy had on one of those iridescent jackets that looks sort of like a life jacket with sleeves. They were carrying a sack of popcorn, and the boy started tossing it into the air a piece at a time. He couldn’t get it high enough to interest the gull, but his mother took over and pretty soon there was a wheeling and screeching flock all around them. The boy was laughing and the gulls were swooping close enough to snatch even his clumsy tosses out of the air.
I thought about the rat. Too bad he was at the other end of the seawall. He would have enjoyed the popcorn.
After a while the woman and the boy left. The gulls hung around and picked up a few of the puffy bits lying on the jetty. Then some of them flew over to where I was sitting in hopes of picking up something else.
“Forget it, gulls,” I said.
They weren’t bothered in the least by my voice, and they screeched and swooped for a few more minutes before they gave up and went back to whatever it is that they do when they aren’t begging: sitting on posts, floating on the swell, scouting out new territory. Eventually I got up and went away myself.
I killed a little more time walking around on the beach, looking for shells. Sometimes in the winter you can still find them, but not very often. Certainly not like when I was a kid and it seemed as if they were lying everywhere.
When I figured that Evelyn Matthews had had plenty of time to get home from work, I got in the car and drove over to her house.
It was easy enough to find, once I located the street among the Tunas and Mackerels and Dolphins. The house was just like all the other houses in that area; they looked as much alike as if they’d been stamped out with the same die. Frame structures with one-car garages, all part of a cheap and quick development a long time ago, but all well kept up and nicely painted now.
I parked the car, went up the walk, and knocked on the door. I didn’t see a doorbell button.
I didn’t know what I was expecting to see, but the woman who answered the door wasn’t it. I suppose that I’d associated the fact that she worked for Dino’s uncles with the time of their heyday, which began in the ‘twenties and extended into the ‘fifties. Let’s face it. I was expecting some kind of little old lady, but the woman who answered the door looked no older than I did.
She was short, with dark hair and eyes, and her figure was what might best be described as voluptuous. She’d probably really been something thirty years ago.
“You must be Truman Smith,” she said. Her voice was dark, like her hair.
“That’s right,” I said. Before she could ask, I took out my billfold and handed her my ID. She looked it over and handed it back. Only then did she ask me inside.
We walked into a small living room furnished with a love seat instead of a sofa, a couple of platform rockers, and a twelve-inch TV on a stand. There was also a small bookshelf against one wall, and I drifted over to it. I’m incorrigibly curious about what people read. There was no Faulkner, so there was no danger we’d be involved in a literary discussion. Her taste ran more to Bobby Jean Mason and Margaret Atwood.
“Have a seat,” she said, and I sat in one of the rockers, which was covered with some sort of Early American pattern: lanterns, plows, harnesses.
“Truman,” she said. “That’s a funny sort of name. Is it a family name?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a political name. My father always liked that picture of Harry Truman holding up the newspaper headline declaring Dewey the winner of the 1948 election. He liked to see the underdog win.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Most people just call me Tru,” I said.
“All right, Tru.” She looked at me with her dark eyes for a minute as if making up her mind about something. “Dino says I can tell you everything. He says you won’t involve me in any way that might . . . might . . . . “
“I won’t compromise your position in town, not if I can help it,” I said.
“That’s what I mean, I guess.”
“Then don’t worry. Dino and I grew up together, played a little football together. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but we know each other pretty well. If you trust him, you can probably trust me.”
“I’ll try,” she said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
It was her house. I was so surprised that she asked; I said “no” before I thought about it. She got up and went out of the room, then came back carrying a table that looked a little like a TV tray. She set it down by her chair, and I could see a package of Marlboro Lights on it, along with a Bic disposable lighter and a pink ceramic ashtray shaped like a scallop shell.
She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the Bic. She inhaled deeply a
nd blew the smoke out in a long, straight jet. I don’t really mind smokers, and in fact she made smoking look so good that I was tempted to take it up myself.
“What do you need to know?” she said.
“Let’s start with you,” I said.
“Me? But I thought--”
“You thought this was about your daughter, and it is, but Dino didn’t tell me much, and I want to get a feel for things. So we’ll start with you. For one thing, you’re a lot younger than I expected. That is, if you worked where Dino said you did.”
She smiled behind a cloud of smoke. “I’m forty-six.”
She looked a lot younger than that. “Still, I would’ve expected someone around fifty. Maybe older.”
She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “You’re sure you want to hear this?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right. I came down here when I was fourteen years old. I wanted to be a whore.” She looked at me to see if I was shocked. I wasn’t, so she went on. “I was from Houston, and I’d heard about the houses here. Where I lived, you heard about places like that.”
“You hear about places like that everywhere,” I said.
She tapped the cigarette again. “I guess that’s true. What I mean is that where I lived, places like that seemed like an attractive alternative. Anyway, I hitched a ride to Galveston and showed up at one of the houses on Postoffice Street. There’s always a market for girls of fourteen.”
I did some quick arithmetic. “You couldn’t’ve worked for very long. The last of those places closed in 1957.”
“Technically, you’re right. But for a young, attractive girl there was still an opportunity for some free-lance work at certain hotels. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I needed the money, so I was able to keep working for a while.”
I’d brought the folder Ray had given me, and I handed it to her. “Where does your daughter come into this?”
She opened the folder. “Her name is Sharon. Didn’t Dino tell you?”
