She looked steadily at me for a moment, trying to read me for a sign of what to do. Perhaps I’ve a kindly face. I doubt it. Most likely her parents were not yet her adversaries and her mother told her it was okay to talk to me, so she talked to me.
“Randi and I were pretty good friends until this year. We were cheerleaders and were on the school newspaper. We had the same homeroom and classes together. I don’t know what happened. She just weirded out, you know?”
“No. What do you mean ‘weirded out’?”
“She just dropped our whole crowd. She stopped going to lunch with us. We didn’t do homework together or sit together in classes anymore. She stopped going to parties or coming over to my house. Then she quit cheerleaders and the newspaper. She was angry all the time, saying everything was garbage and things like that. She just sat in class doing nothing or just skipped and hung out in the halls. One day after school was over, I saw her in the bathroom. I wanted, you know, to see if we could still be friends. She started crying real hard and I asked her what was the matter. She said, ‘We can’t be friends, we just can’t. Don’t you know that?’ I asked her why, and she just blew up and said to leave her alone and walked out. Pretty soon she was hanging out with Angie and Cindy and the rest of the mall rats.”
“Mall rats?”
“Yeah, the freaks and grits that hang out all the time at the mall.”
The shift from genus to species hadn’t made things a whole lot clearer.
“Did you notice anything going on between her and her parents while this was happening?”
“They were just really angry with each other all the time. Her father used to come and pick her up from school every day and used to really ask her a lot of questions about what she was doing.”
“What do you think was going on with Randi?” I noticed she was starting to squirm in her seat and look away from me. I could feel her cooperation coming to an end, and she was closing me out fast. “Can you tell me the names of those two girls again?”
“Angie Martindale and Cindy Fosburg.”
“Do they live in Belle Haven?”
“No, they live in Bucknell. Uh, I have to be going now, okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks very much; you’ve been very helpful. Good luck in your next meet. Would you tell your mother I’ll find my way out and tell her thanks also?” She said yes and headed back to her friends and family.
I went back out through the grill room, found the lobby and left through the front door.
I stood on the portico, my eyes shaded from the sun by the awning and tried to bring Randi Benson to life. An angry and hurt girl who had changed in some way, that was what people kept saying.
Chapter 5
I turned around and walked back into the lobby and asked the receptionist where the phones were. She pointed to a pay phone in a corner and I went to it. I sat on the bench and flipped through the phone book for Fosburg and Martindale. I was in luck—only one of each in this area. I wrote down the addresses and headed back to my car.
Bucknell was a middling neighborhood. People here were working and making it, but barely. The desperation was quieter here than on Route 1; they still had something to lose. Bucknell sat below the hills of Belle Haven and Belle View and inland from Arcturus and the Potomac palaces. Money finds its way up hills and down to the shore. The poor get what’s left. I turned onto Quander Road and began looking for Angie Martindale’s home. I pulled up in front of it and left the car running for a second. It was a square two story wood frame house. Inside it was dark and without curtains. The lawn was unmowed and full of weeds. Paint was peeling on the side walls. I could see a clothes tree in the backyard. A beat-up white Fairlane sat in the driveway. I cut off the engine and headed to the house. I glanced at the car as I went by. The bumper sticker asked me to honk if I loved Jesus. There were two empty Schlitz Lights on the back seat and a pair of foam dice draped over the rearview mirror.
I stepped up to the front door, opened the screen and knocked. No answer. I waited a couple of seconds and knocked again louder. This time there was movement inside. The door came open and a woman in a housecoat appeared. She hugged herself and rocked to her own music. There were curlers in her streaked blonde hair. A cigarette was stuck between her fingers and on her feet were pale blue slippers with fluffy balls on top. Her face was all knobs and slashes. Her eyes were dark and empty like the windows in a bombed building. She looked as if life had steamrolled her flat and when she came out from under the rollers all she had left was amazement that she was alive. What to do with that life was beyond her. She eyed me with the half crafty look of someone searching for an escape hatch, not a chance to turn the tables. Once you get that look, your life isn’t your own. It belongs to any predator who can find you. She eyed me head to toe. I don’t think it mattered who I was. I wanted to bleed her, that’s all she saw.
“Is this the Martindale residence and is Angie home? I’d like to speak with her.”
“No, she ain’t home and what do you want with her?” She tried to snarl but it came out half whimper.
“I understand she knows Randi Benson. I’m looking for her. She’s run away.”
“I don’t know anything about that. She don’t tell me about her friends. She knows everything.” She started to pull back and close the door.
“Uh, Mrs. Martindale, do you know where Angie is now?”
“No. She’s probably at the mall. They all hang out at the mall or at some friend’s. I don’t know.” She waved her hand as if accounting for her daughter was a winged buzzing nuisance she wanted to brush off and me with it. When I didn’t move she glared at me. “She’s a big girl now, at least she sure as hell thinks she is. When I was her age I was on my own. She may as well learn how. I ain’t gonna take care of her.” The door slammed and she was gone.
I backed off the step and let the screen swing slowly, gently closed. I got in my car and checked on the Fosburg address. It was two blocks down. I pulled up and got out. The house and yard were similar. I went to the door and knocked and knocked and knocked. Nothing. I returned to my car and thought about going to the mall, but I had no idea what Angie or Cindy looked like. I didn’t want to go around asking everybody if they’d seen so-and-so. They’d be gone if they heard some strange adult was asking about them. Randi hadn’t had a yearbook in her room. I’d get that tomorrow at school when I saw her teacher Miss Simpson. For now, I’d go visit an artist I knew to update the picture of Randi Benson and then grab some dinner.
Josh Walters did freelance art and photo work for ad agencies. I rang his apartment door bell and waited. In a couple of seconds I heard Josh come to the door. “Who is it?”
“Josh, it’s me, Leo Haggerty. I’ve got some rush work.”
“All right, Leo. Come in.” He swung the door open and bowing a little, waved me in. Josh is tiny, 5′3″ or so, sharp featured with pale freckled skin and red hair he combs up from the back so that it sits like a wreath around his head.
“What’ve you got for me, Leo?”
“A photo, a year old. I want you to change it to make it look current, then make me four copies, okay?”
He nodded. “Sure. Show it to me.”
I dug it out of my pocket and handed to him.
“Pretty thing. How do you want it changed?” he asked.
“Her hair is now straight, long and not well cared for. She’s lost some weight, jawline’s sharper. Cheeks hollowed out, eyes probably have shadows around them.”
“All right, Leo. When do you need them?” He was looking deeply at the photo, doing the work in his mind.
“Pronto, old buddy. When can you have them for me?”
“Tomorrow morning. How’s that?”
“Fine. I’ll pick them up. Noon okay? And clip a bill to it.”
He nodded and we shook hands. Josh headed to his easel and I let myself out.
When I got back to my house I sat at the desk, emptying my pockets. I dug out a manila folder and put a number on
the tab. Into it went my contract with Benson. I pulled paper out of the desk, rolled it into the typewriter and punched out my report. I Xeroxed a copy of it and stuck it in the folder with the original. I cleared my service. No client calls.
I went through my mail. It was the usual mix of magazines, bills and garbage. Except there was a letter from Wendy Sullivan. Actually, it was just a note clipped to a recent Track World photograph of her. I held the picture up and stared at it. It was a good shot, much as I remembered her in one of her happier moments that week we spent together last year when we were both on the mend.
Her note said she’d thrown the javelin sixty-seven meters at the Golden Gate Invitational and was closing in on the U.S. record. She’d also just finished training to be a companion in the university victim assistance program “for all the unearned kindness I’ve known.” Her note also said she missed me. I left the note and the picture on the desk. I missed her too.
I kicked off my shoes and went to the kitchen. Squatting in front of the refrigerator I waited for a volunteer to say “eat me.” No one showed up. I went back to my office and called Benson.
His wife picked up the phone. I asked to speak to her husband.
She held the phone a second and then said, “So he got to you too.” Her voice was the hybrid offspring of a sneer and a whine.
I thought frost was forming on my receiver. “Mrs. Benson, I couldn’t be your agent if you weren’t going to acknowledge hiring me. This is not secret agent stuff. I like working in the sunlight with my eyes open. Your husband hired me and he’s willing to play by some of my rules. The end result is the same—I’m going to find your daughter.” I waited to see what she’d say.
“I quite doubt that.” She and her husband were too busy cutting each other down to see anything as a common interest.
After a minute Benson picked up the phone. “Yes, Haggerty. What have you got?”
I ran through my day for him and my plans for tomorrow. He punctuated my report with grunts. The rhinoceros returned in my mind. He was on his hind legs with a phone in one hand and a drink in the other. I told him I’d call him tomorrow if anything broke. I put down the phone and checked my watch. It was almost five. I went back to the kitchen. Nothing looked very appealing. Rather, cooking for myself wasn’t too appealing. Maybe I’d go out to eat or just not eat. I got a Guinness from the refrigerator, opened it and began to meander through the house. I looked at my office: my files, my books, my trophies. I wandered out to the living room and looked at my albums. I had an itch that I couldn’t scratch. But I could name it, I bet. I bent over and tried to find a record to play, but I couldn’t concentrate at all. Everytime I tried to set up a thought and relate it to others, it disappeared. It was like trying to play chess in a wind tunnel. I got up and walked out to the glass doors and looked across the lawn. Everything was quiet. I looked back into the house. I had everything I wanted, just the way I liked. It wasn’t enough. Samantha’s face kept floating up before me. Maybe I was rushing things? No, I was getting too old to be coy. Carpe diem. I picked up the phone.
It rang four times. Then, “Hello?”
“Samantha, this is Leo Haggerty. I was wondering if you were doing anything tonight?”
“Yeah. I’m going to soak my brain to undo all the damage from the library. I think I’ve fused all my synapses.”
“Can I interest you in going dancing? It’s very therapeutic.” I was held there dangling on the question’s hook. I dangled a good long while.
“Okay, I guess. Let me bathe and change. Why don’t I drive over and meet you at your place?”
I gave her directions from Alexandria via Route 7.
“See you in, say, an hour and a half.”
“Fine.”
“Bye.” I could feel her presence slipping down the black coiled wire and the old chill of loneliness fill me up. Before Wendy Sullivan I didn’t notice it. Maybe I hadn’t known what it was until then. These days it seemed to be there more and more often.
Chapter 6
I pulled out the Powers Gold Label and poured an inch into a tumbler. I put R.E.M. on the turntable, slid into my recliner and angled it toward the patio door. The Irish went down my throat as smoothly as the sun slid below the horizon. I thought about Wendy Sullivan. Apart from some phone calls at first and now some notes, I hadn’t been in touch with her since the trial almost eight months ago. She held up pretty well through that experience. I sat right behind her in the courthouse and when things got bad I slid my hands through the balustrade that separated us and held her hand. Nights we walked and talked on the beach. She was healing slowly. She slept well most nights, went shopping by herself now and hadn’t had a panic attack in six weeks. The night the trial ended we went dancing. Dancing with her highlighted all of the tensions in our relationship: holding her hand in my hand, my arm around her waist, her face so close to mine. I remembered the bright blue eyes, the long gentle slope of her neck when her head tilted back to laugh, the rich exuberance of that sound. For a while I had been able to file Wendy under “victim,” but when I no longer saw her that way my sexual feelings for her emerged anew. I told myself that it was the age difference that kept me from pursuing her. That was rational and it was true. It was also a balm I applied when it became clear she didn’t feel the same toward me. So I packed and patted my sexual feelings into a small hard ball, closed my eyes and threw it as far away as I could. I’d never been just a friend to a woman I desired. It was time I started to learn how to do that. So friends we became.
I sipped some more of the whiskey and listened to a couple of other LPs. The door bell rang. I went to answer it. Through the peephole I got an eyeful. She had on a black felt fedora tipped low over one eye, large white earrings, a white silk blouse open at the throat, black silk pants and slingback heels. I unlocked the deadbolt and let her in.
“You ready to go?” she asked. I wondered who was taking whom.
“Yeah. Just let me lock up.” I went through the house turning out the lights, locked the patio doors, made sure the stereo was off and followed her out the front door. I pulled the door closed, locked the deadbolt and activated the alarm system.
“Why an alarm system?”
“My office is in the house. I keep all my case files here. The things in those files are nobody’s business but mine and my clients’.”
We walked down the driveway. I slowed at the door to my car. Samantha said, “How about I drive?” I shrugged and followed her to an old red Mustang. Samantha got in and I walked around the car as she reached across the front seat and pulled up the door lock. When I got in she asked where we were going.
“The Fountain of Youth. It’s out Route 7, past Tyson’s Corner, on the same side of the road as Clyde’s.”
“Okay.”
She swung around the court and turned right on Gallows Road. A left turn on to Route 7 took us past Bloomingdale’s and the rest of the concrete metastases that were Tyson’s Corner. We went past Clyde’s. Just before Route 7 became the Leesburg Pike I pointed out the bar on the right. Samantha turned and pulled into the lot. We got out and walked across to the entrance. Coming here alone was an act of desperation. At the bar people careened into each other like it was a demolition derby. Hi, my name’s Garth, you into sportfucking? The dance floor was a peaceful respite from that. They played songs you could dance to, really dance to. Here the idea was that you had a partner you were dancing with, not at. Not too long ago I’d followed some kids into a slam-dancing bar downtown and came out worse off than at a couple of professional beatings I’d been invited to.
Samantha and I went in and looked for a table with a pair of adjoining empty stools. I saw one, took her hand and led her toward it. We slid onto the stools and caught the waitress’s eye. She came over to us.
“What would you like?”
I nodded to Samantha. “Bourbon and soda on the rocks.”
“Irish whiskey, neat,” I said.
We swiveled around on our stool
s to see the dance floor. The place wasn’t packed yet. After a drink we’d get out on the floor. I asked her how her day went.
“Not too bad. Doing research is the least fun part of writing.”
“What were you looking up?”
“Just some of the new advances in care for premature infants. I’m writing a story about a rural couple whose premature baby is flown into a major medical center—like Fairfax Hospital’s intensive care nursery—and how the couple copes with the hi-tech efforts to save the baby while they’re trying to connect with the child themselves. Did you know that some parents, mothers usually, have a psychotic episode after all that and show up weeks later at the hospital to return the baby saying that it isn’t theirs?”
“Jesus, what a start in life.”
She stopped for a second, then said, “How about your day?”
“Pretty typical. Missing child case. Seems like a lousy home situation. I’ll find her pretty soon and take her back. Three months from now she’ll bolt again. I ought to install beepers in the kids I find. Make finding them again easier.”
“Sounds pretty depressing to me.”
“Yeah. I guess so. You keep a lid on it. Otherwise it’ll eat you up.”
“I don’t think I could do work like that. Writing about things like that is as close as I want to get.”
“If I only thought about the outcomes it’d get to me too. But each case is a fresh start. Sometimes things do turn out okay. When they don’t I just try to focus on whether I did the best I could. You can’t take a client’s troubles on as your own. That’s the express lane to the rubber room.”
Our drinks came. I raised my glass to toast her. Unfortunately for this encounter, my wit was missing in action. “Enough talk of bad endings. To beautiful beginnings.”
She nodded her acceptance of that toast and we touched glasses.
“Shall we dance?” I held out my hand to her.
All the Old Bargains Page 3
