She gave permission by not commenting on it. She said, “So this is where you work,” as if it mattered to her.
“Yes ma’am. How’s your back? That chiropractor do you some good?”
“It was just a consultation. I gather he’ll have more to tell me next week, after he’s done some X-rays.”
“I hope it works out all right. Nothing worse than back pain.”
“Thank you.”
She looked out through the sooty windows at the Newark skyline. There were piles of half-melted snow on the rooftops.
Ray Seale followed the direction of her glance and said, “Town always manages to look like Dresden right after the Allies got done bombing it. Not a terrific view, is it. I’d move away like a shot if business wasn’t so good here. But if your trade’s repossessing cars and televisions, skip-tracing characters that run out on their creditors or their families, ain’t no place better for business than a city where everybody’s behind on their payments.”
“It must be fascinating work.”
“No. Mostly routine. Have a seat there. Can we get you some coffee or something?”
“No thank you. I really can’t stay. But I do think it’s very exciting, the work you do.”
He was watching her with a peculiar intensity when she sat down. Then he said: “It’s really kind of uncanny, you know? You look just like a woman I saw in Atlantic City, must’ve been three, four years ago. Could that have been you?”
“No. I’ve never been there.”
“Strangest thing.” Ray Seale leaned back in his swivel chair. “I remember some guy was on a hot streak and she’d been betting against him and she’d lost her stack and I watched her walk away from the table. She didn’t seem to be with anybody. But I was on a case—I had to take over for one of my men that got sick. And the subject was right there at the dice table and there wasn’t no choice, I had to wait him out and then keep following him around town until the guy led me to the Olds or the Buick or whatever it was the bank was paying us to repo.
“Funny thing. I don’t even remember anymore whether I got the car back. I do remember going back to the casino and looking for that blond lady. The floor manager remembered her all right. So did a couple of cocktail waitresses and three of the dealers I talked to. But none of them ever seen her before and nobody knew anything about her.
“So I just had the one glimpse of her. Saw her maybe thirty seconds out of my whole lifetime but I still remember her and you are absolutely a dead ringer for that lady. Isn’t that remarkable? You mind me talking this way?”
It sounded like a variant of the archaic “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before” gambit but she didn’t think that was it. He was a feisty little rat but she was sure he was too sly to risk insulting Mrs. Albert LaCasse.
She presented to him another of her cool smiles, one calculated to remind him of his station relative to hers. She said, “I’m sure it wasn’t me you saw. I don’t gamble.”
“You must have a twin sister then.”
“No. Just coincidence, I suppose—like my being in this building today.”
“Must be,” he agreed. “Hard to believe there’s two like you walking around. You’re a real good-looking woman, Mrs. LaCasse. I hope you don’t mind me saying so. Your husband’s a real fortunate man.”
“Nice of you to say so. I suppose in your business you must come across quite a few cases of unusual resemblances. Mistaken identity.”
“Oh sure. Nothing less reliable than an eyewitness. Look how I just mistook you for someone else. Happens all the time.”
“That must make it fun when you’re trying to find someone who’s disappeared.”
“Well—sometimes that’s a fact, yes ma’am. In fact I recall a case …”
She heard him out—a rambling tale—and when he beamed so she could appreciate the punch line she said, “I like to read detective stories but I gather there isn’t much truth in them. Tell me something—I’m fascinated by what you do—suppose someone, oh, let’s say a woman like me. Suppose I disappeared one day without a trace. How would you go about looking for me? What do you call it again—skip-tracing?”
“Yes ma’am.”
He gave her a smile that tried to curry favor. “That would depend on whether you disappeared on purpose. Some people meet with accidents or foul play. That’s a different matter. When a person disappears, first thing you do is normally check all the hospitals, emergency services, friends and relatives of the subject, business associates. Thing is, is that you’d be surprised how many people go away on a business trip—something just came up, you know, spur of the moment—and maybe they forget to tell the wife about it. Half the time you just ask the guy’s secretary, she knows exactly where he is, what hotel he’s staying in, all that stuff. Case closed. See, the first thing you do is just ask sensible questions.”
“Of course,” she said, “but let’s suppose someone has deliberately disappeared. Say you’re looking for a woman who’s married to a drunk or something. Say he beats her all the time and she’s just got to get away from him—far away, where he’ll never find her again. And say the husband hires you to bring her back. How do you find her?”
She knew people tended to be flattered when you asked them about what they did. She’d learned that in a previous life. And it proved easy to draw him out. He sat back and lit a small cigar—it didn’t occur to him to ask if she minded—and said, “Well, first you’d go back to the public records. You find out where she was born, the family background, where she went to school. You check out voting registration, driver’s license, credit files. All this is perfectly legal, you understand. Public records are open to the public. Anyway you build up this jacket on the subject—that’s a fact file. Have you got time, Mrs. LaCasse?”
“I have a luncheon appointment but I can be a little late. Go on. I’m intrigued.”
“Let’s see. Okay, you check with the subject’s doctor and dentist. Family and friends. Chances are some of them have heard from the subject. People have to have their medical records forwarded—for insurance applications or maybe they go into a hospital for some disease and the hospital needs a history on the patient. Whatever. Sometimes people just can’t help getting in touch with their mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers. Or their children.”
“But some of them must be smart enough not to get in touch with people that way.”
“Some are, sure. There’s still ways. A lot of skips seem to figure all they need to do is move to another state and they’re safe. It’s such a big country, you know, two hundred and forty million people, seems so easy to lose yourself out there. A lot of skips don’t even bother to change their names. It’s a hassle, changing your name. You got to start all over with fresh documents, new identification from scratch—it’s hard work. So a lot of people just keep their name and their Social Security number and all that. They move someplace halfway across the country and they apply for a driver’s license and open a bank account and bang, it’s in the computer and we got ’em.
“Credit applications, that’s another one. We buy the subject’s old credit applications from companies that the subject got an account with. We just keep developing facts that way. A friend of mine, investigator out west in Marin County, he likes to say the thing about facts is, is that you put them together and it’s like sex, they produce more facts. So you work the facts. You contact the oil companies and half the time you find out the subject left a trail of gasoline credit card charges all the way across the country right to the new doorstep. You get in touch with the company, you give the subject’s name, you say you’re the subject. Maybe you act angry. You complain you haven’t been receiving your bills and you don’t want to risk your credit rating. You think maybe they got the wrong forwarding address and you ask what address the bills are being mailed to.”
The thin cigar had grown a tall ash. He tapped it into a glass tray on the desk.
He’d warmed to the subject just as he had that nigh
t at the dinner table. He said: “Around Christmas, New Year’s, if it’s a priority subject and a real dead skip—I mean one where all the leads have turned up empty—sometimes in the holidays we’ll post people on stakeouts or we’ll drive around and do spot checks on the relatives. A lot of skips just can’t help going home for Christmas. Sometimes we just offer a reward and tell the relatives about it. You’d be surprised how many people turn in their own brothers for a thousand dollars.
“Sometimes we try to use the Internal Revenue. They’re not supposed to give out information but sometimes you can get through. You tell them you’re on the bookkeeping computer at ex-wye-zee company, you’ve got a W-2 or a 1099 form that you need to send to this person but it came back address unknown and maybe does the IRS have a forwarding address for this person so he can get his taxes straight. I’ve used that one a dozen times. It’s illegal, of course, but I guess we all know you don’t get much done if you don’t bend the regulations a little, just now and then.”
She remembers how his sycophantic wink made her feel soiled. The cigar had gone out; he relit it with a plastic lighter. “If you’ve got some idea what part of the country the subject may have headed for, you call the phone company out there, you ask for the New Listings Operator. Sometimes that gets you an address.
“You keep tabs on the subject’s boyfriend or girlfriend if there was one. A lot of people, especially women, skip out because they’ve been having an affair with a married man and he plans to take off in three weeks and meet her in Yucatan or Hawaii or something. So you ask around, secretaries and whoever the subject used to work with, and if you hear rumors about an extramarital affair you keep tabs on the boyfriend.
“Now you’ll get divorced people where one of the parents doesn’t like the court’s ruling on child custody, so the parent steals his own kids or her own kids. Cases like that, where the kids are school age, we call up the school where the kids used to go. I say I’m the principal out here in Tulsa and I’m inquiring about the transcripts for these kids. And usually I’ll find out the transcripts have already been sent out to a school in Boise, Idaho. Bingo.
“Even the worst cases get solved sooner or later. Most of them.
“See, the thing is, is that people tend to stay with the same social level. They’re comfortable with their own kind of people and they seek out those kind of people. Eventually, see, there’s going to be a coincidence. Eventually they’re going to run into somebody from their old life that recognizes them. Maybe right away, maybe five years down the road. But it’ll happen. It always does. There’s only one way to prevent it, and that’s when they make themselves over into a totally different person. New interests, new social class, new everything. And there just aren’t a whole lot of people capable of doing that.
“And even then we get them sometimes. People make mistakes. And that’s what we look for, mistakes.”
He poked the cigar in his mouth, squinted through the smoke, spread both hands out with palms up and gave her a nasty little smile. “That’s how we do it, Mrs. LaCasse. And notice at no time do my fingers leave my hands.”
He chuckled at his little joke and she managed to smile appreciatively before she said:
“It’s utterly fascinating. I don’t—look. Let’s take it from the other end for a moment. Just hypothetically. It’s just so interesting. Do you mind? Suppose you take an ordinary housewife. Suppose one day she decides to disappear without a trace, and suppose, oh, let’s say she knows her husband is likely to hire someone like you to find her and she wants to make sure she doesn’t get found. How would a person go about disappearing so completely that even you couldn’t find him?”
“Ordinary woman, ordinary husband? I guess she might get away with it if she knew how. But of course that’d be different with somebody like you, Mrs. LaCasse. Somebody with a husband like yours, I mean.”
“That goes without saying.” She smiled yet again. “But I am curious.”
“I’ll tell you then. Your ordinary housewife in South Orange, you mean. There’s a lot of things she might do.
“For openers she’d have to clean out her bank accounts in cash and then throw away her checkbooks and all her credit cards.
“Best way to do that’s put it all in a wallet and let somebody else lay a false trail for her.
“How she does that, there’s a dozen ways. Railroad station’s pretty good. Trailways depots are okay. Airports aren’t so good because people tend to be a little more honest about lost possessions.
“Anyhow maybe she just gets on a turnpike in the direction opposite to the direction she’s really heading. She’d stop in one of those service area Howard Johnson’s and leave the wallet in the ladies’ room. Make it look like she left it behind by mistake. You know how women empty out their handbags when they’re trying to find the lipstick.
“The wallet may get turned in and returned to the husband, in which case he’s got a lead in the wrong direction, but people bein’ what they are it’s more likely somebody steals the wallet. Next thing you know they’ll be passing bad checks and running up credit card charges two hundred miles away, laying down a beautiful false trail for you. Am I boring you?”
She gave him another smile and tried to hide its insincerity. “If I get bored I’ll yawn. Go on, please.”
He did.
26 Getting off the freeway at Pass Avenue she is looking in the rear-view mirror again. It has become a habit too strong to break. And she’s thinking it would be a tasty irony if Ray Seale has been hired to find her: an irony because his life will hardly be worth a thimbleful of dust if it ever gets out that he’s the very one who taught her how to vanish.
It’s half-past three and hot. Doyle and Marian are sitting at one of the outdoor tables in the corral of Buffalo Bill’s Saloon, having what is probably not their first drink of the afternoon.
Graeme Goldsmith is with them.
Damn.
As she parks in front of a wagon wheel someone meanders into the bookshop and she sees Doyle get up from his table and carry his drink toward the shop. Mustache twitching in anticipation, he waves to her as she gets out of the car, then disappears inside in hope the customer is more than a browser.
She leaves the windows open and the car unlocked. There’s nothing in it worth stealing and if you close the windows it’s a furnace when you get back in.
There’s no graceful escape. She joins Marian and the Australian in the shade of the table’s umbrella.
Graeme lifts his beer toward her in a casual welcoming gesture. Coming from him it is at best a meaningless courtesy. He’s made it clear enough that he doesn’t like her. Perhaps it’s her personality; perhaps he just doesn’t like women.
In either case she feels no obligation to change his sentiments.
As she sits down, George, the aged waiter, saunters out from his post in the shade. Marian says, “An iced tea for herself, honey.”
“That’s lemon, no sugar, right?”
Jennifer—she thinks of herself as Jennifer now—confirms it with a nod and George retreats.
Marian says, “So anyway—sorry, Jennifer honey, just finishing the story—anyway,” she says to Graeme in her prairie twang, “Nick used to come around once in a while with a jug and his ukulele. He had a great tenor voice, you know. He and Doyle used to tie one on, sing those old songs, we had a ball in those days, and that’s how we first learned those bawdy tunes. We got the lyrics from Nick. You want the real lowdown, I think his widow’s still got his song collection. Maybe you ought to call her. She’s in the book.”
Jennifer has made the discovery recently that a vast part of ordinary human conversation is made up of idle memories. People spend more time telling one another shaggy dog anecdotes about incidents from their past than they seem to devote to any other social activity.
It makes things awkward when the only past you can admit to is one you make up as you go along—and then have got to remember forever.
Marian is still remi
niscing. “Nick used to know Reagan pretty well back in the actors’ union days and when Reagan started running for governor I remember Nick just shook his head in wonderment. He’d always say, ‘Trouble with Ronnie is, you ask him the time of day, he’ll tell you how to build an Elgin watch but the trouble with Ronnie is, he don’t know how to build an Elgin watch.’”
Both of them laugh and Jennifer joins in it. Marian is drinking something blood red with a stalk of celery in it. Her pert face is sleepily content under the tight helmet of salt-and-pepper hair. She’s forty-eight and her skin is brown and crosshatched by a fine netting of lines but she’s an attractive woman: tiny, tidy, slim, with the abrupt sure movements of a bird. Behind the dark glasses are brown eyes that twinkle more often than not.
“This is my second bullshot,” she says. “We’re celebrating. You remember that idiot collector in Spokane?”
“The Wyatt Earp nut?”
“Uh-huh. The one with the voice like a nuclear explosion.” Marian pronounces it “nucular.”
Jennifer feels the heat of Graeme’s eyes upon her. Marian’s talk drifts by:
“We got a catalog phone order from him a couple hours ago. About blew my ear off. Complete set of Alfred Henry Lewis. Bound volumes of the Tombstone Epitaph and a couple dozen outrageously overpriced first editions—Stuart Lake, Billy Breakenridge, Walter Noble Burns, that kind of whitewash stuff. Take us half the weekend to pack it for shipping but it pays the rent for the whole month and then some.”
“Congratulations.”
Graeme says, “Looks like the value of your stock just went up a point.”
She gives him a lazy glance through her sunglasses. Why is it that everything he says sounds like an accusatory innuendo?
George brings the iced tea. Graeme says, “I’ll have another beer.”
She tastes the iced tea and makes a face. “Can’t you just make real tea and put ice in it? This powdered junk is dreadful.”
Necessity Page 8
