Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  He snapped back. “I know exactly what-”

  Sam interrupted Slocum’s interruption. He said, “Call him Jaris, Alan. We’re all friends here.”

  What?

  Slocum tried again. “I’m perfectly aware that I need to go through your attorney to discuss… that other matter. I’m always eager for a chance to chat with Mr. Maitlin. But Darrell and I aren’t here to talk about Hannah Grant.”

  I might have been offended by the gratuitous sarcasm about Cozy if I wasn’t still stuck on Sam’s announcement that “We’re all friends here.” Since when? And if we’re not here to talk about Hannah, what the hell are we here to talk about? At that moment I thought of Bob Brandt, and to no one in particular said, “It’s your move.”

  “Hey, allow me,” Sam said. “This little party was my idea.”

  I thought my narrowed eyes and tight brow aptly communicated to Sam that I didn’t approve of any of the choreography he’d put into his soiree so far.

  “A little background to start,” he said, sticking to the charade that we were all just friends having a beer and sharing some crispy tofu triangles. “Jaris and Darrell had a piece of the Mallory Miller investigation. Lucy and I were doing time line. They were assigned to follow up a couple of potentially promising leads: one being the empty house next door-the one that’s for sale-and two being the possibility that the girl somehow ended up with her mother.”

  “This is all about Mallory, then?” I asked. Despite my skepticism, I knew my question was evidence of capitulation on my part. I should have been throwing money on the table for my beer and walking full speed away from the three Boulder cops.

  “A little patience, maybe?” Sam said. The drinks arrived. Sam waited until the waitress was gone again before he continued. “I was thinking about the conversations you and I had, you know, about the guy with the car, that classic Camaro, and about the house next door to the Millers’ with the waterfalls and shit, and about your friend, Dr. Estevez, and what happened to her in Las Vegas.”

  Darrell said, “Sam came to us. We heard his thoughts and started wondering whether there might be some connection, something that tied things together.”

  “Some connection?” I asked, even more skeptically than before. I already feared a connection among Bob and Mallory and Diane, and I was beyond skeptical that I was hearing about this from Darrell Olson and Jaris Slocum.

  “Yeah,” said Slocum.

  As far as I was concerned he was nothing more than a punk with a shield. “I’m uncomfortable with this,” I said, trying hard not to sound petulant. Sam’s expression told me that I hadn’t quite succeeded. I felt as though all the confidential information that I’d been trying to guard about my patients was in a balloon hovering above the table, and that each of the three detectives was dimpling the latex with the point of a saber.

  The worst part? I knew I’d gotten myself into this one by trying to finesse the confidentiality rules with Sam.

  “Hear us out,” Sam said.

  Slocum’s mug of beer was almost gone. He’d either been real thirsty, or he was real anxious. He looked toward our waitress and raised the mug and his eyebrows. He wanted a refill.

  Darrell said, “We didn’t know about the guy with the car. The one who rents the garage next door to the Millers. That was news to us. It could be an important piece of information. We should have picked up on it, but it slipped through the cracks.”

  I glared at Sam. “Slipped through the cracks, huh?”

  Slocum picked up from there. “And the fact that your friend disappeared in Las Vegas? That’s curious to us, too.”

  “Curious?”

  “Well, worrisome, of course, but curious, too. Given the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances are those?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Slocum replied.

  “Everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  I found that I liked him almost as much now that we were all friends having beers and I was calling him “Jaris” as I had when he was ordering me around outside Hannah Grant’s office and I was calling him “Detective.” I said, “For old times’ sake, Jaris, treat me like you treated me at Hannah’s office. You know, like an idiot citizen. Tell me what ‘everything’ means.”

  “Alan,” Sam said.

  I remained unconvinced about the announced agenda for this impromptu meeting. “We’re not talking in code about Hannah Grant right now? You’re all sure about that? If we are, my lawyer’s probably not going to be too happy about it. Come to think about it, neither will my wife.” I don’t know why I threw in the part about Lauren. It was petty, but then so was my state of mind.

  Darrell held up a hand to shush Sam. He said, “Let me, Sam, please.” Darrell was using the conciliator’s voice that I’d heard him try on with Slocum and later with Cozy Maitlin the night that we found Hannah’s body. I suspected that Darrell had been a conciliator at least as long as he’d known how to ride a two-wheeler, and that his initial mediating role had been to intervene before his argumentative parents ripped the flesh from each other’s throats.

  “Alan-we didn’t get off to a good start with you and Dr. Estevez last month-Jaris and I didn’t. Water under the bridge, right? Is that okay? Because based on what Sam’s been able to tell us, it sounds like both you and her might have something to do with another situation we’re working.” He lowered his voice here, and leaned closer to me. “Yes, I’m talking about Mallory. Now, it may just all be coincidence. That’s always possible. But it’s also possible that everything’s related.”

  I couldn’t resist a jab. “If it turns out that everything’s related, it sounds like you and Detective Slocum-Jaris-might have missed some important details during your initial investigations.”

  Sam said, “I’m not sure that’s helpful, Alan.”

  I turned on him. My tone was level. My words? Not as much. “And you’re the best judge of that, Sam? Of what’s helpful? Please. He”-I pointed at Slocum-“roughed up Diane last month for no reason other than that he’d had a bad day or his feelings were hurt or God knows what else, and now he wants to have a nice dinner with me and down a few beers and he thinks I’ll just bow down and help him cover up his mistakes on the”-I caught myself and lowered my voice to a coarse whisper-“Mallory Miller fiasco. Because what I think this is about is ass-covering.”

  Slocum’s face was red. He raised his glass and drained the dregs from the bottom of his first beer-a version of counting to ten to calm himself down, I thought-before he said, “I’m guessing you need help finding her. Not to mention the guy with the old Camaro. Him, too. I don’t expect you to like me-to be honest, I don’t give a shit-but I’m willing to try to find these people. You want to work something out, or not? Your choice. I don’t have time for your sissy-ass games.”

  Sissy-ass games? I supposed that meant that Jaris and I were no longer friends. “What can you do to help? Last time I looked, Las Vegas was in Nevada.”

  Sam sighed loudly. I thought he was expressing relief that most of the cards were finally on the table.

  The waitress chose that moment to return with Jaris’s second beer. She dropped it off in record time and withdrew as though she’d just remembered she’d left the water running in her bathtub.

  “If we reach out from here,” Darrell said as she retreated, “the Las Vegas police maybe show a little more interest in trying to find out what happened to her. I suspect that could make a significant difference. The current situation-an out-of-state husband who can’t find his wife for a couple of days-probably isn’t creating a lot of investigative curiosity in Sin City.”

  Of course he was right. I asked, “And the other guy? The one with the Camaro? How are you going to help with him?”

  “One phone call-and one BOLO later-every cop in the state will have an eye peeled for that car,” Jaris said.

  I hadn’t touched my beer. I picked it up and took a long, slow sip. “On what pretense?” I asked.

  Ac
ross the table, Slocum had already finished half of his second mug. Sam spied Jaris getting ready to jump back into the fray and decided to run interference. He said, “That’s our problem. We’ll come up with one. It’s not as hard as you might think. By the way, BOLO is be-on-the-look-”

  “I know what a BOLO is,” I snapped, almost spitting my beer. “So what do you want from me, Jaris?”

  Sam wasn’t done orchestrating. “What do you say let’s order first, okay? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starving here. Darrell, what’s good? Think I’d like the tempeh cutlets?”

  Sam’s tempeh question was theater-of-the-absurd offered purely for my benefit. Tempeh was so far outside the boundaries of Sam’s comfort universe that Hubble couldn’t have spotted it.

  Sam was thinking that he’d won, and he was pretty darn proud of himself.

  43

  We’d almost completed a totally silent trek from the Sunflower back up the Mall to my office when he said, “You wouldn’t have come out with me if I’d told you what I was up to.”

  “Damn right,” I said.

  A few more steps of silence followed. Then, without the slightest bit of animosity in his voice, Sam added, “You should get off your high horse, see what the world looks like from down here with the rest of us.”

  “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I wasn’t as careful as Sam was about keeping the animosity out of my voice.

  “Your cherished position in life-you know, psych-o-therapist, guardian of all the world’s secrets-it’s not as special as you think it is. You’re just a damn guy doing a damn job. You have trusts to keep. Well, surprise, surprise, other people do, too. Other people take their responsibilities as seriously as you do.

  “Me? Tonight? It turns out I saw a way to get Diane some help for whatever mess she’s in. I saw a way to get some serious eyeballs out looking for the guy in the Camaro. You wanted me to find a hook for all this. Well, I found one. The way I see it, call me naive, but no blood gets spilled by my strategy. A few people have to swallow some pride-yeah, you included-but so the fuck what? You think this was an easy meeting for Jaris? The guy has his hands full; trust me on that.”

  I was inclined to say that I didn’t give a ferret fart whether or not it had been a pleasant meeting for Jaris, but I didn’t.

  Sam had his hands in his pockets and was looking down at the sidewalk as we talked. At Ninth he led us off the curb without looking for traffic in both directions. In half a second a guy heading north on a bike almost creamed him. If the man hadn’t screamed a profanity in warning, I’m not sure Sam would have ever noticed.

  Even with the profanity, he seemed unfazed. He muttered, “Too cold for a bike.”

  We started up Walnut toward my office. As we passed the building that was the second or third incarnation of one of Boulder’s legendary breakfast houses, Sam said, “I miss Nancy’s. Those herb cheese omelettes? They were something. Lucile’s is great, but I miss Nancy’s.”

  “Me, too.” After three or four more steps, I added, “You’re right, Sam.”

  “About Nancy’s? Course I am.”

  I hadn’t been talking about Nancy’s, but he was right about that, too. “Wonderful biscuits. Remember those biscuits? But I meant that you’re right about what you said.”

  “I know that, too.” He exhaled audibly. “The fact that you admit it doesn’t change anything, doesn’t mean that what happens next is going to be what you want to happen next, or even that what happens next is what I want to happen next. All that’s different now is that some people who care about the jobs they do are going to try to find some of these missing people.” He pulled his right hand from his pocket and yanked at the knot on his tie. “How bad a thing can that be?”

  He was right.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For being an asshole.”

  “You mean a sissy-ass?”

  I laughed. “That, too.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  And that was that.

  Almost a block later he climbed into the cradle of the driver’s seat of his Cherokee. “Carmen likes to buy me clothes,” he said.

  It took me a moment to realize that Sam was revisiting the conversation we’d been having in the restaurant at the precise moment when Slocum and Olson ambushed me. I had just asked him about his tie. “I figured,” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “About the new threads?” I asked. “Or about the fact that Carmen likes to buy them for you?”

  Sam shook his head gently, and I could hear the throaty tang of a little chuckle come out of the darkness. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t know one other guy who would ask me that question. Not one. And that’s why I’m okay with the fact that you’re an asshole sometimes.”

  “Goodnight, Sam. Thanks.”

  I was halfway home before I realized that I’d spaced out telling Sam about my visit to Doyle’s house with the Realtor the previous night.

  44

  My girls were sleeping in separate beds when I got home. The dogs were squirrelly though, and I had to spend ten minutes outside with them before I could get them settled. Emily detected the scent of a critter of some kind while we were walking the lane and once we were back in the door she strolled the entire perimeter of the interior of the upstairs of the house checking to see if an unseen enemy had succeeded in breaching our defenses. Ultimately confident that all of our flanks were protected, she plopped at my feet with a satisfied sigh.

  The entire house shook when she landed.

  I was thinking about calling Sam to get his inevitable rage over my visit to Doyle’s house out of the way, when the phone rang.

  I pounced on it: Raoul.

  “I’m starting to get somewhere. Couple of pieces,” Raoul said.

  His tone told me that he hadn’t found Diane, so I didn’t ask. His words told me that he wanted to confront the practical, so I refrained from asking the question that was second on my list: How are you doing with all this? Instead, I said, “What do you have?”

  Raoul started with bad news, not, in my mind, a good sign. “Marlina’s a dead end. The woman from Venetian security? One more meal with her tomorrow, and I’m done. I know exactly why the woman’s been divorced twice though I still haven’t figured out how she got married twice. She’s playing me.”

  “Okay, then what pieces do you have?”

  “Two. The guy from the craps table? The shopping center developer who was playing craps at the same table as Diane? He finally called me this morning, told me he’d been drunk when I phoned him and he’d forgotten to call me back. He was cleaning out the memory on his mobile and saw my number. Anyway, he said that Diane was his luck at the craps table that night and when she cashed out, he decided to do the same. He said he was right behind her as she was walking through the casino.”

  “Sounds kind of creepy.”

  “Sí. He says as Diane’s walking across the casino, two guys walk up to her, say hello. Pretty well dressed. Both of them forty to fifty. One tall, one average. One of them whispered something to her. She seemed happy to hear it and the three of them walked on together, talking. She had her phone in her hand, dropped it trying to shake hands with one of the guys. He picked it up and she stuffed it in her purse. One of the two reached around behind Diane, took the phone right back out of her bag, and tossed it on the floor by a row of slot machines. He said the guy was smooth; he picked Diane like a pro. Until the man dumped her phone, the guy from the craps table thought one of the two guys was Diane’s husband, or boyfriend.”

  “Fits with what I remember, Raoul.” I paused before I added, “The guy from the craps table was going to hit on her, wasn’t he? That’s why he was following her?”

  “Yes,” said Raoul without any animosity. He understood these things.

  “So that was it? He never reported this to anyone?”

  “He said that Diane didn’t seem to be in any distres
s. The phone thing was odd, but she went with them voluntarily.”

  “But he doesn’t know where they went?”

  “They were walking in the direction of the lobby, but he didn’t follow them out of the casino. He went up to his room.”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking what he said to her had something to do with Rachel Miller. That’s why she went with them-she thought she was going to get a chance to talk with Rachel.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too.” I paused for a moment. “Somebody must have picked the phone up off the floor and put it in the tray of the slot machine where that drunk woman found it.”

  “It also explains why Venetian security isn’t too eager to let me see the surveillance tape. Probably looks a lot like a rendezvous to them. You know, something between… adults.”

  “But they must have a picture of these two guys, right?”

  “Right. You can’t walk out of a casino without a camera seeing you. No way.”

  “You said you have a couple of pieces of news. What’s the other one?”

  “Norm Clarke came through. I should’ve called him the first day I got here. I can be such a putz.”

  I was surprised-no, shocked-at the Yiddish. I didn’t know it was part of Raoul’s language repertoire. I grabbed a beer from the kitchen so I could sit down and listen to his story about Norm Clarke.

  Any good big-city daily newspaper that doesn’t take itself too seriously has one, though few are fortunate enough to have that special one that becomes a silk thread in the urban fabric. San Francisco had Herb Caen. Denver has had Bill Husted for as long as I can remember.

  What’s their role? Gossip columnist? Man about town? If they’re good, the phrases don’t do them justice. These guys, and a few gals, take the pulse on their city. They tell the rest of us what happens behind closed doors, what happens after the bars close, what’s new, what’s old, what’s coming next. They invite us to the city’s water cooler for the latest gossip on the movers and shakers, and they whisper the latest dish over the city’s backyard fence. They’re the ones who know what local boy has done good, and what local girl has gone bad. What famous visitor has been spotted where, doing what, with whom.