Hardcase

by Bill Pronzini

  I set about brewing coffee. And caught myself whistling while I did it. Well, why not? I was a happy man—truly happy for the first time in years, maybe for the first time in my life. My wedding day and night may have been less than perfect, even if Kerry was satisfied with them, but Saturday and Sunday had been conventionally terrific. This morning too. Marriage agreed with her as much as it agreed with me; in fact, it had done things to her libido that put mine to shame. All that heat wouldn’t last, of course—kill me dead before my sixtieth birthday if it did—but maybe it would last through the delayed honeymoon at Cazadero. That much heat my weary old bones could generate as well as cope with.

  When the coffee was ready I got down to business. First up was a skip-trace that had come in last Thursday afternoon, from one of the better divorce lawyers in the city. The subject was a child-support scofflaw, a type I mark lousy no matter what the excuses or circumstances happen to be. This one was a cut below the average deadbeat. Three kids, the oldest six years; divorced a year and a half, chronically late with payments for the first ten months, not a dime paid over the last eight. Total back support owed to date: $21,500. Dropped out of sight for two months in June, resurfaced briefly with false promises to pay up, vanished again when the attorney and his frustrated client had an arrest warrant put out on him. The ex-wife thought he might have skipped to Kansas, where he had loose family ties. The attorney was of the opinion that he was still in northern California, working construction jobs under an assumed name.

  Some traces are easy, some are difficult. This turned out to be an easy one. The first half dozen calls I made netted me nothing much, but the seventh, to the state board of workers’ compensation, yielded pay dirt. The subject had broken his leg in a job-site accident in Santa Rosa ten days ago, and in order to qualify for disability payments he’d had to file under his real name. He was currently holed up in Windsor, a little town north of Santa Rosa—and he’d be there when the authorities went looking for him, because that was where workers’ comp was to send his disability checks.

  The woman who provided this information, a Ms. Stark, was not my regular contact at the board office. He was out sick and she was overworked and probably underpaid. She grumbled when I asked her to run the check, grumbled some more after she ran it, and felt compelled to deliver a lecture when she finished telling me what I wanted to hear.

  “You know,” she said, “you didn’t have to call for this. You could have accessed the information on your computer.”

  “I don’t have a computer.”

  There was a silence.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You don’t have a computer?” she said.

  “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

  “Everybody has a computer these days.”

  “Not me.”

  “You mean . . . not even a laptop or a PC?”

  “Whatever they are. No.”

  “My God. How do you function?”

  “Not too badly most days. How about you?”

  She ignored that. She was a worshiper at the electronic shrine, and like most zealots confronted by a nonbeliever, she shifted into her proselytizing mode. “These are the nineties,” she said, as if I were ignorant of the fact. “Everything is on computers. Everything anyone could possibly want to know. I don’t see how you . . . well, I just don’t understand why you don’t have one.”

  “I don’t want one,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I guess because I’m a dinosaur.”

  “A ... what?”

  “Dinosaur. You know, one of those big, clumsy lizards that used to roam the earth.”

  “I know what dinosaurs are. Like in Jurassic Park.”

  “Right. I plod along doing things in my prehistoric way.”

  “Dinosaurs couldn’t adapt,” Ms. Stark said pointedly. “That’s why they became extinct.”

  “And so will I be, someday. But until that time comes I’ll probably be content. Plus I’ll never have eyestrain from staring at one of those little screens.”

  “My God,” Ms. Stark said again. “You really mean it, don’t you? You’re never going to learn how to use a computer.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “Well, if you ask me, you’re making a big mistake. One of these days—sooner than you think—you’re going to have a lot of trouble doing your job.”

  “I can still talk to nice people like you.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because people like me might not be available to do your work for you. The more sophisticated computers become, the less important we are. I guess maybe some civil servants are dinosaurs too. Anyway, if you don’t want to learn computers yourself, then you’d better hire somebody who knows them. Otherwise your business will be extinct before you are.”

  I wore a smile when Ms. Stark and I rang off. But the smile faded even before I called my client to tell him where he could find his client’s deadbeat dad. Ms. Stark had sounded pretty ominous there at the end of our conversation: no longer the voice of the proselytizer, but rather the voice of doom. Or, hell, the voice of reason.

  Maybe she was right.

  It was all well and good to personally shun new-age technology, but from a professional point of view it might, in fact, be foolish and potentially disastrous. Every federal, state, county, and city office was computerized; so was nearly every business, large and small. And there were all sorts of databases and networking groups that were easily accessed by someone who knew all about hardware and software and modems and RAMs and bytes. A vast storehouse of information that I could obtain only through laborious legwork and telephone contacts—and in some instances, that I couldn’t obtain at all....

  I was brooding about this when Melanie Ann Aldrich showed up. Prompt, she was: my watch read ten o’clock straight up. I stood to greet her as she crossed the office. Young, all right: no more than twenty-five and probably closer to twenty. One of those tall, slender people who seem gangly and awkward at first glance, all arms and legs, but who possess an odd, fluid grace that soon becomes apparent. Ash-blond hair cut short, long chin, nice gray eyes. Expensively dressed in brown and burnt orange: Gucci bag, Gucci shoes, and the kind of simple, tailored dress that you can buy only in stores like Saks and I. Magnin.

  Her manner in person was as brisk and businesslike as it had been on the phone. Neutral glance around the cavernous ex-loft, quick handshake—during which I noticed she wasn’t wearing either a wedding or an engagement ring—full eye contact once she was seated in one of the clients’ chairs. Self-contained, I thought. And with a lot of poise for someone her age.

  “You mentioned on the phone that I was recommended to you,” I said first thing. “May I ask by whom?”

  “Philip Kleiner.”

  Well, that explained the “competent private investigator” testimonial. Phil Kleiner didn’t believe in stroking anybody’s ego except his own; coming from him, competent was a word of high praise for a lesser human being. He was a local business and tax attorney of some stature. We knew each other as a result of an investigation involving one of his clients a couple of years ago.

  “Mr. Kleiner is your lawyer?”

  “Yes. He was my dad’s . . . he was the Aldrich family’s lawyer for many years.”

  “A competent man,” I said, and smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. “How may I help you, Ms. Aldrich?”

  “I want to know who I am,” she said.

  “... I’m sorry?”

  “My real identity. Who my parents were, and if either or both of them are still alive.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re adopted.”

  “Yes. I didn’t find it out until four weeks ago, after my mother—the woman I always believed was my mother—died.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes betrayed traces of the hurt and anger she must be feeling inside. “There was a letter and an invoice among her effects.”

  “Invoice?”


  From her purse she brought out two folded sheets of paper stapled together. “These are photocopies,” she said as she handed them to me. “You can keep them. Mr. Kleiner has the originals.”

  The letter bore the printed head of an attorney named Lyle Cousins, with an address in a town I’d never heard of: Marlin’s Ferry, California. It was dated December 3, 1971, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Paul R. Aldrich at a San Francisco address, and signed by Cousins. The body, a single paragraph, said that enclosed for the Aldriches’ records was a copy of the paid invoice for his legal services, and that he wished them every happiness with their new daughter. The attached invoice was in the amount of three thousand dollars, “for professional services,” and was stamped Paid 12/3/71.

  “Lyle Cousins is still alive and still practicing law,” Ms. Aldrich said. “Mr. Kleiner contacted him on my behalf. He refused to discuss the dealings he’d had with Claire and Paul. He wouldn’t even admit that there was an adoption.”

  I nodded. In California, adoption records are sealed and secured by the Superior Court. A new birth certificate is issued at the time the adoption takes place; hospital records are altered to reflect the “new birth” and all official documents pertaining to both the original birth and the adoption are sealed in the case file. Attorneys involved in the adoption proceedings are therefore legally sworn to silence. All of this is designed to protect the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and the child. But when the child grows up and decides to trace his or her roots, the court seal acts as a huge deterrent. Not an insurmountable one, but a difficult and frustrating one in most instances.

  I said, “You do know that there are private groups working in adoption research for individuals? Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, Adoptee Identity Discovery, Concerned United Birthparents—”

  “I’ve been in touch with the ALMA chapter in Alameda,” Ms. Aldrich said. “They did some preliminary checking, but ... they’re very busy and the process is slow and there are no guarantees. I can’t bear waiting for months and maybe not finding out even then. That’s why I’ve come to you.”

  “I can’t offer you any guarantees either.”

  “I know that. But you can work much faster than ALMA, and I’m sure you have sources and methods that they don’t. You have found out adoptees’ real identities before, haven’t you? Mr. Kleiner said you’d been a detective for more than thirty years . . .”

  “I’ve done adoption work, yes. And I’ve been successful at it a few times.”

  “Well then,” she said.

  “But I’ve also failed more than a few times.”

  “I understand that that’s a possibility. I do. I don’t expect miracles.”

  I pretended to reread the Cousins letter while I considered. An adoption investigation had a lot of potential headaches, but it was also more challenging than routine skip-tracing and insurance work. And I liked Melanie Aldrich, the impression she’d made so far. I felt sorry for her, too, an emotion people in my profession ought to weed out of themselves but that seemed to grow as perennially wild as thistles in me.

  I said, “Do you think your adoptive mother left this letter and invoice for you to find?”

  “No, I don’t. They weren’t with any other correspondence or legal papers; they were crumpled at the bottom of a storage trunk. I think she must have thought they’d been destroyed long ago. She and Paul never wanted me to know the truth.”

  “Why not? Most adoptive parents tell their children at an early age nowadays.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Secretive types, were they?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “Held some kind of antiadoption bias?”

  “Not that either. The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with who my real parents are.”

  Or the circumstances surrounding the adoption. “I take it Paul is also deceased?”

  “He died three years ago.”

  “Do you have brothers, sisters?”

  “There’s just me. Claire had two miscarriages when she was in her twenties and she may not have been able to conceive again. That would explain why they decided to adopt.”

  “Marlin’s Ferry. Just where is that?”

  “In the Central Valley, east of Lodi.”

  “Family friends or relatives live there?”

  “Not that I know about. I’d never heard of it before.”

  “How about in Lodi or other towns in the area?”

  Ms. Aldrich shook her head.

  “No ties of any kind to that part of the state?”

  “No. Well, we had a summer cabin in the Gold Country when I was a little girl, but Paul sold it ten or twelve years ago.”

  “Where in the Gold Country?”

  “Near Sutter Creek.”

  “Did he and Claire own the cabin at the time you were born?”

  “I’m sure they did. Yes.”

  “What’s the population of Marlin’s Ferry, do you know?”

  “A few thousand. It’s not a very big place.”

  “Your date of birth is what?” I asked.

  “Well, I always believed it was November nineteenth.”

  “November nineteenth, nineteen seventy-one?”

  “That’s the date on my birth certificate, the one that says I was born Melanie Ann Aldrich. But they could have changed it for some reason.” Her mouth quirked. “I don’t even know if Melanie Ann is my true given name.”

  “The birth date is probably accurate, at least,” I said. “I can’t think of a good reason for adoptive parents to change it, even to preserve secrecy.” I’d been taking notes on a yellow legal pad and I wrote the date down and circled it. “I assume you spoke to family friends and business associates, people who knew the Aldriches in nineteen seventy-one?”

  “I did or Mr. Kleiner did. Nobody could tell us anything. They all seemed as surprised as I was to learn I was adopted.”

  “But if Claire Aldrich had really been pregnant . . .”

  “She went away for four months that fall.”

  “Uh-huh. I see. Where did she go?”

  “To stay with her family in Los Angeles, supposedly because she was having a difficult pregnancy and needed special care.”

  “Family members confirm that?”

  “I couldn’t ask any of them. Her mother and father and sister are all dead now—”

  The telephone interrupted her. Minor bit of business; I dealt with it in less than a minute. Ms. Aldrich took the time to remove an old-fashioned beaded cigarette case and a gold lighter from her purse. When I put the receiver down she asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Actually, yes. Cigarette smoke bothers my lungs.”

  She didn’t argue or make a fuss. She said, “I shouldn’t smoke anyway,” and put the case and lighter away. “My dad ... Paul smoked two packs a day. His doctor said it was probably what caused his death.”

  So why do you smoke at all? I thought. But I knew the answer. She was young, and when you’re young, cancer and emphysema and heart disease and all the other life-threatening ailments don’t frighten you much. They seem remote—old people’s problems. Death itself seems remote. At twenty-three, you feel invincible. As if you might just live forever.

  I said, “It would help to have some background on you and the Aldriches.”

  “Of course. Whatever you need to know.”

  “Where did you grow up? Here in the city?”

  “Until I was ten, yes. We had a house in Monterey Heights. Then Claire decided San Francisco was changing for the worse and wanted a better environment for me, better schools. So we moved to Burlingame.”

  “You still live in Burlingame?”

  “Claire did until she died. I moved out when I was eighteen.”

  “College?”

  “If Claire had had her way, I’d have gone to Stanford and gotten a degree in business administration. She was at Stanford for a year before she married Paul and she always regretted not stayin
g and graduating. But I’ve wanted to be a fashion model ever since I was little, so when I moved out I came back to the city—a flat on Russian Hill—and went to modeling school. She never quite forgave me.”

  “You’re a professional model, then?”

  “Well, I haven’t been as successful as I’d hoped,” she said frankly and without bitterness, “but I haven’t lost faith in myself. And now that I don’t have to worry about money . . .” She shrugged. “I inherited more than I’ll ever need.”

  “Where did the Aldrich money come from?”

  “Paul was a consulting engineer, very successful. He had his own company, which specialized in design and construction for water resources. You know, aqueducts and irrigation pipelines.”

  “Did Claire have a profession?”

  “No. Her family had money and she inherited quite a bit from them. She worked with Paul when he first started his company, but after I was . . . after I joined them she stayed home and took care of me.”

  “What happened to the company after Paul died?”

  “It wasn’t his then,” Ms. Aldrich said. “He sold it six months before, to one of the big engineering corporations. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, he said. He and Claire planned to travel, take an around-the-world cruise, but Tahiti was the only place they actually went to. He had a heart attack while playing golf. He ... was only sixty-one.”

  The shimmer of emotion in her voice made me ask, “Were you close to him?”

  “Well, he was away a lot when I was growing up and I never knew him as well as I wanted to, but . . . yes, we were close. He was a kind, good man and I loved him very much. I can’t believe it was his idea.”

  “Keeping your adoption from you, you mean?”

  “Yes. It must have been Claire’s, whatever the reason. Almost every time they disagreed about something, she won the argument. She always got her way.”