“They call themselves the Framers,” Amanda said.
“Never heard of them. What do they believe?”
She pulled a face. “That the world, this world, isn’t really … real.”
“Isn’t that religion in general?” I cracked before I could stop myself.
“You explain it,” she said crossly to her husband. “Jon has a philosophy degree,” she explained, saying “philosophy degree” the way others say “drinking problem.”
“They’re one of those New Age, human potential things,” Jonathan said. “What’s called a charismatic cult.”
As I subsequently learned on the Web, this meant they had organized themselves around the revelations of a single, power-monopolizing individual—apparently a very bad sign as far as cults go.
“The leader’s name,” he continued, “is Xenophon Baars. He’s a former philosophy professor out of Berkeley, believe it or not …”
“You make it sound as if he should know better.”
“He should know better.”
“Maybe he does … “
“Of course he does!” Mrs. Bonjour cried. “The whole thing is a murderous con!”
Whether it was the savagery of her interruption or the implications of that word “murderous,” the outburst left an embarrassing chill in its wake.
“What my wife means,” Mr. Bonjour said stiffly, “is that the cult’s beliefs are too … extreme for anyone with Baars’s education to seriously entertain. We think he’s simply duping these people for money and, ah … sex.”
“What do you mean by ‘extreme’?”
“They think the world is about to end,” he said, his tone as blank as his face.
“And?” So far the Framers were sounding pretty commonplace. The philosophy professor thing was a twist of sorts, I supposed. But otherwise? Didn’t all those crazy fuckers think the end was nigh?
“Five billion years from now …”
Fawk.
I tried hard not to smirk. “You mean, like … when the sun swallows us up?”
“Exactly. This Baars has convinced his followers that the world is more than five billion years older than it is. And that it’s about to end.”
I rubbed my face in an attempt to wipe away a marvelling grin. I looked at them both, each desolate in a different way, gouged not only by loss but by disbelief. That something so absurd, so stupid …
I nodded gravely. “I see what you mean.”
I’ve seen more than my fair share of absurdities in my time: Christ, this job throws them at you like rotten fruit at a burlesque gone wrong. Tragedy astounds people no matter what, sure. The big things are just too heavy to be caught in human nets. But life also has a nasty habit of dishing up calamity as the punchline of a joke as well, and with a regularity that’s nothing short of perverse. We keep waiting for something Shakespearean to happen, when most of the world is just an annex to the Jerry Springer show. Squalid. Cheap. Mean-spirited.
So few people die pretty.
I glanced at the photo of Jennifer Bonjour leaning against my faux art deco lamp. An unopened bill lay askew just below it, and I glimpsed my name and the top third of my address through the plastic window. DISCIPLE MANNING, stamped across some law of perspective. The chill of sudden conviction dropped through me … The first of many such chills, as it turned out.
I’m not sure how I knew she was dead, but somehow I did—and I suspected the grieving couple before me knew as well.
I pressed them for details of the police investigation, expecting to hear the Bonjour version of what I’ve come to call the Authority Rant. Most everybody who comes to me has a grudge against the authorities, either because they have something to hide or because they’ve been let down in some manner. When it comes to cases like the Bonjours’, they almost always have a tale of official indifference, incompetence, or, if they’re really mad, outright malfeasance. Personally, I had nothing against The System. I understood the kinds of limitations that cops faced: the politics, the fatigue individuals were prone to, the constraints of policy and procedure, the ways bureaucratic machinery could generate irrational outcomes.
I’ve worked in factories before. I know the score.
As it turned out, so did the Bonjours. The story they told was one of a local police chief who meant well but was hopelessly out of his depth when it came to this case. Caleb Nolen, his name was. Chief Caleb Nolen. From what they described, he did everything by the book, and a few things above and beyond. According to the Framers (Nolen had interviewed all twenty-seven of them), Jennifer left the Compound with another cult member named Anson Williams at around 8:30 P.M. to walk into town to a bar called Legends, where the two liked to dance. The walk was a long one, at least two and a half miles, much of it through Ruddick’s largely abandoned industrial park, but apparently the two enjoyed the air, exercise, and the opportunity to talk. They were close friends but not lovers. Witnesses placed the two of them at the bar, dancing and drinking, until approximately 11:30 P.M., when the doorman said Jennifer left muted but not otherwise distraught. According to Anson, she had been nursing a headache most of the evening and finally decided to return home to sleep. He claimed that she agreed to call a cab at his insistence, but the doorman said that she left on foot, headed in the direction of the Framer Compound.
She never arrived.
According to cellphone records, Anson called her twice, once at 12:03 A.M. and again at 12:17 A.M. She didn’t answer. He then called the Compound, asking whether anyone had seen her. When he learned from the doorman that she had walked, he struck out on foot after her, calling her name and searching the verges of the road. Evidently, he feared she had been hit by a passing car. He found nothing. At 1:33 A.M., Xenophon Baars himself called the police department, expressing his concern. At approximately 2 A.M., one of Nolen’s deputies embarked on a cursory search of the route and the surrounding brown lands— apparently the area is mazed with abandoned steel and assembly plants, a creepy place for a young woman to be walking alone, but so familiar to the locals that they thought nothing of it. When she failed to turn up the next morning, the Chief wisely said to hell with procedure and pulled out all the missing-person stops. By mid-afternoon they had some eighty-plus volunteers combing the ruined structures and surrounding ravines. There was no sign of her. None. They tried again the next day, this time with State Police dogs. Again, nothing.
The Bonjours got the call from Nolen’s office that morning, and I could see the catastrophe on their faces as they described it: the little girl they had loved, nurtured, and even suffered on occasion was missing. Gone.
They fell silent after that.
I asked them about going to the media. They said the police department had already issued a public statement, that two of the Pittsburgh television stations and the main paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, had aired or printed stories along with photos of their daughter—so far to no avail.
“One reporter told us they purposefully bury stories like ours,” Amanda said with more than a little animus. “‘JonBenet fatigue,’ he called it … But what he meant was that missing pretty white girls are out of fashion.”
“No,” Jon Bonjour said. “It’s because of all the criticism the media received, you know … for being too Hollywood.”
“Hollywood?” Amanda fairly cried.
“The way they pick victims like casting directors, stories like movie prod—”
“So what are you saying, Jon? That our daughter is too blond, too beautiful? That political correctness is what’s keeping her buried on the back page? Keeping her … lost …”
Lost? Was that what they really thought?
I glanced at the glossy on my desk, at the dead girl’s almost smiling eyes. I could already see the crime scene photographs, the grisly before and after. Naked. The limbs bent in poses the living would find excruciating. The skin purple-grey-white. That was when I started thinking of her as “Dead Jennifer.”
Sounds horrible, I know. What can I say? I’
m a freak.
I shook my head and pinched my eyes. I did what I always do when my thoughts take an errant turn: I asked a question. “How would you characterize your relationship?”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Bonjour asked.
“Your relationship with Jennifer. Was it loving or, ah … troubled?”
“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” her husband said with spousal wariness. Jonathan Bonjour, I realized at that moment, wasn’t simply a lawyer, he was a good lawyer.
“Troubled,” Mrs. Bonjour said stiffly. “Troubled.”
“Not abusive,” Mr. Bonjour interjected. “There’s troubled and then there—”
Something flashed across his wife’s face. “I’m sure Mr. Manning re—”
“I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea!”
They both looked to me in expectation—funny how some couples turn every third party into a marriage counsellor—so I held them in suspense for a thoughtful moment. “And what idea would that be, Mr. Bonjour?”
“Jon slapped her,” Mrs. Bonjour said in a clear, broadcasting tone. “The last … fight we had. Jon slapped … her.”
“I … ah …” Jon Bonjour croaked through his sinuses as though ready to spit a la NASCAR, swallowed instead. He wiped tears from his eyes with a fat thumb. “I … I don’t know what to say.” These last words were pinched through a sob. His face flushed red beneath the hood of his hand.
“Jonny blames himself,” Mrs. Bonjour said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” I said as professionally as I could. “Most people try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served if they come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth.” I leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. Very Remington Steele. “You do understand that?”
Irritation scuttled across his fat face. “Of course,” he said.
Rates, conditions, and so on are always difficult items to discuss, so you have to be opportunistic, take what chances the ebb and flow of conversation offer. I typically use money talk to doctor breakdowns in the conversation, especially if things become emotionally overwrought.
No small amount of defensiveness and aggression walks into offices like mine. But as soon as you mention money, most of the personal shit just evaporates. I could literally see Mr. and Mrs. Bonjour’s heart rates slow as I discussed the terms. Few things are more dear to the human animal than simplicity, or the appearance of it anyway. And few things are more simple, more apparently superficial, than monetary transactions.
Open the wallet, close the heart—that’s generally the rule.
They agreed to everything without comment or question—even the exorbitant rate. Something told me that I could have charged double, even triple, and Mr. Bonjour would have responded with precisely the same numb nod. Mrs. Bonjour, I’m sure, would have sold her liver to a Chinese penal hospital if that meant finding her daughter. I suffered that vague and momentary regret that accompanies lost opportunities. You know, Oh well … I realize this isn’t the kind of stuff you want to hear from your heroes. But I was juggling too many bills with too few hands—no different than you, I imagine—and Jonathan Bonjour had a big fat wallet just bursting with hands.
“I have one last question,” I said, “for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour.” The obvious disparity between our income brackets reminded me of an itch I’d wanted to scratch ever since I had realized that Jonathan Bonjour was a lawyer. “Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not?”
A moment of shock. He hadn’t told me his profession.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Stuff like this … personal stuff with consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine … such stuff requires trust…” I let him twist on that word for a second. “Why wouldn’t you go to people you know?”
“This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. I had already guessed as much, but it was good to hear.
“Even still … “
“No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather … jaded …”
This was like a hooker saying she finds the company of strippers embarrassing. No offence, he says. Fucking lawyers.
“And?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience.”
“But it’s not just that,” Amanda added nervously. “You see … Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are … well, more like you.”
“Like me?” I smiled despite myself, nodded. “You mean, like … socio- economically disadvantaged.”
I counted exactly three seconds of embarrassed silence.
“We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language.”
Fucking rich people, man. Always riding the yo-yo of entitlement and embarrassment. The good ones, anyway.
“My ad in the Yellow Pages that bad, huh?”
Twin anxious laughs.
The conversation seemed pretty cut and dried, even though the case was anything but. Still, after-the-fact interpretation being what it is, there were enough hanging threads for me to realize this apparent simplicity would likely buckle under scrutiny, if not flip into something altogether different.
I told them I had a couple of cases pending, but that I would start right away anyway. Time is everything when it comes to missing persons. Then I did what I always do with new clients when I take a job: I gave them a list of things to do. Search her room for anything that might help: an old diary, drug paraphernalia, computer disks, or camera SD cards. Call Nolen to tell him they had hired me, that they expected him to do everything in his power to assist me. The same with Xenophon Baars, taking care to conceal their outrage, of course. “No ego allowed,” I told them, quite oblivious to any irony. “This is not about scoring points.”
You see, the Bonjours had come to me because they were helpless. Sure, they’d contractually engaged my services, but emotionally they’d simply swapped one kind of helplessness for another. Who hasn’t suffered a pang of impotence in the presence of a mechanic, a plumber, or (worst of all) a computer technician? My clients not only leave my office with a professionally legitimated Don’t-worry-about-a-thing lie, they also take home a false feeling of empowerment.
A to-do list.
Makes them happy, and it makes my job easier—sometimes, anyway. Clients have a way of fucking things up.
I ushered the Bonjours to the plate glass entrance with the solemn efficiency of a funeral home director. There was an uncomfortable pause as Mrs. Bonjour knelt on the mat to retie her shoes. Mr. Bonjour simply didn’t know what to say; he just copped that stiff pose that so many husbands assume when their wives interrupt otherwise economical social transactions with nitty concerns. Why couldn’t she just say fucking goodbye and be done with it?
Meanwhile, I wrestled with the embarrassment peculiar to cracked ceilings and beaten linoleum floors. My place had that bankrupt-travel- agency feel to it—stale, grime in the creases. Real chic. I could imagine the two of them sizing it up from the soundproofed confines of their BMW, saying, “Well, it looks like a dump,” with the worn-out irony of those run down to their final options.
Then I realized that Mrs. Bonjour was crying. She had knelt on one knee to tie the shoe on the opposite foot, then switched to the other and just … hung there, her cheek pressed against her knee. Sunlight cut across her at an angle, casting arthritic shadows of her hands and wrists across the mat.
She trembled like a timid dog at the vet, keened in a baby-small voice. Her words, if there were any, were inaudible.
Fawk.
My first thought was of me: she was crying because she had been reduced to the likes of me. But that blew away like the flimsy conceit it was. It was something else—someone else. Suddenly I saw, not Mrs. Bonjour, but the woman my subsequent research wo
uld reveal as Mandy Bonjour nee Patterson. The woman with the secrets she had never told her husband, who hoarded little mementoes that only she could decipher.
It’s strange, isn’t it, glimpsing the person behind the type. The feeling of inside-out recognition. The lining up of first-person perspectives. The twinge of ghosts moving through each other. You bat an eye and suddenly, somehow, this stranger has become a family member.
She cried for all of thirty seconds. Then, abruptly, she stood up, glared at her husband for a hateful heartbeat, then, with a cursory nod at me, pressed her way through the door into the stark world of light and shadow beyond. She strode down the street, a kind of watery walk, the laces of her left shoe kicking in front of her and trailing behind. Jonathan Bonjour wordlessly followed.
I was left with that humbling feeling of having witnessed something heroic …
Or at least something beyond my mangy capabilities.
Track Three
ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND CIGARETTES
After the Bonjours left, I had sex with Kimberley in the copy room—or, as I had devilishly dubbed it, the copy-feely room. Kim put in about twenty or so hours a week, three hours here, four hours there, usually between 10 A.M. and 2 EM., after which she left for her real job at a peeler joint called the Zinger Klub. She was a good kid, something of a smartass, and beautiful in that haggard, too-dolled-up way common to strippers.
The cool thing about frequenting strip bars as a small businessman is that you never need worry about employee turnover—in either sense of the term. Most strippers leap at the job, that is, until they realize a) I’m something of a prick, b) there’s nothing glamorous about day planners and spreadsheets, and c) the money is for shit. But despite this, and despite the fact that I had let her dental coverage lapse, Kimberley had been game for over six months now—long enough for me to worry she might be falling in love.
Afterward we shared a reflective smoke next to the open window.
“Cancel my appointments for this afternoon,” I said.
“You don’t have any appointments.”
Disciple of the Dog Page 2