by Dan Flanigan
He walked through the little park near his apartment. A tree had toppled over onto the swing that he and Sara had swung gently back and forth in not very long ago. He remembered how he had wanted her that night, but it did not occur to him to want her now. An even greater wanting drove him now, an even deeper wound he sought to salve, but for a few moments he managed to forget even about the wanting and the wound as he lingered there in the shrouded womb of that ruined night that doom itself had seemed to come to, leaving behind it a devastated but satiating peace, as if truth could be found only in defeat. Finally, reluctantly, he walked back to his apartment, for there were things it seemed he had to do.
He called Harrigan at home. Mary answered.
“Hello, Mary.”
“You remembered. Good for you. Hello, Pete.”
“Is Mike in?”
“You’re joking, aren’t you? Is it two o’clock in the morning yet? Have the bars closed already?”
She stopped. He guessed she was crying. He did not know what to say. After a few seconds, she hung up the phone.
He tried Harrigan at the office, and he answered on the first ring.
“What’s goin’ on with you?”
“Just sitting here wondering what the fuck I’m doing here.”
“Hey, you oughta call Mary. She thinks you’re out boozing.”
Harrigan said nothing. O’Keefe could tell he would not call her. Their marriage had settled into a bitter stalemate, a small, sad, cold war of the nuclear age.
“I need a favor.”
“What favor?” asked Harrigan, sounding more wary than willing.
“You’ve got connections in St. Louis, don’t you?”
“Sure. Some.”
“How about bankers?”
“Some.”
“I want you to check on a guy who used to be a banker there. It was a few years back. His name is Jerald Ullman. My guess is he was fired or resigned suddenly from his last job.”
“Okay. I’ll check on it. It might take a few days. I’m busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.”
“It can’t take a few days, Mike. I need to know tomorrow.”
“Shit. What’s so damned important about this guy?”
“He was Lenny Parker’s banker down in the lake country.”
“Shit, Pete . . .”
“Spare me the lecture. Just try to find out about him, okay?”
“Why should I help feed this obsession of yours? Maybe I should tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“I’ll just find out some other way. But it’ll take a lot longer. And meanwhile there’s a life at stake.”
“Whose? Yours or hers?”
Before O’Keefe could answer, Harrigan an expert at getting in the last word, had hung up the phone. The answer to his question was “both.”
He had not eaten anything since breakfast, but it didn’t seem to matter to his stomach. He poured himself a Wild Turkey on the rocks, sat down at the kitchen table with an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and his notebook. It occurred to him that Ullman might be sitting at his own table now down in the lake country, not that much difference between the two of them, except that Ullman could only afford Jim Beam and had come a little closer than O’Keefe to the end of his rope.
He read the notebook over and over. She loved Chinese food, ice cream, and barbecued ribs. In her childhood she had possessed no household pets and few friends. In college she had majored in foreign languages, and she was fluent in Spanish. Her only hobby was stargazing, her favorite color, purple. At age eight she had been hit by a car while playing in the street and spent a week in the hospital. She had never wanted to be a movie star. Until junior high she had been taller than all of the girls and most of the boys.
She had been a champion diver in high school—her specialty was the high dive, the big board. He imagined her in a royal blue tank suit, water droplets beading her skin, strong bare feet gripping the board, three or four confident, graceful strides to the edge, right leg up and poised for the spring, her calves suddenly, surprisingly bulging with muscle as she springs, up, so high, the audience gasping as she folds backward toward the board into a gainer, two-and-one-half somersaults in the pike position—marvelous, impossible, the water not protesting her entry at all. Champion.
Facts. Facts but no meanings. The maze of biographical detail thwarted his quest. The only intelligible messages the notebook imparted were “southern Arizona” and “horses.” The lady was crazy for horses. Her parents had given her a fine palomino.
“I’m sure she still has it,” Anderson had said, “pays someone to keep it for her out in Arizona. And she has another one too, I think, one she bought for Lenny to ride. The palomino’s name is Pegasus. She calls him ‘Peg.’ I don’t know what the other one’s name is.”
“Do you know where she keeps it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well then, all I have to do is contact all the places out there that board horses. I find Pegasus, I find her.”
“It’s not that easy. Maybe she’d leave it at one of those commercial places, but I doubt it. I rather think she would have found a rancher or someone like that, someone she could trust to care for the horse like it was his own. That horse could be anywhere in southern Arizona.”
“How about veterinarians? There shouldn’t be all that many veterinarians out there.”
“Horses aren’t taken to vets very often.”
“And,” said O’Keefe, thinking out loud, “even if we find a vet who’s treated the horse at some time or other, that won’t necessarily tell us where it is now.”
“That’s right.”
Still, you had to work with whatever little you had to go on. Unless he could come up with a better idea, he would have to go talk to the horse doctors. But where should he start? Southern Arizona. Anderson’s friend had seen her, or thought he had seen her, in a place called Green Valley, a town full of retired people located a few miles down the interstate highway from Tucson. That might be the logical place to start. Yet Green Valley might be just a red herring. She was certainly plenty smart enough to shop or make any other essential public appearance a very long way from the place where she was hiding.
The family had vacationed in many places, from Tucson south to Tubac, east clear to Douglas. There had been dude ranches and resorts. There had been camping trips and wilderness treks. After her marriage, she had continued going there, three or four extended trips a year, sometimes with Lenny, sometimes without him. As an adult, she repeated the experience of her childhood, going to many different places, often separated by a hundred miles or more, peripatetic wandering, in no particular direction, forming no pattern. The only thing very meaningful he could lock onto—Tag seemed to like things remote, the remoter the better. She seemed to want to be near wilderness. And that would be a necessity in her current situation. But then there was wilderness all over southern Arizona, or at least what passed for wilderness in the late twentieth century. The government seemed to own half the state.
He had never been to Arizona so he pulled out his road atlas. South, a long way south, to Tucson. South from there on Interstate Highway 19 to Green Valley. A few miles farther south to Amado and Tubac. Then Nogales on the Mexican border. Border. She speaks fluent Spanish. Horses. On the run. She likes things remote. At home in the wilderness. What would you do if you were a woman on the run? No, what would you do if you were this woman, Tag, with her particular wants and hopes and talents and fears? The gestalt was forming unconsciously in his head.
Back up to Green Valley. Due west the Papago Indian Reservation. He had never heard of the Papagos, they had never made it into the movies. Nothing due east except the Coronado National Forest. Forest? Pine trees in the sand? South and east, Sonoita, and Patagonia. Ranch country, according to Anderson. Did the cows munch on sand? Farther east, Sierra Vista, Tombstone, Bisbee, Douglas. There’s neither time nor money enough to cover all that ground. Frustrated, he cas
t the map and the notebook aside. He had drunk too much whiskey too fast and felt like throwing up. He would need help in the search, and the help he wanted was George. George had skill, but better than that, seemed to have been vouchsafed a supernaturally large allocation of dumb luck. O’Keefe could use some of that. It seemed like he himself had used up his lifetime quota.
He had picked up the phone to call George when the doorbell rang. Too late for someone to be dropping by. His hackles lifted in sudden fear. He paused at the door, curiously uncertain, debating whether to look out the peephole. Booze is supposed to make you brave, but it’s making me afraid. Then the doorbell rang again, seemingly insistent and angry. Finally, he looked through the peephole. Sara. He hesitated even more now, wanting to see almost anyone but her, hoping she would go away. But she wouldn’t. Maybe she had noticed the peephole darken when he put his eye up to it. She glared at the door as if she could see through it. Shrink. Shrink away. Lovely lady, but no eros there, only disapproval and scolding.
“I’m not going away. You’re gonna have to talk to me, so open the door.”
When he opened the door, she did not try to conceal her anger and disgust. He stepped back, and she walked past him into the living room, the smell of her perfume dazzling him a little as she passed. She sat down on the couch without taking off her raincoat.
“We need to talk.”
He sat down on the Queen Anne chair across from her. She was as angry as he had ever seen her, but she was too gentle for real anger. Her eyes, deep brown wells of sadness, betrayed her. Be careful, Sara, or I’ll fall into your eyes.
“George quit today,” she said.
He tried to conceal his shock, tough this out like the tough guy he was supposed to be.
“Jarvis tried to make him do that union spying job, and George told him to stick it. He said for me to tell you that you could stick it too.”
“So Jarvis is a dumb shit. I’ll talk to George.”
“It wouldn’t have happened if you’d’ve been there, if you hadn’t stopped giving a shit about everything.”
He shrugged. She was right. He didn’t care about it anymore. Even the news that George had quit had failed to move him much.
“You haven’t been in the office for days, and even when you’re there, you might as well not be. You’re losing your clients. Even Harrigan’s ready to write you off.”
“Good. I’m sick of it anyway. Let Harrigan find himself another money grubber.”
“So is that what you’re doing? Making some kind of protest against the system or something? If you don’t like the system, why don’t you just close those doors and go off to the mountains or an island somewhere? This way doesn’t show any brains at all, or any guts either.”
Truth. But he was beyond truth.
She stuck her hand in her coat pocket, pulled out a piece of paper and thrust it at him.
“Here. It’s my resignation. I’ll stay for another month. You know, for old time’s sake, like you and Harrigan, but then I’m gone.”
There did not seem to be anything to do except to take it. She had emptied the shallow pool of her anger. One soft, slow tear meandered down her cheek. Then she seemed to be leaving. It would be polite to open the door for her. At the door she suddenly turned to him, grabbed his hand, and squeezed it. Tears shined in her eyes.
“I read the book.”
“What book?” said the look on his face.
“Malory’s book,” she said. “Morte D’Arthur.”
He smiled suddenly, oddly, a little embarrassment of a smile.
“Do you remember it?” she asked.
“Not very well.”
“Then maybe you ought to read it again. Those knights did what they called ‘marvelous deeds.’ Maybe you do ‘marvelous deeds’ yourself, but something broken in you won’t let you see it. It was only the worthiest knights that received the gift. Only the worthiest ever got to see the Grail. It’s inside you, not out.”
She opened the door and let herself out as he tried to concentrate on what she had said, leaving him nothing except the fading scent of her perfume. Had he remembered it? Yes, that’s what she had asked him. No, he had not remembered it. He had forgotten all about it.
GEORGE OBJECTED TO O’Keefe calling him so early in the morning, and he had plenty to be surly about already. “If you’re gonna try and talk me into coming back, forget it. This rat ain’t staying around for the ship to sink.”
“I’ve got a job that only you can do. Besides, you’ll like it.”
“Is it sabotaging some union?”
“Come off it, George.”
“I’m not believing you, Pete. You forget where you came from or what?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“It seems to me you ain’t been thinking much at all lately.”
“Will you take the job or not?”
“I told you I’m not coming back.”
“You don’t have to come back. Just do this one job and do what you want after that.”
“I’ll tell you what. Maybe I’ll let you hire me as a consultant.”
“Consultant?”
“Independent contractor all the way. You don’t take out no taxes or nothin’.”
“Yeah. And then you won’t pay them and the IRS’ll make me pay twice.”
“That’s how it’s gotta be. You’re hiring a consultant.”
“Well, aren’t you hot shit? All right. How about coming over here and ‘consulting’ right away?”
IT CAME TO him as he waited for George. He wondered how long it had been right in front of him. The gestalt. That’s the way the gestalt worked. Now you don’t see it, now you do.
“Tomorrow you’re getting on a plane to Tucson,” he told George. “And when you get there, you’re going to the public library.”
“If it’s all the same to you, Boss, they’ve got more books than I can read right here in town.”
“You’re going to be reading local newspapers, George—the classified sections.”
“How exciting.”
“If you were a lady trying to hide, what would you do? You wouldn’t go to a dude ranch or a resort. If you were smart, you wouldn’t go anywhere you’d ever been before. You’d try to find some inconspicuous place, some remote place, to hole up in. If you’re that lady, maybe you already know of such a place. Maybe you even have an old friend who owns such a place or knows of such a place. But the last person you want to contact is that old friend. They might be able to trace you easy that way. No, you need to avoid the old contacts and find some place new.”
He sipped his coffee and took a drag off his cigarette. George was sniffing at the bait.
“If you were that lady,” he continued, “what you might do is read the classified ads, the section that says “Farms and Ranches for Rent.” You’re looking for someplace way out in the boondocks. You leave a trail that way too, because you have to rent it from someone, the owner or a real estate agent, probably an agent. You can’t help but leave some kind of trail, but this one’s at least harder to follow. And meanwhile, you’ll try to figure out how to get really lost, no trail behind you at all. You don’t exactly know how to get out of the country, but you speak fluent Spanish, and the border’s right there next to you, and you’ve got lots of time to figure it out, at least you hope you do, and there are smugglers all over southern Arizona, people smugglers, except they’re usually bringing the illegals in from the Mexican side, not from the American one. And if you can get into Mexico, all Spanish-speaking America opens up to you then. So if those classified ads give you any kind of choice at all, you choose a place as close to that border as you can.”
“So, George, you start reading those newspapers. We’re interested in everything from Tucson on east and south. But we focus first on the remotest possible places and the places closest to the border. You copy down the ads and the phone numbers of the people who’ve placed the ads. You go see them and take these pictures of Tag and L
enny. If we’re lucky, we find them pretty easily. If we’re not lucky, we start talking to the horse doctors.”
“Horse doctors?”
“It’s a long story that I hope I never have to tell you.”
“What about you? You coming out there?”
“Soon. But I have to do some trick-or-treating first.”
“What?”
“See you later. Leave as soon as you can. I figure you can get done with the newspapers tomorrow and be talking to the real estate people first thing Monday morning. I’ll be driving out. I should get there sometime on Monday or Tuesday.”
“Why drive?”
O’Keefe looked evasive. “Thought I’d see the country,” he said.
George knew O’Keefe was lying, but he left it alone, quickly downed his drink, and left. One little spark and he knew they might come to blows.
HARRIGAN DID NOT call for two days.
“It’s about time,” said O’Keefe.
“Actually, it’s pretty good service when you give me bum information and send me on a wild goose chase.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That guy Ullman isn’t from St. Louis. He’s from right here in town. He left about five years ago.”
“He sat there and lied to me. He must have hoped I wouldn’t check.”
“And the guy’s apparently a snake. He was a real wonder boy for a while. For a while he was Carter Kendall’s fair-haired boy over at First City Bank. Big corporate accounts, the best country club, wonderful family, all that shit. But Ullman had a taste for booze and broads and BMWs, and everybody was wondering how he could do all that on a banker’s salary, especially when his wife finally got fed up and divorced him and he’s got no assets left and has to pay all that alimony and child support. Then, all of a sudden, a couple of his accounts turn bad. Real bad. A couple of equipment-leasing scams. Lots of paperwork, lots of money going out, some coming in too for a while, then nothing; and then, when they go to find the equipment, it isn’t there; it never was there. He says he trusted the borrower, didn’t bother to check on the equipment after a while, just took the borrower’s word. The borrower whose word he thought was so good turns out to be a small-time mobster who goes to jail for the scam, but everybody knows there’s somebody bigger involved.”