by Robert Crais
Teri said, “If it will make you feel better.” Ignoring Charles.
Lucy disappeared into the rear. Teresa looked back at me and cocked her head. I shrugged. “She’s a mother.”
“Did you have second thoughts about helping us?”
“I wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”
“So you followed us.”
“Sure.” Grilled by a kid. “I wanted to see your living conditions. Also, Charles stole a figurine from my office.”
Charles yelled, “I didn’t do anything!” He made a big deal out of waving his arms and pulling at his hair. “Why does everyone blame me?” Drama.
Teri said, “Charles.” Her eyes narrowed and it sounded like a warning.
I held out my hand. “Give it over, kid.”
Charles dug the Jiminy out of his pocket and threw it on the floor. “Frig!”
Teri glared lasers at him. “Charles.”
Charles scooped up the Jiminy, then skulked over with it, ready to run in case I tried to hit him.
He put it in my hand, then scuttled away. I looked at the Jiminy, then tossed it back to him. “Keep it.”
Charles looked surprised.
Teresa said, “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
She said, “I’m sorry about this.”
I shook my head. It happens.
Teresa Haines took a breath, then said, “So you’ve seen that we’re fine.”
“Looks like you’ve got things under control.”
“So you won’t have to call the police.”
I looked into the calm eyes, only they weren’t so calm anymore. A tiny flame of fear was burning behind the oval glasses. “You were aware of that possibility when you came to see me, yet you came anyway. You must be very concerned for your father.”
The flame grew brighter and her face worked, and then the flame was gone and the eyes were calm again. She had fought to control herself, and she had won. Some kid. She said, “Of course I’m concerned. He’s my father.”
Lucy came back and headed into the kitchen. “Your room is very neat, Teresa. Do you share it with Winona?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The smile. “Charles’s room is a mess.”
Teresa said, “I know. You can’t get him to make his bed.”
Lucy laughed. “I know what that’s like. I have an eight-year-old son who’s the same way.”
Charles made the coughing sound, and this time you could make out the word “Bitch.”
I said, “Hey.”
Charles skulked into the dining room as far from me as he could get, put the Jiminy on the table, and pretended to play with it.
I could hear Lucy open the refrigerator and the stove and the pantry. A serious inspection was taking place, and it was coming from somewhere very female. Something was happening between Lucy and Teresa and, in a way I didn’t quite understand, I was no longer a part of it. “What do you and your brother and sister eat, Teresa?”
“I cook for us.”
Winona said, “I cook, too.”
Lucy came back and smiled at Winona. “I’ll bet you’re a good cook, honey.”
“We make spaghetti.”
“My favorite. Did you have spaghetti for breakfast?”
Winona laughed. “We had Cheerios.”
Lucy smiled at Winona again, then glanced at me and nodded. I said, “Is there food?”
“Yes.”
Teresa said, “I shop and cook for us even when Daddy’s home. It’s no big thing.” She seemed affronted that anyone would think otherwise.
I said, “We just wondered, that’s all. It looks like you’re in good shape.”
Teresa looked hopeful. “Then you aren’t going to turn us in to Children’s Services?”
I frowned at her. “You’re underage. You can’t live here alone.”
Lucy hooked her arm through mine, and squeezed. Tight. She smiled warmly at Teresa. “He won’t call them just yet, dear, but we’ll have to consider that as we go.”
Now I frowned at Lucy. “What’s this ‘we’ business?”
Lucy squeezed tighter. “But don’t you worry about that for now, Teri. Right now, he’s going to find your father.”
I said, “I am?”
Lucy turned the warm smile my way. “Of course you are. If you know what’s good for you.”
I said, “Mm.”
Lucy turned back to Teresa. “Have you eaten dinner yet?”
“I was about to cook.”
Lucy beamed. “We were just on our way to a very nice restaurant. Why don’t you join us?” She gave my arm a little shake. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I said, “Mm.”
Winona said, “I want spaghetti.”
I phoned Border Grill and asked if they could make the reservation for a party of five. They could.
The five of us went to dinner—me, Lucy, Teresa, Winona, and Charles. We had to take the Saturn. Winona sat between Lucy and me; Charles threw a sauteed shrimp at the waitress, tried to steal a pepper mill, and ate two desserts. The bill came to a hundred eighty-two fifty.
Mm.
3
I took Lucy to LAX early the next morning and waited with her at the gate. When it was time to board we held each other, and then she disappeared into the jetway. I went to the observation window, stared at her plane, and tried not to look depressed.
An older gentleman with a walking stick appeared at the glass next to me and shook his head, glum. “Another visit, another parting.” He shook his head some more. “Me, I never say good-bye.”
“Good-byes are tough, all right.”
“They’re permanent. You say good-bye, you’re inviting disaster.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean, permanent?”
“The big birds come in, the big birds go out, and you never know what’s going to happen.” He sighed. “I hope nobody put a bomb.”
I looked at him harder. “Do I know you?”
He made a shrug.
“I think I’ve seen you here before.” He was stooped and balding with baggy, old-man pants.
He shrugged again. “God knows, it’s possible. I spend my whole life in this place, picking people up, sending people off. All without a good-bye.”
“I’m pretty certain.”
He patted my arm and smiled. It was a kindly smile, and wise. “That’s where you’re wrong, young man. The only thing certain is death.” He patted my arm again and leaned close. “I hope you didn’t say good-bye. For her sake.”
Great.
I left him at the window, walked out to the car, and took Sepulveda Boulevard north through the city, the footloose and fancy-free detective reentering the workaday world. I was missing Lucy already and feeling grumpy because of it, but I was also excited and hopeful. She felt that the job with KROK was going to work out, and, if it did, she and her son, Ben, would move here and then I could see her all the time. Thinking about that made me smile, and the grumpiness faded. The sun had climbed nicely, the air had warmed, and a slight orange haze was building in the east past Baldwin Hills. Perfect convertible weather even with the coming smog.
I followed Sepulveda north to Washington Boulevard, then turned east past the old MGM Studios to La Cienega when I spotted a gray Chrysler LeBaron edging across the white line three cars behind me. He stayed on the line a few seconds without changing lanes, the way you do when you want to see something ahead of you, and then he disappeared. I thought that maybe it was the same LeBaron I had seen outside Teri Haines’s home, but then I said, “Nah.” I was probably watching too many episodes of Cops.
Fifteen minutes later I parked behind Teri Haines’s Saturn and went to the door. I kind of expected to find the house in smoking ruins, but I guess Charles had passed out from overeating. Lighten up, Cole. He’s only a kid. Sure. They probably said that when Attila was a kid, too.
Teresa answered the door in jeans and pink Keds and an oversized white T-shirt. I said, “W
here are Charles and Winona?”
“I took them to school.” I guess she could read my surprise. “Charles is in sixth grade and Winona is in third. You don’t think I’d let them grow up stupid, do you?”
“I guess not.” Put in my place by a fifteen-year-old.
The house was as neat and clean as it had been yesterday, only now it was quiet. A washing machine chunked somewhere beyond the kitchen and street sounds sifted in through the windows. Teresa let me in, and stood well to the side as she showed me into the living room. Watchful. “Would you like coffee? I always make coffee before I take them to school.” A blue mug sat steaming on the coffee table atop an issue of Seventeen.
“What about you?”
“I have a cup.”
“I meant about school.”
She sat at the edge of the couch and laced her fingers over a knee. She was so close to the edge that I thought she might slip off. “We move around a lot, and I got tired of always being the new kid, so I took the GED exam last year when we moved to Arizona.” GED. General Equivalency Diploma. “I don’t go to school.”
“Ah.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, but is talking about me going to help you find my father?”
“Maybe. You just told me that you used to live in Arizona, which is something I didn’t know. Maybe he went there.”
She flushed a hard red behind the glasses. I guess she didn’t like being shown up either.
“If I’m going to find your dad, I’m going to need what we in the trade call a lead. That means I’ll ask you a lot of questions, you’ll tell me what you know, and maybe we’ll get somewhere. You see?”
She nodded, but she wasn’t happy about it.
I took out my pen and prepared to make notes. “Tell me about him.”
Her father’s name was Clark Rudy Haines. He was thirty-nine years old, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred fifty-two pounds. He had light brown hair, though he had lost most of it years ago, and brown eyes. He wore glasses. She told me about the glasses, then she had some of the coffee, and then she stared at me.
I said, “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I need more than that.”
She looked uncomfortable, as if she couldn’t imagine more than that. As if she was suddenly thinking that having me here was a bad idea, and she was wishing that she’d never come to my office.
I tapped my pen on the pad. “You said he was a printer. Tell me about that.”
“Okay.” She said that her father was a commercial offset operator, and that they had left Tucson for Los Angeles because he had been offered a job with Enright Quality Printing in Culver City. She told me that he had been laid off, and that he had been concerned about finding another job. Then she shut up and watched me some more.
“So you think he left in search of another job?”
“Oh yes.”
“He’s done this before?”
“Not for this long.” She explained that printing was a nomadic life because companies got big contract orders and hired printers like her father to fill those orders, but that when the jobs were done, the printers were let go. She said that when her father was let go, he would have to look around for another job and that was why they moved around so much.
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
She looked surprised. “We move around too much for that.”
“How about friends?”
She frowned, thinking hard. “I don’t think he has any friends here either. He might’ve in Tucson.”
I thought about her GED. I thought about her not liking being the new kid in school. “How about you?”
“What?”
“Do you have friends?”
She sipped more coffee and didn’t answer. Guess they moved around too much for that, too.
“Does your father have a criminal record?”
“No.”
“Does he gamble? Maybe hit the card clubs down in Belflower or put money on sporting events?”
“No.”
“He drink, or have a history of mental problems?”
“Absolutely not.” The fifteen-year-old face hardened and she gripped the cup with both hands. “Why are you asking questions like that?”
“Because a man doesn’t just walk away from his children.”
“You make it sound like he abandoned us.”
I stared at her, and the washing machine changed cycles.
“He isn’t anything like that. He isn’t a drunk, or have brain problems. He’s a good father. He’s kind and sweet, and he’s been gone before, but he’s always come back.” She shook her head. “There are too many printers and too few jobs. When you hear of something you have to follow up fast or you’ll lose out.” She looked affronted, like how could I suggest anything else? “I’m worried that he went somewhere and had an accident. What if he has amnesia?” Amnesia.
I circled Enright Printing on the little pad. “Okay. I’ll talk to the folks at Enright and see if they know something. Also, it might help if I had a picture.”
She frowned. “I don’t think we have a picture.”
“Everybody has pictures.”
She bit at her lower lip. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, maybe you have a snapshot.” I knew a friend with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She had about a zillion pictures of her cat and her friends and siblings and vacations and school and things. Boxes of the stuff.
Teresa shook her head. “I guess we’re just not camera people.”
I put away the pad and stood. “Okay, let’s go look in your dad’s bedroom.”
She looked horrified. “I don’t think he’d like us snooping in his room.”
I spread my hands. “When you hire a private eye, you hire a snooper. Snooping is how you find people who walk away without telling you where they’ve gone. Snooping is what I do.”
She didn’t like this either, but we went along a little hall and into a bedroom at the back of the house. It was a small room, sparsely furnished with a double bed and a dresser and a nightstand. There were no photographs on the nightstand or the dresser, but large ink drawings of all three children were thumbtacked to the walls. The drawings were done on coarse construction paper with colored felt-tip pens, and appeared to have been torn from a notebook. They were signed CH. “Wow. Did your father do these?”
“Yes.”
“He’s some artist.” The drawings were almost photographic in their realism.
“Unh-hunh.”
When I opened the dresser’s top drawer Teresa stiffened, but said nothing. I looked through the dresser and the nightstand. Maybe a half-dozen undershirts and underwear and socks were in the dresser, and not much else. There was a closet, but there wasn’t much in it, just a single sport coat and a couple of pairs of thin slacks and a raincoat. “Does it look like he packed for a long trip?”
She peeked into the closet like something might jump out at her, then shook her head. “Well, I know he had two coats, and two pairs of pants are missing.”
“Okay. So he packed some things.”
“I guess so.”
I stood in the center of the room and tried to come up with an idea. “Do you have any pictures of your mother?” If there was a picture of the mother, maybe Clark would be in it, too.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Jesus. I had never seen a house without pictures before.
“Okay. Forget pictures. Where does he keep the credit card receipts and bank statements and things like that?”
“We don’t use credit cards.”
I stared at her.
“We pay for everything with cash. When you’re on a budget, cash is the best way to manage your money.” She was very certain of herself when she said it.
“Okay. No pictures, no credit cards.” No clues.
“We have a checking account and a savings account, though. Would you like to see them?”
“That, and your phone bills.”
; The eyes narrowed again. “Why would you need to see that?”
“The phone bills will show any toll calls made from or charged to your phone. You see?” My head was starting to throb. I guess she wanted me to find him without clues. Maybe I was supposed to use telepathy.
But she finally said, “Well, okay.” Grudgingly.
“You know where to find that stuff?”
“Of course I know where to find it.” Offended.
I thought that she might find the stuff in her father’s room, or maybe lead me out to the kitchen, but she didn’t. She brought me to her room. Two twin beds were set against adjoining walls, a small army of stuffed animals on one, pictures of David Duchovny, Dean Cain, and Gillian Anderson above the other. Again, there were no photographs of Teri or her family. I said, “Who likes Duchovny?”
Teri turned red and disappeared into her closet. Guess I’d gotten my answer.
She reappeared with a shoe box held together by a large rubber band. She put the box on the empty bed, then sorted out thin packets of paper held together with large paper clips. She knew exactly what was what and where it belonged. “Are the phone bills in there?”
“Un-huh.” A large wad of cash was mixed in with the packets, even larger than the roll she’d brought to my office. She saw me looking at the cash, frowned, then put it in her pocket. Better safe than sorry.
Far away something chimed, and Teri stood. “That’s the washing machine. I have to put our clothes in the dryer.”
“Okay.”
The checking and savings accounts were from the First Western Bank of Tucson, Arizona. The savings account was a simple passbook account with a balance of $1,104.16, and showed no unusual deposits or withdrawals. The checking account held a balance of $861.47, with the last deposit having been made just before they’d left Tucson for Los Angeles. The entry record was neat and orderly and made in a teenage girl’s rounded hand. I put the banking papers aside and paged through the phone bills. Since they had been in Los Angeles for only four and a half months, there were only four bills, and most of the toll calls were in the LA area, with more than half to Culver City. Most of those were in the first month. Probably Clark looking for a job, but maybe not. Two of the calls were to Tucson, and five to Seattle, three of the Seattle calls made in the last month, and two of them lengthy. When Teri came back, I said, “Who’s in Seattle?”