by Keith Yocum
“Sorry,” he said getting into the car. “I lost track of time. I had trouble sleeping last night.”
“Jet lag is difficult, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes. Wish they’d come up with a pill for it.”
“Oh, I’m sure they will,” she said. “But knowing the pharmaceutical companies, the medicine will get you over jet lag but will cause your eyelashes to fall out. Or something like that.”
Dennis smiled and gave Judy a sidelong glance. She made a joke, he thought. A sense of humor. Interesting.
They drove in silence. Judy was preoccupied with how nonchalantly Phillip had dumped their son this coming weekend. Their son, Simon, was a boarder at St. Thomas, a very old and prestigious high school for boys in a suburb of Perth. For a few minutes, she forgot she had a passenger in her car.
By the time they had parked, Dennis was vaguely aware he might have offended her somehow, and he tried to figure out what he had said or done to piss her off.
Normally he did not care what anyone thought of him while on assignment. There was only one goal: deliver the goods. If he had to give short shrift to people’s feelings, well, so be it. Maybe it was just his nature to remain distant from those around him. He had not given it much thought, really.
Dennis was not himself lately, and the sessions with Dr. Forrester were taking a toll on what little self-confidence remained. Was he too harsh with other people? Did he have trouble with intimacy? He was undecided, but more self-observant than usual.
They walked several blocks in silence. For the first time he noticed the brightness of the buildings and his reflexive need to squint. Perth’s streets smelled different, of course—there was a kind of scrubbed cleanliness—and the pedestrians he passed walked at a much slower pace than he expected. One older gentleman actually said “G’day” as he passed.
“Here it is, Mr. Cunningham,” Judy said, slowing in front of a small retail window. A sign above the store read The Swiss Movement, and in smaller letters underneath: Watches and Clocks Sold, Purchased, and Repaired.
A small, portly, balding man in his late fifties looked up from behind the counter. He was sitting on a stool reading a newspaper and stood up when a quaint brass bell attached to the inside of the door signaled with a high-pitched tinkle.
“Mr. Shingley?” Judy said.
“Yes. Are you Agent White from the AFP?”
“Yes, and I have with me today Mr. Cunningham from the United States. He is here on official business, as I explained to you on the phone. He is investigating the disappearance of an employee from the US Consulate, a Mr. Geoffrey Jansen. We believe you knew him or had business with him, yes?”
Shingley looked closely at Judy and Dennis, forcing his chin downward slightly so he could see them clearly over his reading glasses.
“That is correct, Mrs. White,” he said slowly. “I was acquainted with the fellow. He purchased several watches from me. And I had several watches repaired for him as well. A nice fellow. Passionate about his watches, I must say. It’s quite tragic, his disappearance.”
Dennis looked around the small retail space. Shingley sat behind a long glass case that ran from the front window to the back of the store. Behind the counter were several shelves of clocks of all sizes and colors. He noticed, almost idly, that none of the clocks were synchronized.
Judy took out a small black recording device and placed it on the counter in front of Shingley. “It is standard procedure for us to record interviews,” she said. “Do you mind if I do that, Mr. Shingley?”
“Not at all: I’ve nothing to hide.”
“Of course not.”
Judy was uncertain whether she should proceed with her questions or whether the American wanted to lead. She felt a little foolish for not clearing up the question of protocol before the interview.
“Well, can you tell us how you met Mr. Jansen and provide an overview of your interactions with him?”
Dennis walked slowly around the small store, bending over the glass case and looking at the watches and other occasional pieces of jewelry. Each item had a delicate hand-written price tag attached to it by a very thin piece of bone-white thread. Most of the watches, to Dennis’s eye, looked old and weathered. He was surprised to see that some of them were worth three thousand dollars.
Judy could not tell whether the American was bored or disapproved of her questioning. She felt insecure and a little frustrated and began to dwell again on how she hated this assignment.
Shingley explained that Jansen had simply walked into the small shop about a year ago and perused his watches. The young American asked many questions about the origins of the watches in the case and seemed, to Shingley, to be judging the quality and authenticity of the selection.
Shingley related that after about a half hour of back and forth, Jansen asked to see one watch from the case.
“It was quite telling, actually,” Shingley said. “He chose to look at one of the most valuable watches in the store. It was a fine piece, a vintage men’s Rolex from the 1930s: a relatively rare watch that only collectors would appreciate. He was quite keen to look at it.”
“What was so rare about it?” Dennis spoke for the first time.
“It had a square case of rose gold and a leather strap: very popular style during the ’30s and ’40s.”
“How much was the watch?” Dennis asked.
“Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Did he buy it?” Dennis said.
“Oh, good heavens, no. Not then. No self-respecting collector would spend that much money on a piece without investigating it.”
“Investigating? What kind of investigating?”
“Well, after you certify that it’s authentic, you’d normally go onto the Internet and do a price check: see what it sells for, that kind of thing. He came back twice more and finally purchased it.”
“He spent twenty-five hundred on a watch? An old watch. Did he pay cash?”
“No, he used a credit card. And I must say, sir, that you do not understand the business of watch collecting. It is a serious and discriminating endeavor. We’re talking about exquisitely built mechanical timepieces. The young man was quite adept at picking value. In fact, he was enthralled by the entire industry and sometimes discussed new models from the European manufacturers, but he said he couldn’t afford those new watches.”
Dennis continued to look at the watches in the case, and Judy took his inaction as a signal for her to continue. She prodded Shingley for precise dates when the American had visited the store, but he was fuzzy on that. She asked him to show her the receipts of Jansen’s purchases, and the shopkeeper had already photocopied them in preparation for the visit and presented them to her in a vanilla-colored envelope.
After nearly forty-five minutes, Dennis said, “So what do you think happened to Jansen? Do you think someone might have wanted his watches?”
“I very much doubt that, sir,” Shingley said. “Collectors are not like that. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to the young man. To be honest, I was hoping he was going to buy another watch from me.”
“Which one?” Judy said.
“This one,” Shingley said, leaning over the top of the case and pointing downward with his stubby right forefinger.
“Can we see it?” she asked.
He reached behind the case, slid open the door from behind and gently retrieved a wristwatch, its tag following behind like a miniature seagull circling the beach. Before placing it on the glass case, Shingley put down a deep-purple velvet pad.
Dennis and Judy stooped over the case and looked at the watch. To Dennis it looked like a million other wristwatches: a round gold-colored case and a black, simple leather wristband. He could not see the price, so he turned over the tag.
“Thirty-two hundred dollars?”
While Judy was certainly no watch collector and did not understand paying that kind of money for old watches, she nevertheless appreciated that some people might find inte
rest and pleasure in collecting them. She was not sure Dennis felt the same.
“Dear sir,” Shingley said slowly and with pronounced umbrage, “this is a highly valued IWC Schaffhausen. It is eighteen-carat rose gold with a seventeen-jewel movement. It’s original with no new parts. It was made in the early 1960s, and your young American was quite taken by it, as are several other collectors.”
Judy noticed that Dennis glanced at her quickly, as if they were co-conspirators.
“Look, here’s my Seiko,” Dennis said, holding up his wrist. “Looks about the same to me. Cost about one-tenth the price of this thing. Probably keeps better time.”
God, why does he insist on doing that? Judy thought. Her face felt warm with embarrassment, and she was desperate to end the interchange.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Shingley,” she said, grabbing the digital recorder. “If we have any further questions, we will get back to you.”
Shingley glared at Dennis, his chin raised slightly in a posture of defiance. “Good day,” he said sharply.
The tinkle of the bell signaled their departure.
They walked in silence for a block until Dennis smelled the rich aroma of coffee.
“Hey,” he said, stopping, “can we get a cup of coffee? I could use a cup.”
Judy looked at her watch and didn’t speak, hoping he’d take the hint, but he walked into the small coffee shop and she followed.
The complexity of ordering coffee quickly overwhelmed Dennis as the woman behind the counter tried to explain his choices.
“What’s a flat white?” he asked.
“It’s like a cappuccino, sort of,” she said.
“How do I order a black coffee?”
“You ask for a long black,” she said, both to him and the woman behind the counter. After picking out a pastry, he said, “Oops. Hey, Judy, could you spot me a few dollars? I don’t have any local currency yet.”
She silently dug out several dollars and paid the attendant. Dennis had already sat down at a table, and with both hands raised the cup of coffee as if he were self-administering a sacrament.
Judy sat across from him and continued to look at her watch.
“Well,” Dennis said, “what did you think of our watch seller?”
Judy didn’t answer but looked out the window at the street behind the American.
“And what kind of accent did he have?” Dennis said.
“Accent?” she said.
“He didn’t have the same accent as you.”
“Oh, that’s what you mean,” she said. “He’s probably South African.”
“He sounded earnest enough about his watches,” Dennis said. “But what did you think of him?”
“Think?” Judy said.
“Yeah, what do you think about him? Could he be a suspect?”
“I have no idea,” she said perfunctorily. “It would take more than a single interview to decide that.”
“I know that,” Dennis said. “Was just wondering what you thought.”
“Well, to be perfectly honest, Mr. Cunningham, I thought your interrogation was a little heavy-handed,” she said carefully. “You seemed to want to confront him in a way that I’m not used to. It was a little . . .” she paused, searching for the right word, “aggressive.”
“That’s just my style,” he said. “I actually tried to tone it down a little.”
“That was toned down?” she said.
Immediately she was sorry for confronting her visitor and tried awkwardly to backtrack.
“Actually, Mr. Cunningham, it’s none of my business, really, how you manage your investigation. I don’t quite know why I just said what I did. Really. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how to investigate.”
She could feel the skin of her neck glow with heat as she blushed, and she reflexively raised her hand to adjust the collar of her blouse to cover the blemish.
Dennis noticed both how pretty and uncomfortable she was, sitting there in a red silk short-sleeve blouse and black skirt. She had her hair pulled back with a hairpiece, further accentuating her little upturned nose. Her complexion was lightly freckled, though her neck was a blotchy red as she blushed. Again he wondered how old she was.
“You’re entitled to say whatever you want,” he said. “And believe me, you wouldn’t be the first to mention my confrontational style. I’m sorry it made you uncomfortable.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll figure out another approach one of these days,” he said, leaning back in his chair and looking into the street behind her. “Old habits die hard.”
He sipped his coffee and said, as an afterthought, “Can you run a background check on him?”
“Certainly.” She stood up. “I really must be going.”
They walked back to the car in silence, and Dennis wondered idly about Mr. Shingley and his relationship with Garder. There might have been a lot of money wrapped up in the watches that were left in Garder’s apartment. But then again, the watches were still in Garder’s drawer, not stolen.
On the ride back to the hotel, Dennis grew pensive. Judy made small talk, asking about his impressions of Western Australia just to break the silence. When she dropped him off at the hotel, he seemed glad to leave the car.
Chapter 8
The young American woman sitting across from Dennis was quite pretty. He wondered idly about his own daughter, and he grew distracted by his recent phone conversation with Beth.
“Sir?” the woman said.
“Yes,” Dennis said, collecting himself. “So you knew Mr. Jansen for nearly all his time here, and I gather were one of his ‘party friends.’”
“Mr. Cunningham, as I told you already, we weren’t, like, romantically involved. The way you put it, it sounds like we were hooking up or something. We went out as a group. There were a bunch of us all about the same age, and we did things together.”
“You weren’t attracted to him?”
“No. We were friends!” she repeated. “You keep trying to insinuate things like that, and you’re upsetting me, Mr. Cunningham.”
“Why are you upset?”
“Because you seem to keep suggesting we were lovers. That’s stupid, and I feel like you’re trying to trap me.”
Dennis noticed her eyes were beginning to well up, and again he heard a tiny little bird chirp a warning.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Dennis said.
“No, do you?” she said defiantly.
“No, I don’t,” Dennis said.
“Miss Carter, do you know what Mr. Jansen did here at the consulate?”
“No,” she said, wiping one of her eyes. “But there are a lot of people here that I don’t know what they do.”
“Did he ever talk about his work, his assignments?”
“No, not really. Just that he did a lot of traveling around the state. He was teased a little bit because he would be gone for weeks at a time, and we all said we wanted his job. To be out of the office and driving around: seemed liked fun.”
“Did he tell folks what he was doing driving around the state?”
“No.”
“Did he ever argue with anyone in the group?”
“He wasn’t like that. Geoff was a really nice guy and would never argue and be loud.”
“Did he have any hobbies?”
She laughed, and Dennis was relieved to have changed the mood. “Well, he had unusual hobbies: things that I thought were cool.”
“Like what things?”
“Well, like watches. He would tease me about my watch; it was a Timex. And he would talk about how those kinds of watches were mass-produced and did not have the workmanship of mechanical watches. He was pretty intense about that, but in a good way. I certainly learned a lot about watches. And he helped me get a nice watch, too,” she said, holding up her wrist to show a stainless steel timepiece.
“How did he do that?”
“He told me that he’
d sell my Timex on eBay, take the money, and buy a nice, older mechanical watch. I had to throw in about a hundred more, but it seemed like a good idea. So he showed me this one online and I bought it. It’s an old Tudor, which is, like, the cheap line of watches from Rolex.”
“Besides watches, did he have any other hobbies?”
“Well, I guess you’d call poetry a hobby for him.” She smiled. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t understand his poetry thing but, like, he’d suddenly speak a line from a poem to make a point. Or sometimes he’d just compose something out of thin air. He’d say it with, like, a dramatic flair. We just laughed at him, but he didn’t mind. Like I said, he wasn’t a self-conscious guy or anything.”
Not like me, Dennis thought.
Now with her guard down again, Dennis moved in quickly.
“Did he like to do drugs?” Dennis said.
Her face hardened, and she said sharply, “We didn’t do drugs.”
“Any drugs?”
“Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have any idea what happened to Mr. Jansen?”
“Nope.”
“Anything else you wanted to tell me about Mr. Jansen?”
“Nope.”
As the young woman left the small office, Casolano, the consulate’s PR man, put his head in. “The CG would like to see you, Mr. Cunningham. He’s in his office now if you’d like to follow me.”
Dennis had experienced another night full of vaguely disturbing dreams. As he walked to the CG’s office, he felt tired, and for the first time since he had taken on the assignment, he wanted to go home. This, by itself, was new. Dennis relished the hunt and tolerated everything, really, until the prey was cornered and bagged. Sometimes the prey was a person, sometimes just a piece of information. But it always needed to be hunted down.
Now, in an odd twist, he wondered when he could go home.
St. Regis served up a wan smile as Dennis sat down.
“How is your investigation going?”
“Fine.”