by Harlan Coben
When Myron told him about bodyguarding Brenda Slaughter, Win suddenly stopped and broke out in song: “AND I-I-I-I-I-I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU-OU-OU-OU-OU-OU-OU.”
Myron looked at him. Win stopped, put his face back in place, continued walking. “When I sing that,” Win said, “it’s almost like Whitney Houston is in the room.”
“Yeah,” Myron said. “Or something.”
“So what is the Aches’ interest in all this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Perhaps TruPro just wishes to represent her.”
“Doubtful. She’ll make somebody money but not enough for pulling this.”
Win thought about it, nodded his agreement. They headed east on Fiftieth Street. “Young FJ might pose a problem.”
“Do you know him?”
“A bit. He is something of an intriguing story. Daddy groomed him to go legit. He sent him to Lawrenceville, then to Princeton, finally Harvard. Now he’s setting him up in the business of representing athletes.”
“But.”
“But he resents it. He is still Frank Ache’s son and thus wants his approval. He needs to show that despite the upbringing, he’s still a tough guy. Worse, he is genetically Frank Ache’s son. My guess? If you trample through FJ’s childhood, you’ll stumble across many a legless spider and wingless fly.”
Myron shook his head. “This is definitely not a good thing.”
Win said nothing. They hit the Lock-Horne Building on Forty-seventh Street. Myron got off the elevator on the twelfth floor. Win stayed in, his office being two flights up. When Myron looked at the reception desk—the place where Esperanza usually sat—he nearly jumped back. Big Cyndi sat silently watching him. She was far too big for the desk—far too big for the building, really—and the desk actually teetered on her knees. Her makeup would be labeled “too garish” by members of Kiss. Her hair was short and seaweed green. The T-shirt she wore had the sleeves ripped off, revealing biceps the size of basketballs.
Myron gave her a tentative wave. “Hello, Cyndi.”
“Hello, Mr. Bolitar.”
Big Cyndi was six-six, three hundred pounds and had been Esperanza’s tag team wrestling partner, known in the ring as Big Chief Mama. For years Myron had only heard her growl, never speak. But her voice could be anything she wanted. When she worked as a bouncer at Leather-N-Lust on Tenth Street, she put on an accent that made Arnold Schwarzenegger sound like a Gabor sister. Right now, she was doing her perky Mary-Richards-off-decaf.
“Is Esperanza here?” he asked.
“Miss Diaz is in Mr. Bolitar’s office.” She smiled at him. Myron tried not to cringe. Forget what he’d said about Frank Ache—this smile made his fillings hurt.
He excused himself and headed into his office. Esperanza was at his desk, talking on the phone. She wore a bright yellow blouse against the olive skin that always made him think of stars shimmering off the warm water in the Amalfi bay. She looked up at him, signaled to give her a minute with a finger, and kept on talking. Myron sat down across from her. It was an interesting perspective, seeing what clients and corporate sponsors saw when they sat in his office. The Broadway musical posters behind his chair—too desperate, he decided. Like he was trying to be irreverent for irreverence sake.
When she finished the call, Esperanza said, “You’re late.”
“Frank Ache wanted to see me.”
She crossed her arms. “He need a fourth for mah-jongg?”
“He wanted to know about Brenda Slaughter.”
Esperanza nodded. “So we got trouble.”
“Maybe.”
“Dump her.”
“No.”
She looked at him with flat eyes. “Tattoo me surprised.”
“Did you get anything on Horace Slaughter?”
She grabbed a piece of paper. “Horace Slaughter. None of his credit cards have been used in the past week. He has one bank account at Newark Fidelity. Balance: zero dollars.”
“Zero?”
“He cleaned it out.”
“How much?”
“Eleven grand. In cash.”
Myron whistled and leaned back. “So he was planning on running. That fits with what we saw in his apartment.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got a harder one for you,” Myron said. “His wife, Anita Slaughter.”
“They still married?”
“I don’t know. Maybe legally. She ran away twenty years ago. I don’t think they ever bothered with a divorce.”
She frowned. “Did you say twenty years ago?”
“Yes. Apparently no one has seen her since then.”
“And what exactly are we trying to find?”
“In a word: her.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“Not a clue. Like I said, she’s been missing for twenty years.”
Esperanza waited a beat. “She could be dead.”
“I know.”
“And if she’s managed to stay hidden this long, she could have changed her name. Or left the country.”
“Right.”
“And there’d be few records, if any, from twenty years ago. Certainly nothing on the computer.”
Myron smiled. “Don’t you hate it when I make it too easy?”
“I realize I’m only your lowly assistant—”
“You’re not my lowly assistant.”
She gave him a look. “I’m not your partner either.”
That quieted him.
“I realize that I’m only your lowly assistant,” she said again, “but do we really have time for this bullshit?”
“Just do a standard check. See if we get lucky.”
“Fine.” Her tone was like a door slamming shut. “But we got other things to discuss here.”
“Shoot.”
“Milner’s contract. They won’t renegotiate.”
They dissected the Milner situation, batted it around a bit, developed and fine-tuned a strategy, and then concluded that their strategy would not work. Behind them Myron could hear the construction starting. They were cutting space out of the waiting area and conference room to make a private office for Esperanza.
After a few minutes Esperanza stopped and stared at him.
“What?”
“You’re going to follow through with this,” she said. “You’re going to search for her parents.”
“Her father is an old friend of mine.”
“Oh Christ, please don’t say, ‘I owe him.’”
“It’s not just that. It’s good business.”
“It’s not good business. You’re out of the office too much. Clients want to talk to you directly. So do the sponsors.”
“I have my cellular.”
Esperanza shook her head. “We can’t keep going on like this.”
“Like what?”
“Either you make me a partner or I walk.”
“Don’t hit me with that now, Esperanza. Please.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Stalling.”
“I’m not stalling.”
She gave him a look that was half harsh, half pity. “I know how you hate change—”
“I don’t hate change.”
“—but one way or the other, things are going to be different. So get over it.”
Part of him wanted to yell, Why? Things were good the way they were. Hadn’t he been the one who encouraged her to get a law degree in the first place? A change, sure, he expected that after her graduation. He had been slowly giving her new responsibilities. But a partnership?
He pointed behind him. “I’m building you an office,” he said.
“So?”
“So doesn’t that scream commitment? You can’t expect me to rush this. I’m taking baby steps here.”
“You took one baby step, and then you fell on your ass.” She stopped, shook her head. “I haven’t pushed you on this since we were down at Merion.” The golf U.S. Open in Philadelphia. Myron
was in the midst of finding a kidnap victim when she hit him with her partnership demands. Since then, he had been, well, er, stalling.
Esperanza stood. “I want to be a partner. Not full. I understand that. But I want equity.” She walked to the door. “You have a week.”
Myron was not sure what to say. She was his best friend. He loved her. And he needed her here. She was a part of MB. A big part. But things were not that simple.
Esperanza opened the door and leaned against the frame. “You going to see Brenda Slaughter now?”
He nodded. “In a few minutes.”
“I’ll start the search. Call me in a few hours.”
She closed the door behind her. Myron went around to his chair and picked up the phone. He dialed Win’s number.
Win picked up on the first ring. “Articulate.”
“You got plans for tonight?”
“Moi? But of course.”
“Typical evening of demeaning sex?”
“Demeaning sex,” Win repeated. “I told you to stop reading Jessica’s magazines.”
“Can you cancel?”
“I could,” he said, “but the lovely lass will be very disappointed.”
“Do you even know her name?”
“What? Off the top of my head?”
One of the construction workers started hammering. Myron put a hand over his free ear. “Could we meet at your place? I need to bounce a few things off you.”
Win did not hesitate. “I am but a brick wall awaiting your verbal game of squash.”
Myron guessed that meant yes.
Brenda Slaughter’s team, the New York Dolphins, practiced at Englewood High School in New Jersey. Myron felt a tightness in his chest when he entered the gym. He heard the sweet echo of dribbling basketballs; he savored the high school gym scent, that mix of strain and youth and uncertainty. Myron had played in huge venues, but whenever he walked into a new gymnasium, even as a spectator, he felt as if he’d been dropped through a time portal.
He climbed up the steps of one of those wooden space-saving pull-out stands. As always, it shook with each step. Technology may have made advancements in our daily lives, but you wouldn’t know it from a high school gymnasium. Those velvet banners still hung from one wall, showing a variety of state or country or group championships. There was a list of track and field records down one corner. The electric clock was off. A tired janitor swept the hardwood floor, moving in a curling up-and-down pattern like a Zamboni on a hockey rink.
Myron spotted Brenda Slaughter shooting foul shots. Her face was lost in the simple bliss of this purest of motions. The ball backspun off her fingertips; it never touched the rim, but the net jumped a bit at the bottom. She wore a sleeveless white T-shirt over what looked like a black tube top. Sweat shimmered on her skin.
Brenda looked over at him and smiled. It was an unsure smile, like a new lover on that first morning. She dribbled the ball toward him and threw him a pass. He caught it, his fingers automatically finding the grooves.
“We need to talk,” he said.
She nodded and sat next to him on the bench. Her face was wide and sweaty and real.
“Your father cleared out his bank account before he disappeared,” Myron said.
The serenity fled from her face. Her eyes flicked away, and she shook her head. “This is too weird.”
“What?” Myron said.
She reached toward him and took the ball from his hands. She held on to it as though it might grow wings and fly off. “It’s so like my mother,” she said. “First the clothes gone. Now the money.”
“Your mother took money?”
“Every dime.”
Myron looked at her. She kept her eyes on the ball. Her face was suddenly so guileless, so frail, Myron felt something inside him crumble. He waited a moment before changing the subject. “Was Horace working before he disappeared?”
One of her teammates, a white woman with a ponytail and freckles, called out to her and clapped her hands for the ball. Brenda smiled and led her with a one-armed pass. The ponytail bounced up and down as the woman speed-dribbled toward the basket.
“He was a security guard at St. Barnabas Hospital,” Brenda said. “You know it?”
Myron nodded. St. Barnabas was in Livingston, his hometown.
“I work there too,” she said. “In the pediatric clinic. Sort of a work-study program. I helped him get the job. That’s how I first knew he was missing. His supervisor called me and asked where he was.”
“How long had Horace been working there?”
“I don’t know. Four, five months.”
“What’s his supervisor’s name?”
“Calvin Campbell.”
Myron took out a notecard and wrote it down.
“Where else does Horace hang out?”
“Same places,” she said.
“The courts?”
Brenda nodded. “And he still refs high school games twice a week.”
“Any close friends who might help him out?”
She shook her head. “No one in particular.”
“How about family members?”
“My aunt Mabel. If there is anyone he’d trust, it’s his sister Mabel.”
“She live near here?”
“Yeah. In West Orange.”
“Could you give her a call for me? Tell her I’d like to drop by.”
“When?”
“Now.” He looked at his watch. “If I hurry, I can be back before practice is over.”
Brenda stood. “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. I’ll call her.”
On the ride to Mabel Edwards’s house, Myron’s cellular phone rang. It was Esperanza. “Norm Zuckerman is on the line,” she said.
“Patch it through.”
There was a click.
“Norm?” Myron said.
“Myron, sweetie, how are you?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good. You learn anything yet?”
“No.”
“Good, okay, fine.” Norm hesitated. His jocular tone was a little off, forced. “Where are you?”
“In my car.”
“I see, I see, okay. Look, Myron, you going to go over to Brenda’s practice?”
“I just came from there.”
“You left her alone?”
“She’s at practice. A dozen people are there with her. She’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Look, Myron, we need to talk. When can you get back to the gym?”
“I should be back in an hour. What’s this about, Norm?”
“An hour. I’ll see you then.”
Aunt Mabel lived in West Orange, a suburb outside Newark. West Orange was one of those “changing” suburbs, the percentage of white families sinking bit by bit. It was the spreading effect. Minorities scratched their way out of the city and into the nearest suburbs; the whites then wanted out of said suburbs and moved still farther away from the city. In real estate terms this was known as progress.
Still, Mabel’s tree-lined avenue seemed a zillion light-years from the urban blight that Horace called home. Myron knew the town of West Orange well. His own hometown of Livingston bordered it. Livingston too was starting to change. When Myron was in high school, the town had been white. Very white. Snow white. It had been so white that of the six hundred kids in Myron’s graduating class, only one was black—and he was on the swim team. Can’t get much whiter than that.
The house was a one-level structure—fancier folks might call it a ranch—the kind of place that probably had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a finished basement with a used pool table. Myron parked his Ford Taurus in the driveway.
Mabel Edwards was probably late forties, maybe younger. She was a big woman with a fleshy face, loosely curled hair, and a dress that looked like old drapes. When she opened the door, she gave Myron a smile that turned her ordinary features into something almost celestial. A pair of half-moon reading glasses h
ung from a chain, resting on her enormous chest. There was a puffiness in her right eye, remnants of a contusion maybe. She gripped some sort of knitting project in her hand.
“Goodness me,” she said. “Myron Bolitar. Come in.”
Myron followed her inside. The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you’re a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you’re an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day. “I put coffee on, Myron. Would you like some?”
“That would be nice, thank you.”
“Sit down over there. I’ll be right back.”
Myron grabbed a seat on a stiff sofa with a flowered print.
For some reason he put his hands in his lap. As if he were waiting for a schoolteacher. Myron glanced about. There were African sculptures made of wood on the coffee table. The fireplace mantel was lined with family photographs. Almost all of them featured a young man who looked vaguely familiar. Mabel Edwards’s son, he guessed. It was the standard parental shrine—that is, you could follow the offspring’s life from infancy through adulthood with the images in these frames. There was a baby photo, those school portraits with the rainbow background, a big Afro playing basketball, a tuxedo-and-date prom, a couple of graduations, blah, blah, blah. Corny, yes, but these photo montages always touched Myron, exploiting his overtuned sensitivity like a sappy Hallmark commercial.
Mabel Edwards came back into the living room with a tray. “We met once before,” she said.
Myron nodded, trying to remember. Something played along the edges, but it wouldn’t come into focus.
“You were in high school.” She handed him a cup on a saucer. Then she pushed the tray with cream and sugar toward him. “Horace took me to one of your games. You were playing Shabazz.”
It came back to Myron. Junior year, the Essex County tournament. Shabazz was short for Malcolm X Shabazz High School of Newark. The school had no whites. Its starting five featured guys named Rhahim and Khalid. Even back then Shabazz High had been surrounded by a barbwire fence with a sign that read GUARD DOGS ON DUTY.