by John Moralee
I went home, and he stayed at the bar. I had a hot shower and changed into smarter clothes for the dinner with Scott and his family. I was really looking forward to it, but things didn’t work out as expected.
Chapter 3
At eight I walked up the drive to Scott and Fiona’s house. The evening was sultry with a cool sea breeze that rustled the hanging baskets over the gabled porch. Their house looked warm and friendly. It was big, but it was also quaint. You could tell children lived here. There was a wooden swing in the garden, and, as I passed it, I could not resist giving it a push, imagining a child enjoying it. I carried a bottle of non-alcoholic wine up to the door. Almost the instant I pressed the doorbell, Fiona opened the door. She looked like a supermodel in a black strapless evening dress. Her blonde hair was up in bangs, curling over her ears like gold streamers. She had a bewitching smile. Two smaller clones of her watched from the end of the hall. They were wearing pink party dresses.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Michael,” she said, with some urgency, “tell me Scott’s with you.”
“No, he’s not. Why?”
“Damn.”
“He said he’d be here.”
“He was,” she said, her smile evaporating, “until an hour ago. But then he got a phone call and went out in the car. I thought he’d gone to pick you up?”
“No.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No.”
“I’m worried,” she said.
“Maybe he’s at the office?”
“Maybe. I’ll … I’ll phone it.” She shivered at the cold air. “Oh, please come in. Make yourself comfortable in the lounge. Sorry for the poor introduction … welcome to our home.”
In the lounge, I sat down on a stylish leather sofa. The girls sat opposite, staring at me. Fiona went to the coffee table and picked up the telephone. She pressed speed-dial and waited for it to connect. Someone spoke on the other end. She frowned. “He’s not in his office? Right. Thanks, Lisa.”
“Lisa?”
“His secretary.”
She chewed her lip, thinking. “I’ll try his cellular again.”
While she was doing that, I tried talking to the girls. But they were shy and preferred to whisper things to each other.
Fiona tried the phone three, four times. “I can’t get through. The machine says it’s not working.”
“Does he often do this?”
“Never,” she said, firmly.
I believed her. No man would leave Fiona for any longer than necessary. “Maybe he went to the mall for some ingredients?”
She shook her head.
Her youngest daughter pulled at her hand. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, baby.” To me, she said: “Nothing – yet. I suppose we should wait for him. He can’t be long, can he?”
She told the kids they could play in their room as long as they kept their dresses clean. Once they were gone, she unlocked the drinks cabinet and poured herself a sherry. She asked if I wanted a drink, but I politely declined. Her hands were shaking. “Something’s wrong. Something’s happened. I can feel it.”
“Knowing Scott, he probably just forgot the time.”
“You think so?” She sounded desperate to believe it.
“I think so.”
Fiona sipped the sherry. “I guess you’re right.”
We waited until 8.30.
Scott did not come home.
Fiona came back from checking the dinner. “We’d better eat before it’s ruined.”
So the four of us ate. The children had impeccable manners. It was a subdued dinner. Fiona and I watched the clock. Though I knew the children’s names – Scott had told me they were Elizabeth and Amanda – I needed an ice-breaker.
“What’s your names?” I asked the oldest.
“My name is Amanda!”
“What’s yours?” I asked her sister. She scowled.
“Her name is Elizabeth!” Amanda said, pronouncing the name with care. Ee-liz-a-beth. “She is shy. I’m not! I like to talk. I like to tell jokes.”
“Really? I like jokes. Do you want to tell me one?”
“Um. Okay. Knock. Knock.”
“Come in.”
“No! You say ‘who’s there?’”
“I don’t know. Who is there?”
Amanda giggled. Elizabeth shook her head, saying, “He’s not playing fair, Mommy. He’s not doing it right!”
“I’ll tell you some jokes then,” I said. “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Amanda.”
“Amanda who?”
“Amanda’d your buzzer so nobody has to knock again.”
They burst into laughter. Kids were such an easy audience. I amused them with bad puns until the dinner was finished.
9.00: Scott still hadn’t returned.
Now I was worried.
“Michael,” Fiona said, “something’s definitely, definitely wrong.”
I had to agree. You didn’t invite someone over to your house and then not turn up yourself. “I’ll go look for him.”
“What about the police?”
“They won’t do anything. An adult has to be missing for a day or two before they do anything, I think. Well, I heard that in a movie, anyway. The most likely thing is his car broke down. What type is it?”
“It’s a grey Mercedes.” She told me the licence number.
“Should be easy to spot. If you tell me where he’s likely to be, I can drive around, looking.”
She named a few places.
I went driving.
On the off chance Scott had gone to my house and had somehow been detained, I checked. My dad said nobody had been over. I considered Wayne Leary’s boat as a possible location – maybe Scott had gone to talk to him on my behalf – but Scott wasn’t there and neither was Wayne. Wayne was probably in a bar. I didn’t leave a message, knowing how he felt about me. Next, I checked Wharf Street and Main Street and the streets leading off them. It was getting dark by then. I checked the Garden District, rolling past the palatial homes like a drive-by killer looking for victims. I saw several Mercedes in the driveways, but they were the wrong colours. I stopped to ask a few people out walking their dogs if they’d seen a grey Mercedes in the neighbourhood. Those people who didn’t think I was crazy or a pervert gave negative answers. I drove on. My search was coming up with nothing. I was growing increasingly frustrated and concerned. Where the hell was he? It had gone beyond a joke into something deeply disturbing. Maybe he was driving around just like I was and I kept missing him. Maybe. I didn’t think so.
I drove out of Cape Mistral to the woods where Scott’s uncle lived like a hermit. He lived near the river in a log cabin with no phone or electricity. As I drove up through the forested hills, losing sight of familiar landmarks, I felt as though I were entering another century.
Vernon Taylor was Scott’s only living relative. He had brought up Scott like his own son after Scott’s parents died when he was just a baby. They had been hippies who had taken accidental overdoses. Vernon was also a hippie, but the most he took was reefer and magic mushrooms, which legend had it he grew in a secret place in the woods. Vernon had been a philosophy lecturer at Berkeley before he turned on, tuned in and dropped out. He earned money playing the guitar at a few bars in Cape Mistral (or at least he had done when I’d left for Hollywood – maybe he was a teacher again, for all I knew.) It was from Vernon that Scott had received his education. Scott had been proud and slightly embarrassed to have Vernon as his guardian. He could be cool, I knew, but he could be weird, too. It depended on where the moon was, probably. I could remember Vernon organising these bizarre camping trips for Scott and his friends. Vernon would smoke reefer and tell ghost stories to us. He would say a mad axe-murderer lived in the woods with a taste for the flesh of young humans. He would get more scared than we did - thanks to the paranoid effects of the reefer. Vernon had been sensible enough to not encourage us
to smoke it, but I’d always wondered how someone as sensible and law-abiding as Scott could have lived with him at all.
The cabin loomed out of the darkness, lit by my headlights. It looked deserted and dilapidated. Some windows were boarded up. Others were dusty. I felt as if I could smell reefer in the air as I parked my MG next to his battered 1958 Buick, but it was just the sickly smells of the trees and moist undergrowth. I turned off the engine. My headlights illuminated a white-tailed deer peeking out of the dark woods before it darted away with the soft rustle of disturbed branches. I turned them off. The cabin was dark and silent, just like the woods.
I walked up to the door and knocked.
“Vernon? You in? It’s Michael Quinn. I’m looking for Scott. You seen him?”
There was no answer, but I guessed Vernon didn’t know where Scott was since his Mercedes wasn’t parked there. I was wasting time. Yet I wondered where Vernon was. His car was here. He had to be nearby. I looked through the dark windows, wiping away the dust. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see beyond the glass. It was weird. Where was he at this time of night?
I didn’t think any more of it until much later. I had other places to check.
I searched fruitlessly for an hour; then called Fiona to check he had not come home. Scott wasn’t there. So I continued for another hour, sometimes backtracking along streets. I called again with no news. Fiona sounded hysterical. I calmed her down with reassurances and white lies.
Personally, I imagined Scott dead in a ditch somewhere, crushed behind the wheel, just like my brother. But that was just me, Michael Quinn, the ultimate pessimist. I drove on, checking either side of the road with slow sweeps of my head.
I drove everywhere I could think.
I drove up the coast road with the top down and the wind roaring. The road gradually rose into the hills until I was nearly at the highest point on the island.
There was a sign:
EMERALD POINT ¼ MILE
As a kid I’d gone to Emerald Point to look at the wild geese bathing in the creek before they took flight to warmer places. They were majestic birds, drawn to Emerald Point by something primal. Judging by the calibre of the construction workers I’d encountered at the beach, I expected the creek to be concreted over, the geese buried up to their necks. But I did not get that far. A barrier blocked the road. There was a Cyclone fence keeping unwanted visitors at bay. Beyond, I could see trucks and bulldozers and road-workers wearing hard hats. Several large maples had been flattened to accommodate the vehicles. I stopped beside the barrier and called out to a red-haired foreman smoking a cigarette. He came over.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re developing the road for the hotel, sir.”
“How do I get to Emerald Point?”
“You can’t, sir. Not yet. The road needs developing.”
“How long will that be?”
“Six weeks.” He didn’t sound certain.
“What about on foot?”
“No, sir. Too dangerous. We’d get our asses sued if any civilians got hurt.”
“I suppose you’ll stuff the geese and put them in a souvenir shop.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Have you see a man in a Mercedes?”
“No, sir.”
I turned my car around and drove back to the town punching the dashboard. Putting a hotel on Emerald Point was like converting the pyramids into casinos.
God bless America.
I was running out of places. After a while every shadow started looking like a Mercedes. Sort of.
But I didn’t find Scott or his car.
It was after midnight when I drove back to his home.
Fiona opened the door. She looked terrible. She’d changed into sweater and jeans that gave her no shape. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying. She asked me to call the police now; she was in no condition to do so.
The sheriff arrived twenty minutes later. He looked at me as if he knew me – perhaps he remembered seeing me on the beach – but he didn’t refer to it. He listened to what we had to say, taking notes, asking a few pertinent questions and a few dumb ones, nodding when appropriate, but then he got a call on his radio about a domestic fight at the trailer park and his attention wandered. He said he had to go.
“That’s it?” Fiona said.
“There’s no grounds to panic,” he told Fiona. “There are a million explanations for why he hasn’t turned up.”
“A million …” Fiona’s voice faded out, as though she couldn’t be bothered to finish the sentence.
“Like what, Sheriff?” I said.
“Yes,” added Fiona, “like what?”
“He’s a lawyer, so maybe a client needed him.”
Fiona made a disbelieving sigh. “Then why didn’t he call?”
He did not answer. He clearly had no reassuring answer. He flipped shut his notepad. “Look, I have to go now, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have my men look out for the Mercedes. But I’m sure he’s in a bar somewhere. He’ll come home when the bars close.”
“He won’t,” Fiona said.
But the sheriff was preoccupied with the domestic fight. He left.
“I don’t believe it,” Fiona said. “My husband goes missing and no one cares.”
“I care.”
“Yes, I know.” Fiona fell into my arms, crying. “He’s dead. I know it. He’s dead.”
Her words would haunt my dreams for a long, long time.
Now, I was a great believer in the Method school of acting. In order to truly play a role convincingly you had to understand the psychology of the character down to the minutia of daily life. I had never gone as far as killing someone to make myself believable as a serial killer, but when I had played a cop in the Dark Noir series of TV movies, I had had the privilege of following around several LAPD officers on their patrols until I was thoroughly inside their skins, thinking like “a police”. I had done the same when I played a private investigator in Blood in Law and Blood in Law 2. The studio had hired consultants and specialists to make sure I had the performance real. Sure, I might not have done any real detective work, but I knew where to start and how to act. I could act as a private investigator. I could be one for Fiona. Therefore, I was not lying when I promised her I would find Scott.
Michael Quinn, the detective, always kept his promises.
Chapter 4
In the morning I waited for Dyler and Westbrook’s office to open its doors to the public. They opened at nine precisely. I walked past a grey-uniformed security guard into a lobby furnished with potted plants and soft pastel-coloured furniture. A glass fountain was in the middle, shaped like a legal eagle; its wings sparkled with running water. Ambient muzak drifted from somewhere. Another door – unmarked – led into the offices, but to reach it I had to get past a banana-shaped reception desk where an officious-looking receptionist and a second security guard blocked the way. They were watching me. I probably looked shabby in yesterday’s clothes. The receptionist had a black microphone over her mouth and an earpiece like something out of a science fiction movie. She smiled, but I didn’t think she meant it. Her nametag said she was Wendy, Public Interface Personnel Assistant. What? I think that meant receptionist in English.
“Hi,” I said.
“How may I help you, sir?”
“I’m here about an employee of the firm who went missing last night.”
“You’re with the police?”
I thought of saying yes, but then she’d ask for my ID. “I’m a concerned friend. His wife sent me.”
“Which employee are you speaking about?”
“Scott Taylor.”
She wrote it down. If she cared that her fellow employee was missing, she didn’t show it. “And your name?”
“Michael Quinn.”
“One ‘n’ or two?”
“Two.”
“Excuse me,” she said. She spoke into her microphone. She repeated what I’d said to someone higher up the fo
od chain. “Yes, Mr Dyler. I’ll tell him.” She smiled even wider. “Mr Dyler will see you immediately. Ross will show you the way.”
“Thank you, Wendy.”
She scowled.
Ross, the security guard, opened the door with a nifty remote control. He did it with panache, as if he were pretending to be a secret agent. Click. The door opened. I guessed he had to amuse himself somehow. I could not imagine why a law firm required as much security work. “Please follow me, sir.”
“High security,” I commented.
“Client confidentiality is all important here,” he said, as though reading a script – badly. “The firm has a reputation for discretion.”
“Omerta,” I said.
“What?”
“Code of silence. Like the Mafia.”
He didn’t say anything after that. I’d annoyed him. He was an efficient guide, though. The building layout was complex, labyrinthine. I half expected Theseus and the Minotaur around the next corridor, swapping blows. But Ross, the security guard, knew where he was going, even if I was lost after the fifth turn. We came to an oak door with a gold name plaque: Mr Alexander Dyler.
Ross knocked on the door. Someone inside said, “Yes. Come in, Mr Quinn. Ross, you may return to the lobby.”
The room was oak-panelled like a large study. Law books and journals lined the walls. I saw Dyler behind a mahogany desk with another remote control. He was about my father’s age, perhaps five years older. He had a silvery-white Frank Sinatra toupee and the blue eyes to match. His face was craggy and soft like a well-worn sofa. I entered the room feeling like a first-grader going to see the principal for some unknown transgression of the school rules. He was intimidating, but maybe it was the desk. The desk spoke of old money and power. Spookily, the door closed behind me without a touch or sound.
“Mr Quinn, I’m shocked by this news, I have to say. Scott Taylor is one of our finest junior partners. I can’t believe he would just disappear like this with so many caseloads to complete. It is outrageous. Please take a seat. Let’s talk.”