“You promise to stay out of my hair?”
“I work on my own,” I said. “I happen to be a helluva self-starter.”
He thought about it, nodded. “You have a bit of a reputation for finding people. You could, of course, just be damn lucky.”
“There’s always that.”
“Either way, we could use the help.” He slid a manila file toward me. “Make a copy of this. Tell no one. Bosses don’t like us giving away our real police work to private dicks.”
“Sure thing.”
“And King?”
“Yeah?”
“Anyone ever mention you sound like Elvis?”
I took the file and stood. “Once or twice.”
Chapter Eighteen
It was after hours, and I was sitting in the Trader Joe’s manager’s office. By “office” I meant a raised platform at the front of the store. I think the openness of the manager’s office was supposed to inspire a sense of trust and togetherness with the employees and customers. I thought it inspired a sense of opportunity for thieves. Then again, what did I know? I’m just a simple private dick.
The Trader Joe’s store manager was a thin man with pale skin. Since there was absolutely nothing remarkable or distinguishing about him, I decided he needed a tattoo. Or a piercing. Something, anything to distinguish him. His name was Ernie.
“Look,” Ernie was saying, “I’m sorry to sound rude, but I’ve been through this at least a dozen times now. I don’t know what else to say that hasn’t already been said before.”
“I understand,” I said. People like Ernie shut doors. People like me opened them. That is, when I’m sober. “Does anyone from your staff remember seeing her?”
Behind me, the closed grocery store was a beehive of activity as employees swept and stocked and cleaned.
“Christ, have you ever been here during rush hour?” he asked.
“Like Pamplona,” I said, “minus the bulls.”
He didn’t find me very funny. “I’m sorry, Mr. King, but no one remembers seeing her.”
That wasn’t entirely true. According to the police report, which I had committed to memory after many careful readings, a young employee working in the parking lot had reported seeing her. Ernie wasn’t being entirely honest with me. I wondered why. Maybe he was just eager to tally up that day’s receipts and go home. Maybe.
“Is Edward Rutherford here tonight?” I asked.
Ernie knew he was caught. “You know about Ed?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said.
The store manager drummed his fingers on his desk. “Look, I just want this to go away. I’ve had police investigators in and out of here for the past week, not to mention a handful of you private eye guys, or whatever it is you call yourselves.”
“I prefer investigative engineer.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. “Anyway, it’s been totally disruptive. I should be counting registers right now, but instead I’m dealing with this again.”
“It’s very inconvenient,” I said, “when someone disappears.”
“Hell, yes, it’s inconvenient.”
“It’s probably less inconvenient than being kidnapped and murdered.”
“Nobody said anything about a murder.”
“No, not yet,” I said. “But it’s looking more and more probable. And it happened on your store’s property. Imagine how that’s going to play out once word gets out. Talk about your PR problems, Ernie. You think investigators are harsh? Wait until Access Hollywood gets wind of this.”
The color drained from his face, and kept on draining until he was as white as snow. “We need to find her,” he finally said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.
“I’ll go get Edward.”
“Good idea.”
Chapter Nineteen
Edward was a lanky kid wearing badly faded jeans, a red Hawaiian shirt, and a dour expression. I introduced myself and told him why I was here. He shrugged; obviously, he was overjoyed. I asked if he could show me where he had seen Miranda on the evening of her disappearance. He shrugged again and nodded.
“Over here,” he said in a monotone. He led the way through the automatic front doors, which Ernie had left unlocked for us, and out across the mostly empty parking lot.
Trader Joe’s isn’t a big market, but it attracted big business. The small parking lot, which wrapped all the around to the rear of the store, was often packed to overflowing with vehicles, with many more squatting for a parking space to open up.
Edward led me past a long row of red plastic shopping carts and hung a right, leading us to a section of parking lot located behind the store. Now behind the building, he pointed to the second to last parking spot, to an area that abutted a gently rising dirt hill.
“I saw her park here.”
I nodded. According to the police file, this was indeed where Miranda’s vehicle had been discovered. So far so good. Still, I wasn’t learning anything new.
I continued scanning the back lot. Three cars were presently parked back here, one of which was quite dusty and appeared abandoned. Opposite the parking lot was the store’s receiving docks. The docks were stacked with empty wooden pallets, with broken shopping carts parked haphazardly about. Two Dumpsters were packed to overflowing with straining trash bags and flattened cardboard boxes. A homeless woman was sleeping between the two Dumpsters. It looked kinda cozy, actually.
“What do you do here at Trader Joe’s?” I asked Edward.
He shrugged. “I’m a box boy.”
I detected a noticeable lack of pride in his voice.
“You bag groceries inside?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But you saw her park her car outside?”
“Yes. Sometimes we take turns collecting shopping carts.”
“What time of day did she arrive?”
He thought about it. “I started work at four. This was sometime before my first break. Probably around six.”
“Did you also see her leave?” I already knew the answer. According to the police report, Edward had stated he had not seen her leave.
But now he hesitated...and continued hesitating. He looked away and bit his lip. Ah. Something that wasn’t in the police report, perhaps?
“Well, I was bagging groceries when she left. I might have seen her leave, but I’m not sure. You know, we’re pretty busy at that time.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “But you did see her leave, didn’t you, Edward?”
He didn’t answer me. He was looking off somewhere in the near or far distance, hard to tell at night. He sucked in some air to speak, but remained silent.
“Look, you did nothing wrong,” I said. “Most of the men in your store were probably checking her out. Nothing wrong with that. You’re only human.”
He nodded; we were silent some more, then he said, “Is this just between you and me?”
“I don’t see anyone else around, except for that old lady sleeping between the Dumpsters, but I’m pretty sure she’s high or drunk or waiting for her boyfriend Ernie to get off work.”
Edward laughed, but he still wasn’t talking.
“What do you know, Edward?” I pressed.
“It could be nothing,” he finally said.
“Could be is more than what we have now.”
“It’s just a hunch,” he said.
“I live and die by hunches.”
“I didn’t tell the police—” He paused.
“Because you didn’t want them to know that you were secretly watching her.”
He took another deep breath. Like pulling teeth, this one. Finally, he said, “There was a guy, a bum. He was watching her, too.”
My pulse quickened. In the hills above, tree branches rustled in the breeze. Lights in the houses twinkled, appearing and disappearing behind the shifting branches.
“How do you know he was a bum?”
“I’ve seen him outside before, begging for money.”
> “Okay, so he was a bum. Lots of people were watching her, Edward, we established that.”
“I know.”
“Besides, you were busy and didn’t see her leave, right?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, “but when I looked up again, she was gone...and so was he. I’m pretty sure he followed her out.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath of my own. “Tell me about him.”
And so he did.
Chapter Twenty
“So why didn’t this Edward kid tell the police about the bum?” asked Kelly, my on-again/off-again girlfriend.
We were in my apartment cooking a late-night dinner together. I’m not much of a cook, granted, but I’ve developed a few specialties. One of them is spaghetti, which is what we were cooking now. At the moment, the spaghetti was boiling but the pasta was still hard and translucent and not very appetizing. Soon that would all change. Ah, the magic of spaghetti.
“And admit he was following her?” I asked. “Stalking her in his own way, however innocent it might have been? That could look bad.”
“So why not make something up?” she asked.
“And lie to the police? Bad things happen when you lie to the police, especially if you’re not very good at it.”
“So why does he spill his guts to you?”
“I’m not the police. He felt comfortable around me. And, I believe, he was feeling guilty.”
“Guilty?” she said.
“Guilty because the information he held back might have helped find her.”
“So he tells you now after, what, almost a week?”
“Better late than never,” I said.
“But the little shit might have waited too long.”
Kelly was still dressed in a cream-colored power suit, having come straight from a meeting with some high-level executive types at Paramount Studios. She thought the suit made her look fat. I thought the suit made her look yummy. She didn’t care what I thought. As she sipped from her wineglass, she left behind a very sexy lipstick smudge on the rim.
“So what will you do with this info?” she asked.
“Find the bum, talk to him.”
“You think the bum did something to her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“And how will you find him? We are, after all, talking about a bum.”
I grinned. “I’ll figure something out. I am, after all, an ace detective.”
“Or so you keep telling me.”
I stirred the boiling spaghetti, which was softening and turning more opaque. Doing its own kind of magic.
Kendra the Wonder Kat was sitting on top of the refrigerator, watching the whole show below, her whiskers occasionally twitching, her glowing yellow eyes alert should I accidentally open a can of tuna and place it in front of her.
“Kendra worships you,” said Kelly.
“She has to worship me,” I said, adding a touch of salt. “I feed her.”
Kelly was seated on a stool, elbows on the Formica breakfast counter, which, at the moment, was doubling as a bar counter. The bar counter sort of hovered over my kitchen sink, allowing her full view of my every move. Lucky girl. She was currently snacking on some leftover corn chips from Tito’s Tacos and drinking from her third glass of white wine. Her eyes had that glazed look they get when she’s nearly drunk.
“You’re quite graceful, Aaron King, when you want to be. Are you sure you weren’t a dancer in a past life?”
“I’m sure.”
“How come we never go out dancing?”
“I’m too old to dance. I might break a hip or something.”
She grinned and drank some more wine, then hummed a little song to herself. “Rubbernecking” by one Elvis Aaron Presley. One of my favorites. I stirred the spaghetti. It was looking more and more whitish, and thus more and more appetizing.
“So what do you think happened to this girl?” asked Kelly.
“I think something very bad happened to this girl.”
“Can you help her?”
“As best as I can.”
“And your best....”
“Is pretty damn good,” I finished.
“You’re going to find her, aren’t you?”
“Dead or alive,” I said.
I poured the spaghetti into a colander, drained it, then dumped the steaming heap of noodles into a large plastic bowl. The spaghetti was white and plump and looked nothing like it had just a few minutes earlier.
“Like magic,” I said. “Hard and turgid one minute, soft and supine the next.”
“You do realize that we’re talking about spaghetti here, right?”
“Yes.”
“Seven-year-olds can make spaghetti.”
“No,” I said. “They can make magic.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“Let’s talk about your deceased brother,” said Dr. Vivian.
“I never had a brother,” I said.
“But you did,” she said softly. “For nine months, in the womb, you had a twin brother.”
It was just past nine o’clock in the morning. The sunlight was shining through the partially open blinds. This time there was no cat and bird high drama. At least, not yet.
I said, “I see you’ve been doing your research.”
“As have you, Mr. King.”
“What do you mean?”
She sat back. “I specialize in twin research. You knew that, which is undoubtedly why you picked me to be your therapist.”
“I picked you because you’re cuter than sin.”
She ignored that. “Further, you probably know that I’m a twin myself. As were you.”
Indeed I was. For nine months, like she said. Suddenly I could barely speak. “But he was born dead,” I said.
“But he was alive with you in the womb. For nine months he was alive and you had yourself a twin brother.”
I found myself staring out the window, through the partially open blinds, at a gently swaying tree branch. I locked onto it, watching its every movement, absorbing its every detail. As I did so, I could hear my own heart beating, loudly and powerfully in my chest. And as I meditated on the branch and lost myself to its texture and movements, as I listened to my own heart beating steadily in my chest, I heard something else. Something not entirely unexpected.
After all, I had heard it before.
It was another heartbeat, a tiny heartbeat, and it rose up through the ages, up through the depths of my soul, up through my subconscious. Demanding to be heard.
And it wasn’t my own.
It was the heartbeat of someone who had been very close to me. The heartbeat of someone who had been stolen away from me. The heartbeat of someone I had never had the pleasure to know.
Dr. Vivian was watching me. I could feel those big eyes of hers on me. But she said nothing, letting me work through whatever issues her words had stirred within me. The branch outside the window waved gently, sometimes even scraping the exterior of the house, and even the window itself, creating a grating, high-pitched sound on par with fingernails on a chalkboard.
Dr. Vivian eased forward. “How do you feel about losing your twin brother, Mr. King?”
I sucked in some air and my eyes stung with a thin coat of salty tears. “I think it’s a damn shame the little guy never met his ma,” I said.
She was quiet, but the tree branch wasn’t. For now, it continued grating, scraping, the sound of it filling the small office, momentarily blocking out the tiny heartbeats in my head.
I said, “I think it’s a damn shame that while I was in the hospital with her, he was being buried on some hillside, left alone to rot in the cold and dirt and emptiness.”
Dr. Vivian didn’t move.
“I think it’s a damn shame he never got to play with me, or laugh with me, or grow up with me, or....”
Words failed me. Tears blurred my vision.
“Or sing with you,” she finished, somehow reading my thoughts.
“Yes, ma’am
,” I said. “I think...I think I would have very much liked to sing with my older brother, Jessie. He was born first you know. He was my older brother, and I think he would have had a damn fine voice.”
“How much older was he?”
“Thirty minutes,” I said. “And they say he never took even a single breath.”
“Do you blame the doctors for not saving him?”
“The doctor was a good man. Knowing Jessie was probably lost, he was more concerned about saving me.”
“And what if you had been born first?” she asked quietly.
“Then it would have been me up there on that hill, ma’am,” I said. “And if my brother had a chance to live, he might have done things differently. He might have been a wonderful father and a wonderful husband, and he might not have ruined his life.”
“You feel guilty for living?”
“Hard not to,” I said.
“Because Jessie might have done things differently?”
“No. Because Jessie might have done things better.”
Chapter Twenty-two
As a light rain pleasantly tapped my sliding glass door, with a cold beer in hand, I pressed the “Play” button on my DVD remote control and settled in to watch a movie called “Some Don’t Like it Hot”.
Catchy.
It was Miranda’s first movie, made back when she was eighteen-years-old, and fresh off the boat, so to speak. It was about a gang of bank robbers who disguise themselves as women, and end up kidnapping a female bank employee during their escape. The employee is, of course, Miranda, and those in the gang invariably vie for her affections, all while on the run from the law.
Two hours and a six-pack of beer later, I slipped in movie #2, called “The Shallows”. This one was a suspense thriller, and a little too violent for my tastes. In it, Miranda plays a character kidnapped by a serial killer and forced to live in his basement, where she comes oh-so-close to escape, only to be killed after a botched police rescue.
Three shots of whiskey later and I was on to her third movie, and quickly losing my ability to grasp plots. This one seemed to be about a College frat party gone wrong. Or right, depending on how you looked at it. There were lots of breasts and farm animals and far too many hairy guys for my liking. Although she didn’t have much to work with, Miranda played her part admirably, and in the end the nerd in the group somehow managed to win her affections by besting the jock in a game of poker. Been there, done that.
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