“He would not be stealing drugs. He is so honest.” Baros pronounced the h as my mother used to—Latin speakers uncertain about when it is silent in English, when it is aspirated.
“He took off about ten days ago without saying where he was going,” I said. “Does he have a lover, or friends in the building or the neighborhood, he would talk to?”
Baros shook his head. “I don’t know everything about the tenants—there are thirty-six apartments here, after all. But we live opposite, my wife and I, so we see this entrance more than the others, and my wife, she worries about August, that he is too lonely. He is so polite, so kindhearted, one of the few who even knows she is having radiation treatments. He has taken care of Rosquilla for us sometimes.”
He pointed at the little terrier, who barked at his name.
“Can I talk to your wife? Maybe August confided in her.”
Baros’s wife was at work, despite her cancer treatments, but he promised to consult her and call me.
“You didn’t see who broke in?” I asked.
“We are in bed at ten, so it has taken place after that. After seeing the destruction in Mr. Veriden’s home, I am telling the owners they must put in better security, cameras, alarms, but it is too late to protect Mr. Veriden.”
I shook hands and left him on that melancholy note. His phone was ringing as I went down the walk, and he called out to me to wait—it was his wife, on her break.
He spoke in Spanish, explaining that a detective was here asking about Señor Veriden. After that, I lost track of the conversation, except for the “sí, sí, sí” that Baros interjected at intervals.
When he hung up, Baros shook his head sadly. “She didn’t know he was going away. He is a nice young man. We would not like to think of any harm coming to him.”
4
Long Shot
Even though I’d never met August, I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him either. I had gone to his place partly to quiet Bernie, partly because I’d been baffled by what I’d seen at the gym yesterday.
Now I was not only baffled but worried. In fiction it’s the cliché of the serial killer or drug dealer that he’s quiet, keeps himself to himself: Such a good boy, so attentive to my wife, you’d never suspect him of dismembering and burying a dozen people. We never believed he was head of a cartel that stole drugs from college locker rooms.
In fiction August would be that person—quiet, thoughtful, tidy on the outside, a raging psychopath within. This being real life, or at least as close as I could get to such a thing, I found it highly unlikely. Call it impossible.
A cold drizzle began to fall, forcing me to sprint the last quarter mile home—parking is at such a premium in August’s neck of the woods that I’d walked the two miles from my own place. There’s nothing like physical discomfort to clear the mind. When I’d changed into dry clothes and made myself an espresso, I phoned a detective I know at Area Six.
Terry Finchley and I have a long history. We respect each other and don’t quite trust each other. In his case it’s part general cop dislike of PIs complicated by his being close to a cop I used to date: Terry thinks I behaved badly to Conrad Rawlings, because Conrad got shot when he involved himself in a case I was working. However, Terry is one of the most senior officers I know whom I trust. He’s also African-American and might be more empathetic with August’s situation.
I left a précis of the situation on his voice mail. “Right now your buddies in Evanston aren’t treating it like much of anything, but I don’t want August in the cross hairs if they suddenly decide it’s a major event. I’d love it if your techies printed the ruins in August’s apartment and compared notes with Evanston over the break-in at the gym.”
The dogs had come upstairs while I was on the phone, delighted to have me back in the middle of the day. I petted them absentmindedly.
I needed to talk to someone who knew August better than Bernie and Angela did. I’d run a search on him through my subscription utilities, which give me access to a lot of law-enforcement and financial data that ought not to be available to people like me.
Neither LifeStory nor DataMonitor had turned up much beyond what Angela had told me: August had studied exercise therapy and film at Loyola, he worked for Six-Points as a contract employee, he was an orphan whose father had died in the First Gulf War, and his only relatives were Angela’s branch of the family down in Louisiana. His bank account was modest, but twelve days ago he’d cashed a check for four thousand dollars.
I whistled softly. Even though it didn’t go as far today as it used to, that was a respectable wad to be carrying around. No sign of where it came from either. Maybe he’d done an exceptional job filming a middle reliever’s trapezius movement.
Both search engines mentioned August’s film work and his website: Spectral Vision, with the tagline “Turning ghosts of ideas from reel to real.” I clicked on the link and found clips of some of his work—weddings, mostly of gay or lesbian couples; First Communions and bar mitzvahs; forays into art shorts of the kind that are popular today, featuring ominous unseeable presences with people running from horrors too terrible to make concrete. Nothing that suggested a four-thousand-dollar check.
His publicity photo on the website was an artfully arranged shot of him staring at himself in a sequence of mirrors. It showed him in standard young-auteur dress: black turtleneck, black leather jacket, blue jeans. His face was round, with full cheeks and deep-set, serious eyes. I copied the picture to my photo album.
“August, I believe in you,” Emerald Ferring had written on his poster. I asked my phone if it knew anything about Ferring or Pride of Place. The movie had been made in 1967 by Jarvis Nilsson, a black male director I’d also never heard of. Pride of Place had been screened at only a handful of theaters in Harlem, Bronzeville, and other black neighborhoods around the country before it disappeared without a trace.
I scrolled through the plot summary. Ferring played a young woman raised in a wealthy black enclave on Cape Cod. It’s 1964, Freedom Summer, and she’s a freshman at Vassar who volunteers to go to Mississippi, against the wishes of her parents. She is arrested during a voter-registration drive. Her parents bail her out and try to bring her home, but she insists on staying in prison with the other detainees. After her release she gets involved with a sharecropper and witnesses his murder at the hands of the Klan. At the end of the movie, she withdraws from Vassar, following a hot altercation with the college president along with her parents, and returns to Mississippi to help run a Freedom School.
Wikipedia didn’t offer much about Ferring. Neither did my databases, but they told me she’d been born in Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1944. The account of how she’d met Nilsson was sketchy, but she’d made two other films with him after Pride of Place, both of which had also disappeared after a minimal release.
Her current home was in Chicago, where she’d settled while filming Lakeview, a series that sounded like a thinly disguised remake of The Jeffersons: the show’s theme song was “Moving On Up to the North Side.” I wondered how much litigation that had spawned.
Ferring had given August her autograph and a personal message; maybe she’d also let him confide his dreams and plans. Maybe he’d even told her where he was going. It was a long shot, but I didn’t have any close ones.
Ferring lived down on Ninety-sixth Street, in the Washington Heights neighborhood, a few blocks from the church where Barack used to worship when he was a state senator.
My calendar was clear until midafternoon, when I needed to be in court to testify in a warehouse-supply scam I’d helped uncover. I could get down to Ninety-sixth Street and still make my court date, if I hustled to my office for my case files. I changed quickly into my courtroom costume, a severely cut suit in superfine wool, but as I was stuffing keys and laptop into my briefcase, I recalled the aloof, regal face in August’s poster. That photo was almost fifty years old, but Ms. Ferring didn’t look like the kind of person a stray detective could just barge in
on.
My databases had given me Ferring’s unlisted number. A man with a deep, soft voice answered on the fifth ring.
When I announced myself and asked if I could speak with Ms. Ferring, the deep voice became cold. “What are you selling?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m a private investigator—”
He hung up on me. A son or a butler whose job was to protect Ferring’s privacy?
I tried phoning again. This time my call went straight to voice mail. Announcement only, no way to leave a message.
I gritted my teeth. If the traffic gods had any sense of decency, I could get down to Ninety-sixth and Halsted, have an hour with Ms. Ferring or her bulldog, and still make my court date. I made sure my makeup go-bag was in my briefcase, drove to my office for my files, and covered the fifteen miles to Ferring’s house in a breathtaking forty-seven minutes. Speed record on the Ryan this time of day.
Ferring lived on a street of small ranch houses and tidy yards. The trees had dropped their leaves, but most people had raked their lawns. Halloween decorations still dripped ghostly fingers from the bushes, but Ferring’s walk, like her neighbor’s, was lined with potted mums. Her house was a bit bigger than the others on the block, but not ostentatiously so.
No one answered, and anyway, the house felt empty behind the shrouded windows. Empty buildings seem remote somehow, as if without people inside they were withholding themselves from the world.
Across the street an older woman was out with a dachshund. The dog was barking at a squirrel taunting it from a nearby tree, but the woman was staring at me in frank curiosity. White woman in a black neighborhood, what could I possibly be doing here?
I walked over and introduced myself. “I’m hoping to talk to Ms. Ferring. You wouldn’t know if she’s due back soon, would you?”
The woman curled her lip. “Are you expecting to sell her something, like sandy cement for her driveway?”
“A lot of scam artists trolling around here?” I asked. It’s an infuriating part of modern life, bogus contractors preying on the elderly. That might explain the coldness of the young man who’d answered Ferring’s phone.
“And you’re not one of them.” Her mouth twisted more derisively.
“I’m a private detective.” I handed her one of my cards. “A young man, a wannabe filmmaker, has disappeared. He’s a loner, without much family, and I can’t find anyone who knows where he is. I know he made a good impression on Ms. Ferring, and I’m hoping he might have told her where he was going.”
“Would this young filmmaker have a name?”
I pulled out my cell phone and showed her August’s picture. “August Veriden.”
“And what is it you think he’s doing with Ms. Emerald? Stealing from her?” The contemptuous twist of her lips became more pronounced.
First the guy with the deep voice hung up on me, and now this. I began to wonder if August was actually hiding inside Ferring’s house and the neighborhood was protecting him from authorities, or just from a nosy white woman. But that would mean he’d been involved in something that predated the break-ins at the gym and his home.
The dog kept whining and growling, pulling on its leash while the squirrel made that chuck-chuck-chuck sound: I’m up a tree and you’re stuck. My sympathies were completely with the dog.
I shook my head. “I can’t tell you more than I have already: I’ve been hired to find him, and I can’t find anyone who knows him. Speaking to Ms. Ferring is my last hope. Is she ill or out of town that she isn’t answering her phone herself?”
“Don’t we all deserve some privacy, away from prying questions?” the woman burst out.
“Is that what this sounds like? I’m not trying to pry into Ms. Ferring’s life and business, but young August Veriden may well get framed for a crime I don’t think he committed. The police have issued a bulletin asking for anyone who spots him to turn him in. I’d like to find him first. If you can’t help me, I’ll ring every bell on the street. Someone will tell me something.”
The woman looked down at her dog, yanked at its leash, snapped at “Poppy” to be quiet. Poppy grinned up at her and resumed barking.
“You’d better talk to Troy,” she said to me, her lips tight with bitterness at having given in to me. “Troy Hempel.”
She pointed at the house just south of Ferring’s. “He ran errands for Ms. Emerald when he was a boy, and he’s the person she trusts with her power of attorney and what-have-you. He’s at work now—his mother’s the only person home. He’s at a downtown bank, technology director.”
5
Designer Beer
Troy Hempel arrived at the Golden Glow about half an hour late, but I didn’t mind. It had been a long day; I was glad of the chance to unwind, sip a little whisky, chat with Sal. She nudged me when Hempel came into the room—good bar owner that she was, even though she was in the middle of an amusing story about her grandmother’s 103rd birthday, she could track the whole room.
My own computer consultant has the soft face and body of a cherub, or at least someone whose only workout involves moving from the desk to the coffee machine and back. Troy Hempel looked as though he could break Ukrainian hackers into his soup, like crackers: his navy superfine pullover stretched across traps that made Sal cock a wicked eye at me.
“Is this Jake’s competition? Boy never got those muscles playing a bass.”
Jake Thibaut, my lover. I think. At any rate he’s a bass player, currently in Switzerland with his early-music group.
I shadowboxed Sal and got up to greet Hempel. I’d tracked him down while I was waiting in the hall at the Daley Center for my testimony to be called.
Court cases never work to a reliable timetable, which is fine with lawyers and judges who get paid for being there, but not so much fun for witnesses like me. At least during the hour I swung my heels, I managed to dig up Hempel’s phone numbers, both his cell and his office at the Fort Dearborn Trust.
Instead of trying to explain myself over the phone, I sent him a text. I composed it carefully, writing it out beforehand: I wanted to give him enough information to persuade him to meet me, without trying to second-guess why Ferring’s neighbor had been so cagey or why Hempel himself had hung up on me—assuming it was he who’d answered my call to Ferring this morning. My formal, stilted approach proved effective: Hempel’s response wasn’t enthusiastic, but he agreed to meet me at the Glow at six.
After setting that up, I found the court still arguing over whether my evidence was admissible. I also found three new incoming messages from Bernie. no news, I wrote back. i’ll let you know when i’ve learned anything, so please stop slapping your stick at my knees.
Netflix had all three feature films that Jarvis Nilsson had made with Emerald Ferring. I streamed Pride of Place. Ferring made an ardent activist, but the dialogue was heavy-handed.
The bailiff finally called me at four, just as Ferring was sitting by the sharecropper’s grave with her baby boy. She was making a stirring speech to her parents about how one day a boy like him would be president, but until then, “We have work to do here, Mother. I can’t leave Elton’s side in death any more than I would in life.”
Yes! Cue “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Court adjourned half an hour later, with my testimony still incomplete. I took the L north, changed out of court clothes to give the dogs a quick run, then put on clean jeans and a bronze wool jacket and hiked back to the Glow. I was starting to feel like Peter Sellers, playing six characters in the same movie, racing from one costume to the next. I was late getting to the Glow, but still twenty minutes ahead of Hempel.
When I explained to Sal who I was meeting and why, she gripped my shoulder in an iron hand and pushed me onto a barstool.
“Emerald Ferring?” she said. “You’ve arranged a meeting with Emerald Ferring?”
“You know her?” I asked, prying her fingers out of my shoulder.
“I watched everything she was in when I was growing up, ev
en that lame rip-off of The Jeffersons. She was such a model for me—if you meet her, you do it here.”
“It all depends on this minder of hers,” I said, “assuming he shows up. You’ll be glad to know that her neighbors protect her privacy as if she were the head of the CIA.”
Sal pelted me with questions—about the neighbors, Ferring’s house, and how August Veriden had wormed his way into Ferring’s confidence.
“You’re like a teenage girl with a crush,” I grumbled.
Sal nodded. “Where Emerald Ferring is concerned, I am a teenage girl with a crush.”
I decided not to mention I’d never heard of Ferring until this morning: that might create a chasm that would be difficult to bridge. Instead I showed her Troy Hempel’s entry on LinkedIn, and we bet on what he was likely to drink.
“Bourbon,” I said. “He’s young, he’s hip, he’s proving he’s smooth.”
“You might as well pay up now, girlfriend. Young, hip—beer, local brew.”
Hempel came in about ten minutes later. He had the impassive face of a discreet butler, but his eyes widened as he took in Sal’s famous bar, a mahogany horseshoe, and the Tiffany lamps that make her insurance too high for me to count even if I use my toes along with my fingers.
“I work five blocks away and never knew this place existed. How long has it been here?” he said.
“Since you were teething,” Sal said, flashing her thousand-watt smile to take the sting out of the words. “What can I pour you?”
He wanted beer, which made Sal smirk. Hempel asked for something called Hophazardly. I thought maybe he was challenging Sal for making fun of his youth, but she just called over to Erica, her head bartender, who trotted down the stairs and came back with a case to stick under the bar.
Sal had reserved a table for me in the far corner of the room, away from the televisions, which were giving us news on one screen and the Bulls on the other.
Fallout Page 3