“Okay,” Hempel said. “Now tell me what you want with Ms. Emerald.”
“August Veriden.” I brought out my cell phone and showed him a couple of the shots I’d taken this morning in August’s apartment. “I have no idea what’s going on, but there’s similar wreckage in the gym where he works.”
I went through my spiel: August’s cousin hiring me to find him before the police did, my various theories about what had led to the destruction, and my wondering how well August knew Emerald Ferring. “Is she someone he might have confided in?”
Hempel had drunk his Hophazardly in two swallows and was rolling the bottle between his palms. Erica, who scans the room almost as skillfully as Sal, appeared with a fresh bottle and a lifted eyebrow. Hempel nodded but asked for a word with Sal. In private.
I made a face as Erica took him over to the bar and interrupted Sal’s conversation with one of her regulars, a trader who sits at the end every night, drinking four double bourbons whether the market is up or down. Sal is African-American: Hempel apparently needed her opinion on whether a white woman like me was trustworthy.
He came back to the table a few minutes later, Sal laughing at me behind his back. “Ms. Emerald left town ten days ago with August,” he said without preamble. “She might have told me what she was doing if I’d been here, but I was attending an advanced training institute in Tel Aviv. I only got home five days after she left. She told my mother she’d forwarded her phone to mine, and she expected me to take care of her affairs while she was gone.”
He gave a half smile. “I’ve been running errands for her since she moved onto our street twenty-five years ago. I think she still imagines I’m seven: ‘Troy, I need my lawn cut today’ or ‘Troy, I need a ride to the hairdresser,’ that kind of thing.”
“She didn’t tell your mother where she was going?”
“Oh, yes. She said August was a gifted young filmmaker who was going to put together a documentary of her life. They were driving down to Kansas so he could film her roots.”
I digested that. “Was it supposed to be a big secret? I don’t understand why August isn’t answering his phone.”
Hempel shook his head. “That has me worried, too. My mother wondered if August was taking advantage of Ms. Emerald. She never was a superstar, but she still gets royalties from a couple of TV shows she was in. She does better than most old black women, and we all—everyone on the street—try to keep an eye out for hustlers.”
“Is she able to manage her own affairs?” I asked.
“Oh, her mind is fine, but she never had much business sense even when she was young. She’s given me a power of attorney so I can handle her affairs. Anyway, my mother says she had a long talk with Veriden before they took off, and she thought he was on the level.”
“Right before he disappeared, Veriden cashed a biggish check. I’m wondering if Ferring gave it to him, and if so—did he con her out of it, or did she offer it?”
“Is that where that money went?” Hempel said. “I’m a signer on her accounts. I saw she’d pulled out four thousand, but she did it as a cashier’s check. Damn.”
He smacked a wide palm on the table. “This all happened while I was out of the country, but my mother says it was Ms. Emerald’s idea and that she talked August into going with her to film her, to make what they call an origin story these days. She’s wanted to find a way to revive her career, or at least generate interest in those feature films of Nilsson’s, so I believed it, believed that Ms. Emerald driving the train, in a manner of speaking.”
“Maybe August pitched it to her, but in such a way that she thought it was her own idea,” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve started to think, especially since neither of them is answering their phones. We—my mother and I—have been trying to decide what to do. I hate to involve the cops, especially when I don’t know where Ms. Emerald is. They could be on the road in any of four different states or in some dinky Kansas town.”
“They drove?” I asked.
“Yes, in Veriden’s car, a Prius. Ms. Emerald hardly ever drives anymore, so he’d be doing it all. I’ve been worrying since I got back from Israel, but now I’m seriously disturbed. Look, I’d have to talk this over with my mother and one or two other people—but if they agree, would you try to find them?”
6
Crossing the River
“One day my grandfather walked across the Kansas River when a drought had shrunk it down to three feet,” Gertrude Perec said. “He left behind a wife, eleven children, and all his recipes for curing everything from warts to cancer.”
“You never told me that before, Gram. I mean about the cancer recipes,” Cady Perec said. “Did you ever try any of them? Or show them to Dr. Kiel?”
Gertrude laughed. “I only remember one, for stomach cancer: you soaked rose petals in port for seventy-two hours. Probably made all those good church ladies who signed the Pledge feel better even if it didn’t make them well. No, I never thought to mention it to Dr. Kiel, but maybe that lay behind my wanting to work for a scientist. Show up my grandfather for the charlatan he was.”
“Who is Dr. Kiel?” I asked.
“He’s a big disease authority—at least he was,” Cady said. “He’s retired now, but they still talk to him sometimes, like last year when there was a salmonella outbreak in Eudora—that’s a town east of here—he tracked it down to someone who was handling food at a burger joint. Gram used to be his secretary.”
She turned back to Gertrude. “I know that your grandfather never came home, everybody knows that, but did he ever write your granny, or your mom, or anyone?”
“If he did, she never let on,” Gertrude said. “I always wondered if he had another family on the other side of the river or if he just kept walking north until he got to Canada. My grandmother was a terrifying woman—the only time I asked her about my grandfather, she beat me until my legs bled, with a switch she pulled from that bush.”
Gertrude waved a hand toward the porch stairs, where a thick bush, stripped of most of its leaves by the fall storms, overhung the railing. The branches were about an inch around. Getting struck with one of those would hurt.
Cady Perec turned to me. “Disappearing grandfathers is a family theme. If I ever have kids, they’ll never know what happened to their grandfather, because I never knew what became of him—my own father, I mean. Gram never hit me with anything, but she doesn’t like to talk about him.”
Gertrude stretched out a hand to press Cady’s shoulder. “I’ve told you all I know, punkin.”
“Which is nothing,” Cady said.
“Even if I knew more about him, it’s nothing a stranger wants to hear.”
It was a warning signal, delivered with all the subtlety of a switch across the legs, but I ignored the hint.
“I want to hear things,” I said. “It’s how I sift out what I need so I can get where I want to be. And I never wantonly use the chaff.”
“Listen to you,” Gertrude Perec scoffed. “Sifting wheat from chaff. No one would ever guess you grew up in a big city instead of a farm.”
My cheeks burned, but I said in a tone of innocent inquiry, “I knew this was a university town, so I didn’t realize people who lived in it still farmed. Did the town grow up around houses like yours?”
Gertrude Perec’s brick house would have qualified as a mansion in the South Chicago of my childhood. I hadn’t been invited inside—we were sitting on a screened porch that faced northeast, toward the river that Gertrude’s grandfather had waded across—but it was a big Victorian, with maybe a dozen rooms on two stories. The sun had set, but the streetlamps shone across a few dead sunflowers, not wheat fields.
Cady laughed softly. “Gram grew up in this house, but we all know a little about wheat and corn, it’s so close to us. Everyone knows someone who works at the grain elevators or the fertilizer plant, especially us, because Grandpa Perec’s family used to farm south of town.”
It had been five
days since my first meeting with Troy Hempel; I’d been in Kansas for two of them. It had taken Hempel, his mother, and six other neighbors several days to agree to hire me—after a fierce discussion on my abilities, whether I could be trusted to take Ms. Ferring’s disappearance seriously, and whether my fees constituted price gouging. Troy and his mother called me to a neighborhood conference; Troy had invited Sal as a character witness.
I brought Bernie and Angela, putting them under strict orders not to speak. Both young women were furious when I weighed in on the side of “No, this private detective doesn’t know or care enough about Emerald to waste our money on.”
I shut them up and continued to explain that Chicago was my briar patch. “I know how to get things done here, who the players are, and what games they cheat at. It’s where my friends are, so if I fall on my face, as we all sometimes do, the people are here who will glue me back together. Kansas—I might as well try to solve a crime in Milan. In fact, I’d probably feel more at home in Milan—at least it’s an industrial hub with an identifiable group of thugs. There are local agencies in Kansas who know all the players. It makes more sense for you to work with one of them.”
“None of us can go down there to evaluate an agency, except maybe Troy, and even then we wouldn’t know if they could be trusted to do the right thing,” Troy’s mother said. “Believe me, Ms. Warshawski, we talked about that, we talked about calling the Kansas state police. And Missouri and Iowa, depending which route August and Emerald took. It’s hard to involve an investigator in your private business, but at least we’ve met you and we’ve talked to people who think highly of you. Sal Barthele here says you are honest and reliable. We can pay you for a week’s work down there.”
Bernie interrupted to applaud vigorously. Angela said, “Another three days have gone by, and we don’t know where August is, or Ms. Ferring either. You really have to do this, Vic.”
I tried to suppress my visceral, two-year-old’s objection to people telling me what I really have to do, especially when Sal weighed in on that theme as well, saying she’d go herself if I didn’t.
“Ferring could be lost in some Iowa cornfield. Or this young moviemaker could have been hauled off to jail or shot by some small-town cop. Didn’t you say the police put out one of those reports on him because of the break-in at the gym?”
“A BOLO,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve checked with law enforcement in the four states where Veriden and Ferring might have been stopped and can’t find any record that he’s in custody.”
“But would you get a report from every rinky-dink town between here and Kansas City?” Sal demanded.
I’d worried about that myself, but even if Veriden had been picked up somewhere along the route, I couldn’t possibly check every small town along the interstates between Chicago and Kansas.
Sal’s urging wasn’t what sent me southwest. I’m not sure what my real reason was. It’s true none of my big-money clients needed me right now and most of the cases I was working on could be handled online. Any essential surveillance in Chicago could be offloaded onto the Streeter brothers, a trio whose core business had never been clear to me—they did woodworking, piano moving, bodyguarding, and surveillance, all with the same patient attention to detail.
Mr. Contreras was going to the Caribbean for three weeks to stay with a niece who had a winter place in St. Croix. While he’s able to look after himself, I don’t like leaving him on his own for long stretches now that he’s in his nineties. If he was going to be gone anyway, it removed one reason for my staying in Chicago.
And then there was Jake Thibaut, my bass player. A bass player. We’d been dating, or whatever people our age do, ever since the night he smuggled me past a group of thugs in a bass case.
Jake plays both modern and early music; his early-music group, High Plainsong, had won an important competition whose prize was a year’s residency in Switzerland. Jake had flown out in September, after six weeks of maniacal activity: renting his condo, working out logistics with venues where he already had commitments, helping his students find other teachers.
Long before he left, his head had been in the Alps, dreaming of music and musicians. Jake tried to talk me into going with him, which led to a major quarrel. “You’re in a rut, Vic. You do the same thing over and over. Why not jump off the high board with me, see what the future would hold if you risked everything?”
“You’re not risking anything,” I’d replied, annoyed. “You have a paid-for fellowship. What would I do? Quickly master German so I could start investigating Swiss banks for defrauding Holocaust survivors?”
“That’s what I mean,” he responded, annoyed in turn. “You’re bright, you’re creative—why does your mind automatically go to banks and fraud instead of something bigger, more challenging?”
“Can’t think of a bigger challenge than taking down a Swiss bank,” I couldn’t help saying.
“You take chances with your body all the time in your work, but you never take the big chances, life-changing chances,” he argued. “Fly to Basel with me, see what will unfold for you. There’s so much music there! It would inspire you in ways you can’t predict.”
“Listening to music and loving it, or loving you playing it, isn’t the same as making music,” I objected. “I can see myself in my life in Chicago. I love my work, and I don’t know what kind of work I could find in Basel that would bring me as much satisfaction.”
“Take a chance, see what opens up,” Jake urged. “If you spend the rest of your life chasing con artists and corporate maniacs, they’ll destroy your soul in the end.”
He flushed as soon as the words left his mouth.
“That’s what you think of my work?” I said after a stunned silence. “Soul-destroying? I thought I was helping people who’d lost all other options gain a measure of dignity.”
We’d kissed and made up, sort of, but in the two months since he’d left, our Skype sessions had become shorter, less intimate, and a few days before Bernie and Angela had come to me, Jake had sent me an e-mail saying he wouldn’t be back at Thanksgiving, as he’d originally planned.
“That’s the only week that Galina Yakovna can come to Basel before our Christmas concert, so it’s imperative that I stay here. Why don’t you fly out to join me?”
Yakovna was a Belarusian cellist whose name cropped up more and more frequently in Jake’s more and more infrequent messages. Maybe that’s why my message back was a terse, single sentence:
and develop a soul?
A trip out of town, even to Kansas, began to seem like a good way to keep my mind off my troubles.
At the end of the meeting with Troy Hempel and Emerald Ferring’s other neighbors, I drove over to Max Loewenthal’s house. He lives on one of the quiet streets fronting Lake Michigan, and I knew Lotty Herschel was there that evening.
Lotty is a doctor who’s mended the breaks and tears my investigations have inflicted on my body; I’ve helped her navigate the painful journey through her murdered family’s history. It’s not a contest, no one’s keeping score, it’s just that despite the difference in age and background, we each keep the other going.
“The choice is between Kansas and Switzerland, and you choose Kansas?” Lotty’s mouth twisted in affectionate mockery.
“Mountains versus prairies, artisanal chocolate versus wheat, cuckoo clocks versus cuckoo politicians—who wouldn’t make the same choice?” I said. “Besides, even though I miss Jake, I don’t want to be a third wheel with his Belarusian cellist. Eighth wheel, since High Plainsong has seven members already.”
I could picture trying to find ways to amuse myself while Jake and his cohort practiced ten hours a day.
“You realize, Victoria, that something serious has perhaps already happened to Emerald Ferring and August Veriden,” Max said quietly. “I won’t tell you your duty, because you are the most duty-driven person I have ever known, but it would be a mitzvah to go in person, not rely on an unknown outsider.”
&n
bsp; When I got up to leave, he stood on tiptoe to kiss my forehead. “You know, you have quite a fine soul. I wouldn’t tamper with it.”
I suppose it was the kiss, the compliment, that pushed me the final wavering steps across the line. The next day I organized the Streeter brothers’ support, mapped my route to Fort Riley, and rechecked law-enforcement databases for any dead or injured John and Jane Does who might match August’s or Ferring’s description.
I was bringing Peppy with me. A dog might be a hindrance in a strange place, but I felt as though I were setting off on a voyage to Mars, untethered from every place and person I knew and loved: I needed the dog’s companionship. Mitch, her half-black-Lab son, I sent to Dr. Dan’s, a boarding farm in Wisconsin—one companion on the road was all I could comfortably handle.
I packed a bag with my main physical tools: picklocks, extra clips for my Smith & Wesson, night-vision binoculars, evidence bags. A fifth of Johnnie Walker Black. My laptop, iPad, charging cables. Peppy’s bed, a bag of dog food. For me, hiking boots, a suitcase with three pairs of jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, slickers for the rain in the forecast, underwear, dress boots, my red Bruno Magli pumps—after all, I was going to Kansas—and a good outfit, because you never know.
Midafternoon I drove Mr. Contreras to O’Hare to catch his flight to St. Croix. Home to Skype with Jake. It was 5:00 p.m. in Chicago, midnight in Basel; he had just returned from a post-concert dinner. In the past when he’s been on the road, he’s played for me across the ether. We’d been too unhappy with each other lately for either of us to get comfort from his music, but tonight I asked for “Non più andrai,” from The Marriage of Figaro—a martial air to send me to battle in good spirits.
Jake got out his early-music bass and played the melody, then improvised on it for some minutes, finishing in a minor key. When the music faded, we hung up without speaking and I drove the first leg of the trip, spending the night on the Iowa border near the Mississippi River.
Fallout Page 4