by Glenn Ickler
We went up the steps, and I opened the screen door and rang the bell. A dog started barking inside and a man’s voice yelled, “Shut up, Boris.” Apparently Boris was the latest successor to Bruno, who would have been 175 dog years older by this time.
A minute after Boris shut up, the inner door opened a crack and a man with stringy white hair and a white beard at the end of his long, narrow face peered out. The angular nose bore the tiny red lines that appear when a person consumes too much alcohol over too long a period of time. “Yeah?” the man said.
Without moving my upper body, I slid my left toe into the opening and introduced myself and Al. “We’d like to speak to your brother and his wife for a moment,” I said. “We promise not to stay long; we just have a quick request.”
“Who do you think I am?” the man asked.
“Jack Anderson’s brother Eddie,” I said.
“What if I told you I ain’t no Jack Anderson’s brother?”
“I’d still think you were.”
“So you’re callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m calling you a good protective brother who’s doing his family duty. But as I said, we just have one quick request that won’t take more than a couple of minutes. Just ask Jack and Jill if they’ll give us that much time.”
“Tell me what your ‘one quick request’ is and I’ll run it by them.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I told him about our desire for a photo of Marilee, then asked, “Can we wait inside?”
He thought about this quick request for a moment. “Oh, I suppose that won’t hurt.” He opened the door and we stepped into a small living room that was dominated by a huge flat screen television set. The rest of the furnishings—a sofa, two armchairs, and a coffee table buried in newspapers and dirty coffee cups—had an aura of gray about them. “Nondescript” would be a kind way to describe the entire collection.
A medium-size black poodle with some gray around his muzzle bounded toward me and put his front paws up on my knees. “Get down, Boris,” Eddie said. Boris tried to climb higher, sniffing my clothing every place his nose could reach. “He won’t hurt you. Might lick you to death.”
“He’s okay,” I said. “He probably smells my cat.”
“He likes cats. Plays with the one next door. Folks are out back on the deck. You wait right there.”
We didn’t have to wait long. A gray-haired woman so thin that my fingertips would have met if I’d put my hands around her waist hobbled in with the aid of a cane. “I’m Jill Anderson,” she said in a monotone. “What is this quick request you want?”
“We’re very sorry about your daughter,” I said. “We’d like to borrow a picture of her to use in the paper, if you have one with you. We’ll take very good care of it and bring it right back.”
“Something taken as close to the time she disappeared as possible,” Al said.
“All I got in my purse is her seventh-grade school picture,” Jill said. “It’s kind of beat up and it isn’t very big.”
“We can use that,” Al said. “We can even make you a bigger and better copy.”
She sighed. “That would be nice. My purse is in the bedroom. Be right back.” She walked slowly down a hall to our right and returned bearing a wallet-sized photo with the ragged edges and faded colors that come from being carried in a woman’s purse for twenty-five years.
The photo showed the unsmiling face of a young girl with Nordic features and intensely blue eyes. I got the feeling that those eyes would be the first thing one would notice upon meeting her, even if she were, as Bart Ziebart had so delicately put it, physically developed.
Al took the photo and held it carefully by the yellowed border. I thanked Jill and said we’d return it the next day. I added that we’d like to talk to both her and Jack about the police activity currently going on at their home as soon as possible.
“I’m glad the cops are doing something after all these years,” she said. “I’ll talk to you when you bring the picture back. I don’t know about Jack.”
“Will you still be staying here with Eddie tomorrow?”
“Looks like it. That bald detective with the big ears said he’d send a car for us when they were done going through the house.”
“You mean Detective Brown?” Al asked with a grin.
“Yah, I guess he did say that his name was Brown. Anyhow, he seemed to be the big honcho.”
“He’s a very big honcho,” I said. “And if anybody can find out what happened to your daughter, it’s him.”
“It’s time it all came out,” Jill said. She turned away and walked slowly back toward the deck.
“What do you suppose she meant by that?” Al said.
“I don’t think she was talking about spilling a pail of water,” I said.
Al went to work on the photo as soon as we got back to the Daily Dispatch. He photographed Marilee’s picture with a closeup lens on his camera so that he had a digital image to work with. Some electronic touching-up and enlarging time later he had a clean, crisp image and made several eight-by-ten prints.
“Marilee’s mama should like this,” he said, holding up one of the eight-by-tens.
“Wow, those eyes just burn into you,” I said as I looked at the print.
“Bore a hole right through you,” Al said.
“I feel like I’ve seen those eyes, but I can’t imagine where it would have been.”
“I don’t think you’d forget them.”
“Yeah, probably my imagination. What’s that little smudge on her right cheek?”
“It’s a mole or a birthmark, I think. It doesn’t show up that much on the little original.”
“I wonder what she’d look like now if she was alive,” I said.
“I’m going to find that out,” Al said. “I know a guy in my photography club who’s a whiz at aging people’s images. He can take an image of a ten-year-old and show you how he’ll look at fifty a couple different ways—fat or skinny. I’ll send him a digital copy of Marilee and ask him to work on aging her face by twenty-five years.”
“That’s a great talent.”
“It’s a great lucrative talent. Cops, private detectives, and families looking for lost relatives are willing to pay for that talent. Our police department’s missing persons division has used him several times.”
“Maybe they will again, on this case.”
“Maybe. But we’ll be a few days ahead of them.”
“Meanwhile, Don has the teenage image of Marilee to run with my story. That’s something that Trish Valentine won’t have to show her audience while she’s standing out in the street reporting live.”
“Right. Well, my day is over. See you later.” Al gave a little wave and headed for the elevator.
My day was over, too. I straightened up enough of the jumble of newspapers, magazines, notes, and old candy bar wrappers on my desk to avoid an overnight avalanche, made a note of Eleanor Miller’s house number on East Geranium Street, and called it a day. My plan was to swing past Ms. Miller’s house before going home. However, by the time I flopped into my car I felt too tired to go out to the East Side before heading west to the Lexington Avenue apartment I shared with Martha Todd, the gorgeous brunette who had been my wife for all of seven weeks, and my neutered black-and-white tomcat, Sherlock Holmes.
All I wanted to do was walk in the door, grab a drink of ice water, and crash on the sofa. I’d probably be asleep when Martha Todd, who had kept her maiden name rather than becoming Martha Mitchell, got home.
When people were rude enough to ask why Martha hadn’t changed her name, we replied that it was because she had established herself as Martha Todd at the St. Paul law firm where she worked. The real reason was that she had changed her name for her first husband, who rewarded her by beating her up and dragging her across the kitchen floor by her hair, had changed it back after her divorce, and didn’t want to go through the name-changing process a third time. I also suspected that she had an unspoken fear that another
change might bring bad luck to our union.
Martha is the light of my life, both physically and emotionally. Physically, she is part Cape Verdean, with a knock ’em dead dazzling white smile, a silken complexion the color of coffee with a heavy dose of cream, and the most perfectly sculpted ass of any woman I have ever seen. Emotionally, we love each other with a passion that goes beyond anything I’d ever imagined.
Our apartment is the on left side of a two-story brick duplex. The right side is occupied by our landlord, a Liberian immigrant named Zhoumaya Jones. Zhoumaya’s husband was killed and she was paralyzed from the waist down in a bizarre motorcycle accident about five years ago. They were buzzing along at sixty miles per hour when a tree fell across the road only a few feet in front of them. Now Zhoumaya gets around briskly in a motorized wheelchair. She works in an office in City Hall and has anonymously steered me to some meaty stories involving our city government.
The house looked blessedly quiet as I walked up the front steps. I put the key in the lock, yawned before turning it, and opened the door.
I was greeted with a blast of voices shouting, “Surprise!” I found myself facing at least a dozen grinning people, including Martha; Al and his wife, Carol; my mother; my grandmother; Zhoumaya; and several fellow ink-stained wretches from the Daily Dispatch. I took a step backwards and almost lost my balance.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“It’s your birthday, dummy,” said Al.
“Oh, God, that’s right. It’s the thirteenth of July.”
“Party time,” said Martha. She threw herself against me, wrapped me in her arms, and kissed my lips for a long time. “And there’ll be a special party time later when everybody goes home,” she whispered into my ear.
“Why the big party crowd?” I said. “It’s not a special year, like forty or forty-five or, God help me when I get there, fifty.”
“It is a special year, silly. It’s your first birthday as my lawfully wedded husband.”
Chapter Five
Party Time
SOMEHOW MY ADRENAL glands produced enough of the energizing chemical to revive me and carry me through the festivities, which included grilling hamburgers in the backyard and consuming an assortment of beverages. There was wine and beer for those who could handle it and lemonade for Mitch, the recovering alcoholic.
In order to avoid creating a fire hazard, Martha had decorated my birthday cake with only two candles. They were shaped like the numbers four and two and stood about two inches high. I drew a round of cheers by blowing them out with one puff after formulating my secret wish. The cake itself was perfect: chocolate, with chocolate frosting. Martha responded with laughter when I asked if she had made it from scratch.
After the cake was demolished, my eighty-eight-year-old Grandmother Goodrich, who I call Grandma Goodie, took me by the elbow, walked me away from the crowd, and expressed her usual concern for the status of my soul. “You’re a year older and a year closer to the afterworld,” she said. “Warnie Baby, you need to pick a church and start going every Sunday to prepare your soul for the day of reckoning.” I have been Warnie Baby to her since the day I was baptized Warren James Mitchell.
“You’re just full of good birthday party cheer, aren’t you?” I said.
“I’m only thinking of your future, Warnie Baby. You need to get yourself right with God before the Day of Judgment arrives.” The only Sunday church service Grandma Goodie has missed within my memory was when she was hospitalized with a gall bladder attack, and then the minister of the Methodist church and five members of the choir conducted a service, complete with hymns, prayers, and a sermon, in her room.
“I appreciate that, but churches and I don’t get along very well.” As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I had submitted myself to the care of a higher power, but I wasn’t prepared to worship that higher power in a weekly Sunday morning service.
“Every week you let go by is another week your soul is at risk,” she said.
“Maybe I should join the church Martha and I were married in,” I said. A Unitarian-Universalist minister had been kind enough to conduct a wedding service for us two non-churchgoing backsliders.
“I don’t know,” Grandma Goodie said. “Some of those Unitarians think they’re not Christian.”
“Some of those Unitarians aren’t Christian. That’s their whole point: everyone is welcome no matter what they believe.”
“I’m not sure that kind of thinking will get you into heaven, but I suppose it could be a start,” she said. “At least it’s a church.”
Luckily for me, we were interrupted at that moment by someone who knows everything about churches—Franklin P. Butterfield III, who covers all newsworthy events pertaining to religion for the Daily Dispatch. Franklin is openly and gloriously gay, and is known affectionately at the office as Churchy LaFemme (with apologies, of course, to the late Walt Kelley, creator of the Pogo comic strip, which included a character of that name).
“Ready to start a mid-life crisis?” Churchy asked. “You’ve reached the magic age and you’re halfway over the hill.” His flowing dark hair was woven into a pair of pigtails and tied up with bows of yellow ribbon. His pierced ears displayed dangling earrings with an easily decipherable phallic design.
“I had my mid-life crisis standing at the altar on my wedding day,” I said. “From here on in I plan to age gracefully and go gentle into that good night.”
“Good plan,” Churchy said.
“Good night,” said Grandma Goodie, who had been studying Churchy’s hair and earrings with a facial expression usually produced by sucking on a raw lemon. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to round up your mother and head off to bed.” She and Mom were staying in Zhoumaya Jones’s guest room overnight because our second bedroom had been converted into a shared office for Martha and me.
“Night, night,” I said. “And thanks for your words of wisdom.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck,” she said. I really hadn’t meant to be; not this time any way.
“Good night, dear lady,” said Churchy, giving her an effeminate finger wave of farewell.
Grandma Goodie wrinkled her nose. “Night,” she said, and off she went.
After the crowd departed, Martha and I adjourned to the bedroom, where she hosted the special party she had promised. An hour later, as we lay side by side in quiet reverie, I said, “You know something?”
“What?” she whispered.
“I know what day your birthday is but I don’t know what year you were born.”
“Sounds good to me.” Seconds later she was asleep.
* * *
AFTER A BREAKFAST TOPPED with the last two pieces of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, I got into my Honda Civic and drove toward downtown. It was a cloudless, sunny day that promised to get hot and humid later, about the time I planned to check out the address of Eleanor Miller.
Maybe I could avoid the afternoon heat. I called Don O’Rourke and asked if my presence was required in the office at eight o’clock.
“Did you oversleep again?” Don asked. “Married life is wearing you out.”
“It’s not like that; I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and eager to excel,” I said. I explained that I wanted to take a run past East Geranium Street on the way to work and Don gave me the go-ahead. He said he remembered Eleanor Miller and that she would be a good person to interview if she was “still cogent.”
The police roadblock was still up, so I parked in front of it and walked to Eleanor’s house. As I passed the yellow tape ringing the Anderson residence, I waved at the well-fed cop who was again standing guard with his back against the tree. He nodded but did not wave back. He was holding a plastic coffee cup in one hand and two-thirds of a doughnut in the other. A suspicion confirmed.
I turned and went up the steps to the next house, rang the bell, and waited. I was about to ring the bell again when the inner door opened and a girl of about twelve stood facing me through the screen door.
She was wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, which she held closed with both hands, and her long brown hair hung straight to her shoulders. Obviously I’d gotten her out of bed.
“Yes?” she said.
I held up my Daily Dispatch identification card and introduced myself. “I’m looking for Eleanor Miller.”
This produced a puzzled look on the young face inside the screen. “Who?”
“Eleanor Miller. She lived here twenty-five years ago.”
“Oh, that must be Great-Grammy. We moved in here when they put her in a home.”
“What kind of home? A nursing home?”
“I guess,” the girl said. “They feed her and help her get dressed and push her around in a wheelchair and all that kind of stuff.”
“What’s the name of the home?” I asked.
“Oh, jeez, I don’t really know. It’s out of town somewhere.”
“Do you know where?”
“Not really. I go out there with my mom and dad sometimes but I don’t look where we’re going.”
“Are either of your parents home?”
“Both working,” she said. “My little brother is home but I’m pretty sure he don’t know any more than I do.”
“Maybe he does,” I said. “Sometimes boys pay attention to where a car is going.”
“You want me to wake him up?”
“If you would.”
“Jeez! Okay, I’ll see if I can rock him.” She turned and went away. I tested the screen door with a gentle pull. It was locked.
I was about to ring the bell again when a boy wearing only a red shorty pajama bottom emblazoned with baseballs appeared. He was about eight or nine and looked as sleepy as the girl.
“Meghan says you want to know where Great-Grammy is,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know if it’s okay to tell you.”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”