Photo Finish (9781101537510)

by Paretsky, Sara

  PHOTO FINISH

  A V. I. Warshawski Mystery

  Sara Paretsky

  New American Library

  New American Library

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in Body Work.

  First New American Library E-Book Printing, October 2011

  Copyright © Sara Paretsky, 2000, 2011

  Excerpt from Body Work © Sara Paretsky, 2010

  All rights reserved

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  ISBN: 978-1-101-53751-0

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  I

  When he came into my office that July afternoon, I thought I’d met him before. It was something about his smile, sweet but aloof, as if inviting and withholding at the same time. I check databases before my first meeting with a new client, but whatever Hunter Davenport did hadn’t made my favorite search engines yet. If I’d seen him before, it wasn’t on the evening news.

  “I’m glad you could meet me on short notice, Ms. Warshawski. I’m only in town a few days and these Chicago hotel bills mount up.” He had a trace of that Southern drawl we Northerners secretly find appealing. “They warned me summer in Chicago could make Charleston feel cool, but I could hardly believe them until I got off that plane.”

  I shook his hand and offered him the armchair in the alcove where I meet clients. Outside, the heat was turning sidewalks into reflecting pools, but in my windowless office, all seasons and hours are alike; with air-conditioning and floor lamps, it might have been midwinter.

  “Charleston, South Carolina? Is that your home, Mr. Davenport?”

  “I lived there when I was a teenager, but most of my adult life has been spent in Europe. I can’t quite shake the accent, or a secret longing for long summer afternoons when time stops and all we do is lie in the tall grass, waiting for fish to rise and drinking lemonade.”

  I smiled. I feel nostalgia for those same endless summers when my friends and I kept our ears cocked for the Good Humor truck while we jumped rope.

  “So what brings you to Chicago when you could be in Charleston getting just as hot, and visiting your old haunts in the bargain?”

  He smiled again. “Since the grandmother who raised me died, there hasn’t been anything to take me back. I’m looking for my father. Someone told me he’d retired to Chicago. I didn’t see him in any of the phone books, so I thought I’d better get an investigator. The folks at the Herald-Star said you were good.”

  That was enterprising: an out-of-towner going straight to the dailies for advice. “When did you last see him?”

  “When I was eleven. When my mother died, I guess he couldn’t stand it. He left me at my grandmother’s—my mother’s mother—and took off. I never even got a postcard from him after that.”

  “And why do you want to find him now? After what, fifteen years?”

  “A pretty good guess, Ms. Warshawski. I’m twenty-four. When my grandmother died, I started thinking I wanted more family. Also, well”—he played with his fingers as if embarrassed—“I wondered if he didn’t have a side to his story I ought to hear. I grew up listening to my granny and my aunt—her unmarried daughter, who lived with her—repeat what a bad old bag of bones my old man was. They blamed him for my mama’s death. But I began to see that was impossible, so I started wondering about all the rest of what they had to say about my folks. I guess every man likes to know what kind of person his own old man was—what he’s got to measure himself against, so to speak.”

  I’m no less human than the next woman—I couldn’t resist the self-deprecating smile or the wistful yearning in his blue-gray eyes. I printed out a contract for him and told him I needed a five-hundred-dollar advance. Under the floor lamp, his helmet of ash blond hair looked like spun gold; as he leaned forward to hand me five hundreds in cash, I could almost imagine the money to be some conjuror’s trick.

  “I do accept checks and the usual credit cards,” I said.

  “I don’t have a permanent address these days. Cash is easier for me.”

  It was odd, but not that odd: Plenty of people who visit detectives don’t want a paper trail. It just made me wonder.

  His story boiled down to this: His father, also named Hunter Davenport, was a photographer—at least, he had been a photographer when young Hunter’s mother died. Hunter Senior had been a freelance journalist in Vietnam, where my client’s mother had been an army nurse. The two met, married, produced young Hunter.

  “That’s why I lived in Europe as a child: After the war my father covered hot spots in Africa and Asia. My mother and I lived in Paris during the school year and joined him on assignment during the summer. Then she died, in a car wreck in South Africa. It had nothing to do with whatever conflict he was covering. I don’t even know where he was working—when you’re a kid, you don’t pay attention to that kind of thing. It was just the ordinary dumb kind of wreck she could have had in Paris or Charleston. He wasn’t with her—in the car with her, I mean—but my grandmother always blamed him, said if he hadn’t kept her half a world away, it never would have happened.”

  He stumbled through the words so quickly, I had to lean forward to make out what he was saying. He stopped abruptly. When he spoke again it was in a slow, flat voice, but his knuckles showed white where he gripped his han
ds against his crossed legs.

  “I was with her when she died. My mother was so beautiful. You never will see a woman as beautiful as her. And when she was covered with blood— It was hard. I still see her in my dreams that way.” He took a deep breath. “It must have been hard for him, for Hunter—my—my dad—because the next thing I knew, I was at school in Charleston, living with my grandmother, and I never saw him again.”

  “What was your mother’s name? Birth name, I mean.”

  He’d gone away to some private world; my question jolted him back to my office. “Oh. Helen. Helen—Alder.”

  “And why do you think your father’s in Chicago?”

  “The agency. The agency where he used to sell his pictures, they told me they’d last heard from him here.”

  I had to work to pry more information from him: The agency was a French bureau. First, he claimed not to remember the name, but when I handed the hundreds back across the table, he came up with it: Sur Place, on Boulevard Saint-Germaine in Paris. No, he didn’t know his father’s social security number. Or his date of birth. He and his mother had spent so much time apart from his father that ordinary holidays and birthdays weren’t times they had in common. As for where his father came from, young Hunter was similarly ignorant.

  “My dad never talked to me about his childhood that I can remember. And my mother’s family declared him hors la loi, so that—”

  “Declared him ooo-la-la?”

  “What? Oh, hors la loi—an outlaw, you know. They never talked about him.”

  The client was staying at the Hotel Trefoil, a tiny place on Scott Street where they unpack your luggage and hand you a hot towel when you walk in so you can wipe the day’s sweat from your brow. If he could afford the Trefoil, my fee wouldn’t make a dent in his loose change. I told him that I’d do what I could and that I’d get back to him in a few days. He thanked me with that tantalizing familiar smile.

  “What do you do yourself, Mr. Davenport? I feel I should recognize you.”

  He looked startled. In fact, I thought he looked almost frightened, but in the pools of lamplight, I couldn’t be certain. Anyway, a second later he was laughing.

  “I don’t do anything worth recording. I’m not an actor or an Internet genius that you should know me.”

  He left on that note, making me wonder how he afforded the Trefoil. Perhaps his Charleston grandmother had left him money. I laid the five hundreds in a circle on my desktop and ran a marking pen over them. They weren’t counterfeit, but of course fairy’s gold vanishes overnight. Just in case, I’d drop them at the bank on my way home.

  The Internet readily found the phone number for Sur Place, which cheered me: Young Davenport had given me information so unwillingly that I’d been afraid he’d manufactured the agency’s name. It was nine at night in Paris; the night operator at the photo agency didn’t speak English. I think he was telling me to call tomorrow, when Monsieur Duval would be in, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

  It was only two in Chicago, and Sherman Tucker, the photo editor at the Herald-Star, was at his desk taking calls. “Vic, darling, you’ve found a corpse and I get the first look at it.”

  “Not even close.” Sherman has a passion for the old noir private eyes. He keeps hoping I’ll behave like Race Williams or the Continental Op and start stumbling over bodies every time I walk out the front door. “Ever use a stringer named Hunter Davenport, or heard anything about him? He used to freelance in Africa but someone thinks he might have moved to Chicago.”

  “Hunter Davenport? I never heard of the guy but he gets more popular by the hour. You’re the second person today asking for him.”

  “Did you refer an extremely beautiful young man to me?” I asked.

  Sherman laughed. “I don’t look at guys’ legs, V.I. But, yeah, there was a kid in here earlier. I told him if he didn’t want to take a missing person to the cops to go to you.”

  Sherman promised to call me if any of his staff recognized Davenport’s name. I felt as though I was trailing after my own client, but I checked the city and suburban directories just to be sure. There were a lot of Davenports, but no Hunters. I frowned at my desk, then dug out the phone directory disk for the Southeast from a service I subscribe to and looked up “Alder” in Charleston, South Carolina. There weren’t any. A whole bunch of Aldermans and Aldershots were listed, but no plain Alders. The client had said his granny was dead. She didn’t seem to have any relatives besides young Hunter. No wonder he wanted to find his father.

  I checked with the department of motor vehicles, but Hunter Senior didn’t have a driver’s license. For almost any other search, I’d need a social security number or a place and date of birth or some such thing. Of course, if the guy really had retired to Chicago, it was possible he’d been born here. I looked with distaste at the hundred or so Davenports in the city, and the two hundred more scattered through the suburbs. As a last resort I’d start calling them to see if a cousin or brother was mooching from them, but first I’d see what I could learn from the County.

  They know me in that mausoleum on Washington Street, but the warmth of my greeting still depends on who’s working the counter that day. I was lucky this afternoon. A middle-aged clerk who was marking time until he could take early retirement and devote himself to his homemade-pie shop was on duty. I’ve bought desserts from him from time to time; he was willing to give me a fifteen-year stack of registers at one go.

  Twenty minutes before closing, when even my friendly clerk was snarling at citizens to hurry up and finish, I found Hunter Davenport. He had been born in 1946 at Chicago Lying-In, to Mildred and Wayland Davenport (race: white; no previous live births; home address on Cottage Grove; age of parents: twenty-seven and thirty-five, respectively). If Mildred and Wayland were still alive, they were ancient, and they probably had long since moved from Cottage Grove, but at least it was a place to start.

  I detoured to my bank to deposit the five hundreds. As I was boarding the L at Lake Street, I thought I saw my client’s gold halo in the crowd. I jumped off the train, but by the time I’d fought past the rush hour crowd behind me, I couldn’t see him. I finally decided it must have been a trick of light.

  II

  Wayland Davenport had died the same year as my client’s mother. Poor Hunter Senior, losing his wife and his father at the same time. His mother, Mildred, was still alive, though, living in a shabby apartment complex in Lincolnwood. When I rang the bell, we began one of those tedious conversations through the intercom where she couldn’t make out what I was saying and I kept shouting into the door mike.

  “I’m too old to work,” she screeched.

  “Your son’s work,” I hollered. “His photographs. We’re interested in a display—an exhibit. Africa in the nineteen seventies through American eyes.”

  “You’d better go away,” she finally said. “I’m not buying anything.”

  I ground my teeth. A woman carrying two large bags of groceries came up the walk, followed by three young children. The biggest had his own small shopping bag, but the younger two had their hands free to punch each other. The woman kept muttering an ineffectual “Michael, Tania, stop it.” When she tried to balance a bag on her hip while she fumbled for her keys, I took the bags and held the door. She thanked me with the same exhausted mutter she used on her children.

  “I’m visiting Mildred Davenport in 4K, but I’ll be glad to carry your bags up for you first,” I said brightly.

  “Oh! Oh, thank you. Michael, let go of Tania’s hair.”

  She was on four as well, but at the other end, and, no, she didn’t know Mildred more than to recognize her. The kids kept her running all day, and Mildred never left her own apartment, except on Mondays, when someone from the senior center came to take her to the store or the doctor.

  “Do you know if her son is staying with her?”

/>   “Is that who that man is? I don’t like the way he looks at Tania. I told my husband it wouldn’t surprise me if he was a molester, out of prison, and they won’t tell us who’s in the building. We could be murdered here or our children abducted, and would the management care? Not any more than they did the time the people in 5A were keeping goldfish in the bathtub and let it overflow into our place. And then the cats, yowling to get out. I have complained a thousand times— Tania, stop pinching—”

  I was thankful when we reached her door. I dumped the bags on the floor, in the middle of a litter of LEGOs, Beanie Babies and half-empty cereal bowls, and fled as the children’s whines rose to howls.

  Before leaving my office this morning, I had written a short letter to Mildred Davenport, giving her the same story I had tried shouting through the intercom: I was a freelance journalist writing a book on Africa through American eyes and very much wanted to get hold of some of her son’s photographs from the eighties.

  At the far end of the corridor, I knocked loudly on her door. After a long wait, I heard a shuffling on the other side and then movement at the peephole. I smiled in a cheery, unthreatening way.

  She opened the door the width of a chain bolt. “What do you want?”

  I kept smiling. “I put it in writing—I thought that might be easier than me trying to explain it through the door.”

  She grudgingly took the envelope from me and shut the door again. The television was turned up so loud, I could hear it through the closed door. After about ten minutes, she came back.

  “I guess you can talk to him, but he says he doesn’t know what you mean. He never was in Africa.”

  I followed her into her living room, where a fan stirred air so heavy, it fell back like soup onto my hair and blouse. A television tuned to Oprah provided the only light. Stacks of newspaper and pieces of furniture were crammed so close together that it was hard to find a place to stand.

  “Hunter! This here’s the lady,” she shouted over Oprah in a flat nasal.