by Robert White
Annaliese O’Reilly wasn’t under my skin. I didn’t even know if she was a victim yet. That matters. A few years ago, I’d have gone to Tico’s or some darkened watering hole on the Strip and drunk with the locals until I felt reasonably sane again. Instead, I made a few quick calls to some friends left over from my detective days at the Jefferson-on-the-Lake station house and played mah jongg on my computer for four hours straight. It’s not like solitaire; it’s about freedom and confinement.
I asked another drinking comrade filling out time in the weapons room until retirement to check her out. Annaliese O’Reilly had been arrested for DUI in the summer before she disappeared. She’d been weaving a mile west of Route 45—right at the curve near the Billow Beach Lounge—and the arresting officer radared her. I knew him: an OK cop working plainclothes out of the Jefferson PD.
The report says he smelled alcohol on her breath and he found her to be intoxicated when she flunked the field test. She herself wanted a breathalyzer at the station house, but she flunked that too with a 0.21. It was her only violation. That didn’t say much, however, because the chief of police had to play ball with the Chamber of Commerce, and there’s nothing like a buzzkill for a resort town when ticket-happy cops start bagging motorists up and down the Strip. It can spoil a summer’s revenue mighty fast. Even the staties in their basic black observe the custom of staying clear in high summer and wait for motorists at a respectable distance. One gung-ho cop named “Red Dog” from his academy days in Columbus learned his lesson the hard way when he mistranslated the daywatch commander’s pep talk about reducing drunk drivers and filled his monthly quota in a week. Typical of police logic, he was given a commendation and then transferred to community service where he spent the next year visiting elementary schools in various seasonal costumes talking to kids about D.A.R.E. When he refused a direct order from Chief Millimaki to don an Easter rabbit costume, he wound up on suspension for six weeks. Not one of my rules necessarily, but it’s the old golden rule at work: He who has the gold rules.
Something else I learned from another contact in Children’s Services: Annaliese had an abortion when she was seventeen years old. By law, she was required to notify at least one parent that she intended to abort a fetus and that she had to observe the 24-hour, state-mandated waiting period and listen to alternatives to abortion. One of my best contacts in county welfare faxed me a copy of the parental consent form. Annaliese had forged her father’s signature. I knew that much because the signature on his retainer check was not even remotely like the one I saw beneath Annaliese’s own signature on the form. Was it her father’s child she aborted? Either he knew and was too ashamed to tell me or he didn’t know because she didn’t tell him. There is no corollary to the universal cop rule that everybody lies. This admits of no exceptions because everyone lies, principals and witnesses alike, some people for the sheer fun of lying to a cop. You want truth, find it out for yourself.
There is a word I learned from Jack, my former partner in Cleveland PD, who never missed a chance to smirk at my rookie zeal. I have a photo of us at a crime scene: he’s resting against the black-and-white, one of his stinking cigars sold at fine Dairy Marts everywhere clamped in his mouth while I’m scouring the grass in the foreground—presumably for evidence but I can’t remember now. There’s a look of patience fighting exasperation on his face that I used to dread because it precipitated a long lecture at some perceived incompetence of mine. He used to talk about achieving a higher state of being, ataraxia, he called it, a serenity borne of tender indifference to the human avalanche of misery that threatened to wash over any cop dumb enough to take his job seriously. We weren’t fighting crime, he used to say: we were stirring up the shit in the swill bucket and watching it resettle to the bottom. Cop wisdom.
I look at that photo now and then, and I see in my furrowed rookie brow the light of initiation and beatitude. I see Jack looking at me and I recall his amusement at my blundering efforts to control a crime scene. Jack never saw me make it to the elite ranks of homicide because he ate his gun a year into his retirement, a year before I earned my detective shield.
My cell phone rang. My ex-wife’s voice told me she was expecting a child. I asked her what she was going to name it. I don’t know why I asked because it is a matter of indifference to me what name it has. Everyone is condemned to live out the destiny of the name we get at birth, and it is never one we choose for ourselves. I heard myself congratulating her. She always wanted a child but we could never have had one together because I am sterile. A man I fought with in an alley had a knife and he cut my scrotum; the infection left me unable to have children. That was shortly before I joined the cops when I had just quit the ore boats and a life on the Great Lakes to come home to bury my grandmother and marry Micah. Sometimes I slip my existentialist leash and revert to my boyhood faith—all the years of bending the knee has done its psychic damage and I am unable to rid myself entirely of superstition. When Micah said goodbye, I thought: We’re just mud pies God likes to play with. I can forgive her for her treachery and her lying while our marriage was collapsing; I was a useless drunk wallowing in my own unhappiness. She found a way out, and though I loathe her choice regarding my replacement—a man whose morals are lower than a gangbanger’s pants—I don’t begrudge her that right to choose her form of happiness. Happiness, as Reggie used to say on his way to sinking the 8 ball, was the maximum agreement between reality and desire. The day I signed my divorce papers in his office, I snarled at him from under a murderous hangover and asked him who the fuck said that. “Stalin,” he grinned. He showed his scratch pad to me; he was doodling wolves. Right there and then, in my office in a boxy room full of nothing but stale Ohio air and the white noise from my computer, I decided that my happiness depended on finding Annaliese. When it’s a mission, you just have to go. That is all there is left to do.
On Monday I found my first lead to Annaliese—just a tickle but a palpable one nonetheless. I reached her Jefferson landlady and from her I obtained the phone number of a high-school classmate. She agreed to meet me at the diner opposite the Courthouse that afternoon. She said she’d bring photos of Annaliese.
There was a thunderstorm moving up from the south and temperatures were dropping fast; someone spoke of a last gasp of winter, and the farmers in the diner where I was waiting for Brenda Holbacher were bemoaning another killer frost just as the shoots were clearing the ground.
She came in, hair in spiky bangs all streaked and moussed, and gold earrings the size of dog collars. A stud in her lip. I was too out of touch to know whether gothic or grunge were still the fashion. She smiled at me, popped her chewing gum, and then sat in a single swift motion.
“I appreciate your coming, Brenda,” I started.
Her eyes darkened. “Yeah, whatever.”
She smiled big. I detected prettiness the frumpy clothes couldn’t belie but the eye make-up must have been ladled on with a spatula. She chewed her gum while I spoke, interrupting me once to shout an order for a cheeseburger at a passing waitress, who was someone she knew well enough to tease about her “muffin tops.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Love handles, man,” she said. She needed no warm-up, and I doubted that there was anything she wanted to hide. Her mannerisms were the fidgety ones of youth rather than deception.
“Brenda, Annaliese’s father has hired me to find her and bring her back. If you know where she is, you can save me a lot of trouble and him a lot of expense if you can tell me where she is right now.”
“Her old man,” she began thoughtfully. “Did Annaliese—did she tell you about him?”
“I know all about it.”
“Yeah, uh-huh. Why should I wanna help you find her?”
“Look, Brenda. I could lie to you and tell you that her father is sorry for what happened. But I know that doesn’t cut anything. I could say he’s dying and wants to leave her all his money and there’s a finder’s fee in it for you. But the fact
is I just want her found. She may be in trouble. Maybe she’s OK and wants to be left alone. If that is the case, I’ll just verify it and go away without her ever seeing me and then I’ll tell her father that she doesn’t want to be found.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I haven’t any reason to hurt her. We both know she’s been hurt enough.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Tell me then.”
She had told the detective who came to see her three years ago when her father first filed a missing person report on his daughter that Annaliese never returned to the apartment she shared. This was late in May, she said. She herself had been out of town with a boyfriend, a married man who took her to Chautauqua Lake region in western New York. When she returned, there was no Annaliese, no message from her stating where she had gone or anything unusual about her disappearance. As far as Brenda remembered, all Annaliese’s clothes were still in the closet. It looked as though she had disappeared with the clothes on her back and nothing else. She turned over to the police all of Annaliese’s papers—pay stubs, one letter from her mother, bills, bank statement—the whole kit and caboodle. There was nothing left of Annaliese O’Reilly except three photos she had held back from the police as keepsakes of their friendship.
I asked to see them.
Annaliese was alone in the first two of them. In one she had been caught stepping from the shower. There was the expression of surprise and shock as she inadvertently mimed the classic pose of modesty, one hand to her crotch and the other across her chest. One shell-pink aureole peeked through her fingers and her caramel thatch was evident despite the splayed fingers. In the other photo, she was dressed for work across the street in sedate gray tones—a navy blue ensemble of pleated skirt and white blouse. Her eyes were a warm liquid brown. She smiled with the same smile of the newspaper clipping her father brought to my office.
The third photo was graphic, electric, and pornographic.
She was on her knees performing fellatio; the man’s torso disappeared above his belly button; his penis was thick and fully extended—about half of it was in her mouth.
“Well,” she said, watching me to see what my reaction would be.
“Well, what?” I asked.
“Thought, like, you’d have something more to say.”
“Why, Brenda?”
“Well, you know. Like I thought you’d at least show some curiosity.”
“I was a cop in Cleveland before I got into the private investigations. I’ve had a lot of experience looking behind door number three. That’s the one everybody’s interested in, right? So tell me about this one.”
“You know, I thought that, like, since you were looking for her for that fucking scumbag, that you might reconsider.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know. Daddy’s little darling on her knees with a big dick in her mouth. Maybe he won’t be so eager to have her back now and he’ll leave her alone.”
“Was the photo taken at the same time as the others?”
“No. The first two are old ones. We were just out of high school. That last one came in the mail, no letter, nothing. Just the photo.”
“What did you think?”
“If she meant to shock me, well . . . I had walked in on her once with Marcus. I saw the two of them before. Like that. You know, engaged.”
“So you weren’t shocked?”
Her face wrinkled a bit. “You mean because she lets her photo be taken? Why should that surprise me? You never heard of sexting?”
The insouciance of youth, I supposed. I was getting too old to relate to anyone who didn’t know who Squeaky Fromme was.
“Did Annaliese date any African-Americans?”
“What makes you ask that?”
I knew many cops who saw things on the street that sent them reeling off into blind racism, an easy psychological niche to carve under the compelling circumstances of the street’s mindless violence, and it was all nigger this, nigger that. It wasn’t just a Crip or Blood thing anymore to find a strawberry girl, usually some ADC type with a kid or two, take over her apartment and steal her welfare check. Hatred for another human being nearly destroyed me once. Instead of telling her this, I said: “I had a partner once, a self-educated man and a first-rate cop. When he was teaching me how to be a real cop, he used to quote a philosopher named Spencer who said, ‘There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a person in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.’”
“You are weird, man.”
I flipped the photo over and tapped at some writing in block letters. “What’s this mean?” BEST FRIENDS. The e, however, was drawn like the schwa, a tipped arrow.
She squinted at me, arched eyebrows and bangs. “What’s it supposed to mean? I dunno. They’re, like, best friends, I guess. Sorta looks like it, eh?”
“Do you still have the envelope the photo came in?”
“Hell no, I tore it up long ago. When she got back from seeing her mother that summer in Philadelphia—”
“Pittsburgh?”
“Whatever. She told me everything about how her mom had an affair with a black guy in Germany and how her father beat the shit out of her when he found out.”
“Think hard, Brenda. Where was the postmark on the envelope from?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You do too. You had to be curious after her skipping off—”
“All right, all right. No—wait, Boston, I think. Yeah, Boston.”
“Do you remember the address? Anything at all about the postmark?”
“No, man. It was too long ago, like.”
“Do you have any idea where Annaliese might be now?”
“I’m not sure I’d tell you even if I did know.”
“Fair enough.”
“Listen, you said you don’t want to bother her. Well, how do you know she won’t be bothered when you show up and tell her that her goddamned father who messed her up wants her to come home, all’s forgiven and all that shit?”
“I don’t know what she’ll think or say until I have a chance to ask her. If she’s happy wherever she is, I won’t bother her, and all her father will get from me is my word she’s safe. I can’t promise more than that. I owe her father something too. He is my client.”
“He’s a piece of shit,” Brenda said.
“I don’t have to like him,” I said.
She stayed silent, looking at me through those raccoon eyes, her thumb and forefinger stretching out a stray spit curl. I thought how much harder it is to have a girl nowadays. We’ve abandoned them in this hook-up culture.
“If you still have doubts about my intentions,” I said, “we’ll go our separate ways and no one has to be told anything. You don’t know me and you have no reason to trust me, but maybe I can give you proof that I don’t intend any harm to her. Is that fair?”
“All right,” Brenda said, “but let me warn you. See this purse? I’ll keep one hand on my gun, so don’t get any stupid ideas.”
My hands flew up in mock surrender. “I’m your prisoner until you say I can go.”
Damn. Ask any cop: a civilian with a gun is one of the scarier things around, but a girl just out of her teens? I knew many professional women in Cleveland who used to pay their parking fee with one hand and keep their other tightly around the butt of the .25 in their purse. I could see Jack smirking at me from beyond the grave: “O tempora, O mores . . .
“Where’s your whip at?”
“My what?”
“Your ride, man. Wheels. You know, C-A-R.”
“Over there,” I said, pointing to my trusty gray steed sandwiched humbly between some lawyer’s Escalade and some circuit court judge’s Benz.
“That piece of shit? Oh hell.”
I drove to a place I sometimes visit along the lake shore when I need to clear my head; someti
mes the ducks and Canada geese come in to roost and there’s a lot to see that has nothing whatsoever to do with the affairs of humankind. I brought a thermos of coffee and two paper cups, but Brenda refused the coffee with a yuck. “I never drink that shit,” she said.
“To each his own.”
Curlicues of steam in widening gyres drifted above the cup in the chilly air, then dissipated into nothingness.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just a saying,” I said. “It means we pick our own poison.”
“I dunno about that,” Brenda said. “I do know that Annaliese never asked to be raped by her old man. But that wasn’t all she didn’t ask for either.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean her whole life was fucked up. When she was at the Vo-Ed, she used to talk about this older guy she was dating, used to drop big hints about his being a married man, so it wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Who was the guy?”
“I don’t know. She was real secret about him on account of his being married. This was before Marcus. I think she picked Marcus up on the rebound.”
“Marcus still around?”
“Jesus, how should I know?”
“What was her relationship with Marcus like?”