Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  I remembered Emily’s passivity when I first saw her. Her creativity was certainly muted at home.

  “When you’re a child you think what happens in your house is normal,” I said. “If she doesn’t have friends she may not know other kinds of households exist. She might not talk about it. But I’ve seen Fabian in action. Believe me: he’s a wild man.”

  “Is he? I’ve never noticed that. Perhaps ... well, autocratic. But we see a fair amount of that: the parents here often are in positions of considerable authority and are used to deference.” The humorous lines around her mouth deepened, but whatever amusing memory had come to mind, she wasn’t sharing it.

  My lips tightened bitterly. Fabian exuding witty charm with his guests last Wednesday, displaying heartbreaking distress over his lost daughter last night—his public personality persuaded a shrewd cop like Terry Finchley. Why not a high school teacher as well? If I hadn’t returned for my coat last week and seen him in action would I have believed he could be violent? Instead of trying to persuade Cottingham of Fabian’s sadistic side I asked what had precipitated Emily’s flight.

  “She broke down reading her poem. That was Monday’s assignment—to write a poem. I make them draw straws to read, since some are exhibitionists who will hog all the time and others are so shy they never volunteer. Emily’s turn came fourth. She read a few lines and then started to cry. Pretty soon she was suffering a major emotional storm and I had to get her out of the classroom.”

  “Was it about her mother?”

  Cottingham grimaced. “I hope not—it was quite a grim piece.”

  “Do you remember it?” I tried to curb a swell of excitement at the possibility of a direct lead on Emily’s frame of mind.

  “Oh, I’ve got it here. She left it on the table when we went down to the nurse’s office.”

  Cottingham’s table, at the front of the room, was distinguished from the others by the stacks of paper on top. She fished in one pile and pulled out a sheet of pin-feed paper. She frowned more deeply as she looked it over.

  “Certainly something is going on in her life. Kids usually cover standard subjects—the grandeur of nature, the pain of racism. This is just ... well, pain.”

  I took the sheet from her.

  A Mouse Between Two Cats

  by Emily Messenger

  Quaker Mouse decked out in gray

  Leaves her hole for work, not play.

  Every sound makes her shudder—

  She’s too small for the fray.

  Small nose twitches, whiskers flutter,

  She seeks crumbs—not bread and butter.

  What the gods refuse to eat

  She knows must suit her.

  Two cats are lords on this beat.

  Their approach means her retreat.

  One is fat, the other lean,

  Cruelty their meat.

  Late one night they move unseen

  As Mousie nibbles on terrine

  They trap poor Quaker and press her

  Sharp claws between.

  Lean cat sings, would caress her;

  Mousie darts toward a dresser.

  Fat cat snarls and holds her close—

  As if to bless her.

  Fat cat grins, You get to choose.

  Lean cat sings, You are my Muse—

  Stay with me and be my pet.

  You can’t refuse.

  Fat cat grins. His lips are wet.

  Go with him, you go to death.

  Stay with me. You’ll be my slave

  And in my debt.

  Slave or Muse, Mouse feels depraved.

  Claws on neck can’t make her brave.

  Caught twixt grins and songs she faints.

  Poor sport, cats rave.

  Two cats howl their loud complaints

  On her back red stripes one paints.

  The other rakes out her nipple.

  There’s no restraint.

  Quaker lives, badly crippled,

  Creeps round her hole on tiptoe.

  Cats grin and sing, hunt for sport.

  Their muscles ripple.

  I shivered. The furies raging in the Messenger home came to grotesque life on the page. I was surprised, too, by the care invested in the language. I wouldn’t have suspected the Emily I’d seen, by turns tearful and withdrawn, to have such inner control.

  “Do you have any idea when she wrote this?” I asked Cottingham. “You said it was Monday’s assignment. Does that mean she wrote it over the weekend? After her mother’s death?”

  Cottingham pursed her lips, considering. “I made the assignment two weeks ago, when we’d been discussing poetry for a few sessions. Students usually wait until the last minute, so the probability is she wrote it on the weekend. It is strange, though, isn’t it—if she knew her mother was dead. And also, how could she have the ... well, the emotional energy to write anything within hours of her mother’s murder. I’d guess she did it ahead of time. But then, why read it now?”

  “Presumably Emily sees herself as the mouse. But maybe she’s seeing her mother like that, and herself some guilty monster. I’d like to take the poem with me.”

  Cottingham shook her head. “Nope. It’s a student’s private paper. You don’t know—”

  “I don’t know where she is. The longer it takes to find her the less likely she is to be in decent mental shape, or even alive. And she’s got her two brothers with her. Anything that can help me learn enough about her to figure out where she may have gone is crucial.”

  “The police are looking—”

  “And I wish them every success.” I cut her off again. “But they’re not studying Emily. They’re focusing on the situation. Fabian is confusing the investigation by hauling in the state’s attorney every time he wants action.”

  “And you have special skills?”

  “I thought you knew. I’m a private investigator.” Surely I had told her that last night on the phone. Or was I so rattled by events that I couldn’t even identify myself anymore?

  In the end Cottingham gave unenthusiastic assent to my making a copy of the document, as she called it. She stood next to me in the office while I used their copier. I even put a dime in the tray—the donation requested for personal use of the machine.

  “And you’ll call me if you think of anything—or hear anything—that might tell me where she’s gone?” I said as she left me at the door.

  She promised, but not with the air of someone placing great confidence in my abilities. As if to test her assessment I stopped at the Messenger house on my way north. The housekeeper opened the door a crack.

  “No reporting.” Her accent was thick, almost unintelligible.

  “I’m a detective.” I spoke slowly. “Is Mr. Messenger home?”

  “No reporting,” she repeated firmly, starting to shut the door.

  Sticking my toe in the crack, I fished frantically in my brain for the few words of Polish I’d learned from my father’s mother. Those didn’t include private detective, of course, but since he’d been a policeman I’d heard her mention that. To palliate the lie I pulled out my wallet to show her the photostat of my investigator’s license.

  She frowned at it, reiterated “Policjant,” and opened the door. When I asked again for Fabian she answered in Polish. Disappointed at my blank stare, she said, “No home,” and turned on her heel.

  Feeling guilty—at impersonating the police, at trespassing on Emily’s privacy—I trotted up the stairs to her bedroom. Someone had sorted through it with an undiscriminating hand. The times I’d been here it had held the mild disarray of the average teenager, but today drawers stood open, trailing bits of sweatshirts and underwear, books lay haphazardly on the floor, and papers tilted drunkenly over the sides of the small desk. I couldn’t believe Finchley or Neely had searched the place so carelessly. Either Fabian had vented his rage here, or Emily had been hunting something crucial before she fled.

  I picked up the papers from the floor. They were all schoolwor
k—essays, geometry problems, class notes. The essays expressed what Ms. Cottingham had called “the standard subjects”—the intense yearning for love and death that catches you at adolescence.

  I hoped for more poems, or a diary, but found nothing so personal. Only in the margins of the notes, between savagely etched doodles, were occasional remarks. “Why, oh why?”appeared, and stern adjurations to silence, in English and French. The hand itself, although still juvenile, was tiny, as though the writer were trying to efface her presence from the paper.

  Stuck among the papers was a snapshot of Emily with Joshua and Nathan. She was cradling the baby, holding Joshua by the hand. The picture might have dated from the previous summer: she wore the muddy yellow shirt I’d seen her in last Saturday, but over shorts. Both she and Joshua stared at the camera with a painful solemnity. I tucked the picture into my notebook and continued hunting.

  A letter from Emily’s grandmother, in the round script taught in the thirties, thanked her for her card and described the coming of spring to Du Quoin, in downstate Illinois. The cat was catching sparrows in the garden instead of the mice in the kitchen. The college students were feeling their oats with the warm weather; Grandmother hoped Emily was behaving herself and taking advantage of her own educational opportunities. I copied down the address, wondering if someone who saw herself as a mouse would turn to a grandmother who wrote so prosaically about her own murderous cat.

  I took a quick look through Emily’s wardrobe. Girls today wear anything, from leggings and smocks to tattered jeans and granny dresses. Girls whose fathers earned Fabian’s kind of money have drawers spilling out with teddies and other feathery lingerie. In Emily’s closet the pink wool dress she’d worn to Manfred’s dinner hung with some of Deirdre’s other castoffs and two pleated skirts, last in fashion when I was in high school. I shut the door, embarrassed to have pried on such desolate ground.

  After that I couldn’t bring myself to go through her dresser, even in the hopes of finding a hidden diary. Where the plain cotton briefs stuck out I shoved them in and firmly closed the drawers.

  I picked up a few of the books at random. The old standbys, Charlotte’s Web and Laura Ingalls Wilder, were mixed with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ursula K. LeGuin. A dreaming child, or perhaps one in retreat from the painful world she inhabited. I jotted some of the titles next to the grandmother’s address, wondering what possible significance I could hope to find in them.

  A fat book had been thrown in a corner, its edge just visible where it poked beyond the radiator. I lay down flat to pull it out. It was a copy of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. In the dust jacket Fabian had written “To Emily, the Alpha and the Omega. Happy Birthday. Love, Father.” The alpha and omega? Let alone that it was a strange thing to write to his daughter, Fabian had never seemed to me to treat her that way. Although there was his unexpected gentleness when I was leaving the house on Saturday.

  Something else lay behind the radiator. Impelled by what curiosity I couldn’t say, I stuck a hand in to pull it out. It was a baseball bat, signed by Nellie Fox. I’d noticed it, casually, last Wednesday night, in the hall umbrella stand. The head was covered with a dried, scabby mess. I looked at it, stupefied, knowing what it was but refusing to accept knowledge, then stuffed it back under the radiator and fled the house.

  21

  What’s in a Poem?

  I drove over to the lake. The ground was still brown, cut in ugly hillocks by the stones flung along it during last winter’s storms. I walked out to the promontory jutting east at Fifty-fifth Street. The day was cool; the city to the north was shrouded by fog. The water, gunmetal-blue, slapped at my feet. An old man sat by a line, a bucket and net next to him. He didn’t look up as I passed.

  Emily could not possibly have killed Deirdre. I made myself repeat those words. The bat somehow had gotten into her room. Fabian put it there and threatened to turn her in for her mother’s murder if she didn’t give him an alibi for last Friday. The pressure proved too much for her, poor little mouse, and she ran away. I liked it. But would Terry Finchley?

  In a second’s unthinking revulsion I had thrust the bat back behind the radiator. I wanted to protect Emily and I didn’t want anyone to know the weapon was there. But I would have to tell the police. Staring sightlessly into the mist, I saw it had been foolish to think otherwise. And my first impulse, to make an anonymous call, was also foolish: my prints were on the bat. At least I hadn’t been so stupid as to wipe them clean. The surface might show Fabian’s as well.

  I realized my cheeks were wet. A thin rain had started to fall without my noticing. I walked back to my car, as slowly as though every muscle in my body had been flayed from the bone.

  Going in the Eleventh Street entrance to the police station I was struck by an unexpected nostalgia. It’s an old precinct, still with the high wood counter, narrow corridors, and dim lights I remember from the stations where my father used to serve. I longed for the sight of him at the counter, waiting to buy me an ice cream after school, or to listen to my tale of woe with a gentle smile my mother never wore. I longed for a comfort that life could not give me.

  The desk sergeant sent me up to the detective area without even a smile, let alone an ice cream. Several of the crew I knew were at their desks. John McGonnigal, a sergeant I hadn’t seen for a while, looked surprised, but called out a cheerful greeting. And Bobby Mallory, my father’s oldest friend on the force, now a year from retirement, saw me from his office and came out.

  “What’s up, Vicki? Come to see how the worse half lives? Or do you have something on your chest after last night?” Bobby has moved from active dismay at my career to a grudging neutrality.

  “They say confession is good for the soul. And I have a confession to make.”

  Bobby looked at me sourly, but called Terry to his office. Finchley’s face showed a little gray at the edges. His normal poise had been worn raw by the stresses of dealing with the wake Fabian was churning up.

  “Have you found the girl?” he demanded. “We’ve notified airlines, bus lines, circulated the CTA, the cab companies, and we’re not hearing anything.”

  “Except round-the-clock from Clive Landseer, Super Kajmowicz, and the networks,” Bobby interjected.

  “No,” I said baldly. “I’d much rather be here with Emily than what I do have: the murder weapon.”

  When I explained what I’d found and how, Bobby snarled, but Terry smiled bleakly. “So the girl killed her mother?”

  “Instead of Tamar Hawkings doing it, you mean?” I couldn’t keep a nasty inflection out of my voice.

  “Look, Vic, we do the best we can with what evidence we have. Now you’ve got the murder weapon in the girl’s bedroom. How did it get there if she didn’t put it there?”

  “Fabian lives in that house too. He could have stuck it behind her radiator.”

  “And she left it there? Come on, Vicki, think what you’re saying: Would she have slept three nights in the room with her mother’s brains stowed behind her radiator?” Bobby was keeping close tabs on the case—he had the whole chronology in his head.

  “And she would have slept if she’d put it there herself?” I demanded. “You’re suggesting that if she murdered her mother she kept the weapon as a trophy, but shoved it out of sight. If Fabian put it there maybe she didn’t know about it.”

  “Come on—why would a man try to frame his own daughter?” Bobby, who doted on all four of his own daughters and numerous grandchildren, couldn’t imagine a home like Fabian’s.

  “Easier to believe the girl killed her mother?” I demanded.

  Terry pressed his temples with one hand, as though trying to make sure his head stayed in one piece. “The important thing now is to send someone down to collect it. Not being a private citizen like Vic, I need a warrant. And you know how Fabian Messenger is going to react to learning you’ve been searching Emily’s room behind his back.”

  “Come on, guys: I found the murder weapon
for you. Don’t act as though I hid it there myself.”

  “Come to that, I wouldn’t put it past you.” Bobby thought he was being funny. “The Finch has told me you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about Fabian Messenger. If you didn’t think we were going after him hard enough to suit you, you could have put it there.”

  I smiled. “In that case I would have planted it in Fabian’s room. I wish I’d thought of that—instead of taking evidence seriously. I did come here, even though I knew you guys would start haring after Emily. Just as you did Tamar Hawkings. Whom you’ve yet to find.”

  I swept from the station in a fine dudgeon. Back in my car, though, my worries about the girl returned full force. I couldn’t swear she hadn’t killed her mother. I didn’t have any sense of what a teenager under the kinds of stresses Emily endured might do. I pulled her poem from my pocket and read it through again. What if she and Fabian were the cats and Deirdre the mouse whom they’d attacked together? I didn’t like that idea at all. It implied a thralldom to Fabian of unbearable servility.

  I put the car in gear and drove north to Arcadia House. Marilyn Lieberman came out of a meeting to talk to me.

  “Any news about Deirdre?” she asked. “People keep calling me, wanting to know if her death had any connection to the shelter. And everyone on the board is worried. You found her ... her body, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I feel like Lady Macbeth—in my house? Right now I’m more worried about the kids. You heard they vanished?”

  Marilyn opened her eyes wide. “No. I tend not to watch the news. Life around here is too harrowing without thinking about war and famine. Where ...? Why ...?”

  “I wish I had a clue. I’m worried that Fabian killed Deirdre and is coercing Emily—his daughter—into giving him an alibi. That she freaked from the pressure and took off. He’s got too many important friends for the police to push very hard on him.”

  I couldn’t tell Marilyn about the baseball bat before the police had recovered it. I did recount my evening at the Messengers’, and what I’d seen of him since. Unlike Emily’s teacher, Marilyn had no trouble believing me.