Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  “A gambler?”

  “In his heart, that kind of gambler. I waited until he left the table and then I called his mobile number after about twenty minutes. I told him I was the guy from the craps table. He said, ‘Not now.’ I asked, ‘When?’ And he said, ‘I have your number now. I’ll call you.’ Then he hung up.

  “Pastanaga. I think he was playing with me.”

  “He hasn’t called?”

  “In Vegas terms the night is young, right? Me? I’m twenty years older than I was at this time yesterday. A week more of this and I’ll be ready to trade in the craps table for some pinochle.”

  I could almost feel his despair. I was on the portable phone, wandering between the mostly dark kitchen and the mostly dark living room, where I stopped and found myself, once again, searching for Twelfth Street in Boulder’s dark grid. Looking for the Millers’ house, and for Doyle’s.

  The noise in my ear was Sinatra and percussion. Traffic, too. A siren.

  “Are you in a club?”

  “I’m at the Bellagio. Outside, watching the fountains. I like them. I know they’re garish, but I like them. Have you ever seen them?”

  “Only on TV.”

  “Someday then.”

  “Yes.” Maybe. “With Diane.”

  “With Diane, sí. Alain?”

  I was a bit taken aback. He hadn’t used the French pronunciation of my name for a long time.

  “Yes.”

  “If there were a man involved-with my wife-you would tell me?”

  “What? You mean a-”

  “Yes. Un autre. We’re grown-ups here, right?”

  That Raoul was susceptible to whatever affective tides the prospect of infidelity caused in other people surprised me. Where romance was concerned, Raoul lacked confidence the way Spider-Man lacks grip.

  I said, “To the best of my knowledge, this has nothing to do with another man. Nothing.”

  “Thank you. I had to ask.”

  “Raoul? The Rachel you’re looking for? It’s Mallory Miller’s mother. That’s who Diane went to Vegas to try to find.”

  He was silent. I hadn’t lost him; I could still hear the Sinatra and the fountains and the impatience of the traffic on the Strip, but Raoul wasn’t speaking. As the interlude grew longer, I immediately flashed back to the night before and Diane’s abrupt disappearance from the conversation I was having with her in the casino. My heart accelerated like a teenage driver with a lead foot chasing after a pretty girl.

  “Raoul? You there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I was afraid I lost you.”

  “You didn’t lose me; I’m thinking. Diane went to see the missing girl’s mother?”

  “If you’ve followed Mallory’s story in the news, you may also know that Rachel Miller suffers from mental illness. That might be important for you to know when you finally find her.”

  “I don’t read that kind of thing. Diane tells me, but she didn’t tell me that. What kind of mental illness?”

  I wasn’t sure what the tabloids had reported. “I know the answer to your question, Raoul, but I shouldn’t say. It’s something serious. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Is she dangerous?”

  “Rachel? Unlikely, highly unlikely.”

  “Why did Diane want to see her?”

  “I found a way to rationalize telling you who Rachel is. Giving you the why part is much harder. I’m sorry. And I’m not sure it will help you to know the answer. If I think it will, I’ll tell you, I promise.”

  The fact that Mallory’s mother lived in Vegas, even the fact that she lived in Vegas and suffered from a severe mental illness, had been reported in the news media. I wasn’t telling Raoul anything new by telling him that. If a patient tells a psychologist that the sun came up that morning, the news isn’t necessarily confidential. The psychologist can share the revelation with others.

  Raoul asked, “Is Diane mixed up with whatever happened to Mallory Miller?”

  “I can’t”-I fumbled for a word that seemed to fit-“address that.”

  “You could if your answer was no.”

  To myself, I said, Thank you. Raoul was absolutely right. I could tell him if the answer was no. But the answer wasn’t no, and he knew exactly what that meant. “I can’t argue with your conclusion, Raoul.”

  “This mess-whatever this mess is-it started with Hannah’s death, didn’t it?”

  I thought for a moment about what I could say in reply. “Hannah’s death started a lot of balls rolling.”

  He responded with, “Si ma mare fos Espanya, jo seria un fill de puta.” From the cadence and tone, I assumed it was profane, and from the reference to Espanya I guessed that a Spaniard wouldn’t be thrilled to hear the phrase cross Raoul’s Catalonian lips.

  36

  I hadn’t been on the University of Colorado campus for a while. January wasn’t my favorite time for a visit, and the Duane Physical Laboratories wasn’t my ideal destination. But when my 11:15 appointment canceled on Thursday, I recognized that if I added the newly freed time to my midday lunch break, I had a seventy-five minute hole in my day. I decided to make the short trip from my office to the university.

  The physics building is a large, angular, modern complex on the east side of the Boulder campus, segregated by roadways and by design from the cluster of lovely brick or flagstone structures that form the Mediterranean architectural core of the original university. The newer academic buildings surrounding Duane were, like Duane itself, looming, cast-concrete forms faced with just enough flagstone and roofed with just enough red tile to pay wink-wink homage to the Tuscan soul of the place.

  I’d been aware of Duane for years; the tallest structure on campus, situated right across Colorado Avenue from the Muenzinger Psychology Building, it was hard to miss. But, given my arm’s-length relationship with the physical sciences, or at least my arm’s-length relationship with the study of the physical sciences, I’d never had reason to go inside Duane. Once I did make my way into the building looking for Bob, my initial impression was that Duane was state-university big and anonymous and that the notices on the bulletin boards were mostly about things I didn’t understand and, more to the point, until that moment didn’t even know that I didn’t understand. A professor was looking for a research assistant to study femtosecond optical frequency combs. Another lab needed help developing microcalorimeters and bolometers based on superconducting thin-films cooled to 0.1 K.

  I didn’t know what any of it meant, not even close, but I was almost one hundred percent confident that I wasn’t their man. The students wandering the flavorless hallways-students who likely deserved my respect because, unlike me, they might have a prayer of being able to translate the bulletin boards-seemed a bit more serious than those I was accustomed to running into in my usual haunts on campus.

  A big, anonymous building full of serious students? I suspected that Bob had gravitated to the physics department by unconscious design and had ended up burrowing into an environment where he could survive-thriving for Bob wasn’t really an option-for the many years he’d been putting in his time waiting for whatever would come next.

  After a few false starts going to the wrong offices, I learned that Bob was actually a clerk/secretary in the office/lab where plasma physicists did their incomprehensible things. It turned out that Bob’s boss, a middle-aged woman named Nora Santangelo who was shaped like a chunk of water main, was as curious as I was about Bob’s whereabouts, and had a terrific intuitive sense of the parameters of Bob’s peculiarities.

  When I introduced myself I omitted the doctor part. I told Ms. Santangelo-she didn’t strike me as the type of supervisor that a subordinate, or a visitor like myself, should call “Nora”-that I was a friend of Bob’s and that he had missed a rendezvous we’d planned for the previous evening and wasn’t answering his phone.

  She responded suspiciously, “You’re his friend? I didn’t know he had any.”

  Point, Ms. Santangelo.
<
br />   It had taken some effort on my part to refocus her on the fact that I didn’t know where Bob was. “I called here this morning. The person who answered his phone told me he was out sick. But he’s not at home, either. I’m concerned.”

  “Well, to be honest, I am too. I hadn’t called his home-that’s not the sort of thing that Bob… appreciates. He missed a day of work back during the spring blizzard in 2003, but that’s the only other time I can remember.”

  Bob’s previous absence was undoubtedly excused: The infamous March 2003 blizzard had dropped almost four feet of snow on Boulder. “He didn’t call in today?”

  She shook her head. “Or yesterday. Bob usually eats lunch at his desk. Puts his nose in a book or plays games online. Scrabble. Sometimes chess. He never hangs with the rest of the staff. Never. But Monday? Around eleven in the morning he told me he was going out for lunch. Came right up to my office, walked right up to my desk, and said, ‘Mrs. Santangelo, I’m going out to lunch.’ I was so surprised-and so pleased, really-that I told him to enjoy himself, to take a whole hour.”

  “Did he?”

  “Sure as heck did. He never came back at all. Didn’t call in. I still don’t know where he is.”

  “Well,” I said, while I digested the news that Bob’s vanishing act had started even earlier in the week than I’d suspected.

  Ms. Santangelo and I were standing in her office and I was finding myself increasingly distracted by the tubular shape of her. I would swear that her thighs, hips, waist, bosom, and shoulders were all the exact same measurement. She wasn’t particularly heavy; she just looked like she’d been forced to spend her formative years hibernating in a sausage casing.

  “Listen,” she said. “Bob is… different. Different-different. I inherited him when I came over here from Hellems-the history department? I used to think those folks in history were peculiar, but these physicists? Don’t get me started; they’re something else. And Bob, he’s the oddest ball in the rack. Excuse my honesty, but if you know him then you know that already. He likes to keep his distance. He can be difficult for people to deal with, people who aren’t sensitive to his… shall we say, tendencies. But he does his job. No more, mind you, not a scintilla more. Bob does just his job. And I’ve finally found him a desk in a lab where everybody seems to get along with him okay. What I’m saying is that he’s not on a short leash like some of the people here. I’m not going to fire Bob for whatever… this is.” I watched her expression as her imagination took her someplace she hadn’t previously considered. “Within reason, of course.”

  “Ms. Santangelo, it sounds like you know him well. Do you have any idea where I might look for him?”

  She thought for a moment and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, as she took a step toward the door. “But you’ll call me if you hear anything? I am concerned. Bob grows on you.”

  Like a mushroom, I thought. Or a truffle. Something parasitic.

  “Of course.” I scrawled my pager number on a Post-it that I spotted on the desk behind me and handed it to her. “Will you do the same?”

  She said she would and I headed out the door. Before I’d cleared the threshold I stopped and turned back to her. “Did Bob take his begonia with him? You know the one I’m talking about?”

  She smiled at me. “Of course I do. You do know him well. But I don’t know the answer to your question. Why don’t you and I go down to his desk and see about that darn Christmas begonia.”

  As she led me down the hall toward the administrative area that included Bob’s desk, I allowed myself the suspicion that Ms. Santangelo had quite a mouth on her when she was younger, but that a lot of ambition and some determined self-discipline had turned her from a damn-and-hell young woman to a darn-and-heck middle-aged one.

  The Christmas begonia was sitting in what his boss said was its usual place on the corner of Bob’s desk. The plant’s presence told me one thing, but it told Ms. Santangelo two. She explained to me that if Bob anticipated being away from the office for an extended period-anything more than a long weekend constituted an extended period-he would carefully transport the begonia home with him. The transport was an elaborate process involving a beer-case flat and tented brown grocery bags. She also explained that if he anticipated being out of the office for a period even as long as a full day but not longer than three, he would move the plant and its pebble tray from the corner of his desk to the top of a waist-high bookshelf that sat beside a southeast facing window at the far end of the room.

  “Always?” I asked.

  “Always,” she confirmed, without hesitation. “He never puts the begonia in direct sun. And he always watered it from below, you know, from the pebble tray. He knows what he’s doing with it. Bob manages to keep the thing in bloom like that from Thanksgiving until spring break some years. People always comment on it, always.”

  I’d already noted that the begonia was healthy, its blossoms prodigious. I stated the obvious: “Bob didn’t expect to be gone for this long, did he?”

  Ms. Santangelo reached down and caressed the petals of one of the delicate begonia flowers. “No, he didn’t. I wonder if I should move it over to the bookcase so it can get some light while he’s gone. Bob would. I know he would. I just don’t know if he would want me to.”

  I’d followed her hands to the desktop and was scouring the surface for a clue that might tell me something about Bob’s destination when he’d left work to go out to lunch on Monday. Other than the Christmas begonia, though, his desktop was devoid of anything personal. I asked, “When Bob plays games, does he use this computer?” I was pointing at the less-than-state-of-the-art machine that filled a third of his desk.

  “No, he doesn’t. He has a laptop, he brings it with him to work every day. He asked me a long time ago if it’s okay with me for him to hook it up to the university’s network over lunch to play his games. I told him to have at it. Bob doesn’t cheat. If he’s unsure about a rule, he asks.”

  Her response deflated me a little. “He took his laptop with him to lunch?”

  “I don’t know, heck,” she said, and started rummaging in the drawers of Bob’s desk. From my vantage the drawers appeared to have been arranged by a demonic closet organizer.

  “Don’t see it,” she said. “He must have taken it.”

  “Do you know anything at all that might help me find him?”

  “I wish I did,” she said. “I really wish to heck that I did.” She made her hands into fists and lifted them so that they came together just below her chin. “A few of my people here are totally reliable, you know what I mean? But some of the rest? Flakes. If they were gone for the amount of time that Bob’s been gone-a couple of days-I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Par for the darn course is what I’d think. Par for the darn course. But Bob? He’s not part of either group. He’s not regular, he’s not a flake. He’s…

  “You know what? I’ll just say it: I don’t really like Bob, but I… like him. Do you understand? I do hope he’s okay.”

  I understood.

  I crammed in a quick stop at Mustard’s Last Stand on Broadway, inhaled my hot dogs with only a small side of guilt over the indulgence, and made it back to my office with just a few minutes to spare before my next appointment.

  37

  Was the after-work plan I cobbled together a good idea? Probably not. But once my workday was done I realized that I was fresh out of good ideas, so I was left to settle for questionable ones.

  I assumed that it would take me a day or so to get an appointment arranged to see the inside of Doyle’s house, but I was wrong. When I phoned the listing agent asking if she could meet me for a showing, her eyes apparently began flashing dollar signs at the prospect of mining a buyer for a house for which she was already representing the seller. She asked me what time I got off work. I told her I was done at six. Without a moment’s hesitation she asked if 6:15 would work for me. “You won’t believe the water features in the backyard,” she exclaimed. “They are worth the
purchase price all by themselves. Trust me, they’re…”

  I didn’t tell her that I already knew.

  When I called Viv, our part-time nanny, she informed me that Lauren would be late getting home, too. Viv promised me that she was happy to stay with Grace a little longer. In my head I added a small bonus to her monthly check. I also left Lauren a voice mail at her office that I would pick up some Thai takeout for dinner.

  The woman I was meeting was named Virginia Danna. She pulled up in front of Doyle’s house in a silver Lexus SUV, the big version, the fancy Land Cruiser clone that was all shoulders and hips. I was parked a couple of doors farther north and walked the short distance from my car in time to meet up with her near the front porch.

  “Dr. Gregory?” she beamed when she spotted me coming. “You’re going to absolutely love this place. The bathrooms need a little work, but oh, oh, the potential with the…” She was a tall, thin-the word svelte actually came to mind-elegantly dressed woman with just a hint of an accent, as though she’d emigrated to the United States from someplace when she was quite young. Despite her last name, for some reason I was guessing she was from Brazil. Her wardrobe made few concessions to winter. She wore no coat and she balanced effortlessly on high heels. All in all, very not-Boulder.

  “Ms. Danna?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m so sorry. My manners sometimes escape me when I’m excited. And this house, it…” She reached out to shake my hand. “Will you excuse me for just a moment?” She pressed a speed-dial button on her cell. “Yes, yes. Dr. Gregory is here. We’re going in now. Fine, fine. Yes, I’m sure. Doctor Gregory. That’s right, on Twelfth. Thanks!” Ms. Danna turned back to me. “With what’s happened to some poor agents in Denver-I’m sure you heard-we’re required to check into the office before all private showings. I hope you understand, it’s…”