by William Baer
I wondered if I was about to get blasted for telling her how to do her job, but she let it slide.
“Fine.”
“It might be under Rita’s name. Or maybe her mother’s name, Deborah Rockingham.”
“Or it might not exist at all, right?”
“Right.”
“Anything else, Mr. Bossman?”
“Yeah, find Casey.”
“I already did.”
I waited for at least several eternities.
“He’s out in the Gap. At least, he was out there a few years ago. I’ll text you the address.”
“Someone’s the best.”
“She certainly is. You have yourself a lovely day.”
She hung up. Usually I’m the one who hangs up on people, so it was useful, every once and a while, to experience what it felt like.
I left Rita’s house, leaving from the front door, and looked around her quiet suburban neighborhood. There were two self-absorbed kids sitting next door under their front-yard tree. A boy and a girl, maybe a brother and a sister, maybe ten years old or so, diddling away on their stupid cellphones and ignoring each other.
I walked over, towering above them.
Like the tree.
The little girl looked up.
“Did you guys see the old lady today?”
I gestured at Rita’s place.
I don’t know why I had this nagging notion that maybe the grave in Tacoma, Washington, was empty. That maybe Deborah Rockingham was alive and well. I had absolutely no tangible reason to make such an assumption, but, as Rikki once pointed out, I’m the suspicious type.
“What old lady?” the little girl said.
“Doesn’t an old lady live next door?”
“Just the lawyer lady. Mrs. Sehorn.”
Having completed her neighborly obligations, she refocused on the hyper-addictive little box in her hand.
“Why don’t you two brats get up off your asses and play some sports?”
They both frowned simultaneously, didn’t bother to look up, and hoped that I’d go away.
I did.
37
French Hill Inn
Sunday, March 29th
42°
Xander was sitting at a table in the back, right where he always sat, right next to his mousy little girlfriend, who always sat on his right.
He was a criminal without a criminal record, and we always met at the French Hill Inn in Wayne, New Jersey, which was now calling itself the Taphouse Grille. Back in the Roaring Twenties, nearly a hundred years ago, the French Hill Inn was a very shady and sketchy roadhouse/speakeasy with lots of illegal booze, illegal gambling, and illegal working girls.
On the night of February 17, 1926, two New Jersey State Troopers went inside to investigate the previously raided roadhouse. Trooper Charles Ullrich was shot dead in the head, declared DOA at St. Joe’s in Paterson, and Trooper Charles McManus was knocked unconscious with a baseball bat, suffering permanent mental impairment. The shooter, Sam Alessi, who was also the co-owner, along with his baseball bat wielding bouncer, James “Slam Bang” DeLuccia, were both subsequently arrested and convicted.
The place should probably be a memorial today, but the contented Taphouse customers, eating their Steakhouse Burgers and Braised Short Rib Pot Pies, didn’t have a clue.
Maybe it was better that way.
Maybe Xander knew, maybe he didn’t.
History wasn’t a strong point these days, especially with his generation, but he had other abilities. It was true that Nonna was a hell of a looker-upper and a finder-outer. She’d been a librarian for a billion years, and my uncle had trained her about the legal and criminal side of things. But Nonna was no criminal herself, never doing anything that might be illegal, like hacking, which was why people like me needed people like Xander.
The kid had dropped out of Eastside High when he fully comprehended his computer capabilities. His old man, Constantine Demetrios, who owned the Haledon Diner, just shrugged about it. Xander was now twenty-four years old, and, on the surface, he was hardly the computer geek stereotype. He wore, as he always did, an ordinary brown business suit with a dark brown tie. Nothing hippieish. Nothing gothish. Not even anything quirkyish. The kid was always polite; he had a seemingly normal, nicely dressed girlfriend; and they both seemed perfectly well-adjusted. No drugs, no booze, no arrests.
But the kid was a bloody terror in cyberspace.
When he saw me approaching, he stood up and put out his hand.
“Mr. Colt.”
As we shook hands, Marcie stood up.
“You remember Marcie?” he said.
“Of course.”
I shook hands with his little cutie, and we all sat down.
Xander, like me, was never much for small talk. He had the full report in a little manila folder in front of him on the table. Next to his lemonade.
He knew it all by heart.
“Her account was shut down four years ago. A year after her death in Washington State.”
He was talking about Deborah Rockingham.
“For fifteen years, subsequent to the death of her husband, Andrew Rockingham, she received monthly payments, forwarded automatically from the personal account of Richard J. O’Brien of Cape May, New Jersey, in the amount of $1,500.”
He sounded like an accountant.
“She lived on O’Brien’s stipend, along with her husband’s governmental pension of $2,122.16 a month, plus her own personal annuity of $956.22 a month, arranged through the Cape Regional Medical Center, where she’d worked as a maternity nurse for fourteen years. At her death, being only fifty-one years old, she wasn’t yet eligible for Social Security benefits.”
“Anything else of interest?”
“Not really. Except for the O’Brien deposits.”
I nodded.
“Does it make sense to you?” he wondered.
Xander never stuck his nose into the gritty details of my investigations, but he wanted to make sure that he’d been useful.
“Yes, I believe it does. Good job.”
Yes, the respectable judge had seemed “above reproach” to Detective Pavese—and everyone else—but his ex-wife had told me in the Pines:
“He keeps all of his women comfortable.”
I guess Deborah Rockingham was one of “his women.”
Xander handed me the manila file.
“It’s all inside.”
“Thanks. Send me your bill.”
The kid never liked to talk about money, as if it was beneath him, and I respected him for it.
When I stood up, the two lovebirds stood up, and I went outside to my latest rental, a black BMW 3 Series.
Once I was comfortable in its soft leather seats, I called the burner phone down in Beach Haven.
Rikki picked up.
“The bathing suit fit nicely.”
“That makes my day. Is someone behaving herself?”
“Yes, I think she is. She went into the water up to her waist, keeping her bandages perfectly dry, and now she’s cool, refreshed, and damp.”
Was she flirting again?
I hoped so.
“It’s March,” I pointed out.
“So what? I swim all year round.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You’re smarter than you look.”
I reminded myself that there was an actual purpose to the call.
“Tell me about Deborah Rockingham.”
“I’ve already told you about Mrs. R. About everybody else for that matter.”
“Tell me what you forgot to tell me.”
She thought it over.
“I can’t think of anything new. Rita hung at our place a bit, but we never went over to hers. Her mom was always a bit coldis
h and standoffish. Not really hostile, but not really welcoming either. So I never saw her that much. Besides, she was a nurse at Cape Regional, and she kept funny hours.”
“Did your father know her?”
I could sense a shrug in Beach Haven.
“Maybe. Maybe in passing.”
I left it right there.
“Is she a suspect.”
“Everyone’s a suspect.”
“Even me?”
“We’ve been through this before.”
“But I thought detectives were supposed to eliminate suspects?”
“I prefer to be open-minded.”
“Yeah, that’s a very believable word for the likes of you!”
“Goodbye, Rikki.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Goodbye, Rikki.”
“I’m going back to the couch to lie down and read some Shakespeare. I was reading Act 3, Scene 2, of The Winter’s Tale, when some law enforcement type rudely disturbed me.”
“Goodbye, Rikki.’
I hung up.
38
Delaware Water Gap
Sunday, March 29th
44°
She vanished.”
“You want to elucidate?”
We were standing on an isolated dirt-road offshoot of Old Mine Road, overlooking a spectacular view of the Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware slices beneath the Kittatinny Ridge of the Appalachians. Behind the young trooper, across the deep and long Gap, was distant Pennsylvania. Behind me was the burned-out shell of a small rustic home at the western edge of the Worthington State Forest.
In truth, all the views of the Gap are quite “spectacular,” which is why George Inness came here in the 1860s and painted numerous landscapes, and why there’s always one of his pictures hanging at the Met.
Trooper Hank Turner, wearing his sharp gray/blue uniform, with neat yellow patches, was probably in his mid-twenties, boyishly handsome, diminutive, energetic, athletic, and, fortunately for me, talkative.
He elucidated.
“Mr. Sehorn popped up at the Hope Station one day and told me that his girlfriend was missing. He said her name was Pamela Johnson, and that they shared a home off an isolated trail from Old Mine Road. He said she’d been missing for two days, but he didn’t have a picture, and his description was pretty generic. When I started asking questions, he got edgy and evasive and left.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Stuff like, ‘Where does she work?’ which he shrugged off and said she was ‘in between’ jobs. He wasn’t very convincing.”
“What else?”
“He said there was no problems in their relationship. ‘Absolutely not.’ He was emphatic about that, but when I asked him if he could send me a picture, he said, ‘Sure, I’ll see what I can do.’ But who says something like that if he really thinks his girlfriend is missing?”
I had no answer.
He continued.
“Then he stood up, thanked me, and left the station. He never bothered filing out a missing person’s form, and he didn’t even take my business card.”
“Is this him?”
I showed the Trooper the DMV picture of Billy Kelly.
“Yeah, that’s him, but maybe ten years ago.”
“What was he like?”
“Polite. Actually, very polite, but wary as well. I might even say he seemed ‘spooked’ about something. As if he didn’t know what to do.”
“Did you ever hear from him again?”
“Never.”
“Did you follow up?”
“A little bit. I did a routine check on Pamela Johnson and found nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all. Except that the house behind you had been purchased in her name. In cash. From the previous owner. Two days after the guy’s visit at the station, I was up in the area, so I stopped at the house, but Sehorn wasn’t at home. Neither was his car. The very next day, I heard the news about the fire. It seemed as though the guy had simply vanished. Just like his girlfriend.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, I contacted the guy’s estranged wife, a lawyer over in Sussex County. She seemed both surprised and concerned, but she had no idea where Sehorn might be, and she said that she’d never heard of Pamela Johnson.”
Turner turned, looking down at the far base of the Gap, at the Delaware River.
“Maybe they’re down there somewhere. In the river.”
39
U-Store Storage
Sunday, March 29th
45°
As I mentioned earlier, I like breaking into houses, but storage facilities can be fun, too. You never know what you’re going to find.
I disabled the lock, then slid up the garage-like door. The unit, on Route 23 in Wayne, was registered in Deborah Rockingham’s name, and it was as neat and perfectly clean as Rita’s brick house.
Which, of course, had once been her mother’s house.
I turned on the light and shut the door behind me. In the far left corner, there was a wooden file cabinet, and in the far right corner, there was a matching cabinet. In between them, there was a handsome wooden desk with a wooden chair.
As if waiting for me.
The cabinet on the left was the “Billy” cabinet. It was full of countless old newspaper articles about William Kelly, beginning when he was a freshman in high school, playing football at my alma mater, DePaul High School, right here in Wayne, New Jersey. There were various programs, photographs, and Facebook printouts, all neatly organized. Chronologically. There was also a meticulously crafted scrapbook lying flat in the bottom drawer. There was a particularly interesting file about a “prospective student” trip to Johns Hopkins ten years ago, and another file containing a handful of wedding pictures.
There were exactly seven wedding pictures, each of them including just the bride and the groom. No one else. Rita, looking buoyantly happy, in a pleasant off-the-rack white dress, holding a small bouquet of colored flowers, and Billy, wearing a neat navy suit, and looking equally content.
The right-side cabinet was mostly empty. It contained the “life” documents of the lives of Rita and her mother. Birth certificates, wedding licenses, insurance policies, medical records, financial records, etc. In the bottom drawer, there was a red wig and a small pack of letters bound with a rubber band.
I sat at the wooden desk, within the airless, moteless, windowless room and tried to put it all together. Two lives. A mother and a daughter. Plus Billy. Sitting directly in front of me, on the top of the desk, was a upright wooden frame containing two pictures side-by-side. One was a grainy selfie of a little girl, maybe ten years old, standing next to a slightly older kid in his football pads holding his helmet. She was smiling like she was the happiest girl in the world.
The second picture, taken by someone unseen, was a young woman and a young man at a high school football game. She was maybe twenty years old, and he was a bit older. He had his arm around her. Affectionately. They were both smiling, and Rita was again smiling like she was the happiest girl in the world.
It was, I suppose, the perfect symmetry of her life.
The kind of ordered, exacting, and appropriate symmetry that life affords to very few of the rest of us.
I removed the rubber band and read the first letter from Ginger Addison to Edward Colt. It was short and sweet, actually bittersweet, dated last January:
Dear Edward,
You don’t respond to my texts, but I’ve found you anyway, and I’ll continue to write you a letter every single week until you respond.
Your disappearance, without a word, has left me empty and devastated. Yesterday, I started crying at work, at my desk, uncontrollably. Everyone was very nice about it, but I was ashamed. I was pathetic.
I don’t know why you’re in Cape May, New Jersey, but I’m waiting here, where we had so much happiness together, waiting for you to, at least, tell me why, if not to tell me that you’re coming home to fall within my arms again.
All my love, Gee
I counted the letters. Ten total. Ten days. I skipped to the last one, also short, also sad:
Dear Edward,
I can no longer write these letters. It’s too painful. I know that I’ll have to accept the fact that what I thought we had—and what I thought it meant for our future—was just a delusion on my part. Maybe that’s why you left. Maybe you saw within my eyes the desperation of “last hope,” of “last chance.”
I just wish you that you had told me face-to-face. Your refusal to communicate, in any way, has made a horrible situation even worse, but, having admitted all that I’ve already admitted, I still wish you the best, nothing but happiness, and I continue to leave my door always open.
Love, the one who loves you
Life’s a bitch.
I don’t say that in any way that might seem dismissive or belittling of the pains of life. It’s just a fact. Life can be hard, especially on those who love without getting it back, those who crave love yet never really find it.
Ginger Addison, whoever she is, hurts my heart.
I texted Nonna.
Find out whatever you can about Ginger Addison, 218 Cranberry Street, Harrisburg PA, 17101, who was Edward Colt’s girlfriend last year. Thanks.
I made sure to add the “Thanks.”
My cell vibrated immediately, which was way too fast. It was the California girl from California. I read her daily “new” text, then I reread the one from a month ago:
I’m standing in Furnace Creek, Death Valley, the hottest place on earth, were they shot the famous Twilight Zone.
Meaning the episode called “The Lonely.”
I dialed the judge, and he picked up immediately, surely worried about his daughter.