Dearly Departed (17 page)

It was a waste of time.

“She’s good,” I decided, depressed by the realization that merely throwing my glove on the field wasn’t going to beat her, that she might actually beat me.

I’ll get her yet
, my inner voice vowed. She might have genius on her side, but I had experience

Only I wasn’t encouraged. You can divide private investigators into two camps. The first will declare vehemently that the longer an individual goes missing, the harder she is to find. The second, a much smaller group, will insist that the longer an individual is missing, the easier she’ll be to find. I tend to agreed with the first group.

fifteen

S
cott Dumer was a bartender. Not a bartender who was studying the law or working on a graduate thesis. Not a bartender who wanted to be an actor or a musician or a writer. He was simply a bartender. It was what he liked to do, and he was good at it. He poured a Summit Ale without my asking for it and set it in front of me. He didn’t recite the price and wait for me to pay it. He didn’t ask where I had been lately. Nor did he tell me I was a sight for sore eyes. Instead, picking up a conversation we had left off nearly a month earlier, he said, “With their piddling payroll, no free agents, bunch of minor leaguers in The Show for the first time, I figure the best the Twins can do is fourth in the Central, and that depends on what Kansas City does.”

Considering how badly they’d been crushed by Oakland before going on to lose five of seven to Seattle and California, fourth place looked good. Still, hope springs eternal.

“Second,” I told him. “The kids will come around. Besides, it’s early.”

“More pennants are lost in June than in September,” he reminded me, then moved down the stick to attend to another patron.

Hey, a good bartender is like a good mechanic: When you find him, keep him. Scott was the only reason I went into The Dusty Road. Well, that and its close proximity to my home in Roseville. It’s where I go when I grow tired of my own company and can’t find someone to impose myself upon. Like Cynthia.

The bar was about a third filled, a weeknight crowd, quiet. The most noise came from a table of expensive-looking college girls. The girls were clearly slumming. They had tried to dress poor, but, being rich, they couldn’t manage it. They generated a lot of wistful glances from us older, blue-collar guys who frequented the bar. All that young, taut, college-girl flesh—a man is never immune no matter how agreeably attached he might be to another.

I tried not to stare, reminding myself that I was on the far side of middle-age. Because by my calculations, middle age is not forty-five or fifty and certainly not sixty. If a man’s average life expectancy is seventy-two or seventy-three, middle age is thirty-six, thirty-seven. You’re just kidding yourself to believe otherwise. And to think that these sweet adolescents would be interested in a man of my advanced years would be just vanity, pure and simple. Besides, I didn’t need an adoring-coed fantasy. I still had Cynthia. Didn’t I?

I wished she’d take my calls so I would know one way or the other; I thought it was unfair of her to keep me hanging. Were we through or weren’t we?

I was debating whether to call Cynthia at home—maybe she would beat her answering machine to the phone this time—when a woman came through the door, moving with a clear sense of purpose. She was well favored, and if she had seen better days, it wasn’t too long ago. Her hair was glossy and so were her eyes, and although she didn’t look like her, for a moment I recognized Alison. I dismissed the image with a sip of beer. Lately I had been seeing Alison everywhere.

The woman’s presence silenced the college girls. They stared at her and she stared back, and in the moment their eyes met something was exchanged. I have no idea what. Her past and their future, perhaps. She was older than the girls by a couple of decades. She could have been their mother. For all I knew, maybe she was. By my standards she was merely middle-aged.

The woman made her way to a stool and ordered a shot, water on the side. It wasn’t until Scott left her that she began surveying the bar for likely prey. Her eyes fell on me, lingered for a second or two, passed by, then came back. My pulse quickened.

I nodded.

She nodded back.

I smiled.

She smiled.

When Scott served her shot, she asked him a question, gesturing toward me with her chin. Scott, looking like someone who had just lost his dog, spoke about six words in reply. The woman downed her shot and left the bar. I felt betrayed.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Scott.

“Just another woman looking for love in all the wrong places.”

“Can the country-western shit. What did she say?”

“She asked me who you were and why you looked so unhappy.”

“And?”

“I told her you’re in mourning because your roommate just died of AIDS.”

“You’re an asshole, Scott.”

“I’d hate to see you do something you’d regret in the morning.”

“Shut up and pour me another beer.”

Like I said, a good bartender. We spent the next hour or so talking sports, segueing from baseball to football to basketball while he filled the drink orders of his waitresses and the other customers at the stick.

How did I come to this
? I wondered during one of his brief absenses. Alone in a bar, pretending that the man who served me drinks was a long-lost pal. When I was a cop, when I played ball and hockey, when Laura was alive, I had lots of friends. But after she died … It was four years, ten months, two weeks, two days ago. You’d think I’d have lost track by now. In fact, it’s how I judge the passage of time: Before Laura. Laura. After Laura.

I had dated her for sixteen glorious months. Maybe a million times I came
this close
to asking The Question, only to lose my nerve at the last moment and leave it for another time. Then in exasperation she told me, “If you ask me to marry you tonight, I’d say yes. But if you keeping putting it off until tomorrow or the day after …” I didn’t put it off. She did say yes.

We were together for seven years, one month, one week, one day. Then a drunk driver took her away; her and my baby girl, Jennifer.

The memory of it tempted me to chug my beer. Only I had chugged so many beers—and anything else with alcohol in it—in the months immediately after her death that I purposely pushed it away just to prove that I could. My bout with alcoholism had been temporary. Temporary insanity. I’d gotten over it just as I had gotten over Laura’s death.

I tested my willpower for about ninety seconds, then finished the Summit and ordered another.

I did a quick survey of the bar. I was the only one sitting alone. But that was okay. I like being alone. I like relying only on myself. It’s so much easier.

I admit that sometimes—not often but sometimes—I regret quitting the cops, the teams; I chastize myself for neglecting to return the phone calls of my friends and refusing their invitations until they stopped issuing them; I regret being alone. When that happens I call Anne Scalasi. And if she’s busy, I hang out with her kids, take them to ball games, listen to their troubles about school and girlfriends and boyfriends and such—things they probably don’t tell their mother. And if they’re too involved with their own lives for my Big Brother act I call … who?

There have been women to chase away the alone feeling. Not many. But some. Like Cynthia. No, not like Cynthia. She’s more than a warm body to lie near. She’s someone I could actually care about, whose troubles I’d take to heart. That’s what love is all about isn’t it? Caring about someone who cares about you? It’s that simple. And that complicated.

I drank some more beer.

I
was working on my fourth beverage when Freddie sauntered in. Sidney Poitier Fredericks was tall and black and as mean as a politician who’s behind in the polls. Some time ago he pistol-whipped me in an alley, causing me a mild concussion and great embarrassment. I returned the favor a few evenings later, breaking into his condo and shoving the business end of a nine millimeter up his nostril, letting him know how bitterly disappointed I was by his behavior. I was content to let it go at that, too—keep your distance and neither of us will get hurt. But then a few months later the sonuvabitch turned around and saved my life. Twice.

Freddie made his way noisily around the stick to where I sat, appraising the college girls as he passed their table. I was glad to see him. If not a friendly face, his was at least a familiar one.

“Mr. Fredericks,” I said happily in recognition as he sat next to me. “Let me buy you a beer.”

He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “Why?” he asked bluntly.

“Well, you did save my life.”

“Don’t get misty-eyed about it; it wasn’t anything personal. I was paid, remember? It’s not like we’re friends. Is that what you think? We’re friends now?”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

“Shit,” he said, making the word sound like
sheet
.

“We are in the same business,” I reminded him.

“Only as competitors.”

Scott took Freddie’s order. Pete’s Wicked Ale. I insisted on paying for it.

“Call it professional courtesy,” I told him.

Freddie gave me a look when he snatched the bottle from the bar top, but there was no thank you in it. Yeah, me and Freddie. Pals forever.

“What brings you down here?” I asked, just to be polite.

“Lookin’ to git me an order of spare ribs,” Freddie grunted.

“They don’t serve spareribs here.”

“Oh, man … Spare ribs, Taylor. Spare ribs. You know, like Eve was made from Adam’s spare rib.”

“Do you make this stuff up, Freddie, or do you subscribe to a magazine or something?”

“Is this banter? Huh, Taylor? Are we supposed to be fucking bonding now?”

“Apparently not.”

“Shit,” he said, this time breaking the word into two syllables: shii-it.

Freddie had turned his back to me. He was watching one of the college girls, who was watching him while pretending not to. “You got business, Taylor, you need air cover, you got my card. Otherwise, fuck it.”

“Whatever you say.”

He smiled then. “I do believe supper’s on the table,” he muttered for my benefit.

“Ladies!” he shouted and juke-jived his way to the college girls. Sixty seconds later he had them giggling hysterically. In another sixty seconds he was kneading the shoulders of the girl who had given him the eye. In two minutes more he was sitting at the table next to her, gesturing wildly with one hand to the beat of yet another seemingly hilarious story. What he was doing with the other hand under the table, your guess is as good as mine.

I couldn’t bear to watch anymore.
How come I can’t do that? I have charisma!
I decided I hated Freddie. Decided I should have shot the surly sonuvabitch when I’d had the chance.

I quickly settled my tab and left, considerably drunker yet no more cheerful than when I’d arrived. I was in no shape to drive. But I drove anyway. If I was busted for DWI on the way home, maybe Cynthia would defend me.

T
he morning broke cold and gray and didn’t hold much promise for improvement. The woman on the radio said eighty percent chance of showers. It was a good day to stay in bed, I decided, and drew the blankets close to my chin. What with my pounding head and unsteady stomach, I could use the extra shut-eye, anyway.

Besides, I was tired. So tired, it was difficult to even roll over and find a more comfortable position. Yet deep sleep did not come. Nor had it last night, despite the numerous beers. Nor the night before. Nor the night before that. I kept waking after only a few hours, from dreams that were all too vivid, filled with the shadows of ninety-six murder investigations, with the ghosts of men whose lives I’ve taken in anger.

Whenever a case disturbs me, it seems like all my past troubles resurface and crowd around it. And this case disturbed me. In the beginning my desire to find Alison, to find her alive, tingled throughout my body like lust, making me aware of everything: the way my fingers caressed the keyboard of my personal computer, the way my chest heaved up and down with my breath—Cynthia had been right about that. Only now, twenty-four days after convincing Truman that Alison was alive, my passion was spent. I found I had no enthusiasm for the day, no energy. The search for Alison had stopped being fun, stopped being a game. It had become work, hard work at that, and I had begun to challenge the logic of it. Alison had not broken any laws, unless some overzealous prosecutor wanted to hang an abandonment rap on her—Cynthia had been right about that, too. And if her abrupt disappearance had made life difficult for Raymond Fleck and Irene Brown and Stephen Emerton and the rest, well, golly gee, that just broke my heart.

Still, I was taking money for it, wasn’t I? Four hundred dollars a day. And expenses. What was the meter at now? Ninety-six hundred? Something like that. I found myself wishing I was broke, that I needed the job, needed the money. At least that would have given me an excuse for dragging my sorry ass to the office to resume the chase. It would let me pretend that I wasn’t looking for Alison for personal reasons.

I stayed in bed until my headache shrieked for relief and the nausea in my stomach forced me into the bathroom.