Missing Persons Read online

  He kicked at the dirt. “You know the… that woman who was killed? Who died? On Broadway? The therapist, like you?”

  Like me? I felt gooseflesh on my back. “Hannah Grant? A few weeks ago?”

  “Her. She was Mallory’s… therapist. Mallory was afraid after she died. Really afraid. She thought… Mallory has this thing about Christmas. The guy that the neighbors saw? You know about that?”

  Oh shit. “Which guy? On Christmas night? Outside? That guy?”

  If Bob knew anything new about Mallory and the Christmas guy it meant that he’d seen Mallory since she disappeared.

  “I was watching a movie.”

  “At Doyle’s house? You were there?”

  “Before Christmas she thought someone may have found out about… oh boy. And because of… that’s why… she wasn’t comfortable. No, not at all.”

  “That’s why what?” There was enough pressure in my questions to launch a rocket.

  Smooth, Alan. Real smooth.

  “She doesn’t really like Christmas. I don’t either. She was scared that she might be-Sheesh. I can’t, I shouldn’t… It happened once, it could happen… I have to go. I don’t want you to…,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t like to be late.”

  You don’t want me to what? “I’m very interested in hearing more, Bob. It will just take another moment. You came all the way out here.”

  I’m sure I sounded pathetic.

  “I have to go.” He opened the door and climbed into his car. The vinyl seats were so cold that they squeaked with his weight.

  “Are you scared about something, too, Bob?” I asked through the glass.

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know anything about where Mallory is? Anything? Please tell me.”

  “I’m late.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said, barely loudly enough so that I could hear.

  He fishtailed a little as he spun around to head out the lane. The rumble of his motor was almost enough to stifle the pounding in my ears.

  She was scared. He’d said she was scared.

  Was I tempted to read what Bob had written? Of course I was, right that minute. I was also certain that my temptation was part of the challenge that Bob was positing.

  Why was he setting things up to tantalize me that he might know something about Mallory Miller’s fate and then keep the evidence of what he might know just out of my reach? He had taunted me already with the proposition that he knew her, was friends with her. He had just added the proposition that he knew that Mallory had seen Hannah for psychotherapy. And he’d added the tantalizing possibility that he’d been right next door in Doyle’s house on Christmas night. He’d said that Mallory was scared.

  I didn’t know what Bob was up to with Mallory. Far from it. But trust-therapeutic trust between Bob and me-was on the table in the form of the manuscript in the Kinko’s box. That much was perfectly clear.

  What were the odds that Bob actually knew something crucial about Mallory?

  Low, really low.

  Bob’s life was smoke, not fire. Heat, not light. Bob hadn’t told me anything that was really new to me. I was already aware that Mallory had seen Hannah for psychotherapy. I already knew about the man who had been loitering outside, everybody did. All Bob had really added to the equation was that Mallory was scared.

  And that he’d been next door watching a movie.

  Hopefully, the next day I’d learn what Bob thought Mallory was frightened about. I could wait until then.

  Long before the dust had settled on the lane from the Camaro’s too-rapid departure, I’d flicked off the lid of the Kinko’s box and looked inside. The flimsy cardboard box was less than a quarter full of 81⁄2 11 sheets. The title page was simple, the typeface minuscule.

  My Little Runaway

  By R.C. Brandt

  In the lower right-hand corner Bob had carefully sketched the encircled c of the copyright symbol and beside it had typed out the word “copyright” and beside that, the year.

  I closed the box.

  25

  I didn’t see patients most Fridays. Diane skipped most Mondays. So I wasn’t at all surprised that her Saab wasn’t in its usual spot in front of our wreck of a garage all day Monday while I was at the office.

  Anyway, she’d asked me if I would cover her practice in case she and Raoul went away for the weekend, and weekends for Diane almost always included Mondays.

  But the phone call she made to me that evening caught me off guard. Dinner was done, the kitchen was clean, Lauren had Grace in the tub for a mother-daughter bubble soak. Their giggles and laughter filled the house and buoyed my spirits like a healthy dose of rock and roll.

  I had the dogs at my feet. Life was good.

  “Can you hear that?” Diane asked.

  I heard noise but it sounded like nothing more than routine mobile-phone clutter crap. I figured Diane was in her Saab, driving behind the spine of a hogback someplace, or in the deep recesses of one of the many canyons that snake west out of Boulder into the heart of the Rockies.

  “No, I don’t think so. You’re breaking up.”

  Then I heard it-the frenetic calliope melody of a slot-machine jackpot followed by an orgasmic scream of “I won! I won! Yes! Yes! I told you about this machine. Didn’t I?” I could almost hear the cascade of dollar coins tumbling into the stainless-steel tray.

  “You up in Blackhawk?”

  “Nope.”

  “Central City?”

  “One more try.”

  I could have wasted my third guess on Cripple Creek, the final member of the triad of Colorado pioneer mountain towns that the electorate had burdened with legalized gambling. Instead I went for the jackpot.

  “You’re in Vegas. You really went.”

  “Told you.”

  “How much of Raoul’s money have you lost?”

  “I make plenty of my own money.”

  “Yeah, but you told me once that you only gamble with his.”

  “I forgot I told you that. I can’t believe I told you that. I’m down a grand or so.”

  “Or so?”

  “Maybe a little more. Single digits.”

  “Single digits plus, what, three zeros?”

  “My luck will change. I rescheduled my patients until Thursday. That’s a lifetime in craps. Can we talk about something else? How about matrimony? You want to talk about matrimony?”

  Part of me didn’t want to know. But I said, “Sure.”

  “I found her. Mrs. Miller. She was hanging out at a place called the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.” Diane made sure that her pronunciation of “love” had two syllables. “Everybody knows her in the Vegas wedding racket; she’s kind of a local legend. I only had to go to three chapels and ask a few questions.”

  I had a picture in my mind.

  A woman who had once been pretty dressed in an outfit that had once been fashionable topped by a hat that had once been fresh was sitting by herself on the bride’s side of a chapel that had never, ever really been pretty or lovely or fresh, and she was celebrating the nuptials of two people who had known each other for hours or days or months or years.

  Elvis was there, too, or he wasn’t.

  The woman heard voices in her ears saying cruel, frightening things and one glance at her made clear that she spent many more of her waking hours tormented than she did at peace. Her face was sometimes molded into odd grimaces with tight, scared eyes, a cockeyed mouth, pursed lips, and a protruding tongue. She mumbled replies to the voices at inopportune moments and strangers in all walks of life kept their distance.

  Her hygiene was lacking, her makeup was abundant and applied with idiosyncratic whimsy, and she’d resorted to wearing bad wigs to cover a tangle of hair that, during moments that approached sanity, she realized she could no longer manage.

  Her teeth had begun to rot and her breath smelled like roadkill.

  She lived in a homeless shelter, or
worse.

  She had a paper bag full of medicines but most days she hated the side effects more than she hated the voices. Although she would occasionally take a pill or two or three to quiet the rageful ranting, or to still the incipient panic, or to dull the despair that urged her closer and closer to the futility of suicide, she lugged the stained brown bag of pharmaceuticals around more as a totem than anything else.

  She was a lost life who was ordered by unseen powers to celebrate the marriages of pairs of strange people eager to believe that their own lives were full of nothing but promise. As each newlywed couple walked out the door of some tacky wedding chapel, whatever future the woman saw in them would disappear like a conventioneer’s promise to his wife to behave himself in Vegas.

  That was the picture I had in my mind.

  “Is this going to make me sad?” I asked Diane. “Is it going to do me any good to know?”

  Lauren sometimes asked that exact question of me late in the evening when we were in bed and the late news was on TV. A story would start to air-something about murder or rape or previously unimaginable despair or desperation in a part of the world that seemed always to bring unimaginable despair and desperation. The anchorperson’s eyes would be stern, his voice would be grave, and Lauren would hit the mute button and ask, “Is it going to do me any good to know this?”

  The carnival midway refrain of another jackpot, this one at a more distant location in the casino, filled my ear. Almost as if prompted by the loud celebration that followed the slot machine victory, Diane said, “This is Vegas. You can’t stay sad here long.”

  She said it, I was sure, for her own benefit as much as for mine.

  “Something tells me that she’s managed to stay sad.”

  “Mallory’s mom? Yeah,” Diane admitted. “I think she has.”

  I was thinking Reese’s mom, too, but I didn’t throw his name into the mix. The refrain from the previous week’s morning run with Sam was still part of the soundtrack spinning in my head.

  “She’s still crazy?” I asked. My question was irreverent and my choice of descriptors pejorative, but Diane knew that I was asking with a heart laden with pathos.

  “You know,” she said.

  I did know. It was because I knew that I was so certain that it was going to make me sad. “Did you learn anything?” I said, but I was thinking: What could she have learned? What could Mrs. Miller know? I didn’t think that Mallory had gone to Vegas to see her mom. I didn’t think that Mrs. Miller would know anything that would help Diane understand the connection between Mallory and Hannah.

  “It’s not what you think, not what I thought. Coming here to see her? It’s like poking at a hornet’s nest, for some reason it gets a lot of people stirred up. It’s… just a sec. I can’t talk here-I’m going to go outside, or at least to a quieter part of the… It’s such a trek to get out of the casino from here; if the call gets dropped I’ll phone you right back. You really need to hear this.” Her next words were a simple, pleasant version of “Yes, I’m out.” I suspected the message was intended for the croupier or whatever you call the person who handles the dice and the chips at a craps table.

  Diane dropped the phone on the floor-at least that’s the way it sounded-cursed, kicked it, picked it up again, and asked, “You still there?” She laughed. “The phone slipped out of my hand while I was trying to pick up all my chips.”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Good. I won five hundred or so. That’s pretty good. This place is so huge.” A moment of silence. Then, “Hi. Do you know which way’s the door?”

  Hi? Was she talking to me?

  “Which means you’re only down… what?” I asked.

  Thud. I thought the phone must have fallen out of her hand again.

  “Diane? You there?”

  That’s when the call died.

  Diane didn’t call right back.

  I gave her five minutes before I tried to reach her. Her cell phone rang and rang and rang before it clicked into voice mail.

  I waited half an hour, hitting redial again every ten minutes or so with the same result. I was chewing on the possibility that technology had failed somewhere, that her phone had died or that the network had burped.

  Soon I started thinking that she’d simply changed her mind about talking to me right then. Maybe she’d passed an open seat at a twenty-dollar blackjack table that she was sure had her name on it in raised gilded letters, or she’d eyed a spot at a new table and thought she’d seen steam rising from those dice.

  I also considered the possibility that she’d run into someone she knew-Diane knew more people than anyone I’d ever met-while making her way out of the cavernous casino, and that they had headed somewhere for a drink or a meal or… what?

  Diane, I guessed, was staying at the Venetian, the mid-Strip gambling palace that was decked out to look like Venice, Italy; that’s the hotel where she’d booked us to stay the weekend after Hannah’s death. I’d never been, but she’d told me that the canals in the hotel were lined with shops and I knew from long experience with Diane that a garish SALE sign in a store window could have distracted her. Easily.

  All were reasonable explanations. But none, I thought, were likely.

  Had her plans changed, Diane would have called me back and told me she’d talk to me later. She certainly would have picked up my call to her cell. Were her cell not working properly she would have gone to a pay phone and called me the old-fashioned way. After tracking down the mother of a missing girl-a girl who was the patient of Diane’s dead friend-and after telling me she had news I needed to hear, Diane would have done something to reach me. She wouldn’t have left me hanging, waiting, wondering.

  She wouldn’t.

  I called Raoul at home to see if he’d heard from her. He wasn’t there.

  I followed happy voices down the hall and found Lauren and Grace on the bed in the master bedroom, where I interrupted Lauren’s dramatic rendition of Alice in Wonderland. She told me she thought she had Raoul’s mobile number in her Palm. With monumental inefficiency, and only after pecking enough tiny faux buttons to book an entire round-trip flight to Kathmandu-including arranging for Sherpas-I tracked down Raoul’s mobile number and dialed the ten digits.

  “Raoul,” he answered almost immediately.

  He sounded tired. The usual gorgeous timbre of his voice was disguised by the wireless ether.

  “Hey, Raoul. It’s Alan. Where are you?”

  “San Francisco, consulting at a clueless incubator. How these people expect to make any money is beyond me. What’s wrong?”

  His question made perfect sense. I don’t think I’d ever before called Raoul on his mobile phone. Instinctively, he knew I wasn’t calling him in San Francisco to recommend a restaurant.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said.

  He replied, “Mierda.”

  26

  Raoul’s voice, when he wanted it to, carried no echoes of his childhood in Catalonia. I’d never given much thought to whether or not the tonal charade required much of his energy or attention. I’d always assumed that he could move back and forth between the American and Catalonian accents effortlessly, the way that a skilled actor does Kerry one minute and New Jersey the next.

  Raoul said, “Back up. When did all this start? When did she call you?”

  I heard echoes of Barcelona, and of worry, in his perfect English. I supposed that I was hearing the Barcelona only because I was hearing the worry. The caller ID unit by the phone told me that Diane’s call to me from the craps table had come in exactly forty-seven minutes earlier.

  “Forty-five minutes ago,” I told Raoul.

  “So she’s been out of touch less than an hour?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s not a big deal.”

  I’d been doing the same comfort calisthenics. But I clearly remembered the intensity of Raoul’s barely contained outrage while Jaris Slocum was holding Diane hostage in the backseat of the patrol c
ar after Hannah Grant’s death, and I remembered how resistant he’d been to any reassurance at that time. I knew that all the fret-yoga he was doing to convince himself that the current circumstances were some version of ordinary wouldn’t, ultimately, do him a bit of good. Diane being out of touch for forty-seven minutes in the current circumstances required explanation.

  And when I told him what I knew, I knew he’d agree with me.

  “Raoul? Do you know why Diane went to Las Vegas?”

  He spent a couple of heartbeats mining the apparent innocuousness of my question for innuendo before he replied, “She likes it there. She missed her chance last month when… you know.”

  “Do you know why she went now?”

  There it was again. The shrink’s “precipitating event” question.

  Why now?

  Raoul was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I could almost hear the gears turning in his head as he tried to make sense of the bare glimpse he was getting as he strained to see where it was that I was leading him.

  “She told me that a patient’s mother was there. In Vegas. Somebody she wanted to talk to about a case. That was her excuse, but she really wanted to play craps and the mountain casinos have a five-buck limit. Small bets bore her.”

  “It wasn’t one of her patients’ mother she was planning to talk to, Raoul.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The patient whose mother is living in Las Vegas? That patient wasn’t Diane’s; it was Hannah Grant’s.”

  I could hear his breath blow hard against the microphone. “And you knew this? You knew that was why she was going?”

  It was an accusation. His unspoken words were “And you let her?” I felt his finger pointing at me physically, felt it mostly in my gut. I could no more have stopped Diane from going to Las Vegas than I could prevent January from being colder than July. But that didn’t matter to Raoul, not then.

  “She told me she was thinking about it, about going to Vegas to talk with this woman. But I thought she was just being provocative with me. You know how she is. I didn’t think she’d really go.”