Fidelity

34

The police kept Emily talking until seven in the morning. Ray Hall was sitting in the hallway when they released her, waiting to take her home. They drove through the heavy morning traffic to his house, and when they were inside, she said, “Ray, do you have Sam Bowen’s phone number?”

He looked at her for a moment, then went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and pulled out an address book. He found the page and handed the open book to her.

“Thanks,” she said. She dialed the number and waited. “Hello, Sam? This is Emily Kramer. Oh, things haven’t been so hot around here since the funeral, but it’s a long story, and I don’t have the energy right now.”

She listened for a few seconds, staring at the floor and nodding her head, then said, “Why haven’t you opened it?” She listened for a few more seconds. “Well, open it now, and read it. I’ll be up there as soon as I can get a flight. I don’t know the schedule. I’ll call you from the airport.”

When she had hung up the phone, she said to Ray, “I know you won’t agree with what I’m doing. You’ll notice I haven’t asked you.”

“I assume what you were saying means Sam has the evidence. You haven’t told the police?”

“He has a package. I’m going up there, and we’ll see what’s in it.”

“That guy is still out there. He must have ditched the SUV within ten minutes after he left you, or they would have caught him. And he’s nuts. He could be right outside waiting for you.”

“If so, then the best way you can protect me is drive me to the airport and watch me leave.” She picked up the telephone again.

THE HOUSE WAS a two-bedroom cottage with brown clapboards outside Seattle overlooking Puget Sound. There was a wooden deck lodged in the space between two pine trees, and a hot tub. On a cool day, Sam Bowen could step from the tub into the warmth of his house in two steps.

Sam wore a pair of blue jeans and a green flannel shirt with buttoned flaps over the breast pockets. He sat on an Adirondack chair staring out at the water. An empty glass was on the table, and beside it was the stationery box with a maroon top and gold print.

“I never opened it until you called, Emily,” Sam said. “It arrived a couple of days ago, but the handwriting on the label was Phil’s. I figured it had to be just another one of those housekeeping things that Phil did sometimes. He would have something he didn’t want lying around the office, or maybe he even wanted to be able to tell somebody truthfully that he didn’t have it. He would stash it somewhere, sometimes with someone like me.”

Emily said, “Weren’t you even curious?”

“Shit, Em. I’m seventy-three years old. I was a cop for twenty years, and then a private investigator for about as long. I’m cured of that. I’m not interested in getting hit in the face or staying up late anymore, and there aren’t any secrets I haven’t heard.”

“But now you’ve read it, haven’t you?”

“Yes. It’s about a case we had.”

“What kind of case?”

“A bad one. It was one of those jobs that you hesitate to take, and you probably wouldn’t take at all, except that by the time you hear about it, the client is already sitting in your office. He’s so distraught that you can barely stand to look at him, and he’s there only because he’s already tried everything that had a reasonable chance of success.”

Emily said, “So it was a man who came to see you.”

“Not me, Phil. I wouldn’t have heard about it at all, except that Phil called me into his office to listen. He introduced me and said, `I want my associate Mr. Bowen to hear this.’ That was a bad omen. He never called anyone his associate unless that person was about to do something painful.”

“What did you say?”

“I sat down and shut up and listened. The man was rich. I could see it by looking at his shoes. They were Mephisto walking shoes, handmade. That was a telling thing, to me. What it said was that he had enough money to buy whatever he wanted, but that he wasn’t interested in impressing people. They don’t look like anything. He had a good haircut, a watch that looked expensive, but with a French name I hadn’t seen before. I could tell Phil had seen the same signs, and so I stopped thinking about what we were going to make, and listened to the story.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing special-a story we’ve all heard about a thousand times. Sometimes I think a third of my working life was spent with daughters looking for their fathers, and another third with fathers looking for their daughters.”

“That was the case?” Emily asked. “He was searching for his missing daughter?”

Sam nodded. “He had a lot of land in the San Joaquin Valley, and he lived in a big house on an enormous piece of land-the sort of place where if you want to gossip over the back fence, you have to drive there.”

“What was his name?”

“Theodore Forrest, the Something. Maybe the fourth or fifth.”

“And the daughter? What did he say about her?”

“Her name was Allison. He said that she had been a terrific kid at first, the sort of little girl who was always happy-maybe a little smart-ass, even-and who lit up a room as soon as she came into it. He brought a couple of old pictures of her at about age five and ten along with the others, and I could see what he meant. She was a really pretty kid, with a lot of intelligence behind the eyes.”

“You said `at first.’ What was the problem later?”

“He said that around age thirteen or so, troubles started. She had a kind of personality change. All of a sudden she wasn’t interested in the family anymore, just wanted to stay in her room. Her grades went all to hell. Her old friends seemed to move on, and they were replaced by a different kind of kid.”

“That doesn’t sound unusual. What kind of kid?”

“The kind that skips school, does drugs, and so on. This wasn’t exactly a new story to me, but it was to him, so we listened. He said the girls were the worst in his eyes. They were the kind that gave a father a lot to think about, for sure. He said that he’d heard stories about a couple of them. They were promiscuous in that scary selfdestructive way that girls are sometimes, kids who don’t seem to give a damn whether what they’re doing kills them or something else does. The more he tried to get rid of them, the more Allison liked them. She would sneak out to meet them. He moved her to a private school, and she would slip out at night to go out with them. Then she was gone.”

“How old was she at that point?”

“Sixteen. By then she was looking very grown up. When her father came to see us, we saw the pictures, and I remember thinking she would be hard to find because she could pass for twentytwo or so in the right clothes.”

Emily sensed something withheld. “Tell me more about the pictures.”

“There are a few in here.” Sam opened the box and pulled an envelope from a pharmacy’s photo lab out of a file. He set the envelope on the table in front of her, and she began to shuffle through the photographs.

One showed an athletic-looking man in his early forties in a fancy cabin or ranch house-possibly some kind of resort-sitting at a table with his arm around the girl. They were both grinning at the camera with similar expressions, and Emily looked closely at the two faces, trying to detect a family resemblance. There was nothing obvious. The girl had long chestnut hair and big green eyes and a pretty face, but it was the sort of wide-cheeked, fair face with Cupid’s-bow lips that she associated with Irish women she had known. The father had the long face with pointed, narrow nose that made her think of Englishmen. She found herself forming theories about Allison’s mother.

She kept going, looking at each picture, and then noticed a similarity. There were lots of places-a houseboat on a lake in a treeless landscape that had to be Arizona, a white sand beach on the ocean, a redwood grove, a place that looked like a restaurant on a balcony above a lagoon, outside an apartment or condominium-but just the two of them. In some shots Allison was alone, and in others she was with her father, but there were never any friends, either her age or his. And there was never anyone who could be the mother. She said, “Was the mother the one who took the pictures?”

“I think she was out of the picture, literally. There was no mother I ever saw, and no shots of her, either, even in the pictures of the girl as a toddler. I think they were all taken by strangers, people he handed the camera to and asked to press the button.”

Emily found one of Allison in a bathing suit, and understood what Sam had said earlier. The girl had an exceptional figure, like an hourglass, and it made her seem older than sixteen in spite of her smooth, untroubled face. “She was very pretty.” Emily returned the photographs to the envelope and put them back on the table.

Sam said, “He gave us the pictures. He showed us the girl’s birth certificate and a black-and-white photocopy of her driver’s license. After the first meeting, we asked for things. Anything we asked for, he would send by overnight mail. Phil wasn’t easy on him, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a father from up north comes to you and says his sixteenyear-old daughter disappeared two months ago. He’s already had the local cops on the case, and he’s hired detectives up there. They’ve talked to all her friends and relatives, searched her room and her school locker, and every place she went regularly. Now he comes down to L.A. and hires a detective to find out if that’s where she went. It’s got to occur to you that most likely what you’re looking for is a corpse. Phil went up and got fingerprints off some things she touched in a ranch the family owned that nobody had visited since she left.”

“To identify her body?”

“Well, if the cops find a Jane Doe somewhere, they generally fingerprint her if they can. Our theory was that we might be able to end this guy’s uncertainty just by a records check. It didn’t pan out.”

“What did you do after that?”

“We started to search for a live girl, thinking we probably would find a dead one. It was one of those stories you wish you hadn’t heard. He grounded her because of her grades. She slipped out of the house on a school night in the middle of the week, and spent the night with a few friends of both sexes. There was drinking and, he suspected, some drugs. He got stricter. He said she couldn’t go out for the rest of the year, and that she would have to earn his trust if she was even to go out during her senior year.”

“Isn’t that going a bit far?”

“He thought he might have laid it on a little thicker than he needed to. After we talked to him for an hour or two, he mentioned that maybe he called her a few names, used words he might not have used if he had it to do over again.” Sam paused. “Only he didn’t. They kind of coexisted for a week or so. They didn’t talk much. His story fit one of the things I’d noticed a few times in this business. It’s a lot easier to avoid people if you’re rich. They lived in a big house with a lot of out-of-the-way rooms, and servants who would serve the girl a meal by herself so she didn’t have to eat with her father. And just having servants around all the time makes the house too public to hold a big confrontation that will clear the air. Then she was gone.”

“Gone? Just gone? No message?”

“That’s what he said. He was out all day as usual, and he got home late at night and figured she was asleep. When he got up the next morning around ten, he figured she was at school. While he was at lunch, the phone rang, and it was the math teacher asking whether Allison was going to be sick another day and needed the homework assignment. He said it took him a day and night to realize that she wasn’t just skipping school, and then to find out that she had probably been gone since at least the morning of the day before, or even at the end of school the day before that. She didn’t take the car, didn’t even take credit cards, so he wasn’t ready to panic just yet. Then he discovered that she had taken out three thousand dollars from a savings account her grandmother had started for her. She was gone.”

“He called the police?”

“That was the first step. They seemed to have covered all the friends, interviewed servants, teachers, relatives, and so on during the first week. At that point, he was crazy with worry. He’s a rich man, so he offered a reward and hired a big detective agency that works out of San Francisco-you’ve probably heard of them-Federal Surety and Safety International. They had offices in Fresno, Modesto, and Sacramento, and they had people fanning out all over the place showing her picture and asking questions. Nothing. All this took time. At the end of a month, the cops were clearly preparing him for the probability that she was dead. His detectives, of course, were not about to give up, ever. They had a client who could keep paying until the end of time, and you know this business. There’s always another door you can knock on, and when you run out, there’s always another town where you can start the whole process over again. A customer who can pay can have as much time as he wants.”

“What brought him to Phil?”

“I don’t know. He said he’d had his attorneys check around with Southern California attorneys. Phil got mentioned.”

“But why Southern California?”

Sam shrugged. “If he had really been thinking, he should have done it earlier. L.A. is one of the places where runaway kids are most likely to come.”

“Did Phil take the case right away, or did he hold out?”

“He was pretty good about it. He said right off that he didn’t want to keep the distraught father in suspense. He was willing to try to help. Then he said everything you would want an ethical investigator to say-that the cops were good at this, and that after a month, anything we found was probably not going to make him happy. But Mr. Forrest said he knew all that, and a few other things the cops had told him. He just wanted the girl found, and he wasn’t ready to give up. Clear enough. We went to work.”

“What did you do?”

“We got the pictures copied, and then we went out showing them to people and asking around. We went to nightspots and found kids who were willing to look in exchange for the reward. It was a hundred thousand, so we didn’t hear `No’ a lot. Then we moved to street kids, who were always out there, always looking, always hungry. Next we found some upscale kids outside expensive stores, and got them interested, too. That was an idea of Phil’s. If you think about Allison’s background, you know that’s who she would fit in with. And her looks were good enough to get her in anywhere. We talked to authorities, too-anybody who would run into somebody like her. We went to the volunteers who ran shelters and clinics, a few cops I knew in Hollywood, street vendors, hookers, cabdrivers, anybody who would talk to us. I used to find that I got a lot of good observation from the guys who drive around to fill the machines that sell newspapers. One of these guys will be out in the dead hours from three to six. He has to drive to each spot, get out of his truck, open the machine, empty a coin box, take out the old papers and put in the new ones. It takes a minute or two, and he’s always looking closely at anybody nearby so he doesn’t get robbed. He sees a lot.”

“How long did that go on?”

“That phase of things kept Phil and me occupied for about a month. We went out with pictures day and night, on rotation. We tried to hit everybody’s schedule who might have seen her-the night sleepers and the day sleepers. Then we started over again. Finally, after a couple of months, we got a breakthrough.”

“What was it?”

“A pocket. When you’re looking for people who have seen somebody, you get either none or some. If it’s real, you usually get one, then a few more. If you do, then you’ve found the neighborhood where she hangs out. You chart the sightings-where, exactly, she was seen, and when-and you begin to get an idea of where she was at what time of day and what she was doing.”

“So she was alive after all,” Emily said.

“That’s right. Allison’s territory was a long, thin strip of pavement. She was seen in several clubs along Hollywood Boulevard near Highland. And during the day she was in stores and coffee shops along Melrose. She was seen as far west as Fairfax at Farmers Market. On the east she went as far as Crescent Heights. If she was on Wilshire, she’d go a little farther, at least as far as the art museum. It was like the territory of a cat, and for the same reasons. She was always on foot, and she wanted to skirt the dens of the scary animals. She went where she felt safe.”

“Was she hiding?”

“She didn’t want to be found, but she was just a kid. She thought all she had to do was travel to someplace new and call herself by another name. Once she was in Los Angeles, she forgot about laying low, and started to go places where other people would see her. She was on an adventure in the big city. I don’t think she ever thought Forrest would hire anybody to find her.”

“But you found her?”

“We did. Once we had mapped her territory, we picked some places for a blind.”

“A blind?”

“A place to wait for her to come by. We got a plain white van with no windows in the back. We would put a different sign on the side of it every day, then park it and sit inside to wait. We figured the time to concentrate on was evening, from dark until maybe two in the morning. It was the best time to spot her because there weren’t as many people out, and it was also the best time to do what we were planning.”

“What was it?”

“We were going to jump out of the van, flash some badges, handcuff her like we were arresting her, and drive off.”

“My God, Sam! What could you have done that was more illegal than that?”

“I know. If we were caught in the act, there wouldn’t be much we could say about the badges and so on. But when the target is a minor, and you’re carrying the father’s written permission to use whatever force is necessary to bring his daughter back, you have a certain leeway.”

“Did you get her that way?”

“We didn’t have much luck at first. We sat and smoked cigarettes and stared at everybody on the street, then went home. The next night we would do it again. After she didn’t turn up for seven nights in one spot, we would move to the next one. She had been gone a long time by then. We figured she must have a job or a boyfriend, a place to live, and fake ID, so it wasn’t just looking for a lost person hanging on a corner. She had choices. But the thing was, we had plenty of time to do it right, because the money was behind us.”

“What did Forrest say?”

“When we called him to tell him we were getting recent sightings from people-that his daughter wasn’t dead, in other words-you should have heard him. We were all happy. Listening to him made us feel good. If we had asked him for a million dollars, he would have written the check. After he hung up, we replayed the recording, and I laughed so hard I thought I was going to have a stroke.”

“Recording? Phil recorded the call? Why?”

“Well, think about it. We’re about to do something that could get us arrested. He had written us a note giving us permission, but Phil wasn’t going to take any chances. I mean, what if he said later that it was a forgery, or even that he’d never heard of us?”

“I guess your arrest would be a conviction.”

“That was our guess, too. But at that point, the guy was ready to drive down here to be in the van when we grabbed her. As you can imagine, Phil didn’t let him.”

“Why not?”

“We knew where she had been a week ago and two nights ago, but not tonight. Also, he was an amateur, a first-timer. We were trying to grab a young girl off a public street, and the only way you want to do that is if you can do a convincing cop. I had been a cop, so I wasn’t acting. Phil was a cop in the marines, so he wasn’t really, either. Part of our credibility was that this Allison girl had never seen me or Phil. If she saw her father on a street, even four hundred miles from home, she would certainly recognize him and take off.”

“So you were expecting her to resist?” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t it be just as likely she would see him and want to come home?”

“If she did, she knew the phone number. And if she wanted to surprise him, she knew the way home.”

“But to take her against her will-“

“You know better than that, Emily. In this state, a sixteenyear-old doesn’t have a will, legally. She does what her parents tell her.”

“I’m not talking about legal fictions.”

“Neither am I. You know any success stories about runaway girls in L.A.? We weren’t sure how she had gotten that far, but neither of us could think of any possible future for her that wasn’t a disaster. I mean, she’s got one thing to trade. We were convinced that we were saving her life.”

Emily was silent.

“So we did it. One night we happened to be in the sweet spot. The van had a sign on it that night that said TWENTY FOUR-HOUR PLUMBING. We parked it right off Hollywood, halfway up on the curb with orange safety cones behind it. We had the back door open so you could see one of those rooter machines Phil had rented that day, and the effect was great. I mean, what fake has one of those things?”

“And?”

“Along comes Allison. It’s around midnight. She comes right along the sidewalk from the direction of those old apartments around Fountain. I don’t know if she was crashing there with somebody she had met, or she just happened to like the route. I came from the building side and Phil came from the truck. We scooped her up and packed her into the back of the truck. Phil went in after her, and I drove off.”

“Didn’t she fight or scream or anything?”

“For a couple of seconds, I could hear her kicking and stuff. But then Phil handcuffed her and put a plastic restraint on her ankles. All the while he was reciting the Miranda warning. It’s a great way to calm somebody down. It intimidates them, but persuades them in a deep way that nothing freaky is happening to them. They’re still in a world where if everything goes wrong, they’re going to court. It also tells them that you think what you say to them matters-that the truth matters. So she went limp and stayed quiet for a long time. We were on the freeway nearly to Camarillo before she figured out we weren’t taking her to the station. She got really agitated, and we had to give her a little something to keep her quiet.”

“You drugged her?” Emily was horrified. “With what?”

“Phil gave her a little shot of something. I think it was that stuff that the doctors give you to put you down before they anesthetize you. Thiopental sodium or something.”

“Where in the world did he get it?”

“You know how Phil was. He had connections with everybody. People did things for him.”

“I know he cheated on me, Sam. I think we can assume he talked some woman pharmacist or nurse he knew into giving him the drug.”

Sam looked at her sadly. “He felt bad, Emily. He always felt like hell after. He really loved you.”

“Just tell me the story.”

Sam’s eyes didn’t move from her face. “It sometimes helps to forgive people for things like that. People have weaknesses.”

“They sure do,” she said. “Phil got some nurse to risk a prison term to give him a needle full of a sedative, and he risked killing the client’s daughter by shooting it into her in the back of a van. Is that about it?”

“That’s about it. For the rest of the trip she was okay and didn’t fight or feel scared. He stayed in the back with her to keep an eye on her pulse and breathing. He had been trained to handle battlefield first aid, and I had been a cop for twenty years.” He paused. “I can see that look on your face, and you’re wrong, Em. If there had been a bad reaction or something, he would have told me, and we would have rushed her to the nearest hospital, even if it meant the next stop would be jail. We were doing a job, taking a young, misguided girl back to her family, which had the resources to help her. If it was drug rehab, or psychiatric help, or just sending her a check for a few thousand a month, she was going to be better off.”

“How did it end?”

“We delivered her to her father at a ranch in the Central Valley. I recognized it from some of the pictures he had given us. There was a sign at the front gate that said ESPINOZA RANCH. There was a big living room he called the `great room,’ with beams made from tree trunks, and a stone fireplace and Tiffany chandeliers and oriental rugs.”

“Odd,” said Emily. “Why there? Why not the family home?”

“He had his reasons. He seemed to feel that it was likely she was going to make a scene about being snatched off the street like that, and that she would probably raise hell and fight. He didn’t want the house staff and visitors to know all about it. He said he couldn’t think of a way it would do anybody any good, and he didn’t want her to become the staple of local gossip. I could agree with that.”

“Were there other people there?”

“I didn’t meet them, but there certainly were. This was a big place. When you got past the gate, there was a gravel road that wound a bit to get around a hill and past some old oak woods. The house was there. And beyond it there was a stream that looked as though it might have some trout in it. You need people to keep a house that size from turning musty and dusty. It was just private. He wanted to spend time with her and talk to her and see where he had messed up, and begin to fix it. He had always planned to have her go east to an Ivy League school. He said that running off in her junior year had probably blown that for good. But he said he had learned that it didn’t really matter. She was home and she seemed to be all right, and that was all that mattered.

“We were still there when she started to come around. She was healthy, all right, and strong. She started to struggle right away, and make sounds. She was beginning to swear at him, but he said she would calm down as soon as she didn’t have an audience. Phil and I offered to stay or fetch help, or whatever, but he said he was already in touch with a psychiatrist who’d had lots of success with runaways-he’d deprogrammed kids who had joined cults, and was part of some institute that helped kids get off drugs and so on. The doctor and three or four members of his staff would be there within a couple of hours. He said he didn’t care what it cost or how long it took, he was going to save Allison. We drove home feeling pretty good about what we had done.”

Emily waited. Sam seemed to leave her for a moment, his eyes staring out at the wall of mist that was moving into the sound from the open ocean. “It goes to show you,” he said.

“To show you what?”

“Everything I just told you was a lie.”

“A lie?”

“That’s right.”

“Everything?”

“All of it. Nothing was true.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sam lifted the box with the maroon cover, pulled out a file folder, and set it on the table between them. Emily picked it up. It was a packet of plain sheets of paper, typed in single-space paragraphs with a line skipped between them. “Read that.”

She began to read. “My name is Philip R. Kramer, and I am the owner and principal investigator of Kramer Investigations, Van Nuys Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. I swear on penalty of perjury that everything in this statement is true …”