Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-nine

My cell phone began to vibrate, again, as I rewound the last of the microfilm spools. The display said it was Amanda, calling for the third time. That I’d let her calls go straight to message, unanswered, was because I was in a quiet room of the library. That I hadn’t walked outside to return any of them was because I didn’t know the answers to the questions she was going to ask.

I put back the spools and walked down the stairs, anxious now to get out of the library. I’d learned nothing new. The story had disappeared from the Tribune and the Sun-Times two days after Maris disappeared, dead from a lack of leads.

Outside, I walked underneath the elevated tracks, then north along Dearborn. I passed a store-wide patch that had been grassed over after a demolition the year before. Plans must have changed; nothing had been built on it. Now it was covered with filthy snow, dark from the splatters of the truck traffic and the trains that rumbled overhead.

I sat on a bench by the bus stop. The air smelled of oil and diesel exhaust, and it was cold, too cold to sit on a bench. I wanted that; I wanted to feel the cold, instead of the paralyzing, futile heat of an old August.

My cell phone rang again. This time, it was Patterson, calling from Iowa. I got up and moved away from the noise of the traffic on the street.

“I e-mailed you photos of the Kovacs brothers,” he said.

“I’m not at home.”

“Let me know if one of them is your security guard.” He started to say good-bye.

“Wait,” I said before he could hang up. I’d just spent a few hours searching for an investigation that had never taken place. Now I was seeing another one not happen, all over again. “Did you send them to Michigan and Florida as well?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all you’re going to do?”

“What more are you suggesting?”

“Ace police tracking,” I said. “Stay on top of Michigan and Florida, make sure those photos get shown around. Find those brothers. Force them to tell you where Carolina is.”

“You think she disappeared in Iowa?” he asked.

“Of course not.” I took a breath. “You know what I want.”

“Recognize what I can do, Mr. Elstrom: I can ask around about a couple of brothers who have absolutely no links to the bank robbery, and maybe I’ll stumble across something to interest the F.B.I. But I can’t commit major resources, because I have no justification. I can’t pursue a disappearance in Michigan, either. If you think your Carolina was taken across state lines, give me something I can take to the F.B.I.”

“Find those Kovacs brothers, you’ll find her.”

“Then get your ass to your computer and check out the photos. Tell me which Kovacs you saw in Michigan.”

I phoned Amanda. She’d called from her office. It was only a few blocks away.

She started bright. “How’s the sunshine? It’s miserable here, dark and gray and very Chicago.”

“I know. I’m back.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Late?”

“Too late to call.” It sounded dismissive, a greasy, quick excuse. “Listen, I just got done with some stuff at the Washington Library. I thought I’d swing by your office, use your computer to check my e-mail, then take you to lunch.”

“It’s way too late for lunch.”

“Dinner, then. I’m starved.”

“It’s too soon for dinner.”

I looked at my watch. “It is not.”

“It is, for us.”

“I’ll come over to the Art Institute, we’ll have coffee from a machine.”

“Go back to the library; use their computers to check your e-mail.”

“What the hell do you want, Amanda?”

“I’ll see you in the lobby of the Palmer House in a half hour,” she said and hung up before either of us could do more damage.

There was a Starbucks on the way, but there’s a Starbucks on the way to everyplace, except perhaps the moon. Someday, they’ll move all the Starbucks inside the Wal-Marts, next to the Oreo displays, and that will mark the last time mankind will see the sun. I don’t like Starbucks coffee; it’s too bitter, too strong, for a dishwater man like myself. I bought a small cup anyway, because I needed a prop, something to do with my mouth when it wasn’t ruining a relationship. I sipped it while I walked to the hotel.

The lobby of the Palmer House is an enormous room of cathedral ceilings, painted with scenes of bare-breasted ladies being comforted by muscular men and children playing flutes. It is a place of arched entrances, marble staircases, and second-story balconies worthy of any weeping Juliet. Its widely distanced sofas make it the kind of grand setting where a Cary Grant, impeccable in a soft gray suit and solid, unencumbered tie, would choose to meet a regal blonde in understated silk-an Eva Marie Saint or a Grace Kelly. The surrounding bustle of people going up, coming down, and traversing the ornate rugs gives almost-lovers good last cover, as they decide whether to order a drink and ponder safe, small next steps or say the hell with it, rent a room, and go up to screw their brains out.

The Palmer House lobby is also a place for soon-to-be ex-lovers to meet, because that same surrounding bustle demands civility and restrained, last good-byes.

Amanda sat at the end of one of the large sofas in the middle of the great room. I sat at the other end, turned to rest one arm along the back of the sofa, and tried to grin like a man not haunted.

“You look awful,” she said. “And you hate Starbucks.”

I set the vile brew on the low table in front of us and told her of Leo’s examination of the typewriter, told her the woman who’d named me her executor had been a girl we’d once known.

“You and Leo?” she interrupted.

“More me.”

“‘Known?’”

“We dated my last semester of high school and into the summer.” I reached for the Starbucks, saw that my hand was trembling slightly. I left the prop where it was. “Until she disappeared,” I finished.

“You never mentioned any of this when we were married.”

“I always thought I would.”

“Someday?”

“Someday.”

“Why do you have to be the one carrying this now?” It was a reasonable question, but not what she was really asking.

“No one else will.”

Her eyes narrowed, seeing half-truths.

“No one else must,” I said, finally.

“You really think she’s still alive?”

“If so, she’s safe someplace with a pot full of money.”

“If not?”

“If not, she died several weeks ago, tortured by someone who wanted that money.”

“She’s an old love,” Amanda said.

“We were kids; we went out for a few months. Her father was murdered and she disappeared.” I paused. “I have felt responsible.”

“How?”

“It took me a long time, years, to accept the possibility that she was dead, though that was what everyone was saying. She never called, and gradually… I always figured, if she was all right, she would have found a way to contact me, to let me know…”

“Maybe she’s a bitch.”

The urge to get up, walk away, came burning. Just as quickly, it passed. Amanda was right. And she loved me.

“I have to see this through,” I said.

“Because that’s what you do: see things through?”

“Not always, Amanda, but this time.”

She stood and reached down to touch the side of my face lightly. Then she was gone.

I joined the throng of purposeful people, sure of their next steps, hurrying to Union Station. The five fifty-three, west to Rivertown and better places, was a slow train that stopped at every crossing. That was fine. It was late enough to get a window seat, and for a time I let myself shut down a little, watching the passing stores and flashing lights, listening to the other riders talking on their cell phones about meetings and class schedules and things that were sure to make them rich.

At Rivertown, instead of crossing Thompson Avenue to head to the turret, I turned the other way. The sun was long gone, but the sidewalk was bright with neon and smiling ladies. Rivertown was shrugging itself to life.

I stopped on a very particular square of cement, three blocks down. Just ahead, multicolored lights pulsed from the street-level windows, in time with high-tech pong, ding, and zoom sounds from digitized machines. The pinball parlor had evolved with the times. It was now a video arcade and, according to rumor, a drug depot for high schoolers.

I’d come to that building every day, right after Maris vanished. I’d stood at the exact square on the sidewalk, in front of her door, where we’d argued that last time. Crazily, I’d tried to believe that I could change time, summon her back if I just stood there long enough, willed her back hard enough. Then that horrible August ended. I went to school in Chicago, and sometime after that, I gave up coming back to Rivertown altogether. When I did return, years later, I looked the other way each time I passed by her old door.

I stepped to the curb, looked up at the apartment on the second floor. A light burned in the bedroom that had been Maris’s. The window was covered by soft white curtains, as when Maris slept there. I stared up for a minute or two, half expecting to see a female shadow cross behind the curtain.

I walked on and turned off Thompson Avenue. Leo’s mother’s bungalow was in the middle of a block of identical bungalows. Ma Brumsky’s windows flickered the most brightly, from the biggest television screen on the block. Even from several houses away, so many primary colors were bombarding the pulled-down shades, and with such ferocity, that a stranger to the block could easily have assumed that fireworks were being set off in the parlor. Which, in a sense, was true enough.

I went into the narrow gangway next to his house. A light shone up from Leo’s office. I tapped on the window. He pulled open the curtain, grinned, and pointed to the back. I walked around and waited until he opened the porch door.

“I’ve got to come around back, like the service class?” I asked as I stepped in. His screened back porch was piled high with two-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi, for the effervescence; bags of potato chips, for the salt; and cans of fruit juice, for the regularity. Wintertime, those babushkas still left in Rivertown used their back porches as walk-through refrigerators.

“Ma’s lady friends are due here any minute. They’d get embarrassed if we were upstairs, to see them come in.”

“Always a risk when you’re running a porn theater for septuagenarians.”

I followed him down the basement stairs, then sat in his desk chair and switched his computer on to the Internet.

“Iowa?” Leo asked.

I nodded as I opened the e-mail Sergeant Patterson had sent.

“Nice to know people are recycling motor oil,” Leo said, looking over my shoulder.

It was true. The police photos of the Kovacs brothers showed shiny, slicked-back hair, acne scars, and the sullen, face-on expressions of the newly arrested.

“No bingo,” I typed in a reply to Patterson’s e-mail: “Neither one is John Reynolds.”

“Shit,” said Leo.

“Exactly. It means we’ve got a third man in the equation, somebody else who wanted to hunt Maris.”

I stood up and moved to the overstuffed chair as Leo extracted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a tube of plastic cups from a desk drawer. “Snort?”

“I told Amanda about Maris,” I said.

“Definitely calls for a snort.” He poured two inches of Jack into each of the cups, set one down at the edge of the desk for me, and dropped into his desk chair.

He took a sip and asked, “How much did you tell?”

“Most of what I understand.”

He raised his glass in a kind of toast. “Which isn’t very much, then or now. Besides, you were kids.”

“I’m not a kid now,” I said.

He leaned forward, to speak carefully. “If she’s alive, she’s running with plenty of money, and she’s safe. If not, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It matters, Leo; either way, it matters.”

He looked away, realizing he’d stumbled with the words.

Upstairs, the front doorbell rang, and for a time we sipped Mr. Jack’s golden elixir and tried to grin, listening as Ma’s lady friends shuffled in, chattering excitedly in Polish. I finished the Jack and got up, and he walked me up the basement stairs.

He paused at the back door. “You told Amanda all of it?”

I knew what he was asking. He was the only person in the world, save Maris, who suspected how much there could be, but in all the years since that August, he’d never asked.

“I’ve never told anybody all of it,” I said. “Not even myself.”