Illusions

4

Skip-tracing can be easy or it can be difficult as hell, depending on the person you’re trying to find, how much detailed information you have, how long he or she has been missing, and how much effort the individual has put into covering past tracks and/or in building a new life. Three years is a long time, but I’d once located a man who had taken considerable pains to remain hidden under another name for a full decade. And I’d done it, with the aid of a little luck, in less than a week.

The thing is, it’s pretty hard in the society we live in to drop out of sight and keep on functioning without leaving a paper trail. You can change your identity, your means of earning a living, your habits, but unless you become one of the faceless soldiers in the traveling army of the homeless, the new identity still builds a paper trail that can lead straight to your door. In my dinosaur days — a woman at the state board of worker’s compensation had referred to me in those terms, not long ago, when I’d told her I didn’t own or know how to operate a computer — I’d conducted my skip-traces by personal interviews and document searches and by telephone through contacts at various city, state, and federal agencies. Now, thanks to my good sense in hiring Tamara and her hacking skills, I let her handle most of the paper-trailing and then do whatever follow-up legwork is necessary myself. She has instant access to all sorts of information that would have taken me long hours, even days, to gather. As a result, most skip-traces are simpler and faster to manage, with a higher success rate. The same is true with the bulk of my other cases — personal background checks, suspected insurance fraud, adoption searches, that sort of thing. With the two of us working together, we could handle a third more investigations per month than I’d been able to do alone. We could, that is, if we were able to get the work. The competition in the private detection racket, like the competition in so many other businesses these days, is fairly cutthroat, and it’s the big agencies that wield the sharpest knives. Eberhardt wasn’t the only one who’d found that out with a vengeance.

The Janice Durian Erskine trace didn’t look promising in the early stages. No apparent paper trail for Tamara to tap into. No driver’s license, credit cards or credit rating, bank accounts, or Social Security number under the names Janice or J. Durian, Janice or J. Erskine. The American Cancer Society had no record of her. She also had no local, state, or federal record of criminal arrest, nor so much as a parking ticket, under either name. Which was mildly encouraging in one sense. It indicated she might in fact have managed to overcome her drug addiction. On the other hand, it might also have meant that she’d avoided being picked up on a possession rap or for one of the illegal activities, like prostitution, that junkies drift into to support their habits. It was also possible she’d been arrested and charged under a wholly different name, though most individuals have been fingerprinted for one reason or another these days and a computer check would have turned up her true identity.

Tamara and I contacted each of the various drug abuse treatment centers in the Bay Area. Some refused to give out patients’ names; the ones that were willing to cooperate when we explained about Tommy Erskine’s terminal leukemia had nothing to tell us.

The postcard indicated Janice Durian Erskine was still alive. But it could’ve been written by somebody else, despite Erskine’s certainty about the handwriting, or penned months or even years ago and just now mailed by someone else for motives of his or her own. So Tamara ran a check on the California death records for the past three years. No listing under either name. Still inconclusive, though. She might have died in another state; and drug addicts often enough perish under circumstances that put them in the morgue as a John or Jane Doe.

Our next step was the art angle. There are dozens of professional arts organizations in San Francisco alone; Tamara and I started with the larger ones — Artwork Marketing and Publishing, Brava for Women in the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Education Foundation — and worked our way down to the small specialty outfits. None of them had ever heard of the subject. Neither had any of the fifteen or so artists’ agents operating in the city. That left art galleries, dealers, and consultants, of which there are three full pages in the San Francisco telephone directory; and art schools, art restorers, fine arts artists and commercial artists, which take up another page or so in the directory. And that was just for the city proper. It gave me a headache just thinking about how many more organizations, galleries, schools, and individuals there are in the nine counties that comprise the greater Bay Area, not to mention how many in the entire state of California.

Canvassing the local ones would take days; canvassing them all would take weeks. And Tamara couldn’t do it by computer. We’d have to divvy up the San Francisco listings and call each one, with me doing most of the telephone work because she has a full school schedule on Tuesdays; and chances were the effort would net us zero. If there was no paper trail on Janice Durian Erskine, she was probably using another name and therefore not trading on or even mentioning her past affiliation with the Santa Fe art scene. And she didn’t have to be living in this area if she was living at all; she could be anywhere in California or one of the other forty-nine states or even in another country. And she didn’t have to be working at a job that had anything whatsoever to do with art. Or any legitimate job, if she was still hooked on cocaine.

Anybody who thinks the private eye business is exciting ought to spend a few days sitting in on a problematical skip-trace like this one. They’d be in for a rude awakening. Not to mention a sore head and an even sorer tailbone.

Bobbie Jean’s son-in-law, Cliff Hoyt, dropped off the keys to Eberhardt’s house and office late Tuesday morning. He was a chubby, usually cheerful man in his thirties — a tax attorney who worked for an old established firm on Montgomery Street. He didn’t look particularly chipper when he walked into the agency; his mouth had a glum downturn and his eyes were grave.

“Sorry to be late in getting these to you,” he said. “I meant to bring them in yesterday, but I got hung up in court.”

“No problem.”

“Bobbie Jean really appreciates what you’re doing,” he said. “So do Pam and I. It can’t be an easy chore for you.”

I shrugged. “She holding up okay?”

“Not really. She puts on a brave front, but... well, it’s eating her up inside. I think she blames herself.”

“There’s nothing she could’ve done to stop him. Nothing any of us could’ve done.”

“We keep trying to convince her of that,” Cliff said. “She says she knows it, but I don’t think she accepts it as fact. At some level she feels she failed him — didn’t love him enough, didn’t give him enough support.”

“It’s the other way around. He’s the one who didn’t care enough about her or about himself. And he’s the one who pulled the trigger.”

“Yes, the ultimate selfish act. Bobbie Jean knows that as well as we do, but knowing it and coming to terms with it are two different things.”

“She’s strong. She’ll be all right.”

“Not as strong as she once was. He wore her right down to the nub. She won’t cave in, I’m pretty sure of that, and eventually she’ll work through it. But it’ll take time. And the quicker the closure the better. Her life with him, I mean — severing all the material ties so she can start cutting the emotional ones.”

“I’ll get the task done as soon as I can, Cliff.”

“I don’t mean to pressure you—”

“No, no, I understand. I’ll try to sort through everything by the first of next week.”

“Thanks. For Bobbie Jean’s sake,” he said. Then he said, “You know, she really does feel bad about shutting you and Kerry out the past four years. Going along with Eberhardt, not challenging or defying him.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Pam and I talked to her about it more than once. The harm cutting off old friends can do. But he had such a psychological hold on her. And he grew more and more bitter, more and more screwed up.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“No hard feelings then?”

“Not toward Bobbie Jean. Never.”

“I didn’t think so, but I wanted to make sure. I’ll tell her again; it might help. Might help, too, if you and Kerry came over to visit at some point. As friends.”

“Count on it, Cliff.”

He shook my hand. “Let’s keep in touch.”

“Count on that, too.”

Alone, I sat looking at the keys before I put them in my wallet. Two keys that would not only open house and office doors but doors into the past. I had no desire to pass through any of them; to touch any part of Eberhardt now that he was dead and buried. Yet at a visceral level I needed to walk through those doors, for as long as I could stand to be on the other side of them. If any of the missing pieces to his suicide existed, that was where I would find them.

Bobbie Jean needed closure, and like it or not, so did I.

Tamara said, “This phone stuff isn’t getting us anywhere. You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“There’s a better way to find out if there’s anything in the art angle. Faster, anyhow. We’re just jerking around here, you know what I’m saying? Get it over with and move on.

“Fish or cut bait,” I said.

“Huh?”

“An old expression. Means quit jerking around, do what needs doing, move on.”

“Sort of like shit or get off the pot.”

“You have such a delicate way of phrasing things, Ms. Corbin.”

“Hey,” she said, “we’re private eyes, right? Private eyes have to talk like private eyes, keep up the tradition. You think Bogart said fish or cut bait in The Maltese Falcon?”

“No, but he didn’t say shit or get off the pot, either.”

“Would have if they hadn’t had the Hays Office.”

“What do you know about the Hays Office?”

“More than you, I’ll bet. Like, real name was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Man hired to run it in 1922 was Will Hays, former U.S. Postmaster General. Production Code was adopted in 1936. Only about four thousand words long, bunch of generalities in outline form. Paragraph in Subdivision Two, sexual taboos, that says scenes of passion such as excessive and lustful kissing have to be treated so they don’t stimulate the lower and baser elements. Code never did define who the lower and baser elements were—”

“Okay, okay. Enough, college girl.”

“College woman,” she said.

Verbal sparring with Tamara can sometimes be wearying, particularly when it involves trying to build a rickety bridge across the generation gap. And we’d already wasted enough time this Wednesday morning. Almost noon now, and we’d both been on the phones since nine-thirty, turning up one blank after another on Janice Durian Erskine. Diligence often pays off, but on some cases you get certain feelings, and the feeling I had on this one was that we weren’t going to find the subject working at any art gallery, organization, school, or other affiliated business in San Francisco or anywhere else in the Bay Area. Any reasonable new tack was fine with me.

I said, “What’s your suggestion on the art angle?”

“Well, let’s say the woman did clean up her act. Could be she got married again, right? Could be she doesn’t need to work. Client told you the only thing she ever cared much about is art, her own painting. So if she did learn to just say no to drugs, got her shit together, what’s one of the first things she’d start doing?”

“Painting again. Maybe.”

“Maybe’s all we got. Say she did. If she’s as good as the man says, good enough to have a showing at a fancy Santa Fe gallery, her work’s probably still good enough to be hanging in some Salishan clone out here. And from what I know about artists, it’d be the same sort of stuff she used to do — same style, subject matter. You know where I’m coming from?”

“And where you’re heading. The thing to do is visit galleries in person, flash the photos of her and her paintings.”

“That’s it. You’re the man.”

“Might work. If she’s off drugs, if she started painting again, if her work is still good enough to interest a gallery, and if she cares enough and is confident enough to make it available to one.”

“No worse odds than playing telephone roulette. Kind of obvious by now she’s got herself another name.”

“Pretty obvious,” I agreed. “So you think I should take those photos and climb on the old shanks’ mare—”

“The which?”

“Go out and start making the rounds. Me. Alone.”

“Like I said, you’re the man.”

“Uh-huh. And the man has a better idea. Two people can canvass twice as many galleries in the same amount of time.”

“Me? Hey, I’m just a hacker and glorified secretary—”

“If that’s what you think, then it’s time you got out and did some fieldwork. Didn’t you tell me you’re considering a full-time career in this business?”

“High-tech, high-concept,” she said. “Where I’m the boss and my people do the scut-work.”

“In this low-tech, low-concept agency you’re the people and I’m the boss. Besides, the idea was yours. Tell you what. We’ll close up now and take those two snapshots of Janice Erskine’s paintings down to the fast-photo place on the corner and have them duplicated while you and I eat lunch and decide which of us scut-works where. And then we’ll each spend an instructive afternoon in the world of showcase art.”

Tamara groaned. Then, slyly, “You buying lunch or do we put it on the expense account?”

“You’re learning fast, all right. Too fast. I’ll buy.”

“Okay. But if I’m the one gets a line on her, how about a reward? Say another twenty bucks a week?”

“So fast, in fact, you’ll probably end up owning your own agency before you’re thirty.”

“I’ll settle for ten more a week. Deal?”

“Deal. But only if you get a line on her.”

She hopped to her feet, grinning. “Fish or cut bait,” she said.