Marked Man

30

Ghosts. I was surrounded by ghosts, or at least those plagued by them, because when the haunted man in the cab drove away, I turned to face the haunted woman waiting for me in front of my office. She was wearing the classic Philly combo: red high heels, blue jeans, tight black shirt. My first thought was how damn pretty she was, so pretty it was hard to tear my gaze away. My second thought was how the hell I was going to get rid of her.

“You promised,” I said.

“I promised I wouldn’t call,” said Monica Adair.

“This is worse. Monica, it wasn’t a date. Really. It wasn’t.”

“Okay, I buy that now. It wasn’t a date.”

“I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

“I know.”

“Good, I’m glad that’s clear. Then what are you doing here?”

“Can we talk, like, privately?”

I looked around. Pedestrians were sparse. “This isn’t private enough?”

“Not really. I have a legal question.”

“Monica, this is crazy. Stop it now. I feel like I’m being stalked.”

“Maybe I’m a little confused. You are a lawyer, right?”

“Yes, I’m a lawyer.”

“Then why won’t you talk to me about an important legal matter?”

I closed my eyes. “What kind of matter?”

“Do you always talk about important legal matters on the street?”

“With people who aren’t clients, sure.”

“How do I become a client?”

“Pay a retainer.”

“How much?”

“Depends on the case.”

She opened her bag and reached in, and as she searched, she said, “Do you take small bills?”

“What kind of legal matter is this, Monica?”

“Can we discuss this upstairs, in your office? Please?”

Beaten, finally, and wanting to get the spectacle off the street, I led her through the dirty glass door, up the wide stairs, past the accountants’ office and the graphic-design office, and into our suite.

Ellie smiled warmly at Monica. “I see you found him, Miss Adair.”

“Yes, Ellie, thank you,” said Monica.

“Good luck.”

I gave my secretary a wary look as I led Monica into my office. When I had her seated, I stepped back out.

“Ellie, do me a favor and call Detective McDeiss. I need to hand over some evidence to him as soon as possible.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Carl.”

“And ask him if he could set up a meeting with Mr. Slocum and that fed, Jenna Hathaway, for this afternoon, okay?” I paused, thought about something. “Ellie, why did you wish our Miss Adair good luck?”

“She said she’s looking for her sister. I hope she finds her.”

“Right,” I said.

“Are you going to help her, Mr. Carl?”

“I think she’s a little beyond my help, Ellie. Thank you, and let me know right away when you hear back from McDeiss.”

When I returned to the office, Monica was standing behind my desk, leaning back, arms crossed, examining the framed photograph of Ulysses S. Grant hanging crookedly on the wall. “He looks like my Uncle Rupert,” she said.

“He looks like everybody’s Uncle Rupert,” I said. “Can we get started? I have a busy day and it’s already taken a turn for the worse.”

She winced at that, slightly, nothing big, but a wince just the same. I watched her as she moved away from the photograph and sat in the client chair in front of my desk. She was twisting her lips, as if she were trying to figure out why I was being such a jerk. Good luck to her. I wasn’t quite sure why myself, though there was no doubt that I was.

“All right, Ms. Adair,” I said.

“Oh, we’re all formal now, are we?” she said with a slight smile.

“Yes, that is what we are,” I said. “So what can I do for you?”

“I want to hire you.”

“To do what?”

“To find my sister.”

I sighed for effect. “This sister who disappeared before you were born.”

“That’s right. I want you to find Chantal.”

“I’m not a private detective, Ms. Adair. I can refer you to one if you’d like.”

“I want you.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s not what I do.”

“What do you do, Victor?”

“I primarily defend people accused of crimes.”

“And that’s more important than finding a missing girl?”

“No, and it’s not more important than being a teacher or a doctor, or even dancing with my clothes off, but it is what I do.”

“Why are you so mean to me?”

“I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to be honest.”

“But you’re being mean.”

“What do you want from me, Monica?”

“I want to see it.”

“See what?”

“The tattoo.”

“Gad, no. Forget it. There is no way.”

“Please.”

“Absolutely not. I’m starting to get very uncomfortable here. I’m sorry I can’t help you with your sister, but right now this meeting is over.”

“Every place I go, I check the phone book,” she said. “Every day I look her up on the Internet. Just to see if there’s anything going on with a Chantal Adair. I know it’s silly, she won’t have the same name if she was taken, but I do it. There are a couple Chantal Adairs out there. I keep track of them all. They’re not the right ages, but still I feel close to them, as close as family.”

“Monica, you’re starting to weird me out.”

“Is that so weird?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it is. You know those guys who sit all alone in some laboratory, listening in on the static, waiting for a message from outer space?” she said. “That’s me, that’s my life. I’m all alone with my dog and my gun, waiting for a message from my sister. And there’s been nothing. Nothing.” Pause. “Until last week.”

I leaned forward, my interest suddenly piqued. “Really? What happened last week?”

“You,” she said.

It was only then that it dawned on me, with heartbreaking clarity, that I was dealing with a higher level of insanity than I had heretofore previously thought. And I sensed its root cause, too.

We all suffer, from time to time, the spiritual unease that flickers like a faint flame before being doused by a nice chardonnay or a ball game on the tube. What is our purpose? What is our destiny? Is there more to life than this bland string of continuous sensation? We try to stifle our questions with money or love, with sex or politics or God, we try to plaster over the hole as best we can until the very end, when the light dims and the plaster shatters and we’re left alone to wrestle with our doubts through to our final, painful breath. But hey, that’s half the fun of being human.

Yet here, sitting across from me, was a woman who had no existential hole to fill. She had been taught, from her earliest moments on earth, that her life contained a singular purpose. She was conceived and raised and carefully trained to fill the gap created by the loss of her sister. And she had succeeded in her own strange way. Chantal was a precocious little dancer with a pair of ruby slippers, and so Monica became a dancer herself, using her sister’s name as she strutted in red shoes of her own. Chantal loved animals, so Monica owned a maniacal guard dog with a taste for smoked flesh. Chantal had been killed or abducted, and so Monica guarded Chantal’s replacement with a dog and a gun and a series of locks, no doubt, on her door and her heart. No word had been heard from Chantal in decades, and so Monica dedicated herself to listening for a voice in the ether. If you think it’s tough being born without a purpose in your life, imagine how tragic it must be being born with one.

“Monica, you must know that I am not a message from your sister.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I do. This is all just a sad misunderstanding. The tattoo was a mistake, and telling you about it was even worse. I’m sorry.”

“Can I see it?”

“No.”

“Please?”

She stared at me with her big blue eyes, the simple, faithful eyes of a baby or a pilgrim. I think maybe those eyes were the reason I had been treating her so badly. They seemed to need too much of me, pleading for me to fill a want I could neither fathom nor satisfy. Her parents must really have done a job on poor Monica. And, in turn, I had been a jerk. I felt ashamed.

“If that’s what you want,” I said. “If that will end all this.”

“Yes, it is what I want.”

I stood up from my desk, walked around it, closed the door and pressed the button on the knob. I sat on the front of my desk and shucked off my jacket. I stuck my finger above the knot of my tie. When I gave it a tug, it slipped down a bit. I tugged it again.

With the tie completely undone and hanging loosely from my collar, I unbuttoned my shirt, slowly, all while she was closely watching. It must have been a strange reversal for her. Now she was in the small locked room, waiting with bated breath as someone else stripped. I had the urge to warn her against being handsy, but the seriousness of her expression stopped me. She was not a drunken frat boy urging the girls on the balcony to lift their shirts, she was the devout, waiting for a glimpse of the miraculous.

I pushed away the edge of my white shirt. She leaned forward, her eyes widened, she tilted her head. “I thought it would be bigger,” she said.

“I get that a lot,” I said.

As she leaned her head still closer to get a better look, she reached out her hand and gently traced the name with her finger.

I pulled back a bit and thought about stopping her, but it felt so strange and comforting, her soft flesh brushing my still-wounded skin, that I let it go on. And when she leaned yet more forward and drew her face closer to the tattooed heart, I found myself waiting, expectantly, for the soft kiss of devotion.

A sharp knock at the door.

She pulled back. I almost clocked her with my elbow as I hastily clutched the front of my shirt together.

I jumped off the desk and said loudly, in a voice strangely high-pitched, “Yes?”

“Mr. Carl,” said Ellie from the other side of the door. “Detective McDeiss called and said he was sending an officer over to pick up the evidence and take a statement. He also said that Mr. Slocum is in court today, and A.U.S.A. Hathaway told him – and this is a quote – ‘I never want to see his ugly face again.’”

“Ouch,” I said. “Okay, thank you, Ellie.”

“Do you need anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

We looked at each other, Monica and I, and then we both turned our heads away in embarrassment. We had let something go a bit too far, and we both knew it. I started buttoning my shirt. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Well, that’s that, then,” I said as I went to sit behind my desk and started retying my tie. “You can see it’s just a silly tattoo and it has nothing to do with your sister.”

“I suppose.”

“It was actually nice meeting you, Monica, and I wish you luck in the future.”

“That means you’re not taking the case.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Finding a missing person, especially one missing for decades, is not really my thing.”

“And you won’t be coming back to the club?”

“No, it’s not my kind of thing either.”

“So no more dates.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Oh, right. I guess that’s it, then,” she said, standing. “By the way, the Hathaway you’re meeting with today, is that the police detective?”

“No, she’s a prosecutor. Why?”

“Because it was weird hearing the name. The police detective who was investigating Chantal’s disappearance was a Detective Hathaway.”

My hands suddenly grew clumsy and the knot I was tying disintegrated.

“My parents still speak very highly of him. Detective Hathaway spent years looking for Chantal. He and my parents became very close. It was like he was one of the family.”

“You don’t say.”

“We haven’t seen him in a while.”

“How old are you, Monica?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And your sister disappeared how many years before you were born?”

“Two. Why?”

“Just thinking, is all.”

“Thank you for showing me the tattoo, Victor. I don’t know what it means, but I won’t annoy you anymore, I promise.”

I watched as she turned around, as she turned the knob, as the button popped and the door opened. I watched and I thought and I tried to make sense of everything.

“Monica,” I said before she was out the door. She turned around again, and she had that look of need and expectation on her face. “Maybe I ought to meet your parents. What do you think?”

My God, she had a beautiful smile.