Marked Man

39

“It’s been like this for about a year,” said Jenna Hathaway as we stood in a sorrowful group beneath the bright sun in the parking lot outside the Sheldon Himmelfarb Convalescent Home for the Aged. She was fiddling with her keys, her head was bowed, she seemed younger somehow as she talked about her father.

“It’s been like what?” said Monica.

“My father doesn’t recognize anyone anymore. Not my mother, not his old friends. I’m just the woman who comes in every other day to say hello. It’s as if all the names in his life have slipped away from him, all but one.”

“Your sister,” I said to Monica.

Monica nodded without surprise, as if obsession with her sister Chantal were only to be expected, and, seeing the company she was in, maybe she had a point.

“Each detective has an unsolved case that haunts him,” said Jenna. “For my father it was your sister’s disappearance. He couldn’t abide the idea that a girl that young, so full of life, could simply vanish. He never put the case to sleep when he was still at the department, and when he retired, he took the file to keep working on it. That was going to be his hobby. But somewhere along the line, his mind latched onto the whole affair with something beyond obsession. Every day and every night he would stare at the file, at the pictures, the clippings, the strange lighter he found in your sister’s drawer. It was as if the rest of the world had ceased to matter and all that was left was the one thing that didn’t exist anymore – Chantal.”

I could see it right off during my brief visit behind the curtain. That was the first unpleasant surprise I mentioned before. I had come to Detective Hathaway with a series of questions, but he was the only one who did the asking. Have you seen her? Do you know what happened to her? She was just here, and then she was gone. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw trembling. Chantal. Where is Chantal?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I have to get out of here. I have to find her. Will you help me?”

“I don’t think I can, Detective.”

“You have to, you must. I need to find her.”

“We all need to find her,” I had said.

“After a while my mother couldn’t take it anymore,” said Jenna Hathaway in that parking lot. “She grabbed the file, everything he had about Chantal, and burned it all. She hoped that would free his mind of the missing girl. But it didn’t work out that way, it only drove him deeper into himself. We wanted to believe he had willfully shut us out of his life. Somehow that was easier for us to handle than the truth, that his fixation with Chantal was an indication of something going awry in his brain. By then it was too late to do anything.”

“But you’re still trying, aren’t you?” I said.

Something changed in her just then. Her back straightened, her eyes flashed anger, she was no longer Jenna Hathaway, bereaved daughter. Instead she was now Jenna Hathaway, self-righteous federal prosecutor. It didn’t last but for a moment, before she deflated again.

“I thought maybe learning the truth might help,” she said. “Maybe if he found out what really happened to Chantal, he’d find another name to replace hers in his memory.”

Monica reached over and took hold of Jenna Hathaway’s hand. “I understand,” she said, and they looked at each other with the sad knowledge of their secret bond: They both had parents obsessed with the same missing girl.

“So how’d you light on Charlie?” I said.

“There was a task force formed to try to deal once and for all with the remnants of the Warrick gang. It wasn’t my usual turf, but they brought me in to see if there were any tax charges that could be leveled at the leaders.”

“The Al Capone strategy,” I said. Despite all his thieving and murders, it was a tax charge that finally sent old Scarface to Alcatraz.

“During one of the meetings,” said Jenna, “Charlie Kalakos’s name popped up. There were rumors that he wanted to come home. He had once before given information against the Warricks, and his testimony could be the linchpin of a RICO charge that could wipe out the gang once and for all. But I also remembered my father telling me of his suspicions about a connection between Charlie Kalakos, the Randolph Trust heist, and the missing girl. So I asked to be assigned to deal with Charlie, and I pressed the FBI to find him. That’s why they were outside Charlie’s mother’s house when you went visiting.”

“And why you’ve been such a hard-ass about giving him a deal.”

“I just want to find out what he knows.”

“But you’re not willing to give him immunity.”

“If he’s responsible for what happened to that girl, he has to pay a price. And if you have a problem with that, maybe you should ask Monica.”

We both looked at Monica.

“I’m with her,” she said, edging closer to Jenna.

“Thanks for the support,” I said. “Okay, how about this? Why don’t I draft up a cooperation agreement for my client? I’ll send it to you, and you can put in the provisions you want regarding Chantal’s disappearance. I’ll give a look-see to what you have in mind.”

She stared at me for a moment and then turned her head with suspicion. “That sounds almost reasonable. What’s the catch?”

“No catch. But I’d appreciate you hand-delivering it to me so we can talk it over. I’ll be running around the next couple of days, but I’ll be in family court on Wednesday morning. The child involved in my case is not at risk, so the judge has been letting the proceeding drag, delaying the trial to deal with more pressing matters. I could be waiting there for hours. That would be a good time to talk. And there might actually be something in my case you’d be interested in.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you then. But you won’t be disappointed.”

She looked at me again, trying to figure what the hell I was doing, and then she looked at Monica. “How did you guys end up together, anyway?” said Jenna.

“I began looking into the Chantal situation myself,” I said, “and found Monica. Let me ask you, before he drifted away, what did your father tell you about the case?”

“Just that he was sure there was a connection between the robbery and the disappearance, and he was focusing on five neighborhood guys. Charlie was one of them.”

“What about at the trust? Did he think anyone there was part of it all?”

“There were two women at the trust who were apparently in some sort of death fight. One was a young Latin woman, the other was an old lady who my father said he never trusted. I forget her name.”

“LeComte?”

She looked at me, surprised. “That’s it, yes. Tell me, why are you so interested, Victor? Why did you start looking into Chantal’s disappearance in the first place?”

“You don’t know?”

“No. How would I know?”

“Because somebody knows. Somebody made sure that the missing girl’s name was tattooed onto my brain, and I thought you might be the one.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“No idea, huh?”

“None.”

I stared hard at her. Not a smile, not so much as a twitch. Damn, I thought I had figured it out.

“Nice girl,” said Monica after Jenna Hathaway had shaken her keys for the last time and left the parking lot.

“You two seemed to hit it off.”

“Remember how she said I should call her for coffee sometime? I think I will. We have a few things in common.”

“You going to tell her what you do for a living?”

“Shut up.”

“Well, I noticed that you seem more comfortable with a fake job and a fake relationship. So maybe you should lie to Jenna and start up a fake friendship.”

“Victor, if you want to psychoanalyze me, get a degree.”

“Exception noted.”

“What?”

“That’s lawyer talk for you’re right and I’m sorry.”

“Did you really think that Jenna was responsible for the tattoo?”

“It was a thought.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? So where do we go now?”

“I suppose to Mrs. LeComte at the Randolph Trust.”

“Let’s do it.”

“I think I’ll do this one alone, Monica. Mrs. LeComte, despite being on the far side of seventy, is a woman to be reckoned with. She’ll want to use all her charms and wiles on me, and I think I’ll let her.”