You're Next

NOW
Chapter 8

There was no front-office woman, just a front office. No sign, no venetian blinds, no noir stenciled lettering announcing HANK DANVILLE, P.I. Mike stepped past the bare wooden desk, tapped on the inner office door, and opened it.

Hank was behind his desk, pants dropped, withdrawing a needle from the pale white skin of his thigh. He looked over his shoulder, grimaced, and barked, ‘Goddamn it!’

Mumbling an apology, Mike skipped back and closed the door. A moment later Hank yanked it open again. Tucking in his shirt, he returned to his desk, Mike shadowing him across the room on a cautious delay, both men avoiding eye contact. Hank slumped into his chair and gestured at the worn love seat opposite, where Mike had sat many times over the past five years.

Hank had an old-fashioned build, the kind they don’t make anymore – tall and lanky, scarecrow shoulders broad enough to hang a linebacker’s frame on. He was balding pleasantly and evenly, his hair receded midway on his head, which extended, turtlelike, on a ropy neck. It was an intellectual head – academic, even – built for peering at dusty tomes and longhand letters. It matched neither his powerful forearms nor the taciturn cop’s demeanor he’d perfected during the thirty-some years he’d spent behind a badge before going private to limited success.

Hank’s dry lips wobbled as he tried to come up with an explanation. No easy task, given what Mike had walked in on. Hank cursed under his breath, shoved back from his desk, and stood, cuffing his sleeves. Mike noticed that he was wearing his years a bit more heavily than when they’d last face-to-faced. Hank never gave his age. He was old enough to wobble here and there but young enough to get pissed off if you tried to steady his elbow.

He crossed to the window, shoved it open, and leaned on the sill, his suspenders drawing tight across his back. He’d quit smoking but still forgot sometimes, leaning out windows as if to exhale. His cat, an obese tabby, looked up from the radiator at him with indifference.

Mike cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I wanted to apologize for yesterday when-’

‘I’m dying,’ Hank said. He remained leaning over the sill, staring off at the Hollywood sign in the distance, the fabric of his shirt bunching between his shoulder blades. ‘Lung cancer. I gave ’em up, hell, fifteen years ago. Thought I was in the clear. Amazing how something like that can boomerang back on you.’

He strode over and tapped the little needle kit on the desktop. ‘That’s what this poison is for. Neupo-something. Supposed to stimulate my last two white blood cells.’

Hank eased down into his chair, his gaze shifting, unsure where to land. At closer glance he looked not just slender but downright gaunt. Mike had never seen him uneasy, let alone floundering. Empathy left Mike tongue-tied. It was always hard to find the right words when someone parted the curtains like that, when you were given a glimpse into the inner workings of a life. So Mike said the first thing that came to mind: ‘What can I do?’

Hank sneered a little. ‘You gonna start coming by the house Wednesdays with baked casserole?’

‘If I baked a casserole,’ Mike said, ‘it would kill you for sure.’

Hank tilted his head back and laughed, and Mike recognized him again. That quiet dignity, the wise-man smirk in the face of it all.

‘Aw, hell,’ Hank said. ‘Your expression when I had my pants around my ankles just about makes dying worth it.’

‘Maybe-’

‘We stopped chemo. Last week. It’s in the bone now.’ A wry grin lost its momentum, flared out on Hank’s face. He swiveled slightly in his chair, bringing into view a wallet-size school photo of a young boy, maybe six years old, thumbtacked to the otherwise blank wall behind him. Mike had politely inquired during an early meeting, and Hank had made clear: Any discussion about the photo was off-limits. That Hank was unmarried and had never mentioned children only added to the photo’s curiousness. The picture was worn, wrinkled with white lines. The boy’s striped, snap-button shirt had late sixties written all over it. Something in the shrinelike placement of the picture – so low as to be a private reminder – suggested that the boy was dead. An estranged son? A victim from an unsolved case that Hank couldn’t let go of?

Mike averted his focus before Hank could key into it. Hank read Mike’s face, then broke the mood by floating a hand Fonzie style over the remaining strands straggled back on his shiny scalp. ‘Least the new-generation chemo let me keep my hair.’

Mike leaned back, shot a breath at the ceiling. ‘Shit, Hank,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, everyone’s ticket gets punched sometime. I know better than to take it personally.’ Hank tugged a fat file from a bottom drawer and thunked it on the desk, causing the cat to leap from the radiator and stalk along the baseboards. ‘You came by to pick this up?’

Mike regarded the file like an artifact, giving it its due before reaching over and pulling it into his lap. It held the record of the private investigator’s search for Mike’s parents. Its girth was impressive, given that Mike remembered so little to set Hank on his investigative course. John and Momma. Approximate ages. No last name to work with, no city, no state. Abandoned-child investigations back then weren’t what they are now. Nor were computer records. Half of what Hank had dug up was on crumbling microfiche, and none of the missing-person reports on record fit what little Mike remembered. For decades he had lived with the gnawing conviction that it was his mother’s blood that had darkened his father’s sleeve that morning. Maybe he’d have to live with it forever.

He leafed through the file, memories and possibilities rising from the print. The geographic spread of the search was large, since he didn’t know how far his family home had been from the preschool playground he’d been left at; his father could have driven a few blocks or all through the night. There were investigation reports and phone transcripts, crime blotters and clipped obits from small-town papers. Mug shots of scowling men named John, all of an age, all of whom were not his father. By now he knew most of these strangers’ faces by heart. The sight made him cringe, made him wonder what children these men had left behind, what women they had destroyed. But what really put a hook into his gut were the morgue photos, a Technicolor parade of women who’d been murdered in 1980 and unclaimed bodies that had turned up for years after that. He’d become acquainted with a virtual dictionary of shrug-off terms for corpses – floaters, crispy critters, headless horsemen.

He closed the file and tapped it with a fist. A scrapbook of a failed investigation. Years of dead ends. Years of high hopes and corrosive disappointments, a deep-seated yearning running through each day like a habit you can’t quite quit.

It occurred to him that this file, with its cop-house chicken scratch, bluing flesh, and flashbulb misery, had become all he had of his parents.

Hank drew a hand across his face, tugging his features down into a basset droop. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do better by you, Mike.’

Over the years there had been quite a few other investigators, but none as committed.

‘I didn’t come by today for this,’ Mike said, tapping the file again. ‘I came to apologize. I was up against it when we talked. I know how to handle stress better than that. Things have been good long enough that I forgot what it’s like to be graceful when they’re not.’

Hank studied him. Gave a nod. The tabby jumped up into his lap, and he dug his fingers into its scruff, the cat going limp and squint-eyed. ‘You gonna be all right with this pipe business?’

‘It’s my own goddamned fault. I liked the price and didn’t perform due diligence, and now I’m a liar and a cheat.’

‘What’s that mean?’

Hank was still regarding him curiously, but Mike just shook his head. No use getting worked up. He’d made a decision, and now he had to put it in the rearview mirror. He stood with the file and offered his hand across the desk. ‘You always did fine work for me, Hank.’

They shook, and Mike left him there, staring out the window, the cat purring in his lap.

Jimmy was waiting in Mike’s truck, passenger window rolled down, elbow stuck out, radio blaring. Mike had brought him along because they needed to select rock for the fire pit, and Hank’s office was en route to the stone yard, a good drive from the site.

Mike climbed into the truck and tossed the enormous file onto the vast plane of the dashboard. Jimmy eyed the file but said nothing. Mike had told him he needed to run an errand, and it was clear enough he hadn’t wanted to say more than that.

The music was all ska rhythm and subbaritone bleating. Mike turned down the volume, but kept the channel in a show of largesse. ‘Thanks for waiting.’

Jimmy shrugged, bopping to the tunes. ‘You the boss, Wingate.’ Pulling out, Mike watched him poke at the buttons on the console, turning on the seat warmer – a seat warmer in fucking California. ‘Hey,’ Jimmy said, ‘can I have this truck, too, when you done with it?’

‘Not if you play this music in it.’

Jimmy made a dismissive sound, tongue clicking against his teeth. ‘Shaggy’s shit so smooth, you get VD just listenin’ to his ass.’

‘That’s by way of recommendation?’

‘Better than your James Taylor shit.’

‘My James Taylor shit?’ Mike rolled the knob in protest. A few channels over, Toby Keith was crooning that he should’ve been a cowboy, a sentiment not shared by Jimmy, judging by the sour twist of his mouth.

Mike loved music, but particularly country with its twang and swagger, its paternal America, its celebration of hardworking men who punch a clock their whole lives and don’t ask for nuthin’. Parents were heroes, and if a man put his sweat into the land, he could have a shot at an honest life and good woman’s love. An honest life. Those PVC pipes bobbed up through Mike’s thoughts like a corpse that wouldn’t sink, and for the rest of the drive and the baking walk through the stone yard he was distracted and useless.

On the drive back, they passed a cemetery Mike hadn’t seen before, so he pulled off the frontage road and turned in.

Jimmy looked across at him, displeased. ‘We don’t got enough to finish today that you gotta do this again?’

Mike said, ‘Two minutes.’

The guard in the shack kicked back on a stool, reading the L.A. Times. Mike rolled down the window and was surprised to confront himself in a grainy black-and-white photo beneath a headline reading, GOVERNOR SHOWS FOR THE GREEN. Yes, that was Mike, grinning in all his lying, hypocritical glory, his arm stretched around the governor’s considerable shoulders. The paper rustled and tipped, the guard’s ruddy face appearing. The guy waved Mike through without asking any questions. There was a time when Mike got stopped at every checkpoint and reception booth, but now he was legitimate, with a knockoff Polo shirt and an overpriced fucking truck.

He parked under an overgrown willow, and they climbed out, Jimmy tapping down his pack of smokes. ‘The hell you look for in all these graveyards anyway?’ Jimmy asked.

‘John.’

‘Just John?’

‘That’s right.’

And a woman born in the late 1940s.

‘There a lotta Johns out there, Wingate,’ Jimmy said.

‘Five hundred seventy-two thousand six hundred ninety-one.’

The cigarette dangled from Jimmy’s lower lip. His eyebrows were lifted nearly to his dense hairline. He took a moment, presumably to ponder Mike’s sanity. ‘In the country?’

‘State.’

‘You know he dead, though? Just John?’

Mike shook his head, thought, Wishful thinking. He grabbed the file off the dash, because he didn’t need Jimmy nosing through it, and headed off.

The sod yielded pleasantly underfoot, and the dense air tasted of moss. A snarl of rosebush plucked at his sleeve. He found his first one three rows in – John Jameson. The dates were a stretch, but you never knew. Two more rows, the file growing heavy in his arm. Tamara Perkins. Maybe you. A gravestone at the rear fence, lost beneath dead leaves. He swept them with his foot, unearthed another cold, carved name. Maybe you. He scrutinized dates and wondered. He closed his eyes, breathed in the familiar scents, and dreamed a little.

He knew, of course, that neither of his parents was in this cemetery or any of the countless others at which he’d stopped over the past twenty years. He couldn’t even be certain that they were dead. Given that splash of blood on his father’s cuff, he assumed that his mother was. And his father could well have been brought down by any variety of perils. But even if one or both of Mike’s parents was in the ground, and even if through some marvel of chance and guesswork he arrived at the correct cemetery, he could stroll straight over the right grave and still not know. So what the hell was he looking for here on these lush swells? The rites that were denied him? After all, he never got the deathbed visit, the box and shovel, the ash-filled urn.

He passed the aftermath of a service, people breaking off in solemn twosomes and quartets. A rubbed-raw exhaustion hung over the gathering, all those universal fears and vulnerabilities laid bare. And Mike at the periphery, traipsing between gravestones like a zombie, trying to convince himself that he came from somewhere, anywhere. Trying to convince himself that as a four-year-old boy he might have been something worth keeping.

Your mother and I, we love you very much. More than anything. Feeling intrusive, he gave the widow a wide berth and a gentle nod. It’s Morning Again in America. Walking up a jagged path of broken stone, he pictured the way Hank’s dress shirt had bagged between his shoulders in the back, slack from his lost bulk. Nothing that happened was your fault. He sensed the phantom bite of the station-wagon seat belt’s buckle beneath his hip, saw the sweat tracking down the flushed back of his father’s neck, felt that void in his four-year-old gut. Where’s Momma? He thought of the high curve of his mother’s cheekbones, his eyes misting, and then he became aware of his arm, sweating under the weight of the file.

It was an absurdity, the file. A collection of random men and women who shared a birth year or a first name or a vague set of descriptors. He’d always kept it at Hank’s. What was he gonna do now? Take it home? Leaf through it with Kat?

A pastor’s voice, cracked and portentous, carried down the hill from a second service: the age-old incantation, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Something in Hank’s illness had jarred loose a new awareness, a harsh reality Mike couldn’t help but meet head-on. Maybe it was the symbolism of his sole remaining accomplice in the search being stricken with a death sentence, but it hit him with sudden, vicious certainty that failure was inevitable and that it had always been inevitable. He’d been searching for a needle in a stack of needles.

He would never know.

A trash can appeared around the turn, a sign from the accommodating universe, and Mike looked down at the bulging file, trembling in his too-firm grip. He held it over the mouth of the can, closed his eyes. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. He let it fall. The twangy rattle echoed off the surrounding stone.

Case closed.