Fidelity (2 page)

Emily walked cautiously through the living room again. She looked at the polished cherry table near the front door under the mirror, where they sometimes left notes for each other. She forced herself to walk into the downstairs guest bathroom and look in the tub. There was no body. She reminded herself she shouldn’t be looking for his body. A man who carried a gun would shoot himself, and she had heard nothing. If he did kill himself, she was sure he would have left a note. She kept moving, into the small office where Phil paid bills and Emily made lists or used the computer, into the den, where they sat and watched television.

There was no note. She knew she had not missed it because she knew what the note would look like. It would be propped up vertically with a book or something, with EM printed in big letters. For for mal occasions like birthdays or anniversaries, he always used an envelope. Suicide would be one of the times for an envelope.

She walked back to the telephone and called the office. Phil’s office line was an afterthought, but she knew she should have tried earlier. The telephone rang four times, and then clicked into voice mail. She recognized the soft, velvety voice of April Dougherty. It was an artificial phone voice, and Emily didn’t like it. “You have reached the headquarters of Kramer Investigations. I’m sorry that there is no one able to take your call at the moment. For personal service, please call between the hours of nine A.M. and six P.M. weekdays. You may leave a message after the tone.”

Emily had written that little speech and recorded it twentytwo years ago, and the moment came back to her sharply. She remembered thinking of calling the crummy walk-up on Reseda Boulevard the World Headquarters. Phil had hugged her and laughed aloud, and said even the word headquarters was stretching the truth enough.

Emily took the phone from her ear, punched in the voice-mail number and then the code to play back the messages. “We’re sorry, but your code is invalid. Please try again.” Emily stared at the phone and repeated the code. “We’re sorry, but-” Emily disconnected. She considered calling back to leave a message telling Phil to call her, but she knew that idea was ridiculous. He could hardly not know that she was waiting to hear from him. She made a decision not to waste time thinking about the fact that Phil had changed the message-retrieval code. Maybe he hadn’t even been the one to change the code. Maybe little April had put in a new code when she had recorded the new message. It would be just like Phil to not know that a new code would be something Emily would want to have, or that not telling her would hurt her feelings.

How could Ray Hall sleep through eight rings? Maybe he was with Phil. That was the first positive thought she’d had. Then she reminded herself that the ring sound was actually a signal, not a real sound. If Ray had turned off the ring, the phone company would still send that signal to Emily’s phone.

She thought of Bill Przwalski. He was only about twentytwo years old-born about the time when she and Phil had gotten married and started the agency. He was trying to put in his two thousand hours a year for three years to get his private-investigator’s license. Could he be out somewhere working with Phil? He got all the dull night-surveillance jobs and the assignments to follow somebody around town. She looked at the list in the drawer near the phone and tried his number, but got a message that sounded like a school kid reading aloud in class. “I am unable to come to the phone right now, but I will get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the beep, then leave me a message.” She said, “Billy, this is Emily Kramer, Phil’s wife. I’d like you to call us at home as soon as possible. Thank you.” Us? She had said it without deciding to, getting caught by the reflex to protect herself from being so alone.

The next call was harder because she didn’t know him as well as Ray, and he wasn’t a trainee like Billy, but calling the others first had helped her to get past her shyness and reticence. She had already called Ray and Billy, so she had to call Dewey Burns. If she didn’t call him, Dewey might feel strange, wondering if she had left him out just because he was black. She made the call, and there was only one ring.

“Yeah?”

“Dewey?”

“Yes.”

“This is Emily Kramer. I’m sorry to call so early.”

“It’s all right. I’m up. What’s happening?”

“I just woke up, and Phil isn’t here. He never came home last night.” She waited, but Dewey was waiting, too. Why didn’t he say something? She prompted him: “I just started calling you guys to see if anybody knows where he is, and you’re the first one who answered.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Phil is. He’s had me working on a case by myself for a while, and he hasn’t told me what he’s doing. Have you called Ray yet?”

“Yes, and the office, and Billy. Nobody’s up yet.”

“It’s early. But let me make a couple of calls and go to the office and look around. I’ll call you from there.”

“Thanks, Dewey.”

“Talk to you in a little while.” He hung up.

Emily stood holding the dead phone. His voice had sounded brusque, as though he were in a hurry to get rid of her. But maybe that terse manner had just been his time in the marines coming back to him-talk quickly and get going. He had been out for a couple of years, but he still stood so straight that he looked like he was guarding something, and still had a military haircut. Phil had told her he still did calisthenics and ran five miles a day, as if he were planning to go into battle. Still, he had sounded as though he wanted to get rid of her. And he had said he was going to make calls. Who was he going to call? Who else was there to call besides the men who worked for Phil?

She reminded herself that this was not the time to be jealous. Dewey might have numbers for Ray Hall and Bill Przwalski that she didn’t-parents or girlfriends or someone. But what he had actually said was that he would make a couple of calls. What numbers would he have that he could call when Phil Kramer didn’t come home one night? She hoped it meant Dewey had some idea of what was going on in Phil’s latest investigation, or at least knew who the client was. But if he did, why had he said he didn’t?

There was so much about Dewey that she didn’t know, and she’d always had the feeling Phil must know more about him than he had said. Nobody seemed to know how Phil even knew Dewey. One day there was no Dewey Burns, and the next day there was. He and Phil always seemed to speak to each other in shorthand, in low tones, as though they had longer conversations when she wasn’t around.

There was one more person to call. She looked at the sheet in the open drawer, dialed the number, and got a busy signal. She looked up at the clock on the wall. It said five forty. Had it stopped? Had all of this taken only ten minutes?

She hung up and redialed the number. This time the phone rang for an instant and was cut off. “What?” April Dougherty’s voice was angry.

“April? This is Emily Kramer, Phil’s wife. I’m sorry to call at this hour.”

The voice turned small and meek. “That’s okay.”

“I’m calling everyone from the agency.” Emily noticed that April didn’t ask what was up. How could Emily not notice? She answered the question that April had not asked. “Phil didn’t come home last night, and I’m trying to see if anybody knows where he is, or what he was working on, or if he’s with someone.”

“No,” April said.

“No?”

“He didn’t mention anything to me. I went home at six, and he was still at the office.”

“Do you remember if Ray was there, or Billy?”

“Urn, I think both of them were still there when I left. They were, in fact. But they were getting ready to leave, too.”

“Do you remember what Phil was doing when you left? Did he have a case file, or was he packing a briefcase with surveillance gear or tape recorders, or anything?”

“I didn’t notice. He could have. I mean, it’s his office. He could have got anything he wanted after I left. I think he was sitting at his desk. Yes. He was.”

“Was his computer turned on?”

“It’s always on.”

Emily was getting frustrated. “Look, April. I know it’s early in the morning. I would never do this if I weren’t worried sick. In twentytwo years, Phil has always managed to make it home, or at least call me and let me know where he is.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t come home.” April’s voice was quiet and tense. “I’m sure there’s a good reason.”

Emily was shocked. She had not said anything critical of Phil, but here was this girl, defending him against her. Emily said, “If you hear from him, tell him to call home right away. I’m about to call the cops. If you know of any reason not to, I’d like to hear it.”

“If I hear from him, I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks.”

“‘Bye.” April hung up.

Emily dialed Phil’s cell phone again, and listened to the message. “The customer you have called is not in the service area at this time.” She put the phone back in its cradle. The chill on her feet reminded her that she was still barefoot, still wearing her nightgown. She picked up the telephone and hurried to the stairs to get dressed. On the way, she looked at the printed sticker on the phone and dialed the nonemergency number of the police.

Emily Kramer hurried from the elevator to the office door, staring at the hallway. She had not been in this space in at least five years, but it had not changed since the days when she and Phil had moved the agency here twenty years ago. There was a scuff mark on the right wall above the baseboard that she was sure she had seen before.

She reached the door with the raised gold letters that said KRAMER INVESTIGATIONS, tried to fit her key in the lock, and failed. Phil had not told her anything about changing locks. It was a simple, common sort of difficulty, but it had stopped her progress, and for the moment she couldn’t think of a way to move forward. People like building managers tended to show up at ten or eleven, and it was barely six thirty. She felt dazed.

The door swung open, and Dewey Burns faced her. “Emily. What are you doing?”

“Same as you.” She charged past him, as though he might shut the door on her. She took a few steps and stopped. Ray Hall and Bill Przwalski were standing together, leaning on one of the desks in the outer office.

“Ray? Billy?” she said. “I tried to call you.”

Ray Hall returned her gaze. “Dewey got through to us.” He was about forty years old, with gray, squinting eyes that seemed much older, as though he had been disappointed so many times that he was incapable of surprise. This morning he was wearing a black sport coat, a pale blue oxford shirt, and a pair of jeans.

“Phil didn’t come home last night,” she said.

“We heard,” Hall said. “I’m sorry, Emily. But I think he’ll turn up okay.”

“But you’ve worked for him for at least ten years. You know he’s never done this before. He would never just not show up.”

Ray Hall sighed and looked at the floor for a second, then raised his eyes to her. “I think he’s okay.”

“What does that mean?”

“There are two ways people disappear-involuntarily, and voluntarily. When you have a healthy man who is six feet four, has been in a few fights, and carries a gun, it’s hard to take him anyplace he doesn’t want to go.”

“You think he just took off, without saying anything to anybody?”

“That’s one possibility, but I don’t know yet.”

“And what if you’re wrong?”

“I can’t be wrong, I haven’t guessed yet,” he said. “We’ve got to stay calm and find out what we can before we draw any conclusions.”

Emily sat down at the receptionist’s desk, because she felt her knees beginning to tremble. After a second, she realized the desk and chair were the same ones she’d used twenty years ago. She gained some strength from the familiarity. She tried to ignore the dwarf plants in cup-sized pots that April Dougherty had on the desk, and the little plush monkey with magnets on its hands that clung to the desk lamp. There was white blotter paper with doodle drawings of spindly-legged girls with long hair swept across big eyes, and the name April with a heart dotting the i. Emily noticed that Bill Przwalski was watching her and looking nervous, as though he were afraid she was about to search the desk.

She wanted to. Her hands itched to pull out the drawers and look, but she resisted. She said to Ray Hall, “I called the police.”

“So did I,” Dewey Burns said.

“You did?”

He frowned. “I told you I was going to.”

“Not exactly. You said you were going to make some calls. What did they say?”

“They haven’t arrested him or taken him to a hospital. They’re checking now to see if they had any contact with him since yesterday afternoon-a traffic stop or something.”

“That’s what they told me, too.” Emily glanced at Ray Hall, but he avoided her eyes.

She stood and walked to the door of Phil’s glassed-in corner office. When she pushed open the door, she saw that the deadbolt was still extended and the woodwork was splintered. She spun around in alarm.

Ray Hall said, “That was me. He’s the only one who has a key.”

She nodded and went inside. Everything in Phil’s office looked the same as it always had. She realized that she had been expecting something different. There should have been something that stood out, something that might not be instantly visible to other people, but that Emily Kramer would see. And that would tell her what was wrong. The desk was polished and smelling of lemons, with only a set of IN and ouT boxes that held a phone directory and a hole punch. Phil was not really a neat person. His orderliness came from the military, where they had trained him to straighten and polish the surfaces that showed.

She opened the drawers and filing cabinets, looking for something that was not routine and ordinary. She found time cards and payroll documents that had been annotated in his handwriting as recently as yesterday. She found a copy of a letter he had signed requesting payment of a final bill for what looked like a divorce case. She took it out to Ray Hall. “See this letter? As of yesterday, he was still interested in having this woman pay him. If she gets the letter tomorrow and puts the check in the mail right away, he still wouldn’t get it until two days later. He was expecting to be back.”