Maria Gutierrez tapped on Phelps’ door. “Excuse me Lieutenant, but you said you wanted to see any reports Ledezma ordered before I put them in his box.” She held a manila envelope in her hand. “It’s the ME’s preliminary report on the body they found in the desert.” She read the label on the front. “Saundra Smith, missing since May…four years ago.”
Fresh from the police academy, Maria had been assigned as an intern to homicide, the first of her rotations through the department’s various sections and divisions. This month she was assigned to Phelps. What she really wanted was to ride right seat in a patrol car.
“Thanks. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Make me a copy of the report and then take the original to Ledezma. Then, get on the computer and pull all the incident reports for anything that happened within two miles of where that lady lived on the day she disappeared. No, make that three miles. We have to assume she was moderately healthy and could do a long walk. Put those in one group. And then, do the same thing for up to three months before and afterward.”
He read the question on her face. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. Homicide seemed to reduce the smile quotient among its members. He could joke with the squad. It wasn’t that they didn’t say funny, usually ironic things, but the response lacked the easy laughter of ordinary society. Homicide was about death. Its first victim, for those newly assigned to it, was laughter.
“I want to see if there is any pattern in the area—any activity that might point to a reason the woman disappeared.”
He saw she still didn’t get it.
“Suppose other people walked away and weren’t found. This guy lived out near a retirement community. Do you have any idea how many old people walk away from home and get lost out there every year? It’s Alzheimer City. Is there any reason to suppose this is anything else?”
Gutierrez nodded. Whether she understood or not he could not tell, but it would be her first lesson in routine digging. She needed to learn it now and from him, not the seat of the pants detective work she’d learn later.
“Go through them and cull out any that aren’t relevant.”
“How will I know which are relevant and which aren’t?”
“Well, we are tracking a missing woman, so missing cats, bicycles, loud parties, that kind of thing, won’t apply. Domestic disturbances, ditto. When you’re done, copy them all and bring them to me.”
“Copies to Ledezma and Pastorella?”
“No, they should have already seen them.”
“Sir, when I’m done with that, can you get me a ride?”
“You don’t want to learn detective work?”
“Well, yes, but….”
“We’ll see how well you do on this project, Gutierrez. Then, maybe.”
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
“Get me Dave Fowler on the phone.” He saw a cloud cross her eyes. “He’s the dive team leader. He left me a message to call him. That’s it for now.”
Three minutes after she left, his phone rang.
“Fowler, sir,” she said.
“Thanks. What line?”
“Three, sir.”
He punched the third red button. “Dave, what’s up?”
“I wanted to ask you the same thing. One of your guys had my crew tied up all Monday afternoon. I thought we were after a sinker but it’s not the way it went down.”
“Who tied you up?”
“Ledezma. He had us out in a lake on a golf course in the West Valley. He said he wanted to find a gun.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. We found two, as a matter of fact, a nickel plated 1911 Colt .45 and a newer .38 caliber S and W. The .45 looked like a presentation piece and had been in the water for a long time, the .38 maybe a month or less.”
“So what’s the problem? You found at least one piece.”
“Ledezma kept us out there for three more hours searching for anything else we could find. Artifacts, he called them. What the Hell is an artifact?”
“No idea. Did you find anything else?”
“Yeah, a golf club. Looks like some guy missed a hundred dollar putt and tossed the thing in the lake.”
“What kind of putter?”
“I don’t know from golf, Marty. It had a funny, short name. Not a name I’d recognize.”
“Cleveland, Taylor Made?”
“No, short, like a sound.”
“Ping?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You want it? I have it right here.”
“Sure.”
“And that’s the lot. Two guns and a putter. Five hours, three men at time and a half, plus air tanks, setup. It could bust your budget, Marty.”
“Thanks, Dave. I’ll talk to Ledezma. The next time someone over here calls, give me a heads up, will you? Oh, by the way, where are the guns?”
“Crime lab.”
He hung up and drummed his fingers and dialed the lab. Saul Levinson answered after ten rings.
“You got two guns last Monday or Tuesday early from either Dave Fowler or Manny Ledezma. What can you tell me?”
“The.45 is in bad shape, Lieutenant, Been in the water a long time. We lifted the serial number. Registered to a Frank Smith.”
“What about the .38?”
“Numbers filed off. We were able to fire it and get a good slug, nice lands and grooves. We put the image in the computer and we’re running it for a match for anything local. We are dabbing the filed part with acid to lift the serial number. We’ll send it to the FBI later.”
Phelps hung up a second time and continued his drumming. So, they found the gun, but nothing else. Unless Smith had a second piece. What did Ledezma think he’d find in that pond besides a gun? The trouble with big city cops who move to small municipalities like this one, he thought, is they have no patience with grunt work. They’re used to umpteen shootings a day and so focus on the nearest suspects and grind them until they nail them or lose them. Ledezma needed to learn detective work all over again, Phelps style.
“Maria,” he shouted, “how are you coming with those reports?”
***
“Here, this is for you.” Frank slid the key card still in its paper envelope toward her.
“What’s this?”
“Key to the room at the motel or hotel. I’m not sure what to call it. It has a bellman, but a bad one—that makes it a hotel in my book, but there’s no restaurant so it’s a motel.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“No, I suppose not. Anyway, here’s the key to the room.”
Well, at least he didn’t say
my room.
“Is that important? That I have a key, I mean.”
“Not important. I just thought it might be convenient for you if I’m not around and you have something to put in the safe or want to rest or—”
Or fool around?
“Not likely. Well, maybe…to put things in the safe, I mean.” She took the key card and slipped it in her purse. He cocked his head to one side and stared at her quizzically. She took a deep breath.
“Frank, I
have a confession to make. I hear voices. Well, not voices, a voice, and I talk to it.”
He leaned forward as if he wanted to sample her perfume.
“Who?” he said softly.
“Who, what?”
“Who do you talk to, that who.”
“Oh. Me, I talk to myself, but not really. This is confusing, but I need to tell you because our waiter thinks I’m rude and the server, the little round girl with the ponytail, thinks I’m crazy. I thought if you knew, you could sort of help.”
“Right. I’ll just point at my temple and circle my finger and wink at them while I tilt my head your way. The woman’s nuts but not to worry.”
“No. That’s not it at all. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Rosemary’s face reddened again, but not from blushing.
“I’m sorry. It’s not something to joke about, is it?”
“No.”
“How long have you been having these chats with yourself?”
“Not myself completely. A part of me…an alter ego, I guess. She taunts me, dares me, you know? No, you don’t. Well anyway, this other me pops up in my head and says things and before I know it I answer, lately, out loud.”
“And sometimes the out loud part is misunderstood by waiters and servers—”
“And sales clerks and friends and—”
“This has been going on just lately or for a while?”
“I think I always did. It was a way to think. You have conversations with yourself or made-up people and work it out. I expect if everyone were honest, they’d say the same thing. Then, a year after George died and all my friends stopped dancing attendance on me, unless they needed a chair filled at dinner or a fourth for bridge, I found myself with lots of time on my hands. It seemed like my entire life had become solipsistic. There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. I guess this is the way I keep from being lonely. You probably know about that, too.”
“I do.”
“I just wanted you to know, so that when I say something apropos of nothing, I’m probably arguing with my other self. You should not be alarmed or confused.”
“So when you answer a question and the answer is a little eccentric—”
“I’m probably talking to me and then trying to make the comment fit the conversation I’m having with you, yes.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve been there, done that, too. Not to myself though—talking I mean.”
“To your wife?”
His expression changed just for a split second, but in that second she saw the accumulated pain, fear, and anxiety—the overwhelming burdens he carried. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his.
“Tell me about her, tell me the rest,” she said.
Are you sure you want to know?
“Are you sure you want to know?”
She smiled. “Yes, I’m sure.”
The first time he ever laid eyes on Saundra Halliwell, she was stark naked, hands flying about trying to cover up and at the same time pull her window shade back down. He’d taken a shortcut through the parking lot behind the women’s dorm on his way to the library. The sound of the shade slapping against its roller and her gasp caused him to look to his left and there she was, a brunette Venus. Her mouth formed a perfect O. He stood transfixed. In the seconds that passed before she managed to pull the shade back down, he fell in love. He often wondered if he would have anyway, if he hadn’t caught her at that precise moment.
His problem after that was to find out who she was without revealing how he knew her, in a manner of speaking. It took him three weeks of hanging around outside the dormitory door and watching its inhabitants come and go before he spotted her. It was not an easy task. It is one thing to recognize a face in normal circumstances, quite another when the first impression includes a whole lot more skin than a face. He supposed that in this day and age, it wouldn’t make much difference. Nudity, frank discussions of sex,
Sex in the City
, had changed the world, and it didn’t include him or his generation. He guessed his parents felt the same way when they were his age.
When he finally approached her, she almost screamed. Apparently, he’d been noticed lurking, her word, around the dorm, and the women in it had come to the conclusion he was some sort of pervert. Stalker had not entered the lexicon then. His difficulty came in convincing her he wanted to meet her and no one else, and he had to do that without telling her why. They had no classes together, ate in separate cafeterias, and had absolutely nothing in common. It would make for a good match.
He didn’t tell her about the window shade until much later—on their honeymoon. After that, when she would see a secret smile on his face, she would say, “window shade,” and he’d nod. He still smiled that way once in a while, but now it hurt.
***
“We met in college. She was an undergraduate and I was in graduate school. We were married a week after she graduated. I’d finished my graduate work the same year and we moved to Chicago. I taught a few years on the North Side, then we drifted to Omaha and finally to Phoenix.”
“Did she work, have a career of her own?” Rosemary asked.
“At first she worked a variety of jobs. She was a French major in college, not the best choice to establish a career path. She thought she might be a translator at the U.N. or something like that.”
“And?”
“And…we were happy, had two kids, nothing unusual or unique.”
Rosemary waited. For a man who could write two dozen books, Frank Smith had very little to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I will never see her again. Talking about her this way does not make it any easier. It’s enough to say we loved, we had a good marriage, and now she’s gone.”
She sat watching him, trying to read his expression. “You said two children? I know about your daughter. What about the other?”
“My son, Francis…we aren’t speaking at the moment.”
“What happened between the two of you?”
“He, like Scott Academy, thinks I have money. The fact we lived modestly did not dissuade him from that notion. He just thought I was cheap. Anyway, he invented or wrote…I’m never sure which is correct…a software program that he claimed could accurately predict the stock market. He wanted me to provide the risk capital to market it.”
“Could it predict the market?”
“No idea. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if it could, he wouldn’t need me to front end the financing and, more importantly, Francis didn’t know anything about the market. He was a math and computer science major in college, the two years he actually attended. He was guessing.”
“So you turned him down cold.”
“Not cold. I said, ‘Come back with a business plan and some other investors and I will contribute toward the project.’ He got angry. Said I never trusted him, and so on.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. I think my wife sent him money from time to time but….”
She waited. Clearly, Frank had nothing more to say.
“I lost track of your family when they moved away. What—?”
“My father bought a house in South Carolina near the coast. Not in one of the fashionable towns but very nice. Any hopes he had for a peaceful retirement went out the window when my mother developed Alzheimer’s. She died after a money-draining, soul scarring eight years. My father just gave up and died the next year. That disease takes its toll on everybody around it.”
“On you, too?”
“Oh yeah. You think, what if it’s genetic, what if I’m next?”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know, but I live with that fear every day. It rummages around in my subconscious pulling up reminders of my slipping mental faculties. Every time I forget a name, misplace my keys, or can’t recognize a familiar street…I think, here we go. It’s awful.”
He told her about the backlog of books on his hard drive “Sandy would just have to pop out a book a year, let an editor fix it up, and there’d be money in the bank. Frank Smith may have to go to that big mystery writers conference in the sky, but Meredith Smith could live on forever.”
“Do you still work that way?”
“Yes, but now it’s just a habit. My kids will be responsible for sending them in, I guess. You know the worst of it? When you disassociate.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s hard to explain. You find yourself rejoining a conversation but you have no recollection of having drifted away. Most people have had that happen—mind wanders and then you hear someone repeat a question or look at you funny and you say, ‘Sorry, just wandered away for a moment.’ But with disassociation, you don’t remember going anywhere, only coming back. You wonder, ‘How long was I gone? A nanosecond, a full second, a minute, and when will the day come when I don’t come back at all?’ It scares the hell out of you.”
“I’m sorry. It must be awful to have something like that hanging over your head.” She’d never thought about it before, losing one’s mind and drifting, or perhaps speeding would be more accurate, into senility. “Is there some way doctors can predict if you…have it?”
“I think so. I’m not sure. Even if they can, I don’t want to know…would you?”
She guessed she wouldn’t. They sat in silence after that. Rosemary sipped her tea and scanned the room. Frank picked up the reports and began to read.
An older couple sat across from them. The husband, it had to be a husband, seemed agitated. He twisted and turned in his chair, searching, it seemed, for his server. He rubbed the check between his fingers as if it was currency and he needed to be sure it wasn’t counterfeit. He wig-wagged at his waitress and held up the bill.
“Two dollars and eighty cents for coffee?” he said, glaring at her.
“Yes, sir, two coffees at—”
“I’ve never paid that much for coffee.” He patted the carafe in front of him.
“Sir, the coffee was for two cups and we leave the carafe for your convenience—”
“It’s highway robbery,” he said, shaking his head. His wife kept her eyes fixed on the back wall, not looking at either her husband or the waitress.
“This is highway robbery,” he repeated and glared some more. “I’m telling all my friends not to eat here.”
“Sir, if you’d like to speak to the manager—”
“No thanks. What can he do except make up some lame excuse? My friends will never eat here. This is outrageous.” As he rose, Rosemary thought she caught a fleeting look in his eye, the briefest hint of confusion, as if it flashed through his mind he might be wrong and was making a fool of himself. It faded just as quickly and he stomped away to the cashier’s station.
The waitress didn’t move as she watched him pull out his wallet and start in on the cashier about the cost of coffee. The cashier comped him the coffee. He didn’t seem satisfied even then. His wife shifted around in her chair.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the waitress. “Sometimes he forgets.”
“It’s okay. He probably had a bad day.”
Rosemary suspected the wife had spent the last forty or fifty years apologizing for hundreds of small misunderstandings on his part. Her husband returned, face still red. He helped her to her feet and gently slid the walker in front of her.
Then the truth hit Rosemary so hard she wanted to cry.
“That couple has been married forever,” she said. “They had an arrangement that worked all those years. He did the business end of the marriage, she did the domestic. Now, she is crippled and can’t keep up her end. She can’t cook for him, so they eat out. He probably never learned to do anything more complicated than boil an egg.”
Frank stirred but still concentrated on his papers.
“My guess is she prays daily that she dies before he does. She has no idea where the money is, how they live…anything. She’d be completely lost without him.”
“What?” Frank said finally, lifting his eyes from the papers.
“Getting old is a bitch.”