Vanishing Act (3 page)

“Bryan.”

He didn't answer.

“Bryan,” I repeated, this time more loudly.

He answered me reluctantly, as if he begrudged the energy it took. “That's him,” he growled. He didn't shift his gaze. “That's the scumbag I've been telling you about.”

I
followed Bryan's gaze, but all I saw was a crowd of milling college students. “Could you be a little more specific?” I asked.

“Over there.” With an angry jerk of his hand Bryan indicated the group of guys that had just walked through the door and were now heading toward the bar.

They moved in a tight V formation as they laughed and talked and slapped each other on the back. The crowd gave way before their onslaught, ebbing and flowing around them.

“Which one is Tommy West?”

“The one with the blond hair wearing a Sigma Phi jacket.”

I strained to get a good look. There were at least three guys that fit the description. “That doesn't help me much,” I observed.

“I'd like to shoot the sonofabitch,” Bryan said by way of an answer as he kicked the chair in front of him out of the way. It glanced off the leg of the boy sitting at the next table.

“Hey,” he said, turning to Bryan. “What's with you?”

Bryan ignored him and took a step forward. I reached over and grabbed his arm.

“Don't,” I said, hoping to prevent the mess he was about to make.

The boy at the other table started to get up too, but the girls sitting on either side of him pulled him back down before he could and started making soothing noises. The kid muttered “schmuck” and turned away.

I don't think Bryan even heard him. His body was coiled. His muscles were twitching in anticipation of the fight to come. Looking at him, I understood the meaning of the phrase “wants him so badly it hurts” for the first time. He shook my hand off—I could have been a fly for all the notice he took of me—and started walking again.

I grabbed his arm for a second time and used all my strength to yank him around. “Your mother,” I said. “Remember her?”

Bryan furrowed his brow. “What about her?”

“You just told me you want to do right by her.”

“I do.”

“If you start a fight with this guy West, you could end up in jail.”

“So what? It'd be worth it,” Bryan snarled, doing a bad imitation of a grade-B movie gangster, but the snarl lacked conviction.

“She needs you here. Don't do something you're going to regret.”

“I didn't mean ...” Bryan swallowed. I could feel the tension flowing out of the muscles in his arm.

“I know.” I grabbed our jackets and hustled him outside.

As the Rhino's doors banged shut behind me, I realized that I still didn't know what Tommy West looked like, but there would be time for that later.

“Thanks,” Bryan mumbled. I handed him his parka. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground as he shrugged it on. “I have this problem with my temper.”

I put on my jacket. “No kidding.” Talk about stating the obvious.

“I'm working on it with my therapist.”

“You ask me, you should work a little harder.”

He grimaced. “But you are going to take the case?”

I nodded. Bryan might be a little rocky, but money was money and at this point I could sure use every little bit. “How about showing me Melissa's room?”

“Now?”

“You have a better time?”

He shook his head.

 

 

We drove over to Bryan's house in my Checker cab. Another legacy from my husband, the only one I was thankful for, my New York City yellow Checker taxicab had close to two hundred thousand miles on it, but the thing still ran and I intended to keep it going for as long as I could.

Bryan spent the five minutes it took to reach his house talking about how overwhelmed he felt, a feeling, given his position, I could empathize with. The Hayes house was located in the Outer Comstock area, about five blocks from a small vest-pocket park, in a neighborhood populated mostly by students, teaching assistants, high school teachers, and the occasional assistant professor.

I pointed to the maple in the front yard as I parked in the driveway. “Is that the tree in the picture Melissa was leaning against?”

“We used to have a swing in it when we were little,” Bryan noted, getting out of the cab. He fished around in his jacket pocket for his keys as we walked over the snow-covered front lawn and up the three icy steps to the front porch. After a couple of seconds of fumbling with the key in the lock—“damn thing always sticks,” he groused—we went inside.

Bryan pointed to the stairs. I wiped my feet on the floor mat. “Missy's room is up there.”

I peeked into the living room as I followed him. The beige carpeting needed to be vacuumed, one end of the brown tweed sofa was covered with what must have been a two-week accumulation of newspapers, and the top of the television supported a line of soda cans.

“I'm going to clean everything up today,” Bryan said, motioning me along.

Something told me he'd been saying that for weeks.

Melissa's room was at the head of the stairs.

Bryan stepped inside and gestured for me to follow. “All her stuff from the dorm is still here. I just left it. I didn't know what to do.”

I looked around. The room surprised me. It was the room of an eight-year-old girl, an eight-year-old girl from twenty years ago. The wallpaper was a floral, with faint green and white stripes in the background, while the foreground was dominated by bunches of white and yellow pansies. The bedspread on Melissa's four-poster was white chenille. Her furniture was antique white. Stuffed animals and dolls decorated her shelves and the top of her dresser.

“She didn't want to change anything,” Bryan informed me as I took another step inside. “My mom offered, but she said she liked it like this.”

“She seems conservative.”

“She is.” Bryan pointed to the duffel-sized laundry bags lying on their sides on the beige carpeting and the four cartons next to them. “That's her stuff from the dorm.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

“Be my guest.”

The cartons turned out to be full of books, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and the other ephemera of dorm living. I dug around a little and came up with a beer stein, a small stuffed bear, and a key chain with a .45 shell attached to it.

“What's this?” I asked, holding up the key chain.

Bryan laughed. “All that stuff are the prizes Missy won at the state fair last year.”

I put everything back and straightened up. “What's in the duffel bags?”

“Bed sheets. Towels. Pillowcases. Dirty laundry. I hung her clean clothes in the closet.” He crossed the room and opened the closet door. “See.”

Melissa's closet was crammed with slacks, jeans, shirts, jackets, and dresses, all of which seemed to have come from the J. Crew catalogue or the Gap.

“I can see why you can't tell if something is missing or not,” I said, studying the jumble inside.

“You should see her drawers,” Bryan said, and he opened one for me to prove his point. “How many T-shirts does one person need?”

“Evidently, a lot,” I said, rummaging through the dresser.

“The police couldn't find anything,” Bryan said.

“Maybe I can do better.”

After an hour, though, I was forced to conclude that I couldn't.

I
t was a little after seven in the evening when I left Bryan Hayes and headed over to the store. It was dark. Smoke streamed out of house chimneys, cars had their lights on, and the people that were out walking hurried along. I wished spring would come, I reflected as I waited for a light to turn green on State Street. I could deal with December, January, and February, but March in Syracuse seemed interminable. Winter's charms, such as they were, had worn thin.

All I wanted was sunlight and the tender greens of May, but spring wouldn't come till the end of April—if we were lucky. As far as I was concerned, March and April were the bleakest months of the year, the time, if you could afford it, to go south. Unfortunately, I couldn't do that even if I could afford to, which I couldn't. Stores are jealous mistresses—take too much time off, and they might not be around when you get back.

I thought about bleak again when I pulled up in front of my store. It certainly was a good word for the window display, although boring was probably a better one. Window dressing had never been my forte. Fortunately, this wasn't Bloomingdale's and I wasn't selling clothes. Most of our clientele came because they needed crickets or birdseed, not because they'd been window-shopping and something had caught their eye. The store wasn't in the kind of area that promoted leisurely strolling anyway, unless, of course, you enjoyed looking at run-down houses and convenience stores.

At one point I'd been thinking of taking out a loan and setting up in one of the malls, but after going over the figures with my accountant, I'd decided it wasn't worth it. The overhead was too high. Most of the shops in the mall were chains—and with good reason. It took deep pockets to keep one going, and I didn't have those.

Besides, the items that usually attracted people—large boids and parrots—were precisely the ones I wasn't about to put on display. The stress was bad for them, and they were too easy to steal. All you had to do was smash a window, grab, and go. Three pet stores in the area had been robbed recently. The thieves had gotten away with thousands of dollars worth of birds that they would probably resell down in New York City, a loss I couldn't afford. So maybe boring wasn't so bad after all.

Noah's Ark had started off on the ground floor of an old house that had received a variance for commerical use. I'd liked that space better, even though it had been harder to maintain, but when it had burned down, I'd moved us to your standard small-size commerical space, consisting of a front room with a storeroom, small office, and bathroom in back. I'd packed as much product as I could—we had shelves running to the ceiling—into the store without making it look cluttered. We continued to specialize in reptiles and miscellaneous exotics such as hissing cockroaches and tarantulas. What we didn't sell were puppies and kittens, except for the ones dumped at our front door by irresponsible jerks.

Tim looked up from the leashes he was sorting through as I came in. The smell of cedar shavings permeated the air.

“Ah,” he said. “The great detective returns.” He was a slight guy in his early thirties. In the last few years he'd gone through some sort of midlife crisis and shaved his head, pierced his ears and his nose, and taken to dressing in black. Maybe he thought we were really in SoHo. He'd worked with my husband when he'd opened the store and stayed on when Murphy had died and I'd taken it over. He was good with snakes. I always thought he knew as much, maybe even more, than the herp curator at the zoo, and, given his appearance, was also surprisingly good with little old ladies and kids.

“That's me. Sherlock Holmes in drag.”

“You've had about ten phone calls from Tino.”

I cursed under my breath. I'd forgotten all about him. I was working on getting an indigo and a red-tailed Haitian boa for the guy. I'd found a couple of babies down in Florida, but it was too cold to fly them up since the cargo areas in planes aren't heated, and so far I hadn't come up with anything from the local breeders I'd phoned. I had three more people to call though. I'd hoped one of them could help me out. If not, there'd be something at the herp show down in Philly—with one hundred dealers there always was.

Tim gave me a baleful glance. “I've got more than enough to do here without acting as your secretary.” The gurgling of the fish tanks punctuated his sentence.

I apologized. Tim disapproved of what had become a regular part-time gig for me because it took me away from the store. My cases had me spending a lot of time becoming acquainted with stupid people who not only did stupid things but occasionally did them in the store.

On the other hand, once in a while my cases did bring in some extra off-the-books cash, which we could definitely use. Unfortunately, it wasn't often enough, because my clientele usually do not tend to be the rich and well connected. I'd fallen into the work when I'd become a murder suspect and had to clear myself. Then several people had asked me to help them out. I'd said yes because I have trouble saying no, and after a couple of go-rounds I'd become hooked on the action. Sometimes I even think about selling the store and opening up an office. Robin Light. Private detective. I could work off someone else's license. I don't know. I can't decide. But until I do, I still have a business to run, which was why I asked what else had happened since I'd been gone.

Tim shrugged. “Aside from the phone never stopping ringing, not much. We sold some feeders since you've been gone. A couple of mollies, a bag of that all-natural dog food. That's about it.”

Business had been sluggish since after Christmas and, if previous years were any indication, it would remain that way until the spring, when sales would start picking up again.

“Oh.” Tim slapped the counter. A guinea pig, momentarily distracted by the noise, glanced up and then went back to its food. “You'll enjoy this one. Some lady wanted to know if we sold Gaboon vipers. She wanted to give her boyfriend a surprise birthday present.”

“That would be quite a surprise. Did you explain about them?”

“I think she knew.”

“Nice lady.” Depending on the size of the person, a bite from a Gaboon could be fatal, a fact that reminded me of the conversation I'd just had with Bryan Hayes. “Speaking of which, do you remember if we sold a boa or a Burmese to a kid called Tommy West?” I inquired as I went behind the counter to stow my backpack. Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, looked up from her bed by the back wall and yawned. I swear that animal sleeps at least eighteen hours a day. Maybe I should cut back on her beer ration.

Tim twirled the stud in his ear around while he thought. “Sorry,” he said after a minute. “The name doesn't ring a bell. Why?”

Zsa Zsa got up, stretched, and came over for a pet. I scratched behind her ears. She gave my hand a hello lick, then went in the back to get some water. I straightened up and put the flyer Bryan had given me on the counter.

“What about her? Does she look familiar?”

Tim glanced down. “That's the case you're working on? I remember reading something in the paper, but I can't remember what.” He frowned. “After a while all these missing-person cases sound alike. Another couple and I'm going to begin believing what those alien abduction guys are saying.”

I nodded. “According to her brother, she was in our store last year wanting to buy a sugar glider. You told her they make bad pets.”

“Well they do. Sorry, I don't remember her. I guess she didn't make much of an impression.”

“He thinks she was killed by her boyfriend's snake.” I told Tim the story.

He snorted. “When in doubt, blame the reptile.”

“Well, it is a possibility. Remember down in New York,” I said, referring to an incident that had recently taken place in the Bronx.

“The guy didn't feed the snake. He was a moron.”

“Now he's a dead moron.”

“It was a nine-foot retic.”

I wondered what kind of boid Tommy West had and how often he fed it.

The bell on the front door rang. A customer walked in.

“I don't know,” Tim said as he watched him approach.

“If I had to trust a reptile or a person, my money would go with the reptile. At least they're predictable.”

I was inclined to agree.