And Sometimes I Wonder About You (5 page)

I
got up to the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building at a few minutes before 7:00. Now and then I try to get into the office before Mardi. It’s a kind of competition for us. Though usually quiet, and always reserved, Mardi is likely to give me a certain look when I come in and she’s already there. The look says,
You see? I am the better worker here.
So now and then I like to come in early to stick out my tongue at her.

But when I turned the corner headed toward my office I forgot about the silly rivalry.

Standing there beside my office door was a medium-sized white man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He was five-seven or -eight but with bad posture and a sagging belly, though he was not overweight.

When he saw me approaching, the man forced a hopeful look into his depressed features. As I came up to him he said, “Mr. McGill?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Stent,” he said. “Hiram Stent.”

His features were what I could only call indistinct. There was no ridged border between his lips and the surrounding skin. His eyes were murky, neither brown nor green. And Hiram Stent’s skin was tan but not from day labor or last summer’s visits to the beach. His leathery rind came from long hours of overexposure and a little too much alcohol that worked to cure this finish from the inside out.

“Oh yeah.” I was working the first of seven keys on the office door. “Mardi gave you an early appointment. But you know, Mr. Stent, we don’t open till ten.”

“I didn’t know so I came early so I wouldn’t miss you or anything.”

I was pretty adept at the locks and so the door soon came open and I ushered my scruffy would-be client in.

I crossed past Mardi’s big blond desk and went to the metal door that protected the greater part of my office suite from the outside world. I placed my electronic card next to the little screen at the right side of the door. This caused a virtual number pad to appear. On this pad I entered the seventeen-digit code and the heavy door swung open.

“After you, Mr. Stent.”

As he went by I noticed two things: a scent and his shoes. The odor had a dry earthy bouquet that I remembered from when I was a happy child with a mother and a father playing in the dirt. The shoes were the real giveaway though; black at one time, they were now turning gray and wearing thin, almost shapeless from many more miles of walking than they were designed for. Those soles knew the pavement from long association and little or no respite.

“This way,” I said to my visitor.

I led him down the long aisle of empty cubicles toward my office.

“You have a large staff,” he said, looking from side to side at the empty desks.

“Only the receptionist and my son.”

“Then why all these offices?”

“I have the ambition of being a big fish one day. I figure if I have the room to grow there’s a chance it might happen.”

By then I was shepherding him into my office.

I went behind my extra-large ebony desk and sat with my back to the window that looked down the isle of Manhattan to the swirly new World Trade Center.

“Sit,” I told my guest, and he perched on the closest red and boxy office chair that Mardi said looked better with my black desk.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. McGill,” Hiram Stent said.

The man’s physical presence was a puzzle in itself. The hair on top of his head had turned a dirty blond. The tier under that was the brown of a pecan shell and there was a spotty ridge below that which was almost all gray. These layers showed that Mr. Stent was much in the sun, a natural brunet, and very possibly under great strain. He was no more than forty but some of those years had been long and hard.

I was silent while studying the middle-aged man.

He was getting nervous.

“I’d like to hire you, Mr. McGill,” he said.

“How did you find your way to me?” I asked.

“What do you mean, um, I took the number six train.”

“I’m asking you where you heard my name. I don’t advertise.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “I heard your name from a man called Rooster.”

“Red Rooster Collins?”

“I don’t know his full name.”

“Black man, red hair and tall?”

“That’s him.”

Rooster was a man I knew; not an important man but a well-connected one. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic and so often spent his time, when off his meds, in places that might house a man like Stent.

“How can I help you, Mr. Hiram Stent?”

There was a story behind his vague features, the burning coal of a problem that turned his stomach and kept him up at night. But when asked he was struck dumb.

“Why did you want to see me?” I said, hoping that a rearticulation of the question would loosen his tongue.

“My name is Hiram Stent,” he said. “I was the CFO of Lipsky, Van der Calm, Tryman, and Wills for twelve years.” He said these words and stopped, hoping to have made some kind of impact.

“Chief financial officer,” I said to urge him on.

“They’re an investment company,” he said, “specializing in midsized corporations and family businesses.”

“Okay.”

“Because,” he said, and then he cleared his throat. “Because most of the work is done on computers and the phone, Charles Wills decided that the firm should move to Wyoming, where real estate is cheap and so we could either lower costs or increase our assets. The downtown Manhattan landlord was raising the rent from six to sixteen thousand a month.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I noted.

“I guess it is. That’s why they decided to relocate. They offered to take me with them.”

“But you didn’t go,” I surmised.

“My wife didn’t like the idea and I…I thought that I could, I could get another job easily enough. I mean, I have an MBA and twelve years’ experience working for LVTW.”

“But that was the time of the market slump,” I said.

“Exactly, the economic slump,” he said, grabbing onto the phrase like it was a lifeline. “I couldn’t get work anywhere, anywhere. And even when things got better no one wanted a CFO who’d been unemployed for three years. I only knew how LVTW worked and I was too old for most entry positions. My wife took the kids and left to go stay with her family while I was job hunting. She connected with an old boyfriend…”

I didn’t need to ask anything; his story was as obvious as a pair of worn shoes.

“I kept looking,” he said. “When I asked Lois to come back she said no. When I called again she’d had her number disconnected. Her mother wouldn’t tell me where she went. I haven’t seen my children for two years.”

There were tears in his reptilian eyes.

“After a while I lost the condo on Thirty-third and now I stay in a rooming house on Flatbush in Brooklyn when I can get enough money together…”

“So why are you here, Mr. Stent?”

“Lois’s old boyfriend is a handyman. He doesn’t make much. I was being paid nearly two hundred thousand when LVTW moved out west. If I had that kind of money now I could buy a plane ticket and go down to Florida and get my family back.”

His tone was plaintive, his dreams the dreams of a child. I felt for the guy.

“But why are you here?” I asked.

“I need to get back on my feet, Mr. McGill,” he said. It seemed to me that he’d lost the thread of his purpose.

“And how could I help with that?”

“By finding, locating Celia Landis.”

I was half convinced that Stent had lost his mind from sorrow, homelessness, and alcohol consumption. But then he uttered a real name. I wondered if there was an actual person attached to the name.

“And who is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I mean I’ve never met her.”

“Then why are you looking for her?”

“A guy, a man named Bernard Shonefeld, sent a letter to my old address and a neighbor who knew me sent it on to my post office box. You know I keep that box in case my children ever need me—they’ll know how to find me.”

“Bernard Shonefeld,” I said.

“He’s doing work for a law firm in San
Francisco—Briscoe/Thyme.
They’re looking for this Celia Landis woman…young woman. I think she’s twenty-eight or -nine. That’s what Mr. Shonefeld said.”

“Why is a law firm in San Francisco asking you about a woman that you don’t know?” I was fascinated by the twists and turns of his hapless story.

“They said, Shonefeld told me that, that this Celia Landis is a distant cousin on my mother’s side. I never heard of her but Briscoe/Thyme had been looking for her for a long time, eleven months, and all they could locate was me.”

“What did they say they wanted with Celia?” I asked.

“Her grandfather, on the other side of her family, people I’m not related to, died and left her many millions of dollars. The estate tasked the lawyers to find her for a ten percent fee. Shonefeld told me that they’d give me ten percent of that if I could find her.”

“Did this Shonefeld ask you for money?” I asked.

“No. No. He just said that I should find her and I’d get ten percent of ten percent of over a hundred million dollars. That’s at least a million, more than enough to go down to Miami and get Lois and the kids back.

“I used the computers at the New York Public Library to try and find her through the genealogy search engines. But there wasn’t anything. I tried every kind of search but there was nothing.”

“Did you try asking your mother?” I asked.

“Mom died when I was seventeen and she was estranged from her family because they didn’t like my dad because he was Catholic. He’s dead too. Dad’s family is from Canada somewhere and I’m an only child. But I did find one of Mom’s sisters in Newark. I called out there and told her that I was looking for Celia because I didn’t have any family and I heard she might be in New York. Mr. Shonefeld told me that he believed that she was in New York. She, my aunt Charlotte, said that she had a picture of Celia from a high school graduation photograph. She said that she’d sell it to me for seventy-five dollars. After that I did day work and collected bottles until I had enough to take a train out there and buy the picture.”

From the breast pocket of his threadbare brown suit he brought out a tattered square of paper. He stood up and leaned across the desk to hand it to me. It was a snapshot of a pretty girl, somewhere in her late teens, with long brown hair and red lips. She was smiling at the camera, pushing her left shoulder forward in an inviting way.

“You paid seventy-five dollars for this? Why?”

“I thought maybe a private detective could find her. I mean that’s what she looks like and she comes from around Princeton, New Jersey.”

“Did you look?” I asked.

“Just on the Internet and in the phone book. She’s not there and Aunt Charlotte said that most of her family is dead or in the wind. That’s the words she used—‘either dead or in the wind.’ ”

“And what do you want from me?”

“Find her, Mr. McGill. You’re a detective. You can do things that I don’t know about just like I can work with monies in ways that you probably don’t understand.”

“Speaking of money,” I said. “How do you plan to pay for my services?”

“Ten percent.”

“Ten percent of ten percent of ten percent?”

“I figure that to be a little more than a hundred thousand dollars,” he said, his voice filled with impossible hope.

“Mr. McGill, are you in?” Mardi Bitterman said over the intercom.

“Hey, Mardi, I’m back here with Mr. Stent.”

“You’re in early.”

“Earlier than you,” I said with just a hint of satisfaction in my voice.

Then I turned my attention back to the homeless man who dreamed about millions. If I were ever to teach a class on being a PI the first thing I’d say is to never take a case like Stent’s. There’s no percentage in it—ten or otherwise.

“I can’t help you, Mr. Stent,” I said.

“I’ll sign any contract you want.”

“It’s not that. It’s not that you’re unemployed or distressed or lost. I like you. I feel for your predicament but I don’t believe that what this man is telling you is true.”

“I have the letter.”

“I’m sure you do. I’m sure there’s a Celia Landis out there somewhere and that some man calling himself Shonefeld is looking for her. But wealthy people don’t offer poor people a million dollars for a name and an address; not unless there’s something hinky going on.”

“But they said that they’re looking for her. What other reason could they have?”

I stood up and walked around the desk, handed Hiram back his frayed photograph, and gestured for him to stand.

“What am I going to do?” he asked as if I was his only friend in the world.

Maybe I was.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Hiram. I can’t take this case because, in my professional opinion, something in this story stinks.”

“But…”

I put my hand on his shoulder and he stopped talking. I walked him down the untenanted aisle, past Mardi’s desk, and through the front door.

He never said another word.

I
watched Hiram Stent walk down the hallway toward the elevators. He didn’t look back. I almost called to him. After all, I had money from Camille Esterhouse and Marella Herzog (if indeed that was her real name). I could afford to do a good deed for some poor schlub down on his luck. But the truth was that Hiram couldn’t be helped. Whatever I did, it would just turn out bad.

“How are you this morning, Mr. McGill?” Mardi asked my back as Stent turned the corner.

I closed the door and turned to my pale assistant, slight and white. Her gray-blue eyes carried all the sadness of the last days of autumn and her voice was so soft that it could have been a memory.

“Fine,” I said. “And you?”

“I’m okay.”

“How’s your sister?”

“Just entered middle school. She loves the ocean and wants to be an
oceanographer.”

I sat down in one of the blue-and-chrome visitor’s chairs that used to be in my office.

“You’re hardly ever in this early anymore,” she said.

“I used to be this early?”

“Mmmm-hm. When I first worked here.”

She was right. My schedule had slowly shifted since Mardi began to shoulder some of the
responsibility.
She had been Twill’s classmate. Barely in her twenties and she made more difference in my life than almost anyone ever had.

“Now that I’m here you can tell me about it,” I said.

“About what?” she said, searching her desk for something to do with her hands.

“Twill.”

She picked up a bright yellow disposable mechanical pencil and set it in a ceramic mug used to hold such things. This process took just long enough for the door buzzer to sound.

I was sure that it was Hiram Stent come back to beg me. I would have probably given him a day or two—after all, failure is a big part of being human.

“It’s Ms. Ullman,” Mardi said, looking down at the monitor I had installed in her desk drawer.

I could feel my Adam’s apple writhe in my throat.

I got to my feet and, stumbling a little, took the two and a half steps to the entrance.

When I pulled the door open Aura said, “Oh!”—shocked that it was me.

Tall for a woman, she had a few inches on me. Aura was the color of pure gold that hadn’t been polished for some years. She was nearing the midway mark in her forties with a generous figure that would never go out of style. Her hair was naturally wavy and darkly blond. Her surprised eyes were not brown but that’s as far as I would go trying to define the color. Her mother, I knew, was Danish and her father black Togolese.

Aura was the plant supervisor of the Tesla Building. She was very efficient at her job. The only task she ever failed at was getting me evicted. She tried, and might have succeeded, but then we kind of fell in love.

“Didn’t expect me?” I said to my sometime lover.

“Um,” she said. “I wanted to ask Mardi something.”

“She’s right here,” I said, moving backward and to the side, allowing her room to come in.

Mardi was already on her feet.

“Good morning, Ms. Ullman,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Um,” she said again.

“I’ll go back to my office and let you ladies talk.”

“No,” Aura said with more emphasis than was necessary.

“Why don’t I go downstairs and get you guys some coffee and bagels?” Mardi offered.

“Thank you,” Aura said to my assistant.

The next thing I knew, Aura and I were sitting in my old visitor’s chairs more or less facing each other.

We had a lot to talk about and nothing to say.

When we met, my wife had left me for a banker named Zool. He turned out to be an embezzler who ran off, somewhere down in South America, leaving Katrina and my blood son, Dimitri, high and dry. And so Katrina returned just when my relationship with Aura was beginning to take form.

We, Aura and I, broke up for a while and had started to get back together a few times. The latest breakup had to do with Katrina again. Aura felt guilty making love to a man whose wife was suicidal.

“How’s Katrina doing?” Aura asked.

“Kinda faded, I guess.”

“Does she need new medication?”

“She needs something,” I said, “but don’t we all?”

Aura decided to ponder that question.

It struck me that sadness had as many striations as a rainbow—only in grays. Hiram Stent was sad because of a
miscalculation.
He believed that his education, his station in life, would allow him to make choices about how he might live. He lost his job, his wife, and his children; he’d lost his vanity and hope all because somebody named Wills wanted to do financial planning while living on a ranch.

Aura and I, on the other hand, loved each other fiercely but when together we turned morose and downcast.

Mardi had been molested as a child, repeatedly and over many years, and so her sadness descended when there was nothing for her to concentrate on.

“My daughter got into Mount Holyoke,” Aura was saying.

“Good for her,” I said.

“Are you working?” she asked then.

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“I finished one job,” I said. “That was a domestic beef. Those kinds seem to resuscitate now and then. I helped a woman who was being stalked but that only treated the symptom. And then there’s Twill.”

Aura smiled. Most people’s moods lighten when they hear my son’s name. He’s just that kind of guy.

“What about him?” Aura asked.

“He’s been absent and then seen wearing clothes not his style. He hasn’t called in to me and that usually means that he’s into something either illegal or dangerous, or both. Since he’s working with me now it’s more than likely that he’s taken on a job I wouldn’t approve of.”

“He’s got a lot of facets,” Aura agreed.

The jeweler’s term brought Marella to mind. I realized that her skin was very close to the same hue as Aura’s. I wondered if that was the reason I’d taken such risk. Maybe I thought that if I put my life on the line I could receive a night of familiar love.

“What are you thinking, Leonid?”

“That we should have dinner one night next week.”

“I’m free for lunch next Monday,” she said.

Lunch—a single word that says,
I don’t want to be alone with you in the evening when you might, and I might, get confused and break the unspoken rules that were chiseled for us on the tombstone your wife almost made.

I didn’t answer and then the door came open. Mardi entered with a small gray cardboard box holding our coffees and bagels.

“That was fast,” I said.

“The coffee cart is usually on floor sixty-five this time of morning,” she said.

Aura stood up and told us both, “I have a meeting down in my office in a few minutes. I’m going to have to take my coffee and run.”

I stayed in my chair.

Aura gathered her coffee and bread.

“So we’ll have to make a plan for Monday,” she said.

“We’ll see,” I replied.

She looked a little lost for a moment and then left.

When the door closed I took out my smartphone and started entering a text.

“She seems a little upset,” Mardi commented.

I erased what I had been typing and said, “Both of us I guess.”

I started typing again.

“She’s a nice lady,” Mardi continued, trying to draw me in.

Instead of answering I sent the text to Aura’s phone. It read: I LOVE YOU.