Pain Management (7 page)

The courthouse was nothing like the Roman Colosseum monster they have in Manhattan. It was simple and kind of elegant, with a short flight of steps flanked on the left by a slab of black marble, complete with the obligatory quote from some historically significant person. I leaned against the marble slab, put the briefcase between my feet. Then I opened my copy of
Cuckoo
and scanned it like it was a court decision.

People streamed by on the sidewalk. Hard to imagine a more public spot. Whoever this Madison was, she knew something about self-defense.

Directly across the street was a small public park—just wide enough for a few trees, a couple of benches, and a statue. I saw a guy with long dark hair sitting on a bench, a pair of binoculars to his eyes. Bird-watchers can be some pretty dedicated people, but I’d never heard of one interested in pigeons.

She approached from my left, moving slowly . . . wary and alert, a bright-colored comic book in her right hand. A slender woman with long, wild white-blond hair, scarlet lipstick harsh against a never-seen-sun complexion. She wore black pants, a black thigh-length jacket, and a white blouse, with a big red purse on a strap over one shoulder. I tucked my comic under my arm, spread my hands a little, caught her eye. I knew better than to try a smile.

“Are you—?”

“Yes. I’m the man who wants to buy a complete set of your series,” I finished her sentence for her. “Signed,” I said, to keep it consistent.

“I . . . have them right here,” she said. “There have been only fifteen issues so far. . . .”

“Fair enough,” I told her. “Is there something special you sign comics with? I mean, the covers are so slick, it looks like ink would just slide off.”

“We use these,” she said, taking a gold-colored tube from the breast pocket of her jacket. “It’s called a paint pen. Only thing is, you have to be sure to let each one dry before you bag them.”

“Bag them?”

“You don’t . . . ? Well, it doesn’t matter; I already have them set up.”

“Great,” I said, deliberately turning my back on her and walking up the steps. I pointed to the top of the black marble slab. “How’s this? For signing them, I mean?”

“It should be fine. . . .”

“Oh yeah. I’m sorry,” I told her, reaching into my inside pocket. I brought out ten new fifty-dollar bills, handed them to her.

“This is a lot of money for the comics,” she said earnestly. “You understand that there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be worth so much, don’t you?”

“I’m a gambler,” I told her.

“Well . . . all right, then.” She opened her purse, took out a stack of comics, each one inside a clear plastic sleeve with white cardboard backing. She opened the first bag, carefully slid out the comic, positioned it until she was satisfied, then shook the paint pen vigorously and tested it on her thumb. She nodded to herself, then signed her name with a sharp, fluid motion. “It’s good it’s not raining today,” she said, setting the signed comic on the flat surface to dry. She opened another bag. Her movements were practiced, professional. Maybe she wasn’t used to scoring five hundred bucks for a single deal, but she’d signed a lot of comics before.

While she was concentrating, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” she answered, her tone a lot more guarded than the word.

“I was looking through the one issue I already had. People write you letters, right?”

“Sure,” she said again. I could hear the barriers dropping into place.

“You can’t print all of them that you get . . . ?”

“Well, I don’t get
that
many.”

“But more with each issue, isn’t that so?”

“Yes. But how would you—?”

“It just makes sense. As the series gets more popular, picks up word-of-mouth, more people get to read it. So there’s a bigger pool of people who might write to you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, I was thinking, you couldn’t possibly print all the letters. Besides, there are probably some you wouldn’t
want
to print.”

“I don’t understand. You mean the idiots who—”

“No, I didn’t mean anything negative. I was thinking . . . people might write to you because they’d know you’d understand what they were going through. So maybe they’d want advice or whatever. And you’d keep their names confidential if they asked, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s right,” she said, her voice as pointed as the pen she was using.

“I’m trying to help someone,” I said abruptly, sensing she wasn’t going to hang around after she finished signing her books. “And I was hoping maybe you could help me do that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “And I’m looking for a girl who’s run away from her home. Or, at least, people
think
she has. It’s my job to make sure she’s okay.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, I know she was a big fan of yours.”

“And how do you know that?”

“She had a whole stack of
Cuckoo
in her room. And those were the only comics she had.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Ms. Clell, I’m not saying it means anything. I just thought that maybe,
maybe,
she wrote to you. If she did, then it might be possible that you could—”

“I don’t know you,” the woman said. “And I’m not telling you—”

“I don’t want you to tell me anything,” I said softly. “Her name is Rosebud. Some people call her Rose, others call her Buddy.
If
she wrote to you, and
if
she left an address where you could write back, I think you would have done that.”

“I—”

“I don’t
want
the address. All I want is to give you this note,” I told her, handing her an envelope. “It’s unsealed; you can read it for yourself. It explains who I am and why I’m trying to make sure she’s okay. It’s got a phone number she can call. This one right here,” I said, pulling my jacket back to show her the cell phone I carried in a shoulder holster under my left armpit. “I just want to know that she left of her own free will, and that she’s not in any kind of trouble.”

“I’m not—”

“You do what you want,” I said. “I’m playing a hunch, that’s all.”

“A hunch that this girl wrote to me?”

“A hunch that you’ll do the right thing,” I said.

She turned to face me. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

“That one copy of
Cuckoo
I had,” I told her. “I read it.”

She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away, either.

I put my signed and bagged comics into my briefcase, made my eyes a soldering iron between the woman and the truth of what I’d told her, bowed slightly, and moved off.

“Why do you need all this information about their neighbors?” Gem asked me that night.

“Too many times, a missing kid, you find the body under the bed of some other kid right close by. Or buried in a backyard, rotting in a shed, chopped up in a shower . . .”

“But—”

“Yeah, I know. She’s a little old for that. When a kid’s the perpetrator, you expect the victim to be younger. Smaller and weaker, anyway. Unless there’s a gun involved. But the stealth jobs, it’s usually a
little
kid that’s targeted.”

“I was not going to say that,” Gem said, tapping her child-sized foot the way she does when she’s impatient. “There was a note.”

“A computer note, remember? Not in her handwriting. Anyone could have written it.”

“Do you believe that is why the parents did not show it to the police?”

“I don’t know what to believe. This whole thing reeks. Gem, listen to me for a second, okay? What exactly did you tell them about me when you pitched the job?”

“I told him nothing specific. Just that you were a man accustomed to difficult, dangerous jobs, and that you expected to be paid well to do them.”

“You tell them I was a—”

“Not ‘them,’ Burke. I never met anyone but the father.”

“Okay,
where
did you meet him?”

“At the club. The same place where the girl Kitty worked. The one with the boyfriend who—”

“I remember. He was looking
there
for his kid?”

“Not looking for her. Looking for someone who might help him find her. One of the dancers told him she might know somebody. Then she called me. And then I met him.”

“I should have asked you this before, I’m sorry. Tell me everything you can remember, okay?”

“Yes. He thought I was Vietnamese. I did not disabuse him. He told me he had been against the war. I did not say anything, but I encouraged him to speak more.”

“How could you—?”

“Like this,” she said. She cocked her head slightly, widened her ocean eyes, and oh-so-innocently used the tip of her tongue to part her lips.

“Ah . . . all right, little girl. What did
that
get you?”

“He . . . implied that he had done many things to stop the war. Illegal, even violent things. I did not press him for details. He also told me he studied what he called ‘the arts’ for many years, and that he did not trust himself to confront those who might have lured his daughter away, because he could very easily kill a man with his hands.”

“ ‘The arts’?”

“That is what he said. He asked me if I had a relationship with you. I told him that I was a businesswoman; I did not associate with those I worked with. He apologized. He said he wasn’t trying to get nosy, that he knew the value of confidentiality. He said he only asked me about my relationship with you because I was a fascinating woman. That he would like to know me better, but he didn’t want to . . . intrude, I believe he said.”

“This is after telling you he’s married?”

“Oh yes. I told him that he, too, was a person I was doing business with, so it was not possible.”

“He bought that?”

“I do not think he did. He is like most Americans you meet in places like that—all their images of Asian women are as sex toys. Between the stories servicemen tell of Vietnamese whores and Bangkok bar babies, the ‘Asian Flower’ services that advertise in the magazines, and the strippers they see in clubs, they find all they care to know. He acted as if we were playing an elaborate game but the outcome was not in doubt.”

“Where did he get the idea I was a mercenary?”

“Well, in the dictionary sense of the word, I suppose I told him. You are a man for hire; that is what I said. But he thought I was referring to war, I am certain.”

“Why?”

“He asked if I was familiar with your résumé—that is the specific word he used. I told him, yes, I was. He asked if you’d ever served in Africa. At first, I felt a little shock—like a warning jolt. I had not told him your name—I
still
have not—nor did I describe you. But you
were
in Biafra, and I didn’t see how he could have . . . But he kept talking, and I realized that he was just asking questions out of some movie.”

“You mean, he was a buff?”

“A . . . buff?”

“A . . . fan, sort of. Cops get them all the time. Some people get turned on by the whole police thing. They collect badges, keep a scanner in their house, volunteer to be auxiliaries. They hang out in cop bars,
talk
like cops. Some cops’re flattered by all that, specially if the buff is a broad. But the more experienced ones, they’re smart enough to keep them at a distance.

“There’s mercenary buffs, too. They buy the magazines, collect the paraphernalia, talk the talk . . . usually on the Internet. The more extreme ones just fake it, spend a lot of time in bars dropping names and places. He come across like that?”

“I . . . am not sure. Every time I did
not
answer one of his questions about you, he would nod as if I just had. As if we were sharing secrets. It was very strange.”

“I can’t make it fit,” I told her. “But you’ll get me the stuff on the neighbors?”

“I am here to serve you,” Gem said, bringing her hands together and bowing.

When she turned to go, I smacked her bottom hard enough to propel her into the next room. My reward was a very unsubservient giggle.

“Do you have something?” he said, his voice feathery around the edges.

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “I may have found a connect to her. I can’t be sure until I go a little deeper. And I need a couple of things to do that.”

“What?”

“You take a lunch hour?” I asked him.

“Yes. But most of the time, it’s with clients. Lunch is when we get to—”

“Today?”

“I don’t—”

“Are you having lunch with clients today?” I cornered him.

“Well, no.”

“Okay. Tell me where you want to meet. And what time. We’ll finish this then.”

There was cellular silence for half a minute. Then he asked me if I knew my way around the waterfront.

“You said you needed two things,” he greeted me abruptly.

“Yeah. The first is from your lawyer.”

“My . . . lawyer?”

“Sure. You’ve got a lawyer, don’t you?”

“No. Not really. I mean, I
know
lawyers, of course. But—”

“You’ve got a lawyer you’re close with,” I said confidently. “Doesn’t have to be one you
use,
okay? Just someone who’d do a little favor for you.”

“How little?”

“Very little. I don’t have a PI license. That’s no big deal; it’s not against the law to be asking questions on the street. But you know how the fucking cops are,” I said, taking the cues from my conversation with his wife and what Gem had told me about him, “they could roust me for nothing, especially if I start getting closer than they are.”

He nodded knowingly, but said, “What do you think I could do about that?”

“Not you. The lawyer. See, you hire the lawyer to represent you in this whole matter of your daughter going missing. Maybe you’re thinking about suing her school for negligence or whatever. It doesn’t matter, that part’s all camouflage. What
does
matter—okay—is that anyone working for a lawyer as an investigator doesn’t
need
a PI license. That’s what I want now: a little more cover.”

“I . . . I can do that. I have a friend who does a lot of criminal-defense work, as a matter of fact. I’ll ask him, how’s that?”

“Good. And what I also need is some money. Not the
actual
money,” I said quickly as he opened his mouth to . . . I don’t know what. “But there’s got to be a bounty put out; a reward, understand? There’s people who wouldn’t do anything for love, but they’d move quick enough for money.”