Pain Management (8 page)

“I’d thought of that myself. But I didn’t want to attract—”

“Sure, that’s the whole idea. It would be
me
offering the money. For information, see? My own idea, not yours. But if someone actually comes up with your daughter, I’d have to pay it off.”

“How . . . much are we talking about here?”

“Ten grand should do it, at least for now.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

He pretended to be thinking it over. People with money always see themselves as consumers, and their road maps through life are always marked by brand names. When they rant about corruption, all you’re really hearing is jealousy. They want a friend on the force, an insider contact, a political connection. All that crap about a level playing field always comes from people who’d be happy to stand at the top of the hill if they had the chance. And pour boiling oil down the slope.

“All right,” he finally said.

By the time the lawyer agreed to meet with me, I knew a lot more about him than he’d ever know about me. His office was in a big-windowed townhouse. Whitewashed walls lined with posters of Che, Chavez, and other visionaries whose convictions had been stronger than their support. Delta blues growled its way out of giant floor-standing stereo speakers.

The lawyer was a short, chubby man with thinning blond hair that turned into a ponytail past the collar of his blue-jean sports coat. He sat behind a free-form desk with what looked like a bird’s-eye maple top under fifty coats of clear varnish. I selected a straight chair from a motley collection arranged against one wall, carried it over so I could sit right across from him.

“Kevin said you were doing something for him?”

“He tell you what that was?”

“You’re a cagey man, Mr. . . . ?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

“Sure,” he said, making it clear he wasn’t buying it.

“But I’m using different ID for this job,” I said, sliding the driver’s license Gem had gotten made for me across to him.

“So I’d be hiring Joseph Grange,” he said, reading the plastic laminate of my photo, “DOB 10/19/52. Is that right?”

“Not ‘hiring,’ “ I told him. “I’m what you’d call an independent contractor.”

“I see,” he said, chuckling to let me know he was hip. “But you’ll need a . . . document of some kind, to verify that you’re on assignment to this office, yes?”

“No. I just need whoever answers the phone here to vouch for that. If anyone should ever call.”

“That isn’t difficult. But . . . Kevin didn’t tell me very much about you. . . .”

“So?”

“Well, I was thinking . . . we might know some people in common.”

“I don’t run dope,” I said, dismissing any chance we had mutual friends.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“The way I hear it, it comes to weight busts around here, you’re the man.”

“Lots of people hear that. Where did
you
hear it?”

“Inside,” I said. Softly.

“Not many of
my
clients there.”

“Exactly.”

He laughed. “I like you, Mr. . . . Grange.” He leaned back in his chair, lit a long white cigarette. The scent of cloves wafted over me. I looked at a spot behind the middle of his pale eyebrows. “Kevin tells me you did some work overseas,” he said, blowing a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“Does he?”

“We don’t just defend people who have run afoul of the draconian drug laws here. A lot of our work is . . . political, I suppose would be the best way to describe it.”

“Cool.”

“Probably not. At least, probably not
your
politics.”

“I don’t strike you as a liberal?”

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Your receptionist didn’t like me either.”

“We don’t make judgments here. And we’re very good at what we do. You might want to keep that in mind if you run into any trouble while you’re working for Kevin.”

“I will. You know what that work is, right?”

“You’re looking for his daughter.”

“Yeah. You ever meet her?”

“Buddy? I’ve known her practically since she was born.”

“She ever work here?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Well, the kind of office this is, I figure it’d be like heaven to an idealistic kid. Free Huey one generation, Free Willy the next, right?”

“I appreciate your sarcasm. But Buddy isn’t
that
kind of idealist.”

“What kind is she?”

“She’s more . . . introspective, I would say.”

“Okay. Any idea where she went?”

“Not a clue.”

“Or why?”

“That’s an even bigger mystery. She had an . . . I almost said an ‘ideal’ . . . life. I know that’s not possible for a teenager; at least not in
their
minds. But I never knew a happier, more well-adjusted young woman.”

“You have kids?” I asked him.

“No. You?”

“Four,” I told him, just keeping my skills in practice.

Being a teenager in America is a high-risk occupation. They’re the most likely to get shot, stabbed, sexually assaulted, beat up, bullied, turned on to chemicals, turned into zombies—and used and abused by the people who “counsel” them after all that.

And their peer-pressured cynicism makes them the easiest to trick, too.

It wouldn’t have shocked me if Rosebud had been driven to a remote area and killed by some other girls who didn’t like the way she spoke to one of their boyfriends. Or was snuffed out because some freakish boys wanted the “experience.” Or didn’t survive a gang rape.

But those kinds of crimes always seem to pop to the surface, like a river-disgorged corpse. Back in the sixties, there was a young guy in Tucson who killed a couple of girls for the fun of it. Buried them out in the desert. If he’d been a nomadic serial killer, the crimes might still be unsolved. But he had to tell some of his groupies about his feats. And when they scoffed, he showed them where the bodies were buried.

When teenagers commit crimes, they tend to talk about it. Today, they even make videos of it.

But the wires were quiet.

Or maybe Rosebud had been in a secret romance with a guy who killed her in a rage when she said she was going to tell his wife.

It never takes much.

But if she’d had a boyfriend, the guy had to have been sneaking into her room at night. Because it turned out that Rosebud had led a tightly scripted life . . . and one that made Mother Teresa look like a slacker. Two nights a week at the hospital’s children’s ward, visiting kids with cystic fibrosis. Saturdays, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women. That was when she wasn’t reading books into a tape recorder for the blind, or collecting signatures to abolish the death penalty, or delivering canned goods for a local food bank.

I thought back to what the father’s lawyer had said about Rosebud. Maybe, to him, anything less than overthrowing a government was “introspective.”

The high-school principal talked to me readily enough after she got a call from the father. She was surprised, though, that Rosebud was into all those activities—she certainly didn’t do any extracurricular stuff at school. Her grades were good but not spectacular.

When I asked about her friends, the principal just shrugged. At her level, she just heard about the extreme kids—the ones bound for the Ivy League, and the ones they were holding a prison cell for. She told me to try the guidance counselor.

He was a black guy in his thirties, dressed casually, with alert eyes. Told me Rosebud had never been in to see him. About anything. He knew of her only in the vaguest terms. A loner, not a joiner. “It was more like she . . . tolerated school.”

“Any chance she was more friendly with one of her teachers than she was with the other students?” I asked him.

His eyes went from alert to wary. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. Sometimes a kid relates better to adults than to peers. You’ve seen that yourself, right?”

“Not the way you’re implying. Not at this school.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You don’t sound very satisfied, Mr. Grange.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s not your problem, is it?”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Why should you, when you don’t like where I’m going? Look, Mr. Powell, this is a big school. And you’ve been here a while. You don’t seem like the kind of man who spends all his time pushing paper. You’ve got your ear to the ground. On top of that, the kids trust you. Some of them, anyway.”

“And you know all that how, exactly? Instinct?”

“More like experience. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years.”

“That’s just another way of spelling ‘generalization.’ “

“I’m a hunter. It’s no generalization to say that lions prefer crippled antelopes. They’re easier.”

“And you hunt teachers?”

“You know, I did hunt one, once,” I told him, keeping my tone conversational. “I knew he was a freak. I knew what he liked. I knew where he’d been, so I figured out where he’d be going.”

“I’m not sure I’m following . . .”

“This teacher, he never had a single complaint lodged against him in thirty years. But he quit three jobs. Pretty good jobs, near as I could tell. And moved on. Nobody at any of his old jobs had a bad word to say about him. So I took a look. My kind of look: a hard one. And what all the schools he left had in common was this: each one had banned corporal punishment. You understand what I’m saying, Mr. Powell?”

“I believe so.”

“Yeah? Well, let me spell it out for you, just in case. This guy was a child molester, but he never had sex with any of the kids. No, what he did was ‘punish’ them. That’s how he got his rocks off, paddling kids. Nothing illegal about it, in some schools. And every time one of the schools changed their policy, he’d just go someplace else. Where he could have his fun.”

“That’s sick.”

“I’m sure that’s what the teachers’ union would have said, if he’d ever gotten busted for what he was doing.”

“You don’t like teachers much, Mr. . . . Grange?”

“I like teachers fine. I don’t like freaks who hide behind authority to fuck with kids. Do you?”

“Look! I told you—”

“Hey, that’s all right,” I reassured him. “I’m sure, no matter who I ask around here, nobody tells me about one single teacher in the whole history of this school who ever had a thing for students. Not even a whisper of a rumor.”

“Rumors are pernicious,” he huffed, still offended.

“Thanks for your time,” I told him, getting to my feet.

“Sit down a minute,” he said. He got up, walked over to the door, and closed it. “You want me to level with you, that’s a two-way street.”

“The girl is missing,” I told him, flat out, no preamble. “Not a trace, not a clue. Disappeared. The cops have it marked as a runaway. The parents don’t think so. They hired me to see what I could find out.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what Principal McDuffy told me. That
and
to keep it quiet. There’s been nothing in the papers. . . .”

“And there’s not going to be, not for a while. The parents don’t want to . . . put on any pressure. If she was snatched, they’ll hear from the kidnappers. If she ran away of her own accord, they don’t want her to think they’re . . . hunting her. And if she’s already dead . . .”

“
Dead?
Where did
that
come from?”

“She’s gone, okay? When you work one of these cases and you’ve got a blank piece of paper in front of you for possibilities, ‘dead’ is one of the things you write on it.”

He leaned back in his chair, as if to put some distance between us. “What if there
was
the kind of teacher you were talking about here? Not the . . . one who liked to beat children . . . the . . . For the sake of argument, an English teacher who picked out a new girl—a budding poet—every year. Say everybody knew about it, but nobody ever said anything, because it doesn’t seem as if he ever got . . . sexual with students.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want to argue abstractions with you. Especially since we’re only speaking theoretically here. But what if, say, you knew about this particular teacher, but you
also
knew he couldn’t possibly be connected to Rosebud?”

“And how would I . . . theoretically . . . know that?”

“Because he . . . this hypothetical individual . . . has a pattern. One a year, right through the next summer. And he’s still involved with someone. A graduated senior. Over eighteen.”

“Yeah. What if?”

“I’m trying to help out here. To the extent I feel comfortable doing so.”

“Much appreciated,” I said, getting up again. This time, he didn’t make any attempt to stop me. Or to shake hands.

“She was more
studious
than she was a
student,
if you understand my meaning,” the English teacher told me in the front room of his charming little cottage. I could hear sounds of another person coming from the kitchen, but nothing more specific.

“I’m a little slow, doc. Help me out.”

Reference to his Ph.D. seemed to transform him from nervous interviewee to pontificator. “Rosebud was very interested in the
subject
of creative writing, but not always so interested in the individual assignments.”

“Typical of a kid her age, right?”

“Not really,” he said, condescension hovering just above his voice. “Young people her age are much more mature in their decisions than a layman would expect.”

“Uh-huh. Well, is there
anything
you can tell me?”

“I think not,” he said, carefully. “I doubt I had a single conversation alone with her during the entire year.”

I sat silently, listening to the sounds from the kitchen. A drawer closing, a dish rattling against a counter, refrigerator opening . . . Whoever was in there wanted me to be certain I knew
someone
was.

“I know she was a vegan . . .” he finally said, once he realized I was too thick to know when I’d been dismissed.

“A . . . ?”

“A vegetarian, only more intense about it. And she loved old Jimmy Cagney movies.”

“Thanks. That could be a big help.”

I stood up to leave, then turned to him and said: “Tell me, who’s a friend of hers. Any friend.”