The McCone Files (4 page)

The old man turned, clinging to a camel for support. His was the weathered face of one who spent most of his life outdoors. “I'm sure, Miss McCone. Look at them.” He motioned around at the other riders. “This is Monday, and still the place is packed with kids. On a Sunday we get ten times as many. How do you expect me to remember one, out of all the rest?”

“Please, take another look at the picture.” I rummaged in my shoulder bag. When I looked up the man was several yards away, taking a ticket from the rider of a purple toad.

I hurried after him and thrust the picture into the old man's hand. “Surely, this child would stand out, with all that curly red hair.”

His eyes, in their web of wrinkles, narrowed. He squinted thoughtfully at the photo, then handed it back to me. “No,” he said. “She's a beautiful kid, and I'm sorry she's missing, but I didn't see her.'

“Is there any way out of here except for the regular exit?”

He shook his head. “The other doors're locked. There's no way that kid could've left except through the exit. If her mother claims she got on the carousel and disappeared, she's crazy. Either the kid never came inside or the mother missed her when she left, that's all.” Done collecting tickets, he leaned against a pony, his expression severe, “She's crazy to let the kid ride alone, too.”

“Merrill is ten, over the age when they have to be accompanied.”

“Maybe so, but when you've seen as many kids get hurt as I have, it makes you think twice about the regulations. They get excited, they forget to hang on. They roughhouse with each other. That mother was a fool to let her little girl ride alone.”

Silently I agreed. The carousel was dangerous in many ways. Merrill Smith, according to her mother, Evelyn, had gotten on it the previous afternoon and never gotten off.

Outside the round blue building that housed the carousel I crossed to where my client sat on a bench next to the ticket booth. Although the sun was shining, Evelyn Smith had drawn her coat tightly around her thin frame. Her dull red hair fluffed in curls over her upturned collar, and her lashless blue eyes regarded me solemnly as I approached. I marveled, not for the first time since Evelyn had given me Merrill's picture, that this homely woman could have produced such a beautiful child.

“Does the operator remember her?” Evelyn asked eagerly.

“There were so many kids here that he couldn't. I'll have to locate the woman who was in the ticket booth yesterday.”

“But I bought Merrill's ticket for her.”

“Just the same, she may remember seeing her.” I sat down on the cold stone bench. “Look, Evelyn, don't you think it would be better if you went to the police? They have the resources for dealing with disappearances. I'm only one person, and—”

“No!” Her already pallid face whitened until it seemed nearly translucent. “No, Sharon. I want you to find her.”

“But I'm not sure where to go next. You've already contacted Merrill's school and her friends. I can question the ticket-booth woman and the personnel at the children's playground, but I'm afraid their answers will be more of the same. And in the meantime you little girl has been missing—”

“No. Please.”

I was silent for a moment. When I looked up, Evelyn's pale lashless eyes were focused intensely on my face. There was something coldly analytical about her gaze that didn't go with my image of a distressed mother. Quickly she looked away.

“All right,” I said, “I'll give it a try. But I need your help. Try to think of someplace she might've gone on her own.”

Evelyn closed her eyes in thought. “Well, there's the house where we used to live. Merrill was happy there; the woman in the first-floor flat was really nice to her. She might've gone back there; she doesn't like the new apartment.”

I wrote down the address. “I'll try there, then, but if I haven't come up with anything by nightfall, promise me you'll go to the police.”

She stood, a small smile curving her lips. “I promise, but I don't think that will be necessary.”

Thrusting her hands deep in her pockets, she turned and walked away; I watched her weave through the brightly colored futuristic shapes of the new children's playground. Why the sudden conviction that the case was all but solved? I wondered.

I remained on the bench for a few minutes. Traffic whizzed by on the other side of the eucalyptus grove that screened this southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, but I scarcely noticed it.

My client was a new subscriber to All Souls Legal Cooperative, the legal-services plan for which I was a private investigator. She'd come in this morning, paid her fee, and told her story to my boss, Hank Zahn. After she'd refused to allow him to call the police, he'd sent her to me.

It was Evelyn's unreasonable avoidance of the authorities that bothered me most about this case. Any normal middle-class mother—and she appeared to be just that—would have been on the phone to the Park Station minutes after Merrill's disappearance. But Evelyn had spent yesterday evening phoning her daughter's friends, then slept on the problem and contacted a lawyer. Why? What wasn't she telling me?

Well, I decided, when a client comes to you with a story that seems less than candid, the best place to start is with that client's own life. Perhaps the neighbor at the old address could shed some light on Evelyn's strange behavior.

By three that afternoon, almost twenty-four hours after Merrill's disappearance, I was still empty-handed. The old neighbor hadn't been home, and when I questioned the remaining park personnel, they couldn't tell me anything. Once again I drove to Evelyn's former address, on Fell Street across from the park's Panhandle—a decaying area that had gone further downhill after the hippies moved out and hardcore addicts moved in. The house was a three-flat Victorian with a fire escape snaking up its façade. I rang the bell of the downstairs flat.

A young woman in running shorts answered. I identified myself and said Evelyn Smith had suggested I talk with her. “Her little girl has disappeared, and she though she might've come back here.”

“Evelyn? I haven't heard from her since she moved. You say Merrill's missing?”

I explained about her disappearance from the carousel. “So you haven't seen her?”

“No. I can't imagine why she'd come here.”

“Her mother said Merrill had been happy here, and that you were nice to her.”

“Well, I was, but as far as her being happy…Her
un
happiness was why I went out of my way with her.”

“Why was she unhappy?”

“The usual. Evvie and Bob fought all the time. Then he moved out, and a few months later Evvie found a smaller place.”

Evvie hadn't mentioned a former husband. “What did they fight about?”

“Toward the end, everything, but mainly about the kid.” The woman hesitated. “You know, that's an odd thing. I haven't thought of it in ages. How could two such homely people have such a beautiful child? Evvie—so awkward and skinny. And Bob, with that awful complexion. It was Merrill being so beautiful that caused their problems.”

“How so?”

“Bob adored her. And Evvie was jealous. At first she accused Bob of spoiling Merrill, but later the accusations turned nasty—an unnatural relationship, if you know what I mean.
Then
she started taking it out on the kid. I tried to help, but there wasn't much I could do. Evvie Smith acted like she hated her own child.”

“Have you found anything?” Evelyn asked.

I stepped into a small apartment in a bland modern building north of the park. “A little.” But I wasn't ready to go into it yet, so I added, “I'd like to see Merrill's room.”

She nodded and took me down the hallway. The room was decorated in yellow, with big felt cut-outs of animals on the walls. The bed was neatly made up with ruffled quilts, and everything was in place except for a second-grade reader that lay open on the desk. Merrill, I thought, was an unnaturally orderly child.

Evelyn was staring at a grinning stuffed tiger on the bookcase under the window. “She's crazy about animals,” she said softly. “That's why she likes the merry-go-round so much.”

I ignored the remark, flipping through the reader and studying Merrill's name where she'd printed it in block letters on the flyleaf. Then I shut the book and said, “Why didn't you tell me about your former husband?”

“I didn't think it was important. We were divorced over two years ago.”

“Where does he live?”

“Here in the city, on a houseboat at Mission Creek.”

“And you didn't think that was important?”

She was silent.

“Is he the reason you didn't call the police?”

No reply.

“You think he snatched Merrill, don't you?”

She made a weary gesture and turned away from me. “All right, yes. My ex-husband is a deputy district attorney. Very powerful, and he has a lot of friends on the police force. I don't stand a chance of getting Merrill back.”

“So why didn't you tell me all this in the beginning?”

More silence.

“You knew that any lawyer would advise you to bring in the police and the courts. You knew an investigator would balk at snatching her back. So you couldn't come right out and ask me to do that. Instead, you wanted me to find out where she was on my own and bring her back to you.”

“She's mine! She's supposed to be with me!”

“I don't like being used this way.”

She turned, panic in her eyes. “Then you won't help me?”

“I didn't say that.”

She needed help—more help, perhaps, than I could give her.

The late-afternoon fog was creeping through the redwood and eucalyptus groves of the park by the time I reached the carousel. It was shut for the night, but in the ticket booth a gray-haired woman was counting cash into a bank-deposit bag. The cashier I'd talked with earlier had told me her replacement came on in mid afternoon.

“Yes,” she said in answer to my initial question, “I worked yesterday.”