Five

I’ve adopted a pet, Emma thought. A cute but clumsy stray, a well-meaning pain in the ass.

She sat in her office, door closed, and watched the tape again, shaking her head. Shouldn’t photography have been part of Billie’s artsy-fartsy course work?

“It, uh, isn’t too good,” Billie’d said when she handed over the tape. “I hope there’s a way to take off the, um—my voice. I accidentally… It isn’t something that’ll ever happen again, but I think maybe I’d have to go back, except of course this event—the running away—won’t happen again, so I don’t know if she’d ever be this way again and…”

Emma, unable to bear the stammering apologies, sure the girl was being overmodest, prepping the boss for extravagant praise, waved her out. “Give me a chance to look at it,” she said.

Now she had. And she thought Billie should have entered the office on her knees, banging her head on the floor as she approached. Point and shoot, that’s all it took. But in addition to pointing the wrong direction half the time, in addition to problems of dark sky and inadequate light, her focus was all wrong. The rain was clear and fierce, the human figures a background blur, fuzzed and featureless, useless for purposes of identification.

And the situation had indeed been perfect. A lucky one-time-only break. And it was recorded, more or less—as long as nobody wanted to identify the dark little figures who flickered through, always unrecognizable. One of them—obviously Sophia, but only because Emma knew the players—raced down the front steps of the Redmond house, leaping off the last one like an aging gazelle, then taking off after the car. No sign of being wheelchair-bound or suffering vertigo. Could have been good. Very good.

Then for a few seconds the tape grew focused, gained clarity so that Sophia was recognizable. Unfortunately, she was also standing still, shouting, demonstrating no mobility, except of her vocal cords. Nonetheless, the segment was entertaining for its loud voice-over. “See, Emma? I’ve got what it takes—I got her. The blonde got her.”

Emma pressed her front teeth into her bottom lip, reminding her mouth that this was not funny. This was expensive and worthless. This time, she feared, Harold would be well and truly sick of her agency. Bye-bye client. The six thousand hours of training required of novice PIs were not going to be enough for this Billie girl. She’d need to repeat the course, get outside help. A brain transplant, maybe. Look what she did. Look what she did next!

Because just as the tape’s clarity gave the viewer hope that this was going to work since Sophia was down there on the sidewalk and would need to get back inside on her own—at that precise moment, the lens suddenly veered up to the treetops, to the leaden sky, around into a whirlpool of blur and down. As if Billie had decided that rather than film these people she’d set a mood.

But that obviously hadn’t been her intention, or why say, “Shit!” Why repeat it twice, just in case Harold and the entire insurance company hadn’t heard it the first time.

Billie’s car had been hit by the careening yellow thing. Slapstick surveillance, a new specialty of Howe Investigations.

Emma reversed the tape again. Maybe this time she’d see a way through the blunders to get usable, not laughing, stock. She was back again to the “blonde got her” soliloquy, finding it less amusing with each replay, when her phone rang and she lifted it to hear a wavery voice say, “Emma, there’s a criminal in my neighborhood and I’m scared.”

As if Billie weren’t enough. “Call the police, Miriam,” Emma said. “Immediately.”

“He’s not here now. This happened last night. In the dark.”

“Did you call them then?”

“Well, by the time I realized what the noise was—I mean, I thought it was a car backfiring, if they still do that. Do they?”

“You heard a gunshot?”

“It took me awhile to realize that’s what it must have been. It took me until right now, in fact. When I heard more noise, I thought it was a raccoon into the garbage at first—the can was full, you see, and even though I try to have nothing attractive to raccoons in there, sometimes… This morning was collection day and—”

“Miriam? I’m really rushed this morning.”

“—it was too late. The noise stopped. He was gone. What would I have told the police? They’d think it was a raccoon. Besides, I went and asked my neighbors if they’d heard a shot and they said no. But they listen to their TV so loudly. In the summer, you could go deaf living next door! And then I thought—maybe the noise was on their TV, but I didn’t know how to ask them that.”

“It probably was a raccoon and a backfire, so why are you scared?” Miriam was a relic of Emma’s past, the barely remembered Emma, as out of place in her life now as a miniskirt. But the older woman was tenacious, and failing, and Emma had so far been unable to find an uncruel way to dislodge her.

They’d met when they both had children climbing all over them and they’d taken their collective offspring over the mountain to the ocean, into the city to the zoo, on easy trails, and to library story hours. They’d sat at totlots and over coffee. Emma’s standards for companionship in those days were that you spoke English and didn’t need your diapers changed. And back then, Miriam was well above the water line. She was older, had been a botanical researcher, and hadn’t had children until her late thirties. At the time, before women’s lib and delayed parenting, that made Miriam seem seriously different, a bohemian in suburbia. Miriam had been freewheeling for years, way ahead of any cultural swings or permissions. She was funny, artistic, and sufficiently quirky to be entertaining.

But as her children moved on, Miriam lost her way and her personality, growing increasingly querulous, pathetic, and tedious. And when she was widowed, three years after Emma’s husband screwed himself to death, Miriam began a decline that now seemed permanent.

Somebody had once told Emma that the Sanskrit word for widow meant “empty.” She’d been vastly annoyed by the demeaning definition. She felt filled to the brim, sometimes overflowing. So she didn’t have a husband—she still had a life, a job, friends, and, in fact, a man for when she wanted him. Children, too, to the degree they wanted her. But Miriam had indeed emptied out. Her husband dead, children scattered, the once super-involved and creative woman was now devoid of resources, and she’d designated Emma as the replacement team for all that was gone. Calls such as this were commonplace.

Emma looked at the videotape, frozen now on an unintelligible shot that made more than half the screen black. The tire of Billie’s car, she decided.

“There’s blood.”

“What? Where? Mir— Call the police!”

“Inside my garbage can. Wouldn’t they laugh at me?”

“Should they? Did you toss out bloody meat? Is it really blood, or beet soup or tomato sauce?”

“How would I know? I didn’t taste it! I didn’t touch it! It’s a garbage can! I know about AIDS and bodily fluids. Besides, beet soup would go in the compost.”

“Okay, so you heard noises last night around the garbage can and you thought it was a raccoon. And one of the noises seemed like a shot—”

“Earlier. That was an earlier noise.”

“Okay. An earlier noise sounded like a shot.”

“Well, it did once I found the blood this morning.”

Nothing quite like retroactive hearing. Besides, who inspects her trash can interiors?

“I wasn’t looking for the blood, Emma,” Miriam said as if she’d read her old friend’s mind. Her voice was aggrieved and suddenly fully aware of and sensitive to the nuances of her surroundings and self. That happened, and made dealing with her still more difficult. “Like I said, the trash men came this morning so I was putting the can back where it belongs and I saw it.”

Emma looked at her watch. First the worthless video, now Miriam with a bloody trash can. Bloody nonsense. Miriam was seventy, which seemed way too soon for sporadic senility. Emma constantly found herself doing math—if Miriam decayed at seventy, did that mean Emma had only fifteen years until her brain developed potholes?

She worried how any of the army of aging single women, including her, would know they were losing it, each of them living alone in a large or small container. How could they tell when their hardwiring went bad and they were on Disconnect with the world?

She should try to reach Miriam’s kids, tell them their mother needed attention. Talk to Miriam about giving up the house, moving to a supervised facility. “Call the police, Mir,” she said. “They’ll be able to tell you if it’s really blood.”

“And where will I put my trash meantime? On the floor?”

Emma gave up. “I’m being buzzed,” she lied. “A business call. Let me think about what you should do.”

“I’m frightened,” Miriam said before hanging up.

“You’re not the only one,” Emma muttered. About lots of things—business, bills, about whether we’re individualists or demerited, about why the only person willing to work with me is an idiot. At least Miriam’s husband had left her enough money to allow her to tiptoe in and out of a fogbank.

She’d watch the video one more time. This time, she’d discover the salvageable part and the Redmond investigation would be done, the insurance company pleased and ready to hand over more work.

She reached her favorite part: “See, Emma?… The blonde got her.…” and repeated it three times before she moved on to Billie’s exuberant “she’s Olympic gold!” shouted so loudly it was hard to believe the Redmonds hadn’t heard. They were moving toward the collision and there seemed no point in further viewing. The tape was worth zero, and Sophia Redmond was not likely to perform in that style again. The case would go to court, the insurance company would settle and decide to forget about Emma, whose bills would pile up further.

So that was it for Harold. She should have known Billie wasn’t going to rescue anything.

Maybe she’d sent the girl out too soon. Maybe she should teach her something else, start her where she couldn’t hurt much.

“Hey,” she said after knocking on Billie’s open office door. The girl looked up, startled. She’d been tidying a desk that needed no straightening, that had nothing on it except the regulatory book, opened, and a small, fabric-framed photograph of a little boy in overalls and a peaked cap. Emma never had understood the need for family photos at work, as if people were afraid they’d forget their kids between nine and five, or stop working if they didn’t have those hungry-looking relatives watching them.

A radio played softly, a man’s rich voice talking about Presidents’ Day and U.S. patriotism.

“How about learning what’s available on the databases?” Emma said. “It’s the only way to go, to a point. Save you so much time, you’ll do fifteen cases at once.”

Billie smiled brightly and nodded, turning to snap off the small radio. Before the sound stopped, Emma heard the words “hardworking, decent—” and recognized the rich voice. “You listening to Talkman?” Her shock, hidden, she hoped, was real. Of course she believed in freedom of speech and freedom of listening, but the man was a pain-in-the-ass advocate of “moral values.” He was very popular, the current number-one radio personality, but only because he played to the lowest common denominator. She’d expected Billie’s taste to be on a higher plane.

“Who? What?” Billie stood up to follow Emma.

“That radio guy. The one you were listening to. Isn’t that who it was?”

Billie looked at the small radio as if waiting for it to answer the question. Obviously, she’d been lost in a daze. Emma wondered where she’d been, what could have so absorbed her thoughts. Surely not memories of her excellent performance with her first assignment.

“Program must have changed,” Billie said softly.

“We’ll use my computer,” Emma said.

“I don’t particularly like him,” Billie said.

“I don’t get what he’s doing here. This isn’t back country.”

“Seems to appeal to city folk as well,” Billie said.

“That ‘lad from Nevada’ crap?” Emma said. “What’s that supposed to mean? I never got it.”

“I think it’s supposed to make him sound folksy.”

“Who needs right-wing folksy—in the Bay Area?” Once in her office, she gestured for Billie to pull up a chair and settled herself at the computer, talking all the while. “When he moved here, they made a fuss about his being the number-one radio personality in Vegas. As if that meant something. Who listens to the radio there?” She hit keys on the computer while she spoke. “I used to keep that station on all day, till they changed format when he arrived. I’ve waited half a decade for him to fail and go back to Nevada.” She shook her head in mild disbelief as she put a CD ROM in the computer. “So, supposing you want background on somebody,” she began. “Say…who?”

Billie shrugged. “Is everybody in there?”

“As long as they’ve had some interaction with the law or the state, like getting married or divorced, being arrested, buying or selling property, taking out a license to hunt, own a business, own a gun, being drafted…you get the drift.”

Billie nodded.

“So name somebody,” Emma said. The girl wasn’t going to play passive-aggressive in her office.

“Okay,” Billie finally said. “Audrey Miller.”

“You have a specific Audrey Miller in mind?”

Billie nodded. “This girl I knew in tenth grade. Actually, I didn’t know her. There didn’t seem to be anything to know. She had no personality. You forgot her the minute you met her.” She looked at Emma quizzically. “Maybe not the sort anybody would ever search for. She’s sort of a generic female.”

Emma put her hands up, palms out. “Interesting choice. You know anything we could work with? Where was that high school?—what year would she have been born?”

Billie dithered, wasn’t even sure which of her many relocations this had been. “Boston,” she finally said. “Framingham, actually.” She didn’t know much beyond that, except to estimate that colorless Audrey would be around her own age of twenty-eight—“unless, of course, she’d been left back. Or skipped.” She shook her head. “Audrey couldn’t have skipped.”

Emma was on to the Social Security records. “We can find out if she’s dead,” she said. “That would save time.” No Audrey of Billie’s vintage was on the list. “Let’s see if she’s married. Or has a license for a business.”

“Under her birth name, right?” Billie asked.

“As a starter—until we find a husband’s name.”

They didn’t. They discussed the chance that Audrey had moved away and married years earlier. “You remember her parents’ names?”

Billie shrugged and shook her head. “I’m surprised I remember Audrey.”

“Remember whereabouts in Framingham they lived? We could check property records. There’s a chance they’re still there and we’d have a contact with which to find her. There’s also the high school’s alumni association. The reunion committee tracks most grads down.”

Audrey had apparently not married, at least not in Massachusetts. But she was, as they backtracked, registered to vote in the next town over. And, once they’d checked licensing, Audrey fleshed out into the owner and proprietor of Audrey’s WeCare Pet-Care, Inc.

“I’d bet that’s your girl,” Emma said. “We can find out more, but the thing is—you’ve done it, located her. You found somebody. So maybe we should look at somebody else, start somewhere else. Suppose we didn’t know the high school, or year of birth. Maybe we know something else, like what she does or where she does it. See how you can go about it differently. Give me a new nominee.”

Billie looked around Emma’s office, as if seeking inspiration. “Him, then,” she said. “Talkman, the guy I wasn’t listening to. We know his job and that he does it and lives in the Bay Area.”

Emma sighed. She’d asked for it. “In Marin, actually. You’d think his views would violate zoning laws, wouldn’t you? Don’t get me started on what used to be a good radio station. Let’s get some background. We can start with what we know—last name is Marshall and he moved here from Nevada five years ago. Trying to give you a sense of the scope of this, the possibilities. We don’t really need to know about him, so I’m going to move fast. Next time, we’ll take it step by step, when it’s for an actual case. But let’s do a search for his name and…”

She meandered through driving records. “They’re not public records in California, but I have an account, so once you get a license number, we could find it out. In other states, there’s no hassle. You pay a fee, you get your guy’s name. The good news is we know he’s from Nevada. The bad news is, if you were really looking for the guy, Nevada addresses wouldn’t help you find him ’cause he’s not there anymore. But old addresses can be a lead, or a suggestion that somebody wasn’t where he says he was, for example. Or where he used to live. And see, look here—his birth date, height, weight. Who knows what could be useful?—the birth date can help get other records, sometimes.”

She could feel small gusts of air when Billie remembered to exhale after a long spell of holding her breath. She felt like a performer boosted by applause and heard a new enthusiasm in her voice. “Lots of data depends on the state. For example, marriage records are not public in New York City, but here they are, and presumably in Nevada. Let’s look.”

Which they did, accompanied by Billie’s soft puffs of breath and they found seven Marshalls, most of whom were too old, too young, or female. Harley was their man, they decided. “So you see,” Emma said, “the records keep feeding into each other. Here’s Harley’s marriage license. Married Genia Ann Christophe. Wonder if he stayed married? Should have, he’s such an advocate of the ‘nu cleer’ family.” She moved to divorce records, searched, shrugged. “Practices what he preaches,” she said, not at all pleased at learning that.

“Or he divorced her in California,” Billie softly suggested.

Emma swiveled around in her chair. She tended to forget what the girl looked like when not facing her, imagined her a faceless marshmallow. And then the girl would say something intelligent and Emma would be surprised by the precise features and the cleverness in the eyes. “Could be,” she said. “Divorce records can be good—find out lots of things. Not about him, per se, but they can include things like allegations of abuse, or third parties involved, or a sense of what happened to the assets. Lots of stuff. They’re filed by county.”

Meanwhile, she moved through voter registration files.

“To know their politics?” Billie asked.

Emma thought she was joking, but didn’t turn around to verify it. “More like addresses, Social Security number.” She loved shifting around the databases. Snooping at its easiest, a boon to her aging bones. “You still have to get your ass in gear and go outside, however.” She wasn’t sure if she meant that remark for Billie or herself. “Amazing the things you find. People put phone numbers on pet licenses which are public records. Your friend Audrey could help you there with her client list. You can check for ownership of assets—tell you something about somebody. Automobiles, trucks, RVs, airplanes—who knows? Then there’s property records, there’s licensing records if the guy’s, say, a carpet cleaner or a beautician….” She swiveled around again and faced Billie, who seemed delighted by the potential in the box. “Let’s do somebody else. He wasn’t a great choice,” she said.

Billie’s face fell.

“Not your fault!” If she was going to have to watch every damned word… “He’s a public figure. We should look at somebody harder to find, way less known, at least to us.”

“Like who?” Billie now sounded like a student afraid she’ll be called on.

Emma sat back in her chair and steepled her fingers under her chin. Then she smiled and sat up straighter. “Why—how about you?” she said and felt a thrill when Billie’s neon eyes opened wide with undisguised fear. “You’ll be all over the place—birth, marriage, divorce, property files, neighborhood-worth rating…”

“But—” Billie said. “Why? I mean, I know about me. I know all about me.”

“Perhaps,” Emma purred as she swiveled back to face the computer. “But I don’t.” She didn’t turn around to delight in the younger woman’s discomfort. She wasn’t a sadist.