“Frigging vegetables,” Detective Jim Smithson growled, staring at a pale object resting on a napkin in the middle of his desk. He set his elbows on the desk and cupped his plump chin in his hands as Harry and I walked into the small office. A sign on the door said MISSING-PERSONS.
“Excuse me, Jim?” I said. “Vegetables?”
Smithson shook his head, his neck-wattles shivering. “It’s this freaking diet. Uncooked veggies and fruit.” He pointed to the object. “How’d you like to wake up in the morning next to this?”
“A French fry?” I asked.
“It’s a parsnip slice, Ryder. It’s just a little brown. I guess it’s an old parsnip. They don’t date them.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’ve never had a parsnip.”
Smithson glared at the pitiful strand of vegetable. “This strip of parsnip, this one right here, is my lunch. Doc says to drop thirty pounds. I got the sugar, y’know.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s all I could think of to say. Smithson wheezed, picked up a sharpened pencil, speared the parsnip, held it over his wastebasket and, wincing with repugnance, flicked it in the trash.
Harry spoke up. “It’s not good to go without eating, Jim.”
“Don’t worry about me, Harry,” Smithson said, “I’ve got a kohlrabi in my locker.”
Smithson shifted heavily in his seat, his polyester-clad bottom squeaking against the vinyl chair. He was in his fifties, nosing hard toward retirement, putting in his time working the Missings desk with an occasional assist from one of the junior detectives. Smithson gave Harry a dyspeptic stare. “You boys here for a reason, or just come over to watch me eat?”
“You did that check for us on the woman we found in the motel, got nothing, right?”
He rolled rheumy eyes. “Yep. Brown and brown. Average height, weight.”
“About fifty years old. You put that in?”
“Hell yes. What, you want me to call AARP?”
“Probably had hard work in her background. Outside perhaps, like I mentioned…picking, or maybe construction. Maritime even. You get that?”
“You told me all that. Nothing clicked.” Smithson belched and pecked disconsolately at his keyboard. “To repeat myself…I got a nun reported overdue, but that’s way up in Chilton County. Got an AWOL sailor; she’s nineteen. Got about a dozen teen runaways. Got an insurance saleslady, a local, Bay Minette. Listed at 256 pounds -”
“There’s another aspect,” Harry said. “Seems a Mr Rubin Coyle’s prints were among the hundreds that turned up in the motel room with the dead lady. We just found out he’s a Missing. How long’s he been listed?”
Smithson brought up another screen, squinted at it. “Six days back. He never showed up at his office, not at home. Reported by Lydia Barstow, a part-time paralegal at his office. She came in, did the report.”
Harry scowled. “I didn’t see a sheet on this Coyle. You forget to send a heads-up out on this?”
Smithson grunted, produced a Missing-Persons report, waggled it in the air. “I sent a sheet out. It’s probably buried somewhere on your desk, maybe under your stack of commendations.”
I grabbed the report and angled toward the hallway. Smithson sighed, reached into his wastebasket, fished out the parsnip and flicked off the pencil grindings clinging to it. He was dangling it over his mouth when we retreated out the door.
The offices of Hamerle, Melbine and Raus were in an office building off Airport Road by USA, a five-story brown box with reflective windows. It had rained on our drive out, but storms blow through Mobile in the time it takes to count the change in your pocket, and the sun now pushed from the clouds. The traffic was thick on Airport, a stream of anxious metal. Exhaust mingling with evaporating rain turned the air into a poisonous brew and we hustled into the box.
The elevator deposited us on the fifth floor, opening to a hallway as hushed as a funeral parlor at midnight. We passed doors with signs boasting of the accountants, surveyors or financial consultants hunkering within. The last portal was the law firm, an office bathed in understated prosperity: satin wallpaper with a hint of floral pattern, beige carpet, gray-shaded lamps, abstract office-art in quiet pastels; even the trumpeter on the amorphous background pop was playing with a mute.
We announced ourselves to an elderly receptionist. Seconds later Lydia Barstow entered the lobby. In her late forties, I judged, green eyes in a round face, small nose, slender lips, hair walking the edge between brown and blonde. She wore a frumpish brown skirt and jacket, tan blouse, cream hose, brown flats. Muted. She walked with her hands wrapping her body, like the room was icy cold.
We asked Ms Barstow if we could meet in Rubin Coyle’s office. She nodded, and despite her businesslike appearance, I noted the eyes of someone recently experiencing a near-miss by lightning. She led us past a long hall of lawyers in their kennels. Coyle’s office was in a corner overlooking one of suburban Mobile’s brickencased communities. The requisite diplomas were on the wall, alongside commendations from various charities and Rubin Coyle shaking hands with a variety of people, clients I figured.
“Do you have any word on Mr Coyle?” Her eyes were hopeful.
“I’m sorry, no. Detective Smithson probably told you -”
“There’s not much you can do without evidence of…foul play. I understand. I was just hoping maybe…” She let the words trail off.
Harry apologized for repeating questions Smithson had asked, then revisited Coyle’s disappearance. He’d been gone almost a week, with no calls, no e-mail, no messages of any sort.
I said, “No wife, right?”
“Divorced years ago. They don’t stay in touch.”
“Girlfriend?”
She paused. Her hands started to flutter, but she contained them in her lap. “I, that is…”
From her tremulous anxiety - and that she’d filed the Missing report - I figured she was closer to Coyle than a paralegal.
“Are you his girlfriend, Ms Barstow?” I prompted.
Her attempt at a smile didn’t stick. “That would be me, I guess.”
“You’re uncertain?”
“He’s so involved in his work. We didn’t get much chance to go on dates, be together. Not like big nights out kind of thing, movies, dinner. We mostly, just, uh…”
She suddenly looked stricken, like she’d talked herself down the wrong road. Harry said, “We don’t mean to pry, Miz Barstow. But the more we know, the better we can do.”
Ms Barstow appeared on the verge of tears. “Mostly we stayed inside. It’s what Rubin wanted to do.” She looked away and bit her lip. I took it to mean Rubin Coyle was more interested in companionship than movies and restaurant dining.
“Did Mr Coyle ever mention, or take you to the Cozy Cabins motel?”
Pure puzzlement is one of the toughest expressions to fake, the tendency being to overdo it, popped eyes, dropped jaw; Lydia’s confusion looked real.
“Why?”
“He appears to have been there recently.”
“I never heard him mention it.”
“Did the routine of your relationship change any in the last couple of weeks?”
She took a deep breath. “The last time we…got together was Friday two weeks back. He seemed his usual self.” She looked around the office, closed her eyes.
“Do you work solely with Mr Coyle?” I asked.
“I work for several lawyers. Truth be told, there wasn’t a lot of work from Ru—, Mr Coyle. Typing, mainly.”
I said, “We have to ask - do you know of anyone who would have reason to abduct Mr Coyle, wish to do him harm?”
Her head shook my words away. “Rubin…Mr Coyle is so - so, nice.”
“No angry clients, cases lost, botched filings?”
“He never litigates. Negotiations are his specialty. And mediation. He always says, ‘Lydia, if I have to enter a courtroom, it’s because I’ve failed.’ He feels successful negotiations are his calling - everyone leaves satisfied, or as close as possible.”
Harry and I discovered nothing to mark Rubin Coyle as a target of anger. Indeed, he seemed almost an anti-lawyer, working to cement relationships, create effective settlements, broadcast harmony at every opportunity. On the seventh day he rested, now and then with Ms Barstow.
“How about the owners, partners, I guess they’re called. Do they know anything?”
She shook her head. “Mr Hamerle’s the head partner, the only person Rubin reported to, really. Mr Hamerle came in and tried to work today, but his angina flared up. He went to the hospital for observation. The poor man’s seventy years old.”
“What’s Mr Hamerle think of this?”
“He keeps saying Rubin’s taking a few stress days, he’ll show in a day or so.”
“One final question, Ms Barstow. The week before Mr Coyle disappeared, did anything set any kind of bell off? Don’t think big picture, think small. Tiny. Anything stand out, good, bad or indifferent?”
A memory flickered across her eyes.
“A couple days before he…stopped coming in, Rubin was at a client meeting in Bay Minette. He got a package marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, no return address. Even when he’s out, Rubin wants me to open everything. There was an envelope inside the package, thick and puffy. I opened it and found another envelope, smaller. It was like opening a puzzle. Inside that was bubble wrap. Inside the wrapping were pieces of cardboard taped together like a sandwich.”
“Inside the sandwich was…?”
She positioned her thumb and forefinger the width of three postage stamps. “An eensy little painting, or something like that.”
I felt a tingle rise up my spine. “Excuse me, Ms Barstow,” I interrupted. “Art?”
She nodded. “On canvas. The edges were torn, like it had been ripped off a larger work.”
I heard my morning caller’s voice rasping at me: What about art? You find anything like that?
But the caller had meant art at the scene, hadn’t he? Very specific. I said, “What was the drawing or painting of, Ms Barstow?”
“Not any real image. More like swirls and shapes. The colors were breathtaking.”
“No note or other explanation?”
“It seemed strange there wasn’t a note with it. I put it in his inbox.”
“You haven’t seen it since?”
She shook her head. “He must have picked it up. He never mentioned it.”
I said, “Is Mr Coyle an art collector, anything like that?”
A sad smile. “I made Rubin take me to the art museum once, a contemporary exhibit. He kept saying, ‘But what does it mean, Lydia? I can’t figure any of this stuff out.’ We left after twenty minutes.”
“Tell me more about the artwork from the mail.”
“I’ll never forget how gorgeous it was, the incredible colors, the way the shapes fit together. And yet…”
Her hushed tone made me look up from my note-taking. “What, Ms Barstow?”
“It had something strange about it. Something I could feel, but not see.”
“Like what, ma’am?” Harry asked.
She gave us a puzzled look. “Like if I looked at it too long, I’d get bad dreams. Does that make any sense?”