When I walked into the office, Jimmy Hungerford looked like he was being scolded. He sat in his desk chair, hands clasped between his legs, looking up at a man in an expensive suit. The man stood over him, wagging a finger and shaking his head. The man was older, midfifties, with gray temples and a slightly expanding waistline.
Jimmy’s father.
They both turned to me when I walked in.
“Dude,” Jimmy said. I assumed that it was a greeting.
I nodded. “Jimmy.”
Nate cocked his head, eyeing me. Then his face registered recognition. He smiled and held out a hand.
“You must be Mike Garrity. Jimmy’s told me all about you.” We shook hands. “I’m Nate Hungerford, Jimmy’s father. The agency does a lot of business with my law firm upstairs.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“We were just discussing a recent case. And the importance of actually serving papers to the people who are supposed to receive them.” He looked pointedly at Jimmy, who returned a tight-lipped smile.
“Thanks for the tip,” I said.
Nate hiked up a trouser leg and sat on the edge of Jimmy’s desk. “I hear that you’ve already brought in two cases.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m impressed. How are they going?”
“Fine. It’s early in both.”
“What are the cases?”
“A missing person and a suicide investigation.”
Nate nodded. “Who are the clients?”
I hesitated. Chewed the inside of my cheek. I tilted my head at Jimmy, then turned back to Nate. “Client confidentiality prevents me from discussing the details with anyone but Jimmy.” In my peripheral vision I saw Jimmy’s eyes brighten.
“Well,” said Nate. “We’re all family. I won’t divulge anything. Attorney-client privilege, right?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“I have a vested interest in the success of this agency. I like to know what’s going on. In fact, I have a right to know. Hell, my money pays for most of this agency’s caseload.”
“Maybe. But not these two cases.”
A flash of something not altogether nice passed over Nate’s face before vanishing behind a slick grin.
“Well,” he said. “I see you’re a man of integrity. That’s to be commended.” He checked his watch, made a vague statement about having to get back upstairs, and left the office. Jimmy wheeled around to me in his chair.
“Dude,” he said, breaking into a wide, toothy smile. “That was so awesome. My dad’s not used to people saying no. He hates it. Not these two cases. Ha! Awesome …”
“I was serious about client confidentiality. The worst thing that can happen to you, other than getting arrested or killed, is to pick up a reputation that you can’t keep a secret. A PI firm should be a vault for information. People come to private investigators with their lives’ most dirty little secrets and suspicions. You need to be like a priest.”
“A priest. Right. Except for the no sex, though.”
“Yeah. Except for that.” I sat in one of the guest chairs, hoping that the vow of poverty was also exempted. “You said I need to fill out some paperwork?”
“Right. I am so pumped that you’re coming on board. Totally pumped.” Jimmy retrieved the human-resources paperwork that I needed to complete. A-Plus contracted all HR functions to a separate company. I sat at my new desk and filled out an impressive stack of forms. The health coverage was as good as Jimmy had promised.
“Okay,” I said when I was done. “As the agency principal, you really do have a right to know the status of all the active cases.” I filled him in on both the Victor Madrigas and Jonathan Dennis investigations.
Jimmy pursed his lips and nodded his head. “Gotcha … gotcha. What can I do to help?”
I had anticipated the question and was ready. “I need a picture of Jonathan Dennis. They might have something in the computer downtown for his city ID badge, but I think they purge the pictures when you no longer work there. Jonathan went to West Orange High. I need you to get me a yearbook photo.” Jimmy’s brow creased but his head kept nodding. That was his thinking face. I suspected that while interested in the assignment, he had no idea how to actually accomplish it. I helped him out: “I’d probably start by going to the school. They usually keep archive copies of yearbooks in the office. Maybe you can get a scan or a photocopy of the picture.” The brow uncreased a little. “Class of ’04.”
“Cool,” Jimmy said. His eyes narrowed in thought.
“No disguises, Jimmy. Or secret cameras. Just a straight-up retrieval.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
But he couldn’t hide the disappointment on his face.
“Okay, Mike, I want you to point at each picture and tell me what it is.”
She was young. Too young to tell me what to do. Midtwenties, I’d guess. Her name was Megan and she was my brand-new occupational therapist. Megan had raven-black hair, a pale complexion, and a single silver stud in one ear. She also had just a little too much cleavage popping out of her black knit top. Thanks to a lastminute cancellation, I was able to get a morning appointment to start figuring out why I couldn’t remember how the hell to say “hamburger.”
I sighed. “Okay. That’s a car. A train. A duck.” A large binder full of pictures of various items was open before me. By me pointing at images and saying what they were, the therapist would be able to determine the severity of my memory loss. I felt like I was three years old.
A is for apple. B is for brain damage.
I thought I did okay. I identified all but three pictures. As soon as Megan told me what they were, they immediately popped back into my memory, little pegs finding empty holes in my brain and plugging themselves in. Mouse, shovel, and cake: that’s what I couldn’t remember. How could I forget cake, for God’s sake? Each was just as frustrating as the Hamburger Incident of last night.
“Your brain suffered some trauma from the operation, Mike,” Megan said.
No shit. Try plucking a malignant growth out of your cerebrum and see if you can remember “mouse.” But that’s not what I said.
“Yeah,” I said instead.
“Your brain needs exercise.”
“Exercise?” I pictured my poor wrinkled brain with the scoop taken out running on two little legs on a tiny treadmill.
“Sure. You need to use it. Get the synapses firing again. Make new connections. Use it or lose it.”
“Okay … So, what do I do? I can’t exactly do brain-ups.”
“Sure you can, figuratively speaking. Read a book. Do a crossword puzzle. Memorize the Preamble to the Constitution.”
“We the people.”
“There you go. What’s the rest?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Figure it out, Mike. It’ll be good for you. Use it or lose it.” She looked at me seriously. I forced myself not to look at her cleavage.
I left the therapist’s office and got into my truck. We the people … The two cases I was currently working on were forcing me to think more than I had in a long time. That had to be good for my now Bob-free brain. I could start reading again, too. I wonder if Sports Illustrated counted.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, I realized that I actually knew a little more of the preamble than I’d thought. I had memorized it in fifth grade and the doctor’s brain scoop had obviously missed some of it. We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish something and promote the something with liberty and justice for all. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Okay, I didn’t really know much more than the first few words, and I may have mixed it up a bit with the other chunks of childhood knowledge sloshing around in my brain gumbo. But if I could’ve just remembered it, I’d have turned around and run back into the building so I could shout it at Megan.
I vowed to learn the rest of it. And then I’d come back and recite the whole damn thing.
The report confirmed everything that Boyd Bryson had said. After seeing the therapist, I returned to my apartment and laid the files out on my scratched coffee table. The medical examiner determined Victor’s cause of death as an overdose of alprazolarn, commonly known as Xanax, a popular antianxiety drug. It required a prescription, but it was easy enough to score on the street or in the hallways of a large suburban high school. Although such transactions were usually for small quantities, not the large amount of drugs Victor had apparently swallowed. Bryson had spoken to at least a dozen of Victor’s friends and his interview notes were solid. He was a good detective, very thorough. However, the kids offered no leads and none had any idea where Victor might have gotten the pills.
No behavior skeletons in Victor’s closet, either. He was an altar boy. Literally. He helped serve Mass every week at St. Joseph’s. Of course, given my personal experience in the rectory as a kid, some of the meanest, most twisted individuals I had ever met were altar boys. And that includes my seventeen years as a cop.
But Victor was also a volunteer youth minister, a service I couldn’t claim in either my youth or my adulthood. He helped teach religious education one night a week. He was a straight-A student in school. No discipline problems. No steady girlfriend, but a tight group of close friends. He played saxophone in the jazz band. None of his friends had ever been in trouble. Bryson’s notes didn’t list even a detention.
Victor had been accepted early into three colleges, two state universities, and a private Catholic seminary out of state. By all accounts, Victor was good kid, a kid who had things together, who was going places. There were three eight-by-ten photos in the envelope: two sterile shots of Victor’s lifeless face and a color yearbook portrait. The yearbook picture featured a smiling, optimistic young man, looking slightly up past the camera, grinning with gleaming teeth that had recently had their braces removed, his bow tie a little askew. His brown hair was an inch or two longer than in the ME’s photos, and his dark eyes seemed to hold wonder and humor and even optimism. But I was probably reading too much into it. Juxtaposed next to the two images of his open-eyed death gaze, the yearbook picture took on more meaning than it would have alone.
“Why, Victor?” I muttered aloud, holding the yearbook picture in one hand and the death gaze in the other. Looking back and forth between the two, I couldn’t reconcile them. I understood what Boyd Bryson meant. There was just a funny feeling about it.
Certainly nothing in the evidence suggested anything except suicide. Regrettably, there are plenty of kids just like Victor all across the country—good kids, kids with prospects, who swallow a handful of pills. But usually there was some warning sign somewhere. It might be subtle: a teacher noticed him being quieter the last few days; friends claimed that he refused invitations to the movies; parents noticed a loss of appetite. Victor presented none of these signals.
Again, there was plenty of precedent for cases just like Victor’s. A complete shock for friends and family. No good explanation. A tragedy. If we only knew.
Still …
That one percent was nagging at me. If he had just left a note, explained why he felt suicide was necessary … But he didn’t. I could definitely see Ben Madrigas’s angst. He simply couldn’t believe that his son was capable of killing himself. Based on Detective Bryson’s notes, Ben Madrigas wasn’t alone in thinking that.
I shoved all the files back into the envelope and pushed it aside. I decided that I had read enough. I needed to do some interviewing of my own. And I knew exactly who I was going to interview first.