“Do you think I pay you just so you can sit and stare out the window all day long?”
Gracie looked up at me guiltily. “I was just — ”
“Just nothing. Here. I want you to look up all the women with the last name Hauptlaander in California.” I spelled it for her. “They should be between the ages of forty and sixty, with a daughter who disappeared. I’m guessing you can narrow it down to just one. The name’s rather uncommon.”
“I’ll get right on it. But . . . is it all right if I go to lunch, first?”
“Well, all right.” I tried to sound reluctant.
She smiled at me knowingly. She started to get up, leaning heavily on the desk.
I reached over and handed her her crutches.
“Thank you.” She slid them under her arms. I found myself looking at the bottom of her dress, where that one smooth leg came out — looking at that leg, and then that space where the other one should be, but wasn’t. My eyes shifted away from there to her hand, wrapped around the handle of the crutch — the perfectly painted scarlet nails, and the thick calluses across the balls of her hands, from where the handle rubbed. Guiltily, I looked away — right into her face. She was smiling at me, as if she didn’t know I was staring. But her cheeks were red. She must know — it must hurt her, that I still look. A year — a year, she had worked for me, and still I couldn’t get used to it. There was just something about it, that place where that leg should be.
She crossed the room to the door, swinging that one saddle shoe — she couldn’t wear heels — a heel — the way that other secretaries did.
She stopped in the doorway, shifting her crutches. “Lance . . . ”
I was watching Vernon Green down in the street, getting into his car at the curb. A dark green Buick. A fifty-eight. “Yeah?”
“I have a bad feeling about him.”
“Yeah? What kind of bad feeling?”
Down on the street, the green Buick backed up sharply, tapping the bumper of a Lincoln behind it, and then jerked away from the curb into traffic.
“He just doesn’t seem well. He seems sick.”
I looked at her. She was very serious, her mouth a straight red line.
“Maybe that’s why it’s so important to him. Maybe he won’t be around much
longer, and — ”
“I’m serious, Lance.”
I grinned at her. “I know. I know. He’s a little touched.” I tapped my finger against the side of my head. “But you would be, too. If your wife had run off and left you, and if you had heard all those things about her hooking before you were married . . . you would be too.” I knew she had been listening to Green and I talk.
She nodded, and went out. She paused in the hall, shifting her crutches again, reaching to shut the door. I crossed the room and closed it for her, and our eyes met for a moment. She opened her mouth, and I knew she was going to say something about being too nosy, or how she shouldn’t worry me with her ideas, or whatever. I put a finger to my lips and closed the door.
After that I shoved my hands into the pockets of my slacks and stood in the middle of the room, staring out the window and down into the street, thinking about where to start looking. I had a feeling that Sarabeth Green had not gone far — but she would have gone far enough to be sure that her husband and the blackmailer could not find her. I had a hunch that she was somewhere in the sprawl of suburbia, inland of Los Angeles, or maybe south, say San Diego. It was just an idea, but somehow it seemed right.
I watched Gracie moving down the sidewalk to the little park at the corner, where she always sat and ate her lunches. Why didn’t she get one of those prosthetics? Then, maybe, she could have just a cane. She could wear slacks, or something, then, and people wouldn’t stare at her as much. I wouldn’t stare at her as much. Maybe I would even be able to forget about it.
I had to stop myself from thinking about it, because I started to wonder what it looked like — how much of it there was, and what it looked like at the end, and . . .
I went in my office and stared at the picture of Sarabeth instead.