Dearly Departed Read online

  Stephen Emerton? Had to be. Who else was there?

  I sighed noisily, drawing more frosty stares.

  Motive and opportunity. Motive and opportunity. I kept repeating the words in my head like a mantra.

  Meanwhile, Portia, still disguised as a male lawyer, was now dancing around her befuddled husband, messing with his mind, diddling him out of the ring she had given him on the day they were married, the ring he vowed never to be without.

  “I see, sir, you are liberal in offers: You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answer’d.”

  Marie Audette was a good actress. Wait a minute! my inner voice shouted. So was Alison! My mind spun back to the first act of the play. What was it that Portia told Jessica when she took up her disguise?

  “I’ll hold thee any wager.… I’ll prove the prettier fellow … and wear my dagger with the braver grace; and speak, between the change of man and boy, with a reed voice and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies, how honourable ladies sought my love, which I denying, they fell sick and died.… And twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell, that men shall swear I have discontinued school above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind a thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks which I will practice.”

  Motive and opportunity.

  “Alison really is a genius,” I muttered loud enough to earn another punch in the ribs.

  Remember when you first came to my office?” I asked Truman the next morning. “Remember I said Alison might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes and kept on going? That it’s been done before? Well, maybe she did.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Truman answered, pacing my office floor like a caged cat.

  “Hey, man, this is America,” I reminded him. “It’s always been easy for Americans to go somewhere else and start over. That’s what our ancestors did. That’s why America exists today. Remember the executive director of the Minneapolis City Council? She packed her bags, arranged for her attorney to pay off her debts, and—poof!—she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. Everybody thought she had run away with a lover or had been abducted or ripped off the city. Turned out she simply went to San Francisco to become a different person.”

  Truman was unimpressed. He pointed out that the police had had the same theory but rejected it because none of Alison’s belongings were missing. She hadn’t packed, as the executive director had; she hadn’t closed her banking accounts and settled her affairs; she hadn’t contacted an attorney—hadn’t contacted him.

  “All that means is that what she left behind didn’t concern her,” I told him.

  “This is insane. You’re saying Alison staged her own disappearance, the tape recording, the blood, everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bullshit. There’s no evidence of that; you haven’t got any evidence. All you have is a self-serving theory from some bum-fuck doctor who might have been the one who killed her in the first place. I can’t believe you’re buying this shit.”

  “Dr. Bob doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Oh, no? Then where the fuck did this amazing theory come from?”

  “Two things. One, the note on my windshield. Whoever put it there didn’t want us looking into Alison’s disappearance. I think it was Alison. That was a mistake because instead of quitting, it made us look harder.”

  Truman snorted at that.

  “Yeah?” he asked. “What’s number two?”

  “The Merchant of Venice.”

  Truman stopped his pacing and stared long enough to measure me for a white jacket that fastens in the back.

  “You’re shitting me,” he said.

  “No, I’m not,” I assured him.

  “I can’t believe I’m paying for this,” he groused.

  “Think about it,” I told Truman. “Raymond Fleck, Irene Brown, Stephen Emerton, Dr. Holyfield, her parents: They all wronged Alison one way or another. Now each of their lives has been turned upside down; each one is paying a price. Why? Because no one knows for sure exactly what happened to her. She got ’em. She got ’em all at the same time; a brilliant girl is our Alison.”

  “You’re saying she staged her own murder just to get even?”

  “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Truman replied to the line I had memorized the evening before.

  “Oh, and you would never do anything like that. You would never go out of your way to stick it to someone.”

  Truman didn’t want to hear any more. “Find her, goddammit!” he demanded, throwing his hands in the air. “You think she’s fucking alive, find her.”

  I made an effort to explain just how long, tedious, and expensive a missing-person’s search could become, especially if the missing person was working hard at not being found. I don’t know if I was trying to talk him out of it or not.

  “Find her,” he repeated.

  I quickly produced a standard contract. He signed it after reading it twice and then threw the pen down on my desk blotter.

  “No one is to hear about this,” he ordered. “Not your friends with the police, especially not the media. I don’t want anybody getting away with murder just because you have a fucking hunch. Understand?”

  I understood. I told him I would keep the investigation to myself unless Irene Brown or Raymond Fleck were indicted. If that happened, I would probably have to speak up. Truman disagreed and commenced to argue with me the fine points of Minnesota Statutes 326.32–326.339, the licensing requirements and procedures for private detectives and protective agents. He thought there might be a loophole. I disagreed.

  “Just find her,” he said at last.

  fourteen

  Iretrieved a missing persons form from my desk drawer and I started filling it with information. The form was basically a cheat sheet I had picked up at the last convention of private investigators I attended. Once complete, it would contain nearly every known fact about Alison, from her style of dress (lots of sweaters and natural-fiber blazers) to her hobbies (dogs, cross-country skiing), from the languages she spoke (French and Russian) to her driving record (three speeding tickets in two years) and spending habits (two credit cards, paid entire balance monthly). All this plus a Portrait Parle, noting in detail Alison’s physical characteristics—everything from the size and shape of her ears to the quality of her walk.

  Much of this information was already available in Anne Scalasi’s file. The rest I would acquire through interviews with Alison’s neighbors, co-workers, paperboy, hairdresser, investment adviser, high-school and college professors, veterinarian, insurance agent, travel agent, Marie Audette, her family, her husband, and so on. It was a complicated, tedious process. Not as complicated as a shuttle launch yet complicated enough to give me a headache.

  The reason for all this work is simple: People are creatures of habit. After spending a lifetime doing a specific thing in a certain way, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change. Consider the case of Christopher Boyce, the Falcon in the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. Boyce escaped from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for selling secrets to the Soviet Union, and disappeared. Completely. However, Boyce was a nut about falconry, thus his nickname. So the government staked out those locations frequented by people who shared Boyce’s passion—there are only so many places where people go to hunt with falcons. Sure enough, Boyce was discovered in one of them, a small town in Oregon.

  The past had led investigators to Boyce’s new life. The past would lead me to Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.

  “All right, darlin’,” I told the photograph I taped to my office wall, the photograph of Alison and Marie Audette in costume. “Let the games begin.”

  As with all my missing persons cases, I tried to find Alison the easy way first. By telephone.


  “How may I help you?” the operator asked in a machinelike monotone.

  “That damn daughter of mine. My wife says we got a telephone bill with all kinds of long-distance calls on it that we didn’t make, and she thinks my daughter has let her low-life boyfriend use our phone. I was outta town when we got the bill, and my wife kept the first page, which is the bill, but not the bottom pages, which lists the numbers. So could you mail me the bottom pages so I can get this kid to pay for his calls? Cause I ain’t gonna pay for ’em.”

  “What is your home number and billing address?”

  I gave the operator Mr. Donnerbauer’s address and telephone number but added, “Could you send them to my office?”

  Sure she could.

  “Customer service,” a pretty voice chirped.

  “Yeah, this is Phil Gaffner over at WorldNet. We got a DNP and we’re tryin’ ta verify some toll charges. Could ya give me listings and returns on 666-2273?” I recited Stephen Emerton’s telephone number.

  “Just a second while I pull it up on my screen, Phil,” the woman replied, much of her cheerfulness gone. Telephone companies hate people who don’t pay and are usually more than willing to help even competitors get their money.

  “Customer service, how may I help you?” a man’s voice asked.

  “This is the Ian Ravitch Agency representing Miss Marie Audette. Miss Audette will be out of town for the next forty-five days on an acting assignment, and she requested that we pay her bills until her return. Could you send Miss Audette’s telephone bill to our office, please?”

  “What is the telephone number and regular billing address, sir?”

  I read them to the operator directly from the missing persons form.

  “And what address do you want the bill sent to?”

  After gathering their records, I discovered that Mr. and Mrs. Donnerbauer had not made any long-distance phone calls to their daughter—or to anyone else since her disappearance. All of Stephen Emerton’s calls were to credit-card and insurance companies. Marie Audette had made sixteen long-distance calls, most of them to agents in Chicago and Los Angeles. One set of digits did interest me, however. She had dialed a Deer Lake, Wisconsin, number the day I spoke with her. I dialed the number myself after preparing a sure-fire pretext designed to obtain me the name and address of whoever answered. The pretext wasn’t necessary. A tape recording told me I had reached the residence of Deputy Gretchen Rovick, please leave a message.

  Framed in silver and hanging above my computer is a photograph of a ridiculous-looking man dressed in a trench coat and fedora and leaning against a personal computer. The photograph was accompanied by a long newspaper article explaining how a private investigator had squashed the hostile takeover of a beloved local firm. According to the article, the investigator—the female reporter described him as James Bond-handsome; I just thought you should know—used his computer skills to uncover several secret bank accounts in Nevada and the Bahamas where the corporate raider’s chief officers had quite illegally stashed fifty million undeclared bucks. The IRS, SEC, and FBI had been quite impressed and leaked the news to the media. I would tell you who the investigator was except, well, modesty forbids me.

  Truth is, I am not an expert with a computer, merely tenacious. I approach it like John Henry, that steel-driven’ man. I ain’t gonna quit. I’m gonna find what I need if it kills me.

  Fortified with a fresh pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain and armed with my PC, hard disk drive, printer, modem, and telephone and source books, I started dragging databases. There are literally thousands of them, most created and maintained by the government, most free and easily accessed. The trick is knowing where to look. I looked everywhere. I conducted credit bureau sweeps and social security number traces. I accessed the U.S. Post Office’s National Change of Address Index, another database containing names compiled from every telephone book in the U.S., and another filled with voter registration information. I searched the motor vehicle registration records of forty-nine states and the criminal records of every county in all fifty states. I hired an information broker to hunt through bank accounts. I personally examined the membership directories and subscription lists of every public-relations-related association and newsletter I could find as well as a database that recorded the names of executives who have moved from one job to another in the past year.

  Days turned into weeks. And I learned only one thing: Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was hiding real, real hard.

  “Why are you doing this?” Cynthia Grey asked in a tone that made me think of icebergs and polar bears.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I told her. I liked the sound of that so much I repeated the phrase—I’m a private investigator—a half dozen times with different inflections, making it sound like I was either a swashbuckling adventurer or I made my living repairing refrigerators.

  “You’re annoying me,” she said.

  “This is getting old, Cynthia. Ever since I told you I thought Alison was alive, you’ve been ragging on me to quit the case, telling me she didn’t break any laws, telling me she has a right to be left alone. Fine. I get the message. Now quit it, will ya? I don’t tell you what cases to take.”

  We were in bed—my bed to be precise—and for the first time since we’d become intimate, our bodies did not warm each other. She was lying on one side and I was lying on the other, and the few inches that separated us might as well have been the Grand Canyon.

  “What’s the big deal, anyway?” I asked.

  “It’s wrong.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. What’s wrong is Irene Brown and Raymond Fleck sitting in the Dakota County jail because neither can make bail, waiting to see if they’re going to be tried for killing a woman who’s not dead.”

  “Since when do you care about them?”

  “I don’t,” I admitted. “But I’m the one who put them on the spot—at least Irene—and that makes me responsible.”

  “If only I could believe that.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re trying to find Alison because you want revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Yes, revenge. When you thought she was dead, you acted like she was the great lost love of your life—”

  “Stop it,” I told her.

  “You kept staring at her photograph with such longing—don’t tell me you didn’t; I know you did—but then you discovered that she had an affair, and suddenly you don’t like her anymore. Taylor, you act like she had cheated on you. Well, she didn’t cheat on you. She didn’t do anything to you. She didn’t even know you. So why don’t you leave her alone? She was treated shitty enough in her life.”

  “She gave as she got,” I told her.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.…”

  “You know nothing about her except what some people told you, and even then you’re only listening to the bad and none of the good. Why do you believe Emerton and that doctor? Why do you insist that they’re right about Alison and not Marie Audette and Alison’s other friend, the deputy?”

  “Because—”

  “Because you don’t want to.”

  “Are you going to let me finish?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you hope Alison really is dead. That way you can recast her as the virginal innocent in the fantasy you’ve created in your head.”

  Something cold gripped my heart. Alison dead? No, I didn’t want that. I most certainly did not.

  “You might find this hard to believe, Cynthia,” I said, working hard to keep my voice calm and level, “but I have no emotional investment in locating Alison.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “If you want to argue that I’m trying to find her just to prove that I can, fine. Maybe there’s something to that. But it’s my job, you see. It’s what I do for a living.”

  “It’s wrong,” Cynthia reiterated.

  “Why? Why is it wrong? When I was trying to find her dead body
, I was a good guy. Now, because I’m trying to find her live body, I’m a jerk. Why is that?” Cynthia didn’t answer, so I added, “It’s just a job, honey.”

  “And if someone gave you four hundred dollars a day and expenses to investigate me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Cynthia, please. This is not about you.”

  “But it could be. That’s the thing. It could be. If somebody wanted to learn about my past, if they wanted to hurt me with my past—”

  “I’m not hurting anyone,” I insisted.

  “—me or anyone else on the planet, all they have to do is pay you four hundred dollars a day and expenses.”

  And then I understood. Cynthia didn’t want me to find Alison because she didn’t want a detective to one day find her, the real her. The expensive clothes, the furniture, the store-bought manners, they allowed Cynthia to do what Alison was doing: hide. That was why she worked so hard at her profession, why she so enthusiastically embraced the media. She was building a life beyond reproach, strengthening her reputation against the day that someone—like me—would discover that Cynthia Grey, attorney at law, was once a drug addict, that she had danced topless for a living. I understood that, only I wasn’t thinking. Instead, I let my mouth do all the work, my brain just standing there leaning on a shovel while I talked myself into a hole.

  “I ferret out people’s secrets,” I replied, trying to make my voice sound just as icy as hers. “I do it for money. And most of the people who hire me? They’re lawyers. You act like all this is new to you, Cynthia. But we both know it’s not. You’ve worked with PIs before; hell, you’ve worked with me. You want information you can take into court, you come to us. You want dirt you can use to help your clients and hurt your adversaries, you don’t even quibble about our fee. Well, what I’m doing now is no different than what you’ve hired done in the past. You’re no different than Hunter Truman.”