Everything but the Squeal Page 2

  “Ah,” I'd said, wishing they would leave. “Coffee, anyone?” I was on my fifth cup. Three to fuel the effort of cleaning the living room and two to deal with Mommy and Daddy. Missing children are not my specialty, not by a long shot. If they want to stay missing, they will. And even if you hit enough dumb luck to find them, how do you know whether you should send them home? Home is a generic word. It can mean where the heart is or where the horror is. Looking at Daddy, I wasn't ready to guess which it had been for Aimee.

  “No coffee,” Mommy said, pushing down gently on my wrist. I put the cup back on the table, and she allowed her hand to remain on mine. “And don't blame me for the name.” Despite the gentleness of her touch, as she turned her gaze to Daddy there was enough acid in her tone to etch glass. “All their names begin with A. His name is Alan, you see.”

  There were two boys, she said, and another girl. She spelled their names. Wherever possible, they all had extraneous vowels tucked here and there, sad little head starts on distinction. She finished the litany and looked over at him out of luminous blue eyes. “Isn't that cute?” she said to me. He concentrated on the bright squares of his plaid madras sport coat, paying particular attention to a kelly-green area on his right cuff.

  “Aimee’s the youngest,” I said neutrally. It was Saturday, and I wanted to be out of the house.

  “She's the baby,” Mommy said. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her, just a slender, expensively maintained woman well-wrapped in a sleeveless dress, long delicate tendons in her forearms, a big sapphire glittering on one hand, as dry and bright as her eyes. “She's also the problem child.”

  Daddy grunted something that could have been a negative. It could also have been gas.

  “How do you know she ran away?”

  “Well, she's missing.” She gave me the cool blue eyes full-bore. Daddy fidgeted impatiently in his chair, plucking at a button.

  “As opposed to, well, foul play,” I said. Inwardly I cursed Janie Gordon, whom I'd once brought kicking and screaming home to her mother, for telling her distant cousins the Sorrells where I lived and what a whiz I was.

  “She left a note, of sorts,” Mommy said. “Aimee’s not much of a writer.” She reached into the enormous Louis Vuitton purse on the floor at her feet and pulled out a much-creased piece of paper. Mommy, it read, I always hated it when you played your farty old music. A bunch of old geezers acting like their Young. But there's one song I like. Push Play.

  “Play?” I said.

  “This is pretty cute,” Mommy said with obscure pride. “I have to give Aimee credit for it.”

  Out of the purse came a little chrome cassette player. She put it on the coffee table in front of me. “It's the big black button,” she said. I pushed it.

  Paul McCartney's voice, distorted by the small speaker, sang the opening verse of “She's Leaving Home.” When he got to the words “stepping outside, she is free,” there was a click, and a young girl's voice, too close to the microphone, said, “Here's another one.” Four raucous, unmistakable guitar chords, and even before I heard the singer's voice, I knew it was the Kinks.

  “I can make the most ordinary little man in the world into a star”—Ray Davies leered, all pinky rings and cigar-smoke flash, while his brother Dave chopped the air into fuzzy heavy-metal chords. Then there was another click, and the young girl was back, a little farther from the mike this time. “That's all, folks,” she said. Then she giggled. And a bank of strings cut the giggle short, and Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow” all the way through. Then there was nothing.

  Daddy cleared his throat in the silence. “She's crazy about The Wizard of Oz” he said, shaking his head. “Punk music and The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Why wouldn't she be?” Mommy said with a rasp you could have struck a match on. “Dorothy got out of Kansas.”

  “She wants to be an actress?” I asked.

  “At her age, who doesn't?” Mommy said. “I sure as hell did.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen.” That was Daddy. “But she's mature for her age. She can take care of herself. I know she's okay.”

  Mommy and I looked at him in disbelief.

  “Well, I have to believe that, don't I?” he said defensively. “Stop staring at me like that, Mommy. Otherwise, where would I be?” It was his longest speech to date.

  “Where you should be, maybe,” Mommy said. “Worrying about her instead of yourself.”

  Daddy subsided. He looked back down at the bold squares in his plaid coat, moving a finger from one to another like someone tracing the moves in a classic chess game. His bony face worked slightly.

  “Got any pictures?” I asked.

  “They're almost a year old.” Mommy scooped out four little color shots taken for a yearbook: crumpled blue-paper background and the kind of lighting Joan Crawford made lifetime enemies to get. Daddy notwithstanding, Aimee was a young-looking twelve, a pretty little blond with a hopeful smile, but also with something knowing around the eyes, an expression that could have been either premature confidence or something much less attractive.

  I let out a sigh. I didn't want any part of it. “How long has she been gone?”

  “Six weeks,” Mommy said.

  “Any communication since she left?”

  “One note.” She pulled it out of the ubiquitous bag.

  “The note is how you know she's in L.A.?” I asked, opening it.

  “Yes.”

  “She's a good girl,” Daddy said suddenly. He sat up, buffed a cufflink, and crossed his ankles. “She and Mommy don't always see eye to eye, like women don't sometimes, but she can always talk to me. Always. If she has homework trouble or gets a crush on some little jerk, she'll always come to me with it. The boys really like her, though. They really like her.”

  Mommy's foot tapped the carpet as I opened the note. If Aimee was on the loose in Hollywood, being attractive to the boys was going to be a mixed blessing at best.

  The note was written in pencil on blue-lined paper. It said: Over the Rainbow. Then there was a telephone number.

  “Have you called?”

  “Five or six times,” she said. “No one had ever heard of her. I think a different man answered every time I called. Some of them sounded, well, like they were drunk or something. There was loud music and people talking and laughing in the background. It sounded kind of noisy and frantic.” She reached out and moved the tape recorder about a quarter of an inch to make it exactly parallel with the edge of the coffee table. Her hand shook very slightly. “It sounded awful,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “let's give it a try.”

  First I had to find my phone. It was wedged on one of the bookshelves, behind a warped and rippled copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a casualty of the perpetual leak in the living-room ceiling. I'd opened it up and leaned it against the phone to dry it out. The phone cord is long enough to let you place a call from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, so I took it over to the couch and sat, giving Mommy a grimace that was intended as an encouraging smile as I dialed. She was looking at her fingernails. Daddy cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a ton of popcorn.

  The phone rang two, three, four times, and then someone picked it up and dropped it. There was an interval of clattering and a thick male voice said something that sounded like “Yunh?”

  “Hi,” I said brightly. “Is Aimee there?”

  Mommy was still looking at her fingernails, but she was as still as an insect in amber. Daddy was gazing intently at the opposite wall and he'd poked his tongue into his cheek, adding one more lump to an already lumpy face.

  “Who?” the voice on the other end said. Head-banger music filtered through the wire. “Who the fuck you want, Jack?”

  “Aimee,” I said. “Aimee Sorrell. She gave me this number.”

  “I don't care if she gave you the clap, I never heard of her. Good-bye.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Tell me one thing, okay?”


  He paused. A woman made a sound in the background that could have been a laugh or a cry.

  “Depends,” he finally said.

  “Where are you? Where's this phone?”

  “It's a pay phone,” he said reluctantly.

  “Yeah, but where?” The woman in the background made that sound again. This time it sounded like a bray.

  The guy at the other end breathed heavily. “It's the pay phone at the end of the world,” he said. He hung up.

  Mommy and Daddy were both staring at me. “It's a pay phone,” I said, “with a single-digit IQ answering it. Sounds like a very public place, not ’21’ or Spago maybe, but not anyplace illegal either. It's a hangout.” Neither of them looked very impressed. Well, it wasn't very impressive. It was so unimpressive that it nettled me,sol picked up the phone again and called Al Hammond at home.

  Hammond is my pet cop. He'd kill me with his teeth if he knew I thought of him that way, but I can't help it. He's two hundred twenty-five pounds of whiskers, bass voice, and bigotry, tempered only by an uncontrollable desire to put the bad ones away and tuck the good ones safely into bed.

  “Yeah?” Hammond belched into the phone.

  “Jeez,” I said, “sorry to interrupt the well-digging or log-splitting, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “I was waxing the kitchen floor,” Hammond said.

  “Oh, Al,” I crooned. “How domestic.”

  “Well, I haven't really gotten to the waxing yet. Right now I'm in the middle of skinning a sheep so I'll have something to buff it with.”

  “Can you get me an address to go with a phone number?”

  “Could Einstein count to ten?”

  “And some idea of what's at that address?”

  “Some idea?” Hammond said. “Yeah, I guess I can manage to give you some idea.”

  “Five-five-five-one-four-two-four.”

  “Two-thirteen area?”

  “Yes.”

  “You at home?”

  “Just waiting for the sun to come out.”

  “Give me ten minutes. What do I get out of this?”

  “How about a big chocolate Easter bunny with your name on it?”

  “How about a drink at the Red Dog?”

  “Only one?”

  “Hold the phone.” He hung up without saying good-bye. He always does. He learned it from the movies.

  Mommy and Daddy were both watching me with a kind of repressed anticipation that made me feel like a broken TV set. It was time to disappoint them.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don't really think I can help you. This just isn't the kind of thing I do.”

  “I told you, Mommy,” Daddy said with grim satisfaction.

  “But Janie . . .” Mommy said. She wasn't going to give up.

  I held up a hand. “Janie was a couple of years ago. I found her because she wanted to be found. Her mother, I hope this doesn't offend you because you're related to her somehow, her mother is a bucket of loose marbles. She'd driven everyone else in her life crazy enough to leave, so she aimed it all at Janie, and then Janie left too. I brought her home twice because she was living wrong when she was on her own. That's the end of my experience with missing children.”

  Daddy got up. “Let's go,” he said.

  “Sit down, Al,” Mommy said. She pointed to his chair with an arm that was all muscle tone and electrical energy. Al sat.

  “There are about twenty-five thousand missing kids in L. A. at any given time,” I said. “I'm one man. The cops are better at this than I am. Have you gone to them?”

  “They made us fill out a report,” Mommy said. “As long as they have a report, they seemed to say, they'd done their job. They didn't even dial the number. At least you dialed the number.”

  “I'm going to get you an address, too,” I said. “But I'm afraid that's it.”

  “That's it, all right,” Daddy said, getting up again. “Look at this dump.” He glanced around my living room. It looked okay to me, but I could see his point. He hadn't seen it the night before. “You can stay and waste your time if you want,” he said without giving me a look. “I'll be in the car.”

  “I'll walk you down,” Mommy said, “but I want to talk with Mr. Grist for a moment or two more.” She took his arm and steered him to the door, throwing me a glance over her shoulder as she went. The glance said wait.

  I used the time to drop the coffee cups into the sink and to put the copy of Gibbon under the woodburner where it would dry more quickly. Five minutes later I'd decided on a jog at the beach followed by a sauna at UCLA, and she was back.

  “He's resting,” she said.

  “He looks like he could use it.”

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Just clam up.” She sat down again, reached into a pocket, and tossed onto the table three bright, hard little color Polaroids. I knew before I picked them up that I didn't want to. After I looked at them, I let out a slow, labored breath. “Oh,” I said.

  All three pictures showed Aimee, naked, standing up against a wall. There was a man's hand in the picture. The hand was reaching up, doing something obscene. Her eyelids in one of the shots drooped lopsidedly, one much lower than the other.

  I knew that look. It was the blink of someone who's deeply stoned. The eyes come down at different rates of speed. She had bruises on her arms and an angry, swollen mark in her navel that looked like a burn. The man's hand was just a man's hand. No watch, no rings, no tattoos, just five nasty fingers sprouting from the end of a hairy forearm. The wall behind Aimee was white and featureless.

  “He doesn't know about these,” I said, meaning Daddy.

  She held my eyes with hers. “No. They'd kill him. He had heart bypass surgery a few months ago. He weighed two-eighty then. There isn't enough of him left for something like this.”

  “When did they arrive?”

  “Last week. I was home when the mailman came. I'm always home. I had to leave so I wouldn't be there when he got back. I drove around for hours before I could face him without giving it away.”

  “Was there a note with them?”

  “It just said, ‘Don't do anything stupid. I'll be in touch.’ Nothing since.”

  “Have you got it?”

  She pulled a wallet out of her purse and a piece of paper out of the wallet. It was a single line, printed on what looked like a cheap dot-matrix printer, the most anonymous of all printing media. No envelope.

  “Who's seen the pictures?”

  “No one.”

  “No cops?”

  “Why would I show them to the cops in Kansas? She's here. And if I had showed them to the cops here, Daddy would have learned about them, wouldn't he?”

  “So you're carrying this alone.”

  She flicked the edge of the top picture with a painted nail. It made a sharp click. “I'm stronger than I look.”

  “I guess you are.” There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

  “But I don't know for how long,” she said. She made a sudden stab at her hair with her right hand, and her nails scraped her forehead. She was bleeding immediately. The phone rang.

  “Go into the bathroom,” I said, picking it up. “Press toilet paper to the cut until it stops. Hello?”

  She walked toward the bathroom as though her spine were made of steel. She took very small steps. The blood ran in a thin red line down her cheek.

  “Missing kid, huh?” Hammond said.

  “Why?” I could barely understand him. I was fighting the ghost-image of the photographs.

  “Tommy's Oki-Burger. Fountain, near Gardner. That's one of the places the kids go. It's a pay phone. And it's no place for somebody's baby. You plan to talk to your friendly neighborhood cop about this?”

  “Later.”

  “Whatever you say, pal. Got to go. The sheep's bleating.” He hung up again.

  I stacked the Polaroids into a neat little pile and aligned their edges precisely. Then I picked up the top one and studied it. Aimee's hair, so meticul
ously unfashionable in the yearbook photos, was matted and greasy-looking. There were dirt smudges on her wrists and elbows and a scab on her knee. She'd traveled a long way from Kansas City.

  After Mrs. Sorrell came out, tissue pressed to her forehead, I told her I'd do what I could. I forgot to ask about the fee. When she was gone, I studied the Polaroids again, trying to learn anything I could about Aimee's first starring role.

  3 - One After Thirty-nine

  “T he problem,” Bernie Siegel was saying as he stood on one leg, closed his eyes, and tried to touch the tip of his nose with his index finger, “is that the amount of intelligence on the planet is a constant, and the population is increasing.” Then he frowned in concentration and stuck his finger into his eye. He'd just failed the roadside sobriety test.

  Neither the gesture nor the sentence was as precisely articulated as Bernie might have liked, but most of us were three or four notches beyond the point where we would have noticed. The one exception was Bernie's girlfriend and sole source of support, Joyce, who was pregnant. She was following her doctor's advice, or maybe it was her own advice, since she was a doctor, and not drinking. She had the glow that comes with early pregnancy. The rest of us had the glow that comes with advanced intoxication.

  A fortieth birthday party is like trying to cut your wrists with an electric razor. It takes longer than you'd hoped it would, and there's no payoff. Although most of us had been doing our best, this evening was no exception.

  The candles were burning in Wyatt and Annie's living room, just as they had in the late sixties and early seventies, and the food, most of it fearsomely healthy, smelled the same as it had then. The birthday cake was carob. Annie thought that carob tasted like chocolate. She also thought that near-beer tasted like beer. The cake was enormous and slightly lopsided, and it said Forty is better than nothing. Most of us in attendance, if we'd been polled when Wyatt was twenty-five, wouldn't have put small amounts of money at favorable odds on his reaching twenty-six, much less forty. When Wyatt was twenty-five, any vampire sufficiently ill-advised to bite into his neck would have OD'd long before sunrise.