"He owe you money?" asked Willeford, without removing his gaze from the screen.
"Not yet," I replied.
"Good. You owe him money?"
"Not yet," I repeated.
"Pity. Still, I'd keep it that way if I were you." He turned himself toward me. "What can I do for you, son?"
It felt odd to have someone call me "son" at thirty-four. I almost felt compelled to show some ID. "My name's Charlie Parker."
He nodded in recognition. "I knew your granddaddy, Bob Warren. He was a good man. Hear you may be moving in on my patch, Charlie Parker."
I shrugged. "Maybe. Hope there'll be enough work for both of us. Buy you a beer?"
He drained his glass and called for a refill. I ordered coffee.
"'The old order changeth, yielding place to new,'" said Willeford sadly.
"Tennyson," I said.
He smiled approvingly. "Nice to see there are still some romantics left." There was more to Willeford than long lunches in a dark bar. With his kind, there usually is.
He smiled and saluted with his new beer. "Well at least you're not a total philistine, son. Y'know, I've been coming to this place for too many years. I look around and wonder how much longer it'll be here, now that they're building fancy apartments and cute little stores on the port. Sometimes I think I ought to chain myself to some railings in protest, 'cept I got a bad hip and the cold hurts my bladder." He shook his head sadly. "So, what brings you to my office, son?"
"I was hoping you could tell me about Billy Purdue."
He pursed his lips as he swallowed his beer. "This professional, or personal? 'Cause if it's personal, then we're just talking, right? But if it's professional, then you got your ethics, you got your client confidentiality, you got your poaching, although-and here I'm speaking personally, you understand-you want to take Billy Purdue as a client, then be my guest. He lacked some of the basic qualities I look for in a client, like money, though from what I hear he needs a lawyer more'n a PI."
"Let's call it personal, then."
"Personal it is. He hired me to find his birth parents."
"When?"
"Month or so back. He paid me two-fifty up front-in ones and fives, straight out of the cookie jar-but then couldn't pay anything more, so I dropped him. He wasn't real pleased about it, but business is business. Anyway, that boy was more trouble than arthritis."
"How far did you get?"
"Well, I took the usual steps. I applied to the state for nonidentifying information-you know, ages of the parents, professions, birth states, ethnicity. Got zilch, nada. The kid was found under a cabbage leaf."
"No birth records at all?"
He held up his hands in mock amazement, then took another huge mouthful of beer. I reckoned it took him three mouthfuls to a glass. I was right.
"Well, I headed up to Dark Hollow. You know where that is, up north past Greenville?" I nodded. "I had some other business up by Moosehead, figured I'd do Purdue a favor and carry on some of his work on my other client's time. The last guy who fostered him lives up thataways, though he's an old man now, older than me. His name's Payne, Meade Payne. He told me that, far as he knew, Billy Purdue's was originally a private adoption arranged through some woman in Bangor and the sisters at St. Martha's."
St. Martha's rang a bell, but I couldn't remember why. Willeford seemed to sense my struggle. "St. Martha's," he repeated. "Where that old lady killed herself last week, the one who ran away. St. Martha's used to be a convent and the nuns took in women who had, you know, fallen by the wayside. Except now all the nuns are dead, or Alzheimered out, and St. Martha's is a private nursing home, strictly low end. Place smells of pee and boiled vegetables."
"So no records?"
"Nothing. I looked through whatever files remained, which wasn't a whole lot. They kept a record of the births and retained copies of the relevant documents, but there was nothing that matched Billy Purdue. It didn't go through the books or, if it did, then somebody made sure to hide the traces. No one seemed to know why."
"You talk to this woman, the one who arranged the adoption?"
"Lansing. Cheryl Lansing. Yeah, I spoke to her. She's old too. Jeez, even her kids were getting old. All I seem to meet is old people-old people and clients. I think I need to make some young friends."
"People will talk," I said. "You'll get a reputation."
He laughed to himself. "Can you be a sugar daddy without having any cash?"
"I don't know. You could try, but I don't think you'd get very far."
He nodded and finished his beer. "Story of my life. Dead folks get more action than I ever did."
So Cheryl Lansing was the woman who had arranged Billy Purdue's adoption. She obviously had more than a professional interest in him if she was still trying to help out his ex-wife and his son three decades later. I pictured the bag of clothes, and the box of food, and the small wad of bills in Rita Ferris's hand. Cheryl Lansing had seemed like a nice woman. The news of the two deaths would hit her hard, I thought.
I called for another beer and Willeford thanked me. He was pretty stewed by now. I felt like a great guy, getting him so drunk that he wouldn't be able to work for the rest of the day just so I could satisfy my crusading urge.
"What about Cheryl Lansing?" I pressed.
"Well, she didn't want to talk about Purdue. I kept at her but it was no use. All she would say was that the mother was from up north, that she arranged the adoption at the request of the sisters, and that she didn't even know the woman's name. Apparently, she made some money brokering adoptions for the nuns and passed on a portion of the proceeds to them, except this one was pro bono. She had a copy of a birth certificate, though, but the parents were John and Jane Doe. I figured there had to be a record of the birth somewhere."
"What did you do?"
"Well, through what Payne could tell me and by checking the records, I found that most of the people who fostered Billy Purdue also came from up north. Farthest south he got was Bangor, until he left for Boston when he was old enough. So I asked questions, put up notices with approximate dates of birth, even took out an advertisement in some of the local papers, then sat around and waited. Anyway, the money had run out by then and I didn't see as how Purdue would be able to come up with any more.
"Then I got a call, saying I should talk to a woman in the old folks' home up in Dark Hollow, which brought the focus back to St. Martha's." He paused and took a long slug of beer. "Well, I told Billy that I might have something and asked him if he wanted me to continue. He told me he had no more money, so I told him that, regrettably, I would have to terminate our business relationship. Then he chewed me out some, threatened to smash up my office if I didn't help him. I showed him this-" He pushed back his jacket to reveal a Colt Python with a long, eight-inch barrel. It made him look like an aging gunfighter. "And he went on his way."
"Did you give him the name of the woman?"
"I would have given him the coat off my back to get rid of him. I figured it was time to beat a strategic retreat. If I'd retreated any faster, I'd have been going forward again."
My coffee was cold in the mug before me. I leaned over the bar and poured it into a sink.
"Any idea where Billy might be now?"
Willeford shook his head. "There is one more thing," he said.
I waited.
"The woman in St. Martha's? Her name was Miss Emily Watts or, least, that's what she called herself. That name ring a bell with you?"
I thought for a while but came up with nothing. "I don't think so. Should it?"
"She's the old lady who died in the snow. Strange stuff, don't you think?"