As he remembered, he could still see her in the bright sunlight, the most naked and exposed he had ever seen anyone up to then, and she was amazing and beautiful. Even then he was awed at the generosity and bravery she had. He loved her, and loved even the self he had been on that day, too, because of how young and clumsy and stupid and sincere they were then.
As Hobart approached Valerie, his hand reached out to her. She spun to turn away from him and said, “It’s getting late. I need time to stop at the bank before work.”
He stood there with his hand held out, feeling the wind blowing on his palm. Then he lowered his hand and followed. She stayed ahead of him, and she seemed to Hobart to be going faster now that they were on their way back, and it stung him.
When they reached the edge of the plateau and she started down the incline, he decided not to chase her, and she got still farther ahead. He watched her, letting her lengthen her lead until she was small and he no longer heard her feet on the stone and gravel.
He kept moving down the slope at his own steady pace. He watched her reach bottom, then raise her hand to shield her eyes and lookup at him for a second or two. Then she turned and walked back to the trailer where she lived, went inside, and closed the door.
Hobart reached the bottom and walked at an unhurried pace along the path to the rectangle of asphalt. He passed her trailer without stopping and walked straight to where his car was parked. He got into the car, pulled his seat belt across his body, and saw the door of Valerie’s trailer fly open. She was out and moving toward him. He started the engine, and he saw her walk faster. He pretended he didn’t see her, turned his head, and backed the car up to turn around and head for the exit.
She appeared beside him and rapped on his window, hard, so he would press the button to lower it. “Where are you going?”
“You said you have to get ready for work, so I figured I might as well get on the road.”
“Just like that?”
He stared at the dashboard, then raised his head and looked up at Valerie. “Don’t you ever wonder what it would have been like if we could have kept from punishing each other?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied. “I don’t do that to you.” She stared at him, the muscles in her neck taut. “I felt insecure when you got that call. I was trying to get over it. I would have. I am.”
“Good.” His voice was flat. “It was just business. Have a good evening at the restaurant. Get a lot of tips.”
“I was over it, and now you’re just being mean.”
He hesitated and then said, “I think it’s a shame that whenever I reach out, you hold me off, and then push me farther away. It’s such a waste.”
“It’s because it’s too late.”
“We’re here now. We’re both alive and thirty-eight years old. I have enough money so you could call the restaurant and say you’re not coming back. We could stay together and live, just the way we wanted to when we were kids.”
“That was supposed to happen twenty years ago, Jerry. If you wanted it, you could have had it. Too much has happened since then. We know too much, we’ve done too much.”
“You’re doing it again. You’re denying yourself a chance to be happy just to get back at me.”
“What makes you think that just being with you is what would make me happy?”
“I’ll be seeing you, Valerie.” He turned in his seat, backed the car up the last few feet, and shifted to Drive.
She stayed beside him. “When? When will you be back?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know that it matters.” He drove out of the trailer park onto the access road, went past Hadley’s to the stop sign, and turned onto the interstate, headed west toward Los Angeles.
9
Emily sat beside April at the reception desk and patiently explained the process again. “The finance company lends money to people to buy things-say it’s a TV set. The company offers this customer a period of twelve months with no payments. When the year is up, the customer has to start paying back the three thousand bucks he owes for the flat-screen high-definition TV Only in the meantime, his wife ran off with a neighbor who wasn’t sitting in front of a TV all day. The finance company wants the customer to start making payments, but he sold the house and moved away. The finance company puts together a list of these people and sends it to us. Here it is. We go down the list finding out where they live now.”
Emily saw the expression of labored thought on April’s face, but kept her own expression bland and calm. She had to keep the agency operating. She had to hold her emotions inside, so the others couldn’t see her uncertainty, and maybe so they didn’t sense the ferocious need she had for their help. She had to keep performing each of the small, irritating tasks, because if the agency died, so would her chance to know what had happened to Phil.
“It doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Very good.” Emily smiled. “The glimmerings of a conscience in one so young.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“This is not fun. It’s survival. I’m trying to make the payroll for this week, and skip-tracing is something I know how to do. The people who owe the finance company are mostly good people who don’t intend to screw anybody. But they do owe the money.”
“Okay,” April said. “I just feel funny, chasing regular people for money.”
“We’re not getting into that end of it, and I hope we never have to. Let’s do a couple of the traces on this list.”
Emily turned the computer keyboard so she could reach it, and typed the name, Social Security number, and driver’s-license number in the blank form on the screen, then clicked on “Search.”
“You’re such a good typist.”
“Thanks. Typing used to be what paid the rent.” It occurred to Emily that April probably thought of the boss’s wife as a spoiled rich woman who spent her days getting facials and pedicures and going to the gym. After an instant she realized that she had not worked in the office since about the time when April was in kindergarten. April wasn’t much older than her son Pete would have been.
The rest of the blank spaces on the skip-trace template on the screen began to fill themselves in rapidly: current address, current employer, vehicles registered. “Ah,” she said. “This one has moved to Oregon. Save it, print it out, and go down the list to the next one. I’ll be back in a bit to see how you’re making out. I’ll catch the phones.” Emily went back to Phil’s office and sat at his desk.
Emily had been married to a detective long enough to recognize that the police effort was essentially over. If the homicide detectives found nothing in the first week, they probably wouldn’t find anything later. They had too many murders to spend all their time on an investigation that had stopped producing new information. For a year or two, the murder book they had compiled for Phil would stay within Detective Gruenthal’s reach, and then it would be archived to make room for newer cases. Emily had to do what was necessary to keep the case alive, and the first thing she had to do was keep the detective agency going.
If she had to close the agency, there would no longer be detectives she could ask to follow leads in Phil’s murder, and she could no longer search their memories for things they might have observed in the weeks before Phil was shot. There would be nobody to explain anomalies she found in the case files, payment receipts, and phone records. There would be no office, and the telephones would be disconnected. Anybody who had a tip about Phil’s death that might get them in trouble would think there was nobody left to tell but the police.