35
As Emily read Phil’s file, she recognized the pseudo-authoritative language he had often used in constructing statements for clients when she was still serving as typist for him.
In certain instances I have included photographs, copies of official documents, audiotapes, and newspaper accounts. I think they are sufficient to corroborate this assembly of facts. But these are not the only ones I have. If there are gaps or discrepancies between this account and other versions of the story, I can make available other documents, photographs, recordings, or independent narratives by others to verify what I say here.
I first met Theodore Forrest on October 23 eight years ago. He called my office at 9:15 A.M. and made an appointment to speak to me about a missing-person case. My colleague Samuel Bowen and I met with Mr. Forrest at 1:30 P.M. that day in my office. He told us he lived on a country estate outside Fresno, and that his sixteenyear-old daughter, Allison, had been missing since late July.
She recognized that what she was reading was the same story that Sam had just told her. But it wasn’t, because it was Phil who was telling it. She pictured him as she read, and then she reached the end of the story Sam had told her. He and Sam delivered the girl to Theodore Forrest at the Espinoza Ranch, received their payment in the form of a cashier’s check, and drove home.
Our business was concluded, and that was the last time I saw or spoke with Theodore Forrest for eight years. I did not initiate any contact with him, nor did he with me or my employees.
On the fourteenth of June this year, I was engaged in a project intended to increase the income of Kramer Investigations. Over the previous twenty years, the Kramer agency had served a great many satisfied clients. Some clients had been assisted in a oncein-a-lifetime matter: a divorce, a lawsuit, a search for hidden assets, a defense against criminal charges. But it seemed to me that it might be useful to compile a mailing list of former clients and remind them that the agency was still there to fulfill their needs.
Emily could hear Phil’s voice saying the words, as though he were dictating them. She had been hearing him since she had begun to read, but now she could see him, too. It was June 14, only a few months ago. Phil was sitting in the office. He was behind his desk in the glassed-in room. She saw him through the clumsy, overly formal narrative he was typing on the computer, and then without at first expecting it or wanting to, she began to supply the other parts Phil had left out. Part of what she was seeing was memory, and where memory was not enough, her imagination supplied the rest, and he was alive again in her mind.
In her imagination, Phil was wearing the light gray super-100 wool pants that she had bought him around Easter. He had on a blue oxford shirt, and hanging on the spare chair at the side of the room was his navy summer-weight blazer. He wore a coat only when he was with a client or in court. It had been hot since the tenth of May, even though May and June were usually cool and overcast in Los Angeles. This year it had seemed to Phil that the climate had changed, and the little break that the June weather brought had been revoked.
Emily pictured him looking out through his glass wall toward the doorway. What was there to look at but April? She was so far away on the other side, and as he watched her, she must have seemed unreachable. Phil loved to touch, to put his hand on a small shoulder or around a thin waist, but he couldn’t right now. She was probably talking on the telephone, reminding clients to pay on time. Emily had noticed she had a pretty voice, like a singer, and it seemed to disarm deadbeat clients and make them send in a check here and thereoften it was just a token payment-as though they were giving her a little present.
Phil must have had a feeling of cynical amusement whenever he saw the smile appear on her face and knew that she had gotten one of them to agree. He would have said, “The stupid bastards.” That would describe him, too, more than any of them. She knew now he was as susceptible to a pretty woman as any fourteen-year-old boy. He was a man who made resolutions, but these had probably all been broken when the first temptation presented herself. The resolutions undoubtedly never lasted long enough to include him actually turning a woman down and watching her walk away forever. She imagined that he had watched April through the glass for a few more seconds, and then forgave himself. He would have said it didn’t really do any harm unless Emily found out, and he had always taken precautions to keep Emily from suspecting. He had kept her ignorant and resigned to a life she didn’t really understand.
Emily stopped herself. That was a false note. Phil would never have called her ignorant in his thoughts. He would have fooled himself long ago into believing he was protecting his wife from being hurt. He would have said male promiscuity was an inevitable force of nature, but that there was no reason to hurt Emily’s feelings.
But probably he wasn’t thinking about Emily at that moment, only about April. She was sweet and loving, and when she looked at Phil, he must have felt young again, and attractive. It had been a long time since Emily had looked that way at him. Pete’s death had been the major moment of her life. Since then she had looked at Phil as a partner in her hopes and disappointment, an old friend suffering with her.
Phil did a lot of brooding during the past year. Emily guessed that he had been getting ready to make a change in his life. He was coming up on his forty-fifth birthday, and for some reason, it was affecting him more than any earlier one had. Maybe for him it was Pete, just as it was for Emily. It was going to be five years since the crash, a big, round number.
Phil had always been intellectually and emotionally involved in his work, but not long ago, he had told her he could see the end of the detective business. He was being pinched. On one side there were huge security companies that provided an umbrella service against unpleasantness. They monitored alarm and surveillance systems for businesses, swept offices and phones for bugs, took care of paper shredding and burning, did background checks on employees, rivals, and customers. They supplied bodyguards for foreign travel, and forensic specialists for testifying in court.
On the other side, there were small, low-end operators. Those guys would tap telephones, do black-bag jobs to steal papers from offices and houses, threaten or beat up opposition witnesses. They seemed to spend every day with one foot in a jail cell. But the other foot was in the bank, on the way in to cash a fat check.
Phil wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, but he had said several times that he was in a game he was losing gradually, and all he could do was try to make his chips last as long as possible. Now maybe he had decided it was time to stand up and cash in.
According to Ray, for a couple of years, Phil hadn’t been able to concentrate on the actual cases that came in. He seemed to have occupied his time looking for grand strategies and shortcuts. If he could have gotten to work again-really working-he might not have felt this way.
During one of these conversations Emily had wondered aloud if he was in a midlife crisis. He had been insulted. What the hell was a midlife crisis? Were troubles supposed to happen only when you were a child or a dying man? He supposed that if he made it to ninety, then fortyfive was the exact definition of midlife. And he was sure as hell in a crisis. He had to do something that worked soon.
Phil’s written narrative said: “For several years, Kramer Investigations had been running at a deficit. I had cut costs by not replacing personnel who left. I had been keeping the business going by using my family savings to keep the office open and the employees paid.” Emily stopped. There it was: the explanation of where the money had gone, and the halfhearted way he had been running the office. He had been trying to keep it alive.