He tried to slide away, but I slid with him. He watched the racing, I watched him, watched him wilt under my gaze. I knuckled his head, twice, and he just shrank away, like a slug shrinking away from salt.
“What’s the connection, Richard?”
“Forget about it.”
“No, I want to hear.”
“It’s not important.”
“Sure it is.”
“What are you doing here? Get the hell out of here. Leave me alone, or I’m going to tell Monica you hit me.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” I said. I leaned close, so close my lips were almost touching his ear. “Here’s a lesson for you, boy. There are two types of people in the world, users and tools. You want to be a user, you want to turn your sister into a whore, but you’ll always be just a tool. And you want to know why? Because you have to be able to read people to be a user, and you are functionally illiterate. See, here’s the thing, Richard: You thought I came here because I have the hots for Monica, that I have her name tattooed on my lustful little heart, but you’re wrong. She’s not the Adair whose name I have tattooed on my heart. How do you like them apples?”
He turned and stared at me, and there was fear on his doughy face and in his yellow eyes. The couch shifted as his butt muscles clenched.
Just then the toilet flushed. Richard’s head swiveled. Mr. Adair stepped out of the downstairs powder room. Monica and Mrs. Adair appeared from the kitchen with a tray.
“I have the tea and a fresh batch of Chex Mix,” said Mrs. Adair. “Oh, look at you two, getting along so nicely. What are you boys talking about?”
“Chantal,” I said.
35
It was the movies that finally determined it for me. The home movies, Super 8s unspooling on a projector Mr. Adair pulled out of the closet, the images splashed upon one of the living room walls. After I brought her name up, the Adairs seemed only too willing to talk about Chantal. They reminisced about her sparkling personality, told fond stories, recounted again the great day when Chantal danced on television on the Al Alberts Showcase. It was all sweet enough to make of me a disbeliever. Is there anything more dubious than someone else’s happy childhood? But then at one point, Mrs. Adair clapped her nervous hands and said, “Let’s see the movies,” and only a moment passed before the projector was whirring and the memories were flickering.
It took me a moment to get my bearings as the past unreeled for me on the living room wall. That young woman with the short black hair and sexy smile, with a body lithe enough to get me to thinking, the woman clapping her hands in delight at her children, oh yes, that must be Mrs. Adair. You could see now where Monica got her beauty. And that arrogant young buck with the muscles bursting proudly from beneath his tight shirt, that was Mr. Adair, when life still was full of electric promise. And that kid there, laughing and tossing leaves into the air, towheaded and pink-cheeked. Richard? It couldn’t be, could it? Yes it could. Richard. Gad.
I looked away from the images and scanned the room, the parents staring raptly at a time when life was perfect, Richard with his arms crossed, unhappy to be there but unable to look away. And Monica, sitting next to me, leaning forward, her face suffused with some strange nostalgia for an era that ended brutally before she was born. Something had turned the past of the film into the withered present, something more vicious than the mere passage of time.
“She just never came home,” said Mrs. Adair. “Went out one day to play and never came home.”
“We went door-to-door,” said Mr. Adair. “Had the police out, put up posters, walked every inch of the parks. The whole neighborhood came out.”
“Her picture was on the news for a solid week.”
“Nothing. And it’s the not-knowing that’s the worst of it, like we’re still in the middle of it. The ache, it never leaves. It started in my chest before creeping into my bones. My doctor says it’s arthritis, because he doesn’t know.”
“Did she have friends?” I asked.
“She was very popular,” said Mrs. Adair. “Miss Personality. But none of her friends had seen her that day.”
“Who saw her last?”
“Richard saw her leave,” said Mr. Adair. “But it’s not his fault, it’s our fault. We let her go out, always. We trusted her, and we trusted everyone else.”
“Any idea where she was going, Richard?” I said.
“I told the police everything,” he said.
“Detective Hathaway,” said Mrs. Adair. “What a wonderful man, what a sweet man. He did everything he could.”
“He kept the case open for years,” said Mr. Adair. “Never gave up.”
“What did you tell him, Richard?”
“That I didn’t know where she went. Can we get back to the race?”
“Sometimes still, I get so angry,” said Mr. Adair, “angry at myself, at the world, at my own helplessness. Sometimes I still try to put my hand through the wall.”
Chantal Adair. My breath caught in my throat the first time she showed up on the screen, my chest throbbed. The name had been scrawled into my flesh and engraved deep in my consciousness, and now there, in front of me, in light and color and shadow, there she was, oblivious to the tragedy rising already behind her, moving to some jerky, otherworldly rhythm. To see her on that wall was to see a legend, a mythic hero come to life, like watching old movies of Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey, of a young Willie Mays loping like a leopard in the outfield.
“Oh, my sweet Chantal,” said Mrs. Adair.
Whether she was sweet or not, little Chantal, you couldn’t tell from the sun-drenched images in the movies. Her dark hair, flashing eyes, the glittery dance shoes she loved, the way she laughed, hugged, mugged for the lens. Already there was something self-conscious in her pose, something of the ingenue in her movements, like she knew already at age six how to turn and twist for the camera.
There was a little blond girl in many of the shots, about the same age as Chantal, throwing snowballs and laughing as she roughhoused. She marched and ran while Chantal pranced.
“My cousin Ronnie,” said Monica. “Uncle Rupert’s daughter.”
“Uncle Rupert. He’s the guy who looks like Grant.”
“Who’s Grant?”
“The guy with the beard in the picture in my office.”
“That’s the one. My mother’s brother.”
“Was Ronnie close to Chantal?”
“They were like sisters,” she said.
“Thick as thieves,” said Mrs. Adair. “They were nothing alike, but they were together all the time. The loss really hit Ronnie hard.”
“Did Detective Hathaway have any ideas about what happened to Chantal?” I said.
“He had ideas,” said Mr. Adair. “Nothing that amounted to nothing, but he sure had ideas. And most of them centered on something he found in Chantal’s room.”
“What was that?”
“Strangest damn thing. A lighter. How she got hold of it, none of us could figure it out, but there it was, hidden in one of her drawers.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No, he took it as evidence, but I still remember it,” he said. “A gold lighter, well worn, with the initials W.R. engraved on its case.”
“Do you have a picture of Chantal I might be able to take with me?”
“We printed up tons for the search. A head shot. We still have them somewhere.” Mr. Adair pushed himself out of his chair with a soft moan. “Wait a minute and I’ll get one for you.”
And that was what I had in my pocket, that photograph, as Monica and I drove away from her girlhood home. The lighter with Wilfred Randolph’s initials was evidence of a possible connection between the disappearance of Chantal Adair and the robbery of the Randolph Trust. And if a connection really existed, then my client, definitely involved in one, most likely knew something of the other. Next time I saw him, I’d have to give him the third degree. But something else was tugging at my sleeve.