“You keep tabs on the subject’s boyfriend or girlfriend if there was one. A lot of people, especially women, skip out because they’ve been having an affair with a married man and he plans to take off in three weeks and meet her in Yucatan or Hawaii or something. So you ask around, secretaries and whoever the subject used to work with, and if you hear rumors about an extramarital affair you keep tabs on the boyfriend.
“Now you’ll get divorced people where one of the parents doesn’t like the court’s ruling on child custody, so the parent steals his own kids or her own kids. Cases like that, where the kids are school age, we call up the school where the kids used to go. I say I’m the principal out here in Tulsa and I’m inquiring about the transcripts for these kids. And usually I’ll find out the transcripts have already been sent out to a school in Boise, Idaho. Bingo.
“Even the worst cases get solved sooner or later. Most of them.
“See, the thing is, is that people tend to stay with the same social level. They’re comfortable with their own kind of people and they seek out those kind of people. Eventually, see, there’s going to be a coincidence. Eventually they’re going to run into somebody from their old life that recognizes them. Maybe right away, maybe five years down the road. But it’ll happen. It always does. There’s only one way to prevent it, and that’s when they make themselves over into a totally different person. New interests, new social class, new everything. And there just aren’t a whole lot of people capable of doing that.
“And even then we get them sometimes. People make mistakes. And that’s what we look for, mistakes.”
He poked the cigar in his mouth, squinted through the smoke, spread both hands out with palms up and gave her a nasty little smile. “That’s how we do it, Mrs. LaCasse. And notice at no time do my fingers leave my hands.”
He chuckled at his little joke and she managed to smile appreciatively before she said:
“It’s utterly fascinating. I don’t—look. Let’s take it from the other end for a moment. Just hypothetically. It’s just so interesting. Do you mind? Suppose you take an ordinary housewife. Suppose one day she decides to disappear without a trace, and suppose, oh, let’s say she knows her husband is likely to hire someone like you to find her and she wants to make sure she doesn’t get found. How would a person go about disappearing so completely that even you couldn’t find him?”
“Ordinary woman, ordinary husband? I guess she might get away with it if she knew how. But of course that’d be different with somebody like you, Mrs. LaCasse. Somebody with a husband like yours, I mean.”
“That goes without saying.” She smiled yet again. “But I am curious.”
“I’ll tell you then. Your ordinary housewife in South Orange, you mean. There’s a lot of things she might do.
“For openers she’d have to clean out her bank accounts in cash and then throw away her checkbooks and all her credit cards.
“Best way to do that’s put it all in a wallet and let somebody else lay a false trail for her.
“How she does that, there’s a dozen ways. Railroad station’s pretty good. Trailways depots are okay. Airports aren’t so good because people tend to be a little more honest about lost possessions.
“Anyhow maybe she just gets on a turnpike in the direction opposite to the direction she’s really heading. She’d stop in one of those service area Howard Johnson’s and leave the wallet in the ladies’ room. Make it look like she left it behind by mistake. You know how women empty out their handbags when they’re trying to find the lipstick.
“The wallet may get turned in and returned to the husband, in which case he’s got a lead in the wrong direction, but people bein’ what they are it’s more likely somebody steals the wallet. Next thing you know they’ll be passing bad checks and running up credit card charges two hundred miles away, laying down a beautiful false trail for you. Am I boring you?”
She gave him another smile and tried to hide its insincerity. “If I get bored I’ll yawn. Go on, please.”
He did.
26 Getting off the freeway at Pass Avenue she is looking in the rear-view mirror again. It has become a habit too strong to break. And she’s thinking it would be a tasty irony if Ray Seale has been hired to find her: an irony because his life will hardly be worth a thimbleful of dust if it ever gets out that he’s the very one who taught her how to vanish.
It’s half-past three and hot. Doyle and Marian are sitting at one of the outdoor tables in the corral of Buffalo Bill’s Saloon, having what is probably not their first drink of the afternoon.
Graeme Goldsmith is with them.
Damn.
As she parks in front of a wagon wheel someone meanders into the bookshop and she sees Doyle get up from his table and carry his drink toward the shop. Mustache twitching in anticipation, he waves to her as she gets out of the car, then disappears inside in hope the customer is more than a browser.
She leaves the windows open and the car unlocked. There’s nothing in it worth stealing and if you close the windows it’s a furnace when you get back in.
There’s no graceful escape. She joins Marian and the Australian in the shade of the table’s umbrella.
Graeme lifts his beer toward her in a casual welcoming gesture. Coming from him it is at best a meaningless courtesy. He’s made it clear enough that he doesn’t like her. Perhaps it’s her personality; perhaps he just doesn’t like women.
In either case she feels no obligation to change his sentiments.
As she sits down, George, the aged waiter, saunters out from his post in the shade. Marian says, “An iced tea for herself, honey.”
“That’s lemon, no sugar, right?”
Jennifer—she thinks of herself as Jennifer now—confirms it with a nod and George retreats.
Marian says, “So anyway—sorry, Jennifer honey, just finishing the story—anyway,” she says to Graeme in her prairie twang, “Nick used to come around once in a while with a jug and his ukulele. He had a great tenor voice, you know. He and Doyle used to tie one on, sing those old songs, we had a ball in those days, and that’s how we first learned those bawdy tunes. We got the lyrics from Nick. You want the real lowdown, I think his widow’s still got his song collection. Maybe you ought to call her. She’s in the book.”
Jennifer has made the discovery recently that a vast part of ordinary human conversation is made up of idle memories. People spend more time telling one another shaggy dog anecdotes about incidents from their past than they seem to devote to any other social activity.
It makes things awkward when the only past you can admit to is one you make up as you go along—and then have got to remember forever.
Marian is still reminiscing. “Nick used to know Reagan pretty well back in the actors’ union days and when Reagan started running for governor I remember Nick just shook his head in wonderment. He’d always say, ‘Trouble with Ronnie is, you ask him the time of day, he’ll tell you how to build an Elgin watch but the trouble with Ronnie is, he don’t know how to build an Elgin watch.’”
Both of them laugh and Jennifer joins in it. Marian is drinking something blood red with a stalk of celery in it. Her pert face is sleepily content under the tight helmet of salt-and-pepper hair. She’s forty-eight and her skin is brown and crosshatched by a fine netting of lines but she’s an attractive woman: tiny, tidy, slim, with the abrupt sure movements of a bird. Behind the dark glasses are brown eyes that twinkle more often than not.
“This is my second bullshot,” she says. “We’re celebrating. You remember that idiot collector in Spokane?”