“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was having a look at your things here. I’d like to spend some more time looking at them, provided you’ve reached a decision about whether you want my help.”
“We have,” I said. “And we do. We’d like you to try to find out what happened to Cynthia’s family.”
“I’m not going to give you any false hopes,” Abagnall said. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and jotted down the occasional thing in his notebook. “This is a very cold trail. I’ll start with reviewing the police file on this, talking to anyone who remembers working on the case, but I think you should have low expectations.”
Cynthia nodded solemnly.
“I don’t see a lot here,” he said, motioning to the shoeboxes, “that jumps out at me, that offers any sorts of clues, at least right away. But I wouldn’t mind hanging on to these, for a while, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s fine,” Cynthia said. “Just so long as I get them back.”
“Of course.”
“What about the hat?” she asked. The hat she believed to be her father’s sat on the couch next to him. He’d been looking at it earlier.
“Well,” he said, “the first thing I would suggest is that you and your husband review your security arrangements here, perhaps upgrade your locks, get deadbolts on your doors.”
“I’m on it,” I said. I had already called a couple of locksmiths to see who could fit us in first.
“Because whether this hat is your father’s or not, someone got in here and left it. You have a daughter. You want this house to be as secure as it can possibly be. As far as determining whether this is your father’s,” he said, his voice low and comforting, “I suppose I could take it to a private lab and they could attempt to do a DNA test on it, to find hair samples from it, sweat from the inside lining. But that won’t be cheap, and Mrs. Archer, you’d need to provide a sample for comparison purposes. If there turned out to be a link between your DNA and what they might find on this hat, well, that might confirm that this was indeed your father’s, but it won’t tell us where he is or whether he’s alive.”
I could tell, looking at Cynthia, that she was starting to feel overwhelmed.
“Why don’t we just leave out that part of it for now,” I suggested.
Abagnall nodded. “That would be my advice, at least for the time being.” Inside his jacket, his cell phone rang. “Excuse me one second.” He opened the phone, saw who was calling, answered it. “Yes, love?” He listened, nodded. “Oh, that sounds wonderful. With the shrimp?” He smiled. “But not too spicy. Okay. I’ll see you in a bit.” He folded the phone and put it away. “My wife,” he said. “She gives me a call about this time to let me know what she’s making for dinner.”
Cynthia and I exchanged glances.
“Shrimp with linguini in a hot pepper sauce tonight,” he said, smiling. “Gives me something to look forward to. Now, Mrs. Archer, I wonder, do you think you have any photos of your father? You’ve provided some of your mother, and one of your brother, but I have nothing for Clayton Bigge.”
“I’m afraid not,” she said.
“I’ll check with the Department of Motor Vehicles,” he said. “I don’t know how far back their records go, but maybe they have a photo. And perhaps you could tell me a bit more about the route he traveled for work.”
“Between here and Chicago,” Cynthia said. “He was in sales. He took orders, I think it was, for machine shop supplies. That kind of thing.”
“You never knew his exact route?”
She shook her head. “I was just a kid. I didn’t really understand what he did, only that it meant he was on the road a lot of the time. One time, he showed me some pictures of the Wrigley building in Chicago. There’s a Polaroid shot of it in the box, I think.”
Abagnall nodded, folded his notebook shut and slipped it into his jacket, then handed each of us a business card. He gathered up the shoeboxes and got to his feet. “I’ll be in touch soon, let you know how I’m progressing. How about you pay me now for three days of my services? I wouldn’t expect to find the answers to your questions in that time, but I might have an idea whether I think it’s reasonable to think that such a thing is possible.”
Cynthia went for her checkbook, which was in her purse, wrote out a check and handed it to Abagnall.
Grace, who had been upstairs all this time, called down, “Mom? Can you come up here for a second? I spilled something on my top.”
“I’ll walk Mr. Abagnall to his car,” I said.
Abagnall had his door open and was about to plop down into his seat when I said, “Cynthia mentioned that you might want to talk to her aunt, to Tess.”
“Yes.”
If I didn’t want Abagnall’s efforts to be a complete waste, it made sense for him to know as much as possible.
“She recently told me something, something she’s not yet disclosed to Cynthia.”
Abagnall didn’t beg, but waited. I told him about the anonymous donations of cash.
“Well,” he said.
“I’ll tell Tess to expect you. And I’ll tell her she should tell you everything.”
“Thank you,” he said. He dropped into the seat, pulled the door shut, powered down the window. “Do you believe her?”
“Tess? Yes, I do. She showed me the note, the envelopes.”
“No. Your wife. Do you believe your wife?”
I cleared my throat before responding. “Of course.”
Abagnall reached over his shoulder for the seat belt, snapped it in place. “One time I had a woman call me up, wanted me to find someone, went to see her, and can you guess who she wanted me to locate?”
I waited.
“Elvis. She wanted me to find Elvis Presley. This was around 1990, I think it was, and Elvis had been dead about thirteen years at that point. She lived in a big house, had lots of money, and she had a few screws loose as I’m sure you might have guessed, and she’d never so much as met Elvis in her entire life and had no connection to him whatsoever, but she was convinced that the King was still alive and just waiting for her to find and rescue him. I could have worked for her for a year, trying to track him down for her. She could have been my early retirement plan, this lady, bless her heart. But I had to say no. She was very upset, so I explained to her that I’d been hired once before to find Elvis, and that I’d found him, and he was fine, but wanted to live the rest of his life in peace.”
“No kidding. And did she accept that?”
“Well, she seemed to at the time. Of course, she might have called some other detective. For all I know, he’s still working on the case.” He chuckled softly to himself. “Wouldn’t that be something.”
“What’s your point, Mr. Abagnall?” I asked.
“I guess the point I’m making is, your wife really wants to know what happened to her parents and her brother. I wouldn’t take a check from someone I thought was trying to string me a line. Your wife isn’t trying to string me a line.”
“No, I don’t think she is, either,” I said. “But this woman who wanted you to find Elvis, was she trying to string you a line? Or did she really believe, in her heart, that Elvis was still alive?”
Abagnall gave me a sad smile. “I’ll report back to you folks in three days, sooner if I learn anything interesting.”
16
“Men are weak - not you, of course – and they let you down, but just as often it’s the women who’ll really betray you,” she said.
“I know. You’ve said this before,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Getting sarcastic. He didn’t like it when she got like that. “Am I boring you, sweetheart?”
“No, it’s okay. Go ahead. You were saying. Women will betray you, too. I was listening.”