Phelan smiled. I’ll be damned. He tipped the chair’s seat into loading position and sat in it, like the boss should.
Mumbling.
“May I ask what your visit is in reference to?”
More mumbling, a lot of it. Then—Phelan hated this sound—sobbing. Not that he hadn’t prepared for it. He’d bought a box of Kleenex at the dime store for the brokenhearted wives. Stashed it in the desk’s bottom drawer next to the husbands’ fifth of Kentucky. Had his .38 license in his wallet, PI license on the wall, newly minted business cards on the desk. An ex-con impersonating a secretary.
Delpha Wade entered, closing the door behind her. “Can you see a client now, Mr. Phelan?”
“Bring her on.” He was rooting for a cheated-on society matron in crocodile pumps, her very own checkbook snapped inside a croc bag.
“You can go in now, Mrs. Toups.”
A bone-thin woman in yesterday’s makeup and rumpled shirtwaist took the doorway. Leatherette purse in her fists, little gold nameplate like a cashier’s pinned over her left breast. The two slashes between her eyebrows tightened. “You’re kinda young. I was looking for—”
“An old retired cop?” Delpha Wade said. On cop her neutral voice bunched. “Mr. Phelan has a fresh point of view.”
What Mr. Phelan had was a fresh legal pad. He wielded a ballpoint over it. “Please, sit down, Mrs. Toups. Tell me what I can do for you.”
Delpha Wade scooped an elbow, tucked her into the client chair, at the same time saying, “Can I get you some coffee? Cream and sugar?”
Phelan furrowed his own brow, trying to grow some wrinkles. Coffee, he thought. What coffee?
“Take a Coke, if you got one.”
The inner door closed behind Delpha Wade, and he heard the outer door shut too. His first client stammered into her story; Phelan’s ballpoint despoiled the virginal legal pad. The Kleenex stayed in their drawer. Caroleen Toups had her own hankie.
By the time his nonsecretary returned with a dewy bottle of Coke, Phelan had the story. The Toups’s lived over on the north side, not far off Concord, nothing that could be called a neighborhood, more like one of a string of old wooden houses individually hacked out of the woods. Her boy Richard was into something and she didn’t like it. He’d been skipping school. Running around all hours. Then last night Richard had not come home.
Gently, Phelan asked, “Report that to the police?”
“Seven o’clock this morning. They said boys run off all the time. Said been a bunch of boys running off lately. Four or five. Like it’s a club.”
Phelan silently agreed, having once woken up with two or three friends on a New Orleans sidewalk, littered, lacquered, and convinced somebody’d driven rebar through his forehead. “What does your husband think?”
“He passed last fall. Took a virus in his heart.” Her reddened eyes offered to share that grief with him, but Phelan bowed his head and went on.
“Does Richard have a favorite item of clothing?”
“Some silly shoes that make him taller. And a Johnny Winter T-shirt he bought at a concert over in Port Arthur.”
“Would you know if those are gone from his room?”
“I would… Mr. Phelan.” Having managed to bestow on T. Phelan’s callow mug that title of respect, Mrs. Toups looked at him hopefully. “They’re not.”
“Have a piggy bank?”
She snapped the purse open and took out a roll, Andrew Jackson on top. “Till about midnight,” she said, “I read the Enterprise. That’s where I saw your ad. After midnight I searched my son’s room with a fine-tooth comb. This was in a cigar box under his bed. Along with some baseball cards and twisty cigarettes. There’s $410 here. Ricky’s in tenth grade, Mr. Phelan. He don’t have a job.”
The phone rang in the outer office, followed by the light click of the reconditioned Selectric. “You wouldn’t a brought a picture of him?”
Mrs. Toups dug into the leatherette, handed over a school photo. Fair and baby-faced, long-haired like a lot of kids these days. Grinning like he was saddled on a Christmas pony. Ricky Toups when he still had a daddy.
The mother’s tired eyes held a rising rim of water. “Why I wanted you to look old and tough—you find Ricky, scare him good. I cain’t take any more a this.”
Phelan was jolted by a gut feeling, a pact connecting him to that haggard mother. He hadn’t expected it. “Okay,” he said quickly. While Mrs. Toups sipped her Coke, he scrawled her address and phone number, then jotted an inventory of Ricky’s friends. Make that friend, a neighbor girl, Georgia Watson. School? French High, Phelan’s own alma mater, an orange-brick sprawl with a patchy football field. The legal pad was broken in now.
He wrote her name on a standard contract and slid it toward her. He’d practiced the next part so he could spit it out without blinking. “Fee is seventy-five a day. Plus expenses.”
Nobody was blinking here. Mrs. Toups peeled off five Jacksons. “Could you start now?”
“First day’s crucial on a missing-child case,” Phelan said, like he knew. “You’re at the top of the schedule.”
He guided Mrs. Toups through the outer office to the door. To his right, Delpha Wade sat behind the secretary’s desk, receiver tucked into her neck, typing. Typing what? And where had she got the paper?
“A Mrs. Lloyd Elliott would like to speak with you about a confidential matter. Says her husband’s an attorney.” Delpha Wade’s dry voice was hushed, and she rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the universal sign for money.
She got that right. According to the Enterprise, Lloyd Elliott had just won some court case that paid him 30 percent of yippee-I-never-have-to-work-again.
Mrs. Toups stuck her reddened face back in the door, a last plea on it. But at the sight of Phelan taking the phone, she ducked her head and left.
“Tom Phelan,” he said. Crisply, without one um or you know, the woman on the phone told him she wanted her husband followed, where to, and why. She’d bring by a retainer. Cash.
“That’ll work. Get back to you soon. Please leave any relevant details with my… with Miss Wade. You can trust her.”
And don’t I hope that’s true, he thought, clattering down the stairs.
The band was playing when Phelan pulled up to French High School. God, did he remember this parking lot: clubhouse, theater, and smoking lounge. He lit up for nostalgia’s sake.
A little shitkicker perched on the trunk of a Mustang pushed back his Resistol. He had his boots on the bumper, one knee jackhammering hard enough to shiver the car. Phelan offered him a smoke.
Haughtily, the kid produced some Bull and rolled his own. “Take a light.”
Phelan obliged. “You know Georgia Watson?”
“Out there. Georgia’s in Belles.” The boy lofted his chin toward the field that joined the parking lot.
“What about Ricky Toups?”
The kid tugged down the hat, blew out smoke. “Kinda old to be into weed, ain’t ya?”
“That why people come looking for Ricky?”
Marlboro-Man-in-training doused the homemade, stashed it behind his ear. Slid off the trunk and booked.
Phelan turned toward the field, where the band played a lazy version of “Grazing in the Grass.” The Buffalo Belles were high-kicking, locked shoulder to shoulder. Line of smiling faces, white, black, and café au lait, bouncing hair and breasts, 120 teenage legs, kicked up high. Fondly remembering a pair of those white boots hooked over his shoulders postgame, he strolled toward the rousing sight.