to work the last quarter inch of a joint that smelled like buffalo dung. Walter returned the ungrateful Freddy to his platoon. The CO covered his ass by sending the MPs a report saying there had been a mistake, that Specialist 4th Class F. Russo had been injured while off duty and had thus been unable to contact his unit until that morning. The written report credited Pfc. Walter Sherman with the “rescue.”
Walter’s Vietnam was an evil funhouse with no sense of proportion and few secrets. Everyone soon had a version of the event-and the Locator tag was born. Two weeks after, Walter’s CO received an order assigning Walter to Headquarters Company. Now he was to find someone else-not an AWOL, not a political. This one was a bona fide POW. They airdropped Walter in the middle of fucking nowhere and he cursed himself all the way down. Still cursing, he trudged alone into the buggy jungle to find a captured American helicopter pilot. The officers who sent him on this mission and the helicopter crew that delivered him never expected to see Walter Sherman again. He turned up three weeks later with a gangrenous toe and identifiable fragments of the pilot’s body. Walter was soon a sergeant and his only job after that was finding people. Sometimes he looked for Americans, other times Vietnamese. He found them more often than not, mildly bemused that others could not. Then Walter went home to civilian life, too old and too wise for college.
When the Colonel called, Walter was working whatever hours he could for a food distribution warehouse. He pushed boxes of fruit juice from here to there and loaded cases of canned vegetables onto trucks. Some weeks he worked seven days and overtime. Other weeks he had no work at all.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked the Colonel.
“Find her. Bring her home.”
“Well, I got a job now, and I have to work-”
“I’m not asking favors, son. I have money and I’ll pay you whatever it is.” That sound again.
“Okay, sir,” said Walter. And so saying he stumbled onto the path that brought him a better life.
He found the Colonel’s daughter four days later in Panama City, Florida. She was over her head in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, and not always rock ‘n roll. He didn’t clean her up. He just took her home. The Colonel paid Walter a thousand dollars. During much of the flight to New York he kept his hand in his pocket, on the money.
Locator.
Reputations grow most quickly in sensitive lines of work. Walter had a talent made for an apparently insatiable market. The sons and daughters of notable people-rich ones, celebrities, public figures; mostly, in fact, the daughters-were opting for the AWOL life in very impressive numbers. Almost all of the younger ones, the kids in their early teens, were into sex and drugs. Once they had some of either they couldn’t get enough. For the older ones, the college kids, it was parents driving them over the edge, and they just had to get away. Rarely did any have any idea of how to avoid being captured. Their survival skills amounted to a credit card and a Holiday Inn. They were easy for Walter, if not others, to catch.
He found wives who’d slammed the door and peeled off in the Mercedes and forgotten the way back. There were endless embarrassing family members, the boozy, brawling brother-in-law, the loving husband gone deep underground, the off-kilter auntie who thought the better of coming home from the club one day. It might be the CEO taking a breather from heterosexual pretense, so much in love that he failed to notice the passing of the time. It might be his horsehide-happy spouse. The kinkier the sex, the more anxious the contracting party; the more the client was more than willing to pay.
Famous, wealthy, and public people, Walter quickly discovered, can be embarrassed by almost anyone close to them. When those close disappeared, when they went missing or lost, and especially when they seriously intended to stay that way, Walter was the man their protectors found to find them. He much preferred the droll situations, the high-priced peccadilloes. It was the melancholy Walter could do without, the hard-core human interest.
He made it his business to offer his clients the commodity they held most precious: privacy. He didn’t start a firm. He didn’t promote himself. He did not become Walter Sherman, P. I. He didn’t print cards, open an office, have a secretary, or even a phone. He worked only by referral. You couldn’t get to him unless you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone else. Consequently, he did not do this work often, and for another year continued his shifts at the warehouse. But that, his mother pointed out, was how to really advertise discretion.
Back then, if you did your due diligence and actually managed to talk to Walter Sherman, you did so on his mother’s line. And before he stepped foot out of her house, you’d had someone hand-deliver a box full of fifties and hundreds.
St. John
“Off the rack?” asked the old black man sitting at one of Billy’s tables, the square, chronically creaky one nearest the front. “I don’t think so!”
He was short and thin like an old broom handle. He wore a close-cut white beard and had almost no hair under a pink baseball cap sporting the red bulldozer logo of a construction company on St. Thomas. His small, delicate, deeply creased face always seemed to be smiling, and maybe it was. The smile showed a full set of wonderfully large and strong-looking yellow teeth. Ike had to sit near the front because he smoked cigarettes one after another and Billy hated smoke. That particular dislike struck Walter as a singular disadvantage for a man who owned a bar. But there it was.
“Tailor made,” said Walter.
Ike nodded contentedly. “New York or Hong Kong? I’ll say Hong Kong. They make a lot of suits over there in Asia.” Ike nodded again, this time definitively.
“Italy.” Walter told him.
“Italy?” Ike half-whispered, half in agreement, half not. “What you think, Billy?”
Billy Smith wasn’t his real name-William Mantkowski was-but the locals laughed at that jumble of sounds and divided it into five parts, with witty pauses between each and prolonged laughter at the end. After a month on St. John, William Mantkowski rechristened himself Billy Smith. He bought a bar called Frogman’s and, once in charge, changed absolutely nothing except the name on the sign out front. No one on St. John asks a white man where his money comes from. That was eleven years ago. Walter had been a regular at Frogman’s, and, like the furniture, stayed.
“New York,” said Billy, leaning back on the other side of the bar opposite Walter at the far end. His skinny, ostrich-skinned elbows rested on the faded gray formica liquor shelf behind him. He stood there, tall and bone- white, almost as white, it seemed to Walter, as his ugly rugby shirt, shaking his head like he had some great wisdom he was about to impart. “Italian tailor, maybe, but the suits are from New York. Where exactly, who knows. But New York.” He meant that he couldn’t specify where in Manhattan this New York tailor tailored. He jutted his thick, black-stubbled jaw.
“They all from New York?” Ike squinted as he pursued the investigation, absently blowing smoke from his mouth into his nose.
“Ike, that shit will kill you,” Billy growled. “Yeah, they’re all from New York, and the suits too. Right Walter?”
Walter shook his head. “Made in Italy.”
“Hong Kong,” mumbled Ike.
“Write it up, Billy,” said Walter, confirming closure.
Billy shambled to the center of the bar, grabbed a blue chalk stub from beside the fifty-year-old cash register, and carefully printed several more words onto the four-foot-square rimless blackboard propped against the streaked and pitted mirror. They were: “New York/Hong Kong/Italy.” He was confident New York would garner the most votes.
“Walter, you know the problem with New York?”
“No, Ike, what’s the problem with New York?”
“Too big,” the old man said gravely. “Too damn big.”
In that instant Walter’s thoughts alighted again on Tom Maloney and the substantial possibility that by bedtime he’d have in hand just the type of assignment he liked best-one involving excellent money and minimal human interest-which caused him to surprise his friends with a sweetly incongruous smile. “And too fucking cold in
