Since I had made no progress with a positive explanation for Amy’s collection of text messages, I went back to one of them. I’d realized earlier in the afternoon that there was a direct approach to finding out whom they were from. I hadn’t wanted to go that far then, and I hadn’t been drunk. Now I was.
I hit the green button and called the number.
After a few seconds of silence, I got an out-of-ser vice recording. I cut the connection, feeling relieved and disturbed. Where the hell was Amy? Was she okay? If so, why didn’t she call? How much longer should I leave it before going to the cops? I knew their likely response to a man with as little evidence as I had, but I was worried about her. The only other avenue I could think of was trying to find our car. I could try to check all the downtown parking lots, which would be a long-shot endeavor, but I suddenly found the idea compelling. At least I’d be doing something, the kind of legwork that had to lead somewhere. At the moment it was pouring rain outside. But maybe when it slacked off…
In the meantime I called home yet again. Still no reply, and it was now well after nine. I did the math and worked out that it had been about forty-six hours since we’d last spoken, a record in seven years. This forced me to believe that something was wrong and simultaneously made me want to believe it wasn’t—like seeing the doctor wince on reading your blood tests, even though you’ve spent the last six months wanting to know why you feel like shit.
As a distraction I went back to the phone to see if there was anything else I could find. The picture section had four files. Over the last year, Amy had developed a weird resistance to photographs. She dealt with them all day at work, of course, glistening product shots and endless casting pictures, but didn’t like being in them or seem to have much enthusiasm for taking them of anyone else. The first picture was the one she had previously used as the general wallpaper on her phone. It showed the two of us, heads together, laughing. I’d taken it with my phone a year and a half ago, at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. It was a good picture, and I didn’t like the fact that she’d evidently stopped using it. The next two were called Photo–76.jpg and Photo–113.jpg. Both were dark and grainy, and on such a small screen I couldn’t make anything out. The final picture was lighter, and while it still looked as if it had been taken in twilight, its subject was more evident. A man’s head and shoulders, shot from a distance of about six feet away. His face was shadowed. He wasn’t looking at the camera but turned away, as if unaware he was being photographed. This picture didn’t seem to have a title as much as an attached message:
Confirmed. Apologies for quality. You’ll be happy, though.
The number it had come from was not the same as that on the text messages. I laid the phone back on the table and took a swallow of beer. Going back to drinking Mack & Jack’s was beginning to seem like a good idea. I knew it wasn’t. I also knew that wasn’t likely to stop me. When the drinks waitress came into view, I looked up at her but then turned back as I heard my phone ring.
I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?” I said. “Is that you?”
It wasn’t Amy. It was the cabdriver.
chapter
TWELVE
He arrived twenty minutes later. Too-blue jeans, a new three-quarter-length leather jacket. Short hair, sturdy and anonymous bone structure. I’d started to see guys like this arriving in L.A. a year or two before we left. The workhorses of the new millennium, young men who would stack shelves, sell contraband on street corners, toil like dogs in regular modes of employment or smack heads in the dead of night, all with a steady, glacial determination that seemed to elude the local populace.
And, of course, drive cabs. I indicated who I was with an upward nod. He came over and sat on the opposite side of the table, glanced at my beer.
“You want one?”
“Please,” he said.
“But you’re working, right?”
He just looked at me. I held my hand up, got us both a drink. The waitress was fast and had them back by the time I’d lit another cigarette.
When Georj had taken a long swallow, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “So?”
“Thanks for taking the phone to the hotel.”
He shrugged. “Thank you for the money. I think probably it not be there. So?”
“I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else.”
He glanced at his hands like someone used to not remembering things and not remembering them on demand. “I drive all day. All over. They get in, they get out.”
I clicked a couple buttons on my cell phone, held it up to him across the table. “That’s her,” I said.
He leaned forward, peered at the picture on the screen. It was the one that Amy had been using as her background until recently.
“She’s my wife,” I said. “That’s me there with her, right? I’m not a cop. I’m just trying to find her.”
He took the phone from me, angled it against the dim light. “Okay,” he said finally. “I remember.”
My heart started beating faster, but I had many years’ experience of this kind of inquiry. “She’s pretty tall,” I said. “Around five ten?”
He shook his head immediately. “Then not her. Woman I think of, more like five feet and a half feet.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s her.”
He looked at me, raised an eyebrow sardonically. “Not a cop, right. I not Russian either. I from Disney World.”
“You got me. I was once a cop. I’m guessing you’re someone who’s used to talking to the police, too. So let’s not jerk each other around. When did you see her?”
He considered. “Early in the night. Pick up downtown. Drop in Belltown somewhere, I think.”
I shook my head, not knowing where he was talking about. He pointed right. “Up, past fish market. She tip too much, is how I remember.”
Score two for recognizable characteristics. “You recall anything else?”
“Not so much.” He took a cigarette from my pack, lit it. “It was rain. I watch the road. They talk. I—”
“Wait a minute. They?”
“Her, a man.”
My stomach felt sour. “What did the man look like?”
“Suit, I think. Dark hair. I don’t remember.”
“Did they get in the car together?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. Just talk, you know.”
“What were they talking about?”
“How do I know? I have radio playing.”
“Come on, Georj. Did they look serious? Were they laughing? What?”
I realized he was staring at me and that my volume level was getting out of control. Took a breath.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. You picked two people up. Drove them someplace, up in Belltown, wherever. She pays, you drive away. That’s it?”
He swallowed the rest of his beer. He was ready to leave. In desperation I took Amy’s phone from the table. Found the final picture. Passed it over to him.
“Could that have been the man?”
He looked at it for barely a second, shook his head, stood up. “I don’t know. Bad picture. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. You got a job to go on to?”
He hesitated. “No.”
“You do now.”
