Pain Management

“Are you—?”

“Yes. I’m the man who wants to buy a complete set of your series,” I finished her sentence for her. “Signed,” I said, to keep it consistent.

“I . . . have them right here,” she said. “There have been only fifteen issues so far. . . .”

“Fair enough,” I told her. “Is there something special you sign comics with? I mean, the covers are so slick, it looks like ink would just slide off.”

“We use these,” she said, taking a gold-colored tube from the breast pocket of her jacket. “It’s called a paint pen. Only thing is, you have to be sure to let each one dry before you bag them.”

“Bag them?”

“You don’t . . . ? Well, it doesn’t matter; I already have them set up.”

“Great,” I said, deliberately turning my back on her and walking up the steps. I pointed to the top of the black marble slab. “How’s this? For signing them, I mean?”

“It should be fine. . . .”

“Oh yeah. I’m sorry,” I told her, reaching into my inside pocket. I brought out ten new fifty-dollar bills, handed them to her.

“This is a lot of money for the comics,” she said earnestly. “You understand that there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be worth so much, don’t you?”

“I’m a gambler,” I told her.

“Well . . . all right, then.” She opened her purse, took out a stack of comics, each one inside a clear plastic sleeve with white cardboard backing. She opened the first bag, carefully slid out the comic, positioned it until she was satisfied, then shook the paint pen vigorously and tested it on her thumb. She nodded to herself, then signed her name with a sharp, fluid motion. “It’s good it’s not raining today,” she said, setting the signed comic on the flat surface to dry. She opened another bag. Her movements were practiced, professional. Maybe she wasn’t used to scoring five hundred bucks for a single deal, but she’d signed a lot of comics before.

While she was concentrating, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” she answered, her tone a lot more guarded than the word.

“I was looking through the one issue I already had. People write you letters, right?”

“Sure,” she said again. I could hear the barriers dropping into place.

“You can’t print all of them that you get . . . ?”

“Well, I don’t get that many.”

“But more with each issue, isn’t that so?”

“Yes. But how would you—?”

“It just makes sense. As the series gets more popular, picks up word-of-mouth, more people get to read it. So there’s a bigger pool of people who might write to you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, I was thinking, you couldn’t possibly print all the letters. Besides, there are probably some you wouldn’t want to print.”

“I don’t understand. You mean the idiots who—”

“No, I didn’t mean anything negative. I was thinking . . . people might write to you because they’d know you’d understand what they were going through. So maybe they’d want advice or whatever. And you’d keep their names confidential if they asked, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s right,” she said, her voice as pointed as the pen she was using.

“I’m trying to help someone,” I said abruptly, sensing she wasn’t going to hang around after she finished signing her books. “And I was hoping maybe you could help me do that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “And I’m looking for a girl who’s run away from her home. Or, at least, people think she has. It’s my job to make sure she’s okay.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, I know she was a big fan of yours.”

“And how do you know that?”

“She had a whole stack of Cuckoo in her room. And those were the only comics she had.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Ms. Clell, I’m not saying it means anything. I just thought that maybe, maybe, she wrote to you. If she did, then it might be possible that you could—”

“I don’t know you,” the woman said. “And I’m not telling you—”

“I don’t want you to tell me anything,” I said softly. “Her name is Rosebud. Some people call her Rose, others call her Buddy. If she wrote to you, and if she left an address where you could write back, I think you would have done that.”

“I—”

“I don’t want the address. All I want is to give you this note,” I told her, handing her an envelope. “It’s unsealed; you can read it for yourself. It explains who I am and why I’m trying to make sure she’s okay. It’s got a phone number she can call. This one right here,” I said, pulling my jacket back to show her the cell phone I carried in a shoulder holster under my left armpit. “I just want to know that she left of her own free will, and that she’s not in any kind of trouble.”

“I’m not—”

“You do what you want,” I said. “I’m playing a hunch, that’s all.”

“A hunch that this girl wrote to me?”

“A hunch that you’ll do the right thing,” I said.

She turned to face me. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

“That one copy of Cuckoo I had,” I told her. “I read it.”

She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away, either.

I put my signed and bagged comics into my briefcase, made my eyes a soldering iron between the woman and the truth of what I’d told her, bowed slightly, and moved off.

“Why do you need all this information about their neighbors?” Gem asked me that night.

“Too many times, a missing kid, you find the body under the bed of some other kid right close by. Or buried in a backyard, rotting in a shed, chopped up in a shower . . .”

“But—”

“Yeah, I know. She’s a little old for that. When a kid’s the perpetrator, you expect the victim to be younger. Smaller and weaker, anyway. Unless there’s a gun involved. But the stealth jobs, it’s usually a little kid that’s targeted.”

“I was not going to say that,” Gem said, tapping her child-sized foot the way she does when she’s impatient. “There was a note.”

“A computer note, remember? Not in her handwriting. Anyone could have written it.”

“Do you believe that is why the parents did not show it to the police?”

“I don’t know what to believe. This whole thing reeks. Gem, listen to me for a second, okay? What exactly did you tell them about me when you pitched the job?”

“I told him nothing specific. Just that you were a man accustomed to difficult, dangerous jobs, and that you expected to be paid well to do them.”

“You tell them I was a—”

“Not ‘them,’ Burke. I never met anyone but the father.”

“Okay, where did you meet him?”

“At the club. The same place where the girl Kitty worked. The one with the boyfriend who—”

“I remember. He was looking there for his kid?”

“Not looking for her. Looking for someone who might help him find her. One of the dancers told him she might know somebody. Then she called me. And then I met him.”

“I should have asked you this before, I’m sorry. Tell me everything you can remember, okay?”

“Yes. He thought I was Vietnamese. I did not disabuse him. He told me he had been against the war. I did