when they were photoless cards, and two expired passports with stamps from countries that had long been wiped off the map. And that was only from the file boxes that Henry had already been through. There were three more stacked beside his dining room table.
The huge amount of evidence was only part of Henry’s problem. Even after he’d been through it all once, categorized it and cataloged it and sorted the useful pieces from the trash, he’d still have to confront the real challenge. What was the story these clues were trying to tell him? How could he put together these tiny scraps in a way that would turn them into a coherent narrative?
At least in a murder investigation, half the story was predetermined. He knew the basic parameters going in. Someone had been killed. Someone else did it. Henry had to figure out who that was. Difficult certainly, but at least he knew the beginning and the end of the tale going in.
This story had no predetermined structure. If it could be said to have a beginning, it was only that the subject had been born many years ago. There was no ending, and there would be none until the subject passed away. And in between there were only random artifacts of the moments that make up any life. It was completely up to Henry to decide which incidents defined a life and which ones were simply trivia.
He’d never intended to start scrapbooking. In fact, if someone had mentioned the idea to him only a month ago, it would have meant nothing more to him than the minor irritant of seeing one more noun recklessly turned into a verb.
That was before Betty Walinski, the still-attractive widow who ran her late husband’s tackle shop, complained over a tray of bait that her fading eyesight was making it hard to sort her old photos into an album for her new granddaughter. She dropped several broad hints about how nice it would be to have some help. Henry suspected that she was less interested in preserving her legacy for future generations than in a chance to demonstrate what an excellent cook and companion she could be to a lonely divorce, but he didn’t object. He had an ulterior motive, too.
When Herman Walinski was still alive, he was legendary for his handcrafted fishing lures. A few of those he put up for sale, but the entire Santa Barbara fishing community still buzzed with legends of the lures he’d kept for himself. Especially his masterpiece, the one he called YTBL3. It was rumored that the very presence of the YTBL3 in any body of water would draw fish all the way from the Atlantic. Henry knew that if he could just get inside Betty’s door, he could sweet-talk her into letting him get his hands on that collection.
When he got to Betty’s tidy bungalow on the inland side of the hills, Henry’s first thought was to make a bit of small talk, eat whatever she might put in front of him, promise to spend as much time as she wanted going through her photos, then subtly change the topic of conversation to her late husband’s lure collection. It was something he’d learned long ago while interviewing suspects-people rarely notice that you’re trying to get something out of them when they think they’re getting something out of you.
That was before Betty placed the shoe boxes full of snapshots in front of him. Out of politeness, and a desire to look like he was helping, Henry leafed through a couple of the yellow mailing envelopes, each containing the product of one roll of genuine Kodak film. At first he barely glanced at the pictures, but when he opened the third envelope he saw something that grabbed his attention-Herman Walinski in a police uniform. Henry stopped in at the tackle store at least once a week for twenty years before Herman’s death, and in all that time, the owner had never mentioned he’d been a cop.
The normal response to a discovery like this might have been to ask Herman’s widow about it. After all, she was standing right over him, asking if he’d like another piece of seed cake crammed with enough poppy to make the entire US Olympic team test positive for opiates. But Henry had known Betty almost as long as he had her husband, and she had never mentioned his law enforcement history, either. It wasn’t a general prohibition on talking about the past, because they’d both told stories about the years he spent driving a tow truck when he originally arrived in Santa Barbara. Forgetting about the lures for the first time since Betty had asked him over to the house, Henry invented a series of reasons why he had to return home immediately-he’d left the water running or the stove burning or the water running onto the burning stove-and asked if he could take the photos home with him to start organizing them.
If Betty’s quick assent gave Henry a reason to reconsider her motives for inviting him over, he didn’t spend too much time mourning the loss of the possible relationship. Instead he loaded up his truck with boxes of her old photos and got away before she could change her mind.
That was when the detective work started. Using the photo of Herman as his starting point, Henry began to build a time line of his life stretching out in both directions from that moment. He worked slowly and methodically, organizing the photos not only chronologically but also thematically, so he would have parallel histories of Herman’s career, his vacations, his children, and the various weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, fishing derbies, anniversaries, and holidays that made up his life in pictures.
The story that began to emerge out of the photos was one that bore almost no relation to the Herman Henry had thought he’d known. The man behind the counter at the tackle shop had been a jovial backslapper, apparently uninterested in anything that couldn’t be used to persuade a fish to swallow a hook. The private Herman, the prefishing Herman, was a much more complex soul. Starting with the pictures and concluding with a long bout of Googling, Henry met a young police officer on the Miami force who’d started out with great promise, and then had been teamed up with a corrupt partner. As far as Henry could piece together, Herman had initially tried to switch partners, and then for reasons that weren’t apparent in the photographs, he had decided instead to help Internal Affairs clean out the department. He worked undercover long enough to learn that his partner and several officers were tied to the thieves who pulled off a daring daytime robbery of the Calder Race Course. The officers and the criminals were all believed to be captured, even though the money was never recovered. A few months after the picture that sparked Henry’s interest had been taken, Herman testified to a grand jury about corruption in the Miami PD.
There was one picture of Herman shaking the hand of someone who must have been the chief, while a graying man, most likely the mayor, smiled down on them, but that was the last image of Herman in uniform. In fact, that was the last image of Herman of any kind for the next six months of his life. The next time he showed up in one of the yellow envelopes, he was smiling cheerfully from a hospital bed, his arms and legs in traction.
That was a story Henry could figure out without additional information. Herman had informed on his fellow officers, and the rest of the force had frozen him out. Henry couldn’t say for sure how he’d ended up in that hospital bed, but it was easy to assume that Herman had called for backup on a dangerous assignment, and none of his brother officers had bothered to show up. That was the most positive version Henry could come up with.
After that, a sequence of photos showed Herman’s slow recovery, the sale of a house in Florida, a trip across Europe-Henry assumed he’d reached some kind of cash settlement with the Miami PD-and the businesses he ran in Santa Barbara, starting out as the owner-operator of a one-truck towing company until he became the dominant player in the area, then cashing out and buying the tackle store.
It took Henry almost two full weeks to put the whole story together in an album, complete with subplots about the couple’s friends, their siblings’ children, and all the other people who drift in and out of a life.
When he was done, Henry drove the album over the hill and presented it to Betty. She was thrilled. She was just leaving for a week to visit an old friend in Montana, but she promised that when she got back, she’d have something very special for him.
Henry could almost taste the fish Herman’s lures were going to catch for him. But it turned out that what he considered special and what Betty did were two very different things. What she wanted to give him was a recommendation.
It turned out that all of Betty’s friends wanted books just like hers. She was willing to set him up in business. She even had a name for him-the Memory Detective.
Henry tried to decline politely. He told her he had time-management issues. That he was concerned a pay- check might interfere with his police pension. Finally he came flat out and told her he’d rather die.
That was when the first lure came out. And what it caught wasn’t a fish-it was a retired Santa Barbara police detective. Betty understood that he didn’t want to do this anymore, but she had promised her best friends, the Perths, that Henry would do a scrapbook for them. She couldn’t let them down. So she was willing to make a deal-if he did her this small favor, he could choose three of Herman’s lures. Any three-even the YTBL3.
He had no choice once that lure was dangled in front of him, any more than the shovelnose guitarfish Herman caught off the pier with it had. Henry had to bite.
