As I got into Somerville, construction narrowed the road to a single lane, and many horns blared as one as drivers tried to force their way right. When that finally cleared, the GPS told me to turn left onto a street that was closed off and dug down to the pipes. As I missed the turn, she said, in an icy tone, “Recalculating,” then gave me a new route.
Madras Grocery was situated in the ground floor of an old house on Bow Street, whose name derives from its semicircular shape. The street was hard to find, which may have contributed to the business’s rundown look. That and the apparent scarcity of people of South Asian origin who might be in the market for its goods.
A bell tinkled over the door as I went in past a billboard stuffed with notices for local movers, tutors, music teachers and dog walkers. And a copy of the same poster we had found asking for help finding Harinder Patel. As I walked to the counter, the smell of spice crowded in: cumin, turmeric, others I knew but couldn’t name, all in a pungent swirl around me. The woman at the front cash was wrapped in a yellow-and-orange sari with silvery trim. She smiled warmly without saying anything. I took out my copy of the poster and she looked at it through glasses whose panes were scratched and fogged.
“I’d like to speak to you about this man,” I said. “He might be connected to another missing person’s case.”
She turned to face the back of the store and called out, “Sanjay!”
A well-built young man in his twenties came up the aisle. He wore a long-sleeved grey sweatshirt and blue jeans, and had jet-black hair combed straight up in front but forward from the back, giving him a fearsome cresting pompadour. A beard no thicker than wire traced his jawline and chin.
“Help you, sir?” he asked. He looked to be in his early twenties. But already serious. Serious about something.
I flashed the poster. “You’re looking for this man?”
He started to look hopeful. “Yes, yes. He’s my father. Have you found him? Found something?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
The expression sagged back to neutral. “Oh. Then why are you here?”
I showed him a picture of David Fine. “Because this man is missing too, and he had your flyer among his effects.”
He knew David. From the first widening of the eyes to the slight opening of his carefully barbered jaw, I could tell he knew him.
“Come to the back,” he said.
He led me past an office too tiny and crammed for the two of us, and into a storeroom made narrow by sacks of rice, beans and other goods stacked against its walls. “Who are you, please?”
“Jonah Geller. I’m a licensed investigator from Toronto.” He didn’t need to know the vagaries of my standing in Massachusetts. “This man’s family hired me to find him.”
“You say he’s missing too? For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
“My father went missing three weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sanjay.”
“Call me Sammy.” We shook hands.
“So you know this man,” I said.
“Yes. He came into the store one evening about two weeks ago. Dad had been gone at least a week by then.”
“Definitely him?”
His eyes sparkled. “Oh, yes.”
“You remember the day of the week?”
“A Wednesday. Around eight-thirty. I was cleaning out the basement for our Thursday-morning delivery, which is our biggest. My mum doesn’t speak much English so she called me up. This guy said he had heard about my father and wanted to help the family, and he handed me an envelope.” Even though we were alone in the store, he lowered his voice. “It had five thousand bucks in it. Fifty hundred-dollar bills.”
“This man here,” I said, pointing at the photo. “David Fine.”
“If that’s his name, yes.”
“All in hundreds.”
“Yes.”
It had to be right. David’s stash was in hundreds too, an equal five thousand. In a doubled elastic band. Seemed like David had started out with ten thousand dollars, when he shouldn’t have had a nickel, and he had chosen to split it with a stranger.
“Trust me,” Sammy said. “It never happened in my life before, and it will probably never happen again, a guy handing me that much cash. And then he was gone, like one of those rich guys on a reality show who go around handing out money. Only there was no one filming my reaction. Which is too bad, in a way, because I remember I was pretty floored. But a little scared, too.”
“Of him?” Sammy looked like he could pick David up and body-slam him without losing his place in the sports page.
“No. It just seemed like a sign my father is dead. I don’t know why but that’s how it struck me.”
“Did he say why he wanted to help? Did he know your father?”
“He certainly wasn’t a regular customer,” Sammy said. “I’d never seen him in the neighbourhood before and neither had Mum.”
“He lives in Brookline.”
“That’s pretty far to come for what we sell.”
“And he said nothing else?”
“Nope. Gave me the money and left without another word.”
“Sammy, does your father have any medical problems?”
“What do you mean?”
“David is a surgeon,” I said. “Or about to become one. Specializing in transplant medicine.”
“My father certainly has no condition like that. Nothing a better diet and a little exercise wouldn’t cure.”
“Has he been a patient at Sinai Hospital?”
“I think he had a thing on his neck removed there last summer. Was it there or Mass General? No, it was in the Longwood Area. I picked him up on Francis Street when it was done. But they just cut off a cyst, that’s all. No reason he would see a transplant surgeon.”
“Who’s investigating your father’s disappearance?”
“The Somerville cops,” he said, rolling his liquid brown eyes.
“Not much confidence in them?”
“It’s a very small force,” he said. “And Dad isn’t a runaway or Alzheimer’s patient, which is mostly what they deal with.”
“Same with Brookline. Did you tell them about David’s visit? About the money?”
“Hell, no! I figured the first thing they’d do was impound it,” he said, putting quote marks around impound.
“I didn’t tell Brookline that David had money either. Another five thousand. Which links the two cases in my mind, but won’t in theirs if we don’t tell them about it.”
Sanjay stared at a sack of lentils that wasn’t doing anything stare-worthy. “I can’t tell them about it,” he said softly. “It’s gone. We needed it so badly. You can see how bad. It was spent the next day, keeping us afloat for another few weeks. You won’t tell anyone, right?”
“No.”
“All right. Thank you. And look …”
“What?”
“I can’t pay you extra on top of whatever you’re earning. But while you’re investigating your own case, if there is any connection, anything you can find out about Dad, what happened to him … Because if we don’t …”
“What?”
“Look around you. My father wasn’t the shrewdest operator. The store is poorly located and our margins are thin. We’ve been on a tightrope for months, barely holding on, to tell you the truth. And with Dad missing now,
