Chapter Twelve
Sarah’s third birthday had come and gone when the package from Florida arrived at the Brooklyn store. At first, I was as surprised by it as I had been by Joe Spivack’s flag. Then I remembered that I had asked Moira’s mother to send it up to me. Inside was a hodgepodge of the personal effects her mother had held on to during the nineteen months of her daughter’s disappearance: pictures, a college ID, a ring of keys, her checkbook, some mail. Her mother had attached a handwritten note which included her good wishes that I find whatever it was I was looking for.
Although I considered it a blessing to have finally been involved in a case that I could hold at arm’s length, I was daunted by my inability to make any emotional connection with Moira Heaton. I suppose I was saddened, too, by her inability to connect with people in life as she had in death. She would be remembered now, if only through the scholarship that bore her name. It had seemed painfully important at the time, just after the case had come to a head, to somehow discover the essence of Moira Heaton. Six or so weeks had surely numbed the ache, but I flipped through her things anyway.
I don’t know what I had expected to find when I asked to see these things. Whatever it was, it continued to elude me. Flipping through her checkbook ledger, I did find one entry from a few weeks prior to her murder that got my attention:
CK NO. DATE CODE TRANSACTION PAYMENT/DEBIT 42611/7/81HNJ 1956Headlines Search, Inc.115.00
It stuck out for several reasons, not the least of which was the size of the check. After her rent, this was the biggest check she’d written in months. What could be so important to a woman making barely ten grand a year, I wondered, that she’d be willing to spend almost half a month’s rent on it? Second, Moira was nothing if not consistent. She wrote the same checks for roughly the same amounts in the same order for months at a time. There was her rent, her phone bill, her electric, her student loan, and an occasional check written to the local supermarket. Page after page had the same entries, then, a few weeks before she disappears, bang! Naturally, I was curious about exactly what goods and/or services Headlines Search, Inc., had provided to Moira for her money. I didn’t waste the time guessing and let my fingers do the walking.
“Media Search, Inc.,” a woman answered, “how can we help you?”
“Was your firm once known as-”
“-Headlines Search, Inc.?” she completed the question. “Yes, sir. We are in the process of making the changeover, but unfortunately some of our ads continue to display our former name.”
“What is it you do, exactly?”
“Why, are you from Dun and Bradstreet or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I’m actually a private investigator and I’m looking into a missing-wife thing,” I lied casually. “I’m going through her financial records and I see she wrote a check to you guys about twenty months ago. I guess I’m just curious.”
“Oh, you’re an investigator. We do a lot of work with you guys.”
“That’s great, but it doesn’t tell me what kinda work that is,” I said, letting her hear a hint of impatience.
“Sorry. My name’s Judith Resnick, by the way.”
“Moe Prager.”
“Well, Moe, as our name implies, we do searches. You give us a locale, a date, a subject, any sort of reference, and we’ll look through the search area’s media and collect related materials. Let’s say a freelance reporter is relocating from out of state and he has to do catch-up on local politics. He names some names and we search available archives for his info. It saves him a lot of time and legwork. For years after my dad founded the company, we only did newspaper searches. These days we’ve expanded to include radio and television as well. We even have computer hookups to libraries and a few police departments. Only public-record stuff, of course.”
“Hence the name change.”
“You got it, Moe.”
“Sounds fascinating.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it could bore you to tears. Depends on the search.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. “How comprehensive are your searches?”
“Again, that depends.”
“On?”
“The parameters the client sets and the depth of his or her pockets.”
“How’d I know you were going to say that?”
“Because you’re a perceptive man,” she said with a bit of flirt in her voice.
“Which only an obviously perceptive woman would spot. How big a search would a hundred and fifteen bucks have bought me two years ago?”
“Sounds like a limited-area-old-newspaper search. Something like a search for stories about how the influenza epidemic in the teens affected Des Moines, Iowa. See what I mean?”
“I get it. Listen, Judith, if I give you a reference number, could you-”
“Sorry, Moe, no can do. Confidentiality is as important to us as to you. And even if I were inclined to break the rules, I couldn’t help you. The warehouse we store our old records in was gutted by fire about a year ago.”
“Fair enough, but can you at least tell me if the reference number is one of yours or not?”
“Sure.”
“HNJ1956.”
“It’s not one of ours. We don’t use letters in our system, and our file numbers all have at least six digits. Sounds more like a license plate number. I wish I could be more helpful.”
“Thanks anyway. One more question before I let you go, okay? And it’s kind of goofy.”
“Sure.”
“What would a package from your firm look like?”
“That’s not so goofy,” Judith assured me. “You’d get a tasteful brown envelope stuffed with dated newspaper clippings and/or photocopies thereof. It’s that simple. We don’t do any analysis. We just provide source material.”
I thanked her and asked that she mail me some material about her company. I thought I might have use for her services someday, and if not, I knew a journalist or two who might be interested. Okay, I had some answers, but they were the kinds of answers which led only to more questions. Moira Heaton had spent a chunk of money to have a company search old newspapers. What about and where those newspapers were located were still unknown to me. And what on earth did that reference number on the notation line in Moira’s checkbook mean? Was Judith Resnick right? Was it a tag number? If so, from where? The biggest question of all remained: Did the search, whatever it was for, have the slightest significance in the scheme of things? Moira was dead, and nothing was going to change that.
I called Rob Gloria over at One Police Plaza and asked him to run HNJ1956 in all fifty states. I was careful not to mention the connection to Moira Heaton. Cops like their beer cold and their cases closed. They want nothing to do with poking around in the past, especially when their promotions are based on old, closed cases. I needed to be very careful with Larry Mac and Rob, so I lied to Gloria about this being a liability case. He said he was glad to run the tag number for me, but that it would take a while. I knew it would.
My next call went to Sandra Sotomayor at Senator Brightman’s community affairs office. She was in a very upbeat mood these days, and why not? She’d hitched her cart to a man whose potential could now finally be realized. When Brightman moved into the governor’s mansion in Albany or the Senate Office Building in D.C., there was bound to be a high-level position and a fat paycheck waiting with Sandra’s name on it.
“Mr. Prager, how good to hear from you.”
“Thank you. Things pretty busy these days in the Brightman camp?”
“Busy, yes, but good busy. If you know what I mean?”
“I do. Listen, Sandra, Moira’s family has asked me to do a little research on her. You know, they’re curious
