They sat down in his office, him in a gimpy swivel behind a large metal desk, both included in the rent. Her in one of the proud new clients’ chairs, padded leather with regally tall backs.
“Gotta be honest with you, Miss Wade. Think I already found a secretary.”
No disappointment in those blue eyes, no hope either. She just passed a certificate with a gold seal across the desk. The paper said she typed seventy words a minute, spoke shorthand, could do double entry. The brunette with the coral nails claimed all that too, but she’d backed it up with a giggle, not a diploma from Gatesville.
“Your first choice of a job a P.I.’s office?”
“My first choice is a job.”
“Number one.”
“I’m flattered. Get off the bus, you come here.”
The blue eyes let in a smidgen of light. “Course that doesn’t count the dozen applications I wrote out ’fore they showed me the door.”
No wonder Joe was pushing her. “Had your druthers… where’d you work, Miss Wade?”
“Library. I like libraries. It’s what I did
“How many you do?”
“Fourteen.”
Phelan quelled the whistle welling up. That let out checkkiting, forgery, embezzling from the till, and probably dope. He was about to ask her the delicate when she handed it to him on a foil tray. “Voluntary manslaughter.”
“And you did fourteen?”
“He was very dead, Mr. Phelan.”
His brain shoved: the picture fell into the slot. Phelan’d been a teenager, jazzed by blood-slinging, and reporters had loved the story. Waitress in a bayou dive, waiting for the owner to collect the take. Alone. Two guys thrown out earlier came back-beat her, raped her, cut her. Father and son, that was the kicker. That, and they went for the girl before the cash register. But surprise. Somehow the knife had changed hands. The father’d got punctured and son sliced. When the owner’s headlights showed, dear old Dad ran for their heap and peeled. Delpha Wade had not let nature take its course. She finished off Junior in the oyster-shell parking lot.
The Gatesville certificate was being fit into a faded black leather clutch, years out of date. She gathered her feet under her. But didn’t stand up. Those eyes got to him. No hope, no despair. Just a storm cloud back on the blue horizon.
The outer door tapped. A hesitant tap, like a mouse was out there. “’Scuse me,” Phelan said and stood. His chair flopped its wooden seat upward like its next occupant would arrive in it via the ceiling. He wrenched it up; the seat surrendered again. “Gotta fix that,” he muttered.
When he looked up, he saw Delpha Wade’s straight back, walking out. Funny, he’d had the impression she wouldn’t fold so easy.
“Forgot your purse, Miss Wade.”
“No, I didn’t.” She shut the door between their offices-or rather, the door between his office and whoever got the secretary job’s office-soundlessly. He heard, “Good morning, ma’am. Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Phelan?” Her dry voice was smooth as a Yale lock.
Phelan smiled.
Mumbling.
“May I ask what your visit is in reference to?”
More mumbling, a lot of it. Then-Phelan hated this sound-sobbing. Not that he hadn’t prepared for it. He’d bought a box of Kleenex at the dime store for the brokenhearted wives. Stashed it in the desk’s bottom drawer next to the husbands’ fifth of Kentucky. Had his.38 license in his wallet, P.I. license on the wall, newly minted business cards on the desk. An ex-con impersonating a secretary.
Delpha Wade entered, closing the door behind her. “Can you see a client now, Mr. Phelan?”
“Bring her on.” He was rooting for a cheated-on society matron in crocodile pumps, her very own checkbook snapped inside a croc bag.
“You can go in now, Mrs. Toups.”
A bone-thin woman in yesterday’s makeup and rumpled shirtwaist took the doorway. Leatherette purse in her fists, little gold nameplate like a cashier’s pinned over her left breast. The two slashes between her eyebrows tightened. “You’re kinda young. I was looking for-”
“An old retired cop?” Delpha Wade said. On
What Mr. Phelan had was a fresh legal pad. He wielded a ballpoint over it. “Please, sit down, Mrs. Toups. Tell me what I can do for you.”
Delpha Wade scooped an elbow, tucked her into the client chair, at the same time saying, “Can I get you some coffee? Cream and sugar?”
Phelan furrowed his own brow, trying to grow some wrinkles.
“Take a Coke, if you got one.”
The inner door closed behind Delpha Wade, and he heard the outer door shut too. His first client stammered into her story; Phelan’s ballpoint despoiled the virginal legal pad. The Kleenex stayed in their drawer. Caroleen Toups had her own hankie.
By the time his nonsecretary returned with a dewy bottle of Coke, Phelan had the story. The Toups’s lived over on the north side, not far off Concord, nothing that could be called a neighborhood, more like one of a string of old wooden houses individually hacked out of the woods. Her boy Richard was into something and she didn’t like it. He’d been skipping school. Running around all hours. Then last night Richard had not come home.
Gently, Phelan asked, “Report that to the police?”
“Seven o’clock this morning. They said boys run off all the time. Said been a bunch of boys running off lately. Four or five. Like it’s a club.”
Phelan silently agreed, having once woken up with two or three friends on a New Orleans sidewalk, littered, lacquered, and convinced somebody’d driven rebar through his forehead. “What does your husband think?”
“He passed last fall. Took a virus in his heart.” Her reddened eyes offered to share that grief with him, but Phelan bowed his head and went on.
“Does Richard have a favorite item of clothing?”
“Some silly shoes that make him taller. And a Johnny Winter T-shirt he bought at a concert over in Port Arthur.”
“Would you know if those are gone from his room?”
“I would… Mr. Phelan.” Having managed to bestow on T. Phelan’s callow mug that title of respect, Mrs. Toups looked at him hopefully. “They’re not.”
“Have a piggy bank?”
She snapped the purse open and took out a roll, Andrew Jackson on top. “Till about midnight,” she said, “I read the
The phone rang in the outer office, followed by the light click of the reconditioned Selectric. “You wouldn’t a brought a picture of him?”
Mrs. Toups dug into the leatherette, handed over a school photo. Fair and baby-faced, long-haired like a lot of kids these days. Grinning like he was saddled on a Christmas pony. Ricky Toups when he still had a daddy.
The mother’s tired eyes held a rising rim of water. “Why I wanted you to look old and tough-you find Ricky, scare him good. I cain’t take any more a this.”
Phelan was jolted by a gut feeling, a pact connecting him to that haggard mother. He hadn’t expected it.
