Janet Simon sat on the hearth, as far from me as she could get and still be in the room. I went over and sat by her. She didn’t look up. I went back to the couch. Here were these two children and their father was dead and here were we, faking it, holding back The Big News.
We watched 3-2-1-Contact until five, then switched channels for Masters of the Universe until five-thirty, then switched again for Leave It to Beaver. It was the one where Eddie Haskell talks Wally into buying a watch so Wally can make like he stole it to get in solid with some tough kids. I’d seen that one before, too. Halfway through Leave It to Beaver, Janet went back to see the older girl, Cindy. I heard a door close, then muffled screaming, Cindy shrieking that they were both crazy and she hated them. She hated him and she hated her mother and she wished she lived in Africa. Carrie inched closer to the television. I said, “Hey, you hungry?”
She shook her head. Even with the lousy angle I had I could see her eyes swelling.
“Listen, you think you could help me find something? It’s your kitchen, right? You know where things are.” She turned up the volume. I said, “I could really go for a donkeyburger. Or the hairball soup. Or the breast of puppy.” She looked at me. “Or the stuffed toad au gratin with duck fuzz.” She giggled and said, “I can make soup.”
In the kitchen, we couldn’t hear Cindy. The kid got a three-quart pot from beneath the sink, a large spoon from the drawer beside the refrigerator, a glass measuring bowl, and a packet of Lipton chicken noodle soup mix. She put the pot on the stove, filled the measuring bowl with three cups of water, then put the water in the pot. She covered it and put the heat on high. She put the packet of soup mix on the counter with the spoon beside it and the measuring bowl in the sink. “We have to wait for the water to boil,” she said.
“Okay.”
We stood there a while, sneaking glances at each other. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. “You got a gun?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see it?”
“It’s in the car. I don’t carry it when I don’t have to. It weighs a lot.”
“What if you get jumped?”
I looked over my shoulder. “Here in the house?”
She said, “You see Bateman and Evans? ”
“What’s that?”
“This TV show. You know, Bateman and Evans. It used to be on Wednesday nights.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t watch much nighttime TV.”
“Why not?”
“I think it promotes cancer.”
“You’re silly.”
“I guess.”
She said, “My daddy used to represent Evans. I met him once. He was a detective and he always carried a gun.”
“You see, if I carried my gun I’d probably be on television.”
“Well, you have to be an actor, too.” Wouldn’t know it from watching most of those guys.
“I got to meet Lee Majors that time, too, and this other time my daddy got this actor a job on Knightrider and brought me over to Universal and David Hasselhoff was standing there and I got to meet him, too.”
“Unh-huh.”
“Are you going to find my daddy?”
Something long and thin and cold went in just below my stomach and up into my chest. “Soup smells good,” I said.
She said, “I bet I know where he is.”
I nodded. “You want a bowl or a cup?” Some big-time private cop, you want a bowl or a cup?
She said, “We’ve got soup cups in that cabinet there. Blue ones. If I tell you, you can’t say I told you, okay? Cause nobody knows this but me and Daddy and he wouldn’t like it if I said, okay?”
“Okay.” My voice was hoarse.
“Wait here.”
She ran out of the kitchen, then ran back thirty seconds later with a thick green photo album. It was the older kind, with heavy cardboard covers and black felt paper and the pictures held to the pages by little corner tabs. On the front of the album it said, “ Home. ”
On the first page there were faded sepia pictures dated June 1947 of a man and a woman and a baby. Mort. Adult faces changed or disappeared, but the child’s face grew. Mort as a toddler. Mort riding his bike. Mort and a skinny, long-tongued dog emerging from an infinite field of Kansas wheat.
“My momma made this book up and gave it to my daddy when they moved out here. You see, these are all of my daddy back in Elverton, that’s where Daddy and Momma are from in Kansas. It’s got pictures of Gramma and Grampa and their house and Daddy in school and this dog my daddy had named Teddy and this girl named Joline Price that Momma used to tease Daddy about and all this stuff.”
She flipped the pages for me, taking me on a guided tour of Morton Lang’s life. She would point. I would nod. Isn’t that nice? Mort in grade school. Mort at the paint store in a clerk’s apron. Mort and three buddies sitting around a bedroom, laughing. Crew cuts one year, duck’s ass pompadours the next. Mort in a ’58 Dodge. Mort looking good and strong and proud. Mort in a play. Mort and Ellen. Their prom. She was pretty. Very pretty. Isn’t that nice?
Carrie was saying, “I got up real late to go to the bathroom one night and Daddy was sitting in the living room. He was looking at this book and he was crying, looking at the pictures and crying and I started crying, too, so we looked at the book together and he said, ‘I don’t know what any of this is.’ I said, ‘That’s Gramma and Grampa, that’s Teddy, that’s Joline Price.’ He always says how much he hated Kansas and how he doesn’t even want to go back there to visit, but I’ll bet that’s where he went. I bet if you went back to Elverton, Kansas, and looked you could find him and make him come home.”
I said, “I think the soup’s ready.”
I ladled out the soup into two blue mugs while she got two spoons and two napkins. Out in the dining room you couldn’t hear Cindy anymore. We sat down and ate, Carrie with the book beside her on the table. Her last meal believing her daddy was alive, could walk in the door and make it better. I got up and found the dark stuff Janet Simon had been drinking and brought it back to the table. Carries nose wrinkled. “Yuck.”
Yeah, kid. After a while Janet came out of the back of the house and asked to see me in the kitchen.
When we were in there she stood well away from me. “It’s after six, Elvis. Ellen wouldn’t stay out like this.” Her face was white.
“Okay,” I said, feeling cold. I picked up the phone and called Lou Poitras.
12
I told Poitras that I had been at Ellen Lang’s since I’d left him earlier that day and that she hadn’t come home. I told him that Ellen had failed to pick up her children from school and that there had been no messages. I told him I was worried. There was a long pause on his end, then some noise I couldn’t make out, and then he asked questions. I gave him Ellen Lang’s description and the make and model of her car. Janet Simon knew the license number, KLX774. He told me to stay put and hung up. I think I caught him going home to dinner.
Janet said, “What do we do?”
“Cops are on the way. Is there someplace we can put the kids so they don’t have to hear it?”
There was. Mrs. Martinson’s, across the street. While Janet walked the girls over-Carrie scared and Cindy sullen-I found directions for a Toshiba automatic coffee maker and fresh Vienna cinnamon beans in the freezer and put on a pot. Then I went out to the Corvette, took the Dan Wesson out of the glove box, put it on, and got out a pale blue cotton jacket I keep in the trunk to wear over it. Made me feel like I was doing something. Maybe I should
