itself. I tried to tell if it had gotten any bigger and decided it hadn’t.
After taking a shower, I rubbed my hand over my face, testing whether I needed a shave. I’ve got one of those baby faces that can go past a week without needing to take a razor to it. If it wasn’t for the gray hair, folks would have a tough time guessing I’d hit forty-two.
My skin was smooth enough to let the blade wait another day. I got dressed and headed off for work. As I drove towards the city, I could see the sun hadn’t yet risen past the cloud of brown smog which sits atop Denver. Sunlight illuminated the cloud, making it appear as if the city were about to be smothered.
I didn’t have much of an appetite, but I guess I felt too off-kilter to jump right into work. After parking the car, I walked to the Corner Diner. Carol was in her usual place working behind the counter. When she saw me come in she gave me a wink and came over and started mopping up the area in front of me.
“Hello, Johnny. Do you know how that girl’s doing?”
It took me a few seconds to realize she was referring to Debra Singer. “I hear everything’s fine with her.”
“I’m so glad I didn’t screw things up for you.” She gave me a playful smile. “I think I got a case for you. Some stiff walked away with a fifty cent tip of mine. How much will it cost to find him?”
“Well now,” I said. “I usually charge four hundred a day, but for you, honey, I’ll consider it for a little extra hash browns.”
“Food! That’s all he ever wants from me is food!” She gave the guy sitting next to me a little slap on the arm. “You know who that is next to you? That’s Johnny Lane, the detective. The one in the Examiner.”
That got some fellow diners to turn around and give me a look. It wasn’t long before I was telling stories and folks were shaking my hand and patting me on the back. The black mood I had been drifting into was all but gone. By the time I finished eating I was feeling pretty good, feeling confident that I was doing the right thing with Mary and that everything would work out. I had a third cup of coffee and kidded Carol a little. By the time I left everything was fine with the world.
Once back at my office, I checked in with my answering service and got a list of messages. More than half were from Mary. After a few tries, I located her at school. She was too excited to listen to me at first. After calming her down I gave her the bad news about the trip being a bust. I asked if she could stop by for a talk, which was like asking a politician if he could stomach a contribution. We agreed to meet in a half hour.
Chapter 7
Mary looked miserable. “I don’t understand. You seemed so sure you were going to find them.”
We had been at it for a while now. I let my eyes close. “With these things you never know for sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control. “I did think I was on the right track, but out in Oklahoma I hit a stone wall.”
She was struggling to keep the tears back. The corners of her mouth were quivering and I sped up, hoping to keep the dam from breaking open. “If you think about it, tracing a full grown woman back to the parents who gave her up for adoption can be close to impossible. A mother giving up her baby is usually doing it for a good reason but that doesn’t stop her from feeling ashamed about it. So she doesn’t cooperate by supplying agencies or hospitals with any useful information. What you end up with is birth certificates and hospital records listing the mother as JANE DOE.”
“What are you trying to tell me, that you can’t do the job?”
“Well, no,” I said, a little hurt. “If the job can be done, then I can do it. I’m just trying to tell you that these things don’t always happen the way you’d expect them to.”
I heard the door to my anteroom open and excused myself to find Max Roth standing there looking uncomfortable. I asked him to take a seat and wait. Back in my office, Mary was sitting with her head bowed, pulling at her fingers. When I sat down, she slowly lifted her head and peeked at me. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I know you’ve been trying your best. I guess I’m disappointed and a little frustrated. You seemed so positive before you left. And I thought knowing the name of that lawyer would make it easy. I-”
She lowered her eyes. I could tell she was having trouble putting her thoughts together. It was as if she were trying to express herself in a foreign language and only knew a few of the words.
“I know,” she continued slowly, “it might be hard for other people to understand, but I need to find who my real parents are. I have to know who I really am.”
Her shoulders started shaking and I could see it was useless. I took a deep breath and waited and sure enough the tears started flowing. I got up and patted her head, telling her everything was going to be okay and being as sympathetic as all hell.
After a while the crying stopped. I took out a handkerchief and mopped up around her eyes. After blowing her nose, she looked up at me and bit her lip. “This is embarrassing,” she said. “Usually I’m not like this.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve been wanting this awful bad and it’s only natural to get shaken up a bit when you’ve been let down.” I hemmed and hawed a little before continuing. “I hate seeing you torn up like this. Should it really be this important for you to find your birth parents?”
“I don’t know, Johnny. But it is.”
“Your adoptive parents are nice folks, better than most people could hope for. Maybe you should be satisfied with them. It would be a shame to end up spending all this money and time only to find out something you might be better off not knowing. There’s a reason why a pretty little baby is given up for adoption.”
She shook her head, her jaws tightening with determination.
“I’ve got to find them,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to ever since I was twelve-that’s when I found out I was adopted. Frank and Julie are wonderful parents and I love them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need to know who I really am.”
“What if it turns out your real mother was a prostitute? Or your daddy was a madman? Or a murderer?”
“Why are you saying that?”
I gave her a sympathetic smile. “Mary, some things are better left alone. Maybe this is one of them.”
“I don’t want to leave it alone.”
“How’s your job going?” I asked.
“What-it’s going okay.”
“It must be awful hard,” I said, “going to college during the day and then working nights at that convenience store. Just to pay for this.”
“It’s my decision.” She forced a weak smile. “I’m an adult, you know.”
I leaned back in my chair and decided to go at it from a different angle. “When I first started out as a private detective I had a case similar to this. This boy, he felt the same as you, that he couldn’t be happy unless he was able to meet with his birth parents. And-”
Mary cut in, giving me a cross-eyed look. “I’m really not interested in this,” she insisted.
“I appreciate that,” I stumbled on, “but it might help to hear me out. I found this boy’s momma for him. After more sweat and hard work I found his daddy had been long dead, killed in prison. It turned out that my client, well let’s just say, was the product of a rape and grew up to be the spitting image of his daddy. When he showed up at his momma’s door and she got a look at him, something in her snapped.”
Mary’s eyes drifted away from me. My story was boring her and I couldn’t help feeling a little hot under the collar. I cleared my throat and continued, wishing I had never started.
“When she looked at this boy she didn’t see him as her long lost son. Instead she saw the son of a bitch who had raped her years before. By the time anyone was able to get her off him, she had half his face scratched up and had almost cut out one of his eyes. My client didn’t end up any happier and neither did his mother.”
Mary was looking around impatiently. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this. It’s not going to change my mind. And besides, I don’t think I have to worry about being the spitting image of a rapist.”
I leaned further back in my chair and gave her a hard look. She was so damn determined and headstrong. There was no sense trying to talk her out of it. For a second, I almost told her the truth. I wanted to, but it would have ended up causing too much pain.
