presidential deployment of the National Guard to search for her niece would satisfy her.
We listened to their footfalls descend the belfry stairs and then I watched from the window as they left the schoolyard beside the church and walked to a weather-beaten Dodge Aries. The sun had drifted west past my line of sight, and the early October sky was still a pale summer white, but wisps of rust had floated into the white. A child’s voice called, “Vinny, wait up! Vinny!” and from four stories above the ground there was something lonely about the sound, something unfinished. Beatrice and Lionel’s car U-turned on the avenue, and I watched the puff of its exhaust until it had pulled out of sight.
“I don’t know,” Angie said, and leaned back in her chair. She propped her sneakers up on the desk and pushed her long thick hair off her temples. “I just don’t know about this one.”
She wore black Lycra biking shorts and a loose black tank top over a tight white one. The black tank top bore the white letters NIN on the front and the words PRETTY HATE MACHINE on back. She’d owned it for about eight years and it still looked like she was wearing it for the first time. I’d lived with Angie for almost two years. As far as I could see, she didn’t take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they’d been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I’d never solve-like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.
“Don’t know about this case?” I said. “In what way?”
“A missing child, a mother who apparently isn’t looking too hard, a pushy aunt-”
“You thought Beatrice was pushy?”
“Not any more so than a Jehovah with one foot in the door.”
“She’s worried about that kid. Tear-her-hair-out worried.”
“And I feel for that.” She shrugged. “Still don’t enjoy being pushed, though.”
“It’s not one of your stronger qualities, true.”
She flipped a pencil at my head, caught my chin. I rubbed at the spot and looked for the pencil so I could throw it back.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I mumbled, as I felt under my chair for the pencil.
“We’re doing real well,” she said.
“We are.” The pencil wasn’t below my chair or the desk, as far as I could see.
“Made more this year than last.”
“And it’s only October.” No pencil by the floorboard or under the mini-fridge. Maybe it was with Amelia Earhart and Amanda McCready and the bell.
“Only October,” she agreed.
“You’re saying we don’t need this case.”
“Pretty much the size of it.”
I gave up on the pencil and looked out the window for a bit. The wisps of rust had deepened to blood red, and the white sky was gradually darkening into blue. The first yellow lightbulb of the evening clicked on in a third-story apartment across the street. The smell of the air coming through the screen made me think of early adolescence and stickball, long, easy days leaking into long, easy nights.
“You don’t agree?” Angie said after a few moments.
I shrugged.
“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she said lightly.
I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.
In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.
“What?” Her wide mouth broke into a grin.
“Nothing,” I said softly.
She held my gaze. “I love you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Scary, ain’t it?”
“Sometimes, yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, not at all.”
We sat there for a bit, saying nothing, and then Angie’s eyes drifted to her window.
“I’m just not sure we need this…mess right now.”
“This mess being?”
“A missing child. Worse, a completely vanished child.” She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm breeze through her nose. “I like being happy.” She opened her eyes but kept them fixed on the window. Her chin quivered slightly. “You know?”
It had been a year and a half since Angie and I had consummated what friends claimed was a love affair that had been going on for decades. And those eighteen months had also been the most profitable our detective agency had ever experienced.
A little less than two years ago, we’d closed-or maybe just merely survived-the Gerry Glynn case. Boston ’s first known serial killer in thirty years had garnered a lot of attention, as had those of us credited with catching him. The spate of publicity-national news coverage, never-ending rehashes in the tabloids, two true-crime paperbacks with a rumored third on the way-had made Angie and me two of the better-known private investigators in the city.
For five months after Gerry Glynn’s death, we’d refused to take cases, and this seemed only to whet the appetites of prospective clients. After we completed an investigation into the disappearance of a woman named Desiree Stone, we returned to publicly accepting cases again, and for the first few weeks the staircase leading up to the belfry was jammed with people.
Without ever acknowledging it to each other, we refused out-of-hand any cases that smelled of violence or glimpses into the darker caverns of human nature. Both of us, I think, felt we’d earned a break, so we stuck to insurance fraud, corporate malfeasance, simple divorces.
In February, we’d even accepted an elderly woman’s plea that we locate her missing iguana. The hideous beast’s name was Puffy, and he was a seventeen-inch-long iridescent green monstrosity with, as his owner put it, “a negative disposition toward humanity.” We found Puffy in the wilds of suburban Boston as he made a dash across the soggy plains of the fourteenth green at Belmont Hills Country Club, his spiky tail wagging like mad as he lunged for the hint of sunlight he spied on the fairway of the fifteenth. He was cold. He didn’t put up a fight. He did almost get turned into a belt, though, when he relieved himself in the backseat of our company car, but his owner paid for the cleaning and gave us a generous reward for her beloved Puffy’s return.
It had been that kind of year. Not the best for war stories down at the local bar but exceptional for the bank account. And as potentially embarrassing as it was to chase a pampered lizard around a frozen golf course, it beat getting shot at. Beat the hell out of it, actually.
“You think we’ve lost our nerve?” Angie asked me recently.
“Absolutely,” I’d said. And smiled.
“What if she’s dead?” Angie said, as we descended the belfry steps.
“That would be bad,” I said.
“It would be worse than bad, depending on how deep we got into it.”
“You want to tell them no, then.” I opened the door that led out to the rear schoolyard.
She looked at me, her mouth half open, as if afraid to put it into words, hear them hit the air, and know that it made her someone who refused to help a child in need.
