slowly, wanting to soften his answer as much as possible. “Miss Collins, I’m sorry but this isn’t really my type of case. Maybe you don’t understand what it is I do.”
Before pain could even register on Bea’s face, Mother Washington said, “She understands, Hannibal. You help people, just like this little girl here.” She patted Janet’s hand as she said it. “And I just know you’re going to help her.”
“Mother Washington,” Hannibal said, standing, “We don’t have any reason to believe this woman’s fiance is in any kind of trouble.”
Mother Washington stepped heavily to the desk and placed a big soft hand on Hannibal’s shoulder. “Look at her, son. It’s Bea Collins who’s troubled right now. A woman who sits in my church every Sunday and sings out so you can hear her on every hymn, and I bring her to you for help. I know you won’t let her down.”
Hannibal shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at the floor. Mother Washington had helped him move in and become part of the neighborhood. She visited, unasked, just to clean the office or drop off home made biscuits. She had a heart as big as the Capitol dome and, besides all that, she was the unofficial mayor of this block and everybody’s surrogate grandmother. Why did she work so hard when she must know he hadn’t the strength to say no to her?
“Look, maybe he’s visiting family.”
“Dean hasn’t any living relatives,” Bea said. “I’m all he’s got.”
“Maybe a coworker,” Hannibal said. “Sometimes guys get cold feet and want to hang with the fellows for a bit. Why not call his job tomorrow morning? If he’s at work you know he’s okay, right.”
At this point Bea sniffled. Mother Washington’s eyes bored into Hannibal. Cindy’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. Bea managed to look up at Hannibal with damp eyes. “I went to his job yesterday afternoon. Sometimes he goes on the weekend for a while. At least I thought so.”
“Excuse me?”
“Please, Mister Jones. He told me he was working on a programming project for a marketing company over in Falls Church. And there were people there, working on the weekend. But, they had never heard of him. Oh, Mister Jones…”
The picture was morphing before Hannibal’s eyes. Mother Washington’s face told him he was getting her view of the situation at last. Another woman being abused by a man, but in a manner more subtle than what Janet Ingersoll’s husband did. More subtle, he thought, but perhaps no less damaging. When Cindy stood, Hannibal knew she saw the same picture. She stepped closer to Bea, looking down at her as if she were a witness on the stand.
“Sounds like you don’t know this man very well. Maybe it would be better if you just never saw him again, eh?”
Bea’s eyes slid up Cindy’s body, past the jeans clinging so tightly to her rounded form, past the tee shirt her breasts threatened to burst through, past the wavy hair cascading wantonly onto her shoulders, and stared deep into her dark Latin eyes. Hannibal would never have believed any woman could make Cindy look cheap, but the tiny curve at the edge of Bea’s lips spoke volumes.
“That,” Bea said, dropping each word like a tiny chip of ice, “is not the nature of my love.” Then her eyes returned to Hannibal. He could see then that this Dean had wormed his way all the way down into her soul.
“Will you find him for me Mister Jones?”
“You understand this isn’t a free service, Miss Collins.”
Now Bea’s cutting smile settled on Hannibal. “This isn’t about money for me, Mister Jones. I will pay you whatever it takes if you’re the man who can do the job. Business has been good for me. I already have enough saved for the down payment on our..” the sentence tripped her, but only for a moment, “our first home. Picked out a nice little brownstone in Georgetown, near my office. But without Dean, that’s an empty dream, isn’t it? Will you help me? I may not be your usual client, whatever that may be, but Mother Washington told me that you help those who have no place else to turn. I have no place else to turn.”
Would he help her? Help a woman being taken in by a swindler, a swindler who had perhaps had a change of heart or moved on to bigger things? Would he take her money to find the con artist and show her his true face? Perhaps Mother Washington was right and it was the only way to free this woman’s heart to love again. Not the kind of trouble he usually helped people out of, but maybe as valid as any.
Besides, even if he could say no to this petite stranger sitting in his office on Sunday morning in her church clothes, he could never say no to Mother Washington. He pulled a drawer open, pulled out a contract and slid it across the desk to Bea. She signed without reading it while he was talking.
“Five hundred dollars a day. Plus unusual expenses. And another two fifty if I need to subcontract other professionals on the case. No way to know how long a trace like this can take. If he’s lied about his work, he’s probably lied about a lot more. Are you sure you want to see this fellow again that badly?”
Bea’s signature was small and precise. When she finished, she returned Hannibal’s pen to its stand and asked, “When can you get started?”
Hannibal looked at Mother Washington who gave him a warm smile. “It’s a real nice yard party, son, but it’s running itself just fine. And I think all your friends would understand.” He continued to glare at her. “I’ll clean up and make sure everything gets put away proper.”
He walked around the desk to lean against it just to the side of Bea’s chair. His office seemed stifling just then, but maybe it was just the mix of four different women’s perfumes.
“Truth is, with missing persons, the sooner you start the more likely success is. Do you have a recent photo of the missing man, Miss Collins?”
“Well, not a still picture,” she said, fumbling her purse open. “Never really had time to take any. But I’ve something even better!” She gave him her first genuine smile and handed him a video tape cassette.
Hannibal managed to leave Mother Washington and Janet behind when he shifted to his own apartment across the hall. His front door entered the fourth room back, just before the kitchen. Cindy dropped onto his sofa but Bea stood while he pushed the tape into his VCR. The image soon resolved itself into a news broadcast, and a second later the sound kicked in. An anchor was setting up the next story, a fluff piece, but Bea narrated right over her.
“This is from Monday’s news. It’s about last Sunday’s event at the Mall. You remember, the international food thing? Dean and I were there.”
The story was the kind of light fare beginning reporters are often assigned, composed of little more than a series of man on the street interviews. The reporter, a trim redhead, was too perky by half. She interviewed couple after couple, child after child, about what a fun time they were having getting a “Taste of DC” as the event was called. This annual affair took place on The National Mall, which was not a collection of stores but rather a flat park sitting in the middle of the city, anchored at one end by the Washington Monument and at the other by the Capitol Building.
The National Mall is as perfect a gathering place today as it was a hundred years ago, big enough to give the revelers the illusion of being separated from the traffic and the grime of government at work, surrounded as they are by this nation’s repositories of knowledge and culture, the various buildings of the Smithsonian Institute.
The screen presented a collage of revelers biting into sausages and baklava and meat pies with unpronounceable names. Less than a minute into the story, the camera zoomed in on the happy couple. Hannibal was focused on the twenty-six inch screen, but he heard Bea drag in a ragged breath as the cameraman zoomed in with that jerky movement now popular, and framed up Dean’s face.
Hannibal didn’t react, but he was surprised. He was briefly displeased with himself for making assumptions. He expected a slick looking, dapper brother of the Taye Diggs school. Instead, he was staring into a rounded, clean-shaven Caucasian face, with straw-colored hair falling into eyes that crinkled almost shut when he smiled. He was a little on the heavy side, in stonewashed jeans and a flannel shirt. He had rolled his sleeves halfway up his arms, and when he slipped one of those arms around Bea’s waist, her face lit with new love. He babbled something about “having a stone blast out here, like Epcot Center in Disney World,” and the whole time he was speaking into the camera, Bea’s eyes were on him, watching his precious words being formed by thin lips and pushed out between white, even teeth. Yep, he had her.
Hannibal rewound to the closest shot of Dean and froze the picture. Perfect con artist looks, he thought. Average height, weight, hair and eye color, common haircut, no facial hair, nothing to make him stand out in a
