too old to be of much use. This was especially so with teenagers. A family photo of a fourteen-year-old girl-one taken at home with the whole family gathered around a Thanksgiving meal or a Christmas tree-bears little resemblance to the same girl, three years later, sexed-up, high as a kite, with a couple of new piercings, a tattoo and colored hair. Over many years, many cases, Walter had developed quite a skill identifying live people from photographs that would be useless to others. The fact that the others always seemed to include the authorities had guaranteed a brisk marketplace, a deep vein in Walter’s gold mine of a profession. He really could do what others couldn’t. Some pictures of some targets never went far away. Walter had never really gotten over being fooled so badly by the photos of a man he looked for, and eventually found, four years ago. Leonard Martin was his name and every cop in America was trying to catch him. Martin fooled them all and Walter had allowed himself to be buffaloed just like they were. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The pictures of Leonard Martin and the real Leonard Martin were so dissimilar… Just thinking about it bothered him all over again-Leonard Martin, Michael DelGrazo, the cowboy with the floppy hat… Sonofabitch, he thought. Here I am standing in the doorway of Harry Levine’s room in one of the oldest hotels in the world, and all I’m thinking about is-Leonard Martin.
“I just arrived,” said Harry. “I’ve only been here a few…”
“Registered under your own name.”
“Not a good idea?”
“No, Harry. Definitely not a good idea. Check out and move into my room until I figure out where to go next.”
“What room are you in?” asked Harry.
“Not here. Not this hotel. Come on, get your things.” Walter saw that Harry was a very neat person. His bathroom had been set up as if he’d moved in. The toothpaste, toothbrush and a small bottle of mouthwash were stacked next to a drinking glass. His razor, shaving cream, aftershave lotion and extra blades had been carefully lined up on the side of the sink opposite the toothbrush. On a marble shelf next to the shower, Harry had arranged his deodorant, hairbrush and comb. The towels at first appeared undisturbed, still hanging, nicely folded. Walter’s experienced eye saw one of them had been used. It was refolded and had been put back in its original location, but he noticed the small change in the crease on one side. Very neat, he thought. He expected what came next. Harry’s clothes were hung in the closet and arranged in drawers-underwear and socks in the top drawer, a few shirts in the second and a sweater, sitting alone in the bottom drawer. “Look, Harry,” he said. “Just toss everything in your bag and let’s get out of here. Before they get here.”
“They can’t be that close-whoever they are-can they?”
“They could be getting off the elevator at the end of the hall, right now.”
“What? Come on now…”
“You’d be better off assuming that than assuming they’re not. I’m here, aren’t I?” Walter reached into the closet, grabbed the hanging pants, a jacket and the shirts and threw them into Harry’s open bag sitting on the bed. Harry looked upset, but he did the same with the rest of his belongings. Then he reached under the bed and retrieved a bulky attache case.
“That it?” asked Walter.
“Yes,” said Harry, “I hid it in London. I got it before I came here, to Holland.”
“That’s what I figured,” Walter said. “Call the desk. Check out.”
Harry called down and told the front desk to prepare his bill. Doing just as Walter instructed him, he said, “Put the charges on my credit card and mail the receipt to me.”
In a minute they were down the stairs, past the kitchen, out of there through a back door.
PART TWO
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
The day Anna Rothstein ran away from Memphis and married a kid named Eddie O’Malley, her father, Saul, worried about his wife’s sanity. Doris Rothstein was crying in the kitchen. Her sister Irene was on her way over but hadn’t arrived yet. They were always there for each other at a time of crisis. That’s certainly what this was, Saul said to himself. The word helpless ran through his mind. It was a very uncomfortable word. Saul Rothstein was not the kind of man who was used to feeling helpless. Despite his wife’s emotional meltdown, he saw this… thing, this set of fucking outrageous circumstances.. . as a challenge to the central rule guiding the Rothstein family’s life- I, Saul Rothstein, make the rules! The phone call from Anna pissed him off. Saul couldn’t believe she actually put this Eddie guy on the line. What can you say to a nineteen-year-old auto mechanic who’s just run off with your daughter?
That morning, Anna left for school before seven, saying she needed to be there early. A friend was picking her up, she told her parents. Saul Rothstein now realized the friend had been the little Irish shithead now calling himself Anna’s husband. Saul hung up the phone and muttered, “Fuck me? I don’t think so, you little Mick sonofabitch!”
The newlyweds returned home, to Memphis, by car from the small town in Mississippi where they had been married, a place called Langston, so small Saul had never heard of it, somewhere in the southwest part of the state not far from Louisiana. This Eddie O’Malley apparently lived in an apartment somewhere near the Memphis airport. Anna mentioned something about two other roommates who had gone off to let them have some privacy. Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley were holed up inside. This bullshit needed fixing.
What kind of assholes live in Mississippi? Rothstein pondered that question as he waited in the outside office of his old friend, the Honorable Milton Fryer, Memphis’s only Jewish judge. “How is it they allow children to get married over there?” he asked the judge. Anna was only sixteen. He thought she said the O’Malley guy was nineteen. Saul wasn’t sure, but he was certain he’d had enough of this already. He beseeched Judge Fryer to help and, in less time than it took cement to harden, the judge annulled whatever nonsense Mississippi had been stupid enough to sanction. Anna Rothstein-now never legally O’Malley-went home, to her parents’ house. Her mother, Doris, didn’t stop crying for weeks. Even Irene was no help. Saul wanted no part of that either.
Anna Rothstein was a nice looking girl, tall, five-eight, maybe more, hazel eyes and light brown hair-almost blonde. At fourteen she was full breasted and by sixteen, with a little makeup and a nice dress, she was able to look twenty if she wanted. She was a bright girl, clearly the favorite of her dad, also smarter than her older brother. She took after her father. Everyone always said that and it pleased Saul tremendously. But not now. Although she had gone home, Anna reacted harshly to the annulment. She said she was going to retain counsel and challenge the Judge’s ruling. She already knew the law much better than her father did. Saul’s friend Milton Fryer wasn’t there to help. He capitulated.
“Do you love this… Eddie O’Malley?” her father asked.
“That is not what we are talking about,” said Anna. “What’s at issue here is the legality of your bogus annulment. You and Milton Fryer have a relationship, the sort of which any judge, other than ‘Uncle Milty,’ would easily see as a conflict of interest for him. You know, Dad, the legal system of the state of Tennessee was not created for your personal use. I wasn’t even married in this state-they wouldn’t let me. My Mississippi marriage cannot be tossed out by some Tennessee judge, sitting in the company of my father, absent either myself or my husband or any representation either of us might wish to have. Do you see what I mean?” Saul couldn’t help himself. He was proud of his daughter.
“What is it you want, Anna? And remember, you’re driving your mother nuts here.”
So it was that a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl from Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 1953, granted her parents’ wish to annul her Mississippi nuptials in return for being allowed to keep the name O’ Malley. She didn’t think that was asking too much, and she was right. Her grandmother would get used to it, she said.
Two years later, when she left Memphis to attend the University of Tennessee, Anna O’Malley dropped the Anna for Abby. She liked the sound of it. She spent four highly entertaining, successful years in Knoxville, studying Political Science-and did it- “Thank you God!” her father had prayed – without getting married again. Eddie O’Malley was long gone, not missed and hardly remembered. In the autumn of 1959, Abby O’Malley enrolled at the University
