His office was decorated in modern-day-man-cavemeets-aging-geek: built-in bookshelves, two flat-screen plasma televisions (which went well with the plasmas in the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest room and the one in the garage, which seemed an odd place to keep an expensive television), a small desk decorated with old Star Wars action figures (including at least half a dozen different Boba Fetts), framed comic books and photos of Henry’s deceased wife and of Brent.
It was also surprisingly clean compared to the rest of the house, which was bachelor-dirty: old sports magazines on every available surface, dust bunnies under all of the furniture (which Brent assured me were there long before his father disappeared) and DVDs scattered throughout.
The desk itself, with its carefully laid-out calendar in the center, the action figures along the rim, and the phone placed at a perfect diagonal to everything else, made me think of a catalog. There was a stack of papers inside a wicker mail organizer that by themselves weren’t noteworthy-a flyer for a notary conference next January in Palm Desert, California, the receipt for a small donation to hurricane relief in Haiti and a Post-it reminding him to pay Brent’s tuition and housing bills-but together they painted an odd picture. Why keep those things?
There was something off about the office but I couldn’t exactly place what it was. The books might have given me an initial clue as to who he was, but the rest of the office told me something different. A Star Wars - obsessed notary who kept only one room in his entire home clean? And who needs two plasma TVs in one small room?
I went back to the bookcase and examined his reading again, my eyes landing on a book called Building Bunkers, Safe Houses and Underground Domestic Dwellings by a writer calling himself “John Q. Keep Me Out of the Public.” Cute. I pulled it out and flipped through the pages once, stopping to ponder the entirely inaccurate information about planting trip wires before I headed to the living room.
Fiona and Brent sat on the sofa going through stacks of old bills and bank statements. Sam was in the kitchen tinkering with a desktop computer that looked to be at least fifteen years old, which made it the perfect age for Sam’s computer skills.
“Would you like some light reading?” I said to Fiona. I handed her the book but she just set it on the coffee table. She’d calmed down some. Or at least enough to patiently go through stacks of unopened mail Brent had found in his father’s bedroom, in the trash can and overflowing out of the mailbox.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m engrossed in the correspondence from the homeowners’ association.” She showed me a stack of yellow papers, all of which bore the telltale sign of an angry group of residents: a propensity to overuse capital letters.
“What seems to be the problem?”
“Uncut grass,” she said. “One letter says that every blade of grass over three inches in height is subject to a fine. Really, Michael, who chooses to live among these people? Why not just move into a gulag?”
“Anything we can use?” I asked Fiona.
“He let his beer-of-the-month-club membership slide,” she said quietly and then tilted her head in Brent’s direction. He was looking at an invoice with more attention than I’d been aware he could muster.
“It was a gift from my mother,” Brent said. He handed me the invoice. His membership had lapsed three months ago. “He always made sure it was paid. Always. Each month, it came with a greeting card from my mother, or not my mother, but my mother’s name. It was a gift. He didn’t even drink that much.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sure if he pays his bill, they’ll start it back up.”
“That’s not the point, Michael,” Fiona said. I knew she was right, but I was just hoping to reel things in, if possible. I’d forgotten, again, that I was essentially dealing with a child.
I handed the invoice back to Brent. “It’s silly, really,” Brent said. “It’s not like they got along when she was alive.”
“It’s hard to tell with parents,” I said. “I thought my mom and dad hated each other, and, maybe after a while, they did. But what I think of as the worst years of my life, my mother tends to remember differently. Maybe it’s the same with your father, Brent.”
“He once told me that he gambled because it was the closest thing to feeling normal that he had,” Brent said. “Does that make any sense?”
I told him it did. One thing I’d learned all of these years, and why I’ve struggled so long to get my name back and clear my burn notice, was that I never felt more like who I was supposed to be than when I was a spy. It was the most natural state of calm and being I’d ever possessed. And then one day it was gone. Helping people like Brent salved the wound some, but nothing was the same.
Sam came into the living room and plopped down in a caramel-colored recliner that was positioned about four feet from one of the ubiquitous flat-screen televisions. He attempted to turn on the television using one of the four remotes that were tucked in the recliner’s pocket, but none of them worked.
“Life was easier when there were only thirteen channels,” Sam said. “I’m telling you, if Reagan were still in office, there would be one remote control in every house and it would operate every television in the universe.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t find anything,” I said.
“He had software on that computer from the nineties,” Sam said. “And judging from the amount of music he downloaded from Napster in 1999, I’m going to say he’s lucky he didn’t get thrown into record-industry prison.”
“That was my mom’s computer,” Brent said. “He didn’t want to change anything on it.”
“Your mom,” I said, “how did she die?”
“Car accident,” Brent said. “Dad fell asleep at the wheel. They were driving home from the Keys. They’d gone down there for their anniversary and left me with my nana.” The way Brent recited the information was robotic. He’d given the answer so many times in his life that it was now just a series of simple, declarative facts. He’d boiled down the worst part of his life into three mundane sentences.
“Jesus,” Fiona said. “How old were you?”
“Nine,” Brent said.
The problem in dealing with teenagers is that they sometimes leave out salient bits of personal information.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you know if your dad gambled when your mom was alive?”
“No, no, never,” he said. “He was a completely different person.”
“Grief will do that,” I said.
“No, I mean he was actually a different person,” Brent said. “He got thrown out of the car in the accident and his brain, it was like it got rewired. He was in the hospital for three months and when he got out, he had a different personality pretty much. I mean, you know, he was a notary. And now he’s like this… dirtbag.”
Traumatic brain injuries resulting in changes in personality aren’t uncommon. In Henry’s case, married with the inadvertent death of his wife, it was pretty much textbook. That he was ready and able to risk everything on the outcome of a sporting match spoke to a larger mental instability, certainly, but in light of everything else I’d learned about Henry subsequent to his disappearance, there was a strong sense of paranoia at work here, too, and a certain fatalistic streak. He’d left his son to fend for himself, but also left him with a fortune in life insurance. Nothing about Henry made sense, because nothing in Henry made sense. I had a sinking feeling that when we found Henry, he wasn’t going to be in a good mental state.
“When did your dad start collecting plasma TVs?” Sam asked.
“That was a recent obsession,” Brent said. “For a long time he was just really into Star Wars. ”
“How recent?” I asked.
“He started stockpiling them a few months before he skipped town,” Brent said.
“Any idea why?”
“He watched a lot of sports,” Brent said. He then shrugged for maybe the thousandth time in the last two days. I was empathetic toward Brent for the odd life he’d been forced into, but I wondered if his shoulders ached from the amount of shrugging he did. “He’s a hoarder when he puts his mind to something.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Ten plasma televisions was obsessive even for an obsessive. There had to be something else.
“Your father’s gambling,” I said. “He ever think about turning the tables?”
“What do you mean?” Brent said.
“Going into business,” I said. “Starting his own sportsbook.” I remembered what Sam had said about his
