“Jeez,” I said, “sorry to interrupt the well-digging or log-splitting, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“I was waxing the kitchen floor,” Hammond said.
“Oh, Al,” I crooned. “How domestic.”
“Well, I haven't really gotten to the waxing yet. Right now I'm in the middle of skinning a sheep so I'll have something to buff it with.”
“Can you get me an address to go with a phone number?”
“Could Einstein count to ten?”
“And some idea of what's at that address?”
“Some idea?” Hammond said. “Yeah, I guess I can manage to give you some idea.”
“Five-five-five-one-four-two-four.”
“Two-thirteen area?”
“Yes.”
“You at home?”
“Just waiting for the sun to come out.”
“Give me ten minutes. What do I get out of this?”
“How about a big chocolate Easter bunny with your name on it?”
“How about a drink at the Red Dog?”
“Only one?”
“Hold the phone.” He hung up without saying good-bye. He always does. He learned it from the movies.
Mommy and Daddy were both watching me with a kind of repressed anticipation that made me feel like a broken TV set. It was time to disappoint them.
“Listen,” I said. “I don't really think I can help you. This just isn't the kind of thing I do.”
“I told you, Mommy,” Daddy said with grim satisfaction.
“But Janie. .” Mommy said. She wasn't going to give up.
I held up a hand. “Janie was a couple of years ago. I found her because she wanted to be found. Her mother, I hope this doesn't offend you because you're related to her somehow, her mother is a bucket of loose marbles. She'd driven everyone else in her life crazy enough to leave, so she aimed it all at Janie, and then Janie left too. I brought her home twice because she was living wrong when she was on her own. That's the end of my experience with missing children.”
Daddy got up. “Let's go,” he said.
“Sit down, Al,” Mommy said. She pointed to his chair with an arm that was all muscle tone and electrical energy. Al sat.
“There are about twenty-five thousand missing kids in L. A. at any given time,” I said. “I'm one man. The cops are better at this than I am. Have you gone to them?”
“They made us fill out a report,” Mommy said. “As long as they have a report, they seemed to say, they'd done their job. They didn't even dial the number. At least you dialed the number.”
“I'm going to get you an address, too,” I said. “But I'm afraid that's it.”
“That's it, all right,” Daddy said, getting up again. “Look at this dump.” He glanced around my living room. It looked okay to me, but I could see his point. He hadn't seen it the night before. “You can stay and waste your time if you want,” he said without giving me a look. “I'll be in the car.”
“I'll walk you down,” Mommy said, “but I want to talk with Mr. Grist for a moment or two more.” She took his arm and steered him to the door, throwing me a glance over her shoulder as she went. The glance said
I used the time to drop the coffee cups into the sink and to put the copy of Gibbon under the woodburner where it would dry more quickly. Five minutes later I'd decided on a jog at the beach followed by a sauna at UCLA, and she was back.
“He's resting,” she said.
“He looks like he could use it.”
“Be quiet,” she said. “Just clam up.” She sat down again, reached into a pocket, and tossed onto the table three bright, hard little color Polaroids. I knew before I picked them up that I didn't want to. After I looked at them, I let out a slow, labored breath. “Oh,” I said.
All three pictures showed Aimee, naked, standing up against a wall. There was a man's hand in the picture. The hand was reaching up, doing something obscene. Her eyelids in one of the shots drooped lopsidedly, one much lower than the other.
I knew that look. It was the blink of someone who's deeply stoned. The eyes come down at different rates of speed. She had bruises on her arms and an angry, swollen mark in her navel that looked like a burn. The man's hand was just a man's hand. No watch, no rings, no tattoos, just five nasty fingers sprouting from the end of a hairy forearm. The wall behind Aimee was white and featureless.
“He doesn't know about these,” I said, meaning Daddy.
She held my eyes with hers. “No. They'd kill him. He had heart bypass surgery a few months ago. He weighed two-eighty then. There isn't enough of him left for something like this.”
“When did they arrive?”
“Last week. I was home when the mailman came. I'm always home. I had to leave so I wouldn't be there when he got back. I drove around for hours before I could face him without giving it away.”
“Was there a note with them?”
“It just said, ‘Don't do anything stupid. I'll be in touch.’ Nothing since.”
“Have you got it?”
She pulled a wallet out of her purse and a piece of paper out of the wallet. It was a single line, printed on what looked like a cheap dot-matrix printer, the most anonymous of all printing media. No envelope.
“Who's seen the pictures?”
“No one.”
“No cops?”
“Why would I show them to the cops in Kansas? She's here. And if I had showed them to the cops here, Daddy would have learned about them, wouldn't he?”
“So you're carrying this alone.”
She flicked the edge of the top picture with a painted nail. It made a sharp click. “I'm stronger than I look.”
“I guess you are.” There didn't seem to be anything else to say.
“But I don't know for how long,” she said. She made a sudden stab at her hair with her right hand, and her nails scraped her forehead. She was bleeding immediately. The phone rang.
“Go into the bathroom,” I said, picking it up. “Press toilet paper to the cut until it stops. Hello?”
She walked toward the bathroom as though her spine were made of steel. She took very small steps. The blood ran in a thin red line down her cheek.
“Missing kid, huh?” Hammond said.
“Why?” I could barely understand him. I was fighting the ghost-image of the photographs.
“Tommy's Oki-Burger. Fountain, near Gardner. That's one of the places the kids go. It's a pay phone. And it's no place for somebody's baby. You plan to talk to your friendly neighborhood cop about this?”
“Later.”
“Whatever you say, pal. Got to go. The sheep's bleating.” He hung up again.
I stacked the Polaroids into a neat little pile and aligned their edges precisely. Then I picked up the top one and studied it. Aimee's hair, so meticulously unfashionable in the yearbook photos, was matted and greasy-looking. There were dirt smudges on her wrists and elbows and a scab on her knee. She'd traveled a long way from Kansas City.
After Mrs. Sorrell came out, tissue pressed to her forehead, I told her I'd do what I could. I forgot to ask about the fee. When she was gone, I studied the Polaroids again, trying to learn anything I could about Aimee's first starring role.
