“How could that be?”
“If she didn’t in fact die.”
“She was hit by a bus in San Francisco in eighty-three, killed instantly,” Drummond said. His delivery was pat, much the same as when he detailed his duties at Perriman Appliances.
6
In a dark bedroom only slightly larger than its full-sized bed, Mickey and Sylvia Ramirez slept.
The telephone changed that.
Mickey looked first to the clock. 5:56.
Usually he slept until the alarm buzzed at 7:05. Then he needed three cups of coffee to dissipate the haze of semiconsciousness. Adrenaline made coffee superfluous now. Good tips often came early, before word could spread and odds could plummet.
“Fucking horseaholics,” Sylvia groaned.
Mickey was well aware that people had trouble believing he had a wife at all, let alone a beauty like Sylvia. Olive skinned, with leonine features and a chute of lustrous black hair, she reminded everyone of the queens and princesses on the canvases of El Greco or Velazquez. A few minutes with her, though, and everyone realized Mickey was no luckier in love than at the track.
The phone was just inches from his pillow, atop the stacked milk crates he used as a nightstand. Sylvia always insisted on answering, her aim being to prevent other horseaholics from putting ideas into his head. By the numbers, he admitted, she was justified. So far. But it was only a matter of time, he believed, until the big score that would bring the apartment of her dreams-“the one with separate bedrooms,” she liked to say.
As was their custom, he rolled out of the way and she swung wildly at the phone. Once she got a handle on the cordless handset, she answered with an indignant, “Hello?”
The entirety of her face bunched furiously toward her nose, telling Mickey who was on the line. In Sylvia’s mind, Charlie was to gambling what the Devil was to sin.
“Like the rest of the fucking world at this hour, he’s asleep now,” she said. “But just one thing before you go, Charlie Horse: Fucking thanks a lot for Great Aunt Edith. That money was supposed to be my sofa.”
Mickey could hear Charlie’s pleas as she plunged the handset toward the cradle. He grabbed it in time to save the connection.
“Man, how many fucking times I gotta tell you not to call here?” he said. This was for Sylvia’s benefit, which Charlie would understand. He wouldn’t have risked stirring Hurricane Sylvia, especially so early, unless something big was up.
Taking the handset, Mickey shot off the bed and out of the room. Sylvia was content to roll back to sleep, thank goodness.
The linoleum in the narrow hallway froze his bare soles. He entered the compact living room, which also served as his office, and pulled the door shut delicately, so the click wouldn’t wake four-month-old Alfonso-the living room also served as the nursery.
“The less you know, the better,” Charlie was saying, “but I need you to help me get hold of my mother or Grudzev’s going to be the least of my problems.” It did not sound like the man was calling with any sort of tip. It did sound like he’d been at the bottle.
“Your mother?” Mickey whispered for the sake of the baby, four feet away. “Wouldn’t you be wanting a lady with a crystal ball to get hold of her?”
“Listen for five seconds, please?” Charlie said, as sober as Mickey had ever heard him. “The first of her Social Security checks was forwarded to me from general delivery, Monroeville, Virginia. And last night, my father said something that led me to believe she’s actually still there.”
“So, you’re thinking, what? Your mom, who’s rich enough that she doesn’t give a shit about seventeen hundred bucks a month, can solve your problems?”
“For our purposes, that sums it up.”
“I’m guessing you tried calling four one one?”
“Every permutation of Isadora VanDeuersen Clark I could think of. The closest I got was an Isaiah Clark in Arlington, which isn’t in any way close. I know if anyone can find her, it’s you.”
“Directory assistance operators are amateurs,” said Mickey, the once and future PI. He lowered himself into his swivel chair at the computer table that, lately, doubled as a diaper-changing table. He toggled a switch and set his hard drive purring.
“Fasten your seat belt,” he said to Charlie. “I know a back way into the online databases the directory assistance operators use. Unpublished numbers they can’t access, I can, with just a click of the option key.”
His browser opened. A mouse click and three keystrokes and he was in the national master directory. A few more keystrokes and he relayed, “Nothing listed or unlisted for her. But, relax, we haven’t even gotten started.”
Placing his icy feet onto the radiator, he accidentally knocked a rubber bath duck from its perch atop the diaper pail. It squeaked softly on impact with the rug. Baby Alfonso awoke in full-on wail.
“Hang on,” Mickey said to Charlie.
He stuffed a hand through the crib slats and rubbed the crown of Alfonso’s head. As usual, the baby was back asleep in seconds. But now Sylvia was marching down the hallway.
“Hey, man, can you call me a little later at the office?” Mickey asked Charlie.
“I might not be able to, actually, because I might be dead.”
Mickey didn’t take this lightly. Charlie had been calm in comparison when detailing Grudzev’s cup-of-sand threat. “Okay, okay,” he said, mouse-clicking his way to the board of elections Web site. Its information-rich database was available only to qualified election officials. Mickey could access it thanks to a guerrilla Web site that generated functioning election official pass codes.
“I thought we were through with this shit, Moby Mick,” Sylvia yelled from the other side of the hollow plywood door. She maintained it was thoughtless to speak inside the nursery while the baby slept.
“Charlie, hang on one more sec?” Mickey said.
He balanced the handset atop the hard drive and stepped out of the room, head lowered. The appearance of supplication usually helped.
“It’s not the horses this time,” he said.
Her eyes were hot coals. “I don’t care if it’s the weather. You said you don’t want your son knowing you associate with the likes of that dead-beat.”
Mickey winced. Charlie probably had heard her. This was gracious, though, compared to things she’d said before to his face. Mickey’s concern was Alfonso.
Indeed, the baby began to cry again.
“Nice work,” Sylvia said, as if it were Mickey’s fault.
Mickey rushed back into the nursery, simultaneously picking up poor Alfonso and the handset. He saw that, in his absence, the board of elections site had linked to and automatically opened a PDF of the elaborate paperwork required, in light of all the Social Security benefits fraud, for a change of address. It requested that Isadora VanDeuersen Clark’s checks be forwarded to Charles Clark at 305 East 10 Street in New York City. The original address was General Delivery, Monroeville, Virginia. No news there. But the form stated, in oversized bold caps, that if the original address were a post office box or general delivery, the applicant needed to supply a physical address below. So to learn Isadora VanDeuersen Clark’s actual whereabouts, in theory, all Mickey had to do was scroll down.
“What’s going on?” asked Charlie and Sylvia, almost in unison.
“Just a sec,” Mickey told them both.
Sylvia stomped into the room. Mickey’s back was to her. Still, her look made him wither. “One more second, please,” he begged, scrolling furiously toward the address.
“Okay…” She eyed the ceiling for about one second, then seized the computer’s power cable, shifting her weight toward the outlet, to pull the plug with maximum dramatic effect.
