The Wrong Case Read online

  What the hell, I wasn’t above taking advantage of a woman, running out the tired trappings of romance, even drugging them to have my way. We could make up the morality afterward in that sad time when passion has degenerated into a quick cigarette, a slow drink, silence.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked one more time, hand poised over my pad.

  “I’m…”

  “Wait a second,” I interrupted, reaching into the bottom desk drawer for the cassette recorder, which I’d bought from Muffin when I’d had to sell the fancy Ampex reel to reel. Muffin had assured me that the cassette recorder wasn’t hot, but I didn’t believe him for a moment.

  “Do you mind?” I asked as I switched on the recorder. “My secretary went to lunch and hasn’t come back yet. I like to have a record of these things. I assure you that everything that passes between us will be strictly confidential.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. I didn’t tell her that my secretary had gone to lunch four years ago, and that the reason she hadn’t come back was because she had run away with a dope dealer from Portland. It had been a successful match. They were living in Mazátlan now; she sunbathed, he financed dope deals.

  “Where shall I begin?” she asked, a nervous tremor in her voice.

  “How about name and address? That sort of stuff.”

  “Oh,” she said, somehow surprised, as if she had expected to hire me without telling me her name. “All right. My name is Helen Duffy, and I live with my parents,” she said, her voice unnaturally high and loud for the benefit of the recorder.

  “Listen,” I said, “just speak normally. You don’t have to shout or anything.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Those things make me nervous.”

  “They make a lot of people nervous, but don’t let it bother you. Just tell me where you live. More specifically than ‘with my parents,’ okay?”

  “All right,” she whispered, then steeled herself to begin again. “My name is Helen Duffy—”

  “A little louder than that, please.”

  “—and I live with my parents at Rural Route number 4, Box 52B, Storm Lake, Iowa, Zip Code 50588, and I am an assistant professor of English at Buena Vista College in Storm Lake.”

  “Isn’t that where they had the massacre?”

  “What? Oh, no, that was Spirit Lake. MacKinlay Kantor wrote a rather good novel about it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I read it a long time ago.” She looked so surprised that I added, “I went to college too. Not very successfully but for a long time.” I didn’t add that I went until my GI Bill ran out, along with the patience of the trustees of my father’s estate.

  “Where did you go?” she asked politely, her voice normal now, which was what I had been after.

  “Here at Mountain States, Mexico City College, USC, a couple of junior colleges in California.”

  “What did you major in?”

  “Booze, broads, and various water sports,” I said, hoping to turn her back to the business at hand.

  “Oh.”

  “Who do you want me to find? Whom?”

  “How did you know I wanted you to look for somebody?”

  “Easy. You’re not married, so you don’t want a divorce. You don’t look like the sort of woman who wants me to repossess a used car or a color television or hassle some guy for a gambling debt, so I assume you want me to find somebody. Let me guess,” I said, showing off. “Your sister came out West—”

  “Brother.”

  “Younger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, your younger brother came out West to work this summer and—”

  “Two years ago. To work on his master’s in history. Raymond always loved Western history,” she said, as if that too explained everything.

  “—and dropped out of school into radical politics or into the drug scene—”

  “To finish his research for his thesis on criminal justice on the Western frontier,” she corrected me.

  “—and the family hasn’t heard from him in several months, and you’ve come West on your summer vacation to find out what’s wrong.”

  “Three weeks. We—I had a letter three weeks ago.”

  “Three weeks isn’t very long,” I said, glad to be right about something.

  “In his last letter, he seemed worried about something, under some sort of strain.”

  “What about?”

  “He didn’t say,” she said primly.

  “Then how did you know he was under a strain?”

  “He’s my brother,” she stated flatly.

  “Sometimes parents don’t even know their own children.”

  “That isn’t the case here.”

  I managed to keep myself from saying, “Well, what is the case, lady?” It was a beginning. In the book it says to let the client talk, to listen carefully and take copious notes, and making certain that when you do speak, to be sure to reveal your perception and intelligence, your deep understanding of human behavior, and that way the client will have the utmost confidence in your abilities, etc. But I always seemed to do it this other way: stagger them with wit, ply them with romance and whiskey sours, and convince them that I wouldn’t be able to eat that night unless they paid me a large retainer. Sometimes it worked.

  “Okay. Did the letter have a return address?”

  “Yes. A hotel. But when I went there, it had burned down.”

  “The Great Northern?”

  She nodded sadly.

  “What the hell was he doing living there?”

  “It had something to do with his research, I think.”

  “What was he researching? Cockroaches and bedbugs?”

  She didn’t bother to answer.

  Once, the Great Northern had been a fine Western hotel, where prospectors who had hit it and ranchers who could afford it came to raise hell in Victorian splendor. Even after its heyday, it was a good hotel, somewhat run-down but still holding on to enough elegance to make a person feel comfortable. But an Eastern corporation had bought it, and in order to show a profit they had subdivided the rooms; made it into a flophouse for winos with a steady income and a hot-sheets home for Meriwether’s few prostitutes. It had burned down about three weeks ago, burned down in about fifteen minutes because the sprinkler system was rusted shut.

  “A terrible fire,” I said.

  “You don’t think…”

  “No chance. I was there when they sifted the ashes. Everybody got out, except for two winos. Petey Martinez, who was deaf and wouldn’t wear his hearing aid except on formal occasions, and the old man who started the fire, smoking in bed, drunk probably. Your brother wasn’t in there. At least not when it burned down.”

  She didn’t seem relieved, so I tried another question.

  “Was your brother—Raymond, isn’t it?—into the drug scene or radical politics?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. He was a decent middle-class young man. Well-mannered, considerate, intelligent. Somewhat timid, I suppose, but then that seems to run in our family. He was opposed to the Vietnam war, of course, but he certainly wasn’t a radical, and he wouldn’t have had anything to do with drugs. He had hobbies.”

  “Hobbies?” I guess I said it as if I wanted to know what they were. She took it that way.

  “Yes. He was a fine horseman, and his gun collection was the finest in the state. He was also a regional fast-draw champion.”

  “Some hobbies.”

  “He enjoyed them, yes. He was kind to his horses and he never killed a living thing with his guns.”

  “Okay,” I said, not knowing what else to say without making her defense of her little brother even stronger. I had the distinct feeling that her little brother wasn’t quite the angel she had in mind, and I knew we wouldn’t get anywhere if I told her that. So I changed tactics: “Have you ever smoked marijuana?”

  “Of course not. Why do you ask?”

  “Just trying to see how reliable
a source of information you are,” I said. “Sometimes people who aren’t familiar with drugs don’t know when—”

  But she burst into tears before I could finish. After all that had happened, she chose to fall apart over that.

  “I—I may not know anything about—about drugs or radical politics or anything like that—but I do know my—my little brother,” she sputtered, trying to hold her face together. “Know he wouldn’t do—do anything awful.” The awful nearly became a scream. Her pain and worry was real, and it dangled between us like a frayed empty sleeve.

  “Excuse me,” she blubbered, coughing to cover the tears. “I—I have to take out my contacts…I haven’t had them very long, I’m not used to them.” So she removed her contact paraphernalia from her purse and started prying at her eyes.

  I switched off the recorder. Some things didn’t need recording. As I watched her face tilt over her open palm, I tried to think about her missing brother. I almost told her that it was senseless for us to go on like this, since the chances of me finding her little brother were less than slim. Runaway children are almost impossible to find, even for people who are trained in missing-person work, which I wasn’t, and the only lost children I’d ever found had been lost in the woods. But I didn’t tell her. I still wanted her, so I didn’t tell her. She seemed like a woman from a simpler, better time, a small-town time when sprinklers graced neat lawns and screen doors smelled like rain or dust instead of plastic, when the seasons changed as gracefully as scenes on greeting cards, when snow was never dirty, when fall leaves were never soggy and damp, and when children never cried, except for brief moments, and then were so gently comforted that they didn’t mind crying at all. She did that to me, made me homesick for a childhood I’d never really had, the one I sometimes constructed in odd drunken moments to make me forget the real one. And she made me hope, something I hadn’t done for years, made me believe in a better, cleaner world where a man and a woman could raise a family in peace. I decided then that she deserved better than my tired version of comfort; she deserved my help, such as it was.

  So I didn’t have another hit off the office bottle, but capped it and set it back in the bottom drawer, trying to think seriously about her little brother. But she dropped one of her contacts, and we spent the next few minutes crawling around the faded and scarred carpet, searching the charred spots for her contact. She had one eye closed, and I acted like I could really see after drinking most of the day. I cursed silently, cursed Simon and the missing drinks, which I knew he had slipped into an alley to drink, hating himself even as he drank them but already constructing the lie he would tell Leo to get two more and another free shot for his grief. And I cursed vanity: hers for the contacts, mine for refusing to wear my glasses. The longer we searched, the more it looked like she was going to need a drink. She snagged her panty hose twice; she bumped heads with me only once, but so hard that she sat back on the carpet, her knees folded under her, her hand to her forehead. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to wail like a hysterical child, but she caught herself when I found the lens in the chair. At least I found something. She put it away, took out the other without incident, and we went back to business.

  As I switched the recorder back on, I said, “I know this must be a strain, but if I don’t ask hard questions, I’ll never be able to help you. Okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, slipping on rimless glasses that made her look more her age. “I’m not usually this sensitive. But sometimes…sometimes, as my mother says, I’m a ninny. I never know when it’s going to happen. Sometimes the tears just start. Sometimes when I lose things, I just can’t…”

  “That’s all right. Don’t worry.”

  “How can I help but worry? I just know Raymond is in some sort of difficulty. Otherwise he would have been in touch. Raymond and I are very close.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for that. Let’s start over. What sort of trouble do you think he might be in?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quickly.

  “You won’t even guess?”

  “I thought you were supposed to do that.”

  “Yeah. I guess so. Who referred you to me?”

  “I told you I’d rather not say. If you don’t mind,” she answered, folding her hands around the purse and arching her neck. Then she suddenly began to giggle and blushed very nicely, the warmth rising from her bare shoulders to her slim neck. I tried to blush back, but there are some things not even I can fake. After the giggles rattled away into the summer afternoon, she straightened her face and hair, then said, “I’m afraid I lied a moment ago. I have smoked pot a few times. When I was in graduate school in the early sixties, but nothing happened.”

  “What did you expect to happen?”

  “Oh, something terribly sinful, I suppose. Don’t look at me like that, please. I’m not as naïve as I may appear.”

  “Whatever you say, lady,” I said, wondering where the blush and giggles had come from. “But back to your little brother and his trouble.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that he’s in trouble,” she said gaily, “I mean I don’t know it for sure. I think he’s in trouble but I don’t know it for a fact, and as my mother is always telling me, thinking isn’t knowing. Perhaps he’s just angry at the family and is staying out of touch to hurt us.”

  “Why should he be angry with your family?”

  “That’s rather personal. I’d rather not go into it, if you don’t mind,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping back to her lap, where her fingers were busily mauling each other, her voice no longer gay at all.

  “Why should I mind,” I said, but she missed the irony. Family life, I thought, wonderful family life. There ought to be a law against families, or, at the very least, children should be given a choice of families or colors of their Skinner Boxes. Families are always a mess: everybody always wants to fuck everybody else and usually finds a particularly vicious substitute. And love doesn’t seem to matter either. Too much, not enough—somehow the same unhappy family life comes out. Her family was probably a nice middle-class, ordinary group. My family had been a nightmare. My father a rich, worthless drunk; my mother an insane drunk. So here was Helen Duffy coming to me for help, when I probably needed help more than she did. And her little brother probably wanted nothing more in the world than to be left alone by his family. But help I intended to give, and for that help I intended to be paid in kind. Long days looking for a kid who didn’t want to be found, short nights with his big sister.

  But as I thought about it, I suddenly didn’t like myself very much. I’d never been really fond of myself anyway, but now I disliked myself so much it made me feel old and tired, deceitful and dirty, the drunk in the gutter unworthy to even touch the shoes of the passing lady.

  “Miss Duffy—Helen. Do you mind if I call you Helen?”

  She sighed rather than answering, keeping the nightwatch on her frantic fingers.

  “Miss Duffy, I’ll be frank with you, if you don’t mind. I haven’t been frank with anybody in years, not since I started this grimy racket. In the ten years or so since I started this crap, I’ve done almost nothing but divorce work. A little repossession work, but I don’t like it. Every now and then somebody comes into my office wanting me to find somebody else—a runaway kid or a husband who decided to become somebody else—and what usually happens when I look for a runaway is that I find them really quick because I bribe some creep at the power company or the telephone office or the post office, which costs my client three bills plus the bribe and which makes me feel worse than the creeps I have to deal with. If that doesn’t work, and a lot of times it doesn’t, then I never find the runaway, and that costs my client a small fortune and makes me feel even worse than when I find somebody. It makes me feel like warmed-over shit, if you’ll excuse the expression.

  “And if I’m looking for a kid who has slipped into the street scene here, I never even get close. Not even the hometown freaks who’ve known me all their live
s, who deal me dope, they won’t help me find somebody in the street scene. They know that nobody wants to go home—that’s why they ran away—so they won’t talk to me, and I can’t find my ass with either hand when people won’t talk to me.

  “So save your money. If you want somebody to look for your little brother, go to the police. The bastards are corrupt but they’re cheap. I’m expensive and corrupt. And not very good at my job. I can find a naked woman in a dark room, but not if she runs— Shit,” I said, trying one of her sighs and discovering that I was standing up, leaning heavily on my desk, shaking slightly like a man who needed a drink more than he needed frankness. So I reached in the drawer and had one.

  Her hands had fallen still, and she looked up at me blankly, then said quietly, “You’re rather a profane and unhappy man, aren’t you?”

  “Lady, I’m worse than that,” I said as I sat down.

  She stared over my shoulder into the blue slopes of the Diablos, her clear blue eyes reflecting the peaks and the mountain sky.

  “Oh, you’re probably like most men,” she murmured, a sad authority in her voice as she looked past me, “not nearly so terrible as you think. Men are always so hard on themselves. Morally, I mean. My friend, who recommended you, says you’re a good man. Unhappy but good. And he warned me that you would be profane. I really don’t mind. I just can’t talk that way, you know, the words feel dirty in my mouth.” Then she giggled faintly but not happily. “My friend said you knew—knew whenever anybody farted in Meriwether County—”

  “His opinion is too high,” I said.