The Wrong Case Read online

  “And he said that if anybody could find Raymond, you could, and I’m so afraid that—that something awful has happened to him—he was such a lovely child, so kind and gentle. Not like other boys. And he left home too soon; he wasn’t ready for the world just yet. But my mother—my mother…”

  But she had stopped talking to me. Her words were directed somewhere else. Inside her perhaps, or into her past, or maybe off into the mountains where she saw herself living in a quiet, sheltered cabin, mate to a pious man who might help.

  “And if you don’t help me, I don’t know where to turn. I’m so afraid—I must find him, you know.” The eyes she turned toward me were glazed with a fear approaching madness.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What are you frightened of?” I asked again.

  “That something awful has happened to Raymond, of course.” She picked at her cuticles again, digging at them so hard that I could hear the thrum as thumbnail ripped flesh, even over the sound of the afternoon traffic drifting up from the street below. She bit off a piece of cuticle as neatly as my grandmother used to snip thread with her store-bought teeth, then spit the skin sharply onto my carpet. I expected her to apologize, but she didn’t seem to know that I was in the room. Her glazed eyes turned misty and sorry with some unexplained loss.

  “Hey, let’s start over,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s try again, okay?”

  She touched her face with her hand, her fingers moving like a blind woman’s across an unfamiliar face. Then she came back, saying, “I must apologize for taking your time, Mr. Milodragovitch. You’ve been very kind and patient. But somehow I thought—thought it would be different somehow—”

  “Like on television?”

  “No. Easier somehow. I don’t know. But I can see now that you can’t help me, can see that this was a mistake from beginning to end, so if you’ll just tell me how much I owe you for your time, I’ll pay you and be on my way,” she said, her voice carefully controlled. Then she giggled again. “Be on my merry way,” she said lightly, taking a sheaf of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks, so thick that she couldn’t fold them, out of her purse. In another time I might have thought, Hey, this dame is loaded! And since I’m an old-fashioned guy, that’s exactly what I thought. She had come prepared to look long and hard for the little brother, had come burdened with the family hopes and fortune.

  “Hey, put the money away,” I said, taking a quick hit off the whiskey, making myself talk without thinking. “Hey, listen,” I began again, then had one more drink, that drink that frees the tongue. She neither looked at me nor stuffed the checks back in her purse; she sat there at my command like a child waiting to be punished. “Hey, listen for a minute, will you? I’ll make a deal with you. My life hasn’t been too grand these past few years. Shit, my life was never grand. And the thing I liked best of all about divorce work was that I never had to see anybody whose life was any better off than mine. The people who came asking for my help convinced me that the world was just as stupid and filthy and cruel and corrupt as I thought it was. And maybe I still think that, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what I think, I guess, because that part of my life is over. I’m out of business. The Robin Hood of the Divorce Courts has slung his cameras and mikes and dirty pictures behind him…and I’ve got nothing to show for those years but bad debts and grief, I’ve not done a single thing in all that time I could be proud of, so maybe here at the end I should do something nice for a change, something for free, and maybe this shitload of misery I call myself will feel better instead of worse for a change. Maybe.

  “So I’ll make a deal with you, okay? I’ll make your little brother my last official act as a private creep, I’ll look for your goddamned little brother in the daytime, if you’ll…”

  But when it came down to it, I didn’t have the guts to say it.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” she said into my pause, and she didn’t sound as if she cared to understand either.

  So I said it: “I’ll look for your brother in exchange for your nights…my days for your nights.”

  So what if I was half in the bag, lonesome and dumb with self-pity, left with a life that had become all hangover and no drunk. I wanted to feel human again, and the only way I knew was with a woman, and the only women I knew were gay divorcees, stoned hippie chicks, and tired barmaids whose emotions were as badly mangled as mine, and I wanted more, wanted this squirrelly, oddly virginal English professor from some goddamned crossroads in Iowa, wanted her like I hadn’t wanted anything in a long time, too long. So I said it again, “My days for your nights.”

  She glanced up coldly, her face composed and prim.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Fuck it then,” I said, finding myself standing again. “Just fuck it, okay?”

  She didn’t seem particularly angry. She just slipped the checks back into her purse, snapped it shut, then left my office without another word. As she walked she held her back very erectly, moving her legs as if she had envied too many models. It was an exit, but she tripped over the sill, stumbled down the hall, leaving my office door open. I didn’t feel much like laughing but I tried one anyway. It sounded like the croak of a crushed frog, so I turned back to my bottle and my northern view, shut off the recorder and sat there without thinking about anything.

  A light haze shrouded the Diablos, not smog yet but the hot afternoon sun vaporizing the pine pitch, drawing moisture from the needles and the bark. When the trees were dry enough, lightning or a careless smoker would start the first fire, and my timber would finally burn all the way down. Again I considered selling it, maybe even selling the land to some rich tourist. Recreation land, they called it, better than gold or silver. I thought of selling and taking the money away with me to some foreign land where I could live cheaply until my fifty-third birthday made me a rich man, but even as I thought about it, I knew I wouldn’t leave. Not yet.

  Traffic north of Dottle Street was still stalled by a fire truck. Two firemen washed the blood off the street, leaving a larger, darker stain that steamed on the hot asphalt. The man with the hose worked very intently; his partner stood with his hands on his hips, his cap tilted back, the smile of an untroubled man wide across his face.

  When I went to shut the door, the smell of her was thick in the cool air of my office, a fragrance of spring, flowery and untainted, then old Simon shuffled sheepishly through the open door, bringing the drinks and the smell of stale cigarettes and whiskey sweat with him.

  “Sorry, sorry, Milo, sorry to be so long, sorry, but these two kids, Milo, these two kids took, sorry…” he babbled in his usual drunken manner as he sat the drinks on my desk. Then he began to pound his clothes so hard that dust puffed from his shoddy suit. “Cigarette, Milo, sorry, Milo, cigarette, Milo, please, just one.”

  “She’s gone, you old fart, so you can act human again. The cigarettes are right where they always are.”

  He filched a whole pack of Camels from the drawer where I kept them since I quit. After he lit two, he gave me one, then sucked on his so hard that he nearly choked to death. As soon as he caught his flimsy breath, he said, “Thank you, Milo. You’re a real gentleman.”

  “Fuck you, old man,” I answered as I had the single drag I allowed myself. I flipped the long butt out the window, hoping it landed on a tourist. “What took so long with the drinks, huh?”

  “You know how it is,” he said, not even bothering to lie. He was drunk but maintaining. He could still rub his hands together as if he were just about to freeze to death, could still revolve his cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he spoke, and he still spoke in a normal voice, which meant that he knew who I was and spared me the string of foolish chatter which he used like a shield against the sober world. “Who was that lovely bit of fluff on the stairs, Milo?”

  “Fuck you, Simon.”

  “Since you don’t care to con
fide in an old and trusted friend—who’s saved your dumb-ass more times than can be counted— perhaps you’ll share these as yet untasted drinks with an old man in great need of a taste.”

  “Weren’t the first two enough? And the two shots?”

  “Milo, my boy, there’s never enough.”

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping over to the desk to get the drinks, since Simon obviously wasn’t going to. I handed him one, then looked at the recorder. I started to erase the tape, but the sound of her voice was there. I thought I might want to hear it sometime, might want to hear my own foolishness, so I took the cassette out and slipped it into my hip pocket. Then Simon and I snapped the lids off the Styrofoam cups, left the office and sipped the drinks as we strolled the forty easy steps down to Mahoney’s, sauntering like lords through the summer afternoon buzz of shoppers and gaping tourists, down to Mahoney’s Bar and Grill, where I had unlimited credit and willing friends, grease to ease the squeaking wheel of a summer afternoon.

  “Did you hear about the tragic purse snatcher?” Simon asked. When he said it, it sounded like the first line of a dirty joke, but I told him I’d already heard it.

  Two

  During his more lucid moments, Simon often said that when I grew old enough to become a full-time drunk, he and I would have a worthless contest, and he maintained that I would lose because I lacked the necessary character to forgo the last vestiges of middle-class morality. “When I’m so soused that I defecate in my trousers,” he would confide in his rich, rolling, private voice, “even in your deepest stupor, boy, you will turn away in disgust. However mild, still disgust. And the man who would truly discard his life lacks that fatal disgust. And prides himself upon that lack.”

  Simon and I had been friends for years, ever since the night I had taken him home in my deputy sheriff’s unit instead of heaving him into the county drunk tank, which had been filled with its usual Saturday-night complement of outraged Indians, collapsed winos, and downright mean drunks. I’d fed him bacon and eggs, coffee and whiskey, and talked to him, I guess, as if he were still a man, and we’d become friends. It had been on his advice that I’d become a private investigator after resigning from the sheriff’s department. He told me that if I didn’t have a job I’d drink myself to death before I really had time to enjoy it. He added that being a divorce detective was about all I was good for. Like most of his advice, it sounded good, so I took it. But in all those years, he never told me why, out of all the people in Meriwether’s bars, he had chosen to allow only me behind his drunken mask. Perhaps he did it in memory of my father, who had been his friend and drinking companion too, or perhaps simply on a drunken whim. When I asked him why, he would only say lightly, “Even the foulest drunk needs a friend. One dependable friend. Any more than one confuses the issue. When I die, I’m assured one mourner.” Then he would laugh until he choked, adding, “And that’s more than you can say, boy.” I never asked myself why I let him choose me.

  Like me, Simon had been the scion of an old Meriwether family, and until he was in his early forties had been a damned successful criminal lawyer, perhaps the best in the mountain West, feared by prosecutors in seven states, beloved by assorted murderers, rapists and bank robbers. Then one spring day he lost it, lost his belief in the law, in justice, in the court system. He said that anything that easy to best couldn’t be any good. So he closed his office and opened a bottle, drank from that bottle seriously for ten years, long enough for people to forget who he had been and to see only what he had become. With whiskey he destroyed their memories, then settled down to steady drinking, his thirst strong but not suicidal, and joined that fair brigade of peripatetic drunks that makes Meriwether such a fine and pleasant city, the best little town in the West, a small city that could boast of the highest per capita ratio of bars in America.

  (It could but it doesn’t. Instead it chooses to boast of mountain vistas, trout streams and the most highly speculative land values in the West. Sometimes I think the Chamber of Commerce and the tourist office should tout the bars: at least they aren’t filled with strangers.)

  Although he worked on it very hard, Simon didn’t quite qualify for the honors of town drunk. They were reserved for a young man who had appeared in the local bars one day wearing an old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap and claiming to be able to repeat the radio broadcast of any Dodger game within the last twenty years. When he was sober, that is, which was never. Nonetheless, Simon was a character of some renown in his own right. He lived in the discarded clothing of other men, possessed nothing except those clothes, a pencil and a child’s notebook for his letters, and whatever might lurk in the dusty pockets of other men’s suits. Year round he slept where he fell or wherever people dragged him afterward. I never saw him buy a drink or a meal, although he had a small monthly income from his father’s trust. Surely sometime during those years he must have bought a meal or a drink, but I never saw him do it. A matter of pride, he maintained. There were a few things that he wouldn’t do for a drink, though. He wouldn’t humor a fool, if he recognized the fool beforehand, and he wouldn’t change his political opinions, which were dangerously violent and radical.

  Periodically he was arrested for threatening the life of some political figure, and only because he was Simon Rome he spent two or three months drying out at the state mental hospital at Twin Forks instead of two or three years in a federal slammer. Almost daily, he wrote long, rambling letters of protest to Washington, letters that must have given many a sweet laugh to poor secretaries dulled by the Capitol atmosphere. During the days of antiwar protest marches, Simon could always be found at the head of the line, dancing and shouting the most vile threats against the government. The freaks and college students who came into Mahoney’s at night, looking for a real place, loved Simon. They could cheer him on in his idiot act, buy him drinks just to hear him shout for presidential blood. Simon was our only radical wino and he played his role day and night. Except with me. With me he could be ordinary, normal, and even sad, if it suited his mood.

  —

  As Simon and I reached our favorite booth in Mahoney’s, I waved at old Pierre, who was sitting like a stone at the back table next to the jukebox and the shuffleboard machine, watching each new customer as if he dared him to activate either electronic obscenity. I didn’t offer Pierre a drink because his brain was so whiskey-soaked that he didn’t bother to drink much anymore; he just sat around and thought about being drunk, which usually worked. Sometimes he would clutch his head and curse in his unintelligible French, squeezing his head as if that would put the taste of whiskey in his mouth. After he had awoken one morning to discover that he had completely forgotten the English language, he cut down his consumption, but he still spent his days in Mahoney’s, watching the shuffleboard machine and grunting with a French accent. Sometimes, though, I suspected that like Simon’s idiot babble this was the ruse with which old Pierre kept the world at bay. It certainly simplified life, and on certain days, such as this one, I envied that simplicity and wondered what sort of guise I would wear when I made that final retreat. When I waved at Pierre, he seemed to smile slyly.

  When Leo brought the shots and beers, he mentioned that he had added four whiskey sours and two shots to my heavy tab.

  “You mean you didn’t buy Simon’s story of robbery and near murder?” I asked, but Leo just sneered. The only person more cynical than a drunk is a reformed drunk.

  After he left, Simon checked to see that nobody was close enough to hear his normal voice, then he asked, “And what did that lovely lady want, lad? Not a divorce, I venture.” Then he cackled softly. The ruin of my business amused him greatly.

  “I’m not sure what she wanted. A better man than me, I guess.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard to find,” Simon said, sipping slowly at his shot.

  “Off my ass, old man. Let’s get drunk and be somebody.”

  Simon nodded sagely, sipped again, then started to say something, but Fat Freddy, whom Simon hated
passionately, waddled slowly past our booth, picking his teeth and sucking the last juices from the debris of his Slumgullion lunch. Simon hated Freddy because he had been a corrupt cop, fired from the force of a large Midwestern city for running a string of whores. The passion came because Freddy had taught me to shadow by following Simon everywhere he went for three weeks. Simon had never seen us but he had felt us behind him somewhere, dogging his tracks like a pair of patient but lazy hounds. After a month or so, Simon had forgiven me but he had never forgiven Freddy.

  “Good afternoon, Milo. And how are you today, Mr. Rome?” Freddy said as he loomed past our booth, presenting his enormous belly as if it were a treasure of great worth, a leg of lamb with mint jelly, perhaps, or a crown roast engulfed by oysters.

  I nodded, but Simon went berserk, sputtering, “Fa-fa-fat ba-ba-bastard bastard bastard.”

  “Don’t have a fit,” I said. “Not at my table anyway.”

  Simon hushed and Freddy moved on to dock next to Pierre, where they would wait out the afternoon, Pierre watching for the fool with a coin who would destroy his peace, Freddy plying his toothpick with a devotion my cousin the dentist would have admired.

  When he finally settled down, Simon went back to the lady, saying, “That was a truly fair maiden, boy. I would have thought that you would have done whatever she asked.”

  “I tried.”

  “A really lovely lady,” he whispered, pausing to stare into his shot glass. “Something sweet and lovely about that lady. I remember the ladies. Vaguely…” Then he chuckled at his self-pity. Though there were rumors that Simon had been hell on the ladies in his youth, he had never married, but after the years of drinking, he had become as sexless as an old woman. He didn’t even indulge in the bitter, helpless comments of the other winos when they would appraise the body of a young woman in the bar. Just passing Helen Duffy on the stairs, he had been caught like me by the special nature of that woman. “Lovely,” he repeated, as if the word would bring back the vision, then he smiled sadly, lifting his small red notebook and pencil from his coat pocket as carefully as if they were deadly weapons. He began to babble and scrawl, forgetting me completely.