The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 4
I have thrown a man off the walkway on top of that beacon.
On the easterly shore of the Funnel leading into Shrouded Bay is Eastman’s Light, a squat box-like structure close to the ground. On the southern-most point of Fissure Bay is Ansgar’s Light, a candy-cane colored tower at the center of the only decent park in south Ansgar. I still wouldn’t go there at night.
The city. Her streets welcome me. The day is bleached out by the overcast and it all looks like an eclipse. I light a smoke and step out into my hometown. Another day.
7
Because of me, Darla Boothe’s phone starts ringing.
Walking along the street, snow has stopped. I pause by the public library because it has WiFi and I get good reception.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Boothe?”
“Yes, who is this?” Her voice, tarnished with absolute concern and worry. Those few words paint her picture: bags under weary, bloodshot eyes, aged ten years in two months. Lips drawn in a perpetual look of sorrow. A brunette despair.
“My name is Richard Dean Buckner. Mr. Derne hired me to look for Delilah. I was hoping you could help.”
“He said one of you people would be calling me, I guess. I get so lost now after...all this. So, a...what are you called?”
“I’m a private investigator, ma’am.”
“Right. Like Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
“No. I have much better hair.”
She laughs, mostly hollow.
“Have you heard from her, ma’am?”
“No.” The worry creeps out of her voice and slithers across the phone line. She says with a defeat so absolute I am taxed to hear it: “Bring my baby back to me.” Little words. She begins to sob quietly.
A brilliant sun cascades down through skies as azure as the waters in Lake Tahoe. The thick sheets of snow and ice coating everything rob the light of its warmth and life before reflecting them back up into the world. Beauty, but only skin deep. The allure of the glowing day turns to fangs of icy bitterness as soon as I step into its grip. An empty dazzling.
“Ma’am, do you drink coffee?”
“I do.”
“There’s a place called Raoul’s Mexican Cantina that serves breakfast. If you like chorizo this is the place. How about we meet in a half hour?”
“Okay, I guess.”
I give her directions. Hang up. Raoul’s loves the police. Without us they’d have no business before noon. Their coffee sucks so I hope Darla Boothe hasn’t pinned all her hopes and dreams on the Joe I offered. But their chorizo really is the best. I’m hungry. And, I can drink bad coffee.
We’ve been in Raoul’s now for a half hour at least and Darla Boothe smokes.
The snow has driven construction workers inside here from a site across the street. They’ll spend the day eating hash and eggs and smoking cigarettes, watching the crummy TVs tuned to the local news and making fun of the female anchor who is twenty years past her face-for-TV.
“I hate to trouble you but I just smoked my last cigarette,” Darla says, eyeballing my smokes.
“You’re welcome to share mine,” I say, nudging the soft pack across to her. “Beware though. They’re heavy.”
“I’ve never heard of these.” She examines the pack, taps one out. “Rum Coast cigarettes, huh? Do you buy them online or at an Indian Reservation or something?”
“South of the river. Any convenience store with bars on the windows and the clerk inside a bulletproof box will have them.”
Rum Coast is my brand of coffin nail. For ditch weed tobacco, they’re stout. Darla’s first inhale, she hacks as if that one drag gave her cancer. I can see the look on her face as she contemplates trying it again, but her eyes say that one more drag and she’ll be choking back vomit. She crushes it out.
“Sorry for the waste,” she says, her voice a swirling mixture of rasp, worry and a gentle smoothness that must have been erotic if I heard it lying next to her back in her prime.
“You’re not the first to reject my brand. No worries,” I say, enjoying my smoke. “So, this is Delilah?”
Darla brought a shoebox full of photographs. Each picture tethered to the next by the presence of Delilah Boothe. They’re all jewels on a necklace that is the timeline of a little girl’s growth into adulthood. I flip through the pictures and Delilah Boothe becomes more human than search object.
“This is my little girl,” Darla says, sipping coffee. “She was ten in this one; that was the first year I planted Foxglove in the front yard.”
She taps her finger on a picture of a dark-haired girl looking bold on a pink bicycle. Where the drive meets the walk to the front door is a small patch of white Foxglove, a flower that sends a long, thin stem upwards adorned with rows of bell-shaped and freckled flowers.
They are also rather poisonous.
“Where have you already checked?” I ask, take a bite of my chorizo burrito. Lazily roll ash off my smoke.
Darla thinks. Gears turn behind her eyes, rust in their cogs from all her tears. She exhales and I can hear the flutter in her lungs born from being emotionally drained.
“I think if she wanted to come home she would have.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know Elam cares for her; he’s the only father she ever had. But, Delilah follows her heart everywhere, even to places she damn well knows she shouldn’t go. If her heart isn’t aiming back here, she won’t come.”
“Ma’am, you’ve spoken with old boyfriends, friends from work, school, maybe checked her old places of employment—”
“Delilah’s heart is guided by a wayward compass,” Darla says. “For a time I dated a man who loved to sail. He used to say something about deviation with compasses. I get it all confused now but he said it interfered with how a compass could read north. Delilah’s heart is guided by a compass that cannot read north.”
This is how people answer questions that they do not want to answer.
“Elam said after high school Delilah went off on some crazy adventures before she came back around and went to college.” Darla’s eyes slowly close and she nods. She does not re-open them. “Is there a possibility she’s off on another adventure?”
“I guess,” she says under her breath, closing her eyes for a long while. She opens them suddenly and shakes her head as if she were asleep and startled awake.
This is going poorly.
Redirect. I drop a fingertip on a photograph and slide it out from the bunch. “Tell me about this one.”
Darla focuses on the photo, reads it with her memory. Smiles. “Christmas,” she says. “1992, I think.”
The picture is of Darla and her two daughters, all wearing matching Santa sweaters that screamed early ’90s. Even Darla’s hair was still feathered with ridiculous bangs; the ’80s fashion mistakes hadn’t had enough time to bleed away before this picture immortalized them.
“Yes. 1992. That was the year we had these sweaters,” she says, a small bit of life seeping back into her. “I wanted it to be a tradition but this was the only year we wore them.” She huffed a dry laugh. “Fashion. What a fickle bitch it is.”
“This is your oldest daughter?” I point to a girl fully cloaked in the awkward development of adolescence. Glasses, braces, teeth much too big for her mouth, pimples so clustered it’s as if she was being punished by the gods.
“Yes. Belinda. She’s an officer in the Navy now.”
“Okay. A military officer, huh? Did she attend Annapolis?”
“Yes. Graduated in the top half of her class. Economics major. She says the Marines tried to steal her somehow—they’ll steal anything—but she wanted to drive huge boats. Be a captain one day. She always loved pictures of the sea.”
I won’t mention I was a Marine. We Devil Dogs didn’t steal “anything.”
“Did Delilah ever talk about joining the service?”
“Belinda practically beat her over the head with it but Delilah...she just—well, it’s not in her genetic make-up to be so...pinned down. Delilah will just take flight when the mood strikes her. In high school she lost virtually every job she had because she just never showed up. She would follow that heart of hers. Hell, one time she took a four-day weekend and left the state. If she had a cell phone back in those days it might have eased up on my heart a little bit to know that she and some friends just went on a joy ride and it turned into some teeny-bopper version of Thelma and Louise without the weird suicide thing at the end.”
“When she left this last time, there was no note? No phone message?”
“No.”
“Email?”
“No.”
“What happens when you call her?”
“Voice mail. My emails go unreturned.”
“Any friends or family heard from her?”
“No. Unless they’re lying.”
“When she did this before, she just dropped off the face of the planet?”
“Yes.”
“What does she do for money?”
“I know a few times when she’s taken waitress jobs here and there for a few weeks at a time to make ends meet. She bums.”
“Does she have a credit card with your name on it?”
“No.”
“Does she have her own credit card?”
“I don’t know. I assume so.”
“Did she ever go to a payday loan place?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
With the way Derne made Delilah’s credit sound, she’d have a low limit credit card that wouldn’t go far.
“What did she take with her?”
“Oh...” Darla drifts off. Finally, “Some clothes, I guess. She left most everything. Jewelry, her laptop. If she kept cash around I never knew it.”
“So you came home and Delilah was just gone. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know she wasn’t coming back?”
“It was just in the air, I suppose. She’s done it enough over the years that I have a sixth sense for it. After a few days, well, the writing was on the wall.”
“Where did you think she’d gone?”
“At first I thought she’d run off with a man. But she hasn’t talked about any guys for a while. Usually she mentions whoever she’s dating at the time in casual conversation. She’d say things like I’m going out with Chris tonight or whatever. Usual stuff. She hasn’t done that for a while I guess.”
“Any boyfriends?”
“The last two steady ones she had you know about. White and what’s-his-fuck. God I hated that last guy.”
I search my memory. “Dobbins.”
“Yes, him. White, I could see why she was with him. It wasn’t until it was over did Delilah mention he was still married. But he was clean-cut, handsome, sophisticated. I thought for sure she’d landed a movie star. My Delilah always had the looks to draw in Hollywood-quality men.”
If anyone labeled me a Hollywood-quality man and thought it was a complement I’d correct that in the ugliest way I know how.
“Delilah didn’t need a degree from Annapolis hanging on her wall. There are two types of women, Mr. Buckner. Belinda was one, Delilah was the other. Belinda wanted to show the world there is nothing a man can do that she cannot do. Delilah was happy having men clamoring for her.”
So I need to focus on the men.
“But you don’t think she left with a guy?”
“No. I can’t put my finger on it, but no.”
“With a girl?” Darla smirks and coughs out a half-laugh. “Maybe not romantic, but even a friend?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. She—she hadn’t kept tight friends for some time. Just a lot of tenuous connections. Delilah was pushing people away even if she didn’t know it. I think her life was crumbling a piece at a time but she’s so inured to folks coming and going and hard times that she probably doesn’t see it.”
“So she left on her own for no discernible reason?” I ask, wondering why I’m here.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I know my daughter. Something pushed her away.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Frustrated: “She’s an adult. She’s free to leave and not tell anyone. Why even hire me to look then?”
Before she can answer her cell phone rings. A single moment of blabbering and then silence. I crush my cigarette into the tray and take one more bite from my burrito. I’ll find the girl because people are paying for it but this is the kind of shit that is a waste of time. Delilah didn’t want to be here anymore so she left. Case closed.
“Mr. Buckner...” Darla says. I look up. She’s scared. She points to her phone and mouths something at me.
“I can’t make that out.” I say. Then she says it and it makes total sense.
“It’s Delilah.” She says as she closes her phone shut. Tears carve fresh lines down her cheeks. “She says she’s pregnant.”
Darla looks down at the table and touches her cell phone, an insignificant object that held her to her daughter on a silk thread for a fleeting moment before it was cut off.
“Delilah says someone is trying to hurt her.”
8
Darla Boothe hasn’t breathed since I don’t remember when.
Sitting there, her skin slowly drains of color like death is creeping into her veins, bleaching her life to a waxen nothing. I drag from my smoke and watch her. She methodically, somberly closes her cell phone and sets it on the table before her. She stares at it, sadness dropping like a veil across her eyes. Examines the mundane details of the phone as if inscribed in there somewhere were the answers she needs.
I reach out. Take the phone. Hit REDIAL. Nothing. Voice mail. I do it again. Voice mail again. Over and over.
Finally: “What did she say?”
Quiet, so quiet: “She said she was scared and she was being threatened. She said she was pregnant.”
“Why would she call, tell you how scared she was and then just hang up?”
“You’d have to know her...” She exhales so wearily it sounds like she were a starved and frozen soldier in some long campaign and for months now there has been no sleep. Just terror. Just a quiet hell.
“Delilah is impulsive. Sinfully so. She’ll get in these moods and just start to confess a secret or lay her troubles on you and then just as sudden as the wind will change she just catches herself and thinks better of it. I have always hated that. It’s like she had some terrible secret she needed to tell me and she just couldn’t quite get it out of her mouth. Belinda was always just silent. Contemplative. Delilah would do this start-stop thing.”
“So you think she called out of momentary fright and then thought better of it?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, Mr. Buckner.”
“Do you think someone else made her hang up?”
“Who knows?”
“Would that not surprise you either?”
“No.”
“Did you hear another voice in the background?”
“No.”
“What about any noise at all? Cars? Boats? The sounds of daily living?”
“I didn’t pay attention. This is the first time I’ve heard her voice in months. She was being threatened.”
“Did she give an example?”
“I don’t know she just said—”
“Call the cops but listen to me first. Ready?”
“Oh...”
Probably not going to hear a word I say. Outside, the daylight passes from us in an instant. It might as well be Darla’s soul. Gray.
“Without something specific to go on, something like Delilah saying John Doe tried to punch her or a note from John Doe saying he is going to hurt her, they can’t do much. So—”
“Can’t do much? Much? My damn kid is being threatened for Christ’s sake! What does that sound like to you?”
“It sounds like a girl who, according to her own mother, runs from everything. The word ‘threaten’ needs to be quantified. Her just saying it means nothing. It’s not illegal to be crazy. Or act crazy. Or make bad decisions. Or fuck up constantly. Or be a drama queen. Are you listening?”
“No...” She begins crying. Head-in-hands crying.
“Call the cops. Tell them what she said. They can put out notice to other agencies. Check the welfare. That means if they see her they’ll stop her. See if she’s okay. And they’ll notify our PD.”
“Can they form a, a...like a manhunt or something?”
“No. Not on this.”
“Will it be a missing persons case?”
“Maybe. For a missing persons case there needs to be some evidence that she went missing against her will. A crime was committed. Call the cops. Call her back. Leave a voice mail saying you need to know where she is, who is threatening her, who the father is, anything.”
“Why do you need to know the father?”
“He might know where she is. He might be threatening her. A child from an affair can be a serious problem. When was the last time he slept with her and where gives us a date and time of her location. Call the cops. Call me with anything.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll call and call and call.”
“Alright.”
I consider the possibility that, for who Delilah Boothe apparently is, the words that come out of her mouth need to be dialed down a notch. Finding out she is pregnant is a great motive to run away. If Darla raised her girls to get married before they got pregnant, and Delilah went against it, I can see her doing this.
But if she really is knocked up I want to know who the father is. Dad equals suspect. Bigger than shit.
With the sun tucked safely away behind a cloak of pregnant clouds, the wind feels confident enough to dance outside. It conjures dust devil patterns which snatch up crystalline grains of snow, swirling in angry frenzies.
