The Local News Page 14

  And the task itself continued to be laced with a sense of intrigue. Holding the notepad in hand, standing next to Kimberly, scribbling in time to her scribblings, I saw how people responded to us, the way they snapped to attention and stopped what they were doing to listen. Many eyed us suspiciously, glancing sideways at the picture, as if we were a collection agency presenting an overdue bill. Others leaned in eagerly, their voices quickening, their eyes growing wide, seemingly grateful for the way we’d just made their day noteworthy, given them a good story to tell later. Either way, heads turned as Denis slapped Danny’s picture down on countertops, as he unfolded the letters and asked people to take a look. It was hard not to feel, just standing several steps behind him, like part of something that might matter. Or even if it didn’t, still, at least part of something.

  And I found myself growing more deft at note-taking. By late morning I’d developed a system similar to the one I used during Hollingham’s swirling tangents about martyrdom in the Middle Ages and the assault of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, in which I became the instinctive stenographer, recording scattershot details, not necessarily every word, but rather anything that struck an indefinable chord, anything important-seeming, even if I did not know why. (The virgin martyrs, Hollingham would shout excitedly, weren’t as demure as you might think.) In a machine repair shop, I noted the scaly rash on the back of the manager’s hand. Ibrahim was his name, and he hadn’t seen Danny, but I noted the way he punctuated each sentence with an odd yup. “Boy doesn’t look familiar, yup.” “Wish I could be more help, yup.” I noted that the long, deep wooden trunk behind the counter resembled a sarcophagus.

  “I read about this,” one of the ladies in Zephyr’s Lunch told us. Zephyr’s was a packed little diner, a late-morning crowd filling most of the booths and dotting the tall stools of the counter. The kitchen sizzled with grease. “He was kidnapped off a playground, right?” the lady said, glancing quickly at the picture. “I thought he was younger.” Denis told her there was no evidence of kidnapping, but the woman continued as if she hadn’t even heard. “That’s why I don’t let my kids go with people they don’t know. They want to stay at a friend’s house, I’m going to ask to meet the parents first. I’m going to want to see the fire escape out the second story. I understand those parents who keep their kids on leashes in the mall. You look away for one second and—” She snapped her fingers. “They’re gone.” She spoke so forcefully, spit sprayed from her mouth and landed on the table. When she handed the photo back to us, I saw flecks on it too.

  I recorded her story about the fire escape, noted the remnants of french fries and BLT on her plate, the half-smoked cigarette, the quiet boothmate who had a splotchy birthmark on his left cheek. I noted that she dropped the r’s regularly from the ends of her words. Togethah, mothah, whatevah.

  When I stole a glance like a plagiarist at Kimberly’s pad, she had things like the time, the name of the restaurant, lots of quotes. Her penmanship was crisp, the lines and curves of her e’s, her fe’s, her p’s precise even when she was writing at such a fast clip. Mine more resembled the fevered scrawling of a lunatic, some of the words unreadable even to me moments after I’d written them. But my notes were poetic to her efficient, the flourish to her robotic precision. Yes, Kimberly noted that it was 11:42 a.m. and that the woman appeared to be approximately five-foot-five and 125 pounds. But I had smell of sugary ketchup. And I’d written broken nose; Kimberly hadn’t caught that.

  “She had a broken nose,” I announced when we were back out on the street.

  “Interesting,” Kimberly said, though without her usual coo. She was still busy scribbling.

  “Good eye,” Denis said, the first nice words out of his mouth.

  “She had the hump right here.” I pointed to the bridge of my nose. “You know, that jagged kind of hump?”

  “Sure,” Denis said, and then repeated, “Good eye,” which seemed the best I could hope for. I made myself stop talking, so as not to appear desperate.

  As lunch neared, we drove to the factories lining the river. At the food cart across from the lime plant, men in heavy Carhartt jackets and even heavier workboots waited to buy sandwiches, passing the picture down the line like a bucket brigade passing water to a fire. As soon as it got to a man whose eyes were ringed with the red welts of recently removed goggles, he started nodding and said, “Tanda Moore. That’s the kid Tanda got all worked up about last fall.”

  “Whoua,” I said, barely a noise. Kimberly turned just slightly in my direction, not lifting her pen from her pad, one eye on me, the other on Denis and the man. It hadn’t been loud enough for Denis to hear, for which I was grateful.

  Tanda Moore used to work at Haber’s dry cleaners with the man’s wife, the man said. After she saw this boy on the news, she was sure she’d seen him in town. “I think it was this kid,” the man said, giving the picture a second look. “It was some missing high school kid. How many can there be?” He laughed—not a belly laugh, more like a chuckle, his expression turning serious again when none of us joined in. Everyone else in line quieted, listening to our conversation with Sal. Short for Salazar, he told Denis, as I scribbled furiously.

  “You should talk to her,” Sal said. “She was real worked up about it for a few weeks.” When Denis asked where we could find Haber’s, Sal said she’d quit working there because of back problems. Far as he knew, she spent her days home now.

  Denis thanked Sal and then made his way to the back of the line. He didn’t say anything about what we’d just heard. Kimberly too was expressionless. I felt a blustery sort of buzz, an urge to make an eep-ing noise or a yawyawyawyawyaw. How automatically resigned I’d become—almost instantly, it seemed now, maybe before we’d even stepped out of the car—to the idea that we’d find nothing today.

  But here we stood, notes in hand from Sal, short for Salazar. It was a sweet, sudden high, the unearthing of a clue. Nothing like the buzz from alcohol. Instead of lapsing into sluggish stupidity, everything seemed to come into clearer focus: the individual voices of the men in line, the damp air off the river, the sharp, oily smell from the factory. And when we got to the start of the line and Denis grinned at me and said, “What’s your pleasure?” his normal affability was back in full bloom. I could see that he felt it now too: the world suddenly awake with possibility.

  The three of us ate huddled together on the sidewalk, the cold less bothersome than it had been minutes before. Denis and Kimberly talked quickly about finding Tanda’s address, about whether or not to show her the letters, about possible lines of questioning. We stood in a cloud of our own vapor.

  “It’s important,” Denis said in between bites of his tuna, “not to get excited about this kind of information.” Kimberly nodded earnestly. They were both looking at me. “It’s good that we got a name. She’s someone to talk to. But most leads turn to nothing. Okay?”

  But their manner betrayed the words. They were unusually smil ey. And as we finished eating, they bantered about people I didn’t know, the most relaxed conversation I’d heard all day. Tom was coming into the office tomorrow. Denis had to remember to call the phone guy. Kimberly made some joke about the phones and Siberia.

  “You’re quite the natural,” Denis said, turning to me and pointing to the notepad sticking out of my coat pocket. “Doing all sorts of writing, weren’t you?”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Philip Marlowe, on the trail,” he said. “What do you have? I mean, what’s something good that you got?”

  I paged through my pad and told them about sarcophagus. I was, truth be told, exceedingly proud of sarcophagus. Kimberly looked puzzled. Denis did too, for a minute, before he started laughing. It was a loud laugh. Some of the men in the food cart line turned to look. I could see deep inside Denis’s mouth, the shiny gold fillings in his molars, the bits of unswallowed sandwich still on his tongue. I laughed beside him, though more quietly and with a niggling sense of blasphemy, but still, it was nice.r />
  We drove through slushy streets and sat at poorly timed lights on the way to Ecorse, the city south of River Rouge where the white pages had listed Tanda’s address. Her neighborhood turned out to be as hardscrabble as the one we’d just left. She lived on a block almost entirely stripped of trees, the houses uniformly boxy and squat, with faded aluminum siding or equally faded brick, crumbling cement porches, and plastic weatherstripping or wooden boards adorning select windows. The 3 in Tanda’s address hung crookedly, tilting lazily to the left, having lost its bottom nail.

  Tanda was, as you could see as soon as she opened the door, the sort of woman not used to people ringing her doorbell in the afternoon. She blinked slowly at us, as if we’d just woken her. The sound of the television blared in the background. Tanda was big, with a fleshy red face and the receding hair usually seen on much older women. She looked like maybe she was in her forties, though it was hard to tell. Her chin did not so much end as just slide loosely into her neck. Her T-shirt was twisted sloppily across her torso, the collar gaping on one side, one sleeve pouching forward, the other straining against her armpit. She needed to shake herself out.

  “Can I help you?” she said with both a detectable annoyance and an unidentifiable drawl.

  “We’re looking for Daniel Pasternak,” Denis said simply.

  “Wrong house,” she said.

  Denis held Danny’s picture up to the screen door. “This is Daniel Pasternak,” he said. Tanda’s mouth puckered into a little o. She ran one hand over it, a thumb and middle finger pulling at the corners of her lips.

  “You the police?” she said. Police came out POE-leese. The drawl, if I had to guess, seemed to be a mix of Cajun and drunk.

  “No, ma’am,” Denis told her.

  “I had police come here after I called about that boy. A long time after. And I never had a ruder bunch of men in my house. Treating me like I’m the criminal.”

  “We’re not the police. I’m a private investigator, and this is my assistant, and this”—he waved his hand toward me—“is the boy’s sister.” He clasped his hand on my shoulder.

  I smiled at the sudden contact, though with Tanda eyeing me, it felt instantly wrong. I bit my bottom lip. “Hi,” I said quietly. I raised my hand to her.

  “We’d appreciate if you could spare a couple minutes of your time,” Denis said, his hand still on me. Tanda looked as if she were calculating a complicated math problem.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” she finally said as she opened the door, and then, by way of explanation, “Slipped disk.” The room was dark and cluttered. Baskets of laundry sat next to the couch, unwashed dishes littered the coffee table, weeks’ worth of newspapers covered the chairs. Tanda held both hands to her lower back as she sat slowly in one corner of her couch, the cushion long sunken from use. Den is and Kimberly took the only two chairs, leaving me to share the couch. It had a dense, mossy feel. I tried not to touch anything. Tanda muted the television; a talk-show hostess ran soundlessly through the aisles of her audience, microphone extended.

  “So,” Denis said, “can you tell us what you know about the whereabouts of Daniel Pasternak?”

  “Is there still a reward?” she said and picked up her drink, an amber liquid with ice cubes clinking noisily. Droplets of condensation lined the outside of the cup. Similar droplets lined Tanda’s hairline. “You want anything?” she offered, an afterthought.

  No, we all told her, we’re fine. Yes, Denis told her, there was still a reward.

  “I saw him a long time ago, before I quit Haber’s.” She took a long swig of her drink.

  “Can you recall the date?”

  “No, sir. But it wasn’t yet September. September’s when my back started to go.”

  “And where did you see him?”

  “At Sonny’s Groceries. I was on my way to work, buying cigarettes. I seen a boy and a man going through the aisles, loading up all sorts of stuff into their cart—bread and soda and chips and all kinds of junk. Real full cart.”

  “And why, if I may ask, did they stand out in your mind? I mean, I see people at the grocery store all the time, but I wouldn’t then recognize their faces on the evening news.” His voice was distinctly light and affable, as if he were trying to keep a child’s attention.

  “Yeah, that’s what the police said too, like I was making the whole thing up. They kept telling me my tip was uncorroborated. But I’ll tell you something, River Rouge’s not a big town. You see the same faces at Sonny’s. The cashiers know my name. I go in there and they say, ‘Tanda, how’s your back?’ or ‘Tanda, you need help to your car?’ Strangers might stop off from the highway, but those people are getting a bag of chips or a drink. You don’t see them filling a whole cart.”

  Denis nodded. I could smell Tanda’s homebound musk, her ineffective sheen of deodorant.

  “Also, he was out of it.” She looked at me. “Your brother was really out of it. Looked half asleep. He’s a big kid, right, but he was shuffling through the aisles like Frankenstein, you know? Real heavy arms and legs. There was something wrong with him. Oh,” she said more loudly, as if she was just remembering, “his leg was scraped up too. He was bleeding from one knee.” She took another long drink. “I seen him on the news a few days later and I knew, that’s the kid from Sonny’s. I called the cops that night. News was still going. I called as soon as they flashed the number on the screen.”

  I listened to everything as if she were talking about someone I’d never met. My mind began doing loop-de-loops. What about the benign stranger from the picture—what if I was right about that, what if he really existed, not as Danny but as Danny’s doppel-gänger? What if that was who Tanda saw stumbling about and bleeding from the knee? That would make more sense, as I found it unlikely that my brother had ended up in that state in a dusty, wide-aisled River Rouge grocery store. I caught Denis looking at me, his expression strange, and I wanted to smile at him but knew not to. The smell of this place—the liquored sweat of Tanda’s living room-was getting to me. The back of my head tingled.

  Denis asked her what the man with Danny looked like. She described a medium-sized man with a gray mustache. He was white. He wore a John Deere cap. He was average height, a little taller than Danny. No, she did not know his eye color; no, she couldn’t remember anything else he wore (regular clothes, she said); no, she didn’t see his car. It starts to make you feel crazy, she said, when no one believes you.

  “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “They didn’t look like they fit together, the kid and the man. They could have been father and son, I guess, but there was something off, you know? Something wrong. Something not right. I’m trying to think of a better word for it, so you get it.” She stared at me then as if it were up to me to think of the word. I looked away.

  “You didn’t mention any man with him in the letter,” I said.

  “The letter?” She twitched a bit. “What letter?”

  Denis was looking my way, not happily, his brow furrowed, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was filled with an urge to pick a fight with this woman.

  “We read the letters you wrote to us. That’s how we found you. But you didn’t say anything about the man.” There was a childish quake to my last words.

  Tanda reached across the couch, her upper body lurching wob-blingly toward me, and put a hand on my hand. She squeezed with a vicelike grip. It was a startling gesture in its sudden, unexpected aggressiveness. “I didn’t want to upset you people,” she said. “I needed you to know he was here, but the police already knew all the details. I just wanted you to know he was alive and that he’d been here. I’d want to know that if it was my boy.”

  She held on so tightly I could feel the tips of my fingers going numb. “Uhh,” I said, my inchoate plea for her to let go. She, of course, did not understand. The roller-coaster emotion of the day, with all its anticipation, nervousness, excitement—I could feel it all coming to a head here, right in the middle of Tanda’s couch, my breath burbling in my th
roat. It came out in a strange, wheezy sigh, like I’d been gut-punched. Everyone looked at me. Tanda let go of my hand. My fingers were bright red. I tried just to breathe like a normal person, in, out, in, out, but the longer Denis stared, the less I remembered how to do this. It smelled like something burnt in there.

  “Is something burning?” I said. My voice was thin in my ears.

  Denis and Kimberly exchanged looks. “Kim,” he said, “why don’t you go get some air with Lydia?”

  “Sure, sure thing,” Kimberly said, but it sounded an octave too high.

  “Sorry, hon,” Tanda said. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m fine,” though my voice was still strained, laboring for breath.

  Kimberly and I stood on the porch for a long time. She said nice, evenly modulated things like “Every piece of news can turn into something good,” “You never know how something like this will turn out,” “I’m always surprised where things lead.” Two houses away, a kid stomped around in the snow of his yard. I wondered what his excuse was for hooky. The longer we were out there, the more ashamed I grew for having exiled us, the baby and the babysitter.

  “I’m okay,” I kept telling Kimberly, but she resisted my suggestions to go back inside.

  “Let’s let Denis do his job,” she said, and I wondered if there was an accusation in there.

  When Denis finally came out, he said. “You okay, kiddo?”

  “Sure,” I told him. “I’m cool. The smell—” I pointed inside.

  “I think we’ll call it a day,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and he told me we’d tapped out this town for now. He’d come back. “You have to know when to fold ’em.” He was smiling, but I felt a clear defeat, a feeling that would trail me for the rest of the day and well into the next few.

  In the car Denis spoke in a low voice to Kimberly, apparently to signal that this was a private conversation, though I could hear every word. There was the list of reasons not to believe Tanda (drunk, lonely, wanting reward money, differing written and oral recollections) and to believe her (the timing was right, details were plausible without being overprepared). “It’s easy,” he said full-voice into the rearview, “to think the worst from whatever you hear. What she told us could mean a million things. A million and a half. Don’t let your imagination carry you away to some dark place. It doesn’t do anyone any good. Okay?” He kept repeating “Okay?” until I nodded.