“He’s torn up inside. Pain has different effects on different people, you know that.”
“I know it. Boy’ll be gone pretty soon and there’s nothing he can do about that, but she’s still alive. So he figures maybe he can talk her into coming back to him, sharing the grief.”
“Seems to be what’s in his head.”
“ ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’ Uh-huh.”
“Don’t be cynical. It happens. Probably won’t in this case, even if we can find Janice Durian, but if Erskine believes it and it helps him get through, what’s the harm?”
“No harm, no foul,” Tamara said and shrugged. “But I still think he’s a strange dude.”
4
Skip-tracing can be easy or it can be difficult as hell, depending on the person you’re trying to find, how much detailed information you have, how long he or she has been missing, and how much effort the individual has put into covering past tracks and/or in building a new life. Three years is a long time, but I’d once located a man who had taken considerable pains to remain hidden under another name for a full decade. And I’d done it, with the aid of a little luck, in less than a week.
The thing is, it’s pretty hard in the society we live in to drop out of sight and keep on functioning without leaving a paper trail. You can change your identity, your means of earning a living, your habits, but unless you become one of the faceless soldiers in the traveling army of the homeless, the new identity still builds a paper trail that can lead straight to your door. In my dinosaur days — a woman at the state board of worker’s compensation had referred to me in those terms, not long ago, when I’d told her I didn’t own or know how to operate a computer — I’d conducted my skip-traces by personal interviews and document searches and by telephone through contacts at various city, state, and federal agencies. Now, thanks to my good sense in hiring Tamara and her hacking skills, I let her handle most of the paper-trailing and then do whatever follow-up legwork is necessary myself. She has instant access to all sorts of information that would have taken me long hours, even days, to gather. As a result, most skip-traces are simpler and faster to manage, with a higher success rate. The same is true with the bulk of my other cases — personal background checks, suspected insurance fraud, adoption searches, that sort of thing. With the two of us working together, we could handle a third more investigations per month than I’d been able to do alone. We could, that is, if we were able to get the work. The competition in the private detection racket, like the competition in so many other businesses these days, is fairly cutthroat, and it’s the big agencies that wield the sharpest knives. Eberhardt wasn’t the only one who’d found that out with a vengeance.
The Janice Durian Erskine trace didn’t look promising in the early stages. No apparent paper trail for Tamara to tap into. No driver’s license, credit cards or credit rating, bank accounts, or Social Security number under the names Janice or J. Durian, Janice or J. Erskine. The American Cancer Society had no record of her. She also had no local, state, or federal record of criminal arrest, nor so much as a parking ticket, under either name. Which was mildly encouraging in one sense. It indicated she might in fact have managed to overcome her drug addiction. On the other hand, it might also have meant that she’d avoided being picked up on a possession rap or for one of the illegal activities, like prostitution, that junkies drift into to support their habits. It was also possible she’d been arrested and charged under a wholly different name, though most individuals have been fingerprinted for one reason or another these days and a computer check would have turned up her true identity.
Tamara and I contacted each of the various drug abuse treatment centers in the Bay Area. Some refused to give out patients’ names; the ones that were willing to cooperate when we explained about Tommy Erskine’s terminal leukemia had nothing to tell us.
The postcard indicated Janice Durian Erskine was still alive. But it could’ve been written by somebody else, despite Erskine’s certainty about the handwriting, or penned months or even years ago and just now mailed by someone else for motives of his or her own. So Tamara ran a check on the California death records for the past three years. No listing under either name. Still inconclusive, though. She might have died in another state; and drug addicts often enough perish under circumstances that put them in the morgue as a John or Jane Doe.
Our next step was the art angle. There are dozens of professional arts organizations in San Francisco alone; Tamara and I started with the larger ones — Artwork Marketing and Publishing, Brava for Women in the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Education Foundation — and worked our way down to the small specialty outfits. None of them had ever heard of the subject. Neither had any of the fifteen or so artists’ agents operating in the city. That left art galleries, dealers, and consultants, of which there are three full pages in the San Francisco telephone directory; and art schools, art restorers, fine arts artists and commercial artists, which take up another page or so in the directory. And that was just for the city proper. It gave me a headache just thinking about how many more organizations, galleries, schools, and individuals there are in the nine counties that comprise the greater Bay Area, not to mention how many in the entire state of California.
Canvassing the local ones would take days; canvassing them all would take weeks. And Tamara couldn’t do it by computer. We’d have to divvy up the San Francisco listings and call each one, with me doing most of the telephone work because she has a full school schedule on Tuesdays; and chances were the effort would net us zero. If there was no paper trail on Janice Durian Erskine, she was probably using another name and therefore not trading on or even mentioning her past affiliation with the Santa Fe art scene. And she didn’t have to be living in this area if she was living at all; she could be anywhere in California or one of the other forty-nine states or even in another country. And she didn’t have to be working at a job that had anything whatsoever to do with art. Or any legitimate job, if she was still hooked on cocaine.
Anybody who thinks the private eye business is exciting ought to spend a few days sitting in on a problematical skip-trace like this one. They’d be in for a rude awakening. Not to mention a sore head and an even sorer tailbone.
Bobbie Jean’s son-in-law, Cliff Hoyt, dropped off the keys to Eberhardt’s house and office late Tuesday morning. He was a chubby, usually cheerful man in his thirties — a tax attorney who worked for an old established firm on Montgomery Street. He didn’t look particularly chipper when he walked into the agency; his mouth had a glum downturn and his eyes were grave.
“Sorry to be late in getting these to you,” he said. “I meant to bring them in yesterday, but I got hung up in court.”
“No problem.”
“Bobbie Jean really appreciates what you’re doing,” he said. “So do Pam and I. It can’t be an easy chore for you.”
I shrugged. “She holding up okay?”
“Not really. She puts on a brave front, but... well, it’s eating her up inside. I think she blames herself.”
“There’s nothing she could’ve done to stop him. Nothing any of us could’ve done.”
“We keep trying to convince her of that,” Cliff said. “She says she knows it, but I don’t think she accepts it as fact. At some level she feels she failed him — didn’t love him enough, didn’t give him enough support.”
“It’s the other way around. He’s the one who didn’t care enough about her or about himself. And he’s the one who pulled the trigger.”