Her voice faded out as she shrugged.
End of the story.
“So,” Simon said, “Aaron’s mother is dead.”
“That’s what Wiley says.”
“But when I asked you if she was alive, you said you didn’t know.”
“You’re a quick one, Mr. Greene.” She raised her glass and smiled. “Why the hell am I telling you any of this?”
She stared at him and waited for an answer.
“Because I have an honest face?” Simon tried.
“You look like my first husband.”
“Was he honest?”
“Shit no.” Then: “But oh, man, he was great in bed.”
“So we have something in common.”
Enid snorted. “I like you, Mr. Greene. And ah, what the hell. I can’t see how it will help you and yet... I’ve seen some strange shit. And bad stays. Bad doesn’t go away. You bury bad, it digs itself out. You throw bad in the middle of the ocean, it comes back at you like a tidal wave.”
Simon just waited.
“Do you keep your old passports?” she asked him. “I mean, after they’re expired?”
“Yes.”
In fact, Simon advised his clients to do the same, just in case they ever needed to prove they’d been someplace. He was big on saving any official paperwork, because you never knew.
“So does Wiley. Not where someone could easily find them. They’re boxed up in storage in the basement. But I found them. And you know what?”
“What?”
Enid put her hand to the side of her mouth and stage-whispered, “Wiley has never been to Italy.”
The office at Tattoos While U Wait was glass enclosed, so whoever sat in it could look out at the chairs and the artists and the waiting area and vice versa. The computer’s monitor faced a wall, however, so that while privacy was pretty much nonexistent, you couldn’t see what the person sitting at the desk may have been surfing or browsing or whatever people called it nowadays.
The desk was partner-style, so that two people could sit facing each other. The top was cluttered with scraps of paper, three pairs of drugstore reading glasses, a dozen or so assorted pens and markers. There was a bag of cherry cough drops on the left, a few paperback books, bills strewn about with no reason or guiding principle behind them.
In the center of the desk, facing the glass, was a slightly faded photograph of six men with huge smiles. Two were up front, with arms around each other’s shoulders, the other four slightly behind them with folded arms. It’d been snapped in front of the parlor — opening day from the looks of the ribbons and the oversized faux scissors. The clothes, the facial hair, the poses — the whole vibe made it feel like a Doobie Brothers album cover.
Elena picked up the photograph and showed it to Nap. Nap nodded and pointed to the guy in the front on the right.
“That’s the victim. Damien Gorse.”
Nap slid his finger toward the guy next to him — a hefty dude in full leather motorcycle wear and a salt-’n’-pepper handlebar mustache. “That’s the partner, Neil Raff.”
Elena sat in the swivel chair in front of the monitor. The computer’s mouse was red and in the shape of a heart. For a moment Elena just stared at it. A heart. Damien Gorse’s computer mouse was in the shape of a heart. As an investigator, you keep your head down and you think analytically because that was often the best. You focus on your particular goal — in this case finding Henry Thorpe — but Joel had always told her not to forget the devastation, the lives lost or destroyed or irrevocably torn apart. Damien Gorse had sat in this chair and used this heart-shaped mouse. The heart-shaped mouse was a gift — it had to be, it was not the kind of thing you buy for yourself — and the person who gave it to him wanted Damien to know that he was in some way loved.
“Don’t let those emotions cloud you,” Joel would tell her. “Let them fuel you.”
When Elena touched the mouse, the screen lit up. A photograph appeared of Damien Gorse and Neil Raff, with an older woman between the two. They were on a beach somewhere, all smiles.
In the center of the screen was a box asking for a password. Elena looked over at Nap as if he might know. He shrugged no-idea at her. There were Post-it notes all over the computer. She scanned them for what might be a password, but nothing jumped out at her. She opened the top drawer. Nothing.
“You have someone who can crack this?” she asked.
“Yeah, but he’s not here yet.”
The front door flew open, and a man she recognized from the photographs as Neil Raff burst into his own tattoo parlor. The outfit was denim now rather than leather — almost more dated than in the photograph — and the handlebar mustache was now full-on salt. But there was no mistaking him for anyone else. Dazed, he turned his head and looked about his own business, as though seeing it for the first time, through red-tinged, swollen-from-crying eyes.
Nap hurried over to the man. Elena watched. Nap put a hand on the man’s shoulder and lowered his head and talked softly. Nap was good. Again, something in the way Nap carried himself brought on Joel’s echo. It stirred her. God, she missed Joel. Every part of him. She missed the conversations, the company, the heart, but right now she couldn’t help but think of how much she missed the sex. This may sound odd to some, but making love to Joel was the greatest thing she would ever do. She missed the weight of him on her. She missed the way he looked at her when he was inside her, as if she were the only woman on God’s green earth. She missed — and this wasn’t very feminist of her — the way Joel towered over her and made her feel safe.
She was thinking this because it suddenly dawned on her, as she looked at the photographs of Gorse and Raff, as she thought back to what Nap had said about the owners taking the cash home to their safe, and as she watched the devastation on the face of Neil Raff, that she recognized this particular grief, the gut-wrenching, all-consuming devastation of losing a life partner rather than a friend or business partner.
She could be projecting, but she didn’t think so.
Nap got Raff seated on a leather couch in the waiting area. He wheeled over a chair and sat right in front of the grieving man. Nap had a notepad in his hand, but he didn’t want to risk appearing anything less than completely focused and sympathetic, so he took no notes. Elena waited. There wasn’t much else to do.
Half an hour later, after she offered her condolences, Elena moved the heart-shaped mouse again, waking up the screen. The photograph appeared.
“Oh God,” Raff said. He turned to Nap. “Has anyone told Carrie?”
“Carrie?”
“Damien’s mother. Oh my God, she’s going to be devastated.”
“How could we reach her?”
“Let me call her.”
Nap didn’t reply to that.
Raff said, “She lives in a condo in Scottsdale now. On her own. Damien is all she has.”
Is, Elena thought. Is all she has. Still using present tense. Common.
“Did Damien have siblings?” Nap asked.
“No siblings. Carrie couldn’t have kids. Damien was adopted.”
“And his father?”
“Out of the picture. His parents had a nasty divorce when he was three. His adoptive father hasn’t been part of Damien’s life since.”
Elena pointed to the white box on the screen. “Do you know Damien’s password?”
Raff blinked and looked away. “Of course I know his password.”
“Could you tell me what it is?”
He blinked some more, his eyes brimming with tears. “Guanacaste.”
He spelled it for her.
“It’s a province in Costa Rica,” Raff said.