I looked up “Nursing Homes” again. I had just seen the same pages the day before, when we found the Peach Tree Senior Community.
“Alex, you’re the one who told me this is a bad idea.”
“I know,” I said. “I just want to do this one thing. Otherwise, it’s gonna bother me.”
“You’re gonna call every one of them, Alex? How many are there?”
“A lot,” I said. “This might take awhile. Why don’t you go get us some breakfast?”
A couple of hours later, I dialed the last number. I went through the routine for the hundredth time. Ask for Mrs. Valenescu, figuring there would be more chance of her being alive than her husband. In the obituaries, it’s always men who are survived by their loving wives. The women die alone. Even if I was wrong on that, they’d probably catch me on it and tell me that there was no Mrs. Valenescu there but that there was a Mr. Valenescu. The name would stick out in their mind.
“Okay, thank you,” I said, and hung up. I stood up and stretched.
“You’re something else, you know that?” Randy said.
“It was worth a shot,” I said.
“Thanks, Alex. Now we can stop.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “I got one more idea.”
“Now what?”
“Her brother,” I said. “What did he do for a living in 1971?”
“He was a housepainter. Like his father.”
“Mr. Meisner said he was good at it, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So what do you think he’s doing for a living right now?”
“I suppose he could still be a housepainter.”
“Let’s say he is,” I said. “Do you think he still lives around here?”
“He might.”
I grabbed the Yellow Pages again. “I don’t see him listed here under ‘Paint Contractors,’ but that doesn’t mean much. Most of those guys just work on word of mouth. So let’s say that’s what he does. What do you think he’s doing right now?”
“Painting something?”
“Okay,” I said. “You think he still makes people call him Leopold?”
“I would bet on it, yeah.”
“So what happens when Leopold runs out of paint?”
“He buys more paint.”
“He buys more paint,” I said. “And where does he buy it?”
“At a paint store?”
“And how about next week,” I said, “when he needs more paint?”
“At a paint store?”
“At the same paint store,” I said. “I see about forty listings here for the whole Detroit metropolitan area. Why don’t you go get us some lunch?”
When he was gone, I started working through the numbers. It was a long shot, but I’d be thinking about it for weeks if I didn’t give it a try.
When I got through to the first number, I went into my spiel. “Hey, have you seen Leopold over there?” Thank God for strange names. If his name were Al, I’d have no chance.
“Leopold?” the man said. “Don’t know no Leopold, sir.”
“Ah, okay, wrong place. Sorry to bother you.”
I did ten of the numbers.
I did twenty.
And then on number twenty-one…
“Leopold?” the man said. “Not today. He was here on Monday, I think.”
I froze. My God, I’ve got a bite.
“Hello? Sir?”
I was about to play it straight, tell him who I was and why I was looking for Leopold. But then I thought about Leopold, and what Randy had told me about him. How much he hated Randy. Almost killing him on the street in 1971.1 had two seconds to decide how to play it. I went for theater.
“Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. “Hey, I’ll be perfectly honest with you.” Honest, my ass. “I’ve got one of Leopold’s thirty-foot ladders here, and if I don’t get it back to him today, he’s gonna have my head on a platter. You know how he is.”
“Oh man,” he said. “Do I ever. I can’t believe he even let you borrow it.”
“Hey, I know he’s been working on that job over there. Where was that again? Maybe I can just run it over to him.”
“No, he didn’t say.”
Damn! Think, think.
“Oh man, I’m dead,” I said. Okay, let’s go for the home run here. “Hey, I know. Maybe if I just run it over to his house, you know? Leave it there. Hell, maybe he’ll even forget he loaned it to me. You think that would work?”
“I still can’t believe he loaned it to you.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I must have caught him on a hell of a good day. I was over at his house one time. God, where was it? It was over on…”
I let it hang. I was sweating. Come on, take the lead here.
“On Romney Street,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right! On Romney Street. I’ll just go over there right now and put that ladder in his garage.”
The guy started laughing. “That’ll never work, my friend.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But at least this way, I’ll have a running start.”
“Good luck to you,” he said.
“Hey, um, just one more thing. I appreciate you helping me out here. I’m just trying to remember which house it was on Romney. It was like a sort of white kind of-”
“Hell if I know,” the man said. “I sure as hell never been to the man’s house. I just know it from the address on the bills.”
“Oh yeah, of course. Ah, well, never mind. I’ll find it.”
“Here, let me see,” the man said. God bless this man. “Seventeen forty Romney Street.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said. “Man, you’re really helping me out here. I appreciate it.”
“Hey, no problem. Just don’t tell him I helped you do the drop and run.”
“Ha! You got it! Thanks a lot.”
I hung up and let out a big breath.
By the time Randy came back with the McDonald’s bags, I had already looked up the street in the index and found it on the map. It was in Farmington Hills, an upper-middle-class suburb to the northwest. “Looks like Leopold moved up in the world,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
I held up the piece of paper where I had written his address. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
I remembered Farmington Hills as one of the nicer suburbs of Detroit. It was what they called “semi-rural,” with four-bedroom houses on half-acre lots. A good old-fashioned mailbox on the street, with the little flag you raised when you had a letter to be picked up. I couldn’t believe how much had changed.
“I remember this corner,” I said as we drove past a strip mall. All the usual suspects were there now: Blockbuster Video, Subway, TCBY. “I swear to God, there was nothing here but one gas station.”
“Yeah, the owner used to come out, pump the gas himself, wash your window, and then turn the crank on the front of your car for you.”
“Randy, I’m talking about fifteen years ago. It’s like an entirely different place now.”
“Progress,” he said. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”
There was a lot of traffic on Halstead Road now. It used to be a lazy little two-lane road through nothing but weeds and dirt. We found the new subdivision we were looking for, right next to about five other new subdivisions, and turned in. We drove past a few dozen houses that looked like they had all been built that morning. We passed Corriedale Street and then we found Romney Street.
“Sheep,” he said.
“What?”
“Corriedale and Romney. They’re types of sheep. They must be running out of names.”
We followed the numbers on the mailboxes until we came to 1740. The house was a split-level ranch, set back about a hundred feet off the road.
“Nice lawn,” Randy said.
“I don’t see a name on the mailbox,” I said.
“So what do we do?”
“We’ll just go knock on the door and ask,” I said. “No big deal.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “No big deal.”
We drove down the driveway. It was asphalt, with what looked like a new coat of sealer on it. I stopped my truck behind a little red compact.
We got out. We walked to the door, passing a row of rhododendrons that had a long way to come back from a hard winter. We rang the doorbell.
A young girl answered. She was sixteen or seventeen years old, dressed in a softball uniform. There was an F on her jersey. Farmington High School. She smiled at me. She looked at Randy and her smile got a little bigger.