“No, there was more than that. She seemed to know stuff about how I was trying to prove to my father that I could be successful doing my own thing instead of going into business with him.”
“A son trying to impress his father. Another amazing revelation.”
“All right, Alex. I hear ya. It’s not like I really believed in that stuff. It’s certainly not why I went back the next day.”
“Let me guess.”
“I left Maria a little note. Just like a high school kid. I was only twenty, remember. She was nineteen.”
“How many times did you see her?”
“Every day for ten days. Until I got shelled and then… um, sort of left the human race for a while.”
“You had your fortune told every day for ten days?”
“No, just a few times,” he said. “Madame Valeska would have killed me if she’d know about Maria. And her father. And God, her older brother. His name was Leopold. He saw us walking together downtown once, and he just about strangled me right there. Maria had to go over and talk to him, calm him down. She must have made him promise not to tell their parents. We always had to sneak around, you know, meet in different places. I saw her every day, even if it was only for a few minutes before a ball game.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
“Alex, come on.”
“Did you?”
“It was 1971. Everybody was having sex back then.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Yes,” he said. “We had sex. Although really it was only the one time. A couple other times, we sort of just-”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t need the details. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Leon’s house,” I said as I stood up. “He’s waiting for us, isn’t he?”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
“How can I not?” I said. “It’s such a heartwarming story.”
“I told ya,” he said. “I know it doesn’t sound good.”
I led the way down the stairs. “Did you say that Leon has already been working on this for you?”
“Yeah,” he said as he caught up to me. “Actually, I had already tried a couple of those person-locator services, but all I had was an address from 1971. I don’t even know her birthday. Leon’s been looking at some stuff, says we’ll probably have to do some leg-work in Detroit. And in his condition…”
“What condition?”
“You know, from his accident. Are you telling me he’s your partner and you don’t even know about his accident?”
“No,” I said.
“He fell off his roof. He was trying to get the ice out of his gutters or something. I tell ya, you guys are crazy living up here.”
“Yeah, we’re crazy,” I said. “Come on, let’s go see what he did to himself. And see if he’s got any ideas about how to find your fortune-teller’s daughter.”
CHAPTER 4
Leon’s wife answered the door. Her name is Eleanor, and the first thing you notice about Eleanor is how large she is. You can’t help it. There was a time when Leon hated me, back when he believed in his heart that I had cost him his job as a private investigator. In those days, I was honestly more afraid of Eleanor than of Leon. They’re both bigger than I am, but something about Eleanor always made me think she’d move a lot faster than her husband.
Since then, I’ve gotten to know Eleanor a little bit, enough to know that she’s a good woman, with a quick mind and a sense of humor. And a lot of patience about her husband’s dream of being a practicing private eye. I’d still take her over Leon, though, if I needed some backup in a bar fight.
Randy kissed her hand when I introduced them. Another woman charmed right out of her socks.
“Don’t mind him,” I said.
“I don’t mind him one bit, Alex,” she said.
“What in hell happened to your husband?” I said. “Randy said he fell off the roof?”
She rolled her eyes and pointed behind her. There was an open door on the other side of the kitchen, and through it I could see Leon lying on the bed with both feet propped up on pillows. There were casts on both ankles. “Alex!” he called when he saw me. “Bring our client in here!”
The lights were off in the bedroom. There was a computer monitor set up on one side of the double bed, and Leon was bathed in the blue glow off the screen. It made his unruly red hair look downright frightening. He had a plaid flannel shirt on and gray sweatpants. The keyboard from the computer was in his lap.
“You must be Mr. Wilkins,” he said, extending his right hand.
“Call me Randy.” He shook Leon’s hand.
“Leon,” I said, “did you actually fall off the roof and break both your ankles?”
“I was trying to get the ice out of the gutters,” he said. “Ellie’s been carrying me around for the last week. Good thing I’m as light as a ballet dancer.”
“Make that three ballet dancers,” Eleanor said as she came into the room. “I should have just left him out in the snow.” She was carrying a big wooden kitchen chair in each hand as casually as a pair of dinner plates. “You’ll be wanting some chairs in here,” she said, “seeing as how my husband isn’t going anywhere.”
When we were sitting on either side of the bed, he finished tapping something on the keyboard. From somewhere behind me, a printer sprang to life.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ve put in a good twenty hours on the case, and here’s what I’ve done so far.”
“Twenty hours?” I said.
“Hey, what else am I gonna do?”
“I’m glad that you’re keeping track,” Randy said. “I’m going to be paying you both for your time.”
“And getting your money’s worth, I hope,” Leon said. “You can count on our best efforts.”
“Save the commercial,” I said. “And speaking of which, remind me to ask you about that Web site…”
Leon moved his eyes over to Randy and kept them there. “As I said, here’s what I’ve done so far. I know that you’ve already tried a couple of the locator services. For both Maria and her brother, Leopold. They can run the names through every database out there, but there just isn’t enough information to go on. All we have are a couple names, an approximate year of birth for Maria at least-sometime in 1952, based on the fact that she was nineteen years old in 1971-and a very old address, where she worked with her mother and… you said they lived there, as well?”
“Yes,” Randy said. “On the top floor.”
“And you don’t remember either of the parents’ first names?”
“No, I don’t,” Randy said. “Her mother was just Mama to Maria and Madame Valeska to everybody else. I don’t think I ever heard her father’s first name.”
“And it was just the one brother, you think? No other siblings?”
“Yes,” Randy said. “She said her parents had a hard life before they came to America. They were already in their forties when they had Leopold and Maria. I think that’s part of why they were so protective of her.”
“And you don’t know how old Leopold was in 1971?”
“I know he was older,” Randy said. “But I have no idea how much.”
“Those locator services,” Leon said. “They usually need a date of birth, a Social Security number, or a recent address,” Leon said. “Without any of those, they’re not going to get very far. But then, you know that. That’s why you’re here.”
“Absolutely,” Randy said.
“The good news, right off the bat,” he said, “is that she isn’t dead. Not if she’s in the Social Security system, anyway. There have been four women with that name who have died since 1971. All four of them were a lot older than she would have been.”
“Okay,” Randy said. “Okay, that’s good.”
“I didn’t see a Leopold Valeska, either. For what that’s worth.”
“That’s good, too,” Randy said. “Even though he did hate me.”
“She’s not in prison, either. Not in a Michigan state prison, or a federal prison. Again, same thing for Leopold.”
“Right.”
“Our biggest problem,” Leon went on, “is the amount of time that has passed since you last saw her. Obviously, a lot can happen in that almost thirty years. A woman can get married. Leopold has the same last name, you would think, but Maria’s name may be different now. She may have moved out of the area. How many people do you know who still live in the same neighborhood they did in 1971? What we have to do, in effect, is go back in time and try to trace her whereabouts from 1971 until the present. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it can be done. The one thing we have going for us is her last name. If you were looking for Maria Smith, I wouldn’t be optimistic. Maria Valeska is another story. That’s gotta be what, some kind of Eastern European name? Yugoslavian maybe? Romanian?”