“Yeah, babe?”
She always smiled when I said those two words.
“You drifted off.”
“What about Twill?” I asked.
“Huh? What about him?”
“If I asked you to give me a brief interpretation of him, what would you tell me?”
The wan girl frowned and pulled her head back a quarter inch.
“I’m not asking you for secrets,” I said. “I don’t want to get into his business, at least not through you. I want to know how you would describe him if somebody were to ask.”
“Why?” She put the word up like a storm trooper’s see-through shield.
“You know what the most important thing is that a PI has to know?” I asked.
“What?”
“That everybody knows things he doesn’t. Everybody sees things that he’s missed. Everybody. If he only relies on his own mind and memory and point of view he will never get a leg up.”
“But what if they lie to you?” Mardi asked. “Like Shawna did?”
“The only complete lie is that which goes unsaid and unseen,” I said. “Shawna spoke a lie, but what she showed me — her face and style — that was a truth I had to decipher. That’s why not everybody can do what I do.”
Mardi eyed me with a feeling akin to suspicion. I was telling her the truth, but there was something that she was missing. She knew this but nothing more.
Under that scrutinizing gaze I remembered that this girl was actually a woman who had decided to murder the man she thought was her father in order to save her sister from his predation.
“It’s like Achilles,” she said suddenly, the words leaping from her mouth.
“What is?”
“Twill,” she said. “He’s like an old-time hero. Beowulf and Achilles and Gilgamesh were just men, but they were so perfect that no one believed it. And Twill is even better.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Because he doesn’t think that he’s better than anyone.”
“So you’re saying that my son is perfect.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t have that connection that everyone else does,” the astute child whispered. “He, he sees things like they really are. And he isn’t afraid to do what he thinks is right or, no... not right but best.”
Yes, I thought, Twill was my father’s ideal revolutionary, a willing passenger on that dinghy I left without mooring.
I stood up, headed for my inner sanctum. It wasn’t until some time later that I realized I hadn’t thanked Mardi for her insights and labors.
13
By early afternoon I was standing in front of the municipal courthouse downtown, waiting. I had on one of my four dark-blue all-purpose suits and size twelve triple-E dullish, black leather shoes. My white shirt had grayed a bit after hundreds of washings at Lin Pao’s French Cleaners, and one of my socks was black while the other was dark brown. I’d become the downtrodden workingman that my father always wanted me to be — but with a twist.
I was also a predator that lived on the invisible ether of personal information. Not digital bullshit, I stalked people’s souls, took from them their most precious possessions, their secrets. And even though I performed this heinous job day in and day out, still I would have called myself rehabilitated — a simple wretch who had once been a monster.
What was I doing there, on the street, waiting? I wasn’t sure. In the past forty-eight hours I’d collected twenty-two thousand dollars in advances to protect a woman I had not met from a man who might be in love with her. A working-class hero from my father’s cracked pantheon would never work on such a project. Realizing this, I smiled, feeling that I’d dodged the revolutionary’s bullet — at last.
At that very moment I looked up and saw a young milk-chocolate-brown man clad in a fancy suit of synthetic olive-green snakeskin coming down the broad concrete staircase. He was skipping happily, moving fast. He, like I did, felt that he was getting out of a bad situation. I wondered, as I moved to block his egress, if I was as misguided as he.
“Tally Chambers?” I said in a mild voice.
“Say what?” His grin disappeared like a small white rabbit down a deep dark hole.
“My name’s Leonid McGill,” I said quickly. “Your sister Shawna hired me. She gave me the money to pay your bail.”
“Shawna?” he said, stopping in spite of all instinct.
“Your other sister, Chrystal, is missing and Shawna felt that you might be able to help finding her.”
Tally Chambers’ hair was close-cropped and his head was sleek, styled for speed. He eyed me, wanting to run, but worried about his sisters and, on top of that, wondering how money was traveling through their hands into mine.
“I don’t understand,” he said truthfully.
“Shawna came to my office and said that Chrystal had disappeared,” I said in my most effective, matter-of-fact tone. “She, Shawna, said that she was worried that Chrystal’s husband had either killed her or that she was so scared of him that she ran to ground.”
“How much Shawna pay you?”
“She gave me twelve thousand. I used eleven hundred to pay ten percent of your bail.”
“Shit.” Tally swayed away from me, ready to walk on.
I touched his arm with a blunt finger and said, “Chrystal gave Shawna a ruby and emerald necklace that she sold to a woman named Nunn from Indiana.”
That stopped him.
“No.”
“Hey, man. I’m all up in your family business. I’m not trying to hurt you. Does anybody hate you enough to go into debt eleven thousand dollars over your bond?”
For a few moments he took the question seriously. Was there someone who’d pay good money to have him hurt or killed? Was there?
“You know there isn’t, Tally,” I said to the unspoken question.
I was a mind reader, and he a true believer. We made a connection and now all I needed were his secrets.
“So what is it exactly you need with me?” Tally asked, giving in, for the moment, to my superior, moneyed position.
“Shawna wanted me to get you out of jail,” I began.
“How she even know I was there? I haven’t seen her in days.”
“How many days?”
“Four... maybe five.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
Theodore Chambers clearly remembered the conversation.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Just shootin’ the shit is all.”
The kid was going to be a puzzle. That was fine by me.
“When she couldn’t find Chrystal, Shawna went looking for you,” I said. “When you were nowhere to be found, she came to me. I did a citywide systems search and found that you’d been arrested. I told her and she said to get you sprung.”
“Why didn’t she come herself?”
“With both brother and sister missing she went into hiding,” I said. “I don’t even know where she is. She calls me to get her updates.”
While Tally wondered at my story I got a closer look at him. The whites of his eyes were darkening and encroached upon by blood vessels. There was an odor coming off him that was mildly organic and not at all healthy.
Seemingly to underscore my perceptions he emitted a mid-lung cough.
“So what do you want, man?” he asked when the hacking subsided.
“Shawna wants to help you,” I said. “She told me to get you out of jail and then question you about your sister. If you cooperate, I’m supposed to supply a lawyer to get you outta this jam and give you twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Show me the money,” he said, suddenly all ears and bloodshot eyes.
I took three fresh new hundred-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them over.
“This only three hundred,” he said.
“Down payment on the talk we have.”