Rainy City (3 page)

When he turned to walk out of the house, I fish-poled the wire coat hanger out and dropped the sharp crook of it into his coat pocket. As he kept walking, the hanger ripped the pocket off his coat. I let go of the wire. It swung from the remnants of his pocket for a moment and then tinkled onto the floor. Holder swirled around, his eyes tiny dots of brown death.

“Sorry,” I said, smiling smugly. He examined the pocket flapping at his hip. I wouldn’t be the bull that locked horns with him, but I’d be the gnat that made his ass itch.

“Isn’t that Dave and Jim outside right now?” blurted Kathy, thinking quickly.

Holder glared at me.

“Ain’t life a bitch,” I said.

Holder considered the situation, then marched through the front door without bothering to hold the pieces of his gaudy sportscoat together. A spectre in tattered turquoise. ?

BURTON’S MOANS WERE THE SORT THAT HURT TO LISTEN TO in the beginning, then rapidly became irksome, then disgusting, and finally, nauseating. Kathy realized it as soon as I did and scurried into the bathroom where I heard water running. When she returned with a damp washcloth, her crooked clown nose had been fixed.

I strode to the front door and closed it as Holder drove off. I waved but he didn’t see it. “Be like that,” I said.

When I turned around, Kathy was daubing at Burton’s smeared face with the washcloth. It took him a while to come down from whatever ragged cloud he was hugging and focus on Kathy.

“You…who? Oh, Kathy. I didn’t recognize you.” Holder’s drubbing had swollen one lip, torn a small patch out of his cheek. Holder invariably wore large rings. Nice guy.

Dressed in a pair of faded jeans and nothing else, his back against the doorjamb in the bedroom, Burton rolled his face away from Kathy’s washcloth and began weeping.

“They took Angel,” he sobbed. “They took my Angel. That big…” He racked his brain for a fit word to describe Holder. “…turkey.”

He was talking around the puffy lip expertly now, a quick study. Perhaps he had taken pastings before.

“Why did they take your daughter?” I asked.

“It was Melissa’s folks. They said I was an unfit parent. That they would get a court order.”

“Fat chance,” said Kathy. “Legally, it’s almost impossible to take a child away from its parents. What they did, actually, was kidnap her. We’re going to file a complaint right away. Don’t worry, Burt, we’ll get her back.”

“I don’t know,” said Burton Nadisky, rolling his head from side to side, defeated before the battle had begun. “They said I could visit. If I got a lawyer and tried anything fancy, they said they’d skip the country with her.”

“Sure. They know they’re in the wrong.”

“They’ve get an awful lot of money,” conceded Burton. “I suppose they could go anywhere they wanted.”

“Tip your head back,” said Kathy, wiping his nose. “Thomas, this bleeding isn’t going to stop. Do you know what to do?”

“No,” I lied. “Why don’t you take my truck? Ballard Hospital is down the street. They’ll know how to stop it.”

As the three of us stuffed him into a shirt and some battered hiking boots, I could see why he’d been such a pushover for Holder. Burton Nadisky was five-seven, blond, fair-complexioned and was built like a last-place marathon runner. My guess was he had been last place in everything he had ever attempted in a gym class. He wasn’t fat, merely soft. And there was certain gentleness to his manner that was evident immediately, in his eyes, even in the way he breathed and spoke. His words burbled out softly like those of a sleepy child.

“He told me to stay down,” said Burton, tears runneling off his pink cheeks. “But I had to try. My Angel. He hit me and I got up. He hit me every time I got up.”

“You did what you thought was proper,” said Kathy. “Angel will be fine with her grandparents until we can get her back. By the way, Burt, this is Thomas Black, my landlord and my friend.” I liked the way she said that.

Burton looked at me with new eyes. He poked his limp paw out to shake but withdrew it when he realized it was dappled with blood.

“I’ll wait here,” I said, “in case they come back.” “Sure, sure,” said Burton, genially. “And make yourself at home. The TV works now. We’ve got eggs in the fridge. Help yourself. Whatever is mine is yours.” He said it as if it were an expression he used frequently. I spied a photo of his pretty wife sitting atop the Zenith and wondered if she were the same way.

Propped up by Kathy, he hobbled away. When they got to the front door, I jangled my truck keys and tossed them to her. She caught them neatly in one fist. As a storm lumbered across the sky, they drove away slowly.

Too nice to suspect that I would plunder his house, Burton had left me in total trust. It was a trust I betrayed immediately. In order to locate his wife, it was best that I knew everything, even things he wouldn’t freely divulge.

I scoured the house like a freeloading relative searching for penny rolls. He had about sixteen dollars in crumpled ones in plain sight on the dresser top. There were no penny rolls. Their checkbook had been drawn down to zero for a week or so. I scanned the list of places they bad written checks to. It was easy to distinguish the different handwritings. His was large, rounded and careless. Hers was almost neurotically cramped and precise, every loop closed. The messy house was not her doing. Not likely.

He had scrawled his last check for five dollars to the food bank. The guy couldn’t afford socks, but he was tithing his money, doling it out to people who probably had more than he did. Her last check had been written eight days earlier to Tradewell. It was all pretty mundane, until I saw the fifty-dollar entry to the Hopewell Clinic. The Hopewell was a low-cost mental health center on Capital Hill. Her handwriting. I wondered, had they gone in for marriage counseling? If so, she was probably just another routine runaway housewife.

The refrigerator harbored eight brown eggs in the door, a full jug of cultured milk and half a slab of margarine. The rest of the shelves were bare. They didn’t even own a squirt bottle of mustard. A shopping list and a booklet of food stamps sat next to the toaster. I had the feeling the kid ate and the father went without. The dishes in the sink corresponded to that. One plate. Someone had eaten an omelet and toast that morning and imbibed the last drops of orange juice.

Scattered across the kitchen table were the pages of a partially completed poem. I sat down and studied it.

It reminded me of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and was dedicated to “Melissa, my only love.” I wished I could write like he did. I hadn’t read such embarrassing and touching lines since school. Geez, Burton adored her. It turned a different light on him.

Outside, in the backyard, a small plot had been spaded up and was blanketed with layer upon layer of soggy leaves, probably garnered from the local park. I could envision a blonde woman and a blonde tot dragging them home in plastic garbage sacks. The flattened dregs of a pile some little feet had twittered through lay like a pyre in the center of the lawn.

In the living room, I picked up the Sears family photos off the Zenith and examined a pastel Burton and a pastel Melissa.

Once in a while I saw couples like them strolling down a shopping mall. Burton and Melissa were one of those strange twosomes who looked like brother and sister. Same bone structure. Same coloring. Same blonde hair, same bland facial expression. Usually those couples consisted of two extremely shy people who had seen nothing to fear in a near mirror image of themselves. Angel resembled a younger sibling instead of a daughter.

Melissa was a slightly built, blue-eyed blonde, wearing her long, straight hair parted in the center. If I hadn’t known she was married and had a three-year-old and was missing—if hadn’t heard that she had been a tramp and didn’t think there was a good chance that she was screwy—I could have fallen in love with her. Any man could have.

The brilliant macho detective tumbles for the elusive prey he stalks. Shades of Laura.

Bit by bit, I went through their house like a monkey combing his tail for ticks. I was shameless, snooping under their pillows to see what sort of night gear they wore, rifling their medicine cabinet to check on contraceptives.

Geez, I love to snoop. We all do, given the right opportunity. I found no contraceptives. Perhaps she had taken them with her. Perhaps she would be needing them. Folded tidily beneath her pillow was a floor-length cotton nightgown. Her pillow smelled of wildflowers and, like all pillows, of spit.

All my hocus-pocus could draw no more of their story out of the house. It was rented and shabby. By the looks of the penciled marks on the baby’s wall, charting her growth, they had lived in the house since before she could walk. The baby had few toys. The parents had fewer clothes. It was all very spartan and hip, right out of the late sixties and early seventies. Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, and A.S. Neill dotted the bookshelf.

I had lived like that once. Now I was a full-time American. Now I cherished my La-Z-Boy and my color television, and I hoarded pennies for the copper content no matter what the treasury said.

In the living room, someone had embroidered a sampler in colored floss and hung it on the wall. It said: Love is having a family that cares.

Some family. The daughter kidnapped by grandpa. The mother missing. The father at Ballard Hospital getting his nostrils cauterized. You would almost suspect they were jinxed.

The 49ers were annihilating San Diego when Kathy and Burton came through the front door.

“Good game?” asked Burton jovially, as if that were all that mattered that morning. A small Band-Aid had been pasted to his cheek and he was still limping, still anemic. I clicked off the black-and-white Zenith and said, “I suppose Kathy told you I was a detective?”

“Why, no.” Burton turned around and gave Kathy an awkward look. “She didn’t. I’ll bet that’s interesting work.” He shook my hand limply. “I’d like to sit down and talk to you about that sometime. You might have some interesting material for my novel.”

“Don’t be so damned complacent,” I said. “Somebody just kidnapped your daughter. Your wife is missing. A jackass spent most of the morning playing break-a-face with your face. Get mad!”

He did the opposite. Burton Nadisky’s voice collapsed into softness. ‘I’m sorry if I don’t live up to some expectation that you have of me.” He dumped a pile of doll clothing from the end of the sofa onto the floor and offered Kathy a seat, which she accepted. “I’m not like other men, I guess. I can’t get angry at any of these people. They’re only doing what they think is right.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You sit here and feel sorry for yourself and I’ll go find your wife.”

Burton looked like a man in a Chinese restaurant who’d just been informed that his bill was six thousand dollars, no charge for the fortune cookies. Kathy interceded.

“Burton, we want to help you. It won’t cast you a thing. ‘May is Sunday, but tomorrow I’ll get a friend of mine who owes me some favors and we’ll get an injunction to get Angel back. In the meantime, Thomas can look for your wife. He’s really very good. He once located a cat that had been missing for two years.”

My eyes rolled involuntarily toward the ceiling. “Gee. That’s awfully nice of you to offer, Kathy. You don’t know what it means to me to have a friend like you. But really…there’s nothing to be done.”

“Don’t you want Angel back?” Kathy asked.

“Of course I want her back. But I’m not sure it’s the right thing for her. We don’t have much money. The family’s kind of breaking up. Maybe she is better off with Nanna and Angus.”

“What about your wife?” I asked, pointedly.

A muscle in his right cheek quivered. “She’s… I’m sure she’ll come back if

Really, I don’t know what good it would do to find her.”

“You know where she is then?” Kathy asked, hope-fy.

“Melissa? Gosh, no. Do you?”

“How did she disappear?” I asked.

“I took Angel to the park last Sunday afternoon. When we got home, she was gone.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah. It was kind of funny. You know. Odd?”

“No warning? You hadn’t been quarreling? Was she worried about something?” In their financial straits it was difficult to imagine her not worrying.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“She leave a note?”

Digging into his jeans pocket, Burton pulled out a partially shredded scrap of paper and handed it to me. He was reminiscent of a kid caught with his fingers in mama’s undies drawer, as if the note were something he shouldn’t have and was ashamed of being caught with. He’d obviously had it in his pocket all week. Perusing the wrinkled note over my arm, Kathy leaned in until I could smell her greasepaint.

Burty, I have to go away. Things haven’t been working out and I know they won’t get better unless leave. I am no good for you so please don’t worry. Love, Melissa.

Where she wrote “I am no good for you” there was a natural break in the continuity of the writing so that “I am no good” was almost a separate entity and not connected with “for you.” As if she unconsciously wanted to make a point of the words: “I am no good.” The script was less businesslike and precise than her handwriting in the checkbook.

Melissa Crowell Nadisky was a woman in trouble. ?

“SHE HAVE ANY MONEY WITH HER WHEN SHE LEFT?” I asked.

“Cripes,” said Burton. “I never thought about that.” I wondered what he did think about. Money was the first thing most people would have considered. “No, she didn’t. A couple of bucks, maybe. And we only have the one checkbook. She left that.” I knew why. “She didn’t take hardly any of her clothes.”

“Where do you think she went?”

Burton shrugged. “I really couldn’t say.”

“We’re going to find her,” said Kathy. “If she doesn’t want to come back, fine. But we’re going to locate her and talk with her.”

“Sure,” said Burton. We probably could have said “let’s go get your balls amputated” and he would have said “sure.” I bet the Fuller Brush men and the Avon ladies and the pixie girls selling Scout cookies loved him. For that matter, I bet his little girl loved him.