Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Also by William J. Reynolds

  The Nebraska Quotient

  Moving Targets

  Money Trouble

  Things Invisible

  The Naked Eye

  Drive-By

  THINGS INVISIBLE

  WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS

  Copyright © 1989 by William J. Reynolds

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  Brash Books

  PO Box 8212

  Calabasas, CA 91372

  www.brash-books.com

  This one is for

  JIM CARNEY,

  because he ought to have a book dedicated to him;

  and for

  PEG,

  because everything is for her.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Days like this remind you that you’re going to die.”

  I looked from the cup and saucer in the woman’s lap to her eyes, which were focused, or unfocused, on the window, past the window, on something beyond the moisture-spotted pane. I looked, and knew what she meant. It was one of those gray, drizzly, blustery days, the kind that descend on the Midwest in late September and remind us that the bright, balmy days will, like everything, pass away and be replaced by the cold, bleak landscape of winter. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

  On this particular Monday morning the world, or that portion of it occupied by Omaha, Nebraska, was the color of lead. The air had been replaced with some thick, wet substance that carried the subtle but definite aroma of fish. The skies, heavy and close, couldn’t decide whether or not to rain, so until a consensus could be reached they just hung there, gray and misty. The bullet wound in my left arm, a nearly healed leftover from an escapade earlier that summer, ached dully from the damp.

  The woman was definitely more interesting than the weather, so I looked at her again.

  She was, I suppose, a few years older than me—mid-to late-forties, make it—dark-haired, olive-skinned. Small-boned, a little plump by modern standards. But mine are not modern standards. When you grow up with Hollywood proffering the likes of Jane Russell and Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Senta Berger and Elke Sommer as the epitome of feminine beauty, it’s hard to get too worked up over the slender, even emaciated look that’s been in vogue—and for all I know Glamour and Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle too—far too long. The pendulum was past due for its return swing.

  I said, “Mrs. Berens, about your daughter …”

  Donna Berens turned away from the window and fiddled with the cup in her lap, dipping a silver teaspoon in and out, in and out of the beige liquid. Her fingers were long and delicate and ended in well-tended nails that were painted a pale, pearly pink. That one of them was chewed down to nothing was the only clue that they were her own and not Lee Press-On Nails. That a few strands of hair glinted silver under the unflattering blue-gray light from outside indicated that the color was hers and not Lady Clairol’s. That a dark puddle had gathered below her left eye proved that her long, dark lashes were a gift from Max Factor and not Ma Nature, but what the hell.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and her voice was cool and smooth, like silk on glass. “I just …” She looked at me, straightened her backbone and lifted her chin. “What can I tell you, Mr. Nebraska?”

  “You tell me.” I smiled winningly. “I’m smiling winningly, incidentally. I learned it from watching Spenser on TV.”

  She smiled, sort of. “You really are the oddest man.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” I sipped coffee from a china cup so delicate I was almost afraid to touch it. “Let’s see if I have the facts straight.” I consulted the little wire-bound pad on my knee, but there was no need: The story was easy enough to remember. “You spoke with your daughter, Meredith, on the telephone yesterday afternoon.” Donna Berens nodded. “You tried to call her again last night and there was no answer.” She nodded. “You tried again several times—”

  “Four times.”

  “—during the evening, still with no answer.” More nodding. “You tried twice more after midnight—”

  “If Meredith had gone out—and she hadn’t, or she’d have told me—but if she had she would have been home by midnight. She had to work today. She was supposed to work today …”

  “—with no answer. You tried again twice this morning, same result.”

  “And Meredith didn’t show up for work this morning,” Donna Berens said. “I talked with her employer. She didn’t call in sick, she gave no indication that she wouldn’t be in today. She simply didn’t arrive.”

  All of which occupied less than one of those stingy little notepad pages.

  I said, “What about friends? Relatives? Someone Meredith might have gone to stay with.”

  This time the dark head moved in a negative wag. “There’s no one, really. Meredith is … Meredith has always been something of a loner. Perhaps that’s my fault. Her father and I separated twelve years ago, when Meredith was only thirteen. Meredith and I moved back here and I suppose she was somewhat … isolated. It’s hard to make new friends at that age. The girls at Duschene were awfully cliquish.” Duschene was and is a girls’ high school. “Not that Meredith is … abnormal in any way,” she added, the words almost rushing out. Her eyes darted, swept the sterile little room as if seeking some flaw. Her voice was stiff, perhaps even defensive, as if she was afraid that I or someone else might accuse her of disloyalty to her daughter. “She’s a perfectly normal girl. A beautiful girl. She has friends.” As if I had said she hadn’t. “Just not the sort she would up and go stay with. Certainly not without telling someone. Telling me.”

  “Perhaps she tried to and you were out.”

  “I wasn’t. I went to Mass yesterday morning before I talked to Meredith, and then I was home all day. In any event, I have an answering machine. She would have left a message.”

  I carefully positioned my cup in its circle in the saucer and let my eyes wander the living room.

  The private-eye books all begin with the hard-boiled hero in his down-at-heels office, sitting behind his battered wooden desk, leaning back in his creaky swivel chair, his feet up (which explains how the desk came to be so battered), a glass of whiskey in his hand, a half-empty bottle on the blotter. Half-full, if you’re an optimist. Across the desk from him sits the client: female, of course; attractive, of course; disapproving, natch. She’s having a hard time getting to the point, and our hero is doing his macho best to ignore her, focusing his attention on the spinning of a spider in a corner of the ceiling or the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly against the dirty window. Eventually the flinty-eyed protago
nist will (a) get the client sufficiently ticked off to tell him what she’s there for or (b) get the client sufficiently ticked off to leave. Doesn’t matter; the case will come back around to him one way or the other. Trouble Follows Me, and so on.

  It’s a good scene, but even when I was in the PI business fulltime, and had the requisite down-at-heels office downtown in the Condemned Building, I preferred to hold the preliminary meeting on the potential client’s turf. You get a better idea what sort of person you’re apt to be dealing with when you see him or her in the natural environment. Since quitting the business, to the extent I have quit, and taking up the equally low-paying life of a freelance writer, preference has become necessity. My “office” is a desk shoved into a corner of the bedroom of my apartment on Decatur Street. Put me, a client, and a blue-bottle fly in that room and you’ve exceeded the legal occupancy.

  Donna Berens’s townhouse apartment was small, too, but she gave it the illusion of spaciousness by underfurnishing it. In the living room, white wicker furniture perched prissily on golden-oak floors, while a few small, pale watercolors watched from white metal frames on the walls. The walls were blue, but only barely, and the woodwork was white. A narrow oak étagère held a peach-colored vase of dusky silk flowers, a couple of small photographs in large, wide frames, some tasteful, forgettable bric-a-brac, and not much else. The room was as empty of personality as it was of furnishings, loaded with all the warmth and charm of a model unit. And yet it was vaguely familiar—not the room, but the atmosphere of it, the flavor of it. I sat gingerly on a white wicker love seat and wondered about people who seem to have no feeling for a home, who decorate from a magazine instead of from the heart. God knows, my joint is done up in a combination of Early Mismatch and Clutter Provincial but at least you know it was thrown together by a human being.

  Donna Berens sat erect in a tall-backed chair at the far corner of my loveseat, waiting with something like expectation on her face. “Relatives?” I repeated.

  She shook her head, and a dark curl that had escaped the shell of hairspray holding the rest of her coif bobbed and tickled her right cheekbone. She had well-defined cheekbones and an expressive mouth that was almost too small for the teeth in it. When her lips stretched across her teeth her mouth was pulled into an involuntary smile. She reached up and tucked the lock behind her ear and everything was nice and neat again. “Nobody.”

  “What about Meredith’s father?”

  “He doesn’t live in Omaha.”

  “Where does he live?”

  She stirred her coffee some more. By now the cream in it must have been well on the way to becoming butter. “Wilmette. Illinois.” So I wouldn’t confuse it with all the other Wilmettes in the country. “It doesn’t matter. We haven’t had any contact with him for more than ten years.”

  “You haven’t,” I corrected gently. “You don’t know about Meredith.”

  Donna Berens looked at me long. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  I shrugged. “Your daughter lives on her own, Mrs. Berens. You don’t screen her calls, you don’t open her mail, you don’t know who she sees or where she goes … obviously.” Her chin came up at a dangerous angle. “It’s not impossible that she may have had some contact with her father without your knowing.”

  “You don’t know Meredith,” she said stonily. It was true. “If Meredith were fifteen, or sixteen, or seventeen, I would say, yes, you have a point. But she hasn’t so much as set eyes on her father in over ten years. He’s not a part of our lives and we’re not a part of his. She would have no reason to go to him.”

  None except biology, I thought. Heredity. History. Call it what you will. It struck me as entirely possible—I didn’t know any of these people, you understand—but it struck me as entirely possible that a young woman, living on her own, et cetera, might develop an interest in reestablishing a relationship with a father she hadn’t seen in more than a decade. And since the Berenses’ obviously was not an amicable parting, it further struck me as likely that the girl would not mention this interest to her mother. For all we knew, Meredith Berens may have been in contact with her father for months, or longer. For all we knew, the father might be able to provide some helpful information. Or not. The point is, in any investigation you like to turn over as many stones as you can, even if your client thinks her ex-husband might be living under one of them. Still, I let it go. For one thing, she wasn’t any client, not yet, not until I had determined that there was a case worth investigating and she had crossed my palm with silver—or check, money order, stamps, or major credit card. For another, how hard could it be to find a guy named Berens in Wilmette, Illinois? How many could there be?

  I said, “I don’t blame you for being concerned, Mrs. Berens. But if you want my advice, I’d hold off hiring an investigator to look for your daughter. You’re better off contacting the police.”

  “I’d rather not. Besides, don’t the police make you wait several days before they’ll take a missing-person report?”

  “There’s a reason for that, and the reason is that most missing persons aren’t missing at all; they turn up in a day or two all by themselves.”

  “I don’t want to wait a day or two. I don’t want to sit here doing nothing, worrying. I want to find my daughter. I want you to find my daughter. If you won’t take the job, perhaps you’d be so kind as to recommend someone who will.”

  I drank some coffee. It was very good: strong and yet smooth, the way coffee should be. There was the slightest hint of amaretto to it, an aftertaste more than anything else. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take the job, Mrs. Berens. I only said that I would wait, if I were you. I was trying to save you an unnecessary expense.”

  “Well, you’re not me,” she said tartly; then she visibly softened. “I’m sorry. I understand what you’re saying, and I appreciate it. But I won’t wait. I can’t. And as for the expense—I have money. Don’t worry.”

  “I won’t, then. Let’s get back to your daughter. I assume you went by her place?”

  “Yes. She has an apartment on Dupont Street. I stopped by there this morning, after I tried calling her at work and found out that she hadn’t come in today.”

  “She works where?”

  “Castelli and Company, a little public-relations firm on St. Marys. I don’t know the address …”

  I was writing. “I can get it. Who’s in charge there, do you know?”

  “Dianna Castelli. She owns the company.”

  I could probably have guessed at that.

  “All right. What happened at Meredith’s?”

  “Well … she wasn’t home, of course. I knocked on the door but there was no answer.”

  “Did you go in?”

  She seemed not to understand me. She frowned, and cast around her, a flash of something—worry, fear, something—springing to life in her dark eyes as she looked for someone who could translate my question into a language she understood. “I told you,” she said unsteadily, “there was no answer at the door.”

  “You don’t have a key?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you find the manager or landlord and ask to be let in? Under the circumstances I’m sure they would have let you.”

  She kept on shaking her head, harder and faster now. “I … I guess I just didn’t think of it. My first thought … well, I suppose you could say I panicked. That’s when I called you. I came straight home and called you. It was the only thing I could think to do.”

  Odd, I thought. Most people would call the police ages before even thinking of calling a private investigator.

  Donna Berens still held the twisted napkin between her slender fingers. Now she wound the pink rope around her left index finger. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I said, and it didn’t really matter. What would we have gained if Donna Berens had entered the apartment? Excepting obvious and unlikely possibilities, such as finding Meredith dead or stoned or sharing the place wi
th an all-midget orchestra, Donna Berens would have noticed nothing. Nothing except that what she was looking for was not there: her daughter. I couldn’t expect her to have been able reliably to report what shape the apartment had been in, whether anything appeared to be missing, whether her daughter’s clothes, makeup, jewelry and so on were all there. No, even though Donna Berens had not gone into her daughter’s apartment, I would still have to go and see for myself.

  “How could I be so stupid,” the woman was saying, mostly to herself. “Why didn’t I find the manager …”

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” I repeated. “Does anyone have a key to Meredith’s apartment, do you know?”

  The query threw her. She was trying to stay sane, and it took all of her concentration.

  “A key to Meredith’s apartment,” I said. “I’ll want to have a look for myself. Begin at the beginning, as the poet has it.”

  Again the woman looked around the room, uncertainly, as if the apartment was as strange to her as it was to me. “I don’t … Who would Meredith give a key to if not me?”

  A neighbor, a boyfriend, a coworker, but what was the point of going into it? Donna Berens was fading fast.

  “Won’t the apartment manager or whoever have a … a passkey or something?” she wondered, frowning.

  “Almost certainly,” I said in a chipper tone, although I wouldn’t put too much money on even my ability to convince an apartment manager to let me into one of the tenants’ apartments. Give me a peek, sure, if only to see that the tenant wasn’t lying dead in the middle of the living room floor; but not let me conduct the kind of search that I would want to undertake. Having a key would make life so much easier. I could have taken Donna Berens with me, I guess. A mother’s plight might soften even a landlord’s minuscule heart. But us down-these-mean-streets guys work best solo. Besides, there was no telling what I might find when I got there, and Mrs. Berens was already wound as tight as her little napkin. I didn’t need the aggravation. Neither did she.

  There was a pause, the kind novelists like to call “pregnant,” although “awkward” is more accurate. Then she said, “If there should be any, you know, any trouble, I’ll back you up. With the police, I mean. I’ll tell them you had my permission.”