Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 2

  And that plus thirty-five cents would buy me a copy of the Omaha World-Herald. “Thanks for the sentiment, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do me any good. You have no more to say about my entering Meredith’s apartment than a bum sleeping under the North Freeway overpass.”

  “But I’m her mother.”

  “Doesn’t matter. If I have trouble with the police, you don’t back me up: You don’t know what I’m doing, all right? You hired me to look for your daughter and beyond that you don’t have the foggiest notion what I’m up to. Right?”

  “All … all right.” Her hands gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles were the same color as the wicker. The strain had a cumulative effect on her, an effect that was accelerating before my eyes. It was obvious she wouldn’t hold up much longer, and I couldn’t blame her. I hurried up and put together some more questions.

  “Mrs. Berens, do you have any other children?”

  “No. No. Only Meredith.” She started to say more but her voice caught and she stopped, tearing one hand from the arm of her chair and pressing her fingers to her lips.

  “Is Meredith seeing anyone? Does she have a boyfriend? Or boyfriends?”

  She moved her hand from her mouth to her throat. Her eyes were trained not on me but on some point over my left shoulder. They did not seem quite focused.

  “Boyfriends?” I repeated.

  It startled her. “I—I told you. Meredith keeps to herself a great deal.”

  “What about you?”

  I might have thrown a glass of ice water in her face, the way she reacted. “What about me?”

  “Do you have, for want of a better word, a boyfriend?”

  Donna Berens stood, suddenly—so suddenly that I thought for an instant I had somehow offended her and she was about to show me the door. She moved to the étagère, regarded its contents for the span of a heartbeat, then returned to her chair, her high heels tapping imperatively on the wood underfoot. She didn’t seat herself, but rather moved behind the chair, resting her nervous hands on its high back. She might have been posing for a portrait. Or she might have been using the white wicker as a shield. A shield against me. “What can that possibly have to do with anything?” she said, and her voice trembled. The untamed curl of hair jumped from behind her right ear, bobbed and swayed. Her slender fingers flexed on the wicker, tightening and loosening, tightening and loosening their grip.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said truthfully. “None, maybe. Probably. But you never know. I’m trying to think of reasons that Meredith might have disappeared; often, the reasons give us a good idea of where the person disappeared to. Family tensions are a pretty common reason.”

  “I see.” Her body was stiff and unreceptive. She turned her back to me and looked out the window. “No,” she said to her watery reflection in the glass. Her voice was both regretful and proud. “I’m not seeing anyone. No one …”

  I believed her. I had no reason not to. But you wonder about the ones who get so worked up about personal questions. Do they simply value their privacy? Or do they have something to hide?

  “Did you and Meredith argue Sunday afternoon?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you argued recently? Say, in the past week or so?”

  For a while I thought she must not have heard me. Then she said, to the glass, “What if Meredith hasn’t disappeared?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Mrs. Berens turned, very slowly, and faced me. Her small body was taut, her cheeks sucked in, accentuating the infrastructure of her face even more than usual. I had the impression that she was biting the inside of her mouth and, when she spoke, I had the impression that there was blood on her tongue. “You talk as if Meredith has gone away, voluntarily. What if she hasn’t? What if something has happened to her?”

  She looked at me in a kind of numb panic, as if I was supposed to have the words that would disprove the horrible thought she had forced herself to voice. As if I had the words that would make the hideous fear an impossibility.

  I hadn’t. If I had, I would surely have spoken them.

  But all I had to say was, “We’ll deal with that if and when we come to it, Mrs. Berens.”

  Her face relaxed then, but not her body. Suddenly tears washed over the dam of mascara below her left eye, sending a bluish stream over the rounded swell of her cheek. She moved back to her chair, to the coffee table between it and my chair, and took one of the small, square paper napkins to stanch the flow. She had it under control again, just that fast. The air fairly hummed with the energy it took for Donna Berens to keep her concern, her panic, in check. But she did it.

  “Then you will help me, Mr. Nebraska?” she said after a long moment. Her voice was thick and husky, but steady. She twisted the new napkin between her fingers, winding it into a tight, little pink licorice stick.

  “If I can. I’ll need some things from you—a recent photograph of your daughter, color would be best. Her address. Her place of work we already know. The kind of car she drives, license plate number, if you know it. The name of her bank. Any close friends, coworkers, people she might confide in.”

  She nodded rapidly, taking it all in, welcoming any little distraction from what was so heavy on her mind. “I can get you most of that,” she said. “I don’t know the license number, but everything else.” She smiled, then, and it was a real smile, not the illusion caused by the high cheekbones and the wide, full mouth. “I … Well, thank you. There’s no one else I can turn to. If you hadn’t helped me … But I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  “Really?” I smiled. “I’ve been wondering how you happened to call me, Mrs. Berens.” I don’t exactly maintain a high profile, even if I still keep my line listing in the Yellow Pages.

  Donna Berens retrieved her cup from the glass-topped table and sipped for a moment before answering. “You did a favor for a friend of mine, Mr. Nebraska. A good friend of mine. Several years ago.”

  “Did I?” I said with bland politeness. It would come when it would come. I had spent enough years trying to get things out of people—years as a newspaperman, years in army intelligence, years as a private investigator—to know that you can’t really get anything out of someone who doesn’t want to give. Short of relying on rubber hoses and electric prods and chemical injections, that is; but using them, especially on potential clients, is considered bad form in the detective biz, and anyways I was fresh out of sodium pentathol. “Who would that have been?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I’m sure I’d remember; I don’t do that many favors.”

  “It’s not important. I take it you don’t do a lot of detective work anymore …”

  She took it right. I had been tapering off for several years now, reasoning that while free-lance writers are paid even worse than private investigators, the job is on the whole a lot less strenuous and, if properly undertaken, requires almost no bullet-dodging. However, a couple of small magazines that I had been writing for pretty regularly had gone the way of the dodo, and my checking account and I sorely missed even their niggardly and invariably tardy contributions. I had long since squandered the advance for The Book, my epic detective novel, on food and drink and rent, and I was still a couple of months away from finishing the pulse-pounding sequel. And it had been a couple of months since my last assignment. So, not to put too fine a point on it, I wasn’t turning my nose up at any investigations work that happened along. Or at least I wasn’t turning it up as far as usual.

  In fact, with time and a friend of mine who happens to be a psychologist, I had come to accept and even enjoy the schizophrenic nature of my work life. Where is it written that a guy has to be just one thing? Variety is the spice of life—I think that’s in the Bible, or maybe the Bill of Rights—and if variety spices up the bank account, too, so much the better.

  But Donna Berens didn’t need to hear all of this. I merely said, “No, but I manage to keep my hand in,” and let it go at that
. She wasn’t the only one in the room who could be evasive.

  My coffee was gone now, and it was time for me to imitate it. I didn’t particularly like the idea of heading into this investigation feeling that I didn’t know everything I should—about Meredith Berens, about her mother, about the relationship between mother and daughter. I wasn’t even sure what it was that I didn’t know enough about, just that there was something, something in Donna Berens’s evasiveness that didn’t sit right. Nevertheless, I couldn’t see what harm it would do to at least have a quick look-see at Meredith’s apartment. No telling what that might reveal. Or not.

  There was a time when I’d have kicked up more of a fuss with Donna Berens, when I’d have pushed her hard to let the police handle the matter—they’re good at stuff like missing persons, the police: it’s sort of like a specialty of theirs—when I’d have bullied her for answers to the unanswered questions. Eventually, though, I’d have probably taken her money anyway. For one thing, most people who have their hearts set on hiring a private detective aren’t soon talked out of it, and they may as well give their dough to me as to someone who’ll just rip them off, right? For another thing, if Donna Berens had it in mind to evade my questions, she’d probably only lie if I pushed her. A lie can be worse than nothing at all, in investigations and life in general.

  And for a third thing, perhaps most important, I was interested. I’d done a lot of missing persons, a ton of runaways. None was quite like this one sounded. I’d had cases where the subject plain up and disappeared like a puddle on a sunny day: Usually they were men, and usually they were leaving an unhappy domestic situation, or maybe just a boring one. I’d had cases where women made themselves scarce, usually for the same reasons; but typically they gave some indication of their intentions, even if you didn’t recognize it as such until after the fact. Women tend to tie up loose ends. Dumb stuff: canceling the paper, that type of thing. Men figure the hell with it, but women will usually take care of them. It’s the same with suicides, a lot of the time.

  But man, woman, or child, the disappearee was almost invariably abandoning a no-win relationship. Teenagers—good God, teenagers don’t split for any reason except family. Meredith Berens, however … If she had lived under her mother’s roof, I might have put more stock in the possibility that the women had fought and Meredith had split. But she hadn’t; she lived alone. And she didn’t seem to have anything to run from.

  To run to? Perhaps. There was the old man back in Wilmette, the ex-husband that Donna Berens didn’t want to talk or think about. And there was the possibility that Meredith had a boyfriend that Donna didn’t know about, or didn’t want to know about, or wouldn’t talk about, and the two had run off together.

  A lot of unanswered questions. I like to try to put answers to unanswered questions. Nature abhors a vacuum, or something like that. As I’ve stumbled through my life trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, I have always been drawn to endeavors that seek to answer unanswered questions.

  I stood up.

  “Are you taking the case?” I hadn’t noticed her eyes anxiously studying me.

  I nodded.

  “When will you start?”

  “I’ve already started.” I tapped my temple. “Now give me some money and I’ll go away.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fifty years ago, the house must have been magnificent. It must have stood tall against the sky, narrow and long on a gentle bump of green yard that also was narrow and long. That was before someone had the bright idea of carving it up into apartments, before someone had the bright idea of selling off half of the backyard so that someone else could build another house, far too big for its lot, facing the cross-street, and before someone had the bright idea of paving the south yard with lumpy blacktop to fashion a four-car parking lot. Now the place was just a big old house on too little land off of Dupont Street, not far from Hanscom Park. Old houses, old trees, narrow shady streets. The house sat under a colossal maple that dribbled water and tree-litter onto the roof and sidewalk.

  I climbed out of my crate and grabbed my windbreaker from the backseat. The morning, though wet and cool, was too humid for the jacket, but I needed it for another purpose and slipped it on, already starting to stew in my own juices. I locked the car and rummaged through the trunk. Then I closed it up and looked both ways before crossing the street, and didn’t see another living creature except for a pair of robins hunting in the tall grass in front of the house. According to the adenoids on the car radio, the afternoon was supposed to be cloudy but dry. It wouldn’t be—dry, that is. When you see birds out having brunch in the rain, it’s a safe bet that you’re in for an all-day wet. Otherwise the birds would wait until later. Your average bird is smarter than your average disk jockey.

  The front door was locked. A sun-yellowed card Scotch-taped inside the storm door said, in faint blue spidery script, that it must ever be so. An uneven, tree-littered sidewalk went around the south side of the building to the back, and so did I. A glance at the little parking lot to my right was all I needed to determine that Meredith’s car—a dark blue Mazda, her mother had told me—was not parked there. I hadn’t noticed it on the street, either.

  The flimsy storm door at the rear of the house opened at a touch; the heavy old slab of wood beyond it required some hip action, but eventually agreed to admit me to a small landing. Three steps down, three up. Meredith Berens’s apartment was first-floor, front, according to her mother. I made myself upwardly mobile on the appropriate stairs and put a little more wear on a well-worn runner down a long, bare hallway, smugly certain that Nero Wolfe could not have accommodated himself to its narrowness.

  The hall obviously had been constructed when the house was subdivided into flats; it doglegged twice before ending at the front door. Along the way I passed four numbered doors spaced at irregular intervals. Three of the doors were very old, suggesting that they were original issue, doors to rooms that had been there when the house was a house. The fourth was newer, added during the remodeling—or, as the preservationists would have it, “remuddling.”

  Meredith Berens’s door, across from the stairs just inside the front door, was new. Her apartment must have been the house’s living room, or part of it, judging by the tall, wide windows I had observed from the street. I wondered what the house’s original owners would have thought if they could see the place now.

  I knocked lightly at the door. Politeness is one of the lesser known tenets of the Private Eye Code. Besides, with my luck, it would turn out that the girl had simply dropped out of sight for a couple days’ R and R and got home safe and sound mere minutes before your intrepid hero came busting in like Eliot Ness.

  Such was not the case. At least, there was no answer.

  Having tried the door and found it locked, and having inspected the lock as thoroughly as possible from the hallway side, I toddled off in search of the apartment manager—no easy feat, inasmuch as the building’s residents didn’t go in for signs, labels, or other such traveler’s aids. As it was, the manager—a faded, wizened old thing in plastic hair curlers and a flowered housecoat that exposed her flabby, pale upper arms, and thin, birdy lower legs, and very little else—found me. She came out of the apartment at the rear of the building, near the back door, and confronted me with that unlikely mix of arrogance and anxiety that only old women can manage. “Can I help you,” she said challengingly. Her mouth was a thin, bloodless gash in a hard, pointed face that might have been molded of wax. The gash moved more than was necessary to produce the tremulous words.

  I smiled that old winning smile and asked if she was the manager. She put a thin hand to her hair, dull reddish hair spun tight around the curlers, and admitted to it. “I’m Mrs. Schneiders.” She pronounced it with a long e. “There are no apartments open,” Mrs. Schneiders added. Somewhat smugly, it seemed to me.

  “Oh, I’m not looking for an apartment, Mrs. Schneiders; I’m looking for one of your tenants.” I hauled out the ID
. She took it in her bony, short-nailed fingers and studied it closely, her colorless eyes moving rapidly in their watery sockets behind the lenses of her glasses. The lenses were thick and somewhat bulbous. “My name is Nebraska,” I said charmingly. “I’m a private investigator.” “Investigator” sounds so much more official, and upstanding, than “detective.” I use “investigator” the way lawyers use “attorney” and doctors use “physician”—to make myself sound more than I really am. “I’ve been retained by Mrs. Donna Berens to look for her daughter, Meredith.” “Retained” is another good word, for the same reason.

  Behind the little windows, the eyes came up to my face. “Is Meredith in some kind of trouble? Mrs. Hunsberger—she owns the building, you know—Mrs. Hunsberger doesn’t stand for any trouble with her tenants.”

  “That’s a good policy.” I took back my paper. “No, Meredith’s not in any trouble—at least, we hope not. It’s just that no one’s seen her or heard from her since yesterday afternoon, and her mother’s worried. She asked me to come by here and check.”

  The old woman sniffed. “Why didn’t she come herself?”

  “She did. There was no answer at Meredith’s door. She got worried and called me. I suggested that the apartment manager certainly would let me have a peek inside, just to make sure Meredith’s not in there, sick or hurt.” I turned up the rheostat on the smile. But only a bit. Too much more wattage and Mrs. Schneiders would have to go back to her apartment for a pair of sunglasses.

  The woman’s mouth worked aimlessly as she considered my request. “Well … I’d have to go in with you.”

  “Of course,” I said immediately. “We’ll just pop our heads in the door and see that everything’s as it should be.”

  “I haven’t seen Miss Berens for a couple of days myself,” she said as if to herself. “But then, I’m not a nosy Nellie, you understand. The people here all mind their own business and nobody causes anybody any trouble. That’s how Mrs. Hunsberger likes it.”