Flesh Wounds Read online

“If she needed it, I presume she was. Ted doesn’t deny her much.”

  The reference to her fiancé seemed to annoy her for some reason. Or maybe she was annoyed with me—most of my clients are at some point, at about the time I get to the heart of the matter.

  I decided to sidestep the family for now. “What’s her name?”

  “Nina.”

  “Are you sure she’s missing? She’s old enough to have gone off on a toot by herself.”

  “Actually, it’s quite possible that’s what she did do.”

  “Go off on a toot? Why?”

  “To punish us. Me, mostly,” she added after a moment.

  “Punish you for what?”

  “For coming on the scene.” Peggy looked at me with sudden intensity. “You were thinking kidnapping, weren’t you?”

  I nodded. “Ransom?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing as dramatic as that. This is more a runaway, like all those other cases you used to have. Whatever happened with the Miller girl? Did you find her?”

  “Not long after you left, her parents asked me to stop looking. ‘We’re no longer interested,’ was the way they put it.”

  “God.”

  “I don’t think God had much to do with it.”

  I drained my coffee and settled back in the booth and enjoyed a lesser degree of foreboding while wrestling with a stubborn degree of restlessness. A part of me wanted her problem to be more cataclysmic, of a degree that required heroics. Then I could impress her. Then I could remind her who I was. Then I could win her back and take her home with me. Not for the first time, I envisioned making love to a woman who was pledged to another man.

  A waitress materialized and asked if we’d finished our desserts and cleared the table when we nodded. We both ordered a second espresso; I made sure she remembered mine was decaf. I can sip whiskey all night if I pace myself, but if I have an ounce of caffeine in the evening, I don’t sleep a wink. Basically, I have the constitution of a five-year-old: a bag of Oreos never lasts me more than twenty-four hours.

  I got out my notebook and pencil. “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said when the waitress was out of earshot. “What’s Nina’s last name?”

  “Evans. Nina Becker Evans.”

  “Evans is her father’s name?”

  She nodded. “And Becker her mother’s. Judy Becker.”

  I looked up. “Are you going to be Margaret Evans?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll still go by Nettleton.”

  “Are you in the phone book?”

  “Only under Ted’s name.”

  “You’d better give me your number.”

  She recited the digits and I jotted them in my book. When I’d finished, she issued a caveat. “Please don’t call me at home unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’ll call your motel every evening at nine—Ted takes the dog for a walk then; he’s gone for half an hour. If I don’t reach you at nine, I’ll call the next morning at eight—Ted leaves for work before I do.”

  “Why all the rigmarole?”

  “I don’t want Ted to know I’ve done this unless it turns … you know. Horrible, or something.”

  “I thought you were sure it wasn’t horrible.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t be sure, Marsh. I don’t know enough to be sure.”

  No one ever does. “Why did Nina drop out of school?”

  “I don’t know, but it seemed to be part of a general deterioration of her life. The process began in adolescence and accelerated when Ted and I started seeing each other three years ago. It peaked when I moved in with Ted last Christmas and he announced we were going to be married. Nina left school a month after I started living with her father.”

  “What kind of deterioration are we talking about?”

  “The stuff young people are so damned good at—sex, drugs, hatefulness, irresponsibility.”

  “You make her sound pretty mutinous.”

  “That’s exactly what she was, apparently. According to Ted, at least.”

  “What triggered it?”

  She shrugged. “Ted makes vague references to her past from time to time, as though something traumatic happened in her childhood, but if it did, I don’t know what it was.”

  “Did she have run-ins with the police?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “When’s the last you heard from her?”

  “Not since she abandoned her apartment—no notice, no nothing, she just left it in her wake along with everything she owned.”

  “Do you know where she’s living now?”

  “No.”

  “Is there a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But you think her snit has something to do with you.”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “It’s pretty hard to cast you in the role of the ugly stepmother,” I said easily.

  “Well, that’s what I seem to be. In Nina’s eyes, at least.”

  “Was there a particular bone of contention?”

  She shook her head. “Quite the contrary. I tried very hard to make her like me; I didn’t interfere in her life at all. I went out of my way to be nice, but for some reason she hated me anyway.”

  “Hate’s a pretty strong word.”

  Peggy’s lip quivered. “It’s the word she used. To my face. More than once.”

  Peggy was on the verge of tears; I tried to tug her away from them. “Nina sounds pretty immature.”

  “She is. Unquestionably. I think most kids are these days. They’re very spoiled, very used to getting their way, very used to ignoring authority without consequence. I think it’s because the parents aren’t around to impose discipline.”

  Peggy looked beyond me, at the traffic streaming by outside the restaurant, and used the kinetic blur to assemble her thoughts. “Nina is very verbal; very opinionated; very aggressive; very sanctimonious. And very beautiful. I think her parents avoided discipline because it turned into a war they couldn’t win. It was easier to let their lovely daughter have her way. And I have to admit, based on her looks, it would be hard to imagine her acting as anything but an angel.”

  “Laissez-faire can be a formula for disaster, though.”

  Peggy nodded. “Kids need limits. They push till they feel them. When they don’t feel any, they push harder. If there aren’t any there, they fall down. Limits equal love; kids understand it better than adults do, sometimes.”

  I didn’t have anything to add to her essay.

  Peggy toyed with her spoon and overstirred her coffee. When she spoke again, her tone was thin and uninflected. “The person Nina’s really angry with is Ted, of course. I’m just a standin for her daddy.”

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

  “Ted and Judy were divorced when Nina was twelve. A tough age for an upheaval, particularly for girls—they’re very susceptible to rejection at that point. They’re finally beginning to see themselves as individuals and just when they think they have a picture of who they are, they get slapped in the face by the person they love most in the world. Some kids never recover from it.”

  “Who took Nina after the divorce?”

  “She lived with her mom at first. It went okay for a while, but they had problems once Nina hit high school—the relationship was turbulent. Ted was aware of the situation and tried to smooth things out—he saw Nina almost every weekend. There was a lot of bitterness toward him at first, but over time the relationship became quite strong.” She paused. “Maybe to an unhealthy degree, because when I came along Nina acted more like his wife than his daughter—she definitely played the role of the wronged woman. I half-expected her to charge me with alienation of affections.” Peggy’s smile wasn’t as disarming as it should have been.

  “You’re not saying there was anything going on in a literal sense.”

  She reddened as though I had slapped her. “Of course not. My God.”

  She stayed silent long after I ap
ologized.

  “The more I tried to be nice to her, the worse it got,” she continued finally. “She even called me a slut one night when she showed up unannounced when Ted and I were preparing to … well, you get the picture. Once I moved in, she stopped coming by the house entirely. Her father had abandoned her again, at least symbolically.”

  “She and Ted haven’t gotten together at all in recent months?”

  “Up until two months ago they still saw each other regularly, but not in my presence. They had dinner once a week, Wednesday nights usually, at some nice restaurant. They made a big deal out of it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They played dress-up. And drank champagne. And went to places like Canlis and Kaspar’s and the Hunt Club. It was quite a production, usually.”

  “Sounds a little bent to me,” I said, then quickly wished I hadn’t.

  Peggy started to object to my choice of words, then changed her mind and offered a concurrence. “It was bent. That’s exactly what it was. What she was, at least.”

  “It sounds like a two-way street, Peggy.”

  The pain in her eyes was palpable. “I know it does. And it was, I guess. But it wasn’t perverted, Marsh—Ted was just trying to keep his family together and that was the only way he could think of to do it.”

  “Did you say anything to him about his methodology?”

  “Once.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He told me I was being silly, that he was just giving a poor college student a night on the town once in a while. So he kept on fawning over her. And telling me to give her more time to adjust.” Peggy finished her coffee. “I don’t mean to make him sound stupid,” she said, even though that was what she’d done. “He was just determined to keep Nina’s goodwill at any cost. Or almost any. He did tell me that if I insisted on it, he’d stop seeing her, at least so ceremoniously.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Of course not. How could I?”

  “But Nina took off anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she the only child?”

  Peggy shook her head. “There’s a brother. Jeff. He’s two years younger.”

  “What’s his attitude about all this?”

  “He’s pretty much written off the whole lot of us.”

  “What’s he do?”

  Peggy chuckled wryly. “Jeff writes a column for a local alternative newspaper called Salmon Says. What he is is a sex adviser.”

  “A what?”

  “He tells people how to improve their sex lives. Ted hasn’t spoken to him since Jeff did a column on anal intercourse. Which is probably the reason he wrote it.”

  To cover my embarrassment, I pecked at a small thread. “Does Ted have a will?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what it says. Why is that relevant?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. Do you have a prenuptial agreement?”

  She reddened and set her jaw. “This is none of your business; it has nothing to do with Nina.”

  That wasn’t necessarily true but I didn’t debate it. “Let’s see if I’ve got it right. Nina lives a wild life that becomes even more rambunctious when you and Ted start dating. When you move in, she drops out of school and stops coming around the house but she and her father keep in touch. Then two months ago, she disappears altogether.”

  “Right.”

  “But you don’t have evidence the disappearance was involuntary.”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. “Frankly, it doesn’t sound that serious to me. Kids take off all the time. She’ll show up next week with a nice tan and tell you she’s been in Sun Valley for two months.”

  Peggy shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  I smiled. “I have to admit, you used to be a good huncher. But I don’t see why the best thing to do isn’t to give it more time.”

  Her outburst shoved me back against the booth. “Because my life is going to hell, that’s why. It’s all he can talk about. All he does with his free time is look for her. We haven’t done anything but search for Nina in weeks—he says he can’t marry me until he finds her.”

  Her fists were white and her words were raw with ire and insult. The admission that her relationship was in extremis had cost her a lot.

  “Has Ted called in the cops?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s afraid he might get his precious Nina in trouble. She did lots of drugs for a time. Ted’s afraid if the police nose around, they might find evidence to charge her with something.”

  “Has Ted hired his own investigator?”

  “I don’t know; it’s possible. He’s as desperate about this as I am, though not quite for the same reason.” She reached out and grasped my hand. “Will you look into it, Marsh? It would mean a great deal to me if you could find her. You can probably do it in a day—she’s just gone off to pout somewhere.”

  I met her look. “You must think it’s worse than that or I wouldn’t be here. What I don’t understand is why.”

  “I just want Ted to have his daughter back. Why is that so awful?”

  “It isn’t awful at all, if that’s all there is to it.”

  Her eyes danced away. “What else would there be?”

  “I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “Do you have a picture?”

  Peggy reached in her purse and gave me a photograph. It was an informal snapshot of an extremely pretty young woman wearing shorts and a halter top, leaning against a car and eating an icecream cone. Her pose was casual but self-aware, as though she knew exactly how to make herself look innocently provocative, exactly how to make the cone seem unwittingly symbolic, exactly how to seem sinful.

  I put the picture in my pocket and looked at my watch. “It’s only eight. We could go somewhere for a nightcap.”

  Peggy hesitated, then shook her head. “I should get home. Ted gets nervous when I’m out late.”

  I was tempted to tell her Ted needed to get used to it.

  Twenty minutes later, I got a drink on my own, the sole customer in the generic lounge adjacent to the motel, and spent the rest of the evening imagining Peggy Nettleton coming to the end of her day in bed with another man.

  CHAPTER 5

  Shrouded in a polyester scarf and formless shift, eyes erased by pseudo-Claiborne shades, she loiters across the street until the gallery is full to bursting. Then she enters surreptitiously, joining a group of three as if she completes the quartet even though the others are strangers, these casual consumers of erotica, these corrupters of her trade.

  When the woman of the trio frowns at her impolitic proximity, Nina heads for a crowded corner near the door to the storeroom, aware as she edges through the mass of humanity that is attaching itself like lichen to the fecal equivalents displayed on the walls that she is known to a dozen people in attendance, so her guise is being road tested. Shoving the dime-store sunglasses higher on her nose, she wanders toward a place of refuge near a group of disapproving strangers adjacent to the rear partition. Slowly, she begins to relax; slowly, she trusts her costume; slowly she feels invulnerable. Eagerly incognito, she seeks what she has come to find.

  His name is computerized and enlarged and tacked to the north wall, above a series of six matted but unframed photographs that bear his splashy stamp. Several people are gathered nearby and one of them, a woman in Levi’s and Greenpeace T-shirt, seems antagonized by what she has seen. Her companion has the look of weary tolerance that indicates he has been embarrassed by his lover’s outbursts so frequently that he has concocted an antidote in the form of an unimpeachable nonchalance that is subject to whatever interpretation one wishes to attach to it.

  When the space is free, Nina fills it. One by one, she looks at his treasons. One by one, her body temperature mounts, one by one her pulse accelerates to an ultra-high frequency, one by one a white-hot singe of rage inflames
her as she sees the extent to which Gary Richter has defiled her, made a shambles of her devotion, used her body not as a molten vessel but as a chamber pot for his treacly eroto-politics. She is afraid, for just a moment, that she is going to faint.

  I started my search for Nina Evans first thing in the morning, at the place where she used to live, which was an eight-plex apartment near the corner of Fifty-second and University, just north of the University of Washington campus. The people up and at their lives at 9 A.M. didn’t include the manager of the Pacific Apartments. He lived in Unit 1, so the sign by the door informed me, and was apparently a dedicated sleeper. By the time he answered my summons, my thumb ached from pressing his bell.

  The apartments were arrayed on two levels in a horseshoe configuration that extended back from the phony stone facade and corrugated tin fence that fronted the building on the street. The set pieces perched on the veranda that provided access to each unit ranged from various forms of plastic furniture to a greasy Suzuki motorcycle and a bedraggled cactus that looked homesick for Arizona. The manager made do with an overstuffed chair that slumped like a drunken sailor outside his door and was bloated with moisture and rotted with age. From the polka dots on its back and arms, I guessed sparrows made more use of it than he did.

  The man who opened the door wore khaki shorts that fell to his knees and a Husky T-shirt he had rendered sleeveless for reasons not evident from his biceps. His eyes were lidded and unfocused, as though he’d left his glasses or his amphetamines by the bed. His feet were bare but for a layer of soot ground deeply into the soles. His beard was soggy and his hair was wet and matted. The general effect was that a thunderstorm had let loose inside his bedroom and he hadn’t had time to towel off.

  After I introduced myself, he made an assumption. “You’re the guy from twelve, right? Well, I ain’t going up there, I don’t care how much it’s backed up. I told her if it happened again she had to ream it out herself. Last time I ran a snake down there I pulled out a hair ball the size of a weasel. She’s got to stop barbering in the bathtub, man.”

  “I’m not from twelve,” I said as soon as I could manage it. “I’m here about Nina Evans.”

  He blinked to switch circuits and picked his nose to refocus. “Nina? Yeah. Yeah. I’m tracked. What about her?”