Pain Management Read online

  The husband got up without a word. I watched him walk away. Toward the garage . . . or maybe his studio above it.

  He was back in a couple of minutes. Walked over to where I was sitting and handed it to me.

  It was on one of those blank music sheets, written in perfect calligraphy, the words fitted neatly between the ruled lines. I tilted it against the light. Ink-on-paper, sure, but it was a computer font, not handwriting:

  I went to find the Borderlands. I’ll be back when I learn enough.

  It was signed R♥B.

  “Nothing else?” I asked them.

  They both shook their heads.

  “You don’t like the police being involved, right?” I put it to the husband.

  “No, I don’t. I never liked the idea. If it wasn’t for . . . my wife,” he said, nodding in her direction, “I wouldn’t have notified them at all, to be honest.”

  When people make a point of telling you they’re being honest, pat your pocket to make sure your wallet’s still where it should be.

  “Then why—?”

  “The authorities,” the woman said. “If we didn’t let them know, we could end up . . . suspects or something. Isn’t that true?”

  “It is,” I confirmed for her, watching the self-satisfaction briefly gleam in her eyes. “But if the cops saw that note, they’d make you report her missing, maybe even file a petition against her in court.”

  “Court?” the husband said sharply. “What the hell is that all about?”

  “Your daughter’s a minor. About sixteen, yes?”

  “She’ll be seventeen in September,” the wife said.

  “Sure. Anyway, if she’s running around unsupervised somewhere with your permission, that could look like neglect to the law. Unless you’re in contact with her, sending her money . . .”

  “No,” they both said in unison.

  “But if she’s gone without your permission, and if you want the law to bring her back, you’d have to file a petition so she could be brought back against her will, understand?”

  “I would never go to court against my own—”

  I held up my hand like a traffic cop. I was there to get some leads, not listen to a discourse on the philosophical perspectives of the privileged. “What else do you have that might help?” I asked them.

  The husband showed me a dollhouse he’d built for his daughters. “Well, it was originally for Buddy, but by the time Daisy was old enough to be interested, Buddy had pretty much outgrown it anyway.”

  The dollhouse was ultra-modern, almost futuristic. It was as precise and substantial as a miniature of the real thing, but it didn’t have the warmth of Rosebud’s rolltop desk. Didn’t look as if anyone had ever played with it, either.

  I stayed for dinner, some quasi-Oriental dish, heavy on the presentation. Afterwards, the husband offered me a joint.

  “I’ll pass,” I told him.

  “You have problems with marijuana?” he asked, a faint trace of belligerence in his voice.

  “By me, it’s just an overpriced herb, a hell of a lot less dangerous than booze.”

  “Exactly right,” he approved. “But even in an ‘enlightened’ state like Oregon, it’s still a crime to possess it, except for medical reasons.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “We’ve been smoking for . . . how many years, Mo?”

  “You’ve been smoking for decades,” his wife said. “And I have asked you a million times not to call me that.”

  “Excuse me, Maureen,” he said.

  Apparently, the secondhand ganja hadn’t mellowed out their relationship. From the way Daisy didn’t react, the exchange was nothing new to her.

  “Did Rosebud . . . Buddy . . . smoke?” I asked.

  “No,” said the mother.

  “Once in a while,” said the father.

  “She didn’t like it,” Daisy added.

  I took notes—I don’t need to write things down, but it always makes clients feel better—while the father filled me in on his missing daughter’s life. If she’d had a boyfriend, either it escaped his attention or he didn’t see fit to share the info with me.

  By then, I knew who would know, but I could see I wasn’t going to be alone with her again on that visit.

  I didn’t leave until almost ten at night. Felt like I had been vacuuming for hours, but without a lot of suction.

  Before I left, they gave me a couple of photos of their daughter. She was a medium-built girl with long straight hair and a crowd face. Not a single scar, tattoo, blemish, or disfigurement to set her apart. The shots weren’t candids; she looked at the camera stiffly—not unhappy, not even bored; just . . . composed. Maybe it was the bland expression that made her look so generic.

  I got up, carefully slid the photos into my jacket.

  “I’ll walk you out,” the husband said. His wife was looking straight ahead. Not at me. Neither of us said goodbye.

  Outside, in the night, I cupped my hands around a wooden match, fired up a cigarette, giving him time to say whatever he wanted to. I don’t smoke anymore, but I never go out without a pack. They cost so much today, because of the piety taxes, that they’re good for mini-bribes. And it’s always smart to let people think you have habits that you don’t.

  “Buddy is a good girl,” he said quietly, as if he’d thought about it carefully before pronouncing his opinion.

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Sure. What difference?”

  “I don’t understand. I was just trying to—”

  “You don’t know where she is, right?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “So I have to look around, understand? There’s no special place where good girls wouldn’t go. You’re not narrowing down my search any with that.”

  “Well . . . I just meant, I mean, Buddy doesn’t use drugs. Wouldn’t that be a help for you to know, for example?”

  “You know why she took off?”

  “No. We told you—”

  “So how can you be so sure about the drugs?”

  “I . . . All right, I get your meaning.”

  “Okay. I’m on the job.”

  “You don’t sound very optimistic.”

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up. Your daughter seems like a very intelligent, very organized young woman. She could be a hundred places by now.”

  “She’s around here,” he said, certainty in his voice. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Up to you. Me, I’m on the clock. You know the rate, you decide when I’ve been out there enough.”

  “Can I have one of those?” he asked, nodding his head at my cigarette.

  I gave him one, handed him my little box of matches. His hands were steady.

  “Mr. . . . ?”

  “Hazard. B. B. Hazard. That’s the name I gave your daughter.”

  “My . . . Oh! You mean Daisy.”

  “Yeah. She’s a little pistol, that one.”

  “She is that. Buddy spoiled us. No notes from her teachers, no disciplinary problems at school . . .”

  “Daisy and her are different personalities?”

  “Night and day,” he assured me. “Uh, what I wanted to . . . discuss with you . . . when you find her, what do you do?”

  “There’s a few options.”

  “Such as . . . ?”

  “I could try and get an address, turn it over to you. I could brace her, try and talk her into coming home. Or at least into giving you a call, let you try the persuasion. . . .” I let my voice trail off, giving him the opening if he wanted it.

  “Suppose she . . . refuses to come back. Is there anything you could do then?”

  “I could bring her back,” I said flatly, no emphasis anywhere.

  “You wouldn’t hurt—?”

  “No. Is she on any medication?”

  “Medication?” he said, on the thin edge of hostility. “What are you talking about?”

  “Medication. Like you get from a doctor. An
ti-depressants, stuff for allergies, insulin . . .”

  “Oh. No. No, she isn’t. But what diff—”

  “Some medications don’t mix.”

  “Look, Mr. . . . Hazard, I’m not following you here.”

  “You want her brought back, whether she wants to come or not, right?”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “One way is physical force; one way is with . . . medicine.”

  “You mean like a Mickey Finn?”

  “Something like that,” I said, watching his eyes. “And if she was taking other stuff, the combination could be dangerous. Even chloroform could—”

  “Maybe you’d better not . . . I mean, isn’t there some way you could just . . . hold her wherever you find her? I’ve got a cell phone. You could ring me any time, day or—”

  “I couldn’t hold her in a public place.”

  “But you could follow her and—”

  “Sure. And if she’s staying somewhere permanent, that might work out. But if she’s crashing different places, or sleeping outside, or with a crew, or . . . well, thing is, I may only get the one shot. And if she knows she’s been located, she might bolt. There’s a lot of roads out of Portland.”

  “I don’t like this,” he said bitterly, throwing his cigarette down, grinding it dead with his heel.

  “Look, I’m not promising anything,” I told him. “Only a crook would do that. It’s long odds any way you look at it. But what I can do, I can see if I can pick up her trail but keep in the background, all right? If anyone’s going to make a pitch, it shouldn’t be me, it should be you or her mother.”

  “It should be me,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look, this is complicated,” he said into the silence. But that was all he had to say.

  “You paid me for ten days,” I told him. “If I turn her up in that time, I’ll call you. Then you decide how you want to play it.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “It’s still your call. If you want me to keep looking past that, it’s the same rate.”

  “What are you saying? If you don’t find Buddy in ten days, you won’t be able to at all?”

  “I’m not saying anything until I start looking. I don’t know if the trail is cold, or even if there is a trail. I’ll have a better idea after I’ve poked around.”

  He told me the number of his cell phone. “Don’t you want to write it down?” he asked.

  “I’ll remember it,” I promised him. “Writing certain things down, it’s bad for business.”

  “I . . . All right,” he said, sounding more depressed than convinced.

  He walked back to his architecturally unique house. I started up my commonplace car and took off.

  Driving back, I ran through it in my mind. Even adding up everything I’d seen and been told, there was a lot I didn’t know. Nothing so strange about that. But I guess what bothered me the most was why they had all lied to me. Every one of them.

  “She wrote music,” I told Gem the next morning. “I’m dead sure of it, especially since her little sister ran out of the room when I brought it up.”

  “But why would her parents—?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s not all of it. No way a girl her age, living in that kind of room, wouldn’t have a backpack, but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t tell if any of her clothes were missing; there were too many of them. But . . . no guitar, no backpack, no menstrual . . . stuff. The notebooks, you could tell they were part of a series, but the only ones she left behind were blank. Like the music-composition paper. This was no snatch. Wherever the girl was going, she planned it. And she figured on staying, too.”

  “That ‘Borderlands’ reference . . .”

  “If she wrote that note herself, yeah. It was just a computer printout—anyone could have done it.”

  “Why would anyone—?”

  “Pro snatch artists would have something like that prepared in advance—it can buy them a lot of time. And the parents could have written it themselves, after . . .”

  “After she left?”

  “After they killed her. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Burke. If they killed their own daughter, they would hardly be hiring private assistance to find her.”

  “You mean O.J.’s not spending his NFL pension on private investigators to find the Colombian drug dealers who killed his ex-wife?”

  “Sometimes your sense of humor is offensive,” she said, eyes level.

  “And sometimes,” I told her, “you just don’t get the joke.”

  Hours later, she came into the room where I’d been sitting with my eyes closed.

  “Have you learned anything?” she asked in a neutral voice. Gem knew where I went when I searched with my eyes closed, but she didn’t like to talk about it.

  “I thought the comics might have a clue,” I said, “but they’re all about a girl dealing with MPD.”

  “MPD?”

  “Multiple Personality Disorder. Only now they call it DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder. Madison Clell—the one who writes and draws the comic—she has it herself. This Cuckoo is kind of . . . harsh. Right on the nerve endings. Powerful stuff. But I think Rosebud was just interested in it . . . artistically . . . not because she herself had the same thing.”

  “Perhaps one of her friends?”

  “I don’t think so. If that was it, she might’ve had one of the comics, but not the whole set. Some kids collect comics, but these were the only ones in her room, so I don’t think that was it, either.”

  “Did this . . . Cuckoo person run away, too?”

  “Damn! I didn’t think of that. Not in this issue, anyway. Doesn’t say anything about her writing music, either. But I just don’t think that’s it.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because she left the comics behind, Gem. And it looked like she took along everything that was precious to her when she ran.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “Everybody’s lying,” I told her. “Those people, they never showed the girl’s note to the cops. Probably just handed them a pile of bullshit. A lot of rich people, they think the cops work for them personally. Like servants.”

  “Truly?”

  “Sure. Say their kid wants nothing to do with them, okay? But the kid’s of age, so the parents can’t turn her in as a runaway. What they do, they call the cops, tell them the kid has been really depressed lately, they haven’t heard from her . . . and she always calls regularly, so they think she may have done something to herself.

  “The cops go pound on the kid’s door, probably scare the hell out of her. Just what the parents want: they prove to the kid that they’ve got the power; the law will do what they tell it to.”

  “That is disgusting.”

  “Sure. Sometimes the kid doesn’t panic. She proves to the cops that she’s an adult, and that her parents were just playing them because she wants the parents out of her life and they don’t know how to take no for an answer. And sometimes the cops get angry about being used.

  “But, most of the time, they just play the role—tell the kid she really should sit down and talk with her parents, all that crap. It’s none of their business, they shouldn’t be doing it; but, the way they figure, a little gratitude from people who have money never hurts.”

  “Do you believe that is what these people are doing?”

  “Well, aren’t they? Let’s say the note’s for real—the kid’s a runaway, then, and they know it. Why would they keep that from the cops?”

  “But if the police locate—”

  “The parents will just say they never saw the note, sorry to have troubled you . . . but thank God our precious baby is back home, and we’ll be sure to write a nice letter for your personnel file.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, only it’s not just the parents who are gaming. The cops might have the kid’s photo posted; she might even make a milk carton or a
few Internet sites. But no way they’re bringing out any of their big guns on this.”

  “Big guns?”

  “Extra officers, heavy overtime authorized, squeezing informants, putting out the word that they’re offering a felony walkaway for a solid lead . . . like that.”

  “Why do you believe the parents told you the truth, then?”

  “They didn’t. I already said—”

  “No, no. I don’t mean the truth about the . . . things you said. But why did they tell you the truth about her running away?”

  “People like that, they see the cops as public servants, but not necessarily their servants. Me, they’re sure of—I’m bought and paid for.

  “Besides, they know I’m not exactly comparing notes with the law. That’s what they hired me for. Most PIs are ex-cops. That’s what people pay them for; they can get information by just walking down to the precinct and spreading a little goodwill. That’s great if you’re a defendant, or even a suspect. But if you’re coming across as a victim, you don’t need all that. And the firm they hired—the ones the cops touted them on—you can bet it’s full of ex-cops, too. So they could never trust them, either. Me, I’m an outlaw. No question about my loyalty . . . at least in their minds.”

  “You sound as if you despise them.”

  “I don’t know what I feel about them—yet. I guess I’d have to find the girl to know for sure. But I don’t like them; that part’s true enough.”

  I parked behind the strip club, in the vacant spot Gem said would be waiting for me. It was the kind of joint where every button on the speed-dial is set to 911. Gem was at a little table in the back, as far from the action as you could get and still be hit with the cover charge.

  “Anything?” I asked her. Before I went out into the street,it was worth seeing if the girl had made headlines in theunderground newspaper—the one that isn’t printed. Gem had a subscription.

  “Nothing. Not by her name, anyway. And the description is almost . . . meaningless. It could fit so many.”

  “About what I figured,” I told her, not disappointed.

  One of the house features swivel-hipped her way over to us, asked Gem if she wanted to buy a lap dance for me. Even standing still, the woman was in motion, packing enough silicone to grease a battleship through a car wash.