Dead on the Island (3 page)

"
I
can tell you," Dino said.

"This is beginning to smell," I said. "I
don't think I want to be involved in it, even if I owe you." I
stood up.

"You're gonna have to tell him, Dino," Ray
said.

"Shit," Dino said. He looked at me hard and
then said, "All right, goddammit. Sit down. I'll tell you."

I didn't move.

"Please," Dino said. "Please sit down. Is
that polite enough for you? You want pretty please with sugar on
it?"

I sat down. Ray handed me the folder
again.

"There's not any parents," Dino said. "I
mean, there's not any father. The mother is one of my uncles'
girls."

I looked at Ray.

"He's telling it, not me," Ray said.

"She stayed in town after the houses closed
down," Dino said. "Nobody knew where she'd worked before, and she's
a respected woman now. She had the kid a few years after leaving
the houses but before she'd really established herself. She was
naturally a little upset at the idea that part of her past might
come out in an investigation, and she asked me to see what I could
do."

"Another favor from big-hearted Dino," I
said.

"Yeah, another favor. Nothing wrong with
that. We take care of our own, you know?"

"I know."

"I know a few people on the cops," Dino
said. "They didn't ask to see the parents." He gave me a hurt
look.

"They don't work like I do. They've got
computers and terminals everywhere, which is good in a way, but it
keeps them from doing some of the legwork they used to do."

"Well, Evelyn--the mother--didn't want to
talk to them, and she didn't have to. I guess she'll talk to you,
but you gotta promise that you won't talk to anyone about her past,
uh, occupation.”

"No promises," I said. "I don't really want
to do this."

Dino looked at me for a second or two. "Go
call Evelyn, Ray. Tell her the deal. See what she has to say."

Ray faded out of the room again.

"This Evelyn have a last name?" I said. "A
job?" I opened the folder and looked at the picture again. "I'm
just curious, but I'm going to have to know sooner or later. Why
not now?"

Dino walked back over to the sofa and sat
down. He picked up the button-covered TV control and turned it over
and over in his hands. "Her name's Matthews," he said finally.
"Evelyn Matthews. And, yeah, she's got a job. She works at the
Medical Center as a receptionist. I don't think she's going to want
to talk to you there, though."

Ray came back into the room. I didn't hear
him coming, but there he was. "She'll talk to him," he said. "But
she's not too thrilled about it."

"That's just because she hasn't seen me
yet," I said.

Dino smiled faintly. "I forgot what a high
opinion you had of your looks. But somehow I don't think you'll
impress this one."

"We'll see. When and where?"

"Her house," Ray said. "After she gets off
work. I'll write down the address."

This time he was back quickly. He handed me
a piece of white paper with the address written in black
ball-point. It was just off Ferry Road.

"Easy enough to find," I said. "All the
streets over there are named after fish, though." I looked at Ray
and then at Dino. "There're probably a few more things you guys
want to tell me now."

"Huh?" Dino didn't get it.

"I mean, you must've found out something
about the girl, maybe something I should know. You must've done a
little nosing around here in town."

"Oh," Dino said. "Yeah. We did that. A
little. But it's your turn now. Maybe we did it wrong, and anyhow,
everything we know, we got from Evelyn. If you're gonna talk to
her, you can get everything we got. After that, it's up to you.
You're the ace private eye."

"Your faith in me warms my heart," I said.
"Especially considering my track record around here."

"Look, Tru," Dino said. "You gotta quit
blaming yourself. We told you it wasn't your fault."

"I know. I just can't convince myself."

"Well, this may help you get it off your
mind. Working for somebody else, I mean."

"Maybe." I didn't believe it any more than
he did.

"Sure it will. Now, what's the freight?"

"It's a favor," I said. “Like you did for
me."

Ray laughed somewhere behind me. "How much
money you got in the bank, Tru?"

I turned my head so I could see him. "A
little."

"I bet 'little' is just the right word," he
said.

"I never thought house painting was going to
make me rich."

Dino stepped over to my chair. "I want this
official, and I want your best shot. What do you usually charge?
Two hundred a day and expenses? Tell me if that's not enough."

"Well," I said, "it beats painting
houses."

He reached into the pocket of his wool-blend
slacks and pulled out a sheaf of bills folded in half. He counted
out ten of them. "Here's for five days, not counting the expenses.
You can keep a record or not. I'll trust you on them."

I took the money. It had been a long time
since I'd held that much. "What if I don't find her? I looked for
Jan hard for six months, a lot of the time for three more, and off
and on for the last three. I still haven't found a trace."

"You get paid for doing the work, not for
the results," Dino said. "Besides, this is just a kid. This is
different."

"Sure it is," I said. I stood up. "I'll be
in touch."

From Dino's house I cut back to Broadway and
drove toward the beach. There's a lot of Galveston's history along
Broadway. The wide esplanade is covered with oleander bushes and
tall palm trees and often looks quite pretty, but on either side of
it are the signs of what's become of a once beautiful city.

The long cotton warehouses of the old
compresses, once jammed with bale after bale of cotton, stand
deserted and empty. It's a polyester world, but all the cotton
shipping had long departed Galveston before people started dressing
in miracle fibers. Signs of decay are all around. A huge hardware
store, empty, its windows boarded up, its parking lot cracking and
weeds growing through the cracks. An old movie house that's gone
through every phase there is. Not so long before it had been
showing
Debbie Does Dishes
and now it was trying to make a
go by showing G-rated family films. Muffler shops. Pawn shops.

But on down the street are Ashton Villa and
the Bishop's Palace, once a private home that would knock your eyes
out if you could see it in the middle of a lavish country estate
instead of cramped up between other houses of a less noble
appearance. Galveston had once been the most powerful and richest
city in Texas; now it was a vestige.

I turned over to The Strand, named for the
famous London street. This was where the town was really making its
comeback, restoring the old buildings and regaining some of the
grandeur of the past with the Tremont House and the 1894 Grand
Opera House. I drove on down to the Medical Center, one of the few
things in Galveston that Houston hadn't managed to steal. The
wonderful old main building, Old Red, was still there, but it was
hardly visible from the street, thanks to all the new buildings
that surrounded it and almost hid it from view. Evelyn Matthews
worked somewhere inside the complex, but she had said that she
wanted to see me later, at her home, so I wouldn't bother to
stop.

I had a thousand dollars in my billfold and
what appeared to be an unlimited expense account. Whatever she
wanted was fine by me.

I drove on up Seawall Boulevard and down to
the South Jetty. The area was deserted, thanks to the weather,
which had not improved a hell of a lot since my run that morning. I
didn't mind. I liked having the jetty to myself, and I didn't feel
too cold in the sweatshirt. The wind had died down somewhat, but
the sky was still gray and low, the temperature still hovering in
the forties.

I parked the car and walked out on the
jetty, which was basically just a pile of granite boulders with the
Gulf water sloshing around them. It was fairly smooth walking if
you kept to the middle, but the edges were just a jumble. The
granite had been hauled in on railroad flatcars, and the railroad
had been built right on the jetty as it got longer and longer. The
engines had backed the flatcars right into the Gulf, so to
speak.

About halfway out I sat down and thought
about Jan. Black hair, brown eyes that laughed all the time. White
teeth, just the least bit crooked. The kind of kid sister that
could keep up with her older brother when he climbed a tree or rode
his bike. She'd disappeared at just about this time of year, or a
little earlier. I'd missed her letters for a couple of weeks, and
it was unusual for her not to write. So I called. No answer. I
called back every few hours for two days; then I'd gotten into the
Subaru and driven to Galveston. Her apartment had been neat but
empty. There was dust on the tables and knick-knacks. There hadn't
been anyone there for a while. There was no note, no message,
nothing. She was just gone.

I'd gotten in touch with some old friends,
including Dino. I'd talked to her co-workers, her friends, anyone
who might have known her. They were no help. Neither were the
cops.

I waited. No credit card bills came in.
There were phone calls, but just from people wanting to know where
the hell Jan was. I couldn't find her car. The cops couldn't find
any trace of it in their computer records of arrests or
accidents.

It was as if she'd just vanished into the
Gulf breeze.

There was nothing unusual about a woman
vanishing, God knows. It happens every day, and probably several
times a day, in and around a city like Houston, and Galveston is
certainly a part of the Greater Houston area, no matter how much it
galls the BOIs to admit it. Sometimes bodies and bones are found
months or years later by some kid playing in a field or taking a
short cut home from school. It makes the news for a day or two.
Then everyone forgets.

I showed her picture everywhere. In the
places I knew she went, in the clubs and dives, in the shops and
the corner groceries. Nothing. No one knew a thing, no one had seen
her. For six months of hard looking, nothing. And all the time
after that. Nothing.

Dino was right. I'd quit the business for a
year, obsessed with my own search, and I'd found nothing. It was
time for me to get back to trying to find something for someone
else. Just to see if I still could.

But I knew I was never really going to stop
looking for Jan.

A woman and a small boy came out on the
jetty. She was holding his hand. A gull flew down by them
hopefully. The woman had on a long cloth coat, and the boy had on
one of those iridescent jackets that looks sort of like a life
jacket with sleeves. They were carrying a sack of popcorn, and the
boy started tossing it into the air a piece at a time. He couldn't
get it high enough to interest the gull, but his mother took over
and pretty soon there was a wheeling and screeching flock all
around them. The boy was laughing and the gulls were swooping close
enough to snatch even his clumsy tosses out of the air.

I thought about the rat. Too bad he was at
the other end of the seawall. He would have enjoyed the
popcorn.

After a while the woman and the boy left.
The gulls hung around and picked up a few of the puffy bits lying
on the jetty. Then some of them flew over to where I was sitting in
hopes of picking up something else.

"Forget it, gulls," I said.

They weren't bothered in the least by my
voice, and they screeched and swooped for a few more minutes before
they gave up and went back to whatever it is that they do when they
aren't begging: sitting on posts, floating on the swell, scouting
out new territory. Eventually I got up and went away myself.

I killed a little more time walking around
on the beach, looking for shells. Sometimes in the winter you can
still find them, but not very often. Certainly not like when I was
a kid and it seemed as if they were lying everywhere.

When I figured that Evelyn Matthews had had
plenty of time to get home from work, I got in the car and drove
over to her house.

It was easy enough to find, once I located
the street among the Tunas and Mackerels and Dolphins. The house
was just like all the other houses in that area; they looked as
much alike as if they'd been stamped out with the same die. Frame
structures with one-car garages, all part of a cheap and quick
development a long time ago, but all well kept up and nicely
painted now.

I parked the car, went up the walk, and
knocked on the door. I didn't see a doorbell button.

I didn't know what I was expecting to see,
but the woman who answered the door wasn't it. I suppose that I'd
associated the fact that she worked for Dino's uncles with the time
of their heyday, which began in the 'twenties and extended into the
'fifties. Let's face it. I was expecting some kind of little old
lady, but the woman who answered the door looked no older than I
did.

She was short, with dark hair and eyes, and
her figure was what might best be described as voluptuous. She'd
probably really been something thirty years ago.

"You must be Truman Smith," she said. Her
voice was dark, like her hair.

"That's right," I said. Before she could
ask, I took out my billfold and handed her my ID. She looked it
over and handed it back. Only then did she ask me inside.

We walked into a small living room furnished
with a love seat instead of a sofa, a couple of platform rockers,
and a twelve-inch TV on a stand. There was also a small bookshelf
against one wall, and I drifted over to it. I'm incorrigibly
curious about what people read. There was no Faulkner, so there was
no danger we'd be involved in a literary discussion. Her taste ran
more to Bobby Jean Mason and Margaret Atwood.