Missing Persons (2 page)

As they all do, she turned to see what I was looking at and saw the photo of her husband on their wedding day. She kept her eyes there, reluctant to turn her back on him.

“He had such wonderful dreams for you both,” I continued. “I can imagine it was something you talked about a lot.”

“It was.” Her voice cracked.

“He must have wanted to give you everything.”

“He did.”

“I guess that’s why he was working so late.”

That was it. Tears came down her face. She began to shake. I reached over and placed my hand on hers. She turned her eyes back to me. She was so vulnerable, in so much pain. It would look great on camera.

I leaned back and spoke gently. “I want to go over the last question one more time. I know this is difficult, but tell me again about the day your husband was murdered.”

She barely got through the story.

“S
ometimes I don’t like you.” Andres Pena, my cameraman, loaded the last of the equipment in his van. I waited by my car, parked in front of his.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not that fond of myself right now.”

“The way she thanked you for helping her. It’s like being thanked by a cow right before you bring down the hammer on its skull.”

“You forgot the hug.”

Like so many interview subjects, she wanted me to stay afterward to chat, to keep in touch, to really become friends. It’s interview euphoria, and since I rarely share it, I like to get out as quickly as possible. Even waiting outside the house for the crew to pack up, as I was doing now, made me a little jumpy.

“Nobody has to do the show and nobody has to watch,” I said, repeating what had become my mantra. “But they do.”

“You don’t have to be so good at it.”

“Yes, I do,” I argued. “If I don’t bring back what the network wants, I don’t get hired for the next job. And neither do you.”

Andres nodded. “It’s going to look great. The way she chokes up when she says his last words. I pushed in a little. You’ll really see the tears.” So much for his conscience.

I’ve been working as a freelance television producer for nearly twelve years. The title “producer” can mean a lot of different things depending on what area of entertainment you work in—from the person who spends ten years trying to get a film made to the lead in a sitcom who wants to feel more important. In my tiny little corner of the basic cable television world, a producer actually produces an episode of a show. That is, a production company creates a show, like
Caught!
, and hires people like me to conduct the interviews and write the episode. The episode airs on some network, in this case Crime TV, and my name appears in small print that goes by too fast for anyone to see. Assuming, of course, that anyone watches credits, which they don’t.

I prefer to work in the field. I go to the interview subjects rather than have them come to a studio. It’s typically easier, cheaper, and more interesting to shoot people where they actually live or work, so it’s done a lot. In my career I’ve interviewed CEOs and prison inmates, celebrities and coroners, gardeners, beauty queens, UFO nuts, orphans, and even a monkey. When you watch a documentary and the interview subjects are looking slightly off camera while they talk, they’re talking to someone like me. My face and my voice never end up in the finished product, so there’s no glory in it. But there is money. And as long as you don’t worry too much about who gets hurt, it’s an interesting job.

I always tell myself that no one is forced to tell their story to a television crew. Like a drunk sorority sister in a
Girls Gone Wild
video, they might eventually regret their actions—but while it’s happening, they want it to happen.

Yeah, I know how that sounds.

“Did you hear about a new doc that Ripper is producing?” Andres lit a cigarette and leaned against my car. Andres was nearly forty, three years my senior, and he shared my weary acceptance of our profession. But he justified his actions differently—no drunken sorority analogies for him. He had three kids, two mortgages, and a dog with arthritis.

“Mike mentioned something.”

“I hear it’s about unsolved cases,” Andres said. “Sounds depressing as hell.”

“It’s going to be episode after episode of kids on milk cartons, crying parents, and earnest cops who will never give up.”

He laughed. “Who wants to watch that crap?”

“Are you kidding? It’ll be a huge hit. People love other people’s misery. It makes them feel superior. It’s just no fun being on the other side of it.”

He nodded but said nothing. Andres was like that. He knew when it was better to keep his mouth shut. But our sound guy, a musician who called himself Victor Pilot, wasn’t so discreet.

“How’s the divorce coming, Kate? Has the old man completely fucked you over?”

“Not completely, Victor.”

Not yet anyway.

“If you’re lonely at home, you can always hang out at my place.”

Victor was in his midtwenties, a decade younger than me. And while I still had my figure, my long red hair, and the unmistakable scent of a woman who hasn’t had sex in a while, I couldn’t figure out why he continually hit on me. Whatever his reason, I wasn’t interested. I was in the process of getting rid of one dreamer with more confidence than common sense. I didn’t need to take on another.

“Thanks anyway,” I told him.

“You need to get out there, lady,” Victor prompted.

“Papers aren’t even signed yet. We’re still, believe it or not, arguing over the four hundred dollars in our savings account. The lawyers charged six hundred dollars to fight for that.”

“Then why not sit down with Frank and figure it out without lawyers?” Andres asked.

It was a reasonable question, but then Andres has never been divorced. Divorce, and the subsequent dividing of the assets, isn’t about reason. It’s about revenge.

“It’s my money,” I answered. “If I’m going to give it to some man who has never done anything for me, I’ll give it to the lawyer.”

“Better than giving it to Frank’s new squeeze,” Victor offered.

Though the mention of my husband’s girlfriend made bile rise into my throat, I just smiled. Unlike my interview subjects, I wasn’t dumb enough to offer up my private hell for the enjoyment of the general public.

“The good news is that with all the true-crime shows you’ve done, you probably know eight ways to kill him and get away with it,” Victor continued.

I took the shot tapes from Andres and opened my car door. “Problem is, I’ve done enough shows to know that if Frank ends up dead, I’ll be the number one suspect.”

Within twenty-four hours, I’d find out I was right. Who says you can’t learn anything from television?

F
rank and I had met in high school. I was smart, bored, and anxious to get out of the middle-class Chicago suburbs I grew up in. I wanted to be a writer and travel the world, which made me odd in a school full of kids who didn’t think beyond Friday night. I was also too skinny, more Olive Oyl than Kate Moss. And I was taller than a lot of my classmates, with red hair and glasses. Not exactly prom queen material.

Frank shouldn’t have been interested in me. He played basketball. He was popular, sensitive, and handsome, from a family with more money than mine, and he wanted to be a painter.

If there is something more romantic than a seventeen-year-old guy turning his back on the easy life that seems almost his birthright so he can struggle for his art, I don’t know what it is.

And if there is something more annoying than a thirty-seven-year-old man turning his back on his responsibilities as he continues to struggle, I don’t know what that is either.

We married right after college. I had a degree in journalism, Frank in accounting. I immediately found a bad-paying job as an associate producer at a local news station and Frank went to work in the office of his father’s construction firm. Things were good for a while. When our friends were single and complaining about their love lives, we would feel smug. But when one friend took a job in London because nothing was holding her in Chicago and another had a passionate affair with a famous musician, the smugness began to melt. Our friends were free to make crazy, interesting, wild choices, and it suddenly felt as though all our choices were already made.

It’s not that I’m against meeting your life partner on the playground. It’s worked out for a lot of people, and I’d hoped it would work out for us too. But Frank and I didn’t turn out to be the people we said we would be. In the twenty years since high school, I’ve only used my passport once, and that was to show identification on a flight to Pittsburgh. I write cable television informational programs. Despite having my name in the credits of dozens of shows, nobody thinks that makes me a writer. Including me.

Frank went even further off course. His father fired him from the construction firm after he failed to show up thirty days in a row. His painting career never took off, unless you count the summer he painted our bedroom a soft blue. For a while he put painting aside and sought new passions, new outlets for his creative energy. First it was gardening, then cooking, then ceramics, and then I stopped keeping track. The interest would start off high and gradually melt away. The books and supplies he’d bought would find their way into the basement without ever having turned into something that paid for itself, let alone supported us. For a while he made big plans and promises, but in the last few years he didn’t even look guilty when the bills arrived and he had to hand them over to me.

Instead of looking for a job, Frank spent most of his time watching TV, hanging out with his friends from high school, and reliving the glory days of his basketball victories. I would come home after a fourteen-hour shoot to a sink full of dishes and a lecture about how I was working too hard. After months of my pleading to help out a little, Frank did one thing for me. He went to the grocery store to pick up milk.

And somewhere in the dairy aisle he met Vera. And had an affair. And fell in love. And filed for divorce.

I should have been thrilled to have the deadbeat husband land on someone else’s doorstep. And when my sister, my mother, our friends, coworkers, neighbors, or the UPS guy asked me, that’s what I said. (The UPS guy was, technically, just dropping off a package for Frank, so he may not have been asking, but he heard anyway.)

But, as often as I said I was glad to be rid of him, I didn’t know what I really felt. All right, maybe I had some idea. I felt angry, betrayed, humiliated, and slightly embarrassed that while I spent my days surrounded by male cameramen, male audio guys, and often male interview subjects, Frank stayed home and watched ESPN—and yet he was the one who had an affair. Not once, not even once, had someone hit on me in all the years I’d been working. Not that I would have cheated, but that’s hardly the point.

One thing was for sure, I was alone in our tiny two-bedroom bungalow with an upside-down mortgage and a leaky roof, and he was happy with someone else.

 

 

When I got home from the shoot, I dropped the tapes on the kitchen table next to a note from Frank. “Picked up some stuff. Brought in your mail.” He’d doodled a mailbox with a face, arms, and legs in the corner of the paper. It was a cheery little note, flaunting his happiness, it seemed to me, making it a mean little note.

It also didn’t make sense. What
stuff
had he picked up? I walked around the house but I couldn’t see what was missing. His clothes had been gone for months. He’d taken his paints and easel from the garage a week after he’d moved out. And I’d removed our wedding photos from the bookcase. There was no sign that Frank had ever lived in this house, so I couldn’t figure out what there was left to take.

I made myself a turkey sandwich and grabbed a pop. I sat in the kitchen, reading the paper and going through the mail. It was only when I walked into the living room a second time that I realized the space above the fireplace was empty. The painting was gone. Frank had done an oil painting of a couple walking hand in hand down Michigan Avenue and given it to me when we bought the house ten years ago. It had decorated that wall ever since. I’d gotten so used to it, and in the last few years, so used to not looking at it, that its loss had escaped my notice for nearly an hour.

I didn’t want the painting. And after everything that had happened, I didn’t even like it anymore. But it was technically mine. It had been a gift from Frank. Before I could stop myself, I’d dialed his cell phone, ready to demand it back. It was my painting, something I had treasured since the day he gave it to me. That’s what I was going to say. Even as I dialed, I knew how pathetic I would sound.

But it got worse.

“Hello?” The voice was female.

I hung up.

“Oh, my God,” I yelled to an empty house. “She’s answering his cell phone. What kind of person answers another person’s cell phone!”

I knew what kind of person. The “we’re so in love we have no secrets from each other” kind of person. I momentarily comforted myself with the notion that the hang-up might make her think there was
another
other woman. Then I remembered caller ID and just felt stupid.

Do you ever have a moment in your life when you think, “This is not what I signed up for?” And then you look around for someone to blame and there is no one, just you. I guess you could go see a shrink and blame your mother, but that wouldn’t work for me. She hadn’t wanted me to marry Frank in the first place.

After all the years of being unhappy in my marriage, after Frank’s announcement that he was leaving me, after months of lawyers and divorce filings and angry phone calls with the man who had once promised to love me forever, it was finally real. A real person on the other end of the phone. All I knew about her was her first name, Vera, not even enough to Google her. But hearing her voice, I knew she was real. Everything that had once been real for me, every happy memory with Frank, was reduced to dust.