Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (36 page)

“My ass. Bet you've knocked at least one of 'em down, haven't you? Come on, fess up. Tell Uncle Kenny the truth,” he prodded, and when the slow grin lifted a corner of Boxer's mouth, Kenny really revved up. “I knew it! Come on, tell!”

So Boxer told him about the nineteen-year-old who pranced around the gym talking shit and messing with people, especially with Boxer, whom he called Old Mother Fucker every time he spoke to him. Boxer had ignored him until he couldn't ignore him anymore and suggested that they step into the ring. The young guy, whose name was Franco, danced and ducked and bobbed and weaved and taunted, all while Boxer shuffled from side to side, looking for the boy's rhythm. And when he found it, he delivered a roundhouse right, just as Franco moved his head into it. “He dropped like a concrete block,” Boxer said, laughing gently. “Took two vials of salt to bring him around, and you know what he said? ‘Where am I,' like he was in some kinda movie.”

“There's more'n one way to skin a cat!” Kenny said with a gleeful laugh. “Next time you see him, tell him you still hold the record for the most KOs in Uncle Sam's army.”

“After all this time? No way.”

“So what!” Kenny punched him on the arm and sped out the door, slamming it so hard the Manhattan skyline on the adjacent wall shimmied.

Boxer cleaned up the kitchen then went to his office, sat at the desk,
and counted Kenny's money: two grand exactly, half in hundreds, half in fifties. He could buy groceries, a new battery, and new tires for his truck before the weekend's predicted solid freeze and flurries, a rug for his office, maybe even a pair of bedroom slippers. And he could leave the heat on. Turned down low, but on. And have money left to reopen his savings account. More than one way to skin a cat indeed, he thought, disliking the expression for the image it conjured up, but appreciating its meaning.

He looked at Kenny's written notes. Linda was his favorite of Kenny's wives, and she wasn't a flighty woman, not the kind to pick up and leave without a word. She'd worked the same job at the county hospital since graduating high school, up the ladder to the position of billing supervisor; had worked her way through night business school; and was working on a commercial real estate license. He took a pen from the cup on the desk and wrote at the bottom of the page:
Professor's name? Best friends?
He could have asked Kenny, but he knew one of Linda's friends, and he'd find the others through her. And he'd ask them about the professor and if they knew him, knew about him, then they'd know if Linda was with him. If she wasn't, and if she wasn't at home and really hadn't been at home for more than a week, then Boxer would agree that Kenny was right to worry. Right now, he would approach the situation as if Kenny were being a jealous, overbearing jerk, overreacting because his ex-wife didn't jump when he said jump. And as grateful as he was for the money in his pocket, that's what he wanted to be the case. Otherwise he'd have a missing person on his hands, and those almost never ended well. He should've told Kenny that, he thought to himself. He'd started to tell him then stopped himself; but he should have started preparing him for the worst. And missing persons always were pretty close to the worst. He looked at the photo of Linda—red hair cut short, green eyes sparkling, freckles dancing across her face—and started preparing himself for the worst.

The difference the new battery and tires made in the twelve-year-old Bronco was miraculous; and it helped that he may have picked up a new client at the automotive store—the manager wanted to hire somebody to run background checks on prospective employees. Boxer felt good as he parked at the restricted curb in front of central police headquarters. The front and rear bumpers of his truck still bore the FOP emblem, and the
sheriff's star was in the front windshield. He wouldn't get a ticket. He hustled to the front door and inside, to the duty desk, like he still belonged.

“Heads up, Dugan,” he called out, and let fly a jumbo Baby Ruth. The desk sergeant, a central casting cop on the job since Buffalo opened a police department, caught it with the one hand he had, and with the help of his teeth, ripped open the candy bar and bit it halfway down.

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

“How're ya doin', Dugan?” Boxer asked as he placed the bag with the extra large cup of Irish coffee on the counter. Dugan had been drinking on the job since he trained Boxer more than twenty-five years ago and seemed no worse for the wear.

“Shitty, as usual. Whaddaya want, Boxer?”

Boxer took a piece of notepaper from his pocket and handed it across the desk. “Missing person filed on her in the last couple of weeks?”

Dugan put the coffee on the shelf beneath the counter and took the paper to a desk with a computer on it and one-handed typed faster than Boxer did with two hands and was back in three minutes. “No missing person, no wants or warrants, nothing from traffic.”

“Will you keep an eye out?”

Dugan nodded, Boxer thanked him and left. He stood in the lobby waiting for a break in the rain so he wouldn't have to run to his Bronco, thinking through what he'd learned so far: County Hospital, Downtown Sales and Leasing, and her parents all said that Linda was on a spur-of-the moment vacation. He'd run the missing person angle just in case. He'd met her parents one Thanksgiving when she and Kenny had a big dinner. He was a mess that year, and Kenny, worried, had bullied him into coming to dinner. Linda's parents remembered and were glad to see he was OK. They weren't glad that Kenny was looking for Linda and didn't believe the reason why. “The man's a liar,” Jim Stone said. “He hasn't ever paid alimony on time. He's just mad she went off and he doesn't know where.”

Boxer went to a one-hour photo shop and got copies of Linda's photograph. Then he went to her church and her gym where she was recognized but had no connection close enough for anybody to know where she was. Driving home, Boxer thought Mr. Stone was probably right, but just to be sure, he'd eat dinner and then spend the evening on the computer,
running Linda's credit card numbers and out-of-state checks on her tags. “Which I wouldn't have to do if I could get in her building garage,” he muttered. But he couldn't. Linda had moved into a high security building to get away from Kenny . . . so how did he see her going in the building with the professor? Was he stalking her again? He'd done that for a while after she first left, and it had taken all of Boxer's persuasive powers to convince Kenny to leave her alone. “Dammit, man, why can't you grow up?”

Boxer stared at the bank computer screen, hesitant to spend the money to run all the checks he needed. “You've got the expense money, use it!” Instead, he got up from the desk and paced a bit, trying to fix a few things in his head, one of them being the wisdom of calling Peggy Brown. She was one of Linda's closest friends, and she didn't think much of Boxer, though he didn't really know why. Kenny and Linda had tried to fix them up; they were the only Black people either of them knew, and they thought they'd be perfect together. They weren't. But Peggy and Linda lived in the same building. If Linda was on vacation, Peggy would know. If Linda's car was in the garage, Peggy would know. If Linda were secretly married to a professor, Peggy would know.

He sat back down at the computer and typed in the codes to access the information he needed. It had been so long since he'd worked a job that required the kinds of checks he wanted to do that he had to refer to the manual to remember how to do it. He needed to work more, and not just for the money. He couldn't let himself sink back down into self-pitying depression. He
wouldn't
do that. He was a good investigator, trained by the army and seasoned by the Buffalo PD. He was just on his own now, no shame or harm in that. Not his fault that a thief's bullet had finished the work Vietcong shrapnel had begun years earlier. He probably could have stayed on the job, doing desk duty like Dugan, but he hadn't wanted that. He was a field investigator. “So investigate, already.”

He worked the computer for the next two hours, turning up no more on Linda Stone Schuster than he already knew, and he checked under Linda Stone, Linda Schuster, and Linda Stone Schuster. If she went on a trip, she didn't pay for it on her own credit cards, nor had she bought gasoline or booked a hotel room. So, the professor's footing the bill? He consulted his manuals, typed in some more codes, and was in Canada. He
ran the same checks and got the same nothing. Then he had a thought and checked Niagara Falls; maybe they'd eloped. People still eloped to Niagara Falls. But Linda hadn't.

How long did a “spur-of-the-moment” vacation trip last? He recalled his conversation with the acting billing supervisor at County Hospital: “She just jumped at the chance to get away for a few days.” To Boxer that meant three or four days, not almost two weeks. And what had her mother said? “The poor girl needed a little time away.” To the average forty-hour-a-week American, two weeks is more than a little time; two weeks is the year's allotment.

He knew where Linda lived, because he'd been to Peggy Brown's for dinner.

Once. The building looked like an old, stone castle. It sat back from the street, inside a circular driveway, and it was impossible to see the front door from the street, and the garage entrance was at the rear of the building, where he was now.

“Who is it?”

“It's Boxer Gordon, Peggy . . .”

“Yes?”

“I'm looking for Linda . . .”

“What do you want with Linda?”

“There's a line of cars behind me, Peggy,” he lied again. “Could you just buzz me in and I can tell you what I want when I get upstairs?” It was several seconds before the iron gates guarding the garage began to slide open. Boxer sped in and up to the second floor where he knew Linda parked. He'd spot her classic Cadillac Seville if it were in its assigned space. It wasn't. Boxer found a visitor's parking space and limped to the elevators.

She opened the door to his knock, then stood aside. “Thanks for seeing me, Peggy,” he said, sliding past her into the living room that had made him drool the first—and only—time he'd been here. Peggy herself had made him drool, too. She was mid-forties, beautiful, smart, and artistic enough to be a decorator, though she was a nursing supervisor and teacher by profession. It was her Persian carpets—real, not fake like his—
and apparent haphazard blending of the classical and the contemporary that inspired Boxer in his own decorating choices. He found himself wishing again that the chemistry had been better between them.

“What do you want with Linda?” Peggy asked again.

“I'm selling my cabin. I'd planned to wait until spring, but I need the money now. I know commercial real estate is Linda's thing, but the cabin'll sell quickly and since somebody's got to make the commission, I'd rather it be her that some stranger. I've been trying to reach her, but no luck, so I took a chance that you'd be in.”

Peggy gave him an appraising look. “That's decent of you, and I'm sure she'll appreciate it. She likes that cabin a lot. She even had a fight with dumb fuck about wanting to visit there more often.”

That caught Boxer by surprise, and it must have shown, because Peggy's voice changed, softened a bit. “Don't worry. He accused every man she talked to of wanting her, and her of egging them on, his best friends included. She really likes you, and that really pissed him off.”

Kenny's words replayed in his head:
“You didn't like your own wife, and you liked Linda.”
Shit. “I didn't know . . .”

“I told you, don't worry about it.” Then, looking pensive, said, “I wish I could tell you when Linda's coming back, but I don't know.”

“Where is she?”

“I don't know that, either, and I'm getting a bit worried, to tell the truth.”

“I know I don't know Linda as well as you do, but that sounds, well . . .”

“Not like Linda.”

“And I thought you two told each other everything.”

“There was an E-mail when I got home one evening two weeks ago . . .”

“An E-mail? She sent you an E-mail?”

“Which makes it even weirder. I don't care how ‘spur-of-the-moment' her decision was, she'd have told me about it, in person.”

“Maybe . . .” Boxer said, and hesitated, generating the desired result.

“Maybe what?” Peggy jumped right on it.

“Well . . . a guy, maybe?”

She gave him a derisive snort. “The last ‘spur-of-the-moment' decision she made about a guy was marrying that fool Kenny Schuster. No, when it comes to guys these days, she takes her time.”

“Nobody she cares about enough to spend a few days with?”

“Oh, sure, there's somebody she cares about, but he doesn't know where she is, either. He's why I got worried, he called me looking for her.”

Boxer paced a few steps, then turned back toward Peggy. “I don't want to upset you, but I don't like how this sounds, Peggy. Have you talked to her parents? Maybe even the police . . . ?”

Now it was Peggy's turn to pace. “I thought about it, but I don't want to scare her parents. And the police . . . but . . . could you do something?”