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Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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something about trapping winter air that brings out the worst in it. I dialed up the thermostat and the oil furnace kicked in with the sound of a distant cash register. I plugged in the coffee maker and bought myself a drink from the cupboard bottle to start my blood moving. After a few minutes I took off my hat and coat to let the heat inside. The chill crept out of the place on slow club feet.
In my not-so-easy chair, sipping coffee laced with whiskey and listening to the click-clunk of the antique clock in the living room, I went over what I had. It wasn’t much. It was less than that. So far I hadn’t been able to establish an existence for Little Georgie Favor this side of three years ago. Where he went after the Kitchen was a question as wide as Detroit, or as narrow as an old man’s options. I took out the picture Iris had given me of the two smiling people standing in front of the Piano Stool in Kingston. A happy young couple enjoying themselves for eternity, not knowing or caring what was coming, the moment lifted cleanly from time and set aside, like an item of token value rescued from an apartment before flames took it. Chief Crazy Horse was right. Cameras trapped the soul.
There were people I couldn’t find. I had a drawerful of unfinished cases, most of them unpaid for too. Some of them just walked out on their lives and never went back. It’s easier than you might think, and the more paper we have to carry around to prove we exist the easier it gets. In the last century you could run out to the territories, but communities were small and strangers stuck out a mile. Now it’s just a question of getting hold of a birth certificate, which unlocks all the other paperwork, and getting swallowed up in a population center somewhere. Strangers are more common than acquaintances; no one thinks about them. They aren’t even invisible. They’re part of the scenery.
For all that, people who disappear according to plan are the most easily traceable. They trade in opposites. If they live in Los Angeles they move to New York City. If they’re blond they dye their hair black. If they work in the accounting department they get a job hoisting crates of machine parts onto a loading dock. They take common names in place of unusual ones and nine out of ten of them wear their new lives like thorn underwear. You can pick them out of a crowd upside-down in a dirty mirror. The tough ones to find are the ones who left suddenly without thought, the thirty-year clerks who just missed being run over by stricken cab drivers on their way to work and the wives who walked into their husbands’ offices and found them on the sofas with their secretaries—people who just turned away from their various crossroads and started walking with no idea of where they were heading. They took up lives similar to those they had left, sometimes in the next block and sometimes without even changing their names, and unless someone who knew them in their other lives ran into them in a supermarket you’re out of luck. People don’t pay private investigators to sit around waiting for coincidences. The success ratio isn’t sparkling and even the most dedicated fishermen lose interest when their lines are slack as often as they’re taut.
I didn’t know which pigeonhole fitted George Favor. A man without friends glides around on the edge of others’ vision. People never looked at him directly or noticed when he wasn’t around until something happened to remind them. The job needed less work. Sometimes when you just let them lie, a root found its way into the soil and they blossomed on their own. The other job, the death’s-head drawing in Iris’ jewelry box and the bullet in her car, needed more work. The garage where she’d picked up the car was one handle. So far the attendant she’d claimed it from was the only person who knew she was in town. That was my all day tomorrow. When it comes to giving up information, garage attendants are as
In my not-so-easy chair, sipping coffee laced with whiskey and listening to the click-clunk of the antique clock in the living room, I went over what I had. It wasn’t much. It was less than that. So far I hadn’t been able to establish an existence for Little Georgie Favor this side of three years ago. Where he went after the Kitchen was a question as wide as Detroit, or as narrow as an old man’s options. I took out the picture Iris had given me of the two smiling people standing in front of the Piano Stool in Kingston. A happy young couple enjoying themselves for eternity, not knowing or caring what was coming, the moment lifted cleanly from time and set aside, like an item of token value rescued from an apartment before flames took it. Chief Crazy Horse was right. Cameras trapped the soul.
There were people I couldn’t find. I had a drawerful of unfinished cases, most of them unpaid for too. Some of them just walked out on their lives and never went back. It’s easier than you might think, and the more paper we have to carry around to prove we exist the easier it gets. In the last century you could run out to the territories, but communities were small and strangers stuck out a mile. Now it’s just a question of getting hold of a birth certificate, which unlocks all the other paperwork, and getting swallowed up in a population center somewhere. Strangers are more common than acquaintances; no one thinks about them. They aren’t even invisible. They’re part of the scenery.
For all that, people who disappear according to plan are the most easily traceable. They trade in opposites. If they live in Los Angeles they move to New York City. If they’re blond they dye their hair black. If they work in the accounting department they get a job hoisting crates of machine parts onto a loading dock. They take common names in place of unusual ones and nine out of ten of them wear their new lives like thorn underwear. You can pick them out of a crowd upside-down in a dirty mirror. The tough ones to find are the ones who left suddenly without thought, the thirty-year clerks who just missed being run over by stricken cab drivers on their way to work and the wives who walked into their husbands’ offices and found them on the sofas with their secretaries—people who just turned away from their various crossroads and started walking with no idea of where they were heading. They took up lives similar to those they had left, sometimes in the next block and sometimes without even changing their names, and unless someone who knew them in their other lives ran into them in a supermarket you’re out of luck. People don’t pay private investigators to sit around waiting for coincidences. The success ratio isn’t sparkling and even the most dedicated fishermen lose interest when their lines are slack as often as they’re taut.
I didn’t know which pigeonhole fitted George Favor. A man without friends glides around on the edge of others’ vision. People never looked at him directly or noticed when he wasn’t around until something happened to remind them. The job needed less work. Sometimes when you just let them lie, a root found its way into the soil and they blossomed on their own. The other job, the death’s-head drawing in Iris’ jewelry box and the bullet in her car, needed more work. The garage where she’d picked up the car was one handle. So far the attendant she’d claimed it from was the only person who knew she was in town. That was my all day tomorrow. When it comes to giving up information, garage attendants are as
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