Book of Secrets (11 page)

  The morning's drive was long and numbing, just straight highway over bayou and through wood, with nothing much to look at and even less to do. Like a Warhol film on wheels. I think I must have nodded off at one point, but dreamt of driving with my eyes open, so it didn't really make much difference. I stopped once in Baton Rouge for cigarettes and gas, and passing a pay phone decided to make a call. It was kind of nice not having a cell phone ringing all hours of the day and night, but it was hell making outgoing calls.

  The long distance operator found the number for me without too much trouble, and patched me through to the line. After only five or six rings, the line was answered, by a voice that sounded like its owner had far better things to do with his time.

  "KXEN-home-of-Houston's-number-one-newscast-three-years-in-a-row," the script came pouring over the line. "How-may-I-direct-your-call?"

  "Could you give me the news desk?" I asked.

  "
Who
may I ask is calling?" the voice asked, professional and the polar opposite of friendly.

  "My name is Davis Miles and I'm an attorney representing Mr. J. Nathan Pierce," I spun. "I would like to speak with whomever was in charge of the segment about my client's business interests that aired yesterday morning."

  "One moment, sir," the voice answered, sounding a bit more alert.

  I heard the line click, and enjoyed a muzak version of "Friends in Low Places" for the next fifteen seconds.

  "News desk," came another, more chipper voice. "This is Andy."

  "Yes, this is Davis Miles," I droned. "Could I have your full name please?"

  "Um… Andrew Morris."

  "Uh huh," I breathed. "And am I to understand that you supervised the editing of the piece on J. Nathan Pierce's alleged agreement with Lucetech Incorporated yesterday?"

  "Yes," he answered, and I could hear him bristling, defensively. "Was there some problem with it?"

  "I have not been authorized to make any formal complaint, Mr. Morris, if that's what you are asking. But there were a couple of points that grabbed my attention. At the opening of the segment, my client was shown standing in a large room surrounded by statuary and antiquities in glass cases. Do you recall this portion of the airing?"

  "Y-yes."

  "It is my responsibility to ask how that footage was obtained by your organization, and by whom you were authorized to air it."

  "Oh," the voice answered, sounding a bit confused. "That was just a bit we cut from last week's Barbara Walters special. We're an affiliate, you understand, and have blanket permission to rebroadcast any and all network transmissions."

  "Hmm mmm," I hummed. "And where was that special filmed, if I may ask?"

  "Wait a minute." I heard papers rustling in the background, frantically. "Here it is.
'Tonight, Barbara
speaks with billionaire philanthropist J. Nathan Pierce
from his home in Houston, Texas.'
It originally aired… almost three weeks ago. It's not currently scheduled to be rebroadcast, but we could provide you with a copy if you like–"

  "Not necessary," I interrupted. "That's all for…" A thought struck. "Actually, that would be very useful. If you could just overnight it to my offices in Austin, I think we can get this straightened out without any serious difficulty."

  I gave him the address of a place I knew in Austin, and got his assurance that he would send a copy out right away.

  "Thank you for your time, Mr. Morris," I sang into the receiver. "You've been most helpful."

  With that I dropped the phone back in its cradle and lit a cigarette. Something was coming together, I knew, but just what I couldn't say. For now I was just a blind man describing an elephant, and hadn't got any farther than the tail.

Driving across the state line into Texas, I got a sudden flash of memory, a rush of associations that started with a roadside marker and ended with me and my brother standing in short pants with blood on our hands. Snaking its way through the corridors of memory came an image so indelible I checked my hands for the stains, which I hadn't recalled in years. The flood gates of memory opened wide, and I lost the train entirely, focused entirely on the destination. This happens enough for me to recognize the signs; when I smell bleach I become uncontrollably hungry, when I see a woman in overalls I go weak. I leave my memories alone as much as possible and expect them to do the same for me.

  It wasn't easy for us to adjust to living in Texas, my brother and me. We had spent our earliest years in California, the sons of an up-and-coming screenwriter, and thought it a matter of course to go to playgrounds with the children of the stars and to have Mister Spock over to dinner regularly. In those strange years before we became truly aware of the outside world, our little nucleus of mother, father, and brothers existed at the center of reality, and everything else revolved around us. The people we saw on television and in the movies were no less real than our own parents were, if for no other reason than that our parents seemed to know them all.

  Looking back on it, it must have been incredibly strange, but in all honesty we were too young to notice it. We took it as a given that, if we pestered our dad long enough to introduce us to Donnie and Marie or one of the Brady kids, eventually we would pile into the car and drive off to some unimaginably large building past the hills and be presented to them. By which point, naturally, we had lost all interest, and hung at our father's pants legs, hounding him for some other treat or favor.

  When our parents died, I think we both expected the television to stop, at least for a while, if only out of respect for them. It didn't, and I don't think I ever really forgave it for that.

  In any case, when we arrived in Texas and were escorted to our new school, my brother and I quickly realized something distressing. The center of the world had moved; or rather, we had moved and left it behind. We found ourselves somehow on the periphery of reality, relegated off to a corner where no one really cared who we were. The marks of status among our new peers were how fast you could run, whether you wore the right kind of jeans, and how many of those little green peppers you could cram into your mouth at once. My brother and I were not much at running, our grandfather (or rather his housemaid) consistently refused to buy us the right kind of jeans, and at three peppers I was tearing up and beginning to wretch. We quickly dropped to the back of the herd.

  Left to our own devices, the two of us had to find new ways to entertain ourselves. Our new favorite television shows, starring people we did not and could never know, were the cop shows.
Hawaii Five
O
, S
WAT
, even, inexplicably,
Barney Miller
. Anything and everything to do with crime fighting. After a light appetizer of Clayton Moore as
The Lone Ranger
and Adam West as
Batman
, we'd settle in for long hours of guns and badges and the letter of the law, all in full color. By the time we were eight, we could both recite the Miranda Rights from memory, though it was years before we knew what they were called.

  It wasn't too long before we decided we knew everything there was to know about crime fighting, and only a short hop from there to deciding that we should fight crime on our own. Later, after my adventures in breaking and entering into our grandfather's study, I would resolve to put my lot in with the black hats, but for those brief summers, I was foursquare on the side of the angels.

  Realizing early the practical difficulties presented by crime fighting on a large scale, we decided to start small, in our own back yard. In any neighborhood there is petty theft and vandalism that slides in under the radar of the authorities, but which served as more than enough to occupy the attention of two small boys looking for something to do. One neighbor "borrows" another's rake without asking, the newspaper in front of a certain house goes missing every morning, lost dogs and toilet paper-strewn trees. These were as close to larceny as we could come, and we made the most of it.

  We started by putting up fliers all around the neighborhood:

FINCH TWINS

DISCREET INVESTIGATIONS

NO JOB TWO BIG

NO JOB TWO SMALL

217 CRESCENT ROW

Despite the spelling errors and the barely legible print, the fliers were noticeable, and within a few days we had our first client. A neighborhood kid had lost two months' worth of lunch money to a schoolyard bully, and wanted our help getting it back. It wasn't exactly the kind of case we were after, but it was undeniably a crime, and so we set to with all our energy. In the end, we dug up some dirt about the bully smoking in the parking lot after school and cowed him into returning the kid's money. As insurance, we wrote up a list of his offenses, made a dozen copies, and had him sign each and every one. Then we distributed a copy of the list to each of the kids he terrorized on a regular basis, with instructions to hand it to the nearest authority in the event that any of them were troubled further. The only real leverage we had, in the end, was that the bully's dad was a coach at the high school, and knew each of his teachers personally, but it proved to be enough.

  It verged on extortion, and when it was all said and done, having collected a fee of one day's lunch money from our client, we were a little uncomfortable about our methods. But seeing justice done proved an admirable result, and we decided never to let the letter of the law stand in our way of the pursuit of justice.

  We went on like that for several months, returning stolen bicycles, reuniting joyful little girls with lost kittens, and quelling schoolyard frauds. Then the case we had been waiting for dropped in our laps, and we were ready for it. A runaway, in our own neighborhood.

  Ricky Young, who lived four houses down and across the street, was the kind of kid who gets a wide berth in any school. Overweight, in clothes that never seemed to fit and always seemed to be covered in dirt, or food, or both, always wearing a parka even in the warmest weather, he made strange noises while in the bathroom, picked his nose and ate the results. Always looking slightly dazed when peering out from under his chili-bowl hairdo, he never said two sentences running in anyone's presence, and was not a member, official or otherwise, of any of the free-floating cliques which form and reform in elementary schoolyards at alarming rates. Ricky was simply the fat kid, a constant presence, but a tolerated one. He was a troglodyte, but he was ours.

  In the winter of our fifth grade year, our friendly neighborhood troglodyte went missing, and to be honest it took everyone, teachers included, a few days to notice. Always sick with something or other, Ricky was a perennial absentee, and his failure to appear was nothing out of the ordinary. Finally, though, his parents arrived in our classroom, looking so polished and presentable that I couldn't believe they had anything to do with the troll I knew. They wanted to know if anyone knew anything about where Ricky might have gone, whether anyone had seen him since Tuesday, if he had said or done anything that might have indicated he was unhappy. Greeted by a unanimous silence, they filed out of the room, red eyed and harried, and class was back in session.

  It didn't take my brother and me that long to decide what had happened. The Ricky that we all knew and loathed had to be a front, a sham, covering some more secret self. The real Ricky must have suffered some trauma to hide away behind all those layers of fat and filth, and when it all proved too much for him had run away from home. He might even now be crouched somewhere in the rain, hungry and alone, shivering at the sound of wolves baying in the distance; never mind the fact that it was sunny and seventy degrees outside, and the only wolves within a hundred miles were in the San Antonio zoo.

  We started our Grand Search for Ricky Young that afternoon, starting with the school grounds and fanning out from there. Ricky had last been seen leaving there Tuesday afternoon, and had not gone home. From that, we had deduced that he had made his preparations for running away before coming to school in the morning. None of our classmates remembered seeing him with a bag or sack of any kind on Tuesday, but we couldn't rely on that testimony. Few found that they could describe Ricky with any kind of certainty at all, except perhaps to mention his odor. We were beginning to suspect that maybe it was all part of his plan.

  Our search that first night turned up nothing, and we retired to our grandfather's house and Maria's home-cooked dinner to plan out the next stage of our investigation. The weekend was before us, and all the hours of the day at our disposal. We couldn't leave a three block radius from our house, naturally, but we thought that more than sufficient. Ricky couldn't have gone far.

  Over dinner, my brother showed more courage than I had seen him display in some time, and broached the subject of our neighbor's disappearance with our grandfather.

  "Did you hear about that kid who ran away?" he said, his voice only cracking once or twice. "The… um…
big
one?"

  Our grandfather speared an entire shrub's worth of salad and, pausing with it right before his face, examined it intently.

  "There are many dangerous people in the world," he replied, and then guided the fork into his open mouth.

  My brother and I just stared at him, and then at our plates, not sure how to respond.

  We started the next phase of the investigation early the next morning. Forgoing the standard Saturday morning fare of
Scooby Doo
and
The Banana
Splits
, we watched dutifully as Maria fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the two of us, and then we packed them away in matching nylon backpacks along with flashlights, pocket knives, and first aid equipment. We had never been Boy Scouts, but had read enough issues of
Boy's Life
at the doctor's office to know to be prepared.