Indigo Slam: An Elvis Cole Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he’s been gone before, but he’s always come back.” She shook her head. “There are too many printers and too few jobs. When you hear of something you have to follow up fast or you’ll lose out.” She looked affronted, like how could I suggest anything else? “I’m worried that he went somewhere and had an accident. What if he has amnesia?” Amnesia.
    I circled Enright Printing on the little pad. “Okay. I’ll talk to the folks at Enright and see if they know something. Also, it might help if I had a picture.”
    She frowned. “I don’t think we have a picture.”
    “Everybody has pictures.”
    She bit at her lower lip. “I don’t think so.”
    “Well, maybe you have a snapshot.” I knew a friend with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She had about a zillion pictures of her cat and her friends and siblings and vacations and school and things. Boxes of the stuff.
    Teresa shook her head. “I guess we’re just not camera people.”
    I put away the pad and stood. “Okay, let’s go look in your dad’s bedroom.”
    She looked horrified. “I don’t think he’d like us snooping in his room.”
    I spread my hands. “When you hire a private eye, you hire a snooper. Snooping is how you find people who walk away without telling you where they’ve gone. Snooping is what I do.”
    She didn’t like this either, but we went along a little hall and into a bedroom at the back of the house. It was a small room, sparsely furnished with a double bed and a dresser and a nightstand. There were no photographs on the nightstand or the dresser, but large ink drawings of all three children were thumbtacked to the walls. The drawings were done on coarse construction paper with colored felt-tip pens, and appeared to have been torn from a notebook. They were signed
CH
. “Wow. Did your father do these?”
    “Yes.”
    “He’s some artist.” The drawings were almost photographic in their realism.
    “Unh-hunh.”
    When I opened the dresser’s top drawer Teresa stiffened, but said nothing. I looked through the dresser and the nightstand. Maybe a half-dozen undershirts and underwear and socks were in the dresser, and not much else. There was a closet, but there wasn’t much in it, just a single sport coat and a couple of pairs of thin slacks and a raincoat. “Does it look like he packed for a long trip?”
    She peeked into the closet like something might jump out at her, then shook her head. “Well, I know he had two coats, and two pairs of pants are missing.”
    “Okay. So he packed some things.”
    “I guess so.”
    I stood in the center of the room and tried to come up with an idea. “Do you have any pictures of your mother?” If there was a picture of the mother, maybe Clark would be in it, too.
    She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Jesus. I had never seen a house without pictures before.
    “Okay. Forget pictures. Where does he keep the credit card receipts and bank statements and things like that?”
    “We don’t use credit cards.”
    I stared at her.
    “We pay for everything with cash. When you’re on a budget, cash is the best way to manage your money.” She was very certain of herself when she said it.
    “Okay. No pictures, no credit cards.” No clues.
    “We have a checking account and a savings account, though. Would you like to see them?”
    “That, and your phone bills.”
    The eyes narrowed again. “Why would you need to see that?”
    “The phone bills will show any toll calls made from or charged to your phone. You see?” My head was starting to throb. I guess she wanted me to find him without clues. Maybe I was supposed to use telepathy.
    But she finally said, “Well, okay.” Grudgingly.
    “You know where to find that stuff?”
    “Of course I know where to find it.” Offended.
    I thought that she might find the stuff in her father’s room, or maybe lead me out to the kitchen, but she didn’t. She brought me to her room. Two twin beds were set against adjoining walls, a small