who keeps his mouth shut even at the dentist’s.”
“Who says?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I like to keep track of whose mailing list I’m on from week to week.”
He said he thought that was wise and gave me a name I recognized, never mind what it was. “I’ll be straight with you,” he said then. “Yours isn’t the only name I had and it wasn’t the first I tried. I called two others, but one’s out of town and the other don’t do this kind of work no more. They said. I think they backed off when they found out who was interested. Does working for Ben Morningstar make any difference to you?”
“It means I can charge more.”
Twitch. I was beginning to think it really was a smile. Then it was gone. “I’m told you specialize in missing persons as well as insurance fraud.”
He was having trouble getting into it. I crossed my legs and tapped half an inch of cigarette ash into the near cuff, sat back to finish the butt. I studied his face through the smoke.
“Who’s missing?” I asked.
4
H E SLID A WALLET-SIZED photograph out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. Our hands brushed as I leaned forward to accept it. His had a temperature and consistency to go with its blue-cheese appearance.
It was a high school graduation portrait of a dark-haired girl with even darker eyes that looked as if they flashed and a complexion like twelve-year-old Scotch going down. She seemed pretty, but you can’t trust school photos. Those touchup artists can make the picture of Dorian Gray look like Robert Redford at the beach.
“Relative?” I held onto it. Giving it back would be a gesture of rejection and if I put it in my own pocket I was hooked.
“Ward. Her father shot himself in ’63 when the government indicted him for smuggling Mexican Brown across the border and I raised her. Her name is Maria. Maria Bernstein.”
“Leo Bernstein’s girl?”
He nodded. “I see you’re up on your Cosa Nostra history. Yeah, Leo Bernstein. Son of Big Leo Bernstein, king of Robbers’ Roost. But of course you wouldn’t remember that. Your father might. That’s what the papers called him when he was down in Ecorse during Prohibition, running Old Log Cabin across from Windsor. But he wasn’t really big, just five-five, weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds. They just called him that because Big Al was what the Chicago papers was calling Al Capone, the fat-ass guinea bastard. He was my partner. Leo, not Al. I guess I can say that now that the statute of limitations has run out. Not that it matters much anymore.
“I brought Maria up the best I could after my wife died. I must have done all right because she never gave me a reason not to be proud of her. Not until—” He stopped and cleared his stainless steel throat. The sound was like firecrackers exploding inside a drainage pipe. “Last year, when she graduated high school in Phoenix, I sent her back here to a finishing school in Lansing. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Why Lansing? Why not some place in Arizona?”
“They don’t have finishing schools in Arizona. They have spas and dude ranches and co-ed colleges, complete with hot and cold running gigolos and vending machines with rubbers in them in the men’s rooms. I had my fill of them health nuts and horsey cowboy types hanging around her when she was living at home. Besides, I sent my kid sister to the same school in 1928 and I liked what they did for her there. Miss Fordham’s School for Young Ladies, they called it then. Now it’s the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women. The same woman runs it now that was running it then. Esther Brock. She’s a good ten years older than me, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. You’d say it’s closer to a hundred. But she hasn’t changed her methods of teaching, so off went Maria to Lansing.
“She stopped writing home almost a year ago. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Christmas vacation was coming up and I figured she