Night Secrets (2 page)

Phillips's face suddenly grew hard and tense. “I need a solution,” he said emphatically. “I need to find out what's happening to my wife.” His eyes glistened slightly. “If she wants something, I'll try to provide it. But first I have to know what it is she wants.”

“Why not ask her directly?”

Phillips shook his head. “I'm afraid … that it might precipitate a crisis. Push her over the edge, into whatever she's thinking of doing. I—I just don't want to confront her yet.”

Frank glanced down at the small stack of mail which rested on his desk. “What do you want me to do, exactly?” he asked.

“Find out what she's up to,” Phillips said. “But, of course, discreetly.”

“Nothing else?”

“I wouldn't want you to confront her yourself, if that's what you mean,” Phillips said. “Just find out what you can, and let me know. I can handle the rest.”

Frank looked back up at him. “It's two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. Five hundred in advance.”

Phillips watched him expressionlessly. “Money is not a problem,” he said. He immediately took a wallet from his jacket pocket and placed ten crisp hundred-dollar bills on Frank's desk. “I'd like to up the advance a little, if you don't mind. It's just to encourage you. And I'd also like to make it nonrefundable.”

Frank didn't reach for the money. Instead, he pressed the tip of the pencil down on the paper. “What's her address?”

“Thirty-two East Sixty-fourth Street.”

“Is she there most of the time?”

“As far as I know. I'm at my office a great deal. I travel.”

“What about a job?”

“She has a few charity connections, that's all,” Phillips said. “It's social clubbing, nothing more. The committee to do this, the women's auxiliary to do that. You know the kind of thing I mean.”

“So, she doesn't work?” Frank asked, a little impatiently.

“Not at an actual job, no.”

“How does she spend her day?”

“I really don't know,” Phillips admitted. “As I said, I'm very busy. I'm not home all that much.”

Frank drew in a deep breath, wondering at this man who knew so little about his wife of one year. “I'll need a few numbers,” he said.

Phillips didn't seem to understand. “Numbers?”

“Bank account numbers,” Frank explained. “Commercial and telephone credit card numbers. Things like that.”

Phillips looked at him suspiciously. “Why would you need all that?”

“To find out if there's anything suspicious going on with her private accounts,” Frank explained. “Money going in or out in strange amounts.”

“And the phone credit card?”

“It wouldn't hurt to know who she's been talking to.”

“You really need all that?”

“If you want it done right.”

“Very well,” Phillips said reluctantly. “I have everything here.” He drew his wallet from his jacket pocket and ticked them off methodically.

Frank recorded them in his notebook, then shoved it back into his pocket. “Okay, I guess I have enough to work with for now,” he said. Then he stood up and offered Phillips his hand. “I'll be in touch.”

Phillips looked slightly offended, as if he'd been peremptorily dismissed. “So you'll be able to get to work right away then?” he asked as he got slowly to his feet.

“Yeah,” Frank said. He offered a quick, reassuring nod. “I'll report to you as soon as I find something.”

Phillips looked at him pointedly. “Just keep in mind that time is very important in this situation,” he said. “For Virginia, I mean.”

Frank smiled quietly. “It may not be that serious,” he said, trying to ease him slightly. “It usually isn't.”

“No, it is very serious,” Phillips said emphatically. “Virginia would not be stealing from me if it weren't very serious.”

“If she's stealing at all,” Frank reminded him, “she's stealing from herself.”

“It's the same thing when you're married,” Phillips told him, his face almost brutally severe. “That's why I really believe something very serious is wrong. It could be a matter of life and death, Mr. Clemons.”

Frank smiled again, though his eyes didn't.
Isn't everything
, he thought.

Once Phillips had gone, Frank returned to his desk, pocketed the money, then began going through the afternoon mail. He could tell that one of the letters was from Sheila, his ex-wife. The rose-colored paper alerted him. She wrote him only once or twice a year now, always when she was thinking about their daughter's suicide, picking at the wound. Still, a letter was better than the melancholy phone calls, the low moan of her voice as she went through it all again, how good Sarah was, how kind, smart, full of possibility. She never failed to recite the entire litany, all the “hows” but one: how lost.

He slid the letter from under the rest, swept it over the edge of his desk, into the open drawer, then went on to the next one, hoping that it might be something interesting, perhaps something that would move him onto a different path because it had that “something extra” which most cases didn't. But it was only a thank-you note from a client, along with a check for six hundred dollars, full payment for the time he'd spent trailing a retired security guard whom an armored car firm had come to suspect of plotting an inside job. He read the note quickly, then threw it in the garbage. The check went into his jacket pocket.

The rest were bills, except for a single letter in a light-blue envelope. He was beginning to open it when he glanced up and saw Farouk's enormous legs move ponderously down the cement stairs, then heard him lumber along the littered corridor and open the office door.

“Hello, my friend,” Farouk said.

Frank nodded.

“Forgive me for the intrusion,” Farouk added as he walked to the chair opposite Frank's desk and eased himself down into it. He glanced at the letter. “You are in the middle of something?”

“Nothing important,” Frank told him, the last letter still unopened in his hand. “Why, you feeling lonesome?”

“No,” Farouk said lightly. “I am my own companion.” There was no pride in the way he said it, only the brief acknowledgment that such was the way things had turned out for him.

“Well, I noticed that Toby wasn't at the bar last night,” Frank said.

Farouk scratched the side of his face absently. “And because of that, I am supposed to be lost?”

“No,” Frank said. “It's just that I didn't see her, that's all.”

Farouk's face screwed up slightly. “That is because she is gathered with the saints.”

“With the what?”

“Back in her village,” Farouk said. “In Colombia. It is her village that has the Jesus Tortilla.”

Frank looked at him quizzically.

Farouk smiled, but with a strange, aching darkness. “Some years in the past, an old woman was frying tortillas,” he explained. “She turned one over, and there it was, a miracle.” His eyes widened in mock amazement. “The face of Jesus.” The smile disappeared. His eyes closed worshipfully. “The face of Jesus,” he repeated.

“On the tortilla?”

“As if burned onto it by the hand of God,” Farouk said reverently, his large hand over his heart, still feigning astonishment. “It has since then become a shrine for the local people. Once every five years or so—when the urge comes upon her—Toby returns to it.” He drew in a deep breath. “But she comes back as she was before,” he added wearily. “Only the tortilla was transformed.” He stood up and stretched, groaning slightly as his arms hung motionless in the dimly lighted air.

Frank smiled, but said nothing.

Farouk's arms sank down again, held rigidly, as if bolted to his sides. Dust swirled around him like tiny flakes of dirty snow. “The rites of spring,” he said, as if to himself, “they are not so kind to a man my age.”

“They're not that great for anybody,” Frank told him dryly. He returned his attention to the letter, opening it hurriedly as if it might actually contain something important.

When he'd finished reading, he passed it over to Farouk. “It's from Imalia Covallo,” he said. “Trying to explain herself.”

Farouk's eyes narrowed menacingly. “Covallo,” he whispered as he reached for the letter. “Some things cannot be explained.”

She'd once been a leading fashion designer, but in a long, winding investigation, Frank had uncovered a lost history, which, in the end, had resulted first in one murder, then another. For this, she was now in prison.

It was during the ordeal of this investigation that Farouk had come into Frank's life, an immense, nearly motionless figure in an after-hours bar, one who earned his living simply by “lending assistance in difficult matters,” as he himself had put it at their first meeting. After that they'd moved forward together, as if sewn to each other by a weird, invisible thread, the two of them mismatched in size, Farouk so large against Frank's lean and haunted look; by color, Farouk's desert brown, Frank's Appalachian white; and even by the most basic habits of mind, Farouk cautious and meticulous, Frank hurled forward by a sudden passionate surge.

In the end, it was a union that had saved Frank's life, and as he watched Farouk reach for his glasses, he remembered the flash of the pistol that had suddenly materialized in Farouk's enormous hand, saw Riviera tumble forward, then Farouk again, standing massively behind him, his eyes as calm as his voice when he finally spoke:
Come now, my friend. It is not time to die
.

Farouk finished the letter, folded it again, then handed it back to Frank. “Do as you wish,” he said. “But I do not forgive.” Then he smiled brightly as he slapped his great thighs with his hands. “Perhaps we should take in the evening air,” he said.

Frank shook his head. “I don't know,” he said reluctantly.

Farouk smiled. “Are you waiting for a better offer?”

“No.”

“Then take what is handed to you,” Farouk said as he got to his feet. He walked to the door and waved Frank through it. “Come.”

Within a few minutes they were in Hell's Kitchen Park, enjoying the unusually warm breeze that filtered through the empty swings and seesaws. Frank sat on one of the cement benches, his eyes concentrating on two men who leaned against the black metal bars at the other end of the playground.

Farouk sat beside him, watching them too. He craned his neck, then scratched beneath his chin. “It is the pettiness that kills you,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him. “One should not be eaten in small bites.”

“Good cases are hard to find,” Frank said. He thought of Phillips, the blond woman in the photograph. “The dull ones pay the bills.”

“And a man has to eat, yes?”

“That's right,” Frank said. He could tell that something had suddenly gone bad between the two men. They faced each other edgily, their voices growing louder and more strained. In an instant, faster than anyone could imagine, it might all be over, with one body sprawled across the cement, another hanging limply from the fence.

He looked away, toward the only other people in the park. It was a family of four. The man and woman bounced up and down on the seesaw, one small child cradled in each lap. The woman said something, and all of them laughed. Watching them, Frank wondered what contentment felt like, whether it was real, or just a dream you hadn't questioned yet.

“Do you know the tarot?” Farouk asked, in a question that seemed to come from nowhere.

Frank shook his head.

“It is an ancient way of learning the future,” Farouk explained. “Like palm reading. Only with cards.” He glanced over at the two men, who were still arguing loudly beside the fence. “One of them should do a reading, to see if he has stepped too near the snake.”

Frank nodded as he watched. One of the men moved up close to the other, pushed him hard with the flat of his hand, then rotated on his heels and slowly began to walk away, his back turned arrogantly to the other man.

“To insult and then turn your back,” Farouk said. “One should never be that sure of the weakness of another man.”

Frank dragged his eyes away from them, let them settle on the gray metal steps of the slide. He started to think of his daughter, as he always did in playgrounds. He blinked quickly, batting her away, then stood up, suddenly tense, agitated.

“Where are you going?” Farouk asked.

“I don't know,” Frank said. “Just moving.”

Farouk groaned as he rose beside him. “Then I will go as well.”

They headed back down the avenue. The traffic was moving rapidly alongside them, cars, trucks, Chinese delivery boys on rusting bicycles, and as he walked along, watching it speed by, Frank felt his own unease like thousands of tiny arrows whizzing down the blue corridors of his veins. He didn't know where it came from, or where it would lead, but only that it was the most authentic part of his character, the part he couldn't direct, anticipate or control.

“Look, there, my friend,” Farouk said after a moment. He pointed to a small storefront on the east side of Tenth Avenue. A plain neon sign hung between a dark blue curtain and the unwashed glass:
FORTUNES READ.

Frank stared at the sign. “It's been there for a few weeks.”

“Yes, I know,” Farouk said. “I have been watching it.”

“Watching it?” Frank asked, surprised. “Why?”

Farouk's face seemed to grow very thoughtful. “It is an odd thing, memory,” he said. “To think that it might move in both directions, that it might be possible for one to
remember
the future.”

Frank regarded him quizzically, but said nothing.

Farouk drew one side of his coat over his large belly, then pulled his tie up to his throat. “Do you wish to join me?”