Fidelity (37 page)

“We were still there when she started to come around. She was healthy, all right, and strong. She started to struggle right away, and make sounds. She was beginning to swear at him, but he said she would calm down as soon as she didn’t have an audience. Phil and I offered to stay or fetch help, or whatever, but he said he was already in touch with a psychiatrist who’d had lots of success with runaways-he’d deprogrammed kids who had joined cults, and was part of some institute that helped kids get off drugs and so on. The doctor and three or four members of his staff would be there within a couple of hours. He said he didn’t care what it cost or how long it took, he was going to save Allison. We drove home feeling pretty good about what we had done.”

Emily waited. Sam seemed to leave her for a moment, his eyes staring out at the wall of mist that was moving into the sound from the open ocean. “It goes to show you,” he said.

“To show you what?”

“Everything I just told you was a lie.”

“A lie?”

“That’s right.”

“Everything?”

“All of it. Nothing was true.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sam lifted the box with the maroon cover, pulled out a file folder, and set it on the table between them. Emily picked it up. It was a packet of plain sheets of paper, typed in single-space paragraphs with a line skipped between them. “Read that.”

She began to read. “My name is Philip R. Kramer, and I am the owner and principal investigator of Kramer Investigations, Van Nuys Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. I swear on penalty of perjury that everything in this statement is true …”

As Emily read Phil’s file, she recognized the pseudo-authoritative language he had often used in constructing statements for clients when she was still serving as typist for him.

In certain instances I have included photographs, copies of official documents, audiotapes, and newspaper accounts. I think they are sufficient to corroborate this assembly of facts. But these are not the only ones I have. If there are gaps or discrepancies between this account and other versions of the story, I can make available other documents, photographs, recordings, or independent narratives by others to verify what I say here.

I first met Theodore Forrest on October 23 eight years ago. He called my office at 9:15 A.M. and made an appointment to speak to me about a missing-person case. My colleague Samuel Bowen and I met with Mr. Forrest at 1:30 P.M. that day in my office. He told us he lived on a country estate outside Fresno, and that his sixteenyear-old daughter, Allison, had been missing since late July.

She recognized that what she was reading was the same story that Sam had just told her. But it wasn’t, because it was Phil who was telling it. She pictured him as she read, and then she reached the end of the story Sam had told her. He and Sam delivered the girl to Theodore Forrest at the Espinoza Ranch, received their payment in the form of a cashier’s check, and drove home.

Our business was concluded, and that was the last time I saw or spoke with Theodore Forrest for eight years. I did not initiate any contact with him, nor did he with me or my employees.

On the fourteenth of June this year, I was engaged in a project intended to increase the income of Kramer Investigations. Over the previous twenty years, the Kramer agency had served a great many satisfied clients. Some clients had been assisted in a oncein-a-lifetime matter: a divorce, a lawsuit, a search for hidden assets, a defense against criminal charges. But it seemed to me that it might be useful to compile a mailing list of former clients and remind them that the agency was still there to fulfill their needs.

Emily could hear Phil’s voice saying the words, as though he were dictating them. She had been hearing him since she had begun to read, but now she could see him, too. It was June 14, only a few months ago. Phil was sitting in the office. He was behind his desk in the glassed-in room. She saw him through the clumsy, overly formal narrative he was typing on the computer, and then without at first expecting it or wanting to, she began to supply the other parts Phil had left out. Part of what she was seeing was memory, and where memory was not enough, her imagination supplied the rest, and he was alive again in her mind.

In her imagination, Phil was wearing the light gray super-100 wool pants that she had bought him around Easter. He had on a blue oxford shirt, and hanging on the spare chair at the side of the room was his navy summer-weight blazer. He wore a coat only when he was with a client or in court. It had been hot since the tenth of May, even though May and June were usually cool and overcast in Los Angeles. This year it had seemed to Phil that the climate had changed, and the little break that the June weather brought had been revoked.

Emily pictured him looking out through his glass wall toward the doorway. What was there to look at but April? She was so far away on the other side, and as he watched her, she must have seemed unreachable. Phil loved to touch, to put his hand on a small shoulder or around a thin waist, but he couldn’t right now. She was probably talking on the telephone, reminding clients to pay on time. Emily had noticed she had a pretty voice, like a singer, and it seemed to disarm deadbeat clients and make them send in a check here and thereoften it was just a token payment-as though they were giving her a little present.

Phil must have had a feeling of cynical amusement whenever he saw the smile appear on her face and knew that she had gotten one of them to agree. He would have said, “The stupid bastards.” That would describe him, too, more than any of them. She knew now he was as susceptible to a pretty woman as any fourteen-year-old boy. He was a man who made resolutions, but these had probably all been broken when the first temptation presented herself. The resolutions undoubtedly never lasted long enough to include him actually turning a woman down and watching her walk away forever. She imagined that he had watched April through the glass for a few more seconds, and then forgave himself. He would have said it didn’t really do any harm unless Emily found out, and he had always taken precautions to keep Emily from suspecting. He had kept her ignorant and resigned to a life she didn’t really understand.

Emily stopped herself. That was a false note. Phil would never have called her ignorant in his thoughts. He would have fooled himself long ago into believing he was protecting his wife from being hurt. He would have said male promiscuity was an inevitable force of nature, but that there was no reason to hurt Emily’s feelings.

But probably he wasn’t thinking about Emily at that moment, only about April. She was sweet and loving, and when she looked at Phil, he must have felt young again, and attractive. It had been a long time since Emily had looked that way at him. Pete’s death had been the major moment of her life. Since then she had looked at Phil as a partner in her hopes and disappointment, an old friend suffering with her.

Phil did a lot of brooding during the past year. Emily guessed that he had been getting ready to make a change in his life. He was coming up on his forty-fifth birthday, and for some reason, it was affecting him more than any earlier one had. Maybe for him it was Pete, just as it was for Emily. It was going to be five years since the crash, a big, round number.

Phil had always been intellectually and emotionally involved in his work, but not long ago, he had told her he could see the end of the detective business. He was being pinched. On one side there were huge security companies that provided an umbrella service against unpleasantness. They monitored alarm and surveillance systems for businesses, swept offices and phones for bugs, took care of paper shredding and burning, did background checks on employees, rivals, and customers. They supplied bodyguards for foreign travel, and forensic specialists for testifying in court.

On the other side, there were small, low-end operators. Those guys would tap telephones, do black-bag jobs to steal papers from offices and houses, threaten or beat up opposition witnesses. They seemed to spend every day with one foot in a jail cell. But the other foot was in the bank, on the way in to cash a fat check.

Phil wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, but he had said several times that he was in a game he was losing gradually, and all he could do was try to make his chips last as long as possible. Now maybe he had decided it was time to stand up and cash in.

According to Ray, for a couple of years, Phil hadn’t been able to concentrate on the actual cases that came in. He seemed to have occupied his time looking for grand strategies and shortcuts. If he could have gotten to work again-really working-he might not have felt this way.

During one of these conversations Emily had wondered aloud if he was in a midlife crisis. He had been insulted. What the hell was a midlife crisis? Were troubles supposed to happen only when you were a child or a dying man? He supposed that if he made it to ninety, then fortyfive was the exact definition of midlife. And he was sure as hell in a crisis. He had to do something that worked soon.

Phil’s written narrative said: “For several years, Kramer Investigations had been running at a deficit. I had cut costs by not replacing personnel who left. I had been keeping the business going by using my family savings to keep the office open and the employees paid.” Emily stopped. There it was: the explanation of where the money had gone, and the halfhearted way he had been running the office. He had been trying to keep it alive.

Phil continued: “I had begun a project of going through the company archives to find clients with open accounts.” He was reading the files of his agency’s old cases, looking for money. He assembled a list of deadbeats. He started a policy of reissuing bills to them, even if their cases were ten years old. Emily felt a sad closeness to him, because she had seen the letters in the files. As of May, the billings had not been a startling success, but April’s wheedling had brought in a few dollars. Then, while he had been finding open accounts, he had noticed another kind of client: those he or his detectives had served especially well, and who had businesses that might require help again.

He started to build a mailing list of satisfied clients to remind them that Kramer Investigations was still around and still cared about them. A lot of companies did that and thrived. After a few weeks of work, he hit on the file of Theodore Forrest. It had been eight years.

Phil admitted he wasn’t sure exactly what services a man like Forrest might need after eight years. But as Phil looked at the case file, he wrote, he “felt proud of how effective Kramer Investigations had been.” He and Sam had found Forrest’s daughter when several police forces and big security companies had failed. He and Sam had managed to snatch her off the street and deliver her to her father unharmed and without leaving a hint of how it had happened. The girl could go on with her life as though she had never had her little breakdown. It occurred to Phil that in the eight years that had passed, time had not stood still for Allison, either. She would be twentyfour or twentyfive. She had almost certainly gone to college, graduated, and done something with herself by now.

As Emily read the next portion, she could tell that Phil’s mind was sparked, ideas blazing in his mind, each igniting others. Forrest had been obsessed with his daughter. He had wanted her back so badly that he had been willing to do just about anything, to pay just about anything. And Phil Kramer had delivered her. When it was over, he had not taken advantage, he had not padded the bill. He could have invented ten or fifteen imaginary operatives, or gotten thousands in cash to pay rewards to imaginary informants. He could have done almost anything, and Forrest would have paid and then thanked him. Maybe now, Forrest would consider paying a retainer for a permanent all-purpose security service, like the big companies offered.

Eight years was a long time. Maybe by now Allison Forrest had married. Maybe she had a husband Forrest wanted watched. She could even have a baby or two. Forrest would be the sort of grandfather who would pay for surveillance to be sure no harm ever came to his grandchildren. And whom could Forrest trust more than the detective agency that had saved his daughter from ending up as a teenaged prostitute or an unidentified body in the L.A. County Morgue?

The fact that Kramer Investigations had never tried to capitalize on the case would help a lot. In eight years, Phil had never even used Theodore Forrest as a reference. He had kept everything confidential to protect the family’s privacy. Emily knew the truth was that he had kept it quiet because of the girl. Phil genuinely liked women, and the idea of compromising a young girl’s reputation would have been unthinkable to him. But he was not in a position to turn down additional work if the Forrests happened to feel gratitude he had legitimately earned.

It was clear that he saw the Forrest family as a potential solution to a lot of his financial troubles. There were big, complicated familybusiness interests to protect. There were undoubtedly pieces of real estate to watch, employees to clear. There were probably deals all the time that would be safer if the parties on the other side were the subjects of quiet, discreet investigations.

He recorded his uncertainty about how to approach Theodore Forrest that day. He looked in the case file for the telephone numbers, picked the home number, and started to dial, then stopped. It had been eight years. What if something had happened in the past eight years that he ought to know about? If there had been some major event, Forrest might say, “Some detective,” and hang up. Eight years was enough time for some fundamental change, and it was more than enough time for Forrest to forget how pleased he had been with Phil’s work.

Phil turned to his computer and began to run searches. At first all he discovered was that Forrest Enterprises was mentioned a few times a year in regional newspapers in Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, and even San Jose. But Theodore Forrest was almost never in the article. Phil tried typing in the girl’s name-Allison Forrest, Fresno, California.

In Phil’s narrative, he described the entire process. His computer screen had said: “Your search for Allison Forrest, Fresno, California returned no results.” He deleted the request and typed “Allison + Missing.” In seconds the search engines threw up dozens of references: “Allison Missing,” “Still No Sign of Missing Girl.” Of course there would have been local news reports from years ago. The fact that she had been missing was why he knew Theodore Forrest at all: Private detectives and cops met rich people only when disasters happened. He kept searching for something that sounded more recent. Finally he found a Web site titled “Allison’s Story,” and up it came.