The Color of Blood (2 page)

She tried to smile, but it didn’t come out right. She looked down and fussed with some papers on her desk. As I opened the study door, she had pushed her left hand to her mouth and was gnawing on the ring like an anxious child with a pacifier.

Shane Howard sat behind a dark wood desk, lit by a green-shaded lamp. The long room was otherwise in gloom: heavy velvet drapes hung over the windows. There were more rugby photographs on the walls — Howard had been a second-row international when I was at school, and one spectacular shot showed him bursting across the line through a shambling disarray of English forwards. Above the white marble mantelpiece hung a portrait of a handsome silver-haired man in tweeds and flannels with a stethoscope around his neck; a plaque at the base of the gilt frame identified him as Dr. John Howard, 1915–1985. All over was an airless fug of dust and old upholstery and cigar smoke; Howard’s desk was strewn with papers and framed photographs, used cups and glasses, an almost empty bottle of Bushmill’s and two overflowing ashtrays. I sat across the desk from him, refused his offer of a cigar, and shook my head quickly when his hand strayed toward the whiskey. He nodded, cleared his throat, and then took an envelope from the desk, passed it to me, and said, “My daughter.”

Emily Howard was about nineteen, slim and petite, with a pale complexion and black eye shadow around her large brown eyes and full red lips and short spiky hair dyed candy apple red and piercings in her ears and nose and on her tongue. She also had a red rose tattoo high on one thigh and her nipples were pierced and her pubic hair had been shaved into a tiny heart and dyed red. I could see this because in the photographs, she was naked, and having sex with a boy and another girl, in most of the usual ways and a few that weren’t so usual, except in photographs like this. The other girl wore a sequinned eye mask and her blond hair was tied in a shiny scarf; the boy wore wraparound shades and a black baseball cap; the only one you could get a clear look at was Emily. I looked up at her father. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on one of the framed photographs on his desk: a sandy-haired big-eyed girl of about six with no front teeth, biting into an apple.

I looked at the photographs again. When I worked in L.A., at least once a month I was asked to find a girl who’d gone missing, and she’d almost always turn up having sex on camera in the San Fernando Valley, and in the movies she did, she always had this smile that didn’t reach her angry eyes, a smile that said fuck you to someone, usually her father or her stepfather or her uncle; to some man who had taken everything from her before she was old enough to understand what it was. And she’d always say the same thing: that she was never going home again. And if letting a bunch of strangers ejaculate on your face is preferable to going home, then home must have really been something. So I’d go back and tell the client — the father or stepfather or uncle — that she didn’t want to see him, and usually I’d give him a tape or a magazine so he could understand for himself what he had done. But he rarely did; more often than not, he’d ask me if I could get her autograph.

“Will you find her?” Howard said.

I looked at him. He didn’t look the type, if there was a type, which there wasn’t, and this wasn’t that kind of porn. Still, it was hard to tell from the photographs: in most of them, Emily Howard looked detached, ironic even, as if to indicate a distance from what she was doing; but in a few of the shots, there was a glint in her eyes that could have been anger.

“How did you get these?” I said.

“They were hand-delivered. I didn’t see who by. And there was a message.”

He passed me a sheet of white A4 with a note typed on it:
Next stop the Internet, where your daughter’s ass will live forever — unless you cough up fifty grand by midday on Thursday. We’ll tell you where and when.

“They don’t say they’re holding her against her will,” I said.

“What are you suggesting — that she’s in on it?” Howard said. “How dare you?”

“Could she be?”

“Get out of my house.”

Howard’s voice was loud, but it lacked conviction; he clutched the edges of the desk with his great hands.

“Has she new friends, or friends you don’t know about? Has she become secretive about who she knows or where she goes?”

Howard’s hands slapped down hard on the desk, sending papers flying and raising a cloud of ash. He stared to one side and to the other, opening and closing his mouth as if, in his rage, he didn’t trust himself to speak, or he couldn’t figure out who he was angriest at. Then he tried another laugh, but it didn’t catch, and left him breathing hard and blinking back what looked like tears.

“Maybe you’d better tell me all about it from the beginning,” I said. “When did it go wrong between you and Emily?”

Howard flung his head toward me as if I had accused him of something, chin thrust out, jaw set, eyes ablaze, ready for the fray; then as quickly the fire left him; he nodded eagerly, exhaled loudly, and in a low, deliberate voice that sounded as if it was allowed out only on special occasions, began to speak.

“That’s just it,” he said. “We had always been very close, all the while she was at school — great pals. More. I suppose she was Daddy’s little princess, you know? That’s what her mother always said, anyway. But we were the best of friends. Always came with me to see Seafield play rugby, even the away games. Picking her up after dates and clubs and so on, like her own personal driver I was. Then she went to university, and all that stopped, overnight, it seemed. Didn’t want to know me. First cheek and smart answers, then the silent treatment. We’d always kept her hair long, and one day she came home with it all cut off, spiked up and bleached blond. Broke my heart. I mean, look at her.”

Howard plucked one of the framed photographs off his desk and passed it to me.

“That’s Emily the day she got her Leaving Cert results. A real lady she was growing into.”

I looked at a pretty girl with long blond hair and too much orange makeup and fussy designer clothes and intelligent eyes blurred with boredom and premature cynicism. There were fifty-year-old women all over the city traipsing from beauty parlor to hairdresser to designer store trying to maintain that look. At least Emily’d had the spirit to tear it up.

“Once she did the hair, we didn’t know what to expect next: a pierced nose, a tattoo, God knows. She dropped all the girls she’d been to school with, girls she’d known all her life, girls whose parents are
our
friends. Her boyfriend since fifth year, David Brady, had just made the Seafield first fifteen, smashing guy, one of the best fullback prospects in the country, good career ahead — and she dumps him for one of the club barmen, he’s in her class at college, some scrawny clown who plays in a band. Broken up about it, poor David was. Then she started staying out, night after night, wouldn’t tell us where.”

“Drugs?”

“No. I don’t know. Drink maybe. Hangovers. She spent enough time in that bed. But she’s nineteen, half of them get sleeping sickness that age. Seems to go to all her premed lectures.”

“She’s doing medicine?”

Howard gestured to the portrait above the fireplace with a wry smile.

“She’s going to make her grandfather proud. He didn’t think dentists were top drawer. At last, a doctor in the family.”

“How long has Emily been gone?”

“This is Wednesday. I haven’t seen her since last Friday. The photographs arrived yesterday.”

“And do you think she’s in on this?”

“She’s always had everything she wanted. No girl could have been better looked after.”

“Maybe she’s tired of being looked after. Maybe she’s decided it’s time she looked after herself.”

Howard shook his head.

“No, I… she has seemed angry at us… but I don’t believe she would do this. Not unless she was being forced in some way.”

“Why was your daughter angry, Mr. Howard?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She had no cause to be. No cause.”

Howard shook his head, his damp brown eyes gaping, seemingly bewildered at the thought that his daughter might not be his best friend for life, or that at nineteen she might want her own life, rather than the one he had fashioned for her.

“Will you find her?”

“Mr. Howard, why haven’t you taken this to the Guards?” I said.

“Because I don’t want any more people knowing about this than have to. In my experience, once the Guards know about something, so does everyone else. I can depend on you to be discreet, I assume.”

I said nothing. My job was getting people to tell me their secrets, not swearing them to secrecy. Discretion rarely came with the territory.

“Anyway, if I send the Guards after her, I have little chance of winning her back.”

“Maybe she’s a bit old for her father to win her back,” I said.

“Maybe,” he agreed wistfully, staring again at the photograph of his daughter as a six-year-old, as if that was the image of her that had taken permanent root in his mind. “But she’s never going to be old enough to have her body splashed across the Internet like a cheap whore.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

There was a knock on the door, and Anita appeared.

“Dr. Howard, there are six in the waiting room. And Miss O’Kelly is… well, you know how she gets.” A phenomenally loud overelocuted female voice could be heard bellowing something about consumer choice and the need for a patients’ charter.

“It’s not her fault,” Howard said. “I’ve kept them waiting. Thank you, Anita. Give me a minute.” The receptionist shut the door behind her. Howard stood up.

“Mr. Loy, I have patients to treat. If there’s anything else—”

“I’ll need phone numbers for Emily’s boyfriends and friends, past and present, I’ll need to look at her room—”

“I was about to say. My wife is waiting in the house. She’ll fill you in on all that.”

“I’ll need to know immediately they call, and what they say. I’ll need your mobile number to key into my phone, so I’ll know when you call. And I’ll need a check.”

I told him how much I wanted, and he said I should invoice him, and I said I preferred to get paid up front, and he asked would I settle for half, and I asked him if that’s how he ran his own business, and he said that was completely different, and by this stage Miss O’Kelly’s fluting cries were loud enough to be heard through the closed door, so Howard wrote the check, smiling, as if he found the little people’s need for money quaint and amusing, and flung it at me, just so I’d remember how completely different we were. He went out to rescue his patients, and as I heard his loud mechanical laugh defuse Miss O’Kelly’s ire and I got down on my knees to retrieve the check from under the desk where it had fallen, I wondered, not for the first time, why it was that the richer the people who hired me, the more reluctant they seemed to pay me. Maybe it was an attempt on their part to recapture the control they felt they had lost by revealing so much about themselves. Or maybe it was just that they hadn’t become that rich by parting easily with their money.

WHEN SHANE HOWARD SAID HIS WIFE WAS WAITING IN
the house, it turned out he didn’t mean the house we were in: that was only used as a dental surgery these days. Anita directed me downstairs through a stone-floored kitchen piled with boxes of drug company samples and calendars and laundered white tunics and out into a sodden, half-wild back garden. Through the thickening mist, I walked along another damp cobbled path flanked by rowan trees until I came to a dark green marble pond about fifteen feet in diameter. The low walls formed a hexagon, and each side and angle was inlaid with a greenish crystal flecked with red the size of a child’s fist. Orange and yellow leaves floated on the surface of the cloudy water. The whole thing looked beautiful and grave and strange, like a memorial without a dedication, and I wondered what its purpose was, what puzzle it was asking me to solve. Then I reflected that a downside of my job was the habit of searching for mysteries where there were none; sometimes a pond is just a pond.

At the bottom of the garden a tongue-and-groove door in a whitewashed roughcast stone wall opened into the garden of what Anita had rather loftily called “Howard residence.” (Anita had also scrupulously avoided mentioning Mrs. Howard by name.) Howard residence was a seventies-style L-shaped dormer bungalow with great floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The garden was tended to within an inch of its life, with snooker table lawns and tightly sheared borders of bay and box. At the front of the house, a black Porsche lurked on the gravel drive, sleek and feline; the garden there dropped steeply to another white stone wall, shielded by a row of mature eucalyptus; a hundred feet below the wall, the railway tracks vanished into a tunnel; beyond that, a shroud of grey where the sea spread out toward the sky. What sounded like gunshots snapped in the damp air, and then the crackle and hiss of fireworks sparkled through the gloom, and I remembered it was Halloween. I rang the doorbell and Jessica Howard answered it and led me into a room the depth of the house with walls of glass back and front.

Jessica Howard was maybe a little too blond for her age, and the skirt of her dark suit was maybe a little too short, and another woman mightn’t have worn heels so high or a top cut so low or perfume so musky, not this early in the morning, or at all, but another woman might have looked tarty, or cheap, or desperate, and Jessica Howard didn’t: she looked bold and direct and careless. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me at first; then again, I wasn’t another woman. While she made coffee I looked around the room, which was sparsely furnished with a couple of long couches and a round glass table with four metal chairs. On the walls, there were framed posters advertising theatrical productions:
Juno and the Paycock
at the Abbey,
An Ideal Husband
at the Gate,
Shopping and Fucking
at the Project. Above the fireplace, two photographs hung: one showed a younger version of Mrs. Howard in Restoration costume with cleavage fit to bust; in the other, she sat naked on a rug with her back to the camera, her head turned around to smile, heavy-lidded, into the lens. Between them, a portrait of the lady in pop art oils, big-haired and glowing like a trophy bride. I began to see where at least some of Emily’s anger might have come from.