Part 3 (1/2)

”I told you what was up, DA. Nothing funny on my end. Can't vouch for your daughter, though.”

His hands go from inside his pockets to folded across his chest. He's a statue made of granite. I'm an abandoned rag doll.

”Maybe we should just call Jennifer, then, to straighten everything out,” he says, pulling out his cell phone and poking at a few b.u.t.tons before getting my permission.

”Let's. A fine idea.” I yawn, my head getting murky, its natural state. I'm afraid of this phone call. I'll only get to hear his end of the conversation.

He says, ”Hi, sweetie. It's Dad. . . . I know, but I need a quickhonest answer to a potentially difficult question. . . . I know, great way to start a phone call. . . . So, did you hire a Mark Genevich? . . . Mark Genevich, he's a private detective. . . . He's here in my office, and he claims you went to his Southie office and hired him-says you gave him some photos. . . . What? . . . Oh, he did? . . . Okay, okay, no. . . . Don't worry, Jennifer. Nothing I can't take care of. I have to go. . . . Good luck tonight. You were great last night and I'm sure you'll make it through to next week. . . . Love you too.”

I think I need to find my own attack mode. The problem is I'm toothless. I say, ”You two have such a swell relations.h.i.+p and all, but if she said she's never met me, she's lying.”

”Jennifer said you showed up in the autograph line at Copley the other day, claimed to be working on her case, and left your card.”

”I sure did.”

”She also said she'd never seen you before Copley.”

I yawn again. The DA doesn't like it. There's nothing I can do about that. I say, ”I have her signed contract back at my office.” Complete bluff. He knows it too.

He walks around to the front of the desk and sits on the top. One leg on the floor, one leg off. A DA flamingo. He says, ”Blackmail is a felony, Mark.” He drops the hard-guy act momentarily and morphs into pity mode. He holds out his hands as if to say, Look at you, you're a walking s.h.i.+pwreck, unsalvageable. ”If you need money or help, Mark, I can help you out, but this isn't the way to go about it.”

I laugh. It's an ugly sound. ”Thanks for the offer, DA, but I get by. And I'm not blackmailing anyone. If I were, would I be dumb enough to do it while sitting in your office? Give me a little credit.”

”Okay, okay, but Mark, try to take my point of view here. You are presenting me an odd set of circ.u.mstances, to say the least. You come out of nowhere, telling me that my daughter hired you on the basis of photos that aren't of Jennifer. Are we on the same page so far?”

I nod. I yawn. The murk is getting used to my chair. The conversation is getting fuzzy. I need to move around, literally put myself on my toes. I stand up and wander behind the chair, pretending to stretch my back.

He says, ”Jennifer denies having ever met you before you showed up at Copley. What is it exactly you want me to believe?”

Good question. I want to hear the answer too. I say, ”I don't know what to tell you. Kids lie to their parents all the time, especially when they're in trouble. Maybe she's met some bad people. Maybe she's embarra.s.sed, doesn't want Daddy to know that someone sent her a threat, some nude photos that look a lot like her, enough so that if released into the wild many folks would believe it's her in the pictures.” I say it all, but I don't really believe it. There's something missing. What's missing is me. Why am I the one with these pictures?

He says, ”No one would believe that woman was Jennifer.”

I shrug. ”Sure they would. Presented in the proper light; people want to believe the worst.”

The DA has his chiseled face in hand, another pose, and says, ”I'll have another talk with her later, but right now I believe her, not you.”

It's not a shock, but it stings. To be dismissed so easily. I fire back with a double-barrel dose of healthy paranoia. ”That's fine. I believe me over both of you. Tell me, DA, how do I know that Jennifer was really the person on the other end of that phone call?”

He rolls his eyes, gets up off the desk, and walks to his office door, holds it open. He says, ”Okay, I think our meeting is done. If I hear or see anything more about these photos of yours, don't be surprised if you find me in your Southie office, warrant in hand.”

”I guess this means no brunch.” I adjust my hat and slip the envelope inside my coat. ”I'm only looking out for your daughter's best interests because I was hired to.”

There's nothing more to be said. We're all out of words. I walk out of the office. He shuts the door behind me. I tighten my coat, the envelope pressed up against my chest. The secretary has her head down, computer keys clicking.

The goons aren't in the waiting room. Maybe they were never here. Maybe, like Jennifer's mole, they've been Photoshopped out. The room is too empty. No chairs are askew, all the magazines are in a pile, nothing out of place, but it's staged, a crime scene without a body.

I'm alone again, with a client who denies such status and with photos that aren't of her. I'm alone again, with nothing, and I just want to sit and think, but my head is a mess, trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that's suddenly missing all but a few pieces. I need to call a cab, go back to the office, begin at the beginning, focus on those few pieces I do have, and see if I can't force them to fit together.

EIGHT.

After my DA meeting I sat at my office desk and looked at the photos again, searching for clues I might've missed. I didn't see any. In the first photo, the one with the fully clothed Jennifer, there was a bookcase that holds ten books. I couldn't read any of the slimmer t.i.tles, but there was one fat hardcover with LIT written big and white across the bottom of the spine. Library book probably. In the second photo, the camera is angled up, and I see only the ceiling and the wall and the topless Jennifer.

I locked the photos with the negatives in my office desk and slept the rest of the afternoon away on my apartment couch. I dreamed my usual Dad-in-the-backyard dream. There was still a lot of s.h.i.+t to clean up. No one called and woke me. No one missed my conscious presence. I'm used to it and don't take it personally anymore.

Now it's two o'clock in the morning. I've been wandering and haunting my own apartment, a ghost without the clanging chains. I can't sleep. I already said I was sick of irony, but it's a narcoleptic's lot.

I turn on the VCR and watch two taped American Star episodes, last night's and tonight's, the one I slept through. First show has a disco-night theme. Jennifer Times sings ”I Will Survive.” She sings well enough, right notes and right key, but she moves stiffly, her hips are rusty hinges and her feet don't want to stay in one spot, a colt walking in a field full of holes. The judges call her on it. The British guy says she was icy and robotic, a mannequin barely come to life. The people in the audience boo the judge even though he's correct. Truth is usually greeted with disdain.

Jennifer doesn't take the criticism well and fires back at the judges. She whines and is rude and short in dismissing the critiques. She turns and tilts her head, rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, stops just short of stomping a foot on the floor. She leaves the stage with, ”I thought I was great and they did too,” pointing to the audience. She gets a lukewarm cheer.

Jennifer forgot it's not about the song you sing or the words you have to say; it's always about the performance, how you present your public self. She could've come off as a hero if she argued with the judges correctly, mixing self-deprecation, humility, and humor with confidence and determination. Maybe she should've hired me as a coach instead of her PI.

As the vote-off show queues up next on my tape, I fire up my laptop and check out the Internet message boards and blogosphere reaction. Jennifer was universally ripped and often referred to as a privileged brat. There will be no recovering from that. The show's voters agreed with the brat tag, and Jennifer is the first finalist knocked out of American Star. A quick THE END to that singing career, I guess. Jennifer doesn't take the news on the vote-off show well either. Instead of gracious smiles and hand-waving, we get the nationally televised equivalent of a kid storming out of her parents' room after a scolding. While I think Jennifer handled her fifteen minutes of fame poorly, I do sympathize with her. Sometimes you just can't win.

Maybe this means she'll return my calls when she gets back to Boston. Maybe she'll apologize for lying to her father, for making my public self appear to be a lunatic. My performance in her daddy's office needed her help, and she threw me tomatoes instead of roses. Or maybe she won't call me and the case is dead, now that she's off the show.

I shut off the VCR and laptop and wander back to bed. Insomnia is there waiting for me. The sheets and comforter feel all wrong, full of points and angles somehow. The pillow is not soft enough; it's too hard. I'm Goldilocks in my own house.

The awake me can't help but rerun everything in my mashed-up head. Yeah, I'm stubborn, but I have to try and see Jennifer one more time, somehow straighten out all that's been bent out of shape and put the case to bed, so to speak.

NINE.

The phone rings; it sounds far away, in the next universe. I lift my head off my desk, an incredible feat of strength, and wipe my face. Leftover fried rice trapped in my beard and mustache fall onto the Styrofoam plate that had been my pillow. The rice bounces off and onto the desktop and on my lap. I need to make a note to vacuum later.

It has been two days since my meeting with the DA. My office phone has rung only once. It was NANNING WOK double-checking my order because the woman wasn't sure if I'd said General Gao or Kung Pao. The General, of course, as if there was any question.

I spent those two days getting nowhere with Jennifer's case. Her agency doesn't return my calls, and I don't know when her next public appearance is. I haven't looked at the photos since locking them in my desk. I wanted them to find their own way out, somehow, before I thought about them again. Doing nothing with them couldn't be any worse than my previous attempts at doing something.

The phone is still ringing. Someone insisting that we talk. Fine. Be that way. I pick it up.

I say, ”Mark Genevich,” my name bubbling up from the depths, sounding worse for the trip.

”Have you found it yet?” A male voice. He sounds older. His voice is deep, heavy with time, like mine.

I'm disappointed. I was really hoping it'd be Jennifer. Instead, it's a client that I've been s.h.i.+rking. I have two abandoned property searches that I've put on hold since the Times case came walking in my door.

I say, ”No, I haven't found anything yet. Need more time.” I should just hang up and put my face back into the leftover fried rice.

”I don't think we have more time, kid. There's a red car driving around my house. It's been by four times this afternoon already. f.u.c.k!”