Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [163]
Her journal.
It was bound and black, the pages unlined, with a colored print on the cover of Botticelli’s Venus rising from the waves. He opened it to the first page, careful to check the date, and the only entry began a few days after Alice returned from the hospital:
FINISH
Oh, he needed to find her! He needed to find out what happened next. But he couldn’t find her on his own. He needed a professional.
Google “private investigator” and the hits came replete with as many pop-ups as porn sites, with joke names that made it hard to take these services seriously: Check Mate, Check-A-Mate and Investi-Mate; Cheater Beaters, Vowbusters, and Spouse-a-Louse. Just the number of hits alone, 7,494,000, was mind-boggling: a whole city’s or separate state’s worth of private eyes: Pvteyes, hidemseekm, and Sherlock; RUsure and Bsure.com, Divorce.net. He narrowed his search to New York, whittling the number of hits down to a million four, and baffled still how to choose between so many options, he clicked on the site whose name he liked the most:
DialM.com
Missing Person Specialist
Lost/Found
Click Here to Enter
He clicked, and once he entered the site, saw the only information on the page was a telephone number. After a few minutes of staring at the screen, he dialed—it was a pager—and punched in his number, then hung up.
Almost instantly, a man called back. “Can I help you?”
“I’m calling about my wife,” David said.
“Ah,” he said. “What did the bitch do?”
“She left me.”
“For another man?”
“I’m … I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
“But you want to know so.”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to find her.”
Silence—for so long, in fact, that he thought they’d been disconnected. “Are you there?”
“I’ve gotta say,” the man said, “you don’t sound particularly upset.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t sound like someone who’s been betrayed.”
“I don’t know if I have been.”
“If you’re calling me, you don’t know anything.”
“What am I supposed to sound like?”
“Angry. You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“Extremely.”
“You feel deserted, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Like you’re capable of anything?”
“If she were here right now I’d wring her—”
“Don’t say it,” the man said. “Let’s meet right away.”
They agreed on a Greek-run diner nearby. Anxious to get out of his wrecked apartment, David left immediately, walking the few blocks as quickly as he could. The restaurant was nearly empty but he took a booth in the rear anyway, as far from the few patrons as possible, his back to the giant mural of the Acropolis. The waiter came over to take his order, and it was comforting how little Greek waiters had changed over the years. Still with the buttons of their white shirts unbuttoned and their mats of chest hair exposed, still with the gold chains—never less than one or more than three—from which dangled symbols that looked vaguely Hebrew, but, most of all, still with the complete indifference with which they took your order, that socialite’s over-your-shoulder look while you spoke, and then the dismissive rip from their dupe pad whether you’d asked for the right side of the menu or just a cup of tea. The waiter left, revealing another person standing behind him.
“Are you David?” the man said.
For a moment, David thought he’d been addressed by a boy. He stood light-switch high, his belt well below the tabletop, pictures of lobsters embroidered into his tie. Of indeterminate age—he could be thirty or fifty—he had black hair long in the back and bangs that half hid his eyes, black eyes that glinted brightly, like the pictures you see of the deepest deep-sea fish. Though diminutive he was still physically imposing, top-heavy, long-armed, and large-headed too, like a boxer or a pit bull, his mouth so big that a bite from it could