J Bertrand - Back on Murder

But then a new segment begins, and a familiar face looks back at me.

She’s cut her white hair short, and the camera flashes accentuate the pruning around her lips, but otherwise Lieutenant Wanda Mosser is unchanged since the days I worked Missing Persons under her tutelage. It was a brief stint, not my kind of thing, but I always respected the lady. She was straight out of the Ann Richards school of toughness, rising through the ranks at a time when, to hold her own, a woman had to be able to convince everyone she was the best man in the room.

“We’re taking the case very seriously,” she’s saying to a press conference audience, obviously prerecorded. “We are following a number of leads at this time, and we encourage members of the public with any information that might help to please get in touch.”

Boilerplate stuff, but Wanda delivers the lines with conviction. Curious, I watch a couple of former prosecutors-turned-commentators long enough to figure out why my old boss is on the tube. A teenage girl named Hannah Mayhew disappeared in northwest Houston. She left classes midday yesterday at Klein High and no one has seen her since. Early this morning her abandoned car was discovered in the Willow-brook Mall parking lot, and now a major search is under way.

But why is this national news? The girl’s only been gone a day and a half. Last week’s big headline, the vanishing financial advisor Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who’d gone out on his own after the Enron debacle, had consumed the local outlets without getting even a hint of national traction. The man absconded to Cancun and points southward, supposedly with a suitcase full of his clients’ money. Macneil, one of those guys who sits on everybody’s board, has a finger in everybody’s pie, put a dent in some prominent bank accounts, but outside the Loop, nobody cared.

Now a missing Houston teen is big news? Kids run away all the time in this town. Finding the car might put a sinister spin on things, but as far as I can tell from the commentary, no one saw her being abducted or anything.

Then they flash a headshot of Hannah Mayhew on the screen. Everything becomes clear.

She’s a beauty, haloed in golden hair with a dimpled smile that’s gotten plenty of use. Her eyes are that crystalline ice-blue that catches light like a prism. The picture looks professional, the background tastefully blurred, like it came straight out of a modeling portfolio. Which is no surprise. She has the kind of face that gets photographed a lot.

You can’t call yourself a jaded cop if you’re not cynical about the different treatment an attractive white suburban blonde gets when she runs into trouble. Her story makes the front page, beams out into millions of living rooms, and strangers everywhere look upon her as their own. They worry, they agonize – and above all they love, projecting all their frustrated hopes onto this inscrutably attractive teen.

By losing track of their daughter, her parents have donated her to the public at large, and now she’s everybody’s missing kid.

I shake my head at it all. In my house off West Bellfort, sharing her deathbed with Octavio Morales, there’d been another girl. No one’s interested in her. Not even the lab. When I called to request a rush on the blood work, hoping to get an id on my absent victim, I got the usual answer. We’ll get to it when we get to it. No cutting to the front of the line.

But Hannah Mayhew won’t have to wait. They’ll bump her right to the front. Because girls like her aren’t supposed to disappear.

I can’t watch anymore. I turn the television off and go upstairs to change, not even bothering to keep the noise down. By now, her pills downed with a glass of water, Charlotte’s long past hearing.

There are closer bars and probably cooler ones, but the place I end up is the Paragon, where the waitresses wear layered tanks with plaid miniskirts and the crowd would rather drink than dance. Even on a Saturday night, even as Labor Day weekend kicks off, I can find a table in the back corner, far enough away from the speakers that the ice doesn’t shake in my glass.

I cast a glance over the room, confirming Tommy’s absence. Pearl Bar is his haunt these days, but I’ve caught him at the Paragon once or twice and had to leave. Nobody knows me here and I’d like to keep it that way.

A waitress named Marta flounces up, showing an inconceivable amount of tanned thigh. Acts like she’s never seen me before, not realizing she actually has. She jots down my whiskey sour, which I have no intention of drinking, then shuffles bar-ward through the crowd, shaking schoolgirl pigtails that look anything but innocent. I watch her move even though I shouldn’t.

She’s a cute enough little thing, but she couldn’t get famous just by vanishing.

“Excuse me. Are you using these?”

I turn to the table next to me, where a couple of women in low-cut tops are busy arranging extra chairs. One of them looms over me, a pink-skinned blonde with glitter on her eyelids, of indeterminate age, motioning to the unused seats around my table.

“Take them.”

They all descend, dragging the chairs off just in time for another wave of girlfriends, who arrive with many air kisses and group hugs.

When Marta returns with my drink, she nods toward the packed table and asks if I want to move. I think about it, but decide to stay put. I don’t plan on being here all that long. She gives me a suit-yourself shrug, then takes a deep breath before retrieving orders from the newcomers. I’m thinking girls’ night doesn’t generate the kind of tips for the leggy Marta that a table of men would.

I stare into the whiskey sour like it’s a crystal ball, but it doesn’t reveal anything. The glass sweats and eventually the ice shifts. My finger traces patterns in the condensation.

I’ve been coming to this place for years, going through the same ritual. The first time was October 6, 2001, and that night I made a big enough scene I had to wait awhile before showing my face again. Now I keep it discreet. Nobody needs to know why I’m here.

People stream past the table, some heading to the restrooms, others hunting the shadows for likely targets. As the crowd expands and contracts, the bartenders move with practiced grace. There’s a guy at the bar I’ve seen before – not here, but out in the real world. He cranes his head subtly, taking in the room without seeming to. A white male, my age or a bit younger, with a hedge of black hair jutting forward like the figure on the prow of a ship. Probably someone I know from the job, another cop, judging from the never-off-duty vibe he’s giving off. I lean sideways for a better look, but the crowd closes in.

For the rest of the night, the party at the next table bleeds girls. They peel off in packs of two or three, heading home or to other locations. As they go, their places are filled by empty shot glasses and slumped-over bodies. The glitter-eyed blonde starts scooting her chair closer to my side of the gap, sending sideways looks in my direction, keeping me here longer than I’d planned.

“Are you gonna drink that?” Marta says, appearing suddenly between the tables.

She gives off a self-assured vibe, but it’s the kind of brittle hardness you always see in women who keep choosing the abusive boyfriends, or can’t keep off the bottle or the needle. Deceptive strength, more protective coloring than character.

I glance at the melting lowball at my elbow, but don’t answer. Reaching into my pocket, I peel off a twenty and toss it onto the table. It’s a stupid gesture, the sort of thing that gets remembered. But I’m sympathetic to her type.

“All righty then,” she says, swiping the twenty and running a towel over the place where it landed. She gives the girls next door a reproving glance. “Sorry, ladies, but I think I’m gonna have to cut you off.”