Jan Burke - Liar

“Looks like your cousin goes by Maguire,” Pete said.

“You found him!” I said.

“Got an address, anyway.” He read it off-and the balloon popped.

When I didn’t respond right away, he said, “That help?”

“Thanks for trying, Pete, but it’s Briana’s apartment address. As far as I know, Travis never really lived there.”

“Oh.”

“At least I know he’s going by Maguire.”

There was a short silence, then Pete said, “Maybe. If the address checked out, I would have felt a little more certain about that. Better not assume anything yet.”

A couple of friends on the staff asked me to join them for lunch, but I had the feeling they were curious about why (according to a newsroom rumor that quickly made the rounds) an LAPD homicide cop was asking if I had been in on a certain Wednesday morning. So I begged off- told them, quite truthfully, that I was waiting for return calls.

My stomach growled, so I went from desk to desk glancing at take-out menus (more standard on newsroom desks than dictionaries) and found a good one on Stuart Angert’s-a deli that delivers to the Express. I called it and ordered a turkey sandwich.

While I waited for the delivery, I logged on to the computer and went to a program that has replaced our old reverse phone directories. I typed in Briana’s old address, the one she lived at before moving to the apartment, and within seconds the computer came up with a list of names, addresses and phone numbers for some of the residences on the same block. I printed this list, but decided I’d wait until later in the day to actually start phoning. I’d make the calls when people were more likely to be home from work.

I logged off, opened a desk drawer and pulled out McCain’s manila envelope. That morning, before leaving the house, I had added to it, stuffing the envelope full of papers from Briana’s desk; I opened it now and began sorting through them. In a few moments, the papers were stacked in four piles: church bulletins, grocery lists, bills and-the biggest category-flyers and advertisements.

The two grocery lists were short, and only included a few everyday items-they didn’t reveal anything the tour of her kitchen hadn’t already told me. I put them back in the envelope.

Next I looked through her bills. There weren’t many of these either- her lifestyle didn’t include flashing a lot of gold cards all over town. In fact, there were no bills from any kind of plastic. No yuppie necessities such as cellular phones, dry cleaning or cable television. Like her grocery lists, her bills were for the basics: electricity, gas, water and the telephone. Among the older bills, there was a large amount due to an orthopedic surgeon, but as I studied it, it was clear that her medical insurance company was being billed for the full amount.

But there would be other expenses, of course. Her food, rent, taxes and probably some bus or cab fares. Donations to the church. Postage, laundry-all the other little things that might cause her to feel anxious about the ways she must divide a dollar. Living on disability checks, it would have been difficult to make ends meet.

“Where was your strong young son?” I wondered aloud. Where the hell was your niece? an inner voice quickly answered.

I forced myself to focus my attention on the phone bills. Most were for little more than the basic service rate, but the most recent telephone bill was extravagant by comparison-it included over sixty dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, all to numbers in California cities.

The calls were made within a three-day period-and when I saw which three days, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I pulled out the holy card just to make sure I had correctly remembered the date of Arthur Spanning’s death. Yes-and the calls were made in the three days following his demise.

Geoff, the Express’s security guard, called to tell me my sandwich was waiting for me at the front desk. I went downstairs to get it, thinking about the phone bill all the while. When Briana had learned of Arthur’s death, she would have called Travis. Even if he had been the one to inform her of his father’s death, it was likely that they had spoken. His number must have been one of the first ones she called. But who were all the other people she had phoned?

Back at my desk, I ate the sandwich without really tasting it as I studied the bill more closely. The cities called ranged across the state-from Crescent City in the far north to El Cajon in the south, from Eureka on the coast to Blythe at the Arizona border. Most were very brief calls, but three lasted longer-the ones to El Cajon, Mission Viejo and Lake Arrowhead. I wrote these numbers down.

Did Arthur have friends all over California? And why would Briana be the one to contact them?

The more I studied the bill, the more I became aware of a pattern to the calls. They began to follow a kind of geographical order: the call after Crescent City was to Eureka, then Leggett, Santa Rosa and San Francisco. A straight line down the Northern California coast. Following San Francisco, she called Vallejo, then Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno and Visalia.

I pulled an atlas off a reference shelf in the newsroom and opened it to a map of California. As I had thought, this group of calls followed a line inland from San Francisco to Sacramento, and then down the San Joaquin Valley along Highway 99. The other calls were the same, as if the caller-Briana-had also looked at a map, using the course of major highways to decide where to call next. There were some leaps (as I began to think of them) here and there-places where the pattern jumped to another area, a separate highway. But after each leap, the pattern continued.

With this pattern in mind, I logged back on to the computer and accessed the same database. The program can also search by phone number-enter the phone number, and it produces the name and address of the listed party. I decided to try the numbers for the three longer calls and entered the Mission Viejo phone number.

When the listing appeared on the screen, I double-checked the number on the phone bill, thinking I must have made a mistake. I hadn’t.

The number was that of the Mission Viejo Public Library. I tried Lake Arrowhead and El Cajon. Both were public libraries. Puzzled, I tried a few of the others. More libraries. I looked up every phone number; almost all were public libraries. The only exceptions were four elementary schools and two children’s bookstores.

I tried running the name “Travis Maguire” through the program and came up with zilch, but found thirty-eight listings for T. Maguire and about a thousand other Maguires. There were forty-two T. Sperry listings and nothing for T. Spanning. There were very few Spannings; Arthur Spanning wasn’t listed. I printed out the T. Sperry and T. Maguire listings.

I was about to try running the name DeMont when the phone rang. “Kelly,” I answered, somewhat distracted.

It was Rachel. “You hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Our boys are going to Idaho.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they’re trying to find a witness for one of their cases-guess it’s about to come to trial.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Don’t worry about Frank,” she said, guessing the direction of my thoughts. “He’ll be fine, except that Pete will probably make him crazy. Might do him some good to get out of town for a few days.”

“Yes,” I said, “you’re probably right.”

“You don’t sound convinced. I guess I should have let Frank tell you.”

“No, it’s all right. Glad to have some warning. It will help me to not overreact when Frank tells me. I mean, it really isn’t a big deal, is it?”

“Unless maybe you were recently forcibly separated from someone, and spent time worrying about whether he was alive or dead. Then you might be forgiven for being a little worried the next time he says he’s going out of town to find a witness.”