Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

“Got a lot on the platter here.”

“I know, Colt,” Teddy said. “But a couple things. I’ll just throw ’em out there. The reward? It’s for seventeen fifty.”

“You mean seventeen thousand, five hundred.”

“No, I mean seventeen hundred and fifty buckaroos.”

Very low for a missing child. And the low sum meant the mother had scraped together every penny she could.

“The other thing?”

“The offer,” Velma told him. “Listen to what she posted online. I’m quoting: ‘Please, please, please help!!!’ A bunch of exclamations here. ‘Tessy, love of my life, has gone missing in San Francisco. I’m sick with worry over her. I’m offering a Reward. I’ve started a GoFundMe page to raise more. Please.’ More exclamation points. Then a picture of her. Sweet kid.”

Shaw’s experience was that parents rarely posted a shot of demonic-looking children. “That kind of money, nobody’ll go to the trouble to look for her.”

“Exactly.”

Shaw looked at his father’s map with the eighteen red X s on it.

“When was it posted?”

“Couple days ago.”

Before BlackBridge knew he was in town, so it wouldn’t be a trap.

He looked at the notes in such delicate and perfect script:

Haywood Brothers Warehouse, the Embarcadero

3884 Camino, Burlingame

After a moment he said, “Send me the offer.”

They said goodbyes and a few seconds later his phone dinged with Maria Vasquez’s reward notice. He read through it once. Shaw started to read it once more and put the mobile down. He thought: Why bother? Either you’re going to do it or you’re not.

Please, please, please help

Followed by a bunch of exclamation points.

One question was answered.

Maria Vasquez, mother of the missing woman, lived in the heart of the TL.

This explained the low sum she was offering for information about her daughter. Very few residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin would be able to come up with a big enough reward to snag anyone’s attention.

The neighborhood, in the central part of the city, was infamous. Seedy, dilapidated, graffitied, marred by trash-filled streets and sidewalks, the TL was home to street people, those working in the sex trade — traffickers among them — gangs and those involved in all phases of drug enterprises: manufacturers, transporters, sellers and, of course, consumers. The SFPD has defined more than six hundred “plots,” small geographic areas of the city, for the purpose of analyzing crime stats. Seven of the ten most dangerous plots in San Francisco were in the TL.

Shaw hadn’t been here for years. Back then the place was filled with single-room occupancy hotels and small shabby apartments, adult bookshops, massage parlors, bodegas, Asian and Filipino grocery stores, tobacco/vaping places, cell phone card and wig shops and nail salons.

Much of that atmosphere persisted to this day but Shaw now saw a few nods toward improvement. Outreach programs operated out of storefronts, helping runaways, trafficking victims, addicts. There was even some gentrification, albeit modest. Across the street from Maria Vasquez’s walk-up was a ten-story apartment building that offered studio and one-bedroom units, which the poster described, with an inexplicable hyphen, as de-luxe. There was a Starbucks wannabe on the ground floor, along with an art gallery and a wine bar. Changing... but not changed: the windows on the first two floors of most buildings along this block were covered with thick iron security bars.

He chained his bike and helmet to a lamppost then walked to the door of the apartment building. He pressed the intercom and, when a woman answered, he said, “I called earlier. About the reward you posted.”

“You’re—”

“Colter.”

The door buzzer sounded and he stepped inside and climbed to the third floor, smelling fresh paint, garlic and pot. He knocked on the door of 3C. He heard the creak of footsteps and she answered.

Maria Vasquez looked him over cautiously, eyeing the leather jacket and jeans and boots.

In most assignments, when meeting with offerors he wanted them to see him as a professional — part lawyer, part detective, part psychologist. His garb would be sport coat, laundered jeans, polished shoes, dress shirt in dark shades. Not an option now, not with the Yamaha.

She’d have to deal with the reward-seeker as biker.

Something about his face, perhaps, put her at ease, though. “Come in. Please, come in.”

Vasquez, in her forties, was about five eight or nine, a pretty face and trim figure. Her dark features suggested blood from Mexico.

The one-bedroom apartment was nicer than he’d expected. The furniture was cheap but the walls had been painted recently — and were hung with bold floral posters and a half-dozen fine-arts photographs, reminiscent of the work of the famous West Coast photographers of the mid-twentieth century: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham.

She asked if he wanted anything to drink and he declined. They sat and the woman held her hands to her face. “Oh, it has been a terrible year. Such a terrible year. My husband, he died without insurance, and I lost my job. I was a receptionist at a tech company.” A cynical grimace. “Big start-up! Oh, we were going to all be millionaires. They promised everything. Stock bonuses. All that. It went under. I’ve been doing that since then.” She waved toward a pink waitress’s uniform. “We lost our house. And the bank owns it and still they’re suing us! I never wanted a big house in the first place. But Eduardo...” She shook her head, as if exhausted at replaying the car crash of her last twelve months. “And now this.”

Tears formed, and she found a tissue in a battered, cracked beige purse with an old-style clasp on top. She blotted her eyes.

From a pocket in his leather jacket, Shaw extracted one of the 5-by-7-inch notebooks in which he jotted information during interviews like this. His handwriting, like his father’s, was extremely small and precise. The notebooks were not ruled but each line of his script was perfectly horizontal.

He used a Delta Titanio Galassia fountain pen. The barrel was black and it featured three orange rings toward the nib. Occasionally an offeror or a witness might glance at the pen, which was not inexpensive, as if using it were pretentious or showy. But this wasn’t the case. The pen was largely practical; filling page after page of notes in Shaw’s minuscule script was tough on the hand and the gold-tipped fountain pen eased words onto the paper smoothly and with less effort than the best ballpoint. It was also a pleasure to use the fine device.

Someone once asked him why he didn’t just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

Shaw said, “Let me tell you who I am and what I do. You can look at me like a private investigator that you don’t pay until I’m successful. I’ll try to find your daughter. If I do that, you pay me your reward. You don’t have to pay for any expenses.”

A reward is, under the law, a unilateral contract. The offer is made but there is no enforceable bargain until one party — the reward-seeker — successfully completes the job. Then an enforceable contract comes into existence.

Vasquez nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Two days ago Tessy was gone when I got home from my shift. She was supposed to be at work at six but she didn’t show up. Her phone doesn’t ring. It just goes to voice mail. She didn’t show up for work that night. I called her friends... Nobody’s heard from her.”