Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

The wily Sherpa was none other than Someone-Help-Me, who, rebuffed the night before, had discarded the spoiled custom-made sign that had provided his name. It was Will’m’s misfortune the beggar had chosen that very night to camp in an alcove across from the venerably decrepit Higgins “plant.” Awakened by a caroming warble of sirens from black-and-whites, he had poked his head from the cardboard; it was then that he saw an alley child in the light of the street lamp, and heard an unmistakable shout calling her back to darkness. A large, charcoaly figure appeared and lifted the girl to his back, covering her with a greatcoat before galloping off.

The vagrant and the detective walked from alley to sidewalk, scrutinizing the crime scene.

“Did the girl seem to be in any distress?”

“That time of night … little girl that age. I’d be distressed. Not in bed with her toys all safe. I would be—”

He rasped his words, interposing repulsively guttural clicks, grunts and snickers.

“Was she fighting? Did he force her—”

“—wouldn’t be playing no kinda game that time of night.”

“But he shouted at her,” said the detective, mildly exasperated.

“A command —and you better listen. ‘Come ’ere, girlie!’ All ‘Englified,’ too, like he Michael Caine! Shit, that one’s a bear .”

“You saw her face.”

“Not too well. But I’d know her. Yep, I’d know her!”

“And the man?”

“I didn’t so much seen him but heard him.”

“Then how could you identify?”

“That one hard to miss! Big as a house — I know that one. Chased after him awhile, too. Couldn’t keep up, me with my leg … Never thought he go that way, not with kids . Them who fuck kids is pure shit.”

“Which way did he run?”

“Down Broadway. I didn’t go no further. He was movin’ and groovin’— the girl on ’im like a papoose!”

“Now, you know this man?”

“Name Will’m but some call ’im Topsy.”

“And you know where to find him?”

“Give me heehaw and I’ll know, know what ahm sayin’?”

One-legged Fitz passed by and Half Dead nipped the informer’s ankle, drawing blood.

“Mother fuck you, spunion! Old crackhead bitch !” He lowered a fist down on the dog’s spine and the thing trundled off. “I’ll kill that mutated peesuhshit!” He pounded the air with a gnarly fist. “Kill you too , Half Man !”

Fitz skedaddled as the dog dodged a bike messenger, who threw them an oath.

Someone-Help-Me rubbed his bitten ankle as he cane-lurched after the laughing detective on the short walk back to the St. George.

†For the careful — or skittish — reader, we can assure that a fortune of Dodd Trotter’s magnitude, shepherded by a man of his skill and temperament, was destined to remain one of the great fortunes of our time. If that same reader needs more assurance, suffice it to say, the prescient CEO had invested heavily not only in real estate but in energy, the “go-go” field of the new millennium.

Lucy Trotter had a mission. She would help her cousin, the boy who was first — next to Edward, of course — in heart and in blood. She would do this large and amazing thing for him and be Author in the process. She had finally solved the Mystery of the Blue Maze — or was at least well on her way, for the riddle now had a designation: Marcus Weiner, long-lost father extraordinaire. She had pried the surname off a reluctant Winter, then backed away from further interrogations. Vanity would not let her take the easy route.

So, she Yahoo!’d and Google’d, fidgeted and stressed; there were a million pages to sift through on the Web. She back-slashed, skidded and WWW’d her way from Net Detective 2000 to The Skip Tracing and Locating Missing Persons Resource Center, The Hollywood Network’s Missing Persons CyberCenter, How to Find Anyone Anywhere, Tracing Missing Heirs, Missing Persons Throughout the World, and TrackStar Inc. — America’s Missing Person Locator (an Infotel Company). Each site offered Certified Missing Persons Investigator courses and on-/off-line seminars in locating specialized detectives (the latter would have been a cheat). Lucy staved off tears of anxiety, frustration and boredom — YOU ARE VISITOR 193,784—mailing in subscriptions to PI and Pursuit magazines and Professional Repossessor once she got her seventh wind.

The free sites were filled with suggestions on how to track down the vanished through genealogy, local 411, voter registration, birth and civil records, criminal and military, real estate and alumni, news archives, former husbands, former wives, licensing bureaus, hospitals, et alia.

There were Netherlands databases and comprehensive national White Pages and what seemed to be an infinity of pathetic, once-poignant notices from those looking for loved ones stretching all the way back to the birth of the Net — how could she possibly sort through it? She enlisted her phlegmatic brother to root out Social Security numbers on Lexis-Nexis while she, with halfhearted incompetence, tackled property deeds. It felt hopeless.

There were certain obvious details that would have made things easier. For example: what, at the time of his leave-taking, did Marcus Weiner actually do for a living? Until she hit the PowerBook wall, Lucy made a pact with herself not to approach her parents — a true girl detective would never need to resort to such tactics. After conferring with AltaVista (there were 608,540 pages found pertaining to “Marcus Weiner,” many of which were translated from other languages), she decided to do a little flat-footing at the Beverly Hills Library to check local newspapers; one of them must have reported the Weiner-Trotter nuptials. But it was rainy that week, so Lucy found herself glued to the enormous screen of Joyce’s unused G-4 instead. Truth be told, there were some Webby diversions from her main cause — per usual, the pigtailed researcher was IM’d so many times that she couldn’t make much headway; a veritable fusillade of “creaking doors” and harmonic tantaras announced that endless Buddies were on-line. Along the way, she surprised herself by becoming seriously obsessed with the Boulder Langon homepage, a development the actress herself found hysterical.

Whenever the thought of approaching her mother with a few queries reared its torpid head, she stubbornly ruled it out. Anyway, that wouldn’t have been easy: an unnerving secrecy had dropped like a veil after Aunt Trinnie sat her son down and told all — as if there were nothing more to reveal! The party-line spin on “closure” was sorely artificial. Mysteries abounded, and the body of Marcus Weiner floated, pickled and unquiet — like the story she had read during an epic Internet tangent of a teenager who slipped and fell into a river in Georgia. Lucy and her Buds were riveted: trapped beneath the surface, wedged vertically between rocks for months, the teen’s body was impossible to retrieve save for damming the waters. Locals said leave the river alone, it would “give the girl up” in its own time; but that wasn’t good enough for the girl’s father — and not good enough for Lucille Rose, who loved Cousin Tull more than she could ever admit, even to herself. She would not wait for time or the river or Bel-Air to give Marcus Weiner up. She could see the crown of his head just below the surface and would do anything in her power to pull him ashore, and to rest. She was convinced Tull would one day thank her for kayaking him through such a watershed; it might even make him drop a knee and propose.