Last Call

He smiled and said, "Hey, baby."

"Hi. Do you live here?"

"Yeah. Wa

"Don't say it," she said. Obnoxious enough, but on some level, she was sort of flattered that he hadn't taken her for the mother of one of his buddies. "My name's Andie," she said. "Andie He

"I'm David. You with a sorority?"

Either David was playing with her, or the darkness was kinder to her thirty-something face than she realized. "Yeah," she said, playing along. "I'm a pledge over at FBI."

He scrunched his face, as if reciting the entire Greek alphabet in his head, and then it hit him. "You mean…"

She nodded and flashed her badge. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah – sure," he said nervously. "I guess so."

He let her inside and closed the door. "How can I do for you? I mean, what-"

"Relax, okay? You're not in any kind of trouble."

"I should probably get our president."

"Is he here?"

"Yeah. But he's kind of – he's with his…"

"He's in his PAD?"

He smiled, which softened some of his nervous edge. "You know how that is."

"Look, I'm working on a very old case. It doesn't affect anyone who currently lives here. All I want to know is if you keep any composite photographs of your old fraternity classes around the house."

"Of course," he said. "They're hanging in the chapter room."

"Great. Can I see them?"

"Well, I don't know."

"It will take five minutes. You live here, so all I need is your consent."

"It's just that, we don't really let anyone in the chapter room. Not even pledges. It's only for brothers."

"Oh, come on. You know as well as I do that there's nothing sacred in there. The only reason you keep it locked is because you don't want anyone looking at those composites and seeing what a bunch of geeks you PADs used to be."

"Yeah," he said with a chuckle. "Those mullet haircuts in the eighties were the best."

"What about the seventies?" she said, soft-pedaling her real interest. "The days of big hair and bad mustaches. Or maybe you don't go back that far."

"Oh, we go back to 1962."

"Wonderful. I love a place with a sense of history. So what do you say? You and me in the chapter room for five minutes? Or do we have to go knocking on the door of your president's PAD?"

"Well, okay. Follow me."

He led her down the hall and through the cafeteria. It was after the di

"This is it?" she said.

She hadn't meant to insult him with her reaction, but had she endured the living hell that fraternity initiations were in the 1970s and earlier, this first look at the secret chapter room would have smacked of the proverbial crock at the end of the rainbow.

"This is it," he said.

The windowless room had all the charm of an unfinished basement – concrete floor, walls of painted cinder blocks, and shop-style fluorescent lighting suspended from the ceiling. Covering the walls, however, were several dozen framed composite photographs, each with head shots of young men dressed in suits. Andie immediately zeroed in on the composites where the outfit of choice was the powder-blue leisure suit. Andie went straight to them, as she removed her printed photographs from her purse.

David asked, "You know what year you're looking for?"

The composites were arranged in chronological order in columns of three. "Right around here," she said, searching. "Early to mid-1970s."

Andie's adrenalin was pumping. Each head shot had the young man's name underneath it, so if her computer-generated photographs matched, she was home-free. Theo's mother would have been fifteen years old in 1968, so she started there, just to be overinclusive. She compared the cameraman's image first, breezing through the late sixties, and slowing down for more careful examination in 1970, 1971, and so on. She went all the way to 1980.

He wasn't there. She went through it again, just in case she'd missed something.

He definitely wasn't there.

She did the same thing with the image of the heckler and the drunk who had started the war of words with Portia in the movie. She checked each composite, photograph by photograph.

They weren't there, either.

At this point, she was well beyond her allotted five minutes. David said, "Something wrong?"

"I was just so sure that-" She stopped herself and did a double take. "There's a year missing."

"What?"

"Nineteen seventy-two. It's not here."

David took a closer look. "You're right."

Andie walked the entire room, checking to see if it had been mounted someplace else, out of chronological order. "It's not here," she said. "Is there another room where it could be?"

"No. I been living here three years. All the old composites are in this room."

"I need to see 1972," she said.

"Well, I don't know how to help you. The one you want is the one we don't have. Which is sort of an interesting coincidence."

Andie noticed something about the wall. The composites weren't all the same size, and they'd hung so long in the same place that a faint shadow on the painted wall matched the outline of their frame. The composites after 1972 didn't match their shadow – which meant they'd been moved. Rearranged. Recently. To make it not so apparent that 1972 was missing.

"It's definitely interesting that it's not here," she said, the wheels turning in her head. "But I'd say it's no coincidence."

"Hey wait a sec," said David. "Pi Alpha Delta does have a historian"

"A historian?"

"Yeah. He's with the national office in Columbus, Ohio. Some old fart who doesn't want to let go of his college days."

"You think he has copies of old composites?"

"He has everything from every chapter in the country. But they'd be little copies. Like yearbook-sized. Would that help?"

Andie smiled. "Immensely. Think maybe I'll visit his pad."

Chapter 39

Jack got a phone call from Andie at midmorning. She had "important information" for him. Before he could ask why she didn't just tell him over the telephone, she beat him to the punch.

"You were nice enough to invite me to di

Jack laughed, but apparently she was serious. He jotted down the address and agreed to meet her there at noon.

The FBI field office was in North Miami, an area that Jack didn't know well, except to pass by it on his way to Broward County and all-important places like Dolphin Stadium or Fort Lauderdale beach. He was sure they had plenty of good lunch spots up that way. Knowing Miami, however, he wasn't so sure Andie had been kidding about the Laundromat-restaurant. He pulled into a strip mall off North East 163rd Street to see Andie standing in front of the U-Wash-It.

"What do you think?" she said.

Jack checked it out from the sidewalk, peering through the wide-open double doors. The place had no air conditioning; instead, a noisy commercial fan circulated hot air inside. Two sweaty old women shared a bench and yesterday's newspaper as their clothes tumbled in the dryer. A washing machine on spin cycle rattled and shook violently, as if it was about to walk out the door on its own power. That universal and distinctly unappetizing smell of a Laundromat filled the air.