Necessity

“No. I’ve never been there.”

“Strangest thing.” Ray Seale leaned back in his swivel chair. “I remember some guy was on a hot streak and she’d been betting against him and she’d lost her stack and I watched her walk away from the table. She didn’t seem to be with anybody. But I was on a case—I had to take over for one of my men that got sick. And the subject was right there at the dice table and there wasn’t no choice, I had to wait him out and then keep following him around town until the guy led me to the Olds or the Buick or whatever it was the bank was paying us to repo.

“Fu

“So I just had the one glimpse of her. Saw her maybe thirty seconds out of my whole lifetime but I still remember her and you are absolutely a dead ringer for that lady. Isn’t that remarkable? You mind me talking this way?”

It sounded like a variant of the archaic “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before” gambit but she didn’t think that was it. He was a feisty little rat but she was sure he was too sly to risk insulting Mrs. Albert LaCasse.

She presented to him another of her cool smiles, one calculated to remind him of his station relative to hers. She said, “I’m sure it wasn’t me you saw. I don’t gamble.”

“You must have a twin sister then.”

“No. Just coincidence, I suppose—like my being in this building today.”

“Must be,” he agreed. “Hard to believe there’s two like you walking around. You’re a real good-looking woman, Mrs. LaCasse. I hope you don’t mind me saying so. Your husband’s a real fortunate man.”

“Nice of you to say so. I suppose in your business you must come across quite a few cases of unusual resemblances. Mistaken identity.”

“Oh sure. Nothing less reliable than an eyewitness. Look how I just mistook you for someone else. Happens all the time.”

“That must make it fun when you’re trying to find someone who’s disappeared.”

“Well—sometimes that’s a fact, yes ma’am. In fact I recall a case …”

She heard him out—a rambling tale—and when he beamed so she could appreciate the punch line she said, “I like to read detective stories but I gather there isn’t much truth in them. Tell me something—I’m fascinated by what you do—suppose someone, oh, let’s say a woman like me. Suppose I disappeared one day without a trace. How would you go about looking for me? What do you call it again—skip-tracing?”

“Yes ma’am.”

He gave her a smile that tried to curry favor. “That would depend on whether you disappeared on purpose. Some people meet with accidents or foul play. That’s a different matter. When a person disappears, first thing you do is normally check all the hospitals, emergency services, friends and relatives of the subject, business associates. Thing is, is that you’d be surprised how many people go away on a business trip—something just came up, you know, spur of the moment—and maybe they forget to tell the wife about it. Half the time you just ask the guy’s secretary, she knows exactly where he is, what hotel he’s staying in, all that stuff. Case closed. See, the first thing you do is just ask sensible questions.”

“Of course,” she said, “but let’s suppose someone has deliberately disappeared. Say you’re looking for a woman who’s married to a drunk or something. Say he beats her all the time and she’s just got to get away from him—far away, where he’ll never find her again. And say the husband hires you to bring her back. How do you find her?”

She knew people tended to be flattered when you asked them about what they did. She’d learned that in a previous life. And it proved easy to draw him out. He sat back and lit a small cigar—it didn’t occur to him to ask if she minded—and said, “Well, first you’d go back to the public records. You find out where she was born, the family background, where she went to school. You check out voting registration, driver’s license, credit files. All this is perfectly legal, you understand. Public records are open to the public. Anyway you build up this jacket on the subject—that’s a fact file. Have you got time, Mrs. LaCasse?”

“I have a luncheon appointment but I can be a little late. Go on. I’m intrigued.”

“Let’s see. Okay, you check with the subject’s doctor and dentist. Family and friends. Chances are some of them have heard from the subject. People have to have their medical records forwarded—for insurance applications or maybe they go into a hospital for some disease and the hospital needs a history on the patient. Whatever. Sometimes people just can’t help getting in touch with their mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers. Or their children.”

“But some of them must be smart enough not to get in touch with people that way.”

“Some are, sure. There’s still ways. A lot of skips seem to figure all they need to do is move to another state and they’re safe. It’s such a big country, you know, two hundred and forty million people, seems so easy to lose yourself out there. A lot of skips don’t even bother to change their names. It’s a hassle, changing your name. You got to start all over with fresh documents, new identification from scratch—it’s hard work. So a lot of people just keep their name and their Social Security number and all that. They move someplace halfway across the country and they apply for a driver’s license and open a bank account and bang, it’s in the computer and we got ’em.

“Credit applications, that’s another one. We buy the subject’s old credit applications from companies that the subject got an account with. We just keep developing facts that way. A friend of mine, investigator out west in Marin County, he likes to say the thing about facts is, is that you put them together and it’s like sex, they produce more facts. So you work the facts. You contact the oil companies and half the time you find out the subject left a trail of gasoline credit card charges all the way across the country right to the new doorstep. You get in touch with the company, you give the subject’s name, you say you’re the subject. Maybe you act angry. You complain you haven’t been receiving your bills and you don’t want to risk your credit rating. You think maybe they got the wrong forwarding address and you ask what address the bills are being mailed to.”

The thin cigar had grown a tall ash. He tapped it into a glass tray on the desk.

He’d warmed to the subject just as he had that night at the di

“Sometimes we try to use the Internal Revenue. They’re not supposed to give out information but sometimes you can get through. You tell them you’re on the bookkeeping computer at ex-wye-zee company, you’ve got a W-2 or a 1099 form that you need to send to this person but it came back address unknown and maybe does the IRS have a forwarding address for this person so he can get his taxes straight. I’ve used that one a dozen times. It’s illegal, of course, but I guess we all know you don’t get much done if you don’t bend the regulations a little, just now and then.”

She remembers how his sycophantic wink made her feel soiled. The cigar had gone out; he relit it with a plastic lighter. “If you’ve got some idea what part of the country the subject may have headed for, you call the phone company out there, you ask for the New Listings Operator. Sometimes that gets you an address.