the salt shaker between his thumb and index finger and shook it into Frings’s coffee. Amateur tough-guy stuff. Holding Smith’s eye, Frings picked up the mug and took a long sip of the coffee. More stupid tough-guy stuff, he knew, but when you were dealing with stupid tough guys . . .
Smith winked and stood up. Putting down the mug, Frings watched him saunter out the door and into a black Ford idling at the curb. One of these days, Frings thought, I’m going to push him too far.
CHAPTER TEN
Stenciled on the outside of Poole’s door in black-edged gold paint were the words ETHAN POOLE, INVESTIGATIONS AND INQUIRIES. This work was not exactly a steady source of income, but it did augment the money he got from his less legal endeavors. Mostly it consisted of tailing husbands or wives or business partners and either confirming or allaying his clients’ fears. Sometimes he falsely reported good news while blackmailing the disloyal spouse or scheming partner, depending on who the client was. He looked to Carla for guidance in those situations, trusting her to determine where his clients were positioned in the chain of production. This visitor, though, was not his typical client.
The woman was in the twilight of middle age. Her hair was chopped short, haphazardly. Her face and body were puffy and pale in a way that didn’t seem to make sense. Clearly, her features had once been attractive, and Poole saw a dignity even now trying to assert itself on the drooping shoulders and heavy gait. Her eyes, however, were lost and, half-covered by their lids, moved slowly in their sockets.
Poole’s living room served as his office. He gestured for the woman to sit in the chair opposite his couch as he placed a pad on the inner thigh of his crossed leg and pulled a pen from his breast pocket. She sat with her hands in her lap, her gaze directed at his black brogue, which he wagged restlessly.
“I want you to find my son,” she said, her words slurred around the edges.
“Okay. When did he go missing?”
“Seven years ago.”
“Seven years ago?” he asked, confused.
She nodded.
“Have the police been looking for him during this time?”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Wait. You mean to say, you haven’t been in contact with the police?”
She shook her head.
Poole closed his eyes hard to refocus his thoughts. Her son missing for seven years and she doesn’t know if the police are looking for him? And she waits this long before contacting a detective? There was more to it, too. Her manner . . .
“Okay, what were the circumstances of his disappearance?”
“We were separated.”
“How do you mean?”
She shrugged.
“By who?”
She shrugged again, seeming neither impatient nor frustrated by these questions she could not answer.
“How about your son’s father? Your husband?”
“He was killed.”
“When was this? The same time you and your son were separated?”
She nodded. “Around then.”
“Do you have any thoughts about where your son could be?”
She did not. Nor did she have a picture of her son or her husband or any other type of starting point for Poole.
“What’s your son’s name?” Surely she knew this, at least.
“Casper.”
“Okay. Last name?”
“Prosnicki. His father was Ellis Prosnicki.”
When Lena Prosnicki left, Poole uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured a fair amount into a pint glass. He looked at his notebook, open to a page of mostly unanswered questions. She had left saying that there was no way of contacting her, but that her son, Casper, would know how to find her once Poole found him. This made no sense, of course, but then little about her had. Poole would normally have run from such a situation without a second thought, but Mrs. Prosnicki had handed him five hundred dollars in cash and said to do whatever amount of work for her that might cover—and if he had still not found Casper, then he would at least have done his best. She was so odd and defeated and—what?—that he did not expect she would be able to find anyone else to make inquiries for her. So he had accepted and she had nodded in that vague way of hers, seeming neither particularly happy nor satisfied.
The other point that left him uneasy was her sheer lack of understanding or concern about what had happened to her son. They had been “separated.” Her husband had been killed. But she was unable to supply even a hint of the circumstances of these events. Nor did she mention them with any