Photo Finish (9781101537510) Read online

  A figure stirred in one of the overstuffed armchairs. In the flashes from the screen, I’d mistaken him for a heap of towels or blankets. Mrs. Davenport muted the sound.

  “Who you work for?” he said. “They have money for prints?”

  “Gaudy Press. They have some money, but they don’t throw it around.” I looked around for a place to sit and finally perched on the arm of another chair. “They’re especially interested in your work in the eighties. When you were in Africa.”

  “Never was in Africa.” Hunter shot a look at his mother.

  “If they want to pay you for your work—” Mrs. Davenport began, but he cut her off.

  “I said I never was in Africa. You don’t know anything about my life away from here.”

  “I’m only deaf, not crazy,” his mother snapped. “Why don’t you see if you can make some money? Show this lady your photographs. Even if you don’t have Africa, you’ve got plenty of others.”

  “You go back to Oprah, and the lady can go back to her publisher and tell them no sale.” He took the control from his mother and restored the sound; a woman whose car had broken down on the Santa Ana Freeway had been rescued by an angel.

  I moved close enough to him that I could see his frayed T-shirt and the stubble of graying hair on his chin. “Your son says you were in South Africa in 1986.”

  He curled his lip at me. “I don’t have a son. That I know of.”

  “Helen Alder’s son? That the two of you produced after you married in Vietnam?”

  “Helen Alder? I never heard of a . . .” His voice trailed away, and then he said with a ferocious urgency that astounded me, “Where are you really from?”

  “Could we go where we can hear each other?”

  His mother watched suspiciously when he pushed himself up from his chair, but she stayed behind when he led me to the kitchen. The stuffy air was larded with stale dishwater. The window had a two-by-four nailed across it to keep it from opening. Sweat started to gather at the back of my neck.

  “Who sent you to me?” His teeth showed, crooked and tobacco-stained, through the stubble.

  “Your son.”

  “I don’t have any children. I never married. I never was in Africa.”

  “What about Vietnam?” I asked.

  He shot me an angry look. “And if I say, ‘Yeah, I was there,’ you won’t believe I didn’t marry this Helen whosis.”

  “Try me.” I wanted to keep my voice affable, but standing in the musty room was hard on my back as well as my manners.

  “I was a photographer. For the old Chicago American before it folded. I covered the war for them from sixty-three to sixty-nine. Sur Place bought a lot of my shots—the French were more interested in Indochina than we were. After the paper collapsed, I signed on with them as a freelancer.”

  “Where were you in 1986? Here?”

  He shook his head. “Europe. England. Sometimes New York.”

  I took a notepad from my handbag and started fanning my face with it. “When did you come back to Chicago? Do you work for Sur Place out of here?”

  His face contorted into a sneer. “I haven’t worked for anyone for a long time. My mother doesn’t like me sponging off her, but she’s paranoid about burglary, and she thinks a man around the house, even a washed-up ex-photographer, is better than living alone. Now it’s your turn. And don’t give me any crap about being a freelance writer.”

  “Okay. I’m a private investigator. A man claiming to be Hunter Davenport Junior asked me to find you.” I showed him my license.

  His face began to look like dull putty. “Someone was pulling your leg. I don’t have a son.”

  “Fair, very good-looking, most people would be proud to claim him.”

  He began to fidget violently with the utensil drawers. “Get the guy to give you a blood sample. We’ll compare DNA. If his matches mine, you’re welcome to my whole portfolio. How’d you find me?”

  I told him: county birth records followed by tracing Wayland Davenport through old phone books. He’d gone from Cottage Grove Avenue to Loomis, then Montrose, stair-stepping his way up the northwest side until landing at a bungalow in this tiny suburb in 1974. His wife had moved into this little apartment four years ago.

  “So anyone could find me,” he muttered.

  “And is that a problem?”

  He gave an unconvincing laugh. “No one wants to find me these days, so it’s no problem whatsoever. Now, you’ve wasted your time and mine enough. Go hunt up some real mystery. Like who your client is and why he’s stolen my name.”

  I stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked back at him. “By the way, who is Helen Alder?”

  He bared his teeth, showing a broken chip on the left incisor. “The figment of your client’s imagination.”

  I put a business card on the countertop. “Give me a call if you decide to tell me the truth about her.”

  As I made my way through the dim passage to the front door, someone on television was extolling a drug whose side effects included nausea, fainting and memory loss. Over the cheerful tout, Mildred Davenport’s voice rose querulously, demanding to know whether I was going to buy any of his pictures. Her son said something inaudible. The last thing I heard on my way out was her calling to him to make sure he put the chain bolt on behind me.

  When I stepped back into the sticky July heat, the back of my blouse was wet all the way across my shoulders. I smelled of stale grease. I sank into my car and turned on the air conditioner. Behind me a blue Toyota was idling, the driver lying with the seat reclining so that all I could see was the newspaper over his chest, like a character in a James Bond movie.

  I made a U-turn and drove as fast as I could to the expressway. I wanted to get to the Trefoil and ask my client the same questions Hunter Davenport had put to me: Who had given me those five hundred-dollar-bills and why did he really want to find Hunter Davenport?

  III

  My client had checked into the Trefoil as Hunter Davenport, but he’d gone out early this morning and hadn’t come back yet. The receptionist wouldn’t tell me if young Hunter had used another name on check-in or if he’d shown a credit card.

  “Ma’am, I’m sure you must understand that I cannot possibly discuss our guests with you.”

  I pulled out my ID. “I’m a private investigator. Normally I don’t discuss my cases any more than you discuss your guests, but when Mr. Davenport hired me he paid cash and—something I found out this morning makes me wonder whether Davenport is his name.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but unless you are with the police and have legitimate grounds for an inquiry, I cannot discuss any of our guests with any outsider. Newspaper reporters have come up with such inventive ways of violating privacy that it’s our ironclad rule.”

  “You often have celebrities here?”

  “We often have guests who prize privacy. That’s why they choose the Trefoil.”

  The Trefoil is a small boutique hotel. There wasn’t any way I could hover unobtrusively in the lobby and sneak into the elevator. I wrote a note for Hunter Davenport asking him to call me as soon as he came in. When I handed it to the receptionist, I managed to sneak a look at the cubbyhole where he put the envelope: 508. It never hurts to know.

  When I got to my office, my part-time assistant told me the client had called. “He said to thank you for your help, but he’s decided it’s a needle in a haystack and not to go on looking. The five hundred can cover your fee and expenses.”

  I thought my jaw might crack my sternum, it dropped so far and fast. “When did he call?”

  Mary Louise looked at her notes. “At one o’clock.”

  It was almost two now, so he’d stopped the investigation before I’d visited the hotel. I told Mary Louise about the case.

  “Findi
ng Hunter Senior was easier than I thought it would be, actually. But the guy claims he never had a kid. He even offered to do a DNA match. That might have been a bluff, but it didn’t sound like it. He knows something about Helen Alder, something that got him pretty agitated, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the kid.”

  Helen Alder’s name didn’t mean any more to Mary Louise than it had to me. We talked it over for a bit until Mary Louise left to pick her foster kids up from summer camp. Before she took off, she had me fill out an expense report and a time sheet—an important reason I keep her on my payroll. I had a clean profit of a hundred fifty. At least I could afford another call to Paris.

  Although it was now nine twenty in Europe, Monsieur Duval was indeed in, and indeed he did speak English. Certainly he remembered ’Unter Davenport, but this was a matter most strange, that I was the second person to ask for him in one month. Could it be that Davenport’s fortunes were going to change, that he might once again be going to work? If so, Sur Place would like to continue to represent him: He had done very inventive work in the past.

  “Do you know where he is now?” I asked.

  “We think he maybe go to Chicago, but we have no direct word from him since four years now. One woman at Sur Place, she say he always talk about Chicago when he is unhappy.”

  So the client had gotten the Chicago information from Sur Place. “What kind of pictures did you buy from him?”

  “All kinds. But, of course, for our clients, for Paris Match, or the Sun, we want mostly the faces that are popular with their readers. The Monaco princesses now that Princess Diana is no more, or even Princess Diana’s sons. Sometimes they like Madonna. You know, the celebrity. But by and by ’Unter, he fall more in love with what he sees in a bottle than what he sees behind the camera, and we have to tell him good-bye.”

  “Did he ever shoot a woman named Helen Alder?”

  “’Elen Alder? ’Elen Alder? I do not know this woman. But I will look in our files. If you have e-mail I will let you know.”

  I gave him my details, not very hopefully. If Helen Alder had been a celebrity subject, I think even I would have heard of her. Her name had clearly meant something to Davenport, although it had taken a minute to register. Maybe they’d had some brief fling in Vietnam that he’d forgotten about. She’d had a kid, named him after his biological father, brought him up on the idea that she was a widow. Then the kid found out the truth and started tracking down the photographer.

  It was all useless speculation. I logged onto the Web and did a search through LifeStory and a few other databases but didn’t find any Helen Alders. I gave it up and turned my attention to other clients’ problems.

  IV

  At three the next morning, Davenport came forcibly back to mind when the phone hauled me out of sleep.

  “Vic, why would an old drunk be clutching your business card when he was run over?” It was John McGonnigal, a Chicago police sergeant I used to do a lot of work with. I’d lost track of him when the Department transferred him from downtown to one of the far-northwest precincts.

  “John!” I sat up in bed, trying to scramble my wits together. “What old drunk?”

  “Sixtyish. Five ten, five eleven, three-day growth, chip on left incisor. Ring a bell?”

  Hunter Davenport. I demanded details in exchange for a name and McGonnigal grudgingly supplied them. Hunter had been bar-hopping, as far as the cops could make out, ending up at the Last Belt on Lincoln around one a.m. A witness said a car had actually driven up on the sidewalk and hit Hunter before roaring off into the night. The few onlookers out at that hour couldn’t guess at the color or the make of the car, or remember the license number.

  “He didn’t have any ID. Just some singles wadded up in his pocket and your card. What’s the story, Warshawski?”

  “There is no story. Maybe he was trying to work up the nerve to invite me out for a drink. Have you talked to his mother? No, of course not. You only just learned who he was.” I gave him Mildred Davenport’s address. “I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

  He began a sentence with, “You can leave police business,” but I hung up before he told me where.

  There’s a wonderful freedom in driving the city in the predawn—no one else is out, and you feel as though you own the empty streets. I coasted up to Mrs. Davenport’s building at the same time that McGonnigal’s unmarked car arrived.

  He grunted a greeting but didn’t actively try to keep me from following him into the building. He had phoned Mrs. Davenport from the hospital, waking her up, confirming her nightmares about the city’s dangers, but she buzzed us in. She opened her own door the width of the chain and demanded McGonnigal’s ID, then caught sight of me.

  “What do you know about all this, young woman? Are you with the police? Hunter told me you weren’t really interested in his photographs, but he’s never been mixed up with any crimes—at least not that I know of.”

  “Can we come in, ma’am?” McGonnigal said. “We’ll wake all the neighbors if we have to talk to you through the door.”

  She compressed her mouth in a suspicious line, but unbolted the chain. “Hunter’s been like a cat on a hot brick ever since this lady came over. He’s been drinking way too much for years. I warned him after Vietnam no one would keep a drunk on their payroll forever, and I was right. All those glamorous places he used to visit, all those famous people he took pictures of didn’t count for anything in the end. He had to come home to his ma and the little bit of social security he can claim. So when this lady said maybe someone wanted to buy some of his old pictures, I thought he should talk to her.”

  McGonnigal stopped her to ask me about that; I muttered that I was a go-between with a possible buyer but nothing had come of it. Before he could push me further, Mrs. Davenport interrupted.

  “Yesterday, after this lady left, someone started calling on the phone and hanging up. I thought maybe it was her bothering him, but all Hunter would say was he didn’t know who was on the phone. Finally, about eight o’clock tonight—last night, I should say—the fifteenth time the phone rang, he said, ‘I can’t take this. They’re going to drive me insane.’ And off he went.

  “I knew he was going out to find a bar, like he always does when he’s in trouble. I told him a million times all it gets you is a hangover and the trouble is still there in the morning, but you can’t talk to a drunk. But the calls kept coming. Someone who just said, ‘Hunter, I know where you are, Hunter,’ and then hung up. So the last time I yelled before he could say anything, ‘He’s not here. Leave me alone or I’ll have the cops on you.’ I should have done it then and there, but how could I know they’d follow after him in the street?”

  “Who could have been harassing him?” McGonnigal demanded of me.

  I shook my head, bleakly, and asked Mrs. Davenport if her son had ever discussed any threats from anyone overseas.

  “If he had any troubles like that, he never said anything to me about them. He lived away from home for thirty years, and he wasn’t much of a letter writer at the best of times. I don’t know what he got up to, all the places he visited.”

  “Do you think he could have a child he never told you about?” I asked.

  “With a man, anything’s possible. Just because he’s your own boy doesn’t change that.” She folded her lips tightly.

  McGonnigal was demanding what that was about when his cell phone rang. He grunted into the mouthpiece a few times, then turned to Mrs. Davenport.

  “Does he have any insurance? It looks like they can save him, but it’s going to be expensive.”

  “Insurance? Where would he get insurance? He wasn’t even a vet, just a war correspondent. And if they think I’ve got fifty thousand lying around to pay their rotten bills, they can think again.”

  While McGonnigal relayed the news to the hospital, I wandered into the
back room, looking for evidence of Davenport’s work. I found a worn black zip case under the daybed, where he seemed to keep his clothes and a few personal items. The case was stuffed with hundreds of prints.

  McGonnigal came in and watched me go through them. Near the bottom of the stack, I came on a dozen views of a woman who looked so familiar that I thought I must surely know her. Tortoiseshell combs pulled a halo of ash blond hair away from her face, and her blue-gray eyes smiled at the camera with a wistful yearning. At first I thought my leap of recognition was because she looked so much like my client. But I felt sure I knew her face, and that that was why I thought I’d known him when he had come into my office.

  I tried not to let McGonnigal see I’d come on anything I knew. I was zipping up the case when it fell from my hands, scattering photographs wholesale. I managed to stick a shot of the wistful woman inside my T-shirt while I was scrabbling under the daybed for the rest.

  V

  Sherman Tucker, the Herald-Star’s photo editor, wasn’t happy at climbing out of bed so early in the morning, but he met me at the paper. He took one look at the print I’d borrowed and went without speaking to a cabinet, where he pulled out a thick file.

  “Were you brain-dead thirteen years ago? The only person photographed more back then was Princess Di.”

  “I was in law school,” I mumbled. “My father was dying. I didn’t follow the society pages.”

  Sherman slapped a dozen versions of the face onto the table: Lady Helen Banidore riding to hounds in Virginia; Lady Helen bringing her infant son, Andrew, home from the hospital; opening a charity ball; leaving a courthouse in tears after her divorce; laughing on the arm of a Marine colonel at a British embassy ball.

  She had been born Lady Helen Aldershot, only child of the Earl of Revere. Revere didn’t have a dime, or even a shilling, to his name, so everyone agreed it was a wonderful thing when she had married one of the heirs to Banidore Tobacco in South Carolina. Happiest of all had been the paparazzi who followed her, supplying the insatiable appetites in America and France for beautiful women with titles.