Chapter Eleven
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The air-conditioning in the office building on Fifth Avenue feels like it costs twelve hundred dollars an hour.
I put my nose against Holden’s. “Let’s stay here all day, what do ya say, koala?
Huh? My wittle sweedles. My wittle snuggle bear.
” I am rubbing my nose against his, using my silliest baby voice, when a fembot assistant appears.
She is holding a tray of water. Still? Sparkling?
How to decide? She then pulls out a basket full of stuffies.
“Family law. We’re stocked,” she says, winking.
She presents the basket to Holden. He’s just developed a sense of color and depth perception.
He can’t go shopping for a complimentary stuffie out of a bespoke basket.
I pick out a gray rhinoceros from the pile and dangle it in front of his happy little well-air-conditioned face.
Fembot explains that August Levin is tied up and can’t meet me, but he’s set me up with Greta, “one of his top associates.”
She leads us into a conference room where Holden settles into his afternoon nap and I guzzle at least three bottles of complimentary Voss.
An hour later, I poke my head out. “Sorry, I’ve got about twenty more minutes of this nap before hell breaks out,” I say in my most subservient voice.
Fembot holds a finger in my direction. “Sutter, Lang and Weintraub,” she says into the phone. “Please hold.”
It’s nearly three when Holden starts to stir and Greta comes in, exuding the kind of calm competence that confirms a thirty-something woman’s choice not to have children. “You must be Emily Joan? Pleasure.” She reaches out her slim hand to shake mine. Wrist stacked with Cartier Love bracelets.
Holden begins to sob. I offer him a bottle of breast milk, but he rejects it.
I try a blueberry-flavored Happy Baby teething wafer.
He grasps it, right on schedule, per Dr. Brooke.
“At fifteen weeks, your little one is getting pretty good with their hands, bringing everything and anything to their mouths.”
Greta gives us a tight smile.
“I really appreciate you doing this,” I say.
“Happy to help a busy working mom.” Is that what I am? A busy working mom? No one has ever called me that before. I almost forgot that I have a job I’ll have to go back to in a couple of months.
I explain that I am trying to find my best friend from college. “Her name is Daisy…We lost touch.” I push my stack of paperwork toward Greta.
“Did you try Facebook?”
Facebook? Really, Greta? “It’s all here.
Name. Last known address, employment. If someone could do a background check?
” I reach into the stack of chronologically ordered lewd magazines—Cum Drop City (Germany), Lolita (the Netherlands), Goo Girls (Germany)—that I’d marked with Post-it notes, flagging any hint of Daisy, or “Jacki.” Greta takes one look at the triple-X images and almost dry-heaves.
“I know, it’s all sort of…graphic,” I say.
“The last time Daisy did any of this kind of work it was”—I check my reporter’s notebook—“eleven, twelve years ago? So I don’t even know if she’s still working in the industry. ”
Greta’s eyes drift out of the conference room. I see her make a sort of Help me face to an associate with six-inch black patent stilettos and a stack of manila folders.
“I realize this may be below your pay grade, but I schlepped a four-month-old fifty blocks uptown, through a crowd of climate activists and a man trying to take a shit in a Snapple bottle, because your firm handles ‘sensitive, time-critical cases.’ Well, this is it. My best friend disappeared. Years ago. And yeah, maybe this is insane. Maybe I’m projecting.
Maybe I just need something to care about that isn’t a silicone nipple or medical bills, but she could be in trouble. Or dead.”
“Absolutely. I’ll…delegate.” Greta pushes herself from the boardroom table, leaving the magazines and stack of research.
Greta is gone. “Appreciate your help,” I say, finishing off my complimentary sparkling. Holden is crying. I lean down, stick my face against his tush, inhale. He’s dirty. I am digging under the table to find the blueberry teething wafers that fell on the floor when a voice wafts in.
“We’ve got a restroom at reception…if you want to change him,” Fembot says.
Could she smell it from the next room? “Um, yeah. Thanks.”
The restroom has a cherrywood midcentury changing table and Apothecary lavender and chamomile baby powder.
I change Holden and sit on a sheepskin ottoman to give him a bottle.
I then stuff seven Coterie organic diapers into my bag.
I am waiting for the elevator when a man in an Armani suit and pocket square stops me.
“Penelope’s friend, right?” He reaches to shake my hand.
“August Levin.” He looks into the Yoyo. The shade is pulled.
Holden is milk drunk, sucking on a pacifier.
You can’t see his face. “Cute kid. Look, I know Greta can come off as sort of…detached? You hire these kids because they made Law Review, but they’ve got the client skills of a stapler, you know? ”
“I don’t.”
“I want you to know that we’re on it. We’ll run a background check—criminal records, civil cases, sex offender list, full social media scrub, employment verification, even obituaries.
If your girlfriend as much as tapped a debit card yesterday, we’ll know.
” He talks like a man who charges by the minute, a taxi meter running on human drama.
“Thank you. Wow. That’s…I really appreciate it.”
“Not a problem. Anything for Peepers. God I adore that woman.”
“Yeah. She’s the best, right?” Peepers? I squint, studying him, wondering if this is more than the monthly legal retainer. Did they fuck? He is her type. New money. Swagger. The opposite of Penelope’s husband. Old money. Castrated.
August presses the down button. He is holding the elevator doors open with a Gucci loafer, making sure we safely get inside. He smells like cedar and sandalwood and is wearing a silver Patek Philippe. “Give her my love?”
“Will do. Thanks again.” I linger on him. Oh, they definitely fucked.
Holden and I are alone, on our way downstairs, changed, refreshed, supplied with a stash of stolen organic diapers worth at least a hundred and fifty dollars and an investigator on the case.
I look at Holden. I wave the rhinoceros stuffie at him.
He lets out a squeal. “Somebody actually held a door open for us, Holden. It’s all happening!
” Woo. Woo. Woooo. “That’s right, they’re gonna find Daisy!
” He squeals and squeals and smiles. I am smiling at my baby, seeing my exact smile back at me.
It is like looking into a mirror that hasn’t shattered yet.
—
That evening, some guy named Amir calls my cell.
He tells me there is no record that Daisy is dead, but there is also no record that she is alive.
Huh? “Doesn’t mean she’s not a Jane Doe who wound up unmarked in a morgue somewhere.
That tends to happen a lot with these women,” Amir says.
These women. He didn’t find any tax or property records, but obviously, she works in a cash business.
There is no record that she is a sex offender, but I already knew that, too.
These women tend to be victims, not offenders.
Nothing on social media. Thanks, Amir. Maybe I should charge twelve hundred dollars an hour.
Amir did, however, get a hit on criminal history.
Scenarios start to flash in my head. Did things get rough with a john and she had to defend herself?
Did she get desperate and rob or hurt someone who deserved to be robbed or hurt?
I imagine a scene from Taxi Driver. “Here is a woman who would not take it anymore. A woman who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a—” Then Amir tells me about the unpaid speeding ticket.
“Happened outside Waco in 2010,” he says.
“Texas state troopers pulled her over doing nearly a hundred in a sixty.”
A flash of the past. “I remember that speeding ticket.” Daisy had just started dancing at the Landing Strip, working weekends and early shifts, still hoping to stay in school.
We had an essay due the next day; I think it was for a Power of Prose freshman seminar.
Daisy hadn’t written a word. She’d had a real spiral about this essay because she was trying to apply for financial aid and if she flunked this one, it was over.
The ticket pushed Daisy over the edge. I offered to pay it.
We both took an Adderall, washing it down with peppermint tea.
We played David Bowie and stayed up all night writing.
I remember Daisy’s A-plus opening line: “In the summer of 2004, I set out to investigate a man I never knew: my father…”
“That’s it?” I ask. “How can that be all?”
“We’ve run it through the system. She could’ve been arrested under a different identity, a fake name. It would really help if you could get us fingerprints, DNA?”
“I wish. Any idea where she is now?”
Holden is on my hip. I’m heating up baby oatmeal in the microwave. I check to make sure that my phone isn’t in there. Oh, right, I am talking on it. Roman has drinks with his team after work, so it is just me and Holden and Trader Joe’s instant Japchae Korean Glass Noodles & Vegetable Stir Fry.
Amir says the last known address was at a rehab facility in LA, but that was thirteen years ago.
LexisNexis did get one possible hit, a couple of references to a high-end escort named Jacki in a Kuala Lumpur newspaper, related to a Malaysian tycoon at the center of a massive financial scandal.
“She lives in Malaysia?” Flying to Southeast Asia for a weekend will be a bigger ask.
“No. Last time anyone saw Hu Lee, he was living in New York, with a girl.”
“Sorry, who?”
“Hu, the Malaysian billionaire. He was hiding in New York with a hired girl.”