There was something vaguely, disconcertingly wrong about Joshua Blakely.
He was in his mid-thirties, a slightly tall, slightly thin man with bedhead at two in the afternoon. Not the carefully-cultivated bedhead that the kid are all wearing these days; his was an honest holdover from eight hours on the pillow. He wore a blue denim workshirt and pants, and a beige denim jacket with western yokes that was noticeably darker at the cuffs and collar from ground-in dirt.
His long face bore vertical creases to either side of his mouth that emphasized the thinness of his cheeks. He wore rimless glasses with a weak prescription, and his eyes seemed almost as transparent as the lenses in front of them; they were a crystalline blue, and gave the impression of an unfocused emptiness behind them.
And he was sitting in my client chair.
"I'm trying to find my brother," he said.
"Where did you lose him?" I asked.
He paused just long enough to indicate that he didn't know whether that was supposed to be funny, and didn't care either way.
"In California," he said. "He disappeared about four years ago. He was having some problems with the police. Drug charges. So he went away."
"Why do you think he's not still in California?"
"I looked there," he said. "I couldn't find him."
"California's a big place."
"I couldn't find him," Blakely repeated. "When we were kids, we used to come out here to St. Anselm for family reunions. My grandparents lived here. Then when Weston was in high school he got into skiing, and came out to stay with Grandma and Grandpa over Christmas vacation to go skiing around here. So I thought he might have come here when he went away."
"Do your grandparents still live around here?"
"They died a little before Weston disappeared."
I looked past Blakely's shoulder, out the office window. It was a lightly overcast October day; a couple of tenacious leaves still clung to the maple sapling outside the window.
"I doubt he's skiing this early," I said.
Blakely just looked at me without blinking. He rarely blinked. That added to the glassiness of his expression.
"I think he could have come out this way to live," he said. "I want to find him."
"Why?" I asked. "Why now? After four years?"
"My parents just died two months ago..."
"I'm sorry."
"...And there are inheritance issues," he said, unpunctuated by grief. "Weston and I are the next of kin. The only kin, actually."
I watched Blakely watch me. My initial impression of unfocused emptiness was a little off. There was a certain quiet intensity to Joshua Blakely, but it was deep inside, and seemed otherwise occupied.
"It sounds to me," I said, "like your brother doesn't want to be found."
"That's my concern," he said.
"What I mean is that people who are trying to hide are sometimes a lot harder than people we may have simply lost track of. I have no idea how much time it would take to find him. It could be tomorrow. It could be never. Even if he is around St. Anselm, or somewhere else in the state."
"I think we're talking about a retainer," Blakely said. He pulled a wad of carelessly folded hundred-dollar bills out of his front pants pocket and started unfolding bills and stacking them on my desk until they were standing as high as a deck of cards.
"I think that's enough to get started," he said, and returned the rest of the money to his pocket.
Once again, I watched Blakely watch me with those straightforward, blank eyes.
A private investigator is "self-employed," but that's a deceptive term. Nobody pays themselves. Self-employed people get a succession of temporary bosses, and I was debating whether I wanted to answer to Joshua Blakely for as much time as his stack of Ben Franklins bought.
"Mr. Blakely, how did you come to choose my agency? Were you referred by someone, or --"
"The phone book," he said. "I started at the top. You were the first one I called this morning who could see me today."
And that decided me. Because directly below me in the phone book was Barnetti Investigations. And Terry Barnetti was the kind of qualmless hireling who would do exactly what he was paid for, for exactly as long as he was paid, and never wonder what it was about Joshua Blakely that seemed just a little bit wrong.
"Let me get you a receipt for that retainer," I said.
** ** **
Weston Joseph Blakely. Five and a half years younger than his brother Joshua; he had been twenty-five when they had last seen each other. Medium-brown hair, hazel eyes, shorter but more athletic. I grilled Joshua Blakely for forty-five minutes and took notes about Weston's interests, pastimes, distinguishing features, scholastic aptitudes, jobs, girlfriends, favorite foods, politics, and religion.
That last subject seemed to touch a chord, wherever Joshua Blakely was deep inside those eyes. Their family had not had much spiritual grounding; his parents, he said with a noticeable undercurrent of disapproval, had not been religious people.
"Do you think that Weston minded that?" I asked. "Did he feel he was missing something?"
Blakely blew air out his nose.
"Probably not," he said.
When I had filled seven pages on a yellow pad with jotted notes, I flipped the pad shut and stood up.
"Well, I think I have enough to get started," I said. "Enough to suggest some avenues of inquiry, anyway. I'll most likely need to talk to you again in a couple of days, when I come up with questions I didn't think to ask."
"Actually," he said, "I want you to check in with me every day and tell me what you've found."
"Odds are," I said, "there will be several days when I haven't found anything."
"Then you'll let me know what you haven't found. I insist." He handed me a card from a local Motel 6. "This is where I'm staying."
I shrugged and smiled a canned smile, and started ushering him gently toward the door.
"And one more thing," he said. "When you find him, don't talk to him or approach him. Tell me where he is, and let me be the one to contact him. I insist. I'm very serious."
I agreed and got him out of my office. Then I went to the window and let the winding-down temperatures of autumn swirl around the office and invigorate the air a bit.
That last promise was one I had no intention of keeping.
