Page 30 of A Week Away
“I don’t know where she lives. She was never really around.”
“I found her in the phone book.”
“I don’t know her last name, so how do?—”
“I looked in your mother’s address book. The one with a koala bear on the cover.”
“You went in my mother’s desk? She’s going to be so pissed.”
“You went in your mother’s desk. You stole one of her illegally obtained credit cards. She’ll figure that out eventually.”
“She said I could use one in an emergency.”
I didn’t believe him, so I asked, “And what emergency are you experiencing? Exactly?”
He clamped his mouth shut as his face turned red. Then drove us to the Corktown neighborhood in downtown Detroit where Heather Szymanski lived. It was a silent half an hour and we passed through a number of neighborhoods featuring hundreds of political signs. Clinton seemed to be winning over Dole, while most of the other signs continued to confuse me. The names seemed to change a lot, probably local stuff I didn’t know anything about.
“What’s E?” I asked Cass.
“They want to have casinos in Detroit. My mom’s all excited.”
We drove down Rosa Parks Boulevard and turned onto Marantette Street. The house Heather lived in was two-stories and had once been a single family house. It was now divided into apartments. An extra door had been added on the first floor next to the original front door making it all look chopped up.
After we parked the car and Cass put his anti-theft bar onto the steering wheel, we walked up to the house. He looked around suspiciously—I think he was concerned about the neighborhood but he didn’t say anything.
The neighborhood didn’t look great. Which didn’t mean anything one way or another. I knew of a lot of neighborhoods in Los Angeles that looked fine even when they weren’t. What Ididrecognize was the fear of a suburbanite visiting the big city in Cass’s eyes.
I rang the doorbell, which we could hear quite well on the stoop. Seconds later, footsteps came down the stairs. Locks were opened. Three. Then finally, the door.
Standing there was a woman in her mid-thirties. She had long straight sandy hair, light blue eyes, and freckles on her cheeks. She wore a peasant dress that was years out of style and splashed with paint here and there. She looked from me to Cass, and then said, “Oh my God, Cass… is that you?”
He nodded.
“You look just like your dad.” Recognizing that was a sore subject, she mumbled the word, “Shit.” Then she looked at me and back at Cass.
“This is a friend of mine,” he said.
She looked worried. I decided to drop the Big Brother lie. I wasn’t convinced it worked. I said, “I’m kind of a private investigator. Cass wants to find his father. I understand you’re a friend of his mother, Joanne Reilly.”
“I was. But that was a long time ago. Cass, how can you afford a private investigator?”
Before he could stutter and stumble his way through that, I said, “There was a bit of money when his grandparents died. He just came into it.”
“Why don’t you come up stairs,” she said, stepping aside so we could get to the stairs. Once we were both past her, she shut and relocked the door. We went up the stairs, which were wooden and showed the effects of having been trod upon for about a century.
At the top of the stairs was another door, also with a lock. We walked through it, but Heather didn’t lock it behind us. We were standing in a kitchen that hadn’t been updated in decades. The appliances didn’t match. The stove was white and shaped like a Buick from the fifties, while the refrigerator was harvest gold. In the center of the room was a table and chairs.
On the right, there was a closed door which must have led to the bedroom and bathroom. To the left, pocket doors opened onto a large living room that took up half the floor. It was immediately obvious why she lived here. The room had been turned into an art studio. There were a couple of easels, one large, one small. Both had half-finished paintings on them. There was a table with brushes, glasses filled with mucky water, tubes of paint and dribbled paint all over it. A tarp had been put beneath the table and it, too, was covered in dribblings. There were finished paintings stacked against the walls, and several hung on the walls.
Heather’s style was colorful and abstract, flirting with geometric but never fully committing. It probably didn’t belong in a museum but looked like it might be at home above a sofa. Speaking of sofas, she had one shoved up against the large uncovered windows at one end of the room.
“I really have no idea what happened to Dom,” she said, without offering us anything to drink or even a seat.
“I’m hoping you can tell us about Dom and Joanne when you knew them. I understand you were with Joanne when they met?”
“I was. Joanne and I were pretty wild as teenagers. We loved disco music. I remember skipping school with her and going to a movie theater and watchingSaturday Night Feverover and over again. We were younger when that came out though. By the time we met Dom, it was all about Donna Summer, I think. We loved her. ‘Last Dance’. We started going out a lot that year. To clubs and places. Joanne had gotten us fake IDs. In the daylight they were obvious fakes but at night… well, now I think they let us inbecausewe were so young. We always had great clothes, great makeup, shoes that made us six feet tall. Joanne taught me how to shoplift so it was… Sorry Cass, I don’t mean to make your mother sound awful.”
“Stores charge too much,” he said with a shrug. “They factor it in.”
