Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

CHAPTER 1

    Leon Spector had dead written all over him, not the kind where they put you in a box, say a few words and toss the earth back over you, not the ashes-to-ashes kind of dead, but the kind that lets the world know that whatever the battle was, you lost, the kind that says that sometime, a long time ago, you were beaten into the ground by circumstances beyond your control. I didn’t know what those circumstances were in Leon’s case, but on a particularly sunny afternoon at the Washington Square Park dog run the month I turned forty and my pit bull, Dashiell, turned five, Leon apparently planned to tell me.
    He met me as I was closing the inner gate, a wide, multicolored camera strap slung around his neck, his Leica hanging low on his chest. I’d*seen him at the run before, not with a dog but with his camera, and I’d seen him taking pictures on other occasions as well, the opening of the new park along the river, the annual outdoor art show, the gay pride parade. Someone said he was a freelance photographer. Someone else said he was working on a book. Until that afternoon, that was all I knew about Leon, but not why he carried not only a camera everywhere he went but also the weight of the world. You could see it pulling him toward the ground, as if the gravity under Leon was working overtime.
    “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said as I bent to unhook Dashiell’s leash. “I couldn’t call you because...“
    I looked up. Leon stopped and fiddled with the strap of his camera.
    “Because I’m not listed?” I asked.
    Leon shook his head. “I never got that far,” he said. “The person who told me about you, who said what I needed was a private investigator and that’s what you . . .“ He stopped and shrugged. “It is, isn’t it?”
    I nodded.
    Leon nodded back. “She just said she’d seen you here and that your dog wore a red collar with his name on it and that you had,” he made a spiral with his left pointer, “long, curly hair. She didn’t know your last name.”
    I didn’t know his last name either, at least not yet, but I didn’t say so. Leon didn’t look in the mood for small talk.
    “What’s the problem?” I asked.
    Instead of answering me, Leon put the camera up to his face and looked through the viewfinder. I wondered if he had a deadline of some sort or if he was just one of those people who talked better if he was doing something else at the same time.
    I heard the shutter click and looked in the direction Leon’s camera was pointing. There was a little girl of about nine or ten sitting alone on a bench, watching the dogs. She was wearing dark glasses and a shirt that looked three sizes too big. Next to her, on the bench, there was a small see-through plastic purse the shape of a lunch pail, with something colorful inside, but I was too far away to make out what it was.
    I waited. Sometimes, doing something else or not, I let the other guy do the talking, see what comes out before adding my own two cents.
    “I need you to find my wife,” he said.
    I guess that explained the sagging shoulders, the hangdog look. He’d been a good-looking man once, you could see that. But now he looked faded, used up, worn out. You could feel the effort it took for him to form sentences, as if he could barely muster the energy to speak.
    “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for my daughter. She’s in trouble and she needs her mother.”
    Dashiell was busy digging a hole in the far comer of the run, a hole I’d have to fill in before I left. I turned to look at Leon now to see if his face might tell me what his words hadn’t. But Leon’s face wasn’t talking either.
    “Where is her mother?”
    “That’s the whole point. I don’t know, not since she walked out on me and Madison.”
    I took out a small notepad and a pencil. I wrote down, “Madison.”
    “Divorced you?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Nothing so...“ He scratched at the dirt with the sole of his shoe. “Nothing as clear as that.“
    “Missing, you mean?”
    Leon nodded. “I do,” he said. “Every day.”
    I nodded. I knew what it was like to miss someone who was gone. I figured, one way or another, just about everyone did. But Leon had a bad case of it, not only being abandoned, but being abandoned with a kid.
    “Come on,” I said, “let’s sit down.”
    We walked over to the closest bench.
    “No clue as to why she left,” I asked, “or where she went?”
    “You ever notice the