U Is for Undertow

him make a public fool of himself. Ah, well. Once I reached my apartment and closed the door behind me, I secured the locks, turned on a couple of lamps, and adjusted the louvered shutters. Then I changed into my comfies, grabbed a quilt, and settled on the couch to read. Happily, I had a weekend coming up and I intended to goof off for the whole of it, which is exactly what I did.

    Monday morning was a wash—busy, but otherwise forgettable. The afternoon was taken up with a due-diligence request for an Arizona mortgage company interested in hiring a high-level executive. According to his résumé, he’d lived and worked in Santa Teresa from June of 1969 until February of 1977. There was nothing to suggest he was hiding information, but the Human Resources director had been in touch, asking me to do a sweep of public records. If irregularities came to light, they’d send one of their investigators to do a follow-up. I was looking at half a day’s work at best, but it wouldn’t be strenuous. A paycheck is a paycheck, and I was happy to oblige.
    At 10:00, I walked over to the courthouse, and spent the next two hours trolling the index of civil and criminal suits, property liens, tax assessments, judgments, bankruptcy filings, marriage licenses, and divorce decrees. There was no evidence of wrongdoing and no suggestion the fellow had ever crossed swords with the law. The problem was that there was no evidence of the guy at all.
    I’d been given an address on the upper east side. On his application, the guy claimed he’d bought the house in 1970 and lived there until he sold it in 1977, but the owner of record was someone else entirely. Since the public library was just across the street, I left the courthouse and jaywalked, approaching the entrance with a suitable sense of anticipation. I love shit like this, catching liars in the act. His fabrications had been so specific and detailed, he must have felt safe, assuming no one would ever bother to check.
    I returned to the reference department, where I’d spent such a satisfactory hour the week before. I shed my windbreaker and hung it across the back of a chair while I pulled the Santa Teresa city directories for the years in question. Again, a fingertip search turned up no trace of the guy. I cross-checked the address in the Haines and Polk and came up with nothing. Well, wasn’t that a kick in the pants?
    I was on my way out of the building when I remembered the dog tag. I took it out again and studied it, tempted by the phone number on one side. It wouldn’t take five minutes to look it up in the Haines. Maybe I’d never know the whole story, but I might glean the odd bit of information. The issue wasn’t pressing. My curiosity was idle and wouldn’t have warranted a separate trip to the library. However, I was already on the premises and the effort required would be minimal.
    I returned to the reference department, which I was beginning to regard as my adjunct office. I took out both the 1966 and 1967 Polk and Haines directories and sat down at what I was beginning to think of as my personal table. I put the tag down beside me and leafed through the Haines until I found the same three-digit prefix. I worked my way down the sequence of numbers until I found a match. In both directories, the number was assigned to a P. F. Sanchez. By flipping back and forth between the Haines and the Polk, I found an address for him, though it wasn’t a street name I recognized. His occupation was contractor; no indication of a wife.
    I returned the directories to the shelf and then crossed to the section where the telephone directories were lined up. I pulled the current Santa Teresa phone book and looked in the S’s, running down the listings until I came to “Sanchez, P. F.” His telephone number was the same, as was his address on Zarina Avenue. Where the heck was that?
    I walked back to my office, sat down at my desk, and hauled out my Thomas Guide to Santa Teresa and Perdido Counties . Zarina Avenue was actually in Perdido County, one of half a dozen streets that formed a grid in the tiny coastal town of Puerto, a name that had morphed into the longer Puerto Polvoriento, which was then shortened to P. Pol and from there to Peephole. I sat and pondered the geography. I’d hoped to feel better informed, which in some ways I was. What puzzled me now was why a man who lived in Peephole would bury his dead dog in Horton Ravine, a good fifteen miles north. There