Inherit the Dead

the only thing he’d been able to salvage from the divorce). Montauk was the far end of the island, so he’d be annoyed for a while. People out that way claimed that their town had been the inspiration for Jaws, and Perry in his sour moments liked to imagine a two-ton great white emerging from the water to gobble up all the actors and investment bankers and their fawning acolytes.
    He’d had a client a couple of years ago, an economist at Columbia who thought his boyfriend was cheating. They had a place in Southampton, and the boyfriend lived there full time, while the professor drove out on weekends. Perry must have braved the Long Island Expressway a dozen times over the course of a month. Passersby gawked at his ancient car and took him for common, which he certainly was. Finally, Perry concluded that the boyfriend was true as steel. But the client sent him back to take another look. Perry went along, because in those days he was what his father used to call short funds . It tookhim another week to figure it out. The boyfriend was clean. It was the professor who was cheating, and hoping to find evidence of a dalliance by his partner to make the breakup easier.
    Clients lied. All of them, without exception. Perry pondered this most basic rule of the business as his Northstar V8 allowed him to accelerate past the shiny new Priuses and Audis of environmentally conscious millionaires. Clients lied. There were the clever ones who lied because they were proud, and the shy ones who lied because they were ashamed. There were the mothers who lied about what they’d done to their children, and the husbands who lied about what they’d done to their wives. Clients lied to protect their own guilt or somebody else’s innocence. Lots of the lies were innocuous. But a lot of them weren’t. Half the time, the job the client really wanted Perry to do was a lot grubbier than the job he had supposedly been hired for.
    Like his new client, Julia Drusilla. She might not have been lying, but she certainly wasn’t telling the whole truth. Perry had felt it from the moment he walked in. She had sat there beneath that fading portrait of her father and smiled her butter-won’t-melt smile and sipped her tea and told him considerably less than half the story.
    Perry didn’t know yet what she was leaving out, but he could make some educated guesses.
    Take Norman, Julia’s ex-husband. Whoever heard of a missing-child case in which the mother wasn’t screaming that the whole thing was her ex’s fault? And then there was the ammo. The drinking. But all Julia had to say was that Perry should be sure to talk to him. Then there was her sad confession that she couldn’t actually remember the last time she had clapped eyes on her daughter—an event no mother was likely to forget. Or maybe it was her determination to keep the investigation away from the police. Lots of clients asked for that when the question was whether some relative had a hand in the till. But when a family member vanished, they usually hired the PerryChristos of the world to supplement, not to supplant, the official inquiry.
    This was why he didn’t like missing-persons cases: the lies were almost always central to the mystery. Once you solved the lie, the mystery ceased to mystify. Some parent or spouse was always teary, but in Perry’s experience, nine times out of ten the husband or wife or child who was missing had run away voluntarily—and, most of the time, had an excellent reason for not wanting to go back. Usually the reasons involved the very person who’d hired Perry in the first place.
    He wondered what Angel was running from. Julia Drusilla had spoken with relative warmth and understanding of her ex-husband, Norman. It would be interesting to learn whether those feelings were reciprocated. If Perry’s own twisted life was any indication, Norman and Julia fought a lot, especially about Angel. He was even willing to bet that Norman saw less of his daughter than he would like. Perry had never met Norman Loki, but he already sympathized with him.

    The expressway ended abruptly when one reached the rich part of the island, as though the denizens of the Hamptons and points east wanted to make it as hard as possible to find their weekend McMansions. In summer, the expressway would be clogged all the way to the terminus; although it was winter, and traffic light, Perry exited early by habit and was on Route 27, the Sunrise Highway, which resembled main roads