Twenty-one

Before I even brushed my teeth I ran downstairs and turned on the computer to check for Facebook messages. Had Jeff Warren posted something? Did he say where he was? It was ridiculous-I felt like a fifteen-year-old girl waiting for “Billy” to ask me to the prom. I showered and dressed but punctuated every morning ritual with a return to the computer and my Facebook page. It was as if I were tethered to the damn thing and some unseen force was reeling me back in every ten or fifteen minutes.

When I was in the television business, my company had an account with an online outfit called Background.com. It was pretty scary that something like Background.com even existed. I hadn’t thought of it that way in my previous life when I had different notions of the definition of privacy, but the fact that anyone, anywhere could simply plug in your name and get your phone number and vital statistics made me want to close every credit card account, shred every piece of paper that had my name on it, and become a survivalist somewhere in Montana.

The production company used it to vet possible hires and to confirm the reliability of story sources. It wasn’t a given that you’d get all the info you needed on a source, but often you could find out if someone who’d been spilling his guts to you had any hidden agenda or ax to grind. Once I’d learned that a so-called witness to improprieties at a day care center had himself spent time in jail on a lesser but similar charge. It had saved me days and an embarrassing story, but more important, it had saved his potential victims a lifetime of having to repudiate untrue allegations. They never learned how close they came to being ruined.

Instead of checking Facebook for the umpteenth time, I went to the Background Web site. Our passwords used to be changed monthly but were sometimes repeated since Betsy, the department head, wasn’t quite as paranoid as management thought she should be. And it wasn’t easy to keep coming up with memorable words or names every four weeks when you’d been doing it for years and had passwords for just about everything.

When I had left the company the password was Pyewacket1250. Betsy was an animal lover, and Pyewacket was the name of the cat in a movie she was crazy about. The twelve fifty was a constant, a required numerical addition to the password. That part was easy to remember-it was our address. I took a chance and tried to sign on with the old password. No luck.

I considered looking through the newspapers, trying to find a more recent film with animals in it, but how would I know?-They rarely got top billing unless you went back to Marley & Me, and Betsy was more of a cat person than a dog lover. I knew it would mean tipping my hand, but it was a heckuva lot simpler to call Lucy Cavanaugh.

Lucy and I went way back. She’d have liked us to go way forward, too, but I was still committed to my five-year plan for Dirty Business. If I couldn’t make it work, then maybe I’d see about a return to the big city and the career I’d left behind. I can get us a production deal. We’d be a two-woman team and just use the freelancers we liked and only when we needed them. Our lives will be a write-off. I could hear her sales pitch even as I dialed.

The company we’d both worked for had flirted with hard-hitting news stories during my tenure, but I couldn’t take credit for that. I left during the embryonic stage of non-news news. Now there was more money and ratings in missing coeds, baby bumps-real or imagined-and celebrities misbehaving. Those were the things people seemed to care about, and it was one of the reasons I was not unhappy to get out.

Lucy’s assistant, Courtney, always sounded disappointed when she heard it was me on the phone and not a colleague or source about to drop some bomb that would make them all famous. Courtney might have been nicer to me if she knew that I was on the fringes of one of those salacious stories, but I resisted the urge to impress her. She put me through.

“Luce, I need a favor.” I was interrupting her, of course-I could hear her keyboard clicking. It was nearly impossible to get her undivided attention.

“What’s up?” she asked. “I’m checking on a chocolatier who’s being accused of using less cocoa in his candies than he claims. I think we got him.”

I felt so much safer knowing that someone was tracking down the real evildoers. “I’m calling about Caroline Sturgis,” I said.

The clicking stopped, and for a moment I wondered if I had crossed over to the dark side.

Lucy knew Caroline had been extradited to Michigan; everyone who cared to, knew. It was what I would have considered junk news if I hadn’t been tangentially involved. A judge there had scheduled a hearing to be held in three weeks. Until that time Caroline would be making her home in a Michigan jail. I tried to imagine her in a cell instead of in her pristine kitchen with its whiteboard tracking everyone’s activities. What would her new bulletin board read? Walk around courtyard, make hand-carved shivs, design tattoos, join gang?

“They confiscated her knitting needles,” Lucy told me. I could tell she was reading from a screen. “I guess they didn’t think she was a threat to herself or anyone else in the Bridgeport jail, but things are more formal where she is now. Maybe they’ll let her crochet. How much damage can she inflict with a plastic crochet hook? Although I suppose you could kill someone with a sharpened pencil if you stuck it in that right spot.” An interesting theory. I’d have to bring my pencil case the next time I went out at night.

“I need to use Background. Do you guys still have an account?” I whispered, as if someone other than Lucy could hear me.

“You’re wasting your time.” The keyboard clicking resumed. “I already plugged her name in. Just a few old phone numbers under Monica’s name and five under Caroline’s-her home number and four cells which look like hers, her husband’s, and the two kids’. I did get the criminal records, though, and the original arrest report. You want them?”

Sure I did. Lucy sent them and the phone numbers as an E-mail attachment. The police report had been copied so many times it was probably six generations away from the original and nearly impossible to read, but I printed it out anyway.

“Caroline was arrested with two others, Kate Gustafson and Edward Donnelley. I checked them out but nothing much came up,” Lucy said. “She’s dead and he’s out of prison. Gone.”

“I need to look up someone else. Betsy will never know and it won’t cost the company a dime. Can you give me the new password?”

Silence.

“C’mon, it’s five hundred dollars to open a Background account-you know I can’t afford that. Just this once?”

The clicking stopped.

“You know I’m not supposed to. Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for and let me do it?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you just now. Later, I promise. If I’m right I don’t want to scare anyone off with major media coming in.”

“Flatterer. And do I get to use any of the info at some point in the future?”

“Absolutely.”

After a pause she spoke.

“Do we?”

“Do we what?” I asked. “Have a deal? Yes, we do.”

“Dewey. Dewey1250.”