“No way. She’s too stressed out. We can fill her in afterwards.”
I arrived at the top level of the structure, heart pounding, out of breath. One of these days, I was going to have to start jogging again. Amazing how quickly the body tends to backslide. When we reached the car, I shifted impatiently from foot to foot while Dietz went through his inspection routine with the Porsche, checking the doors first for any signs of a booby trap, peering at the engine, the underside of the chassis, and up along the wheel mounts. Finally, he unlocked the door on my side and ushered me in. I leaned across the driver’s seat and unlocked his door for him.
He got in and started up the engine. “Lay you dollars to doughnuts, there’s nobody left. If this traumatic event took place in January nineteen forty, you’re talking more than forty years ago. Whatever happened, all the principal players would be a hundred and ten … if any were alive.”
I held my hand out. “Five bucks says you’re wrong.”
He looked at me with surprise and then we shook hands on the bet. He glanced at his watch. “Whatever we do, let’s be quick about it. Rochelle Messinger’s due up here in an hour.”
Pulling out of the parking structure, he cut over one block and headed left on Santa Teresa Street. Concorde was only nine blocks north of the courthouse, the same quiet tree-lined avenue Clyde Gersh and I had walked yesterday in our search for Agnes. Unless I was completely off, this had to be an area she recognized. Certainly, it was the address given for Emily Bronfen at the time of her death. It was also the house where Irene’s parents resided at the time of her birth ten years later.
Dietz turned right onto Concorde. The nursing home was visible above the treetops, half a block away. I was watching house numbers march upward toward the eleven-hundred mark, my gut churning with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Please let it be there, I thought. Please let us get to the bottom of this . . .
Dietz slowed and pulled into the curb. He turned the engine off while I stared at the house. It was right next door to the place where Mark Messinger had caught up with me and sprayed the porch with gunfire.
I held a hand out to Dietz without even looking at him. “Pay up,” I said, gaze still pinned on the three-story clapboard house. “I met Bronfen yesterday. I just figured out how I know him. He turned the place into a board-and-care. I met him once before when a friend of mine was looking for a facility for her sister in a wheelchair.” I saw a face appear briefly at a second-floor window. I opened the car door and grabbed my handbag. “Come on. I don’t want the guy to scurry out the back way.”
Dietz was right behind me as we pushed through the shrieking iron gate and went up the front walk, taking the porch steps two at a tune. “I’ll jump in if you need me,” he murmured. “Otherwise, you’re the boss.”
“You may be the only man I ever met who’d concede that without a fight.”
“I can’t wait to see how you do this.”
“You and me both.” I rang the bell. The owner took his sweet time about answering. I really hadn’t even formulated what I meant to say to him. I could hardly pretend to be doing a marketing survey.
He opened the door, a heavyset man in his seventies, diffuse light shining softly on his balding pate. It was strange how different he looked to me. Yesterday, his elongated forehead had lent him a babylike air of innocence. Today, the furrowed brow suggested a man who had much to worry him. I had to make a conscious effort not to stare at the mole on his cheek. “Yes?”
“I’m Kinsey Millhone. Do you remember me from yesterday?”
His mouth pulled together sourly. “With all the gun battles going on, it’d be hard to forget.” His gaze shifted. “I don’t remember this gent.”
I tilted a nod at Dietz. “This is my partner, Robert Dietz.”
Dietz reached past me and shook hands with Bronfen. “Nice to meet you, sir. Sorry about all the uproar.” He put his left hand behind his ear. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“Pat Bronfen. If you’re still looking for that old woman, I’m afraid I can’t help. I said I’d keep an eye out, but that’s the best I can do.” He moved as though to close the door.
I held a finger up. “Actually, this is about something else.” I took the birth certificate from my handbag and held it out to him. He declined to take it, but he scanned the face of it. His expression shifted warily when he realized what it was. “How’d you get this?”
The inspiration came to me in a flash. “From Irene Bronfen. She was adopted by a couple in Seattle, but she’s instituted a search for her birth parents.”
He squinted at me, but said nothing.
“I take it you’re the Patrick Bronfen mentioned on her birth certificate?”
He hesitated. “What of it? ”
“Can you tell me where I might find Mrs. Bronfen?”
“No, ma’am. That woman left me more than forty years ago, and took Irene with her,” he said, with irritation. “I never knew what happened to the child, let alone what became of Sheila. I didn’t even know she put the child up for adoption. Nobody told me the first thing about it. That’s against the law, isn’t it? If I wasn’t even notified? You can’t sign someone’s child away without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“I’m not really sure about the legalities,” I said. “Irene hired me to see what I could find out about you and your ex-wife.”
“She’s not my ex-wife. I’m still married to the woman in the eyes of the law. I couldn’t divorce her if I didn’t know where she was.” He gestured impatiently, but he was running out of steam and I could see his mood shift. “That wasn’t Irene, sitting on my front porch steps yesterday, was it?”
“Actually, it was.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. I remember her when she was this high. Now she’d have to be forty-seven years old.” He stared down at the porch, brow knitting parallel stitches between his eyes. “My own baby girl and I didn’t recognize her. I always thought I’d be able to pick her out of a crowd.”
“She wasn’t well. You really never got a good look at her,” I said. He looked up at me wistfully. “Did she know who I was?”
“I’m sure she didn’t. I didn’t realize it myself until a little while ago. The certificate says Sumner. It took us a while to realize the address was still good.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t recognize the house. She was almost four when Sheila took her. Used to sit right there on the steps, playing with her dollies.” He shoved his hands in his pockets.
It was occurring to me that Irene’s asthma attack might well have been generated by an unconscious recognition of the place. “Maybe some of the memories will come back to her once she knows about you,” I said.
His eyes had come back to mine with curiosity. “How’d you track me down?”
“Through the adoption agency,” I said. “They had her birth certificate on file.”
He shook his head. “Well, I hope you’ll tell her how much I’d like to see her. I’d given up any expectation of it after all these years. I don’t suppose you’d give me her address and telephone number.”
“Not without her permission,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m still interested in finding Mrs. Bronfen. Do you have any suggestions about where I might start to look?”
“No, ma’am. After she left, I tried everything I could think of-police, private investigators. I put notices in the newspapers all up and down the coast. I never heard a word.”
“Do you remember when she left?”
“Not to the day. It would have been the fall of nineteen thirty-nine. September, I believe.”
“Do you have any reason to think she might be dead?”
He thought about that briefly. “Well, no. But then I don’t have any reason to think she’s still alive either.”
I took a small spiral-bound notebook from my handbag and leafed through a page or two. I was actually consulting an old grocery list, which Dietz studied with interest, looking over my shoulder. He gave me a bland look. I said, “The adoption agency mentions someone named Anne Bronfen. Would that be your sister? The files weren’t clear about the connection. I gathered she was listed as next-of-kin when the adoption forms were filled out.”
“Well now, I did have a sister named Anne, but she died in nineteen forty . . . three or four months after Sheila left.”