Stone Cold: A Sissy Stone Story
Stone’d had clients like this before and the cases went as far as a donkey cart carrying a hippo. This one hadn’t broken that record.
Sissy Stone didn’t think that she’d had a worse meeting with a client in her entire time working as a PI. That included the clients who threatened to sue her when she asked them to pay their bill and who she had to dangle out her office window until they did pay their bill.
Mr Schumann served time for minor dope pushing when he was young but he served his time, started flipping burgers, and got so good at it he opened his own restaurant that turned a small profit. He wasn’t rich but he had money to spend. He got married and had a baby. That baby grew up and one day she disappeared. No note = no suicide. No body = no murder (maybe). No demands = no kidnapping (hopefully-kidnappers who don’t send demands are usually after something else and that no parent wants the kidnapper to get that from their daughter).
That was over a year ago.
Mr Schumann and his wife came to Stone six months after their daughter Anastasia disappeared. The police were banging their heads against the brick wall at the end of a cul de sac and told the Schumanns Stone could help them better than they could. She could just imagine the simpering, bleeding-heart desk sergeant telling them “Go to her and she can find your daughter for you” and she hated the bastard’s blue-wrapped ass for it. Stone’d had clients like this before and the cases went as far as a donkey cart carrying a hippo. This one hadn’t broken that record.
She’d told the Schumann’s the day they walked into her office that this was one of those tragic cases they heard about in a sensational news story, where someone just sinks down into the soil and never resurfaces, but they wouldn’t buy it. Actually, Mrs Schumann did but Mr Schumann just wouldn’t accept that his daughter had become a tragic item for the tabloids. He’d sat there during one appointment after the next sweating and crying in equal measures. There were stains in Stone’s chair he sat in and she’d lost hope of ever wiping them out. She told him to let it go, on a loop like some goddamn study music track. The poor, broken-hearted sap wouldn’t listen. Stone wished she could let him go.
His wife just sat there staring severely at Stone like Stone was fleecing her husband. Stone supposed she was but it wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to get Mr Schumann to drop it. Besides, he’d just go to another PI and that one may very well fleece Mr Schumann for everything he was worth. Stone knew more than one PI like that. If she kept Mr Schumann as her client, at least she could control how much he paid for nothing. That’s what the meeting was about.
After the Schumanns left, Stone’s ‘associate’ Bianca came into her office. Sam Spade and Jake Gittes and all the other PIs you see on TV and in the movies with secretaries are full of shit. Unless you’re making the dirty laundry of hedge fund managers vanish up your sleeve, as a PI you’ll have ‘associates’ not secretaries to help you out with the work.
“You busy with anything?” Bianca asked.
“Being miserable,” Stone said, “but that’s easy to juggle. What’s up?”
“You remember my little cousin Darren?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s writing an essay for an assignment at school.”
“That’s usually what they do in the fifth grade.”
“He’s in the eighth grade.”
“They do the same thing in both.”
“Anyway, so he has to write an essay about a real-life hero”
“And?” Stone asked but she already had some idea what the answer would be.
Bianca said: “He wants to write about you.”
“NO!”
Stone thought she bellowed the word with enough force to blow Bianca out her office door and maybe even down the hall to the elevator. Bianca didn’t budge. Her eyes didn’t even flinch from Stone’s face.
“Come on,” Bianca said.
“Isn’t there a local firefighter who saves kittens from trees he could write about?”
“Maybe, but he wants to write about you.”
In weary slow motion, Stone slapped her hand over her forehead. She remembered Bianca’s cousin Darren: a cute and good little kid who always said hello and please but who gobbled up detective comics and movies like some adults do porn. He’d actually gone and found and bought a Dick Tracy comic omnibus online. “What kind of kid does that!” Stone thought. Stone could have thought of him as a creepy nerd in waiting but couldn’t when she pictured him. She just saw a glowing, full-moon smile flying through space.
“What would he write about?” Stone asked. “I search through people’s garbage for a living.”
“You help people,” Bianca said. “Like the Schumanns.”
“I haven’t helped them.”
“But you keep trying.”
“Nothing will come of it.”
“Which is why,” Bianca said, “you had them here today to tell them you want to drop your fee.”
“Do you know if they agreed or not?”
“Does that matter” Bianca asked, “when you tried?”
Stone took her hand off her eyes. “Tell Darren to call me tomorrow to make a time to come over and talk to me.”