Motherless Child

The envelope arrived on a Thursday, thick and cream-colored, the kind of envelope that costs more than my weekly rate. Inside was a check for two hundred dollars and a typed letter from a woman named Dorothy Whitfield asking me to find out what was happening to her mother-in-law Martha.

"I don't know her," the letter said. "But Richard won't talk about it, and Vivian won't look me in the eye. My name is Dorothy. I'm married to Martha's son's brother. I know how that sounds. But I'm asking you because you're the only private investigator in Los Angeles who doesn't ask questions before he takes a case."

I folded the letter and put it in my desk drawer next to the half-empty bottle of bourbon and the stack of unpaid bills. Then I picked up the phone and called Dorothy Whitfield and said I'd take the case.

---

Martha Whitfield lived in a boarding house on Sunset Boulevard, room forty-seven, third floor, the stairwell smelling of boiled cabbage and someone else's cooking. I knocked and she opened the door wearing a housecoat that had been expensive once and a face that had been beautiful once.

"Mr. Callahan," she said. She'd been expecting me. Of course she had. Women like Martha Whitfield always know when someone is coming, the way cats know when the can opener is about to start.

I sat on the edge of her bed—a single mattress on a metal frame, the springs pushing through the fabric like ribs—and told her I'd take the case. She nodded and poured me coffee from a chipped pot and told me about her son.

"Richard," she said, and the name came out flat, like a stone dropped into a well. "He told me to leave. Said the house was too small. Said Vivian needed space."

"Your daughter-in-law needs space," I repeated.

"She needs a therapist," Martha said. "But that's not the point. The point is Richard agreed. He agreed to kick his own mother out of her own house."

I drank the coffee. It was terrible. "When did this happen?"

"Three weeks ago."

"Where was I three weeks ago?"

"Where you are now," Martha said. "In a room that isn't yours, drinking coffee that tastes like regret."

---

Richard Whitfield was a lawyer with an office on Wilshire Boulevard and a mahogany desk that probably cost more than my car. He sat behind it now, his hands folded, his face arranged into the expression of a man who was concerned but not worried, which is to say not concerned at all.

"Mrs. Callahan," he said. He'd assumed I was married. Everyone did. It was easier than figuring out.

"Mr. Whitfield. Your mother hired me."

"I know." He sighed, the sigh of a man burdened by family drama. "Look, Mr. Callahan—can I call you Jack?—this isn't what you think. My mother has been... difficult. Since my father died. She doesn't understand that Vivian and I need our space. She doesn't understand that I need mine."

"Your mother lives in a boarding house on Sunset."

Richard's jaw tightened. "She chose to live there. After the... disagreement... with Vivian, she decided to leave. I offered to pay for a better place. She refused."

"Of course she did."

Richard leaned forward. "Here's what's going to happen, Jack. You're going to talk to my mother. You're going to tell her that I love her, that I want her to come home, that this whole thing was a misunderstanding. And then you're going to take your two hundred dollars and you're going to forget that you ever took this case."

I stood up. "Two hundred dollars is two hundred dollars, Mr. Whitfield. But I don't forget things. That's my problem."

---

Vivian Whitfield lived in a house in Beverly Hills with white furniture and white curtains and white teeth that probably cost more than my annual income. She sat on her white sofa and looked at me through white-lashed eyes and told me everything and nothing.

"Martha?" Vivian said, and sipped her tea. "Martha is... complicated. She's not a bad woman. She's just... a lot. She cries a lot. She talks to herself. She leaves things everywhere. Richard tries, but—"

"But?"

"She has debts." The word landed on the white table like a brick. "Gambling debts. From before my husband was born. From her husband's gambling. From before that. I paid them. All of them. Every last cent. And in exchange, I asked one thing: that she stay out of our lives."

"Your mother-in-law is a gambler?"

"My father-in-law was a gambler," Vivian corrected. "My mother-in-law inherited his habits. And his debts. And his tendency to see conspiracies where there are none."

"What do you mean, 'where there are none'?"

Vivian set down her teacup. "Martha thinks Richard and I are plotting against her. She thinks we've conspired to push her out of the house. She's not entirely wrong, Jack. But not for the reasons she thinks."

---

Martha Whitfield died on a Tuesday, in room forty-seven of the boarding house on Sunset Boulevard, alone except for me because I'd stopped by to check on her and found her on the floor beside her bed, her eyes open and unseeing, her hand still clutching the edge of the mattress.

There was no dramatic last word. No final confession. Just a woman who had lived a hard life and died a hard death, on a third-floor room that smelled of boiled cabbage and loneliness.

Richard came from the office. He saw her face and his knees buckled. He caught himself on the doorframe and stared at her like she was a ghost, which, in a way, she was. The ghost of every mistake he'd ever made, sitting on a third-floor bed, waiting for him to come home.

I stood in the corner and watched him break. It wasn't satisfying. It wasn't unsatisfying. It was just what happened when a man spent thirty years building a life on top of a foundation of lies and then one day the foundation cracked and everything came down.

---

I buried her myself. Dorothy paid for it, through her husband's brother, which is to say through Richard, who signed the checks with hands that didn't shake but eyes that did. I stood at the grave in the rain and watched the casket lower and thought about how many people Martha Whitfield had touched in her seventy-two years and how many of them had shown up to bury her.

Two. Me and Dorothy.

On the drive back to the office, I stopped at a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon and sat in my car and watched the rain hit the windshield and thought about the envelope that had started this whole thing. The thick cream envelope that cost more than my weekly rate. The letter that said: I don't know her.

But she knew Martha Whitfield. Dorothy knew her. She'd seen the photographs on the mantelpiece, heard the stories Richard never told, understood the shape of a family held together by silence and held apart by truth.

I lit a cigarette and drove back to the office, where the phone would be ringing by morning and the next case would be waiting in another cream envelope, and the whole miserable beautiful machine would keep turning.

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