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I felt the father’s eyes watching me as I read. He said his name was John O’Reilly.
It was hard to concentrate. Twenty minutes earlier I was staring at the hand-drawn lettering of my name, Thomas Haftmann, Private Investigator, across the plate glass of my office window and trying hard not to reach for the gun in my drawer. The man I hired to paint it was one of the Strip’s local characters. He always gave the impression of having a mild buzz on. We were sitting at the bar in Tico’s Place reminiscing about last year’s riot, the one when two motorcycle gangs had decided to fight for ownership of our crappy little resort town. Downing the last of however many boilermakers before I got there, he drew my name in handsome letters with a few lavish strokes across a bar napkin. I was so impressed I hired him on the spot. Now I wondered what happened to those impressive curlicues and bold dagger-like stems of letters in the smeared scrawl I was literally faced with every time I looked up from my desk. He had smudged the last two n’s of my surname so that it looked like a child’s attempt with a fat crayon.
I didn’t know what to make of the clipping Mr. O’Reilly handed me after introducing himself so I read it again. Below the photo of a dark-eyed, attractive girl I read this:
Cruel Court, you are the enemy of truth, justice, of innocent life. You are the enemy of God. Cruel Court, your morality is that of the abortion provider who rips and tears head and heart from the innocent to comfort the powerful and selfish. Cruel Court, for years you have inched us, child and father, toward the precipice as you worked to guarantee our slavery. Cruel Court, you have killed . . .
I could hear the rumbling of suppressed sobs in his throat, waiting for me to finish so that he could talk, but I kept my eyes fixed to the clipping.
… Annaliese, already, haven’t you? To protect your dishonestly contrived, official evidence from truth; to protect your paper excuse for your slaving operation.
I heard him blowing his nose loudly into a Kleenex. There was even more maudlin whining in bad prose after this, so I cut my eyes to the end to see if it was going to make any sense.
... the daughter who knew too much and was too honest and unselfish had to disappear, didn’t she? You sent Annaliese reeling toward the precipice. She fell over the edge, didn’t she? Or was she pushed? Her sad and lonely grave is another one of your client’s dark secrets, isn’t it? Annaliese – the infant with haunting eyes, knowing eyes; the child with quick hand and mind and kind and generous spirit; the young woman full of promise. The Human Sacrifice to Corruption. Loved, and at last, mourned by her father.
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