My Name Is Venus Black(62)

When the librarian leaves him alone, he begins to flip slowly through the pages for each day. Everett definitely has its share of crime. What is wrong with this world? Then he finds it, on the lower right corner of the front page for February 13.

SON OF SLAIN MAN MISSING.

And there, looking blankly up from the screen, is Leo. The same boy he’s come to love as his own. The same photograph that’s now plastered on milk cartons from here to California—and maybe the whole country.

Tony starts reading, barely breathing.

The son is identified as Leo Miller, seven years old. The paper reports that he is mentally disabled, small for his age, with cropped blond hair. Apparently, Leo went missing not from home but from the house of a friend of the family. It wasn’t known whether the boy was abducted or if he ran away.



At the end, the piece quotes his mother, Inez Miller of Everett, pleading for his safe return. The public is encouraged to join the search or report any tips.

But what about “Slain Man”? A related article reveals that less than a week earlier, a thirteen-year-old female related to the missing child was arrested for the murder of Raymond F. Miller, the missing boy’s father.

What? Tony scrolls back carefully through the pages until he finds the first mention of the crime. The headline is blazoned in all caps across the top of the February 4 edition: TEEN ARRESTED IN DEATH OF STEPFATHER.

Tony shakes his head in surprised disbelief as he reads about the crime and its aftermath. He plunges ahead, following the trail through February. Almost every day, there’s news coverage of the crime and its investigation. Apparently, it was a shooting. Often, it takes top billing over the mysterious disappearance of the boy. Clearly the double tragedies had put the family’s story in the full glare of media attention.

After a couple hours hunched over at the machine, bleary with eyestrain, Tony finally quits. He has printed out a small stack of articles.

By now he’s starving, so he finds a McDonald’s and orders two Big Macs and a large coffee with cream. Seated at a small table by a window, he lays the photocopies in front of him and tries to sort it all out before he finds a phone and calls Marco.

It doesn’t take Tony long to realize that “Phil Brown” was actually Leo’s uncle, and his name wasn’t Phil. According to one of the articles and an accompanying photo, his name was Thomas Miller, a.k.a. Tinker Miller. Tinker was an ex-convict and a person of interest in Leo’s abduction, but at the time of these news reports, his whereabouts remained unknown.



But why would this guy abduct his own nephew, only to abandon him in California? That part still makes no sense. The other question is the status of Leo’s family. What happened to the girl, and where is the mother, Inez Miller? The paper lists an address on Rockefeller as the scene of the crime, but Tony can’t imagine the mom would still live there. At some point, he’ll drive by and scope it out.

He’s guessing the thirteen-year-old was Leo’s sister. Had she been convicted of the crime? If so, where was she locked up? By now, she must be nineteen. Tony had been too exhausted to read all the way through to the conclusion of her case—he was more interested in the mother. Surely it was the mother, Inez Miller, who was looking for Leo. She had lost so much—her husband, most likely her daughter, and her son in the space of a week. He can’t even imagine such a thing.

The more he pieces together what must have happened, the more awful it seems. He thinks of Leo back home in Oakland, playing his cello or maybe watching TV in that absent way he has. All his protective instincts rise to the surface. Where was the mother when the sister pulled the trigger? Where was Leo? How could a thirteen-year-old girl do such a thing?



* * *



—

AFTER HE LEAVES McDonald’s, Tony drives by the address on Rockefeller. It’s an ordinary house on a corner lot, painted blue. There’s obviously a basement level, where the garage sits. And then if you turn and drive up the alley, there’s a carport, too, and a back-door entrance.

There’s no car visible and it appears no one is home.

It’s not until he circles the block and drives by the front that he notices the COMING SOON sign in the yard. Whoever lives here now is moving. If it’s not Inez Miller, maybe the seller could tell him about the previous owner. How would you go about that? Knock on the door and start asking? Wouldn’t that raise red flags?



It’s raining as he drives up to Broadway Avenue, a busy, non-residential street, and searches until he finds a small market with a pay phone. Why can’t they put the damn things inside instead of outside?

It takes Tony twenty minutes to update Marco and make a plan. In the meantime, his fingers are frozen stiff. It’s stopped raining, but a hellacious wind has picked up, and he keeps losing pages of photocopies. Each time, he drops the phone and chases them down, because what could be more suspicious than his obvious interest in this case?

Marco suggests that Tony look up all the Millers in the Everett phone book and try to find Inez. Standing there with the open Everett phone book, he sees pages and pages of Millers—but no I or Inez to speak of. “I can’t possibly call all these Millers,” he tells Marco. “And even if I find her, then what am I supposed to say? I think I have your kid, by the way?”

In the end, Marco comes up with what is probably the best idea. “Forget the Millers,” he tells Tony. “Find out the mother’s maiden name, in case she’s gone back to it. And don’t waste time on the phone book; everyone in Everett must know this story. Go to a bar, get someone talking—but don’t be obvious about it! See if you can’t find out what name she goes by now and if she’s still around.”