When she was settled into her chair, Cobb looked at the young woman. “What is it you think I can help you with, Ms. …?”
“Brill. Monica Brill.”
“Would you care for a cup of coffee, Ms. Brill?”
She shook her head, sat forward in the chair, and looked at Cobb with eyes that confirmed my earlier assessment. She was all business.
“I’m interested in hiring a private detective, but I need someone who does more than spy on wayward spouses in divorce cases.” She wasn’t smiling.
Cobb was. “I won’t lie, Ms. Brill, I did a few of those back in the day, but haven’t for a long time. I’m an ex-cop, worked robbery for a few years, homicide for a few more.”
She nodded, then looked over at me, eyebrows lifted. “That’s what my research indicated. Your partner does the divorce work now?”
“Neither of us does, actually,” Cobb said, as she turned back to him. “Mr. Cullen is, as I mentioned, my associate. We occasionally work together. Mr. Cullen is particularly good at conducting research. I tend to be more at ease … in the field.”
“Will you be working together on this case?”
“That depends on the nature of the investigation you want me to carry out. Maybe you should tell me how I can help you.”
She nodded, pursed her lips, and said, “Maybe I’ll take that coffee, after all.”
“On it,” I said, heading for the Keurig machine. Adam Cullen, researcher and gofer. “How do you take your coffee?”
She smiled. “One sugar, please. No milk.” She turned again back to Cobb. “I’d like you to find my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother is missing?”
“She is. That is, she has been for some time.”
“How long has your grandmother been gone?” Cobb asked.
“Fifty-one years.”
“Make that two coffees,” Cobb said to me.
There was silence in the room for a few minutes, but for the gurgling of the coffee machine. I glanced over my shoulder at the two of them. Cobb was studying the young woman, a quizzical, slightly surprised, but not thunderstruck look on his face. I had never seen Mike Cobb look thunderstruck.
Finally, he spoke. “And are you certain your grandmother is still alive?”
“I’m not certain of that.” Monica Brill shook her head. “That would be part of your assignment. I want you to find out if she’s still alive after all this time … and if she’s not, I want to know what happened to her.”
“Maybe you should start at the beginning, Ms. Brill.”
I started toward her with the coffee, but before I could make the delivery she stood up and walked to the window, standing in almost the same place I had left moments before to answer the door. “You might want to take a look,” she said.
Cobb and I looked at each other, then followed her to the window, Cobb moving up alongside her, me standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder.
She pointed. “See the Italian restaurant there?”
She was pointing at Parm, a place Cobb and I had been to a few times. Decent food, better-than-decent pizza, and extremely handy — directly across the street and maybe fifty steps from the front door of Cobb’s building.
“Parm,” I said, to confirm that we were all looking at the same place.
She nodded. “Do you know what it used to be?”
“You mean pre-Parm, or fifty-one years ago?” Cobb’s eyes were still focused on the restaurant.
“In the sixties there was a coffee house located in the basement of that building. It was called The Depression.”
I nodded. “I’d forgotten that,” I said. “I’ve read about the place. It was Calgary’s first coffee house. Did fairly well for a time, I think. A few big-name performers appeared there early in their careers. Neil Young, the Irish Rovers, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell —”
“Except her name wasn’t Mitchell. Not then.”
She turned away from the window. Cobb and I followed suit. Monica Brill settled back in her chair; I set her coffee on the desk in front of her, passed Cobb his coffee, and returned to my spot on the concrete slab disguised as a chair.
“Anderson,” I said. “She was Joni Anderson back then.”
“Very good, Mr. Cullen.” Monica Brill nodded and glanced approvingly at me, making me feel like I had just passed some test.
She sipped coffee, set the cup back down, and took a breath. “On February 28, 1965, my grandmother was playing The Depression. She was on the same bill as Joni Anderson. My grandmother stepped out into the alley behind the building between sets to have a cigarette. She was never seen again.”
“Right,” I said, “I remember reading about it. A couple of guys were shot, and a third person — your grandmother, I take it — disappeared. The police were never able to solve either the shootings or the disappearance.”
“That’s right. No one has solved the case … up to now.”
“I assume you have a reason you’d like this looked into after all this time,” Cobb said.
“Our family has lived without knowing what happened to my grandmother that night. I don’t want to live like that anymore. Even if the news is really bad, as it very well could be … I want to know.”
Cobb rubbed one hand over the other, then changed hands and repeated the gesture. He was thinking.
“Ms. Brill, you want to engage my services to conduct a search for your grandmother, who disappeared a half century ago. I’m not in the habit of taking people’s money under false pretenses. And that’s what I’d be doing if I were to accept this case. Almost all of the people your grandmother knew back then, and those who knew her, will be either dead or in a home, some with limited ability to be of help. If we can even find them. I have quite a high regard for my ability to do my job. But this case offers so little likelihood of being solvable that, I say again, I feel like I’d just be taking your money.”
Monica Brill didn’t answer. She reached down into the satchel she had set at her feet and pulled out a file folder. It was fairly thick.
“This is what I’ve been able to do on my own,” she said, setting the folder on Cobb’s desk. “In this folder are press clippings, a photocopy of the police report from the original investigation, photographs of my grandmother performing, and a map of the street as it was back then. I put that together myself. I might have one or two of the businesses wrong, but I think for the most part it’s quite accurate. The two detectives who first worked the case were Lex Carrington and Norris Wardlow. Mr. Wardlow died in 2003, but Mr. Carrington is still alive and is a resident of Cottonwood Village Retirement Centre in Claresholm, which is about an hour south of Calgary. I tried to get in to see him, but the people in charge wouldn’t allow it, so I don’t know if he remembers the case or is even mentally competent. That’s as far as I went with my own investigation. I decided it was time for a professional to take over.”
I could see Cobb was impressed. He opened the folder, flipped through some of the material in it, read a couple of the clippings, and finally looked up at the young woman sitting opposite him, who showed no sign of impatience.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Cobb told her. “We’ll work this for a week — make some calls, see if there’s any chance that there might actually be some leads out there, something we can take hold of and follow up on. If after that time I feel there’s any point to continuing the investigation,