Photo Finish (9781101537510) by Sara Paretsky Page A

those same endless summers when my friends and I kept our ears cocked for the Good Humor truck while we jumped rope.
    â€œSo what brings you to Chicago when you could be in Charleston getting just as hot, and visiting your old haunts in the bargain?”
    He smiled again. “Since the grandmother who raised me died, there hasn’t been anything to take me back. I’m looking for my father. Someone told me he’d retired to Chicago. I didn’t see him in any of the phone books, so I thought I’d better get an investigator. The folks at the Herald-Star said you were good.”
    That was enterprising: an out-of-towner going straight to the dailies for advice. “When did you last see him?”
    â€œWhen I was eleven. When my mother died, I guess he couldn’t stand it. He left me at my grandmother’s—my mother’s mother—and took off. I never even got a postcard from him after that.”
    â€œAnd why do you want to find him now? After what, fifteen years?”
    â€œA pretty good guess, Ms. Warshawski. I’m twenty-four. When my grandmother died, I started thinking I wanted more family. Also, well”—he played with his fingers as if embarrassed—“I wondered if he didn’t have a side to his story I ought to hear. I grew up listening to my granny and my aunt—her unmarried daughter, who lived with her—repeat what a bad old bag of bones my old man was. They blamed him for my mama’s death. But I began to see that was impossible, so I started wondering about all the rest of what they had to say about my folks. I guess every man likes to know what kind of person his own old man was—what he’s got to measure himself against, so to speak.”
    I’m no less human than the next woman—I couldn’t resist the self-deprecating smile or the wistful yearning in his blue-gray eyes. I printed out a contract for him and told him I needed a five-hundred-dollar advance. Under the floor lamp, his helmet of ash blond hair looked like spun gold; as he leaned forward to hand me five hundreds in cash, I could almost imagine the money to be some conjuror’s trick.
    â€œI do accept checks and the usual credit cards,” I said.
    â€œI don’t have a permanent address these days. Cash is easier for me.”
    It was odd, but not that odd: Plenty of people who visit detectives don’t want a paper trail. It just made me wonder.
    His story boiled down to this: His father, also named Hunter Davenport, was a photographer—at least, he had been a photographer when young Hunter’s mother died. Hunter Senior had been a freelance journalist in Vietnam, where my client’s mother had been an army nurse. The two met, married, produced young Hunter.
    â€œThat’s why I lived in Europe as a child: After the war my father covered hot spots in Africa and Asia. My mother and I lived in Paris during the school year and joined him on assignment during the summer. Then she died, in a car wreck in South Africa. It had nothing to do with whatever conflict he was covering. I don’t even know where he was working—when you’re a kid, you don’t pay attention to that kind of thing. It was just the ordinary dumb kind of wreck she could have had in Paris or Charleston. He wasn’t with her—in the car with her, I mean—but my grandmother always blamed him, said if he hadn’t kept her half a world away, it never would have happened.”
    He stumbled through the words so quickly, I had to lean forward to make out what he was saying. He stopped abruptly. When he spoke again it was in a slow, flat voice, but his knuckles showed white where he gripped his hands against his crossed legs.
    â€œI was with her when she died. My mother was so beautiful. You never will see a woman as beautiful as her. And when she was covered with blood— It was hard. I still see her in my dreams that way.” He took a deep