The Shadow Catcher

I look at the pictures of Edward and Enrico again, This is us, they say, when we are happy.

But it was the 40s.

And he had once had the admiration and respect of Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan.

And he was working on his memoirs.

As ever, he was working on his MYTH.

When you’ve immortalized great chiefs of state, tribal chiefs and Presidents, when you’ve broken bread with Red Cloud, T.R. and Geronimo, what does your private life have to do with the way you want your name to be remembered?

In his own mind he was CURTIS, the signature — E.S.C., the monogram — and who on earth would care, in the gristmill of posterity, if the only thing it said on his gravestone were the two words, LOVING FATHER?

Lester tells Clarita there will be wheelchairs at the hospital and he offers to carry her to the truck but she insists on going in her moto because she doesn’t like to “be push,” and within minutes we’re on the road, the two of them chatting up a storm in the front cab while I hold onto the wheelchair with both hands to keep it from rolling all around the flatbed of the truck, my hair flapping in my face as we speed along under the now predictably scorching Vegas sun.

I go inside with them so I can show the I.D. that we found to the nurse at the nurse’s station on the cardiac floor and then while Clarita sits beside “Johnny’s” bed I tell Lester I’m going to check into a hotel to work the phone and Internet to try to locate Curtis Edward’s son before the weekend starts and places of information, like schools and businesses, shut down.

I give him my cell phone number and he agrees to call me later and in half an hour I’m standing in the middle of my own loft suite at the Alexis, an off-Strip hotel across the street from the Hard Rock but far enough away from the noise to guarantee some quiet. I draw a hot bath then get down to work checking the online White Pages for Elkton, Virginia, and then Mapquest to find out where the hell Elkton, Virginia, is. There are four Edwardses listed in Elkton and after I have my bath I call them all, asking in my best non-threatening I’m-a-nice-person voice if any of them are missing an old man named Curtis.

Not one.

If the son was ten years old in 1970, as the article says he was, he would have graduated high school in ’76 or ’77 so I dial Elkton Regional High and ask to speak to someone who can help me trace a graduate, owing to a “family emergency.” I get a really nice sounding lady who digs out yearbooks for those years and finds a Curtis Edwards, Jr., in the senior class of 1977.

“Would you happen to know if he went on to college after high school?”

She asks me to hang on a while and then she comes back and says they don’t keep those kinds of records but that someone in the office remembers Curtis Edwards, Jr., and would I like to speak to her. I say I would and then a second nice sounding lady comes on the line and tells me she doesn’t remember Curtis, Jr., himself, but she remembers he was well known in the town because he got written up in the local paper when he won a scholarship to the Air Force Academy “out there in Colorado.”

I call Colorado Springs and ask to speak to the press office and tell the young man on the other end my tale (“family emergency”) and after some time he’s able to confirm that Curtis Edwards, Jr., graduated the Academy in June 1981.

“Is there any chance that you can tell me his address?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The town he lives in?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Because of Homeland Security?”

“Because, I think, of the Constitution.”

“Can you say if he’s active or retired?”

“I can say that he’s on active duty, ma’am.”

“Can you tell me where?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Can you tell me his rank?”

“Ma’am, why would you want to know his rank?”

I take a breath. Sir, I say: “I’m trying to find a man whose father has had a serious heart attack and may not make it through the weekend. This man’s last name is Edwards. Aside from having an entire Air Force Base named Edwards, how many Edwardses do you think you might have on active duty? Ten, fifteen? Twenty? If I knew this gentleman’s rank it would—”

“That would be a colonel, ma’am.”

I Google Col. Curtis Edwards, Jr., and come up with nothing.

I order lunch.

I think about how to find a colonel in a haystack, and then when my room service arrives it dawns on me to call Nellis Air Force Base right here in Vegas a couple miles away and ask to speak to a public relations liaison. Which I do, while sitting on the bed, picking at my thirty dollar salad. My call is passed from one department to another and while I wait I doodle the colonel’s last name on the hotel notepad, followed by his first name. Then I draw two lines and stare:

EDWARD /S/, CURTIS

“How can I help you, ma’am?”