Lady Midnight (9 page)

“I think Senator Patrick mentioned that,” I replied, and let him go on.
 

“Well, he hired the firm of Bowman and Grant to find her once before. That’s how I knew who Bowman was.”
 

“If Senator Patrick had hired Bowman and Grant to find Connie on a previous occasion, I’m afraid I wasn’t told that.” I smiled wanly to myself. Neither had Grant. Grant surely had been lying, when I had visited him.
 

“You see, that’s why I hired Bowman. Senator Patrick knew that she crashed here sometimes, especially on those occasions when she wanted to get away from him, so he sent Bowman around to check once before, when Connie had pulled her disappearing act. She wasn’t here, but Bowman came by to ask some questions, see if I knew where she might be. Anyway, he was a pretty nice guy, and so when I needed somebody to look for her myself, I remembered him and gave him a call. He had left his card with me.”
 

I got up. “Well, thanks, Randy.” I gave him a card of my own. “If you hear from your sister, please have her call me; I’m concerned for her safety. If you get any more information, don’t hesitate to call me yourself.”
 

“I’ll do that.”
 

I walked out the door and headed for my Buick. Connie had been born into a life of privilege, wealth, and position. However alluring that life might be to some, she was trying like hell to get out of it. People run away from things all the time. They get born into situations where they feel they don’t belong. Maybe they live on a farm and want to be an actor. Or maybe their parents are theater types and they want to study the law or become a priest. It happens. But most people, I have found, run without a plan. They run away from something, without any idea where they’re heading. Many of them end up in deep trouble. Sometimes it’s better to sit tight. Better to bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of.
 

I have that on good authority.

Chapter 10

My cell phone jolted me from thinking about missing girls, dead girls, and another girl I’d seen recently who was very much alive.
 

“Roland?”
 

I recognized the girl’s voice at once; it was the one who was very much alive. “Hello, Nookie.” I smiled devilishly to myself. Somehow, it just felt good saying that, and it being okay.
 

“Hey, Mr. Detective, when I got home the other night I went looking through my closet, because I thought that maybe Bonny—or Connie, if you prefer, had left some of her things when she left. Well, I was right. I thought maybe you might want to take a look.”
 

“What kind of things did she leave?”
 

“Personal stuff. Letters, pictures, things like that.”
 

“I would definitely like to take a look at those things. How does one get to where you are?”
 

* * *

The young woman who called herself Nookie Uberalles lived in an old brownstone near downtown Atlanta. It was a nicely refurbished post-war building. It looked like Nookie was pulling down some big bucks these days, I thought to myself, smiling at the double entendre.
 

Nookie gave a little squeal of pleasure when I rang and she spied me through the peephole in her apartment door. That was a rattling of chains and the door opened. She was a casual dresser at home, too; she was wearing just a bra and panties. The panties were blue and there was a little bunny waving at me, right there on the crotch.
 

“You like my Hello Kitty?” Nookie asked coyly, a reference, I gathered, to her distinctive underwear.
 

“Hard to say no to that,” I managed, as we moved inside.
 

“You want coffee? Soda?”
 

“No, thanks. I’m kind of in a rush.”
 

“Aw. Don’t rush off. I was hoping we could talk a while.” She turned and opened the door to what was apparently a spare bedroom. “Bonny . . . Connie’s stuff is in here.” We went into the room.
 

“Maybe we could talk just a little, at that. So you said Connie Patrick stayed here with you for a while?”
 

“That’s right.”
 

“How long was she here?”
 

“A couple of weeks.”
 

“Why was it that she ended up staying with you?”
 

“Mmmm . . . she had been living somewhere else . . . with a guy. She had a falling out with her boyfriend.”
 

“Was his name Anthony Herron?”
 

“What? Oh. It’s not like I knew him. I think she mentioned some guy named Tony, once.”
 

“Just once? They weren’t seeing each other?”
 

“I don’t know, Roland. I got the impression that she must have gone through quite a few guys in her time, but I don’t like to pry. She talked to some guy late at night on her cell phone a couple of times. I didn’t ask who. None of my business.” She was quiet for a second after that, as if intent on some task.
 

Nookie stood on tiptoe, trying to lift down an office-style box from the top shelf in the closet. I reached over her and lifted the box down myself. In addition to her modest apparel, she was wearing some heady and intoxicating perfume. She turned to face me while both our hands still held the box.
 

“She left her favorite CD in there. There was a song on it, “Lady Midnight” by Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t believe she left it behind; she used to listen to it all the time. We used to joke it was our theme song.”
 

She said all of this, while still standing there, and stretched up to me, showing her lithe young body to best advantage. When she was sure that her charms had caught my eye, she said, “You know, Roland, you are one damned handsome man.” Her breath caressed my face. Our lips were very close. I slowly picked the box up over her head and turned, and put it down on the bed. I turned back and put my hands gently on her shoulders.
 

She was pretty, delicately pretty, and her brown eyes sparkled with humor and intelligence, but the drugs she based her life around told me that she was just another pilgrim on her way to the necropolis, and I had had my fill of that.
 

“And you are a very lovely young woman,” I said, and she smiled. “But like I said, I am busy at the moment.”
 

Still smiling, Nookie brought her lips forward to kiss me. I turned and caught it on the cheek. “Promise you’ll call me later, then. For helping you out,” she said softly.
 

I nodded, unable to hold back a smile. “Okay, okay. I’ll call you later,” which I knew I would probably have to do, for one reason or another.
 

“Stop back by?” The big brown eyes made it awfully hard to say no.
 

“Maybe. We’ll see. I have to go right now.”
 

“Wish I was as important as whatever
it
is.”
 

I smiled and picked up the box, and left her standing there.

Chapter 11

A man waited on the sidewalk outside of Nookie’s building. I was quite surprised to see him standing there, because I knew him well, although it had been a few years since I’d last seen him. His name was Vince, and he had been a debt collector and muscleman for a man named Big Daddy, a heroin dealer in Birmingham’s North Side.
 

Vince looked like one of those professional wrestlers you see on local television. He was thirty-odd, meaty with muscle. He was sweaty, despite the cold, and his thinning hair was long in the back, permed into a kinky curl. He wore his Hawaiian-print, satiny-looking shirt open at the collar to show off a thick gold chain. This also showed off his sparse, wiry chest hair. He was wearing enough cologne to kill mosquitoes. Everything about him spoke of brutal, animal crime. What he was doing here in Atlanta was beyond me, but it was too big a coincidence for me to take lightly.
 

His eyes widened. “You—” he sputtered.
 

Before he could finish that thought, I moved in to meet him. My uppercut caught him squarely under the chin, before he could react. The blow sent him staggering backward a few feet, before he lost his footing on the wet pavement, and he fell back hard on the sidewalk. I walked over and grabbed him by the collar, under the right ear. He struggled, his heels sliding on the wet concrete, his arms flailing to achieve balance. I sat him down, hard.
 

Vince sat there, shaking his head. I backed off and stood over him, a pace away, waiting for his next move.
 

He didn’t try to get to his feet. He sat on the pavement and rubbed his jaw. Then, his sweaty face broke into a slow smile.
 

“Well, hello Longville, you big, black bastard.”
 

“Maybe you’d better keep a civil tongue in your head, Vince. The way I figure it, I still owe you a lot worse than you just got.”
 

Vince debated the wisdom of this advice for a moment, then rose shakily to his feet, his palms outward to show he meant no threat. “I’m a legitimate businessman now, Longville. I could have you arrested for what you just did.”
 

“You’ll never be a legitimate anything, Vince. You’re an animal, and you belong in a cage with your pal, Big Daddy.”
 

Vince smiled even more broadly at that. “You’re a little behind times. Big D’s been out of the can for months. He got an early release and we’re in business together. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to visit with some of my talent, in this very building here. And I promise you, if you lay hands on me again, you’ll regret it.”
 

With that the sweaty, chunky man moved cautiously away. I stood there on the sidewalk, slightly stunned at what he had just told me. How could they let a monster like Big Daddy out of prison? Prisons had been invented for people just like him.
 

Once again, I felt like my hand was a couple of cards short. I didn’t like Vince and Big Daddy showing up in the current mess. I didn’t like the timing, and the placement was all wrong. Suddenly it dawned on me that Vince was going into Nookie’s building, and everything fell into place with crystal clarity.
 

Vince and Big Daddy were in the porn business, and Nookie Uberalles was working for them. She was the “talent” that Vince had been referring to, which meant one thing: Vince and Big Daddy knew Constance Patrick, too. Suddenly I felt that Vince had been right, and I was very far behind the times, indeed.

Chapter 12

Since Big Daddy had been in prison, wonderful things had happened. Sure, Communism had ended, and all that stuff, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Politics and world affairs didn’t matter to him. No, other stuff had happened, stuff that had affected him in a very real and positive way, something that he could never have foreseen affecting him in the least—but it had.

The Internet had happened.
 

Vince had once worked for him. Vince, his old buddy and muscle that he used to send around to collect on late loan payments. Since Big Daddy had been inside, Vince had grown a brain. While Big Daddy had gone down for five to twenty-five after they had dosed a hooker with some too-pure heroin and the bitch had died, Vince had gotten off with probation. He bought a computer when the Internet was just starting out. It seems he’d had some latent talent. Vince had quickly understood what few could grasp in the beginning days, that the Internet was going to be the place where people made money. Millions, billions, trillions of sweet dollars were waiting out there in the form of Ones and Zeroes.
 

True, you couldn’t ship smack or deliver a hooker over the phone lines, the cables, or the airwaves that this new medium of communication depended on for its existence. So what could you sell over the Internet? Porn, in all its various and wonderful forms. Vince had understood that, and the beauty of it was, he had correctly surmised that other people would understand it, too. You see, you could sell a hooker to a million guys at once through a computer. You could sell your old lady to them, every night, and plenty of people did, and nobody had to touch anybody; the girls never even had to see the faces of these virtual Johns.
 

A girl sits in a booth in Munich, in Bangkok, in Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires, in Atlanta, and maybe she’s in college and needs the dough, or maybe she’s got a little habit she can’t kick, whatever, because all she has to do is put on some lingerie and a smile and lay on a bed and stare into a web cam, and all over the world in lonely rooms lonely men with no confidence, or husbands with secret needs or pimple-faced kids with hearts beating fast stare back at the girl on the screen and take part in the oldest hustle in the world, one that’s been going on since nervous husbands followed the footprints of whores in Ancient Rome who had the come-on in Latin, “Follow me” engraved on the bottoms of their sandals so prospective customers could literally follow the trail to what they were looking for. It was an old racket, even then.