River of Glass (16 page)

They exchanged amused looks. The kid on the ramp, lean and wiry, with skin the color of burnt cocoa, cocked his head and smirked. “You buyin’ what he sellin’?”

“Depends on the price. And the goods.”

He flipped his board up with his toe and caught it with one hand, then strolled over and leaned close to my window, baring his teeth in a dangerous smile. “You a cop? ’Cause you kinda look like a cop.”

“I look too much like a cop to be a cop. Anyway, I tried it for a while. It didn’t suit me.”

“Don’t know why. You the type, for sure.” He jerked his head up the street, the way we were headed. “You’ll know it when you see it, you got any brains at all.”

Apparently, I had some brains, because, two blocks down the street, I saw it. One-story cracker box with a small front porch and gabled roof. Chipping purple paint. Sagging chainlink fence. Windows curtained with heavy black cloth. From the porch eaves hung a rainbow-colored windsock, intersecting spirals like a DNA chain.

A woman leaned against the fence, elbows propped on the top bar, emphasizing small breasts and a bony chest. Short skirt, hazel eyes, skin the color of a boiled pork chop. She smiled when I pulled up, almost like she meant it, and patted her hair, which had been dyed orange and teased into frizz. It looked like she was wearing a Pomeranian.

I got out of the car, and she pushed herself away from the fence, tugging at her skirt. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” she started, then stopped as Khanh climbed out of the passenger side. Her gaze flicked over the scars, the stump, the oversized Titans poncho, then swung back toward me. She looked at the bright blue cast jutting from the sleeve of my coat, and her mouth twitched. “You’re not cops.”

“No,” I said, and made an offer to prove it. “Fifty bucks for a blow job.”

“It’s extra for two.”

I glanced at her neck, where, just above her collarbone was a scar shaped like a DNA helix. “Truth is, I don’t really need a blow job.”

“Nobody does. It’s what you might call a luxury. You wanna get luxurious with me, baby?”

It was probably the biggest word she knew, and she’d probably learned it from a hand-lotion commercial. “What I need is to talk to your pimp. Helix, right?”

“He don’t like to be called a pimp.”

“What does he like to be called?”

“A entrepreneur.” She pronounced it with a
y
in the last syllable and not enough
r’s
, but I knew what she meant. “Whattaya need with Helix?”

“I just need to talk to him.” I pulled a twenty from my wallet, held it up between two fingers. “Tell him it’s about the dead girl with the double spiral on her collarbone. Tell him I’m the one who found her.”

She stared at the bill for a moment. Then she pushed herself away from the fence and plucked the twenty from my hand. “Just a minute.”

She took her time sauntering to the house and up the porch steps. Lots of hip action going on beneath the short skirt.

Khanh nudged me with a finger. “She think you look, you buy.”

“Not my type,” I said. “Besides, a place like this, you don’t buy, you rent.”

An elderly black man came out of the house next door, smacked the screen door open, and mopped his broad face with a grimy handkerchief. He leaned on the porch railing and sipped at a Corona, watching us with hostile eyes.

A few minutes later, the woman with the orange hair came back. Jerked a thumb toward the purple DNA house. “You wanna talk, it’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred.”

Khanh’s mouth dropped open.

I said, “Steep.”

“Talk ain’t cheap. The blow job was a better bargain.”

“Depends on what you need, I guess.”

We followed her into a living room crowded with oversized leather recliners and a matching sofa that looked like it had been built for a family of Yeti. High-dollar brands. A big-screen TV filled one wall, and a high-priced speaker hung in each corner. The air was heavy with the stench of cigarettes, marijuana, fried fish, and stale beer.

Somewhere in another room, a baby cried, long, inconsolable wails.

The baby changed things. I glanced into the kitchen, wondering if, given the neighborhood and Helix’s line of work, the covered windows meant sex wasn’t all Helix was selling. Blackened or covered windows were signs of a meth lab. Images flashed through my mind. A two-year-old with burns over most of his body, an eight-month-old who’d died in convulsions after swallowing the rat poison his parents were using to cut their meth. In scope, prescription drugs were a bigger problem, but meth was a scourge. Sooner or later, it killed everything it touched.

I took a deep breath, nostrils flaring at the sour smells, but there were no smells of ammonia, ether, or rotting eggs, as there would have been if someone had been cooking meth. Through the open doorway, I saw dirty dishes, empty pizza boxes, crushed beer cans, and empty liquor bottles. No tell-tale plastic tubing, stained coffee filters, plastic gloves, or lithium batteries.

It didn’t make Helix the father of the year, but at least it lowered the kid’s risk. A gruff voice turned me back toward the living room. “You lookin’ to buy the place, or what?”

The man from the website sat on the couch, legs spread, arms draped across the sofa back, making a point of filling the space. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders but soft in the middle. Mulatto skin, short-cropped hair, gray linen suit with a pale blue shirt and a striped tie. Lots of gold. Rings, chains, a gold hoop through one eyebrow. The tie was loose and the shirt untucked. He looked like a banker, except for the woman who perched beside him, one hand stuffed into the waistband of his pants, tugging without passion. Alpha male posturing. He might as well have pounded his chest and banged two garbage can lids together.

“You looking to sell it?”

He hunched a shoulder. “Right price, maybe. You got the right price, everything be for sale.”

“Helix, I presume.”

“You look surprised. You thought maybe I be wearin’ a snakeskin suit and a hat with ostrich feathers? Hell, I got a business degree.”

“I read that on your website. Color me impressed.”

“You should be. Bet I make more money in a day than you make in a month.”

“Yeah, but look what you have to do to get it.”

His eyes slitted. Then he grinned, flashing gold incisors. He made a
hand it over
motion. “Time’s money, Cowboy. You want to talk, pay up first.”

I pulled out my wallet again and, keeping it tilted toward myself so he couldn’t see the contents, peeled out ten twenties. He folded the bills into his palm, then plucked the wallet from my hand.

The baby wailed, and Helix gave the woman with orange hair a stern look. “Yo, Simone, shut that kid up.”

With a sour glance at the girl on the couch, Simone stalked out of the room.

I introduced myself as a private investigator, and interest sparked his eyes. I didn’t introduce Khanh. He hadn’t introduced his women, would probably see it as a sign of weakness. Instead, I said, “A woman was killed last night. She had your symbol burned into her.”

“Simone say you the one who found her. Thing like that, I guess it mighta damaged your fragile little psyche.”

“My psyche’s pretty tough. How’s yours?”

“Titanium.” He cupped a massive hand behind the girl’s head, lifted his hips in rhythm with her hand. “What I care about some dead ho? She ain’t one of mine.”

“Then how do you know she was a ho?”

“They all hos. What’s your jones for this one?”

“I’m looking for a girl. A Vietnamese girl. Whoever marked the dead girl has the one I’m looking for. Or can get me one step closer to whoever does.”

He flashed a predatory grin. “Hell, you want some Asian pussy, I get you some.”

“Not just any girl. A particular girl.”

“What I’m tellin’ you is, they all the same. You had one, you had ’em all. What’s so special about this one?”

“She’s family. So she’s not interchangeable.” I pulled a business card out of my wallet and a pen from my pocket and scratched out the Chinese character Khanh had called the eye of the dragon. “You ever see a mark like this?”

I handed it to Helix, who looked at it briefly and shook his head. “Never seen it.”

“Somebody’s marking women with it. Same place you mark yours.”

His lips tightened. “What’s that they say? Imitation is the best kind of . . .”

“Sincerest form of flattery.”

“Screw that.” He closed his eyes. Gave a little grunt of pleasure. The girl slipped her hand out of his pants and wiped her palm on her jeans. He tugged his shirt down over his crotch. Somewhere in the back, the baby fussed, and Simone’s voice, soft and cooing, shushed it.

I said to Helix. “If you’re not involved in this, somebody’s going to a lot of trouble to make it look like you are.”

He gave a brittle laugh. “I gone kill some bitch, I’m not gone put my mark on her. How long I be breathin’ free air, a bunch of dead hos start showin’ up wearin’ my signature?”

Simone came out of the back room jostling a mocha-skinned baby in a dingy pink romper. A pink bow stood out against a head of black curls. So much promise. No future. I saw her fifteen years from now, maybe less, a spiral-shaped scar above her collarbone. Just one more kid who couldn’t be saved.

Helix fumbled with his zipper, fastened his belt. “Somebody tryin’ to set me up for sure, but don’t tell me you come here to do me no favors.”

“Not directly, no. But our interests might intersect.”

“I save you some trouble. I never seen your girl, and I never seen your mark, and I don’t know who be doin’ all this. Hell, how I know you not the one behind it?”

“If I were, why would I be here?”

He got up and shambled over to the TV, pushed aside a rack of DVDs, and took a thick stack of banded bills from the wall safe behind it. He tossed it to me, and I caught it one-handed and flipped through it. All hundreds.

“That’s ten thousand dollars,” he said. “I bet you never seen ten thousand cash dollars all in one place.”

“Not true. I was Monopoly champion in third grade.”

He gave me a sideways glance. “Naw, you not the Monopoly type. You the dodgeball type.”

“Dodgeball was okay. My favorite was Manhunt.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Not much money in Manhunt.”

“Depends on who you’re hunting.”

He nodded toward the wad of bills. “My point.”

“I’m not that stupid. All I want to know is, who might be trying to set you up? You got any partners? Asian-looking guy? White guy with a manticore tattoo?” I showed him the drawing of the manticore.

“Ain’t got no partners. Don’t believe in ’em.” He looked at Simone, then at the girl on the couch. Jerked a thumb toward the hall. “Y’all get on up out of here now.”

As the women trooped out, Helix gave Khanh a pointed stare. She looked straight ahead, not acknowledging his nonverbal message, and when it became clear that she never would, he shrugged and turned his gaze back to me. When he spoke again, most of the gangsta schtick was gone. “I have a good lawyer, Mr. P.I. Had me out of jail before lunchtime. We beat this one, he says. But what about the next one? Some asshole kills a girl and puts my mark on her, he’s got a beef with me. You think he’s going to stop?”

“Maybe. If it did what he wanted it to.”

“I ain’t behind bars, which means the cops still be looking for him. So how could it do what he wanted it to? You in tight with the cops, Mr. P.I.?”

“Pretty tight, some of them.”

“Our interests intersect, you said.” He nodded toward the wad of cash in my hand. “You want to prove it, go to work for me. Five thousand now, five thousand when you bring me the guy who setting me up. Hell, you don’t even have to bring him to me. Just give me his name and address.”

I tossed the money at him. He wasn’t ready and had to scramble for it, tipped it with a finger, then got his palm under it and clamped his fist around it. He took two steps toward me, thunder in his eyes. “Something wrong with my money?”

“I don’t want to work for you.”

“I get it. You some kinda white knight. Think you better than me.” I didn’t answer, but he didn’t seem to notice. He loosened his tie, shrugged out of his jacket, and tossed it over the back of the couch. “Couple ways this can go, bro. One, I kick your ass, shove this money down your throat, and turn out your ugly-ass woman. Not many guys into that shit, but I know a few that are. Two, you kick my ass. Not likely, but you could get lucky. Three, you take the money and bring me the name of the guy who set me up. Everybody be happy.”

I shifted my weight forward and rolled my shoulders to get the kinks out. The arm in the cast throbbed. “I wouldn’t be happy.”

Helix bounced on the balls of his feet, clenching and unclenching his fists. “You find your girl, you gone find this asshole anyway, right? Then you gone get him arrested, and his name and address be public record.”

“You’ve got it all figured out. So why do you care if I take your ten thousand dollars?”

“Hell, I lose more than that between the sofa cushions. Ain’t nothing.”

Khanh touched my sleeve. “Ten thousand dollar, buy plenty medicine.”

I clamped my teeth until my jaws ached. It wasn’t my job to buy her mother medicine.

From the back of the house, the baby mewled. Helix and I studied each other from two feet apart. He spread his hands, his grin an arc of white and gold. “Say I been to your office last week and axed you to find out if my lady was cheatin’ on me. What would you have done?”

“I’d have taken your money. And then, when I checked you out, I’d have given it back.”

He shrugged. “Then you seriously stupid, man. Look, you can’t be a good person and do what I do. I know that. I’m okay with it. But I’m a nice guy, Mr. P.I. People like me. Hell, you spend a hour with me, you gone like me too. But you, you sure you’re so much better? You gone let your pride keep your lady here from getting her medicine?”

I handed him my card. “You think of anybody who might be setting you up, give me a call. Might be another wallet in it for you.”

“A man can always use a new wallet.” Smirking, he summoned Simone, who led us out, baby slung on one hip.