Voodoo Eyes (16 page)

Not hard to figure out.

It wrote itself.

He was exactly the right person for the job.

If it went wrong, the story would read something like this: Vanetta Brown had had two of his friends killed, so he’d gone to Cuba for payback. It fitted his behavioural profile: he’d pulled this kind of stunt before – three revenge kills that had earned him seven years in prison. Unreformed, unrepentant. If he got caught and started talking about Wendy Peck, she’d deny everything. They’d never met, never spoken, never corresponded. His word against hers. And he was an ex-con.

If he succeeded, she’d still deny any connection. He’d gone there of his own accord, on his own initiative, frustrated by his government’s inability to extradite criminals from a country so close. The conservative media would pick up on the story and make him out to be an American hero. He’d be the toast of Little Havana. A year later Vanetta Brown would go on trial for the murders of Eldon Burns, Joe Liston and Dennis Peck.

It was win-win for her.

He did a search on ‘Abakuá’.

He got back a few articles on a Cuban dance troupe touring Europe and something about the Abakuá influence on Cuban music.

It was possible that Brown was behind the murders.

She’d carried heartbreak and hatred with her into exile.

They’d fused and festered.

She’d bided her time, but time was running out. Not just for her, but for the men who’d ruined her life.

She had turned seventy-two in February. Eldon, she would have known, was in his eighties and not long for this world. Joe was close to retirement. Either she punched their clock or God did.

Time to get even. Now or never.

But the fingerprints on the casings?

That was stupid.

Unless she had nothing to lose, in which case it didn’t matter.

Or …

Maybe Vanetta was being framed – possibly for a second time.

Someone had got her prints on the bullets. The casings had either been placed in Eldon’s hand as a calling card or to make sure the cops found them.

If that was so, then who was behind it?

One way or another, the answer lay in Cuba.

He had two days before Wendy Peck called for an answer. He already knew what he was going to tell her.

But, first, he had unfinished business to clear up with Emerson Prescott.

20

Max didn’t usually research his clients. It was an unspoken part of the PI code. He was paid to be on their side, and his trust was covered by his fee; so their probity was taken for granted and they were off limits.

But Emerson Prescott’s invoice was overdue. And he’d never liked the motherfucker anyway.

He sat at his computer and did a search on his client’s name. He got an immediate hit on an Emerson F. Prescott, co-owner of Prescott & Lamb Dental Services, with offices in LA, New York and Miami.

They had a website. Sleek, professionally produced but very simple. The logo was large brown-and-blue lowercase letters on white. Then below came a list of services – dental and cosmetic, skin treatments, spas – followed by a mission statement, FAQ, locations, bookings and staff. He clicked on ‘staff’. He went through to another page: the logo again, then a vertical list of names. Emerson F. Prescott and Arielle Lamb were listed at the very top.

He clicked on Prescott.

A photograph and a bio. Emerson F. Prescott, a dentist with twenty-one years’ experience and numerous qualifications after his name, looked nothing like his client. Emerson F. Prescott was black.

He could have done another search, just to make sure, but he knew he’d find nothing.

He typed ‘Fabiana Prescott’ into the search engine and got back a thousand separate listings for ‘Fabiana’, and ten thousand more for ‘Prescott’, but not a single joint match.

He tapped in ‘RMG Enterprises’ and up came a link for an independent car dealership in California.

He tried ‘Fabiana Prescott’ and ‘RMG Enterprises’ together and found himself looking at a bunch of pages in Chinese and Russian, and a pop-up window asking if he wanted to download the Japanese text option. He hit ‘OK’ without thinking and had to wait twenty minutes for the program he didn’t actually need to load. Then he had to restart the computer.

‘Fabiana Prescott gonzo porn’ was his next attempt.

Big mistake.

Ask the internet for porn and that’s a billion pages.

Ask it for gonzo porn and the billion gets halved.

And there were plenty of women called Fabiana or Fabiane or Fabbie or Fab or Fab Annie doing gonzo porn. Not to mention the ones called Prescott, Prescot, Prescotte, Press Cock and Pressed Cock competing with them, the last two being male.

But no Fabiana Prescott.

So he tried typing in everything he had.

This time he got back the one page, and that with only a single porn-related listing on it – a site reviewing adult DVDs.

Fabiana Prescott went under numerous aliases, the most common being Sharona S. Bliss.

She was also called Sexxx Bliss/Sexy Bliss and BJ Bliss.

She was very popular. There were over ninety websites featuring her.

Her real name was Gilmara Vendramini. She was born March 28, 1975 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She moved to Lubbock, Texas, with her parents in 1986.

She played basketball for Texas A&M University. Dropped out at the age of twenty-one and made her film debut in a flick called
Dirrrty Dreamz 4.
She initially only acted with her then husband, Herc Ho’gan. She’d won three AVN awards – the porn trade’s Oscars – for best female starlet in 1998, and an unprecedented two the following year for Best Actress in a Video and Best Actress in a Film. In her tearful acceptance speech at the 1999 ceremony, she thanked her parents for their support. Her parents weren’t in attendance.

In 2000 she divorced her husband and got engaged to director, producer and owner of the Prêt-a-Porno film studio, Rudi Milk. She was under exclusive contract to the company. They had yet to marry.

She’d starred in over 350 porn films.

He looked at pictures of her over the years. She started out pretty in an unremarkable, girl-next-door kind of way. There were photos of her playing basketball, as well as a team shot from 1995. He wouldn’t have even noticed her if her face hadn’t been circled. Nothing really stood out about her: a plain, sweet-looking girl with a friendly smile, short brown hair and a nose that was on the bulbous side. Within two years her nose had gone down a size and her breasts up three.

He looked up Rudi Milk.

Anthony Rudolph Milk. Born November 17, 1949, Hoboken, New Jersey. Initially a music and boxing promoter, in his mid-twenties he started running strip clubs in Fort Lauderdale, before moving into porn films. He did both mainstream (full-length movies with a semblance of script and plot) and specialist stuff (bondage, humiliation, assorted fetish from feet to food). In the mid-eighties, he launched two companies: Prêt-a-Porno and B-Spokeporno. The second made one-of-a kind films to wealthier fans’ specifications, which could include ‘performing’ with their favourite stars.

The home page of the Prêt-a-Porno website featured a cartoon of a naked, curvaceous black-haired woman in profile. She was lying on her front, one foot in the air, lapping at a gold bowl. B-Spokeporno.com had the same woman, only seen from the front and on all fours, leaning over the bowl, licking her lips.

When he clicked on her, he got a page with the following message:

B-Spokeporno

The ULTIMATE in interactive adult entertainment!

Your very own adult film!

Tailored to your desires!

Tailored to your tastes!

Tailored to your needs!

Yours and only yours!

Made by us – for you!

That’s right!

A truly UNIQUE video –

Made specifically for you!

Only one copy will ever be made –

Yours!

Choose your stars!

Choose what they wear!

Choose what they do!

Choose who they do it with!

REMEMBER –

Only YOU will ever see this.

Only YOU will ever own this.

Your very OWN unique, individual,

one of a kind adult film.

He clicked through to an online form: name, address, email, telephone, and a box to fill in basic requirements. No girls were advertised. No prices were listed.

Max noticed minuscule, illegible print running along the bottom of the form. He magnified the text.

It was the company’s address: Rudi Milk Group Entertainments, Floor 2, Cavanaugh House, 21361 Pennsylvania Avenue, Miami, Florida.

Pennsylvania Avenue was off Lincoln Road, not even fifteen minutes from where he lived.

He continued searching on Rudi Milk, looking for a photograph.

He kept on looking.

And looking. The sun went down in front of him and the city slowly lit up as darkness fell. Traffic snaked across the bridges, every one of those jaundiced sparkles bringing more weekenders to the beach.

Then he came to
Phatboyzusa.com

Phatboy was a self-confessed ‘porn mentalist’ from Nebraska. His ‘heros’ were Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner and Rudi Milk, his favourite stars Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, Midori, Crystal Knight and Sharona Bliss. He described himself as an ‘equal opportunities onernist’. He had a picture gallery called ‘Meat Your Heros & Heroins’ – more than two hundred photographs of him crossing the porn Rubicon and meeting fuck-flick illuminati through the years. Max went through them. Phatboy had been at this for a good long while. There were older pictures of him with ‘legends’ John Holmes and Marilyn Chambers. Both had that red, runny-eyed hayfever
in excelsis
look of the habitual coke funneller. Holmes had a gold soup-spoon pendant around his neck. Phatboy had been a million and one cheeseburgers lighter then.

Come the late nineties and the new Millennium, terminal masturbators like Phatboy went to conventions to meet the objects of their fibre-optically connected fantasies – yup, ugly fuck-ups like him could actually talk to a hot-looking chick without her telling him where to go or getting her NFL-built boyfriend to kick sand in his face. The world, according to Max Mingus, was officially fucked and, thinking about it, he was glad that one day soon he’d no longer be part of it.

At the end of the thumbnails was a folder marked ‘Godz’. More pictures.

Phatboy with Hugh Hefner in his silk dressing gown; Larry Flynt in his wheelchair, legs covered by a silk blanket; Bob Guccione in his silk hospital bed; and, in a black silk suit, Rudi Milk.

Max clicked and enlarged the picture.

He recognised Rudi Milk immediately.

‘Emerson Prescott.’

He wasn’t in the least bit surprised.

Just angry.

Real fucken’ angry.

21

Rudi Milk’s receptionist was about to take a sip of whatever concoction was in her Starbucks takeout cup when Max came storming through the frosted-glass doors. Her face went from startled to petrified in the two seconds it took for recognition to hit. Her hand stopped mid-raise, fingers holding the cup by its dinky cardboard handle.

‘Where’s your boss?’ Max asked, crossing the space to her desk in four quick strides. They’d met several times before in the fake office, where she played the same part. She’d been pleasant and polite, making small talk about the weather and sports and offering him water in between fielding incoming calls and booking fake appointments. She always said goodbye to him when he left, which he thought was a nice professional touch. Most receptionists didn’t. Not that any of it mattered now.

‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him all week. And I haven’t heard from him either.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘A few days ago.’

‘Be specific. Was it before Halloween?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘The last time I saw him was
on
Halloween. He came in in the morning for a couple of hours and left.’

‘Does he have another office somewhere – a real one?’

‘No. This is it.’

Max went round to her side of the desk and stood a couple of feet away, looking down at her, at the grayish swill in her cup, seeing how tiny she was. He gave her his full, unblinking, don’t-lie-to-me-because-I’ll-know-if-you-are stare. Her eyes were deep green with a hint of gold, a nice shade of shallow ocean and the sand beneath. She couldn’t reciprocate. She looked at his nose, mouth, throat, anywhere instead of those hard cold beams he’d fixed her with. She was scared witless – and he didn’t blame her – but at least he could be sure she wasn’t lying.

He could tell she was alone in the office. She’d been getting ready to go out when he came in. Her make-up was freshly applied and her perfume pungent. She was playing music on her big-screen iMac – overproduced, oversung, underwritten dreck that dared to call itself R & B or modern soul, or urban soul, or ghetto smooch, or whatever the fuck they were branding it.

‘Turn that shit off.’

She put down the cup and clicked on her mouse. The torture stopped and silence rushed in all around them like air to a vacuum.

Max looked around the reception area. Everything about the place was tasteful and understated, none of the porn-set vulgarity he’d expected. Tall palm plants either side of the door, pastel-blue walls, grey carpet. Comfortable black leather sofas, a glass table in between with three neat piles of magazines for the upwardly mobile: back issues of
Ocean Drive, GQ
and
Cool Fast Cars.
On the nearby wall was a rack with the day’s newspapers. He could have been standing in the antechamber of any white-collar business. That was, he supposed, the whole idea. Make it all seem like a successful business, nothing furtive or sleazy.

‘Where’d he go?’ Max asked.

‘I don’t know. He does this all the time. Just takes off,’ she said. ‘He calls them his “scouting trips”.’