“Good looking girl.” The officer looked up from the photo. “Your daughter?”
Rickenbacher said she wasn’t.
“Then check the stretch. She’s probably giving head for twenty bucks a pop.” He laughed as he nudged Rickenbacher with his elbow. “If you don’t find her, you’ll find one just like her.”
Rickenbacher stared down at the blue uniform, wondering how long the city had been hiring children to patrol the streets. Then he pocketed the photo and turned away.
The officer called after him, “This place is like a cherry tree. We do our best, but we can’t keep the pimps from picking the ripe ones when they arrive.”
Rickenbacher had parked his van a block away from the bus station. On his way to it, he stepped into a noisy diner and used the pay phone to call Colette Rees and make an appointment to meet her at the Muff Inn later that afternoon.
Rickenbacher had a list of places to visit after he completed the call, and he began with the nearest one and worked his way down the list. While he visited the main offices of the gas, electric, and cable television companies, the police were busy working on another case involving a young girl.
In various locations around town, uniformed patrol officers and plainclothes detectives talked to their favorite snitches and collected a motley group of men informally known as the usual suspects, seeking information about the previous evening’s murder of a brunette teenager. Within a few hours all but one of the known violent sex offenders had been released, and the remainder waited patiently for yet another interrogation.
* * * *
The smell of desperation hung in the air like the cloyingly cheap perfume of redneck women. The habitual criminals had long since moved on, leaving only the hard-core alcoholics sleeping off their latest binges and the first-time offenders whose families were too poor to raise bond or post bail.
Lieutenant Castellano walked down the center of the aisle without really noticing the two dozen men crowded into a cell designed for twelve. He’d never seen the holding tank when it wasn’t overflowing with society’s effluent, and he’d long since passed the point where he noticed or cared. He did notice the wiry blond sitting behind a scarred wooden table in a cramped room on the north side of the building, just past the holding cell. Behind him stood a beefy sergeant whose expansive gut strained the glittering gold buttons of his blue uniform.
The Lieutenant slipped easily into the remaining chair, adjusted the creases on his precisely pressed black slacks as he settled in, and then asked the sergeant without looking at him, “Read him his rights?”
“Twice.”
Lieutenant Castellano looked a question at Sergeant Kowalski.
“I don’t think he understood me the first time.” The sergeant ran a handful of sausage-thick fingers through his closely-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. On the street he had busted heads with his billy and his bare hands long before criminals had rights, but Kowalski had changed with the times and knew just how far he could go before Internal Affairs would question him.
The Lieutenant returned his gaze to the man on the other side of the table. Gilly Boy Thomas stared back through a tangle of greasy blond hair that fell over his forehead and nearly hid his cobalt blue eyes. Gilly Boy’s hands were folded neatly on the table before him, his wrists held only inches apart by a pair of stainless steel handcuffs.
“You like to cut women?”
“You’ve read my sheet,” Gilly Boy responded. “I’ve cut a few.” He seemed alert but wary, with no indication that he had any difficulty hearing or understanding the Lieutenant’s question.
Lieutenant Castellano had carried a slim manila folder into the room with him and he placed it on the table. From it, he withdrew a pair of 8”x10” glossy photos of the dead woman found at the Grafenberg Hotel and he slid them across the table. “You cut this one?”
Gilly Boy picked up the first photo and examined it closely, the way an art critic might examine a newly discovered van Gogh. He smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “But somebody did a damn fine job on the bitch.”
“Seen your parole officer lately?”
“Tuesday last,” Gilly Boy said as he placed the first photo on the table and picked up the second. His faded jeans grew tight and he made no effort to disguise his pleasure. “She’s young.”
Lieutenant Castellano retrieved the photos much to Gilly Boy’s disappointment and returned them to the folder. The wiry blond watched until the folder snapped shut. The room remained silent save for Kowalski’s heavy breathing and the tick of the Lieutenant’s index fingernail against the table.
Finally, Gilly Boy asked, “Got any more pictures?”
Lieutenant Castellano pushed himself out of the chair and looked down on the wiry little man. Gilly Boy’s prison pallor had disappeared after six months on the outside, but he still bore the crudely etched tattoo of a prison gang on the back of his left hand.
The sergeant cleared his throat. When the Lieutenant looked up at him, Kowalski said, “He says he spent the night at his mother’s. She said the same thing.”
“Anybody else see him there?”
“The next-door-neighbor came over, spent about fifteen minutes in the same room with him.”
Gilly Boy smiled. His alibi had held.
“Cut him loose.”
CHAPTER 3
“Care for a drink?”
“No,” Rickenbacher said as he straddled a red leather and chrome stool at the far end of the bar. He’d never finished the beer he’d ordered the previous night. “Thanks.”
“On the wagon?”
“That’s twelve steps to hell,” he said as he dropped a slim file folder on the worn and stained wood before him, still remembering how his head had felt that morning. “I’m just not in the mood.”
Carlos, the Muff Inn’s regular bartender, shrugged and continued cleaning with the dirty towel he’d pulled from his belt a few minutes earlier. He jerked one thumb over his shoulder at the runway stage behind him and said, “The girls don’t start until noon.”
“Didn’t come for the show.”
“No skin off my nose.” Carlos lifted both hands in mock-surrender. His English was good, but not his green card, and he didn’t need any trouble with the big man.
Rickenbacher sat in silence for almost twenty minutes, watching as the now-mute bartender rearranged bottles, refilling nearly-empty name-brand fifths from generic gallon containers. Finally, a slightly overweight woman in her early forties entered the joint and made her way toward Rickenbacher. She hefted herself onto the stool next to him and ordered Jack Black straight up in a frozen shot glass, her sensuously low and throaty voice completely at odds with her appearance.
She had a temporary beauty, applied carefully each morning, then scrubbed off each night with Noxema and a cosmetic sponge. Beneath all the make-up existed one of the homeliest women Rickenbacher had ever met, but she could do things with her mouth and her tongue that most men couldn’t even imagine until she did it to them for twenty bucks. Colette had semi-retired from the street and made most of her living describing sexual intercourse to lonely men who dialed a 900 number and paid $2.50 a minute to masturbate to the sound of her voice. A hooker with a heart of gold is a fiction perpetuated by television cop shows, but Colette was the next best thing.
She owed Rickenbacher a favor.
Rickenbacher pushed the slim file folder toward Colette. She lifted the cover and carefully examined a series of grainy black-and-white contact proofs. Two of them had been circled with orange grease pencil, and Colette’s eight-year-old niece, her thin lips wrapped around the fat head of a rubber dildo, stared