The Last Temptation

by Gerrie Ferris Finger

  I spoke twice to Portia via phone. Although she chose her words carefully, I heard the worry in them, but then that was Porsh. I cleaned my house with an intensity that busted my knuckles but seemed to strengthen my healing arm. I baked pies and cakes and fancy casseroles that I wouldn’t eat. The only time I went outside was to carry food to Peachtree Street and set it on sidewalk ramparts or trash cans for the homeless—for the free spirits who wouldn’t set foot inside a shelter.

  I drank too much gin—not Blue Sapphire, but something less expensive. I woke early Monday morning with a howling hangover, drank coffee and considered a bloody, but before I surrendered to temptation, Portia called. A troubled female teen in foster care had run away.

  I sat in the courtroom gallery, watching Portia’s lips move as she quietly talked to the foster parents, when Lake came in and scooted across the bench to sit beside me. “Hi there,” he said.

  Hi there? “Lieutenant,” I said, head and eyes straight ahead.

  “I talked to Gila Joe Corlee in Palm Springs.”

  “Did he ask if I was in the nuthouse yet?”

  “He told me that Arlo put his house up for sale. He’s moving to LA.”

  “No surprise.”

  “He thinks the move is suspicious.”

  “Oh really now.” I pretended to concentrate on what was going on up front with Portia.

  “Arlo’s lived in Palm Springs for twenty-five years. He’s one of the town’s most popular people.”

  “Movie types move to LA all the time.”

  “Corlee is waiting for your report. Didn’t you tell him you’d share your notes with him?”

  “Did I tell him that?”

  “I wasn’t there,” he said. “Corlee said the neighbor woman’s house is closed up, too. Heidi’s her name. Corlee said people in town are talking about Heidi and Arlo.”

  “I saw them together,” I said. “It didn’t take five seconds to see what was going on. But then, I’m known to be delusional.”

  “Eileen hasn’t been missing a month yet,” he said.

  “Eileen’s dead,” I said.

  “You’ve thought that from the beginning.”

  “Arlo’s selling the house only puts the monument on her grave.” I looked at him for the first time and almost gulped. I’d never seen his achingly beautiful eyes so bloodshot. I looked back at Portia on her bench and whispered, “So detect, detective.”

  I felt his eyes taking inventory of my face. “I’m sorry, Dru.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I miss you.”

  His whisper spoke to idyllic memories of days long gone. I looked to my right, at the wall where Portia displayed that part of the Ten Commandments she deemed proper for her courtroom:

  Honor your father and your mother.

  You shall not murder.

  You shall not commit adultery.

  You shall not steal.

  You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

  You shall not covet your neighbour’s house or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

  I heard Lake rub the stubble on his face. I’d never known him to miss a day shaving. He said, “I’ve been thinking . . .” I looked at him, at the clouds in his eyes.

  A sound intruded, and, when I looked ahead, Portia flapped toward us. In her long black robe, she resembled a scrawny crow wearing glasses. I loved her at that moment. She asked, “Any news on our runaway?” I gave her a brief negative shake of my head. She said, “I feel sorry for the foster parents. They’re opting out of the system. I hate to lose good ones because of problem kids.”

  I said, “I talked to the runaway’s grandmother in Memphis. She swears her granddaughter’s not there. The grandmother also said, and I quote: ‘Glory’s sake, the chile’s fourteen. Let ’er be. I wasn’ but thirteen when my mama throws me out six months gone with chile. I learned to survive. Let my granbaby be.’”

  Lake spoke without spirit. “Maybe grandma has a point. Not much you can do with a fourteen-year-old who doesn’t want to be where she is.”

  Steely-eyed, Portia looked at me. “Find her.”

  “I will,” I said, and then stared at Lake. “I’ll find Kinley, too.” My heart screamed—for God’s sake, take his hand. But my mind was too damn stubborn to do it.

  Portia waved toward the door at the back of her courtroom. “See you, Lieutenant.”

  Lake squeezed my arm, rose, and left.

  “I see things aren’t going any better,” Portia said, sliding onto the bench where Lake had sat.

  “Things are not going at all,” I said.

  “They sort out, they always do—with civilized people.”

  “Who defines ‘civilized’?”

  Her eyes were soulful. “You need to find Kinley,” she said. “Fuck Whitney. I’m giving you the go-ahead.”

  “I thought the powers-that-be think I’m chasing a chimera and want to leave it to law enforcement.”

  “Per diem and expenses,” Portia said. “If I have to pay from my own pocket. And for God’s sake, leave chimeras out of it.”

  31

  When the fat man came in, I was putting away the file on my fourteen-year-old runaway. I hate losing kids. I hate dealing with stupid adults. Best guess was my girl had been given a ride by a trucker heading east, leaving Memphis, where she’d been hidden by her grandmother. My runaway, like as not, had been raped and murdered and left on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  It was five o’clock, and I needed a drink. The intruder was prescient enough to see I didn’t welcome him wholeheartedly.

  “I won’t take up a lot of your time,” he said, rolling a cotton porkpie in his hands. “I knew you had an office here.”

  “And?”

  He slid the soft hat under his arm. “Can I sit a spell?”

  “Sure,” I said, planting my trousered butt back in my chair. I looked more closely at him—ex–law enforcement, private now. “And you can tell me your name.”

  “Bellan Thomas.”

  “Where you from?” I asked. I knew the established PIs in Atlanta.

  “Birmingham,” he said. “Alabama.”

  “I didn’t think you meant England.” He smoothed his tie. That simple gesture told me I was way too testy. Try nice. “Look, Mr. Thomas how’s about we have a drink, and you can tell me what’s on your mind. It’s after five.”

  “I don’t drink,” he said. “Anymore.”

  I knew what that meant—a perpetually recovering alcoholic, although he didn’t have that gray, deprived look. He wasn’t especially tall but he went at least two-fifty, had dirty blond hair and a bushy red moustache with waxed tips. Maybe fifty years old. Southern voice and careful mannerisms.

  I went to the filing cabinet and pulled out a middle drawer. Inside I kept a bottle of cheap gin, tonic, and a stack of Solo cups. As I prepared the gin and tonic, sans ice, I said, “I hope a doctor never tells me my liver’s shot. I wouldn’t be good standing up at meetings and telling about the times I wore the lampshade.”

  “Them meetings aren’t fun, you can take that to the bank.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting, taking a sip, and raring back in the swivel. I eased off my shoes and crossed my ankles on the desk. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Eileen Whitney Cameron.”

  My feet came off the desk and squared on the floor. “What?”

  “She’s a client of mine.”

  “Since when?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “To do what?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Investigate her ex.”

  “She wanted you to dig into Bradley Whitney’s past?”

  “And present.”

  “What for?”

  “She wanted dirt on him to use in court to get her kid back.”

  I felt the wind coming back into my sails. “Tell me you got some.”

  “I gave her my initial report. She asked me to keep digging. I’m a digger, Miss Dru.”
>
  My drink tasted fabulous. “Apparently she wasn’t content to wait for your shovel to do its work. She and Kinley lit out for parts unknown.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “I’m a good PI,” he said. “I also found out you used to be with the APD, and that you have your own PI agency that specializes in kids. You were hired by Bradley Whitney to find Eileen and the kid.”

  “What else did you find out?”

  “You got back from Palm Springs a couple days ago. Something happened out there.”

  “I didn’t find Eileen, and I didn’t find the kid.”

  “I know. The kid’s not with her daddy now, either.”

  “What did you find out about her daddy?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Privileged.”

  “PI work isn’t privileged, Mr. Thomas. And you said Eileen was your client.”

  “I make my work confidential. I don’t tell no one what I’ve found out until I tell the client.”

  “But you reported to her once.” He nodded. “Then you collected more information on Bradley.” He nodded again. “But since then, you haven’t heard from her, have you?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “She told me not to contact her home, but I did. I didn’t identify myself, but the maid told me she was out on vacation. The maid had no idea when she’d be coming back. I suspected from the sound of her voice she was holding back.”

  “No one’s heard from Eileen Cameron for nearly a month,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean nobody knows where she is,” he said, a gleam in his eyes. He obviously thought that I was the nobody. He looked hopeful when he said, “I can pay for any leads you give me.”

  “I used up all my leads. They led nowhere.”

  “You telling me you got no idea what happened to Mrs. Cameron and the kid?”

  “Tell me what you found out about Bradley Whitney.”

  “Can’t.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Don’t give me that. Why else are you here?”

  He raised his chin. “I do good work for my clients. I get paid for my good work. You can take that to the bank.”

  “How much does she owe you?”

  “Fifteen thousand bucks.”

  “Fifteen?”

  “I do good work.”

  “I can tell you this, Eileen won’t be paying you any time soon.”

  “If you know so much, why didn’t you tell the PS cops?”

  Why hadn’t I told Dartagnan about my suspicions? Was it a question of trust? Probably. I said, “Like you, I don’t get paid to do their job.”

  “Where’s Eileen?”

  “Probably dead.”

  He didn’t look surprised. “But you can’t prove it?”

  “Nope, but maybe I could if you’d tell me what you’ve found out.” He breathed in like a man resigned, but still spread his hands, palms facing down. I said, “The juvy judge can compel you.”

  He grunted out a laugh. “I’d open up like a busted oyster if she paid me.” So he knew the judge was a she.

  I took a long, scrutinizing look at Bellan Thomas. I liked him. Didn’t know why, but I did. “Tell you what,” I said, getting up and going to fix another drink. “Why don’t we work together? You’re out fifteen grand, and I’m out two people.”

  He thought about this. “What do you have in mind?”

  “You go to Palm Springs. I’ve worn out my welcome there.”

  “You?” he sniggered.

  “I’ll tell you the story, if you agree.”

  “Before I agree, we got to palaver about it.”

  Palaver? “Okay, but first tell me, did you get paid for your initial report to Eileen?”

  “Yeah, she paid five thousand in advance, and I did five thousand worth.”

  “What did you report to her?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Mr. Thomas—”

  “Bellan.”

  “I’m Dru.”

  His mustache arced up his cheeks in a grin that had the waxed tips almost curling around both sides of his nose. “Mr. Whitney’s an interesting character in case you don’t know.”

  “I met him.”

  “He’s slick and rich.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “He’s also one corrupt cookie.”

  “I believe it, but I’d like proof.’ When he didn’t continue, I said, “Summations are fine, but I want details.”

  “Look, Miss Dru—”

  “Dru. We’re almost partners, remember?”

  “We need to talk money first.”

  “That’s the kind of palaver you want?”

  “For starters.”

  “Well, my client—your target—fired me,” I said. He shoved back, grunting, apparently wondering why I’d wasted so much of his time. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up the case. The juvenile judge will scrape up a few pennies from the state coffers to pay expenses if I can show I’m not chasing a chimera.”

  He grinned. “Is that like something my mama used to call the boogeyman?”

  “I think you know what a chimera is, Bellan.”

  “A spook. An incubus.”

  “A delusion.”

  “Your juvenile judge paying my expenses?”

  “I can pay you. Not the fifteen grand, but for the work you do for me.”

  “You hunt down kids for a living on your own dime?”

  “Idiotic, don’t you think?”

  He brushed off any altruism I might have implied. “Funny you bringing up chimera. You might call your ex-client that.”

  “A boogeyman? A spook and an incubus?”

  “All that, and a dirtbag. I’ll tell you what was in my first report to Mrs. Cameron. I’m keeping the second report to myself until I find out what happened to her.”

  “For which you’ll reap many dimes.”

  “I don’t drive a Bentley.”

  “You know what I drove before the Bentley?”

  “No idea. Do you agree or not?”

  “You want this agreement in writing?”

  “I can tell you’re a straight shooter.”

  “You can? Most con artists I’ve come across look like straight shooters. You look like a straight shooter, too.” He bobbed his head. “But if what you’re holding back, because of a few bucks, keeps me from saving Kinley, I’ll bust your chops—personally.”

  The matter-of-fact way I said it made his eyes blink rapidly. He held his arms out in supplication. “No one wants to hurt that kid.”

  “But Eileen’s a different story, isn’t she?”

  He sat back, sucked in air, and laced his fingers across his belly. “Bradley Whitney was born in the Arkansas backwoods. The Ozarks. His parents were killed in a feud.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe this Hatfield and McCoy stuff still goes on, isn’t it?”

  “I see it every day—the big-city version.”

  “The people who killed his folks, they got killed five or six years later.”

  “By Whitneys?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, there were ten little Whitney kids. All got scattered among the relatives. Bradley Whitney went to Little Rock to live with an uncle. He was nine or ten. Then when he’s eleven, the uncle gets killed in fight, and Whitney becomes a ward of the state. He’s put in a foster home and lives there until he’s fifteen. He finished school and walked away. Nobody knows, or will say, where he went. Nobody tried to find him. Couple years later, he surfaces in Atlanta.”

  “Hmmm,” I mused. “Not the typical background for an academic, is it?”

  “Bradley Whitney is a genius. He never set foot in a schoolroom until his uncle died and they put him in a foster place.”

  “Hard to believe that the Little Rock schools didn’t catch up to him.”

  “He was only with the uncle a while. When he went into the foster home, they gave him a test to show where he should be
in school. They were thinking maybe first grade. Guess what?”

  “He got high school equivalency?”

  “College. He tested off the charts, but they stuck him in ninth grade. He graduated from high school three years later then walked away. Nobody knows where to, until Atlanta.”

  “Time to hit the big-time,” I said. “Where’d he surface?”

  “The clubs.”

  “What clubs?”

  “Strips. Working as an underaged jack-of-all-trades.”

  “Where’d he live?”

  “Here and there. Crashing mostly with people he could charm out of a room and food. He enrolled in Georgia State.”

  “I get it, you worked backward starting with his college records. Naturally they would contain his high school records.”

  “There’s all kinds of ways,” he answered mysteriously. It made me think of Webdog’s ways.

  “Let’s back up,” I said. “Was he ever in trouble with the law in Arkansas?”

  “No record. Model student. Model foster child.”

  “Too good to be true?”

  “Smart people don’t get busted. You can take that to the bank.”

  “So our boy’s now in college, working in strip clubs; what’s next?”

  “So after he’s—well—developed into manhood, he goes on stage.”

  I feigned shock. “What?”

  “He worked his way through college stripping in a he-she joint.”

  Although I knew this, that primal slimy feeling wormed across my shoulders.

  “You look funny,” Bellan said.

  I shook my shoulders. “First time I ever heard of someone who actually stripped their way through college—and it had to be a man.”

  He chuckled. “It’s not something he puts on his résumé, you can take that to the bank.”

  The man had money and banking on the brain. “Did Eileen know all this?”

  “She knew nothing. He told her he was from New York, The Hamptons. She sopped up his story like biscuits in molasses because he’d lost his Arkie accent and sounded very New-Yorky—her word. Smart people can do that.”

  I played with my empty plastic cup. Now was not the time for another gin. “He’s a poster child for bettering oneself.”