The three of us left the coffee shop. I stood with Simon while Wynan walked a few yards ahead of us talking on his cell phone.
I held out my hand to Simon. “Thank you, Simon. If you can help us with this, you will be helping to save a life. Maybe two lives.”
A pursing of his thin lips as he looked at Wynan, and then he turned away.
I caught up with Wynan as he was finishing his call. “That was Reno PD,” he said. “No word from Joe yet, but I checked out Simon’s address. I think we might just drive over to that neighborhood and take a look.”
We drove for a few blocks and watched the bright cleanliness of downtown Reno gradually turn to a grayer, seedier set of buildings. Simon lived in a neighborhood of motels, vacant lots and rundown houses with chain-link fences barring visitors from ragged lawns full of trash and old cars on blocks. We suspected few people walked the street during the day and even fewer at night. There were no visible stores or supermarkets. Four-story apartment houses occupied two of the corners. One was Simon’s. It had been a hotel half a century ago.
Some single-family homes still remained, most of them in need of cleaning and paint. “Room for rent” signs were frequent. The first sign of life came from a line of bedraggled men waiting to get into a homeless shelter that dominated the corner.
“So this is where men come looking for sex?”
“Not here,” said Wynan, coming to a sudden stop to allow a slow-moving figure to inch his way in front of the car. “This is just where the girls are housed. The sex happens in motels and hotel rooms back in the better parts of town.”
“How do the men find the girls? I don’t see any streetwalkers.”
“Oh, there are probably some at night on the main drags. But now most of the contact is arranged through the internet. The customer makes his choice online. The girl is delivered to the customer at his room. The trade is much more out of sight.”
As if to contradict Wynan, two girls appeared on the other side of the intersection. Each was wearing high boots and very short skirts. One had a yellow wool shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders, the other a sweater stretched across impressive breasts. But they didn’t seem to be soliciting, just hurrying to cross the street before the light changed.
“Coming home from a long night,” said Wynan, speeding up as soon as the light turned green. We had both had enough of Simon’s neighborhood.
Back in Landry, I had to rush to get to my Media Ethics class in time. I hated it when students wandered in after class began, so I tried to set a good example and get there ten minutes early. The class topic was pertinent: trigger warnings. The subject had been heavily covered in the media and the debate raged in academic journals with headlines such as “Freedom of Speech under Attack.” A perfect topic for this week’s class.
I had divided the class up in teams, requesting each team take a different perspective. Students would debate the topic in class. One of my brightest was already rehearsing her presentation. The girl brushed her hair back from her face with one hand and waved me over to her as I entered.
“I’ve got a killer quote here, Red. It was written by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times. Listen: ‘People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off campuses.’” The girl paused, her face flushed.
“That’s good, Abby.”
“Wait, there’s more, Red. She writes: ‘What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?’”
“I see you’re preparing your students to do battle.” The voice belonged to Edwin Cartwell, former antagonist, great teacher and, of late, newfound friend. Whenever I felt blue, I’d head for one of Edwin’s writing classes. Watching him teach reminded me of how much I love the work we do in a university. Edwin was the sort of teacher students remember all their lives. “This is the man who taught me how to write,” said a famous author visiting on campus last year. “That was after he taught me how to think.”
Every so often Edwin flatters me by sitting in on one of my classes.
“You joining us today, Dr. Cartwell?”
Edwin had a boyish grin and would have looked younger if his hair was not so thin. “I heard your students are going to debate the merits of requiring professors to issue trigger warnings whenever they plan to discuss something someone might consider controversial.”
“It would save many of us from being offended in our own classrooms,” said another girl who had come in. She slammed her backpack down on the desk.
“It also might save you from learning how to argue intelligently,” said a boy walking in just behind her.
I held up my hands. “Okay, okay, everyone. Let’s save it for the discussions in class. You’ll all have a chance to express your opinions.”
Edwin chuckled. “Oh, I’m glad I decided to come to this one. Sounds as if we’re in for a lively hour or so.”
And he was right on.
Three notions really bugged me. The first was that college students were so fragile that they needed to be spared from hearing ideas and opinions that might offend their personal sensitivities. Second was the use of someone else’s race, religion, sexual orientation or physical appearance as a verbal weapon in a dispute. And third was the difficulty too many people have distinguishing between one and two.
I yearned for the common sense needed to study offensive material without taking it personally.
The lively hour proceeded. The students were wonderful, debating back and forth, employing facts and rational arguments, making me proud of them and a little pleased with myself for assigning them the topic.
It ended with one student insisting that her American Literature class be able to read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud even though Twain used “the n-word,” and another student arguing that the book could “easily be replaced by a better one.” I privately decided there are not that many better books but kept it to myself. It was their match to play, not mine.
As the students gathered up their backpacks and streamed out of the classroom, Edwin came over to me. “Good class, Red. It’s refreshing to hear students engage in such lively disagreement over what they are supposed to talk about. And speaking of disagreement, are you planning to go to that Danica Boerum thing?”
“I wish I could figure my way out of it, but I seem to have shot my mouth off so much about freedom of speech, I’ll be called a hypocrite if I don’t go.”
Edwin’s eyes softened and his hand came to my shoulder. “My deepest sympathies. I share your views on freedom of speech, but I for one plan to stay home and read some D.H. Lawrence just to mark the occasion. I’m old enough to remember when some of his writing was banned in America.”
“Go for it, Edwin. I wish I could escape with you.”
He left me back in the real world, and I hastened off to see Rosie.
Chapter 14
The hospital in Landry was small but efficient and brighter and cleaner than I had expected when I first moved to Nevada. I still remembered the dreariness of the major metro emergency wards back in Ohio when I was a newspaper reporter. A friend had once said, “I hate just driving by a big city hospital. Infection floats out through the windows and drifts into your car.” I thought about that whenever I had to cover a story that took me to hospitals constructed in the nineteenth century.
Rosie’s room was on the third floor of a hospital built in the 1990s. The hallway floor was a shiny vinyl and the walls painted a soft blue. Less rushed than on my earlier visits, I had time to admire the long bulletin boards that displayed the imaginative work of fourth graders who had
created pictures that would cheer up the patients. Flowers and birds, balloons and fire trucks accompanied me down to the chair where a solemn older cop sat guarding Rosie’s room.
A surprising figure came into view from the other end of the hall: Rosie on her feet, stepping slowly with the help of a walker. A nurse followed behind. We met at the door to her room.
“You’re amazing,” I said, watching her grimace as she slowly maneuvered her way back to bed and got under the covers.
“Just determined. You come to watch TV with me?”
“I wish I could bring you some treats to eat.”
“Not just yet,” said the nurse. “Her stomach isn’t ready for anything exciting.”
I nodded at the nurse. “How’s your patient doing?”
“Better than most, and no complaints.” The nurse adjusted Rosie’s pillow. She was a heavyset woman with a broad face and an old-fashioned braid wound around her head. She patted Rosie’s shoulder. “This one puts my other patients to shame. Here she is with gunshot wounds that would make grown men cry and she just soldiers on. Cheerful as all get out.”
Rosie flashed an accommodating smile. “Hey, I’m still here. When I was lying in that parking lot I thought it was all over for me.”
I pulled the visitor’s chair closer to her bed so I could see the television screen. “When’s Boerum due on?”
“In about five minutes. I think the local station will broadcast the interview live from Las Vegas where she is this week. The Reno affiliate announced earlier that they’re broadcasting it here because of Boerum’s coming to Mountain West.” Rosie pushed a button on the side of her bed and brought herself up to a sitting position. “How was your trip to Reno?”
I didn’t tell her about Joe’s disappearance. No point in making her think he or his mission were in jeopardy. “Nothing from Joe, but I had a good conversation with a former colleague who may be helpful. And I drove through the neighborhood in Reno where the pimps house the girls.”
Rosie’s nose wrinkled. “Lovely, isn’t it? I remember two weeks in a house that smelled like a cat’s litterbox. I shared a room with two other girls and a bathroom with six. But it was still better than the motel we stayed in before the pimps rented the house. At least we had a kitchen and a backyard where we could barbeque in the summer.”
I shook my head. “I’m so glad those times are over for you. I can’t imagine…”
Her voice sharpened. “No, you can’t. No woman who has never been a whore can imagine what it’s like.” She aimed the remote at the television set suspended on the wall and we both sat silent listening to the commercials that preceded the interview. The Las Vegas news anchor was a handsome man of about thirty who rattled easily through descriptions of traffic accidents and local crimes before announcing his special interview with Danica Boerum, “the woman who speaks for the American Purists and who will appear in person in Las Vegas tomorrow night and at Mountain West University in Landry later this week.”
The scene shifted to a smaller studio. Danica sat in an upholstered chair, her long legs sheathed in black stockings. She wore a gray conservative suit with a white blouse and red silk scarf that showed off her snowy short hair. I estimated her age at somewhere between forty and fifty, though her skin seemed smooth with only a trace of crow’s feet around her eyes.
The news anchor’s opening questions struck me as lightweight and innocuous given the controversies surrounding his guest. Danica remained poised, her voice gentle and controlled. Finally, her interviewer stopped tossing soft balls. “You’ve been accused by some of causing riots and violence at your appearances. How do you respond to your critics, Miss Boerum?”
A toss of her head signaled a new harshness in her tone, but she kept her cool demeanor. “I don’t personally cause riots. I tell the truth about this country and some members of the audience are unwilling to accept it. Any violence is entirely the responsibility of people who cannot bear to face facts.”
A sharp intake of breath from Rosie. “Oh God, Red. Her voice just changed. I know that voice.”
I took Rosie’s hand. “Are you sure? It seems so unlikely she could be related to the woman you knew in Los Angeles.”
“I’m not certain. But she could be the older sister to the bitch I knew.”
After the interview, Rosie turned off the set. “Well, that was uninformative. We still don’t know any more about Boerum or her motives than we did before.”
“Tell me more about the woman in Los Angeles.”
Rosie slumped down into her pillows. “Her name was Mama D, and she was terrifying. Long black hair and a scary voice that sounded just like Boerum’s at the end of that interview. Mama D ran her girls like a drill sergeant, shouting orders at them even in the street where others could hear. I once saw one of her girls give her some back talk and Mama D punched her. The girl was taller and bigger than she was, but Mama D knocked her down in the gutter and kicked her, again and again. Mama D was wearing heavy leather boots and she kicked like she didn’t care if she messed the girl up and put her out of business for a week.”
“That doesn’t sound at all like the Danica Boerum we just saw.”
Rosie frowned. “I grant you their personalities are entirely different. The woman in LA was loud and offensive. The woman we just watched is polite and cool, although, for me, equally offensive. But when I talked to her on the phone, she hung up on me when I asked if she’d ever had a relative in LA. And I got beat up and shot the night after. I could be dead wrong, but I think I alarmed her with my question. I feel in my gut…even my injured gut…that there’s some connection between Boerum and the meanest woman pimp I ever knew.”
Rosie’s speculation absorbed me as I drove home from the hospital, but my mood lightened when a familiar car drove into my driveway ahead of me. Sadie’s Jeep.
“Just popped over on the off chance of catching you,” she said, emerging from the car with a shopping bag in hand. “I brought you some dinner. I was prepared to leave it on the doorstep if you were out.”
“I’m delighted. I could use a lift, and I am very happy to see one of the few friends who knows all my fears and secrets.”
Sadie put her free arm around my shoulders as we walked into the kitchen, where she gave me a long hug and then pulled a casserole from the shopping bag.
“Stroganoff,” she said. “Not as superlative as the one Joe makes, but reasonable enough for a supper for my best friend.”
“Can you join me?”
“For a while, but not for long. Himself and I are going to an early movie.”
“So Wilson has achieved ‘himself’ status, I see.”
Sadie seated herself at my kitchen table and leaned forward, chin in her hand and a sweet smile on her face.
“Wilson has achieved the impossible. He has returned me to the helpless romantic I was in my twenties. I am absolutely besotted.”
“Sex fiend.”
“That too. Speaking of sex, any word from the father of your child?”
I shook my head and poured some dry dog food into Charlie’s bowl.
Sadie’s smile disappeared. “Sorry about that. How about your new relationship with the dreadful Simon Gorshak? How’s that going?”
“Wynan and I met with him this morning. He’s agreed to try and help us find a contact if he can persuade a former prostitute he knows to cooperate.”
“I still think this is stupidly dangerous work for you. You have a baby to consider.”
“But I need to find Joe. I really need to find him.”
“I know. I want you to find him too. I miss my weekly fix of poetry. It amazes me how he has a perfect memory for poems, lines from literature, even quotes from critics.” Sadie, who was clearly trying to distract me from my misery, talked about the past and reminded me of the many dinners she had shared with Joe and me, and the jokes from Joe and mor
e serious long talks we’d had about books.
I joined her reminiscences. “Joe loves literature. Says he always has. A few weeks ago, I showed him a piece I had written for an academic journal and his comment was: ‘Good, but too many commas.’”
“Too many commas?”
“Yep. And then he quoted James Thurber to me, how Thurber hated commas and argued with the editors at The New Yorker.”
Sadie smiled. “Ah, yes. If I recall, Thurber said that commas were: ‘so many upturned office chairs hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability.’”
We both laughed. “That’s it.”
“I’m still amazed a police detective knows and cares about that stuff.” Sadie checked her casserole in the oven. “I share your wish to get him back again.”
“That’s what I hope will happen with my plan.”
Sadie pulled the steaming stroganoff out of the oven, and I poured a glass of red wine for her and water for me.
“When do you go back to Reno?” she asked.
“As soon as Simon calls and sets up a meeting.”
She frowned and dished up the food. “It’s ironic that Simon Gorshak would be the one you have to count on. You’re sure he isn’t setting some trap for you? He was as dangerous as a rattlesnake the last time you dealt with him.”
Sadie’s warning gave me pause, but I knew I had to keep going with my plan. “I have to believe—or hope—that he’s sincere. Getting through to Joe is paramount, and I don’t know any other way. If I’m getting the straight story from Reno, even the police can’t tell where he is.”
Chapter 15
I managed to get some sleep that night, but the next morning passed much too slowly. Edwin called to discuss a new course he was planning. I almost snapped at him, I was so frustrated and anxious to hear from Simon. By ten o’clock I was ready to pick up the phone and call him when an email appeared on my computer:
Red Solaris Mystery Series Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 57
