Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  “I’m not scared of cops,” she says. “Go ahead and ask me a question. Shel’s gone. There’s no one left to protect.”

  I turn and look at the guy with the pool net.

  “Yeah, he has ears,” she says. “Is this top secret?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say. “Did you know a woman named Cat?”

  She perks up. “The blonde? Yeah. She was on the plane too. I guess Shel was taking her to Hawaii.” Then she stands and says, “Hey, come inside.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Linnea.”

  23

  Linnea leads me from the pool deck into an enormous kitchen with a cool terracotta-tiled floor. Cigarette smoke and country music and male voices drift in from a room far across the house.

  “This way,” she says. “No one will see us on the back stairs.”

  She walks ahead of me up the narrow stairway, and that dimpled lower back, those wide hypnotic hips, and the firm round flesh between them—it’s all waving right in front of me. Like I said, usually I’m immune to this stuff. Work is work. But this woman’s got something going on, and how long has it been? Last week, I found an unopened box of condoms in my bathroom, and they were expired.

  The stairs lead to a wide hallway with dark hardwood floors, long Persian rugs, and side tables with lamps. The walls are hung with paintings every ten feet, and now and then a mirror. We go into the second room on the right, and she shuts the door. There’s a big unmade bed with green and white sheets piled in the middle, a low broad dresser strewn with clothing, sunscreen, makeup, ashtrays, hats, and open soda cans. Next to the dresser is a bathroom with towels and damp clothing all over the floor.

  She has this big teasing smile on her face, and part of me says I can’t be reading this right. I’m not a real good-looking guy. I’m not ugly either, but all those years of getting punched in the face didn’t make me any prettier. I’m not charming or stylish or rich. I’m invisible to women. They only see me when there’s furniture to be moved, or a flat tire to fix, and the only women who flirt with me are waitresses handing me a check. Her leading me up here and that big smile can’t mean what I think it means.

  I say, “You know what you’re doing, right?”

  “What am I doing?” she says.

  “I mean, we’re on the same page here, right?”

  She’s standing there in that bathing suit in front of the dresser, and she has those big teardrop breasts, and all my thoughts are headed in the wrong direction. She says, “Why don’t you come over here and show me what page you think we’re on. I’ll tell you if you’re right.” And then she sucks the tip of her finger in a gesture that comes off as contrived, flirty, coy, and stupid all at once.

  So I go over there, and I put one hand on each of those big round hips. I push her gently back until the cool edge of the dresser presses into the firm flesh of her behind, and I kiss her neck.

  We’re on the same page.

  As I’m drawing back from that kiss, she whispers, “Get me out of here.”

  “What?” I look at her with alarm. “Are you in danger?”

  She slides my left hand from her hip up to her breast. “No,” she says with a smile. “I’m broke, and I’m stuck, and I’m sick of this place.” She puts her arm around my back and pulls me closer. “You could do a girl a favor, you know. A big, big favor. All I need…” She kisses my ear and whispers, “ …is a one-way ticket home.” Then she kisses the other ear and adds, “Tonight. Can you do that?”

  “I can do that.”

  * * *

  A while later, we’re lying in bed, talking. She says, “It’s nice to meet a guy with a little enthusiasm. These drinkers and cokeheads, they just treat it like they’re taking care of business. Their business, not mine. What kind of cop are you?”

  “Private.”

  “What do you want to know about Cat?”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “No.” She gets up and walks to the dresser, takes a cigarette from a crumpled pack of Kools and lights it. “Shel liked her. He met her up in DC.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “I don’t know. The governor flew him up there with Frank Dorsett and another guy to talk to some politicians. I guess they did whatever rich men do in Washington.”

  “Dorsett’s the one with the big beer gut, right?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she says, taking a drag of her cigarette. “Eighteen months pregnant with a keg of Lone Star.”

  “Did Sheldon bring Cat down here?” I want to see if her account squares with Anna’s.

  She shakes her head. “Another guy brought her down as a gift. A guy from DC.”

  “He was here? The guy who brought her down?”

  “Yeah. He came off like a real charmer at first, but he gave me a bad vibe. And she was scared of him. That’s never a good sign. She, uh…” She gives me a little uncertain glance.

  “Cat? She what?”

  “She liked to swim. She was very graceful. A natural athlete. She’d swim laps in the pool, and Shel liked to watch her. Then she stopped.”

  “How long was she here?”

  “I don’t know. A month? Two months? It’s hard to keep track of time in this place. But she stopped coming to the pool. You wouldn’t see her out of her room at all, except when it was dark. And then she only wore dresses. She wouldn’t put on a bathing suit, or anything that showed her skin. That guy—he was rough with her. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “I get it.”

  She takes a drag of her cigarette and blows out a big cloud of smoke. The boredom is back upon her.

  “You’re from Duluth?” I ask.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “You said it didn’t get this hot in Duluth even in July.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “You have a good memory.”

  “Speaking of…” I pick up my phone and tap the Expedia app. “You really want to get out of here tonight?”

  “The sooner the better.” She sits down beside me, and we wait for the list of flights to load onto the screen.

  “Where’d you meet Sheldon?” I ask.

  “Vegas. You know what a whale is?”

  “Big gambler.”

  “Mm-hmm. You know they get special treatment? Their own tables in private rooms, with their own dealers, so they can get fleeced in luxury away from the pikers.”

  “I’ve heard about that.”

  “Those guys stay at the tables for ten or twelve hours at a stretch.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “And guys like Shel, who do a lot of blow, he’ll stay for thirty, forty hours straight.”

  “Were you one of his perks?”

  “I guess you could say that. Or a souvenir. He brought me home with him.” She reaches for a can to dump her cigarette ash into, but the ash falls on the floor.

  “Why are you still here, if he’s dead?”

  “Why is anyone still here? The house is full of food and booze, and no one’s come in to shut it down.”

  The flight search turns up only four results. “There are no flights to Duluth tonight. There’s a six thirty-five tomorrow morning. Stops in Minneapolis.”

  “I’ll take it,” she says.

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Johannson.”

  I type that into the phone, along with her date of birth and an email address where she can receive her electronic boarding pass.

  She takes a long puff of her cigarette and dumps the ash into a soda can. It lands with a short echoing hiss.

  Six Kools and two Diet Cokes later, I know a lot more about Sheldon Brown.

  He was an acquaintance of the governor. Not a friend, but a supporter who attended some fundraising events. He owned a string of car dealerships across the state that benefited from the governor’s tax reforms. He was also two years into an increasingly heavy coke addiction. Six months ago,
he lost $3.5 million in a single night at one of the big Vegas casinos. He went back to his room, got on the phone, and sold off a $5 million chunk of his car dealerships to cover the debt. Sold it to Franklin Dorsett. Then he lost another $1.5 million over the next two days.

  Linnea also mentions that Brown owned a dozen strip clubs. He’d bring in girls now and then from San Antonio or Houston to party for the weekend. Dorsett liked Katie Green, and he liked her best with one or two other girls on the side. “He was a glutton all the way around,” Linnea says. “The kind who always comes back from the buffet with two plates, if you know what I mean.”

  I’m sitting up in bed with my back against the pillows. She’s on the edge of the bed wearing nothing, with her legs crossed at the knees and one foot on the floor. “Frank liked to push Shel,” she says. “Egg him on, you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Encourage him to do more blow. Gamble more. Because—well, let’s put it this way—a lot of the money Shel lost wound up in Frank’s hands.”

  She looks bored as she bends the matches one by one from a matchbook so they stick out like crooked teeth. Then she adds, “There was another guy, fat and kind of creepy, who came into the house once a week and gave reports.”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “The clubs. He was a bouncer at one of the clubs, a big fat sweaty guy, and he’d come and tell Shel the numbers and Shel would ask if there was any trouble.”

  She stops and thinks for a few seconds. “The guy didn’t like him.” She looks up at me and says, “The bouncer. He didn’t like Shel, ’cause he knew Shel was using. The last few weeks before he died, Shel started shooting.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Coke. Ever been around someone who shoots coke? They’re not like junkies. They don’t shoot up twice a day and then lie around all droopy-headed and content. They shoot, they get a rush, then they want to shoot again a minute later when the rush is gone. And they start getting crazy. Like, paranoid, psychotic, out of control. Shel was threatening cops. They’d come in here when the parties got out of hand. When I first got here, he’d tone it down when the cops came, but toward the end, he would threaten them.”

  “How?”

  “He’d say this stuff about how the shit was going to roll uphill, instead of down. How it was all gonna go straight to the top.”

  “What did that mean?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “These were local cops?”

  She stops and thinks for a second. “You know, now that you mention it, no. They were State Patrol. Always State Patrol.” She puts the matchbook down on the bed and takes the last sip of Diet Coke from the can on the nightstand.

  “That’s funny,” I say. “They’re usually out on the highways, not in residential neighborhoods. You have any photos on your phone?”

  She gets that teasing smile on her face again and says, “What kind of photos are you interested in? You want one of me?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “I could tell by the way you were looking at me by the pool. You’re not real subtle, you know.”

  “I’m more interested in photos of Sheldon Brown and Franklin Dorsett. How well do you think Brown knew the governor?”

  She lights another cigarette and shrugs as she blows out a cloud of smoke. “I don’t know. They knew each other well enough to get on each other’s nerves. I wouldn’t say there was a whole lot of warmth between them.”

  “Was he ever here?”

  “The governor?” She shakes her head. “No. But Shel took me to meet him.”

  “Where?”

  “A country club. A fundraiser. Once at the governor’s mansion in Austin. Wait a second.” She picks her phone up from the dresser and scrolls through some photos. “Here.” She comes back to the bed and turns the screen toward me.

  It’s a photo of Brown and Dorsett with Jumbo Throckmorton. They’re all standing in front of a bar, dressed in tuxedos. Dorsett is red-faced from booze. Brown’s pupils are dilated, but it could just be the dark interior. Throckmorton towers over the two of them.

  “Where was this taken?”

  “Galveston. He pinched my ass about two seconds after I took the photo.”

  “What were you doing in Galveston?”

  “The governor.”

  “You slept with the governor?”

  She laughs. “Well, we didn’t sleep. It was just an in-and-out kinda thing. He left his wife at the party to entertain. Told her he had to take a call upstairs.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “I guess I got kinda distracted.”

  “Well, aren’t you a smart detective?”

  “Was he a perv?” I ask, ignoring her jibe.

  “The governor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not at all. But whoever named him Jumbo’s got a funny sense of proportion. They got the throckmorton part right though. He hangs a little crooked.”

  “You have any more photos like this?”

  She shrugs. “I can send you all I got. You decide what’s interesting.”

  “Well, I have one for you,” I say. “That guy Cat was with? I just want to make sure we’re talking about the same person.” I pull up the photo of Lomax on my phone, and when I show it to her, she recoils and puts her forearm across her breasts, as if to protect herself.

  “I fucking hate that guy!” she says, and she eyes me like I’m the devil.

  “But this is the one?” I say.

  “That’s him.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  Her eyes narrow and her nostrils flare, and she says, “I’m glad I’m not Cat. That’s what I know about him.”

  “What was he doing down here?”

  “Same thing everyone else was doing. Living it up. Milking money out of Shel while he self-destructed. Why do you ask so many questions?”

  “I’m a detective, remember?”

  “Yeah. You said that.”

  “Did you have a sense of anything different about him? About Lomax?”

  “I told you—”

  “No, I mean, did he ever try to get you alone—”

  “I avoided him,” she says flatly.

  “Wait till I finish the question. Did he try to get people alone so he could ask them questions?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes narrow again. “What are you getting at?”

  “Did he ever ask you to…” There’s a fine line here that I’m not sure I should cross. I want to know if he ever asked her to inform. Because I want to know if he was actually doing his job while he was in this house, or if he just got caught up in the drugs and the drinking and the sex. The problem is, if I start asking whether he acted like an undercover cop, she’s going to pick up on it. Her ditzy flirt routine out by the pool was pretty convincing, but after talking to her, I see she’s a lot smarter than I had thought. Exposing the identity of an undercover federal agent would be cause for revoking an investigator’s license, and it’s not something Ed Hartwell would ever forgive.

  She sees my hesitation and asks, “What? Did he ever ask me to what?”

  “Did he ask you questions about Brown and Dorsett? About the drugs, or the guy who came in with the weekly reports from the strip clubs, or any of that?”

  She looks at me closely and I can see her mind going. “What are you asking me? If he was a cop? Is that what you’re asking?”

  Shit. She said it, not me.

  “That’s not what I asked. Just answer the question I did ask.”

  “OK, mister investigator. The answer is no. No, he did not ask me about any of that, and if he asked anyone else, I never heard of it. He did ask me if I wanted to snort a line with him. He did ask me to sit on his lap, and then he asked if I liked having a big dick up my ass. He was that kind of guy. Especially when he was doing coke.

  “And ever
y morning, he’d come out of Cat’s room all shiny and fresh. He was the kind who trimmed his nose hairs every day, and kept his hair combed, and brushed every speck of lint off his jacket. A control freak with a perfect tan, and a big ego who could ooze charm when he wasn’t totally self-absorbed. Poor Cat. To have a guy like that obsessed with you…” She shakes her head. “I’d rather be dead. And if I don’t do something with my life soon, I probably will be.”

  The Lomax I saw in DC the other day, with the stains on his lapel and cuff, seems to have slipped a little from the one she described. And I wouldn’t say he looked shiny. He looked jittery and worn with those dark circles under his eyes.

  “You’ll be out of here tomorrow,” I say.

  “It can’t be soon enough,” she says. “I’ve had enough of this nowhere life.”

  “What’ll you do back home?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Duluth is just another nowhere, but at least it’s not here. And I have family there. Hey, I’m gonna wash up. You sticking around? Or do you have to go?”

  “I can stick around for a few. I want to wash up too.”

  When she goes into the shower, I find her wallet and take a photo of her license, just to make sure. Linnea Johansson of Duluth, Minnesota. The names on the credit cards match the license. I find her phone and copy her number, and I put my number into her contacts while I’m at it.

  When it’s my turn to shower, I take everything into the bathroom with me: clothes, phone, wallet, keys. Afterward, she gives me a little kiss goodbye and tells me to keep in touch. I give her a card and tell her my number’s in her phone.

  She says, “You’re sweet, Frankie. Thanks for the roll!”

  24

  I don’t see anyone on my way out but I can still hear the voices, more of them than before, coming from a far corner of the house. The country music seems like it’s been turned up a notch or two. There’s a yell, five or six voices together, when someone sweeps up the pot with what must have been one hell of a hand.