Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  I hit the button on the bottom of the phone, and the home screen image of a blue sky with cottony summer clouds appears behind a web of shattered glass, like a window to freedom barred by a spider’s deadly trap. Then the keypad appears. What’s Julia on a numeric keypad? J-5, U-8, L-5, I-4, A-2.

  58542. Open sesame.

  The first thing I do is put the phone in airplane mode, so it stops sending out location information. Then I check the photos.

  She has quite a few of her apartment. And there’s Katie Green, with the pretty face and the eyes that lack confidence. She’s sitting at a picnic table with blue crabs and beer bottles and wooden mallets. Then come a few more of the apartment, including the couch I’m sitting on right now. I keep scrolling. There’s one of Anna in the mirror, wearing only white satin underpants, with her arm covering her chest. She must have taken this some time ago. She looks healthy, at least ten pounds heavier than she is now. Her skin is glowing, smooth, and clear. Her hair is honey blonde, not the faded flaxen color I saw at Travis’s house down in Texas. Her face shows a sharp appraisal of her reflection, but she’s not looking down at her body. She’s looking up at the eyes that show a mixture of intelligence and doubt.

  I keep scrolling. She gets thinner over time. Katie Green starts looking strung out, the vulnerability in her eyes replaced by the hollow, absent look of the junkie. And then there’s full-figured Linnea standing in a white bikini and sun hat, sipping a piña colada beside the shimmering blue water of that pool in Dallas.

  There are more women inside Sheldon Brown’s house. Then two men in the kitchen, looking hungover. The thinner one, the guy in the white collared shirt with the brown hair and eyes, that’s Sheldon Brown. The one with the checkered shirt and big beer belly is Franklin Dorsett. Brown looks worn from too much partying. Dorsett eyes him with a calculating look, like he’s overseeing the downfall of the man whose empire he will inherit.

  There are photos of messy bedrooms, and big tables covered with liquor bottles, ashtrays, playing cards, white-dusted mirrors, and mirrors licked clean.

  Then comes a series of Anna in the mirror, her face thinner now, tired and careworn. Her skin has lost the glow of the earlier photos. Her hair is paler, drier, more brittle-looking. I can see the outline of her hipbones pressing through her black stretch pants.

  In the second photo in the series, she’s removed the stretch pants. Her legs are thin. I zoom in and study the bruises on her thighs. What did Linnea tell me? That Anna, who liked to swim, had stopped going to the pool and stopped baring her skin.

  In the next photo, she takes her shirt off. The bruises on her ribs and stomach would be hidden by a dress. She turns around. More bruises on her lower back and buttocks.

  I keep scrolling. There’s no photo of Lomax anywhere. She knew better than to try that.

  I check the videos on the phone, but there are none. Strange that someone who took so many photos has no videos.

  I poke around a little more and find an app called File Explorer. I open it up and see the phone has an extra storage card. It contains a single folder called vids, which is filled with hundreds of videos. Usually, when a phone has an extra storage card, the video app is automatically set up to use it. But on this phone, it’s not, which makes me wonder if that storage card came from somewhere else. Like maybe Anna slipped it into this phone right before she mailed it.

  Each video has a preview image, the opening frame, and they’re almost all black. I pick one from about a month ago and hit play. The screen is dark, and at first there’s no sound. Then I hear her muffled voice.

  “I’m changing.”

  There’s a click, maybe a door opening, and the voice of a man, far away. “Keep your clothes on.” The door closes.

  “I thought you wanted—”

  “I said keep them on,” and then he sniffs. “I’ll take them off.”

  They exchange a few quiet words I can’t make out. Then there’s a sudden thud, a loud creaking, and what sounds like fabric rustling across the phone’s mic. What just happened? I listen for a few more seconds before it hits me. The phone is under the mattress. One of them just sat on the bed.

  “Where’s your phone?” That’s Lomax talking.

  “On the nightstand.” That’s Anna.

  For a few seconds, all I can hear are muffled noises and the mattress rustling against the mic. Then two little clicks. I bet that’s Lomax taking the battery out of her phone and then dropping the phone and battery onto the night table. She knew he’d try to control that thing, so she got a second one and hid it from him. She’s a good informant.

  There’s the creaking sound again, maybe Lomax sitting down on the bed, and then some vague noises. Kissing? I don’t know. In a minute, she protests. He’s too rough in taking off her bra. There’s a loud slap. He tells her to shut up, and she does.

  I listen for fifteen minutes. He hits her a number of times, and does some things quietly that make her yelp. At one point, I go to check on Julia in the bedroom because I don’t want her to hear this. She’s asleep.

  Lomax grunts a lot, and Anna makes almost no noise until the end, when he does something that really hurts her.

  I spend the next few hours skimming through these sound-only videos while Julia sleeps in the other room. No one in that house would have let Anna take a video of what really went on there. But she figured out a way to gather evidence without anyone knowing. Let Lomax control her personal phone, and she would hide the secret second phone and record audio.

  In some of the recordings, she’s walking through rooms full of people, or she’s out by the pool, probably at night, among the sound of music and drunken partiers. The phone must be in her purse, or stuffed into her dress. In one, I can hear her heartbeat, quick and urgent, like an animal on alert.

  In a recording from inside the house, I hear the clink of ice in glasses and the tapping of the razor blade on the mirror, the snorting and everyone talking over everyone else. A woman says, “Do that in the bathroom, Shel. No one wants to see that.” That was Linnea. She told me at the house she didn’t like being around people who shoot coke.

  Another snort, and then Lomax says, “You’re up.”

  “I don’t want any,” Anna says.

  “Come on!” Lomax coaxes her the way you’d lure a reluctant dog with a treat.

  “No,” says Anna.

  “What, all of a sudden you’re Little Miss Clean?”

  “I don’t want it,” she says. “I’ve had enough.”

  “You haven’t had any.”

  “I’ve had enough for one lifetime. Really,” she says wearily, “I have.”

  “Hey, Shel,” Lomax says. “Got an extra needle? Little Cat here doesn’t want to damage her pretty nose.”

  Shel sounds excited to have someone to shoot with. Anna says she won’t do it. Lomax says she will. I don’t know how that turned out. The recording ended too soon.

  A number of the recordings don’t include her voice at all. She must have left the phone hidden somewhere in the room and then walked out. The sound quality is poor in all of them, and most contain little of interest.

  There’s one, though, that’s pretty revealing. It’s a poker game, with the occasional shuffling of cards. There are only two people in the room, though now and then others pop in and out. One person snorts an occasional line. One opens a can of beer. It’s Sheldon Brown, the cokehead, and Franklin Dorsett, the drinker.

  In one hand, Brown loses a strip club in San Antonio to Dorsett. Three hands later, he wins it back. Brown tells Dorsett he’s getting fat, and then taunts him. “Linnea says you’re more interested in eating and drinking than screwing.”

  Dorsett says that understanding your priorities is one of the benefits of age. Anyways, he adds, food and beer are better vices than cocaine. Sheldon Brown disagrees, then bets $50,000 on what turns out to be three tens. He wins that hand and tells Dorsett he needs a minute in the bathroom. Dorsett says w
hy can’t he just do it at the table? I can just picture him watching Brown shoot up with the same interest a trainer shows in his developing fighter. Both want to make sure their man is progressing.

  There’s a moment of silence, and then Brown moans and gasps like he’s having an orgasm. Then he goes quiet again.

  “How’s that feel?” Dorsett says, and I can almost hear a grin in his voice.

  For a couple of minutes, they don’t talk. One of them burps a couple of times, probably Dorsett, as he shuffles the cards.

  Finally, Sheldon Brown says, “I gotta get that damn monkey off my back.” His voice is shaky and agitated.

  “Yeah, you do,” Dorsett says. “You in for another hand?”

  “Yeah. Gimme a… gimme a… minute.”

  “How ’bout ten thousand for the ante?”

  “How ’bout OK?”

  Someone comes in and says, “Anyone seen Cat?”

  It’s Lomax.

  “What the hell you been doing to her, Chuck?”

  Chuck? Is that Lomax’s undercover name?

  “Me?” Lomax says. “I thought you were the one roughing her up.”

  “I don’t treat ’em like that,” Brown says. “Just in and out. No need to get rough.”

  “How do you know what you do?” Lomax asks. His voice is filled with arrogance. “You’re so full of coke, you’re like Jekyll and Hyde. You talk too loud, gamble too much, and fuck too hard.”

  Dorsett lets out a loud laugh, and adds, “Yeah, Shel was just telling me he’s got a monkey on his back.”

  “I said I have to get that monkey off my back. That’s what I said. You want a taste?”

  Lomax says OK, and I hear the razor tapping against the mirror, then two big snorts.

  “Where’s Cat?” Lomax asks again.

  “What’s the difference?” Dorsett asks.

  “I’m looking for Cat,” Lomax says, and then he sniffs loudly a few times.

  “No,” says Dorsett. “I mean, what’s the difference between having a monkey on your back and wanting to get a monkey off your back?”

  Brown says, “The difference is, you’re talking about blow, and I’m talking about that goddamn ape Throckmorton. He’s squeezing me too hard.”

  “What’s he want?” Lomax asks.

  “More. Always more. Fucker. Next time you see him, Chuck, tell him to grow some balls and come here himself to collect his money.”

  Dorsett laughs. “What’re you gonna do, Shel? Shoot him?”

  “You’re damn right I am. Fucking overfed bastard. You tell him, Chuck. Tell him to come down here. I’ll shoot his fat ass and throw him on the grill with some barbecue sauce. Serve him up to his own patrolmen next time they come by.”

  “That’s not the kind of message I’d take to the governor,” Lomax says. “You can tell him that yourself, tough guy.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re a little too friendly with him,” Brown says. “Sometimes I think you’re the kind of guy who might bend over for a big man like that. Maybe you like doing favors for a big powerful guy. You like to feel that kind of power, Chuckie?”

  Dorsett says, “Watch it, Shel.”

  “Damn, you’re a mean-looking son of a bitch,” Brown says with a taunting laugh. “Didn’t know such a handsome fella could look so mean.”

  I hear furniture shuffling around. A chair goes over. Someone is hitting someone, and there’s a lot of grunting. Dorsett says, “Calm down. Calm the fuck down, you goddamn psycho!” He’s struggling, like he’s trying to restrain Brown or Lomax. “Go find Cat, will you? He’s high as hell, Chuck. You know there’s no sense arguing with him when he’s like this.”

  Lomax says something I can’t make out. Sheldon Brown is laughing. “I make you mad, pretty boy?”

  “Get out of here,” Dorsett says. “Go find Cat.” It sounds like he shuffles Lomax out of the room. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, Shel, if you don’t watch that goddamn mouth of yours.”

  I skim through a few more recordings without finding anything of interest. Then I come across one that I wish I didn’t find. The phone is under the mattress again. Lomax is getting rough with Anna. He’s charged up, sniffling, like he’s just done a few lines. She tells him she’ll do what he wants if he stops hitting her. He curses and tells her to shut up. Then she’s choking. He’s strangling her, and she must go unconscious, because he starts shouting at her frantically to wake up. I can hear him slapping her. “Wake up! Wake up, you stupid bitch! What the fuck is wrong with you? Wake up!”

  And then the bed starts creaking rhythmically, and I hear him grunting.

  He didn’t wait for her to wake up.

  I have to turn the phone off.

  31

  Julia woke up hungry around eight p.m., so we walked down Columbia Road to 18th Street and had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. She told me her father had been a metal worker in a machine shop just north of Staunton until a job accident left him unable to work. The family got by on his disability and the money her mother brought in from housecleaning.

  Her dad was a restless, pushy kind of guy. “And impossible to please,” she said. He started drinking after he went on disability, and was controlling toward their mother and Anna but not as much toward Julia. Their mother seemed frustrated and bewildered by her lack of opportunity and a life that didn’t turn out the way she had imagined. She picked up her husband’s drinking habit. When he died ten years ago, she went on a binge that hasn’t let up.

  “It leaves you with a sense of defeat,” she told me, “to see your parents give in to a life that demeans them. It upset Anna more than it upset me. I don’t think she ever dealt with it. Not in a healthy way. She did too many things too young, and no one intervened to stop her.”

  Julia came out of college with a lot of debt. “Anna paid hers off,” Julia says, “because she only went for two semesters. I don’t know how I ever will.”

  As the waiter lays the food on the table, she asks me where I grew up, and I say Philly and change the subject. Then she asks how I became a private eye.

  “I worked in a fish market in New York,” I say. “And when I moved down here, I worked in a fish market again. It was the only job I could get. One of our regular customers was a private eye. I used to talk with him two, three times a week. He knew about my boxing career.

  “One day, he wanted to confront a guy who was blackmailing one of his clients. But he was scared. The blackmailer was this big Harley-driving redneck out in Calvert County, Maryland. A mean-looking guy covered in tattoos. The PI brought me along to intimidate the guy. He had dug up some dirt on Mister Harley and basically said, you keep blackmailing my client, and we’ll expose what we know about you. We had a tense conversation in the guy’s garage and we came to an understanding.

  “That’s what got me interested. The chance to put guys like that in their place. The PI brought me on for a three-month probationary period and started training me. Small-time investigators like him chase insurance cheats, crooked employees, cheating spouses, and other lowlifes. I understand those people, and I like them about as much as I liked the smell in the fish market.

  “Eventually, I took the courses and got my license. And then I met Ed Hartwell and took a step up.”

  Julia listens politely to all this, but the whole time the questions she wants to ask about her sister hang heavy in the air. She’s patient and quiet in a way that really gets to me. I can see the burden on her mind, but she doesn’t ask me to lift it.

  On the walk back to the apartment, she says, “Do you always hold on so tightly to your dates?”

  I didn’t notice until she said it, but I’m holding her by the elbow the same way that goon in San Francisco was holding her sister. I’m scanning the street with every step, wondering if Lomax is tracking her sister’s phone and has it pinpointed there in Anna’s apartment. Is he nearby, watching for her? Julia looks so much like her sister, he might go after her b
y mistake.

  “Is this a date?” I ask.

  “It might as well be,” she says. “What else do we have going on? And what are you looking for? You don’t seem like the type who checks out other women when he’s already got one on his arm.”

  “Just looking out,” I say. “When were you planning on heading back to Richmond?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You can’t spend the night at Anna’s.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I have a place lined up for you. I know a US marshal who lives in Northeast.” A good friend of Ed’s. I called him while Julia was sleeping and set it up.

  “Well, I want to clean up before I go.”

  “That’s fine.”

  And she leaves it hanging there in the air, unsaid. I know she’s dying to know, but if I tell her where Anna is, someone could pull that information out of her.

  We’re both quiet for the last couple blocks of the walk. With her arm in mine, she leans on me, all sweetness and warmth, asking nothing. I don’t know if she gets it, if she understands how seductive her simple presence is to someone who’s always on his guard against the scammers and liars and losers and thieves. In my world, everyone’s working an angle. Everyone’s trying to rip everyone else off. No one rests their head on your arm just because they like you. No one does that because they’re sweet. Except this one, who has no guile in her eyes and doesn’t shy away from a direct look because she has nothing to hide. All my defenses were built against dishonest people who are out to screw everyone they can. I have no defense against the honest wishes of an honest heart. All she has to do to break me down is leave me alone with my conscience.

  Finally I say, “You want to talk to her?”

  And she says softly, matter-of-factly, as if she knew this was coming, “More than anything.”