by A. E. Howe
I raised my voice over him. “Stop. Stop. We’re here looking for her.”
“Don’t tell us you don’t know where she is,” Shantel said, accusation in her voice. All of the fear and anxiety that she’d been trying to control for days was ready to come roaring out as anger as soon as she found a suitable target. I had to make sure she didn’t take aim at Jarvis without cause.
“Let’s calm down and go inside where we can talk,” I told both of them.
“Man, ain’t no room inside. Grams is watching her shows. The only way you can stand it is to have buds in.” He indicated the earbuds hanging around his neck.
“We can sit in the car,” I suggested.
“No, no. The neighbors see me talking to you, they’ll think all kinds of crazy stuff and tell Grams.” Jarvis thought for a moment. “We can go around back.”
He led the way off the porch and we followed him down a narrow path between his grandmother’s house and the neighbor’s. We went through a gate and were instantly greeted by an overly affectionate grey Pitbull who tried to lick and jump on all three of us at the same time.
Jarvis opened the door to the back porch and fetched the dog’s food. He filled up a bowl while talking baby talk to the dog, who ate up the attention as ardently as the food.
“We can sit there,” Jarvis said, pointing to an outdoor table and chairs.
“Jarvis, we know that you and Tonya went to the Sweet Spot together a couple of times. Tell us why you went there and what happened while you were there.”
“Oh, damn,” he said, rubbing his head and face with his hands. “It was just a thing. She was all like, ‘You’re so nice, Jarvis, you’re too sweet, don’t you ever do anything exciting?’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I can do something. I’ll take you to the Sweet Spot.’ She liked that. Tonya kinda liked the gangsta thing. But she’d got in trouble in Tallahassee, so she was really trying to stay clean. I think that’s why she wanted to hang out with me. But she got bored, I guess. That’s why I took her to the Sweet Spot. ’Cause I was afraid she was going to get tired of being with me. But where is she now?” His voice cracked a little with this last question.
“How could you take her there?” Shantel asked, as much to herself as to him. She’d apparently decided that he wasn’t a strong enough target for her anger.
“I shouldn’t have. After we went there the first time, that’s all she’d talk about. Could I take her back? When could we go? I didn’t want to hear about it anymore, but she kept on. Finally we went back. Mostly she just wanted to be there. We drank some beers and watched people. Oh, yeah, we were pestered by the dealers. You can’t sit there for two minutes without someone trying to sell you something. I didn’t like it.”
The young man prattled on so much that it was hard to get a question in. Finally I just blurted out, “Why there?”
“What?” he asked after I’d gotten his attention.
“Why the Sweet Spot? Why not someplace in Tallahassee?” The Sweet Spot wasn’t really a place for college-aged kids, even ones looking for trouble. Its main clientele were older men and women who were looking for a fix now. Probably half the people there on a Saturday night were there because they didn’t have transportation to someplace better.
“My uncle hangs out there a lot. Some of the older guys hang out at his house. I know ’em.”
“So you felt safe there.” I made a note to pay the bartender back some day. He and everyone else in the bar had known who Jarvis was, but none of them were going to make it easy for me. Maybe someday I’d have the opportunity to chose whether or not to make something easy or hard for the bartender. It wasn’t going to be a difficult choice.
“Did you notice anyone looking at Tonya?”
“Everyone looks at Tonya. She’s hot,” he said, not disrespectfully, but I saw Shantel stiffen and her eyes blaze.
“But did anyone look at Tonya more than the others?” I persisted.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Did she talk to anyone in particular while you were there?”
Jarvis seemed to think for a minute, then shook his head.
“Did you know that she went to the Sweet Spot on Saturday night?”
“This Saturday?” He seemed surprised.
“Yes, this Saturday.”
“But she was with her friend Jenny,” he said, not a shred of doubt in his voice.
“Did you talk to her or text her Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see your phone?”
“Are you, like, a cop?” he asked.
I needed to tread lightly here. I didn’t suspect him of harming Tonya or knowingly being involved in hurting her, but he was naïve enough that someone else might have used him to lure Tonya into something bad. I didn’t want to taint evidence by pretending to be working on the case. I decided on full disclosure.
“I’m a reserve deputy with the sheriff’s office, but I’m not here in an official capacity. I’m just trying to help my friend, Tonya’s aunt. We just want to get her home safe. You seem like a nice guy who cares a lot about Tonya. Letting us read her messages might help us to figure out where she is, and how we can help her.” I used the most reasonable tone I could muster. Jarvis really did seem like a good guy and, most of the time, appealing to someone’s good nature is not a bad way to start.
“I guess. But I’ve read them like a million times. And she doesn’t say much except she had a plan to get work.” Jarvis pulled out his phone and handed it to me.
As I scrolled through their messages, I angled the phone so that Shantel could read along. The messages ran the gamut: arranging to meet; Tonya complaining about someone or something; Tonya ecstatic over clothes or food. Jarvis mostly responded to Tonya with a little not-so-subtle flirting that she deflected.
Tonya: Bored!
Jarvis: What’s you doing?
Tonya: With Jenny and her boyfriend. he’s an ass.
Jarvis: We could do something. Want to meet?
Tonya: Got to get a job!!!!!!!!!
Jarvis: yeah
Tonya: No one wants to hire me when they find out I got in trouble in Tally!
Jarvis: There must be someone who wouldn’t care.
There was a few minutes’ pause before Tonya responded with: Got an idea! Why am I so brilliant?!!!
Jarvis: What’s the plan? Can I help?
Tonya: Got to check it out first. Tell you when I see you!
Jarvis: K
And that was all there was except for a dozen messages from Jarvis asking where she was and if she was okay. I checked his recent calls and there were several from him that only lasted a second and no incoming calls from Tonya. I handed the phone back to him.
“Why are you asking about the Sweet Spot?” Jarvis asked.
I thought about my answer for a minute. In an interview you always need to make sure that, if you give out information, it’s for a reason. The question was, would telling Jarvis that Tonya went to the Sweet Spot serve any useful purpose? Looking at the sad young man sitting in front of us, I decided that we needed an ally who had a different perspective on Tonya’s life than Shantel did.
“She went to the Sweet Spot looking for work,” I told him and his eyes got huge.
“That’s crazy. The girls that work there… Oh, no. Why’d she do that?” He stood up and started pacing back and forth. “Man, is this because I took her there? Oh, man.”
I felt Shantel shift, but she didn’t say anything. I’d been worried that she might pile guilt on top of Jarvis over this, but it was clear that while he may have made some bad decisions, he really did care about Tonya.
“The decision to go back to the Sweet Spot was her own. You can’t blame yourself. What we need is for you to calm down and help us find her,” I told him.
He remained standing, but stopped the manic pacing. “What can I do? Anything.”
“Obviously, I don’t know all of her friends,” Shantel said. “I need you to write down the names and
numbers of all the friends you know. If you can, call them and ask if they’ve seen her or know of other friends or places she might go.”
“Okay, yeah, I can do that.” It was obvious that he was looking forward to doing something to help find Tonya.
I pulled a pen and paper out of my pocket. In the dim light cast from the house, Jarvis wrote down a dozen names, about half of which were unfamiliar to Shantel. As soon as he was done writing, he got on his phone and started making calls.
While Jarvis contacted Tonya’s friends, I called dispatch at the sheriff’s office to get a number for Deputy Julio Ortiz. When I reached him, he told me he was going on duty in about an hour and agreed to meet with us. We left Jarvis with the assurance that we’d let him know when we found Tonya. I hoped it was a promise we’d be able to keep.
Chapter Six
It was fully dark by the time we rendezvoused with Deputy Ortiz. Tall and lean, his vest, belt, radio, gun and other equipment appeared to cling to him like climbers scaling a peak.
“Hey, man, you working tonight?” he asked me. I’d already done a couple of shifts on the road this month to maintain my reserve status.
“No, I’m helping out Shantel. Her niece is missing.”
“Hey, Shantel, sorry to hear that. That’s rough. You think I can help?”
“Maybe. We know that she was over at the Sweet Spot on Saturday about the time that you cited a guy for public indecency. We just wanted to pick your brain. See if you remember anything.”
“The Sweet Spot.” You could almost hear Julio thinking, What the hell was she doing there? “I remember. Guy pissing in the street. Drunk. Everyone outside that place is high on something.”
Shantel pulled up a good picture of Tonya on her phone and turned it to him. “Taken last week. I don’t know what she was wearing Saturday night.”
“Hmmm, I don’t know. I had a few minutes between calls, was in the area and decided to drive by. There were some guys standing outside. Maybe half a dozen, all of them looking suspicious. They got real interested in their feet when they saw me. But then I noticed this joker standing between a couple of cars, pissing in the dirt. He was swaying back and forth, too drunk to even know I was there. I would have just given him a citation, but he was too drunk to leave. I put him in the back of my car. A miracle that he didn’t puke.”
“Did you see any women?”
“Maybe. When I was leaving I was in a hurry because I didn’t want the guy to hurl in the back of my car. But a house or two down the street, I saw a person walking across a yard. Might have been a woman. It was dark and half the streetlights around there are busted. I thought there was something odd about the person, but nothing was obviously wrong. Nothing said this could be a problem. Not like the drunk in the back of my car.”
Julio gave me specific details regarding which yard he saw the person in, though he admitted it could have been a woman or a man, then headed back to work.
“I can go by there in the morning,” I told Shantel.
“We can go now,” she shot back.
“Shantel, it’s getting late and the neighborhood—”
“No, I understand,” she said.
I sighed. “Okay, we can go, but if I get shot it’s your fault.”
“No one’s going to shoot you. Besides, now’s the best time to go there. People are more likely to be home.” I don’t know who she was trying to convince, but I understood why she couldn’t let it go.
I called Cara to apologize for being late. She was continuing her long-standing campaign to make friends with Ivy.
“I’d have an easier time getting close to an A-list movie star,” she grumbled.
“She’s a bit of a prima donna,” I admitted.
“Well, if she wants some of the chicken I brought then she’s going to have to make nice. Speaking of chicken, have you had dinner?” As soon as she said it my stomach growled.
“No. And I’m starving.” I looked over at Shantel, who rolled her eyes. “You have to be hungry too,” I said to her, holding the phone away from my mouth.
“Are you going to be much longer?” Cara asked.
I looked over at Shantel. “Hard to say. We’re checking out one more lead. I’ll know more after that. I’ll call you.”
Shantel handed me a PowerBar that she’d found in the console. “Mind if I have one?” she asked.
“Please, eat. I don’t want you passing out on me.” I tried to kid her, but jokes just weren’t very funny today.
We drove past the Sweet Spot, which looked fairly quiet this early on a weeknight. I pulled over across the street from the bar and just short of the house that Ortiz had indicated, turning off the headlights.
Shantel reached for her door, but I put my hand on her arm.
“Not yet. I want to watch the house for a few minutes first.” She nodded and settled back in her seat to watch with me.
The house was concrete block, featureless and with no more than eleven hundred square feet. Lights were on in the front windows. We saw someone walk through the living room, but nothing more. After fifteen minutes I figured we’d learned all we could from the outside.
We dodged deadfall and various trash as we walked across the yard to the front door. We were lucky that there was enough light coming from the house for us to avoid most of the junk. Up close, it was obvious that the house hadn’t been painted in a decade. The front door was a cheap, hollow-core interior door. At least we can be sure that whoever lives here isn’t dealing drugs, I thought. I made sure that Shantel was close enough that anyone looking out from inside would see her too. I thought that would increase the chances that the occupant would open the door.
I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again. Still nothing. The third time I heard someone approach the door. I could feel whoever was on the other side of the door looking us over.
“What?” came a voice from inside.
“Could we talk to you for a minute?” Shantel asked in her friendliest tone.
“Got drink, don’t need your god, go away,” was the charming reply.
I dug into my wallet and pulled out a twenty, a ten and a couple of fives and held them up so they could be seen through the DIY peephole in the door. “We just have a couple questions. If you have really good answers, there could be more,” I told the door.
After a short wait for the alcoholic on the other side of the door to consider how much Mad Dog 20/20 could be bought with forty dollars, we heard the chain on the door slide back. The chain was a waste. I could have put my fist through the door.
A grizzled old man, his gray three-day growth of beard contrasting sharply with his dark oak skin, peered out at us suspiciously. Then, to my surprise, he stepped out onto the stoop with us, pulling the door shut behind him. We were all uncomfortably close on the four-by-four concrete slab. I stepped back off of it to escape the stench of alcohol sweat coming off of him. A second later Shantel joined me.
“What you want? You ain’t cops,” he told us. I wasn’t sure why he didn’t think we were cops, but if it made him feel better, he could go on believing it.
“What’s your name?” I asked, although I’d already looked it up on the property appraiser’s website.
“Ra’,” he said, sending spittle flying. His full name was Raymond Emery, so close enough. I handed him a five-dollar bill, which he snatched and crammed into his pocket.
“Were you home on Saturday?”
“No. Gimme my money.” His toothless mouth would have slurred the words with or without the alcohol.
“I said a couple questions. Where were you?” I tried to keep my voice light and easy, trying to sound more like an MC on a quiz show and less like the cop he’d told me I wasn’t.
He looked at me like I’d asked him to calculate the time of the next full lunar eclipse in the southern hemisphere. “Why you want to know?” he finally asked, slowly and suspiciously.
“Not the way the game works. I ask the questions and you answer. Get the answers
right and you get money. Now, where were you Saturday night?”
“I don’t remember. I was drunk.” I was sure that the first statement was a lie and equally sure that the second statement was the truth.
“Guess we don’t have anything more to talk about,” I said and started to turn.
“Give me my money.” He tried to grab me, but was too slow and too drunk.
“One last chance. Want the money? Then where were you?”
“He was at the Sweet Spot,” Shantel said, causing both of us to turn and look at her. “You don’t have to give this saucepot forty bucks for something I can tell you.”
“How you know that?” he slurred in her general direction.
“The Spot is the closest booze hole. Where else would an old booze hound be on a Saturday night?”
“Ha, you ain’t so stupid,” he said to Shantel and then turned to me. “Now give me my money.”
I held up the remaining thirty-five dollars and handed it to Shantel.
“Hey! What the…”
“She’s the one who told me where you were. Now go to bed.”
“No, wait…” he blathered, then changed his mind. “You bastards get off my property!”
“We’re going,” I told him.
Shantel made eye contact with me and I shook my head no. She was puzzled, but followed me as I walked back to the car. The drunk stood on his porch, swaying in the cold night air as he watched us leave.
“Why didn’t you ask him about Tonya?” Shantel sounded a bit upset.
“Because he’s hiding something and I can’t force him to tell me. At least not yet. I’m going to drive around for a few minutes to give him a chance to go back inside and forget we were here. Don’t worry, we aren’t done with ol’ Ray.” I didn’t tell her that he had groped Tonya in the bar on Saturday. I didn’t want her to have a stroke.
We were back in five minutes. I approached from the same direction as before, thinking that he might have decided to take his five dollars and wander over to the Sweet Spot, but we didn’t see him. I certainly wasn’t worried about him seeing us. At night, at his age, and in his state of permanent intoxication, the chances he could see more than five feet in front of himself were nil.
