by Cameron Cain
Gus looks me over. He’s one of those guys who uses his eyes like hands, pawing me up and down. Evaluating my tits, legs, ass, hair, and facial features to see how I slot in a rankings system where porn stars straddle the top tier. “Hey,” he says, “what’s your name?”
I go to the door. To Gus, and to everybody behind the mirror, it looks like I’m leaving. I hear Gus snicker as I open a pocket that contains nothing but pennies. I slide a few in the doorjamb. I reach up, turn off the camera, come back to the table, unplug the mic. And then I scramble across to Gus’s chair, grappling my knees onto his shoulders, pinching my thighs around his neck. Taking him sideways, anchoring his head to the table, I get out my knife and butterfly it open with a flourish. I aim the point at his eyeball and get it slowly closer.
“Hold still, Gus.”
“Help. Help.” He sounds like a tire losing air. “Help me.”
They’re trying. The door’s a thunderstorm of heavy shoulders smacking into it. Amazing what four cents can do.
“Really, Gus, you want to hold still.”
He does, right in time. I let the tip hover by his pupil. There’s no harm done, and won’t be as long as I don’t sneeze.
“All I want is the girl’s name. The girl you were going to use as a double for Polly, the one you locked in a fucking dog kennel, what’s her name? I’m going to back the knife off a half-inch so you can tell me.”
I do it. I’m exact. Keeping your promises is a crucial aspect of successful negotiations.
Gus watches the knife like it’s the whole world. “I don’t remember.”
The door is starting to give. I can hear Dane on the other side. “Goddamn it, Beth!”
“You don’t remember,” I say, bringing the tip in again.
“No! No, I don’t, I didn’t — her picture. Her parents sent in her picture! I said to Doris, I said, ‘This looks like a girl in my building,’ and — Doris knows, ask Doris! Ask Doris, please don’t, please don’t put that in my eye!”
I shut the knife and hop backward. The door springs open, and six nice suits are ready to come barging in. But my composure, plus the mellow sound of pennies spinning like tops on the tile, freezes them in place. I walk through them. They don’t dare touch me.
I go to the observation room for 5. I have the place to myself. I set my back to the wall and watch Doris’s pink press-ons scrape at the table. She’s not aware she’s doing it as she stares into the mirror.
The door pops open beside me. Dane slams it behind him. “I should have you arrested.”
“I’d be out in an hour.”
“We could hold you here. We could hold you indefinitely.”
“Go ahead. You know who hired me. You know the lotto means fat-cats, and fat-cats golf with senators, and your chances of getting that next big promotion narrow down to practically nothing if you take me off this.”
“Gus could sue us.”
“You have no intention of charging that prick, Dane. Half the agents in that room were RICO guys. You’re going to flip Gus on his bosses, nail them for a few gambling operations and put that shithead in Wit Sec, where he can move to a nice suburb and peep in the windows of pre-teen girls.”
“Jesus. You really think I’m garbage, don’t you?”
I don’t answer. I’m not sure. “I didn’t see Laughlin. Did you pull rank?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t happy about it.”
I smile.
“Why’d you go at Gus like that?” Dane says. “For a name? For the girl’s name? We’ll figure out who she is, we just —”
“We just have to handle the real business first.” I’m still fixated on Doris’s nails. They’re perfect — Hattie’s exact shade of breast cancer awareness pink. Except for the middle one on the right hand, which continues to scrape at the table. It’s been ripped and poorly repaired. I watch it, and only it, as I say to Dane, “Why’d I go at Gus? It’s because I was suddenly a woman to him. To men, that makes you not quite real anymore. Not important, not like other men are important. A woman’s important for all the holes you guys can stick things in, all the places on her you can squeeze, but a man? He might actually have something worth saying. He might have things he believes, convictions he holds, lessons he can teach you.” I cut Dane off as he tries to interrupt. “And you’re getting ready to tell me you’re not like that. Women are so soft and sweet and sensitive and vital because at the end of a hard day of trying to rule the world, they’re what you come home to. They’re such a real, vital, important idea.” I look at him. His posture’s rigid, his mouth a hard line. “It’s a lot tougher to think of somebody as an idea when they’ve got a knife in your eye.”
I bump around him and open the door. His voice pipes up behind me. “What about Doris?”
“I’m getting something to calm her down. She’s jonesing.”
“Fell,” he says, exasperated, “she has no arrest record. She’s not into drugs.”
“Dane,” I say, infinitely patient, “she’s not jonesing for that.”
Chapter 12
This building is full of health nuts. I have to go down two floors to find a Coke machine. I buy three cans of Diet, slipping one in my inside jacket pocket, and meander back up, thinking how I want to handle this. The truth is, I’m tired. Not the kind of tired you’d expect from zipping around a city for thirty hours straight, but the kind that comes from watching a tragedy come slowly into focus. It never fails, and it shouldn’t surprise me anymore. But it does — the absurd reasons behind the loss of these kids. The selfishness, the greed. I’ve heard people try to dress it up in every kind of imaginable rationalization, but it always boils down to: me. I needed this, I needed that. Here’s my sad story and how it makes this okay.
There’s a pair of suits guarding Gus’s door when I arrive. They look at me like strict nightclub bouncers who don’t think I make the cut. Doris’s door remains unmanned. I stack two Coke cans in one hand and go in.
She blinks away from the mirror in slow motion, sleepy. When she sees the soda, she betrays an instant of deep physical craving, a knowledge that being awake and aware and the equal of this impossible circumstance is only a few feet away.
“I’m not talking to you,” she says.
You just did, I think, gratified that this won’t be too hard. I sit, setting both cans in front of me, and reach down the neck of my shirt. I pull the medal out by its chain, thinking too late that Dane might be watching on the other side of the mirror. I fit the round coin of gold under a soda tab, torquing it up, hearing the pop and fizz, and slide that can to Doris before doing the same to the other one. I sit back and drink, not looking at her. I genuinely need the caffeine.
I can monitor her anyway, though. The mirror is huge. She caves after ten seconds, picks up the can, gulps half of it in one long pull, and finishes the rest in under a minute. I take out my back-up can and pop the tab the same way, handing it over. This one she sips with something approaching decorum. She gives me a once-over, but I still don’t make eye contact. Her gaze is appraising in a snobbish way, like she might be guessing how much my jacket cost. But it’s also shrewd. The Coke woke her up, all right.
“Which saint is that?” she says.
“Hmm?”
“Your medal.”
“I have no idea,” I say, and it’s the truth. “I use it to open Coke cans. Saves my nails.”
“It was a gift, then?”
I glance at the mirror in spite of myself, wondering if Dane is squirming on the other side. “Yeah, it was.”
“May I?”
She’s holding out a hand for it. I open my mouth to tell her I never take it off, then bite back the words and slip the chain over my head. I feel naked without it. I feel like tackling her and snatching it back as she tilts the medal to catch the light, a smile lifting her lips.
“Anthony of Padua,” she says, returning it to me. “Patron Saint of Lost Items.”
I throw it on and tuck it away. “That’s a hell of a me
mory you’ve got.”
She sips, glancing at me cagily. “You shouldn’t be holding me here. You have no evidence.”
“Other than you being in Gus’s van at one in the morning. And that perm. And those nails and eyebrows.”
“This is how I like to —”
“Doris? I’m going to give you a really important tip right now. However many times Gus told you he was covering his tracks, he had it wired, the two of you were going to skate out of this no problem? He was full of it. However many times he explained to you that police were stupid, they couldn’t make a charge stick with the glue NASA uses to hold space probes together? He was wrong.”
She looks down at her soda can, flicking the tab with her ruined middle fingernail. “I know.”
“Good,” I say, “because here’s something you may not know. However many times he told you he was connected? That wasn’t a lie. He will gladly leverage those connections to get out of this, and it might work, depending on who he’s willing to throw under the bus.”
The can’s forgotten. Doris startles at me, mouth agape.
“How are you with being run over by buses, Doris? Are you insured for that?”
“No,” she says. “No, these are the kinds of tricks you people use. Law enforcement people can lie during interrogation, and —”
“I’m not law enforcement. I was, but I quit so I could actually do some good. Now shut up and listen. I’ve been to the office in Riverside. I saw the photo on your desk. Unless you decided to try the ultimate make-under or you lost a seriously sadistic bet, these renovations in your appearance were an attempt to claim the lotto jackpot. Gus came to you, he told you he had a way to get his hands on eighty-million dollars, he said you’d get a slice of it, and you said okay.”
“I didn’t —” She cuts herself off. She literally puts a hand over her mouth, pretending it’s a move to cup her chin.
“You didn’t? You didn’t say okay?”
She smoothes her hair. Her eyes are wet and welling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How old are you, Doris?”
“I’m sure you already know.”
“In fact I don’t. I could find out easily, but I haven’t had the time. How old are you, or do you want me to guess?”
“A lady never reveals her age.”
A memory rocks me. My mother used to say that. “You had money, didn’t you? You grew up with it or you married it, or both. But something happened. You lost everything; you had to start over from zero. Not real zero, not Hattie Turner zero. People like you have friends with money who can float you a favor here, a month in the poolhouse there. You went out looking for a job, but you weren’t about to wear a fast food uniform or clean toilets. You wanted office work, but nothing you found paid enough. Until you interviewed for this new talent agency that was opening up in Riverside.”
She’s shifting. Either that chair has suddenly grown bumps in its seat or I’m hitting nerves all over the place.
“Did Gus interview you? Did he shower and shave and put on a tie? How long did it take for him to revert to his disgusting pig-self? How long before you realized this wasn’t a talent agency at all — at least, not in the conventional use of the term?”
The door opens. Dane pokes his head in. “Fell, I need a minute.”
I’m livid, but I don’t show it to Doris. “Be right back,” I say, and step into the hall, where Dane’s waiting with a short, fussy type whose name badge reads SAC.
Dane says, “Bethany Fell, this is —”
“The man in charge,” I say. “What an honor. You do realize I was about to break her, right?”
Fussy says, “You weren’t asking questions, Ms. Fell. That would be why we call it ‘interrogation’.”
I glare at Dane unbelievingly.
“Agent Wilson,” Fussy says, gesturing at Dane, “informed me that your technique has a purpose and that I should be patient. Which is somewhat unlike him.” Fussy favors Dane with a tolerant glance. “Nonetheless, I want to remind you that we are law enforcement, we do care about jurisprudence, and nothing you’ve extracted from the witnesses thus far has been usable in court.”
This is the downside of the FBI’s recruitment practices. They love their lawyers and accountants, who make terrific hall monitors but who too often have all the investigative instincts of a desk lamp. I don’t miss that I’m not currently being arrested, which means Dane covered for me leaping on Gus and almost giving his eyeball a new ventilation system. But whatever gratitude I might feel is getting strangled by my impatience at having to teach one more walking, talking dry-cleaning bill how this shit works.
“I’m going to say this once. I’ve been picking missing kids out of thin air while you’ve been climbing the ladder here at headquarters. Think really hard about that. Think about the people who’ve watched me bring home their lost children, as opposed to you, who they play squash with on the weekends. For the people who can afford it, I charge a truly embarrassing amount of money, so there’s a chunk of my clientele that’s made up of the many men and the handful of women who give permission for your paychecks to be signed. So tell me: whose call are they going to take without thinking twice?”
He’s getting it. He’s almost there. I’m not shocked; for the boys with the offices, this speech tends to hit home quickly.
“You think I’m a guest in your building? Wrong. You’re a guest in my pursuit. You’re somebody I’ll put up with as long as you are silent as death. Until I need something, and then all I want to hear from you is, ‘How can I help?’ Feel free to ask around about the desk jockeys who didn’t listen, who put their jurisprudence ahead of a kid’s life, and let me know if we’ve still got a problem. Because I’ll solve it. I’ll solve you real quick.”
Chapter 13
I turn my back on him, changing faces before I open the door. I don’t say, “Sorry about that” or “Where were we?” Instead I take out my phone and pull up Doris’s desk photo — her and her grandson in mouse ears, grinning like goofballs. I take Polly’s school photo and put the two side-by-side in front of Doris. And I walk around, because I absolutely must. That soda woke me up, too. I feel like a puma in a cage.
“Polly’s nine, Doris. Your grandson’s what? Five? What if it were your grandson who was missing, and I was here trying to get his abductor to talk?”
“I didn’t abduct her!”
“Oh, good for you! I plum forgot — you were the sweet, kindly face of a kiddie porn ring in the making until your boss decided to graduate you to kidnapping and murder.”
“No!”
“Yes! Get your head out of your ass and hear me: you are getting smacked with accessory charges no matter what you say or don’t say. You are going down for this, and you are going down alone, because Gus feels about as much loyalty to you as he does to the minors he was going to exploit. You didn’t abduct Polly, you didn’t kill her — but what about Jane Doe? Huh? Polly’s lookalike, who I found in a dog cage a few hours ago.”
“What?”
“A dog cage, Doris. Gus drove her to a storage unit and stuck her in a kennel. I’d love to know why — why he bothered, why he didn’t just kill her. Even more than that, I’d love to know her name so I can call her parents and get them here to try and pull her out of the combined shock and PTSD that’s basically turned her into a screaming vegetable.”
Doris is breathing hard. Tears are trailing down her cheeks. But both hands are over her mouth now, and she’s shaking her head. Shaking it, shaking it.
I get behind her, pick up the phone and put it dead in her eye-line. “Picture your grandson in a kennel. He’d fit even better than Jane Doe, wouldn’t he? Five years old, he’d slide right in there. Picture him in the dark, all day and most of a night, covered in blood —”
“Okay!”
“Okay what?”
She’s batting the phone away. “Okay, get that out of my — yes, okay, yes. Gus was using the office to — but he didn’t ge
t the chance. He was trying to find somebody to back him. Nobody wants to do business with him; he’s lost money for everyone he’s ever worked with. I thought it was a talent agency. I didn’t know what it was. When I figured it out and tried to quit, he threatened my family. He said he’d — I won’t say what he said he’d do.”
“Fine. Tell me about the plan.”
“I said it was insane, that it would never work.”
“Not in the long-term, no.”
“What do you mean?”
I put my back to the mirror, rest my hands on the sill. “I mean, lottery fraud is stupid-easy. All they want is a signature. That’s why there are so many lawsuits after winnings are awarded but the lotto itself is never involved. They’re not liable; they don’t care. So in the short-term, no problem. But murder? That’s a problem. Hattie’s neighbors would care if all of a sudden there’s an imposter pretending to be her. Polly’s friends would notice that she’s not coming out to play anymore.”
“They were going to move,” Doris says. “We — we were going to move. Just overnight, gone.”
“Then there’s your picture in the paper, and every friend Hattie’s ever had is calling the police, saying that’s not her, that’s not Hattie.”
“I was going to remain anonymous.”
“That doesn’t work on short notice. You have to petition the lotto for that, and Hattie didn’t. Some states protect the anonymity of jackpot winners automatically, but not California. Let’s face it: around here, everybody wants to be a star.”
“I don’t . . .” She’s pondering, overwhelmed.
“It’s not that complicated, Doris. Gus promised his mob buddies a cut of the jackpot in exchange for them sending a pro assassin to do the hit on Hattie and Polly. The mob guys go along, because they know that the fraud will be detected but not for a while, and that it will never trace back to them.”
