by Greg Herren
Then Larry, this pharmaceutical investigator—who knew drug companies had their very own PIs, right?—Larry said we got to hit the titty bars on Bourbon Street. I’m not saying I don’t like looking at T&A, especially when they’re as buoyant as those on this chick at Big Dolly’s, but the two-drink minimum meant throwing away twenty bucks on some swill called Cajun wine that tasted distinctly like cough syrup and Tabasco. My roll of one-dollar bills was rapidly depleted, and lap dances were totally out of my price range.
Plus, it didn’t take long before I stopped thinking about tits and ass and starting thinking about the women swinging on the stripper poles. You know, about the dancers themselves, off the stage. Like: Does the redhead cowgirl have to leave her kids with a babysitter? Does the sexy construction worker spend all day at another job? Did the blonde in the schoolgirl outfit have a shitty childhood? And how could any of them possibly still be attracted to men after having to dance on their indiscriminate boners for eight hours, night after night? Had they all gone lesbo? I could swear I was getting a few lingering glances that were more than just delight at finding a woman among their clientele.
So I was sitting there, analyzing each broad’s life like I was Dr. Phil, and after a while I just had to bolt. I took off, ran out onto Bourbon Street, mingled with the frat boys and drag queens and drank my way to Pat O’Brien’s, a piano bar that a half-drunk hot dog vendor nearby assured me was a bit of a tourist trap but still “awfully fun.”
Five minutes later, I saw a goddess, and my story is all down hill from there.
At Pat O’s, dueling piano players take turn rousing the crowds with songs both regional like “Dixie” and what they probably call “adult contemporary” (though the latter seemed to be songs two or three decades old, like Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”). The surly waiters served up these giant drinks called Hurricanes that tasted a little like Kool-Aid and rum while roving photographers snapped black-and-whites of tables full of idiots laughing, singing, and drinking. It seriously took all of one drink and two songs before I, too, was blitzed on the atmosphere, and before you know it I was singing the Alabama fight song (which I swear I don’t know the words to) and I had become best buds with two babes from Ohio and a guy from Tennessee. It was the perfect release after a long day at the conference and a confusing night at the strip club.
Then I spotted this broad across the room, a perfect brunette version of Jessica Rabbit. She was the kind of woman for whom the descriptor va-va-voom was too tame. She was all angles and hips and curves you couldn’t wait to climb and plant your flag on. The piano players switched their tune and the room began crooning a song by a local band, mellow and jazz, the beat of New Orleans.
I’ll never forget it. The song and the way this woman moved with the music like the song was written especially for her. She was practically alone in the corner, I couldn’t tell who she was with, perhaps with the three winsome ladies at the table behind her, but after watching her, mesmerized for three or four songs, I was encouraged by the Hurricanes to find out more.
“Hi,” I yelled over the din. The word hung there, unanswered. The brunette continued to sway and the song came to a close. Still no response. I turned away, defeated. But just then she grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her.
“You just got here.” She spoke with a throaty growl. It was the sexy kind of growl like Kathleen Turner.
“What?” I shouted, “I’ve been here for an hour!”
Her smile was like the rising sun. “No, I mean, you just got here. Don’t go.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Parker.”
“I like that. Parker.” As my name rolled off her tongue, I immediately knew I never wanted another woman to say my name. My name would never sound as good coming out of another set of lips.
She told me her name, but she stayed an enigma for the next hour, even as I ordered more and more drinks and she continued dancing for me as if I were the only person in the room—which was so not true because the place was jam packed—and a photographer snapped our picture. Of course I bought it from him, even though it took my last twenty bucks to do so.
When I look at the picture now, I can see it clearly: I’m beaming and drunk and she looks like a woman haunted by a secret, but all I could see that night were those hazel eyes and big lips and all those angles and curves.
“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing my hand, not even pretending it was a question for me to answer. She knew me all of ninety minutes and assumed I’d follow her anywhere, which I would. Which I did. Which is how I got to Portland.
*
We spent the next four days holed up at the Raven Hotel, a rather divey joint on St. Charles where the courtyard was filled with pros and the ground-floor diner was filled with cops. The nondescript room had a worn-out bed, clean linens, and little else, but I was so excited by marathon sex session that I didn’t think to ask why she dragged me to this particular flophouse or why she seemed so at home with both the pros and the cops.
“Woman, you make me crazy,” I moaned, flipping her on her stomach so I could kiss her lower back. I traced every curve from the nape of her neck—where a spiked gold star tattoo was fading fast—to her deliciously shapely ass. Even on day three or four, I couldn’t get enough of her. I don’t remember eating or drinking, though we surely must have; I just remember wanting to do nothing but make love to this broad the rest of my life.
“Tell me something about yourself.”
She licked her lips and cocked her head at me. “Why? Are you bored with what we’re doing now?” She moved her hand between my thighs without waiting for an answer, a moment of passion that now serves as a perfect example of how I could spend ninety-six hours with the same broad and learn so little about her.
She was a dancer, or an actress, or something like that. She was spending a month or two in New Orleans, then heading west, or north, or home—wherever that was I never heard. It was all so vague, but I was intoxicated with pussy and didn’t even think there’d come a day where we stopped doing what we were doing. But it did.
On day five, the love affair ended. When I woke up sticky and dehydrated, Athena was gone and so were my wallet and cell phone. Sitting on the toilet, I watched a lone cockroach scurry across the bathroom basin, no doubt on the way to a room where there was actual food to pilfer. I waited a while, making excuses: Maybe she took my wallet to get us beignets and coffee. Maybe she took my phone so she could call me at the hotel and tell me where she had gone. Maybe she was coming back.
She didn’t.
The pockmarked boy behind the counter stared blankly at me. “Wait, what do you want?”
He couldn’t grasp my query until I spoke to him like a six-year-old. “The woman who rented room forty-two, do you have any contact info? A phone number? She left but took my wallet.” I was too frantic to be as mortified as I should be. I was still imagining a future in which she was kneeling above me, long hair falling across the sides of face, hot thighs spread before me like a—
“Hello!” The clerk shouted it like a question, breaking me from my reverie. Great, he finally talks and I nod off to fucking fantasyland.
“Sorry? What was that?” I pleaded.
“Look, lady, chicks like that come and go. They pay cash, stay a few hours, maybe a day or two. Get their mark on the hook, them take them for all they got. Don’t usually see women johns, but hey, whatever floats your boat. It’s the Big Easy, after all. You’re lucky if all she took was your wallet.” He ran his index finger across his jugular, “Coulda slit your throat.”
With that he turned around and started placing sticky notes around his desk, a sign for me to move the hell on.
Maybe Athena was a dancer, a euphemism for stripper. But it was hard to believe she turned tricks, too. She certainly hadn’t treated me like a john, and there hadn’t been enough money in that wallet to pay for one night, much less four. But still, I wondered if the desk clerk could be right. Could Athena be a pro? What we’d had was special, wa
sn’t it? If so, how could she just leave?
I left the Raven and walked, head down, hands in pockets, hoping the muggy Mississippi air would clear my head, wipe the cobwebs from my brain, and make this whole thing clear.
I’d like to say that was the end of it all: I somehow paid up with my own much nicer hotel and headed back to Brooklyn, leaving this broad and the lessons learned long behind me. But I can’t. I stayed in New Orleans another week, tromping through every bar, cabaret, and strip club in the French Quarter, showing that black-and-white tourist photo from Pat O’Brien’s to bartenders and door barkers and exotic dancers of both the male and female varieties, and a few who were clearly somewhere in between.
I spent hours on the phone calling my own cell number, hoping she’d finally answer. Why would she have taken my phone if she didn’t intend to use it? I left messages that started out lucid and ended up in drunken rants begging her to come back, or at least call me.
Then one day I was talking to a buddy back home and she suggested I check my credit card to see if Athena had charged anything on it. I could have slapped myself. How could I call myself a PI? Only a woman obsessed would troll every sleazy bar in a city of one million but forget to just call the credit card company. By the time I did, Athena had left me a pedestrian but important record of her travels. There were purchases first in Baton Rouge, then Lafayette, Houston, Dallas, Albuquerque. She was moving west using my credit card. Instead of being pissed, I was relieved. I finally knew where she was. I finally had a connection with her. Maybe, I wondered, maybe she was using the card to stay in touch with me; maybe it was her way of leaving a trail of bread crumbs into the forest. With every purchase, I was one step closer to finding the woman who had become my all-consuming passion.
I kept telling people I was chasing this broad by necessity, but, really, how far does a normal person—even a fucking PI—go just to retrieve a wallet and a phone and maybe get a few answers about why she became a mark in the first place? The thing is, I couldn’t believe I was a mark. I still don’t. Maybe I started out a mark, but at the end of those four days, I don’t think that’s what I was. I think we had something. I felt it, she felt it. I don’t know what spooked her, why she ran, but if I could just find her, hold her, I could figure it all out.
I got myself a new cell phone with a new number but kept the old one active, just in case she responded to one of my messages. Then I hit the road, always one state behind her, the credit card tab leading me to red light districts in half a dozen cities across the west. I showed that photo of us to the clerks at the adult toy store, massage parlor, liquor store, doughnut shop, and Laundromat near each location she stopped at. They always remembered her, the tall icy brunette with the hips and curves and overall va-va-voom. Who the hell was this woman and what the hell was she doing at these joints?
As soon as I got close, she was a ghost. Then my buddy Wyatt Turlington at Phoenix Vice called me with some news.
“We’ve got a dead hooker here, Parker, and I thought she might be your gal.” Wyatt was always a straight shooter.
I felt my chest constrict and my throat close up. “No,” I managed to squeak. “What makes you think it’s the same broad?”
“She shares some of the identifiers with the woman you’ve described. And—well, I hate to break it to you this way, buddy, but she was in possession of your driver’s license. We haven’t been able to conclusively identify her, though. Could you come out and have a look, see if she’s the girl you’ve been tracking?”
Wild bulls couldn’t keep me away. As much as I didn’t want to believe that she could be dead, I had to know for sure. I was on the road within minutes, and during the two-hour drive north to Phoenix, I vacillated between certainty that the corpse wasn’t Athena and the certainty that the love of my life was lying on a medical examiner’s slab.
By the time I made it to Wyatt’s precinct, I was stone cold sober and all cried out.
Wyatt skipped greetings and dodged my first question. “Look, Parker, there’s more to this story, but let’s just see if this is your gal first.” With that he led me down two flights of poorly maintained metal stairs to a frigid room filled with hospital gurneys seemingly floating on a concrete floor painted a putrid shade of gray. Pulling a small tab off the end of one gurney, Wyatt pulled back a sheet to expose a brunette corpse, still stunning even in death. Her hair was matted and her eyes whitened by the milky gauze of murder, but my pulse still quickened in recognition.
I’ve got an almost eidetic memory, a great skill for a PI and not so good for a girlfriend who remembers every fight and every injustice like it was yesterday. But today, looking at the brunette on the slab, I’m taken right back to Pat O’Brien’s, to that night I first laid eyes on her. The corpse was one of the broads who was with Athena that night, the three seated behind her, who I thought might have been with her. They were all pretty, well built, dark haired, but not worth much of my attention other than to wonder if they knew Athena or not. Now I had my answer to that query but so many more questions were at my door.
“It’s not her, Wyatt, but she was with Athena that night at the bar,” I explained. “I don’t know her name, though, I just know they were together. What can you tell me?”
“I think it’s time for lunch. Meet me at the Hooters right down the street. We’ll talk.” With that he was off, and I glanced at this mystery woman one more time before turning tail and making my way to a restaurant I loathed in order to get possible info on a dead woman who might have known the woman I loved. What are the odds?
“The wings are great here,” Wyatt said, ordering a couple dozen from a perky blond waitress while thumbing through an already dog-eared onionskin folder.
“Yes, I’m sure that’s why you come here.” I was snarky but not out of place. Hell, I just spent a month in the kind of titty bars that made Hooters look like Sunday church in comparison.
“So, tell me what you know,” Wyatt urged. I laid out the whole embarrassing fiasco, including the four days in bed, the cross country search, the women in the bar. To his credit, he didn’t needle me about chasing a broad cross-country or essentially funding her trip. But he looked concerned.
“We found this gal behind a truck stop Dumpster. The truckers had seen her alive not fifteen minutes before, so we assume she was working the joint, and someone didn’t like the cover charge and did a dump and dash.”
“Fifteen minutes, that’s not a lot of time,” I pondered out loud.
“Yeah, but wait, there’s more,” Wyatt continued conspiratorially. “We did some digging, and turns out there was another hooker killed in Fort Worth last week, same MO, the broads even look the same. It’s too early to say we have a serial because this is just two and, you know, plenty of junkie hookers turn up dead every day in this country.”
It was true. Serial killers often preyed on sex workers, and even as we spoke the newspapers were awash with gruesome stories from Philadelphia’s Kensington Strangler—just one of many such murderers on the loose at any given time.
“What did the cops in Fort Worth say about their vic? Did anyone see her? Any relation to this girl? Any leads on a suspect?” I was full of questions, even though I foresaw his reply.
“Look, Parker, I know you’re chasing a dame and that’s all well and good, but I’m not sure if this is going to help or not. The uniforms in Fort Worth didn’t seem like they were going to spend too much time on this one. The cop I talked to called it a NHI case. They don’t know her, they think one less junkie whore on the street, less problems for them.”
I’d heard cops in New York use the acronym NHI—no human involved—when talking about murdered street workers, but it still riled me every time I heard it.
“Those fucking lazy bastards,” I roared.
“I know, man, I know.” Wyatt tried to calm me.
“Do they even know if the broad in Texas was using?”
“Tox screen came back positive for ketamine, nothing else.”
He knew what I was thinking.
“Horse tranquilizers?”
“Usually it’s teenagers we find using K, but it’s pretty easy to get on the street.”
“What about the vic in your morgue?”
“Waiting on tox.” Toxicology reports can take days. I had no idea how fast Phoenix crime analysis labs worked.
Wyatt filled me in on the rest of the details he knew. The truck stop, no witnesses, the weapon a simple garrote, milky white eyes, no other trace so far. Then he brought out a photo of Texas and I blanched. I knew that face.
“Oh my God. I saw her, too.” I blurted it, lost in thought.
“What? When? Where?” Wyatt was impatient.
“In New Orleans. Same place as the woman in your morgue. They were both at the table at Pat O’s behind the woman I’m chasing, behind Athena. At the bar, the bar I told you about, where everyone was singing. Athena was singing and dancing and she wasn’t really interacting with these two girls, but she was right next to them so she might have been with them. Now that you’ve connected them to some of the stuff Athena stole from me, I guess there’s no other explanation.”
Wyatt pondered. “Sounds right. So what are we thinking? Your girl Athena killing off her friends? Or someone hunting them all down?”
“I can’t imagine her as a killer,” I admitted.
He nodded. “Still, we’ve got a professional interest in your girl now, too.”
*
By the time I woke up the next day, Wyatt had pulled the LUDs on my old cell phone number, and his team had begun tracing calls to see if they could find a way to track down Athena. In his mind, she was now a potential suspect, or at the least a possible witness. If the girls were dosed with ketamine, a woman could easily strangle them. But why would she? I just didn’t see it. More likely, she was in danger. Either way, I wasn’t saddled with paperwork and forensics, so I promised to keep him posted on any new info and headed out of Phoenix. I hadn’t told Wyatt that a new charge had showed up on my credit card that very morning, so last he knew, Athena was in Santa Barbara—but she wasn’t. She was now in Portland, Oregon, and that’s where I headed. Wyatt would be pissed when he found out, but I had to get to her first, keep her safe.
