“Yeah, twenty bucks. I know you guys got that informant fund or whatever. I want twenty bucks for my information.”
The fact that he didn’t look up was extremely unsatisfying. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a twenty, balled it up, and tossed it at him. It struck him in the chest and settled between his small potbelly and the handheld video game. He picked up the twenty and put it in his shirt pocket. “I wish I would have thought of that earlier,” he said with a small grin. “Pete checked out weeks ago.”
“Are you sure about that? Maybe you should check the ledger.”
“Positive.” He groaned and gave the game a shake. “Just like I told those other cops. He ain’t here.”
“Did the other cops say what they wanted with him?”
“Which ones?”
I was about two seconds from grabbing that damn game and launching it across the room. “How many cops have been here?”
“A few. First there was a guy by himself, then a guy and a woman, and then two guys just the other day. But like I said, Pete was already gone before the first cop came by.”
“Wait a minute. What first cop?”
Smitty and I should have been the first to come looking for Pete’s tapes. I waited for the clerk to say something, but he’d already tuned me out. I leaned over and slammed my hand down hard on the counter to get his attention. “Hey!”
He did not look at all intimidated. In fact, he took one look at me and dismissed me as no threat. Big mistake. “Look, I already told you, I haven’t seen Pete in weeks. As you can see, I’m pretty busy here. So unless you have a warrant…”
I hated people whose answer to everything was “Get a warrant.” They didn’t know what the hell they where talking about. Next thing he would be saying was…
“You know, my tax dollars pay your salary.” Yes, smug words from a bottom feeder who probably hadn’t filed a tax return in ten years. “So why don’t you go out there and fight crime or something instead of coming in here and hassling me.”
The self-satisfied smirk disappeared from the clerk’s face as he went back to his video game. Something pounded in my temple. I squatted down in front of the counter. You know what? I’m not a fucking cop anymore, and I’m trying to do the right thing here. And pretty much all I want to do is get back to the cabin with Riley and start apologizing in every position I know of. And this jackass is standing in the way of that.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing down there?” The clerk got up from his chair.
I grinned. This was going to be fun. As his hands slapped the countertop, I was up with the .38 in my hand. “You know, I’m thinking we’re having a bit,” I grabbed his tie-dyed T-shirt and put the barrel of my gun up his right nostril, “of a misunderstanding.”
I nodded, and just as I expected, he nodded with me, as if we were indeed just having a discussion.
“You seem to have mistaken me for someone who has the patience, or the desire, to waste time talking to you. Obviously you have the patience to sit around and pop pimples all day, so you probably don’t understand how it is for someone impatient like me. So let me explain it in terms even you will understand. I mean, it’s the least I can do, since the tax dollars from your Motel 6 job happen to pay my entire salary.”
A film of perspiration formed tiny droplets on his face. “Hey, you don’t have to break my balls,” he whined.
I shook him into silence. “Now listen carefully. Either you stop fucking with me, or this office is going to look like a larger version of your bathroom mirror. Only your face is my pimple. Understand?” He nodded vigorously and I loosened my grip on his shirt. “All right, now that we understand each other, I’m going to ask some questions, and you’re going to answer them nicely.” I rested the gun on his lower lip.
“What first cop?”
“He said he was a cop and a friend of Pete’s and he needed to get into Pete’s room.”
“When did this happen? Do you remember?”
“I can find out.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t make me come across the counter.” I let go of his shirt, and he went straight to his desk and started rifling through papers. I took the opportunity to check to make sure Riley couldn’t see me through a window. Reassured, I returned my attention to the clerk.
“Here it is. April sixteenth. I know the date because I closed up the office to get my new game over at the mall.” He flipped open the magazine to a large ad proclaiming that Final Fantasy 9 would be at a store near me April sixteenth. “I told the guy to slip the key under the door when he was done. It was here when I got back.”
If this guy was telling the truth, then someone had been in Pete’s room before Smitty and I had gotten there. “Did you get the detective’s name?”
“No, I didn’t.” The clerk didn’t seem to care that he’d given out Pete’s key without getting proper identification. If I ever got so bad off that I had to stay at one of those motels, I would make sure I put a chair up to the door.
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
“Kind of big. He was a black guy. Clean cut. That’s all I know.”
I nodded and held out my hand. He stared at me for a minute, then I raised my eyebrow and he reached in his pocket and slapped my balled-up twenty into the palm of my hand.
“Thank you,” I said politely.
He hesitated. “You’re welcome.”
I put the little .38 back in its holster and walked out of the office without another word. I got in the car and smiled at Riley.
“How did it go?”
“Like I said, pretty uneventful. You were right to stay in the car.” I patted her leg and pulled out of the parking lot feeling quite invigorated.
*
“Someone else knew about the DVDs Pete took,” I told Riley. “The clerk thinks a big African American cop searched that room just before me and Smitty.”
“Well, he didn’t find them,” Riley said. “Or they wouldn’t have been there when you arrived. Maybe he was looking for something else.”
I had my doubts. Pistol Pete didn’t have anything worth stealing. The DVDs were the only items of interest in that disgusting room. I wondered who had bothered to read the arrest report for Pete’s flashing offense. His drunken statement about stealing the DVDs would normally have slid under the radar, but the two cops who’d brought him in had thought it was worth bringing to our attention. Everyone had heard about the snuff films Smitty and I were trying to trace. The information would have traveled up the food chain to the captain and anyone she told. Fuller and Jackson, the arresting officers, would also have mentioned it to their colleagues. There was no way Smitty and I were the first and only detectives to hear about it.
“We need to find Pete,” I said. “And I have a pretty good idea where he is. I just hope Wilson and McClowski haven’t heard about this place yet.”
Pistol Pete was keeping house these days in an old Montgomery Ward store that had closed down a few years back. The city was still trying to determine the fate of the building and its mammoth parking lot. In the interim, its covered parking structure made it the perfect spot for the homeless to crash. If Pete wasn’t earning enough from odd jobs to afford a motel room, that’s where he would be.
Twenty minutes later, Riley and I exited the car and ducked into the parking structure. Several large cardboard appliance boxes littered the area, serving as makeshift beds. The familiar smell of stale beer, urine, and lost hopes hung heavy in the air.
“Watch your step, baby,” I said as we moved cautiously through this city of forgotten and unwanted individuals. A hodgepodge of garbage covered the ground. Used condoms, needles, dirty tissues, candy wrappers, soiled clothing, food wrappers—the usual debris of the displaced.
“Why all the candy wrappers?” Riley asked.
“The junkies eat sweets when they’re coming down off a high.”
I spotted Pete’s shaggy head peeking from beneath a dirty red plaid blanket. He didn’t look like he’
d had a bath in weeks.
“Pete, I need to ask you some questions.” I waited two seconds because I was trying to appear polite in front of Riley and then yelled, “God damn it. Get your ass up!”
The look on his face would have been funny under normal circumstances. He shuffled upright, rubbing his eyes. “You scared me. I thought you were my wife.”
“You married, Pete?”
“Oh yeah, worst move I ever made…that and trusting my business partner.”
“Business partner?”
“Yup, I was an accountant. Owned my own business with my best friend Jerry. Only I didn’t know he was screwing my wife and me at the same time. They took everything.” He rose to his feet, tottering forward at one point, only to regain his equilibrium like the true pro that he was. “Who are you, anyway? I think I got my glasses around here. Hold on.” He started high-stepping through a pile of dirty clothing.
“I’m with the police.” I flashed my fake badge before he could find the means to read.
“Ah, there they are.” He picked up his glasses, placed them on the bridge of his nose, and squinted. One lens was totally missing and a crack ran diagonally across the one still present. “Hey, now look, you can ask anyone, I been here all day,” he blustered.
“I know, Pete, that’s not why I’m here. Please lower your voice.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, I’m sure you don’t. Listen, a friend of mine, Smitty, told me that you helped him out with this case he was working on. He said you were minding your own business and found some DVDs. Remember?”
He frowned. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Those aren’t for nice folk. You don’t want to see nothing like that.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But something happened to Smitty, and he didn’t get the chance to tell me about all of the stuff on the DVDs. Did you look at them?”
Pete mumbled to himself and picked something from his scalp. “They were doing bad things to kids. I only looked at three of them. The tape didn’t work in the machine.”
“Are you saying there were three DVDs and a videotape?”
Pete swayed drunkenly for a minute. “Three DVDs and a video.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can count.”
I frowned. Pete claimed to be an accountant, and accountants were good with numbers. Even a drunk accountant would know the difference between three items and four. If there’d been a video with those DVDs, Smitty and I would have found it when we tossed Pete’s room. “Do you still have that video?”
He squinted at me like I was stupid. “The cops took it. I was in jail.”
“So when you went back to the motel after you were released, it was gone?”
“Three DVDs. One video. All gone. I wanted The Green Mile,” he lamented.
“Pete, do you remember talking to Smitty about the video?”
“I don’t know any Smitty. I told the cops I don’t want nothing, I don’t know nothing. Just leave me alone. Hey, you sure are pretty. Want to see something?” He started to fumble with his pants, and I realized that our interview was officially over.
“No, that’s okay. We don’t want to see it.”
Riley took a step backward.
“No?” He looked sadly at both of us. “Neither did my wife.”
I gave him two twenty-dollar bills and told him to lay low because some people were looking for him. How much of that he understood, I couldn’t say.
As we walked back to the car, Riley said, “I feel sorry for him.”
“Me, too.” My mind was elsewhere.
“No one uses VHS anymore,” she noted in puzzlement. “Why just take the one tape?”
The hairs on my arms stood up. “And why leave the three DVDs? There’s enough evidence on those to put someone in jail for a long time.”
“So you think whoever took the video was specifically looking for it?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. I’m also thinking that whatever is on that video has to be pretty bad.”
“What could be worse than child pornography?”
“That’s a good question, baby.” I rubbed the back of my neck and closed my eyes. “A very good question.”
*
I called Chandra’s cell phone from the Blazer.
“I got to make this fast,” she said. “I found those files you asked for and I got a cross on one of your aliases. You never handled him because he was arrested in San Diego. Anyway, here’s the thing. Michael Albert is an alias for Michael Stratford. They’re the same person.”
“How did you figure that out?” I knew I sounded impressed. “Because whatever you did is probably what Marcus did.”
“I got to thinking,” she said as if she’d just worked out a particularly difficult puzzle. “Albert sounds like a first name. So I switched them. You know, started running Albert Michael and then I started looking into files with Michael Albert as first and middle name. Stratford was the only one that popped up,”
“That’s good work. Thank you,” I said sincerely.
“You’re welcome.”
I worked through the list of names in my mind: Foster Everett, Joseph Smith, Nathan Stein, Michael Albert, Eric Ann. Michael Albert was Michael Stratford, the guy Smitty and I had been looking for. Where did he fit into this? Nothing was adding up.
“Hey, can you pull Stratford’s records? I need everything you have on him.”
“Sure, I can do that. You okay? You don’t sound right.”
“Yeah, I’m good.” I wasn’t, though. I felt like I was getting more questions than answers. “What about Eric Ann?”
“Dead ends so far,” Chandra grumbled. “He’s not in the system.”
After we said our good-byes, I leaned back against the seat.
Riley rested a hand on my thigh. “Any progress?”
“One of the names on the list is an alias. Michael Albert and Michael Stratford are the same person. Stratford’s name came up in connection with a kidnapping case Smitty and I were working a few months back. Thing is, we could never find the guy to interview him.”
“So you think he’s involved?”
“Yes. The question is, how?”
Stratford could have made contact with the mother of his child by now, I thought, and if not, I could always get the details of his new girlfriend from Alicia Alexander again. Smitty and I never had the opportunity to follow that lead before events overtook us, and the information was among his papers. I groaned aloud at the prospect of another conversation about how Alicia’s toilet got broken.
“Don’t worry, you will figure this out,” Riley said.
“But what if I don’t?”
Riley’s nightmare was starting to bug me. I swallowed bile that left a taste like a copper penny in the back of my throat. Anxiety hovered in the cab of the Blazer, silent, like a scavenger waiting patiently for a meal.
Chapter Twenty
“Alicia Alexander?”
“Yeah?” She looked blankly at my badge, then at me. As I’d hoped, there was no spark of recognition.
“We’re here about Michael Stratford.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “For the last time. I don’t know where Michael is. Y’all can keep sending more people over here if y’all want, but I’m going to keep telling you that I ain’t seen him.”
I was tempted to ask about the health of her toilet, but she hadn’t recognized me and I was determined to keep it that way. I stifled a yawn. I hadn’t finished my morning coffee before we set out. Riley seemed to be in a hurry to get our day started. She said she had a feeling we were closing in on something.
“Would you mind if we come in, ma’am?” Alicia reluctantly opened the door, and Riley and I stepped into her domestic chaos. I didn’t see Fee Fee.
“So, what y’all want? I was just about to feed my son.”
Alicia expertly moved a nude doll, a teacup, and a coloring book before she plopped down on her couch. I realized too late that once I a
llowed her to focus on the TV, I would lose her attention and probably all hope of getting any new information from her.
“Hey, what happened with that catfight the other day between the blonde and the brunette?” I asked pleasantly, in order to break the ice. I hadn’t really noticed much about the fight, except that Sherm had been seriously into it until we intruded.
“Ooh, girl.” Alicia’s eyes didn’t budge from the TV. “It turned out that Burdetta, that’s the blonde, and Natalie, that’s the brunette, were actually college roommates who got a little too close back then. That’s what Burdetta’s holding over her head. She has pictures and Natalie wants them back, because that guy Brock, who she is going to marry, would never understand their ‘special’ friendship.”
Riley stared at the TV, riveted. I gave her a slight nudge in lieu of asking what the hell she was doing. She had the nerve to look irritated. I jerked my head to the rear of the home in a pointed reminder of the plan we’d discussed. Her mouth circled into an O and she moved in front of the television.
“Ma’am, may I please use your phone?”
Alicia peered frantically around her. “You can’t make no long distance. I only got basic.” She pointed toward the kitchen.
“That’s fine, thank you.”
Once Riley had disappeared through the kitchen door, I got down to business. I figured I would sit down on the couch, you know—invade her space a little so that she would have to pay attention. “Alicia, could you…” I jumped up as my butt connected with something hard and unyielding. I reached back and pulled the naked doll from beneath me.
“Sorry about that. Fee Fee’s always leaving her toys laying around.” Alicia didn’t bother to check on either me or the toy.
I set the doll upright next to me so that it too could enjoy some quality television. The clattering noise inside its body told me that old Betsy Wetsy probably hadn’t fared too well after having her head sat on. I pretended to be enthralled by the soap for a few minutes before asking, “Alicia, are you aware that Michael Stratford also uses the name Michael Albert?”
“What?”
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