by Tim Tharp
They bought that lie too but were worried when I told them I met her on the Ashton Browning search party. My mom got this look on her face like she couldn’t stand the idea of her boy getting hurt by a rich girl, but my dad was more worried that I’d have to drive the car so far away from home. It was okay, though. The next night, I still got the keys, but I had to leave the house wearing slacks and a button-up shirt so it looked like I really was going on a date with a rich girl.
I picked up Randy, and he made the inevitable crack about how uncool I was to have to drive my parents’ old car. Of course, I reminded him he didn’t have anything to drive. Still, I did take the feathery dream hoop off the rearview mirror.
At Topper’s, Rockin’ Rhonda loitered outside as usual. She gave me the “Mr. Mojo Rising” greeting, and I told her I’d slip her some change on the way out like I always did. We arrived early enough to order our burgers before the mystery man showed up, but still my nerves twanged every time someone walked in.
I didn’t like the look of this guy who nabbed a booth across the room. He was around nineteen or twenty, thuggish, with skuzzy long sideburns and brown hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed or combed since he got fired last month from his job as a motorcycle thief or whatever he did to keep himself in beer and weed. He kept glancing my way, but he didn’t come over, so I figured he wasn’t my man.
Then, when I was about halfway done with my burger, the door opened, and I knew I didn’t have to wait any longer. In walked the same basket-bellied middle-aged dude with the swooping cowboy mustache who’d hassled us outside Gangland.
Randy coughed as a chunk of cheeseburger went down the wrong way. “You didn’t tell me we were meeting that guy,” he said when he recovered.
“That’s because I didn’t know it was going to be that guy, genius.”
Mr. Mustache pulled a chair up to the side of our booth, eyed Randy, then turned to me and said, “I thought you were coming here alone.”
I told him I never said anything about coming alone, and he looked at me like, Yeah, but you should’ve known. Like I was supposed to be some kind of professional at this crap and had broken the rules.
“I’ve seen you before,” Randy told him, and he’s like, “And I’ve seen both of you before too.”
I explained how Randy was there as my backup in case anything went funny, and Mr. Mustache goes, “Well, well, well, you two think you’re a couple of real detectives, don’t you?”
“More like an investigative journalist,” I said. “I’m on the school paper.”
“Oh, excuse me—investigative journalist.” He let out a nasty chuckle, and the wings of his mustache flapped.
“So exactly who are you?” I asked. “I don’t think we ever got that figured out last time we met.”
He pulled out his wallet and showed me a card that identified him as Franklin Smiley, Private Investigator.
“You can call me Smiley,” he said, taking the card back. The mustache cocked up, probably the closest thing to an actual smile you were going to get out of this character.
So I’m like, “Okay, Mr. Smiley—”
“Just Smiley. No need to be formal.”
“Uh, okay, Smiley, on the phone you said you had something to show me.”
“I do,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “But not here. You’ll have to come with me.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Yeah,” Randy chimed in. “How do we know you’re not some crazy psychopath or something?”
“Now, do I really look like a psychopath?” Smiley said, holding out his hands as if to give us a fuller view of his wholesomeness.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If you could tell a psychopath just by their appearance, they’d pretty much be out of business.”
“Well, maybe you’ll trust my employer.”
“And who’s that?”
He pulled his phone from his coat pocket, brought up his list of phone numbers, then showed me the screen. Among the other numbers, one was highlighted—the number of Eliot Browning, Ashton’s dad.
Smiley goes, “Should I call him right now and bother him with everything he has going on, or do you just want to drive over and talk to him?”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll go talk to him.”
Smiley tucked his phone back in his pocket. “Good. I don’t know what you were worried about anyway.” He waved a hand toward Randy. “After all, you have your backup.”
And there was that nasty chuckle again. I didn’t like it one bit.
CHAPTER 26
Smiley wasn’t too crazy about the idea of Randy and me packing what was left of our burgers along in his shiny black sedan, but what were we going to do—just leave them on the table unfinished? Wastefulness is supposed to be a sin, isn’t it?
Between bites, I questioned Smiley on what he knew about Ashton, but he didn’t come forth with any info he couldn’t have read in the newspaper. I started to worry that I should’ve gone through with that call to Mr. Browning after all. I mean, anyone can have a guy’s number listed in their phone. That doesn’t mean they actually know the guy.
I put my worries aside, though, as it became clear we were heading straight into the maw of the Richie Rich side of town. At first the houses were BIG, then they swelled into full-blown mansions, and finally they turned into these humongous castles where probably about fifty people could live together without ever having to see each other. Smiley pulled up to the gate of the biggest castle on the block. Or at least I guessed it was the biggest—with all the trees you never could get a look at the whole thing at once.
Randy was all excited about touring the house, but we weren’t that lucky. After winding down the driveway, Smiley parked and led us around back to a guesthouse by the pool. The Brownings had made themselves a regular paradise back there: stone paths, flower beds and sculpted trees lit by garden lights, a little waterfall that fed into the perfect blue pool—still filled to the brim even though it was autumn—and an ivy-covered wall around it all to keep the riffraff out. No doubt Mr. Browning had something pretty serious to talk about if he was letting a couple of scurvy dudes like me and Randy into a sanctuary like this.
The guesthouse was equally cool. The ceiling was so high it was like we just walked into a church or something. The furniture looked like it had never been used. A fireplace with gold candlesticks on the mantel, huge glass vases with fresh flowers, wood floors with Persian rugs. At least I guessed they were Persian. Isn’t that where all the fancy rugs come from? Golden knobs on the woodwork, chandeliers hanging like clusters of fake diamonds, statues of horses on tables, and six-foot-tall gold-framed paintings of more horses on the walls—as if Mr. Browning wanted you to think he was some kind of gentleman rancher instead of a bank honcho.
Smiley led us through the front room and down this hallway with an arched ceiling of rough stone that made you feel like you were walking into an especially fancy cave. At the end of it, we emerged into the guesthouse media room. That’s right—they had a media room in the guesthouse, complete with a huge wide-screen plasma TV on the wall, wood paneling, leather furniture, and a wet bar. The only way I can describe the odor of the place is rich.
“Have a seat,” Smiley told us. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes with Mr. Browning. Don’t touch anything.”
He left and I sat in a leather chair that felt like it was trying to swallow me whole. Randy immediately walked over to this deluxe armoire and opened the doors.
“Hey,” I said. “Weren’t you listening? We’re not supposed to touch anything.”
And Randy is like, “Wow, check this out. It’s full of movies.”
I started to get up from the chair, but it wasn’t letting me go so easily, so I settled back down and said, “Anything good?”
“Mainly a bunch of crap,” Randy said. He closed the armoire doors and went over to the TV. “How much you think something like this costs?”
“I don
’t know. Ten thousand dollars?”
“Damn,” Randy said, letting out a whistle. “And he’s only offering a hundred grand to get his daughter back? You’d think she’d be worth more than just ten times as much as the guesthouse TV.”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “When he comes in? Don’t mention that.”
“I’m just saying—he’s kind of a tightwad when it comes to rewards. Or maybe he doesn’t really want her back all that bad.”
“Yeah, maybe. But don’t mention that either.”
Randy was seated at the bar, fiddling with a metal figurine of a hunting dog, when Smiley came back with Mr. Browning. Immediately, the room charged with electricity. There was something about Mr. Browning. He didn’t look as tall as the first time I saw him in person, but his presence could really fill a room.
“I told you not to touch anything,” Smiley said to Randy. “That’s all right,” Mr. Browning said. “That’s what it’s there for—to admire.”
After introducing himself to Randy and me and shaking our hands with his vise grip, he walked around to the other side of the bar. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’ll take a beer,” Randy said, but Mr. Browning wasn’t going for that.
“I was thinking of something more along the lines of a soft drink,” he said.
I struggled out of the leather chair and sat by Randy at the bar while Mr. Browning fixed our drinks. Smiley took a seat in the corner of the room. Once the drinks were ready, Mr. Browning pulled up a stool on the other side of the bar and studied us for a second before launching into some small-talk questions about how we liked school and what we wanted to do when we graduated. Randy mentioned that for right now he had a position at a grocery store, but he wouldn’t mind going into banking.
“I hear that pays pretty good,” he said. “So if you’re hiring out, I’m your man.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mr. Browning said, then focused on me. “So, I understand you are quite the journalist.”
“Trying to be.”
“I see.” From a drawer behind the bar, he pulled a stack of papers and spread them out between us. They were copies of my articles about Ashton, not the actual school-paper versions but computer copies.
“Where did you get those?” I asked.
“Your articles seem to be popular among some of my daughter’s friends.”
Nash, I thought. He probably showed the articles I sent him to Tres, and Tres handed them over to the old man.
Just then my phone rang, and Mr. Browning looked at me like I’d farted or something. I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed, especially since my ring tone was the theme song to Walker, Texas Ranger. I didn’t take the time to see who was calling, but I figured it was Audrey.
After I turned off the ringer and put the phone away, Mr. Browning continued. “For someone who never met Ashton, you seem to have a lot of interest in her.”
“It’s a big story.”
“Is that all?”
“What else would there be?” I glanced at Randy, hoping he wouldn’t bring up anything about the reward money. No worries, though. His attention had turned to the thin gold stripe around the lip of his glass. He chipped at it with his thumbnail, probably trying to see if the gold was real.
“I can think of a pretty good reason,” Smiley said from his chair in the corner, but Mr. Browning cut him off before he could go into what that reason was.
“Actually, these articles are impressive. I was especially struck by the one about my daughter’s charity work. I appreciate you shedding light on that so people can get an understanding of what a caring girl she is.” He paused for a moment, looked down, and pinched the bridge of his nose, apparently trying to put a check on his emotions before he started bawling or something.
“Yeah, she seemed pretty caring,” I said.
He looked up, his focus returned, though his eyes were a touch watery. “One person in the article, I believe, even mentioned how much the children in the neighborhood adored her.”
“That’s right. She was sure popular with the kids.”
He asked if I remembered the neighborhood where she knew these kids from. I told him about the Ockle ladies, but I couldn’t remember the street name.
Smiley spoke up from the corner. “These Ockle ladies—did they say anything about any older kids, like about the same age as Ashton?”
This line of questioning I didn’t like. Sure, I thought the cops should know about Hector, but Mr. Browning was still a suspect. Maybe he was fishing for how much I knew that might incriminate him. If he’d hired Beto or Tattoo Head Oscar to put a hit on Hector, he wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of anyone who knew about the connection—namely me.
So I’m like, “No, I don’t remember any older kids. All I know is she delivered meals and everyone liked her.”
At that point, Mr. Browning glanced at Smiley. He seemed surprised about something. Or maybe he suspected I wasn’t telling everything. Then it hit me—he knew about my trip to police headquarters and my Hector Maldonado theory. He probably knew everything that’d happened in that police station since Ashton disappeared. The actual cops didn’t care about what I had to say, but my theory, coupled with my articles about Ashton, were enough to get me dragged down to the Brownings’ guesthouse.
“Well, there was this one guy,” I said, figuring I might as well come clean. “Hector Maldonado.” I went on to tell pretty much the same thing I told the cops, this time going light on how much Mrs. Ockle liked Ashton’s sandwiches. Still, I didn’t mention Beto and Oscar. If Mr. Browning wanted to know about those two, he’d have ask about them by name, which would prove he was involved with them somehow.
He didn’t, though. All he said was, “So you never saw this Hector person with my daughter. And these Ockle women never said they actually saw him with her. In fact, it might have been her brother they saw.”
I had to admit that was true.
He leaned his elbows on the bar top and shot me the stern authority-guy stare. “Then I suggest you refrain from spreading rumors that Ashton was involved romantically with someone of that nature.”
I wanted to ask what he meant by someone of that nature, but Smiley cut in with a question.
“What about the rec hall? We know you were there, but you didn’t write anything about it in your articles.”
I’m like, “The rec hall?”
And Mr. Browning’s like, “I believe the kids call it Gangland.”
Just to convince them I wasn’t holding back information, I told them pretty much all I remembered about Gangland. I figured they already knew most of it, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could get me into trouble—with these two, at least. I especially played up the Rowan Adams angle, but they weren’t as interested in him as they were in the likes of the Rat Finks and Colonoscopy—as if only non-Hollister kids were worthy of suspicion. Smiley even wanted to know more about the two Vietnamese dudes—Tommy and Huy—I saw walking into Gangland after we had to leave. I told him he was wasting his time thinking about them, but he jotted their names down in his notebook anyway.
“I’ll tell you something about that place,” Randy chimed in. “The girls there are stuck-up. They don’t know what they’re missing. If one of them called me right now, I wouldn’t give her the time of day. Except maybe that blonde in the tuxedo. If you know her, I wouldn’t mind getting her phone number.”
Mr. Browning pretty much disregarded that. “So,” he said to me, “I don’t believe you ever said why you didn’t write about any of this in one of your articles.”
“I couldn’t,” I told him. “Nash asked me not to. He said they wanted to keep the place private.”
“Nash asked you not to?” Mr. Browning said.
“That’s right. He’s been a good friend and a good source. I couldn’t mess that up by writing about things he asked me not to.”
“A journalist’s ethics?” Mr. Browning asked.
“Yeah, a jour
nalist’s ethics. Some of us still have them.”
“Let’s hear about the shoe,” Smiley said. He sounded exasperated by any kind of talk about ethics. “Ashton’s running shoe in the field—it’s a pretty big coincidence you were the one who found it, don’t you think?”
“That was no coincidence,” Randy said. “Dylan’s a master at that kind of thing.”
Mr. Browning’s eyebrows raised. “Oh, really? How so?”
I didn’t want to go into how I was actually the one who discovered Hector in the Dumpster and make myself look even more suspicious, so before Randy could crank it up, I said, “It’s my job. As an investigative journalist, I have to be observant.”
But Smiley’s like, “I’ve heard about enough of this investigative-journalist manure. What we want to know is, did you find that shoe like you pretended or did you bring it with you and plant it there?”
All of a sudden it seemed about ten degrees hotter in that media room. “What are you talking about?” I said. “How could I bring a shoe out there? They didn’t allow you to carry any bags or anything with you.”
“Yeah,” Smiley said, “but you know what? There’s plenty of spare room in those baggy pants of yours—you could’ve tucked a shoe up there and shook it out of your pant leg right where you wanted it.”
In my mind, I’m like, Really? You’re making a crack about my baggy pants? Take a look at yourself, why don’t you? But what I said out loud was, “That’s ridiculous. Why would I do something like that?”
“Well, there is the reward,” Mr. Browning said.
“I didn’t even know about that until I got out there.”
“About that reward—” Randy started, but I cut him off.
“Not now, Randy. Not now.”
Smiley goes, “Let’s get down to it—maybe you had her shoe because you had her.”
No joke. That’s what he said. Now I felt like I was back in the cop shop with Detectives Hair Gel and Forehead. Nothing about who I was counted. It was all about how they saw me—a nobody with no mojo.
