Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set)

by Blake Banner

  “I was working,” she said, as though in answer to an unspoken question. “‘Swhy I couldn’t open the door. They pay before they get put through, so you gotta finish the session, or they don’t call back. You can’t leave the guy half way, right?”

  I rested my ass against the draining board and Dehan leaned on the doorjamb. We watched her crush out a cigarette and pull another from a carton. She spoke without looking up, with the cigarette between her lips as she lit it with a green disposable lighter.

  “What d’you say his name was?”

  Dehan said, “Cyril Browne.”

  She shrugged her plump shoulders and coughed smoke. “That name don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

  “This is going back twelve years.”

  “Twelve years? Are you kidding me? Do you know how many men I seen in the last twelve years? True, in the last couple a years I work mainly on the telephone, but honey, do the math. Five Johns a day, five days a week for ten years? What is that?”

  I smiled. “That’s thirteen thousand Johns, Xara.”

  She stared at me a moment. “Thirteen thousand? Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I guess some are repeat customers, right? They get to know you, they like your engaging personality and they come back.”

  She smiled. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “You’re sweet.”

  Dehan said, “Cyril was a bit odd.”

  “All my clients are a bit odd, baby. That’s why they’re my clients.”

  “He lived in Soundview, worked at the library, painfully shy…”

  Xara sucked on her cigarette, looked over at the plates stacked in the sink.

  Dehan went on, “Very quiet spoken, not bad looking, learning to paint…” She pulled out her phone, flipped the screen a couple of times and showed Xara a picture.

  Xara glanced at it and spoke to the washing up. “You ain’t Vice, you’s Homicide.”

  I said, “No, we’re a cold case unit. What do you know about Cyril?”

  “I remember him ’cause of the girl. ’Cause of the murder. He disappeared, and all of a sudden they was lookin’ for him.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe…” She stopped talking and looked down at her cigarette. Her expression was one almost of anger. “I don’t believe he killed nobody.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  She shrugged, still examining the burning tip of her cigarette. “I guess I knew him pretty good. Better than most people. We was close in the end.” We waited in silence. A gust of wind rattled the glass in the kitchen window. She flicked ash. “He used to come once a week. Always on a Sunday. Sometimes he’d come twice if he was feelin’ bad. I liked him.” She drew smoke deep into her lungs and spoke as it trailed out among her lipstick and her words. “You never have feeling for your clients. You can’t do that inthis business. Specially…” She looked up at us, first at me and then at Dehan. “Specially if you advertise as sub. You know what that means? It means submissive. If you’re submissive, they treat you like trash. It’s what they’re payin’ you for. So you ain’t never gonna meet a client you like. It stands to reason. But Cyril…” She smiled. “Poor schmuck. What kind a mom calls her boy Cyril? You might as well cut off his balls at birth. That boy is gonna suffer all his life. Cyril was lookin’ for a sub, not so he could treat her like trash, but just so she’d be nice to him! And kind, and tender. He didn’t want to dominate nobody. He didn’t want to hurt nobody. He just wanted somebody who would not hurt him.”

  Dehan took the chair across from Xara. She was frowning. “How long was he coming here, Xara?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Few months. Regular like clockwork. He used to call them his session…” She laughed and there was genuine fondness in her face. “Like I was some kind a fancy shrink. He talked a lot about his work. He hated the people he worked with. Said they hated him too.”

  I said: “Did he ever mention his class mates, where he was learning to paint?”

  She nodded, gazing out of the window at the leaden, cold sky and the naked trees in the backyard. “Yeah, he did. It’s twelve years ago, so if I get the details wrong don’t give me a hard time. I’m just tellin’ you how I remember it. He said they was all fancy-pants arty types. His teacher was a prick. Some Mexican asshole, no offense to the Mexicans. Some of my best friends is Mexican whores, know what I’m sayin’? But this particular Mexican was an asshole, according to Cyril. Really thought he was somethin’ special. An’ then there was the girl who got killed…”

  “Sue?”

  “I don’t remember her name. It might have been Sue. He said she was nice, and he’d like her to notice him from time to time, but she only had eyes for the Mexican prick. And then…”

  She stopped talking, flicked ash from her cigarette and picked up her mug. She swirled the contents around and watched it for a moment. Then drank.

  “This makes me sad, remembering this,” she said at last. “There was another guy. These are the ones I remember because he talked about them the most. Did the Mexican guy have a brother? He said this guy was nice to him sometimes, laughed at him, but tried to help him get closer to Sue, encouraged him to be a bit bolder with women. It was this guy’s idea he should come and see me, a whore, a submissive whore. Tried to bring him out of himself, know what I mean?”

  “Did this guy ever come and see you?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of, but I don’t ask them for their fuckin’ resumés, right?” She sniffed, then carried on. “He showed me some of his paintings. Gave me a couple. I got them upstairs. They was nice. Did one of me, a portrait. It was good.”

  She fell silent. I watched her a moment and scratched my Adam’s apple. “Xara, if he wasn’t looking for sub-dom sex, what was he looking for? Sexually, I mean. Was he ever violent to you? Did he ever become angry or aggressive?”

  She looked surprised and stared at me a moment. “No, never. He wasn’t lookin’ for any kind of sex. We tried a few times, but he couldn’t get it up. Honey, I tried everything in the book and a few things that was never writ down in the book. He just couldn’t get past Mr. Floppy.”

  Dehan flopped back in her chair.

  Xara turned to look at her. “I ain’t kidding. That’s why I don’t believe he could’a done that murder. He could no more rape a woman than I could. And I ain’t got a dick.”

  I squinted at her. “What about Viagra, Cialis…”

  “Forget it! Ain’t I tellin’ you we tried everything? He wasn’t even interested. All he wanted was a woman to be sweet to him: hug him, hold him, stroke his hair, say sweet things to him. He loved bein’ told he was handsome. Truth is he wasn’t bad lookin’. Nice face. But his dick was like last night’s fuckin’ Chinese noodles. As limp as a boiled shrimp.”

  Dehan was staring at the wall. “I’ll be damned!”

  Xara looked at her and laughed. “Ain’t nobody in this room goin’ to the Good Place, that’s for sure!”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and smiled. “So he gave you no indication that he was planning to leave?”

  “Uh-uh. He just stopped calling and stopped showin’ up.”

  “OK, now think about this very carefully before you answer, Xara. Was there anything he said to you, any passing comment, anything at all that would give you some clue to where he might have gone?”

  She held my eye for a long moment. Her expression was not friendly. “I already told you, I liked the boy. You get your filthy hands on him, and you gonna frame him for a murder he did not commit. So even if I had some idea, which I ain’t, I wouldn’t tell the likes of you, Mr. Gammon.”

  Dehan sighed. “We don’t want to frame him, Xara. We just want to know what happened that night. If he didn’t kill Sue, we need to eliminate him as a suspect. Because right now there is a man out there, who did kill Sue, who may have killed again—who may still be killing. We want to stop this killer, whoever he is. We’re not in the business of framing anybody.”

  She made a face that was skeptical. “T
ell that to your buddies in Vice.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. He talked a lot about going home. Only he didn’t say it like that. He used to say ‘comin’ home,’ ‘I wanna come home,’ he’d say, like that had some special meaning for him. I know he was from Sacramento. I don’t know if he was thinkin’ of going back to California. I know he liked the desert, but I don’t think he was happy out west. He never talked about his family. He said once he had a sister, but he never talked about her.” She crushed out the butt in the ashtray and fiddled with the packet, turning it around in her plump, white fingers. “I know what that’s like, not wanting to talk about your family.” She snorted. “Whatever he thought, I ain’t no shrink, but I know he weren’t happy as a kid. You could see that plain as day.” She hesitated. “And you know what else you could see?”

  I jerked my chin at her in a wordless, ‘what?’

  “He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He come across as sullen and rude sometimes, but it was defensive, not offensive. That was his way of protecting himself. Underneath that shell, he was the softest, sweetest boy I ever met.”

  I looked at Dehan. She shrugged. I said, “OK, Xara. Thanks for your time. You’ve been very helpful.”

  She laughed a smoky laugh and started coughing. “I been helpful to the cops. I’m goin’ to whore hell for sure.”

  We let ourselves out. As I closed the door, I could still hear her coughing in the kitchen. The sudden cold air made us shiver and I thrust my hands deep in my pockets.

  Dehan said: “The softest, sweetest boy a submissive hooker ever met isn’t much of a recommendation.”

  I grunted. “But it was a very believable picture. What time is it?”

  “Eleven. Too early for lunch, Stone.”

  “Let’s grab a coffee and a snack somewhere. This is one hell of a puzzle, Dehan. I need to think this through.”

  We went to Monsignor del Valle Square and hustled inside the Café Sevilla. It was warm and close, it smelled of wet coats and sweet buns, and there was an espresso machine screaming behind the bar. We found a table by the window, squeezed in and ordered two cups of hot chocolate and two almond paste croissants. Then we sat and stared out at the soaking sludge and the traffic in silence. Dehan was the first to speak after the waitress had brought our order. She broke off a piece of croissant and dunked it in her chocolate.

  “She just blew a hole a mile wide in our case, Stone.”

  I smiled at her. “In my case. Your money was on Fernando and Giorgio.”

  She tilted her head in a kind of one shouldered shrug. “You had me almost sold on your semi-serial killer theory, but I have to admit—the sweetest guy she ever met, who wouldn’t hurt a fly and he has erectile dysfunction not even Viagra can cure... that’s not much of a prime suspect.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. But I still think we need to track him down and talk to him. He is still the one guy who didn’t give a sample, and he is the one guy who disappeared the very next morning after the killing. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  She frowned at her croissant and made a ‘hm’ sound, then said, “I agree, but Stone, maybe we need to look at this again. Like I said before, maybe we’ve been making assumptions.” She leaned forward and put both elbows on the table. “OK, so two months earlier, late August, he hands in his notice at work and to his landlord, and because of that we have assumed that this meant he intended to vanish. But actually, when you think about it, it does not, in itself, mean he was planning to disappear from New York at all. He might have been moving next door. He might have been offered a better job and was planning to move up the road, or to Brooklyn.”

  “OK…”

  “So his notice could well be totally unrelated to his disappearance.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  She took a bite of her croissant and sat chewing for a moment. “Suppose Giorgio and Fernando have been trying to get into Sue’s pants for some time, they both implied as much, but Sue, despite being a flirt, is, as her neighbor Bob Smith said, at heart a good, decent, girl next door. We only have Giorgio and Fernando’s word for it that she was a tease, and for how she was behaving at the party.”

  “True.”

  “So let’s imagine for a moment a different scenario. Fernando has been encouraging Sue and Cyril to talk to each other, telling her to sit on his lap, yadda yadda. He’s doing this because he thinks it’s funny, he’s getting a laugh out of Cyril: the more Cyril humiliates himself, the better Fernando looks and feels. But, to his surprise, it has the opposite effect of what he expects. Why? Because Sue is in fact, like Bob said, a nice person. And so is Cyril, and when they are pushed together they actually start to like each other and become friends. Plus, Fernando and Giorgio are getting on her nerves and Cyril is actually nice to her.” She paused. “I know it’s a lot of speculation, but stay with me, ’cause it’s all we have right now. So, at two o’clock that morning, Sue is a bit drunk, but really, basically, she’s had enough of Giorgio and Fernando coming on to her and she just wants to go home. So she leaves. Fernando goes after her, determined he is going to sleep with her that night. She tells him to take a hike. No means no. OK so far?”

  “Yeah, as you say, a lot of speculation, but it’s making sense.”

  “So she goes home to her apartment. With Sue gone, Cyril has no reason to stay at the party. So he leaves too, but on the way home he passes by her place to check she’s OK. Meanwhile, Fernando has gone back to Giorgio to report on his failure. They are both drunk, maybe stoned, and they decide they have had enough of Sue, and what they see as her ‘prick-teasing’. Remember, they both described her in so many words as a prick-tease. Tonight they are going to have her whether she likes it or not.”

  “Hmm… It’s feasible.”

  “Shut up. Listen. When they get there, they find that not only has she rejected them but, to add insult to injury, she is with the nerd. This is too much for their narcissistic egos, they get real mad and they kill her. Cyril freaks, panics, and runs. Nothing to do with handing in his notice.”

  “It’s good, but it has a major flaw, Dehan.”

  “I know, the semen. The DNA. But there might be an explanation for that.”

  “I think I know…”

  “Shut up, listen, give me my moment. If his erectile dysfunction was emotional—not a physical condition—and Xara was actually having a therapeutic effect on him, like he said, Sue might actually have aroused him. If he was in love with her, and she was sweet and nice to him, maybe they actually got it on. It wasn’t rape at all.”

  “Wow, that is one hell of a theory, Dehan.”

  She nodded, using her whole body, and stuffed the last of her almond croissant in her mouth. “I rike idge. I’ burksh fo me.”

  “You like it and it works for you.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  I thought about it, turned it over in my mind, looking at the angles. Finally I said, “Well, if we are going to prove it, we need Cyril Browne more than ever. Let’s go report to the chief and book them tickets. I also want him to run a check on Giorgio and Fernando, see if they have any priors out of state.”

  “No road trip?” she said, licking her fingers and draining her cup.

  “Not this time, ritoo glasshopper. This time we fly.”

  Eight

  We touched down at Sacramento Mather Airport at ten past ten that night. It was cold as we stepped out into the parking lot, but it wasn’t freezing and it wasn’t sleeting. That was a relief. From there it was a twenty minute drive, in an Avis hire car, west along the Lincoln Highway and then south on Watt Avenue, to Elk Grove, where Dehan had booked us into the Holiday Inn on Laguna Boulevard. By the time we had unpacked and hung up our clothes, it was eleven PM, two in the morning in New York. We were spent, so we had a drink from the mini-bar and hit the sack.

  Next morning at eight we had a soulless breakfast of bagels and coffee in a soulless breakfast room; but after that we stepped out into bright sunshine, climbed in the car and rolle
d down the windows for a pleasant two-mile drive to Cyril’s sister’s house, on Kilconnell Drive. According to the file, her name was Mary Browne and she lived on her own opposite the elementary school where she taught. We hadn’t called to let her know we were coming because we wanted to surprise her.

  Kilconnell Drive is a very pleasant road, with attractive houses, broad, green lawns and an abundance of trees. We pulled up outside Mary Browne’s house and I checked my watch. It was ten minutes before nine. I looked at Dehan. She grimaced. “Let’s see if she sends us back to New York.”

  I opened the door. “That ain’t gonna happen.”

  She followed me up the drive, past the garage and up to the front door, in the shade of a large green oak. I rang the bell and a few moments later the door was opened by an oddly familiar woman. She was big, with blonde hair, a tweed skirt and sensible shoes. She had on a very white blouse and a string of peals around her neck. Her face was soft and round, but her expression was hard and sharp. I guessed she was in her late fifties, but might have been older. She said:

  “Well?”

  “Good morning.” I didn’t bother to smile. “We are detectives from the New York Police Department. This is Detective Carmen Dehan and I am Detective John Stone.” We showed her our badges but she didn’t look at them. Her face had gone hard. I ignored her expression and went on. “We have notified the Elk Grove PD that we are here, ma’am. We are conducting some inquiries related to an investigation back in New York. Would you mind answering a few questions for us?”

  “What about? I can’t imagine that I would have any information of interest to the New York Police Department.”

  “Are you Mary Browne?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “Ms. Browne, we would like to ask you about your brother, Cyril. Could we possibly come inside?”