by Dan Ames
She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair.
“So what the hell do you think he’s doing?” Alice said. “Or should we be asking who Jake is doing?”
“Your sensitivity is admirable,” Mary said. “He could be in a ditch somewhere with a closed-head injury, and you’ve got him in a condo in Vegas with a stripper.”
“He’s got a condo in Vegas?” Alice said.
“Figure of speech.”
Mary saw movement out of the corner of her eye and looked out the living room’s picture window as a guy on an old-fashioned cruiser bicycle rode by the front of the house.
“Look, Mary. Jake is a homicide cop with LAPD,” Alice said. “He carries a badge and a gun. I seriously doubt anything has happened to him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
She looked at Mary.
“Except when it comes to women.”
4
Four
The official office of a private investigator was a place prospective clients feared. Mary guessed, if she had to put a number to it, about seventy-five percent of new clients requested an initial meeting somewhere other than her office.
Which sort of pissed her off. After all, she paid monthly rent on the little office in a swanky building that also housed a law firm, an editorial house, and some mystery businesses that had to be tax dodges because Mary never saw anyone coming or going from them.
So, seventy-five percent of consultations involving a new client led Mary to the Coffee Bean, just across the street and down a few blocks from her office.
Today, there were only two homeless guys in the coffee shop. One of them was playing chess, the other was staring at a pile of newspapers stacked next to the garbage can. Waiting for breaking news.
She got herself a low-fat cappuccino and saved the receipt for tax purposes. She thought of adding a “one” before the $4.50 price: $14.50 for a cappuccino in Los Angeles wasn’t out of the question. But she held back. No need to commit tax fraud. Yet.
Mary’s client walked in the door and made a beeline for the counter. Even though she’d never met her in person, Mary knew it was the woman who had called her. She was a strikingly beautiful Latina woman with long, black hair, beautiful eyes, and a figure Mary would kill for.
Armed now with a small black coffee, the woman turned and scanned the room, caught Mary’s eye, then approached her.
“Ms. Cooper?” she said.
Mary stood and shook her hand. “Elyse?” she said.
“Thank you for meeting me here,” said the woman, who Mary knew to be Elyse Ramirez.
“No problem,” Mary said. “I was having my office fumigated anyway. It always smells like bacon—not that that’s a bad thing.”
Mary watched as the woman pulled a folder and an envelope from her purse.
“How do we start?” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I,” Mary said. She saw a brief flash of surprise on the woman’s face. “I’m kidding. Let’s start by talking about—if you are considering hiring a private investigator, namely me—what is it you want me to investigate?”
Elyse Ramirez let out a long breath. Mary caught the scent of coffee and mint.
“I called you about my daughter. She’s missing,” Ramirez said. “Her name is Nina. She’s seventeen years old.” She slid a photograph from a folder across the table to Mary.
“What did the police say?” Mary said, already knowing the answer. She looked at the photograph. Nina Ramirez was beautiful, like her mother, but in a softer way.
“The police will not be involved,” Elyse Ramirez said. “My husband is a very important businessman; he will not allow our daughter to shame our family.”
“So she wasn’t taken, she ran away?” Mary said, catching the meaning in the woman’s carefully chosen words.
“We don’t know. Maybe a little bit of both,” Ramirez said. “She has been dating a man involved in the pornography industry. She may have run away with him.”
Mary sighed. “There’s big money in porn. I spend a lot on those movies.”
Not again!
Mary quickly recovered.
“A lot of dangerous elements are involved in that industry, obviously,” Mary said. “Not a good place for a young girl to go.”
The woman furrowed her brow.
Mary realized Elyse Ramirez was torn between a total panic over her daughter and complete anger with her as well. Probably not an unusual emotional conflict for a parent, Mary assumed.
“All of the information regarding Nina, her boyfriend, and the last time we saw her are here,” Elyse Ramirez said. Her voice had started out a bit shaky; now it seemed to steady itself.
“I’d like to ask you some more questions,” Mary said, sensing the woman’s impatience.
Elyse Ramirez shook her head. “I don’t want talk about it. Everything you need is there,” she said, pointing at the packet. “And this is the first part of your fee.” She pushed the thick envelope across the table.
Mary raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry it is in cash, but my husband insisted.”
Mary nodded.
“Not a problem,” she said.
5
Five
Mary went back to her office and spread the paperwork from Elyse Ramirez out on her desk.
She still had the envelope full of cash in her purse. It wasn’t all that uncommon for clients to pay in cash. Usually it was to hide any record of the payment, either from a cheating spouse or any public record of the transaction.
Since Elyse Ramirez claimed her husband knew she was hiring a private investigator, Mary suspected the latter.
Still, it was a fair amount of cash. Maybe she should go to a strip club and go nuts. Those male strippers kind of grossed her out, though, all greased up and chock full of steroids. Of course, she could always take Aunt Alice with her. That would be fun. Watch the old woman spray whipped cream all over some dancer’s package. Snap a photo of it and put it on Facebook. Except Alice wasn’t on any kind of social media. Too bad.
The mental images of male strippers made her think of Jake.
Mary hit speed dial on her cell phone for him and listened as it went instantly to voicemail.
“Fucker,” she said.
There was a feeling growing in her gut, one she didn’t want to acknowledge. Because in order to admit she was actually concerned about Jake, she would first have to admit she actually cared for Jake. And ever since he’d betrayed her with his boss, the pale and frighteningly vicious Lieutenant Arianna Davies, she refused to acknowledge certain emotions regarding him.
Thinking about the LAPD gave Mary an idea. Mary knew that Jake had been moved from Homicide to Vice, so she made a call to a contact she had in that department. They agreed to meet for beers.
She put her phone back on the desk and thought about her new case.
The porn industry was the Bermuda Triangle for young women. They flew into town by the thousands and half of them just disappeared. They wound up dead or addicted to drugs, with different names and unrecognizable even to their families if they were one of the few fortunate enough to make the return trip home.
All of which posed great challenges to private investigators. Names were changed, fake addresses, fake identification. It was like trying to track a convict through a swamp without a bloodhound.
“Okay,” Mary said out loud. “Enough with the excuses, let’s get going.” Was it bad she’d started talking to herself? What next, a pair of Depends and hot flashes?
“Let’s have a look at you, Nina,” Mary said and slid the photographs from the folder.
Like her mother, Nina Ramirez was a beauty. Dark skin, hair, and eyes, beautiful white teeth, and judging from one photo of the girl in a cheerleader outfit, a knockout body.
Mary wondered how she herself would look in a cheerleader outfit. Probably pretty damn good. She could even use the pompons to make her boobs look bigger.
She w
aded through the documents. Mostly photos and a few newspaper articles. Mary took the time to read them, to learn that Nina was a smart, accomplished, and seemingly happy young woman. But Mary knew this meant virtually nothing. Everything was social media these days. Facebook. Twitter. And of course, the old dinosaur: email.
Mary had asked Elyse to provide her with Nina’s email, which she did. But Elyse didn’t know the password. Naturally. Parents never do. And the few times Mary knew of a child giving their parents the password to any type of social media account, it was usually a dummy account.
Kids these days, they were almost as bad as adults.
So Mary sent an email, attaching the appropriate information, to a friend who knew his way around computers and had been able to unlock email accounts for Mary in the past. This time, she wanted him to get access to Nina’s email account, and from there hopefully follow the digital trail to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and whatever else he could find. For starters.
Now, she turned her attention to the boyfriend. Elyse had said Nina was seeing someone involved in the pornography industry.
Always bad news for a parent. Mary pictured how that might go. “Hi, Mom and Dad, meet Jack Rammer. He stars in short films that don’t have much dialogue other than ‘oh yeah! That’s it, baby!’”
Of course, Nina’s boyfriend’s name wasn’t Jack Rammer. It was Archer DeLoof. Jesus, he sounded like a Harvard graduate assistant, not a skin-flick aficionado.
Archer DeLoof.
Mary launched Google and checked out the young man. There were only a few hits, and she quickly narrowed it down to the only one with any association to Los Angeles. There were no images, other than a tiny, low-resolution head shot, maybe from a yearbook.
As always when dealing with anyone involved in porn, Mary had to consider that the name Archer DeLoof was a fake. Although, it didn’t seem like a fake.
She spent another twenty minutes trying, unsuccessfully, to find out more about Archer DeLoof via the Internet. She was able to locate a production company in Santa Monica that seemed to have some type of association with an Archer DeLoof. She printed off the address then checked her watch. She was going to be late for drinks with her contact from LAPD’s Vice Squad.
Although, since she was buying, she could keep him waiting.
He would just start a tab and probably down as many as possible before she got there, so there was no hurry since she’d save the receipt as a write-off. Except that she was ready for a drink too.
In that case, time was of the essence.
6
Six
It was early enough for Mary to avoid the worst of LA’s never-ending freeway hell.
It took her ten minutes to remember where the bar was—downtown just off of Third Street. It was a cop special called the Tap Room, a dark and gloomy one-room deal that stunk like old beer, smoke, and the residue of decade’s worth of cop stories.
Mary found Oscar Freedham at the bar. He was short but muscular with a shaved head. He had on typical Vice Squad clothes: jeans, work boots, T-shirt, black vest.
“Hey, pretty young thing,” Mary said as she slid onto the bar stool next to him.
“Cooper,” he said with not a lot of enthusiasm.
“Can I buy you a drink then have my way with you?”
Freedham turned to Mary. “After just one drink? I’m not that cheap. A few more beers, a couple shooters, and my ass is yours.”
“God, you such a hopeless romantic, Freedham,” Mary said. She motioned to the bartender, a pale woman with short, dark hair and tattoo sleeves on both arms.
The woman got Freedham another beer. Mary asked for a bottle of Rolling Rock and got it.
She turned to look at Freedham. She guessed he was in his early fifties, a bowling ball of a man with thick forearms and the face of a Catholic priest.
“So, break up any Viagra rings lately?” she said. “And then confiscate the goods for your own use?”
“I wish,” he said. “We’re all about meth. I thought the crack epidemic years back was bad. This shit is twice as nasty.”
“Speaking of the dregs of society,” Mary said, “where the hell is Jake Cornell?”
Freedham laughed.
“Oh, don’t play the tough girl with me,” he said. “I ain’t fuckin’ buyin’ it. I know all about you two. Hell, I think the entire LAPD knows about you and Cornell being lovebirds.”
“Lovebirds?” Mary said. “I thought you were a tough cop, but now you’re sounding like someone’s androgynous grandmother.”
“I told you, I’m not buying your act,” he said. He took a long drink from his beer.
Mary rolled her eyes. “Well, if you know so much, then you certainly know where the Cornell deadbeat is.”
Freedham tossed off his shooter and drained the rest of his beer.
“All this talking is making me thirsty,” he said.
Mary signaled the tattooed bodybuilder cum bartender, who set Freedham up again with his beverages.
“He’s undercover,” Freedham said to Mary, after taking a long pull from his fresh beer.
“Oh Christ,” Mary said. Jake wasn’t all that great at being deceitful. The guy was an overgrown Hardy boy. Undercover for Vice? She shuddered inwardly at the thought.
“Whose bright idea was that? He’s probably floating in the harbor by now,” she said.
Freedham shrugged his oversized shoulders and said, “Hey, the new guy always gets shafted with the worst assignments. What’d he do to Davies anyway that pissed her off so much?”
Mary wanted to punch the old man. He knew damn well what Jake had done. He’d had a brief fling with his boss, the infamous Lt. Arianna Davies, also known as “The Shark.” The woman was evil incarnate, wrapped up in a pale skeleton of a body. And she had a long memory. Jake had pissed her off. And Davies hated Mary. The feeling was mutual.
“I heard he was at a crime scene, and when someone asked to see the corpse, Jake pointed to Davies,” Mary said.
“I believe it,” Freedham said. “The woman is frightening. But she gets things done. That’s why LAPD brass loves her.”
“I guess even the most loathsome creatures have their fans,” Mary said. “Speaking of loathsome, let’s get back to Jake.”
“I told you, he’s undercover,” Freedham said.
“So undercover he can’t even use his cell phone?”
Freedham shook his head. “I’m sure he checks in occasionally. It depends. If he’s working twenty-four seven, it can be difficult. I heard that in this case, he was going to have to go deep.”
“Well, first time for everything,” Mary said.
“Ouch.”
“So he does check in once in a while?” she said.
“Sure,” Freedham said. “But only when he has something to report; otherwise it’s pointless to take any risks.”
“Well, is there any actual danger in this assignment?” she said. “You know, Jake going undercover is like sending a nun into an Anthrax concert.”
Freedham shrugged again. “I’m not exactly his direct superior, so I only know what I hear. But you never really know until the shit hits the fan. My guess is that this one’s kind of a long shot.”
“Well, at least tell me what the general area he’s investigating,” Mary said. “Drugs, prostitution—”
“It’s porn,” Freedham said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mary said. The porn industry was a subculture in Los Angeles, but it was much more ingrained into the town than most people knew. Still, she and Jake both working on porn cases? How romantic.
Freedham threw down his shooter, then drained the last of his beer. “The nasty kind.” He stood, and Mary knew she had gotten all she was going to get from Freedham, at least this time.
“Well, I hope he’s not trying to pose as a porn star,” Mary said.
She drained the last of her Rolling Rock.
“He’ll never be able to pull that one off.”
7
/>
Seven
The sign read ExtReam Productions. Mary shook her head and wondered if they had brainstorming sessions in the porn world, trying to figure out all of the different ways they could work words like ram, bang, pound, and ream into titles.
Mary had left the Tap Room and driven back to Santa Monica to a section just off the interstate where a lot of production companies set up shop.
ExtReam’s building was a single-story, brick structure in a funky block that included an adult book shop, a drug store, and a carpet-cleaning service. Mary thought that made sense. Buy some porno mags at the bookstore, grab a tube of Vaseline at the drug store, and when you jizz all over the carpet, take it in for a cleaning.
She got out of her car, thumbed the alarm, and went to the front door. It was unlocked, and she stepped inside.
Most companies affiliated with the film industry had offices in older buildings. The ones Mary had visited had almost all, without question, been gutted and given the “Hollywood routine.” It was Mary’s own term for the ubiquitous concrete floors, sandblasted rafters with open ceilings and skylights, and brightly colored drywall adorned with movie posters.
The receptionist area consisted of an ornately carved bar, complete with a brass rail.
The only thing missing was a receptionist.
Mary waited for a few moments before a woman appeared at the end of the hallway that divided the space in two. Somewhere, there was an alert of some kind when the door opened. This was still LA, after all.
“Good afternoon, can I help you?” the woman said, with a voice echoing long nights smoking cigarettes and downing whiskey. Mary looked at her. She had big, blubbery lips, long brown hair, enormous knockers, and skinny jeans. Her feet were stuffed into leopard-skin stilettos. If Mary had to guess, the woman was probably in her mid-forties.
Time had not been kind to her.
