Lovelady

by Wynne, Marcus

  “Did he report her as missing?” Spenser said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was her name put in the database for missing children?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Once she’s in that system, if she has any contact with the police, they can ID her and who she belongs to. That’s about all you can do. You an investigator?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you do?”

  His tone had changed, his focus on me.

  “I’m a travel writer. I don’t have any background in this sort of thing, that’s why Marcos suggested I talk to you.”

  He nodded in understanding, still appraising me. “You work for a magazine?”

  “Freelance. I’ve got relationships with several magazines.”

  “Sounds like a good job.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Yeah,” Spenser said. “Well, I feel for the grandfather. It’s a tough situation to be in, especially with a young female involved. We get a lot of runaways here in Minneapolis. Bright lights, big city, all that jazz, draws these kids from the country like moths to a flame. And a lot of them get burned. They come up here, most of them too young to work, end up on the streets, and then every shit bag in the universe comes down to take a piece off them. There’s a thriving sex industry here, if you didn’t know, and these kids get drawn in. Prostitution, both boys and girls, that’s big, but there’s also a more sophisticated deal – making videos.”

  “Porno?” I said.

  Spenser gave me a look as though I was stupid; I wanted him to think that way about me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Porno. The Feds have busted some big time rings out in the suburbs. They had whole houses set up to make movies with kids. Used to be, they’d rent a hotel room, move in and shoot the whole thing in a day, then move on. Now they’ve got whole production studios set up in houses. With computers and digital cameras they get broadcast quality from the get go. They load the stuff onto private computer servers for people to get it on the Internet. Custom made stuff, too.”

  “I had no idea it was so advanced,” I said.

  “Where do you live?” Spenser said.

  “Linden Hills.”

  He snorted in disdain. “You won’t see it there. The yuppies won’t tolerate that in their version of Minneapolis. Go over to Uptown, Lyn-Lake, Downtown, North Side. You’ll see plenty if you know what to look for.”

  “Do you do much work with runaways?” I said.

  “When I was in the bag on patrol, I made it a point to seek out these kids, get them hooked up with the various missions and ministries around here for kids. What with budget cuts, lots of those places have closed down – and there’s even more kids on the street now. I’m in SIU now, Special Investigations. I’ve worked with the Feds on a couple of their porno cases, but they like to stake out that stuff for themselves, and we don’t have the resources to pursue it at the level they do.”

  “So what do you think I should do?” I said. “Is there an organization in the Cities I could talk to, or should I be handing out flyers, what?”

  Spenser took his time answering. Even though he hid it well, he was trying to decide whether to take me seriously or not.

  “You get me the information you got, a picture, name, whatever, I’ll see that it goes out the patrol guys at roll call,” he said. “I’ll make a couple of calls, check around some. I’d advise you not to go out looking for this girl yourself. You start sticking your nose into street business, come to the attention of some people, they’ll rough you up or worse. You could get hurt. Better to leave that to the professionals.”

  It hurts, sometimes, to live your cover. It angered me to hear that kind of assessment coming from a professional – even though it was a validation of my cover and how harmless I worked to appear to him. I wanted to square off with him, tell him the things I’d done for my country, the missions I’d accomplished…and maybe that’s why he said what he did, to draw me out. Perhaps he sensed something about me he couldn’t put a name to. So I sat, my shoulders consciously slumped, made no eye contact, and took the blow to my pride.

  “You’re the expert,” I said. “But I’d like to be doing something besides sitting around while you make calls, as much as I appreciate that. Would it hurt to make some flyers and get them out?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve seen lots of people go the flyer route. Not much response unless there’s money attached to it, a reward, and then you’ve got every cockroach with a jones on calling you and claiming some of that money. Let me have what you got, I’ll look into it.”

  I handed him a manila envelope with copies of Luella Pound’s picture and two letters. I’d kept the originals for myself. Spenser took out the photo and looked at it.

  “Midwestern blonde,” he said. “No telling where she’d end up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a demand for girls like this. Not just here, but overseas, Japan, Middle East especially. White slavery, that’s what it is. Girls like this get picked up here and some fucking sheik pays big bucks to bust her open. Minneapolis is one end of a pipeline that runs that way because we’ve got all these Norwegians and Swedes here, nice blond kids. Big bucks for them.”

  “Is that something the Feds would be involved in?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would they talk to me?”

  “No. You wouldn’t believe how many cases like this come up. They’d only be interested if they could connect her to something they’re working. And they wouldn’t talk to you about it.”

  “But they’d talk to you.”

  “Like I said, I’ll make a few calls.”

  The conversation seemed over. Spenser slid the photo back into the envelope and slid the envelope into his gym bag.

  “What’s your phone number?” he said.

  I gave him a generic business card with my name, e-mail, PO box and telephone number.

  “Fancy,” he said.

  “Don’t be fooled.”

  He gave me a strange look. “I’m not.” He turned to Marcos and slapped him on the shoulder. “See you Wednesday?”

  “Cool, man. Thanks for helping us out,” Marcos said.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out,” Spenser said to me. Then he slung his bag over his shoulder and stalked out of the gym like a big alleycat.

  I watched him go. “Tough character.”

  “I don’t think he likes you,” Marcos said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You got cop’s eyes, Frank. And cops don’t like guys who aren’t cops to have cop’s eyes.”

  “I’m a writer, Marcos. I’m supposed to snoop around and find out things.”

  “That’s what you say, Frank.” Marcos stretched, then waved to Rick Faye who was coaching a fighter in the corner of the gym. “What do you want to do?”

  “Let me buy you some lunch. I appreciate you helping me out.”

  “Sounds good, rich man. We can figure out what to do next.”

  “We?”

  “You’re not fooling anybody with your poker face, Frank. It don’t take a mind reader to see you mean to get some street time.”

  I tugged at my nose. “There’s no need for you to get involved.”

  “Hey, this might be fun, man. And you’re going to need somebody who knows their way around, you go snooping in the dark world.”

  “Dark world?”

  “They only come out at night, dude. So that’s when we’ll have to go hunting.”

  A man, another student, watched us with interest. He was short and muscular, with pinched facial features framed with granny glasses. He sat on the floor and went through some stretches, and smiled and nodded when I caught his eye.

  “Friend of yours?” I said.

  Marcos waved to the man. “Hey, Rake. You get enough of a work out?”

  Rake got up and picked up his bag and walked past us to the door. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He studied me with interest. “See y
ou around.”

  “Later, man,” Marcos said.

  Rake walked like a wrestler, with a bear like roll exaggerated with his shortness.

  “Interesting guy,” I said.

  “You know him?” Marcos said, surprised.

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s a psychic, man. Makes his living doing astrology and tarot cards and giving readings. Kind of creepy, sometimes he’ll just come up and tell you shit that turns out to be true.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No shit. Buy me lunch and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Done deal.”

  iv.

  We ate at Figlio’s in Calhoun Square, in Uptown. Marcos was a regular with the wait staff and bartenders, and he chatted with them during lulls in our conversation, while we ate fried calamari and sipped Sam Adams. Figlio’s was a pleasant place in the mid-afternoon, before the after work crowd of young professionals pushed the bohemian neighborhood characters like Marcos into the corners. I liked the food here, and the attentive pretty waitresses, and the smoothly professional bartender who kept a watchful eye on the level of our beer glasses.

  I tilted my glass up for a last swallow and signaled for a refill. “This guy, Rake…he’s a psychic you said?”

  Marcos plucked a calamari ring from the tangle on his plate. “Yep. He’s a good guy, trains hard at the gym. Seems like a regular Joe, then he comes up with some of this creepy shit about what’s going to happen. But that’s what psychics do, I guess. I hear he makes a pretty good living at it.”

  “You believe in that?”

  “Yeah,” Marcos said. “I believe. I have an auntie back in Rio, she found out she had a cancer. So she went to this psychic healer in the barrio. This healer, he works on my auntie for an hour a day for five days. Then he sends her home. She goes back to the doctors, and they tell her that her cancer is in remission – all on its own. She’s still alive and healthy, and she brings that healer a meal every week. So yeah, I believe in some of it.”

  I watched the bubbles swell into the head of my fresh beer. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d buy into that kind of thing.”

  “There’s plenty of frauds and people who aren’t what they say they are. Doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in there. You think it’s all bullshit?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s all bullshit. Like you said, there’s plenty of frauds running around out there, and you just have to sort through it all. I knew a guy, a military guy, he told me about the government’s psychics.”

  “Government psychics? No shit? I never heard about that.”

  “It was big time,” I said. “The CIA and the Department of Defense had a program, they called it STARGATE. They had psychics looking for nukes and hunting terrorists. Supposedly they were real accurate, and more useful than the satellites.”

  “No shit?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Marcos mulled that over. I thought of my own experiences with the military psychics, the warrior-shaman as they liked to be called. The STARGATE project cover had been blown big time back in the nineties by a handful of disaffected former players. A carefully crafted disinformation campaign swung into effect to downplay the real effectiveness of the unit and make a big show of shutting it down. But that was all distraction and deception to hide the real secret: there were several units of military trained psychics who worked hand in hand with tactical units like the Navy’s Development Group and the Army’s Combat Applications Group – and, sometimes, with us in the Cells. The military psychics could remote view details about targets that couldn’t be gotten to in any other way; they could provide details that could only be gathered by someone on the ground.

  I’d done enough work with them to believe.

  “What kind of psychic stuff does Rake do?” I said.

  “Tarot cards, astrology, sometimes just straight readings. He says the cards and astrology are vehicles.”

  “Maybe I should see if he could find Luella Pound for us.”

  “You want to ask him?” Marcos said.

  “Let’s have a look for ourselves first.”

  “So it’s we now, huh?” Marcos grinned into his beer glass.

  “Like you said, I don’t know these streets at night. I’m a homebody, most nights.”

  “Except on Fridays.”

  “Yeah, when I try to get Ms. Gigi to give me some love.”

  Marcos laughed. “That Gigi, she’s good people.”

  “Maybe we’ll drop in there tonight after we have a look around.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “What time you want to meet me at the house?” I said.

  “Around ten. We can take your car, cruise the city, I’ll point out some places. Then we can park and go on foot to see what we can see, all up close and dirty.”

  After our lunch, Marcos went his way and I went home. I went into the small study that served as my office and sat at my desk and stared into space. There’s a ritual I go through when I prepare for a mission, a mental focusing, a bringing of attention to the here and now that preps my mind for the tasks ahead, whether it’s doing a tactical reconnaissance like I intended to do tonight -- or a killing.

  You have to have your mind right.

  I was going to tackle the duality of the city tonight. Minneapolis was a city with two faces. In the light of day, it was one of the most desirable cities to live in. But at night, the city had a different face. I’d seen glimpses of it: slight, undernourished teens standing together on street corners; furtive drug deals done in plain sight of passing police; one time, a teenage boy running full speed down the street past Gigi’s, blood streaming from an open wound on his head. I never sought out the dark side while I was home; I got plenty of that in my other life. I liked the cleanliness and the order and the civility of my life here. It was my retreat from the chaos of the shadow world. I liked the duality of my life and, so far, I’d done a good job of keeping it compartmentalized.

  Going out to search for Luella Pound was going to blur my boundaries.

  But I said I’d do it, so I would. What’s a man without his word?

  CHAPTER THREE

  i.

  In any act, there’s a moment when you actually decide to go forward. For me it’s a conscious decision, a gathering of my internal resources, a moment when I say, “Go.” While looking for Luella didn’t require the commitment a special operation did, it was good discipline to approach it professionally. I dressed for the job: comfortable running shoes, loose fitting Levis, a sweatshirt and a light leather jacket against the evening cool. My outfit could conceal a weapon, if I’d wanted to carry one.

  I thought about it.

  Marcos showed up on his mountain bike. He went everywhere on his bike, and the ride from his apartment in Uptown to my house was a short one. We stashed his bike in my garage and got into my car, a comfortable and inconspicuous four year old Toyota Camry.

  I adjusted all the mirrors, got settled just the way I liked. “So, Virgil,” I said. “Where you going to start your tour of the underworld?”

  Marcos looked at me for a long moment, then laughed. “You’re just full of surprises, Frank. You read Dante?”

  “I been educated.”

  “Lake Street,” he said. “That’s the entry to the underworld.”

  I drove around Lake Harriet, the traffic sparse at this time of night, and then followed the shoreline of Lake Calhoun to 36th Street to Hennepin and the intersection of Hennepin and Lake. Uptown, at this intersection, was dominated by small boutiques, expensive restaurants, bars and coffee shops. It was an upscale part of town, anchored by the tony shops in Calhoun Square and the Gap right across the street.

  “You’ll see the kids here sometimes,” Marcos said. “But this is more a place to play, to spend some money. The cops are aggressive about keeping them off the street around here. They’ll hang out in Calhoun Square till the security guards chase them out, or over there,” he pointed. “At the l
ibrary. They don’t hustle for much besides spare change. They might sell a little.”

  “Sell?”

  “Dope. Not much sex action around here. No place to go. Can’t stop cars, no privacy in the day time, at night the cops are out in force protecting the yuppies who insist on their god given right to walk around the lakes at night,” Marcos said.

  I turned right on Lake Street and headed east.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Marcos said. “Lake Street changes the farther east you go.”

  The upscale designer boutiques fell away behind us. The stores became run down, shuttered and battered buildings housing furniture rental stores and pawnshops and payday loan outfits. The color of the people shifted from white to black, and the young men gathered on the street corners wore their clothing and bandanas in the intricate display of gang sign. They watched the passing cars with the flat eyes of a predator, looking for the police cars, marked and unmarked, that cruised by.

  “There’s a lot of drug dealing out here, on side streets. But until we get east of the interstate, there’s too many cops for anything open on Lake,” Marcos said.

  We drove east of the highway, went beneath the grimy underpass and passed two winos who stood in plain view of passing cars and urinated against the sloping concrete walls of the underpass. Even the street lights were dirty here; the lamps seemed attenuated and dull, as though they were weary with shedding light on the things and people that passed beneath them. On the other side of the underpass, staking out pieces of the sidewalk, were dozens of street walkers, mostly black women with a few white girls, all of them in skin tight short shorts and halter tops, or else bursting out of short dresses. A short fat woman with her hair teased into a huge Afro waved at us as we drove by.

  “Looking for a date?” she shouted.

  Marcos waved back at her. “Not tonight, baby!”

  “Come back later, then!” she said.