"Do you know who she was working for?"
She rose and went into the hallway, and I could hear her footsteps on the bare floor as she walked. When she appeared again, there was a piece of paper in her hands.
"She told me that if there was any trouble with Donnie or Billy, or if she didn't come back on time, I was to call this number and talk to this man." She handed me the piece of paper. On it, written in Rita Ferris's tight, neat script, was a telephone number and the name Lester Biggs.
"When did the crying incident happen, Lucy?"
"Five days ago," she said, which meant that Rita had called me the day after looking for help and money to get out of Portland.
I held up the piece of paper. "Can I keep this?"
She nodded and I placed it in my wallet. "Do you know who he is?" she asked.
"He runs an escort service out of South Portland," I replied. There was no point in sugaring it. Lucy Mims had already guessed the truth.
For the first time, tears glistened in her eyes. A drop hung from her eyelash, then slowly trickled down her cheek. At the hallway, her daughter appeared and ran to her mother to hug her tight. She looked at me, but there was no blame in her eyes. She knew that, whatever had happened, it was not my fault that her mother was crying.
I took my card from my wallet and handed it to Lucy. "Call me if you think of anything else, or if you just want to talk. Or if you need help."
"I don't need help, Mr. Parker," she said. In her voice, I could hear the echo of someone being kicked all the way to New Jersey.
"I guess not," I said, and opened the door. "And most people call me Bird."
She walked across the room to close the door behind me, her daughter's arms still clutched tightly around her.
"You will find the man who did this, won't you?" she asked.
Passing clouds dappled the winter sunshine, creating movement on the walls behind her. And, for a moment, it seemed to assume a human shape, the shape of a young woman passing through the room, and I had to shake my head slightly to make it disappear. It lingered for a second, then the clouds cleared and it was gone.
I nodded. "Yes, I'll find him."
Lester Biggs operated out of an office on Broadway, above a hairdressing salon. I rang the intercom on the door and waited about thirty seconds before a male voice answered.
"I'm here to see Lester Biggs," I said into the speaker.
"What's your business with Mr. Biggs?" came the reply.
"Rita Ferris. My name's Charlie Parker. I'm a private investigator."
Nothing happened. I was about to ring again when the door buzzed and I pushed it open to reveal a narrow staircase carpeted in faded green, with a small, grimy window on the landing. I went up two flights of stairs to where a door opened on to an office overlooking the street. There was the same green carpet on the floor, a desk with a telephone, two wooden chairs without cushions and a pile of skin magazines on the floor, twin stacks of videocassettes beside them. Three sets of filing cabinets stood along the wall. Opposite them, beneath and alongside the two big windows that looked out onto Broadway, stood a selection of electrical items in boxes: microwave ovens, hair dryers, cookware, stereos, even some computers, although they were made by no company that I knew. The writing on the box appeared to be Cyrillic: trust Lester Biggs to buy and sell Russian computers.
Behind the desk, in a leather seat, sat Lester himself, and to his right, on one of the chairs, sat a bearded man with a huge pot belly and biceps the size of melons. His buttocks hung over the edges of the chair, like balloons filled with water.
Lester Biggs was slim and kind of well groomed, if your definition of well groomed was a disc jockey at his sister-in-law's wedding. He looked about forty and was dressed in a cheap three-button pinstripe suit, a white shirt and a slim pink tie. He wore his hair in a mullet-cut, the top short, the back long and permed. His face was tanning-salon brown, his eyes slightly hooded, like a man caught between sleeping and waking. In his right hand he held a pen, which he tapped lightly on the desk as I entered, causing the gold bracelet on his arm to jangle.
Biggs wasn't a bad man by the standards of his profession, according to some. He had started out running a used electronics store, had progressed rapidly into buying and selling stolen goods, then branched out into a number of other areas. The escort service was a recent one, maybe six or seven months old. From what I heard, he took the calls, contacted the girl, provided a car to take her to the address and a guy, sometimes the big man Jim who sat beside him, to make sure everything went smoothly. For that, he took 50 percent. He wasn't morally bankrupt, just overdrawn.
"The local celebrity sleuth," he said. "Welcome. Take a seat." He gestured with the pen to the remaining unoccupied wooden chair. I sat. The back creaked a little and started to give way, so I leaned forward to take the pressure off.
"Business is booming, I see."
Biggs shrugged. "I do okay. It doesn't pay to maintain a high profile in my line of work."
"And that would be…?"
"I buy and sell things."
"Like people?"
"I provide a service. I don't force anybody to do what they do. Nobody, apart from Jim here, works for me. They work for themselves. I just act as the facilitator."
"Tell me how you facilitated Rita Ferris."
Biggs didn't reply, just twisted in his seat to look out the window. "I heard about it. I'm sorry. She was a nice woman."
"That's right, she was. I'm trying to find out if her death was connected in any way to what she was doing for you."
He flinched a little. "Why should it matter to you?"
"It just does. It should matter to you too."
He exchanged a look with Jim, who shrugged. "How'd you find me?" he said.
"I followed the trail of cheap porn."
Biggs smiled. "Some men need a little something extra to get them going. There are a lot of screwed-up people out there, and every day I thank God for them."
"Did Rita Ferris meet one of those screwed-up people?"
Biggs kicked back from his desk until his chair came to rest against the wall. He didn't say anything, just sat sizing me up.
"Tell me, or tell the cops," I said. "I'm sure they'd be happy to discuss the nature of facilitation with you."
"What do you want to know?"
"Tell me about last Monday night."
Again, he exchanged a look with Jim, then seemed to resign himself to talking. "It was a freak call, that's all. Guy rang from the Eastland over on High Street, wanted a girl. I asked him if he had any preferences and he gave me short, blonde, small tits, neat ass. Said that was what he liked. Well, that was Rita. I gave her a call, offered her the job, and she said yes. It was only her third time, but she was keen to make some cash. Cash for gash." He smiled emptily.
"Anyway, Jim picked her up, dropped her off, parked the car and waited in the lobby while she went up to the room."
"What room?"
"Nine-twenty-seven. Ten minutes later Rita comes down, runs into the lobby and straight over to Jim, demands to be taken home. Jim hauls her into a corner and tries to calm her down, find out what happened. Seems she got to the room and an old guy opened the door and let her in. She said he was dressed kind of funny-" He looked to Jim for confirmation.
"Old," said Jim. "He was dressed old-fashioned, like his suit was thirty, forty years out of date."
For the first time, Biggs looked uneasy. "It was strange, she said. There were no clothes in the room, no cases or bags, nothing but the old guy in his old suit. And she got scared. She couldn't say why, but the old guy frightened her."
"He smelled bad," said Jim. "That's what she told me. Not bad like rotten fish or eggs, but bad like there was something rotten inside him. Bad like… like if evil had a smell, it would have smelled like him." He looked embarrassed by his own words, and started examining his fingers.
"So he puts his hand on her shoulder," continued Lester, "and, immediately, she just wa
nts to run. She pushes out at him and he falls back on the bed, and while he's down there she makes for the door, but he's locked it and she loses some time trying to get it open. By the time she gets it unlocked, he's behind her so she starts to scream. He's pulling at her dress, trying to cover her mouth, and she strikes out at him again, catches him on the head. Before he can recover, she has the door open and she's running down the corridor. She can hear him behind her, too, pounding after her, and he's gaining. Then she turns a corner and there's a group of people getting in the elevator. She reaches them just before the doors close, jamming her foot in the opening. The door opens and she gets in. There's no sign of the old guy, but she can still smell him, she says, and knows that he's close. She was lucky, I guess. The Eastland only had one functioning elevator that night. If she'd missed it, he'd have gotten her, no question. Then the elevator brings her down to the lobby, and to Jim."
Jim was still looking down at his hands. They were big and heavily veined, with scars on the knuckles. Maybe he was wondering if Rita Ferris might still have been alive if he'd had a chance to use them on the old man. "I told her to wait for me in the lobby, by the reception desk," he said, as he took up the story. "I went up to the room, but the door was open and the room was empty. Like she said, there were no bags, nothing. So I went back down to the desk, told them that I was supposed to meet a friend of mine who was staying in the hotel. Room nine-twenty-seven."
He pursed his lips, and tugged at one of his scars with a long fingernail. "There was no guest in room nine-twenty-seven," he said at last. "The room was unoccupied. The old guy must have bullshitted one of the staff so he could get in. I took Rita to the bar, bought her a brandy and waited until she had calmed down before taking her home. That's all there is."
"You find any way to tell the cops about this guy?"
Biggs shook his head. "How could I?"
"You have a telephone."
"I have a business," he replied.
Not for long, I thought. Biggs, for all his posturing, was no better than a cluster fly, insinuating himself into young women's lives and then draining them from the inside. "He could try again," I said. "Maybe he did try, and Rita Ferris ended up dead because of it."
Biggs shook his head. "Nah, these things happen. The freak probably went home and jerked off instead." His eyes told me that he didn't believe his own lies. Beside him, Jim still hadn't lifted his face. Guilt rolled off him like a fog.
"She give you a description?"
"Like we told you: old, tall, gray hair, smelled bad. That's it."
I rose. "Thanks, you've been a big help."
"Anytime," he said. "You ever want to party, you give me a call."
"Yeah, you'll be the first to know."
When I stepped outside, a car drew up: Ellis Howard's car. He didn't look overly happy to see me.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Same thing you are, I guess."
"We got an anonymous tip-off."
"Lucky you." I guessed that Lucy Mims's conscience had got the better of her in the end.
Ellis rubbed his hand across his face, dragging his skin down so I could see the red beneath his eyes. "You still haven't answered the question," he said. "How did you know she was working as a prostitute?"
"Maybe the same way you did. It doesn't matter."
"But you weren't going to tell us?"
"I would have, eventually. I didn't want her labeled as a whore, that's all, not with the press around and not before I had a chance to find out if it was true."
"I didn't know you were so sentimental," said Ellis. He wasn't smiling.
"I have hidden shallows," I replied, as I turned and walked to my car. "See you around, Ellis."
CHAPTER EIGHT
After I left Lester Biggs's office, I headed down to the Bagel Works at Temple Street, where I ate a muffin, drank some French roast and watched the cars go by. A handful of people queued to see cheap movies in the Nickelodeon movie theater next door, or took the air around Monument Square. Nearby, Congress Street was bustling: it had suffered when the suburban malls drew the retail businesses out of the city, but now had restaurants and new stores and the Keystone movie theater and diner, and was pretty much Portland's cultural district
This was a survivor's city: it had burned twice at the hands of the Indians in 1676 and 1690, burned again under the guns of the Englishman Henry Mowatt in 1775 following a dispute over masts, and burned once more in 1866 when someone threw a firecracker into a boatbuilder's yard on Commercial Street and turned the eastern half of the city to ash. And still the city remained, and still it grew.
I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough: it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past is a man adrift in the present. Maybe that was part of Billy Purdue's problem. There had been little stability in his life. His past was a series of unconnected episodes, united only by unhappiness.
In the end, I figured that Billy Purdue was probably none of my business. Whatever he had done to Tony Celli, for whatever reason, was a matter for them both to resolve. Billy was a big boy now and his actions at Ferry Beach meant that he was playing by big boys' rules. So if Billy Purdue was none of my business, why did I feel that I should try to save him?
If I stretched the point then Rita and Donald were none of my business either, but it didn't feel that way. In their apartment, as the two bodies lay on the floor, frozen briefly by the flashbulbs of the camera, I felt something ripple through me, something I recognized from before, something that had come to me as a gift from another. In the crowded coffee shop, as people sheltered from the cold, talked about their children, gossiped about their neighbors, touched the hands of girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, I moved the fingers of my left hand gently over the palm of my right and recalled a touch more intense than that of any lover, and I smelled again the rich heady odor of the Louisiana swamps.
Almost eight months before, I had sat in the bedroom of an old, blind woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, a huge ebony form with dead, sightless eyes whose consciousness moved through the darkness of her own life, and the lives of others. I wasn't sure what I was looking for from her, except that she said she could hear the voice of a dead girl calling her from the swamps. I believed then that the man who killed the girl might also have been responsible for the deaths of my own wife and child-assuming the old woman wasn't crazy, or vindictive, or just plain lonely and seeking attention.
But when she touched my hand in that darkening room, something shot through me like a jolt of electricity and I knew that she was not lying, that somehow she heard that girl crying amid the rotting vegetation and the deep green waters, and that Tante Marie had tried to comfort her as she died.
And through Tante Marie, I heard the voices also of Susan and Jennifer, faint but distinct, and I took those voices away with me, and on a subway train a week later my wife appeared to me for the first time. That was Tante Marie's gift to me: I saw and heard my dead wife and child, and I saw and heard others too. Eventually, Tante Marie was among them. That was her gift, passed in the touch of a hand, and yet I could not explain it.
I think that it may be a kind of empathy, a capacity to experience the suffering of those who have been taken painfully, brutally, without mercy. Or perhaps what I experience is a form of madness, a product of grief and guilt; maybe I am disturbed, and in my disturbance I have imagined alternative worlds where the dead seek reparation from the living. I do not know for certain. All I can say is that those who are absent, by its means become present.
But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know.
And they come.
Despite my misgiv
ings, I spent that afternoon moving from bar to bar, talking to those who had known Billy Purdue, who might have some idea of where he had gone. In some cases, the Portland police had been there before me, which usually meant that my welcome was pretty frosty. No one could, or would, tell me anything, and I had almost given up hope when I found James Hamill.
I guessed that there weren't too many forks in Hamill's family tree. He was a scrawny piece of lowlife, 120 pounds of bitterness, repressed anger and redneck mentality, the kind of guy who wouldn't willingly do someone a good turn if he could do a bad one instead. Hamill's position was pretty low down on the food chain: where he existed, they ate it raw.
He was playing alone in Old Port Billiards down on Fore Street when I came upon him, his baseball cap turned backward on his head as he lined up a shot, his scrawny mustache curled in concentration. He missed the shot and swore loudly. If the ball had been iron and the pocket magnetized, he still would have missed the shot. Hamill was just that kind of guy.
Someone in Bubba's Sulky Lounge over on Portland Street had told me that Hamill hung out with Billy Purdue on occasion. I couldn't imagine why. Maybe Billy just wanted to be with someone who could make him look good.
"James Hamill?" I asked.
He scratched his ass and offered me his hand. His smile was a dentist's nightmare.
"Pleased to meet you, whoever you are. Now go fuck yourself."
He went back to his game.
"I'm looking for Billy Purdue."
"Get in line."
"Someone else been asking after him?"
"Just about anyone with a uniform and a badge, from what I hear. You a cop?"
"Nope."
"Private?" He drew back his cue slowly, aiming to put a stripe in the center pocket.
"I guess."
"You the one he hired?"
I lifted the stripe and the cue ball went straight into the pocket.
"Hey!" said Hamill. "Gimme back my ball." He sounded like a small, spoiled child, although I figured you'd have a hard time getting any mother to claim Hamill as her own.
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