Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  ‘I didn’t even know she was back in town,’ I said.

  He eyed me up and down. ‘You going to give me that Pepsi and sit down or you going to stand there icing your hand?’

  I tossed the Pepsi to him, dropped the bag of Doritos on the desk and sat. Slats of sunlight shined through the window blind like heat from a vent.

  Charles twisted the cap off the Pepsi and said, ‘So what d’you want to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. I guess I want to get the guy.’

  ‘You guess?’

  ‘Yeah, for now.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re going to have to do better’n that. A guy who does what he’s done to Belinda is a messed-up individual. If you’re only guessing you want to get him, he’s going to get you instead. You know that without my telling you.’

  ‘All right. I’m not guessing. I want him,’ I said.

  ‘That’s more like it. Any thoughts about where to start?’

  ‘Sure. Work backward to the killer from the victims. Belinda. The police have her driver’s license and know where she lives. Daniel Turner won’t tell me though.’

  ‘When you last saw her, twenty-five years ago, where was she headed?’ he asked.

  ‘North to Chicago. Whole family went.’

  ‘Because of you and her.’

  ‘That was part of it,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘So we find out where she was staying since she came back and how long, and we make a visit. What do you know about the other dead girls?’

  ‘Just what they said on TV. That plus the killer leaves the bodies in the same position, lying on their backs naked with their ankles tied over their heads. And he has a clean fetish. Washes their clothes and stacks them neatly by the bodies.’

  ‘We’ll stake out the local dry cleaners.’ He didn’t smile when he was being sarcastic so I never knew for sure. He reached to the floor and brought up a black leather bag, removed a Hi-Point nine-millimeter pistol and gave it to me. ‘Disposable, in case you need it.’

  ‘I’d prefer to get the guy alive,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, right. I’ve loaded it with eight plus one. If you can’t take him down with that I figure you’ll be dead already.’

  I shook my head and handed the pistol back to him. ‘You know I don’t like guns.’

  He smiled with bleach-white teeth and cocked his head to the side. ‘You’re insane is what you are.’ He put the gun back in the bag and took his feet off the desk. ‘I’ll get Belinda’s address,’ he said. ‘You see what you can do about the other two.’

  We got up.

  ‘How’s your wife?’ he said. ‘Still sleeping in the sunroom?’

  ‘That’s a private matter, Charles.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as private. There’s only what’s known and what can be known. How about the kid?’

  ‘Thomas is fifteen,’ I said. ‘He’s angry with the world.’

  ‘Better’n him letting the world roll over him.’

  ‘He’s mostly angry at me.’

  ‘Better’n him letting you roll over him.’

  ‘He draws pornographic comic books,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘Maybe he can make a living from it,’ I said.

  ‘He’s fifteen. Give him time.’

  ‘What were you doing at fifteen?’

  ‘I’m unusual,’ he said.

  Charles wasn’t quite a private investigator. At least he didn’t have a state license to be one. I’d checked. He also had no other full-time job. He called himself retired and said he’d moved south because he’d heard the fishing was good. But when I’d spent time with him, he would sometimes disappear for weeks and on occasion he’d come back with a fresh wound that needed healing. He got paid well for his work. I’d paid him too though he’d tried to refuse. He’d said he recognized in me a fellow spirit and that worried me more than a little.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You’re unusual.’

  THREE

  In this town if you wake up on a bright, hot summer morning with the need for a white girl, you can find what you desire on a stretch of Philips Highway that runs past strip clubs, auto body shops and cheap motels. Starting around nine in the morning, girls wander alongside the highway like they’re looking for a bus stop and the last of them don’t leave till three a.m. when their pimps pick them up for the ride home or the industrial park by the airport.

  It wasn’t yet noon and the sheriff had said on TV that Ashley Littleton was white, so I cruised Philips Highway looking for a long-timer who might’ve known her. A young heavy blonde in faded black Lycra pants and a long white T-shirt walked along the shoulder with uneven steps as though something was wrong with one of her legs. A skinny man in jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt walked fifty yards or so behind her. Maybe he was her pimp, maybe a friend who’d agreed to keep an eye on her, maybe a customer who was biding his time until she agreed to do him for the ten or twenty bucks he carried in his pocket. Half a mile farther a woman walked alone. Her hair was black, a dye-job, and her face was pretty. Too pretty. Probably a cop working vice. After the intersection at Emerson two more blondes stood talking on the roadside. One of them, wearing a shimmering short blue dress, had a face scarred from acne or something worse and a left eye that drooped. The other, in jeans and a sports bra, had the sallow cheeks of an addict. I slowed to the side.

  The one with the blue dress and pocked face looked north and south and when she saw nothing that worried her she wandered over to my passenger-side window and leaned her head down.

  ‘Hey, BB,’ she said, then opened the door and climbed in. A pinpoint of sunlight reflected off the passenger-side rearview mirror and shined on her blue dress like a metal instrument that could sear a hole.

  I drove south.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ the girl asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  I pulled into an abandoned Chevy dealership. My dad had bought a car there when I was a kid, a gleaming burgundy Monte Carlo with a black vinyl roof, and I remembered walking through the showroom stroking my fingers across the high-polished hoods and breathing the smell of new carpet and automobile upholstery. Now beer cans, crushed Styrofoam cups and ripped cardboard boxes littered the concrete lot behind the main building.

  ‘How’s your wife?’ the girl said.

  ‘Don’t be mean, Aggie.’ I pulled into the shade of the building and cut the ignition. Above, sparrows darted in and out of a nest they’d built between the wall and a drainpipe.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Fifty bucks if you want it in the backseat. That’s ten bucks cheaper than it used to be but I’m not getting younger.’ She looked hard at me. ‘Neither are you, BB. You OK?’ She had a way of talking too fast, one word tailing into the next. At first you might mistake the habit for the effects of coke or meth but it was just her way.

  ‘I don’t want sex.’

  ‘Then you’re sure as hell not OK. Take me back where you got me.’

  ‘You know a girl named Ashley Littleton?’ I asked. ‘She might’ve hooked along here?’

  ‘Oh, shit, BB. The cops’ve been asking about her. She never hooked this strip, not that I know of. What d’you want with her?’

  ‘You know about her though?’

  ‘I know the cops said she’s dead. And I know what everyone else is saying. The man that did it was fucked-up violent. I’ll tell you what I say every time I hear that. Every man I’ve ever known was fucked up, including you, BB, and half of them were violent. So what am I supposed to do with that information?’

  ‘Get off the street,’ I said. ‘Meet nicer guys. What else are people saying? Where did she hook?’

  ‘Some say over by the arena. Why d’you want to know?’

  ‘That’s black. Ashley Littleton was white.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. I didn’t make her work there,’ she said.

  ‘You hear about the other girl? Tonya Richmond?’

  ‘Yeah, met her once or
twice. She was nice but tough. The sonofabitch that killed her had to hit her with something bigger’n a knife. I once saw a guy tell her he wasn’t going to pay her and she took that boy apart. Had to carry him away in an ambulance.’ She eyed me nervously. ‘You sure you don’t want anything? I can use my hand.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You going to pay me?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll pay. What else did the police say?’

  She smiled like she was unsure about taking money for nothing. ‘They wanted to know who I’d seen Tonya with. But she didn’t hang out here much. She mostly hung at the arena too. And they showed me a picture of a green SUV and asked if I’d seen Tonya get into a car that looked like it.’

  ‘Had you?’

  ‘Uh uh.’

  ‘Did they tell you what the driver looked like?’ I asked.

  ‘Not after I said I hadn’t seen the car.’

  I sat back and thought.

  ‘Why’s this matter to you, BB?’

  I ignored the question. ‘What was Tonya known for? Did she do more than the other girls? Anything special?’

  ‘Depends how much you paid her, I suppose.’

  ‘Bondage? S and M?’

  ‘Tough to do when you’re working on the street. But if a guy had a room and would pay for it, sure, why not?’ She looked at me hard. ‘You’re not getting off on this, are you, BB?’

  ‘How about the other one, Ashley Littleton? Did she do anything special?’

  ‘Look, BB, no one hooks on the street if she’s got choices. Either she’s got a face like mine or a habit so bad that the clubs and services won’t hire her. What d’you have to do with this?’

  ‘I don’t like what this guy’s doing,’ I said.

  ‘No one does. But what do you get out of it? Why you?’

  ‘Why not?’ I pulled out my wallet and gave her two twenties and a ten. ‘I’ll give you a ride back.’

  As I turned the key in the ignition, I heard another car crunch over the pavement, its engine just above idle. In the rearview mirror, a police cruiser flipped on its cherry lights.

  I cut the engine.

  The cruiser pulled at an angle against my back bumper and two officers in short-sleeved uniforms got out with their service pistols drawn. They looked in their mid-twenties and both had short black hair and wore sunglasses.

  They stopped a few steps from our doors and the driver said, ‘Get out of the car and keep your hands where we can see them.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Aggie said and we got out.

  ‘Turn and put your hands on the car roof,’ the driver said.

  He and his partner felt us for guns, knives, or other weapons. Aggie and I locked eyes, hers twitching as the officer frisking her ran his hands up the inside of her legs and stopped where her panties should have been.

  ‘Driver’s license,’ the cop on my side said when he was done. He smelled of sour sweat. I gave him my license and he climbed inside the cruiser and got on the radio.

  His partner said to the girl, ‘I recognize you.’

  ‘Yeah, you too,’ she said. ‘You like it between the tits, right?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said and squeezed her so she hurt. He glanced at me. ‘You shut up too.’

  I smiled at him.

  ‘You’re a pervert,’ he said. Then to Aggie, who still had her hands on the car roof, clutching my fifty dollars, he added, ‘Stay like you are.’ He went to the cruiser and got in next to the driver.

  We stood in the midday sun, no sound except the hum of the police engine, the whoosh of traffic on the other side of the Chevy dealership and the occasional flutter of wings as sparrows flew past. After a few minutes the officers got out of their cruiser together.

  The driver came to me and handed me my license. ‘What were the two of you doing back here, Mr Byrd?’ he said, as if he already knew the answer.

  ‘We needed a private place to talk.’

  He shook his head and gestured at Aggie. ‘You usually pay a whore cash money to talk with you?’

  ‘Depends on what we talk about.’

  His partner said, ‘You’re a smart ass, Mr Byrd.’

  ‘Just telling you what it was.’

  The driver said, ‘I’ll tell you what it is. Next time we find you back here with or without a girl we run you in to the station. You can explain that to your wife and your friends at church.’

  ‘But this time you’re letting me go?

  He nodded. ‘Get out of here.’

  I shrugged. ‘Get in,’ I said to Aggie.

  ‘Uh uh,’ said the other officer. ‘She goes with us.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, but she was already moving toward their car.

  The officer said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you think, Mr Byrd. She goes with us.’

  I stepped toward him but Aggie looked at me, pleading. ‘I want to go with them, BB.’ Then with a little smile, she said, ‘I don’t have a lot of choices.’

  The driver opened the back door to the cruiser for her.

  She started to climb in but turned to me. ‘The guy you’re looking for is bad, BB. Worse than you think. Leave it alone.’

  I looked at her. ‘Do you know who it is?’

  She clasped my money and climbed into the backseat. The cop who’d frisked her climbed in with her and shut the door. The driver leaned against the cruiser and said, ‘It’s time you got moving, Mr Byrd.’

  I went north on Philips, the air quivering and thinning above the hot pavement the way plastic film does above a flame before catching fire and melting away. The Hart Bridge, leading over the river to the arena, looked like it was made of blue matchsticks. I wondered if Aggie had meant only to tell me the obvious, that the person who’d killed Ashley Littleton, Tonya Richmond and Belinda was dangerous, or if she knew more than she’d let on.

  I drove behind the arena to Bridier Street and parked across from an empty parking lot and a pink two-room bungalow with boarded-up windows. Knee-high weeds and dying palm trees lined both sides of the street. Halfway up the block a man sat smoking a cigarette on a concrete wall. No one else was out.

  I leaned against my car, waiting. I knew that eyes were watching. In this neighborhood someone was always watching. A few minutes passed and the screen door on the pink bungalow swung open, showing a shadow as dark as the inside of a man’s throat. A light-skinned black woman stepped on to the front porch, looked up and down the street and headed my way. She wore black high-heeled platform sandals, tight black shorts and a striped, strapless halter top. She had a short afro, a round, childish face, and a bruise above her left knee so big and dark I could see it from across the street.

  She came to me, stood close and said, ‘Hey.’ Her eyes were glazed with something that looked like desire but wasn’t.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  She nodded at the bungalow. ‘I got a room and a bed and I don’t give a fuck what you do to me.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  She smiled at me with the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. ‘Call me whatever you want.’

  ‘I want to call you by your name.’

  She didn’t like that so well. ‘Then call me Evelyn.’

  ‘OK, Evelyn, I’ve got a couple questions—’

  ‘Uh uh,’ she said and her smile was gone. ‘You want to fuck me and pay me, I’ll talk to you while we’re fucking. But I ain’t gonna stand here talking in the hot sun.’

  ‘You know someone called Tonya Richmond or maybe a white girl called Ashley Littleton? You ever hear of a woman named Belinda Mabry?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said and turned toward the pink house.

  I grabbed a wrist. ‘These women are dead. They—’

  A big, dark-skinned black man barreled through the screen door of the house. I let go of the hooker’s wrist but too late. She screamed as though I’d broken her hand, and the man kept coming.

  He pointed at the house and shouted at the girl, ‘Get inside!’

&nbs
p; Before I could climb into my car the man was in front of me. His head was clean-shaven, perspiration beaded on his scalp, and a long scar reached upward from his left ear as if someone had tried to crack him like an egg. He wore long yellow nylon shorts that hung low off his hips, yellow gym shoes and a black T-shirt.

  He stood close to me, chest to chest. ‘What you do, you touch her like that?’ He had a Caribbean lilt. I stepped backward and he came after me, jabbing my chest with his forefinger. ‘I cut your throat you touch her like that.’ I was a couple of inches taller but he had thirty or forty pounds of muscle on me.

  I stopped backing away. ‘Would you have cut my throat if I’d walked inside the house with Evelyn?’ I asked.

  He looked momentarily surprised either that I’d called him on his game or that I’d said the hooker’s name. ‘Ain’t none your business what I do. Nobody grab what’s mine.’

  ‘You watch TV this morning?’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Did you watch TV this morning? The sheriff was on. He said that someone’s been killing girls like Evelyn. Two at least, maybe three.’

  He looked at me with interest for the first time. ‘What that got to do with me?’

  ‘I’m looking for the killer.’

  He eyed me like I might be crazy. ‘And who you s’posed to be?’

  ‘I’m just a man.’

  He laughed derisively. ‘“Just a man.” You a fucking fool, is what you are. You get back in your Lexus and drive home to your family. “Just a man.” Jesus!’

  He turned toward the pink house. I apparently wasn’t worth his anger.

  I stepped after him, kicked hard and his feet flew out from under him. He fell to the street. When he tried to get up, I kicked his head. He went down again, rolled over and stared at the sky. His sweaty forehead was smeared with dirt and dust. Blood trickled from his bottom lip.

  After a moment his eyes found mine. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘You crazy?’

  ‘Yep, I’m crazy.’ I kicked his ribs, kicked his head.

  He covered his face with his hands and yelled, ‘All right! What you want?’

  My foot connected.

  ‘Jesus!’

  I stooped low to him, looked up and down the street. The man who’d been sitting on the concrete wall was gone, probably calling 911. If not him, the girl inside the pink house was. I had a couple of minutes, no more. ‘Two girls disappeared in the last month,’ I said. ‘At least one of them was working in this neighborhood. That’s Ashley Littleton. A white girl. The other one was black. Tonya Richmond. Last night another woman got killed. Her name was Belinda Mabry and she was a friend of mine. A good friend. I don’t know if she was hooking. I don’t know what she was doing. But she’s dead and, as you say, it’s made me crazy. The police think the man who killed my friend also killed the other two. I want to know who did it.’