by Medora Sale
The interview with Mrs. Wilson had been acutely painful and completely useless. She was confused and baffled, unable to understand why anyone could want to harm her Jennifer. As he listened, a nagging voice in his head was muttering, No one did want to kill her; he wanted to kill an over-made-up, perfumed little whore, who for some reason borrowed your daughter’s name. For a horrified instant, he thought he had said the words aloud, but Mrs. Wilson had continued to stare helplessly at him, tears sliding down her cheeks unheeded, with no change in expression. It wasn’t going to help the woman bear her grief to hear that Jennifer’s death was just a mistake. And perhaps it wasn’t. There are, after all, many painfully familiar reasons for pretty, fragile-looking, harmless girls getting themselves killed. He had ventured to ask her if her Jennifer had known another Jennifer Wilson, a girl with black hair, and Mrs. Wilson had silently shaken her head. She had no time for such irrelevant questions, she seemed to be saying. Not now.
She had come to the conclusion, finally, that Jennifer’s death had been caused by a demented person, not responsible for his actions, and that, curiously enough, she did find comforting. Miserably, Rob Lucas agreed that this could very well be what had happened, and assuring her that they were doing everything in their power to find whoever it was, he fled from the scene.
He had sat in his car a block away from the Wilsons’ house and thought. It was possible, of course, that the man in the green hat had had nothing to do with the Wilson girl’s death. He hadn’t believed it when he first heard about him; he didn’t believe it now, but he still had to behave as though the possibility existed. So now it was time to look at the boys in the band.
Kevin was tiresome. He bounced between playing the aggrieved juvenile, defensive and hostile, and the horrified adult, ready to string sex murderers from the highest tree. For just as Mrs. Wilson had clung to the notion that Jennifer had been the victim of a poor demented creature, Kevin clung to an image of sex-crazed pervert. He did, however, provide a rational explanation for the band’s disappearance. This had been the first time that they had had a full week off since before Christmas, and they had spent three days in a borrowed chalet, skiing and eating and drinking and sleeping. And which of them, Lucas had asked, had been sleeping with Jennifer? None of them, Kevin swore. Not since Ryan left. She had said she would never mix work and sex again. And she hadn’t. What had happened with Ryan had almost broken the group up just when they were getting somewhere. Rob filed that away for future reference and left Kevin to cope with his grief and how to find another girl singer.
The rest of the group—Steve, Scott, and Brad—had all been huddled together in Scott’s apartment, looking nervous, confused, and alike. Their only contribution was that Ryan was capable of smashing his ex-girlfriend’s skull in if he hadn’t been in San Francisco that week. But none of them, not Kevin, not his three interchangeable sidemen, had ever seen or heard of a girl with black curly hair who called herself Jennifer Wilson. Lucas yanked the keyboard closer to him and started to write up a report. Maybe he’d get something to eat later.
Lucas walked in the next morning to discover a major reorganization in workloads. Kelleher was now coordinating the investigation into the death of the Wilson girl. Lucas could feel the weight lifting from his shoulders. With luck, he might never have to face Mrs. Wilson again.
“Great,” he said. “Just watch the woman next door. She’ll strangle you in the world’s longest sentence.”
“She can’t be worse than my mother,” said Kelleher. “And I’ve survived thirty-five years of listening to her.” He got up and reached for his jacket. “I think I’ll be off and have a look at that rock band. I’d like to get them before they’re awake. I read the stuff you wrote up last night—anything left out as not suitable for Baldy’s tender ears?” Lucas opened his coffee and took out his Danish, shaking his head, and then stopped. “Yeah—there is one thing. I sent someone to check the prints in the Wilson girl’s apartment against my missing witness. Any results?”
“You haven’t seen them? Your witness’s prints are all over the place. The back room, the victim’s bedroom, everywhere. When you find her, I’d like a word. Like, where was she in the middle of the night?”
Lucas turned his back on the rest of the room, put his feet up on the window ledge and worked on his breakfast while he considered the problem of finding Miss X. The chances were pretty good that her name was nothing like either Jennifer Wilson or Stormi Knight, so he might as well stop thinking of her as Jennifer. That, of course, explained why she didn’t react to being called by name. What had looked to him to be general contrariness and sulkiness had been simple unfamiliarity. So we call her X, he thought, taking a bite of Danish. And X is either a whore or a musician—or something else altogether. But let’s start, he continued to himself, by assuming she is one of those two things. Of course, he reflected, there is nothing to stop you from being both a whore and a musician at the same time. And where does that get us?
All I need is a picture and a visit to Vice. That will take care of the prostitution end of things. Maybe. If she’s known to them. Or a picture and a lot of visits to places where local musicians hang out. He thought with a sinking heart of the hundreds of little bars and clubs in the city and suburbs where rock musicians played, and groaned aloud. “What’s wrong?” asked a passing constable of Kevin’s generation, and Lucas suddenly felt old. In the six years since he had been twenty-two, he had lost touch with the world of groups and teenage wonders.
“Where would you start looking if you wanted to find a singer with a rock group?”
“Any singer? Or a particular one? I mean, if you want to hire a band—”
“No, I’m trying to track down a girl. A witness.”
“The witness you lost? I didn’t know she was a rock singer. I thought she was—”
“Yeah, well, let’s assume she’s a rock singer. I need a name for her. And maybe even an address. But I’ll take a name, to start with.”
“Try the record stores. Those guys that work there, they know everybody. Here, start with the big ones—I’ll write them down for you,” and muttering energetically to himself the names of a host of establishments, he wrote furiously for a minute or two. “I don’t have the addresses, but they’re not hard to find. Besides, you might even know some of them,” he added with good-humoured contempt. “They sell classical stuff, too.” Lucas’s reputation for having peculiar tastes was well established.
“Would you believe I also listen to country and western? No, you wouldn’t. Thanks. You’re a pal.” And he reached for the phone to track down their sketch artist and plead for an instant drawing of X.
Two hours later he was heading for Vice, armed with a pile of copies of a sketch of X. On the whole, he thought it had come out a reasonable representation of her, although maybe it made her look a bit too pleasantly respectable. Vice did not greet him with enthusiasm. “Jesus, Lucas, do you know how many hookers there are in the city? What do you think we are?” said someone resentfully, tossing the picture back at him.
A sleepy-eyed detective in plain clothes picked up the sketch. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. She looks vaguely familiar. But that doesn’t mean a thing. You want to sit here and go through mug shots of every hooker we’ve booked in the past couple of years, be my guest. I don’t think you’ll find her, though. I haven’t noticed her working downtown. How old is she?”
“Early twenties?”
“Naw. I thought maybe she was one of those kids who come through for a couple of weeks and then get whisked off home again or somewhere by some social worker. There are so many of them, I can’t tell them apart. No can do. Sorry.” That was it. And off Lucas went in search of record stores.
Every store seemed to have at least one clerk with an amazing knowledge of the local scene. They all knew Sex Kitten—a group Lucas had never heard of before this week—and that gave him a certain confidence
in their opinions. He started with the two largest stores. In the first he drew a complete blank. In the second, the clerk stared at the picture and then called to someone poring over a stack of computer printout in the office. She stared at it, too, and frowned. “I can’t place her,” she said. “But she looks familiar.”
“Could you have run into her at a party?” suggested Lucas. “She’s about your age.”
The girl shook her head. “Not familiar that way. Familiar, like I saw her on a record jacket or something. Can I keep the sketch?” Lucas nodded. “Give me your name, and if it comes to me, I’ll call you.” She wrote his name down on the back of the picture and whisked off again.
He turned an inquiring eye back to the clerk. “Sorry. She looked, like, vaguely familiar, that’s all. That’s why I called Betsy over. But if Betsy can’t come up with the name, no one can. She has a phenomenal memory. Still, if Betsy remembers her, like on a record jacket, the kid is probably a singer or something. Somewhere, for somebody.”
“Betsy wouldn’t have seen her hanging around on the street outside, or in the store looking at records, and remember her from that? Get the girl confused with someone else?”
“Definitely not. Betsy remembers faces, like, in context, you know? If a hundred people she’d seen before walked into this room, she could say, those ninety are customers, I saw those two on television once, that’s a waitress somewhere, that’s a politician, that’s a hooker who works the street out there—she’s good.”
“Thanks. Betsy should join the police force.” And he left the store feeling elated. Somewhere in this city someone had to know who X was.
Nineteen record stores later, his faith in the phenomenal Betsy began to fade. Nineteen clerks stared at the picture, consulted their friends, shook their heads, said they knew every singer in town, and she wasn’t one of them. He walked into the twentieth tired, hungry, thirsty, and discouraged. The more discouraged because the lead had seemed to be so fertile in the beginning. If he’d been searching for a needle in a haystack right from the start, he wouldn’t have objected so much. After all, he was used to that. It was the irrational rise that Betsy had given to his expectations that had caused this corresponding depression. That and hunger. The twentieth clerk looked at him and handed back the picture. “How the hell should I know? What do you think I am? This is just a part-time job I got, mister, not a goddamn career,” he snarled. “I don’t even like music. You wanna buy a record? Pick it out and give me the money.”
Lucas walked out onto the pavement in a rage and looked around him. To the east were more record stores and some fast-food restaurants; to the west were two pleasant shops across from the University’s Faculty of Music that carried a lot of hard-to-get classical music. There were also a couple of cheap, slow-paced, friendly restaurants, where one could spend hours over a meal, one Middle Eastern and one Italian. This late in the afternoon they’d be almost empty. Obviously he should head east, grab a quick lunch, and finish this damn thing up today. He headed west.
The Middle Eastern restaurant was about ten shop-fronts away to the west. To get to it he would have to pass the first record store. Perhaps he would slip in, show them his picture, just in case, and see what they had that was new and interesting. Then lunch. Then back east to the grind. The entrance was down a flight of concrete steps, and the shop itself was long and narrow. Bins filled with CDs lined the two side walls. The cash register, unattended as usual, was at the front; the only other human being in the place was sitting at the order desk in the back, working in a little pool of light, listening to a recording of Pelleas et Melisande that Lucas particularly liked. The shop was dimly lit after the brightness of the afternoon, and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust. “Excuse me,” he said, opening his small briefcase for the twenty-first time that day, and stopped dead.
There she was. Right in front of him, tacked to the wall behind the order desk. Boots, short black skirt, tiny black top, long black hair. Posed with her foot on a chair, looking bold and sluttish, with one hand on the backrest, the other on her hip.
“May I help you with something?” asked the young man at the order desk, who had by then risen to his feet.
“Yes,” said Lucas. “You certainly may. Who is that?”
“Lulu?” he asked. “The main character in the opera. Berg’s opera. The soprano,” he added, as though talking to a mentally deficient.
“No, no,” said Lucas. “I know that. But that girl in the poster. Is she the one who’s singing Lulu? Or did they hire a model?”
“Oh, no,” he said, shocked. “They don’t do that. No, that’s the Lulu. Annie Hunter. I was the tenor,” he added. “That’s why I still have the poster up. Can’t bear to take it down. That’s me, Peter Johnstone. I sang Alwa. My first big part.”
“This is an old production then? I see it says it’s on April eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. Is that last year? Who put it on?”
He nodded. “Last year. It was a student production, really. We’re all at the Faculty. Of Music,” he added condescendingly. “Opera.”
“You mean this Annie Hunter is a student?” His surprise must have been evident on his face as he spoke.
“Well, I don’t know what she’s doing now. Annie and I were in the performance program together—last year was our first year in the Opera School. I really haven’t seen her this year at all. Once or twice on the street, maybe, but not to talk to.”
“She had the lead?” Lucas’s astonishment was palpable.
“Sure. She’s pretty good. Actually, she was a terrific Lulu,” he added generously. “Good voice and a great actress—that’s why she got the part. There was no one else at the school who could have been Lulu. Sort of vicious and bitchy, yet seductive and pathetic, you know?”
Lucas did know, but had no intention of discussing the point with Mr. Johnstone. “You have no idea where I could find her now?”
“Why do you want to find her?” he asked, dragging himself from dreams of past glory to a present-day suspicious practicality.
He drew out his ID silently.
“Is she in trouble?” Lucas could feel the pull of fellowship, the closing of ranks in the face of the enemy in the tenor’s every word.
“I certainly hope not,” he said. “She may have witnessed a crime—a serious crime—and she could be of great help to us.”
“I see. And what in hell do you mean by witness? Cops seem to mean some pretty funny things when they call someone a witness.”
Lucas tried to sound nonthreatening. “Just that. We think she was an eyewitness to a serious crime. We think that the people who committed the crime knew she saw them. And are looking for her.”
“Just a witness.” Lucas could see the clerk wavering. “So if anyone else asks you about her, it’d be nice if you had a memory lapse.”
“You mean, she may be in real trouble,” he said flatly. “I see.” He sat down to his order books again. “I don’t actually know where she is myself. But if I were you, I’d check with the secretary at the Faculty. She knows everybody and everything.” He swiveled around in his chair and looked back at the wall behind him. “And I think I’ll just take this poster down for a while. It’s time I replaced it anyway.” As Lucas walked away, he saw the young man carefully removing the thumbtacks from his poster and rolling it up.
As he walked by the opera section, he paused at B for Berg and pulled out a copy of Lulu. “What the hell,” he muttered, “I don’t have it,” and he walked back to the order desk to pay.
He looked at his watch as he left the record store and was startled to discover that it was almost five. If he ate now, the secretary at the music faculty would be gone by the time he got there. He could wait. He began dodging his way across four lanes of rush-hour traffic to the music school. But the administration offices were locked, lights out, silent as the grave. He knocked loudly, in case someone was worki
ng late. Not a sound. He rattled the doorknob vehemently. A pleasant-looking girl who was walking past tried to put him out of his misery.
“It’s no good knocking,” she said. “Even if they were hiding in there, they’d rather go out the window than answer. Believe me. You can get them at nine o’clock tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” he muttered. Then, inspired by sudden hope and her friendly face, he added, “You wouldn’t know a girl named Annie Hunter, would you? She was here last year, I think.”
She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m only in first year. What was she doing?”
“Opera,” he said, hoping that was the right category of response.
“That’s a graduate program,” she said. “And anyway, I’m in strings,” she added, and trotted on her way.
Only slightly discouraged, he headed for the restaurant and a telephone call to report to Baldy that his witness had a name—a real name, he thought, although not yet verified from other sources. He was beginning to feel cautious about things like that. Baldy wasn’t around to hear the happy news; he left the message to be added to the pile on his desk. He thought gleefully of the inspector spending his evening plowing through hours and hours of reports—every one of which he had summarily demanded, each one his own fault. It must be a shock to his system, thought Lucas, to be back to the routine of endless hours of actual work. He was probably out right now buttering up Marty Fielding over a Martini, assuring him that all was well for his client, before heading back to the grind. Thank God. And that meant that instead of being hauled down to report in person, he was going to be able to eat and drink himself into a pleasant haze, go back to his apartment, take the phone off the hook, put up his aching feet, and listen to his new recording of Lulu.
