Thursday's Child

by Teri White

  “A runaway?”

  “I assume so. He apparently packed a few things and simply walked away from the house.”

  Gar had taken out his notebook, more for appearance’s sake than anything else. “He lives with you, then?”

  “Yes.” Epstein was quiet for a moment, then sighed and continued. “Beau’s parents died recently. He has no other family.”

  “You two get along?” It was a standard question.

  There was another pause as Epstein played with the cigar. “I checked you out rather thoroughly,” he said, instead of answering the question. “Your reputation is excellent.”

  “I do my job.”

  “And you get results.”

  “Usually.” Gar looked up and frowned. “You should understand up front that the results I get are not always what the client would prefer.”

  That didn’t sit well. This was a man used to getting his own way. “My sources tell me that your interest in missing children is personal. Your own daughter disappeared some years ago and was never found.”

  Gar felt a flush of anger. What gave this old bastard the right to poke into his private life? “I was a cop,” he said flatly. “One of the things you learn as a cop is to find missing kids. A man has to earn a living.”

  “I see,” Epstein said.

  “Anyway, we’re here to talk about your grandson. I repeat: Do you two get along?”

  He was used to dragging stories out of people. Those who needed to hire him were usually anguished. Sometimes irritated. But it was his opinion that, to a greater or lesser degree, they were also embarrassed. After all, the very fact that they were talking to him at all was an admission of failure. The family was an object of near-worship in this country. Father, mother, children. The system was fondly believed to work, no matter how reality intruded on the myth.

  But when you had to invite an outsider in to find one of your children, it was like telling the world that you had somehow messed up.

  Gar remembered the feeling with razor-edged sharpness. You were stripped naked in front of others, with all your faults on display. It made a man feel terribly vulnerable. Even when you were a cop yourself and the ones asking the questions were friends of yours. Even then the look in the eyes of the inquisitors judged you and found you lacking somehow. Otherwise, why would your daughter have run away?

  He gathered up all those memories and shoved them back where they belonged.

  “Until four months ago,” Epstein said at last, “I had never seen Beau.” He finally picked up the cigar and rolled it between his fingers. “Beau. A ridiculous name, isn’t it? My son and his wife were free spirits. And they raised Beau to be the same.”

  “So you two don’t get along.” He made it a statement this time, not a question.

  “It has been difficult. But I thought that we were starting to …” Epstein broke off whatever he had been planning to say. His eyes darkened and it looked as if he was now the one caught up in the past. “My son, Jonathan, was difficult, not unlike Beau. We argued over everything from the length of his hair to the war in Vietnam to the weather.” He almost seemed to smile. “Jonathan and I started arguing when he was about four and we never stopped. Not until the day he left home.” The hint of a smile vanished. “We never spoke again after that day. I kept up on where he was and what he was doing, but we never communicated directly. Rachel wrote me once, when the boy was born.”

  “So you and Beau argued, too?”

  Epstein shook his head. “Not really. He seemed too wrapped up in his own private thoughts. We disagreed, but only about stupid things. Like what was proper attire for dinner. I tried to be patient with him, but it’s not easy for a man my age to change the feelings of a lifetime.” Epstein grimaced. “Although maybe I would have tried harder if I’d thought this would happen.”

  Abruptly, he stopped talking and pushed a manila envelope across the desk. “My staff put this together. Two photographs of Beau and the details of his disappearance. Plus whatever other information we thought might be helpful. It will save us both a lot of time. There is also a check for one thousand dollars. Will that be satisfactory as a retainer?”

  Gar nodded. “Will you want a daily report?”

  Epstein waved that off impatiently. “That seems rather pointless, doesn’t it? I shall expect to hear from you whenever there is something firm to report.”

  Gar stood, tightened his grip on the cane, and started for the door.

  “Sinclair?”

  He stopped. “Yes, Mr. Epstein?”

  “Please find my grandson. I have lost everyone else. This boy is my last chance.” Epstein took out a gold lighter and worked for several moments to get the cigar going. “My son ran away and I never saw him again. That mustn’t happen with Beau. Whatever it takes, I want him back.”

  Gar stared at him. Now the old man looked every year of his age. “I’ll do my best” was all Gar said. He never promised.

  Epstein didn’t say anything else and Gar left the office.

  8

  Robert paused on the sidewalk and lit a cigarette.

  When that was accomplished, he glanced at his watch. It was just after midnight, although he felt as if it should have been much later than that.

  With no real interest, he stared into the nearest store window. The merchandise on view—through a heavy black steel anti-theft gate—was all just schlock for the tourists. T-shirts with dumb slogans. Mugs and key rings. A lot of cheap (although not inexpensive) crap, made probably in Taiwan or some other Third World hellhole. Why would anybody, even a stupid tourist, buy such junk?

  Of course, Robert couldn’t understand why any tourist would go there anyway. Maybe Hollywood had once been a glamorous kind of place, but today it wasn’t worth walking across the street to see. What the hell would prompt a pharmacist from Des Moines to bring the wife and kiddies here? Unless, of course, he wanted to snap a Polaroid of Junior posing with a transvestite whore. Or unless he wanted to roll the old minicam as Sis watched a junkie pee in the gutter. Not exactly the stuff of video memories or postcards home. The fools would be better off just taking the Universal Studio tour.

  As for Robert himself, he was sick and tired of hiking the tackiest streets of Tinseltown in search of a hooker. Not just any hooker, of course—if it were that simple, he could have gotten whatever he wanted (and in Hollywood whatever meant whatever) hours ago.

  Unfortunately, it was all more complicated than that, because he was looking for a particular whore. Her name was Marnie Dowd and he was looking for her because she was—or had been, anyway—Danny Boyd’s girlfriend.

  Robert had given this matter a lot of thought; in fact, he’d hardly been able to think about anything else ever since he learned that Boyd, his brother’s killer, was out of prison.

  After thinking about it so much, he had decided to kill Danny Boyd.

  It was all he could do. Until Boyd was whacked, Andy wouldn’t be able to rest in peace. And Robert wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep. But before he could kill Boyd, he had to find him.

  The first step, therefore, was to look for Marnie Dowd. And that was turning into a real pain in the ass. He’d never really thought about the number of whores in Los Angeles (the day Robert Turchek had to pay for it was the day he’d give up screwing altogether).

  Not even his burning need for revenge could keep him from feeling worn out and bored after all these hours looking at whores and talking to bartenders. He sighed; this wasn’t getting anything done. Right up the street from the store peddling tourist crap was the Moulin Rouge Lounge. A place that specialized in dancing girls and watered booze. Somebody’s idea of a good time, maybe, but not Robert’s. Especially when he’d already been in six other places just like it. He dropped the cigarette to the sidewalk and crushed it under his heel firmly. Time to get back to work.

  Inside the Moulin Rouge, Prince was blasting over a second-rate sound system as three mostly naked broads danced—sort of—on top of the bar. The
action was being observed by forty or so customers jammed into a room that could have held about half that many comfortably. Cigarette smoke formed a thick gray cloud that hung in the air.

  Robert sighed and pushed his way to the circular bar in the middle of the room. One of the dancers, a pretty if slightly plump black girl, did her bumps and grinds about thirteen inches from his face.

  After a few moments, the bartender wandered over and stood there, looking at him blearily.

  Robert ordered a light beer. It was set in front of him still in the can. There was no glass in sight, which suited Robert just fine; he didn’t want to put his mouth on anything in this place but the edge of the aluminum can. And he wiped that carefully first.

  He swallowed a small sip of the beer and then reached into his pocket for the mug shot of Marnie Dowd; it paid to have connections everywhere, even in the police department. When he had the bartender’s attention again, he displayed his fake cop ID and the photo. Actually, the ID wasn’t fake at all; it just wasn’t, technically, his. But since the cop to whom it had actually belonged was dead—through nothing at all that had anything to do with him—Robert didn’t see anything wrong with using the thing when he needed to. “She been in here lately?”

  The bartender grimaced at the ID, then glanced at the mug shot and shook his head. “Hey, man, one’s the same as another to me.”

  None of the people Robert had spoken to over the course of the evening had really looked at him. Not well enough to be able to remember or describe him later, if the subject should ever come up, which Robert doubted very much. There was no reason why it should, even if he had to get rough with the broad. Who cared about a hooker? At best, the tired bartender might recall a man of medium height and weight, wearing glasses and a baseball cap pulled down low over his face. A man to be forgotten as soon as he walked away.

  “Her name is Marnie Dowd,” he said to the blank stare on the other side of the bar.

  “Don’t know her.”

  Somebody yelled for a drink and the bartender wandered off in that direction.

  Robert sipped at the beer, which he really didn’t want at all, having consumed about seven already, and stared at the dancer. She had edged even closer and he could inhale the faint, musky scent of her body, mingled somewhat improbably with the odor of Johnson’s Baby Powder. He knew that smell very well, because the nurses had taught him to put the powder on Andy’s useless limbs to help prevent bedsores.

  Suddenly he became aware that the asshole sitting next to him was jacking off under the bar. That was sort of the final straw, as far as Robert was concerned. This night had gone on long enough. He left the beer still three-quarters full and got out of the Moulin Rouge as quickly as he could.

  Maybe the air of downtown Hollywood didn’t smell so terrific, especially on a steamy night like this, but it was still an improvement over what he’d inhaled inside the bar. Robert paused on the sidewalk and took a couple of deep gulps of air into his lungs. It was time to go home. His encounter with Marnie Dowd would have to wait at least one more night.

  After taking a moment to orient himself, he decided that the shortest route back to his car led through an alley that ran between a magazine store and a blood bank. Robert was not stupid; he would never even consider taking a route like that at this hour without the Magnum that was tucked under his arm.

  He was about halfway through the alley, absently contemplating the horrors of receiving a transfusion from a place that bought blood from the kinds of people he’d been seeing all evening, when he realized that something was going on in the darkness just ahead.

  He stopped to listen. A fight, obviously.

  Damn. As tired as he was, almost the last thing he was in the mood for was some freaks in a brawl. The only thing he wanted to face even less was having to backtrack and take the long route to his car. To hell with it. Whatever was going on, he’d just pass right by. Not get involved. He stuck one hand under the jacket, resting it on the gun, and kept walking.

  What he finally saw ahead of him couldn’t really be called a fight. It was more like a gang assault. There had to be at least six young guys beating up one victim. The odds offended him. Punks offended him. Immediately, he forgot his intention just to pass by. “Hey,” he said mildly. “Knock it off.”

  They ignored him, of course.

  “Hey,” he repeated. “You better quit. Now.”

  Finally a couple of them broke off the fun long enough to turn and look at him. “Fuck off,” one said. Then they saw the Magnum leveled in their direction. The verbal one grunted, and after a moment everybody else let go of the one poor bastard they’d been beating up. He collapsed in a heap.

  “This don’t concern you, dickhead,” the apparent leader of the group said.

  Well, technically that might have been true, but Robert didn’t care. “Fuck this. You better just leave,” he said. “Like right now. You don’t know me, but I’m not into playing games. I’m really not.”

  They hesitated, then must have decided that he meant what he said. As one, they turned and disappeared into the darkness.

  Robert stayed where he was, the gun still out, until even the echo of their running feet had faded. Then he reholstered the weapon and took a couple of steps forward. “You okay?” he said.

  The boy on the ground didn’t say anything. He was breathing, though, and trying to sit up, so whatever damage had been done probably wasn’t too severe. Robert crouched down next to him. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” the kid finally said in a shaky voice. He got to his knees with a grunt and glanced around the alley. A look of dismay crossed his face. “They took all my stuff.”

  “That’s too bad. You’re lucky they didn’t do worse than that.”

  “But I didn’t do a damned thing to them.” The boy cleared his throat and spit bloody phlegm.

  “Bastards like that, you don’t have to do anything.” Robert gave him a pat on the shoulder. “You’re going to be fine. Just take better care of yourself.” He stood and started to walk away.

  “Hey,” the boy said.

  Robert didn’t stop and he didn’t even really answer. He just sort of grunted.

  “I don’t have any money or a place to go,” the boy said.

  “Not my problem,” Robert said.

  “Please?”

  Then, feeling a little guilty—why, he didn’t know, because this still wasn’t his business—he stopped, turned around, and looked back at the boy again. “You eat today?”

  He seemed to consider the question seriously. “I don’t think so.”

  Robert sighed. He took out his wallet and tossed a ten-spot down on the ground. “Eat something,” he said shortly.

  The boy picked up the bill, “Thank you,” he said in a whisper. Then he looked up. “What if those guys come back? I can’t fight them alone.”

  Robert gave up. One of these days he was going to get himself into trouble, being such a damned soft touch. “Well, come on,” he said. “I missed supper, too. We’ll get something.”

  The boy struggled to his feet without saying anything and followed Robert out of the alley. They jaywalked across Sunset to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop. It wasn’t until they were inside under the glare of the fluorescent lights that Robert realized just how bloody the kid was. A passing waitress looked at them, paused, and made a face before moving on.

  Robert spotted the men’s-room sign in the back of the place. “This way,” he said, and again the boy followed silently. Everybody in the place—losers most of them, of course, or why would they be here?—watched their journey curiously, but nobody said anything.

  One man was in the john, standing by the sink. He was using a dripping-wet paper towel on a large mustard stain that decorated the front of his white shirt that badly needed laundering anyway. After a quick glance at the blood and then at Robert’s face, he dropped the paper towel to the floor and scurried out without even taking the time to dry his hands.

  Ro
bert glumly surveyed the sight of the boy standing in front of him. “Jesus Christ, they did a real job on you.”

  “Yeah. The bastards.”

  “Well, you’re starting to get mad. That means you’ll be okay.” Robert took a couple of paper towels, soaked them in cold water, and took an ineffectual swipe at the bloodied face.

  His patient flinched away.

  Robert sighed. “You have a name, do you?”

  After a slight hesitation, the kid blinked. “Beau,” he said.

  “Okay, Beau, stand still, willya?” He tried again, remembering what the nurses had taught him about washing Andy. This time, Beau stood still and most of the blood was washed away. Robert took a step back. “That’s better,” he said. “But that shirt is a write-off.”

  Beau shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s all I’ve got. They took my stuff, remember.”

  “I remember.”

  After a moment, Robert sighed again and took off his jacket. When Beau saw the gun hanging there, his eyes widened and his face lost some color, but he didn’t say anything. “Don’t worry about it,” was Robert’s only comment. He removed the holster, then unbuttoned the pale-green sport shirt and took it off. Finally, he pulled the clean white T-shirt over his head. “Here. Take that off and wear this instead.”

  Beau made the change quickly, shoving the ruined shirt into the wastebasket. There wasn’t anything that could be done about the jeans, but they didn’t show the blood so much anyway. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.” Robert handed him his comb and watched as Beau used it.

  Finally they were both ready to leave the bathroom. Nobody paid them much attention when they walked out and found a booth. Even a cop, newly arrived at the counter, only glanced at them before returning to his newspaper. The waitress, a weary-faced Chicana, finally came over. “You wanna see menus?”

  “No,” Robert replied. “Just bring us a couple cheeseburgers, double fries, and some Cokes.” Then he looked at Beau. “That okay by you?” he asked belatedly.

  Beau nodded.

  The waitress dragged herself in the direction of the kitchen.