by A W Hartoin
I got out and said, “Hi Kevin. I need to talk to you about your sister.” “I don’t know anything.”
“I think you do.”
“Think whatever you want. I gotta go.” He snuck a peek at my cleavage and walked away.
I had to get him to talk to me. I would’ve expected him to be friendlier, if only to use me as eye candy. But he wasn’t playing, so he definitely knew something. If I could get him to come back, I had him. If I couldn’t, he’d never tell me anything.
I called out the only thing I could think of. “I won’t tell them what you did!”
Kevin turned and said with surprising fire, “I didn’t do anything.”
I smiled. Oh, he did something. Probably a lot of somethings. He was fifteen and that age has plenty to hide. “I won’t tell them.”
Kevin didn’t say anything for a minute and I thought I was plenty close.
He sneered at me. “You think you’re pretty cool, huh?”
Well, maybe not that close.
“I won’t tell them,” I said.
“Stop saying that.” With that, he walked back to me. Score.
“Whatever you want me to say? I’ll say it. I want to find your sister.”
He snorted.
“You don’t want to find her?”
He shrugged.
“Do you know where she is?”
“No, I don’t,” he said in a tired voice.
“What you tell me is just between the two of us. I won’t tell a soul.”
He walked back up to the house and sat on the steps. I followed and sat beside him, hoping Carol wouldn’t look out and notice us. He looked at my charm necklace, delightfully tucked between my breasts, an attention-getter if there ever was one. Kevin started to blush. He fought it. The harder he fought, the redder he got.
“So you wanna tell me?”
“About what?”
“Your sister.”
“I’m not sick or anything.”
“Who said you were?”
“Nobody. But I’m not, really.”
“I believe you.”
“Sometimes me and Corey get on my computer and look at stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Pictures of girls.”
“Porn?”
“Yeah. But I mean lots of guys do it.”
I laughed and leaned back. “Don’t I know it.”
He smiled and looked at my necklace. “Charley has a necklace like yours.”
“Does she? Is it her favorite?”
“She never takes it off.”
“Have you seen her necklace somewhere?”
He fidgeted with the hem of his tee shirt. “Yeah.”
“When did you see it?”
“Corey saw it first. Then I kind of hit him.”
“You hit Corey?”
“Just in the arm. He wasn’t mad. Not a lot.”
“Why’d you hit Corey?”
Kevin stood up and looked away from me, crossing his arms. “He said he saw her on the computer. I thought he was lying.”
“Was he lying?”
“No.”
“Where did he see her? What site?”
“I don’t know. He had it saved to his favorite places, but he deleted it. His mom checks his computer and he was afraid she’d see.”
“Did you see Charley?”
“Yeah, I went over to his house. I told you he wasn’t mad.”
“And you saw Charley on a porn site.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure it was her?”
“She looked different, but it was her. She had on her necklace. That’s how Corey recognized her.”
“You can’t remember the site name? Anything would help.”
“It was a girl’s name, but I never heard it before.”
“Do you think that Corey might remember it?”
“He tried to. We thought we might call the tip line or something. They said it was anonymous.”
“It is and that was a good idea. Are you going to see Corey tonight?”
“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be staying home.” He gave me a quick look to see if I caught his meaning. I did.
“We never had this conversation.” I pulled my father’s card out of my purse. I wrote my email and my cell phone number on it. “If you or Corey remember anything else, call or text me.”
On the drive home, I thought about what makes a girl run away in the first place and what makes her stay away when it gets rough. Abuse was number one and drug use was number two. In the back of my mind was the uncomfortable thought that she had been looking for trouble and found it. I remembered three different kinds of kids when I was that age, each a total pain in the ass. Being a cop’s daughter, I was the wary kind. From early childhood, I was suspicious of strangers and considered everybody a possible bad guy. I was the bane of child molesters everywhere. There was no way I’d have been lured off by the promise of a puppy or chocolate. God help you if you tried to take me by force. My friends, on the other hand, weren’t a bit like me. They were the hearts-and-flowers types. My best friend Ellen and I have been friends since the second grade. She had no concept of evil, still doesn’t. She looked at the nightly news like it was a bad fairy tale and that stuff didn’t really happen. Her little girls, ages two and four, are just the same. They have unicorn wallpaper.
The third kind was as far from my nature as the second. These kids weren’t looking for trouble; they were hot on the trail. I’ve had friends like that, but they never lasted long. I couldn’t stand the stupidity. “Hey, let’s ride our bikes over that cliff and see what happens.” They were the first to smoke, drink, and take drugs. I’m not saying I didn’t do those things, but I’ve never drank anything that smelled like it was poured out of a gas can. Those kids were extreme. They couldn’t just have a beer. They had to have malt liquor, followed by an LSD chaser with their car straddling the railroad tracks. Charley might be one of those. If we got her back, no telling what shape she’d be in.
When I walked in my front door, the smell of expensive cologne, vomit, and antiseptic wafted around the apartment like a ghost. That and the gentle snores coming from the bedroom told me Pete had gotten there before me. We’d been together for seven months by then and he’d taken to sleeping at my place quite a bit. My apartment was closer to the hospital than his and my fridge has been known to have food in it.
I snuck a peek at him. He was stretched out on top of my coverlet with my kitten, Skanky, asleep in the crook of his arm. Pete wasn’t a huge cat fan, but he and Skanky had some things in common. They both liked tuna straight from the can, sleep at every opportunity, and me.
I went into my laundry room and used a pair of tongs to stuff Pete’s scrubs into the washer. There wasn’t enough money to get me to touch them. Pete was a magnet for nasty crap and now he was doing his rotation in the ER. Who knows what he came home wearing. I hoped he’d taken a shower. I turned on the washer and pulled some frozen burgers out of the freezer. I popped them in a frying pan and went to dig through the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website. I found six articles on Charley’s disappearance. Police had no leads, no idea why she’d gone, or where she was. Of course, cops don’t give out everything they know, but the articles had less info than usual. From behind me, I heard footfalls. Pete was a heavy walker for someone so thin.
“Hey, babe. Something smells good,” he said.
Frying meat could wake Pete up out of a coma. Bacon would’ve brought him running full speed.
“Go back to bed.”
“I slept for almost a half hour. I’m good.” He smiled and gave himself a healthy belly scratch. I was definitely in love, because he looked kinda sexy, standing there in his holey underwear.
I left the laptop and made fries to go with the burgers, baked not fried. I had to make up for the Oreos I planned on having later.
“What’s with the Post?” Pete asked.
“Aunt Miriam asked me to do her a favor.”
“Oh,
jeez.”
Pete had the benefit of a Catholic education and was properly terrified of Aunt Miriam.
“Is it this abduction?” he said, pointing to a picture of Charley on the screen.
“She wasn’t abducted. She ran away.”
“Why doesn’t your dad take care of it?”
“Don’t get me started. Want to go to Mass tomorrow?”
“Pass.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m a big boy now. I don’t have to go to church.”
“I bet you tell your mom you go.”
“Of course. I’m not stupid. Why are you going to Mass? You do realize it’s not Christmas.”
I made some smart-aleck noises. “I have to give Aunt Miriam an update.”
“Well, then, I’m definitely not going.”
Like there was a chance.
“What does she expect you to do? Find this kid, when the police can’t?”
“That about sums it up.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks a lot.”
We ate our burgers and discussed his night in the ER. He’d had a screwup with the lab, but otherwise he was a shining example to interns everywhere. Pete washed dishes while I finished reading the articles about Charley. I found an old mug shot of Terry Obermark. He was underwear-model gorgeous. He combined the beauties of several races and made it work. At least now I knew why the girls went to him.
“Are you on tonight?” I asked.
“No, but I have to study.” He smiled and said, “Got any bright ideas?”
“Wanna go on an interview with me?” I could tell that wasn’t what he had in mind, but I had to tell Aunt Miriam something in fourteen hours.
“Where at?”
“Little neighborhood off Kingshighway and Hwy 40.”
“No way. You can’t be going in there by yourself.”
“I’m not. I’m taking you with me.”
He grumbled, but got dressed. As he did, I started questioning my request. Pete was pretty skinny and, frankly, brainy looking. He looked more likely to need backup than to give it. He was quick with a cell phone and that was something.
I threw on a jacket and a pair of steel-toed boots I had from a case that involved illegal logging. Don’t ask. Then I went to find my bodyguard. Pete stood by the front door, loaded with books and, God help me, wire-rimmed glasses. I dug my pepper spray out of the hall closet and clipped it on my key ring, just in case. The pepper spray was my dad’s idea of a fun birthday present a couple of years ago. Mom bought me curtains. It was hard to say which gift I was less excited about.
It took ten minutes to drive to Terry Obermark’s apartment, snaking through the warren of streets, some scary, others beautiful. Neighborhoods in central St. Louis change from good to bad from block to block. My parents were in the Central West End section that is very old money even though we weren’t. The Bled brewing family gave my dad the house, which would be considered a mansion in some circles, as a thank you for some favor he did them in the seventies. I didn’t know what the favor was, but it must’ve been huge like the house. I lived three blocks from them. That suits them just fine, but I’d like a three-mile radius better. Terry Obermark’s place lay beyond any of the good sections on a street that made me think about getting a carry permit.
I parked at the curb and Pete looked up from a book on burn protocol and squinted at the brick duplex with broken windows and not-so-recent fire damage.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked.
“It’s not that bad.”
“It looks like central Iraq.”
“You can stay in the car.”
“Do not insult me, woman.”
I laughed and we got out. Terry Obermark’s door had an eviction notice nailed to it. I knocked and got no response. Pete tried the knob and the door was unlocked. I pulled my key ring out and against my better judgment we went inside. The place was disgusting. Trash littered the floor and the smell of body odor and piss hung like fog in the early morning. I fought back a dry heave. We found Obermark passed out on a stained mattress in a back room. His eyes fluttered and his feet twitched. Otherwise, I might have thought he was dead.
“Terry?” I asked. The man that made mug shots look good now looked like roadkill. I guess it doesn’t take long to destroy yourself, if you set your mind to it.
Pete grabbed my arm. “Don’t touch him. I’ll get the emergency kit out of your truck.”
“This isn’t an emergency. This is his everyday,” I said.
“Regardless, I’m getting your kit.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Yes, you do. I put one in your toolbox four months ago.”
“Oh, yeah. That emergency kit.” In truth, I barely knew I had a toolbox. Mom assembled the thing and stuck it in my truck when I refused to do it myself. Mom believes that I should have a working knowledge of my own vehicle. I believed that I should have a working knowledge of the roads leading to local mechanics.
When Pete disappeared out the front door, I turned back to Obermark. I didn’t have much time before Pete got back and started treating the suspect like a patient.
“Terry!” I yelled.
“Waaa.”
“Are you Terry?”
“Yeah. What you want?”
“I want to ask you about Charley Horton. Sit up.”
“Screw you. Can’t you see I’m getting on?”
“I don’t care. Get up!” I kicked his mattress twice.
“Go the hell away.”
I groaned and pulled a pair of gloves out of my purse. I always carried gloves. You never know when you’ll have to touch a scumbag.
I grabbed Terry by the hair and slid him upright against the wall. I kept my pepper spray ready and looked him over. His hair stood up in greasy clumps. The left side of his face was covered with dried drool and extreme acne. There were sores around his mouth that would’ve required double gloves if he was brought into the ER, but I only had one pair on me.
“Where is she?”
Terry’s head wobbled around on his neck. “I’d tell you if I knowed. I’d never be so nice to her if I knowed what she’s like.”
“And how is that?”
“Trouble. What you think?”
“Where did she go? To a friend of yours?”
“Hell no.” He scratched his stomach and looked at the mattress absently. I think he forgot I was there for a second.
“Where is she?”
His head jerked up. “Bitch, I don’t know. I told her get out and she went.”
“Where?”
“Are you deaf? I don’t know. Who are you?”
“A friend of the family. Why’d you kick her out?”
“She can’t pay.”
“Pay for what?”
“I got expenses. She give the dollars or give it up. She don’t. I say get out. She went.”
“Did she have any money?”
“No.”
“Anybody else looking for her besides the cops?”
“Who want her?”
Pete came back, carrying a crazy large emergency kit. He stopped short. “Did you touch him?”
“Maybe a little. I gloved up.”
“Oh, my god!” He popped open the kit and pulled out a disinfectant spray that I hated to use because it smelled like rancid chemicals. Pete sprayed my gloves while I rolled my eyes.
Terry slumped over and landed on his face. I rolled him over with my foot after Pete gave me a look that suggested that he might never touch me again if I insisted on touching Terry even with the gloves and spray.
“Did you have sex with Charley or her friend, Rachel?” I asked.
“Nah.”
“Thank God,” said Pete, rooting through the kit.
“Why not?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t let me.” Terry focused on Pete, if you could call it that and said, “Your girl is a bitch, but I’m so high she look like Marilyn Monroe. What she look like to you?”
/> “Marilyn Monroe.” Pete found a pair of gloves in the kit and started to don them.
“Don’t bother,” I said, pulling off my own gloves. “We’re done.”
“I need to assess him,” said Pete.
“You can assess him if he shows up in the ER. Here he’s just another dirtbag.”
I pulled Pete away from the petri dish that was Terry Obermark and left the dirtbag sitting on his mattress picking at his scabbed arms. I wondered what Ellen would think of him. On the way out, we met an elderly black woman. Her hair was silver and pulled back into a neat bun. Her skin looked like a crumpled paper bag and she held a pronged support cane that she was whacking against the stoop.
“You shouldn’t go in there. You look like a nice girl.”
Well, it depends on who you ask.
“I had to ask Mr. Obermark some questions,” I said.
She appraised me with lashless eyes and I made sure I was standing straight.
“Are you asking about that little girl?”
“Yes, I am. Do you know anything about her?”
“I saw her leave. She was by herself. She walked down that street and she looked like she knew where she was going.”
“Nobody followed her?”
“I couldn’t say. I went inside.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, dear.”
Back at my apartment, Pete spread his books over the kitchen table and started adding notes to his iPad. I disinfected my hands, kissed Pete, and drove over to Uncle Morty’s. A dangerous move. Uncle Morty doesn’t like guests, unless they’re his Dungeons and Dragons cronies, and he’d been more crabby than usual. Something to do with his latest book. Uncle Morty wrote high fantasy in addition to working for my dad doing research. Not many people knew about Uncle Morty’s other life. He wrote under a pen name because, as he put it, no one in their right mind would buy any kind of book from a guy named Morton Barclay Van Der Hoof, much less high fantasy. Whatever problems Morty was having with his latest manuscript, he wasn’t taking any calls. I figured I’d have better luck getting some help out of him if I tried looking pathetic in person.
The smell of Morty’s famous hot bean dip found me before I even got off the elevator to his floor. I was drooling before I knocked.
