by Dan Ames
Since the burger place was only a few blocks from my office, I decided to walk it. The main street of Grosse Pointe typically saw a lot of turnover in terms of stores and restaurants. I’d heard that it was mostly because the real estate was owned by one person who charged abnormally high rents. Luckily, my building was owned by a former client who rented my space to me for very little.
I went inside, climbed the stairs and unlocked my office. I shut all the blinds, turned on my computer and found a good blues album in iTunes.
Once the computer was ready, I began searching escort services in Detroit.
The results were overwhelming.
Most of the sites listed seemed fake, as if they were just aggregators that pulled together other fake ads.
The most prominent site was backpage.com which seemed to be the do-it-yourself escort service. However, after taking a look at the photos and comparing them to some of the “professional” sites, it looked like some of those same companies were advertising on backpage as if they were amateurs.
It was a safe assumption that the whole escort industry was a swamp full of bullshitters. Wasn’t that why people wanted to legalize prostitution? So it could be regulated and taxed?
The page of photos on my screen made me dizzy. It was a swarm of asses, really. Women mostly bent over. A lot of shots in the bathroom using the mirror. Was that a big turn-on for men? An attractive woman in bra and panties standing next to a clearly visible toilet? Were toilets aphrodisiacs these days?
Occasionally, someone would mix up all the ass photos with a boob shot. Or, even stranger, a picture of their toes. How weird was that? I supposed some guys had foot fetishes but would you focus your ad on that small market? It occurred to me I could write a guide to marketing for escorts.
I was getting nowhere.
The best way, I figured, was to search for her stage name. Jade. I went to backpage and typed her name in the little search area. Nothing. I went back to Google, and typed in Jade, then escort.
Several pages popped up, but they were a mixture of the same escort sites I’d seen before, plus some listings for custom jewelry. And most of the listings were for places all over the country, like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. A lot of women named Jade.
So I added Detroit to the search terms.
More results flooded my screen and I dutifully waded through them. So many of the photographs failed to show the woman’s face. I understood that was on purpose. Some of these women probably had day jobs and were doing this on the side. The last thing they wanted would to be recognized.
After my eyes started to get dry and scratchy from staring at the screen I decided it was time to shut down the online search. Maybe there were better options somewhere else. I was about to shut the site down when I saw a listing at the bottom of the page for Platinum Escorts. There, I saw the word Jade attached to a thumbnail.
I clicked on the thumbnail.
A dark little thud landed on my stomach and the outlandishly pessimistic and cynical idea Nate suggested at dinner had just become a reality.
It was Kierra.
21
King of Breakfast, that’s what I thought of myself. My alter ego. My superhero character. I was a morning person, no doubt about that, and I derived no greater pleasure than being the first one up, having my coffee, and making everyone breakfast.
The great thing about having young kids is that I was then able to immediately launch into making their lunches for school. King of Breakfast and Lunch. Which alleviated any guilt I had about not giving the slightest thought to dinners.
Although when Anna called me up and said she didn’t have time to even think about dinner, I was always more than happy to either try to whip something up or order a meal and bring it home.
With the kids off to school, Anna’s peck still fresh on my cheek, I headed out to the office.
The fact was, I was really trying to stay upbeat but the discovery that Kierra was possibly working as an escort did not sit well with me. While I had been home with my daughters, I had blocked the facts of the case and what I’d found. But now, on my way to work, I wondered what I should do.
My next meeting with Marvin Cotton wasn’t really established. If suddenly he wanted to sit down and talk about what I’d found I would have no choice but to tell him. However, if I could put off meeting with him for awhile, maybe I could find out that it wasn’t true. Or that she hadn’t really been working as an escort. I wasn’t holding out a ton of hope, but the strategy to buy some time seemed like a good one at the moment.
But I wasn’t even a block from home when my cell phone rang from a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“John Rockne?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Nix. We met when you came down to Destroy Records.”
I thought I could hear the Hound from Hell in the background growling. He could probably hear my voice.
“Sure, I remember you, Mr. Nix.”
“Not Mr. Nix. Just Nix.” His tone had an edge to it. But when I pictured him in my mind I remembered that his entire being had an edge. The guy could cut you just walking past you in the grocery store.
I frowned at no one in particular.
“Okay, Nix.”
“Grandmaster D would be more than happy to chat with you. He’s playing basketball this morning at the Joe Dumars Fieldhouse in Detroit,” he said. “Do you know where that is?”
It sounded like he was now lightly mocking me.
“Not offhand, no I don’t,” I said.
“It’s off of Woodward at 8 Mile. Used to be the old state fairgrounds.”
“Okay, I can be there in twenty minutes or so,” I said, but instead of an answer I heard a dial tone.
“Goodbye and thank you, pal,” I said to the dead line.
It actually took me a little more than twenty minutes to get to the Joe Dumars Fieldhouse as I hadn’t anticipated the slight increase in traffic due to it being the tail end of rush hour.
As I drove down 8 Mile I passed Bush Gardens which, early in the morning, with an empty parking lot and all the lights shut off, had about as much charm and happiness as a used colostomy bag.
Eventually I saw an enormous sprawling field behind a barbed-wire fence. There were several large buildings, all boarded up with concrete barricades in front of the doors.
I spotted a narrow, weed-choked drive off of Woodward Avenue that led to the center of the buildings. There were about a dozen cars parked by a structure that had a row of windows near the top.
It was curious to me how the place had become associated with Joe Dumars, the ex-NBA basketball player. Why would he have purchased this place, I wondered. It looked like it should be condemned.
There was a spot near the entrance so I pulled up next to a Cadillac with Texas plates. Inside, I passed through a metal detector but the guy at the desk just waved me through.
The Fieldhouse was a collection of four full-length basketball courts all side-by-side. The walls near the entrance were covered with framed copies of vintage Sports Illustrated magazines. Each basketball court was occupied by guys playing hoops. All of them were black. I was the only white guy in the place.
I thought about joining a game but then remembered that I’m slow, out of shape, and can’t shoot a basketball very well.
Instead, I went to the guy at the desk and asked if he could point out Grandmaster D for me. He looked at me with an expression somewhere between skepticism and hostility.
“Who the hell are you?”
Not a great demeanor for a front desk position. “He asked me to come and talk to him here. My name is John.”
“Court 4,” the man said. “The guy with the orange shoes.”
“Thanks,” I told him with very little enthusiasm. I walked down to Court 4 and sat in a miniature set of bleachers, only two rows high and watched the game.
It was mostly offense. In fact, half the guys didn’t even run down the court to pla
y defense. A lot of 3-point shots and the occasional dunk.
There was a woman in an energy drink T-shirt standing by a display. She looked bored.
Eventually, someone made a basket and half of the players threw their arms up in victory, and the other half walked off the court shaking their heads. The guy in the orange basketball shoes walked right up to me.
“You here to see me?” he asked.
He had on a gray T-shirt that was covered in sweat and he took a moment to chug from a bottle of Gatorade.
His skin was jet black and he had a diamond earring in each ear. They were big diamonds. Anna would be jealous, let’s put it that way.
“Yeah, I’m John Rockne,” I said. “Nix told me you would talk to me here.”
It was kind of weird, so I decided to be up front. “So do I call you Grandmaster?”
He smiled. “Nah. My friends call me Derek.”
“Okay. Derek. I wanted to ask you about Kierra Cotton. Sometimes she called herself Jade. I’m a private investigator and her Dad hired me to find her.”
He nodded. “Yep, I knew Jade. Or Kierra. Whatever you want to call her.”
He took a long drink from the bottle of Gatorade and looked at the woman standing off to our right.
“When did you see her last?” I asked.
Derek leaned back and looked at the Fieldhouse’s rafters. “Probably a month or so ago. We used to party a little bit and she was really messed up. I let her stay at my place with some friends for a few days. I knew she was dabbling in the escort business and I told her that was a dead end.”
Someone tossed him a towel and he wiped off his face. He threw his empty Gatorade bottle into a trash can at the foot of the bleachers and let out a small belch.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No problem, my wife does that all the time.”
He laughed and I said, “Ever hear of a company called Platinum Escorts?”
He shook his head, but I had a pretty good feeling he recognized the name. His nonchalance seemed practiced. A well-rehearsed move he did often. In his line of work, he probably had to lie to people all the time.
“What did Kierra say when you told her being an escort was a dead end?” I asked.
“Oh, the same thing everyone says,” he said with a soft laugh. “Don’t matter if you’re a thief or a drug dealer or a rapper. You know it’s all going to end sooner than later, but you just want one more big score and then you swear you’re going to get out once and for all. But you never do.”
The guys on the court had started to reassemble and Derek looked over at them.
“That’s what she said?” I asked. “She had a big score lined up?”
“Not exactly. But it sounded like she had a couple things going on that were going to let her get out. Man, if I had a dime for every time I heard that story.”
“So that was it? You never saw her again?”
He shook his head. “Nope. She told someone she was going to work some auto convention or something and then she was gone.”
Some of the players from the game were looking over at us.
“You want to join us?” Derek asked, nodding toward the court.
“No, I pulled a hammy cleaning my basement this weekend.”
We shook hands and he said I could call him if I thought of any more questions. He produced one of his business cards and if his shorts didn’t have pockets, I didn’t want to think where it had come from. I also gave him one of my cards.
“I hope you find her,” he added before he jogged back onto the court.
“I do, too,” I said.
22
“You white trash piece of shit.”
AJ was dying and Clay was surprised. Even grudgingly respectful that the black punk could talk. He was cut in a hundred places and Clay thought he had bled out.
The ‘white trash’ comment made Clay think of a theory some bitch had told him in a bar. That Michigan’s hillbillies were a particularly malignant form of redneck because during the great auto boom workers poured in from the south to Michigan to work in the car factories.
So, according to this woman, northern urban folks mingled with the true rednecks from the South to form some kind of hybrid mega white trash. Clay had laughed, then waited for the woman outside the bar and knocked all of her teeth out with a tire iron.
Clay looked at the black kid who knew he was dying and had decided to go out with an attempt at being a tough guy.
“What did you call me?” Clay asked.
The kid’s bravado was fading fast. Clay could tell he wanted to cry. All these street punks were tough with their crews, their cell phones and knockoff Glocks. But take that shit away, make them face death, and they reverted to the scared little kids they really were.
“You heard me white boy,” AJ said. His face was cracked and broken, he had cuts all over his body. He had lost a lot of blood.
Clay laughed. He thought again of that woman in the bar. Because he supposed there was some truth to the theory. Hell, his family had come from Kentucky to work at the Ford factory way back when. They’d sprawled out in some place called Centerline, a weird blue collar suburb of Detroit, and brought all of their Kentucky cousins and customs with them.
Eventually, when the jobs and money dried up, they’d gone slightly north, to the farm area where they’d turned to petty crime.
But they hadn’t escaped the spread of racial unrest when the city of Detroit truly started to fall apart. As a kid, Clay had ended up being one of the few white kids left at his public school. He’d gotten singled out nearly every day. He learned to fight hard and fast and be more vicious than his opponents. If they had fists, he had a knife. If they had a knife, he had a gun.
And when he shot his first black punk, that was the end of school. His family had shipped him off with a crazy-ass uncle who stole things for a living.
First chance, he came back to the city.
And he had never forgotten his epic battles with the blacks.
“Did you call me white trash?” Clay said, his voice soft. He took off his leather jacket and set it on the back of a chair, well away from the action. He didn’t want any blood to get on it.
“Goddamn right I did, asshole,” the black guy said. “Fucking bitch.”
Clay slashed him with the knife so fast it took a moment for his captive to realize he’d been stabbed. He jerked back, trying to avoid the blade but he was a full second too late. Clay had run the tip of the knife across the man’s forehead, cutting loose a flap of skin that folded over on itself and looked like a unibrow made of meat. Blood poured into AJ’s eyes and he yanked at his restraints.
With a laugh, Clay slashed the kid again, this time across the throat. A spray of blood shot from his neck and Clay stepped back, fascinated by the way the blood spurted in rhythmic pulses.
Clay was surprised yet again at how much blood had still been in the kid’s body.
“When you call someone like me white trash, boy,” Clay said, “you’re not just insulting me, you’re speaking badly of my kin going way back. And I don’t take kindly to that. Especially from black garbage like you.”
A groan escaped the young man and he slumped forward, no longer breathing.
“Get it?” Clay said. “White trash, black garbage?”
Clay wiped his blade clean on the kid’s shirt.
“Yeah, I think you got it,” he said.
23
The first thing I did when I left the Joe Dumars Fieldhouse was to send Nate a text and ask him if he had ever heard of an escort service called Platinum Escorts.
When I swung into the village, I hit Starbucks and got myself a tall dark roast with some half and half and sugar. Anna wasn’t around, because half and half and sugar in coffee were both against the house rules. We used fat free creamer and that was it. No added sugar.
But when the wife is away, even the most docile husband will play.
Back in my office armed with some delicious caffeine, I
scoured the Internet for Platinum Escorts. And not their lame-ass website full of shots of girls. Because there was nothing at all on the website other than those images and an email address that I’m sure was not going to be easy to track down.
When I searched from a business address perspective, there were a ton of them, and that was the problem. There was Platinum Escorts, Las Vegas. Platinum Escorts, New York. Los Angeles. Dallas. Miami.
That’s a lot of platinum.
Nothing in Detroit, though.
It was a safe guess that these kinds of companies had a million different names for themselves. After all, most of the photos used for one “service” were the same photos for another one. Once they had enough photos, they probably just plastered them all over the Internet with different email addresses or phone numbers that most likely led to the same answering service or whatever scam system they used.
Despite what most people think, looking at photos of scantily clad women, especially young scantily clad women, can get tiresome. Especially when you consider the widespread practice of human trafficking, of which there was quite a bit in the Midwest, and Detroit in particular.
It felt great to close the browser and step away from the computer.
There hadn’t been much hope that I would be able to get an address or a name from the Web. These kinds of companies were evading law enforcement. But I hadn’t even found anything about Platinum Escorts in any other location. Like police reports. Or news stories.
The fact was, you could only do so much research online. The world was still a place inhabited by people made of flesh and blood, not constructed of electronic pulses and pixels.
So I decided to change gears.
I gambled that Nate might be able to point to someone who could help with the Platinum Escort angle.
That meant I could focus on the auto convention Derek had told me about, when he said that Jade was hoping for a big score so she could get out of the business.
