by Dan Ames
Clay wondered if maybe that’s what the PI was doing here. Tracking down Jade’s clients. That made sense. But how would you figure out who she was screwing? Not like these girls kept a written record of their meetings. Not the smart ones, anyway. If there was such a thing as a smart hooker. He thought there probably wasn’t.
Maybe the PI was using Jade’s phone. But if she was missing, chances were, her phone was gone, too.
He had parked in front of a little church just down from the fancy building Rockne had gone into. Now, he considered moving. Clay hadn’t seen any cops yet, but it was better to be moving than to sit still too long in a place like this.
He was reaching for the key to fire the truck back up when Rockne walked out of the building.
Huh, he thought. That hadn’t taken long.
Probably a dead end.
Clay watched as Rockne walked back to the parking garage, then waited until he came out. He started the truck up but stayed well behind Rockne. The truck wasn’t the best choice to follow someone and he had gotten too close a couple of times to Rockne on the freeway.
He decided to take a chance that the PI would go back to Grosse Pointe and probably follow the same route, so he pulled out ahead of his target on Woodward, and followed it toward the freeway.
Sure enough, he saw Rockne behind him. That was the best way to tail someone, Clay reminded himself. Get in front of them so they think there’s no possible reason to be suspicious.
Sure enough, Rockne went all the way back to Grosse Pointe, and Clay turned off before he did, then went the other way on a surface street until he was out of sight, then he doubled back.
Clay spotted Rockne getting off the same freeway exit he’d used to start the trip, and he followed him into a little residential area a few blocks off of Mack Avenue until he pulled up into a driveway.
The house was a two-story brick home and there was a woman in front with a garden hose watering some plants.
Well isn’t that just all cute and charming, Clay thought.
He had to turn off before he got to the block and then he looped around until he was facing it from the other direction.
Even though he was a half a block away, Clay liked what he saw with the woman. She had long, dark hair and was wearing a pair of shorts with a T-shirt. The shorts showed off some nice legs, a pretty good ass, and her boobs looked nice. Big enough to see from here, they were probably even larger up close. Larger and succulent, he thought. Or should he say…suckulent. Haha.
It looked like there was a rugrat running around because when Rockne got out of his car, it came running up to him.
Clay took out the sheet of paper and jotted down the street names of the intersection so he would remember. He decided he’d learned enough about Rockne. He needed to go check out the asshole’s office now.
John Wayne had written that down for him, too.
He put the truck in gear but he couldn’t stop thinking about that woman with the garden hose.
Oh, I’ll give you a hose you can hold onto, he thought.
Clay laughed as he drove away.
33
Being a private investigator requires the ability to have difficult conversations.
One day you might have to tell a woman that her suspicions were right and her husband is doing Zumba with his personal trainer but neither of them wear clothes when they do it.
Or maybe it’s telling an old man that his punk kid had emptied the bank account and run off to Alaska to eat blubber with his escaped convict girlfriend.
That last one hadn’t happened but it sounded like a fun case.
But the conversation I was about to have with Marvin and Arnella Cotton was not going to be easy.
I had made a call to them saying I had some follow-up questions regarding the case, and they invited me over to their house. At least that part was good. Asking the kind of questions I had to ask would be better for them in the comfort of their own home.
At least that’s what I told myself as I pulled up to their extremely modest single story home within a stone’s throw of Mack Avenue. They lived two doors down from the dry cleaner where Anna took my shirts every few weeks.
Marvin answered the door and invited me into the living room, where Arnella was already sitting.
“Want something to drink?” he asked. I could tell he was uncomfortable, sheepish almost. And I could also tell that Arnella looked angry. She sat with her legs crossed in a wingback chair, and her foot was tapping the air not so much in rhythm, but like she was itching to kick someone’s ass.
That particular ass could in theory belong to a wonderful local private investigator who was just trying to do the right thing.
I would be less of a man if I didn’t admit that I hoped she was thinking of kicking her husband’s ass and not yours truly.
“No thanks,” I said.
Marvin sat on the couch, and I sat in a matching wingback chair. It was a little sitting area facing a fireplace that looked like it had never been used. There was a vase on the fireplace mantle and a picture of Kierra. It looked like her graduation picture from high school. She didn’t look anything like that now, I thought.
“So is there news?” Marvin asked, getting right to the point.
“Yes and no,” I said. I then explained that I had been able to track some of Kierra’s movements but that there was still no clear indication of where she was or what had happened to her.
“Are you sure she was in Traverse City?” Arnella asked me. Her voice was full of skepticism.
I pulled out my phone and showed her the photo. “This was taken by a photographer who covered the convention.”
“I see,” Arnella said. She shot a glance over at Marvin that seemed full of hostility. “I’m sure she was someone’s guest there.”
She placed a fair amount of emphasis on the word guest, and it wasn’t a good kind of emphasis.
“I don’t have any clear indication of how she got there or who she was with,” I answered, telling the truth.
“What about AJ?” Marvin asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t been able to find him. I stopped by his house and no one has seen him for the past few days.”
“Maybe he’s with Kierra,” Marvin said.
“Maybe,” I said in as neutral a tone as possible.
“What else?” Arnella asked.
I hesitated, even though I had gone over all of the possible ways of bringing the issue up. In the end, I tried to be as direct as possible.
“Is Kierra transsexual?” The word hung in the room and no one moved.
“Damn you,” Arnella said to Marvin. She got up and left the room.
Marvin looked at me. “I need a drink. Care to join me?”
“Okay.”
He left, and returned with two glasses of whiskey.
“You should have told me, Marvin.”
“I know,” he said, sitting on the couch with a tired resignation. “I just hoped that her gender issue wasn’t a factor. But I should have known it would come up.”
“Technically, it hasn’t come up as having to do with anything,” I said. “But obviously it raises some questions.”
He nodded. “Yes, she wanted to get the operation to transition, but we don’t have that kind of money. And it’s not covered by insurance.”
That information fell into place. No wonder she was working as an escort. It was a way to raise cash. Maybe a lot of cash. And maybe real fast.
I took a drink of the whiskey and Marvin seemed to gulp at his.
“That’s why Arnella didn’t want me to hire you,” he admitted. I had already figured that but I didn’t stop him. “And why she tried to get you to drop the case. She figures the less people who know, the better.”
“Well, I’m not planning on telling anyone,” I pointed out.
“I appreciate it. About that, I’m about at my limit in terms of how much more I can pay you,” he said.
“Bullshit,” a voice said beh
ind me. Arnella was standing in the space between the living room and the kitchen.
“You’ve come this far, now you know why she was doing what she was doing,” Arnella said. “Finish it. Find her, Mr. Rockne. Before something bad happens to her, if it already hasn’t.”
She glared at both me and Marvin, then left. I heard the back door to the house slam shut.
Marvin and I sat there a little longer. His whiskey glass was empty but he seemed to have no interest in remedying that situation. I sipped at mine some more. Marvin glanced up at the photo of Kierra on the mantle a couple of times.
“What do you think, John?” he said, his voice so soft I could barely hear it. “Where do you think she is?”
With everything in my heart I wanted to give him an answer.
But I didn’t have one to give.
34
The Cadieux Café doesn’t sound like a cop bar, but it’s technically in Detroit, and that’s where I agreed to meet the cop son of Nate’s colleague.
It was right on Cadieux, not surprisingly, just down from the border with Grosse Pointe and it was known for its feather bowling courts.
If you’ve never been to Michigan or to Belgium, it’s a strange sport to describe. Basically, you stick a feather in the ground and then roll these things that look like wooden cheese wheels and you try to get them as close to the feather as you can. Kind of like horseshoes.
I feather bowled once but I was quite drunk at the time, so it just may have been a bad dream.
The cop was sitting at the bar, chatting up a bartender with a tight T-shirt and skinny jeans who was old enough to be his mother. Neither one seemed to notice her age, though.
“Are you Jeff?” I asked the young man. He turned initially and gave me that cop look, but seeing that I wasn’t trying to horn in on his action, he mellowed right away.
“I’m John Rockne, your Dad works with my friend Nate,” I said. Looking at the bartender I said, “put his beer on my tab and we’ll each take another.”
She went about her business and I sat on the bar stool next to him.
“Thanks,” he said, tipping his beer toward me and he polished it off with a couple long pulls.
Jeff was a young guy, way too young to me. Another sign I was getting old. He was probably in his late twenties but it looked like he should be graduating from high school. He was blonde with a goatee and his arms were thick with muscles, bulging out from beneath the dark blue shirt.
“I’m off duty,” he said. “I usually stop by here after work to cool off.”
“Me too,” I replied. Our beers came and I took a drink, not realizing how thirsty I was and how good a cold beer would taste right about now.
“So I wanted to ask you about the night of the big party at the mayor’s mansion. Nate said you were on duty and got called to that one.”
He laughed. “Yeah, what the hell was that all about? I mean, you’re the frickin’ mayor and you can’t control your own party? And you’re supposed to be in charge of an entire city?”
He laughed, revealing some pretty crooked teeth. I wondered when the police force’s dental plan kicked in.
“So it got pretty out of control?” I asked.
“Not as bad as the papers made it sound, honestly,” he said. “We had a few drunk and disorderlies, a couple of assaults, open intoxicants, minor possessions. Really the crime was that the party got too big and I think, my own personal opinion, is that people figured they were above the law.”
Above the law. Yeah, I could see that. Especially if the law worked for you like an arrogant mayor might believe.
“Easy to do when you’re partying with the mayor,” I pointed out.
“Right,” Jeff said. “I mean, that’s why people were out in the street and how it got too rowdy.”
“Did you arrest anyone?” I asked.
“No, I let everyone off with a warning, as long as they weren’t doing anything too crazy,” he said. “Mainly because I hate paperwork. A couple of buddies of mine had to pepper spray a guy, though. He went to jail.”
“Were there a lot of women at the party?”
“Tons of them, dude,” he said. His eyes kind of lit up. He was a young man, after all. “A ton of hotties. I think some of them were working the party, if you know what I mean.”
I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture of Kierra at the auto convention.
“Do you think you saw her there?” I asked.
He took the phone and using his fingers enlarged it so he could see her face better.
“No, I don’t think so,” he answered. But he was clearly uncertain. “She looks kind of young. And she’s pretty beautiful. I think I would have remembered her if I’d seen her.”
“Do you guys know a man named Nix? Works security sometimes for the mayor?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Jeff said. “But those guys the mayor’s got working for him? I’d be surprised if they go by their real names. Some real shady characters, is what I hear.”
I put my phone on the bar and tried to figure out what to do next. It still seemed like a good bet that the second of Kierra’s big scores was the mayor’s party, mainly because I had seen or read nothing else that might qualify. Unless it was a private “date” with a wealthy benefactor.
That thought depressed me.
There would be no way for me to track that down. Considering that Platinum Escorts was a dead-end even the police didn’t bother with.
“Everyone says Mayor Mahorn is all about pay to play, and from what I hear there’s a lot of paying and a lot playing,” Jeff said.
“That’s why they call him Horny Mahorn, right?” I asked.
The young cop laughed. “Yep, I heard that one, too.”
He took a drink of his beer, grabbed my phone and looked at the picture of Kierra again.
“Looks like Vaughn had his eye on this girl, huh?”
I put my beer down.
“Who?”
“Vaughn,” he said as he put my phone down and pointed at the picture.
He must have seen the look of confusion on my face.
With his finger he tapped directly on the back of the silver-haired man’s head.
“Michael Vaughn,” he said. “I’d recognize that hair anywhere. He’s a big lawyer. Does a ton of work for the mayor. And his wife’s a judge.”
Jeff smirked.
“Don’t think she’d be too crazy about that picture, though,” he added.
35
“I fucking knew it!” Nate exclaimed over the phone. “I knew it was him, I just couldn’t place it.”
“Okay, get over yourself,” I said. “So tell me about him.”
“He’s connected up the wazoo to anyone who’s anyone in Detroit,” Nate said, all excited. He lived for this kind of thing. He smelled a good story, and so did I. I wasn’t interested in it for that, though. I felt like I was finally closing in on what might have happened to Kierra.
“He’s totally in tight with Mahorn,” Nate continued. “He’s also got connections with the Irish mob and his wife’s a freaking judge. How great is that for a lawyer?”
That did present a lot of interesting angles. I wondered how much of Vaughn’s influence was dependent upon his ability to get favors in court.
“So does he argue his cases to her?” I asked. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Wouldn’t she have to recuse herself from any of his cases?”
“Of course he doesn’t directly argue his cases, that would be a total conflict of interest. Anything they did that way would get tossed out.”
“So what do they do?”
“Well, there are all kinds of rumors.”
“Like what?”
“Just that clients of Vaughn’s firm have a very good track record of winning cases,” Nate said. “He’s obviously not the only lawyer at the firm. They’ve got dozens of them.”
“So the rumor is she gives out preferential judgments if the case is handled by her husband’s firm.
”
“Sure,” Nate said.
“It probably helps his business,” I said. “Hire the lawyer whose wife is a judge.”
“I’m sure Mahorn is well aware of it, as are his other big political clients,” Nate said. “Man, John, if he’s involved in this girl’s disappearance you’d better really watch your back. This ain’t the minor leagues. You’re playing with the big boys now.”
“Thanks for that tip, Nate,” I said.
He couldn’t tell me anything else so we disconnected and I immediately went to my office and logged onto the local news websites, searching for any news stories and photographs of Michael Vaughn and his wife.
I found out quickly that his wife’s name was Claire Vaughn. I saw pictures of them together at political fundraisers. At art gallery openings. With local celebrities. They were clearly what you would call a power couple.
A recent story had made the rounds about the judge giving a very light sentence to a felon with a long criminal history, a scary-looking white guy named Clay Hitchfield. There was a picture of him and for some reason he looked familiar. But I was sure I’d never met him. I stared at his picture a little longer. Something about it made me uneasy but I couldn’t figure out what.
I continued reading articles about the Vaughns and saw that they also happened to live in Grosse Pointe. One of the news stories was about their home. A famous structure built in the early part of the century by a wealthy Grosse Pointe family. The Vaughns had renovated it, of course, and it was one of the finest private homes in Grosse Pointe, which was saying something.
I thought, what the hell. They probably wouldn’t be home, but I knew exactly where that house was.
As quickly as I could I closed up the office and drove out of the Village, then through a section of Grosse Pointe known as The Hill, until I got to a street called Heartmoor. There were only a few homes on the block because each house was enormous. These were estates and certainly worth millions upon millions of dollars. But what’s that to a successful partner in a big law firm and a judge?
