Lady Midnight

by Timothy C. Phillips

  Baucom spoke again. “Herron has a record of petty crime—a couple of arrests for possession, and a drunk driving conviction. He’s a college dropout, and has never held down a regular job. Senator Patrick felt that the man’s interest in his daughter was motivated by the fact that she was associated with wealth.”

  “Really, nothing could be more obvious,” Patrick rumbled. “Connie left her fiancee, just before the wedding. She practically left him at the altar.”

  “Connie was engaged to another young man?”

  “That’s right. His name is Millard Brooks IV—his father’s a very prominent attorney himself—a fine young man, destined for law school. But Connie’s senior year in college—the year other girls settle down and start thinking about their plans after college: family, career, graduate school, what have you—she fell in with some young people, friends of this Anthony Herron. I believe that’s when she started using drugs. Her grade point average plummeted, she was increasingly absent, and there were times when I couldn’t contact her for days. She finished college—barely. Soon after, she broke off her engagement with young Millard.”

  “Did you try to intervene during any of this, Senator Patrick?”

  “Yes. I even went so far as to invite Millard to a dinner at our home and attempt reconciliation between him and Connie. I know now that it was foolish of me, but I thought perhaps they had quarreled and just needed a chance to clear the air.” Patrick paused and looked down at the floorboard, like he’d just lost something down there.

  “And, how did that little reunion go?” I asked.

  Patrick shook his head, and frowned. “Horribly. Connie showed up . . . well . . . intoxicated. She was with this Herron character, and they both looked terrible, like they’d spent the night in a car, or worse. They were both drunk, probably even high on something. I don’t know. She said things, terrible things, to Millard and myself. We argued, and it was a dreadful row. We both lost our tempers, and ended up shouting at each other. I’m afraid I called her some names, said some things that I regret, and that I didn’t mean.”

  I could see it all unfold in my mind’s eye. It even made me a little queasy. It must have been an extremely uncomfortable scene for all involved—maybe for poor Millard, most of all. It sounded like he had the least to lose, in the long run. I guessed that he was probably safely ensconced in law school somewhere, with another pretty girlfriend to give rings to.

  “What happened after you argued?” I asked.

  “They just left. I haven’t seen or heard from Connie since. I have a horror that she’ll get pregnant from this Herron, perhaps even marry him in a fit of anger against me, since she knows how thoroughly I disapprove of him. I need you to find her before any of that happens. I need you to tell her that she still has a family, still has a father who loves her, Roland.”

  “I can do my best, Senator Patrick, but if everything you’ve told me is the truth, you realize that even once I find her, she might simply tell me to go to hell. It happens more often than you might think. If she does that, there’s very little I can do.”

  Baucom spoke again. “If that proves to be the case, Mr. Longville, the Senator will simply require you to inform us of her whereabouts, and we’ll take it from there.” Baucom sounded like he was reading a prepared statement, like the disembodied voice you hear at the end of a game show, lines carefully rehearsed or committed to memory. I wondered if he had told someone else all of this before.

  “I can’t stress enough that you are to tell her about her grandfather, and then let us know that she’s safe, Roland. I need you to do that very much. In fact, call me the instant you find her. The instant.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “One last thing. This Herron. He runs around in some pretty shady places. No doubt, there could be trouble.”

  “Trouble is what you get in my line of work, Senator.”

  Chapter 3

  I drove back home through the North Side. It’s the gritty side of Birmingham, where the bad things go down, but it’s still my home. I know every nook and cranny of the North Side. I remembered growing up there with a mix of emotions. I’d been a good kid, raised by a single mother after my father, whom I couldn’t remember, had died in a place called Viet Nam after getting drafted in the summer of 1969, when I was just a baby. My mother had often recounted for me the story how she was sitting on the couch, giving me my bottle, and my father had been sitting in front of the television, nursing a beer, when the announcer of the draft lottery had called his number.

  My mother had told me many times that my father had simply turned and told her, “That’s it, baby. They’re going to ship me overseas and get me killed, just you wait and see.” A hard thing to tell your young wife, but my parents had plenty of cause to be fatalistic. Martin Luther King had been gunned down in Memphis the spring before, and they had watched with somber attention as Bobby Kennedy, another champion of the downtrodden, was laid to his rest just weeks before. They were living in Birmingham, Alabama, a scant few years after the Civil Rights act of 1964 had been written into law.

  There were bitter memories enough to go around for everyone. They had seen quite enough of man’s inhumanity to man, over the last decade. Now, just when things might be changing for the better, there was this unpopular war, which no one, black or white it seemed, wanted to be involved in. There was also trouble aplenty at home.

  But Edward C. Longville had been raised to believe in his country, no matter what kind of injustice he endured by living in it, and believe he did. So he went down a couple of days later and signed his papers, and promptly got just what he expected, an assignment as a rifleman in the United States Army. He had left with no illusions about his chances of ever returning alive, and he had not.

  My mother and I had ended up in the Westmoreland Heights housing projects. Pauline Longville had been a quiet but strong woman who had raised me to be the man she thought my father would have wanted me to be, and she did so despite tremendous adversity. She had worked as a waitress and put herself through teaching school, and she was able to eventually move us out of the projects. When I was in my early teens, she had been offered a job teaching English at a community college. I had been very proud of my mother for her achievement.

  I had resisted the pull of the gangs, though many of my friends from the projects had not. I had seen somehow, even as a boy, that there was a cycle in crime, where the victims became the perpetrators and made another generation of themselves through there own violence. The mothers and fathers of the gang members were also victims of crime. It was a cycle that seemed to have no end. I had stayed out of trouble, for the most part.

  Despite my mother’s wishes, I’d joined the Army when I graduated from high school. I’d become a Military Policeman, and had proven to be a very good one, eventually making it into CID. After my tour was up, I went to the University of Alabama on the GI bill and played football. I’d been a linebacker, and I’d been pretty good at that, too. The team had won the National Championship my senior year. I’d graduated with a degree in English and Criminology and went straight into the Birmingham Police.

  I’d worked hard and I was a good cop. Life had settled in to a stable routine, when fate intervened, as fate often does. I have a scar that extends from the corner of my left eye down to the left corner of my mouth. I got it when I managed to corner a rapist, a snake-mean freak who loved to slash the faces of his victims after he raped them. The Mountainbrook Slasher, the media had dubbed him. I had stopped that man, though at a cost.

  I had spotted an open window one night at the rare old hour of 2:00 a.m. while on a routine patrol, and I had surprised the so-called slasher as he attempted to commit what was to be his final crime. He hadn’t gone down easy. He’d been armed with a variety of knives, all very sharp.

  I was cut several times during the fight, the worst being the one on my face. As for the Mountainbrook Slasher himself, he had been a mentally disturbed man from a wealthy family, and h
ad fallen on his own knife in the struggle. He had later died of peritonitis while in the hospital. His death had put an end to the attacks, had gotten me decorated for valor in the line of duty, and a promotion to detective, and, of course, the scar.

  I have other scars, too, but they’re the kind you can’t see. After a shooting incident in North Birmingham, a young officer had died on a crime scene, and many had blamed me for her death. No one blamed me as much as I blamed myself, however. I had taken to the bottle after that, and for over two years I had surrendered to its blinding embrace. I had finally fought my way back to sobriety, only to find myself alone, my once promising career down the tubes, and job prospects scarce. With the help of my old partner and constant friend, Detective Lester Broom, I had set myself up as a private detective, and started all over.

  I’d proven to be good at that, too, and forged a reputation for cracking tough cases, and for a willingness to take on cases that others in this line of work either were reluctant to accept or balked at outright. And so it had gone for the last seven years or so, me in my solitary office in the Brooks Building, taking on clients who were hardy enough, earnest enough, and desperate enough, to seek me out in my cloister.

  So here I am today, Roland Longville, Private Investigator, finder of lost souls.

  Chapter 4

  I mulled over the facts in the Patrick case. Connie Patrick had last been seen in the company of a lad by the name of Randy Herron, an aspiring musician. Attempts to locate either of them by more conventional means had failed, so the senator had called upon me through Baucom, his very competent herald. Herron had a drug past and the senator had disliked him on sight. The black sheep daughter had already shown an aversion to college and college boys, and had openly scoffed at the idea of marriage that daddy had planned for her with young Millard Brooks IV, the aspiring lawyer.

  Patrick finished telling this morose tale before he discharged me. Now I was walking past Sally’s Diner, with a nice retainer in my pocket and repeated directions to act with all due haste ringing in my ears. I walked past the space where the murdered man’s car still sat, with the yellow police tape still cordoning it off from the unmolested world: Police Line, Do Not Cross, it proclaimed like a fluttering banner towed by a plane, tied around two portable plastic stanchions on the street side, and a lone parking meter on the other.

  I walked across a parking lot to the Brooks Building, a five-story, weather-beaten brownstone with but one sole surviving tenant—the office of yours truly, Roland Longville, Private Investigator.

  As I made my way up to the third floor—the elevator had died, years before—I wondered who had wanted the man in the car dead. The death of a wealthy man, or the disappearance of a senator’s daughter, well . . . those were the sort of things that attracted media attention, unlike the body of a poor girl being found in some back alley or desolate spot. I assumed that soon I would hear some details of the man’s murder on the news, or maybe read the whole story in the newspapers.

  Constance Patrick was still among the missing. I wondered if anyone, anywhere, missed the Jane Doe multitudes of this world. In my mind, I went over a few figures that I remembered from my days as a police detective, figures that might shock and alarm the average person sitting on their couch thumbing through mindless cable channels.

  Constance Patrick might be the daughter of someone influential, but she was one of the two hundred and fifty people who vanish in the Unites States every day. There are, I know, currently over 950,000 people missing in this country. Almost a million people. Missing. A nation of the lost. Most of them will never be found, and many of the ones who do get found are going to be long dead.

  People disappear for different reasons. Some of them vanish because they run away from lives gone sour for one reason or another; some assume different identities, maybe just wanting to start over somewhere new, where no one knows them; some run away from the law, or are hiding from some past shame. Sooner or later, sixty to seventy percent turn up somewhere, dead or alive. A third of them, however, are different. Three hundred and some odd thousand vanish with no good reason, and they are never found. Were they abducted by faceless murderers, and sold into slavery of one kind or another?

  As incredible as it seems, no one will ever know. It staggers the mind to think that so many people can disappear so completely. Where can such a vast number of people go, and be hidden forever from the sight of their fellow human beings?

  I stopped at the top of the stairs and took a deep breath. I’m in my late thirties now, and though I had once been a linebacker at the University of Alabama, time is having its way with me. I walked into the office, and stretched. I needed to think. A Tom Waits CD was in the player, so I just hit play, and kicked back and listened to “Small Change” while I tried to sort it all out. About the time old Tom tore into “Step Right Up,” the phone rang. I grabbed the remote and paused the player; some people find my taste in music a bit eclectic.

  “Longville.”

  “Roland, it’s Broom.”

  “Les, what’s up?”

  “Listen, I don’t know what to make of this just yet, but we got an I.D. on the man you saw murdered across from Sally’s Diner. Turns out that you two are, or were, in the same business. He was a private detective by the name of Bowman. His registration is with a small firm in Atlanta. I talked to his partner this morning, and he says that he has no idea what Bowman was doing in this state.”

  “That smells funny to me. Smell funny to you?”

  “Yeah. And funny strange, not funny ha-ha. A private eye gets shot dead right outside a diner where another private eye just happens to be having a cup of Joe? Quite a coincidence. I don’t like coincidences. Anything going on with you I should know about?”

  “I was there to meet a middle man to set up a meeting with a potential client, Les. I never heard of this Bowman guy, although that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think he was keeping tabs on me, though. He certainly wasn’t observing me. Wasn’t observing anybody, for that matter. He wasn’t even trying to be inconspicuous. As a matter of fact, that’s the reason I noticed him in the first place. He stuck out like a sore thumb.”

  “Are you working on a case right now?”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact, Sally’s was the meeting place for my contact, the guy who set the whole thing up.”

  “Tough one?”

  “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be. I’m looking for a young woman. Her dad thinks she might be in a little trouble with the wrong type of guy.”

  “Got a description on her?”

  “Sure. Five-five, long blonde hair, blue eyes. Twenty-three years old.”

  “Say, Roland, sorry, can you hang on a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Broom put me on hold while he took another incoming call. A couple of minutes later, he came back on the line.

  “Roland, that was a call from dispatch. Somebody found a body over in the Cahaba River.”

  “I’ll let you go then.”

  “I think you’d better tag along. The body is that of a young woman. That girl you just described to me? I think it might be her.”

  Chapter 5

  I parked on the shoulder behind a half-dozen police cars, and carefully made my way along a path that slanted sharply down the steep overgrown bank to a wooded bend in the river. Broom and Cassandra stood on the bank. The highway roared above us, almost directly over our heads. Cassandra nodded. “We sure are seeing a lot of you lately, handsome.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Sorry it always has to involve someone dying.”

  “That’s the biz we’re in,” she said.

  Broom beckoned me over to where he stood. A young evidence tech worked nearby with a digital camera, reviewing her work. She was a light-skinned black girl, very thin, with big doe eyes. She reminded me of my mother, dead five years now.

  “The mounted patrol says a fisherman found her a couple of hours ago.”

  I looked down the bank toward
the spot where the dead girl’s body had been found. It was a weedy and overgrown place. Litter clung to the high weeds, deposited by the waters of the river when the rain swelled them, and left to mingle with the other detritus when the waters receded again. The Cahaba River flowed straight through the middle of Birmingham, and the river knew all the city’s secret sins.

  At one time, the Cahaba River had flowed past the fledgling town, nourishing and feeding its farms and industries; it had been the city’s life’s blood. Now, it is a largely forgotten estuary, below the level of the highways that carries the masses to and fro over the tenements, the slums, and the fallow lands left vacant by decades of urbanization. The commerce flows on the highways that arches over the Cahaba’s slow and forgotten waters. The long rivers of pavement carry the never-ceasing flood of cargo out of the factories in Leeds, in Ensley, in Fairfield, to the world beyond. No need for a river anymore.

  The city had been born because the elbow of a river is a great place to set up shop. Here, enterprising business men had founded a settlement, nurtured by the river that would provide the labor for their mills and mines. The river provided water, transportation, motive force. Those industries had prospered and the settlement had grown to a town, the town to a city. But now Birmingham had outgrown its old friend, the river. Now, the waste of the city came to rest here: empty oil drums, wine bottles, the odd boot, all bobbing along in the Cahaba’s dirty currents. What the city used up found its way here, to eventually sink in the forgotten waters.

  So it came as little surprise to the detectives of Homicide Division when the body of an unknown girl was found drifting in the swilling black water. She, too, had been used up and cast aside. The very presence of her body told much about how she ended up there. Her young frame showed that she had completed the cycle of a long slow death, a tortured journey of long misuse. She wasn’t the first, and she wouldn’t be the last.