Vince smiled even more broadly at that. “You’re a little behind times. Big D’s been out of the can for months. He got an early release and we’re in business together. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to visit with some of my talent, in this very building here. And I promise you, if you lay hands on me again, you’ll regret it.”
With that the sweaty, chunky man moved cautiously away. I stood there on the sidewalk, slightly stunned at what he had just told me. How could they let a monster like Big Daddy out of prison? Prisons had been invented for people just like him.
Once again, I felt like my hand was a couple of cards short. I didn’t like Vince and Big Daddy showing up in the current mess. I didn’t like the timing, and the placement was all wrong. Suddenly it dawned on me that Vince was going into Nookie’s building, and everything fell into place with crystal clarity.
Vince and Big Daddy were in the porn business, and Nookie Uberalles was working for them. She was the “talent” that Vince had been referring to, which meant one thing: Vince and Big Daddy knew Constance Patrick, too. Suddenly I felt that Vince had been right, and I was very far behind the times, indeed.
Chapter 12
Since Big Daddy had been in prison, wonderful things had happened. Sure, Communism had ended, and all that stuff, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Politics and world affairs didn’t matter to him. No, other stuff had happened, stuff that had affected him in a very real and positive way, something that he could never have foreseen affecting him in the least—but it had.
The Internet had happened.
Vince had once worked for him. Vince, his old buddy and muscle that he used to send around to collect on late loan payments. Since Big Daddy had been inside, Vince had grown a brain. While Big Daddy had gone down for five to twenty-five after they had dosed a hooker with some too-pure heroin and the bitch had died, Vince had gotten off with probation. He bought a computer when the Internet was just starting out. It seems he’d had some latent talent. Vince had quickly understood what few could grasp in the beginning days, that the Internet was going to be the place where people made money. Millions, billions, trillions of sweet dollars were waiting out there in the form of Ones and Zeroes.
True, you couldn’t ship smack or deliver a hooker over the phone lines, the cables, or the airwaves that this new medium of communication depended on for its existence. So what could you sell over the Internet? Porn, in all its various and wonderful forms. Vince had understood that, and the beauty of it was, he had correctly surmised that other people would understand it, too. You see, you could sell a hooker to a million guys at once through a computer. You could sell your old lady to them, every night, and plenty of people did, and nobody had to touch anybody; the girls never even had to see the faces of these virtual Johns.
A girl sits in a booth in Munich, in Bangkok, in Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires, in Atlanta, and maybe she’s in college and needs the dough, or maybe she’s got a little habit she can’t kick, whatever, because all she has to do is put on some lingerie and a smile and lay on a bed and stare into a web cam, and all over the world in lonely rooms lonely men with no confidence, or husbands with secret needs or pimple-faced kids with hearts beating fast stare back at the girl on the screen and take part in the oldest hustle in the world, one that’s been going on since nervous husbands followed the footprints of whores in Ancient Rome who had the come-on in Latin, “Follow me” engraved on the bottoms of their sandals so prospective customers could literally follow the trail to what they were looking for. It was an old racket, even then.
The guy on the Internet doesn’t get the payoff, though. He pays and pays and pays, but he never even gets laid. It’s a tease that never ends. The poor slob goes into a video chat room and sees a hot girl in lingerie, and begs and begs to see some skin, until finally the girl tells him, well, if you like what you see, enter your credit card number to see more. Join the site and we’ll go private. Become a premium member. Pay us, you slob. And they did. Night after night, ten million poor slobs put themselves in credit hell forever to see something that they could never touch. And they came back, night after night, time after time. If you couldn’t see the beauty in that, well, you just didn’t like money.
Vince had found the goose that laid a big fat golden egg, without fail, every single day. And there was another side to this fabulous coin. They got to shoot their own porn flicks. Short and sweet and straight to the point features that the geeks they dealt with referred to as “content,” and for which they paid thousands of dollars each, without batting a jaded eye. Vince had started his own little video company called Blue Moon Video, and now he and Big Daddy churned out that content for their web-geek customers.
These little movies got loaded onto websites that were visited by millions of web surfers per month—tens of thousands per day. Big Daddy still wasn’t clear on just how it all paid, all he knew was, that the checks rolled in to Blue Moon every month, thousands of dollars, completely legal.
Big Daddy had adjusted quickly. There was money and booze and drugs and naked girls, and plenty of them, right? So, no problem. At first, he had thought that he was getting a handout and a free ride from his old buddy Vince, just because of old times. But the more he hung around, he realized that Vince was a businessman, despite all the pretty young girls and pool parties. Vince was busy, so busy, in fact, that he needed Big Daddy’s help.
The hardest part was realizing that it was all true. And one day, it had hit him. Shangri-La. Like the place in the book that he had felt strangely drawn to in prison. The place he had liked to think about, on those long boring days that seemed to stretch off into forever sometimes, to take him far away from Draper Correctional Facility in his mind. He had found his Shangri-La. Big Daddy’s heaven on this brutal, bleeding earth was a mansion in Great Neck, an endless supply of liquor, and a big pool out back surrounded by naked broads. Shangri-La was a glass topped-table with nine lines of coke as long as a prison shank, and all the enlightenment he would ever need was a big wad of cash he could slap in the hand of the parole officer, who had shown up once, taken the dough, and obligingly winked and took a major powder, never to be seen again.
Some probation file somewhere was being updated on a monthly basis, and that file said Big Daddy was shaping up to be a solid citizen, gainfully employed, thank you very much. And so maybe there really was a Shangri-La for some people, Big Daddy pondered, as he padded out to his waiting poolside deckchair and took a seat in the shade of the big umbrella. And somehow, maybe sitting in that prison cell, he reasoned, he had earned his right to enjoy his version, as long as he was able. He had done his time, now he could take it easy. A topless girl appeared, cinnamon skin glistening from the pool. She put a drink in his hand and rubbed Big Daddy’s neck.
Ah.
He took a long drink, found it was a Margarita, and decided that he liked it, just fine. He squeezed the girl’s thigh and turned to smile broadly at her.
“Shangri-La, baby.”
Chapter 13
I set the box of Connie Patrick’s belongings on the car seat next to me, and lifted off the top. Inside I found a diary, a bible, a small stuffed bear, and a photo album. I opened the diary and skimmed through it, but it was clear from the profusion of entries and the tiny, dense handwriting that I would have to pore over it later.
I put the diary back in the box and opened the photo album. The first page featured a picture of Connie and Randy Cross. They were twelve or thirteen, perhaps, smiling into the camera; they both seemed comfortable and happy. I turned the page and saw that many of the pictures were of Connie and her half brother. Clearly, at some point in the past, Randy Cross had not been such a carefully kept secret. Perhaps, as the Senator had become more prominent, his bastard son had also become more of a potential liability, and so Patrick had pushed him back into the shadows of his own shame.
I flipped through the pages. There were a few more pictures of Connie as a youngster, and a couple of even
older pictures of an attractive brunette woman, taken in black and white. She was clearly Connie’s mother; they had the same classic bone structure and the same sparkle in their eyes. I had just decided that there was probably little value in the pictures, when I turned the page and saw what Nookie, no doubt, had been smiling coyly about in her apartment. She hadn’t mentioned it. She probably knew that sooner or later I would find it on my own.
In the last picture, Connie was standing by herself, in profile. The photograph had been taken in the very room where Nookie had given me the box, obviously during Connie’s stay there, in the last couple of weeks. She appeared quite pregnant. I carefully slid the picture out of its vellum sleeve and took a closer look. Constance Patrick, platinum blond and undeniably beautiful, glowing with her pregnancy, her hands laced under her bulging belly. She wore a short white maternity gown and was barefoot. I turned it over. On the back was written: “Three months along and already getting fat.”
Three months along. That meant that she had been pregnant longer than she had been missing. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that Senator Patrick or Baucom had known about the pregnancy. In fact, of all the people I had met, the only person I could safely argue had known was the girl who called herself Nookie Uberalles.
Be that as it may, I had a strong suspicion that some of the people whom I’d talked to so far had known about the pregnancy, and that was somehow the driving force behind the lies that people were telling me. Just why, right now, I couldn’t say.
Chapter 14
“Quiet on the set,” Big Daddy called. There was a momentary murmur and some giggles, and then quiet. Big Daddy liked to call out that command before shooting started. It made him feel like a big-time Hollywood director, or at least, how he figured a guy like that might feel. He was directing a Blue Moon video, and that meant something to him. You had to take whatever you were doing seriously, he told himself.
I mean, we’re not exactly shooting Casablanca or something here, Big Daddy thought wryly to himself. Not that he’d rather be doing anything but what he was currently doing. Big Daddy was directing porno shorts in digital format, which he provided to various online porn distributors, and he loved his work. That was where the money was, and Big Daddy had to be where the money was. In the old days, Vince had worked for him. Now, he worked for Vince, but as long as the work was this enjoyable, he didn’t really care who was boss.
Big Daddy had learned quickly after getting out of the joint. Vince had set him up doing one or two of these gigs a day, watching naked young bodies squirm around all over each other, and getting paid, brother, quick easy cash, by people who put this stuff on the Internet for losers to sit at home and pay good money to get off to. Shangri-La, Big Daddy thought, I have found you at last. At night the girls from the movies were playmates for Big Daddy and his old pal Vince. There was liquor and weed and coke, too, if a guy wanted it, invisible parole officer and terms of his early release notwithstanding. Big Daddy was out of the big house, and he was staying out.
“Okay, come on out, sweetheart,” Big Daddy called to the girl in the next room. He and his crew were currently set up in a house that belonged to one of his investors, one of the Web geeks who made this all possible, who also was acting as part of the crew today, holding the sound boom. It meant the guy got to watch, and he’d put up the money for half of the equipment, anyway. Whatever the guy wanted, as long as Big Daddy got to make his little dirty pictures, and they all got paid.
The script, such as it was, called for the hottie in this number to come into the kitchen in a negligee, and be surprised by the cable guy (or meter reader, or whatever the hell the guy in coveralls and a tool belt who entered through the sliding glass doors thirty seconds later was supposed to be), and then they both were to act attracted to each other and get naked and get down to it. Big Daddy couldn’t decide if he wanted to work another girl into the scene. He really liked watching two chicks go at it, but he was having some trouble deciding how to do it because the damn thing had to make some sense, after all, even if you weren’t Fritz Lang, or somebody important.
Big Daddy was pondering all of that when he was suddenly interrupted. Right on cue, the girl be-bopped into the kitchen, where they were all set up, when Big Daddy’s cell phone rang, screwing everything up. “Aw, shit, cut, cut!” Big Daddy snapped, and pulled out his phone. They’d have to re-shoot that bit. Couldn’t have a cell phone going off in the background, when the chick was supposed to be home alone. Damn scene had to make some sense, he reassured himself. He’d have to remember to shut off his ringer when shooting was going on.
“Big Daddy.” He held his phone to his ear and listened. Vince started talking in a low insistent voice, and the look on Big Daddy’s face clouded and darkened. Storms were gathering over Shangri-La.
“Roland Longville?” Big Daddy asked in a growl, his voice incredulous. “What the hell’s he doing here?” He listened for a moment longer, then nodded. “Okay. I guess we better let Grant know, then. We can’t let Longville queer the deal.”
Big Daddy put his cell phone away, and frowned. Roland Longville had been the reason he’d gotten put away. He hated Longville. Big Daddy had overdosed a hooker in Birmingham to try to avoid the clink, but Longville had made sure that Big Daddy got tied to the crime. He owed Longville for five long years of his life spent inside.
Suddenly he became aware of the geeky guy staring at him.
“Big Daddy? We ready to continue here?”
“Sure, sure kid.” He took a deep breath. He’d figure out the Longville thing later.
The slender dark-haired girl stood in her negligee, tapping the toe of one high-heeled foot. Big Daddy shook off the bad vibes that had momentarily intruded on his creative process. He turned his attention to the girl. Damn, she looked hot. He’d have to have this girl over to his pad, later, after she’d had a shower, and some mouthwash—a lot of mouthwash.
“Okay, sugar, go back out and we’ll do it again.” Big Daddy looked around the room, then yelled, “Quiet on the set!”
The girl entered the room again, and looked in mock surprise at the muscular guy who appeared suddenly on the other side of the glass sliding doors that led out onto the patio. Then, she went over and opened the door, allowing him to step inside. On cue, the sound man started some rhythmic, funky music, and the two young people started to disrobe and fondle one another.
Hey, maybe the other chick could be the upstairs neighbor, who comes down to complain about the noise, Big Daddy thought. He turned to a guy standing nearby and whispered to him, “Get another chick in here.”
Big Daddy nodded slowly to himself. Forget Longville just for now, he told himself. Nothing mattered but art.
Chapter 15
I sat in my car and considered what I’d found. The revelation of Connie’s pregnancy meant that I’d been lied to by Randy Cross, and possibly by Senator Patrick himself, if he had known. I took out my cell phone and dialed the number for Senator Patrick’s office that Baucom had given me. Baucom answered, and I tried to bite back the annoyance in my voice when I spoke, lest I tip him off something was wrong.
“I need to talk to Senator Patrick, Mr. Baucom.”
Patrick came on the line after a moment and some polite murmuring from Baucom. “Yes, Roland?” His voice sounded pure and hopeful.
“I just wanted you to know that I have found a friend with whom Connie was staying until recently. I’ve recovered certain personal items of Connie’s that were left at the friend’s residence.”
“Excellent, excellent! It’s vitally important that you bring those things to my office at once. At once, Roland.” The man’s voice fairly swelled with something like triumph; he sounded like he’d just announced his candidacy, or maybe even won the election in his dreams.
“Actually, senator, I was on my way over there right now, anyway. There’s a matter that I wanted to discuss with you—”
“Anything, anything. Come right away.”
I put my cell phone away. Patrick’s exuberance was so powerful that I found it puzzling. What was in these few items that could possibly make him so happy? It was almost as if the daughter herself had suddenly become secondary in importance, or perhaps of not much importance at all.
Senator Patrick kept an office in midtown, and I headed there now. The security in the lobby waved a paddle over me and had me sign in. They phoned up to Patrick’s office and announced my presence. No Sam Spade-style barging in this time, I reflected. The Senator was in, and would see me, the bored retiree in the blue uniform behind the security desk informed me, and gestured towards the elevators.
I rode the elevator up, trying to formulate questions. I felt Randy Cross had been right about Patrick, and his tendency to hold more cards than he was showing. That fit in well with his being a professional politician, and, to be brutally honest with myself, I had to admit that it explained the entire reason that he had hired me in the first place. The whole point was to avoid embarrassment that might damage his chances for higher office, to keep his daughter’s wild side private. The more I learned about Patrick, however, the less concerned I was with those chances.
The door opened and Baucom met me at the door. “Right this way, Mr. Longville.” But Baucom did not follow me into Patrick’s office.
“Roland.” Senator Patrick rounded a massive mahogany desk to greet me ebulliently, with a firm and honest handshake that only clasped half my hand. A car salesman’s handshake, in itself some kind of slight, that contained a hint of the short-changing to come. I shifted the box full of Connie’s things to one hand to grasp the Senator’s hand. Clearly, he was still in the grip of whatever strange happiness that I had sensed over the phone.
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