Lady Midnight

by Timothy C. Phillips

  Had Randy Cross called this man? I didn’t think so. More likely, Randy’s change in attitude towards me indicated that he’d talked with someone else, and that person had gotten in touch with Raincoat, and that Randy had known, or at least suspected this, upon my last visit. No doubt he had been afraid. I thought about Randy’s sudden insistence that I leave, and looked at the man in the blue raincoat. I studied him openly.

  Underneath the blue plastic sheath of the raincoat itself, he was the best-dressed killer that I had ever seen. He looked like he was yet another member of the Yacht Club of Death, to which Baucom and the dead Bowman belonged. He wore an expensive suit, also blue, and a watch that was a close approximation of the Rolex that I had noticed on Bowman’s wrist on that fateful day. The manicured hands that bracketed the newspaper attested to a life free of manual labor. He had a healthy tan, was about six foot one, and looked like he worked out.

  He also looked like a man who had an office somewhere, one who spent the first half of his day exchanging telephone calls and e-mails about where he and his friends were going to eat lunch, and the last half chatting with those same friends at the place they decided on. But not to underestimate him; I had seen him blow Bowman’s man’s brains out under the pretense of having a friendly chat. I was willing to bet he’d do the same for me.

  I was almost through with my coffee when I saw a bright green VW bug pull up in front of the building across the street. Nookie hopped out, a magazine over her head to protect her hair from the misting rain, and ran up to the front door. I put some money on the table and went out, giving the man in the raincoat a slight nod. He smiled politely, and serenely nodded back.

  I went over to my car and sat in it for a minute. The man in the raincoat didn’t move; he just sat in the corner booth, pretending not to watch me. I retrieved my .45 from under the seat and pretended to talk on my cell phone. Then, I got out of my car and went up to the door of Nookie’s building and pushed the intercom button to her apartment.

  “Hello.”

  “Nookie, it’s Roland.”

  “Hah. I knew you couldn’t resist my charms.”

  “Could you buzz me in?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I stepped inside the foyer of the building and shot a glance back through the glass. Raincoat was on the move, walking casually out of the coffee shop.

  Nookie’s apartment was on the third floor. I went up the two flights of stairs and stopped on a landing. From below came the faint sounds of the lock rattling. The man in the raincoat was picking the lock to the front door of the building.

  I slowly pulled the .45 and waited. Above me I heard Nookie open her door and step out. “Roland, what’s taking you so long?”

  “Nookie, go back inside,” I called to her, waving the girl back into her apartment. She saw the gun in my hand and her eyes widened. She gasped and stepped back inside her apartment. And just then I heard the man in the blue raincoat come through the door. I took a quick look and saw him hesitate for a moment, gun in hand. Then he started charging up the stairs.

  He wasn’t expecting me to be standing there, waiting for him. His eyes met mine and widened in alarm.

  “Drop it,” I managed to say before the other man’s gun came up, firing once, twice, and for a moment there was that serene feeling that only sudden, utter terror can bring, when time slows to a miserable crawl and the bullets spin through the air like honeybees in a sunlit meadow, harmless motes, except for the fact you are slowed down too and cannot slap them from the air to fall harmlessly away from you, and if one of them finds its way to you it will burrow into you like a carpenter’s drill and the life will spring forth from you in a warm arterial spray, leaving you dead like people they find in forgotten rivers, or those who die in expensive cars parked outside crowded restaurants on certain rainy days.

  I fired without knowing if I’d been hit myself, in that red blinding second you have to shoot and stay calm even if it means making yourself a better target, because you had one or two seconds to take the other man out before his training and practice got the better of the situation. I steadied my gun hand by cradling it in my left, took half a breath, and emptied my gun at the man who stood below me on the stairs, shooting up at me. My trigger finger also pulled the switch that sped time back up to its normal pace. I saw the man below me go down on his back. He slowly slid back down the stairs, his unseeing eyes looking up at the ceiling of the stairwell.

  I went down there and checked his throat for a pulse. There wasn’t any. My .45 had put four neat holes in his chest, and nobody but nobody shrugs off four slugs from a .45. I parted the man’s coat and saw that he’d been wearing a bullet-proof vest. Bullet resistant, I corrected myself. Well, this one hadn’t resisted very well, luckily for me. I got up and went up the stairs to Nookie’s apartment and pushed the door open.

  Nookie was cringing on the couch in the far corner of the room. She was shaking and she looked nearly hysterical. I went over, took her gently by the shoulders and made her look me in the face.

  “Calm down. It’s me, Roland. No one is going to hurt you. It’s over.”

  “Oh god, that man out there, is he dead?”

  I nodded and sat down beside her on the couch. “Who was he? Did you know him?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. I met him once before. His name was Pitman.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “I saw him at Big Daddy’s place once. He was with another man, someone named Grant.”

  “What were they doing there?”

  “They were talking about getting money. A lot of money they said they were going to get from Connie’s old man.”

  “Senator Patrick. They were blackmailing him?”

  “I think so. Yeah. But they wouldn’t let me in on any of the details.”

  “Was he paying them to keep Connie’s adult movies under wraps?”

  Nookie shook her head. “No. That was my dumb idea. This was different. She went to them with something.”

  “What? Why would she do that? That doesn’t make sense. Connie’s the one with everything to lose in all of this.”

  “She did, I mean—Connie lost that baby, Roland. She was doing coke, even though she knew that she was pregnant. It was like she just didn’t care. I don’t think she could stop, anyway. She lost the baby and then when she was in the hospital, the people there called her father—the Senator. When she found out they’d notified him, she left the hospital and came here. She didn’t want him to come for her. She’d just had a miscarriage, but that’s how bad she didn’t want to see him. Can you imagine? But they gave him my place as her only known address, I guess. Then those men Senator Patrick hired showed up here—Grant and Pitman. They showed up here and said that they had come to take her home.”

  “Grant told me that he and his partner, a man named Bowman, were working for Senator Patrick,” I said, seeing if Bowman’s name evoked a reaction.

  “Grant and Pitman told me that they were working for Senator Patrick, that night.”

  “You’re sure there wasn’t another man with them?” I thought of Bowman, dead in the misting rain outside of Sally’s Diner, with his expensive gold watch and silver pistol.

  “No. There were just the two of them.” Nookie looked into my eyes. “Connie didn’t want to go home. She hated her father. She told them something that changed their minds. I don’t know what. But just like that, they were listening to her, and it was clear things had changed. They made me leave the room, and I tried to listen but that guy out there.” She glanced past me, out to where Pitman’s body lay. “He made me sit in a chair and kept talking to me. Grant called Big Daddy and he came over here—they all had a long talk. They decided to do something else. Then, they left with Connie. Big Daddy told me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “This ‘something else’ she told them about. It’s the reason they weren’t interested in your own blackmail idea?”

  Nookie’s face clouded. “Her
brother screwed me over, and I was just trying to get my money back. I was her friend, for Christ’s sake.”

  I let the obvious irony that she was going to expose her dear friend’s identity to hoodlums for drug money pass without comment. “So where is Connie now?”

  “You’d have to ask that guy, Grant. After everything that happened, he started running things. It seemed like he and Big Daddy had some kind of understanding.”

  “Nookie, did you lie about Anthony Herron, too? About knowing him?”

  She shook her head. “I swear to God. I never even heard of the guy.”

  I stood and put my hand on her shoulder. “Look, I have to go. Stay in here until the police get here. Tell them everything. Everything. I’ll be back when this is all over.”

  Chapter 18

  I was on my way back to Randy Cross’s place, when my cell phone rang. It was Baucom, according to the number on the screen. Quite a coincidence, I mused. I pulled into a parking lot near the CNN Building and took the call.

  “Longville.”

  “Mr. Longville, this is Baucom, Senator Patrick’s assistant,” he said as though I might have trouble remembering him from the previous day.

  “I guess the Senator told you about our last little chat, then.”

  “He did. The Senator just wanted me to assure you that he has complete confidence in you, that he was upset by some revelations that your investigation has made so far, but—”

  “Anthony Herron,” I said.

  “Excuse me? Have you located Mr. Herron?”

  “No. I’m glad you called, because I wanted to ask you. Have you ever met Anthony Herron, Mr. Baucom?”

  “No, not personally.”

  “Mr. Baucom, I don’t mean, have you ever been introduced. I don’t mean, have you ever spoken in passing. What I mean is, have you ever even been in the same room with Anthony Herron? Have you ever actually seen him, even from a distance? From a car? In a crowd? Have you, in fact, Mr. Baucom, ever laid eyes on this young man who you told me is named Anthony Herron?”

  From the heavy silence on the other end I could tell Baucom was doing some soul searching. But was he carefully formulating his answer to continue covering for Patrick, or was he coming to some realization of his own regarding the story Patrick had given him? I was betting that Baucom was an honest man. When he finally spoke again, I felt more than a little vindicated for my faith in the man.

  “No,” Baucom said, simply. The little word, with all of its implications, hung in the static between us for a long moment.

  “The picture . . . the photo of Anthony Herron that you gave me when we all met in the back of the Senator’s limo, where did that picture come from?”

  “The Senator supplied me with the photograph. He said he got it from Connie’s room.”

  “And other than that instance, Mr. Baucom, had you ever heard of Anthony Herron before? Ever before in your life?”

  “Well, no. I can’t say that I had.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Baucom.”

  “What are you getting at with all of this, Mr. Longville?”

  “I’m not completely sure at the moment, but whatever is happening here, I’m beginning to have my doubts about Anthony Herron’s responsibility. In fact, I’m beginning to think that when I get to the bottom of just whatever is going on here, it isn’t going to have a whole lot to do with anyone named Anthony Herron.”

  Baucom had fallen silent on the other end.

  “I’ll call you when I know more,” I said, and hung up. Whatever was happening with Connie Patrick, I was willing to bet that Baucom was as much in the dark as I was, at the moment.

  I pulled back into traffic and continued on to the building that housed the firm formerly known as Grant and Bowman.

  Ms. Oliver wasn’t at her desk, and Grant wasn’t expecting company. All the same, I came through the door with my .45 in my hand. My meeting with Pitman had demonstrated that Grant wasn’t pulling any punches. He had obviously sent Pitman to silence Nookie and myself. Grant was probably in there waiting for Pitman to show. He was probably wondering why he hadn’t called to let him know how things had gone. Maybe he was getting a little worried, too.

  Maybe he was sitting behind his desk with a gun trained on the door. There was no way to know. But those are the chances you take. Grant was actually standing behind his desk when I walked in. His eyes widened when he saw me.

  “Longville.”

  It was clear that I was the last person he’d been expecting to see. “I know what you’ve been doing, Grant. Where’s Constance Patrick being held?”

  “Don’t make we laugh, Longville. That girl is nothing but a drug addict and a whore. If you know what’s been going on, then you know she’s involved in the local porn business. What trash. You’d expect more from a senator’s daughter, eh? I mean, she could at least go to California and get involved in the real thing.”

  “Where are you holding her?”

  Grant smoothed his hair. “No one is holding anyone against their will, Longville. Constance Patrick hates her father, hates him, and she has good reason to. She came to us with a blackmail scheme.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it.”

  “Sure. This Nookie character was mad at her girlfriend over some kind of junkie’s disagreement. She had some tapes. But Connie had something a lot more interesting.”

  I decided to sweet talk him. “You’re scum, Grant.”

  “I’m in business here, Longville, the same as you. I dig up secrets. Sometimes the secrets that I uncover aren’t the ones people want me to find. I’m sure that you, of all people, know what I’m talking about. The Senator hired me for the same reason that he later hired you, not to find things, but to keep them hidden. He had secrets that he wanted forever buried. I accidentally happened upon his darkest secrets, and realized they were worth something to me.”

  “And so you decided to blackmail him, maybe keep him from becoming governor.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Of course I don’t want to keep him from getting elected. I’d love to have a governor in my pocket. All the better.”

  That was illuminating, but there were still details that were murky; I took a stab in the dark. “So that’s why you had your partner killed?”

  Grant’s expression soured. “Bowman found out what I was doing and came in here spewing a lot of his college boy ideals. He acted like politicians don’t immerse themselves in this kind of deal every day.”

  “I still don’t understand why Bowman was in Birmingham.”

  Grant laughed aloud. “He was an idealist. He found out where Baucom was from someone at Senator Patrick’s office. He was going to spill the whole thing to Baucom. I guess the two idealistic college men were going to put the universe right, in Bowman’s mind. He was a fool.”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. The man in the car, looking towards the Brook’s building, while I took a late breakfast. I watched him die.

  “It was raining that day. I was late getting to the office. The rain must have held Baucom up, too. He didn’t get there until after Bowman died. I saw him get shot.”

  “You saw Pitman, then?” Grant asked with a curiosity that sounded less than sincere, as he put his hands on his desk.

  “The man in the blue raincoat. Yes. I saw him kill your partner. I saw him again today. Get your hands off your desk, Grant, and move away from it.”

  Grant didn’t move away. One of his hands slid under the desktop.

  “Grant, don’t—” I raised my .45 just as Grant brought a small silver automatic up from his desk drawer and fired. The roar of the .45 was deafening in the office. Grant spun like a top and went down in a way that would have been comical if were not so grotesque.

  I walked around behind the desk, gun first. Grant lay on the floor, a dazed expression on his face. He managed to prop himself up against his chair. He looked down where the .45 slug had punched a hole beneath his lower rib, on the left side. There was a lot of blood, and it was flowing f
ast. Grant knew he was dying. He seemed to weigh this fact for a second. He looked up at me and opened his mouth to speak.

  “The kid. The one she was carrying.” He tried to say something else, but his voice failed.

  “What? What are you trying to tell me, Grant?”

  He was silent, struggling hard to get his breath.

  “Grant. Where is Connie Patrick?”

  “Vince has her. Vince and his pal, Big Daddy Lorenzo. She’s at their place, out in Great Neck. Part of our deal. He has her. He’s keeping her stoned and locked up tight. I handle the money. Senator never heard their names.”

  “What is it that you’ve got on Senator Patrick, Grant?”

  “The rotten bastard. Here. Highway 65. You go see for yourself, Longville,” Grant hissed.

  For a man so dirty, suddenly he seemed like he wanted awfully bad to come clean. Dying does that to a man, I knew; I had seen it before. He extended his hand, and even as he died, his hand opened up, and in his palm was a key ring. On it were two keys.

  When I looked down at Grant’s face, I could have sworn there was the ghost of a smile that haunted the corners of the dead man’s mouth. I took the keys, then stood and looked down at him for another long moment.

  I looked around the office. Grant’s shot had put a hole squarely through his own framed license that hung on the wall next to the door, as though his own corruption had, in the end, forever cancelled his membership in the brotherhood of those who struggled in the darkness of the world to find the light of truth, or something close to it. I shook my head, and turned to go. It was time to go see what answers lay out on Highway 65.

  Chapter 19

  The key had a cheap plastic tag that identified it as the property of All-Season Storage. The business in question was on the shoulder of Interstate 65, off a seldom used exit, and shared only by a decrepit gas station with 1960s style pumps on one side of the highway, and an overgrown lot on the other.