by Jeff Shelby
“When you were getting out of the business,” I said.
Her cheeks flushed. “No matter what you think, Mr. Tyler, I was getting out. But it’s not like you can just walk away.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are others involved.”
“Pimps?”
“With the level of clientele I serviced, we called them managers,” she said.
“Sure. So, what? Your manager didn’t want you to leave?”
“Of course not,” she said, frowning. “I was a good earner.” She immediately closed her mouth and the color returned to her cheeks as she realized what she was saying. “My clients paid a good amount of money for my time. I was a strong asset.”
It was clear to me through the vocabulary that she was using that she had completely re-imagined, maybe even dressed up, what she had been. I didn’t know what her circumstances were back then and it was none of my business, but listening to her attempt to dignify her work, I was embarrassed for her.
“Did Meredith threaten to go to her father?” I asked.
Something flashed through Olivia Jordan’s eyes and was followed quickly by anger. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact.”
“You obviously didn’t want her to.”
“How very astute of you.”
“You bribe her? Threaten her?”
I expected an immediate denial, but got a moment of silence instead.
“Yes. I threatened to tell her father about her relationship with Derek. The truth about it. That she was sexually active.”
“He knew she was having sex,” I said. “He told me that himself. You talked to him about getting Meredith birth control.”
She nodded. “Yes. But he didn't know that she was dumb enough to pick up an STD. Jon would've freaked out and she knew that. I told her I'd tell him.”
I didn't say anything.
“You have to understand something about Meredith,” she finally said, the lines deepening on her forehead. “About the relationship I have with her. It isn’t the greatest.”
“That’s not what you told me the first time we talked.”
She hiked her shoulders as if that was ancient history. “I answered your questions.”
“I asked if you had a good relationship with your daughter and you said you did,” I reminded her.
“What I said was that I liked to think so,” she said.
My stomach tightened. I had misread Olivia Jordan after my initial visit with her. She had carefully chosen each word she’d spoken to me, in case it came back on her. It had and she was prepared.
“Tell me exactly what that means,” I said through clenched teeth.
“It means, Mr. Tyler, that my daughter can be a serious pain in the ass and that we don’t always get along,” she explained. “She’s a teenager. She doesn’t like her parents very much.”
“Her father has the same problems with her then?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
I took a deep breath. “So basically everything you told me the first time we spoke was a load of crap? The happy family, the great daughter. All of that?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Do you even want to find your daughter?” I finally asked.
She made a face as if I’d defecated on the rug. “What kind of question is that?”
“You don’t seem to miss her,” I said, watching her. “You weren’t terribly worried the first time I came here and today you seem as if you don’t really care whether you see her again.” I paused. “Either you don’t care or you know where she is.”
I hoped she would respond to the last part, but she didn’t. If she knew where her daughter was, she was doing an excellent job of hiding it. What she couldn’t hide, though, was what a hateful human being she was.
“I don’t want to lose this, alright?” she said, leaning forward. “Any of this. I worked extremely hard to leave my old life behind and I’m not giving any of this up.”
She was veering off course, but I didn’t interrupt her.
“She wants to run away and hide, fine,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Go. Be gone. But there’s no way I’ll let her destroy my marriage.”
“You think she ran away?”
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, her jaw tightening. “I don’t know where she is. But as long as she’s not here, she can’t tell Jon the truth.”
“Lovely,” I said, wanting to vomit. “That’s a beautiful sentiment.”
She sat back in the sofa and sneered at me. “It is what it is. Every time I see her, I remember how far I’ve come. I’m not going back.”
“Your husband doesn’t feel that way,” I said.
For all the things that I didn’t like about Jordan, I had no doubt that he would do anything to get his daughter back. He was acting like a normal parent. Unlike his wife.
The sneer spread to every inch of her face. “Of course he doesn’t. He lives and breathes for her, thinks she is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.”
“Jealous?”
The sneer morphed into an explosion of anger and she leapt off the sofa. “She’s not even his child!our
SIXTY-SIX
Olivia Jordan, perhaps stunned herself that she’d spoken the words aloud, stood frozen for a moment before slowly moving back to the sofa. Her face held the angry outline of a frown.
After a few moments, she glanced at me, as if she was making sure that I was still in the room. She looked around, maybe checking to see if anyone else had been listening. Finally, she clasped her hands together and brought her unfocused gaze back to me. “I’ve never said that out loud.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’s…not his daughter,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth slowly and awkwardly, like she was relearning the language. “He’s not her father.”
“Okay,” I said.
Whereas her face had been a mask of anger one minute before, she now bore the expression of a scared and confused woman who was wading into unfamiliar territory.
“I was with Jon,” she began, her hands rubbing together like she was trying to clean them. “We’d been together for a year. I got a call from…” She paused, staring at her hands, unable to find the word she was looking for.
“Your old manager?”
She looked up from her hands, her eyes vacant. “Yes, that’s right. He called me. An old client of mine was in town, asking for me. He was persistent and offering a larger than normal fee.” Her hands started working again. “Thomas…my manager. Thomas called me, explained the situation, asked if I’d do him a favor.” Her hands stopped. “I told him to fuck off.”
She laughed at the memory, though I didn’t see much humor in it.
She laid her hands flat on her thighs. “So Thomas told me if I wouldn’t help him out, he’d tell Jon. About my past.” She shook her head, her lips pursed together in a sour remembrance. “So I did it.”
“And you didn’t tell Jon?” I asked.
“That was the whole point,” she said. “To not let Jon know. About any of it.”
“Didn’t you think he might come back at you again? Thomas?”
“It wasn’t going to happen again,” she said.
“You couldn’t have known that.”
“Trust me,” she said, leveling her eyes with mine. “It won’t happen again.”
I dropped it and moved on. “Okay. So, the client. He’s Meredith’s father?”
Her eyes slipped away again and she nodded slowly. “When I found out I was pregnant, I assumed it was Jon’s. But when I went to the doctor for confirmation, I realized the timing was off. Jon had gone to Europe on business for a few weeks. When I tracked back, I knew it wasn’t his.”
I tried to sort out the questions in my head and get them in an order that would make sense.
“I was protected, like I always had been,” Olivia said, answering one of the questions. “It was a fluke circumstance, the pregnancy.”
“I was going to,” she said. “That was the plan.” She shook her head. “But a phone call came to the house from the doctor’s office. Jon answered. This was before doctors started taking privacy seriously. He was ecstatic.” A thin, empty smile crept onto her face. “No going back at that point.”
“Did you tell the father?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I’m sure he didn’t use his real name.”
“Wouldn’t…your manager have known?”
She leveled her eyes with mine. “Probably.”
I left it alone. “And I assume Meredith doesn’t know?”
“Of course not. It was bad enough that she learned what I used to be. There was no way I’d tell her the truth.”
“You didn’t worry about her finding out?”
She frowned. “How would she find out when I was the only one who knew? And why would I have wanted to know him? Introductions would’ve been a little awkward, don’t you think?”
It was clear by her tone that she didn't care what I thought.
“You think that would’ve been easy?” she said, gathering steam, her anger fueling her. “You think maybe we could’ve solved our little problem if we’d all just sat down and talked about it? Maybe turned into some sort of Brady Bunch? Give me a fucking break.”
Her eyes were wide with fury. I wasn’t exactly sure who or what she was mad at, but I was getting a good idea.
“Every time you see her,” I finally said.
She stared for a long time at me and I assumed I would get some angry denials, maybe some more profanity. But her face finally took on an accepting expression, the resignation that she couldn’t-or didn’t want to-hide it any longer.
“Yes,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Every time I see Meredith, I am reminded of what I used to be. Of who her father is, of how she came to be. And every time I see her with Jon, when he’s gloating over her, spending time with her, telling her how wonderful she is…” She cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t want to be reminded of that part of my life, but every day, I see her and I see it.”
“She’s your daughter, too,” I said.
“No, she’s not,” she said, shaking her head, looking right through me. “She’s the daughter of someone who no longer exists.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
I walked outside, the interior of the Jordan home feeling toxic and ugly.
I’d asked Olivia a few more questions. It immediately occurred to me that perhaps she had done something with Meredith, but I let go of it almost as quickly. She was interested in protecting her place in the Jordan family and was not going to jeopardize that. She may not have cared for the sight of her daughter, but I doubted that she played any part in her disappearance.
The afternoon sun was high and prominent and the heat weighed on me, unwanted. I sat down beneath the sprawling portico, slipping into the shade.
I was trying to be sympathetic to Olivia Jordan’s situation, but failing. I knew that my own loss played into those feelings, but I didn’t think that if Elizabeth was still with me and Lauren, and we were still married, that I’d feel any different. I didn’t know what had drawn Olivia into prostitution and I didn’t care. She'd made the choice and had to live with it, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. But she'd made the choice. I didn’t see how taking out her frustration on her daughter helped.
By all accounts, Meredith was a good kid. I knew that wasn’t the entire story, but it appeared that she had friends and people liked her. Regardless of the choices she was making now, she didn’t deserve to be looked at as an ugly talisman by Olivia.
And no matter how long Olivia thought she could keep her secrets buried, she was wrong. Secrets don’t stay buried.
They just wait to be dug up.
SIXTY-EIGHT
I was halfway back to Coronado when my cell chirped.
“I checked with vice here,” Mike Lorenzo told me. “Nothing on Olivia Jordan. She runs clean.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
I wasn’t. “I just finished talking to her. She’s screwed up, but she gave it up awhile ago. Pretty sure about that.”
“Gotcha. I did get something else, though” he said. “Not sure if it matters or not.”
“Alright.”
“I called my buddy Tully over in Vegas again, just asked him to poke around her name, see if anything shook out,” he said. “He dug up one thing.”
I pulled over to the side of the road. I kept forgetting that California was a hands-free state and I didn’t want to get stopped while I was paying attention to Mike’s call.
“He tried to track back to her, see if any of her old connections were still live,” he explained. “Turned up the name of the piece of crap who was supposedly her pimp. Tommy Lutton.”
Her manager, Olivia had called him. Thomas. She’d even tried to dress up his name.
“But his ticket was punched awhile back,” Mike said. “Found dead in an alley behind a Denny’s.”
A dull flash fired inside my head. “Oh yeah?”
“Couple of bullets in his face,” he said. “Shooter never found.”
My stomach clenched. “When was this?”
More pages flipped. “Awhile back, actually. Maybe sixteen years? Can’t find the date on here.”
I didn’t need the date. Olivia had been adamant that he would never bother her again. Now I knew why.
“Joe?” Mike asked. “Joe?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
He paused. “That do anything for you?”
I watched cars fly by on the highway, a knot in my stomach. I wasn’t a cop anymore, but the instinct to act like a cop was always with me and influenced everything that I did. I was certain that Tommy Lutton’s death was not a coincidence and that Olivia Jordan had, at the very least, played a part in it. Maybe she hadn’t pulled the trigger, but she was involved. But I wasn’t sure what was to be gained, either, by exposing her. It wouldn’t help Chuck and it wouldn’t help me locate Meredith.
“No,” I finally said. “That doesn’t do anything for me.”
SIXTY-NINE
Gina Coleman was waiting at my hotel for me.
“Charges are dropped,” she said.
I looked around the hotel lobby. “Where’s Jordan?”
“Probably trying to find someone to choke,” she said. “He’s furious.”
“Good for him.”
“I get that you feel like you got screwed,” she said. “And I’m not even saying you didn’t. But you agreed to help find Meredith and it hasn’t happened.”
“I can’t just snap my fingers.”
“No, you can’t. But you show up at his house and pull that power play, you can’t expect him to be happy about it.”
“You think he expected me to be happy about kicking the shit out of my friend?” I asked. “Sending two assholes to cut him down for something he didn’t do in the first place?”
She started to say something, but I cut her off.
“The same guy that you allegedly give a shit about,” I said.
Her cheeks reddened. “I didn’t know.”
“Sure.”
Irritation flared in her eyes. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you know. Bother you at all?”
She stepped in closer to me, the red having spread to most of her face. “Of course it bothers me. That’s why I just quit my job.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Nothing to say to that?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “No wiseass comeback, no sarcastic rebuke questioning my loyalty?” She clicked her tongue. “You must be tired.”
She'd caught me off guard and I deserved what she was giving me.
“I’m sorry you had to quit your job,” I said.
&
nbsp; “Sure you are.”
“I am.”
“Fuck you.”
She turned and headed for the lobby doors.
I stood there for a moment, not sure what to do. She was angry at me for a couple of reasons, but she was also clearly angry about quitting. She needed time to cool off, but I didn’t want to waste the time.
I followed her outside. “I am sorry about your job, whether or not you believe it.”
She was standing in front of the hotel, arms crossed, annoyance set like concrete on her face, her eyes like hollow-tipped bullets. Aimed at me.
“But I still need your help,” I said. “Chuck still needs your help.”
“Chuck is clear,” she said, the concrete cracking a bit.
“No, he won’t be clear until Meredith is found and she clears him,” I said. “It’ll stick to him until she says it was a lie, charges or no charges.”
She thought about that.
“Did you know Olivia Jordan was a hooker?” I asked.
The concrete shattered completely. “What?”
“I need your help,” I repeated. “Come inside and let me tell you what I know. Please.”
After a moment, she nodded and we went inside and sat down at a table in the hotel cafe. I explained what I’d learned from Mike and from Olivia, leaving out the part about Olivia having possibly killed her pimp. I watched her expression the same way I’d watched Olivia Jordan’s. If she was aware of anything I was telling her, she fooled me.
“That is really hard to believe,” she said when I’d finished.
“Tell me something,” I said. “It’s been bugging me since Olivia told me. Wouldn't Jordan have checked out Olivia before marrying her? Wouldn’t he have done some sort of look into her background?”
She cocked her head to the side, running it through her mind. “I don’t know. Now? For sure. It’s one of the things I spent the majority of my time on. Anyone that was working for him, we did lengthy background checks on.” She squinted, like she was trying to see into the past. “But back then? I don’t know. He hadn’t amassed his wealth yet and his company wasn’t nearly what it is today. It’s hard to say. I’ve never for a second thought that their marriage was a sham.” Her eyes came back to their normal gauge. “I think he loves her. You don’t normally run your prospective fiance through the system, you know?”
