Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time

by M. P. Wright

  “Blanchard Stewart partners, can I help you?” A young woman’s voice chirped at me from down the other end of the line.

  “Good morning. I’d like to speak to Mr Terrence Blanchard please.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Blanchard is with a client at the moment, can I take a message, and get him to return your call later?”

  The young woman was precise, efficient and obviously good at cutting to the chase. I was staring to dislike her already.

  “No, but I need to speak to the man now. So you go tell your boss that you have a Mr Joseph Ellington on the telephone and that he would like to urgently discuss the important matter about his club with him. Now, you be sure to tell him my name and that it’s urgent, got that?”

  The other end of the phone went silent for a moment as the switchboard operator mentally went over her options before replying to me.

  “Mr Blanchard isn’t able—”

  I interrupted the receptionist before she had a chance to give me any more of her pre-scripted spiel.

  “Look, I ain’t interested in what he isn’t able to do, sweetheart. I just wanna hear his ten-guineas-an-hour voice on the end o’ this phone in the next two minutes or tings are going to start getting real awkward fo’ the man. Now, write this down so you don’t forget: you give Blanchard my name – it’s Ellington – and tell him that I wanna talk to him about the Erotica Negro. He’ll know what I mean.”

  I heard the telephonist cover the mouthpiece of her receiver and waited for a few moments before coming back to me.

  “I’m just putting you through to Mr Blanchard now.”

  I was about to thank her, but she nervously cut me off before I could express my gratitude.

  “Good morning, Mr Ellington, this is Terrence Blanchard speaking. How can I possibly help you?”

  His voice was calm, cool with a hint of patronising, arrogant superiority inflected in the way he addressed me. He reminded me of nearly every white officer who had casually flipped me an order back when I was on the force. I didn’t reply and instead waited for a moment before speaking, trying to get a measure of the man by how patient he was.

  Patience clearly wasn’t one of Terrence Blanchard’s best qualities. I didn’t have to wait long before he snapped dismissively at me down the phone.

  “Now look here, I don’t know what this is all about. My girl said you wanted to speak to me about something she could barely pronounce. What is it that you want exactly, Ellington?”

  Blanchard spoke my name as if it were a reminder not to step into something unpleasant in front of him. But despite all his self-assured public-school bullishness, I could tell he was bluffing. And for a man who spent his working days pulling the wool over the eyes of his fellow legal opponents in the Crown Court, he was pretty easy to shake up.

  “Erotica Negro . . .” I said the two words slowly, sounding them out in a way that gave Blanchard no uncertainty that I knew what their true meaning was.

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and if you think that you—”

  I interrupted the slippery barrister, quickly looking at my watch. I realised that time was against me and that once my call to Blanchard was over the clock would be ticking and every second was going to count if I was to nail him.

  “I think you best shut your mout’ and listen up, Mr Blanchard. Now git this straight: you stop playing games and I’ll tell you how it is. You may not want to admit it right now, but you know me and you know why I’m on the other end o’ this damn phone, don’t you?”

  Terrence Blanchard was silent, just a trace of his breath on the other end of the line. I continued.

  “Ting is, you hoped that I’d never git the chance to make this call. You thought that with the help of a little bent law and a few well-placed scumbags to scare me off or frame me fo’ a crime I didn’t commit that you could draw me off your scent. Well, surprise, surprise, Mr Blanchard, guess what? Your scent stinks a whole lot more that you thought it did.”

  “Now look here . . .”

  He was about to come back at me, but I didn’t give him the chance.

  “Shut up and listen. I know ’bout your place in the country and those invite-only parties you’ve been having. You do know the ones I mean, don’t you, Mr Blanchard, the Erotica Negro parties? I met one of your lady guests from one of those knees-ups, a Miss Virginia Landry. You remember her? She was a sweet ting, beautiful. Ting is, she was murdered and dumped in some godforsaken coppice in the middle o’ nowhere a few days back. Befo’ she died I had a real good chat with Miss Landry: she remembered you, remembered you well.”

  I lied ’bout Virginia seeing the barrister, but I didn’t care; I just wanted to get Blanchard all wound up, and I was. I kept on at him.

  “Now I just got off the phone talking to another friend of yours, a sack o’ shit that pretends to be a police officer, by the name o’ Mickey Warren. Anyhow, we got to talking ’bout another guy who finds you all those pretty tings: girls like Virginia Landry and the others that you take a shine to. This fella drops them off at your gate door, fo’ a price, of course . . . goes by the name of Otis Grey.”

  Blanchard remained silent. I kept winding him in.

  “Oh, course . . . you may not know him by that name: truth is he don’t normally answer to what his mother first called him the day he crawled out from between her pussy and the best part of him slid down the inside of her leg with the afterbirth and dropped onto the floor.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this filth.” Blanchard went to slam the phone down on me, but I soon stopped him in his tracks.

  “Stella Hopkins . . . Let’s talk about Stella,” I bellowed at him.

  The barrister remained on the other end of the phone; I could now hear his breathing quickening as he waited for me to continue.

  “She’s the reason I got messed up in all your crap, Mr Blanchard. She went missing a few weeks back, I was paid to find her, and the more I look, the more shit I find myself in. Now, I know you know someting ’bout her disappearance, so I’ve decided that I best come down to see you in that pretty old place o’ yours, sort this mess out. I gonna be waiting around fo’ you when you git back this evening, see if we can find her. I assume you’ll want to bring your hired help along, so I’ve invited Papa Anansi and Mickey Warren to hold your hand.”

  Blanchard was silent.

  “That’s fine by me, we’ll have ourselves a coupla drinks, hey? Let Papa and Mr Warren in on the party, they’ll keep us both company.”

  I heard the barrister take a sharp breath before speaking to me; when he did, his tone was concise and brittle.

  “Mr Ellington . . . I warn you, if you choose to go down the path of trying to illegally enter my home then you will be making a very big mistake. I’m not a foolish man and I’ll be taking precautions to see to it that you won’t be a nuisance to me, is that understood? Be aware, my property is very well protected. You’d be a fool to attempt a break-in or to think you can put the frighteners on me. I’m not easily threatened, Mr Ellington.”

  Like a great chess grandmaster he’d made his move and was now patiently waiting for my response. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  “But I ain’t threatening you, Mr Blanchard. You need to understand, I’ve gone way past the point of issuing threats. I know that Papa Anansi and Mickey Warren have been doing a lot of grunt work fo’ you: supplying your so-called ‘Erotica Negro’ evenings with top-grade, good-looking black girls, drugs, maybe some illegal hooch and then taking to butchering anybody who displeased you or stuck their noses too far into your seedy, secret little world.

  “But last night one of those goons of yours went and killed a friend o’ mine. Those bastards took the life of a good man that never hurt a soul and who sure as hell didn’t deserve to end his days being run through by one o’ your hired blades. Well, I got news fo’ you: I’m ’bout to pull the plug on what you and those killers you pay off have been up to. You git into your head real quick how se
rious I am ’bout all o’ this. I ain’t just coming to pay you a visit ’bout Stella Hopkins; I’m coming to settle what you and your people did to my friend Carnell Harris and to those poor young women. So don’t be thinking I’m just spouting hot air here; you in some deep shit mister and I’m ’bout to bury you in a whole lot more of it. So why don’t you git your ass into the back o’ your limousine and git your driver to get you home real quickly.

  “You wanna call the police to fight your battles, that’s fine by me, bring ’em along, but I’m thinking you probably wanting to keep this mess between us.”

  I could hear the barrister breathing hard through his nose. When his reply came it was far calmer than I’d expected to be: cool, in fact.

  “Very well, Mr Ellington, we’ll see you later. I’ll look forward to it.”

  He was about to cut me off.

  “Oh, and Mr Blanchard?” I called down the phone after him.

  “Yes, Mr Ellington?” He remained as cool as ice as he spoke.

  “If you considering letting another dog out with those two thugs that are in your employ, then take my advice and git yourself a bigger one. Cos that last fucker I came up against at your place, he wasn’t up to the job!”

  I slammed down the phone and then looked across to Cut Man Perry, who was staring back at me with a look of horror and disbelief on his pallid, pained face.

  Vic walked back into the office with a large khaki ex-army-surplus bag; he held it out in front of him and nodded at me to take it.

  “No peeking inside now. I’ll meet you back at the car; I just need that quick word with Cut Man here. And don’t worry . . . I ain’t gonna be long.”

  I did as he asked and left Vic alone with Cut Man. I walked out of the stinking office, back down the hallway and made my way out to the street towards the car, knowing that behind me back in the gym my cousin could be committing any number of cruel acts of violence against the immoral aged businessman, and as I dropped the heavy bag into the boot and slammed down the lid, I realised that today I didn’t give a damn.

  39

  I sat in the driver’s seat of the Cortina waiting for Vic. True to his word, he didn’t take long having his “quick” chat with Cut Man and I watched in the rear-view mirror as he sprinted across the road with a rolled-up document in his left hand and a big smile on his face. My stomach stopped knotting itself up and I relaxed a little, in the hope that that my unpredictable cousin hadn’t caused the carnage back at the gym that I was dreading he would. Vic came round to me and opened up the door, still smiling.

  “Hey, where’d you stash that bag, man?”

  “It’s in the boot, why?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Why you always asking damn fool questions? Just git your sorry ass outta that car and follow me, will ya!”

  He winked at me, then walked around to the back of the car and popped open the boot. I could hear him opening up the bag as I made my way round to him. Vic glanced behind him shiftily as I joined him at the rear of the motor. I looked at me and grinned, then pointed into at the opened holdall.

  “I got us a little main-line protection on board, brother.”

  Inside the bag, mixed up in between a couple of large torches, several lengths of heavy-duty naval rope, a tyre iron and a pair of ancient-looking binoculars, were a trio of what had to be unlicensed firearms. Two Colt 45 army-issue pistols sat next to a cut-down Spencer pump-action shotgun, with a half-dozen boxes of mixed ammunition thrown in for good measure. Vic closed the bag and dropped the hood of the boot back down, tapping the top of it as he walked whistling to himself back round to the passenger seat of the car and got in. I joined him and looked over at my cousin, who was drumming his fingers on the dashboard excitedly.

  “Look, Vic, I ain’t gonna ask you where you got all that firepower from, but you can at least tell me why you’re holding that ream o’ paper like it’s made of sheet gold?”

  “I just made me a new deal with Cut Man. I told him that I could keep his name outta all this mess he’s got himself in if he considered his options carefully.”

  “Yeah . . . and what were they?”

  “He could either sign the deeds of his gym over to me or I could make sure the law found out his name was linked to drugs and dead whores. He came to a real quick decision and you’re looking at the new owner of Perry’s gym.” Vic shook the deeds in front of me cheerfully. “Now let’s git movin’; you can fill me in on what goes down next while you drive.”

  Before going into detail with Vic about what was about to go down, I drove round to my digs, left the engine running in the street, and ran up to my bedsit to pick up my wallet, little notebook and the slip of paper Earl Linney had given me a few days back with his address and contact numbers on.

  When I got back into the car, Vic looked at me, then nodded his head towards my digs and laughed.

  “Shit . . . I thought you’d gone inside to bring that mean ole bitch of a neighbour o’ yours as some extra back-up!”

  I looked out towards my front door and saw Mrs Pearce standing in her bay window. She held the curtain back and stared down at me, then raised the palm of her hand and rested it on the glass pane of the window and mouthed the words, “You take care, Mr Ellington,” before she slipped back behind the curtain. I turned to look at Vic, who shook his head in bemusement.

  “You sure like hangin’ round with some funny old muthafuckas, you do know that, don’t ya, JT?”

  We burst out laughing at each other as I drove away down the road, both embracing a brief moment of lightheartedness and realising that the next few hours would hold little laughter for either of us.

  *

  It was after twelve thirty in the afternoon when I stopped just outside of Bristol at a petrol station and filled the car up with fuel. I then got on to the main A38 road out of the city and started at speed on the fifty-mile-plus journey down to Cricket Malherbie and Terrence Blanchard’s home. Vic sat peacefully next to me with his eyes closed; his hands on his stomach, fingers knitted together, his chest rising up and down slowly.

  “Hey, you asleep?”

  Vic opened one eye and peered over to me, a none-too-happy look on his face.

  “Shit no! Asleep? I damn well ought to be, the way you chugging along in this ole hearse . . . Can’t you git a bit more poke outta it?”

  “Poke, I’ve been pushing the damn ting to its limits fo’ the last ten miles; this ain’t no Ferrari GTO, you know!” I snapped edgily at my cousin, and I gave the accelerator another push towards the floor.

  “It ain’t no car either, brother, it’s a piece o’ crap. You need to git yo’self a set o’ decent wheels when all this bullshit is over, you hear me?”

  Taking no notice, I drove on through the bleak wintry countryside, telling him how I wanted things to play out when we got to Blanchard’s place. Vic was looking out of the passenger side window when I’d finished what I was saying. He didn’t turn to look at me when he decided to speak.

  “What makes you think that this Stella Hopkins is still alive, JT? If Blanchard’s as nasty a piece o’ work you say he is, then he’s gonna have had her wasted by one of his punks as soon as he got wind that you were on to him.”

  “I don’t know fo’ sure, Vic, but I gotta a real strong gut feelin’ ’bout all this. I have to find her, and Virginia Landry said she saw a scared young woman who never spoke and who was made to watch while she was molested. Stella’s mute, so who’s she gonna tell ’bout the evil tings she’s seen? She can’t speak and she sure as hell can’t hear anybody ask her questions ’bout what’s could o’ happened to her. No, Stella’s useful to a warped bastard like Blanchard. It’s about power and control and the fact they thought they could git away with it.”

  Vic stayed staring at the passing countryside.

  “I gotta ask you this, brother . . . What’s she to you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just cos she needs my help but can’t ask. I do know there’s a heap o’ people interested in
her fo’ different kinds o’ reasons, and a wealthy guy wants to pay out a heap of cash fo’ me to try to find her and to keep the police outta the picture. I got so many damn questions I can’t answer, Vic. I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can say to you is, I’ll find the truth . . . You gotta trust me, cousin . . . You just gotta trust me.”

  I looked across to him and he stared back at me, shaking his head slowly, tutting to himself.

  “Shit . . . You don’t need to talk ’bout trust, JT, we is family.”

  Vic smiled, reminding me of the little boy who I had grown up with, before he frowned and his placid features changed suddenly and he became severe, savage almost.

  “You just remember what I said ’bout Papa earlier: he’s mine. He made the play on Carnell and he’s gonna pay fo’ what he done to him, you understand me?”

  I said nothing, but nodded sharply at Vic and returned my eyes back to the road, and I kept looking straight ahead of me with neither of us speaking again for the rest of the journey.

  Outside, snow still lingered in the fields and hedgerows. I gripped at the steering wheel as an unnerving, eerie presence clutched at my chest as I drove. The bleak feelings of tragedy and death were now an unwelcome companion on our journey, my kin and I approaching ever closer both to an adversary who would seek to destroy us at any cost and to a cruel truth I would find hard to understand, let alone accept.

  It was just after three o’clock when we drove through the Somerset village of Knowle St Giles and into Cricket Malherbie and out along the single-track road towards Terrence Blanchard’s imposing estate. I pulled up outside of the property next to the impressive wrought-iron gates surrounded by the high sandstone wall that secluded the wealthy barrister from the rest of the world, and the thought hit me that in the cold light of day the place was a lot bigger than I had remembered. Vic pursed his lips and whistled as he gazed up the gravel drive towards the mansion.