I turned the page on my legal pad and wrote down the dates of the disappearances. At least one per month, sometimes more, every month of the school year for 1968 and 1969. And now, 1970.
I got up and hurried toward my office. I grabbed 1969’s blotter from under a pile of papers and carried it back to the kitchen table.
I didn’t even sit down. I set the blotter next to the legal pad and compared.
Every single date was a Tuesday. In some months, girls disappeared every week. In others, only one girl disappeared.
But I knew that meant nothing. For all I knew, a girl had gone missing every single Tuesday, but only some girls were missed by family and friends, so their disappearances were noticed quickly.
I tapped the blotter, and cursed, both at it and at myself. If I hadn’t killed Voss, I would be able to get some answers.
Of course, if I hadn’t killed Voss, then he would have warned the people at the Starlite that I was onto them. He would have connected me to Lacey, and through that connection, probably found Jimmy and Keith.
I didn’t really regret killing the man. It had been the right decision, even if my finger had moved faster on the trigger than my brain would have liked. I just wish I had asked him a few more questions before he died.
Because it was absolutely clear now that the operation at the Starlite used the school as a recruiting site. The fact that it only happened once a week perplexed me a little. Did the handlers—like Voss—go elsewhere during the week?
That didn’t jibe with Jimmy and Keith’s observations of Lacey and Voss. He had worked on her for a while, but brought her in on Tuesday.
So maybe other places had other days of the week, or maybe the operation could only handle one new girl at a time. After all, it would be a bit work-intensive to break a girl and hold her hostage, even a young girl.
Then I rubbed my fingers over my forehead. My back cracked in protest. Which was just fine with me. Because I didn’t want my thoughts to continue along this line.
When I thought too deeply about what could happen, all I saw was Lacey, and then I got furious.
I rapped my knuckles on the table, trying to do something with the anger. Fury did me no good. I needed to remain calm.
I walked around the living room, forcing myself to focus on the facts. That was all I could do.
Fact: the Starlite ran a by-the-hour operation that either trained hookers or it fueled some kind of human trafficking operation, sending young girls elsewhere. (I voted for sending the girls elsewhere, since these girls were not seen again.) There would be no real payoff in intentionally killing the girls, so I had a hunch that, for a while at least, most of them lived past the date of their disappearance.
Fact: The girls were all thirteen at the time of their abduction. Lacey had been the oldest, five months from her fourteenth birthday, followed by Wanda, at nine months from her birthday. Donna was the youngest. She had just turned thirteen. But she had cleavage and didn’t mind showing it off, judging from that candid photograph. Wanda didn’t seem to have as much, although her demeanor might have made her seem older. Lacey had been risqué and flirty and trying hard to look older than her age.
I personally thought no one could take her for an adult, and I was beginning to think that didn’t matter. There were men in the market for younger girls, although I had always thought they wanted unspoiled girls. Voss’s actions had proven that this operation wasn’t looking for girls like that.
Fact: The girls all appear to have been targeted. Had Lacey come to Voss’s attention because she had spoken to Karen Frazier? Or had Voss found her some other way?
Figuring out how Voss found the girls might not be that important now that he was dead, but it might also be part of the pattern, a pattern that suggested more than one man’s system. Because…
Fact: The girls disappeared on a Tuesday, and from what I could tell, only one girl at a time vanished. That spoke to an organization ready to take in a new candidate at a certain time and in a certain place.
It also suggested some cunning. If three or four or five girls vanished every Tuesday, even Decker would have noticed and done something about it. One girl per week out of an economically and educationally challenged school might have been expected, particularly if a good portion of those girls did not have a parent who looked out for them and who would contact the school when the girl did not come home.
I wondered: If I dug deeper into each girl’s background, would I find a pattern of skipping class, of smoking outside of school, of being tardy or vanishing from school for weeks at a time?
I ripped out another piece of paper. I had questions for Lacey, even though I didn’t exactly know how to ask them. I needed her to be honest with me about her contacts with some of the girls on my lists, and I also needed to know how much (or little) she attended school.
If she did skip classes, why had no one called Althea? Lacey had the benefit of an active, involved, stay-at-home mom, something very rare in the Black Belt, not because of culture, but because of economics.
If Lacey had skipped class and no one had noticed or contacted Althea, then we had a greater problem here. Then this particular school was easy pickings for predators like Voss.
I stopped for a moment, set down the pen, and took a deep breath. Then I grabbed the percolator. I needed to do something else for a moment.
I needed to think.
Lists of lost girls were more than I could handle on my own, particularly given my financial situation. I wouldn’t get paid for this job. Even if I wanted to get paid, I didn’t know who to ask. It felt tacky to charge the distraught parents, particularly if the girl had been missing for a long period of time.
In my entire career, I had never been the kind of investigator who preyed on other people’s pain. I wasn’t about to start doing that now.
But all of this had come to my attention, and I did want to find out what happened. I could work these cases slowly and figure out what happened to the girls.
Of course, if I went after the organization itself, even in a small way, I might find out a great deal more.
I poured out some of the coffee and dumped the grounds into the garbage under the sink. Then I carefully scoured the percolator, careful not to use any soap at all. I probably scrubbed harder than I needed to, but the physical action felt good.
I finished, dried off the percolator, and set it down. I had planned to make another cup of coffee, but I didn’t want one.
Instead, I went back to the table.
To the list of questions I made for Lacey, I added one more. I needed to find out what I could about Karen Frazier. Friends, family, anything that might help me figure out exactly what was going on.
I moved that page aside and went back to my fact page.
When Lacey told me about Karen Frazier, she said that her first encounter with Voss had happened before Christmas. Then she had seen him over the holidays. Had she meant between the holidays? Or before school let out?
He took her out to lunch then, and had bought her “stuff,” whatever that meant. I needed to find that out as well. I added that to my Lacey list.
By the time school started for the semester, he was taking her out for lunch regularly. She had waited for him the day before, so they had clearly set that up.
Had he taken her into the Starlite’s restaurant to parade her in front of someone as possible merchandise? Or had he done that earlier?
I leaned back.
The Starlite. It was the center of this particular operation. The restaurant, that hotel room where Jimmy had rescued Lacey, the hookers, the fact that no one wanted to sell the building.
Was the operation only recruiting through that particular school? There were no other junior highs nearby, but the high school that Jonathan went to was only a few blocks away.
I sighed, not liking how my brain worked.
I placed my hand on the flyers. I didn’t need to find more victims, at least, not yet. I had enough, and
they probably had enough points of intersection to give me a clear picture of what was happening. More victims would distract me.
I needed to focus on the missing junior high school girls, the Starlite, and the operation there.
With that in mind, I slid the two professionally done flyers in front of me. I didn’t see any information about where the printing and design had been done. But I did notice something I had missed before.
The contact phone number at the bottom of both flyers was the same. Not only had Wanda Nason’s family used the same printer, whoever had contacted the print shop had a phone number that united both girls.
In what way, I couldn’t tell.
But it was one more mystery to solve on the way to figuring this all out.
THIRTY
I TOOK MY LEGAL PAD and the two professional flyers into my office. I sat down at the desk and slid the phone toward me. Then I grabbed the fat Chicago phone book off the floor. I opened it to the pages for the police department and stared.
I knew a lot about police procedure, but every city was different. Each city had different traditions and behaviors, unspoken rules and the code that the officers abided by. I didn’t know as much about Chicago’s as I did Memphis’s. Part of that came from the fact that I had an outside-the-law relationship with the Chicago Police, whereas in Memphis, I was a licensed private detective who occasionally had to do things with city officials, whether I wanted to or not.
In Memphis, I had dozens of people to contact or I knew the right department. Until now, I had let Truman Johnson or Jack Sinkovich do most of the work with the Chicago Police.
Sinkovich had gotten into trouble in less than an hour by asking about the Starlite Hotel. Laura had a visitor warning her away less than twenty-four hours after she put out her first feelers. If someone wanted to look into the connection between Sinkovich and Laura, that someone would find that the only point of intersection was me, which none of us wanted.
Besides, I knew better than to go to the local precinct. The information I needed was not about the hotel per se, but about two missing girls. Girls who would be noticed in the white areas of town, but they wouldn’t be noticed in black neighborhoods.
That was where I would start.
I decided that the West Side precincts were the best place to start. They were far enough away that most South Side parents, families, and friends wouldn’t regularly go into those areas. Plus, after the Panther raid, the most people considered the West Side much more dangerous than the South Side.
I started with the precinct farthest west, but still inside the neighborhood.
A bored dispatch answered the phone.
“Hello,” I said in my best Tennessee accent. “My name is Detective Eustace Fittle of the Nashville Police Department. I would like to speak to someone in your precinct regarding a young woman named Donna Loring.”
“Just one moment, Detective Fittle,” the dispatch said and put me on hold.
I knew better than to get excited about this; I was probably being transferred to the precinct’s information officer.
“Detective Fittle?” The voice that greeted me was deep and rich. “I’m Officer Sal DePalma. How may I help you?”
“Officer DePalma, I have here in custody one Mark Jones.” I spoke slowly, conversationally, like so many of whites in Tennessee did. I made certain that I sounded unconcerned and unconvinced. “He says he has some information on the kidnapping of a Donna Loring of Chicago and he is willing to trade that information for reduced charges. He says she’s a colored girl who was taken from her school in 1968.”
“Did he say what school?” DePalma did not sound that interested.
“He did not. He said it was quite a coup because she has a brother who is associated with someone named…” I paused here for effect. “…Jeff Fort. Does that mean anything to you?”
DePalma grunted. It was a sound of surprise. “Actually, it does, detective. Jeff Fort is the leader of one of our largest gangs. He does not operate in our neighborhood, and I’m not familiar with the kidnapping of Miss Loring. You probably want one of the South Side precincts. Let me get you those numbers.”
“Before you do,” I said, “let me add that Jones claims that Miss Loring was taken from her neighborhood so that Mr. Fort’s people could not track her. That is why she has not been found.”
“Did he say if she was alive?”
“Unfortunately, he did not. He was quite cagey about the information. He asked through his lawyer that we check on the kidnapping of Miss Loring first, and then he would give us the information we need. This is a fairly high-profile case, or I would not even be talking to you. We believe that in addition to Miss Loring, Mr. Jones has information on one of our other suspects, and we are using this Loring angle as a way to check this young man’s veracity. Am I being clear here?”
DePalma chuckled. I had just told him that I didn’t care about Jones’s case, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with my made-up criminal. Because my made-up case was high profile, however, I had also just told DePalma that I could get in trouble with higher-ups if I didn’t do the obligatory research.
“Give me your number, and I’ll call you right back,” DePalma said.
“I would love to,” I said, “but it would be better for all concerned if I just remained on the phone. If you cannot find any information or need to point me elsewhere in a few minutes, well, that’s just fine and dandy with me.”
His chuckle went deeper. “I’m putting you on hold. This should only take a minute.”
He vanished, and that blank, flat sound that marked being on hold replaced the faint precinct noise behind him.
I clicked my pen while I waited. My stomach was twisted. I had to play this carefully or he would call the Nashville Police and ask for Eustace Fittle. If DePalma did that relatively quickly, he might send out some kind of alert to the other precincts that someone posing as a Nashville Police officer was trying to get information on Donna Loring.
I had had one phone investigation go awry like that when I was still in Memphis. I had called a precinct in Los Angeles, and had done something so obviously wrong that when I called a nearby precinct, I had already been made. I’d had to try something else to finish that investigation.
“Detective Fittle?” DePalma had returned. “How do you spell your last name?”
That twisting in my stomach had grown worse. “F-i-t-t-l-e. My family has been in these parts for more than 150 years. We lost a goodly portion of the Fittles in the War for Southern Independence.”
“The…what?” DePalma asked, and then before I could answer, said, “Oh. The Civil War.”
“We think of it as uncivil here,” I said.
“I suppose you do.” He no longer sounded amused. More perplexed, as if I were some kind of species of human he did not understand.
I wanted to tell him I had never understood that particular species of human, either, but I couldn’t.
“Unfortunately for you,” he said, “Jeff Fort just got out on bail last night or we could have checked with him about his lieutenants or at least, put you in touch with the Cook County jail and they could have worked with him for you. I did check with one of our gang experts, and he said that Fort does have a lieutenant named Raymond Loring. He has a long sheet. I don’t see anything about a sister, though. At least the name checks out.”
“That it does,” I said. “I thank you, and I’ll take those phone numbers now, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” he said. “But before I give them to you, I need to warn you. If there is a sister and if she was kidnapped in fall or winter of 1968, she was probably taken by the Black Panthers. You know we’ve had some Panther troubles here. They were bitter rivals of the Black P. Stone Nation, which is Jeff Fort’s gang.”
“They were, not they are?” I asked. “Have they joined forces?”
“No one is joining forces with Chicago’s Panthers,” he said. “Aren’t you familiar with what happened to th
eir leader in December?”
“Oh,” I said, dragging out the word. “That is the Hampstead boy, right? I hear you gentlemen handled him the way that he should’ve been handled. A little Southern justice Northern style.”
“Hampton, yes,” he said. “Sometimes the best justice is the kind that saves the taxpayer money.”
“It surely is,” I said. “You think this Jones is a Black Panther?”
“It’s possible,” DePalma said. “If he is from Chicago—”
“He says he is,” I deliberately interrupted.
“Then he might also be a Vice Lord. They’re rivals of the Stones, but they’re not as powerful or connected as the Black Panthers. Be careful, if he is with those thugs, all right?”
“I most certainly will. Thank you for that information. And do thank your gang expert,” I said. “I had no idea that this could go that dangerous so quickly. I will inform my chief and the chief prosecutor. We might not want to negotiate with a man like this.”
“Or,” DePalma said, “you might want to find out everything he knows. If there’s anything useful to us here, please contact me.”
“You can count on me. I thank you,” I said. Then I wrote down the phone numbers he gave me, and hung up.
I stared at them for a moment. Dangerous? The Panthers? I knew that the media liked to portray them that way. I considered that the problem all black men had when they carried guns. When they carried guns and pointed out that they had guns, they automatically scared white people.
I hadn’t liked the Panthers, although Hampton had impressed me each time I’d met him, but they did call themselves the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense. And so far as I could tell, they never initiated an action. They defended themselves when they had to.
Not that they had had a chance on December 4th. That shoot-out had been cold-blooded murder, and I might have been talking to one of the members of the assassination squad. Or maybe, talking to him via DePalma, who probably hadn’t had a high enough rank to go on that particular mission.
Raymond Loring, Jeff Fort’s right-hand man. That was a start.
Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 19
