I felt dizzy, had to steady myself, my palm on the window glass. I felt the choppy throb of a news copter going by. I turned away. Get a grip, Payton, work, work it out, work is the answer. I asked myself, What would Blue’s Clues do?
I went over and looked behind the couch, a big mahogany affair with fluffed-up cushions upholstered in wine-dark brocade.
And there he was.
Paul Windmann lay on the ground collapsed in the shape of a backward dollar sign. His body on a long narrow rug, the sort found in entryway halls. One corner of the rug was still bunched up where someone had grasped it to drag it and its load out of sight behind the couch. Done quickly before he bled out, since no marks of it showed on the floor. On the rug however, a wide blot of blood now surrounded him like a crimson moat.
In the fleshy hollow just below his chin was a raw bullet hole, an entry wound. Another corresponding hole was at the top of his forehead below the hairline. A not very big exit wound, a small caliber, I guessed.
Only I didn’t have to guess, the gun glinted between his thighs. A square, silver-plated .22 neat as an Art Deco ashtray, exactly like the one I’d seen in Sayre Rauth’s hands.
I sighed and shook my head. I had no interest in tampering with evidence. But that wasn’t going to stop me.
I straddled Windmann’s body, careful not to step in his blood. It was like playing a twisted game of Twister, trying not to put right foot down on red.
Tucking my hand inside my sleeve, I picked up the pistol. Its snub barrel was warm, and reeked. I flicked its safety on before sliding it into my back pocket.
I was disturbing a scene that a moment before might’ve passed for suicide. Now it was nothing but murder. The angle of the shot told me something, though. There’d been a struggle over the gun and Windmann had lost. Everything.
I left the place without searching further. This time I skipped the elevator and headed for the stairs. And walked directly into the view of a security cam mounted in a corner of the facing hallway.
I was in a cold sweat about it for a second, except there was nothing to do but tuck my chin in and pray.
Walking underneath, I saw its cables hung loose in their factory-sealed plastic. It hadn’t been hooked up yet.
A block away from the Crystalview, I found a pay-phone and dialed Paul Windmann’s number, let it ring twice and hung up, just so my office phone wouldn’t be his last incoming call in case anyone dialed *69.
Then I caught a cab, because my legs were feeling wobbly.
There was a small television screen fitted into the back of the driver’s seat displaying a Channel 7 newsfeed. It ran an update on the death of Craig Wales, providing the latest tidbit: the police, it said, were searching for a woman suspected of providing Wales with the fatal dose. I switched off the TV and rode in silence.
The driver took an unexpected turn, swinging us crosstown on Twelfth Street between Seventh and Greenwich Avenues. It was a narrow ancient lane of unpaved cobblestones, picturesque but bumpy as hell. Maybe the cabbie thought I was a tourist.
With every swerve and hard bounce, I felt the gun in my rear waistband and the other in my back pocket pressing against me, two loaded guns shoved in my back. I fought the urge to take them out and recheck their safeties.
I had the driver drop me a block from my building. I’d become wary of my street door. No one was waiting outside it for me though.
I checked the opposite side of the street as I got closer, watchful for any sudden movement. But it was the end of a workday in Manhattan—there was nothing but sudden movements. People running to make buses or to beat that other guy to a disgorging cab. I gave up.
At the Siamese standpipe where FL!P had been seated waiting for me before, I saw curved white scratches on the sidewalk made by his whetting the edge of his skateboard like honing a tool.
I unlocked my street door and stepped in. Nobody jumped me in the vestibule. It was a good start. How I meant to go on.
The stairwell was empty. I climbed up. Eye-level with the upper floor, I peered through the railing, but no one was there either. I went the rest of the way up. My office door was locked. I opened it, looked in. There was no one inside. I entered and—
Jumped a foot as the downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.
Shit. Couldn’t even sit down.
Chapter Fifteen: HOT KISS AT THE END OF A WET FIST
I pushed the intercom’s SPEAK button, said, “Yes?”
I pressed LISTEN and heard street noises, then a woman’s voice asking, “Payton Sherwood?”
I pressed SPEAK again.
“Yes, who is it?”
LISTEN.
“Sayre Rauth.”
SPEAK.
“What do you want?”
LISTEN.
“I thought more about…hiring you. May I come in?”
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
SPEAK.
“Come on up.”
I buzzed her in. And waited.
I breathed in and out, and braced myself for setting eyes on her again. I’d be cool, reserved, not betray with a single look or gesture the effect she illicit—no—elicited from me. Standard operating procedure was to never show how you really felt. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at concealing my feelings. Easier not to feel at all.
Two short raps. I opened my door.
As soon as I saw her, I started bleeding again. She stood before me dressed in an airy, chocolate-brown silk blouse, a short pleated black skirt, and tasseled calf-high calfskin boots. She smiled at me and gave me a hungry look, and the cut in my forehead started to trickle. A droplet ran down and around my brow, then continued to descend along my left temple like a rivulet of sweat.
She must’ve seen it, but she didn’t say anything. She must’ve seen even more, but if she did, she didn’t give it away.
I excused myself, turned, and headed for the bathroom. Over my shoulder, I invited her in. “Be right with you.”
I splashed cold water on my face and dried it. The cut had already stopped bleeding, wasn’t very deep. To be on the safe side, I put on a Band-Aid. It made me look tough, in a cartoonish sort of way, like Sluggo from the comic strip Nancy.
When I returned, Sayre Rauth was still standing on the threshold, hadn’t come in yet.
She raised both her arms up over her head.
“Want to frisk me? I might be armed.”
“Skip it. I’ve softened my stance on deadly force. Come in, nunchucks, machetes, grenades, and all.”
She looked disappointed, or at least she didn’t put her arms down right away.
What the hell, I knew she didn’t have her gun on her, it was in my back pocket. And I didn’t need to pat her down to pinpoint her other lethal weapons.
She finally walked in and stopped in the center of the room and surveyed it.
“This is your office?”
“I also live here.”
“Alone?” She cocked an eyebrow.
I nodded.
“You aren’t married, then?”
“Not then, not now.”
“Perhaps you are in a… relationship?”
“If so, no one’s told me. Let’s stick to business, Miss Rauth. Have a seat,” I said. “But I gotta tell you up front, we’re all out of toasters.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I sat behind my desk. “It’s just…you’re like my fifth or sixth client today. Hell, I’ve lost count.”
She crossed her legs. I watched the occasion; parts of me celebrated it. She said, calling my attention back up to her eyes, “Business must be good.”
I lifted up my hand in mid-air and tilted it side-to-side like a life raft on choppy waters.
“It fluctuates. And there’s the mortality rate to consider. Hiring me could be hazardous to your health, by the way.”
“I’ll risk it. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I insist.”
She smiled and shook some of her hair out of place.
“Half the time, I don’t understand you.”
I lit a match for her cigarette but a breeze from the window blew it out. She used her own lighter and exhaled a steady stream of smoke through her nose.
“The other half of the time, I think you make fun of me because my English is not always so good. When I am nervous.”
“Sorry, it’s nothing personal really. Just my own private syntax.”
“Sin tax?”
“That too. Mind if I bum a smoke?”
She offered me her pack of cigarettes. Foreign label, brand I never heard of. I lit up. Its dark-brown tobacco tasted like something that’d been scraped off of someone’s cleats. I coughed, but only to the point of tears, no blackouts or brain aneurysms to speak of.
“So. You want to hire me. For what?”
“To find my sister.”
“Your sister. She’s lost?”
“We’ve lost touch. But…I believe you are in contact with her. Her name is Elena.”
“Ah, yes, your sister, Elena. How come you want to find her?”
“It’s complicated. She may be responsible for a robbery the other day. I think she stole property belonging to me, and some…sensitive data involving clients’ personal information stored in my computer. Data I’d very much like to recover.”
“Is that why you sent your associate Windmann to hire me?”
“Paul?” She didn’t try to deny it. “I knew nothing about that until after he came to see you. Paul was listening over the intercom while you and I were talking earlier. He thought he was helping me by coming to speak to you. He thought you might be, well, Elena’s…”
“Elena’s Paul? Yeh, well, he did more than check me out. He hired me to do a job.”
“What was this job?”
“He wanted me to get back something he claimed had been stolen from him.”
“And did you…did you get it back?”
I slid the stack of printed spreadsheet pages across the desk to her. She only looked at the top one, didn’t pick up a single page or bother asking what it was.
I said, “Why don’t we cut out the missing sister story and start from scratch.”
“Scratch?”
“Starting with the modeling agency you were a part of back in the Ukraine.”
“You know about that?” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Okay, but I warn you, my story still may shock you.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“You won’t look at me the same way.”
“I’ll risk that, too.”
She told me her story. It was much the same as what Elena had told me, and told in the same matter-of-fact way. At least this time I didn’t have to fake a heard-it-all-before reaction.
She tried hard to explain to my western sensibilities how something like Tweensland could’ve come into existence and lasted so long.
“We answered an ad in the newspaper. Many girls came with their parents. The day you arrived you saw a clean establishment, a big studio with expensive equipment. A dozen men and women working there. It all looked very legitimate, and the money they promised, they delivered. They paid us by the hour, as much as twenty, thirty dollars an hour. It was a fortune, and no one questioned how they could afford to pay that much. They didn’t want the money to stop coming.
“In the beginning they photographed you in dresses, pajamas, bathing suits. It wasn’t until a couple of days later—once they’d gotten you comfortable—that they started saying now how about one more with it off?
“We were told to keep quiet and, in return for our silence, we got money, too—nearly as much as our parents were receiving, and all our own. Plus clothes and make-up, and food of course. It was heaven for a twelve-year-old girl—except for the fucking.”
“Elena said most girls just posed naked,” I said, “they didn’t have sex.”
Sayre drew on her cigarette, let the smoke out slowly.
“I’m sure she’d prefer to remember it that way. Maybe she does remember it that way. I’ve got a hundred hours of video says otherwise. Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“The secret was well kept,” she went on. “The girls knew, the owners knew, and the customers, of course. The parents knew or should have known, but if any of them ever complained, they were bought off. Or else blackmailed. They’d signed releases to have their daughters photographed; they could go to prison, too, lose their jobs, their families.
“But it rarely came to that. People took the money and kept quiet. It was a bad time for everyone.”
I said, “Mostly for the girls.”
She shrugged. “We weren’t digging ditches or shoveling coal. There were worse things. I knew girls my age who made money having sex with their older brothers’ friends. Less money, less clean, more dangerous.”
“You almost make it sound like the agency was a good thing,” I said.
“No, it was not a good thing. But there were no good things for us. Just bad and worse.”
“How did you get out?”
“I enjoyed the camera, knew what it wanted. By the time I was thirteen, I was working behind it. I’d become the lover of the website’s designer, Raphe. I assisted him, helped pick out photos, decide on themes, coach the other girls. At the same time, I learned as much as I could about the financial side of the operation, the startup fees and monthly charges; how the money came in and where it went.
“It was very profitable, but I knew it couldn’t go on forever. Problems started when some of the girls they’d used earlier on but were too old now began complaining. Word got around. There was talk of an investigation. The official in charge was contacted. It was decided a girl should go over to him and give a thorough and satisfactory… report. On her experiences with the modeling agency, you understand. I was that girl. And I was very thorough. More than satisfactory.
“It bought the agency a little more time. But only a little. More officials were becoming aware of what was really going on. Tweensland was an international enterprise and pressure was being applied by other countries. I didn’t want to be around when it came crashing down, so I made certain preparations. A good thing, too. Because—”
“Because the shit hit the fan,” I said. “When Elena helped that American girl, Cristy, to get out.”
“Yes. That was a big mistake.”
“Whose? Elena’s or Cristy’s?”
“Tweensland’s. They shouldn’t have used Cristy. An American? People care about Americans. You can fuck Ukranian girls, Georgians, Latvians, Albanians, Kazakh, Serbs, Poles, no problem. But you put one American girl in front of the camera, you’ve dug your own grave. She was pretty, she was popular with subscribers—but it was a big, big mistake.”
“But you don’t consider what happened Elena’s fault.”
“Her fault? Of course not.”
“She thinks you’re angry at her.”
“I’m not.”
“She thinks you hate her. That you want to hurt her.”
She smiled sadly.
“Not at all. I’d like to help her if she’d let me. But instead she steals from me. Steals information I need that’s very private. Very, very private. Information that’s worth a lot of money, but only if it remains private.”
She sat a minute not saying anything, then stood and walked around to my side of the desk. Leaning over me, she asked, “Do you know why I’ve told you this, Payton? All my dark secrets?”
I hazarded a guess. “Because you’re going to kill me?”
She laughed huskily and shook her head. The sound filtered through the blades of her hair, languid and low.
“I don’t kill men. I have other means.” She leaned closer, including me within her silky aperture of hair. My immersion in her fragrance was a sweet asphyxiation.
“There are better ways,” she whispered. “Ways more favorable to both parties, more… agreeable. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I wooden. I mean, I wood. I—
” I shut up. She had eyes.
She had more than eyes. Her lips on my lips.
Coming up for breath, she smiled down on me with that kinked-up joker’s grin I’d just been tasting. Strands of her hair caught in my chin stubble like Velcro.
She said, “I’m sure that together, you and I, we can come to terms of mutual, mutual—”
I pulled her back down before she went reaching for my Roget’s Thesaurus.
She might’ve just been auditioning me to take the place so recently vacated by Paul Windmann. A new front man for her operation, another not-quite-honest someone, maybe less ambitious than the last one, who’d apparently struck out on his own before getting struck down. She might have been fitting me for a suit of stripes or a burial suit. But right at that moment I didn’t care.
She’d seduced Eastern Bloc government officials at age fourteen—what chance did I stand at resisting her at twenty-two? So why fight it? Make love, not war. And how.
She raised her arms and I lifted her blouse up and over her head. I had her turn around. I placed one hand on the back of her neck where her silky hair grew low, starting at the top nub of her vertebra.
My hands traveled forward and my fingers traced along the edge of her breasts, down her ribs, across her belly, around her back. Her buttocks tensed and she rolled round. Her face was flushed.
She laid her hands on my shoulders and shoved me down like I was the plunger of a detonator wired to high explosives.
My mouth slid along her belly while my hands went beneath her skirt and felt her thighs and her bare buttocks. She wasn’t wearing panties. She’d come prepared, if that was the right word for it. Screw it, I was beyond words.
My fingers and mouth found her and we were lost in our separate and joint pursuit.
LOSERS LIVE LONGER (Hard Case Crime Book 59) Page 14
